It's 54 or 100+ mbps on paper. When I was using wifi (before I insisted on running cat5), it was just me and the base station seperated by 15 feet and one light wall. My actual connection speed (based on large file transfer to a server box, no other activity) was roughly 10 to 12 mbps, one fifth the claimed rate. So if they're supposed to get 100+mbps, I'd guess it'll actually do 20+mbps.
For the same reason that I would assume my dead-tree mail to be safe from prying eyes despite travelling in clear-text through a series of mail handling offices and mailmen. My mail is written, then enclosed in a container explicitly stating who is supposed to receive/read it. No one else is supposed to read it, despite the fact that it is usually trivially easy to do. Likewise, email is written and enclosed in an SMTP encapsulation that explicitly delimits who is meant to receive/read it. No one without legitimate access (Which, as with DTF mail, includes the government with a warrant) to the sending or receiving accounts is supposed to read it.
It is, of course, even easier to read e-mail than normal mail. What's important is that the proper regulations be applied to government. Although it's also possible for other people to read your mail, if they act on what's contained (e.g. identity theft) it's already criminal. The government is not so good at policing itself however, hence this ruling.
Stross' essay does describe rational reasons you shouldn't have children (In that they are basically a giant drain on you and your mate's financial and physical resources with little or no future ROI). The statements are all logically correct, but serve to illustrate that people do things which aren't rational all the time. And that these things are often for the better.
You're supposed to reject the "don't have children" argument and implicitly reject the "don't colonize space" argument because both arise from the same reasoning that we would call abhorrent and self-serving: Everything for me and screw the future.
(Heh... I got to Stross' essay before it was posted to Slashdot. I feel special ^_^)
A lot of nasty things have happened in the United States in the last 7 years. But guess what. Ya know all that bullshit the criminals in the Bush administration try to hide? They get found out. And there's a huge debate about it. And now their house of cards is starting to implode.
What the bastards running the Bush administration have to try and do in secret to protect themselves from the law, countries like Iran and China do openly. You think the SS will be mean if you make a stupid crack about assassinating Bush? The Chinese Gestapo will imprison, torture, and murder you for saying "I want to be free." You want to know why the CIA did "extraordinary rendition?" Because not even they could get away with the depraved crimes routinely committed in places like Syria and Saudi Arabia.
Want to find out what morally reprehensible countries are actually like? Go to Saudi Arabia and send a letter to the government talking shit about Mohammed. Go to China and openly declare what their lying bastard government did at Tiannanmen Square. If you're lucky enough to escape with your life, come back and wonder at how you can defame, slander, and rant against the US government and it's evil all day with nothing to fear.
If you truly think the USA is morally reprehensible, I suggest you have your moral center's connection for "standard of what evil is" checked out, because I think it's loose and the input is floating high.
What he's saying is that the MAFIAA will go the way of the buggy whip. There are ways to create music and art other than recording cartels manufacturing popularity for the latest boy band or diva. In the course of history, that's actually a rather new thing. What the MAFIAA does, product manufacturing and marketing, is no longer relevant due to the Internet. The Internet does both of those, and places them under artist control. Game over, cartels: Adapt or die.
Impressive, you managed to get the premises, logic, and conclusion wrong all at the same time. Meaning, your premise consists of a strawman, and your logic is non-existant. Now, do you have any deductive or inductive reasoning to support your idea? Here's an example:
By making a market illegal, supply is hindered and price is raised. This draws in risk-taking, and often desperate & dangerous suppliers. Because the market is illegal, all law-based and peaceful routes of dispute resolution are removed. These factors combine, resulting is gangs, violence, and killings. We saw this with Prohibition, and we see it now with prostitution and the war on drugs. Furthermore, because there is no law-based accountability, quality control is poor to non-existant, leading to personal injuries and death. Since the common factor in the negative societal outcomes is lack of legal accountability, the logical conclusion is that markets should almost always be regulated rather than outlawed.
Don't be entirely certain that President Cheney would be an entirely terrible thing. A lot of the 28% support Bush, I think, because they think he's a "nice folksy guy." When Bush tortures the English language (erm, "gives a speech"), it's not embarrassing, it's folksy, heh heh heh. All you good folks keep up the hard work!
