The problem is that whether or not copyright infringement is right or wrong, it's going to happen. Either the media is sent unencrypted, or one must give the encrypted data, key, and algorithms to the recipient. In the latter case, it is mathematically proven that the media can be decrypted. It doesn't matter if you hide the keys on the chip: It's possible to build a TEM and image the individual logic elements and find the key that way. That is to say, it's physically impossible for DRM to work.
If it's a given that this will happen, the question is adapting to it and/or resolving the conditions that lead to excessive file sharing in the first place. So, really, let's look at file sharing. Unless it's the obsession du jour, I'll be searching for some time on one network or another. Then I have to spend hours and hours downloading a 5GB file, only to find out it's the wrong language. Or that the person who reencoded it was an idiot. So goto step 1 again and repeat until getting "The Real Deal." Why would I do this if the alternative is going to the store and getting a gauranteed-good copy (with 5.1 surround)?
Evidently, the market is deciding that the convenience of having a gauranteed-good copy isn't worth $20 to $40 (for HD disks). Which isn't all that suprising, when you think about it. People know that blank DVDs cost that much for an entire pack. Then they see the movie soundtrack on stereo CD for only $5 less than the whole kit on DVD or BluRay. On top of that, Hollywood is perceived as stagnant and unable to do anything truly new that isn't a remake or utterly formulaic. People are deciding that they don't want to gamble $20+ on whether or not they'll like the next movie.
Which brings up the question (more relevant to video than images) of whether file sharing actually hurts the music & film industry. I figure that the people who will dick around with getting a genuinely good MP3 or mpeg off Gnutella must really like movies and music. Want to bet they'll want a pressed DVD or to buy the album if they like it?
PS: Dear fucktards who modded him troll, disagreeing with you does not make him a troll.
PPS: What's wrong with protecting my IP address? It's the only one I've got!:)
1. Write the number and short-short-version on chalkboards around campus (I plan to do this tomorrow).
2. Set an image of it as the background on public computers you use.
3. Start mass-mailings.
4. Post the number anywhere you can in creative ways.
As the RIAA's new internet racketeering gang took over, the song Fuck the MP^h^hRIAA inexplicably cornered 100% of the streaming audio market in a single day. We will keep you up to date on this unprecedented development as more becomes available.
The pure Free Market is just like pure Communism: It's a wonderful thing, and as your description shows it's paradise on paper. And like Communism, it's a complete failure when applied to reality.
The main problems are twofold: All true market adjustments and decisions lag behind the current situation by some amount. More importantly, people do not have full, accurate information about all products. In fact, firms will very often intentionally harm people's ability to be informed with deceptive advertising (Which is in the deceiver's interest, because then people won't know not to buy their product) Without those, the notion of Pareto efficiency (there being a soluble set of differential equations with a single provable maximum) goes out the window.
When it comes to monopolies, capitalism and communism have the same problem; The monopoly just comes about a different way. With the customers being a captive audience, the monopoly finds it's easier to just rape them for all they're worth rather than continue providing superior service at a competitive price. After all, there's no other firm the consumers can go to. And since it's easier, lazy stupid humans will do it.
The best solution (in reality) is between the extremes. The market needs to be as free as practical, with government intervention to maintain the unstable equilibria. That is, to stop out-of-control monopolism and deceptive advertising, and to regulate natural monopolies.
"In the U.S. you have a government that has suspended habeas corpus, lied to the public for the purpose of invading a peaceful nation that had no ability to do you any harm, and continues to spend your children and grandchildren into poverty."
s/peaceful nation/violent nation that had been beaten down until it couldn't harm anyone anymore/
Not that it negates the truth of your statement (Bush administration lying to invade a non-threat), but let's not pretend Saddam was peaceful.
You know what I'd be scared of? An Iran without a way to make money. Countries that have no dough, but where the population is used to a certain living standard are very, very dangerous.
