I've seen satelite; it's expensive and rare, and the latencies are outrageous. Most of the time, only downstream is broadband, and upstream is over a modem. Most importantly, however, is that it doesn't scale. Modem doesn't count, and neither does cellular (except perhaps for some mythical 3G solution I haven't heard anything about yet in Japan or Korea, let alone in this country). We're talking about broadband - one of the many ways you've confused the issue.
The TA96 mandated that phone companies could drop a bunch of regulations, but had to share hardware with competitors. The result was a spate of competition in both local, long-distance, and internet services firms, and a dramatic price drop. The RBOCs saw their end and successfully bribed the government to change course. Cable had never really been deregulated in that sense, and have successfully kept it at bay; their approach is more akin to blackmail.
For an agency that found its niche after the Bell breakup, the FCC has authorized some inexplicably massive telecom mergers lately. The notoriously corrupt Michael Powell made his position eminently clear on competition at the outset, with zero enforcement against the RBOCs' many egregious behaviors toward their "client-competitors." Then, he decreed that Cable providers wouldn't need to share their hardware (as phone companies were "theoretically" required to do by law), and he's since gone on record as being opposed to the CLECs as well... in short - he's sold out any notion of competition, and his figleaf is basically your sham argument, that because we have a choice between Time Warner and Verizon, there's no monopoly.
Which is completely absurd.
It doesn't take a genius to fix prices and rig restrictions in a market with two suppliers in any given region, and less than a dozen nationwide. Prices are already on the steady rise, but TomPaine hits it on the head: the money is unimportant to them compared to control - and they may get it, since this hijacking of the internet is in the interests of the same companies that control the major media outlets, including almost all of the TV news... Putting the internet, ironically, at the center of one of the largest media conspiracies of our time.
They reorganized almost everything, so that everything from cp (only "ditto" copies metadata) to shutdown (not rewritten to care about Apple's replacement for/etc/init.d) to/etc/passwd (user information is now stored in "the NetInfo database") is now useless, and worse, vestigal (!), but everything new they introduced makes the previous unix "non-naming schemes" and disorganization look great by comparison. ".vol" is where trashed files go? It's ".DS_Store" rather than ".Finder Settings"? For that matter, why on earth are we still prepending periods to hide files? Or hiding/usr and/tmp at the application level rather than having a legacy emulation layer and just doing it right? Aliases don't work at the "unix level," and symbolic links work everywhere, but we're once again back to things that break when you move the target... This is the freakin 21st century here.
It may appear to work, and it may crash less than OS9, but from a design point of view, OSX is an anathema. This article just makes it clearer: OSX is, not a port of MacOS or an enhancement of Unix, but a bloody (and fatal?) collision between the two, where both lost what clarity and integrity they had by attrition to the other. A great opportunity to do a new system right was squandered by what appears to be terrifyingly sloppy-looking engineering.
Ah, a republican AC troll. So pleased you guys still take the time to respond "personally." You're an audacious liar, so much so that it's obvious to me you wont benefit from attention to your little fantasies, so I will keep my responses brief...
Reaganites were notorious cost cutters
Like saying Nazis were notorious for their hygiene. Actually they were notorious deficit spenders; oh yeah, and the Iran/Contra affair was rather notorious too... The only costs they ever cut were in civil rights enforcement. MILSPEC was one way they tried to cover the procurement corruption, laughable, really. The kickbacks, and who profited, even made the news (the "Ill Wind"). Oh yeah, you drink that water, don't you.
The president has no recollection...
Electric utilites were not privatized, they were degregulated
Actually, you're wrong again, moron; even your own propoaganda machine doesn't split that hair... You're really funny - I love that you guys are still trying to find cover on this one - you shut off the lights in California with a fake shortage - and the fact got covered on CNN! Well, the show must go on, I guess. Please, read a summary of a rational position on Calif/Enron. You know, the utility privatization scam is widely documented enough now that almost everyone knows about it... you might want to find another dodge, or just pretend you missed it altogether rather than respond with this drivel.
NorthPoint goes out of business and this is proof that Michael Powell is "notoriosly corrupt".
Yep; since you're obviously ignorant, or hoping we are, I'll give you the executive summary: to the RBOCs, Northpoint was a "competitor" and a "client" at the same time. Like most CLEC's, it was brutally abused via service sabotage, but the deathblow was some clever Verizonfraud. Then the bells made a huge show of pulling the plug on 12 hours notice, creating the most widespread, massive and prolonged (months?) downtime in the history of the commercial internet; millions nationwide were affected, including MSN's customers. The message was loud and clear: Don't deal with CLEC's. You might get shut off. Federal regulators? Off somewhere sending faxes from the beach, approving massive RBOC mergers while counting their bribe money.
You know, Verizon settled Northpoint's fraud claim for 175 million dollars...
So if beef prices rise
Slow down there cowboy. Telecom is regulated; the RBOC's prices and service quality aren't based on how well they wrastle their cows, they're based on how good their oversight is. But of course, you knew that, since your whole point here is just to make disingenuous comments that sound like arguments. I don't have to convince anyone Verizon is outrageously overpriced or offers abysmal service - any professional whose dealt with them knows that... Now that he's overseen the final days of behind the scenes sabotage of TA96, Powell has actually gone on record opposing the CLEC concept... backpedaling on the entire idea of competition in the industry. As I say, notoriously corrupt.
So you seem to believe that the proper role of government officials to pick winners and losers in the marketplace.
Thank you - I could have just accused you of having no idea either what I was saying or how the post-TA96 telecom industry works, but you've made my point better than I ever could.
You don't have any specific allegations of wrongdoing.
Thank you - I could have just accused you of either being senile or blatantly ignoring parts of your screen, but you've made my point better than I ever could.
just gratifying his own political bias
This is conservative dogma 101: Any attack is a partisan attack. Any criticism is a political bias. Unfortunately the facts dramatically point to Satanism. But I'll settle for cronyism and nepotism. And to your ignoring all the evidence in a goofy attempt to paint these clear and egregious failures as something other than grounds for criticism... poitical bias? You're gunning to have your headshot next to the definition, aren't you?
I'm sure you were out there dumping offal on dems and their appointees, too. At least there we have some common ground. It's not that dems wouldn't deserve your hypocritical contempt, just that you usually want to have some better reason for your arguments than drooling-fanboy-sports-team-loyalty.
I am not trying to shut down criticism of Bush
Yeah, right, AC Troll, you're just a freelance righter of wrongs, who gets 100% of their facts wrong and has no idea what they're talking about on any of the issues, but sure is fired up "bigtime" that someone may have disrespected your president and his friends.
Hail to the chief. Hit another one for the gipper, ACTroll! I'm waiting! And you can add why you don't log in - modded down too often?
You have people running big bussiness and people in the federal government. They're all friends. They went to Yale and Harvard and Princeton together... they drank at the same clubs. Their parents were friends, and their kids are going to Taft and Dalton and Exeter together right now.
Their goal? Simple. Take tax money out of the government, and get it into their pockets.
Back in the Reagan days, their favorite was the defense industry. It was perfect; there's relative secrecy associated with defense approrpriations, and the military bureaucracy is so intense that it took quite a while for the few people looking to find those $10,000 toilet seats.
We also saw a lot of "foreign aid" disappear into the ether, split up between the corrupt foreign officials and the corrupt local ones, all of it more or less going to Switzerland and Grand Cayman. Still do, actually.
More recently it's been Enron ("privatizing" electric utilities was already absurd, and anyone who followed it the time - including me - called it a blatant invitation to fraud; who knew they'd go all the way to turning off the lights to convince people of a fake shortage! Gives you an idea how little these people fear getting caught), the "airline bailout," the "farm subsidy," and of course, don't forget the "tax breaks."
Now it's a "telecom bailout."
All of these scams netted their perpetrators billions, and in some cases tens or even hundreds of billions. Almost none of the people involved have been investigated, let alone caught. It's the new American mafia, ladies and gentlemen.
Michael Powell is a notoriously corrupt FCC chairman; he's blatantly carried water for both the cable and bell monopolists, and under his watch telecom (and especially internet) service has been abyssmal (remember Northpoint? and what happened to the CLECs?) while prices have risen. It was easy for him, a smug "regulator" in a plum job snagged with handy nepotism; all he had to do was stand back and wink while the bells slaughtered their competition. You don't get a job like FCC chair under a Bush administration without knowing how the game is played... Anyway, this goofy letter to him is pretty amusing; you may as well write a letter to Satan.
Until heads start rolling in quantity (and believe me, once we started, by the time it's over we'd need to build a new federal prison), it's open season.
I'll be blunt. My friend, you should consider joining the CIA. You fit their profile perfectly. As you can imagine, they are currently hiring with a vengance.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/employment/ciaeindex.htm
The experience is literally second to none in the world, and in a variety of private industries, CIA is solid gold on a resume.
Who decides what profits they're entitled to and hence what constitutes "cheating"? The console makers came up with a new, arbitrary set of rules: "we know you think you bought this cosole, but you can't do anything with it we don't authorize." But who says they're allowed to make up that rule? The DMCA? Do you believe the DMCA is a good law? Then stop reading. You're beyond help.
In most informed people's opinion the DMCA is a legislative anathema, to be ignored through civil disobedience and hopefully overturned, either in the courts or the legislature, ASAP. Even with the DMCA, you have to convince a court that the mod chip lacks a significant non-infringing use - far from an open-and-shut case in my book.
Lik-sang gives you equipment and instructions to modify your console. You can buy it and not use it. You can buy it to install Linux on your XBox (a very cheap linux box with hot graphics and a TV out... interesting!). You can install it and make backups of games you own. No crime has been committed, even under the DMCA, by you, Lik-Sang, or anyone else.
Use your mod chip to steal a game? Then you've committed a crime. Not the mod chip maker, or reseller, or UPS for bringing it to your door, or a telecom company for carrying the ecommerce transaction... not anyone else. You. No one else.
That's why the DMCA is bad. It makes a ridiculous bargain with not only our works but our speech, obligating us to guard against possible infringement in advance! Can you imagine how absurd? This is totally incompatible with common sense, let alone with prevailing 1st amendment law. How does anyone know what you'll do with any particular work or speech? The government cannot and should not become the arbiter of speech or acts to insure that it might not "potentially" assist in violating someone's copyright. Not even if IP was our sole industry - and it's not; in fact, it's so tiny in comparison to the size of our economy that this kind of protectionism's negative effects on research, debate and commerce will vastly outweigh any benefit in reduction of piracy.
The unwritten part of the DMCA is that anything that has the potential to threaten the profits of an IP producer is fair game for prosecution, and whether or not there's a victory prosecution is often a victory in itself. It's called a "chilling effect." Look it up.
In principle I would love to give Microsoft a way to have a fool-proof business model of allowing consumers to ammortize hardware costs up-front with subsidies through software sales down the line (the console business model in brief), but it is insane to sacrifice our freedoms provide them with guarantees, not to mention unnecessary. The model doesn't have to be fool-proof to work, and every hardware maker knows they are on thinner ice insisting they can dictate what you can and can't do with your property. Is Microsoft guaranteed to have people do what Microsoft wants when they take their xbox home? Absolutely not. Buy it as a cheap jukebox and DVD player, and never touch a game. Run linux on it if you're clever. Microsoft just lost $150 bucks (since the console costs more to make than its retail price)!
