I've read The Future of Money by Mr Lietaer. It is not a piece of crap, but it's also not going to end poverty any time soon.
The book proposes the design of custom currencies to achieve social goals, like caring for the elderly. It pushes the idea of demurrage (the taxing of money itself, to discourage hoarding of currency) and backs it up with examples like the Woergl stamp scrip.
Demurrage already exists, it's called inflation and the reason a 1%-2% inflation rate is seen as healthy by economists is basically because of things like what happened at Woergl.
Most cases of serious poverty in the world can be traced back to lack of political stability. Before you can create wealth, you need some assurance you aren't going to be killed tomorrow by those seeking to take it, or have the whole thing come down in ruins due to revolution, war, religious riots or whatever. You don't even need a good political system, China is evidence of that. But if you have stability and a basic, functioning economic system, things get better.
That's not to say capitalism can't be improved a lot. It obviously has tons of problems. The biggest threat to making improvements are people who religiously believe in the power of markets. Religious blind faith in anything is bad, but especially so for markets. A market is just a tool, like any tool, it has weaknesses and strengths and won't always be the right tool for the job. It also requires skill to correctly apply. Unfortunately the Washington Consensus is pretty strong amongst the political class. A whole lot of avoidable disasters in recent times can be traced back to inappropriate application of a market to a problem.
I dunno. I'd say the story was basically average.... some fairly major plot holes.... lots of unexplained stuff happening "just becuz" and the bad guy shows up about 3/4 through to announce his entire plan for no obvious reason. Not to mention the cheesy naming. If it were a film it'd get laughed out of the cinema.
Fortunately it's not a film, it's a video game, and a highly enjoyable one at that (I just finished it this evening). And it's worth remembering that we've only seen 1/3rd of the story. It might resolve some of the things that currently look like lazy plot shortcuts.
There were two semi-original ideas I liked though. The first was the idea that entire civilisations would simply find and use advanced technology lying around the galaxy without really understanding it. The second was the whole "mass effect" itself.
I don't know that they're trying to distort the facts. I mean, they brought in a guy who flat out told the "psychologist" that she was talking crap. I mean, he said "have you played the game" and she just laughed and said no. Then he pointed out all the things she'd said that were completely wrong.
If this were some nefarious plot to distort the truth they wouldn't have broadcast that. I think it's more likely that they're just incompetent losers who wouldn't know factual analysis from a hole in the ground. Remember, never attribute to malice what can equally be attributed to stupidity.
Of course. iTunes for Windows also does regular anti-debugger sweeps (every 5-10 seconds? I forget). I don't see anybody crying about that though, perhaps because it's normal and expected? There are probably ways to interfere with DTrace without actually modifying DTrace itself, just like you can interfere with debuggers without modifying the debugger itself.
Yah, totally. If you don't bother understanding the whole system you get programs that, say, start a couple of threads for every copy of that program running on the local subnet (it's p2p! it's cool! it's new! it's 2002!). And then some poor schmuck gets asked to speed it up a bit because some people complain that the program is slow their system swaps a lot.
That's a lot of complexity, given that for 95% of users you can guess how much they will use based on statistics. It's only the outliers that mess this up. I mean, sure, people could learn over time by watching graphs of their own usage, but you're still expecting non-technical people to use units that are not even metric, and don't have any obvious real world parallels...
I really doubt he means cell towers. The word "cell" can refer to a lot of things, and how many people do you know that run BitTorrent over their mobile phone? He probably is talking about local cable internet POP.
The point about upgrading the network is moot. Every ISP I ever talked to has said that P2P traffic expands to fill the available space. It doesn't matter how much bandwidth you throw at it. You'll always flood your pipes with P2P traffic.
Anyway, the interview is pretty interesting. I'm trying hard to figure out if the AT&T guys genuinely believe the stuff about having a moral responsibility to do something about illegal content travelling over their pipes, or whether it's a cynical cover for some other business reason. I can well believe it's both actually. These guys are probably in their 50s or so. They probably were never absorbed into the "information wants to be free dude!" culture that is prevalent in under 35s. I suspect their views on morality and copyright law might seem quite old fashioned to a lot of us here on Slashdot - regardless of whether they work for AT&T or not.
