The air, however, isn't owned by anyone (regulated, yes, but not property). If technology can allow for fast, reliable, two-way Net access through airspace, this removes the telco & cable companies' ability to ignore these undesirable Net services. If they start to lose too many subscribers to over-the-air providers, they will have to back off on the restrictions.
The real problem here, that is causing both the abborhent behavior of the broadband industry and has control over broadcast networking, is the FCC. Frankly, private industry is usually rapacious and shortsighted. The government is supposed to regulate in an attempt to channel those impulses in positive direction. However, Michael Powell is, even in an administration full of regulators who are nothing but lapdogs for the industry they theoretically control, remarkable for his willingness to let the big ISPs do whatever they want.
If wireless broadband is to be a big competitor to the big broadband providers, the FCC will have to be complicet; the FCC regulates broadcasting even more than land lines. And, frankly, if that starts to happen, then the big ISPs are very likely simply to have their pet FCC chief step on wireless broadband (it causes brain cancer! Won't someone thing of the children!? Use safe fiber optics!).
A - Any half-bright terrorist will be using strong cryptography rather than on Security Through Obscurity via unecrypted HTTP/SMTP packets. Thus, this proposal fails to provide law enforcement with any useful tools against serious threats
B - While You, Hugh, may be Joe Normal, I and a lot of other/.rs are/do/talk about things we'd just as soon not have some redneck police officer from Bad Ass, TX (re: Robert Anton Wilson) look up when they're bored and looking for a queer to bash. As per A above, this proposal lacks utility against serious security threats, and therefore it's only effect is to give the unethical, unscrupulous, and stupid in our governments more information to be used in their quest to stamp out non-comformity.
It's like this in the USA, too. It's not just that during our 2000 presidental election it was obvious that G.W. Bush Jr. was a moron, it's _also_ that anybody that _really_ cared to learn what kind of executive he'd be could look at his record in Texas. Anybody that voted for Bush under the theory that he gave a shit about the environment or poor people (especially poor brown people) or anything, really, except large companies did so in total defiance of his record as governer.
In short, voters everywhere are 100% unable to correlate between past performance and future likely behavior. It's very odd, given that you'd think such an ability would be highly adaptive, but there you go.
I think you're missing part of the point of this entire affair. It's not necessarily about computer science, and many people that are looking for the CS value in this may well be bored. But as a story about _chess_, this is facinating.
While your points about how brute forcing the issue may not be very interesting technically, I have found, following this story and the previous iterations of the same, that I am facinated the diffrences between human chess and computer chess. Clearly, Kramnik is playing a very different sort of chess than the one that Fritz plays. Where human chess is intuitive and often highly psychological (Kramnik may well have won this match if he hadn't resigned a possible drawn position), computer chess is calculated and totally passionless. The brute-force approach being taken to teach computers to play better chess produces chess players that won't often make interesting sacrifices; computers are notoriously materialistic in chess. But computer defence is appalingly good; Kasparov could often scare opponents into lost positions with an aggressive attack, and the linked story on this match mentions a similar circumstance , but computers play a frightening defence. Computers never get scared, never make a mistake, and know exactly what's going on in the next five turns. If there's a bizzare line of play that produces a strange but favorable board, humans will often overlook it, as human intuition often passes outre solutions by, but a computer player will take the game places that a human might never. On the other hand, a computer cannot see fifteen turns into the future, with perfect accuracy but no hard data, the way a human player can.
I probably won't be buying this, but I hope someday to have a friend who does (take that, MPAA!) so that I can see the scene where Galadriel dispenses her gifts. Frankly, one of the biggest disapointments of FotR (which, largely, I really enjoyed) was the reduction of Gimli from character to caricature. I'd hope to see in that scene some glimmer of the Gimli that, IMHO, should have been, or have confirmed that Jackson simply had no idea of what to do with a dwarf and decided to settle for Stupid Dwarf Jokes.
I don't suppose any legal eagle sites out there have a more in-depth look at this one? Legal and/or copyright sluts (myself included) want to know if this decision means anything other than a bunch of fanboys (myself towards the front of the line) finally get to buy the Miracleman trade paperbacks we've been coveting.
Simply put, you have no right to choose what content other people do or do not create. Frankly, I think losing sleep over other people's bizzare content preferences is a silly passtime. Some people like listening to N'Sync; no skin off my nose. I like listening to Styx and Billy Joel, and more than one of my housemates finds them appalingly cheesy and melodramatic.
