It is still a problem though, as by the strict interpretation of the law, even tempoary copies of the data in the computer memory on the way to being displayed are a violation of copyright law.
Of course, if anyone ever tried to argue this, it would be immediately ruled as coming under "fair use". But, the "fair use" provisions are really ancillary to the central tenents of copyright law, so it is quite disturbing that digital copyright relies on "fair use" in such a fundamental way.
Especially since laws like the DMCA effectively eliminate "fair use".
Yeah it is a huge joke to think that, if current copyrights ever expire, anyone will be able to read the media anyway. I really feel sorry for the achaeologists of the future. Hopefully decryption tools will advance a lot and today's copy protection mechanisms will be trivially breakable. Otherwise there is a real danger that much of human cultural history will simply be lost forever.
can you imagine this: A museum curator of the future undertakes a last-ditch search for a 500-year-old DVD player so they can copy a bunch of DVD's which are in imminent danger of falling apart becoming unreadable. After a heroic effort, a DVD reader is finally found in an archaelogical dig in a remote village in China. After figuring out how to wire up the reader, they insert the now extremely fragile copy of "Die Hard 15: Die Harder Still". Unfortunately, the only picture they can get is a blank screen, with the confusing text "Invalid Region".... An important artifact of human culture is lost forever....
The problem is, the publishers' are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
If they really sold you the physical media, and you were free to do anything you liked with it there would be no problem. (Of course, subject to existing laws, like you are not allowed to hit someone over the head with it and kill them, you are not allowed to violate copyright and sell copies of it, etc etc etc)
But, software publishers especially, (but even book publishers) try to apply additional restrictions, to the point that you don't actually own the physical media anymore, you are instead "licenced" to make use of the product for some period of time. In this scenario, the phyical media is actually irrelevant, it makes no difference at all whether it came from a CD "bought" at the local store or downloaded from the internet. If the CD gets scratched or you accidentally erase your harddrive, it does not affect your licence to use the content. That is, if you can obtain the content from some other source, you are free to use it. Thus, forcing people to pay the full cost of an additional licence just to get a copy of something they already had a licence to use anyway is double-dipping (especially when it is a download with a marginal cost of zero). An analogy would be, if you lost your driver's licence, instead of just charging some nominal fee for the replacement of the card, charging the full cost of a new driver's licence (or even making you do the test again).
Now, I don't necessarily agree with this model at all, but just stating how (some people think) it works.
I believe it is quite legal to copy or scan every page of a book, as long as you do not distribute the copy. I might be wrong though. It doesn't matter much because that is completely unenforcable anyway. But I think DVD's are different in this respect.
My understanding of the DMCA is that the anticircumvention provisions only apply to copyrighted works. Once the copyright expires, it becomes legal to circumvent the copy protection (or more generally, s/copy protection/access control mechanism/).
I may be wrong here, the quotes in the article certainly suggest otherwise. But I think a law that prohibits breaking ANY access control mechanism is completely ridiculous. It could be interpreted as making it illegal to remove the screws holding the cover on your toaster, for example.
Weeeell, back in the old days, when copyright law was invented, copyright protection was not really a bad thing because it affected practically nobody (since so few people had a printing press), while benefitting practically everybody.
Nowdays, digital copyright protection affects practically everybody (since practically everyone has access to a digital computer of some form), while benefitting practically nobody (the 0.0001% of society that are RIAA executives, and to a lesser extent, authors).
Now, protection for authors' is certainly a worthy goal. But I think whether the way to achieve this is via copyright protection is a debatable point. Although it is not clear what the alternative would be, copyright protection is only going to get increasingly artificial and harmful as time goes on (and the cost of copying dimishes).
The problem is that "fair use" applies to copyright law. Unfortunately there is no similar "fair use" provision in the DMCA for circumventing copy protection.
One of the arguments of the case has been that it does not matter whether copyright is violated or not, as circumventing copy protection is illegal irrespective of the copyright.
But, as I understand the DMCA, there is a link though between copyright and copy protection, as the act only prohibits copy protection when it is applied to a copyrighted work. That is, it is legal to circumvent the copy protection when the content is not under copyright. But, some comments by the lawyers quoted in the article suggest that this is not true, and circumventing ANY copy protection system is illegal? Is that really the case?
Easy solution: print 2 numbers: a score, and the standard deviation. How hard would that be?
Very easy. But I suspect that, in very many graphics card reviews I've seen in the last few years, the standard deviations are big enough to completely swamp the (insignificant) differences between cards. Which do you think sells more copy: "Graphics card X beats card Y on 90% of benchmarks!" (with the unstated fine-print that the 'improvement' is 0.001%) or "Graphics cards X and Y are statistically indistinguishable on all benchmarks!".