Let's assume they're basically honest people, who just have very different views of the world to most of us. Most of the times I've thought people were "evil" that turned out to be just childish naivety on my part. Usually, I just didn't understand their position.
So they see a small number of their customers basically flouting the law, and using up disproportionate resources whilst doing so. It doesn't surprise me that they might feel annoyed or even outraged about that.
And now the industry has backed itself into a corner because everybody is selling "unlimited" subscriptions and trying to sell a "10mbit/sec with a max cap of X GByte/month" just won't fly becaus nobody really understands what "X GByte" equates to. Regular Joe Schmoe has no clue how much a YouTube video would count towards his cap for instance, and probably most Slashdotters don't either. So no consumer ISP is going to talk about this stuff except in the fine print, which leads to people jumping on them for misleading advertising, etc.
I have to admit, if I were an ISP owner I don't know what I'd do. I could try selling a subscription in which BitTorrent traffic was banned, so that people who don't use it can get cheaper and more reliable connectivity, but that implies regular people understanding stuff like "WoW uses BitTorrent" (which imho is a stupid idea anyway... why the hell is Blizzard abusing my upstream instead of just paying Akamai to do file distribution properly?). Or I could just bite the marketing problems and sell most people capped/throttled connections and then sell "pure" lines to people who want to sit on P2P all day.... oh wait, I already sell them, they're called business class lines and don't have any oversubscription problems, but are a ton more expensive.
So it seems I lose no matter what I do. Either I can sell "unlimited" connections which are nice and easy for the 95% of my customers that don't spend all their time downloading movies and video games 24/7, but I have to spend ridiculous quantities of cash on transit just to stop my service grinding to a halt. Or I can try and sell capped/throttled connections, which will kill me because nobody will understand how it's measured and my customers will just go elsewhere. Or I can sell unlimited connections and throttle BitTorrent in some way, perhaps in the fine print, which makes my 95% legit customer base happy but pisses off the 5% I don't really want anyway.
The hard part isn't coding it. As you say, that's pretty trivial, especially for one as simple as Mass Effect. The hard part is designing it - complex enough to have impact on tactics/strategy, simple enough to be usable on a console, usability testing it to ensure it doesn't confuse people, etc.
Generally, I thought the Mass Effect inventory system is pretty good, but it's really let down by the apparent rush job they made of the items themselves. There aren't any items you can get that aren't weapons, basically, so the accumulation of money feels pointless. All you can do with the items once you have 12 of them is sell them, to get money, that you can use to buy..... worse weapons? I also seemed to be acquiring weapons with no obvious method by the time I was done on Virmire. I'd kill some bad guys and get a ton of upgrades or weapons, but didn't feel like interrupting the action to compare them. So I just mostly ignored that aspect of the game until I was back on the Normandy.
Balancing a game is usually way harder than coding it, and coding it is already difficult enough:)
(insert obligatory "mass effect is awesome" message here)
It doesn't work like that. People don't get fired because their stuff was pirated. What happens is that they're never paid to produce the stuff at all.
Look. Let's say you're a games company. You have an idea for an awesome video game, and predict that about 1 million people will want to play your game. You decide to charge $40 per copy, because that's more or less what your competitors charge for a similar experience, so you set your budget at $30 million and hope for a $10 million profit. Obviously these are made up numbers. Anyway, you hire some programmers, some artists, some office space, buy some CD printing runs etc. It's all very expensive but at the end, you do indeed produce an awesome game. It gets rave reviews. The punters love it.
But there's a problem. Your assumption that the game would appeal to about 1 million people is correct, but as it happens, about 25% of those people pirate the game. Thus only 0.75 million people actually pay for it, thus you make 0.75*40 == $30 million. But wait - that was your budget! So actually you make no money at all on this particular project.
