Me again. First, a tip: to get your comment read (or even meaningly responded to), stay under the page limit. Reply to the top level multiple times, if you have to. Working with that volume of text in a little CGI box just CAN'T be fun.
There are no 5000 person killing sprees that go on for days.
The record, I think, was 718.
(e) If you want it, convince reviewers to review it. That means longer review times. That means players being willing to wait for later reviews
When (the first) Half-Life and then Far Cry came out, the reviewers heavily touted the "incredible" AI. A little improvement to AI can go a long, long way in making a game seem more fun, surprising, and real.
I will generously interpret the article's call for an AI as dominant as Sam Fischer to be a bunch of hyperbole. Nobody likes to be invisibly stalked for 5 minutes and then strangled between a dangling ninja's thighs... but if some monsters THOUGHT they were sneaking up on you, even if they were somewhat detectable, that could be fun.
Obviously, instant loading is better than no instant loading, but if something has to go due to a lack of development time (and there's never enough of that), trickle loading is a popular candidate for eviction.
Plus, some reviewers publish the time it took them to play-through, and customers interpret that statistic as getting more hours of entertainment per dollar. Worse loading code actually artificially inflates that quality metric.
Why are you inexplicably seeing from a vantage point hovering in mid-air *behind* the snowboarder, with a wider range of view than he would have available?
No, the player's FOV is smaller than what an actual snowboarder would have. True, the chasecam effect gives a bonus, but not enough to compensate for the fact that a TV screen only covers under 10% of a human's actual ocular FOV. (Ask yourself the simple question: can I see the room behind my game screen, or not?) Chasecams can increase realism in several ways. Real humans have more than 5 senses, including touch, equilibrium, and an ability to know the position of your own limbs (without bending down and gazing at your feet). A visual game screen can't communicate those well, but allowing the player to "see" his own body is the easiest workaround.
Chasecam's main unrealism is the "periscope effect", which allows the player to peek around the corner at an enemy without exposing himself to detection. This could be mostly removed by adding a line-of-sight test for drawing objects, but typical players enjoy both the game benefit and the visual appeal.
Another benefit (which could be considered to be a drawback) is that there isn't the easy temptation to just save at rapid intervals and get past something step-by-step always hovering there -- the idea being that you might want to cheat in the short term, but that you'll regret it over the course of the whole game.
The main pragmatic complaint voiced about checkpoints is related to the fact that save/load game features are used for two quite separate functions. Sometimes you need to reload for game-world events (killed by a monster), and sometimes for real-world events (the carpool is waiting outside).
Naturally, the game designer is only aware of the game world, so checkpoint positions can only be "known good" relative to one of the two uses for save/load. That's why the best solutions are usually some combo of checkpoints and explicit save.
It is true that reflexively quick save/load on small time deltas can be a form of cheating that drains challenge and/or fun from a game... but then again, the "cheat codes" instantly available on gamefaqs.com are also cheating. If some players find that approach more fun, let them have it, just as other kinds of single-player cheating should be permissible.
(Hardcore players might like a difficulty option to constrain their savegames so they only can be used to resume after real
To acquire a FOSS app (assuming you're using a really dumbed down version of Linux):
What a remarkable assumption.
With skills like that, you could also prove that bicycles are faster than airplanes, because assuming that the pilot has both hands cut off, he won't fly very quickly at all!
Yeah, just like how there is only one Cola company, and Pepsi is completely bankrupt. And like how Amazon.com is the ONLY place to buybooks online.
Monoplies only happen if there is a measuable barrier-to-entry in the market, either technical or legal. Postal DVD rental doesn't have a barrier like that, so there will probably stay two companies (functionally interchangable with each other).
I probably should make a Trusted Computing website. It would save me a lot of typing in a lot of posts, but it's a daunting project to do a proper job on it.
You've already produced more than 14 pages worth in the past 36 hours. That should really be more than enough. Put it in a slashdot journal entry for easy hosting.
Ideally, he will give the donkey none, or at least the fewest necessary to get to market.
Humans, at least those capable of valuable creative work, are significantly smarter than donkeys. They cannot be fooled for long (and it would be fraudulent to try). There is no meaningful difference between presenting a human with a reward and the opportunity for a reward. If the opportunity is not consistently fulfilled, it's effectiveness as incentive will quickly be nullified.
Plus, unless he profits more from getting to market than he loses by wasting carrots on the donkey, the whole exercise is pointless, and the donkey should get nothing.
Which is exactly what I said, so you don't really need to waste your time repeating it. You are once again apparently confusing me with the person whom I was refuting. It wasn't I who claimed copyright is meant to reward authors!