Feel bad for them? They knew the rules of the game, and changing them to make a bad idea work is not how things should go in the world. Mod chips don't cheat them out of any profits - though their users might. And if they can't be bothered to prosecute their users when they do, it is not our problem.
It's because you don't know enough about using P2P to use it well. Try Kazaa-Lite. Whereas I find getting a decent transfer rate from any FTP site (or getting in at all) can be a monster pain, I get instant results and max out my bandwidth every time using P2P for this.
Credit is one of those things that should be given most freely, because it is free to give, giving it makes people happy, and withholding it where it is due is unjust.
Names are, however, not easily changed, and Linux, with its widespread recognition, will be particularly difficult (I would guess impossible) to rename. Literally and metaphorically, this assumption is all over the code. So I will call it by its generally acknowledged name simply to be most efficiently understood.
GNU has contributed and continues to contribute an enormous volume of excellent of work to Linux, and perhaps Linux could not have existed without GNU. The reverse is also untrue, obviously, since most of the work in question predates Linux, and in fact GNU has a kernel of their own. I am sympathetic to GNU for the relative lack of recognition their work receives. Linux has become a famous figurehead, not GNU, and they don't see the logic in it. Sometimes, neither do I. It's a question of being in the right place (including the right place in the system, the right little spot on the political spectrum) and the right time. The press, and the public, are ficle.
GNU has an important mission, one for which the benefits are already in many ways self-evident. They see a little strife as necessary in the furtherance of that mission - both to whip GPL violators into line, and to play a larger advocacy role. I am sympathetic to this, too. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelete, etc. and if you believe in your cause, you go out and get results, even if it means judiciously ticking people off.
But is a piece of software truly free, if, by using it in your project, you might one day find yourself under constant harangue to change its name to credit that free software component's authors? Even if you only added 5% to what is 95% free, is it really free if the name change comes with the deal?
I mean, it would be only fair if you were forewarned... if it were part of your obligations under the license. That might have actually been a good idea... if GNU had more marketing experience, they might have said "branding!" and put something like that in. But they didn't. "It's free," they said, freely given to the world in the best human tradition, earnest generosity to others. It's even meant to teach us a thing or two about generosity along the way. That's how they earned their half of that free/open dichotomy we hear about.
They aren't filing any lawsuits, of course - it's just that, a harangue. And as far as it goes, my sympathy extends to their making their point about how misplaced fame and recognition can be, politely and gentlemanly, using whatever naming convention they approve of themselves, and then allowing the community to make up its mind. I would say they lose my sympathy in as much as they overstep those bounds, and claim (or appear to claim, or imply) a "right," or they act in a self-righteous or immature manner on the topic.
I mean, it's human nature to do those things, too, and frankly, I understand it, even if I'm not sympathetic towards it. But crossing those boundaries doesn't fit in with the high-minded ideals that I always thought GNU is all about.
I certainly wouldn't condone being so childish toward GNU as to criticize their opinion. They're entitled to call Linux whatever they want, and to joust at the windmill of name changes too. They've earned it and then some. And I would politely ignore them if they get too worked up in their pursuit of recognition. That kind of behavior needs no rebuke, and no one needs, or deserves, the bad blood. It's way off topic.
If I were Linus, I would give serious consideration to just giving in. As I said, credit should be given freely, because it is free to give. But in the end I would probably consider undertaking a name change, with all it entails, as unreasonable. I would point out that we use Linux to refer to operating systems based on the Linux kernel (of which there are many, and not all use GNU components), and find other ways to better credit my contributors if they feel unsatisfied.
You may be right - Apple has rolled over before. It will be interesting to see what they do. The reason I wonder about it is that they've been so... proactive about music sharing and even "video tools" over the past year or two. And they have so much to gain.
For Microsoft's part, there's that terribly inconvenient antitrust lawsuit. It would perhaps be a bit much, even for Bill, to cut off Apple before it's resolved. And despite the best efforts of the Bush administration, there's still a a chance it won't get resolved. Depends on how the elections go this fall, and most of all on the judge. CKK has been up to some interesting things lately...
Then there's Sun. Sun knows how important Office is to Microsoft. That's why they're pouring $$$'s into their own office suite. Have you seen it lately? It gets closer to MS Office (in features and compatibility) with each passsing month. It's an uphill technical battle, but not unwinnable.
I'm not saying it's a sure thing. But you have to admit. If you're Steve Jobs... it's got potential.
No way, jose. That was my final point about Palladium. Wine will never support it. There won't even be an "NTFS2" filesystem module. If Microsoft does it "right," any attempt to interoperate with Palladium in a meaningful way will have to involve reverse-engineering their system to "beat" the security architecture, much like we had to reverse-engineer and break CSS in order to play DVDs. I bet they'll even find a way to cook up a new "secure" network protocol to squish SAMBA. All of these technologies are designed to keep us (or any competitor) out as much as to keep the content in.
Look what happened to the DVD people. Yes, DeCSS is out there, but many of the kids who wrote it are fighting for their lives in court even as we speak. Microsoft is at least as ruthless as the MPAA and several orders of magnitude richer. They figure it's long past time they got some of these extravagant protections too.
The risk to Intel and AMD is very real. Sales are already very soft. Moore's law may still be hanging on, but returns are diminishing. Consoles are sucking up the home PC market. Fewer and fewer people are deciding to "buy the next version" with each new generation, and that was before the economy got Enroned. More expensive, less and less distinguishable from the current fare, and with the added danger of new restrictions and surveillance... and Sony and Apple poised to snap up your fleeing customers...
A risky business. If customers become unhappy with "trusted computing," perhaps because it's main "feature" is restricing their activities or violating their privacy (and believe me, palladium will do both), they may reject the new hardware.
"Intellectual property politics" may be too complicated and confusing for most people to understand, but when it's sitting on their desktop, they will figure it out quick.
Customers (especially home users) may resist buying the new equipment, which both Intel and AMD are in a poor position to afford. Apple (which has, by the way, put a large amount of effort into promoting open media - rip/mix/burn, ipod, etc) might not play ball with trusted computing, and reap huge rewards in new marketshare. Finally, free operating systems, especially Linux, might be catalyzed by the vast new community of people looking to take advantage of the next generation hardware without the restrictions of "Trusted" Windows (talk about an oxymoron).
Finally, lest we forget, palladium security will be broken, perhaps even before it is released. DRM is only a cage. Things only need to escape once.
Palladium is a giant loser, except possibly for Microsoft, who will use it to invoke the DMCA against open source authors who attempt to interoperate with their "secure" system. Against that, we can only hope the anti-trust judge is up enough on the issues to head off the issue with meaningful requirements (and enforcement) of an interoperability policy.
Well, I read it, and I basically agree with what you're saying. I would put it like this, moral absolutism is arm in arm with the kind of religious (and you might also add "national" or "cultural") fundamentalism that is the cause of so much misery in the world. This is what I would call an "objectivist" approach to morality, and, while unfortunately very common (most people believe, even if not religiously, in the existence of a firm moral code, even if they can't define it), it represents an antique, insular view of the world and its peoples, and ultimately, by way of your description, it is an insupportably coinceited or arrogant mistake about our capacities, to understand and to judge, others.
I'll repeat my point. Morality is relative, but not subject to relativism. Murder may be committed routinely in America by the State, but we still have a strong moral stance that it is wrong - so wrong in fact, that only the state may commit it, only under the most extreme of circumstances, and this only tenuously. This kind of attitude towards murder is very consistent across cultures, and though it is not universal, it is nearly so in the industrialized world, and generally so even outside of it. To say "murder is not black and white" is to miss the point. Regardless of the deficiencies of our language to concisely describe the parameters of a particular code, as you point out, we as human beings have biology and instincts in common. To what degree and in what precise ways these biological similarities affect us in a social sense, or a cognitive sense is up in the air (i.e. Chomsky), but we can probably agree that people in similar environmental circumstances will form what I would term a similar "moral envelope," and within it there are many things which are for practical purposes universal. Further, universality is a sliding scale. Not an either-or.
So what I have to say is fairly subtle; basically, that there are no shortcuts when it comes to moral philosophy. We must be able to speak of common ground and general truths inherent in being a human being, at least in the context of a more narrowly defined setting such as a nation-state or even a larger entity like "the Western World," and indeed it is often perfectly rational to do so. We must be able to distinguish degrees of strength in the various parts of our social contract, so that we can have a healthy debate about how it can continue to evolve without being held logical hostages of the radical, the self-interested, and the ungifted, who would force us into relativism via two falacies:
"To admit that right and wrong are a matter of preference is to destroy any useful definition of right and wrong." Or in other words, either admit no disagreement about morality, or admit that there is no morality.
Any two questionings of our moral code are equally valid, important, useful, etc.
Obviously it's a big complicated world out there, and you just never know if we'll create an innovative new culture by relaxing our attitude towards murder or child-molestation, but I feel fairly safe dismissing such ideas out-of-hand. Simultaneously, I can appreciate even the extreme positions of the copyright anarchists, who really do have a fully considered political philosophy that the very notion of intellectual property is wrong. Here, under the banner of a man who will do several years of hard time for copying software, in a world where both violent criminals and most of the architects of Enron will do less, such childish logical missteps as equating dissension over intellectual property law with moral relativism does not suit the occasion.
Copyright law is hotly debated by laymen and experts, and it is in a catastrophic state of legislative flux, in the last 10 years and the last 100. As a society, morally speaking, we have no solidarity on the issue - we break the rules en masse, often even those of us who campaign for stronger ones. We have just revolutionized the notion of copyright, as well as the punishments for violators, and to say that you can't logically accept debate or dissension regarding the moral dimensions of issues like this is to abdicate your duty as the citizen of a democracy, let alone as a human being, rationis capax.
To an intelligent and open-minded individual, an intelligent true believer is like a good punching bag. You can whack them as hard as you want, but they always bounce back, and they never really know how to hit back.
You will find this hard to believe, I'm sure, since you've painted me as your enemy, but I appreciate the sincerity and tenor of your response. However, I'm sure you will understand, I am not writing for you. Just as a true believer must be sure that I will go to hell (with all its notorious accoutrements) for dying unrepentant with my beliefs, I have, though not a corresponding faith, a reasonable assumption that you are in no danger of questioning yours. I write for those others who are still capable of thinking for themselves.
Your painting of my writing as "baited" with "anti-Catholic hysteria" is, of course, a weak position to start from, since you have not-so-subtly failed to answer almost all of my points, while attempting to fall back on "victim" mentality; what many believers consider to be a kind of or "inherent" moral superiority. Furthermore, the insincerity of this retort is also fairly obvious, as, had you really believed this claim, you actually wouldn't have responded, rather than responding to point out that you couldn't be bothered to respond.