The best thing to do, when reading a graphics card comparison, is to ignore the text completely and imagine some error bar, perhaps 5% - 10% is reasonable on all the data. Then make your own conclusions.
under what circumstances is price harvesting off of the internet not allowed?
The answer to that is, "when influencial businesses can dictate the law to their own ends". I am sure that a great many (non-internet) businesses would love to ban people from walking around their store with a notepad jotting down prices.
The promise of the Internet was that it would make everyone equal: the vastly increased flexibility in how online salespeople can rip you off was supposed to be counterbalanced by the consumer's (or groups of consumers) ability to counteract this by actively extending the functionality of the internet by policing these actions, an important component of which is keeping track of prices/goods/services offered by various merchants.
This 'ideal' absolutely must be enshined in law (probably international law is the correct forum), otherwise it will be whittled away in some juristictions where business has a controlling influence on the legal process (read: USA), and then pressure on the rest of the world to conform.
It is a failure of humanity that we always choose the most optimistic outcome for an upcoming technology. The 'promise' of computers and automation was the paperless office, no more menial tasks resulting in increased leisure time for everyone. The reality is more wasted paper than ever before (printing another copy of the whole document, just to eradicate a typo, is but a mouse click away), and a smaller fraction of the population working much longer hours, while the rest suffer unemployment.
In hindsight, both of these effects can be seen to be at least as likely as the 'promise'. A proper analysis back in the days when it might have been possible to make a difference, might well have shown that it was in fact the far more likely outcome.
The same mistake has been made with the Internet. While the 'promise' of equality and empowering individuals is a possible outcome, the underlying technology also allows unprecedented restrictions on freedom. Given the track record, which do you think is more likely?
What will be required to reverse the course, if the 'promise' doesn't come to fruition? Are there any comparable examples from history?
It certainly isn't a dumb idea, because it works in many other countries without any problems.
The problem with them in the USA is cultural baggage (Italy, especially older Italians, have the same problem with the Euro coins). Americans are simply used to being able to carry a large stack of $1 notes around with them even though it is actually rather pointless doing so. How many quarters do you carry around with you? Why should the number of dollar coins you need to carry be any larger?
Yeah the UK currency is a mess, it will be much better once they get rid of their toy currency and join the Euro.
The Australian coins are a bit of a mess too, but not as big. The only really bad anomaly is the $2 coin is much smaller than the $1. It was a mistake making the $1 coin so big (but understandable, since it was a big step introducing it). They were then stuck because it wasn't really possible to make a $2 coin that was even bigger than the $1 without it being too unwieldy.
I think the plan is, when they eventually get around to replacing the $5 note with a coin (probably many years away) they will redo the $1 and $2 coins at the same time. Perhaps with bi-coloured coins patterned after the 1 and 2 euro coins?
And, I have never seen a half-dollar. But I have only spent about 4 months in the USA (spread over several short trips).
IIRC, the USA 10c coin is much smaller than the 5c ? Or have I got that round the wrong way? I do like the quarters though. They stack very well. For whatever reason, I find 25c to be a nicer amount than 20. Before they got the Euro, the old Dutch currency had a 0.25 and 2.5 guiler coins, and a 25 guilder note (and I guess a 250 guilder note too? Never saw the notes above 100). Unusual, but nice. More consistent than the USA scheme where you can get a quarter of $1 but not a quarter of $10 or $100.
My guess as to why Americans don't like change (as a foreigner who's visited a couple of times): you never know what the correct price is going to be until you get to the checkout. Like, your standing in the queue at macdonalds for 10 minutes, figure out what you want, see that that price listed on the menu is, say, $4.85 so you collect together the right change.
Then you go to pay for it and the cashier says "that will be $5.17 please!" D'OH!
Why oh why can't they just add the tax to the friggin price list????? Every other country on the planet does!
They are pretty rare, but I think most (all?) shops accept them. I havn't encountered an ATM that gives them out, but I did recieve some once (in Germany - maybe they go in for big notes?) as reimbursement for travel expenses.
There are also 200 and 500 euro notes (I think 200 is yellow-ish, 500 is red-ish) which I have never seen, and probably never will. A lot of shops have a sign saying they won't accept them.
Well, until a year or two ago the Intel approach was undeniably the winner. That is how they managed to get to be king of the hill in the first place. But for sure, branch prediction has huge theoretical limits. Consider:
while (1)
{
if (rand() % 2) foo(); else bar();
}
How do you branch-predict that? Beyond simple for-loops (predict correctly N times in a row, predict wrong exactly once at the end of the loop) it gets very difficult.