You should avoid having romantic ideas about authors when considering copyright policy. It only fucks things up.
You should avoid verbosely antagonizing people based on things you only imagine them to have written. Save it for someone who actually HAS a contrary opinion.
And 99.44% of copyrighted works have no value to their authors while the authors are alive, or after their deaths. So it is a bad idea to have long copyright terms, since very few people will profit from them, and the long terms are not necessary in order to encourage authors to create.
I agree fully to all that, which is only natural, since to the degree it is relevant at all, it completely supports my position.
I think that the life of the author should be irrelevant.
Which is the ONLY thing I was saying in that message (outside of the joking postscript). So why did you act as if you were contradicting me? It can only have been a failure to read carefully.
Yes you are, because it is tremendously rare to create a work with economic value
That makes NO logical sense. Your conclusions as to what I am saying have no relationship or resembelance to the grounds by which you claim them (and those grounds are themselves false). Just not paying attention.
because it is tremendously rare to create a work with economic value that lasts not only until death, but beyond.
The majority of commerically produced works have economic value for at least 5 years (assuming they had ANY value to begin with, which some of them do not due to audience disapproval). Any individual human has more than a 4% chance of death within a 5 year period. So an event you called "tremendously rare" will actually happen 4% of the time.
It doesn't. Star Wars -- the movie -- falls within the realm of general knowledge.
Not for any of the definitions of "knowledge" found in an English dictionary. Knowledge is by definition not "creative", but observed from the world around you- just like science (which explains how they may have been used interchangably)
I was guessing that the whole point of doing one photon at a time was that the reciever would be checking the stream one photon at a time and would instantly know if one had been intercepted
No, although that is a separate reasonable plan to detect man-in-the-middle.
However, it has a number of shortcomings. Mainly- how does the reciever know what time the message was SUPPOSED to arrive? If the spy is intercepting the messages, and then retransmitting them, he could also edit the timestamp in each one, so that it appears to have been sent later than it really was, "erasing" the extra time he spent reading it.
Various back-and-forth efforts to fight this are possible.
And, do the sender and reciever even have clocks accurately synchronized enough to notice the difference? (Not too much of a problem today, with GPS time code satellites)
Of all the professional cryptographers I know--and that's quite a few--none of them believe QKE is not a cryptographic algorithm.
Ha ha! Do they seriously believe that QKE can be performed without specialized transmission hardware?
Cryptography is codes. It is algorithms. It is mathmatical functions transforming one number to another. It is software.
It is not exploitation of laws of particle physics such that transmitted energy cannot be intercepted without detection. Cryptography is just math, so it can function even without physics.
If you still think a electrical machine implementing a very specific communication channel between two points is a "code" or "encryption", then you need to go back to your crypto 101 book and read up on exactly what a "code" is. For any genuine code, I can use it to encrypt my hard disk or my outgoing emails. QKE is not even concievably applicable to those problems, because it is not a code.
If you construe "code" so generically that QKE applies, then "10 guys with machine guns escorting a station wagon full of CD-Rs" is also a "code".
PS. Are you prehaps a foreign student in the USA? ESL might explain this.
Maybe you didn't actually read what I wrote, because that was a large amount of irrelevant text that could make sense in other contexts.
The problem is that what if she owns a gold mine that is contaminated with radioactive waste -- nothing is likely to be extracted from it, it provides no profit, and is unlikely to in the future.
If the mine is contaminated, it has no value to the woman while she is alive. I was discussing the specific claim that people who are dying deserve to have their money (or profitable possession) taken from them.
Logically, if you say that copyright should end at death, you should also believe in taking physical property at death (which many people do, at least partially).
You're basically saying that if you win the lottery, we've got to give special treatment to your kids.
No, I am not. You are evidently blabbing away without paying any attention to the highly specific point I was discussing.
Plus, fixed terms are predictable.
Yes, their predictability is indeed useful. That's why everything I said (in this post) was in favor of fixed terms. If you think I said anything different... then you either didn't read carefully, or clicked the wrong "reply" button.
In 1789, when the Constitution was written, 'science' meant general knowledge, and 'the useful arts' meant applied technology.
Did you notice that that sentence is agreeing with me? Star Wars is not applied technology, so it is outside the scope of Constitutional authority to control (unless you use the commerce clause as a blanket permission to do anything Congress wants)
Althought I too would prefer copyrights to last under 30 years, the following is inadequate justification.