OK. Your company is at least not actually bankrupt... lucky for you 75% of your customers are not freeloading! You decide to make a new game. But this time, you know that only 75% of the people it appeals to will buy the game. So you reduce the budget for the game to account for that. Maybe you don't hire such good artists. Maybe you make the levels smaller, or the game shorter, or you reduce the number of programmers and leave out some features you wanted. At least this time, you make a profit and go home to the wife with something to show for your efforts. But the new game is subtly worse than it could have been. Nobody actually got fired - they just weren't hired in the first place. Nobody actually got "harmed" - they just didn't have cool moon buggy levels in their game when they might have done otherwise. All the honest people get a worse product than they otherwise would have done.
"The enemy" is whoever happens to make something cool that other people want to watch/listen/play/read/whatever. You're in this mentality where it's "us vs them" but who is us and who is them? If "them" is "creative people" then doesn't that by definition mean "us" is "uncreative people"? Do you really want to be in a war between uncreative people and creative people?
If you think "the enemy" is not creative people but rather evil corporations who enslave the creative types, then we might have more in common, but the solution is to try and solve corporations being evil. Focus on the root cause. Eliminating copyright won't fix corporations screwing people over. It'll just make them even more determined to do things their way. Bear in mind the supposed utopia of a copyright free world exists now, more or less, because enforcement by the police is so lax. How many people do you know that ended up in court because they downloaded a video game? None, right. It hardly ever happens. If copyright vanished tomorrow, it wouldn't actually make a big difference. Companies would still develop DRM because, well shit, if you make video games for a living what's the alternative? You might as well give away that $20 million in a lottery or something - in a copyright free world, without copy protection you'd lose it anyway.
... because he's really trying to articulate the possibilities for new business and political models that the Internet presents us with.
Where? I read the interview and all I saw was this:
Early on in the debate, we dropped the economic arguments altogether and focused entirely on civil liberties and the right to privacy.
That's not "articulating the possibilities for new business and political models". That's ignoring business models completely, even though the whole debate is about business models, because he doesn't have any answers to these hard questions. Only a list of childish demands - "i want it and i want it NOW!" - without thinking through the consequences. He focuses on "personal liberty" because the moment people engage him on basic economics, like how to amortize expensive productions over those who enjoy them, he has no answers.
Why should I respect a guy that has such a giant hole in his thinking?
There is a poster elsewhere in the thread that says "walk the walk. create cool content and release it copyright free". That is the only possible answer to this debate. DRM and copyright are tools you can use if you want, but you're not obligated to. If Rick and his merry men cared about changing the future so much, they'd go create the next Mass Effect (120 people + unreal engine) and give it away for free, to prove that you don't need to sell modern video games at retail to fund their construction.
But they won't, because they won't be able to find a rich donor who will fund such a venture. And thus their war against copyright collapses in a smoking pile of hypocrisy.
You say the weakness of doing it in the kernel is that if you can strip or eliminate the watermark, you "win" in the sense that your illegally copied music won't be reported. Well yes, obviously if you can strip the watermark, the scheme doesn't work. So what?
I think you missed my point. It doesn't matter if you have to putz around with weird alternative operating systems. Not many people will bother to do it, so the goal of getting most people to pay for their music is still met. BTW just replacing the codec wouldn't work, why would such a check be done in the codec when better ones are developed all the time? The right place to do that is in the kernel, between userspace and the audio driver.
Yeah, so any such purchase-checking system wouldn't work with Linux. But that doesn't matter, does it?
The grandparent post called such a scheme "DRM" but it's actually not DRM, it's about asynchronously checking that you're honest. Honesty checks don't have to have 100% coverage to be effective.
It's time for a bad analogy. Consider ticket checks on public transport. Typically not every trip you take will be checked. If you are determined to never pay your train tickets, you can hide in the toilets on a train for the whole trip and avoid being checked by the conductors (I've seen this happen, it's pathetic). But, hiding in the toilet for an entire trip is a ridiculous pain in the ass, the sort of thing only the chronically broke would stoop to.
Much though I love Linux, it isn't a hole in this scheme. If you are determined to violate copyrights and get away with it, then yes using Linux would be a good way around it. But what is the market share of desktop Linux again? It's very low. Nobody is going to worry if Linux users get away without being checked because they are such a minority. Mac and Windows is enough to get your average consumer covered.
