I wonder what limitations there are on this, if I could put a dent in my income tax by switching some game mods and tools to open source, I would switch them in a heart beat.
I wonder the same thing. No offense intended, but I would hate to have my tax money subsidize game mods.
First: I take issue with the idea that Catholic, or other religious people are in any way shape or form more moral than other people.
I never said that they are. I'm saying that they claim to be, yet aren't, so we shouldn't expect much more of people who don't even claim to be.
Most people aren't either-or, they're more likely to buy legally if thats convenient, cheap, available, practical, good. And more likely to pirate if *that* is convenient, easy, good, practical.
Yes, that's what I'm saying as well.
So, by making the genuine product suck more, you *may* prevent Joe Blow from making a copy of it himself, assuming he already owns the original. But if he *didn't* already buy your product, then the effect is oposite: The existence of DRM on the genuine article is an argument in favor of getting the pirated version.
There are two values in conflict here. One is how much a DRM-free product is worth additionally, and the other is how much more likely people will infringe if DRM is removed. My position is that most people don't really care about DRM (as long as it "works" when they burn a CD, sync with their iPod, etc), so the value of not having it is nearly zero. On the other hand, not having DRM makes "casual piracy" much easier, and therefore (as we agreed above) will happen more.
In other words, once you get a large number of people to agree with you that a DRM-free track is better, I'll agree with you immediately. Right now, it seems to me that factors like convenience and affordability are more important to the average user.
I'm not defending the pricing policy of these copyrighted works. I think many of them are overpriced (in the morality sense) in the third world. What I'm saying is that two wrongs (the second being copyright violation) don't make a right, and poverty is no excuse. The poor can survive just fine without music or movies.
Poverty doesn't enter into it when you're talking about the problem. Since when is poverty an excuse to be immoral, especially when we're talking about non-essentials like music?
Even in rich countries like the US, given the ripe conditions I speak of, people do the "dishonest" thing readily. Remember the original Napster?
Now, poverty does matter in the solution. The $0.99 per song offer from iTunes is successful in the US, but will still not be cheap enough in many other places. But this is just the poor telling themselves that to sleep better at night. The truth is they'll survive without the pirated songs and movies (but perhaps not software).
Let me be very clear that I'm not condemning anybody, or being holier than thou. I've pirated my share - mostly software - growing up. I'm just trying to point out that there isn't this moral majority that'll always do the right thing even when you remove measures like DRM.
Maybe. But the fact remains: DRM causes lots of unpleasantness for the honest buyers, while having no effect whatsoever on the people who download from thepiratebay.
I suggest you read my post again. There's no such thing, plus or minus an error margin, as honest buyers. There are people who take their morality very seriously, but in general people are predictably "pirates" or "honest buyers" depending on a variety of factors.
The Philippines is more than 90% Catholic, and even the rest are mostly still religious (Muslim, Christian, etc), yet piracy is rampant. Without DRM and other measures, it's simply easier to be dishonest, and more people will be. That's the way our world works, unfortunately.
I'm not arguing one way or the other about DRM. I'm talking about the fallacy frequently used by DRM opponents, as if there was a solid bloc of dishonest "pirates" and a solid bloc of honest buyers. There isn't, because people fall into one or another when conditions are ripe.
DRM never has, and never will, make it any harder for the "average consumer" to pirate something.
You're wrong. It stops people from giving their friends a copy of a song, the most casual kind of piracy. In fact, most people will probably not consider this an illegal or immoral act.
It's now much easier to be one of the 98% of pirates for whom piracy is significantly easier than getting a legitimate copy, because of the DRM.
Wrong again. iTunes managed to sell a billion DRMed songs, so it can't be too tedious.
DRM is a stupid idea. It never stops hackers but it stops the average consumer from having the full use of the device they've legally bought.
I don't like DRM either, but one fallacy among opponents is the distinction between "average consumers" and "pirates". The problem is that average consumers can easily become pirates if various conditions are ripe: the original seems expensive, copying is easy, nobody is ever punished, etc. There are entire countries of "average consumers" who almost never buy original software or music.