Anything longer stops making sense, because it is no longer the artist we are protecting, but the heirs or the corporate entities who happen to own copyrights to whatever artistic work is in question.
The majority of humans are social creatures, possessing affection for other people as well as themselves. A parent values her children, and protecting them is considerably similar to protecting her. (Conversely, murdering those same children would be interpreted as a kind of attack on the parent).
If a woman owns a gold mine from which is extracted $100,000 / year, it helps her on her deathbed to know that it will go to her daughters. The feeling evoked by owning the copyright to a perennially popular book will be quite similar.
If you feel that people should not be able to pass their valuable possessions to designated heirs, then propose a 100% estate tax and be done with it. (I do not think you'd really want that)
It would be quite wrong to, for example, make all copyrights expire exactly when the original artist dies (the surest way of cutting off benefits to heirs). That would be terribly discriminatory against the elderly, aside from inspiring assasination attempts against major computer programmers.
The original intent of copyright law was to protect the artist themselves - a 20 to 25 year term for copyright makes sense in this context.
No. If you go by the USA's Constitution, it was meant to promote progress of the arts*. Protection for the artists is only a means towards that goal, not an objective on its own.
The real reason why a shorter time like 20-30 years is appropriate is that it gives the best tradeoff between helping original artists (allowing them time to profit from the work) and later artists (permitting them to expand on old ideas without bogging down their creativity with licensing struggles).
It is through an examination of the business strategies of existing publishing corporations you can learn that 10 years is about as far ahead as they plan the sales of a work- anything further they're not thinking of when commissioning the work, so longer times cannot act as (much) incentive for their creativity. Multiply that 10 years by 2 or 3 creates an adequate buffer to protect authors who experience a few years delay in profiting from the sales, for one whim of fate or another.
* Technically, the Constitution only allows protection for "useful arts", so by a strict interpretation, copyright protection for base entertainment like Star Wars is illegal.
I have a few ideas regarding patent and trademark law as well, but my real passion and focus is copyright.
Just for fun, I hearby propose that no person shall be liable for copyright infringement of any work published on or before her date of birth. This will formalize a longstanding effect that people generally had the right to re-interpret the cultural background they were born into, and move Star Wars into the same category as Beowulf, Shakespere, and Sherlock Holmes.
In practice, since most people start getting into the commercial workforce at around 25, this will be close to the effect of "founder's copyright".
I guess it would cause some major age discrimination at some classes of firms... oh well, they'll just have to pick a revolving 18 year old to hold legal title and then lease it back to them.
One could argue a recording of their neighbors/roomates/etc. having sex (with or without their knowledge) has a "reasonable expectation" of being commercially distributed.
And one could be laughed out of court.
In practice, virtually any true "expected commercial distribution" can be trivially demonstrated by a few paychecks or business plans, or by similar materials previously sold for profit by the same owner.
The only people likely to intend something for sale without having created abundant paperwork to back them up are poor indie artists looking for their "big break", and those kinds of folks won't have too much incentive to press charges anyway.
Chances are, if the work becomes popular on P2p, that'll just help the guy secure a big label to fund his next project. For example, both South Park and Lord of the Rings (the original 1920s books) became commercially profitable only after widespread illegal copying had made them vastly popular.
Distributing that sex tape, by the way, will probably be illegal under harsher laws against invasion of privacy, including gigantic damages for emotional distress.
Some people are obsessed with the idea of doing away with the law (in particular abandoning copyright)
Doubtful. Can you honestly name one DRM-proponent who also wants to absolish copyright?!?
All I've seen is they want to make "circumventing copy protection" illegal, so they can then essentially write their own rules that obselete copyright by being more strict in every regard.
No, you need a lot more than that. The system as described is quite vulnerable to "poisoning": the intentional upload of corrupt, non-playable versions of a file. It is expected that publishing corporations will attempt to poison any anonymous P2p networks which distribute their files.
To combat poisoning, many more mechanisms are required, such as an anonymous authority who downloads many files and provides hash stamps as to which ones are real and fake- and he'll need to use clever cryptography to allow the P2P leechers to recognize him as a trusted reviewer, without also allowing MPAA detectives to track him down for arrest. (PKI will work well there)
Those supporting both non-consensual file sharing and non-consensual film editing are essentially saying they both want to deprive artists of the ability to make money from music sales,
Oh, so now you've decided that 3rd-party editing is about money and sales, when earlier you wrote it was about creative integrity, and not money at all: As for the second bit, the movie industry is taking the side of artists here who are immensely unhappy with the idea of their works being edited in this way. Not everything is about money and royalties.
