I'm against this law. I don't think we should have a bill that limits a company's ability to copy-protect its intellectual property. I also don't think we should have a law restricting a citizen's ability to break that copy-protection (DMCA) either. It ruins the whole sport of it.
Let's be honest. The one thing we all truly respect around here is hacking ability. And that's how this whole game used to (and should still) work. If you were hardcore enough to figure out a way to copy-protect your stuff so that people couldn't easily break it, you deserved to have your IP protected (remember when the first SimCity came out and it shipped with a purple and black page of codes that you couldn't photocopy? Good Stuff!). And if you were enough of a cracking stud to find the tiny, oddly-named file in which X-Wing hid its copy protection (or figured out how to decrypt a DVD), by God you deserved a free copy.
It was a delicate balance, but it worked! We the technologically-gifted were able to either crack stuff on our own or find people on BBS's that could, while the lamers who made fun of us at school kept the IP-producing companies rolling in dough by buying their products at Wal-Mart.
But now they've gone and ruined the game. Where's the fun in not being able to crack stuff, and where's the fun in not being able to wrap your IP in stuff for other people to crack?
As I read this little blurb, I was thinking to myself that this probably won't help me any, since I have a pirated copy of XP (as do a nontrivial number of other users, I would imagine). My first thought was that Microsoft would require you to have an "activated" and properly registered copy of Windows and/or the MS applications you were running in order to receive the updates.
But as I thought about it, I realized that not letting the pirates patch their installs of Windows might not be in MS's best interests either. If some worm gets loose, and 98% of registered Windows users are patched, but none of the cracked copies are, the worm will replicate to the 2% of unpatched registered users much faster than if you'd allowed the pirates to receive patches instead of trying to screw them with an insecure version of the OS. That would increase the ultimate number of infected machines and influence whether or not the worm becomes a PR problem.
I'm not sure what I would do in this situation; I'd probably end up allowing pirated copies to update anyway and just try to capture their IP addresses on the sly in case I could use them later.
Exec 1: Gee guys, with this cheaper fiber, we could roll out much better speeds than what we get on the copper we use now!
Execs #2 & #3: Woo-hoo, that'll really help us get a leg up on the competition!
Exec #1: Oh, wait... We don't have any competition. We don't have to share our lines with anyone, so no one else can get their foot in the door here. I guess we'll have to bonus our expansion money out to ourselves, instead.
Exec #2 (holding plastic fiber up to his eye) : Hey, Dick, I think I can see you through this thing. Neato. Somebody get me a martini.
What's the big deal? Seems to me they have the same grasp of the issue that you do.
What's wrong with this thought process:
1) We can spend $600k making this new technology 2) It will, of course, be cracked 3) However, it will make it harder for the average person, who is technologically clueless, to pirate our stuff 4) Because of #3, we will sell $3M more to users who would commit casual piracy before easy-to-use cracks and tools become available 5) We bank an extra $2.4M
What's so stupid about putting in copy-protection to make piracy harder even though you can't completely eliminate it? If the costs work out the right way (obviously my own numbers are made up), why not do it?
You seem to be saying that pirates are hurting the bottom lines of content-creators less than their copy-protection budgets. I disagree. I have a feeling most businesses' people can handle a simple ROI check.
This is probably the most obvious question asked so far, but...
1) Is there a particular shot or effect in a film you've worked on of which you're the most proud? Does one in particular stand out to you as the best you can do (or could do with the equipment of the time)?
2) Have any of the techniques you personally created (and there must be at least a few after three decades in such an innovation-intensive field) been picked up by others and adopted as standard techniques by the other effect houses? Maybe you were the first person to use a shoe as an off-in-the-distance star-fighter, or you invented the blue screen, something of that nature?
I, personally, would reserve judgement on calling this device a "Tivo for music" until I get a little more info on how expandable it is. Half the reason Tivo has such a great community of supporters is the fact that you can mod them out and do so many things with them that the designers didn't fill in themselves (network cards, bigger drives, new software to run it, etc). If Sony can give those same capabilities with this device, then they might actually earn the honor of being compared with the Tivo line.
"How the hell does the value of the american dollar proove that its easier to read?"
It doesn't. If you think that was the point I was trying to make you have reading comprehension issues.
The point I was attempting to illustrate is that the rest of the world should just be grateful our nice, stable dollar is around at all, and shut the hell up about what color it is.
Yes, yes, you're right. I suppose we should take into account more foreign opinion on our money considering it's the most relied-upon cash in the world.
