It seems there should be better fora for floating this idea, but I can't think of what they may be, and it seems time is no longer on our side. Thus:
The biggest problem is that the copy control technologies are insidious: They are inserted into flashy, cool devices or software without informing the customer they're there, thus thwarting their desire (or not) to avoid them. For example, did you know the latest WinAmp contains copy control measures from InterTrust? Of course not. AOL conveniently "forgot" to tell you.
We could create a list of products, companies, and/or technologies to avoid, but then the copy control philistines would simply change the names of their stuff on a regular basis, and the fight would devolve into a shell game. This lets them say, "Oh, no, we stopped incorporated CPRM at customer request!" and then fail to tell you that it simply got renamed to ICST (Insidious Citizen-Screwing Technology). You're still screwed, but they get to play PR games with us.
Thus, my proposal: I propose the creation of the Open Media Initiative, a non-profit entity whose charter is to analyze new digital hardware and software, and report whether they contain copy control measures. The Open Media Initiative (OMI) would promote the following values:
Technological measures restricting duplication of any data may not exist.
Technological measures restricting usage of any data, regardless of the type of data or the intended use, shall not exist.
Technological measures to record or report to third parties usage, duplication, or any other activity directly or indirectly involving said data shall not exist.
Note that only technological measures are addressed. Social and legal restrictions are free to exist (or not); the OMI simply prohibits their ensconcement in code or hardware. (For the purposes of the OMI, executable programs are considered data.)
Devices and software meeting this three-pronged test shall be eligible to use an OMI certification logo on their products, so that consumers will be able to immediately identify compliant, safe products, and avoid non-compliant ones. A list of products receiving certification would also appear on the OMI's Web site.
Yes, publicizing OMI and the OMI logo, at least in the "traditional" manner, would be horribly expensive. However, as things stand now, if you're a member of the tech community, and are rightfully repulsed by these encroachments on the freedoms we worked so hard to build into our systems, explaining the issues to, say, your grandmother could be a laborious process. However, if you could simply tell her, "Don't buy anything unless it has this logo on it," the problem is considerably simplified.
By way of example, current CD-ROM burners would be eligible for the OMI logo, as would Linux and the most recent rev of Unreal Tournament. SDMI-enabled MP3 players, Windows, and Quake3:Arena would not.
So, who's with me?
Schwab
(Dear Lord, what have I let myself in for?)
What nobody refuses to explore is how humans evolved so rapidly in comparison with all other species. [ ...]
When we achieved sentience (and how that happened is wide open to debate), we took control of our own evolution, so to speak.
Confronted with climactic change, other species would migrate to new climes, evolve to cope with the change, or crawl into a corner and die. Not us. We invented the plow, agriculture, and the calendar. That way we knew how to plant, what to plant, and when to do it. And in doing so, we survived and prospered. Rather than evolving our physiology through multiple generations of breeding, we evolved our skill set.
The reason we progressed so quickly is that sentience and intellect are vastly more flexible than selective breeding. Changing your physiology takes hundreds of generations. Changing your mind takes but a moment.
Now that we have completed the Genome Project, it will be interesting to see if we seize ultimate control over our evolution, and risk tweaking our genetic code. Some would say such manipulation is "unnatural." But since we are ourselves creatures of nature, it could be argued that such manipulation is perfectly natural. The creature is evolving by directing selection at itself; the result is that it will either naturally delete itself, or that it will survive and prosper.
The biggest risk from such exploration is our chronic lack of forward-thinking. ("I need water; I'll build a dam here. Oh dear, this standing pool of water I've created is breeding mosquitos and infecting everyone with malaria.") As such, since it is our own lot we wish to improve by such tinkering, I would Modestly Propose that all genetic experimentation take place on live human subjects. This would tend to strongly encourage experimenters to think things through to the necessary degree before undertaking anything.
This also tends to suggest that, at least initially, the safest forms of human genetic tinkering are those which are purely cosmetic in nature (prettier eyes, straighter teeth, etc.). While this may seem trite, which do you think would be the wiser creation on this tiny resource-starved planet: People with rainbow-colored irises, or a normally-breeding uber-human living to 160 years and immune to nearly all disease?
I'm not really sure what's going on in this instance, but the original link was Slashdotted in a big way ('connection refused' errors galore). One of the following must have happened:
The site owner tried mirroring their content, and Chose Poorly;
The hosting server admin tried mirroring the content, and likewise Chose Poorly;
The hosting server admin is in cahoots with the evil banner ad site, and decided to take advantage of the situation.
Other possibilities no doubt exist. The point is that, yes, there is a real site; it's just hard to get to at the moment. There was a link to a mirror in an earlier post, which works fine.
Wow. I don't know whether to smack you, or make a religion around you?
Decisions, decisions...:-)
Do you actually believe any of that idealistic bullshit?
At the risk of making your eyes bug out: Yes. They are the conclusions I've reached after thinking long and hard about what infinite abundance at zero cost implies.
[Copyrights] are fundemental to human nature. Even babies have concepts of "that mine, that yours" and the copyright is simply a modern manifestation of that.
But in a world where anyone can copy anything, anytime, anywhere, the whole concept of mine-versus-yours loses all meaning.
Consider a more concrete example. Let's say we each have a small red ball. One belongs to me; the other belongs to you. They are in all other ways completely indistinguishable. We put both balls inside a box, close it, shake it up for a while, and open it.
Which ball is yours? Clearly, one is not yours (it's mine), and you'd like to be certain -- out of nothing more than courtesy -- that you don't pick the wrong one. Since they're identical, how can you tell which is yours? More fundamentally, does it really matter?
I contend that it doesn't matter. Once you have infinite, perfect duplication, the idea of mine-versus-yours becomes silly. Pick either ball; it doesn't matter. Each of us will end up with a ball. Make a copy of one and give it to a third person. Then mix all three up in the box again. Which one is the "copy" and which ones are the "originals?" Since everyone's going to get a ball, it doesn't matter. Copying does not diminish what we have.
This is precisely the situation existing in the memories of our computers. Thus, the idea of "ownership" of a digital artifact that can be infinitely copied starts to look specious.
This is not to say the transition to the Real New Economy won't be tumultuous; it definitely will. But unless the issues are conceptualized correctly, society will endure a lot of unnecessary anguish as it charges down blind alleys.
According to my last scan with console-apt, Woody makes use of libc6 v2.2.1, which I'm led to understand is a fairly major departure from potato's libc6 (2.1.3). There are some things in Woody I really want, so I'm inclined to upgrade now, but I have no idea how much stuff the new libc6 will break.
Now, most artists would just be happy that they have more listeners ! BUT... *SOME* artist's [sic] don't want their work... being copied without their permission.
Given the current nature of computers and the Internet, there is only one reasonable answer to this line of thinking. Here's the short version:
Get over it.
A slightly longer version: The keynote of human progress throughout recorded history has been towards increased abundance at reduced cost. The plow was invented to make producing more food easier. The printing press was invented to make more books, less expensively. The telephone was invented to communicate more information in less time....Increased abundance at reduced cost.
