Jitter is defined as random variances, typically in the 10's or 100's of milliseconds, in the delays between successive packets in stream. It is related to latency, which is the minimum delay between the transmission and reception of any given packet. Given that, how, exactly, would adding jitter impede e-mail, web pages, instant messages, or any primary Internet services besides live voice conversations and possibly online real-time games? The technique was mentioned in that article as an effective method for discreetly discouraging the use of VoIP.
They could then just add some jitter to any unrecognized (i.e. encrypted) traffic, thus making the connection useless for any two-way voice streams. They don't have to block the connection entirely, and most services are not interactive and wouldn't notice the difference.
Wasn't that what this thread was about in the first place?
In any event, using LD_PRELOAD should be easier (at least under Linux) if you know which routine it's using (try `ltrace`), more responsive at runtime than using nested virtual machines, and more permanent than setting back the virtual machine's clock (although this is debateable - 35 years (since 1970, the epoch) is a long time).
And just how does the software know what the real date is? Just don't syncronize the clock with the host system. You could even use a LD_PRELOAD wrapper to fake any time you wanted by overriding the system "get time" library calls, eliminating the need nested virtual machines.
If he did the work without without any assurances that he would be paid afterward (a contract of some sort), then it's his own fault that he did the work for free. No one has an inherent right to require payment in the absence of any prior agreement. That is what contracts are for. If you want to be paid for something, find someone (or multiple "someones") who will value your efforts, and convince them to enter into a binding contract for payment on completion of the work. This rule applies as well to creative products as to anything else, but for some reason all the writers, artists, and performers try to do things in reverse.
While Microsoft does not have a monopoly now, they abused their monopoly position in the past to place any potential competitors at a disadvantage, which is illegal under U.S. antitrust law. They were convicted of this, both in the U.S. and in the E.U. Neither case resulted in any significant punishment, and so the market is still left unbalanced by their past anticompetitive behavior. Consider what the market might have looked like if Microsoft had not been allowed to behave as a monopoly; if, for example, their scheme of coercing computer manufacturers into enforcing their operating-system monopoly had been prevented.
P.S. Open Source advocates are not a uniform group; they represent many widely varying points of view. Strongly-held opinions of some members may conflict with strong opinions held by other Open Source advocates. "They're" not changing "their" opinion, because "they" never had a uniform opinion on the matter to start with.
I think the point was that in C or C++ (for example) that array could be allocated on the stack. The savings in startup time are, as you pointed out, minimal. However, the array would automatically be deallocated when the function returned, as part of the normal stack-unwinding code, with almost no additional cost. In particular, there is no need to use free() at all. Of course, this approach can only be used when no references to the array is retained after the function returns.
Re:This sort of thing...
on
RIAA Sues a Child
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The RIAA may be all that is soulless and wrong in how it operates, but you can't sit here and tell me that their desire to have people pay for their music is wrong.
Actually, while I would agree that a desire to be compensated for the opportunity cost of creating or performing music is perfectly normal, the desire to make people pay to listen to music is a fairly new concept, and still quite controversial. Not that long ago, the only way to listen to music was to pay someone else to perform it, or to perform it oneself. Without the ability to record the sound, each performance required separate compensation. However, that is no longer the case. Current technology allows a single performance to be heard by an arbitrarily large number of people, at nearly the same total cost as just one listener would incur. It is the composition, songwriting, and performance that are important now, not the distribution.
In a sense, we have improved upon the concert hall to the point where it can hold a nearly infinite number of people at once without additional cost, every one of whom can hear the music as well as if they were in the front row. The cost of the performance (including the composition of the music and the writing of the lyrics) is constant regardless of the number of listeners. Therefore, the price of a ticket should approach zero as the number of listeners increases. Even under the copyright system, a CD price of $10 (or less) should provide more than sufficient compensation for a typical band selling 10**6 or more "records" (which would be more likely with the lower price). That's about $10**6 per person, assuming no more than ten people in the band. That's more than a typical band actually makes even before expenses. Where are the extra several million dollars going? The RIAA, perhaps? "Promotional expenses" that the Internet renders unnecessary? There is far too much wasted effort in the current system, waste that copyright encourages due to its monopolistic nature.