Religion is a game with words. Understand this thoroughly, and the entire tawdry mass of it becomes transparent. Out here, in the rational world, we use words as they are described in a dictionary. To the sophists of the church, this is nothing more than a weakness to be exploited.
Church opposition to fertility clinics was conducted with beautifully worded position papers and public speeches. Church opposition to abortion and stem-cell research was conducted with systematic violence, expansive and carte blanche political lobbying (or call it by its real name, "subversion"), and domestic terrorism. Yet to you, the Church's position is consistent on both. Until the next round of the argument, where you will, oh, who knows, deny the Church's involvement in politics, or sanction of violence, or claim that their opposition of fertility clinics was just as vehement and organized as their opposition to abortion or embryonic stem cell research. Or surprise me. Come up with something new. The Catholic Church officially condemns Usury, as well, but there is no "Jerusalem Files" website for bankers. Here, fair is fair, I've got something nice for you to read as well: it's called Doublethink.
You made no response to my mention of the Nuremburg Files, or the church's campaign against birth control (despite it being plastered all over that citation of yours), and you admit you are unwilling to engage in what would undoubtedly be an interesting debate over the status of the embryo - typical for someone who arrives at their beliefs by means other than facts and reason. You didn't comment on the church's undisputed and venerable history as a machiavellian political machine - you could learn a lot by having an open-minded discussion of history, you know. Say what you like of me, but don't say I'm not willing to discuss my points in a rational and honest setting. Now that God seems to be out of the bush burning business, that's how most people get their ideas, you see.
You elected not to discuss the peculiarities of the Church's humanitarian priorities, especially their unwillingness to become involved with environmental problems, problems of corruption, or colonialism, some of the chief sources of poverty, especially in the third world, where the Church claims to be so active. Yet you know, I think, your claims that such discussions are "hysterical" or otherwise out of bounds ring decisively false.
The Church rarely recruits adults. It knows it can only breed believers, or (perhaps) recruit them through indoctrination ("Catholic School") while they're still young. The vigor with the church encourages its followers to marry and produce children (your other responder, for instance, had clearly received his opinion about this "requirement" from church sources), and the inherent conflict between this and the duties of a moral person, clearly weight heavily on the minds of your text's author. You claim this is a matter of "hysteria." I much prefer the modern Catholic Church, because such criticism of the church policies in earlier times would have earned me a choice seat at a church barbeque. It makes "hysteria" sound like a real party. But really, I know what you'll say. Actually, you're the most predictable at the weakest juncture of your argument. If you want to surprise me, enter into an honest discussion of Church policy. If you analyze them the way you analyze say, North Korea (who is not nearly as well represented in world politics, I assure you), the conclusions are difficult to avoid. They want what most large bodies want. Survival. Growth. Or dispute me. But don't comfort yourself by thinking that your "hysteria" arguments, or the several other stock "I'm being baited by a Catholic hater" responses make very convincing rebuttal.
Your response to your other poster claims "the church doesn't require you to have children." How charitable. Would you care to comment on the paper referenced in that which you kindly provided for me, "Gaudium Et Spes"
"...married Christians glorify the Creator and strive toward fulfillment in Christ when with a generous human and Christian sense of responsibility they acquit themselves of the duty to procreate. Among the couples who fulfil their God-given task in this way, those merit special mention who with a gallant heart and with wise and common deliberation, undertake to bring up suitably even a relatively large family..."
You have the audacity to misdirect about the Church's blatant propagandizing of the procreative act? Please, don't neglect to comment also on the very paper you cited, HUMANAE VITAE, which follows, "Nonetheless the Church, calling men back to the observance of the norms of the natural law, as interpreted by their constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marriage act (quilibet matrimonii usus) must remain open to the transmission of life..." Your beautiful paper is in fact a pitiful compromise with the rhythm method (skimmers, point 16 is the good part). From point 30, to its own administrators, regarding its strict no-effective-birth-control-allowed policy, your paper says, "Consider this mission as one of your most urgent responsibilities at the present time." How many ways should we dance around it, hoeferbe? The Church is in the baby business! Just a hint, trying to minimize or deny it at this point just massacres your credibility...
The overlap between charity and recruitment. The objective analysis of religion in the context of information science, cellular automata or semiotic phenomenon. The church's role in the violence in Northern Ireland. Yes, even their unwillingness to institute zero-tolerance against pedophiles. All hysteria? You have a different definition of hysteria than the dictionary.
Did the end at any time justify the means, hoeferbe? Did it justify beheading Galileo? Or persecution of gays and lesbians? Did it justify what the church did in Yugoslavia in World War II? Am I hysterical, hoeferbe? Or, truthfully, is my honest and sober talk about the church's behavior rather sedate, in fact downright lazy, when anti-abortion terrorists, whom the church "officially" distances themselves from but unofficially provides the moral (and sometimes financial and logistical) support for (much like Osama bin Laden and the WTC bombers?), are carrying on an active and public murder campaign against Americans? I urge you, read your own side's literature, before you form any premature opinions about what hysteria really is.
I'm hysterical, indeed.
I guess that's the only thing you can tell yourself. Your alternatives would be to start really cranking up the Doublethink - try to bury all this under a deeper bed of lies. Or perhaps you could simply run away, and look for an easier (a more ignorant, pliable) conversational partner. That's the playbook, after all. May God have mercy on your soul.
The poster is pointing out that copying software is not a black-and-white moral issue like murder or child molesting. Copyright is an artificial social policy, and many of the harsh penalties for violators currently in play (through which this unfortunate person will be made an example of) are extremely recent and morally unsupportable in most people's book when you lay out the facts.
Morality is relative but not subject to relativism. Admitting there is disonnance does not dissolve morality, and pretending that it does is a bad ruse in place of what should be good discussion about how to continue improvement of our civic policy (or in our case, how to stem the tide of it's utter destruction).
Except that it's total bullshit. He's not throwing grenades into boxes of kittens. He's trying to help people recover from debilitating injuries and diseases. And the church is trying to prevent it in order to further their political campaign against abortion.
If the church was really after humanitarian causes rather than trying to make sure new disciples spawn as quickly as possible, they would have objected to embryo-juggling in fertility clinics, which had been going on for years before stem cell research got big. But no, they only got the ball rolling now. So transparent.
There is nothing inhumane about embryonic stem cell research, and everything inhuman about hindering it. Similarly with abortion - the church doesn't care about suffering and crime and the ruined lives of young mothers, rape victims, etc. They care about pumping out more believers. And our parents might remember from a few years ago when the church was still campaigning against birth control.
They don't campaign for things for fun, and if they were great moral crusaders, we'd see church-backed demonstrations and "nuremberg files" websites on the environment or corruption in government or colonialism, or any of the other big causes of the poverty they make such a show of "ministering to." Of course, if ministering happens to be recruitment too, hey, who was using those poor people anyway?
Let me spell it out for you.
80% of the world's Catholics live below the poverty line.
Catholicism is a disease that preys on the poor and ignorant.
Or perhaps it's more like a paraiste. It attaches, sucks out money and work, changes behavior to further propagate itself... "You wouldn't like the world without the church." I'll take it any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
Some time from now, when we can look back on it with the illumination of hindsight, the anti-birth-control,anti-stem-cell,anti-abortion campaign will look as evil and cynical as the crusades, or their unwillingness to institute zero-tolerance against pedophile priests, or the church's policital struggles to control Europe (still being fought today, for instance, in Ireland!). Especially on the eve of a Malthusian population nightmare.
What's that, you ask? There are over six billion people on earth. The last billion of which were born in the last ten years. Do the math. Or maybe you went to catholic school, and they taught you some of that new math?
Actually, it seems like you're the one not clear on the issues.
The purpose of open source voting software is peer review, and more basically, adherence to the notion that elections should be conducted in a fair, public and well-understood fashion.
There's no reason to keep the election-booth code secret and every reason not to. Notice I didn't say that the voting booths should be powered by "free software" - a whole other fish altogether.
It's abundantly clear from the article that the vendor of the FL voting machines refused to allow meaningful inspection of their equipment and software, both to the ACM (who volunteered to audit the devices) and to parties in an election-related lawsuit (!). It's also obvious why: clearly, from the magnitude of problems experienced, had such inspection taken place, the vendor's, and the government purchaser's, rank incompetence would have been more rapidly exposed.
Does anyone have other examples of problems with the BBC's reporting? I always thought of them as rather good, but then again I'm an American, so I'm mainly comparing them with American news...:/
Wherever you are, thank you. You have my profound gratitude, and the debt of a nation.
Now if only someone would put a million dollars into reforming our wheezing, corrupt implementation of the democratic process, so that million dollar donations like this one wouldn't be necessary.
Once again, I appreciate that you have stuck with me and are continuing to share your point of view in such a generous and nuanced manner. I really do appreciate it. Please forgive me for continuing to question a few things.
I would like to address your last point first. You say, "Nope, professional pirates don't use DeCSS, they stamp the DVD duplicates 'as is' because they have the equipment to do so, no cracking of CSS required." You are exactly right, but I fear I have not made myself sufficiently clear. My point is that P2P networks don't need armchair pirates to thrive, and in making it I used console and PC game images as concrete examples, but "unbreakable" CSS/DVD only as a metaphor. In reality, things will work exactly the opposite of what you describe, since the DRM-protected movies will be extracted and stored on DVDs for sale and use on legacy hardware, which are, as we know, trivially extractable from the armchair.
I see that we are not reaching agreement on the notion that without armchair pirates P2P will not thrive. I had hoped you would respond specifically to my observations about console and PC game images. Suffice it to say, when you claim "leaks do not open the floodgates or make the DRM weaker, there's no magic secret that can break the system if it escapes. Each leak is going to require a guy with a lab to do it." I can only disagree - even if DRM will leak only in labs, that will be more than enough to destroy its usefulness. Perhaps we can only agree to disagree on the point.
To delve a little further into the issue of the role of professional pirates, you say "Professional Pirates are only going to crack things that they can sell (to recoup the money it cost them to crack each encryption chip), this means only the mainstream stuff will be professionally cracked..." And to this I would respond that pirates will spend a lot of energy once to defeat the system, and then from that point will pirate as many items as possible in order to recoup their investment. In other words, the cost to break the system is high, but the cost per item broken is generally negligible by comparison. I am not aware of any very rigorous research on the subject; unfortunately nothing quite compares to a good stroll through a Hong Kong market. Pirates are not choosy, and while the follow the hits, remember that they are not outlaws in China, but rather generally the sole source of entertainment media, with a catalog every bit as expansive as such an important societal role would imply. They really do get almost everything. And that's just the Chinese. Nonetheless, for rare, unusual, arthouse, and indie, however complete the pirates are, they will never get 100% of what the publishers have, and that could be an asset to the publishers... but remember, if pirates have 95% coverage of what people want, then something like 95% of people will be happy.