In many ways, the computer is the ultimate embodiment of this struggle: Infinite abundance at zero cost. It is now possible for you to say, "I want this song," and a copy of it will appear on your computer.
We achieved this goal after thousands of years of struggle, hardship, war, and painstaking scientific inquiry. So tell me, after all that trouble on the part of your forebears, who hoped that, perhaps one day in the future they could only imagine, we might actually get to this point... Why would you want to throw it away?
Moreover, why would you want to throw it away almost solely at the behest of individuals who are already filthy stinking rich?
In one very important sense, you are correctly concerned about how we will provide incentives for artisans to continue to produce amazing creative works. But attempting to control the proliferation of artifacts is not in any way a reasonable solution. The political and social consequences of such an approach are absolutely disasterous when taken to their inevitable conclusion.
The goal is to reward and encourage artisans to create stuff for all to enjoy. To achieve this, copyrights were instituted to give the artisan exclusive control of commercial trading of their work (with the unstated assumption that the artisan would take their reward from that commercial activity). But that solution is a hack, as it addresses commerce, not creative activity. Yes, it gets money into the artist's pocket (or rather, it used to before Big Media), but it doesn't address the real problem at a fundamental level. And if you're not addressing the actual bug in the system, then you have a hack, not a solution.
Copyrights are a hack. The world has undergone an upgrade, and the hack will no longer work. It's time to go back to the drawing board and engineer a proper solution.
So download the page and edit the HTML to expand the field limit back to 12 characters. Fix the <FORM> tag to point to the fully qualified URL at Nike. Then load the locally edited page into your browser, fill it out, and click submit. If their server admins fell into the "trusted client" trap, it'll work.
Heck, you could theoretically expand the input limit to whatever size you want; certainly large enough to send them the DeCSS code:-).
Best was acquired by Verio a few years ago. Thus, going to Best's home page now teleports you to Verio's home page. However, there are still a ton of subscribers' pages hosted on Best's servers, all logged in search engines as residing at http://www.best.com/. So they couldn't just kill the name.
The result is that Best subscribers up to the point they got acquired still exist on the net as coming from best.com, but it's really Verio now.
I wrote a fake news story about this some months ago, except I set it in the US. Seems like it's getting closer to reality every day.
Talk to your friends and relatives about this issue. Raise awareness. And make sure you vote, both at the polling place and the cash register.
Schwab
Unions are a Two-Edged Sword
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 4
I've been a computer geek for over decades, and until recently have felt that labor unions have no place in the tech industry.
The reason I felt this way was largely a result of my (admittedly superficial) encounters with unions thus far. For example, if you are exhibiting at a computer show, you're not allowed to touch your own stuff. You are required to hire Teamsters to carry your stuff in and out of the building. Once your equipment is in your booth, you are not allowed to plug it in; you have to hire a member of the electrician's union to do that for you. Depending on the city in which your exhibiting, this process can be anywhere between a minor hassle and a sadistic nightmare only hinted at in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. You're busy, you're trying to get stuff done. But if you even think about doing something that's Somebody Else's Job, they'll jump down your throat.
Another fine example of excessive union activity is in the motion picture industry. This little excerpt from the film, The Wizard of Speed and Time should give you an idea of what it's like:
Director's Union Office:
"Hello, hi."
"Can I help you?"
"Uh. yeah, how do I join the Director's Union?"
"You need bring a copy of the D-O-mumble signed by your studio producer before you can pay your initiation fees and be cleared by union council, thank you..."
"Uh, excuse me, what's the initiation fee?"
"Seven thousand dollars, with a hundred dollar application fee, two hundred dollars every quarter, and ten percent of your salary."
"Seven thousand dollars! What is that for?"
"That's the amount you pay to get into our union."
"Well, what is it, like Social Security? I get it back when I retire?"
"Absolutely not! What is your classification?"
"Well, I'm directing special effects with a small crew."
"Well, then you must have an Assistant Director, a Second AD, and a UPM, all signed with the DUA."
"All I'm directing is animation!"
"Well, then discuss that with the Animator's Union."
Animator's Union Office:
"So, uh, what's your animation classification, huh?"
"Well, a lot of everything. Cartooning, kinestasis, rotoscoping, stop-motion..."
"WOAH! Well, cartoon animation alone is twenty-one hundred dollars, plus a fifty dollar entry fee, and a hundred dollar quarterly dues."
"Well, what about filming animation?"
"Well, then ya go to the Camera Union."
Camera Union Offices:
"No sir, the studio hires the next man on the roster."
"Well, how do I get on the roster?"
"You have to be in the union."
"Well, how do I get in the union?"
"When you're on the roster."
"You mean I can't join unless I'm already a member?"
"That's correct. Then you need thirty consecutive days camera operation, a complete physical exam, the producer sends a letter, and you pay your fees"
"Well, fine, I've done ten years of camera work!"
"Then you've worked in violation of seniority! You'll have to start all over as a film loader."
"Look, I'm just building a small set and filming it!"
"That's entirely another union! Set and Modelmakers. Next door."
I see software engineering as a primarily creative exercise. I don't especially want some self-appointed organization telling me what kind of work I can and can't do, and for whom.
However, I've recently come to the opinion that unions may well have a place in the tech industry, most particularly in the support sector. Some months ago, there was a Slashdot story about a guy's experience as a phone tech support person. I found the environment described utterly horrible. Individuality is forbidden; lying to customers ("Are you a supervisor?") is encouraged, the company has no loyalty toward its employees, the system is setup assuming people are going to be used up, burned out, and tossed aside. And if the quality of service sucks, that doesn't matter. Call volume is what matters; let's churn those calls through, people. Hang up in the middle if you have to, helping the customer is not the object of the game here, it's cranking those numbers...
I think that's reprehensible. This is not Dickensian England, this is 21st century America. I think a labor union representing phone tech support people would not only improve their working conditions, but also improve the quality of customer support. I'm sure there are several other low-level areas in the tech industry that could benefit from collective bargaining.
...you know, you can do a: grep "stuff here" * and search through all the files in the directory.
Yes, I'm aware of that. The problem is that it's dog-slow. Opening and scanning 2000 files for one mailbox alone is just darned painful. Even if the mailbox is hundreds of megabytes in size, 'grep' will operate on it faster if it's a single file than if it's zillions of separate files.
Also, when your mailbox grows to thousands of messages, the wildcard expansion in the shell ('*' in your example) may overflow or truncate, and you may not actually scan all the messages. Yes, you can resort to foreach, but then not only are you opening zillions of files, you're discretely launching 'grep' a zillion times as well.
Like I said, I admire 'maildir's reliability, and it's certainly more flexible in certain ways., and if I could get the same or similar search speed out of 'maildir', I'd switch. But for the moment, 'mbox' serves my purposes.
