where the electronic form is much less useful than the paper version.
Run that by me again? That may be your personal preference and is probably based on your experience with early book readers, but reading an RTF-formatted book in a Word processor is no burden. Admittedly if I want a hard copy, I effectively have to spend an additional $5 on printer paper and ink, but the electronic version is perfectly readable online. But on the other hand, it's easier to cart around 30 or 40 eBooks on a trip in my laptop than it would be to haul that many paperbacks along.
And while the electronic form is more useful than a CD or DVD, that argument is irrelevant. CDs and DVDs are DRM-infected as much as (legal) online media downloads are.
Where Flint's argument falls down is that in his marked of science fiction there isn't enough demand to make commercial piracy profitable enough to justify the risks. This is probably true of most book publishing where sales are in the tens of thousands of copies. So Flint and Baen can afford to trust their customers because no one is out on the web trying to sell OCRed copies of published works for $4.99 a pop, .
For movies and disks that sell in the hundreds of thousands or millions of copies, the potential for a competitor to enter the market selling a reproduction of your product is much higher. The problem is, there's a catch-22 here. If you DRM your product, it isn't particularly effective, since the DRM eventually will be cracked. Also, you drive a few of your customers (Slashdot readers) away, possibly into your competitor's arms.
If you don't DRM your product, you regain the few technically-savvy users you lost with DRM, but you lower the barriers to the pirate-competitors to the point where they can flood the market to such an extent that they actually affect your sales to your mass customers. So I actually sympathize with RIAA and MPAA motives, even if the strategy they've come up with is abysmal.
He's not trying to justify piracy, he's trying to justify his company's policy of publishing eBooks in HTML and RTF format with no DRM. Preaching to the choir with this group, but not amongst his competitors.
Speaking of old DOS games, remember DRMs older sister, copy-protection? Every game manufacturer back in the 1980s had some scheme to try to force you to prove that you had actually bought the game. SimCity had the city pattern sheet, some games like Zork did strange things to their floppy disks and forced you to insert the disk to play the game, so a copied disk (in theory) wouldn't work.
Every one of those schemes increased the product cost and reduced sales as a result. Eventually, the schemes died off as games migrated to CD, and the cost of a CD-burner was a temporary barrier to entry. Unless someone comes up with a form of quantum encryption where attempting to decrypt a data stream with an invalid key corrupts the data stream (take advantage of the observer effect), I don't see any possibility of DRM working. And quantum devices in the home are at least a generation away.
Digital DRM is doomed by 3 factors: 1) in order to be commercially viable, the encryption of the data stream has to be mass produced. The decryption process has to be supported in a mass-produced product, and has to use a key of limited length in order to be commercially feasible. 2) The only truly unbreakable encryption stream is a one-time pad with a private key length as long as (or longer than) the data stream. If a key is reused it can be hacked by a man in the middle approach. And if the key is too short, it only takes a finite number of monkeys on typewriters to reproduce the original work. And any finite number of monkeys can be simulated by a finite number of computers. 3) Any finite data stream can be captured by a computer, and once the data is in a computer, any DRM schem can effectively be "root-kitted" by creating custom software to process the data stream (deCSS, for example).
Another possibility: It could be capital gains on the items sold. But I think you're right that they're primarily after the small businesses rather than the online garage sales. Not sure if it would be self-employment income if it isn't income earned as wages, though. It could just be straight income tax on business profits.
If enough judgements go against them in the same fashion, I'd say that opens up the possibility of a class action lawsuit under the RICO act. The basis would be extortion, along with the harrassment, defamation, and stalking mentioned by the parent.
As above: talk to a lawyer. I'm pretty sure there's a separate visa program for business owners, as opposed to employees. On the other hand, you probably have to give up the H1B to get it.
This issue of ensuring that power is divided is also a big reason to ensure that no political party gets control of both houses of congress plus the white house. Let alone the supreme court. Compare the rubbberstamp congress of 2002-2006 with the current one. Unless you completely buy into the positions of one party, it makes sense to have the other party out there to call our attention to the first party's screwups/corruption and so forth. Even if they are doing it from purely political motives, it serves a public purpose. If one party is completely powerless in government, they can speechify all they want, but the other party will just do whatever the hell it wants.
Well, wait a minute. If the patent's claims could be enforced against existing DRM systems like those in Vista, then those systems would constitute prior art for the patent. The only way a DRM system could violate the patent is if the system performs one or more of the claims made in the patent. But if a pre-existing system performs one of the claims in the patent, then the pre-existing system constitutes prior art for that claim, invalidating the patent.