The George W Bush method: give as many different justifications for your actions as can be imagined, so that you still have some left over when the first ones turn out to be untrue.
As for the second bit, the movie industry is taking the side of artists here who are immensely unhappy with the idea of their works being edited in this way. Not everything is about money and royalties.
Nope. Everything is about money. All those "artists" allow their works to be censored for television, which frequently renders them laughably bad.
They don't like it, but they accept it because it gets them money. A rare few don't accept it at all, which is their right, as copyright allows them to prohibit public performance by the TV station.
But by the ancient doctrine of first sale, they have NO RIGHT to attempt control of an individual copy once it has been sold to the public.
Probably, if this law passed, some artists would go ahead and permit censored DVDs to be sold, just as they today permit censored TV broadcast. But in that case, of course, they'll hold out for a little more money.
So many of these guys are arguing for "artistic integrity", which they will turn around and sell for money and royalties. So, who was "promoting whoredom" again?
and continue to refer to the finished product as being "by" that artist, is grossly unfair, and is misrepresenting them.
And since the censoring companies proudly advertise that they have altered the movie from the original version, that will never happen.
In the event they are mislabelling censored versions as the original, they will already be guilty of consumer fraud under existing laws. There is no call for a new law to make it redundantly illegal, while also outlawing legitimate uses of editing.
Note that such a proposed law could also make it illegal to resell a used work if there is any accidental damage to the medium- no more used books on amazon.
Go right ahead, but do the decent thing and take their name off the film unless they consent to it.
What about that feature, which name I've forgotton, that should allow the graphical teams to develop e.g. the Windows dialogboxes with an ML-sort of language?
Do you know how few computer scientists can manage programming in ML? And do you seriously think grahpics artists will decide to learn it to build up their GUIs?
"And now, we will demonstrate iterating over a list of icons with this tail-recursive function returning into an anonymous XY tuple..."
It handles more formats than either Quicktime player or Windows Media Player.
4. A pain in the posterior to use
It is far, far nicer as a UI than either Quicktime or WMP. No stupid frames, add-panels, or buttons totally different from the style guidelines. Just a bare window with the movie inside, and 5 simple keystrokes to control it.
"Ok, dude. First figure out your CD drive. Then choose the command line programs that support your drive. Then create an ISO yourself, and insert a disk in the drive. Don't forget to unmount it before you eject, man! Now press 'burn' and pray to the penguin wanna-be-gods that it works the first time. If it doesn't, you'll need some righteous incantations to get it working!"
Even a year ago you were wrong about this, and k3b hasn't gotten worse since then.
I'm a programmer and I've read the technical specifications. The number one design requirement is to deny the owner access to his keys, the number two requirement is to
Is there a website which annotates (or "fisks") the TCPA specs to more directly map the technical features to the practical effects they'll have on networked data transmission?
I'm personally tired of people complaining "remote attestation isn't really in the spec" or "you can change/disable your key if you really want" and repeatedly composing similar replies. It'd be nice if they could find answers from google, but it doesn't appear to have good references indexed.
The existing TCPA FAQs seem too vague, on the level of marketers, not programmers.
And without the key you cannot read or alter any of your files except as permitted by the Trust chip and system software.
Just a miscellaneous prediction from me: 5 years after the TCPA rollout (simultaneous with the Longhorn launch probably), a free program will come out which includes schematics for a small hardware device to emulate a keyboard. This program will be installed on a non-TCPA PC with a camera, and it will send keystrokes to a TCPA system, photographing and OCRing each page of each file on it, eventually creating DRM-stripped copies of all the data.
One year after that, TCPA-approval will be revoked from all programs whose GUIs don't include a system to detect repetitive keystrokes, to fight back against that workaround. "Sorry, you have looked through files too fast. Someone might be videotaping the documents. Please wait 60 seconds and then try to Page Down again. Meanwhile, check out this hot new single from Brittany Duff!"
Slashdot Mirror
Me again. First, a tip: to get your comment read (or even meaningly responded to), stay under the page limit. Reply to the top level multiple times, if you have to. Working with that volume of text in a little CGI box just CAN'T be fun.
There are no 5000 person killing sprees that go on for days.
The record, I think, was 718.
(e) If you want it, convince reviewers to review it. That means longer review times. That means players being willing to wait for later reviews
When (the first) Half-Life and then Far Cry came out, the reviewers heavily touted the "incredible" AI. A little improvement to AI can go a long, long way in making a game seem more fun, surprising, and real.