But branch-prediction is only one part of the total pipeline performance, and you are arguing the wrong way anyway. Overall, it is the slower clock speed processors where pipelining is more important. In these processors you need to make sure the pipeline is full to get more operations per clock, to compensate for the slower clock speed. At 3GHz, it doesn't matter much if your code doesn't pipeline very well. At 500MHz, it is critical. That is why pentiums are such good general purpose processors, and why Itanium sucks.
I agree with you that they now play the thug to stay on top (burying alpha, doing a huge con job with Itanium etc etc).
Because Intel found that the best way to improve overall performance is to increase the clock speed, even at the expense of making the per-clock performance worse.
They are right too: where has almost all of the increases in performance come from? Not from doubling the number of instructions processed per clock every 18 months, that is for sure.
Yes, I think you are correct here. The amount of misleading comments and direct lies told by politicans, even in 'normal' conversation, is so huge that surely they genuinely believe it themselves. It is interesting what such a brain scan would show for such a person, since they are not actually 'lying', but far more dangerous.
Re:I'd be glad for technology like this.
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 1
But what about the 'horny level' of your daughter?
Yes, this is the only sensible long-term outcome of having such scans widely available.
Unfortunately, a more likely outcome is that such scans are not widely available, or available only to a narrow class of people. For example, your employer can scan you to see if you have a predisposition to stealing office paperclips, but you cannot scan your employer to see if he has a predisposition to ripping you off on your overtime.
Another possible scenario is that this sort of scanning takes a long time to become fully realized (quite likely, since the technology will take a long time (10's to 100's of years?) to develop, even if it is possible at all). In this time, anyone falling outside the social 'norms' (read: not a corporate non-thinking drone) is quitely excised from society. Something like what ACC describes in 3001; people just accept that society is less interesting, in exchange for security... Hmm, sounds familiar! (Although the security was actually real, today it is total fiction.)
I think you are being too narrow here (I don't mean that in a derogatory sense at all). I agree completely that it is 'social conventions' that keep society civilized. But I think it does not actually matter much what those social conventions are, as long as they exist. There are plenty of cultures where what you describe is perfectly acceptable (even a social convention). In such a culture, an American tourist being very sensitive about the bathroom arrangements is a source of homour. The converse (say, someone who doesn't speak English and can't decipher the symbols on the toilet door) is likely to be a source of prison statistics.
I imagine you can guess my opinion on which is the healthier society.
I think much of this is cultural (ie, US/anglo prudishness). In some parts of Europe, for example, it is common to have dual sex toilets in public places, and even common changing rooms at places like public pools. This is partly due to much greater distinction between sex and nakedness (typical of northern europe, where it is perfectly acceptable to show full-frontal nudity on evening television, for example), and partly due to more tolerance (or maybe apathy?). You say that you wouldn't want someone who might find you sexually attractive to watch you shower, but the only reason you give is selfishness: if you can't shower with someone you might find sexually attractive, then why should the converse be allowed? This is regressive - the progressive solution is simply to allow it for everyone. As you say, we are all big girls and boys now and we ought to be able to shower with the female recruits without turning into lunatic rapists.
And why should you not be allowed to become a girl scout leader? There are plenty of female boy scout leaders (at least in Australia). I do not know of any make girl scout leaders in Oz (I would not be surpised if there were none), which is very sad IMO.
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Of course, if anyone ever tried to argue this, it would be immediately ruled as coming under "fair use". But, the "fair use" provisions are really ancillary to the central tenents of copyright law, so it is quite disturbing that digital copyright relies on "fair use" in such a fundamental way.
Especially since laws like the DMCA effectively eliminate "fair use".
Yeah it is a huge joke to think that, if current copyrights ever expire, anyone will be able to read the media anyway. I really feel sorry for the achaeologists of the future. Hopefully decryption tools will advance a lot and today's copy protection mechanisms will be trivially breakable. Otherwise there is a real danger that much of human cultural history will simply be lost forever.
can you imagine this: A museum curator of the future undertakes a last-ditch search for a 500-year-old DVD player so they can copy a bunch of DVD's which are in imminent danger of falling apart becoming unreadable. After a heroic effort, a DVD reader is finally found in an archaelogical dig in a remote village in China. After figuring out how to wire up the reader, they insert the now extremely fragile copy of "Die Hard 15: Die Harder Still". Unfortunately, the only picture they can get is a blank screen, with the confusing text "Invalid Region".... An important artifact of human culture is lost forever....