You know what the official national currency of Libya is? The American Dollar. Most businesses in poorer nations (q.v. Russia) would probably prefer dollars to their own currency as well.
Seems to me we're doing the rest of the globe a favor by making the dollar stable, let alone making it easier for them to read.
5) USB 2.0 can't power the unit, while firewire can, so I never have to bring an AC adaptor *anywhere*.
Hard to take you seriously when you can't even get simple facts straight. USB has always provided power to peripherals. Check their web site if you don't believe me.
Let me just say that these people would have to provide some pretty serious security credentials before I'd let my calls hop along other people's phones. Maybe they could PGP each person's phone. That'd be cool.
Why? Because we're early adopters, that's why! *We're* the ones who bought Beta VCRS! We had remote controls back when they had to be connected with a cord! We're the guys with the collection of laser disc movies and MiniDisc music albums. It's a tough job, and you lose tons of money on it, but by God *someone* has to drive new technology in from the fringes of the market, and we're the ones who do it!
I've looked at both, as I really want to get one of their services in my next car. I'll be going with XM when I do. The main reason is the programming differences between them. For one, XM has a person in charge of each "channel". That's a lot of individual attention to the quality of the music they put on the air. For another, there are two channels on XM that are aprticularly interesting to me a) Deep Tracks, which goes back to classic albums and picks out songs from them that were never released as singles (so you get to hear a ton of good stuff you'd ordinarily never know about) and b) Unsigned, which is made up entirely of bands that have not yet signed with a label.
YMMV, but those reasons make XM a better choice for me
I would think, if Microsoft is truly serious about the level of cheating on XBox Live, they'd use an even more basic and time-tested security measure - people. If all the games take place on their servers, this is easy to do (and I'm sure they've already planned for it).
Imagine how hard it would be for someone to use an aiming cheat or bot in UT if there was a small program that monitored all the scores on a group of servers for cheating. If this program detected someone scoring way out of the norm, an employee of the network could observe the game, see if the guy was really cheating, and then boot him and suspend or cancel his account.
That's just one example, of course, and other cheats may be harder to track (like the one you mentioned about simply knowing where the other players are). I imagine, however, that MS intends to throw a lot of money (and therefore manpower) into this newest of markets. And if they can make cheaters have to deal with a very serious chance of getting their accounts cancelled through good use of human monitoring, I think they'll win the battle.
"Only, intead of donating spare cpu cycles, you donate spare 'think cycles'."
Judging from the fact that their site crumpled within the first five minutes of slashdotting, I'm betting they'd rather have CPU cycles for at least another few hours.:)
Well, the reasoning for me would be that I'd much rather have my kid looking at boobies than watching gruesome, bloody deaths or role-playing as a violent, criminal murderer. Maybe I'm alone on this one.
The actual act of getting paid to program is a dead-end job. The act of getting paid to produce any kind of product for someone else is a dead-end job.
The reason is there's always going to be a finite amount of money you can earn. There's only so many hours in the day, and only so much people are going to be willing to pay for the hourly output of a single worker. Unless you produce intellectual property, and are one of the very, very few who can produce IP that everyone wants and will pay for, you're never going to escape the fact that your earnings will butt heads with an asymptote at some point.
Real money always has been, and probably always will be, in starting a business and skimming off the top of other workers. Once you can pay other people less than you can get for their work, you have escaped the limit, and your "job" is no longer a dead-end.
Way to go, Congress. You take a good and decent idea for a law that needs to be created (hiding video cameras in Nancy Wilson's shower should have been illegal when it occurred and the fact that it still isn't is appalling), and you throw a rider onto it that is totally outside the scope of your power and a flagrant violation of the First Ammendment, virtually guaranteeing its demise. Spiffy.
So not only will the law not pass a judicial review for Constitutionality meaning the good aspects of the law go bye-bye, but you'll be completely ignored by the internet anyway, which is an international construct.
You're on a roll now, why not vote yourselves another raise?
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like Asimov needs an update
One: a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm...
Two:..a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law...
Three: a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First and Second Laws.
Four: Don't buy any more @*#%$ Justin Timberlake albums.
I'm against this law. I don't think we should have a bill that limits a company's ability to copy-protect its intellectual property. I also don't think we should have a law restricting a citizen's ability to break that copy-protection (DMCA) either. It ruins the whole sport of it.