I've been using 'mbox' for -- gawd, can I say this? -- fifteen years, and it's served me well. 'mbox's advantages for me are that it is efficient with disk space (you don't eat an inode per message), and that it is quick to search.
9 times out of 10, when I'm searching my mail, typically with 'grep', I'm looking for something in the body, not the headers. With 'maildir', you have to open each message and search it. This is preposterously slow. There is also the danger that the shell's wildcard expansion limits may be exceeded if you have a lot of messages. With 'mbox', 'grep' opens the one file and slurps through it quickly.
Remote synchronization is not an issue for me. All my email resides on my laptop, which follows me everywhere.
However, I'm hip to 'maildir's increased reliability. I have over 2000 messages in my outgoing box alone, and I'd hate to have a system hiccup destroy any of it. If I could search the bodies of a 'maildir' spool as quickly as an 'mbox' spool, I could be convinced to switch.
Suddenly I'm very pleased to be a Verio SDSL customer. I would never have dreamed a telecomm provider like Verio would have the testicular fortitute to tell the MPAA to smeg off.
1. [... ] However this is the classic argument used by software pirates throughout time. Duh big software makes too much money anyways! Anyways I'm just copying bits and it didn't cost them nuttin'!
You are introducing an assertion I did not make, and attacking it instead of my actual position. Misdirection.
While it is indeed interesting to observe that the crushing majority of people complaining about unrestricted copying are already filthy stinking rich, it is nevertheless orthognal to the issue: Tranfer of resources is a distinct activity from duplication of resources. Pro-control interests are trying to conflate the two. Don't be fooled; they're crucially different.
...some dumb fuckers such as yourself come along and claim that since the pill costs $0.01 to make, it's fair for everyone to dupe it for $0.01 a piece. That is _SOCIAL_SUICIDE_.
You keep making this assertion without supporting argument. What will be killed? Medical research? Hardly. AIDS remains a problem whether or not Pfizer is doing research on it, as does cancer. Software development? Again, hardly. Linux is manifest proof of this.
You may argue that research in these fields would be slowed if corporate interests were unable to exert monopoly powers over their products. That is an arguable point, one which you have yet to make. (I contend that, while such research might be slowed, it almost certainly wouldn't slow to the detriment of society. And perhaps research might be directed toward more pressing needs, like cancer and software reliability, rather than toward hair-loss prevention and a "smarter" animated paperclip.)
...it's quite easy to say "All drug compounds should be public domain" AFTER the forces of capitalism have created it...of course it's completely myopic and unbelievably foolish.
Every bit as foolish and myopic is to presume that all meaningful medical research came out of corporate labs, done solely for profit motive. Should Dr. Jonas Salk have sat on the polio vaccine until he got a patent on it, then soaked the civilized world for his life-saving discovery?
2. In a world where it's possible to rape old ladies in parks, what's wrong with raping old ladies in parks? In a world where it's possible to manipulate the stock market, what's wrong with manipulating the stock market? In a world where it's possible to hack into banks and syphon funds out of other people's accounts into your own, what's wrong with doing that?
Rape is an egregious form of coercion. Artifacts, digital or otherwise, are inanimate objects and cannot be coerced. Analogy fails.
Stock market manipulation implies fraud and deception against other market participants to gain an advantage. Copying artifacts does not employ fraud or deception. Analogy fails.
Cracking into a bank account to move funds involves transferring a resource. As has already been established, copying artifacts is duplicating a resource, which is a distinct economic activity (yes, it matters). Analogy fails.
3. Totally irrelevant red herring intending to portray the existing system as fundamentally flawed, but unfortunately the basis is absurd and ridiculous [emphasis mine]...
Assertion made without supporting evidence.
Further, you are ignoring the mathematics of the current situation. The combinatorial explosion of the current system leads to one of two inevitable outcomes:
Intellectual Property law becomes a tool useful solely to an information oligarchy (to the extent it hasn't already);
The entire system will collapse completely. Since everything will infringe something else, no one will take it seriously anymore.
Neither outcome is especially desirable. Two ways to forestall this are:
Dramatically shorten copyright terms, thereby reducing the search space. However, given the rapidly advancing pace of creation as the Internet spreads, this is a stop-gap solution at best.
Completely replace intellectual property law with an entirely new framework such that it can survive and be workable in a world with universal, ubiquitous copying. (This is the one I'm working towards, since it's more sustainable.)
In reality it's civil law that requires that a copyright not be infringed, with the penalty being usually the profits from the perpetrating piece: Not a big deal. Even then unintentional coincidence is hardly a copyright infringement and it would be held up as one in any court of law.
In a world where justice is swift, accurate, and cheap, this might be a reasonable point. As it is, your position fails to take into account that litigation today is ruinously expensive. Even an accusation that is utterly meritless can bankrupt the individual defending against it. Even if the defendant prevails, they're still out tens of thousands of dollars in unrecoverable legal fees. As a result, corporate interests can and do initiate meritless proceedings against individuals, knowing and expecting the defendant to back down and toe the line for no other reason than they are unable to effectively defend themselves. In any other forum, this would be called "bullying."
(If you want to argue for litigation reform, you've got my support. Likewise, if you want to argue for copyright infringement being treated as the equivalent of a parking violation, you'd get some sympathy from me in that direction as well.)
4. And that reward system is for YOU to decide???
Certainly not. I'm asking you to consider and design a reward system that still functions -- absent totalitarian controls -- in a world where copying is universal and ubiquitous. Around what concept(s) would such a reward system revolve?
5. Relevance?
You appear to be citing the body of Law as an absolute source of moral authority. This is very perilous: it only works if the law was crafted in an ethically pure environment, where all affected parties had a say in its crafting, and had all their ideas and concerns meaningfully and thoughtfully addressed.
In the case of the DMCA, this was most emphatically not the case. So it is with most IP law on the books. Thus, the law as it stands is a very poor moral authority, and you are unlikely to win many converts by citing it.
6. Relevance?
In the regime you appear to support (centralized, absolute copy control), there will be no way for a user -- or a skilled technician, for that matter -- to determine if a read or write failure is due to copy control measures, or is due to the drive having gone toes-up. Copy control is a deliberately introduced capacity for failure. Thus, the true reliability of the storage device will always be obscured with the question, "Were you trying to copy controlled data? Can you prove it was really your data?"
As a computing professional, I find this unacceptable. I don't want questions about the reliability of my drive clouding the issue; I want the thing to work, dammit. That Other Operating System is already unreliable enough; must we now introduce further capacities for failure?
I distinctly wrote, "Points are not awarded for bombast or ad hominem attacks," yet we find:
Fuck you loser.
and:
People like ewhac have been busy spreading their communist manifestos for years,...
Responses such as these make it trivially easy to dismiss the poster and their stated position as nothing more than emotional ravings, and move quietly on.
Sorry, pal, you don't get off that easy. While I confess I took some measure of primal glee in my more intemperate remarks, the main thrust of my message stands: I insist you justify your position with more than bombast and ad hominem (personal) attacks.