Now imagine the cold, malicious intellect of Cheney up on that podium. It's no longer "folksy."
They had that, it's called "Streets of SimCity." It's cute to play, but you are unlikely to ever find a less convincing physics model. It's also buggy as hell.
I don't think it's as simple as searching a database along one dimension. It's more of a SELECT * WHERE a=b AND c=d AND e=f... and you have to know enough parameters to narrow it down to one specific memory. When you get a reminder of a small part, it gives enough reference points that your brain can track down the whole memory.
There will never be any real commercial space service other than data bouncing off satellites so long as we are bounded by the pitifully small energy output of chemical fuels, which impose a cost of (at the very least) hundreds of dollars to put one Kg in low orbit. We have alternatives, but they are all impractical for various reasons at the moment:
Space elevator. First nation to build one owns space, but we need to be able to spin a flawless molecule 40000Km long first.
Nuclear engines. We had the technology to build them almost 50 years ago, including ones able to acheive over 1:1 thrust:weight. Unfortunately, any nuclear engine that can lift itself off will be unshielded and this is unacceptable.
Project Orion. Could potentially launch a spacecraft weighing millions of tons into orbit. Unfortunately, this would generate significant (though not truly massive) fallout. The worst effect would be injecting a massive amount of radiation into the van Allen belts. Due to test ban treaties, it's drive system cannot legally be activated lower than geosynchronous orbit.
Maneuver asteroid into orbit. Find a suitable asteroid the size of a football field; Use one nuke to kick it into a rendevous with earth. Then aerobrake and use more nukes to slow it into a stable high (1000km) circular orbit. Sidesteps "getting shit into space" by using shit that's already there. Obvious public fear issues; Lack of ability to think on necessary time scales. I forsee 2004-mn4 Apophis maybe getting this treatment in 2039.
Electromagnetic launch. Sidesteps need to carry launch fuel by putting the fuel on earth where it's cheaper. Issues with initial expense, aerodynamic drag at low altitudes, necessarily extreme acceleration preventing human use.
Fusion power. Yeah, it's been 20 years away for 50^h^h 60 years.
If any of these can be fully-developed and made working, great. Until then, space utilization is a non-starter. Heck, we do have launches by large space corporations. It costs several tens of millions of dollars to launch a satellite on an Ariane or Delta-IV. You can buy your way onto a Proton, and it still costs millions. Capitalism can do a lot of great things, but defeating the laws of physics isn't one of them. Until we get around chemical fuels, there will never be a meaningful human presence in space, and that's not NASA's fault.
I'll give you dependency hell, but linux scattering files all over the file system? I think not.
In Linux/Unix, you have a set of prefixes (/,/usr,/usr/local, sometimes/opt/kde and/opt/gnome) and directories within each of those (bin, doc, etc, man, sbin, share). If the software doesn't have special needs (e.g. a database, the kind of thing users don't install), you know exactly where crap goes: Binaries are in prefix/bin, libraries are in prefix/lib, images and whatnot go in prefix/share/appname/. Where user stuff goes is admittedly lacking in definition; It's usually either ~/.appname or ~/.kde/share/apps/appname for user-config. But the point is, if you tell me "I installed foobar," I know of maybe 4 places to look for any given file that goes with foobar.
Last time I used Windows, the installer suggests an install directory (following no particular standard), puts most of itself there, and is then free to put some random files into c:/windows/system32, or wherever it feels like.
If you want to win the war against radical Islam, leave their lands and stop manipulating their governments. It's no suprise that people resent being overtly controlled by others to their own detriment. It's also the case that when people are oppressed and made voiceless they often resort to violent insurrection. This is the situation the US has created in the Middle East, starting with the overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran in 1954.
We made our bed, and the best way to stop sleeping in it is a Manhattan Project to develop fusion power and end our oil addiction, thereby terminating the cause for our presence in the Middle East.