That would be more practical if users could create their own limited UIDs. As it is, the system adminitrator would have to manage a number of limited, e-mail-only UIDs (one for each user), or enable some kind of sudo or "run as" procedure (without authentication) with a common UID. Either way, there are still system services that could not be protected in this manner, and the mechanism would be system-specific and thus difficult to design into an e-mail client. A chroot-jail design would at least protect the user's files, but requires root priviledges to work.
One way of "jailing" attachments would be to run them inside a User-Mode Linux process, with no access real network devices or the host filesystem. AFAIK, that would prevent the attachment from altering the system in any way, and could be automated without access to the root account. Of course, this is not all that different from limiting (executable) attachments to Java programs and running them within a limited JVM...
I'm a big fan of the GPL, and of course I'm opposed to software patents, but to divine from the two the need to tax everybody for everything just smacks of totalitarianism. Who then decides how this money gets doled out to the artists, for one thing? And how does this model work for movies, when they cost millions of dollars to produce? I just don't see it.
I agree with the parent. A general tax on Internet use would not be fair to the artist or to the casual Internet user who chooses not to download music (legally or illegally). Also, it would eliminate any feedback from the market that would otherwise direct the most money to the best artists.
An alternative system, which does not depend on government involvement and which could be implemented right away, would be for "consumer groups" or "fan clubs" (for lack of a better name) to charge membership dues in exchange for exclusive perks. The money collected would go to support artists with interests similar to the group's focus, with the agreement that the music would become available to everyone (public domain / Creative Commons /...) upon release. The membership benefits could include a more personal connection with the artists, concert ticket giveaways, priority access to high-quality recordings, etc. Essentially, it would be an adaptation of the patronage system to a more democratic form, with the fans as the patrons. One could think of it as a P2P patronage system.
As for movies, the theatres could always try selling advance tickets to pay for new productions. Theatres cannot survive without movies to show, after all. By raising the money beforehand, they would ensure their revenue even if the movie was later spread all over the Internet, or shown in other theatres. Of course, the theatres would have to work together to pay for the development of something as expensive as a movie.
PS: I also suspect that (some) people would still pay good money to see the movie in a proper theatre, even if they had easy access to a decent, free copy, just for the "theatre experience".
If digital information was stored with the same level of redundancy that "analog" data is stored with, these issues wouldn't exist. In fact, even a low level of redundancy would probably be sufficient to protect against nearly all loss. The "analog" records you refer to can be reconstructed not because they were stored on paper, but because the complete record can be restored from a small fraction of the original, making the paper record much like a simple, but massively redundant, RAID array. With digital records, we can move those portions we care to keep into proper archives before they disappear.
If it wasn't illegal to copy the information on those CDs, then with proper care (including periodic transfers to new discs) the information on them really could be preserved forever. The process would be completely lossless and nearly automatic, whereas a paper document (which will still eventually become unreadable, albiet over a much longer period of time) can only be copied by hand, with a much greater (and thus less likely) expenditure of effort.
Finally, the information in a paper document is fundamentally symbolic in nature, and thus equivalent to the corresponding digital information. It is not analog, because the information is stored as sequences of a finite number of discrete patterns. The underlying analog medium (the ink and paper, for example) can degrade gradually, but the words themselves are either preserved as written or not. Any symbolic information (including digital) could be stored on the same medium, and would be similarly preserved.
What if (once the idea of a Big Mac(TM) had been realized) one could go from a couple pounds of dirt to a Big Mac(TM) in seconds with negligible effort? That is the case with digital arrangements. It is what makes the digital arrangements different from physical ones: they can be duplicated with almost no effort. If someone invented an easy, quick way to rearrange the matter in a few pounds of dirt into a Big Mac(TM), would we grant McDonald's(TM) a monopoly on that particular arrangement of matter to protect them from competition, or would we just let everyone have their (almost) free food?
AFAIK, no one is arguing that the effort and investment in developing the original idea should go unappreciated. However, many people, myself included, are opposed to granting a monopoly on the entire idea to the first one to discover it. Some of use are, instead, attempting to find other ways to compensate artists and inventors for their efforts. Some of these efforts appear to be succeeding (see http://www.magnatune.com/ for a partial example).