You assert that copying is a problem, and is somehow a violation of some moral principle. However, from your writings, it is evident (to me, anyway) that:
Your position is based on a fundamental assumption (namely, copying == theft) that is flat out wrong,
You haven't fully thought through the social and economic consequences of a world of central copy control,
You haven't fully thought through the social and economic consequences of completely uncontrolled copying,
You have not compared the likely consequences of both scenarios, weighed their benefits and drawbacks, and arrived at a conclusion.
You implicitly assert that, without a guarantee of remuneration (which you further implicitly assert can only come from sales of artifacts), no new creative works will be developed. If you believe this, then please explain how Linux happened, and continues to happen. Linux is the result of tens of thousands of people world-wide contributing their effort toward a mind-bendingly complex project, virtually none of them expecting money from their work. Perhaps creative people are motivated by things outside traditional economic incentives? And if that's so, what does that do to your thesis?
As a software designer, you are asking me to set aside some fairly basic and valuable freedoms (in particular, bits in my lawful posession are mine to do with as I please) to serve some higher purpose. Not only have you not articulated this higher purpose clearly, you haven't even appealed to the pragmatist in me; you have not shown me that I will enjoy substantially increased benefit under your proposed regime. As a software designer, I know that I'm not getting paid for my artifacts, I'm getting paid for my time, and that copying my artifacts doesn't harm me. Even if it gets copied a zillion times, getting it done the first time is still quite valuable, that I'm fairly good at it, and that's what I get paid for.
Centuries ago, it was widely accepted as "fact" that the Earth was flat. This conceptual model worked perfectly well for the sweeping majority of people in their day-to-day lives. It was also widely understood amongst sailors and other close observers of the sky that this was not so, that the Earth was in fact curved in some way. But to suggest so in polite company was sure to get you shouted down or, worse, imprisoned for heresy.
Today, it is widely believed that copying == theft. Indeed, in the current economic atmosphere, it is expedient and useful to believe this. However, those of us who have been sailing in the sea of bits for the last twenty years know that the expedient is not the truth; that copying is not, and never was, theft. We also know there are more things than money at stake. And yes, we catch social shit every time we try to explain this to people. And we quietly fear the day when the matter replicator finally gets invented and the expedient falls flat on its face and everyone runs for cover.
As I've posted here before, I believe as John Gilmore now does: That we should put aside the expedient and start treating digital media for what it is: A Santa Claus Machine. By doing this, we force the new social and economic models to get built now so that when the matter replicator does finally show up, we'll at least have some basic framework for living and prospering with it.
Finally, a point of pragmatism: If you know that digital media can be duplicated anywhere by anyone at any time, infinitely and perfectly; and if, as an artisan, you know you make your money from scarce access to your artifacts; then why would you work in digital media in the first place, and then complain when your artifacts get copied?
[[Ordinarily, I don't feed the mentally-handicapped trolls, as it rewards the wrong kind of behavior, but there are certain misconceptions being thrown around that, alas, are mistakenly taken as axiomatic by far too many people, and need correction just on general principles.]]
Your homework is as follows. Answer the following questions. Be specific; give examples. Points are not given for bombast or ad hominem attacks.
Economics: Explain the fundamental difference between transfer of a resource and duplication of a resource.
Ethics: In a world where it is physically possible to copy anything, what is wrong with copying anything? (You may assume the existence of either Star Trek-like (energy-based) or nanotechnologically-based matter replicators.)
Mathematics: Since, by law, it is the responsibility of a publisher to ensure their work does not infringe against any other copyrighted work, the new work must be searched and tested against every existing work to assure non-infringement. Assume, either by law or by technological operation, copyrights never expire. Plot the curve of the search/test time as the number of already-copyrighted works increases. At what point does the curve exceed the physical ability to conduct the test?
Social Studies: In a world where a creator's artifacts can be duplicated by anyone anywhere, what intangible property or concept will still be crucial to reward jobs well done?
Politics: A dozen or so entities tried to provide input to the drafting of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but only two actually had any meaningful effect. Name them.
Computer Science: You attempt to write a block of data to a hard disk, but the operation fails. Describe the steps that can be taken to determine with 100% certainty if the failure is due to a flaw in the drive (necessitating replacement), or due to properly operating copy control measures.
Answers (ROT-13):
Genafsre bs n erfbhepr vf gur onfvf bs gursg, naq vf n pevzr jura cresbezrq vaibyhagnevyl. Qhcyvpngvba bs n erfbhepr vf gur onfvf bs qvyhgvba, juvpu vf abg n pevzr (gubhtu terrql, guvpx-urnqrq crbcyr tehzoyr nobhg vg).
Abguvat. Fvapr rirelbar jvyy unir npprff gb gur fnzr novyvgl gb pbcl, gurer jvyy or ab fbpvny arrq gb pbafgenva pbclvat, fvapr gur "nttevrirq cnegl" pna fvzcyl znxr gurve bja pbcvrf bs jungrire gurl arrq.
Vg nyernql unf.
Gur pbaprcg bs erchgngvba jvyy or prageny gb gur shgher vapragvir fgehpgher. Juvyr pbcvrf bs negvsnpgf jvyy syl nebhaq yrsg naq evtug, gur perngbe'f erchgngvba jvyy or jryy-cebgrpgrq ol ynj naq fbpvny pbairagvba.
[[Concerning his pooh-poohing of DeCSS's legitimate uses, it would be nice to mention that I'd rather like to write an OpenGL screen blanker that takes whatever DVD is in the drive, maps the movie on to a sphere, and bounces it around. It would be nice to point out that such use of a DVD is perfectly legal -- even cool -- but utterly impossible without DeCSS or something like it. But somehow I doubt he'd be able to grasp the concept.]]
As any security expert has already explained -- not to mention Carmack the Magnificent on numerous occasions -- cheating can never be prevented in the "trusted client" model. There is no way you can reliably verify the integrity of the client on a machine not in your physical control. Period. Thus, all the work has to be performed on an electronically and physically secure server.
As for making textures transparent, that serves cheating purposes only because it's a side-effect of over-reliance on Z-buffers. Z-buffers are the most popular method of hidden surface elimination in CG rendering. However, Z-buffers don't eliminate hidden surfaces, they obscure them. Making polygons translucent helps un-obscure otherwise invisible geometry.
Back in the days of wireframe-only displays and pen plotters, a lot of research went into hidden line elimination, which is a variant of hidden surface elimination. Curiously, hidden line elimination is vastly harder to do, since you can't "erase" anything after you've drawn it. You must eliminate all unseen components from the object geometry before passing them on to the renderer. That's seriously icky math, since you have polygons slicing other polygons, thereby creating even more polygons. Add in the fact that you'd like to avoid drawing the same edge multiple times, or cutting a straight segment into a zillion tiny pieces, and the problem becomes even messier. Research into hidden line elimination was largely abandoned when raster displays became fast and cheap enough such that erasing/overdrawing previously-drawn imagery became viable.