The MAFIAA would still try to force draconian DRM on you even if there wasn't a single pirated copy of anything in the world. Stopping piracy is a side component in their true agenda: They want absolute fucking control over you. They want it so that you can only watch from a selection of their choosing, at their times, which expires at the date they say if it's recorded. They want to force you to watch ads against your will (see the recent Disney/HBO thread). They want to force you to buy new formats every X years in perpetuity from them rather than just format-shift it. Given the chance, they would lock your videos up and force you to pay for every viewing.
If DRM were Hitler, people hoping for a compromise would be Neville Chamberlain. Trying to make DRM stop by making concessions will not prevent a war. It will just delay the inevitable confrontation over who controls your computer: You or corporations & governments. I choose me.
Kludges by people who don't know how to refactor their equations? I guess you're hiding the Grand Unified Theory from us, since it's clearly easy and stuff. I bet it's the conspiracy by the burgeiose nouveau-riche oppressive freedom-hating capitalist pig-dogs that's preventing you from telling us, isn't it? I bet they also gave Stephen Hawking ALS to keep him down, too.
Hardware DRM can't work either, for the exact same reason: I have the ciphertext and the algorithm, so all they can do is try and obfuscate the location of the hardware keys. But no matter what, you have to put pre-shared keys somewhere on the chip. Therefore, it is a matter of putting the chip in acid and looking under a scanning electron microscope until you find the right memory area: Game over, MAFIAA loses.
And yes, if I had $50000 to spare, I would buy an SEM in a heartbeat to smite them. Well, that and SEMs being incredibly awesome.
And to circumvent the filter, he added, a hacker would have to "screw up the content itself so it wasn't recognizable," to a degree where it wouldn't even be worth uploading in the first place.
AudibleMagic claims to have invented an algorithm that can recognize the same video in different forms better than the human brain can, across any format? That must mean the video is decoded into it's component frames before hashing, since that's how our brains get it. And better yet, this "Hash-Every-Frame" routine (which is apparently better than any other by leaps and bounds) will run on a site the size of MySpace without a BlueGene/L driving it? Uh-Huh. Say, NewsCorp, I've got this old bridge...
Hypothesis: AM's claim is bullshit.
Test: Everyone try uploading the same video, but add static and drop random frames from the start/end.
Outcomes: If hypothesis is true, AM and the Copyright Mafia look incredibly stupid. Again. If hypothesis is false, they handed us a free DDoS to push MySpace off the 'Net with by consuming all their processor time with hash checking.
Conclusion: Regardless of outcome, hackers win. Once again, DRM and everyone associated with it are Lolcows, unable to stop others from milking their stupidity for our amusement.
So if none of these terrorist watchlists are ever used in a partisan manner, why is it that Democrats seem to end up on them, and Republicans don't?
This is how I know I am wasting my time. As soon as Al-Qaida surrenders, a prisoner exchange can be arranged just like in every other war. We can give them the live prisoners we hold and they can return the corpses of soldiers they have tortured to death. If it takes too long I guess they die in jail. Not an unreasonable sentence for someone who saw 9/11 attacks and said "Yeah, I'm part of that team."
Not wanting to hear it doesn't make it false. Bush has outright claimed that he can arrest people "because they're terrorists" (whether they are or not is immaterial) and then do the following: Hold them indefinetly without charge, torture them and/or ship them to places where they will be tortured, deny the accused access to counsel (or deny the lawyer access to information that may exhonerate his/her client), and wiretap anything he feels like (since there would be no oversight). Do you believe that things like this have any place in a just society?
It may also suprise you to know that very few of the people held in Guantanamo Bay are actually terrorists at all. Most of them were turned in by local enemies when the US offered big rewards for terrorists and never checked stories. There's a big mess now trying to let about half of them go, because they've been branded "terrorists" and due to that the State Department can't find anywhere that will accept them.
Terrorists in every shadow, eh? I never heard that claim. I think most people who want this war fought know that their chances of being killed by a terrorist are pretty low. We also know that eventually one of them will probably manage to nuke or poison a large portion of a city. Maybe tens of thousands, maybe millions, probably Washington DC, NY, or London. I think that is something worth putting effort into stopping.
Terrorists getting nuclear weapons is extremely improbable. It's impossible to make one without a huge manufacturing effort, and everyone knows (even if the US hasn't stated so explicitly) that the country which gives terrorists a nuke will be bombed until it's a hole in Earth's crust. Frankly, I think the best defense against that would be "You nuke America, we nuke Mecca."