I like your idea and see where you're coming from; however I cannot support forcing content producers to behave in a certain way. No matter how desirable that may be.
Revoking copyright (which would naturally result in this system) is not the same thing as artificially forcing "content producers" to behave in a certain way. No one is telling them what to do; they are free to choose any model that they want. However, as a society we are not obligated to grant them exclusivity through copyright.
Not everything that people are willing to pay for should have protection under the law, particularly if we (as a society) wish to maintain a degree of separation between our game-worlds and the real world.
Think of this as being sued for "stealing" your opponent's Monopoly(TM) money during a game. Sure, it's breaking the rules (or at least ethically unstable). However, there is an implicit agreement by the participants in any game that any in-game action will only have consequences inside the game-world. Breaking that agreement--such as sueing someone in a real-world court for questionable, but permitted, actions in the game--ruins the experience for everyone. That agreement should certainly be taken into account when deciding this case.
To summarize: the "victim" entered the game-world willingly, with the understanding that he was participating in a game. The alleged "crime" occurred in the game, between two players, and the stolen "property" was a part of the game as well. It is an abuse of the legal system to ask for arbitration, but if any damages are to be awarded, or punishment prescribed, they should be in accordance with the laws of the game-world and not the real-world. As the game-world's laws do not require that any compensation be offered to the victim in this case, the "victim" is without standing.
For the most part I agree with the Parent: humanlike AI (which may or may not be "true" AI) is far too computationally intensive to be practical with our current level of technology. However, consider the possibility that we may discover at some point that we've been approaching the problem from the wrong angle, or left out some critical element, or just never tried organizing the connections a certain way. In other words, it may be an issue of design, not brute force.
The difficulty is not with the word "theft" per se. The problem is when the economic principles applicable to material property, which depend on significant duplication costs and monopolistic ownership, are extended to digitally encoded information, which exhibits neither of these traits. In the context of this discussion, the use of the words "theft" and "steal" encourage such errors.
All users (legal or otherwise) are taking possession of software they do not own. The software is licensed, not sold. The issue at hand is not ownership, but rather the right to make and distribute copies of a work one legally possesses. The principle illegal act is making the copy, not possessing it. That is why the correct term is "copyright infringement" and not "theft".
A person who says he is a Christian is a Christian. Simple as that.
Not all those who claim to be Christians put their faith into practice. The word "Christian" has a very specific meaning, and refers to followers of the teachings of Christ. These teachings are not incomprehensible or hidden; they are written out clearly in the first four books of the New Testament, along with additional history and commentary by those who knew Christ personally.[1]
I would suggest that you judge for yourself whether a given person is living according to Christian teachings rather than simply taking their word for it. Christianity isn't about the Christians; it's about the Christ.
[1] The Old Testament is also a very valuable resource. There are many cross-references between the New and Old Testament teachings, and much of Christ's instructions regarding personal behavior are a clarification of what the Old Testament law (ten commandments, et al.) was intended to be, and would have been had it been understood and implemented properly.
Even if each copy is worth $50, you do not own all the individual copies. Not even current copyright law gives complete ownership of all the copies to the original author; only the right to copy is exclusive. If someone took one of your copies (which you value at $50), then they owe you $50. However, if someone makes their own copy (thus doing themselves all the work required to make the copy), they have not taken $50 from you. You still have just as much as you had before.
Lost opportunity for a sale is not the same as theft. One might as well say that you owe the bottled-water companies money for the water you drink, which they value at approximately $1.00 per 20oz bottle. Water is actually a good element to compare with here: it is readily available, can be produced (like copies) by both "consumers" and "producers" alike effectively for free, and someone is trying to sell it. The difference is that no one complains when someone bottles their own water instead of purchasing it.
I agree, but this would make a good first step. Wean the companies off of software patents before removing them entirely. In the meantime, we would at least have a reference implementation and some decent example code to work with.
Perhaps my termonology was wrong. What I meant was that all of the cost of software development is up front, when the software is written, while the payment is received in exchange for a copy, which itself costs almost nothing. In most mass-production industries, the majority of the payment goes to cover the cost of the item being purchased, and a very small amount covers the development overhead. I wrongly called the former "product" and the latter "service", for lack of better words. (When I wrote that, I'd been up for >24 hours, so forgive me if I wasn't perfectly clear.)