Let's be honest. The one thing we all truly respect around here is hacking ability. And that's how this whole game used to (and should still) work. If you were hardcore enough to figure out a way to copy-protect your stuff so that people couldn't easily break it, you deserved to have your IP protected (remember when the first SimCity came out and it shipped with a purple and black page of codes that you couldn't photocopy? Good Stuff!). And if you were enough of a cracking stud to find the tiny, oddly-named file in which X-Wing hid its copy protection (or figured out how to decrypt a DVD), by God you deserved a free copy.
It was a delicate balance, but it worked! We the technologically-gifted were able to either crack stuff on our own or find people on BBS's that could, while the lamers who made fun of us at school kept the IP-producing companies rolling in dough by buying their products at Wal-Mart.
But now they've gone and ruined the game. Where's the fun in not being able to crack stuff, and where's the fun in not being able to wrap your IP in stuff for other people to crack?
As I read this little blurb, I was thinking to myself that this probably won't help me any, since I have a pirated copy of XP (as do a nontrivial number of other users, I would imagine). My first thought was that Microsoft would require you to have an "activated" and properly registered copy of Windows and/or the MS applications you were running in order to receive the updates.
But as I thought about it, I realized that not letting the pirates patch their installs of Windows might not be in MS's best interests either. If some worm gets loose, and 98% of registered Windows users are patched, but none of the cracked copies are, the worm will replicate to the 2% of unpatched registered users much faster than if you'd allowed the pirates to receive patches instead of trying to screw them with an insecure version of the OS. That would increase the ultimate number of infected machines and influence whether or not the worm becomes a PR problem.
I'm not sure what I would do in this situation; I'd probably end up allowing pirated copies to update anyway and just try to capture their IP addresses on the sly in case I could use them later.
A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Sure, you can read the whole collection in one night, but you'll be mentally chewing on it for two weeks.
Exec 1: Gee guys, with this cheaper fiber, we could roll out much better speeds than what we get on the copper we use now!
Execs #2 & #3: Woo-hoo, that'll really help us get a leg up on the competition!
Exec #1: Oh, wait... We don't have any competition. We don't have to share our lines with anyone, so no one else can get their foot in the door here. I guess we'll have to bonus our expansion money out to ourselves, instead.
Exec #2 (holding plastic fiber up to his eye) : Hey, Dick, I think I can see you through this thing. Neato. Somebody get me a martini.
What's the big deal? Seems to me they have the same grasp of the issue that you do.
What's wrong with this thought process:
1) We can spend $600k making this new technology
2) It will, of course, be cracked
3) However, it will make it harder for the average person, who is technologically clueless, to pirate our stuff
4) Because of #3, we will sell $3M more to users who would commit casual piracy before easy-to-use cracks and tools become available
5) We bank an extra $2.4M
What's so stupid about putting in copy-protection to make piracy harder even though you can't completely eliminate it? If the costs work out the right way (obviously my own numbers are made up), why not do it?
You seem to be saying that pirates are hurting the bottom lines of content-creators less than their copy-protection budgets. I disagree. I have a feeling most businesses' people can handle a simple ROI check.
"911, what's your emergency?" "I've got a Microsoft product in my living room!" "What?" "I've got a Microsoft product in my living room! AIIIIGH!"
This is probably the most obvious question asked so far, but...
1) Is there a particular shot or effect in a film you've worked on of which you're the most proud? Does one in particular stand out to you as the best you can do (or could do with the equipment of the time)?
2) Have any of the techniques you personally created (and there must be at least a few after three decades in such an innovation-intensive field) been picked up by others and adopted as standard techniques by the other effect houses? Maybe you were the first person to use a shoe as an off-in-the-distance star-fighter, or you invented the blue screen, something of that nature?
I, personally, would reserve judgement on calling this device a "Tivo for music" until I get a little more info on how expandable it is. Half the reason Tivo has such a great community of supporters is the fact that you can mod them out and do so many things with them that the designers didn't fill in themselves (network cards, bigger drives, new software to run it, etc). If Sony can give those same capabilities with this device, then they might actually earn the honor of being compared with the Tivo line.
Personally, I'd start by proving the Riemann Hypothesis. At that point you can take the million dollar prize and hire a few Nobel Laureates as tutors.
"How the hell does the value of the american dollar proove that its easier to read?"
It doesn't. If you think that was the point I was trying to make you have reading comprehension issues.
The point I was attempting to illustrate is that the rest of the world should just be grateful our nice, stable dollar is around at all, and shut the hell up about what color it is.
Yes, yes, you're right. I suppose we should take into account more foreign opinion on our money considering it's the most relied-upon cash in the world.
You know what the official national currency of Libya is? The American Dollar. Most businesses in poorer nations (q.v. Russia) would probably prefer dollars to their own currency as well.