Yes, people who want gitmo terrorists realeased ARE helping terrorists. Try not to miss the concrete undeniable truth of those words.
Your statement is logically correct, but does not apply because no one wants to release terrorists. We want to release the majority who even the government acknowledge are innocent, and put the remainder on trial. If they're obviously terrorists, finding them guilty should be an open-and-shut affair, yes?
"You're either with us or against us" was clearly intended for Governments who ignored or encouraged terrorist activity. I am sick of people willfully misunderstanding this. Aghast at short sighted stupidty? Yes. but believing everyone disinclined to resist terrorism to be in league with them? No.
Then why is it that the Bush administration has been not-at-all subtle in saying that any opposition to it's conduct of the war on terror (particularly if it comes from Democrats) is tantamount to treason? You know, like when Tony Snow would stop one inch short of outright claiming that the Democrats were allied with al Qaeda?
Massive Power=Send troops where YOU don't want them and wiretap calls possibly from terrorists. If you say so.
A strawman which you know to be a strawman. First of all, I never brought up the troops. Second, I went into some detail as to what I meant by massive power concentration. I'll go over it again. The Bush administration claims it has the right to: Hold people without charge, torture them, send them to be tortured, tap phones without a warrant,
No, ordinary people don't. But I wouldn't be suprised if one day we find that a shocking large number of $OPPOSITION_PARTY members do. And thanks to the Bush administration and it's cronies in Congress, they disappear, are denied their constitutional rights, never told why, and held incommunicado.
Remember, you have nothing to fear from the Chinese Communist Party, unless you are associated with those dissidents.
Remember, you have nothing to fear from Comrade Stalin, unless you are associated with those American Pigs.
Remember, you have nothing to fear from Der Fuhrer, unless you are associated with unionists, communists, or Jews.
Remember, you have nothing to dear from Joseph McCarthy's investigation, unless you are associated with Leftists.
Remember, you have nothing to fear from $AUTHORITARIAN_FASCIST, unless you are associated with $SCAPEGOAT_TO_SCARE_YOU_AND_KEEP_YOU_OBEDIANT.
So pardon me as I apply previously learned experience to the current situation and conclude that wholeheatedly embracing a massive concentration of power in the hands of one branch of government because you've bought the Bush administration's claims that there are terrorists lurking in every shadow and that (oddly enough) anyone who opposes him wants to help the terrorists is not only not reasonable, but downright stupid.
If reason and history aren't enough then I guess you'll figure it out when a douchebag socialist replaces the current douchebag proto-fascist in the Oval Office and starts using the new powers Bush claimed against Republicans. But the problem is that by then it'll be rather too late to prevent the catastrophe, so you'll understand if I believe it's important that you realize how authoritarians work to destroy freedom sooner rather than later.
I could argue that his claim of DRM allowing more entertainment is also obviously incorrect; Artists and creative types make new things by building on old things. The GNP of Europe will triple once they're rightfully compensated for their ancestor's work in creating things like Cinderalla, Snow White, Old St. Nick, and Mowgli which the intellectual property pirates in Hollywood stole and used without permission. The descendants of the original Pilgrims should be paid for creating the story of Pocahontas. And that Wendy Carlos person should be jailed for creating unlicensed derivative works of J.S. Bach.
Such claims as I have just described are obviously absurd and wrong, yet they are exactly what DRM enforces: Perpetual copyright. It's impossible for effective DRM to respect fair use or limited copyright for obvious reasons. As others have suggested, it truly should be renamed to Fair Use Circumvention Kit. And it's similarly clear that if you can never have more than read-only access, you can't be creative.
But that's what they want. You are not to be creative, you are to be a good obedient little Consumer, who consumes, watches, and likes what the media tell you to.