If they really sold you the physical media, and you were free to do anything you liked with it there would be no problem. (Of course, subject to existing laws, like you are not allowed to hit someone over the head with it and kill them, you are not allowed to violate copyright and sell copies of it, etc etc etc)
But, software publishers especially, (but even book publishers) try to apply additional restrictions, to the point that you don't actually own the physical media anymore, you are instead "licenced" to make use of the product for some period of time. In this scenario, the phyical media is actually irrelevant, it makes no difference at all whether it came from a CD "bought" at the local store or downloaded from the internet. If the CD gets scratched or you accidentally erase your harddrive, it does not affect your licence to use the content. That is, if you can obtain the content from some other source, you are free to use it. Thus, forcing people to pay the full cost of an additional licence just to get a copy of something they already had a licence to use anyway is double-dipping (especially when it is a download with a marginal cost of zero). An analogy would be, if you lost your driver's licence, instead of just charging some nominal fee for the replacement of the card, charging the full cost of a new driver's licence (or even making you do the test again).
Now, I don't necessarily agree with this model at all, but just stating how (some people think) it works.
I believe it is quite legal to copy or scan every page of a book, as long as you do not distribute the copy. I might be wrong though. It doesn't matter much because that is completely unenforcable anyway. But I think DVD's are different in this respect.
I may be wrong here, the quotes in the article certainly suggest otherwise. But I think a law that prohibits breaking ANY access control mechanism is completely ridiculous. It could be interpreted as making it illegal to remove the screws holding the cover on your toaster, for example.
Nowdays, digital copyright protection affects practically everybody (since practically everyone has access to a digital computer of some form), while benefitting practically nobody (the 0.0001% of society that are RIAA executives, and to a lesser extent, authors).
Now, protection for authors' is certainly a worthy goal. But I think whether the way to achieve this is via copyright protection is a debatable point. Although it is not clear what the alternative would be, copyright protection is only going to get increasingly artificial and harmful as time goes on (and the cost of copying dimishes).
One of the arguments of the case has been that it does not matter whether copyright is violated or not, as circumventing copy protection is illegal irrespective of the copyright.
But, as I understand the DMCA, there is a link though between copyright and copy protection, as the act only prohibits copy protection when it is applied to a copyrighted work. That is, it is legal to circumvent the copy protection when the content is not under copyright. But, some comments by the lawyers quoted in the article suggest that this is not true, and circumventing ANY copy protection system is illegal? Is that really the case?
Very easy. But I suspect that, in very many graphics card reviews I've seen in the last few years, the standard deviations are big enough to completely swamp the (insignificant) differences between cards. Which do you think sells more copy: "Graphics card X beats card Y on 90% of benchmarks!" (with the unstated fine-print that the 'improvement' is 0.001%) or "Graphics cards X and Y are statistically indistinguishable on all benchmarks!".
The best thing to do, when reading a graphics card comparison, is to ignore the text completely and imagine some error bar, perhaps 5% - 10% is reasonable on all the data. Then make your own conclusions.
The answer to that is, "when influencial businesses can dictate the law to their own ends". I am sure that a great many (non-internet) businesses would love to ban people from walking around their store with a notepad jotting down prices.
The promise of the Internet was that it would make everyone equal: the vastly increased flexibility in how online salespeople can rip you off was supposed to be counterbalanced by the consumer's (or groups of consumers) ability to counteract this by actively extending the functionality of the internet by policing these actions, an important component of which is keeping track of prices/goods/services offered by various merchants.
This 'ideal' absolutely must be enshined in law (probably international law is the correct forum), otherwise it will be whittled away in some juristictions where business has a controlling influence on the legal process (read: USA), and then pressure on the rest of the world to conform.
It is a failure of humanity that we always choose the most optimistic outcome for an upcoming technology. The 'promise' of computers and automation was the paperless office, no more menial tasks resulting in increased leisure time for everyone. The reality is more wasted paper than ever before (printing another copy of the whole document, just to eradicate a typo, is but a mouse click away), and a smaller fraction of the population working much longer hours, while the rest suffer unemployment.
In hindsight, both of these effects can be seen to be at least as likely as the 'promise'. A proper analysis back in the days when it might have been possible to make a difference, might well have shown that it was in fact the far more likely outcome.
The same mistake has been made with the Internet. While the 'promise' of equality and empowering individuals is a possible outcome, the underlying technology also allows unprecedented restrictions on freedom. Given the track record, which do you think is more likely?
