Congress can also impeach judges after they have been appointed, but in 228 years of American history the number of times that power has been exercised can be counted on one hand.
The goal of mnay virus writers these days is not simply to destroy your machine, but to transform it into a remote relay upon which they can execute arbitrary programs, monitor your activities, launch new attacks on third parties, and send spam. The benefits of a compromised machine that is fully functional far outweigh any desire on the part of the virus author to simply "nuke" your machine.
In case you haven't noticed many of the quality software engineering, networking, and IT jobs which existed in the United States and Europe several years ago are moving overseas to places like India and China at a rather alarming rate. Do not believe for a second that those foreign workers are not every bit as qualified as you either (a scary thought to be sure). If that doesn't phase you then try this...they are willing to work for just $8,000 US per year (check out the cover story on Wired for February 2004). There is just no way that Americans and Europeans can compete with that. The writing is on the wall...by 2015 the number of American and European software engineers, network administrators, and IT personnel will be down to minimal levels and only the very best will be left in the industry. Any IT job that isn't somehow bolted to the floor or proximity dependent is going to go overseas. Those that do manage to keep stay in IT here in the United States will earn a yearly salary only slightly better than the national average of $42,400 per year in a very difficult and competitive environment. If all of this doesn't discourage you then by all means pursue an IT career, but I would have a plan B in case the whole IT thing doesn't work out.
Darl knows that he will never win against IBM et al in court, even if his claims had some merit, which they don't, IBM has enough cash, credit, and lawyers to squash a relatively small company like SCO. The indemnifications that IBM and others are offering to their clients are the legal equivalent of "an attack against one is an attack against all" treaties such as the one governing NATO. IBM, RedHat, and others will close ranks and take a "we don't negotiate with terrorists" scorched earth approach to this whole thing and when they are finished there will be nothing left of SCO but a smoking crater in the ground.
It would be much easier and more effective for the cafe owner to install spyware on all of his terminals so that he could monitor the activities of his guests.
The problem with this is human nature and economics. People who would normally pay for the work under the framework you have outlined have a disinsentive to do so because of what economists call the "freerider" problem. It is possible to download the song and NOT pay and this option becomes more attractive as more people choose to do just that. That is why National Public Radio has so much trouble finding people willing to donate and why Steven King was unable to finish the Internet Novel "The Plant." Good people, even if they intend to pay, will often behave differently when nobody is watching and "everyone is doing it". That is the reason why goods and services that benefit us but upon which we can "freeride" are generally provided by the government with our tax dollars because that is the only proven reliable way to get everyone to pay their fair share.
Note: I am not in favor of nationalizing the music business and I am generally suspicious of government regulation, ownership, and control. However, the freerider problem explains why the so called "street performer" protocol for compensating artists does not work.
We Americans like pumping our gas in gallons, measuring our speed in miles per hour, and thumbing our collective noses at the rest of the world for using the metric system. Actually there was a law passed here in the United States in the mid 1970s that mandated that the government switch to metric but everyone ignored it and it just went away. Imagine telling those corn farmers in Iowa during an election year that it is illegal to measure their corn in bushels and you will have some idea as to why we will never change.
The reason IBM is doing this is so that someone cannot come along down the line when this sort of payment scheme is popular and launch a frivolous lawsuit against IBM saying that they had thought of (and patented) that payment scheme first. You can thank the lawyers for the death of personal responsibility and common sense in our society. These days if you do not put the obvious in writing and patent it then somebody will hit you with a lawsuit. IBM is simply limiting their legal exposure like any other company would.
The interesting thing about the article is the use of copyright to try and silence criticism of the Diebold system.
This is not a new idea. The Church of Scientology has been using the copyright laws of the United States to silence its critics for the last three decades. The Diebold case is simply the latest example of how copyright laws in their present incarnation can be abused.
I am not a PhD nuclear physicist, but it is my understanding that even if one has an understanding of the general design and materials required for a hydrogen bomb the practical details of constructing it in such a way that you get the desired effect (i.e. thermonuclear detonation) requires intimate knowledge of a vast number of mind numbing details, extensive testing, and a large body of experience, test data, and associated resources. Even then it is never a sure thing which is why even the United States must conduct extensive testing and maintenance in order to guarantee the continued viability of its stockpile (weapons are designed to be used not stored for decades and then used). It is probably for this reason more than any other that a functional and deliverable H-Bomb is and probably always will be beyond the resources of all but the most advanced first world nations and certainly not the domain of terrorist organizations. The dirty bomb is a far more likely scenario with the terrorists...the fully functional H-Bomb is light years beyond their understanding and construction capabilities.
and how excatly does commercial licensing and patent issues get in the way of that? I concede that the present implementation of these ideas in our system is flawed and abused by lawyers, but that doesn't mean that the concepts of commercial licensing and patents are completely useless.