Oh, don't be silly, a country can never run out of money! All they have to do is raise the debt ceiling and sell more bonds. It's the New American Way!
Suppose one were to have a CRON entry that does touch/* -R every night at 3AM? For extra goodness, have it write out 4 random times and then the new time to prevent data recovery of original times. Running every day for a week, it'd be impossible to get the originals. It's impossible to prove anything, including when the script was added, as dates are overwritten constantly. Goodbye timestampiness!
Or if you're real paranoid, just get a laptop body + huge HDD + wireless and bury it in your wall and store your shit on that. Just manually mount the (encrypted) remote volume and supress NFS logging and there's zero evidence that you ever had any files.
Just remember to encrypt everything anyway. And use ext2fs to avoid a journal leaving any "suprises" behind.
And what about disk-copy utilities that duplicate a disk, timestamps and all, except you leave out certain important things (like ~/music/) from the copy? Actually, best to have some classical or nerdcore music, lest the absence of anything prove suspicious.
I guess what I'm saying is, there are many, many ways to foil the MAFIAA. You just have to implement them beforehand, and calmly cover every angle. Trying to do something *after* getting subpoenaed is a bad idea, because then you're hurrying. And as you say, one tiny mistake is all it takes, and people tend to make mistakes when they hurry.
It would be an absolute bitch, but if you really want it to last, engrave the data on a superhard oxide ceramic. Think Sapphire CD engraved ever-so-slowly by laser ablation. It'll never, ever "rot," it'll never get scratched unless you blast it with diamond powder, and it's stable forever at room temperature. Then it'll play back in an ordinary CD drive. If you're smart, engrave plates with pictures depicting the encoding method and data format, starting with basic physics of light diffraction.
What it comes down to is, "How long do you want your data to last and be readable?" The more work you're willing to put in, and the lower the data density you can tolerate, the longer it'll last. Use stronger/harder materials, use as much material as practical to represent each bit, and make sure they're 100% stable compounds/arrangements. Think Egyptian hieroglyphs from 5000 years ago still being readable today, despite all the crap in the intervening millennia.
The only reason that the Internet isn't a fascist's wet DRM dream presently is because when it started there was no need (only authorized personnel had access anyway, and the only media was ASCII porn) and by the time they (authoritarians, facists, and control freaks) first realized what was happenning, it was too late.
You better believe that if a new Internet were designed today, it would be another TV: You'd have your choice of ad-riddled corporate crap and nothing more. There would be no blogs, no personal servers, no freedom at all. Anything genuinely good would be a rare exception, not the rule. You would be locked out from doing what *you* want to do and forbidden from taking the initiative.
We're at the rising edge of a frightening tide. Governments are forcing federal spyware into the central offices and trunks of the Internet (see: AT&T installing signal splitters and roomfuls of NSA spy computers in main offices). Media corporations are perverting hardware into limiting rather than enabling you with DRM. Microsoft, Intel, and AMD are all playing along with it, putting in DRM at every level. If something isn't done, NOW, it's gonna get seriously bad. Now they want to do a ground-level rebuild of the software running the internet... You expect them not to install corporate and government control throughout if they succeed?
At any rate, this will never happen... There's far, FAR too much intertia behind the current internet. I hope.
"[RIAA's Brad] Buckles said the recording industry had never, nor would it ever, assume someone's identity to access that person's phone or bank records."
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as as encountering a superior race. Lesser than other beings or not, humans are unambiguously sentient. Most other life is unambiguously not sentient, but some life falls in a grey area: the great apes, African grey parrots, dolphins & whales (?).
If we take for granted that sentient beings are entitled to certain inalienable rights, then no other could kill us for sport or experiment because we are sentient. We likewise have no right to harm other sentient life. Then the answer to the thread title comes from deciding which properties are necessary for one to be sentient and if chimps meet them. Is a sentient one capable of symbolically representing arbitrary ideas and manipulating those symbols? One that understands that can attempt to systematically understand it's environment? One that can learn new behaviors from non-physical input (i.e. education other than reward/punishment)? One that demands it's rights as a sentient being (pretty important IMO)? The ability to create and spread technology? Creation of art?