I will generously interpret the article's call for an AI as dominant as Sam Fischer to be a bunch of hyperbole. Nobody likes to be invisibly stalked for 5 minutes and then strangled between a dangling ninja's thighs... but if some monsters THOUGHT they were sneaking up on you, even if they were somewhat detectable, that could be fun.
Obviously, instant loading is better than no instant loading, but if something has to go due to a lack of development time (and there's never enough of that), trickle loading is a popular candidate for eviction.
Plus, some reviewers publish the time it took them to play-through, and customers interpret that statistic as getting more hours of entertainment per dollar. Worse loading code actually artificially inflates that quality metric.
Why are you inexplicably seeing from a vantage point hovering in mid-air *behind* the snowboarder, with a wider range of view than he would have available?
No, the player's FOV is smaller than what an actual snowboarder would have. True, the chasecam effect gives a bonus, but not enough to compensate for the fact that a TV screen only covers under 10% of a human's actual ocular FOV. (Ask yourself the simple question: can I see the room behind my game screen, or not?) Chasecams can increase realism in several ways. Real humans have more than 5 senses, including touch, equilibrium, and an ability to know the position of your own limbs (without bending down and gazing at your feet). A visual game screen can't communicate those well, but allowing the player to "see" his own body is the easiest workaround.
Chasecam's main unrealism is the "periscope effect", which allows the player to peek around the corner at an enemy without exposing himself to detection. This could be mostly removed by adding a line-of-sight test for drawing objects, but typical players enjoy both the game benefit and the visual appeal.
Another benefit (which could be considered to be a drawback) is that there isn't the easy temptation to just save at rapid intervals and get past something step-by-step always hovering there -- the idea being that you might want to cheat in the short term, but that you'll regret it over the course of the whole game.
The main pragmatic complaint voiced about checkpoints is related to the fact that save/load game features are used for two quite separate functions. Sometimes you need to reload for game-world events (killed by a monster), and sometimes for real-world events (the carpool is waiting outside).
Naturally, the game designer is only aware of the game world, so checkpoint positions can only be "known good" relative to one of the two uses for save/load. That's why the best solutions are usually some combo of checkpoints and explicit save.
It is true that reflexively quick save/load on small time deltas can be a form of cheating that drains challenge and/or fun from a game... but then again, the "cheat codes" instantly available on gamefaqs.com are also cheating. If some players find that approach more fun, let them have it, just as other kinds of single-player cheating should be permissible.
(Hardcore players might like a difficulty option to constrain their savegames so they only can be used to resume after real
Take for example (SPOILER)
Thanks, because I only heard about him getting a cyborg body twenty-three years ago.
People who work in a professional prepress environment can afford to pay the extra $500 expense out of revenues.
False. In many parts of Africa and Asia, commerical print shops would significantly cut into annual earnings by paying $500 for Photoshop.
so having that functionality in an mp3 player is really nice as you don't have to carry around two devices.
Having all functionality in one device can be really bad, too. Leave music playing and wear out the phone so you can't get calls anymore? Bad.
On 10-hour airplane flight where phone usage is prohibited, and you can't listen to music? Bad.
In a gym where cameras are prohibited, so you can't listen to music / take calls? Bad.
Unable to upgrade/replace any of your portable electronics without replacing ALL of them? Bad.
To acquire a FOSS app (assuming you're using a really dumbed down version of Linux):
What a remarkable assumption.
With skills like that, you could also prove that bicycles are faster than airplanes, because assuming that the pilot has both hands cut off, he won't fly very quickly at all!
In five years, only one will remain.
Yeah, just like how there is only one Cola company, and Pepsi is completely bankrupt. And like how Amazon.com is the ONLY place to buy books online.
Monoplies only happen if there is a measuable barrier-to-entry in the market, either technical or legal. Postal DVD rental doesn't have a barrier like that, so there will probably stay two companies (functionally interchangable with each other).
I probably should make a Trusted Computing website. It would save me a lot of typing in a lot of posts, but it's a daunting project to do a proper job on it.
You've already produced more than 14 pages worth in the past 36 hours. That should really be more than enough. Put it in a slashdot journal entry for easy hosting.
Probably easier to do it by hand anyway.
No. Have you ever scanned a book?
It doesn't do much good for extracting other data
Yes it could.
Ideally, he will give the donkey none, or at least the fewest necessary to get to market.
Humans, at least those capable of valuable creative work, are significantly smarter than donkeys. They cannot be fooled for long (and it would be fraudulent to try). There is no meaningful difference between presenting a human with a reward and the opportunity for a reward. If the opportunity is not consistently fulfilled, it's effectiveness as incentive will quickly be nullified.