Please...Developers are people with families and bills to pay too. Would you want to work for free? Unfortunately, for those of us who went on to careers in the real world after college we need money to survive and that means charging for our software. Even open source projects solicit dontations to keep the lights on and the fridge stocked with RedBull. So no...Windows cannot be free...
Interestingly enough, the Luftwaffe was very careful with its settings documents and its discipline for changing rotors. Bletchley Park never solved the Luftwaffe version of Enigma.
What a bunch of bullox! The following are excerpted from "The Ultra Secret" which was written by F. W. Winterbotham who worked closely with Allen Turing and the rest of his team at Bletchly Park throughout the war.
"Although the well-guarded Kriegsmarine messages could not be deciphered, BP was regularly eavesdropping on the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe was particularly negligent in applying appropriate safeguards to their Enigma-coded messages, perhaps due to a measure of arrogance evident in World War II "fly-boys." Through this source the British were able to piece together Hitler's plans for the cross-channel invasion, dubbed Seelowe (Sealion). Before it could be accomplished, the RAF would have to be neutralized. Warned beforehand of Luftwaffe bombing raids on airfields, designed to eliminate not only the fields themselves but also destroy RAF fighters on the ground, British planes were able to avoid being caught as sitting ducks. Although Ultra intelligence forewarned of impending attacks, coastal radar (underestimated by the Germans) was able to pinpoint flights of incoming enemy planes."
"The British were regularly reading Luftwaffe messages, Of particular interest were messages from the Fliegerverbindungoffiziere, or "Flivos", liaison officers responsible for coordinating air and ground operations The all important Kriegsmarine signals ("Dolphin") were still a mystery. U-33, on a mission to sow mines in the Firth of Clyde, was depth charged and forced to the surface on Feb 12, 1940 by minesweeper HMS Gleaner."
"One of the first relied on German operators using some easily remembered sequence of letters as rotor starting positions. There were identified as "Cillies", after one operator who frequently used "Cilly", his girlfriend's name."
Obviously you were misinformed about your chosen subject. The Kriegsmarine messages were the really tough ones to crack because they were disciplined about transmission lengths, randomized key rotor selections for each message, and distribution of code books which contained the key sequences that would be used in a particular month. By comparison the Luftwaffe operators used their girlfriend's initials as rotor settings and changed keys only infrequently.
Prof. Manindra Agarwal and two of his students, Nitin Saxena and Neeraj Kayal (both BTech from CSE/IITK who have just joined as Ph.D. students), have discovered a polynomial time deterministic algorithm to test if an input number is prime or not. Lots of people over (literally!) centuries have been looking for a polynomial time test for primality, and this result is a major breakthrough, likened by some to the P-time solution to Linear Programming announced in the 70s.
This should be an interesting struggle. Macromedia has a number of popular professional web development products in addition to their popular flash line and large head start in animation. On the other hand Microsoft is probably the worst competitor a company could possibly come up against. They play fast and big and have the cash and credit to turn out your lights. They can buy anything or anyone they want in their quest to beat you and your products into submission. Most companies prefer to partner with them rather than compete directly against them. Anyone who has not already partnered with them is either or bit player or has joined the Rebel Alliance led by IBM and Sun Microsystems. Unless Macromedia gets the long term support of a wealthy patron such as IBM the pressure that Microsoft can bring to bear will eventually break them. At the very least that would make an interesting contract position on tradesports:
This is just observation, being that I am not a PhD geneticist, but isn't there a possibility that use of an adenovirus to splice DNA, even if it is very carefully targeted, could result in mutated versions of the virus appearing in the patient and thus being eventually released into the wild? Suppose, for example that a terminally ill cancer patient is treated using a custom designed adenovirus, but that during the treatment several potentially dangerous mutations of the virus emerge which may result in unknown and possibly serious infections for the rest of the population. The risk of this scenario occurring will probably increase as the number of people treated with these designer viruses cures increases. I have never heard anyone give a satisfactory explanation of the risks involved to the rest of us when we start releasing genetically engineered viruses into the wild. How can we be sure that "cure" does not return to haunt us in a form that proves to be worse than the disease?