Even if we do come up with a razor-sharp definition, it will still never be clear when a species crosses the line, because evolution doesn't magically make the whole next generation smart. Do any members of any species who meet the requirements get called sentient? The species as a whole, when the member's mean intelligence crosses the threshold? Are rights granted all at once, or proportional to how close a species is to sentient? The proportional approach is basically what we have today for research involving animals. Nobody has a second thought about using bacteria as slaves to make proteins for us, (AFAIK) mice must generally be treated humanely, and senseless torture of chimps and monkeys is forbidden.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H L Mencken
Most of the rest of the world doesn't have to count a hundred and fifty million ballots covering dozens of issues in the shortest possible time.
I agree that "in the shortest possible time" is logically bullshit, but this is what happens when TeeVee gives everyone ADD. The sad thing is that this should be the perfect application for computers, since it's literally nothing but adding 1 to selected counters. *sigh*
If you and a friend buy the same thing, you'll get a stream S mixed with watermarks X and Y (S+X, S+Y). XOR them together; Make zero anything in both files that's 1 in the XOR: The data is the same, and is zero when XORed with itself, whereas a watermark will be ~50% 1 and 50% 0. So, S+X + (random) AND (S+X XNOR S+Y) will destroy a mean of half the watermark bits in X's file.
"Oh, and basic things like remembering window size and location. Konqueror, I'm talking to you. It also sucks that I have to remember how many windows I have open. Close-window is C-w, but if it's the last one, I have to C-q to quit. AarrgH!"
Go to Konqueror -> Settings -> Configure Shortcuts. Enter 'quit' or 'close' in the search box and you can set them to the same quick-key.
First open up some website relating to NSLs on your computer screen or write something in Notepad. Then tell the friend who's asking you questions "I need to go to the bathroom. I will return to this room in precisely three minutes and ten seconds. I expect you to be gone by then; Please do not look at my computer screen." Either they get the hint or they're too dumb to risk telling anything to anyway.
Augh, why does everyone talk about Hiroshima when they need to compare something to a big explosion? As far as other nuclear bombs or natural super-disasters go, it honestly wasn't that big. Ivy Mike had 500 times the yield of Hiroshima. Tsar Bomba had 3000 times the yield. Then again, saying "twice the force of Ivy Mike per second" doesn't sound as impressive.
For example, SL could let you define a curve y(x) using simple polynomial functions and some other basic math (ln, e^x, sin, cos, etc) that's revolved around the x axis to generate a complex shape (the aforementioned cowboy hat, for example) without muddling in chopping up prims. But because it's still defined by a simple math function, computing important physics properties (They probably want volume / geometric center, mass / center of mass, and moments of inertia about the axes) remains trivial to a computer algebra system as long as the equations are integrable over the given bounds. Or, for extra fun, ask the user for the answers! So you might make, say, a neat hourglass by defining y(x) = 1.1 + cos(x) from x = 0 to 2pi and revolving it from 0 to 2pi radians.
On the other hand, solving for intersections of volumes of revolution is another task all together. If all else fails, solve for a set of discrete points over the surface and compute plane intersections.
But regardless, they've got more than enough processing power at their disposal: Tens of thousands of clients, some with GPUs capable of hundreds of gigaflops per second in multiply-accumulate tasks. The problem of trusting the client is mostly-solvable; Assuming a large majority of users can be trusted to return the right calculations, sending the same task to n clients (a fraction B of which try to corrupt things) will give only B^n probability that a corrupter goes un-caught. So if you can trust 95% of users, sending the same task to 3 clients gives ~99.99% trust in the result, right? Plenty for a game.