So now it seems we come full circle: The only way you can thwart the translucent polygon hack is to perform the full geometric clipping (as hidden line elimination tried to do) such that invisible geometry is simply not passed to the renderer. Perhaps gaming sites such as this will stimulate renewed research into the area.
As for aim bots: Carmack the Magnificent has previously opined that a very talented player will be detected by advanced anti-cheating heuristics as a subtle aim bot. If you happen to be that talented player booted off the server, you will not be at all happy. (OTOH, Vegas casinos routinely eject card counters playing the Blackjack tables. So if you're hyper-good, they likely don't want you in their place, anyway.)
My favorite t-shirt was from Apple. It was done up as a MacOS error dialog, and read:
The Apple engineer "unknown" has unexpectedly quit.
[[Do something]] [Cancel]
with the arrow positioned over the [Cancel] button.
More generally, you can also get any shirt you want printed up and made available for sale at CafePress.com. Need a shirt printed up for your Quake clan? Toss 'em some artwork and they'll crank 'em out for you for $9.95 each. Go spelunking through their t-shirt index sometime; some of them are quite neat.
John Byrd and I both worked for $(MUMBLE_SALT_PILE_MUMBLE), and I've exchanged email with him since his move to Sega. He does indeed support Dreamcast developers. While we disagree about just how much to crack open the specs of the Dreamcast for "arbitrary" development, he's basically a good egg.
Ask him to spill the beans some time on Sega's reaction to Micros~1's XBox announcement, after Sega spent all that effort helping Micros~1 whip WinCE into shape for a console environment...
I used to work for $(MUMBLE_SALT_PILE_MUMBLE), and they were actually fairly nice to me, as such things go. During one of their countless 'reorganizations', they gave me six weeks' notice, as there was a deliverable they needed me to finish. Everyone else had to be out of the building that same day.
Despite the fact that I was staying on, the IS department (IS&T, Information Services and Telephones, which we constantly referred to as "isn't" behind their backs) froze out my account. No big deal; I still had an open 'telnet' session to the build machine, which I kept open until the account was reactivated.
I was a good little drone, and although I publicly flamed IS&T for spending time farting around setting up a PointCast proxy rather than focusing on keeping essential services running solidly, I finished my deliverable, and left only with those things that rightfully belonged to me.
I would have sworn they would be F*ckedCompany.com material by now. But, remarkably, the company is still in business, focusing on its core competency (spending lots of money creating derivative products).
Yup, and 'round about these parts (San Francisco peninsula), they're starting to retrofit the green traffic lights as well, and man that shade of green is gorgeous to behold...
Slashdot Mirror
It seems there should be better fora for floating this idea, but I can't think of what they may be, and it seems time is no longer on our side. Thus:
The biggest problem is that the copy control technologies are insidious: They are inserted into flashy, cool devices or software without informing the customer they're there, thus thwarting their desire (or not) to avoid them. For example, did you know the latest WinAmp contains copy control measures from InterTrust? Of course not. AOL conveniently "forgot" to tell you.
We could create a list of products, companies, and/or technologies to avoid, but then the copy control philistines would simply change the names of their stuff on a regular basis, and the fight would devolve into a shell game. This lets them say, "Oh, no, we stopped incorporated CPRM at customer request!" and then fail to tell you that it simply got renamed to ICST (Insidious Citizen-Screwing Technology). You're still screwed, but they get to play PR games with us.
Thus, my proposal: I propose the creation of the Open Media Initiative, a non-profit entity whose charter is to analyze new digital hardware and software, and report whether they contain copy control measures. The Open Media Initiative (OMI) would promote the following values:
Note that only technological measures are addressed. Social and legal restrictions are free to exist (or not); the OMI simply prohibits their ensconcement in code or hardware. (For the purposes of the OMI, executable programs are considered data.)
Devices and software meeting this three-pronged test shall be eligible to use an OMI certification logo on their products, so that consumers will be able to immediately identify compliant, safe products, and avoid non-compliant ones. A list of products receiving certification would also appear on the OMI's Web site.
Yes, publicizing OMI and the OMI logo, at least in the "traditional" manner, would be horribly expensive. However, as things stand now, if you're a member of the tech community, and are rightfully repulsed by these encroachments on the freedoms we worked so hard to build into our systems, explaining the issues to, say, your grandmother could be a laborious process. However, if you could simply tell her, "Don't buy anything unless it has this logo on it," the problem is considerably simplified.
By way of example, current CD-ROM burners would be eligible for the OMI logo, as would Linux and the most recent rev of Unreal Tournament. SDMI-enabled MP3 players, Windows, and Quake3:Arena would not.
So, who's with me?
Schwab
(Dear Lord, what have I let myself in for?)
When we achieved sentience (and how that happened is wide open to debate), we took control of our own evolution, so to speak.
Confronted with climactic change, other species would migrate to new climes, evolve to cope with the change, or crawl into a corner and die. Not us. We invented the plow, agriculture, and the calendar. That way we knew how to plant, what to plant, and when to do it. And in doing so, we survived and prospered. Rather than evolving our physiology through multiple generations of breeding, we evolved our skill set.
The reason we progressed so quickly is that sentience and intellect are vastly more flexible than selective breeding. Changing your physiology takes hundreds of generations. Changing your mind takes but a moment.
Now that we have completed the Genome Project, it will be interesting to see if we seize ultimate control over our evolution, and risk tweaking our genetic code. Some would say such manipulation is "unnatural." But since we are ourselves creatures of nature, it could be argued that such manipulation is perfectly natural. The creature is evolving by directing selection at itself; the result is that it will either naturally delete itself, or that it will survive and prosper.
The biggest risk from such exploration is our chronic lack of forward-thinking. ("I need water; I'll build a dam here. Oh dear, this standing pool of water I've created is breeding mosquitos and infecting everyone with malaria.") As such, since it is our own lot we wish to improve by such tinkering, I would Modestly Propose that all genetic experimentation take place on live human subjects. This would tend to strongly encourage experimenters to think things through to the necessary degree before undertaking anything.
This also tends to suggest that, at least initially, the safest forms of human genetic tinkering are those which are purely cosmetic in nature (prettier eyes, straighter teeth, etc.). While this may seem trite, which do you think would be the wiser creation on this tiny resource-starved planet: People with rainbow-colored irises, or a normally-breeding uber-human living to 160 years and immune to nearly all disease?
Schwab
It's not a phony article.
I'm not really sure what's going on in this instance, but the original link was Slashdotted in a big way ('connection refused' errors galore). One of the following must have happened:
Other possibilities no doubt exist. The point is that, yes, there is a real site; it's just hard to get to at the moment. There was a link to a mirror in an earlier post, which works fine.
Schwab
Decisions, decisions... :-)
At the risk of making your eyes bug out: Yes. They are the conclusions I've reached after thinking long and hard about what infinite abundance at zero cost implies.
But in a world where anyone can copy anything, anytime, anywhere, the whole concept of mine-versus-yours loses all meaning.