The calculator has specialized ROMs which provide a wide array of esoteric mathematical functions computed to very high precision at nearly instantaneous rates. These calculators have CPUs just like PDAs but the calculator CPUs have extra built in hardware features which facilitate their function as high precision mathematical engines. Even if you could find software which duplicates all of the functionality of the specialized calculator by the time it ran the same computations on your faster PDA chip the calculator would have won by a mile. In short...hardware specific implementation (ie the high end calculator) is more efficient and widely used and appreciated by all sorts of engineers. I would chose the HP calculator any day of over a PDA with software. Do you know that many of the PDAs have RISC processors which do not support the precission floating point and double precission integer computations that the calculator has built in? So the answer to your question is no...HP would not be better of writing software for the PDA to do all of these functions because there is a huge established market for high end calculators among engineers and no established market for engineering mathematics PDA software among business executives and other professionals who use the PDA to read their e-mail, browse the web, and remember their appointments.
We write software programs to perform tedious and repetitive calculations for us precisely because we are smart people and would rather spend our time on more intellectually stimulating pursuits like improving our Quake III Arena score.
The more technically savvy students could probably bypass these measures. For example suppose that the tech savvy student (he is an engineering major;) runs PuTTY to SSH to a host outside of the campus network which has a cable/DSL connection available. Then he runs Kaaza or whatever file sharing application he likes via the remote desktop or x-windows session and transfers the files to his dorm machine using ftp and everything is tunneled through the SSH session. Finally, the student runs a firewall on his PC in the dorm so that his drive cannot be remotely 'scanned' and the only thing visible to the outside world is an SSH session running on port 22. There are even P2P apps out right now (Earth Station Five) which have integrated SSH support so as to maintain the privacy of their users (excellent). The point is that file sharing is a social problem and social problems cannot be solved exclusively through the use of technological measures. The only purpose this serves is to instigate a technological arms race between the students/P2P providers and the copyright holders/universities.
The essential problem with all current MMORPGs is not that players cannot be punished effectively, but rather that the companies which host these games do not enforce their own policies against bad behavior. They do not enforce them because they have a vested financial interest in maintaining as many paying customers as possible over the expected lifetime of the game. This is the same reasoning process that companies go through when they decide that the privacy policy is less important than the revenue which could be generated by selling the information in violation of the "Privacy Policy" or "Mission Statement". Thus, the game company is likely to adopt policies which never completely satisfy any one faction of players, but which also never alienate them quite enough to give up what they have already "invested" in the game either. In this manner they continue to receive a stream of monthly payments from the largest possible audience of players/subscribers with the least possible amount of work in maintenance, administration, etc...
The best solution, in my humble opinion, involves the players as a stakeholder in the long terms success of the game not just by granting in game rewards, but rather by dividing the real world ownership of the company that administers the game among the players who support it. The effect of shareholder ownership and market forces would necessarily isolate and eliminate those players who choose to be jerks from continuing to harass the majority of the remaining players, only this time, since the players are owners the enforcement would have teeth. As the article stated, the main problem now is deterrence of bad behavior and the problem exists because of inadequate enforcement due to corporate conflict of interest.
There is still a considerable amount of negative brand name sentiment towards DiVX because of the whole Circuit City mess several years back. I remember lines of irate customers arguing with the clerks at the return lines and believe me, the arguments were intense and involved streams of explicatives. I will probably be moded down for saying so, but the HDTV compression and Windows Media formats are becoming very competitive with the more established standards like MPEG and Real. Microsoft claims that DRM will not be used to protect the owner's machine against the interests of the owner, but only time will tell the truth of those claims.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is that you cannot trust anybody's crypto code. Remember that it is always worse than you think and THEY are out to get you.
Congress can also impeach judges after they have been appointed, but in 228 years of American history the number of times that power has been exercised can be counted on one hand.
The goal of mnay virus writers these days is not simply to destroy your machine, but to transform it into a remote relay upon which they can execute arbitrary programs, monitor your activities, launch new attacks on third parties, and send spam. The benefits of a compromised machine that is fully functional far outweigh any desire on the part of the virus author to simply "nuke" your machine.