I'm not saying the patent can't be granted, but I don't see how it can be applied to Vista, unless it was submitted in 2004-2005, before information about Vista's DRM was made available.
This country would be a lot better off if the partisans of both parties would be able to face the facts when their leaders screw up. But so many people are so greedy for the slops from the public trough, they will do anything for just a couple of more years of feeding.
What was the name of that show again? That's the only appropriate use I can think of. Or maybe it's the opposite of the verb "to plane" as used in carpentry. Instead of leveling a wooden surface, you gouge it and make it wavy.
"Welcome to Lake Wobegon where the children are all above average." Since this is obviously impossible, your statement is actually true and unavoidable.
Some unfortunate economic realities: 1) The economic system must include sufficient incentives to motivate people to produce more. Otherwise you just end up with a situation where the top producers lose motivation because the extra work and surplus they generate doesn't provide them any benefit. Without other incentives, it's more to their benefit to work in a more "relaxed" manner. As a result the standard of living slowly declines because productivity declines. Witness the USSR. 2) In any system of incentives, different people are motivated to different levels of effort by similar incentives depending on various other motivations such as the physical or mental difficulty, danger, or enjoyment of the work to be performed. This results in two behaviors: 1) extra incentives need to be paid for work for which workers perceive extra risk or effort, or for which fewer workers qualify, and B)a distribution of incomes where some people receive more incentives than others. 3) The people who have less than average income have less ability to purchase items produced within the economy. If this ability falls below an arbitrary level defined within the society, the people are called impoverished. One reason immigration to the US and Europe is so high is that our definition of the poverty level is higher than many of the surrounding economies.
My computer came with SP1. I bet about 30% of the people out there have PCs that date before SP2 came out on CD. If they don't have a backup (or their backup isn't bootable after a restore), they have to restore from their original Windows disks.
>Whenever I see these threads about the US going to hell in a handbag I always ask, and how is this different? Sure there are somethings to be concerned about (e.g. domestic wiretapping.) But when people go on about how america isn't what it used to be, they loose at least some credibility in my eyes.
I was originally going to write about how different it is now, but you're right that for certain segments of the US population, this is just the same thing that has been going on throughout history. The biggest real difference in what is happening is that in the "good old days" the abuses were publicly condemned, as long as they were against white people. Now that the federal government is treating all of us like blacks under Jim Crow, it's interesting to see how much anger has been roused in just 5 years.
What do you think is the appropriate response? Martin Luther King? or the Black Panthers?
Doesn't the cosmic background radiation from the big bang create an effective "stationary" frame of reference? In other words you measure your velocity in relation to a projection of the original singularity that created the universe.
It's a bit more like hiring someone to go through your snail mail and throw out all of the financial offers from Car Dealers, Credit Card companies and other vermin.
It's not the rising columns of air, but increased kinetic energy and momentum in general. Earth's atmosphere is constantly losing particles that escape into space. This is compensated from particles that fall into our gravity well. It's more an effect of brownian motion and individual molecules achieving escape velocity than air currents, though.
There are several factors involved in determining the rate of exchange. Increased temperature implies increased average energy level in the atmosphere and increased volume (the atmosphere extends further away from the surface). Carbon dioxide is heavier than both H2O and O2, so increased levels of CO2 will tend to push those molecules away from the surface and into the upper atmosphere. Also a collision between a CO2 molecule and a water or oxygen molecule will impart greater velocity to the lighter molecule. Conversely, methane is lighter than O2 or H2O, so it will rise with/above them.
In general, though, I expect global warming to cause a measurable increase in the level of atmosphere lost to space (at least anything lighter than CO2). Given the amount of water in the environment, and the ability of plants to lock up CO2, I don't expect it to turn earth into a venusian hell-hole, let alone lose the entire atmosphere. We're talking millions of years, even if we humans manage to release all of the fossil CO2 from the pre-Cambrian era and kill off all vertebrate animal life in the process.
Puzzle solutions aren't strategies. Heck, they're not even tactics. They're recipes.
The classic strategy guide is probably the strategy guide for the old DOS game Master of Magic. It gave high level recommendations for approaching the game from different angles, recommendations for the most valuable spells, and described almost all of the internal calculations performed by the game.
Do the RPG guides published nowadays tell you how the combat system works internally?
Slashdot Mirror
Each network's footage of presidential press conferences, state of the union address, inaugurals, etc. is copyright by the particular network.
Run that by me again? That may be your personal preference and is probably based on your experience with early book readers, but reading an RTF-formatted book in a Word processor is no burden. Admittedly if I want a hard copy, I effectively have to spend an additional $5 on printer paper and ink, but the electronic version is perfectly readable online. But on the other hand, it's easier to cart around 30 or 40 eBooks on a trip in my laptop than it would be to haul that many paperbacks along.