If Linux ever becomes seriously mainstream then such an honesty check would have implementation issues. But that's a really big if. It's been 15 years already, right? I hate to say it, but for your average Joe using Linux to avoid having their music checked would be like hiding in the toilets to avoid a ticket inspection.
A lot of audio watermarking algorithms are designed to survive psycho-acoustic compression algorithms like MP3 because they're intended to be used on DVD Audio, eg, in this presentation. Note the date on that - it's from 5 years ago. Watermarking technology has advanced significantly since. I think it's fair to say that us armchair researchers on Slashdot are probably a bit behind the times;)
You haven't looked hard enough. Most people who make their living by selling "creative stuff" on the open market do seem to have a problem with it, in my experience.
I know a guy who used to pirate all his software, and tons of sample libraries (used in making music). He now works in the music business and has "gone clean" - he only uses stuff he's bought or got for free these days. Oddly, his views on file sharing changed once he had income and relied on others honesty to make it.
Anyway, I haven't RTFA in fine Slashdot tradition, but I'd be really amazed if any country were to legimitize downloading of copyrighted materials. More likely it's just saying that the state won't make programs like BitTorrent illegal to use. Using them to violate copyright would still be illegal, why would any country risk being kicked out of every supra-national trade body there is just to satisfy a bunch of freeloaders? Even if that describes 100% of the populace, when faced with all the downsides, I'd be surprised if people would still support the principle. It'd be a phyrric victory.
ABB, Ericsson and so on don't produce any IP that can be infringed with file sharing, so it's a useless comparison.
What I'd like to know - how much retail software does Sweden export? What is the size of its movie export industry? What about its gaming industry?
If Sweden want to legalize file sharing of stuff they produce, that's fine by me. But if they try and legalize file sharing of stuff other people produce, you have a WIPO violation on your hands, not to mention a policy that is blatantly unfair.
If it's not useful, why was it released at all? I thought I'd at least be able to contribute to reporting spam, or something, but clicking the stars (no visible indication they _can_ be clicked btw) just says that they don't do anything yet.
Right. IIRC you'd need to split water to get hydrogen, and then combine the CO and H2 in the Fischer-Tropsch process to actually get liquid fuels. So it'd take a lot of energy to do, but if you can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere (a hard, hard problem), voila, you have renewable petroleum.
This, of course, presumes that the purpose of DRM is to "protect" content. We all know that the only purpose of DRM is to lock consumers into a product and restrict consumer choice. So standardizing DRM is something that companies want to avoid at all costs.
Well, the existence of things like AACS says you're wrong. It's a documented specification, and it's open in the sense that, if you want to manufacture HD-DVD players, you can go ahead and license it. You can also read about the algorithms it uses without paying anything.
AACS is largely about defending a large number of secrets and revoking them when they are broken (because everybody knows that software players are leaky as hell). AACS hasn't been broken either - keys have been found, but they have also been revoked, as the system was designed to do.
DRM isn't going to disappear, because business models that work today when people are forced to pay for what they want tend to fail when they rely entirely on peoples honesty. It might disappear in some places (like music) but to disappear from everything, entirely? I suspect not for a long time.
What I'd like to see is a replacement of DRM with some kind of social honor code around buying creative works, unless you really can't afford to because you have no money. It could be enforced by having people publish lists of what they own, that they can share with their friends so people are exposed to more music/movies/games, etc, but there'd be a taboo on actually just downloading your friends entire MP3 collection and not paying the original artists anything.
Sadly, with the rampant "I should not have to pay people for their work if it's digital" mentality a lot of people have these days, I doubt such an honor code will appear anytime soon. DRM it is, then.
Oh, I get it now. Slashdot is being crap-flooded with these MyMiniCity things because you can only "grow" your city by getting hits to it.
Look. If you're willing to waste peoples time and generally be a moron about this dumb game, why not just rent a botnet for a few hours? You could max out your population that way. Failing that, the "population" ticker seems to be based on IP address, so just write a program that hits it via Tor or something and leave it running. There are soooo many possibilities that don't involve using obfuscated redirects it's not even funny.
Or are you just a natural troll, and if it weren't for MyMiniCity you'd be finding other ways to waste peoples time?