I think an interesting experiment would be to measure the amount of time it takes to find a unique photo from various size groups of photos 10/100/500/1000/etc to find out where the sweet spot is for lowFat versus any other file sorting/mgmt system.
Your experiment will depend largely on how well the picture is organized, how visually unique it is, and so on. An advanced amateur photographer can easily have dozens of very similar shots made while looking for that perfect shot, especially in the age of digital cameras. Professional photographers may not even have the time to swap memory cards, opting instead to hire an assistant to reload an identical spare camera while they shoot. They generate a staggering number of very similar shots. On the other hand, the one shot you remember taking with the big red umbrella is probably really easy to pick out from a "pile".
Now, just because a pro might not use it doesn't mean it's a bad idea, but it does mean that scalability beyond the nice demo might be a problem.
It would be like having a music mgmt system that could find/organize music files by humming a melody or riff.
Don't rush to the patent office. Heard of it as early as 1995.:)
The human way of dealing with the real world is limited by many factors, including the size and strength of our hands and arms, and the inability of our eyes to see through opaque things. This makes, for example, finding a picture in a pile of 1,000 a difficult task. In the same way, finding a picture in a computer-simulated pile of 1,000 is a difficult task. I'm generally fond of novel user interface ideas, but this one just smells like a lot of manual work (both sorting the pictures according to your personal criteria, and remember that criteria later). Is this really an improvement over iPhoto's "primitive" folders, for instance? I don't see how this solution would not degenerate into several piles of pictures called "vacation 2005", "dog", "birthday 2003", and so on once you are organizing hundreds or thousands of shots.
Handwriting is a very natural way of entering text, but the keyboard is a far more efficient one. Real world mail from your friends would not be naturally threaded, or sorted by date. Real world spreadsheets don't recompute when you change a value. Real world typewriters can't correct a typo as if it never happened. Real world metaphors (like folders, for example) can be very useful, but they don't belong everywhere. I can find a picture in iPhoto quite a bit faster than I can from the shoebox that Lowfat seems to simulate.
Not really. A tivo that can do realtime MPEG2 encoding only runs a 100Mhz processor. For certain tasks, using a general purpose processor really isn't the brightest idea.
The problem is that realtime is not good enough, because it would then take an hour and a half to rip a typical movie. CDs typically rip within a small fraction of its playing time, which I believe is why people are still willing to do it. Secondly, a TiVo box is not cheap. A new one (including subscription) seems to require a $610.20 commitment over three years.
The best compromise today, I think, is if the iPod/PSP/etc version(s) of the movie comes pre-encoded in the DVD.
Your two main enemies remain the law and cost. Judges are not dumb. They may not establish a substantial non-infringing use for your device, because not many people actually need to rip home video DVDs. This would give your device the same fate as Playstation modchips and such, which also have theoretically non-infringing uses. Secondly, the box could cost as much as a laptop, and almost certainly more than a cheap desktop, which means that only people who rip a lot of movies would buy one. This wouldn't help your legal case.
Why can't they come out with a super fast way to rip [movies] to an iPod?
Firstly, because video compression is a very CPU-intensive process. While faster CPUs or custom hardware may improve its speed, neither is likely to be very cheap. It's not as if people are making it slow just for fun, you know. Secondly, ripping commercial DVDs is currently illegal in the US due to the DMCA, so you might understand the reluctance on the part of manufacturers.
if people are buying macs intending to install windows, Apple may hope to use that as a bate and switch tactic.
You probably don't understand the expression "bait and switch". It refers to a deceptive (and I think illegal) business practice of luring in customers with a fake ad (probably a ridiculously cheap price) - the "bait" - but selling them only some other product because the great deal is "out of stock" - the "switch".