Seems to me we're doing the rest of the globe a favor by making the dollar stable, let alone making it easier for them to read.
Until you realize you have to stick your tongue in a wall outlet to recharge the thing... :)
"Honey, why are you eating the extension cord?"
"I'm meephrbing muh foofphnd!"
"What?"
"I'm meephrbing muh foofphnd, hammt!!"
"I can't understand you."
"I'm recharging my tooth phone, damn it! Now go out to the garage and get me some electrical tape and a case of Bactine."
5) USB 2.0 can't power the unit, while firewire can, so I never have to bring an AC adaptor *anywhere*.
Hard to take you seriously when you can't even get simple facts straight. USB has always provided power to peripherals. Check their web site if you don't believe me.
Let me just say that these people would have to provide some pretty serious security credentials before I'd let my calls hop along other people's phones. Maybe they could PGP each person's phone. That'd be cool.
Why? Because we're early adopters, that's why! *We're* the ones who bought Beta VCRS! We had remote controls back when they had to be connected with a cord! We're the guys with the collection of laser disc movies and MiniDisc music albums. It's a tough job, and you lose tons of money on it, but by God *someone* has to drive new technology in from the fringes of the market, and we're the ones who do it!
I've looked at both, as I really want to get one of their services in my next car. I'll be going with XM when I do. The main reason is the programming differences between them. For one, XM has a person in charge of each "channel". That's a lot of individual attention to the quality of the music they put on the air. For another, there are two channels on XM that are aprticularly interesting to me a) Deep Tracks, which goes back to classic albums and picks out songs from them that were never released as singles (so you get to hear a ton of good stuff you'd ordinarily never know about) and b) Unsigned, which is made up entirely of bands that have not yet signed with a label. YMMV, but those reasons make XM a better choice for me
The first question on everyone's mind...
Is that your real name?
I would think, if Microsoft is truly serious about the level of cheating on XBox Live, they'd use an even more basic and time-tested security measure - people. If all the games take place on their servers, this is easy to do (and I'm sure they've already planned for it).
Imagine how hard it would be for someone to use an aiming cheat or bot in UT if there was a small program that monitored all the scores on a group of servers for cheating. If this program detected someone scoring way out of the norm, an employee of the network could observe the game, see if the guy was really cheating, and then boot him and suspend or cancel his account.
That's just one example, of course, and other cheats may be harder to track (like the one you mentioned about simply knowing where the other players are). I imagine, however, that MS intends to throw a lot of money (and therefore manpower) into this newest of markets. And if they can make cheaters have to deal with a very serious chance of getting their accounts cancelled through good use of human monitoring, I think they'll win the battle.
"Only, intead of donating spare cpu cycles, you donate spare 'think cycles'."
:)
Judging from the fact that their site crumpled within the first five minutes of slashdotting, I'm betting they'd rather have CPU cycles for at least another few hours.
Call the EFF. The Electronic Frontier Foundation might be able to help you, and if not, they can certainly point you towards a good lawyer.
Fight 'em all the way.
Or has it been too long since we've seen one of those "Natalie Portman naked and petrified" trolls? Anybody else miss them?
Ahhh, 1999. So long ago....
Well, the reasoning for me would be that I'd much rather have my kid looking at boobies than watching gruesome, bloody deaths or role-playing as a violent, criminal murderer. Maybe I'm alone on this one.
The actual act of getting paid to program is a dead-end job. The act of getting paid to produce any kind of product for someone else is a dead-end job.
The reason is there's always going to be a finite amount of money you can earn. There's only so many hours in the day, and only so much people are going to be willing to pay for the hourly output of a single worker. Unless you produce intellectual property, and are one of the very, very few who can produce IP that everyone wants and will pay for, you're never going to escape the fact that your earnings will butt heads with an asymptote at some point.
Real money always has been, and probably always will be, in starting a business and skimming off the top of other workers. Once you can pay other people less than you can get for their work, you have escaped the limit, and your "job" is no longer a dead-end.
Way to go, Congress. You take a good and decent idea for a law that needs to be created (hiding video cameras in Nancy Wilson's shower should have been illegal when it occurred and the fact that it still isn't is appalling), and you throw a rider onto it that is totally outside the scope of your power and a flagrant violation of the First Ammendment, virtually guaranteeing its demise. Spiffy.
So not only will the law not pass a judicial review for Constitutionality meaning the good aspects of the law go bye-bye, but you'll be completely ignored by the internet anyway, which is an international construct.
You're on a roll now, why not vote yourselves another raise?