If you continue to insist on stealing our content, and engaging in piracy, we're left with no choice but to replace your computer with a DRM-enabled appliance. Please, let us know if our customer service department can be of further assistance;-)
I see you drank the kool-aid. What did we tell you about that stuff, huh? Here's a laxative to get that gunk out of your system:
Our desire to replace your computer with DRM-enabled crap is only tangentially related to piracy. It's much more about our megalomaniacal obsession with control over everything related to content in any way possible, including preventing you from creating your own movies in HD and forcing you to watch things you don't want to watch. It will also have the side effect of holding culture random, since we don't believe in fair use and DRM doesn't respect finite copyright terms either.
If every file-sharing service magically dropped off the face of Earth tomorrow, do you honestly think the media corporations would stop trying to rape your right to a computer that does what you tell it to do?
But this is all irrelevant, because this has nothing to do with piracy. Cox/Disney gave people a device that can arbitrarily seek through video and *SUPRISE* people are arbitrarily seeking past the parts they don't like. If you don't want people to skip parts of a stream that happen to be ads, then either don't use devices that buffer and seek or find another revenue model (you know, like normal industries do when faced with competition and disruptive technologies). Here's some suggestions to get the ball rolling:
1. Stop running ads so annoying that hackers will collectively spend millions of hours fighting their own hardware for the sake of not having to watch them.
2. Since people seem to hate ads so much, maybe they'll pay to not see them?
Slashdot Mirror
It's 54 or 100+ mbps on paper. When I was using wifi (before I insisted on running cat5), it was just me and the base station seperated by 15 feet and one light wall. My actual connection speed (based on large file transfer to a server box, no other activity) was roughly 10 to 12 mbps, one fifth the claimed rate. So if they're supposed to get 100+mbps, I'd guess it'll actually do 20+mbps.
For the same reason that I would assume my dead-tree mail to be safe from prying eyes despite travelling in clear-text through a series of mail handling offices and mailmen. My mail is written, then enclosed in a container explicitly stating who is supposed to receive/read it. No one else is supposed to read it, despite the fact that it is usually trivially easy to do. Likewise, email is written and enclosed in an SMTP encapsulation that explicitly delimits who is meant to receive/read it. No one without legitimate access (Which, as with DTF mail, includes the government with a warrant) to the sending or receiving accounts is supposed to read it.
It is, of course, even easier to read e-mail than normal mail. What's important is that the proper regulations be applied to government. Although it's also possible for other people to read your mail, if they act on what's contained (e.g. identity theft) it's already criminal. The government is not so good at policing itself however, hence this ruling.
Stross' essay does describe rational reasons you shouldn't have children (In that they are basically a giant drain on you and your mate's financial and physical resources with little or no future ROI). The statements are all logically correct, but serve to illustrate that people do things which aren't rational all the time. And that these things are often for the better.
You're supposed to reject the "don't have children" argument and implicitly reject the "don't colonize space" argument because both arise from the same reasoning that we would call abhorrent and self-serving: Everything for me and screw the future.
(Heh... I got to Stross' essay before it was posted to Slashdot. I feel special ^_^)
A lot of nasty things have happened in the United States in the last 7 years. But guess what. Ya know all that bullshit the criminals in the Bush administration try to hide? They get found out. And there's a huge debate about it. And now their house of cards is starting to implode.
What the bastards running the Bush administration have to try and do in secret to protect themselves from the law, countries like Iran and China do openly. You think the SS will be mean if you make a stupid crack about assassinating Bush? The Chinese Gestapo will imprison, torture, and murder you for saying "I want to be free." You want to know why the CIA did "extraordinary rendition?" Because not even they could get away with the depraved crimes routinely committed in places like Syria and Saudi Arabia.
Want to find out what morally reprehensible countries are actually like? Go to Saudi Arabia and send a letter to the government talking shit about Mohammed. Go to China and openly declare what their lying bastard government did at Tiannanmen Square. If you're lucky enough to escape with your life, come back and wonder at how you can defame, slander, and rant against the US government and it's evil all day with nothing to fear.
If you truly think the USA is morally reprehensible, I suggest you have your moral center's connection for "standard of what evil is" checked out, because I think it's loose and the input is floating high.
What he's saying is that the MAFIAA will go the way of the buggy whip. There are ways to create music and art other than recording cartels manufacturing popularity for the latest boy band or diva. In the course of history, that's actually a rather new thing. What the MAFIAA does, product manufacturing and marketing, is no longer relevant due to the Internet. The Internet does both of those, and places them under artist control. Game over, cartels: Adapt or die.