In case you haven't noticed many of the quality software engineering, networking, and IT jobs which existed in the United States and Europe several years ago are moving overseas to places like India and China at a rather alarming rate. Do not believe for a second that those foreign workers are not every bit as qualified as you either (a scary thought to be sure). If that doesn't phase you then try this...they are willing to work for just $8,000 US per year (check out the cover story on Wired for February 2004). There is just no way that Americans and Europeans can compete with that. The writing is on the wall...by 2015 the number of American and European software engineers, network administrators, and IT personnel will be down to minimal levels and only the very best will be left in the industry. Any IT job that isn't somehow bolted to the floor or proximity dependent is going to go overseas. Those that do manage to keep stay in IT here in the United States will earn a yearly salary only slightly better than the national average of $42,400 per year in a very difficult and competitive environment. If all of this doesn't discourage you then by all means pursue an IT career, but I would have a plan B in case the whole IT thing doesn't work out.
Darl knows that he will never win against IBM et al in court, even if his claims had some merit, which they don't, IBM has enough cash, credit, and lawyers to squash a relatively small company like SCO. The indemnifications that IBM and others are offering to their clients are the legal equivalent of "an attack against one is an attack against all" treaties such as the one governing NATO. IBM, RedHat, and others will close ranks and take a "we don't negotiate with terrorists" scorched earth approach to this whole thing and when they are finished there will be nothing left of SCO but a smoking crater in the ground.
It would be much easier and more effective for the cafe owner to install spyware on all of his terminals so that he could monitor the activities of his guests.
The problem with this is human nature and economics. People who would normally pay for the work under the framework you have outlined have a disinsentive to do so because of what economists call the "freerider" problem. It is possible to download the song and NOT pay and this option becomes more attractive as more people choose to do just that. That is why National Public Radio has so much trouble finding people willing to donate and why Steven King was unable to finish the Internet Novel "The Plant." Good people, even if they intend to pay, will often behave differently when nobody is watching and "everyone is doing it". That is the reason why goods and services that benefit us but upon which we can "freeride" are generally provided by the government with our tax dollars because that is the only proven reliable way to get everyone to pay their fair share.
Note: I am not in favor of nationalizing the music business and I am generally suspicious of government regulation, ownership, and control. However, the freerider problem explains why the so called "street performer" protocol for compensating artists does not work.
We Americans like pumping our gas in gallons, measuring our speed in miles per hour, and thumbing our collective noses at the rest of the world for using the metric system. Actually there was a law passed here in the United States in the mid 1970s that mandated that the government switch to metric but everyone ignored it and it just went away. Imagine telling those corn farmers in Iowa during an election year that it is illegal to measure their corn in bushels and you will have some idea as to why we will never change.
The reason IBM is doing this is so that someone cannot come along down the line when this sort of payment scheme is popular and launch a frivolous lawsuit against IBM saying that they had thought of (and patented) that payment scheme first. You can thank the lawyers for the death of personal responsibility and common sense in our society. These days if you do not put the obvious in writing and patent it then somebody will hit you with a lawsuit. IBM is simply limiting their legal exposure like any other company would.
The interesting thing about the article is the use of copyright to try and silence criticism of the Diebold system.
This is not a new idea. The Church of Scientology has been using the copyright laws of the United States to silence its critics for the last three decades. The Diebold case is simply the latest example of how copyright laws in their present incarnation can be abused.
Perhaps they are running their web server on some of those forgotten electronics or maybe they are just slow to recover from a slashdotting...
I am not a PhD nuclear physicist, but it is my understanding that even if one has an understanding of the general design and materials required for a hydrogen bomb the practical details of constructing it in such a way that you get the desired effect (i.e. thermonuclear detonation) requires intimate knowledge of a vast number of mind numbing details, extensive testing, and a large body of experience, test data, and associated resources. Even then it is never a sure thing which is why even the United States must conduct extensive testing and maintenance in order to guarantee the continued viability of its stockpile (weapons are designed to be used not stored for decades and then used). It is probably for this reason more than any other that a functional and deliverable H-Bomb is and probably always will be beyond the resources of all but the most advanced first world nations and certainly not the domain of terrorist organizations. The dirty bomb is a far more likely scenario with the terrorists...the fully functional H-Bomb is light years beyond their understanding and construction capabilities.