Did you actually bother to read the paper? Singularity isn't a "dream", it is implemented and the code has been given to some universities for research purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read The Future of Money by Mr Lietaer. It is not a piece of crap, but it's also not going to end poverty any time soon.
The book proposes the design of custom currencies to achieve social goals, like caring for the elderly. It pushes the idea of demurrage (the taxing of money itself, to discourage hoarding of currency) and backs it up with examples like the Woergl stamp scrip.
Demurrage already exists, it's called inflation and the reason a 1%-2% inflation rate is seen as healthy by economists is basically because of things like what happened at Woergl.
Most cases of serious poverty in the world can be traced back to lack of political stability. Before you can create wealth, you need some assurance you aren't going to be killed tomorrow by those seeking to take it, or have the whole thing come down in ruins due to revolution, war, religious riots or whatever. You don't even need a good political system, China is evidence of that. But if you have stability and a basic, functioning economic system, things get better.
That's not to say capitalism can't be improved a lot. It obviously has tons of problems. The biggest threat to making improvements are people who religiously believe in the power of markets. Religious blind faith in anything is bad, but especially so for markets. A market is just a tool, like any tool, it has weaknesses and strengths and won't always be the right tool for the job. It also requires skill to correctly apply. Unfortunately the Washington Consensus is pretty strong amongst the political class. A whole lot of avoidable disasters in recent times can be traced back to inappropriate application of a market to a problem.
I dunno. I'd say the story was basically average .... some fairly major plot holes .... lots of unexplained stuff happening "just becuz" and the bad guy shows up about 3/4 through to announce his entire plan for no obvious reason. Not to mention the cheesy naming. If it were a film it'd get laughed out of the cinema.
Fortunately it's not a film, it's a video game, and a highly enjoyable one at that (I just finished it this evening). And it's worth remembering that we've only seen 1/3rd of the story. It might resolve some of the things that currently look like lazy plot shortcuts.
There were two semi-original ideas I liked though. The first was the idea that entire civilisations would simply find and use advanced technology lying around the galaxy without really understanding it. The second was the whole "mass effect" itself.
I don't know that they're trying to distort the facts. I mean, they brought in a guy who flat out told the "psychologist" that she was talking crap. I mean, he said "have you played the game" and she just laughed and said no. Then he pointed out all the things she'd said that were completely wrong.
If this were some nefarious plot to distort the truth they wouldn't have broadcast that. I think it's more likely that they're just incompetent losers who wouldn't know factual analysis from a hole in the ground. Remember, never attribute to malice what can equally be attributed to stupidity.
Of course. iTunes for Windows also does regular anti-debugger sweeps (every 5-10 seconds? I forget). I don't see anybody crying about that though, perhaps because it's normal and expected? There are probably ways to interfere with DTrace without actually modifying DTrace itself, just like you can interfere with debuggers without modifying the debugger itself.
Yah, totally. If you don't bother understanding the whole system you get programs that, say, start a couple of threads for every copy of that program running on the local subnet (it's p2p! it's cool! it's new! it's 2002!). And then some poor schmuck gets asked to speed it up a bit because some people complain that the program is slow their system swaps a lot.
That's a lot of complexity, given that for 95% of users you can guess how much they will use based on statistics. It's only the outliers that mess this up. I mean, sure, people could learn over time by watching graphs of their own usage, but you're still expecting non-technical people to use units that are not even metric, and don't have any obvious real world parallels ...
I really doubt he means cell towers. The word "cell" can refer to a lot of things, and how many people do you know that run BitTorrent over their mobile phone? He probably is talking about local cable internet POP.
The point about upgrading the network is moot. Every ISP I ever talked to has said that P2P traffic expands to fill the available space. It doesn't matter how much bandwidth you throw at it. You'll always flood your pipes with P2P traffic.
Anyway, the interview is pretty interesting. I'm trying hard to figure out if the AT&T guys genuinely believe the stuff about having a moral responsibility to do something about illegal content travelling over their pipes, or whether it's a cynical cover for some other business reason. I can well believe it's both actually. These guys are probably in their 50s or so. They probably were never absorbed into the "information wants to be free dude!" culture that is prevalent in under 35s. I suspect their views on morality and copyright law might seem quite old fashioned to a lot of us here on Slashdot - regardless of whether they work for AT&T or not.