You say, "I still can't get a high quality music vid of a song I'm after." And you're right, neither can I. Your point is an excellent one. But I have two responses. First, the vast majority of people are satisfied with P2P. They aren't looking for what's rare. They're looking for Britney. And second, P2P is a moving target. It is constantly improving - ironically, the more the industry pursues it, the faster it evolves. When you get into, "hope that it's actually on the P2P service, download it at unreliable speeds, hope it wasn't digitized via the analogue audio in..." the P2P networks are already reacting. Protocol security and efficiency is improving, which increases your chances of finding what you want and getting it quickly, even if it's rare. The first- and second-generation systems we've seen, even fasttrack, are needlessly poor in this regard. And most important, these systems are developing democratic rating systems that reward the best versions of a given piece of media and improve the accuracy of the namespace, increasing your chances of only seeing the best available versions of what you want. A great deal can be done in this regard; I have seen some fascinating designs for such systems and my belief is that even on a decentralized platform they can be extremely effective and robust.
Nonetheless, the publishers can always offer superior quality and variety. The question is whether what they offer will be more enticing than zero cost. It depends on what exactly is on offer, and at what price, and what caveats and headaches the DRM regime entails. At $20 for a (randomly copy-protected) CD the RIAA's members are not currently demonstrating a great amount of sensitivity for what the market will bear.
When you say, "Or they could go to one website, know they're getting the right song, download it at reliable speed, know that it's going to be of excellent quality, pay a reasonable rate for it (because it won't get pirated, and the RIAA can use low costs as a carrot here) and get that warm fuzzy feeling of having supported their artist and the distribution of their artist's material..." you are really on to something. That's the real future of the current music industry, if it has one. If they were to take this route, with opt-in DRM and special emphasis on "reasonable rate," I suspect they would have few enemies, and certainly not me. It might not save them (to be more specific, to allow them to continue in their present form), but it would be the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, at present, they are going the opposite way, with attempts to mandate DRM by legislation and, from my experience, if anything they see the Internet as a way to increase their margins, not lower their prices. Not surprising, since real competition has not been an issue in the media business in some time. Could we go so far as to call it a trust? Regardless, when you pay $20 for a CD, half of it is going to the "brick and mortar" retailer and another quarter to third of what's left going for the physical process. All of that is now unnecessary due to instant, super-low-cost electronic delivery. So I would expect to see ~$5-8 per CD online. I must maintain that we've hardly settled the issue that DRM will stop piracy - rather, the failure of DRM is inevitable for the reasons I describe. The salient fact is that piracy is not a large factor in the price of music (unless you believe the baseless and hysterical RIAA "estimates" on the subject) compared to cutting out the physical medium and the retailer, which should reduce the price of an album by at least 60%. Meanwhile, peer to peer users with an altruistic streak who want to support an artist can also work it out through a contribution via fairtunes. Sending $3 to a band is generally giving them more than they get via an album sale, and it avoids supporting a group abusive to both artists and consumers.
You say, "Once DRM machines are in every home then we can talk about whether it's feasible to slowly replace DVDs and CDs," and you are quite right, if the manufacturers phase in DRM systems over a period of years which are backwards-compatible with existing media, we will then be able to say that they have succeeded in fostering DRM hardware adoption and can more safely begin the disappearance of non-DRM media. But the devil is in the details.
You say "I can't really address your points because they rely on the assumption I was advocating a format war and phasing out the old format." Quite right, they do. Any new format is on the shelf next to the old one, and any two competing products on the shelf are always at war. In perceptively answering my complaint about the media vs. player-adoption chicken and egg problem, I appreciate your point that the entire music catalog could potentially be put on-line at launch. Even though this does not affect the big picture (since it doesn't deal with video), let's consider the hypothetical case where the music industry does exactly that, and is able to form an alliance between all of the content producers and the CE manufacturers to support the standard (getting this consensus is not as easy as you think, but perhaps they could do it). If this is a software add-on for a PC, the cost is reasonable but the security is especially poor. No piece of software, no matter how carefully obfuscated and booby-trapped, will withstand compromise for more than a few weeks - it will be disassembled and reassembled to give up its goods more easily than your DRM hardware. And remember, you haven't achieved anything if it's PC only. So how expensive is a dedicated DRM stereo component? Even the insecure DRM system we have been discussing would totally change the paradigm of the consumer electronics media device, getting data from over an internet broadband connection, a complex (LCD?) user interface for navigating the catalog, doing real-time cryptography, a built-in hard drive or a lot of RAM or some other kind of (secure) local storage, and include (I'm sure) a large cost for a futile effort to tamper-proof the device... you can appreciate how the price of such "backwards-compatible" (if they also throw in a CDROM tray) DRM players will be multiples of the legacy devices, and consumers will simply not buy them, and the format "war" is over before it's begun. Of course, you can try to make your DRM format cheaper to implement, but this will be even more trivially crackable.
Ironically, when considering putting their entire catalog online in DRM-protected digital format, one reason the music publishers have balked is that they (correctly) realize that since their DRM systems will immediately be compromised, it will only increase their predicament by helping to fill the remaining gaps in the free P2P-based library with high-quality digital copies straight from their archives.
When referring to the bandwidth problems associated with Internet content delivery, you say "No last mile problems because even with my DRM machine, most of my music will still come from the CD store." Of course, as I have said I believe we could probably do most music delivery over the Internet. So let's assume you can get all your music via DRM. It's with video that you don't have the capacity. Of course, the video people are most of the same companies, and just as big, if not bigger, proponents of "mandatory closed hardware" and other terrible problems as the music people, so we are stuck with the same issues. When discussing video, the content industry would not make a "secure" format they'd be unable to use for more than 2-5% of their volume. This would not be useful.
Regarding watermarking, you say "Psychographic compression will never defeat watermarking." I hope I have not given the impression that it would. In discussing that I was merely referring to the particular complexity of compression algorithms that a watermark would have to survive. I am confident that watermarks, if they are feasible enough to be put into wide use, will be removed by dedicated tools, probably pre-compression but perhaps it doesn't matter. I'm not sure I understand your point about psychographic compression's artifacts, but I would point out that it's the superb quality of mp3 and Divx that have helped created this "problem" in the first place. Regarding "jittered encoding parameters," I see no reason why the encoding couldn't be reverse engineered and the system compromised.
I especially appreciated your insights into watermarks, and I will certainly conduct the experiments you describe. Now, my further objections:
You say, "[with] lots of extra content for the DRM box... this is trivial and well within the power of hollywood." However, you have merely once again stated that this is "trivial." But we are talking about introducing a new standard in a competitive atmosphere. It would be helpful if you could address the following specific points from my first post:
Many excellent formats have fizzled and died for far smaller reasons than that they intentionally eliminate your fair use rights.
during that transition, neither side (the content people or the electronics people) can jump without the other (or they risk a zero-sales incident) and there are too many parties for everyone to jump at once.
Any transitional period would have both formats available [I should point out in with roughly equal quantities of media], hence my point: consumers would have to choose, and as long as they have the choice, they won't choose DRM [because of the inconveniences it causes - even if there are "carrots" on the DRM side, the barrier to invest in new hardware is high, based on the cost of that hardware].
You say, "If you publish your bit perfect digital data, then the key to your DRM box gets pulled and your publishing days are over (until your buy another computer)." We are still discussing the viability of watermarks. While I was hoping you could describe an academic evaluation of such systems, or point to any instance in the real-world where they are at work doing roughly what you describe, in the absence of such evidence (and even in the face of some rather intriguing demonstrations), I remain skeptical that the mark won't either be too fragile to survive PG compression or too big to avoid detection and "removal" (or damage beyond recognition, the same thing). Remember, if each file is watermarked with a unique set of data (a users key, as you describe), pirates studying the watermark can compare the same movie downloaded with different keys, a powerful ally in analysis. My impression is that the history of that business thus far has been of uniform success of the countermeasures once countermeasures are considered by professionals. I refer you to the excellent paper by Felten. Nonetheless, I am fascinated by the techniques involved, and I am open to changing my mind about their feasability. A watermarking technique that can survive the unpredictable and rapidly advancing array of psychographic compression technology and remain uncleanable would be really remarkable. Well, anything is possible.
One thing I remain certain on is that your proposed use of watermarks is moot. You say, "The real security of this hypothetical system lies more in being able to pull keys on demand than obfuscation." I feel as though I have not had an adequate response to my point:
"Watermarks won't even be useful for tracking down pirates, who if enforcement is aggressive will simply steal equipment/keys the way bank robbers steal cars." A few movies on each "stolen" box, and then on to the next one. Remember, throwing out their "DRM Media Player" for each new movie (if the system were that fast to respond, which I doubt) is nothing to them. They're making millions selling bootlegged copies.
I see the anonymous reply makes the statement, "it will most certainly kill off all the armchair pirates, and with them goes the variety of the pirated content available on the internet." I can only disagree.
"Remember, the content only needs to escape once." All it takes is one professional pirate to liberate the content, then he bootlegs it to half of china. Three days later it's on the internet. DRM's failure doesn't require that "casual users" are able to break the box. It only requires that anyone can, because with P2P, armchair pirates are not necessary at all.
I want to be very clear in my point because I am curious about your specific response to it. My point is that, hypothetically, if CSS had been "unbreakable" by consumers (a whole other can of worms - it's not clear to me that that's possible), the P2P networks would be just as full. Professional pirates would crack the protection and sell their wares (intentional pun, intentional ommission of the "z"), and they would instantly reach the internet and be just as plentiful as they are now. But the hypothetical argument is not transparent enough, I have a real world example of this principle in action. I refer you to any of the peer to peer networks to look for disc images of console games for Dreamcast, PS1/2, XBox, etc. which are plentiful, despite the fact that it is impossible to rip an image of that media without special hardware, and in many cases also impossible to burn these images without further special hardware (a mod chip). You could take another step backward and consider the entire PC copy-protection regime in the same context (in that it takes a professional cracker to put a game in distributable form). Virtually every PC game on the network came via a professional. Yet they are by and large all there, all readily available. I hope by now my point is clear.
You say, "if there was DRM then the entire catalogue of the RIAA would probably be available for download at high quality also." However, only a specific discussion of the internet's carrying capacity could dissuade me from disagreement. I think it's clear that the current internet cannot be used to replace current (insecure) video distribution. The telling phrase I've heard uttered many times in the lab is, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of [tape/CDs/DVDs] driving down the highway." The last-mile alone is a problem: if the internet were to become the delivery medium to replace audio and video sales and rental, assuming no backbone contention and the quality adequacy of say Divx5 into 700MB files for a standard movie, most broadband users will wait hours to get their movie under perfect conditions (Most DSL connections are 768/128. And most cable connections, while peaking much faster, are far smaller - even as small as 128/32 - when considered at maximum utilization, since cable connections are shared between all users in a "cable cell"). But it turns out backbone contention is the dealbreaker. The amount of data transferred on physical media in this country is vast. Blockbuster alone rents a billion movies a year. ISPs (while probably lying) are already complaining that "pirate" data alone is too onerous a traffic burden. My apologies for not finding a better source for traffic figures, but this should hopefully give you an idea of what the internet is handling now. Imagine if you add to that all of blockbuster's "data traffic." Or "Hollywood Video." For music, the bandwidth and backbone capacity to replace insecure retail is probably there or could be put in place, but for video, definitely not. Once again, we have a real world example; there are numerous instances which you can read about in the news of providers (usually cable companies here and abroad) who have studied, and in some cases attempted (i.e. pilot projects) "Video on Demand." Their collective conclusion is that we are not even close to this being anything other than a prohibitively expensive investment in new infrastructure. I will spare you a similarly damning analysis of the back-end requirements for real-time strong encryption of video streams for millions of customers a day (you're encrypting over 2 petabytes a day, based on an conservative extrapolation from our figures thus far).