And while the electronic form is more useful than a CD or DVD, that argument is irrelevant. CDs and DVDs are DRM-infected as much as (legal) online media downloads are.
Where Flint's argument falls down is that in his marked of science fiction there isn't enough demand to make commercial piracy profitable enough to justify the risks. This is probably true of most book publishing where sales are in the tens of thousands of copies. So Flint and Baen can afford to trust their customers because no one is out on the web trying to sell OCRed copies of published works for $4.99 a pop, .
For movies and disks that sell in the hundreds of thousands or millions of copies, the potential for a competitor to enter the market selling a reproduction of your product is much higher. The problem is, there's a catch-22 here. If you DRM your product, it isn't particularly effective, since the DRM eventually will be cracked. Also, you drive a few of your customers (Slashdot readers) away, possibly into your competitor's arms.
If you don't DRM your product, you regain the few technically-savvy users you lost with DRM, but you lower the barriers to the pirate-competitors to the point where they can flood the market to such an extent that they actually affect your sales to your mass customers. So I actually sympathize with RIAA and MPAA motives, even if the strategy they've come up with is abysmal.
He's not trying to justify piracy, he's trying to justify his company's policy of publishing eBooks in HTML and RTF format with no DRM. Preaching to the choir with this group, but not amongst his competitors.
Speaking of old DOS games, remember DRMs older sister, copy-protection? Every game manufacturer back in the 1980s had some scheme to try to force you to prove that you had actually bought the game. SimCity had the city pattern sheet, some games like Zork did strange things to their floppy disks and forced you to insert the disk to play the game, so a copied disk (in theory) wouldn't work.
Every one of those schemes increased the product cost and reduced sales as a result. Eventually, the schemes died off as games migrated to CD, and the cost of a CD-burner was a temporary barrier to entry. Unless someone comes up with a form of quantum encryption where attempting to decrypt a data stream with an invalid key corrupts the data stream (take advantage of the observer effect), I don't see any possibility of DRM working. And quantum devices in the home are at least a generation away.
Digital DRM is doomed by 3 factors:
1) in order to be commercially viable, the encryption of the data stream has to be mass produced. The decryption process has to be supported in a mass-produced product, and has to use a key of limited length in order to be commercially feasible.
2) The only truly unbreakable encryption stream is a one-time pad with a private key length as long as (or longer than) the data stream. If a key is reused it can be hacked by a man in the middle approach. And if the key is too short, it only takes a finite number of monkeys on typewriters to reproduce the original work. And any finite number of monkeys can be simulated by a finite number of computers.
3) Any finite data stream can be captured by a computer, and once the data is in a computer, any DRM schem can effectively be "root-kitted" by creating custom software to process the data stream (deCSS, for example).
Another possibility: It could be capital gains on the items sold. But I think you're right that they're primarily after the small businesses rather than the online garage sales. Not sure if it would be self-employment income if it isn't income earned as wages, though. It could just be straight income tax on business profits.
If enough judgements go against them in the same fashion, I'd say that opens up the possibility of a class action lawsuit under the RICO act. The basis would be extortion, along with the harrassment, defamation, and stalking mentioned by the parent.
As above: talk to a lawyer. I'm pretty sure there's a separate visa program for business owners, as opposed to employees. On the other hand, you probably have to give up the H1B to get it.
This issue of ensuring that power is divided is also a big reason to ensure that no political party gets control of both houses of congress plus the white house. Let alone the supreme court. Compare the rubbberstamp congress of 2002-2006 with the current one. Unless you completely buy into the positions of one party, it makes sense to have the other party out there to call our attention to the first party's screwups/corruption and so forth. Even if they are doing it from purely political motives, it serves a public purpose. If one party is completely powerless in government, they can speechify all they want, but the other party will just do whatever the hell it wants.
Remember, though. It's IBM that's the Lord of the Token Rings, not Apple.
Well, wait a minute. If the patent's claims could be enforced against existing DRM systems like those in Vista, then those systems would constitute prior art for the patent. The only way a DRM system could violate the patent is if the system performs one or more of the claims made in the patent. But if a pre-existing system performs one of the claims in the patent, then the pre-existing system constitutes prior art for that claim, invalidating the patent.
I'm not saying the patent can't be granted, but I don't see how it can be applied to Vista, unless it was submitted in 2004-2005, before information about Vista's DRM was made available.
You mean it's a vast left-wing conspiracy?