Impressive, you managed to get the premises, logic, and conclusion wrong all at the same time. Meaning, your premise consists of a strawman, and your logic is non-existant. Now, do you have any deductive or inductive reasoning to support your idea? Here's an example:
By making a market illegal, supply is hindered and price is raised. This draws in risk-taking, and often desperate & dangerous suppliers. Because the market is illegal, all law-based and peaceful routes of dispute resolution are removed. These factors combine, resulting is gangs, violence, and killings. We saw this with Prohibition, and we see it now with prostitution and the war on drugs. Furthermore, because there is no law-based accountability, quality control is poor to non-existant, leading to personal injuries and death. Since the common factor in the negative societal outcomes is lack of legal accountability, the logical conclusion is that markets should almost always be regulated rather than outlawed.
Don't be entirely certain that President Cheney would be an entirely terrible thing. A lot of the 28% support Bush, I think, because they think he's a "nice folksy guy." When Bush tortures the English language (erm, "gives a speech"), it's not embarrassing, it's folksy, heh heh heh. All you good folks keep up the hard work!
Now imagine the cold, malicious intellect of Cheney up on that podium. It's no longer "folksy."
They had that, it's called "Streets of SimCity." It's cute to play, but you are unlikely to ever find a less convincing physics model. It's also buggy as hell.
First rule of attempting to secure anything: You will lose if the attacker has physical access.
Wait for your parents to go off to buy something, force the door open, and reconfigure the machine. If all else fails, reinstall the OS.
I don't think it's as simple as searching a database along one dimension. It's more of a SELECT * WHERE a=b AND c=d AND e=f ... and you have to know enough parameters to narrow it down to one specific memory. When you get a reminder of a small part, it gives enough reference points that your brain can track down the whole memory.
- Space elevator. First nation to build one owns space, but we need to be able to spin a flawless molecule 40000Km long first.
- Nuclear engines. We had the technology to build them almost 50 years ago, including ones able to acheive over 1:1 thrust:weight. Unfortunately, any nuclear engine that can lift itself off will be unshielded and this is unacceptable.
- Project Orion. Could potentially launch a spacecraft weighing millions of tons into orbit. Unfortunately, this would generate significant (though not truly massive) fallout. The worst effect would be injecting a massive amount of radiation into the van Allen belts. Due to test ban treaties, it's drive system cannot legally be activated lower than geosynchronous orbit.
- Maneuver asteroid into orbit. Find a suitable asteroid the size of a football field; Use one nuke to kick it into a rendevous with earth. Then aerobrake and use more nukes to slow it into a stable high (1000km) circular orbit. Sidesteps "getting shit into space" by using shit that's already there. Obvious public fear issues; Lack of ability to think on necessary time scales. I forsee 2004-mn4 Apophis maybe getting this treatment in 2039.
- Electromagnetic launch. Sidesteps need to carry launch fuel by putting the fuel on earth where it's cheaper. Issues with initial expense, aerodynamic drag at low altitudes, necessarily extreme acceleration preventing human use.
- Fusion power. Yeah, it's been 20 years away for 50^h^h 60 years.
If any of these can be fully-developed and made working, great. Until then, space utilization is a non-starter. Heck, we do have launches by large space corporations. It costs several tens of millions of dollars to launch a satellite on an Ariane or Delta-IV. You can buy your way onto a Proton, and it still costs millions. Capitalism can do a lot of great things, but defeating the laws of physics isn't one of them. Until we get around chemical fuels, there will never be a meaningful human presence in space, and that's not NASA's fault.Yes. Linux needs a hardware MMU, and the 386 is the first x86 processor to have one.
I'll give you dependency hell, but linux scattering files all over the file system? I think not.
/usr, /usr/local, sometimes /opt/kde and /opt/gnome) and directories within each of those (bin, doc, etc, man, sbin, share). If the software doesn't have special needs (e.g. a database, the kind of thing users don't install), you know exactly where crap goes: Binaries are in prefix/bin, libraries are in prefix/lib, images and whatnot go in prefix/share/appname/. Where user stuff goes is admittedly lacking in definition; It's usually either ~/.appname or ~/.kde/share/apps/appname for user-config. But the point is, if you tell me "I installed foobar," I know of maybe 4 places to look for any given file that goes with foobar.