Plus, unless he profits more from getting to market than he loses by wasting carrots on the donkey, the whole exercise is pointless, and the donkey should get nothing.
Which is exactly what I said, so you don't really need to waste your time repeating it. You are once again apparently confusing me with the person whom I was refuting. It wasn't I who claimed copyright is meant to reward authors!
You should avoid having romantic ideas about authors when considering copyright policy. It only fucks things up.
You should avoid verbosely antagonizing people based on things you only imagine them to have written. Save it for someone who actually HAS a contrary opinion.
And 99.44% of copyrighted works have no value to their authors while the authors are alive, or after their deaths. So it is a bad idea to have long copyright terms, since very few people will profit from them, and the long terms are not necessary in order to encourage authors to create.
I agree fully to all that, which is only natural, since to the degree it is relevant at all, it completely supports my position.
I think that the life of the author should be irrelevant.
Which is the ONLY thing I was saying in that message (outside of the joking postscript). So why did you act as if you were contradicting me? It can only have been a failure to read carefully.
Yes you are, because it is tremendously rare to create a work with economic value
That makes NO logical sense. Your conclusions as to what I am saying have no relationship or resembelance to the grounds by which you claim them (and those grounds are themselves false). Just not paying attention.
because it is tremendously rare to create a work with economic value that lasts not only until death, but beyond.
The majority of commerically produced works have economic value for at least 5 years (assuming they had ANY value to begin with, which some of them do not due to audience disapproval). Any individual human has more than a 4% chance of death within a 5 year period. So an event you called "tremendously rare" will actually happen 4% of the time.
It doesn't. Star Wars -- the movie -- falls within the realm of general knowledge.
Not for any of the definitions of "knowledge" found in an English dictionary. Knowledge is by definition not "creative", but observed from the world around you- just like science (which explains how they may have been used interchangably)
They tapped into the amplifier points.
That's why there can be no amplifiers in QC. Which is why the range will always be bad, and it will hardly be useful for anything.
Even in a pure OTP, the only flaw is the human factor. But that does not mean that said cryptosystem is not unbreakable.
If you break the human, but not the crypto, then you've only broken the human, not the crypto. Q.E.D.
I was guessing that the whole point of doing one photon at a time was that the reciever would be checking the stream one photon at a time and would instantly know if one had been intercepted
No, although that is a separate reasonable plan to detect man-in-the-middle.
However, it has a number of shortcomings. Mainly- how does the reciever know what time the message was SUPPOSED to arrive? If the spy is intercepting the messages, and then retransmitting them, he could also edit the timestamp in each one, so that it appears to have been sent later than it really was, "erasing" the extra time he spent reading it.
Various back-and-forth efforts to fight this are possible.
And, do the sender and reciever even have clocks accurately synchronized enough to notice the difference? (Not too much of a problem today, with GPS time code satellites)
Of all the professional cryptographers I know--and that's quite a few--none of them believe QKE is not a cryptographic algorithm.
Ha ha! Do they seriously believe that QKE can be performed without specialized transmission hardware?
Cryptography is codes. It is algorithms. It is mathmatical functions transforming one number to another. It is software.
It is not exploitation of laws of particle physics such that transmitted energy cannot be intercepted without detection. Cryptography is just math, so it can function even without physics.
If you still think a electrical machine implementing a very specific communication channel between two points is a "code" or "encryption", then you need to go back to your crypto 101 book and read up on exactly what a "code" is. For any genuine code, I can use it to encrypt my hard disk or my outgoing emails. QKE is not even concievably applicable to those problems, because it is not a code.
If you construe "code" so generically that QKE applies, then "10 guys with machine guns escorting a station wagon full of CD-Rs" is also a "code".
PS. Are you prehaps a foreign student in the USA? ESL might explain this.
Maybe you didn't actually read what I wrote, because that was a large amount of irrelevant text that could make sense in other contexts.
The problem is that what if she owns a gold mine that is contaminated with radioactive waste -- nothing is likely to be extracted from it, it provides no profit, and is unlikely to in the future.
If the mine is contaminated, it has no value to the woman while she is alive. I was discussing the specific claim that people who are dying deserve to have their money (or profitable possession) taken from them.
Logically, if you say that copyright should end at death, you should also believe in taking physical property at death (which many people do, at least partially).
You're basically saying that if you win the lottery, we've got to give special treatment to your kids.
No, I am not. You are evidently blabbing away without paying any attention to the highly specific point I was discussing.
Plus, fixed terms are predictable.