Internationalization/localization is more than just translating strings. At a minimum, you have to deal with local laws, such as the lower volume cap that the iPod had to add for France. Next you need to deal with local sensibilities, such as Taiwan not liking being listed as a part of China (and China not liking Taiwan listed separately), or Pakistan not liking Kashmir listed as a part of India (and vice versa). Finally, you deal with things like icons, because some symbols might be offensive or confusing. Right-to-left languages will also throw all sorts of code into disarray. Beyond merely understandable, you also want to distinguish between UK, US, Australian, and whatever other versions of English you have to deal with.
Good i18n and l10n is quite difficult and expensive.
The failure is that 90% of the world's computer users have not been moved yet. My wife and 4 year old daughter use Linux without problems.
I would assume that is partly because they have a competent in-house/on-call system administrator, a luxury that not many have. My household also ran Linux exclusively for a while, but eventually I got tired of maintaining it, so now we don't.
If I can support them, Michael Dell can.
That's also a fallacy. If you spend five hours throughout the lifetime of the computer on supporting your family, it would easily exceed any profit Dell makes from a $299 PC if he pays a reasonable salary. I would also presume that you don't keep your family on hold on the phone for 40 minutes before diagnosing their problems, which is a level of service that would be even more expensive for Dell.
Note that I'm not saying the support cost for Linux exceeds that of Windows. I'm just saying that your ability to support your family doesn't say much at all about Dell's ability to support millions of other families without greatly increasing cost.
There really is no excuse for selling a computer without a proper user based security model, or decent, multi user multi screen GUI.
I agree! But we should not just say "oh, we can't switch everybody to Linux so we can't get some better security with email" either. There's more than one way to skin the cat.
I cited RFC 821 to establish a time frame (1982) for the technology, not to single out SMTP as opposed to any other network layer. I am also very aware of the things a knowledgeable user can do to encrypt email. What I'm asking for is an out-of-the-box solution for the rest of them, and your kmail suggestion is just funny, if you mean we should first convert 90% of the world's computer users to Linux. Note that I'm also not blaming anybody in particular. The IT industry failed as a collective here.
Every good security expert will tell you the problem is far more social than technical. We can put in all the encryption and layers you want. But we can still call up 8 out of 10 companies and get the operator's computer password over the phone.
What you wrote is true, but has little to do with what I wrote, unless you mean that because of the bigger security hole that is the user there's no need to plug the smaller security hole that is plain-text email. My opinion is that we need to do both, but have failed in the latter.
I still see idiots send out passwords in plain text e-mails all the time.
RFC 821 (SMTP) was published in 1982. 24 years later on computers with 3,000 times the clock speed, we're still blaming users for the total lack of security in their email applications and infrastructure? How about some security out of the box, the same thing we expect of operating systems vendors?
the touch-screen voting system should not tabulate any votes. It should simply print out a paper ballot that is deposited by the voter into the ballot box.
Why would we deprive ourselves of one of the easiest things for a computer to do, and replace it with... what? Who counts your paper ballots?
There are many ways to help safeguard the integrity of the machines, and you can see some of them up and down the responses to this article, more if you're willing to peruse things like the Risks Digest. To toss the baby out with the bathwater is just silly.
Nobody is forcing you to go to mars. Don't project your fears on to other people.
That's not sufficient if you want some of his/her tax money to go to your manned space program, and however brave he was, Neil Armstrong did not pay for the trip out of his pocket. You do need to convince people that the risk is acceptable and the rewards are substantial, which generally translates to the value of things that a man/woman can do on Mars that a robot cannot. I support a certain level of manned missions, but to dismiss your critics as cowards does not further your cause.
There is... It's called choice. It's not a familiar concept in today's monopolist market though...
I highly enjoy the fact that I can read your post using my choice of web browser, but that choice is based on common agreements like Ethernet, TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, and CSS.
From what I've been told by my professors, though, assembler is still better because it's a human readable form of EXACTLY what the computer is doing.
Either your professor is wrong, or you misunderstood your professor. On a superscalar architecture, the CPU may be executing the instructions you wrote in a different order (but with the same intended effect) than in your assembly source code. If you consider features like register renaming, the CPU is also doing something rather different than your source code would suggest.