Consider a more concrete example. Let's say we each have a small red ball. One belongs to me; the other belongs to you. They are in all other ways completely indistinguishable. We put both balls inside a box, close it, shake it up for a while, and open it.
Which ball is yours? Clearly, one is not yours (it's mine), and you'd like to be certain -- out of nothing more than courtesy -- that you don't pick the wrong one. Since they're identical, how can you tell which is yours? More fundamentally, does it really matter?
I contend that it doesn't matter. Once you have infinite, perfect duplication, the idea of mine-versus-yours becomes silly. Pick either ball; it doesn't matter. Each of us will end up with a ball. Make a copy of one and give it to a third person. Then mix all three up in the box again. Which one is the "copy" and which ones are the "originals?" Since everyone's going to get a ball, it doesn't matter. Copying does not diminish what we have.
This is precisely the situation existing in the memories of our computers. Thus, the idea of "ownership" of a digital artifact that can be infinitely copied starts to look specious.
This is not to say the transition to the Real New Economy won't be tumultuous; it definitely will. But unless the issues are conceptualized correctly, society will endure a lot of unnecessary anguish as it charges down blind alleys.
Schwab
According to my last scan with console-apt, Woody makes use of libc6 v2.2.1, which I'm led to understand is a fairly major departure from potato's libc6 (2.1.3). There are some things in Woody I really want, so I'm inclined to upgrade now, but I have no idea how much stuff the new libc6 will break.
Anyone have any experience along these lines?
Schwab
Given the current nature of computers and the Internet, there is only one reasonable answer to this line of thinking. Here's the short version:
Get over it.
A slightly longer version: The keynote of human progress throughout recorded history has been towards increased abundance at reduced cost. The plow was invented to make producing more food easier. The printing press was invented to make more books, less expensively. The telephone was invented to communicate more information in less time. ...Increased abundance at reduced cost.
In many ways, the computer is the ultimate embodiment of this struggle: Infinite abundance at zero cost. It is now possible for you to say, "I want this song," and a copy of it will appear on your computer.
We achieved this goal after thousands of years of struggle, hardship, war, and painstaking scientific inquiry. So tell me, after all that trouble on the part of your forebears, who hoped that, perhaps one day in the future they could only imagine, we might actually get to this point... Why would you want to throw it away?
Moreover, why would you want to throw it away almost solely at the behest of individuals who are already filthy stinking rich?
In one very important sense, you are correctly concerned about how we will provide incentives for artisans to continue to produce amazing creative works. But attempting to control the proliferation of artifacts is not in any way a reasonable solution. The political and social consequences of such an approach are absolutely disasterous when taken to their inevitable conclusion.
The goal is to reward and encourage artisans to create stuff for all to enjoy. To achieve this, copyrights were instituted to give the artisan exclusive control of commercial trading of their work (with the unstated assumption that the artisan would take their reward from that commercial activity). But that solution is a hack, as it addresses commerce, not creative activity. Yes, it gets money into the artist's pocket (or rather, it used to before Big Media), but it doesn't address the real problem at a fundamental level. And if you're not addressing the actual bug in the system, then you have a hack, not a solution.
Copyrights are a hack. The world has undergone an upgrade, and the hack will no longer work. It's time to go back to the drawing board and engineer a proper solution.
Schwab
So download the page and edit the HTML to expand the field limit back to 12 characters. Fix the <FORM> tag to point to the fully qualified URL at Nike. Then load the locally edited page into your browser, fill it out, and click submit. If their server admins fell into the "trusted client" trap, it'll work.
Heck, you could theoretically expand the input limit to whatever size you want; certainly large enough to send them the DeCSS code :-).
Schwab
Best was acquired by Verio a few years ago. Thus, going to Best's home page now teleports you to Verio's home page. However, there are still a ton of subscribers' pages hosted on Best's servers, all logged in search engines as residing at http://www.best.com/. So they couldn't just kill the name.
The result is that Best subscribers up to the point they got acquired still exist on the net as coming from best.com, but it's really Verio now.
Schwab
I wrote a fake news story about this some months ago, except I set it in the US. Seems like it's getting closer to reality every day.
Talk to your friends and relatives about this issue. Raise awareness. And make sure you vote, both at the polling place and the cash register.
Schwab
I've been a computer geek for over decades, and until recently have felt that labor unions have no place in the tech industry.
The reason I felt this way was largely a result of my (admittedly superficial) encounters with unions thus far. For example, if you are exhibiting at a computer show, you're not allowed to touch your own stuff. You are required to hire Teamsters to carry your stuff in and out of the building. Once your equipment is in your booth, you are not allowed to plug it in; you have to hire a member of the electrician's union to do that for you. Depending on the city in which your exhibiting, this process can be anywhere between a minor hassle and a sadistic nightmare only hinted at in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. You're busy, you're trying to get stuff done. But if you even think about doing something that's Somebody Else's Job, they'll jump down your throat.
Another fine example of excessive union activity is in the motion picture industry. This little excerpt from the film, The Wizard of Speed and Time should give you an idea of what it's like:
Director's Union Office:
"Hello, hi."
"Can I help you?"
"Uh. yeah, how do I join the Director's Union?"
"You need bring a copy of the D-O-mumble signed by your studio producer before you can pay your initiation fees and be cleared by union council, thank you..."
"Uh, excuse me, what's the initiation fee?"
"Seven thousand dollars, with a hundred dollar application fee, two hundred dollars every quarter, and ten percent of your salary."
"Seven thousand dollars! What is that for?"
"That's the amount you pay to get into our union."
"Well, what is it, like Social Security? I get it back when I retire?"
"Absolutely not! What is your classification?"
"Well, I'm directing special effects with a small crew."
"Well, then you must have an Assistant Director, a Second AD, and a UPM, all signed with the DUA."
"All I'm directing is animation!"
"Well, then discuss that with the Animator's Union."
Animator's Union Office:
"So, uh, what's your animation classification, huh?"
"Well, a lot of everything. Cartooning, kinestasis, rotoscoping, stop-motion..."
"WOAH! Well, cartoon animation alone is twenty-one hundred dollars, plus a fifty dollar entry fee, and a hundred dollar quarterly dues."
"Well, what about filming animation?"
"Well, then ya go to the Camera Union."
Camera Union Offices:
"No sir, the studio hires the next man on the roster."
"Well, how do I get on the roster?"
"You have to be in the union."
"Well, how do I get in the union?"
"When you're on the roster."
"You mean I can't join unless I'm already a member?"
"That's correct. Then you need thirty consecutive days camera operation, a complete physical exam, the producer sends a letter, and you pay your fees"
"Well, fine, I've done ten years of camera work!"
"Then you've worked in violation of seniority! You'll have to start all over as a film loader."
"Look, I'm just building a small set and filming it!"
"That's entirely another union! Set and Modelmakers. Next door."