Let's assume they're basically honest people, who just have very different views of the world to most of us. Most of the times I've thought people were "evil" that turned out to be just childish naivety on my part. Usually, I just didn't understand their position.
So they see a small number of their customers basically flouting the law, and using up disproportionate resources whilst doing so. It doesn't surprise me that they might feel annoyed or even outraged about that.
And now the industry has backed itself into a corner because everybody is selling "unlimited" subscriptions and trying to sell a "10mbit/sec with a max cap of X GByte/month" just won't fly becaus nobody really understands what "X GByte" equates to. Regular Joe Schmoe has no clue how much a YouTube video would count towards his cap for instance, and probably most Slashdotters don't either. So no consumer ISP is going to talk about this stuff except in the fine print, which leads to people jumping on them for misleading advertising, etc.
I have to admit, if I were an ISP owner I don't know what I'd do. I could try selling a subscription in which BitTorrent traffic was banned, so that people who don't use it can get cheaper and more reliable connectivity, but that implies regular people understanding stuff like "WoW uses BitTorrent" (which imho is a stupid idea anyway ... why the hell is Blizzard abusing my upstream instead of just paying Akamai to do file distribution properly?). Or I could just bite the marketing problems and sell most people capped/throttled connections and then sell "pure" lines to people who want to sit on P2P all day .... oh wait, I already sell them, they're called business class lines and don't have any oversubscription problems, but are a ton more expensive.
So it seems I lose no matter what I do. Either I can sell "unlimited" connections which are nice and easy for the 95% of my customers that don't spend all their time downloading movies and video games 24/7, but I have to spend ridiculous quantities of cash on transit just to stop my service grinding to a halt. Or I can try and sell capped/throttled connections, which will kill me because nobody will understand how it's measured and my customers will just go elsewhere. Or I can sell unlimited connections and throttle BitTorrent in some way, perhaps in the fine print, which makes my 95% legit customer base happy but pisses off the 5% I don't really want anyway.
Thanks. I was hoping somebody knowledgable would pipe up on this topic.
The hard part isn't coding it. As you say, that's pretty trivial, especially for one as simple as Mass Effect. The hard part is designing it - complex enough to have impact on tactics/strategy, simple enough to be usable on a console, usability testing it to ensure it doesn't confuse people, etc.
Generally, I thought the Mass Effect inventory system is pretty good, but it's really let down by the apparent rush job they made of the items themselves. There aren't any items you can get that aren't weapons, basically, so the accumulation of money feels pointless. All you can do with the items once you have 12 of them is sell them, to get money, that you can use to buy ..... worse weapons? I also seemed to be acquiring weapons with no obvious method by the time I was done on Virmire. I'd kill some bad guys and get a ton of upgrades or weapons, but didn't feel like interrupting the action to compare them. So I just mostly ignored that aspect of the game until I was back on the Normandy.
Balancing a game is usually way harder than coding it, and coding it is already difficult enough :)
(insert obligatory "mass effect is awesome" message here)
It doesn't work like that. People don't get fired because their stuff was pirated. What happens is that they're never paid to produce the stuff at all.
Look. Let's say you're a games company. You have an idea for an awesome video game, and predict that about 1 million people will want to play your game. You decide to charge $40 per copy, because that's more or less what your competitors charge for a similar experience, so you set your budget at $30 million and hope for a $10 million profit. Obviously these are made up numbers. Anyway, you hire some programmers, some artists, some office space, buy some CD printing runs etc. It's all very expensive but at the end, you do indeed produce an awesome game. It gets rave reviews. The punters love it.
But there's a problem. Your assumption that the game would appeal to about 1 million people is correct, but as it happens, about 25% of those people pirate the game. Thus only 0.75 million people actually pay for it, thus you make 0.75*40 == $30 million. But wait - that was your budget! So actually you make no money at all on this particular project.