This country would be a lot better off if the partisans of both parties would be able to face the facts when their leaders screw up. But so many people are so greedy for the slops from the public trough, they will do anything for just a couple of more years of feeding.
Boss, it's de plane!
What was the name of that show again? That's the only appropriate use I can think of. Or maybe it's the opposite of the verb "to plane" as used in carpentry. Instead of leveling a wooden surface, you gouge it and make it wavy.
It could be concern over how the more-restrictive EULA for Vista affects the value of upgrading.
"Welcome to Lake Wobegon where the children are all above average." Since this is obviously impossible, your statement is actually true and unavoidable.
Some unfortunate economic realities:
1) The economic system must include sufficient incentives to motivate people to produce more. Otherwise you just end up with a situation where the top producers lose motivation because the extra work and surplus they generate doesn't provide them any benefit. Without other incentives, it's more to their benefit to work in a more "relaxed" manner. As a result the standard of living slowly declines because productivity declines. Witness the USSR.
2) In any system of incentives, different people are motivated to different levels of effort by similar incentives depending on various other motivations such as the physical or mental difficulty, danger, or enjoyment of the work to be performed. This results in two behaviors: 1) extra incentives need to be paid for work for which workers perceive extra risk or effort, or for which fewer workers qualify, and B)a distribution of incomes where some people receive more incentives than others.
3) The people who have less than average income have less ability to purchase items produced within the economy. If this ability falls below an arbitrary level defined within the society, the people are called impoverished. One reason immigration to the US and Europe is so high is that our definition of the poverty level is higher than many of the surrounding economies.
My computer came with SP1. I bet about 30% of the people out there have PCs that date before SP2 came out on CD. If they don't have a backup (or their backup isn't bootable after a restore), they have to restore from their original Windows disks.
Guess what. Instant SP1 machine!
You mean the proxies that the feds subpoena to get the user data?
And the encryption algorithm that contains the government mandated backdoor?
...seem to prefer certification of residency in India or China. And they're willing to pay accordingly.
American corporations (particularly media corporations) and the politicians they lobby. (Yes, that means you, Orin)
Because he seems to have that same problem.
>Whenever I see these threads about the US going to hell in a handbag I always ask, and how is this different? Sure there are somethings to be concerned about (e.g. domestic wiretapping.) But when people go on about how america isn't what it used to be, they loose at least some credibility in my eyes.
I was originally going to write about how different it is now, but you're right that for certain segments of the US population, this is just the same thing that has been going on throughout history. The biggest real difference in what is happening is that in the "good old days" the abuses were publicly condemned, as long as they were against white people. Now that the federal government is treating all of us like blacks under Jim Crow, it's interesting to see how much anger has been roused in just 5 years.
What do you think is the appropriate response? Martin Luther King? or the Black Panthers?
Doesn't the cosmic background radiation from the big bang create an effective
"stationary" frame of reference? In other words you measure your velocity in relation to a projection of the original singularity that created the universe.
It's a bit more like hiring someone to go through your snail mail and throw out all of the financial offers from Car Dealers, Credit Card companies and other vermin.
actually battle Eris' minions in a couple of episodes of their shows?
It's not the rising columns of air, but increased kinetic energy and momentum in general. Earth's atmosphere is constantly losing particles that escape into space. This is compensated from particles that fall into our gravity well. It's more an effect of brownian motion and individual molecules achieving escape velocity than air currents, though.
There are several factors involved in determining the rate of exchange. Increased temperature implies increased average energy level in the atmosphere and increased volume (the atmosphere extends further away from the surface). Carbon dioxide is heavier than both H2O and O2, so increased levels of CO2 will tend to push those molecules away from the surface and into the upper atmosphere. Also a collision between a CO2 molecule and a water or oxygen molecule will impart greater velocity to the lighter molecule. Conversely, methane is lighter than O2 or H2O, so it will rise with/above them.
In general, though, I expect global warming to cause a measurable increase in the level of atmosphere lost to space (at least anything lighter than CO2). Given the amount of water in the environment, and the ability of plants to lock up CO2, I don't expect it to turn earth into a venusian hell-hole, let alone lose the entire atmosphere. We're talking millions of years, even if we humans manage to release all of the fossil CO2 from the pre-Cambrian era and kill off all vertebrate animal life in the process.
Puzzle solutions aren't strategies. Heck, they're not even tactics. They're recipes.
The classic strategy guide is probably the strategy guide for the old DOS game Master of Magic. It gave high level recommendations for approaching the game from different angles, recommendations for the most valuable spells, and described almost all of the internal calculations performed by the game.
Do the RPG guides published nowadays tell you how the combat system works internally?