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen satelite; it's expensive and rare, and the latencies are outrageous. Most of the time, only downstream is broadband, and upstream is over a modem. Most importantly, however, is that it doesn't scale. Modem doesn't count, and neither does cellular (except perhaps for some mythical 3G solution I haven't heard anything about yet in Japan or Korea, let alone in this country). We're talking about broadband - one of the many ways you've confused the issue.
The TA96 mandated that phone companies could drop a bunch of regulations, but had to share hardware with competitors. The result was a spate of competition in both local, long-distance, and internet services firms, and a dramatic price drop. The RBOCs saw their end and successfully bribed the government to change course. Cable had never really been deregulated in that sense, and have successfully kept it at bay; their approach is more akin to blackmail.
For an agency that found its niche after the Bell breakup, the FCC has authorized some inexplicably massive telecom mergers lately. The notoriously corrupt Michael Powell made his position eminently clear on competition at the outset, with zero enforcement against the RBOCs' many egregious behaviors toward their "client-competitors." Then, he decreed that Cable providers wouldn't need to share their hardware (as phone companies were "theoretically" required to do by law), and he's since gone on record as being opposed to the CLECs as well... in short - he's sold out any notion of competition, and his figleaf is basically your sham argument, that because we have a choice between Time Warner and Verizon, there's no monopoly.
Which is completely absurd.
It doesn't take a genius to fix prices and rig restrictions in a market with two suppliers in any given region, and less than a dozen nationwide. Prices are already on the steady rise, but TomPaine hits it on the head: the money is unimportant to them compared to control - and they may get it, since this hijacking of the internet is in the interests of the same companies that control the major media outlets, including almost all of the TV news... Putting the internet, ironically, at the center of one of the largest media conspiracies of our time.
They reorganized almost everything, so that everything from cp (only "ditto" copies metadata) to shutdown (not rewritten to care about Apple's replacement for /etc/init.d) to /etc/passwd (user information is now stored in "the NetInfo database") is now useless, and worse, vestigal (!), but everything new they introduced makes the previous unix "non-naming schemes" and disorganization look great by comparison. ".vol" is where trashed files go? It's ".DS_Store" rather than ".Finder Settings"? For that matter, why on earth are we still prepending periods to hide files? Or hiding /usr and /tmp at the application level rather than having a legacy emulation layer and just doing it right? Aliases don't work at the "unix level," and symbolic links work everywhere, but we're once again back to things that break when you move the target... This is the freakin 21st century here.
It may appear to work, and it may crash less than OS9, but from a design point of view, OSX is an anathema. This article just makes it clearer: OSX is, not a port of MacOS or an enhancement of Unix, but a bloody (and fatal?) collision between the two, where both lost what clarity and integrity they had by attrition to the other. A great opportunity to do a new system right was squandered by what appears to be terrifyingly sloppy-looking engineering.
Ah, a republican AC troll. So pleased you guys still take the time to respond "personally." You're an audacious liar, so much so that it's obvious to me you wont benefit from attention to your little fantasies, so I will keep my responses brief...
Reaganites were notorious cost cutters
Like saying Nazis were notorious for their hygiene. Actually they were notorious deficit spenders; oh yeah, and the Iran/Contra affair was rather notorious too... The only costs they ever cut were in civil rights enforcement. MILSPEC was one way they tried to cover the procurement corruption, laughable, really. The kickbacks, and who profited, even made the news (the "Ill Wind"). Oh yeah, you drink that water, don't you.
The president has no recollection...
Electric utilites were not privatized, they were degregulated
Actually, you're wrong again, moron; even your own propoaganda machine doesn't split that hair... You're really funny - I love that you guys are still trying to find cover on this one - you shut off the lights in California with a fake shortage - and the fact got covered on CNN! Well, the show must go on, I guess. Please, read a summary of a rational position on Calif/Enron. You know, the utility privatization scam is widely documented enough now that almost everyone knows about it... you might want to find another dodge, or just pretend you missed it altogether rather than respond with this drivel.
NorthPoint goes out of business and this is proof that Michael Powell is "notoriosly corrupt".
Yep; since you're obviously ignorant, or hoping we are, I'll give you the executive summary: to the RBOCs, Northpoint was a "competitor" and a "client" at the same time. Like most CLEC's, it was brutally abused via service sabotage, but the deathblow was some clever Verizon fraud. Then the bells made a huge show of pulling the plug on 12 hours notice, creating the most widespread, massive and prolonged (months?) downtime in the history of the commercial internet; millions nationwide were affected, including MSN's customers. The message was loud and clear: Don't deal with CLEC's. You might get shut off. Federal regulators? Off somewhere sending faxes from the beach, approving massive RBOC mergers while counting their bribe money.
You know, Verizon settled Northpoint's fraud claim for 175 million dollars...
So if beef prices rise
Slow down there cowboy. Telecom is regulated; the RBOC's prices and service quality aren't based on how well they wrastle their cows, they're based on how good their oversight is. But of course, you knew that, since your whole point here is just to make disingenuous comments that sound like arguments. I don't have to convince anyone Verizon is outrageously overpriced or offers abysmal service - any professional whose dealt with them knows that... Now that he's overseen the final days of behind the scenes sabotage of TA96, Powell has actually gone on record opposing the CLEC concept... backpedaling on the entire idea of competition in the industry. As I say, notoriously corrupt.
So you seem to believe that the proper role of government officials to pick winners and losers in the marketplace.
Thank you - I could have just accused you of having no idea either what I was saying or how the post-TA96 telecom industry works, but you've made my point better than I ever could.
You don't have any specific allegations of wrongdoing.
Thank you - I could have just accused you of either being senile or blatantly ignoring parts of your screen, but you've made my point better than I ever could.
just gratifying his own political bias
This is conservative dogma 101: Any attack is a partisan attack. Any criticism is a political bias. Unfortunately the facts dramatically point to Satanism. But I'll settle for cronyism and nepotism. And to your ignoring all the evidence in a goofy attempt to paint these clear and egregious failures as something other than grounds for criticism... poitical bias? You're gunning to have your headshot next to the definition, aren't you?
I'm sure you were out there dumping offal on dems and their appointees, too. At least there we have some common ground. It's not that dems wouldn't deserve your hypocritical contempt, just that you usually want to have some better reason for your arguments than drooling-fanboy-sports-team-loyalty.
I am not trying to shut down criticism of Bush
Yeah, right, AC Troll, you're just a freelance righter of wrongs, who gets 100% of their facts wrong and has no idea what they're talking about on any of the issues, but sure is fired up "bigtime" that someone may have disrespected your president and his friends.
Hail to the chief. Hit another one for the gipper, ACTroll! I'm waiting! And you can add why you don't log in - modded down too often?
Was I being unfair to someone? What an interesting debate that would make.
"sarcasm"
Why don't you read what happened under Clinton's FCC and then, when you have any idea what you'd be getting into, come back and drop a line.
You have people running big bussiness and people in the federal government. They're all friends. They went to Yale and Harvard and Princeton together... they drank at the same clubs. Their parents were friends, and their kids are going to Taft and Dalton and Exeter together right now.
Their goal? Simple. Take tax money out of the government, and get it into their pockets.
Back in the Reagan days, their favorite was the defense industry. It was perfect; there's relative secrecy associated with defense approrpriations, and the military bureaucracy is so intense that it took quite a while for the few people looking to find those $10,000 toilet seats.
We also saw a lot of "foreign aid" disappear into the ether, split up between the corrupt foreign officials and the corrupt local ones, all of it more or less going to Switzerland and Grand Cayman. Still do, actually.
More recently it's been Enron ("privatizing" electric utilities was already absurd, and anyone who followed it the time - including me - called it a blatant invitation to fraud; who knew they'd go all the way to turning off the lights to convince people of a fake shortage! Gives you an idea how little these people fear getting caught), the "airline bailout," the "farm subsidy," and of course, don't forget the "tax breaks."
Now it's a "telecom bailout."
All of these scams netted their perpetrators billions, and in some cases tens or even hundreds of billions. Almost none of the people involved have been investigated, let alone caught. It's the new American mafia, ladies and gentlemen.
Michael Powell is a notoriously corrupt FCC chairman; he's blatantly carried water for both the cable and bell monopolists, and under his watch telecom (and especially internet) service has been abyssmal (remember Northpoint? and what happened to the CLECs?) while prices have risen. It was easy for him, a smug "regulator" in a plum job snagged with handy nepotism; all he had to do was stand back and wink while the bells slaughtered their competition. You don't get a job like FCC chair under a Bush administration without knowing how the game is played... Anyway, this goofy letter to him is pretty amusing; you may as well write a letter to Satan.
Until heads start rolling in quantity (and believe me, once we started, by the time it's over we'd need to build a new federal prison), it's open season.
I'll be blunt. My friend, you should consider joining the CIA. You fit their profile perfectly. As you can imagine, they are currently hiring with a vengance.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/employment/ciaeindex.htm
The experience is literally second to none in the world, and in a variety of private industries, CIA is solid gold on a resume.
-David
Boy, with an invitation like that, they couldn't keep me away. There's nothing like a good old unlawful arrest to brighten up your day.
Actually, I think you've got a really good idea there.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see that happening in a few years.
Who decides what profits they're entitled to and hence what constitutes "cheating"? The console makers came up with a new, arbitrary set of rules: "we know you think you bought this cosole, but you can't do anything with it we don't authorize." But who says they're allowed to make up that rule? The DMCA? Do you believe the DMCA is a good law? Then stop reading. You're beyond help.
In most informed people's opinion the DMCA is a legislative anathema, to be ignored through civil disobedience and hopefully overturned, either in the courts or the legislature, ASAP. Even with the DMCA, you have to convince a court that the mod chip lacks a significant non-infringing use - far from an open-and-shut case in my book.
Lik-sang gives you equipment and instructions to modify your console. You can buy it and not use it. You can buy it to install Linux on your XBox (a very cheap linux box with hot graphics and a TV out... interesting!). You can install it and make backups of games you own. No crime has been committed, even under the DMCA, by you, Lik-Sang, or anyone else.
Use your mod chip to steal a game? Then you've committed a crime. Not the mod chip maker, or reseller, or UPS for bringing it to your door, or a telecom company for carrying the ecommerce transaction... not anyone else. You. No one else.