I see software engineering as a primarily creative exercise. I don't especially want some self-appointed organization telling me what kind of work I can and can't do, and for whom.
However, I've recently come to the opinion that unions may well have a place in the tech industry, most particularly in the support sector. Some months ago, there was a Slashdot story about a guy's experience as a phone tech support person. I found the environment described utterly horrible. Individuality is forbidden; lying to customers ("Are you a supervisor?") is encouraged, the company has no loyalty toward its employees, the system is setup assuming people are going to be used up, burned out, and tossed aside. And if the quality of service sucks, that doesn't matter. Call volume is what matters; let's churn those calls through, people. Hang up in the middle if you have to, helping the customer is not the object of the game here, it's cranking those numbers...
I think that's reprehensible. This is not Dickensian England, this is 21st century America. I think a labor union representing phone tech support people would not only improve their working conditions, but also improve the quality of customer support. I'm sure there are several other low-level areas in the tech industry that could benefit from collective bargaining.
Schwab
Yes, I'm aware of that. The problem is that it's dog-slow. Opening and scanning 2000 files for one mailbox alone is just darned painful. Even if the mailbox is hundreds of megabytes in size, 'grep' will operate on it faster if it's a single file than if it's zillions of separate files.
Also, when your mailbox grows to thousands of messages, the wildcard expansion in the shell ('*' in your example) may overflow or truncate, and you may not actually scan all the messages. Yes, you can resort to foreach, but then not only are you opening zillions of files, you're discretely launching 'grep' a zillion times as well.
Like I said, I admire 'maildir's reliability, and it's certainly more flexible in certain ways., and if I could get the same or similar search speed out of 'maildir', I'd switch. But for the moment, 'mbox' serves my purposes.
Schwab
I've been using 'mbox' for -- gawd, can I say this? -- fifteen years, and it's served me well. 'mbox's advantages for me are that it is efficient with disk space (you don't eat an inode per message), and that it is quick to search.
9 times out of 10, when I'm searching my mail, typically with 'grep', I'm looking for something in the body, not the headers. With 'maildir', you have to open each message and search it. This is preposterously slow. There is also the danger that the shell's wildcard expansion limits may be exceeded if you have a lot of messages. With 'mbox', 'grep' opens the one file and slurps through it quickly.
Remote synchronization is not an issue for me. All my email resides on my laptop, which follows me everywhere.
However, I'm hip to 'maildir's increased reliability. I have over 2000 messages in my outgoing box alone, and I'd hate to have a system hiccup destroy any of it. If I could search the bodies of a 'maildir' spool as quickly as an 'mbox' spool, I could be convinced to switch.
Schwab
Suddenly I'm very pleased to be a Verio SDSL customer. I would never have dreamed a telecomm provider like Verio would have the testicular fortitute to tell the MPAA to smeg off.
Schwab
You are introducing an assertion I did not make, and attacking it instead of my actual position. Misdirection.
While it is indeed interesting to observe that the crushing majority of people complaining about unrestricted copying are already filthy stinking rich, it is nevertheless orthognal to the issue: Tranfer of resources is a distinct activity from duplication of resources. Pro-control interests are trying to conflate the two. Don't be fooled; they're crucially different.
You keep making this assertion without supporting argument. What will be killed? Medical research? Hardly. AIDS remains a problem whether or not Pfizer is doing research on it, as does cancer. Software development? Again, hardly. Linux is manifest proof of this.
You may argue that research in these fields would be slowed if corporate interests were unable to exert monopoly powers over their products. That is an arguable point, one which you have yet to make. (I contend that, while such research might be slowed, it almost certainly wouldn't slow to the detriment of society. And perhaps research might be directed toward more pressing needs, like cancer and software reliability, rather than toward hair-loss prevention and a "smarter" animated paperclip.)
Every bit as foolish and myopic is to presume that all meaningful medical research came out of corporate labs, done solely for profit motive. Should Dr. Jonas Salk have sat on the polio vaccine until he got a patent on it, then soaked the civilized world for his life-saving discovery?
Assertion made without supporting evidence.
Further, you are ignoring the mathematics of the current situation. The combinatorial explosion of the current system leads to one of two inevitable outcomes:
Neither outcome is especially desirable. Two ways to forestall this are:
In a world where justice is swift, accurate, and cheap, this might be a reasonable point. As it is, your position fails to take into account that litigation today is ruinously expensive. Even an accusation that is utterly meritless can bankrupt the individual defending against it. Even if the defendant prevails, they're still out tens of thousands of dollars in unrecoverable legal fees. As a result, corporate interests can and do initiate meritless proceedings against individuals, knowing and expecting the defendant to back down and toe the line for no other reason than they are unable to effectively defend themselves. In any other forum, this would be called "bullying."
(If you want to argue for litigation reform, you've got my support. Likewise, if you want to argue for copyright infringement being treated as the equivalent of a parking violation, you'd get some sympathy from me in that direction as well.)
Certainly not. I'm asking you to consider and design a reward system that still functions -- absent totalitarian controls -- in a world where copying is universal and ubiquitous. Around what concept(s) would such a reward system revolve?
You appear to be citing the body of Law as an absolute source of moral authority. This is very perilous: it only works if the law was crafted in an ethically pure environment, where all affected parties had a say in its crafting, and had all their ideas and concerns meaningfully and thoughtfully addressed.
In the case of the DMCA, this was most emphatically not the case. So it is with most IP law on the books. Thus, the law as it stands is a very poor moral authority, and you are unlikely to win many converts by citing it.
In the regime you appear to support (centralized, absolute copy control), there will be no way for a user -- or a skilled technician, for that matter -- to determine if a read or write failure is due to copy control measures, or is due to the drive having gone toes-up. Copy control is a deliberately introduced capacity for failure. Thus, the true reliability of the storage device will always be obscured with the question, "Were you trying to copy controlled data? Can you prove it was really your data?"
As a computing professional, I find this unacceptable. I don't want questions about the reliability of my drive clouding the issue; I want the thing to work, dammit. That Other Operating System is already unreliable enough; must we now introduce further capacities for failure?
Schwab
I distinctly wrote, "Points are not awarded for bombast or ad hominem attacks," yet we find:
and:
Responses such as these make it trivially easy to dismiss the poster and their stated position as nothing more than emotional ravings, and move quietly on.
Sorry, pal, you don't get off that easy. While I confess I took some measure of primal glee in my more intemperate remarks, the main thrust of my message stands: I insist you justify your position with more than bombast and ad hominem (personal) attacks.
You assert that copying is a problem, and is somehow a violation of some moral principle. However, from your writings, it is evident (to me, anyway) that:
You implicitly assert that, without a guarantee of remuneration (which you further implicitly assert can only come from sales of artifacts), no new creative works will be developed. If you believe this, then please explain how Linux happened, and continues to happen. Linux is the result of tens of thousands of people world-wide contributing their effort toward a mind-bendingly complex project, virtually none of them expecting money from their work. Perhaps creative people are motivated by things outside traditional economic incentives? And if that's so, what does that do to your thesis?