In Linux/Unix, you have a set of prefixes (/,
Last time I used Windows, the installer suggests an install directory (following no particular standard), puts most of itself there, and is then free to put some random files into c:/windows/system32, or wherever it feels like.
If you want to win the war against radical Islam, leave their lands and stop manipulating their governments. It's no suprise that people resent being overtly controlled by others to their own detriment. It's also the case that when people are oppressed and made voiceless they often resort to violent insurrection. This is the situation the US has created in the Middle East, starting with the overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran in 1954.
We made our bed, and the best way to stop sleeping in it is a Manhattan Project to develop fusion power and end our oil addiction, thereby terminating the cause for our presence in the Middle East.
The MAFIAA would still try to force draconian DRM on you even if there wasn't a single pirated copy of anything in the world. Stopping piracy is a side component in their true agenda: They want absolute fucking control over you. They want it so that you can only watch from a selection of their choosing, at their times, which expires at the date they say if it's recorded. They want to force you to watch ads against your will (see the recent Disney/HBO thread). They want to force you to buy new formats every X years in perpetuity from them rather than just format-shift it. Given the chance, they would lock your videos up and force you to pay for every viewing.
If DRM were Hitler, people hoping for a compromise would be Neville Chamberlain. Trying to make DRM stop by making concessions will not prevent a war. It will just delay the inevitable confrontation over who controls your computer: You or corporations & governments. I choose me.
A vote cast in ignorance is worse than no vote at all.
It's not that... PEBKAC.
Kludges by people who don't know how to refactor their equations? I guess you're hiding the Grand Unified Theory from us, since it's clearly easy and stuff. I bet it's the conspiracy by the burgeiose nouveau-riche oppressive freedom-hating capitalist pig-dogs that's preventing you from telling us, isn't it? I bet they also gave Stephen Hawking ALS to keep him down, too.
Hardware DRM can't work either, for the exact same reason: I have the ciphertext and the algorithm, so all they can do is try and obfuscate the location of the hardware keys. But no matter what, you have to put pre-shared keys somewhere on the chip. Therefore, it is a matter of putting the chip in acid and looking under a scanning electron microscope until you find the right memory area: Game over, MAFIAA loses.
And yes, if I had $50000 to spare, I would buy an SEM in a heartbeat to smite them. Well, that and SEMs being incredibly awesome.
Hypothesis: AM's claim is bullshit.
Test: Everyone try uploading the same video, but add static and drop random frames from the start/end.
Outcomes: If hypothesis is true, AM and the Copyright Mafia look incredibly stupid. Again. If hypothesis is false, they handed us a free DDoS to push MySpace off the 'Net with by consuming all their processor time with hash checking.
Conclusion: Regardless of outcome, hackers win. Once again, DRM and everyone associated with it are Lolcows, unable to stop others from milking their stupidity for our amusement.
Not wanting to hear it doesn't make it false. Bush has outright claimed that he can arrest people "because they're terrorists" (whether they are or not is immaterial) and then do the following: Hold them indefinetly without charge, torture them and/or ship them to places where they will be tortured, deny the accused access to counsel (or deny the lawyer access to information that may exhonerate his/her client), and wiretap anything he feels like (since there would be no oversight). Do you believe that things like this have any place in a just society?
It may also suprise you to know that very few of the people held in Guantanamo Bay are actually terrorists at all. Most of them were turned in by local enemies when the US offered big rewards for terrorists and never checked stories. There's a big mess now trying to let about half of them go, because they've been branded "terrorists" and due to that the State Department can't find anywhere that will accept them.
Terrorists getting nuclear weapons is extremely improbable. It's impossible to make one without a huge manufacturing effort, and everyone knows (even if the US hasn't stated so explicitly) that the country which gives terrorists a nuke will be bombed until it's a hole in Earth's crust. Frankly, I think the best defense against that would be "You nuke America, we nuke Mecca."