That's why the DMCA is bad. It makes a ridiculous bargain with not only our works but our speech, obligating us to guard against possible infringement in advance! Can you imagine how absurd? This is totally incompatible with common sense, let alone with prevailing 1st amendment law. How does anyone know what you'll do with any particular work or speech? The government cannot and should not become the arbiter of speech or acts to insure that it might not "potentially" assist in violating someone's copyright. Not even if IP was our sole industry - and it's not; in fact, it's so tiny in comparison to the size of our economy that this kind of protectionism's negative effects on research, debate and commerce will vastly outweigh any benefit in reduction of piracy.
The unwritten part of the DMCA is that anything that has the potential to threaten the profits of an IP producer is fair game for prosecution, and whether or not there's a victory prosecution is often a victory in itself. It's called a "chilling effect." Look it up.
In principle I would love to give Microsoft a way to have a fool-proof business model of allowing consumers to ammortize hardware costs up-front with subsidies through software sales down the line (the console business model in brief), but it is insane to sacrifice our freedoms provide them with guarantees, not to mention unnecessary. The model doesn't have to be fool-proof to work, and every hardware maker knows they are on thinner ice insisting they can dictate what you can and can't do with your property. Is Microsoft guaranteed to have people do what Microsoft wants when they take their xbox home? Absolutely not. Buy it as a cheap jukebox and DVD player, and never touch a game. Run linux on it if you're clever. Microsoft just lost $150 bucks (since the console costs more to make than its retail price)!
Feel bad for them? They knew the rules of the game, and changing them to make a bad idea work is not how things should go in the world. Mod chips don't cheat them out of any profits - though their users might. And if they can't be bothered to prosecute their users when they do, it is not our problem.
It's because you don't know enough about using P2P to use it well. Try Kazaa-Lite. Whereas I find getting a decent transfer rate from any FTP site (or getting in at all) can be a monster pain, I get instant results and max out my bandwidth every time using P2P for this.
Credit is one of those things that should be given most freely, because it is free to give, giving it makes people happy, and withholding it where it is due is unjust.
Names are, however, not easily changed, and Linux, with its widespread recognition, will be particularly difficult (I would guess impossible) to rename. Literally and metaphorically, this assumption is all over the code. So I will call it by its generally acknowledged name simply to be most efficiently understood.
GNU has contributed and continues to contribute an enormous volume of excellent of work to Linux, and perhaps Linux could not have existed without GNU. The reverse is also untrue, obviously, since most of the work in question predates Linux, and in fact GNU has a kernel of their own. I am sympathetic to GNU for the relative lack of recognition their work receives. Linux has become a famous figurehead, not GNU, and they don't see the logic in it. Sometimes, neither do I. It's a question of being in the right place (including the right place in the system, the right little spot on the political spectrum) and the right time. The press, and the public, are ficle.
GNU has an important mission, one for which the benefits are already in many ways self-evident. They see a little strife as necessary in the furtherance of that mission - both to whip GPL violators into line, and to play a larger advocacy role. I am sympathetic to this, too. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelete, etc. and if you believe in your cause, you go out and get results, even if it means judiciously ticking people off.
But is a piece of software truly free, if, by using it in your project, you might one day find yourself under constant harangue to change its name to credit that free software component's authors? Even if you only added 5% to what is 95% free, is it really free if the name change comes with the deal?
I mean, it would be only fair if you were forewarned... if it were part of your obligations under the license. That might have actually been a good idea... if GNU had more marketing experience, they might have said "branding!" and put something like that in. But they didn't. "It's free," they said, freely given to the world in the best human tradition, earnest generosity to others. It's even meant to teach us a thing or two about generosity along the way. That's how they earned their half of that free/open dichotomy we hear about.
They aren't filing any lawsuits, of course - it's just that, a harangue. And as far as it goes, my sympathy extends to their making their point about how misplaced fame and recognition can be, politely and gentlemanly, using whatever naming convention they approve of themselves, and then allowing the community to make up its mind. I would say they lose my sympathy in as much as they overstep those bounds, and claim (or appear to claim, or imply) a "right," or they act in a self-righteous or immature manner on the topic.
I mean, it's human nature to do those things, too, and frankly, I understand it, even if I'm not sympathetic towards it. But crossing those boundaries doesn't fit in with the high-minded ideals that I always thought GNU is all about.
I certainly wouldn't condone being so childish toward GNU as to criticize their opinion. They're entitled to call Linux whatever they want, and to joust at the windmill of name changes too. They've earned it and then some. And I would politely ignore them if they get too worked up in their pursuit of recognition. That kind of behavior needs no rebuke, and no one needs, or deserves, the bad blood. It's way off topic.
If I were Linus, I would give serious consideration to just giving in. As I said, credit should be given freely, because it is free to give. But in the end I would probably consider undertaking a name change, with all it entails, as unreasonable. I would point out that we use Linux to refer to operating systems based on the Linux kernel (of which there are many, and not all use GNU components), and find other ways to better credit my contributors if they feel unsatisfied.
You may be right - Apple has rolled over before. It will be interesting to see what they do. The reason I wonder about it is that they've been so... proactive about music sharing and even "video tools" over the past year or two. And they have so much to gain.
For Microsoft's part, there's that terribly inconvenient antitrust lawsuit. It would perhaps be a bit much, even for Bill, to cut off Apple before it's resolved. And despite the best efforts of the Bush administration, there's still a a chance it won't get resolved. Depends on how the elections go this fall, and most of all on the judge. CKK has been up to some interesting things lately...
Then there's Sun. Sun knows how important Office is to Microsoft. That's why they're pouring $$$'s into their own office suite. Have you seen it lately? It gets closer to MS Office (in features and compatibility) with each passsing month. It's an uphill technical battle, but not unwinnable.
I'm not saying it's a sure thing. But you have to admit. If you're Steve Jobs... it's got potential.
No way, jose. That was my final point about Palladium. Wine will never support it. There won't even be an "NTFS2" filesystem module. If Microsoft does it "right," any attempt to interoperate with Palladium in a meaningful way will have to involve reverse-engineering their system to "beat" the security architecture, much like we had to reverse-engineer and break CSS in order to play DVDs. I bet they'll even find a way to cook up a new "secure" network protocol to squish SAMBA. All of these technologies are designed to keep us (or any competitor) out as much as to keep the content in.
Look what happened to the DVD people. Yes, DeCSS is out there, but many of the kids who wrote it are fighting for their lives in court even as we speak. Microsoft is at least as ruthless as the MPAA and several orders of magnitude richer. They figure it's long past time they got some of these extravagant protections too.
The risk to Intel and AMD is very real. Sales are already very soft. Moore's law may still be hanging on, but returns are diminishing. Consoles are sucking up the home PC market. Fewer and fewer people are deciding to "buy the next version" with each new generation, and that was before the economy got Enroned. More expensive, less and less distinguishable from the current fare, and with the added danger of new restrictions and surveillance... and Sony and Apple poised to snap up your fleeing customers...
You could see a real bloodbath.
A risky business. If customers become unhappy with "trusted computing," perhaps because it's main "feature" is restricing their activities or violating their privacy (and believe me, palladium will do both), they may reject the new hardware.
"Intellectual property politics" may be too complicated and confusing for most people to understand, but when it's sitting on their desktop, they will figure it out quick.
Customers (especially home users) may resist buying the new equipment, which both Intel and AMD are in a poor position to afford. Apple (which has, by the way, put a large amount of effort into promoting open media - rip/mix/burn, ipod, etc) might not play ball with trusted computing, and reap huge rewards in new marketshare. Finally, free operating systems, especially Linux, might be catalyzed by the vast new community of people looking to take advantage of the next generation hardware without the restrictions of "Trusted" Windows (talk about an oxymoron).
Finally, lest we forget, palladium security will be broken, perhaps even before it is released. DRM is only a cage. Things only need to escape once.
Palladium is a giant loser, except possibly for Microsoft, who will use it to invoke the DMCA against open source authors who attempt to interoperate with their "secure" system. Against that, we can only hope the anti-trust judge is up enough on the issues to head off the issue with meaningful requirements (and enforcement) of an interoperability policy.
I'll repeat my point. Morality is relative, but not subject to relativism. Murder may be committed routinely in America by the State, but we still have a strong moral stance that it is wrong - so wrong in fact, that only the state may commit it, only under the most extreme of circumstances, and this only tenuously. This kind of attitude towards murder is very consistent across cultures, and though it is not universal, it is nearly so in the industrialized world, and generally so even outside of it. To say "murder is not black and white" is to miss the point. Regardless of the deficiencies of our language to concisely describe the parameters of a particular code, as you point out, we as human beings have biology and instincts in common. To what degree and in what precise ways these biological similarities affect us in a social sense, or a cognitive sense is up in the air (i.e. Chomsky), but we can probably agree that people in similar environmental circumstances will form what I would term a similar "moral envelope," and within it there are many things which are for practical purposes universal. Further, universality is a sliding scale. Not an either-or.
So what I have to say is fairly subtle; basically, that there are no shortcuts when it comes to moral philosophy. We must be able to speak of common ground and general truths inherent in being a human being, at least in the context of a more narrowly defined setting such as a nation-state or even a larger entity like "the Western World," and indeed it is often perfectly rational to do so. We must be able to distinguish degrees of strength in the various parts of our social contract, so that we can have a healthy debate about how it can continue to evolve without being held logical hostages of the radical, the self-interested, and the ungifted, who would force us into relativism via two falacies:
Obviously it's a big complicated world out there, and you just never know if we'll create an innovative new culture by relaxing our attitude towards murder or child-molestation, but I feel fairly safe dismissing such ideas out-of-hand. Simultaneously, I can appreciate even the extreme positions of the copyright anarchists, who really do have a fully considered political philosophy that the very notion of intellectual property is wrong. Here, under the banner of a man who will do several years of hard time for copying software, in a world where both violent criminals and most of the architects of Enron will do less, such childish logical missteps as equating dissension over intellectual property law with moral relativism does not suit the occasion.
Copyright law is hotly debated by laymen and experts, and it is in a catastrophic state of legislative flux, in the last 10 years and the last 100. As a society, morally speaking, we have no solidarity on the issue - we break the rules en masse, often even those of us who campaign for stronger ones. We have just revolutionized the notion of copyright, as well as the punishments for violators, and to say that you can't logically accept debate or dissension regarding the moral dimensions of issues like this is to abdicate your duty as the citizen of a democracy, let alone as a human being, rationis capax.
To an intelligent and open-minded individual, an intelligent true believer is like a good punching bag. You can whack them as hard as you want, but they always bounce back, and they never really know how to hit back.
You will find this hard to believe, I'm sure, since you've painted me as your enemy, but I appreciate the sincerity and tenor of your response. However, I'm sure you will understand, I am not writing for you. Just as a true believer must be sure that I will go to hell (with all its notorious accoutrements) for dying unrepentant with my beliefs, I have, though not a corresponding faith, a reasonable assumption that you are in no danger of questioning yours. I write for those others who are still capable of thinking for themselves.
Your painting of my writing as "baited" with "anti-Catholic hysteria" is, of course, a weak position to start from, since you have not-so-subtly failed to answer almost all of my points, while attempting to fall back on "victim" mentality; what many believers consider to be a kind of or "inherent" moral superiority. Furthermore, the insincerity of this retort is also fairly obvious, as, had you really believed this claim, you actually wouldn't have responded, rather than responding to point out that you couldn't be bothered to respond.