OK. Your company is at least not actually bankrupt ... lucky for you 75% of your customers are not freeloading! You decide to make a new game. But this time, you know that only 75% of the people it appeals to will buy the game. So you reduce the budget for the game to account for that. Maybe you don't hire such good artists. Maybe you make the levels smaller, or the game shorter, or you reduce the number of programmers and leave out some features you wanted. At least this time, you make a profit and go home to the wife with something to show for your efforts. But the new game is subtly worse than it could have been. Nobody actually got fired - they just weren't hired in the first place. Nobody actually got "harmed" - they just didn't have cool moon buggy levels in their game when they might have done otherwise. All the honest people get a worse product than they otherwise would have done.
"The enemy" is whoever happens to make something cool that other people want to watch/listen/play/read/whatever. You're in this mentality where it's "us vs them" but who is us and who is them? If "them" is "creative people" then doesn't that by definition mean "us" is "uncreative people"? Do you really want to be in a war between uncreative people and creative people?
If you think "the enemy" is not creative people but rather evil corporations who enslave the creative types, then we might have more in common, but the solution is to try and solve corporations being evil. Focus on the root cause. Eliminating copyright won't fix corporations screwing people over. It'll just make them even more determined to do things their way. Bear in mind the supposed utopia of a copyright free world exists now, more or less, because enforcement by the police is so lax. How many people do you know that ended up in court because they downloaded a video game? None, right. It hardly ever happens. If copyright vanished tomorrow, it wouldn't actually make a big difference. Companies would still develop DRM because, well shit, if you make video games for a living what's the alternative? You might as well give away that $20 million in a lottery or something - in a copyright free world, without copy protection you'd lose it anyway.
Where? I read the interview and all I saw was this:
That's not "articulating the possibilities for new business and political models". That's ignoring business models completely, even though the whole debate is about business models, because he doesn't have any answers to these hard questions. Only a list of childish demands - "i want it and i want it NOW!" - without thinking through the consequences. He focuses on "personal liberty" because the moment people engage him on basic economics, like how to amortize expensive productions over those who enjoy them, he has no answers.
Why should I respect a guy that has such a giant hole in his thinking?
There is a poster elsewhere in the thread that says "walk the walk. create cool content and release it copyright free". That is the only possible answer to this debate. DRM and copyright are tools you can use if you want, but you're not obligated to. If Rick and his merry men cared about changing the future so much, they'd go create the next Mass Effect (120 people + unreal engine) and give it away for free, to prove that you don't need to sell modern video games at retail to fund their construction.
But they won't, because they won't be able to find a rich donor who will fund such a venture. And thus their war against copyright collapses in a smoking pile of hypocrisy.
You say the weakness of doing it in the kernel is that if you can strip or eliminate the watermark, you "win" in the sense that your illegally copied music won't be reported. Well yes, obviously if you can strip the watermark, the scheme doesn't work. So what?
I think you missed my point. It doesn't matter if you have to putz around with weird alternative operating systems. Not many people will bother to do it, so the goal of getting most people to pay for their music is still met. BTW just replacing the codec wouldn't work, why would such a check be done in the codec when better ones are developed all the time? The right place to do that is in the kernel, between userspace and the audio driver.
Yeah, so any such purchase-checking system wouldn't work with Linux. But that doesn't matter, does it?
The grandparent post called such a scheme "DRM" but it's actually not DRM, it's about asynchronously checking that you're honest. Honesty checks don't have to have 100% coverage to be effective.
It's time for a bad analogy. Consider ticket checks on public transport. Typically not every trip you take will be checked. If you are determined to never pay your train tickets, you can hide in the toilets on a train for the whole trip and avoid being checked by the conductors (I've seen this happen, it's pathetic). But, hiding in the toilet for an entire trip is a ridiculous pain in the ass, the sort of thing only the chronically broke would stoop to.
Much though I love Linux, it isn't a hole in this scheme. If you are determined to violate copyrights and get away with it, then yes using Linux would be a good way around it. But what is the market share of desktop Linux again? It's very low. Nobody is going to worry if Linux users get away without being checked because they are such a minority. Mac and Windows is enough to get your average consumer covered.
If Linux ever becomes seriously mainstream then such an honesty check would have implementation issues. But that's a really big if. It's been 15 years already, right? I hate to say it, but for your average Joe using Linux to avoid having their music checked would be like hiding in the toilets to avoid a ticket inspection.