Slashdot Mirror
Jitter is defined as random variances, typically in the 10's or 100's of milliseconds, in the delays between successive packets in stream. It is related to latency, which is the minimum delay between the transmission and reception of any given packet. Given that, how, exactly, would adding jitter impede e-mail, web pages, instant messages, or any primary Internet services besides live voice conversations and possibly online real-time games? The technique was mentioned in that article as an effective method for discreetly discouraging the use of VoIP.
They could then just add some jitter to any unrecognized (i.e. encrypted) traffic, thus making the connection useless for any two-way voice streams. They don't have to block the connection entirely, and most services are not interactive and wouldn't notice the difference.
Wasn't that what this thread was about in the first place?
In any event, using LD_PRELOAD should be easier (at least under Linux) if you know which routine it's using (try `ltrace`), more responsive at runtime than using nested virtual machines, and more permanent than setting back the virtual machine's clock (although this is debateable - 35 years (since 1970, the epoch) is a long time).
And just how does the software know what the real date is? Just don't syncronize the clock with the host system. You could even use a LD_PRELOAD wrapper to fake any time you wanted by overriding the system "get time" library calls, eliminating the need nested virtual machines.
If he did the work without without any assurances that he would be paid afterward (a contract of some sort), then it's his own fault that he did the work for free. No one has an inherent right to require payment in the absence of any prior agreement. That is what contracts are for. If you want to be paid for something, find someone (or multiple "someones") who will value your efforts, and convince them to enter into a binding contract for payment on completion of the work. This rule applies as well to creative products as to anything else, but for some reason all the writers, artists, and performers try to do things in reverse.
While Microsoft does not have a monopoly now, they abused their monopoly position in the past to place any potential competitors at a disadvantage, which is illegal under U.S. antitrust law. They were convicted of this, both in the U.S. and in the E.U. Neither case resulted in any significant punishment, and so the market is still left unbalanced by their past anticompetitive behavior. Consider what the market might have looked like if Microsoft had not been allowed to behave as a monopoly; if, for example, their scheme of coercing computer manufacturers into enforcing their operating-system monopoly had been prevented. P.S. Open Source advocates are not a uniform group; they represent many widely varying points of view. Strongly-held opinions of some members may conflict with strong opinions held by other Open Source advocates. "They're" not changing "their" opinion, because "they" never had a uniform opinion on the matter to start with.
I think the GP was being sarcastic...
You could try Rekall. Supports multiple database backends, and includes a form designer, a scripting language, and graphical database design tools.
I think the point was that in C or C++ (for example) that array could be allocated on the stack. The savings in startup time are, as you pointed out, minimal. However, the array would automatically be deallocated when the function returned, as part of the normal stack-unwinding code, with almost no additional cost. In particular, there is no need to use free() at all. Of course, this approach can only be used when no references to the array is retained after the function returns.
Actually, while I would agree that a desire to be compensated for the opportunity cost of creating or performing music is perfectly normal, the desire to make people pay to listen to music is a fairly new concept, and still quite controversial. Not that long ago, the only way to listen to music was to pay someone else to perform it, or to perform it oneself. Without the ability to record the sound, each performance required separate compensation. However, that is no longer the case. Current technology allows a single performance to be heard by an arbitrarily large number of people, at nearly the same total cost as just one listener would incur. It is the composition, songwriting, and performance that are important now, not the distribution.
In a sense, we have improved upon the concert hall to the point where it can hold a nearly infinite number of people at once without additional cost, every one of whom can hear the music as well as if they were in the front row. The cost of the performance (including the composition of the music and the writing of the lyrics) is constant regardless of the number of listeners. Therefore, the price of a ticket should approach zero as the number of listeners increases. Even under the copyright system, a CD price of $10 (or less) should provide more than sufficient compensation for a typical band selling 10**6 or more "records" (which would be more likely with the lower price). That's about $10**6 per person, assuming no more than ten people in the band. That's more than a typical band actually makes even before expenses. Where are the extra several million dollars going? The RIAA, perhaps? "Promotional expenses" that the Internet renders unnecessary? There is far too much wasted effort in the current system, waste that copyright encourages due to its monopolistic nature.