Yes, their predictability is indeed useful. That's why everything I said (in this post) was in favor of fixed terms. If you think I said anything different... then you either didn't read carefully, or clicked the wrong "reply" button.
In 1789, when the Constitution was written, 'science' meant general knowledge, and 'the useful arts' meant applied technology.
Did you notice that that sentence is agreeing with me? Star Wars is not applied technology, so it is outside the scope of Constitutional authority to control (unless you use the commerce clause as a blanket permission to do anything Congress wants)
Althought I too would prefer copyrights to last under 30 years, the following is inadequate justification.
Anything longer stops making sense, because it is no longer the artist we are protecting, but the heirs or the corporate entities who happen to own copyrights to whatever artistic work is in question.
The majority of humans are social creatures, possessing affection for other people as well as themselves. A parent values her children, and protecting them is considerably similar to protecting her. (Conversely, murdering those same children would be interpreted as a kind of attack on the parent).
If a woman owns a gold mine from which is extracted $100,000 / year, it helps her on her deathbed to know that it will go to her daughters. The feeling evoked by owning the copyright to a perennially popular book will be quite similar.
If you feel that people should not be able to pass their valuable possessions to designated heirs, then propose a 100% estate tax and be done with it. (I do not think you'd really want that)
It would be quite wrong to, for example, make all copyrights expire exactly when the original artist dies (the surest way of cutting off benefits to heirs). That would be terribly discriminatory against the elderly, aside from inspiring assasination attempts against major computer programmers.
The original intent of copyright law was to protect the artist themselves - a 20 to 25 year term for copyright makes sense in this context.
No. If you go by the USA's Constitution, it was meant to promote progress of the arts*. Protection for the artists is only a means towards that goal, not an objective on its own.
The real reason why a shorter time like 20-30 years is appropriate is that it gives the best tradeoff between helping original artists (allowing them time to profit from the work) and later artists (permitting them to expand on old ideas without bogging down their creativity with licensing struggles).
It is through an examination of the business strategies of existing publishing corporations you can learn that 10 years is about as far ahead as they plan the sales of a work- anything further they're not thinking of when commissioning the work, so longer times cannot act as (much) incentive for their creativity. Multiply that 10 years by 2 or 3 creates an adequate buffer to protect authors who experience a few years delay in profiting from the sales, for one whim of fate or another.
* Technically, the Constitution only allows protection for "useful arts", so by a strict interpretation, copyright protection for base entertainment like Star Wars is illegal.
I have a few ideas regarding patent and trademark law as well, but my real passion and focus is copyright.
Just for fun, I hearby propose that no person shall be liable for copyright infringement of any work published on or before her date of birth. This will formalize a longstanding effect that people generally had the right to re-interpret the cultural background they were born into, and move Star Wars into the same category as Beowulf, Shakespere, and Sherlock Holmes.
In practice, since most people start getting into the commercial workforce at around 25, this will be close to the effect of "founder's copyright".
I guess it would cause some major age discrimination at some classes of firms... oh well, they'll just have to pick a revolving 18 year old to hold legal title and then lease it back to them.
One could argue a recording of their neighbors/roomates/etc. having sex (with or without their knowledge) has a "reasonable expectation" of being commercially distributed.
And one could be laughed out of court.
In practice, virtually any true "expected commercial distribution" can be trivially demonstrated by a few paychecks or business plans, or by similar materials previously sold for profit by the same owner.
The only people likely to intend something for sale without having created abundant paperwork to back them up are poor indie artists looking for their "big break", and those kinds of folks won't have too much incentive to press charges anyway.
Chances are, if the work becomes popular on P2p, that'll just help the guy secure a big label to fund his next project. For example, both South Park and Lord of the Rings (the original 1920s books) became commercially profitable only after widespread illegal copying had made them vastly popular.
Distributing that sex tape, by the way, will probably be illegal under harsher laws against invasion of privacy, including gigantic damages for emotional distress.
Some people are obsessed with the idea of doing away with the law (in particular abandoning copyright)
Doubtful. Can you honestly name one DRM-proponent who also wants to absolish copyright?!?
All I've seen is they want to make "circumventing copy protection" illegal, so they can then essentially write their own rules that obselete copyright by being more strict in every regard.
Add in some encryption, and there you go.
No, you need a lot more than that. The system as described is quite vulnerable to "poisoning": the intentional upload of corrupt, non-playable versions of a file. It is expected that publishing corporations will attempt to poison any anonymous P2p networks which distribute their files.