The _right_ way to handle this problem isn't governmental at all. If the issue is 'purity of content' and 'creator's intent', then copyright isn't a relevant issue at all. If all you ever are interested in is Frank Miller's take on Batman, then only get the stuff that he's done. Ignore the rest. The proper term is 'canon', and it's been usefully applied to a lot of other aggregations of content. If Star Wars was in the public domain, I think a lot of what LucasArts has done to construct a framework that can embrace different levels of content creation, from the canon themselves (the movies), to the Expanded Universe, to lesser works, would serve a lot of companies very well in protecting thier profit interest even in absense of copyright.
The correct solution is not legal at all. Content is so hard to regulate and there are so few good reasons to do so. I don't see any reason for the government to get involved over this issue.
I have yet to meet someone who would inspire me to have a really serious ritual involving lifelong pledges. But if I were to meet someone like that, if they're not the sort of person who would, far from being put off by it, but would be, indeed, charmed and romanced by an aircraft-grade titanium alloy ring, then the relationship was doomed anyway.
> It will be far more important to her if she > knows that you had to make a real ethical > effort to buy one.
Um... it will be far more important to her to know that you had serious ethical qualms about it, but did it anyway because of social pressure? I don't think my girlfriend would exactly look up to me for that one.
> Can't they hire some homeless CS students to monitor who (which ip) does what (which > song/movie)
*snip*
> Please don't tell me about encrypted filesharing, it's not usable for at least the next five > years (IMO). (Isn't strong encryption illegal anyway? Terrorists could use it..)
A) I think you _vastly_ underestimate the difficulty, legal and otherwise, involved in the RIAA setting up file peer to peer file transferring monitering by IP. It's not just not easy, and not just difficult, but, in fact, for to a variety of legal and technical reasons, very nearly impossible.
B) I'm sure that the net-folks of the world are _really_ losing sleep over the US fed gov's opinion of strong encryption. The only reason that we're looking at encrypted filesharing in the next four years or so instead of the next four months or so is that it's just not needed for security right now. If it becomes needed, expect that timeframe to shorten in a remarkable hurry (well, remarkable to anybody that's failed to notice how quickly the 'net responds to attempts to impede information flow).
I'm going to assume that you mean 'the ability to rip mp3's off this new format is non-existent without using an analog cable to connect the RCAA-approved analog out jack to the audio in jack on your sound card'. Frankly, since at some point in the playback process, the signal _has_ to be an unencoded audio signal, it is _trivially_ easy for a bright boy or girl with a soldering iron to rip MP3s off any audio playback device.
The fact is that audio copy protection is dead, dead, dead. Dedicated pirates won't even miss a beat because of this.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem here, that is causing both the abborhent behavior of the broadband industry and has control over broadcast networking, is the FCC. Frankly, private industry is usually rapacious and shortsighted. The government is supposed to regulate in an attempt to channel those impulses in positive direction. However, Michael Powell is, even in an administration full of regulators who are nothing but lapdogs for the industry they theoretically control, remarkable for his willingness to let the big ISPs do whatever they want.
If wireless broadband is to be a big competitor to the big broadband providers, the FCC will have to be complicet; the FCC regulates broadcasting even more than land lines. And, frankly, if that starts to happen, then the big ISPs are very likely simply to have their pet FCC chief step on wireless broadband (it causes brain cancer! Won't someone thing of the children!? Use safe fiber optics!).
Two points:
A - Any half-bright terrorist will be using strong cryptography rather than on Security Through Obscurity via unecrypted HTTP/SMTP packets. Thus, this proposal fails to provide law enforcement with any useful tools against serious threats
B - While You, Hugh, may be Joe Normal, I and a lot of other
It's like this in the USA, too. It's not just that during our 2000 presidental election it was obvious that G.W. Bush Jr. was a moron, it's _also_ that anybody that _really_ cared to learn what kind of executive he'd be could look at his record in Texas. Anybody that voted for Bush under the theory that he gave a shit about the environment or poor people (especially poor brown people) or anything, really, except large companies did so in total defiance of his record as governer.
In short, voters everywhere are 100% unable to correlate between past performance and future likely behavior. It's very odd, given that you'd think such an ability would be highly adaptive, but there you go.
I think you're missing part of the point of this entire affair. It's not necessarily about computer science, and many people that are looking for the CS value in this may well be bored. But as a story about _chess_, this is facinating.