Captain: What happen?
....
Mechanic: Someone set up us the bomb
Operator: We get signal
Captain: What!
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you!!
Cats: How are you gentlemen!!
Cats: All your base are belong to us
Cats: You are on the way to destruction
Captain: What you say?
Cats: You have no chance to survive make your time
Cats: Ha ha ha
Operator: Captain!!
Captain: Take off every 'ZIG'!!
Captain: Move 'ZIG'.
Captain: For great justice
and how excatly does commercial licensing and patent issues get in the way of that? I concede that the present implementation of these ideas in our system is flawed and abused by lawyers, but that doesn't mean that the concepts of commercial licensing and patents are completely useless.
Please...Developers are people with families and bills to pay too. Would you want to work for free? Unfortunately, for those of us who went on to careers in the real world after college we need money to survive and that means charging for our software. Even open source projects solicit dontations to keep the lights on and the fridge stocked with RedBull. So no...Windows cannot be free...
Interestingly enough, the Luftwaffe was very careful with its settings documents and its discipline for changing rotors. Bletchley Park never solved the Luftwaffe version of Enigma.
What a bunch of bullox! The following are excerpted from "The Ultra Secret" which was written by F. W. Winterbotham who worked closely with Allen Turing and the rest of his team at Bletchly Park throughout the war.
"Although the well-guarded Kriegsmarine messages could not be deciphered, BP was regularly eavesdropping on the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe was particularly negligent in applying appropriate safeguards to their Enigma-coded messages, perhaps due to a measure of arrogance evident in World War II "fly-boys." Through this source the British were able to piece together Hitler's plans for the cross-channel invasion, dubbed Seelowe (Sealion). Before it could be accomplished, the RAF would have to be neutralized. Warned beforehand of Luftwaffe bombing raids on airfields, designed to eliminate not only the fields themselves but also destroy RAF fighters on the ground, British planes were able to avoid being caught as sitting ducks. Although Ultra intelligence forewarned of impending attacks, coastal radar (underestimated by the Germans) was able to pinpoint flights of incoming enemy planes."
"The British were regularly reading Luftwaffe messages, Of particular interest were messages from the Fliegerverbindungoffiziere, or "Flivos", liaison officers responsible for coordinating air and ground operations The all important Kriegsmarine signals ("Dolphin") were still a mystery. U-33, on a mission to sow mines in the Firth of Clyde, was depth charged and forced to the surface on Feb 12, 1940 by minesweeper HMS Gleaner."
"One of the first relied on German operators using some easily remembered sequence of letters as rotor starting positions. There were identified as "Cillies", after one operator who frequently used "Cilly", his girlfriend's name."
Obviously you were misinformed about your chosen subject. The Kriegsmarine messages were the really tough ones to crack because they were disciplined about transmission lengths, randomized key rotor selections for each message, and distribution of code books which contained the key sequences that would be used in a particular month. By comparison the Luftwaffe operators used their girlfriend's initials as rotor settings and changed keys only infrequently.
Prof. Manindra Agarwal and two of his students, Nitin Saxena and Neeraj Kayal (both BTech from CSE/IITK who have just joined as Ph.D. students), have discovered a polynomial time deterministic algorithm to test if an input number is prime or not. Lots of people over (literally!) centuries have been looking for a polynomial time test for primality, and this result is a major breakthrough, likened by some to the P-time solution to Linear Programming announced in the 70s.
You may want to add this one to your list....
Primes is in P
This should be an interesting struggle. Macromedia has a number of popular professional web development products in addition to their popular flash line and large head start in animation. On the other hand Microsoft is probably the worst competitor a company could possibly come up against. They play fast and big and have the cash and credit to turn out your lights. They can buy anything or anyone they want in their quest to beat you and your products into submission. Most companies prefer to partner with them rather than compete directly against them. Anyone who has not already partnered with them is either or bit player or has joined the Rebel Alliance led by IBM and Sun Microsystems. Unless Macromedia gets the long term support of a wealthy patron such as IBM the pressure that Microsoft can bring to bear will eventually break them. At the very least that would make an interesting contract position on tradesports:
TradeSports
This is just observation, being that I am not a PhD geneticist, but isn't there a possibility that use of an adenovirus to splice DNA, even if it is very carefully targeted, could result in mutated versions of the virus appearing in the patient and thus being eventually released into the wild? Suppose, for example that a terminally ill cancer patient is treated using a custom designed adenovirus, but that during the treatment several potentially dangerous mutations of the virus emerge which may result in unknown and possibly serious infections for the rest of the population. The risk of this scenario occurring will probably increase as the number of people treated with these designer viruses cures increases. I have never heard anyone give a satisfactory explanation of the risks involved to the rest of us when we start releasing genetically engineered viruses into the wild. How can we be sure that "cure" does not return to haunt us in a form that proves to be worse than the disease?