A lot of audio watermarking algorithms are designed to survive psycho-acoustic compression algorithms like MP3 because they're intended to be used on DVD Audio, eg, in this presentation. Note the date on that - it's from 5 years ago. Watermarking technology has advanced significantly since. I think it's fair to say that us armchair researchers on Slashdot are probably a bit behind the times ;)
You haven't looked hard enough. Most people who make their living by selling "creative stuff" on the open market do seem to have a problem with it, in my experience.
I know a guy who used to pirate all his software, and tons of sample libraries (used in making music). He now works in the music business and has "gone clean" - he only uses stuff he's bought or got for free these days. Oddly, his views on file sharing changed once he had income and relied on others honesty to make it.
Anyway, I haven't RTFA in fine Slashdot tradition, but I'd be really amazed if any country were to legimitize downloading of copyrighted materials. More likely it's just saying that the state won't make programs like BitTorrent illegal to use. Using them to violate copyright would still be illegal, why would any country risk being kicked out of every supra-national trade body there is just to satisfy a bunch of freeloaders? Even if that describes 100% of the populace, when faced with all the downsides, I'd be surprised if people would still support the principle. It'd be a phyrric victory.
ABB, Ericsson and so on don't produce any IP that can be infringed with file sharing, so it's a useless comparison.
What I'd like to know - how much retail software does Sweden export? What is the size of its movie export industry? What about its gaming industry?
If Sweden want to legalize file sharing of stuff they produce, that's fine by me. But if they try and legalize file sharing of stuff other people produce, you have a WIPO violation on your hands, not to mention a policy that is blatantly unfair.
Zero points for you! TFA says that Clarkson admitted he was wrong and that his previous opinion was bullcrap.
Even so, this escapade won't change my opinion of the man as funny but still an arsehole.
If it's not useful, why was it released at all? I thought I'd at least be able to contribute to reporting spam, or something, but clicking the stars (no visible indication they _can_ be clicked btw) just says that they don't do anything yet.
Right. IIRC you'd need to split water to get hydrogen, and then combine the CO and H2 in the Fischer-Tropsch process to actually get liquid fuels. So it'd take a lot of energy to do, but if you can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere (a hard, hard problem), voila, you have renewable petroleum.
Well, the existence of things like AACS says you're wrong. It's a documented specification, and it's open in the sense that, if you want to manufacture HD-DVD players, you can go ahead and license it. You can also read about the algorithms it uses without paying anything.
AACS is largely about defending a large number of secrets and revoking them when they are broken (because everybody knows that software players are leaky as hell). AACS hasn't been broken either - keys have been found, but they have also been revoked, as the system was designed to do.
DRM isn't going to disappear, because business models that work today when people are forced to pay for what they want tend to fail when they rely entirely on peoples honesty. It might disappear in some places (like music) but to disappear from everything, entirely? I suspect not for a long time.
What I'd like to see is a replacement of DRM with some kind of social honor code around buying creative works, unless you really can't afford to because you have no money. It could be enforced by having people publish lists of what they own, that they can share with their friends so people are exposed to more music/movies/games, etc, but there'd be a taboo on actually just downloading your friends entire MP3 collection and not paying the original artists anything.
Sadly, with the rampant "I should not have to pay people for their work if it's digital" mentality a lot of people have these days, I doubt such an honor code will appear anytime soon. DRM it is, then.
Oh, I get it now. Slashdot is being crap-flooded with these MyMiniCity things because you can only "grow" your city by getting hits to it.
Look. If you're willing to waste peoples time and generally be a moron about this dumb game, why not just rent a botnet for a few hours? You could max out your population that way. Failing that, the "population" ticker seems to be based on IP address, so just write a program that hits it via Tor or something and leave it running. There are soooo many possibilities that don't involve using obfuscated redirects it's not even funny.
Or are you just a natural troll, and if it weren't for MyMiniCity you'd be finding other ways to waste peoples time?
Sure, CTL is an old technology. It was used during WW2.
Did you actually bother to read the paper? Singularity isn't a "dream", it is implemented and the code has been given to some universities for research purposes.