That's crazy talk. Cellular data usage (not necessarily WAP) is far from its promised land for a variety of reasons, but there are clearly use cases like checking ballgame scores that people will not be willing to carry a laptop around for. Cellular data will not replace laptops, but laptops don't cover every mobile demand either.
BUT, I'm STILL not voting Democratic because (A) they are just as bad as the Republicans,
So why should either Democrats or Republicans improve? The former can't ever get your vote, the latter can't ever lose it. On the other hand, if you vote against somebody you're angry at, there's at least the possibility that the Democrats know why they got your vote this time. The same principle applies to any Democratic incumbent that anybody else is angry at, by the way.
and (B) they very much want to take away the right to persue my hobbies with all the strength they can muster (ie, off-road vehicle driving).
Nothing wrong with many, many hobbies, including yours, except when too many people do it. There are three hundred million people in the United States. What would happen if we all drive off-road?
Jobs anounced last month that they've sold 42 million iPods, so they've sold on average less than 24 songs per iPod.
What you forget is that those 42 million iPods were probably sold to less than 42 million people, and purchased songs are transferrable to any number of iPods. An average family may own three iPods, each loaded with thrice the average number of songs from your math.
This seems to contradict the oft repeated claims that the iPod ties you to iTMS
Rudimentary knowledge already contradicts that claim. iTunes rips CDs very well. Unlicensed music has also been widely available well before the iPod was introduced.
or that iTMS is a major contributor to the iPod's success.
When you're talking about a vertically-integrated solution, it's not generally useful to talk about how big a contributor each part is. The iPod doesn't win mostly on design, UI, marketing, iTunes integration, iTMS, etc., but on the whole that exceeds the sum of its parts. A component in such an integrated solution may have value ("I might want to buy a single song one day") that affects the purchase decision, even if the customer never actually bothers to.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder the same thing. No offense intended, but I would hate to have my tax money subsidize game mods.
I never said that they are. I'm saying that they claim to be, yet aren't, so we shouldn't expect much more of people who don't even claim to be.
Most people aren't either-or, they're more likely to buy legally if thats convenient, cheap, available, practical, good. And more likely to pirate if *that* is convenient, easy, good, practical.
Yes, that's what I'm saying as well.
So, by making the genuine product suck more, you *may* prevent Joe Blow from making a copy of it himself, assuming he already owns the original. But if he *didn't* already buy your product, then the effect is oposite: The existence of DRM on the genuine article is an argument in favor of getting the pirated version.
There are two values in conflict here. One is how much a DRM-free product is worth additionally, and the other is how much more likely people will infringe if DRM is removed. My position is that most people don't really care about DRM (as long as it "works" when they burn a CD, sync with their iPod, etc), so the value of not having it is nearly zero. On the other hand, not having DRM makes "casual piracy" much easier, and therefore (as we agreed above) will happen more.
In other words, once you get a large number of people to agree with you that a DRM-free track is better, I'll agree with you immediately. Right now, it seems to me that factors like convenience and affordability are more important to the average user.
Now, software is a different question.
Even in rich countries like the US, given the ripe conditions I speak of, people do the "dishonest" thing readily. Remember the original Napster?
Now, poverty does matter in the solution. The $0.99 per song offer from iTunes is successful in the US, but will still not be cheap enough in many other places. But this is just the poor telling themselves that to sleep better at night. The truth is they'll survive without the pirated songs and movies (but perhaps not software).
Let me be very clear that I'm not condemning anybody, or being holier than thou. I've pirated my share - mostly software - growing up. I'm just trying to point out that there isn't this moral majority that'll always do the right thing even when you remove measures like DRM.
I suggest you read my post again. There's no such thing, plus or minus an error margin, as honest buyers. There are people who take their morality very seriously, but in general people are predictably "pirates" or "honest buyers" depending on a variety of factors.
The Philippines is more than 90% Catholic, and even the rest are mostly still religious (Muslim, Christian, etc), yet piracy is rampant. Without DRM and other measures, it's simply easier to be dishonest, and more people will be. That's the way our world works, unfortunately.