Perhaps because they want to have some say in what he's working on?
That would be more practical if users could create their own limited UIDs. As it is, the system adminitrator would have to manage a number of limited, e-mail-only UIDs (one for each user), or enable some kind of sudo or "run as" procedure (without authentication) with a common UID. Either way, there are still system services that could not be protected in this manner, and the mechanism would be system-specific and thus difficult to design into an e-mail client. A chroot-jail design would at least protect the user's files, but requires root priviledges to work.
One way of "jailing" attachments would be to run them inside a User-Mode Linux process, with no access real network devices or the host filesystem. AFAIK, that would prevent the attachment from altering the system in any way, and could be automated without access to the root account. Of course, this is not all that different from limiting (executable) attachments to Java programs and running them within a limited JVM...
I agree with the parent. A general tax on Internet use would not be fair to the artist or to the casual Internet user who chooses not to download music (legally or illegally). Also, it would eliminate any feedback from the market that would otherwise direct the most money to the best artists.
An alternative system, which does not depend on government involvement and which could be implemented right away, would be for "consumer groups" or "fan clubs" (for lack of a better name) to charge membership dues in exchange for exclusive perks. The money collected would go to support artists with interests similar to the group's focus, with the agreement that the music would become available to everyone (public domain / Creative Commons / ...) upon release. The membership benefits could include a more personal connection with the artists, concert ticket giveaways, priority access to high-quality recordings, etc. Essentially, it would be an adaptation of the patronage system to a more democratic form, with the fans as the patrons. One could think of it as a P2P patronage system.
As for movies, the theatres could always try selling advance tickets to pay for new productions. Theatres cannot survive without movies to show, after all. By raising the money beforehand, they would ensure their revenue even if the movie was later spread all over the Internet, or shown in other theatres. Of course, the theatres would have to work together to pay for the development of something as expensive as a movie.
PS: I also suspect that (some) people would still pay good money to see the movie in a proper theatre, even if they had easy access to a decent, free copy, just for the "theatre experience".
If digital information was stored with the same level of redundancy that "analog" data is stored with, these issues wouldn't exist. In fact, even a low level of redundancy would probably be sufficient to protect against nearly all loss. The "analog" records you refer to can be reconstructed not because they were stored on paper, but because the complete record can be restored from a small fraction of the original, making the paper record much like a simple, but massively redundant, RAID array. With digital records, we can move those portions we care to keep into proper archives before they disappear. If it wasn't illegal to copy the information on those CDs, then with proper care (including periodic transfers to new discs) the information on them really could be preserved forever. The process would be completely lossless and nearly automatic, whereas a paper document (which will still eventually become unreadable, albiet over a much longer period of time) can only be copied by hand, with a much greater (and thus less likely) expenditure of effort. Finally, the information in a paper document is fundamentally symbolic in nature, and thus equivalent to the corresponding digital information. It is not analog, because the information is stored as sequences of a finite number of discrete patterns. The underlying analog medium (the ink and paper, for example) can degrade gradually, but the words themselves are either preserved as written or not. Any symbolic information (including digital) could be stored on the same medium, and would be similarly preserved.
What if (once the idea of a Big Mac(TM) had been realized) one could go from a couple pounds of dirt to a Big Mac(TM) in seconds with negligible effort? That is the case with digital arrangements. It is what makes the digital arrangements different from physical ones: they can be duplicated with almost no effort. If someone invented an easy, quick way to rearrange the matter in a few pounds of dirt into a Big Mac(TM), would we grant McDonald's(TM) a monopoly on that particular arrangement of matter to protect them from competition, or would we just let everyone have their (almost) free food?
AFAIK, no one is arguing that the effort and investment in developing the original idea should go unappreciated. However, many people, myself included, are opposed to granting a monopoly on the entire idea to the first one to discover it. Some of use are, instead, attempting to find other ways to compensate artists and inventors for their efforts. Some of these efforts appear to be succeeding (see http://www.magnatune.com/ for a partial example).