Your statement is logically correct, but does not apply because no one wants to release terrorists. We want to release the majority who even the government acknowledge are innocent, and put the remainder on trial. If they're obviously terrorists, finding them guilty should be an open-and-shut affair, yes?
Then why is it that the Bush administration has been not-at-all subtle in saying that any opposition to it's conduct of the war on terror (particularly if it comes from Democrats) is tantamount to treason? You know, like when Tony Snow would stop one inch short of outright claiming that the Democrats were allied with al Qaeda?
A strawman which you know to be a strawman. First of all, I never brought up the troops. Second, I went into some detail as to what I meant by massive power concentration. I'll go over it again. The Bush administration claims it has the right to: Hold people without charge, torture them, send them to be tortured, tap phones without a warrant,
No, ordinary people don't. But I wouldn't be suprised if one day we find that a shocking large number of $OPPOSITION_PARTY members do. And thanks to the Bush administration and it's cronies in Congress, they disappear, are denied their constitutional rights, never told why, and held incommunicado.
Remember, you have nothing to fear from the Chinese Communist Party, unless you are associated with those dissidents.
Remember, you have nothing to fear from Comrade Stalin, unless you are associated with those American Pigs.
Remember, you have nothing to fear from Der Fuhrer, unless you are associated with unionists, communists, or Jews.
Remember, you have nothing to dear from Joseph McCarthy's investigation, unless you are associated with Leftists.
Remember, you have nothing to fear from $AUTHORITARIAN_FASCIST, unless you are associated with $SCAPEGOAT_TO_SCARE_YOU_AND_KEEP_YOU_OBEDIANT.
So pardon me as I apply previously learned experience to the current situation and conclude that wholeheatedly embracing a massive concentration of power in the hands of one branch of government because you've bought the Bush administration's claims that there are terrorists lurking in every shadow and that (oddly enough) anyone who opposes him wants to help the terrorists is not only not reasonable, but downright stupid.
If reason and history aren't enough then I guess you'll figure it out when a douchebag socialist replaces the current douchebag proto-fascist in the Oval Office and starts using the new powers Bush claimed against Republicans. But the problem is that by then it'll be rather too late to prevent the catastrophe, so you'll understand if I believe it's important that you realize how authoritarians work to destroy freedom sooner rather than later.
I could argue that his claim of DRM allowing more entertainment is also obviously incorrect; Artists and creative types make new things by building on old things. The GNP of Europe will triple once they're rightfully compensated for their ancestor's work in creating things like Cinderalla, Snow White, Old St. Nick, and Mowgli which the intellectual property pirates in Hollywood stole and used without permission. The descendants of the original Pilgrims should be paid for creating the story of Pocahontas. And that Wendy Carlos person should be jailed for creating unlicensed derivative works of J.S. Bach.
Such claims as I have just described are obviously absurd and wrong, yet they are exactly what DRM enforces: Perpetual copyright. It's impossible for effective DRM to respect fair use or limited copyright for obvious reasons. As others have suggested, it truly should be renamed to Fair Use Circumvention Kit. And it's similarly clear that if you can never have more than read-only access, you can't be creative.
But that's what they want. You are not to be creative, you are to be a good obedient little Consumer, who consumes, watches, and likes what the media tell you to.
If every file-sharing service magically dropped off the face of Earth tomorrow, do you honestly think the media corporations would stop trying to rape your right to a computer that does what you tell it to do?
But this is all irrelevant, because this has nothing to do with piracy. Cox/Disney gave people a device that can arbitrarily seek through video and *SUPRISE* people are arbitrarily seeking past the parts they don't like. If you don't want people to skip parts of a stream that happen to be ads, then either don't use devices that buffer and seek or find another revenue model (you know, like normal industries do when faced with competition and disruptive technologies). Here's some suggestions to get the ball rolling:
1. Stop running ads so annoying that hackers will collectively spend millions of hours fighting their own hardware for the sake of not having to watch them.
2. Since people seem to hate ads so much, maybe they'll pay to not see them?
1. Pick legal fight with one of the most prestigious law universities in the country
2. ???
3. Profit*
* For Harvard, not the MAFIAA.