Religion is a game with words. Understand this thoroughly, and the entire tawdry mass of it becomes transparent. Out here, in the rational world, we use words as they are described in a dictionary. To the sophists of the church, this is nothing more than a weakness to be exploited.
Church opposition to fertility clinics was conducted with beautifully worded position papers and public speeches. Church opposition to abortion and stem-cell research was conducted with systematic violence, expansive and carte blanche political lobbying (or call it by its real name, "subversion"), and domestic terrorism. Yet to you, the Church's position is consistent on both. Until the next round of the argument, where you will, oh, who knows, deny the Church's involvement in politics, or sanction of violence, or claim that their opposition of fertility clinics was just as vehement and organized as their opposition to abortion or embryonic stem cell research. Or surprise me. Come up with something new. The Catholic Church officially condemns Usury, as well, but there is no "Jerusalem Files" website for bankers. Here, fair is fair, I've got something nice for you to read as well: it's called Doublethink.
You made no response to my mention of the Nuremburg Files, or the church's campaign against birth control (despite it being plastered all over that citation of yours), and you admit you are unwilling to engage in what would undoubtedly be an interesting debate over the status of the embryo - typical for someone who arrives at their beliefs by means other than facts and reason. You didn't comment on the church's undisputed and venerable history as a machiavellian political machine - you could learn a lot by having an open-minded discussion of history, you know. Say what you like of me, but don't say I'm not willing to discuss my points in a rational and honest setting. Now that God seems to be out of the bush burning business, that's how most people get their ideas, you see.
You elected not to discuss the peculiarities of the Church's humanitarian priorities, especially their unwillingness to become involved with environmental problems, problems of corruption, or colonialism, some of the chief sources of poverty, especially in the third world, where the Church claims to be so active. Yet you know, I think, your claims that such discussions are "hysterical" or otherwise out of bounds ring decisively false.
The Church rarely recruits adults. It knows it can only breed believers, or (perhaps) recruit them through indoctrination ("Catholic School") while they're still young. The vigor with the church encourages its followers to marry and produce children (your other responder, for instance, had clearly received his opinion about this "requirement" from church sources), and the inherent conflict between this and the duties of a moral person, clearly weight heavily on the minds of your text's author. You claim this is a matter of "hysteria." I much prefer the modern Catholic Church, because such criticism of the church policies in earlier times would have earned me a choice seat at a church barbeque. It makes "hysteria" sound like a real party. But really, I know what you'll say. Actually, you're the most predictable at the weakest juncture of your argument. If you want to surprise me, enter into an honest discussion of Church policy. If you analyze them the way you analyze say, North Korea (who is not nearly as well represented in world politics, I assure you), the conclusions are difficult to avoid. They want what most large bodies want. Survival. Growth. Or dispute me. But don't comfort yourself by thinking that your "hysteria" arguments, or the several other stock "I'm being baited by a Catholic hater" responses make very convincing rebuttal.
Your response to your other poster claims "the church doesn't require you to have children." How charitable. Would you care to comment on the paper referenced in that which you kindly provided for me, "Gaudium Et Spes"
"...married Christians glorify the Creator and strive toward fulfillment in Christ when with a generous human and Christian sense of responsibility they acquit themselves of the duty to procreate. Among the couples who fulfil their God-given task in this way, those merit special mention who with a gallant heart and with wise and common deliberation, undertake to bring up suitably even a relatively large family..."
You have the audacity to misdirect about the Church's blatant propagandizing of the procreative act? Please, don't neglect to comment also on the very paper you cited, HUMANAE VITAE, which follows, "Nonetheless the Church, calling men back to the observance of the norms of the natural law, as interpreted by their constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marriage act (quilibet matrimonii usus) must remain open to the transmission of life..." Your beautiful paper is in fact a pitiful compromise with the rhythm method (skimmers, point 16 is the good part). From point 30, to its own administrators, regarding its strict no-effective-birth-control-allowed policy, your paper says, "Consider this mission as one of your most urgent responsibilities at the present time." How many ways should we dance around it, hoeferbe? The Church is in the baby business! Just a hint, trying to minimize or deny it at this point just massacres your credibility...
The overlap between charity and recruitment. The objective analysis of religion in the context of information science, cellular automata or semiotic phenomenon. The church's role in the violence in Northern Ireland. Yes, even their unwillingness to institute zero-tolerance against pedophiles. All hysteria? You have a different definition of hysteria than the dictionary.
Did the end at any time justify the means, hoeferbe? Did it justify beheading Galileo? Or persecution of gays and lesbians? Did it justify what the church did in Yugoslavia in World War II? Am I hysterical, hoeferbe? Or, truthfully, is my honest and sober talk about the church's behavior rather sedate, in fact downright lazy, when anti-abortion terrorists, whom the church "officially" distances themselves from but unofficially provides the moral (and sometimes financial and logistical) support for (much like Osama bin Laden and the WTC bombers?), are carrying on an active and public murder campaign against Americans? I urge you, read your own side's literature, before you form any premature opinions about what hysteria really is.
I'm hysterical, indeed.
I guess that's the only thing you can tell yourself. Your alternatives would be to start really cranking up the Doublethink - try to bury all this under a deeper bed of lies. Or perhaps you could simply run away, and look for an easier (a more ignorant, pliable) conversational partner. That's the playbook, after all. May God have mercy on your soul.
Nope, no reasoned responses. Just dreck. NO SOUP FOR YOU.
The poster is pointing out that copying software is not a black-and-white moral issue like murder or child molesting. Copyright is an artificial social policy, and many of the harsh penalties for violators currently in play (through which this unfortunate person will be made an example of) are extremely recent and morally unsupportable in most people's book when you lay out the facts.
Morality is relative but not subject to relativism. Admitting there is disonnance does not dissolve morality, and pretending that it does is a bad ruse in place of what should be good discussion about how to continue improvement of our civic policy (or in our case, how to stem the tide of it's utter destruction).
Except that it's total bullshit. He's not throwing grenades into boxes of kittens. He's trying to help people recover from debilitating injuries and diseases. And the church is trying to prevent it in order to further their political campaign against abortion.
If the church was really after humanitarian causes rather than trying to make sure new disciples spawn as quickly as possible, they would have objected to embryo-juggling in fertility clinics, which had been going on for years before stem cell research got big. But no, they only got the ball rolling now. So transparent.
There is nothing inhumane about embryonic stem cell research, and everything inhuman about hindering it. Similarly with abortion - the church doesn't care about suffering and crime and the ruined lives of young mothers, rape victims, etc. They care about pumping out more believers. And our parents might remember from a few years ago when the church was still campaigning against birth control.
They don't campaign for things for fun, and if they were great moral crusaders, we'd see church-backed demonstrations and "nuremberg files" websites on the environment or corruption in government or colonialism, or any of the other big causes of the poverty they make such a show of "ministering to." Of course, if ministering happens to be recruitment too, hey, who was using those poor people anyway?
Let me spell it out for you.
80% of the world's Catholics live below the poverty line.
Catholicism is a disease that preys on the poor and ignorant.
Or perhaps it's more like a paraiste. It attaches, sucks out money and work, changes behavior to further propagate itself... "You wouldn't like the world without the church." I'll take it any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
Some time from now, when we can look back on it with the illumination of hindsight, the anti-birth-control,anti-stem-cell,anti-abortion campaign will look as evil and cynical as the crusades, or their unwillingness to institute zero-tolerance against pedophile priests, or the church's policital struggles to control Europe (still being fought today, for instance, in Ireland!). Especially on the eve of a Malthusian population nightmare.
What's that, you ask? There are over six billion people on earth. The last billion of which were born in the last ten years. Do the math. Or maybe you went to catholic school, and they taught you some of that new math?
Actually, it seems like you're the one not clear on the issues.
The purpose of open source voting software is peer review, and more basically, adherence to the notion that elections should be conducted in a fair, public and well-understood fashion.
There's no reason to keep the election-booth code secret and every reason not to. Notice I didn't say that the voting booths should be powered by "free software" - a whole other fish altogether.
It's abundantly clear from the article that the vendor of the FL voting machines refused to allow meaningful inspection of their equipment and software, both to the ACM (who volunteered to audit the devices) and to parties in an election-related lawsuit (!). It's also obvious why: clearly, from the magnitude of problems experienced, had such inspection taken place, the vendor's, and the government purchaser's, rank incompetence would have been more rapidly exposed.
Does anyone have other examples of problems with the BBC's reporting? I always thought of them as rather good, but then again I'm an American, so I'm mainly comparing them with American news... :/
Wherever you are, thank you. You have my profound gratitude, and the debt of a nation.
Now if only someone would put a million dollars into reforming our wheezing, corrupt implementation of the democratic process, so that million dollar donations like this one wouldn't be necessary.
Thank you for indulging me in such an interesting and informative discussion. Best regards.
Once again, I appreciate that you have stuck with me and are continuing to share your point of view in such a generous and nuanced manner. I really do appreciate it. Please forgive me for continuing to question a few things.
I would like to address your last point first. You say, "Nope, professional pirates don't use DeCSS, they stamp the DVD duplicates 'as is' because they have the equipment to do so, no cracking of CSS required." You are exactly right, but I fear I have not made myself sufficiently clear. My point is that P2P networks don't need armchair pirates to thrive, and in making it I used console and PC game images as concrete examples, but "unbreakable" CSS/DVD only as a metaphor. In reality, things will work exactly the opposite of what you describe, since the DRM-protected movies will be extracted and stored on DVDs for sale and use on legacy hardware, which are, as we know, trivially extractable from the armchair.
I see that we are not reaching agreement on the notion that without armchair pirates P2P will not thrive. I had hoped you would respond specifically to my observations about console and PC game images. Suffice it to say, when you claim "leaks do not open the floodgates or make the DRM weaker, there's no magic secret that can break the system if it escapes. Each leak is going to require a guy with a lab to do it." I can only disagree - even if DRM will leak only in labs, that will be more than enough to destroy its usefulness. Perhaps we can only agree to disagree on the point.
To delve a little further into the issue of the role of professional pirates, you say "Professional Pirates are only going to crack things that they can sell (to recoup the money it cost them to crack each encryption chip), this means only the mainstream stuff will be professionally cracked..." And to this I would respond that pirates will spend a lot of energy once to defeat the system, and then from that point will pirate as many items as possible in order to recoup their investment. In other words, the cost to break the system is high, but the cost per item broken is generally negligible by comparison. I am not aware of any very rigorous research on the subject; unfortunately nothing quite compares to a good stroll through a Hong Kong market. Pirates are not choosy, and while the follow the hits, remember that they are not outlaws in China, but rather generally the sole source of entertainment media, with a catalog every bit as expansive as such an important societal role would imply. They really do get almost everything. And that's just the Chinese. Nonetheless, for rare, unusual, arthouse, and indie, however complete the pirates are, they will never get 100% of what the publishers have, and that could be an asset to the publishers... but remember, if pirates have 95% coverage of what people want, then something like 95% of people will be happy.