I'm not arguing one way or the other about DRM. I'm talking about the fallacy frequently used by DRM opponents, as if there was a solid bloc of dishonest "pirates" and a solid bloc of honest buyers. There isn't, because people fall into one or another when conditions are ripe.
DRM never has, and never will, make it any harder for the "average consumer" to pirate something.
You're wrong. It stops people from giving their friends a copy of a song, the most casual kind of piracy. In fact, most people will probably not consider this an illegal or immoral act.
It's now much easier to be one of the 98% of pirates for whom piracy is significantly easier than getting a legitimate copy, because of the DRM.
Wrong again. iTunes managed to sell a billion DRMed songs, so it can't be too tedious.
I don't like DRM either, but one fallacy among opponents is the distinction between "average consumers" and "pirates". The problem is that average consumers can easily become pirates if various conditions are ripe: the original seems expensive, copying is easy, nobody is ever punished, etc. There are entire countries of "average consumers" who almost never buy original software or music.
Your experiment will depend largely on how well the picture is organized, how visually unique it is, and so on. An advanced amateur photographer can easily have dozens of very similar shots made while looking for that perfect shot, especially in the age of digital cameras. Professional photographers may not even have the time to swap memory cards, opting instead to hire an assistant to reload an identical spare camera while they shoot. They generate a staggering number of very similar shots. On the other hand, the one shot you remember taking with the big red umbrella is probably really easy to pick out from a "pile".
Now, just because a pro might not use it doesn't mean it's a bad idea, but it does mean that scalability beyond the nice demo might be a problem.
It would be like having a music mgmt system that could find/organize music files by humming a melody or riff.
Don't rush to the patent office. Heard of it as early as 1995. :)
Handwriting is a very natural way of entering text, but the keyboard is a far more efficient one. Real world mail from your friends would not be naturally threaded, or sorted by date. Real world spreadsheets don't recompute when you change a value. Real world typewriters can't correct a typo as if it never happened. Real world metaphors (like folders, for example) can be very useful, but they don't belong everywhere. I can find a picture in iPhoto quite a bit faster than I can from the shoebox that Lowfat seems to simulate.
The problem is that realtime is not good enough, because it would then take an hour and a half to rip a typical movie. CDs typically rip within a small fraction of its playing time, which I believe is why people are still willing to do it. Secondly, a TiVo box is not cheap. A new one (including subscription) seems to require a $610.20 commitment over three years.
The best compromise today, I think, is if the iPod/PSP/etc version(s) of the movie comes pre-encoded in the DVD.
Your two main enemies remain the law and cost. Judges are not dumb. They may not establish a substantial non-infringing use for your device, because not many people actually need to rip home video DVDs. This would give your device the same fate as Playstation modchips and such, which also have theoretically non-infringing uses. Secondly, the box could cost as much as a laptop, and almost certainly more than a cheap desktop, which means that only people who rip a lot of movies would buy one. This wouldn't help your legal case.
Firstly, because video compression is a very CPU-intensive process. While faster CPUs or custom hardware may improve its speed, neither is likely to be very cheap. It's not as if people are making it slow just for fun, you know. Secondly, ripping commercial DVDs is currently illegal in the US due to the DMCA, so you might understand the reluctance on the part of manufacturers.
You probably don't understand the expression "bait and switch". It refers to a deceptive (and I think illegal) business practice of luring in customers with a fake ad (probably a ridiculously cheap price) - the "bait" - but selling them only some other product because the great deal is "out of stock" - the "switch".
Good i18n and l10n is quite difficult and expensive.
I would assume that is partly because they have a competent in-house/on-call system administrator, a luxury that not many have. My household also ran Linux exclusively for a while, but eventually I got tired of maintaining it, so now we don't.
If I can support them, Michael Dell can.
That's also a fallacy. If you spend five hours throughout the lifetime of the computer on supporting your family, it would easily exceed any profit Dell makes from a $299 PC if he pays a reasonable salary. I would also presume that you don't keep your family on hold on the phone for 40 minutes before diagnosing their problems, which is a level of service that would be even more expensive for Dell.