Revoking copyright (which would naturally result in this system) is not the same thing as artificially forcing "content producers" to behave in a certain way. No one is telling them what to do; they are free to choose any model that they want. However, as a society we are not obligated to grant them exclusivity through copyright.
Not everything that people are willing to pay for should have protection under the law, particularly if we (as a society) wish to maintain a degree of separation between our game-worlds and the real world.
Think of this as being sued for "stealing" your opponent's Monopoly(TM) money during a game. Sure, it's breaking the rules (or at least ethically unstable). However, there is an implicit agreement by the participants in any game that any in-game action will only have consequences inside the game-world. Breaking that agreement--such as sueing someone in a real-world court for questionable, but permitted, actions in the game--ruins the experience for everyone. That agreement should certainly be taken into account when deciding this case.
To summarize: the "victim" entered the game-world willingly, with the understanding that he was participating in a game. The alleged "crime" occurred in the game, between two players, and the stolen "property" was a part of the game as well. It is an abuse of the legal system to ask for arbitration, but if any damages are to be awarded, or punishment prescribed, they should be in accordance with the laws of the game-world and not the real-world. As the game-world's laws do not require that any compensation be offered to the victim in this case, the "victim" is without standing.
For the most part I agree with the Parent: humanlike AI (which may or may not be "true" AI) is far too computationally intensive to be practical with our current level of technology. However, consider the possibility that we may discover at some point that we've been approaching the problem from the wrong angle, or left out some critical element, or just never tried organizing the connections a certain way. In other words, it may be an issue of design, not brute force.
The difficulty is not with the word "theft" per se. The problem is when the economic principles applicable to material property, which depend on significant duplication costs and monopolistic ownership, are extended to digitally encoded information, which exhibits neither of these traits. In the context of this discussion, the use of the words "theft" and "steal" encourage such errors.
All users (legal or otherwise) are taking possession of software they do not own. The software is licensed, not sold. The issue at hand is not ownership, but rather the right to make and distribute copies of a work one legally possesses. The principle illegal act is making the copy, not possessing it. That is why the correct term is "copyright infringement" and not "theft".
Not all those who claim to be Christians put their faith into practice. The word "Christian" has a very specific meaning, and refers to followers of the teachings of Christ. These teachings are not incomprehensible or hidden; they are written out clearly in the first four books of the New Testament, along with additional history and commentary by those who knew Christ personally.[1]
I would suggest that you judge for yourself whether a given person is living according to Christian teachings rather than simply taking their word for it. Christianity isn't about the Christians; it's about the Christ.
[1] The Old Testament is also a very valuable resource. There are many cross-references between the New and Old Testament teachings, and much of Christ's instructions regarding personal behavior are a clarification of what the Old Testament law (ten commandments, et al.) was intended to be, and would have been had it been understood and implemented properly.
Even if each copy is worth $50, you do not own all the individual copies. Not even current copyright law gives complete ownership of all the copies to the original author; only the right to copy is exclusive. If someone took one of your copies (which you value at $50), then they owe you $50. However, if someone makes their own copy (thus doing themselves all the work required to make the copy), they have not taken $50 from you. You still have just as much as you had before.
Lost opportunity for a sale is not the same as theft. One might as well say that you owe the bottled-water companies money for the water you drink, which they value at approximately $1.00 per 20oz bottle. Water is actually a good element to compare with here: it is readily available, can be produced (like copies) by both "consumers" and "producers" alike effectively for free, and someone is trying to sell it. The difference is that no one complains when someone bottles their own water instead of purchasing it.
I agree, but this would make a good first step. Wean the companies off of software patents before removing them entirely. In the meantime, we would at least have a reference implementation and some decent example code to work with.
n/t
Perhaps my termonology was wrong. What I meant was that all of the cost of software development is up front, when the software is written, while the payment is received in exchange for a copy, which itself costs almost nothing. In most mass-production industries, the majority of the payment goes to cover the cost of the item being purchased, and a very small amount covers the development overhead. I wrongly called the former "product" and the latter "service", for lack of better words. (When I wrote that, I'd been up for >24 hours, so forgive me if I wasn't perfectly clear.)