While your points about how brute forcing the issue may not be very interesting technically, I have found, following this story and the previous iterations of the same, that I am facinated the diffrences between human chess and computer chess. Clearly, Kramnik is playing a very different sort of chess than the one that Fritz plays. Where human chess is intuitive and often highly psychological (Kramnik may well have won this match if he hadn't resigned a possible drawn position), computer chess is calculated and totally passionless. The brute-force approach being taken to teach computers to play better chess produces chess players that won't often make interesting sacrifices; computers are notoriously materialistic in chess. But computer defence is appalingly good; Kasparov could often scare opponents into lost positions with an aggressive attack, and the linked story on this match mentions a similar circumstance , but computers play a frightening defence. Computers never get scared, never make a mistake, and know exactly what's going on in the next five turns. If there's a bizzare line of play that produces a strange but favorable board, humans will often overlook it, as human intuition often passes outre solutions by, but a computer player will take the game places that a human might never. On the other hand, a computer cannot see fifteen turns into the future, with perfect accuracy but no hard data, the way a human player can.
I probably won't be buying this, but I hope someday to have a friend who does (take that, MPAA!) so that I can see the scene where Galadriel dispenses her gifts. Frankly, one of the biggest disapointments of FotR (which, largely, I really enjoyed) was the reduction of Gimli from character to caricature. I'd hope to see in that scene some glimmer of the Gimli that, IMHO, should have been, or have confirmed that Jackson simply had no idea of what to do with a dwarf and decided to settle for Stupid Dwarf Jokes.
I don't suppose any legal eagle sites out there have a more in-depth look at this one? Legal and/or copyright sluts (myself included) want to know if this decision means anything other than a bunch of fanboys (myself towards the front of the line) finally get to buy the Miracleman trade paperbacks we've been coveting.
Simply put, you have no right to choose what content other people do or do not create. Frankly, I think losing sleep over other people's bizzare content preferences is a silly passtime. Some people like listening to N'Sync; no skin off my nose. I like listening to Styx and Billy Joel, and more than one of my housemates finds them appalingly cheesy and melodramatic.
The _right_ way to handle this problem isn't governmental at all. If the issue is 'purity of content' and 'creator's intent', then copyright isn't a relevant issue at all. If all you ever are interested in is Frank Miller's take on Batman, then only get the stuff that he's done. Ignore the rest. The proper term is 'canon', and it's been usefully applied to a lot of other aggregations of content. If Star Wars was in the public domain, I think a lot of what LucasArts has done to construct a framework that can embrace different levels of content creation, from the canon themselves (the movies), to the Expanded Universe, to lesser works, would serve a lot of companies very well in protecting thier profit interest even in absense of copyright.
The correct solution is not legal at all. Content is so hard to regulate and there are so few good reasons to do so. I don't see any reason for the government to get involved over this issue.
Blockquoth an AC:
As opposed to the deep meaningful way that the rest of the nation is spending their finite, precious time?
American Idol? N'Sync? X^3? Bad sex in the dark? Voting Republican?
I have yet to meet someone who would inspire me to have a really serious ritual involving lifelong pledges. But if I were to meet someone like that, if they're not the sort of person who would, far from being put off by it, but would be, indeed, charmed and romanced by an aircraft-grade titanium alloy ring, then the relationship was doomed anyway.
Geek love is strong love.
> It will be far more important to her if she
> knows that you had to make a real ethical
> effort to buy one.
Um... it will be far more important to her to know that you had serious ethical qualms about it, but did it anyway because of social pressure? I don't think my girlfriend would exactly look up to me for that one.
Moox wrote:
> Can't they hire some homeless CS students to monitor who (which ip) does what (which
> song/movie)
*snip*
> Please don't tell me about encrypted filesharing, it's not usable for at least the next five
> years (IMO). (Isn't strong encryption illegal anyway? Terrorists could use it..)
A) I think you _vastly_ underestimate the difficulty, legal and otherwise, involved in the RIAA setting up file peer to peer file transferring monitering by IP. It's not just not easy, and not just difficult, but, in fact, for to a variety of legal and technical reasons, very nearly impossible.
B) I'm sure that the net-folks of the world are _really_ losing sleep over the US fed gov's opinion of strong encryption. The only reason that we're looking at encrypted filesharing in the next four years or so instead of the next four months or so is that it's just not needed for security right now. If it becomes needed, expect that timeframe to shorten in a remarkable hurry (well, remarkable to anybody that's failed to notice how quickly the 'net responds to attempts to impede information flow).
I'm going to assume that you mean 'the ability to rip mp3's off this new format is non-existent without using an analog cable to connect the RCAA-approved analog out jack to the audio in jack on your sound card'. Frankly, since at some point in the playback process, the signal _has_ to be an unencoded audio signal, it is _trivially_ easy for a bright boy or girl with a soldering iron to rip MP3s off any audio playback device.
The fact is that audio copy protection is dead, dead, dead. Dedicated pirates won't even miss a beat because of this.