You say, "I still can't get a high quality music vid of a song I'm after." And you're right, neither can I. Your point is an excellent one. But I have two responses. First, the vast majority of people are satisfied with P2P. They aren't looking for what's rare. They're looking for Britney. And second, P2P is a moving target. It is constantly improving - ironically, the more the industry pursues it, the faster it evolves. When you get into, "hope that it's actually on the P2P service, download it at unreliable speeds, hope it wasn't digitized via the analogue audio in..." the P2P networks are already reacting. Protocol security and efficiency is improving, which increases your chances of finding what you want and getting it quickly, even if it's rare. The first- and second-generation systems we've seen, even fasttrack, are needlessly poor in this regard. And most important, these systems are developing democratic rating systems that reward the best versions of a given piece of media and improve the accuracy of the namespace, increasing your chances of only seeing the best available versions of what you want. A great deal can be done in this regard; I have seen some fascinating designs for such systems and my belief is that even on a decentralized platform they can be extremely effective and robust.
Nonetheless, the publishers can always offer superior quality and variety. The question is whether what they offer will be more enticing than zero cost. It depends on what exactly is on offer, and at what price, and what caveats and headaches the DRM regime entails. At $20 for a (randomly copy-protected) CD the RIAA's members are not currently demonstrating a great amount of sensitivity for what the market will bear.
When you say, "Or they could go to one website, know they're getting the right song, download it at reliable speed, know that it's going to be of excellent quality, pay a reasonable rate for it (because it won't get pirated, and the RIAA can use low costs as a carrot here) and get that warm fuzzy feeling of having supported their artist and the distribution of their artist's material..." you are really on to something. That's the real future of the current music industry, if it has one. If they were to take this route, with opt-in DRM and special emphasis on "reasonable rate," I suspect they would have few enemies, and certainly not me. It might not save them (to be more specific, to allow them to continue in their present form), but it would be the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, at present, they are going the opposite way, with attempts to mandate DRM by legislation and, from my experience, if anything they see the Internet as a way to increase their margins, not lower their prices. Not surprising, since real competition has not been an issue in the media business in some time. Could we go so far as to call it a trust? Regardless, when you pay $20 for a CD, half of it is going to the "brick and mortar" retailer and another quarter to third of what's left going for the physical process. All of that is now unnecessary due to instant, super-low-cost electronic delivery. So I would expect to see ~$5-8 per CD online. I must maintain that we've hardly settled the issue that DRM will stop piracy - rather, the failure of DRM is inevitable for the reasons I describe. The salient fact is that piracy is not a large factor in the price of music (unless you believe the baseless and hysterical RIAA "estimates" on the subject) compared to cutting out the physical medium and the retailer, which should reduce the price of an album by at least 60%. Meanwhile, peer to peer users with an altruistic streak who want to support an artist can also work it out through a contribution via fairtunes. Sending $3 to a band is generally giving them more than they get via an album sale, and it avoids supporting a group abusive to both artists and consumers.
You say, "Once DRM machines are in every home then we can talk about whether it's feasible to slowly replace DVDs and CDs," and you are quite right, if the manufacturers phase in DRM systems over a period of years which are backwards-compatible with existing media, we will then be able to say that they have succeeded in fostering DRM hardware adoption and can more safely begin the disappearance of non-DRM media. But the devil is in the details.
You say "I can't really address your points because they rely on the assumption I was advocating a format war and phasing out the old format." Quite right, they do. Any new format is on the shelf next to the old one, and any two competing products on the shelf are always at war. In perceptively answering my complaint about the media vs. player-adoption chicken and egg problem, I appreciate your point that the entire music catalog could potentially be put on-line at launch. Even though this does not affect the big picture (since it doesn't deal with video), let's consider the hypothetical case where the music industry does exactly that, and is able to form an alliance between all of the content producers and the CE manufacturers to support the standard (getting this consensus is not as easy as you think, but perhaps they could do it). If this is a software add-on for a PC, the cost is reasonable but the security is especially poor. No piece of software, no matter how carefully obfuscated and booby-trapped, will withstand compromise for more than a few weeks - it will be disassembled and reassembled to give up its goods more easily than your DRM hardware. And remember, you haven't achieved anything if it's PC only. So how expensive is a dedicated DRM stereo component? Even the insecure DRM system we have been discussing would totally change the paradigm of the consumer electronics media device, getting data from over an internet broadband connection, a complex (LCD?) user interface for navigating the catalog, doing real-time cryptography, a built-in hard drive or a lot of RAM or some other kind of (secure) local storage, and include (I'm sure) a large cost for a futile effort to tamper-proof the device... you can appreciate how the price of such "backwards-compatible" (if they also throw in a CDROM tray) DRM players will be multiples of the legacy devices, and consumers will simply not buy them, and the format "war" is over before it's begun. Of course, you can try to make your DRM format cheaper to implement, but this will be even more trivially crackable.
Ironically, when considering putting their entire catalog online in DRM-protected digital format, one reason the music publishers have balked is that they (correctly) realize that since their DRM systems will immediately be compromised, it will only increase their predicament by helping to fill the remaining gaps in the free P2P-based library with high-quality digital copies straight from their archives.
When referring to the bandwidth problems associated with Internet content delivery, you say "No last mile problems because even with my DRM machine, most of my music will still come from the CD store." Of course, as I have said I believe we could probably do most music delivery over the Internet. So let's assume you can get all your music via DRM. It's with video that you don't have the capacity. Of course, the video people are most of the same companies, and just as big, if not bigger, proponents of "mandatory closed hardware" and other terrible problems as the music people, so we are stuck with the same issues. When discussing video, the content industry would not make a "secure" format they'd be unable to use for more than 2-5% of their volume. This would not be useful.
Regarding watermarking, you say "Psychographic compression will never defeat watermarking." I hope I have not given the impression that it would. In discussing that I was merely referring to the particular complexity of compression algorithms that a watermark would have to survive. I am confident that watermarks, if they are feasible enough to be put into wide use, will be removed by dedicated tools, probably pre-compression but perhaps it doesn't matter. I'm not sure I understand your point about psychographic compression's artifacts, but I would point out that it's the superb quality of mp3 and Divx that have helped created this "problem" in the first place. Regarding "jittered encoding parameters," I see no reason why the encoding couldn't be reverse engineered and the system compromised.
You say, "[with] lots of extra content for the DRM box
You say, "If you publish your bit perfect digital data, then the key to your DRM box gets pulled and your publishing days are over (until your buy another computer)." We are still discussing the viability of watermarks. While I was hoping you could describe an academic evaluation of such systems, or point to any instance in the real-world where they are at work doing roughly what you describe, in the absence of such evidence (and even in the face of some rather intriguing demonstrations), I remain skeptical that the mark won't either be too fragile to survive PG compression or too big to avoid detection and "removal" (or damage beyond recognition, the same thing). Remember, if each file is watermarked with a unique set of data (a users key, as you describe), pirates studying the watermark can compare the same movie downloaded with different keys, a powerful ally in analysis. My impression is that the history of that business thus far has been of uniform success of the countermeasures once countermeasures are considered by professionals. I refer you to the excellent paper by Felten. Nonetheless, I am fascinated by the techniques involved, and I am open to changing my mind about their feasability. A watermarking technique that can survive the unpredictable and rapidly advancing array of psychographic compression technology and remain uncleanable would be really remarkable. Well, anything is possible.
One thing I remain certain on is that your proposed use of watermarks is moot. You say, "The real security of this hypothetical system lies more in being able to pull keys on demand than obfuscation." I feel as though I have not had an adequate response to my point:
"Watermarks won't even be useful for tracking down pirates, who if enforcement is aggressive will simply steal equipment/keys the way bank robbers steal cars." A few movies on each "stolen" box, and then on to the next one. Remember, throwing out their "DRM Media Player" for each new movie (if the system were that fast to respond, which I doubt) is nothing to them. They're making millions selling bootlegged copies.
I see the anonymous reply makes the statement, "it will most certainly kill off all the armchair pirates, and with them goes the variety of the pirated content available on the internet." I can only disagree.
"Remember, the content only needs to escape once." All it takes is one professional pirate to liberate the content, then he bootlegs it to half of china. Three days later it's on the internet. DRM's failure doesn't require that "casual users" are able to break the box. It only requires that anyone can, because with P2P, armchair pirates are not necessary at all.
I want to be very clear in my point because I am curious about your specific response to it. My point is that, hypothetically, if CSS had been "unbreakable" by consumers (a whole other can of worms - it's not clear to me that that's possible), the P2P networks would be just as full. Professional pirates would crack the protection and sell their wares (intentional pun, intentional ommission of the "z"), and they would instantly reach the internet and be just as plentiful as they are now. But the hypothetical argument is not transparent enough, I have a real world example of this principle in action. I refer you to any of the peer to peer networks to look for disc images of console games for Dreamcast, PS1/2, XBox, etc. which are plentiful, despite the fact that it is impossible to rip an image of that media without special hardware, and in many cases also impossible to burn these images without further special hardware (a mod chip). You could take another step backward and consider the entire PC copy-protection regime in the same context (in that it takes a professional cracker to put a game in distributable form). Virtually every PC game on the network came via a professional. Yet they are by and large all there, all readily available. I hope by now my point is clear.
You say, "if there was DRM then the entire catalogue of the RIAA would probably be available for download at high quality also." However, only a specific discussion of the internet's carrying capacity could dissuade me from disagreement. I think it's clear that the current internet cannot be used to replace current (insecure) video distribution. The telling phrase I've heard uttered many times in the lab is, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of [tape/CDs/DVDs] driving down the highway." The last-mile alone is a problem: if the internet were to become the delivery medium to replace audio and video sales and rental, assuming no backbone contention and the quality adequacy of say Divx5 into 700MB files for a standard movie, most broadband users will wait hours to get their movie under perfect conditions (Most DSL connections are 768/128. And most cable connections, while peaking much faster, are far smaller - even as small as 128/32 - when considered at maximum utilization, since cable connections are shared between all users in a "cable cell"). But it turns out backbone contention is the dealbreaker. The amount of data transferred on physical media in this country is vast. Blockbuster alone rents a billion movies a year. ISPs (while probably lying) are already complaining that "pirate" data alone is too onerous a traffic burden. My apologies for not finding a better source for traffic figures, but this should hopefully give you an idea of what the internet is handling now. Imagine if you add to that all of blockbuster's "data traffic." Or "Hollywood Video." For music, the bandwidth and backbone capacity to replace insecure retail is probably there or could be put in place, but for video, definitely not. Once again, we have a real world example; there are numerous instances which you can read about in the news of providers (usually cable companies here and abroad) who have studied, and in some cases attempted (i.e. pilot projects) "Video on Demand." Their collective conclusion is that we are not even close to this being anything other than a prohibitively expensive investment in new infrastructure. I will spare you a similarly damning analysis of the back-end requirements for real-time strong encryption of video streams for millions of customers a day (you're encrypting over 2 petabytes a day, based on an conservative extrapolation from our figures thus far).