The calculator has specialized ROMs which provide a wide array of esoteric mathematical functions computed to very high precision at nearly instantaneous rates. These calculators have CPUs just like PDAs but the calculator CPUs have extra built in hardware features which facilitate their function as high precision mathematical engines. Even if you could find software which duplicates all of the functionality of the specialized calculator by the time it ran the same computations on your faster PDA chip the calculator would have won by a mile. In short...hardware specific implementation (ie the high end calculator) is more efficient and widely used and appreciated by all sorts of engineers. I would chose the HP calculator any day of over a PDA with software. Do you know that many of the PDAs have RISC processors which do not support the precission floating point and double precission integer computations that the calculator has built in? So the answer to your question is no...HP would not be better of writing software for the PDA to do all of these functions because there is a huge established market for high end calculators among engineers and no established market for engineering mathematics PDA software among business executives and other professionals who use the PDA to read their e-mail, browse the web, and remember their appointments.
We write software programs to perform tedious and repetitive calculations for us precisely because we are smart people and would rather spend our time on more intellectually stimulating pursuits like improving our Quake III Arena score.
The more technically savvy students could probably bypass these measures. For example suppose that the tech savvy student (he is an engineering major ;) runs PuTTY to SSH to a host outside of the campus network which has a cable/DSL connection available. Then he runs Kaaza or whatever file sharing application he likes via the remote desktop or x-windows session and transfers the files to his dorm machine using ftp and everything is tunneled through the SSH session. Finally, the student runs a firewall on his PC in the dorm so that his drive cannot be remotely 'scanned' and the only thing visible to the outside world is an SSH session running on port 22. There are even P2P apps out right now (Earth Station Five) which have integrated SSH support so as to maintain the privacy of their users (excellent). The point is that file sharing is a social problem and social problems cannot be solved exclusively through the use of technological measures. The only purpose this serves is to instigate a technological arms race between the students/P2P providers and the copyright holders/universities.
The essential problem with all current MMORPGs is not that players cannot be punished effectively, but rather that the companies which host these games do not enforce their own policies against bad behavior. They do not enforce them because they have a vested financial interest in maintaining as many paying customers as possible over the expected lifetime of the game. This is the same reasoning process that companies go through when they decide that the privacy policy is less important than the revenue which could be generated by selling the information in violation of the "Privacy Policy" or "Mission Statement". Thus, the game company is likely to adopt policies which never completely satisfy any one faction of players, but which also never alienate them quite enough to give up what they have already "invested" in the game either. In this manner they continue to receive a stream of monthly payments from the largest possible audience of players/subscribers with the least possible amount of work in maintenance, administration, etc...
The best solution, in my humble opinion, involves the players as a stakeholder in the long terms success of the game not just by granting in game rewards, but rather by dividing the real world ownership of the company that administers the game among the players who support it. The effect of shareholder ownership and market forces would necessarily isolate and eliminate those players who choose to be jerks from continuing to harass the majority of the remaining players, only this time, since the players are owners the enforcement would have teeth. As the article stated, the main problem now is deterrence of bad behavior and the problem exists because of inadequate enforcement due to corporate conflict of interest.
There is still a considerable amount of negative brand name sentiment towards DiVX because of the whole Circuit City mess several years back. I remember lines of irate customers arguing with the clerks at the return lines and believe me, the arguments were intense and involved streams of explicatives. I will probably be moded down for saying so, but the HDTV compression and Windows Media formats are becoming very competitive with the more established standards like MPEG and Real. Microsoft claims that DRM will not be used to protect the owner's machine against the interests of the owner, but only time will tell the truth of those claims.
The Internet was designed to withstand thermonuclear detonations...I think it can survive the RIAA.