To combat poisoning, many more mechanisms are required, such as an anonymous authority who downloads many files and provides hash stamps as to which ones are real and fake- and he'll need to use clever cryptography to allow the P2P leechers to recognize him as a trusted reviewer, without also allowing MPAA detectives to track him down for arrest. (PKI will work well there)
Those supporting both non-consensual file sharing and non-consensual film editing are essentially saying they both want to deprive artists of the ability to make money from music sales,
Oh, so now you've decided that 3rd-party editing is about money and sales, when earlier you wrote it was about creative integrity, and not money at all:
As for the second bit, the movie industry is taking the side of artists here who are immensely unhappy with the idea of their works being edited in this way. Not everything is about money and royalties.
The George W Bush method: give as many different justifications for your actions as can be imagined, so that you still have some left over when the first ones turn out to be untrue.
As for the second bit, the movie industry is taking the side of artists here who are immensely unhappy with the idea of their works being edited in this way. Not everything is about money and royalties.
Nope. Everything is about money. All those "artists" allow their works to be censored for television, which frequently renders them laughably bad.
They don't like it, but they accept it because it gets them money. A rare few don't accept it at all, which is their right, as copyright allows them to prohibit public performance by the TV station.
But by the ancient doctrine of first sale, they have NO RIGHT to attempt control of an individual copy once it has been sold to the public.
Probably, if this law passed, some artists would go ahead and permit censored DVDs to be sold, just as they today permit censored TV broadcast. But in that case, of course, they'll hold out for a little more money.
So many of these guys are arguing for "artistic integrity", which they will turn around and sell for money and royalties. So, who was "promoting whoredom" again?
and continue to refer to the finished product as being "by" that artist, is grossly unfair, and is misrepresenting them.
And since the censoring companies proudly advertise that they have altered the movie from the original version, that will never happen.
In the event they are mislabelling censored versions as the original, they will already be guilty of consumer fraud under existing laws. There is no call for a new law to make it redundantly illegal, while also outlawing legitimate uses of editing.
Note that such a proposed law could also make it illegal to resell a used work if there is any accidental damage to the medium- no more used books on amazon.
Go right ahead, but do the decent thing and take their name off the film unless they consent to it.
Now THAT would be fraudulent misrepresenation!
What about that feature, which name I've forgotton, that should allow the graphical teams to develop e.g. the Windows dialogboxes with an ML-sort of language?
Do you know how few computer scientists can manage programming in ML? And do you seriously think grahpics artists will decide to learn it to build up their GUIs?
"And now, we will demonstrate iterating over a list of icons with this tail-recursive function returning into an anonymous XY tuple..."
3. Not fully compatible
It handles more formats than either Quicktime player or Windows Media Player.
4. A pain in the posterior to use
It is far, far nicer as a UI than either Quicktime or WMP. No stupid frames, add-panels, or buttons totally different from the style guidelines. Just a bare window with the movie inside, and 5 simple keystrokes to control it.
"Ok, dude. First figure out your CD drive. Then choose the command line programs that support your drive. Then create an ISO yourself, and insert a disk in the drive. Don't forget to unmount it before you eject, man! Now press 'burn' and pray to the penguin wanna-be-gods that it works the first time. If it doesn't, you'll need some righteous incantations to get it working!"
Even a year ago you were wrong about this, and k3b hasn't gotten worse since then.
I'm a programmer and I've read the technical specifications. The number one design requirement is to deny the owner access to his keys, the number two requirement is to
Is there a website which annotates (or "fisks") the TCPA specs to more directly map the technical features to the practical effects they'll have on networked data transmission?
I'm personally tired of people complaining "remote attestation isn't really in the spec" or "you can change/disable your key if you really want" and repeatedly composing similar replies. It'd be nice if they could find answers from google, but it doesn't appear to have good references indexed.
The existing TCPA FAQs seem too vague, on the level of marketers, not programmers.
And without the key you cannot read or alter any of your files except as permitted by the Trust chip and system software.
Just a miscellaneous prediction from me: 5 years after the TCPA rollout (simultaneous with the Longhorn launch probably), a free program will come out which includes schematics for a small hardware device to emulate a keyboard. This program will be installed on a non-TCPA PC with a camera, and it will send keystrokes to a TCPA system, photographing and OCRing each page of each file on it, eventually creating DRM-stripped copies of all the data.
One year after that, TCPA-approval will be revoked from all programs whose GUIs don't include a system to detect repetitive keystrokes, to fight back against that workaround. "Sorry, you have looked through files too fast. Someone might be videotaping the documents. Please wait 60 seconds and then try to Page Down again. Meanwhile, check out this hot new single from Brittany Duff!"