As a software designer, you are asking me to set aside some fairly basic and valuable freedoms (in particular, bits in my lawful posession are mine to do with as I please) to serve some higher purpose. Not only have you not articulated this higher purpose clearly, you haven't even appealed to the pragmatist in me; you have not shown me that I will enjoy substantially increased benefit under your proposed regime. As a software designer, I know that I'm not getting paid for my artifacts, I'm getting paid for my time, and that copying my artifacts doesn't harm me. Even if it gets copied a zillion times, getting it done the first time is still quite valuable, that I'm fairly good at it, and that's what I get paid for.
Centuries ago, it was widely accepted as "fact" that the Earth was flat. This conceptual model worked perfectly well for the sweeping majority of people in their day-to-day lives. It was also widely understood amongst sailors and other close observers of the sky that this was not so, that the Earth was in fact curved in some way. But to suggest so in polite company was sure to get you shouted down or, worse, imprisoned for heresy.
Today, it is widely believed that copying == theft. Indeed, in the current economic atmosphere, it is expedient and useful to believe this. However, those of us who have been sailing in the sea of bits for the last twenty years know that the expedient is not the truth; that copying is not, and never was, theft. We also know there are more things than money at stake. And yes, we catch social shit every time we try to explain this to people. And we quietly fear the day when the matter replicator finally gets invented and the expedient falls flat on its face and everyone runs for cover.
As I've posted here before, I believe as John Gilmore now does: That we should put aside the expedient and start treating digital media for what it is: A Santa Claus Machine. By doing this, we force the new social and economic models to get built now so that when the matter replicator does finally show up, we'll at least have some basic framework for living and prospering with it.
Finally, a point of pragmatism: If you know that digital media can be duplicated anywhere by anyone at any time, infinitely and perfectly; and if, as an artisan, you know you make your money from scarce access to your artifacts; then why would you work in digital media in the first place, and then complain when your artifacts get copied?
Schwab
[[Ordinarily, I don't feed the mentally-handicapped trolls, as it rewards the wrong kind of behavior, but there are certain misconceptions being thrown around that, alas, are mistakenly taken as axiomatic by far too many people, and need correction just on general principles.]]
Your homework is as follows. Answer the following questions. Be specific; give examples. Points are not given for bombast or ad hominem attacks.
Answers (ROT-13):
[[Concerning his pooh-poohing of DeCSS's legitimate uses, it would be nice to mention that I'd rather like to write an OpenGL screen blanker that takes whatever DVD is in the drive, maps the movie on to a sphere, and bounces it around. It would be nice to point out that such use of a DVD is perfectly legal -- even cool -- but utterly impossible without DeCSS or something like it. But somehow I doubt he'd be able to grasp the concept.]]
Schwab
So what are the roaming charges for Saturn's moons?
Schwab
I wrote a fake news story last year about exactly this kind of thing, except I set it in the U.S.
Anyone else feeling as powerless as I am right now?
Schwab
As any security expert has already explained -- not to mention Carmack the Magnificent on numerous occasions -- cheating can never be prevented in the "trusted client" model. There is no way you can reliably verify the integrity of the client on a machine not in your physical control. Period. Thus, all the work has to be performed on an electronically and physically secure server.
As for making textures transparent, that serves cheating purposes only because it's a side-effect of over-reliance on Z-buffers. Z-buffers are the most popular method of hidden surface elimination in CG rendering. However, Z-buffers don't eliminate hidden surfaces, they obscure them. Making polygons translucent helps un-obscure otherwise invisible geometry.
Back in the days of wireframe-only displays and pen plotters, a lot of research went into hidden line elimination, which is a variant of hidden surface elimination. Curiously, hidden line elimination is vastly harder to do, since you can't "erase" anything after you've drawn it. You must eliminate all unseen components from the object geometry before passing them on to the renderer. That's seriously icky math, since you have polygons slicing other polygons, thereby creating even more polygons. Add in the fact that you'd like to avoid drawing the same edge multiple times, or cutting a straight segment into a zillion tiny pieces, and the problem becomes even messier. Research into hidden line elimination was largely abandoned when raster displays became fast and cheap enough such that erasing/overdrawing previously-drawn imagery became viable.
So now it seems we come full circle: The only way you can thwart the translucent polygon hack is to perform the full geometric clipping (as hidden line elimination tried to do) such that invisible geometry is simply not passed to the renderer. Perhaps gaming sites such as this will stimulate renewed research into the area.
As for aim bots: Carmack the Magnificent has previously opined that a very talented player will be detected by advanced anti-cheating heuristics as a subtle aim bot. If you happen to be that talented player booted off the server, you will not be at all happy. (OTOH, Vegas casinos routinely eject card counters playing the Blackjack tables. So if you're hyper-good, they likely don't want you in their place, anyway.)
Schwab
Yes, I remember Starcade. I was on the show.
Here's the Starcade Web site. (And here's me on the show.)
Scary, ain't it? :-)
Schwab
My favorite t-shirt was from Apple. It was done up as a MacOS error dialog, and read:
with the arrow positioned over the [Cancel] button.
More generally, you can also get any shirt you want printed up and made available for sale at CafePress.com. Need a shirt printed up for your Quake clan? Toss 'em some artwork and they'll crank 'em out for you for $9.95 each. Go spelunking through their t-shirt index sometime; some of them are quite neat.
Schwab
...Either that or Robert McElwaine, PHYSICIST!
Schwab
John Byrd and I both worked for $(MUMBLE_SALT_PILE_MUMBLE), and I've exchanged email with him since his move to Sega. He does indeed support Dreamcast developers. While we disagree about just how much to crack open the specs of the Dreamcast for "arbitrary" development, he's basically a good egg.
Ask him to spill the beans some time on Sega's reaction to Micros~1's XBox announcement, after Sega spent all that effort helping Micros~1 whip WinCE into shape for a console environment...
Schwab
I used to work for $(MUMBLE_SALT_PILE_MUMBLE), and they were actually fairly nice to me, as such things go. During one of their countless 'reorganizations', they gave me six weeks' notice, as there was a deliverable they needed me to finish. Everyone else had to be out of the building that same day.
Despite the fact that I was staying on, the IS department (IS&T, Information Services and Telephones, which we constantly referred to as "isn't" behind their backs) froze out my account. No big deal; I still had an open 'telnet' session to the build machine, which I kept open until the account was reactivated.
I was a good little drone, and although I publicly flamed IS&T for spending time farting around setting up a PointCast proxy rather than focusing on keeping essential services running solidly, I finished my deliverable, and left only with those things that rightfully belonged to me.
I would have sworn they would be F*ckedCompany.com material by now. But, remarkably, the company is still in business, focusing on its core competency (spending lots of money creating derivative products).
Schwab
Yup, and 'round about these parts (San Francisco peninsula), they're starting to retrofit the green traffic lights as well, and man that shade of green is gorgeous to behold...
Schwab