What will be required to reverse the course, if the 'promise' doesn't come to fruition? Are there any comparable examples from history?
It is not unusual to get passed the occasional NZ twenty, I've never had a problem with shops (or even banks) refusing to accept them.
I wonder, are there more NZ twenties in circulation in Australia, or Australian twenties in circulation in NZ?
The problem with them in the USA is cultural baggage (Italy, especially older Italians, have the same problem with the Euro coins). Americans are simply used to being able to carry a large stack of $1 notes around with them even though it is actually rather pointless doing so. How many quarters do you carry around with you? Why should the number of dollar coins you need to carry be any larger?
The Australian coins are a bit of a mess too, but not as big. The only really bad anomaly is the $2 coin is much smaller than the $1. It was a mistake making the $1 coin so big (but understandable, since it was a big step introducing it). They were then stuck because it wasn't really possible to make a $2 coin that was even bigger than the $1 without it being too unwieldy.
I think the plan is, when they eventually get around to replacing the $5 note with a coin (probably many years away) they will redo the $1 and $2 coins at the same time. Perhaps with bi-coloured coins patterned after the 1 and 2 euro coins?
And, I have never seen a half-dollar. But I have only spent about 4 months in the USA (spread over several short trips).
IIRC, the USA 10c coin is much smaller than the 5c ? Or have I got that round the wrong way? I do like the quarters though. They stack very well. For whatever reason, I find 25c to be a nicer amount than 20. Before they got the Euro, the old Dutch currency had a 0.25 and 2.5 guiler coins, and a 25 guilder note (and I guess a 250 guilder note too? Never saw the notes above 100). Unusual, but nice. More consistent than the USA scheme where you can get a quarter of $1 but not a quarter of $10 or $100.
Then you go to pay for it and the cashier says "that will be $5.17 please!" D'OH!
Why oh why can't they just add the tax to the friggin price list????? Every other country on the planet does!
Actually, I think at one point downtown Tokyo was worth more than the whole USA :-)
Can't remember which note it is though, I just remember a Serbian friend of mine describing it once.
There are also 200 and 500 euro notes (I think 200 is yellow-ish, 500 is red-ish) which I have never seen, and probably never will. A lot of shops have a sign saying they won't accept them.
Small correction, I didn't really mean to say "year or two ago", I really mean up until the time around the K7 came out.
while (1) { if (rand() % 2) foo(); else bar(); }
How do you branch-predict that? Beyond simple for-loops (predict correctly N times in a row, predict wrong exactly once at the end of the loop) it gets very difficult.
But branch-prediction is only one part of the total pipeline performance, and you are arguing the wrong way anyway. Overall, it is the slower clock speed processors where pipelining is more important. In these processors you need to make sure the pipeline is full to get more operations per clock, to compensate for the slower clock speed. At 3GHz, it doesn't matter much if your code doesn't pipeline very well. At 500MHz, it is critical. That is why pentiums are such good general purpose processors, and why Itanium sucks.
I agree with you that they now play the thug to stay on top (burying alpha, doing a huge con job with Itanium etc etc).
They are right too: where has almost all of the increases in performance come from? Not from doubling the number of instructions processed per clock every 18 months, that is for sure.
Umm, when did SCO ever own the UNIX trademark?
Yes, I think you are correct here. The amount of misleading comments and direct lies told by politicans, even in 'normal' conversation, is so huge that surely they genuinely believe it themselves. It is interesting what such a brain scan would show for such a person, since they are not actually 'lying', but far more dangerous.
Let me guess, you never considered that? :-)
Unfortunately, a more likely outcome is that such scans are not widely available, or available only to a narrow class of people. For example, your employer can scan you to see if you have a predisposition to stealing office paperclips, but you cannot scan your employer to see if he has a predisposition to ripping you off on your overtime.
Another possible scenario is that this sort of scanning takes a long time to become fully realized (quite likely, since the technology will take a long time (10's to 100's of years?) to develop, even if it is possible at all). In this time, anyone falling outside the social 'norms' (read: not a corporate non-thinking drone) is quitely excised from society. Something like what ACC describes in 3001; people just accept that society is less interesting, in exchange for security... Hmm, sounds familiar! (Although the security was actually real, today it is total fiction.)
I imagine you can guess my opinion on which is the healthier society.
And why should you not be allowed to become a girl scout leader? There are plenty of female boy scout leaders (at least in Australia). I do not know of any make girl scout leaders in Oz (I would not be surpised if there were none), which is very sad IMO.
Unfortunately, the chances that you would actually own the information obtained from your brain scan are (in the USA at least).... zero.