Note that I'm not saying the support cost for Linux exceeds that of Windows. I'm just saying that your ability to support your family doesn't say much at all about Dell's ability to support millions of other families without greatly increasing cost.
There really is no excuse for selling a computer without a proper user based security model, or decent, multi user multi screen GUI.
I agree! But we should not just say "oh, we can't switch everybody to Linux so we can't get some better security with email" either. There's more than one way to skin the cat.
I cited RFC 821 to establish a time frame (1982) for the technology, not to single out SMTP as opposed to any other network layer. I am also very aware of the things a knowledgeable user can do to encrypt email. What I'm asking for is an out-of-the-box solution for the rest of them, and your kmail suggestion is just funny, if you mean we should first convert 90% of the world's computer users to Linux. Note that I'm also not blaming anybody in particular. The IT industry failed as a collective here.
What you wrote is true, but has little to do with what I wrote, unless you mean that because of the bigger security hole that is the user there's no need to plug the smaller security hole that is plain-text email. My opinion is that we need to do both, but have failed in the latter.
RFC 821 (SMTP) was published in 1982. 24 years later on computers with 3,000 times the clock speed, we're still blaming users for the total lack of security in their email applications and infrastructure? How about some security out of the box, the same thing we expect of operating systems vendors?
Why would we deprive ourselves of one of the easiest things for a computer to do, and replace it with... what? Who counts your paper ballots?
There are many ways to help safeguard the integrity of the machines, and you can see some of them up and down the responses to this article, more if you're willing to peruse things like the Risks Digest. To toss the baby out with the bathwater is just silly.
That's not sufficient if you want some of his/her tax money to go to your manned space program, and however brave he was, Neil Armstrong did not pay for the trip out of his pocket. You do need to convince people that the risk is acceptable and the rewards are substantial, which generally translates to the value of things that a man/woman can do on Mars that a robot cannot. I support a certain level of manned missions, but to dismiss your critics as cowards does not further your cause.
I highly enjoy the fact that I can read your post using my choice of web browser, but that choice is based on common agreements like Ethernet, TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, and CSS.
Either your professor is wrong, or you misunderstood your professor. On a superscalar architecture, the CPU may be executing the instructions you wrote in a different order (but with the same intended effect) than in your assembly source code. If you consider features like register renaming, the CPU is also doing something rather different than your source code would suggest.
That's crazy talk. Cellular data usage (not necessarily WAP) is far from its promised land for a variety of reasons, but there are clearly use cases like checking ballgame scores that people will not be willing to carry a laptop around for. Cellular data will not replace laptops, but laptops don't cover every mobile demand either.
So why should either Democrats or Republicans improve? The former can't ever get your vote, the latter can't ever lose it. On the other hand, if you vote against somebody you're angry at, there's at least the possibility that the Democrats know why they got your vote this time. The same principle applies to any Democratic incumbent that anybody else is angry at, by the way.
and (B) they very much want to take away the right to persue my hobbies with all the strength they can muster (ie, off-road vehicle driving).
Nothing wrong with many, many hobbies, including yours, except when too many people do it. There are three hundred million people in the United States. What would happen if we all drive off-road?
What you forget is that those 42 million iPods were probably sold to less than 42 million people, and purchased songs are transferrable to any number of iPods. An average family may own three iPods, each loaded with thrice the average number of songs from your math.
This seems to contradict the oft repeated claims that the iPod ties you to iTMS
Rudimentary knowledge already contradicts that claim. iTunes rips CDs very well. Unlicensed music has also been widely available well before the iPod was introduced.
or that iTMS is a major contributor to the iPod's success.
When you're talking about a vertically-integrated solution, it's not generally useful to talk about how big a contributor each part is. The iPod doesn't win mostly on design, UI, marketing, iTunes integration, iTMS, etc., but on the whole that exceeds the sum of its parts. A component in such an integrated solution may have value ("I might want to buy a single song one day") that affects the purchase decision, even if the customer never actually bothers to.