Disclaimer: It's 3am right now, so I may very well be talking nonsense in all regards.
ISPs won't do this because of the people who are their customers now. It's the fucking idiot masses. Here's an example:
Hi, I'm the dipshit with an infected machine that's spewing viruses, spam, and ddos over it's connection. I don't care that my ignorance is damaging to the Internet. I am entitled to be on it. Who cares that it's the most complex thing humanity has ever created, I have a right to use the Internet despite knowing nothing about how to be safe on it. And don't you dare suggest I educate myself, you elitist pig! You have no right to disconnect me because of the trojans, worms, viruses, and spyware riddling my computer, stealing my information, and wasting your bandwidth. If anything goes wrong, it's entirely your fault for not seeing into the future and stopping it from happening. I demand all the privileges of being an Internet citizen with none of the responsibilities. If you dare contravene my militant ignorance, I will scream at your tech support non-stop for hours on end and go to the first alternative provider who will let me remain dumb.
In the olden days, circa the mid 90's and earlier, the technical knowledge required to become a Netzien was it's own test. Now, there should be an explicit test that one must pass before being able to get a network connection. It should cover, for example: Basic network etiquette, setting up a firewall, the signs of malware and appropriate removal tools, and safe browsing habits. When you first get the connection, all outbound connections go to a study guide and a "take test" buttom. When you pass (80+%), the connection unblocks and you're free.
If a random scan or scans for common malware flag your connection, all connections except HTTP to anti-malware sites are blocked until another scan (at your request) shows you are clean. Of course, see above for "why this will not happen." As a stopgap, ISPs should insert clauses of "You will run a firewall; If you run Windows, each machine will be scanned for malware regularly" into their TOS:)
I'm so terribly sorry that those horrible hackers planted a script on my server (which happens to use ext2fs) that corrupts my bootloader then runs "shred -z -n 40/var/log/httpd/*/var/log/*; reboot". It's even worse that the bastards made it execute if I type "oh shit feds" into a terminal, as I'm prone to do when suprised... I wish I could help you find the SOBs, but all my logs got erased. Here, look for yourself:
As convenient as shopping on the Internet is, then you have to pay for shipping (or it's included in the price) and there are positive aspects of meatspace stores:
You can go shopping with friends.
You can merchandise for quality and breakage before buying it.
Immediacy. There are legitimate reasons for this other than stereotypical consumer-sheep-ADHD; Running out to get some cooking ingredient you ran out of, for example.
You can ask the salesperson questions before buying (YMMV WRT QoS).
From the store's perspective, more potential for impulse buys.
For the paranoid among us: meatspace stores take cash.
Naw, we're going to have retail stores for quite a while yet.
Sure, some people will use this thing to play HD-DVD's on their linux-based computer systems, but the vast majority of it will use it to infringe on copyrights.
Sure, some people will use freedom of speech to speak out against injustices, but the vast majority (like NAMBLA, the KKK, and Fred Phelps) will use it to spread their sick ideas.
Sure, some people's uses of their firearms will be to defend themselves against attack, but the vast majority of uses will be shootings and drivebys in poor neighborhoods.
Sure, some people will take the 5th to avoid hurting those they love, but the vast majority who refuse to testify are corrupt corporate pigs who will use it to try and avoid paying for their crimes.
My point is, the ability to decrypt information is a tool. Freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to not testify... these are all tools, and they can't be banned because people abuse them. They can't be banned even if most uses of them are wrong or offensive, because tools aren't good or bad, they're just tools.
[Obligatory FUCK THE MAFIAA and link to everyone's favorite Fuck the MPAA song]
You do not know what a circular argument is, because neither of those statements has anything to do with each other: QoS and NN refer to filtering based on entirely different parameters. And once again, you either don't want to hear or don't understand that the market in question is "access to the rest of the Internet" which means that the very act of breaking Network Neutrality damages that market.
Capitalism is an emergent system that optimizes the distribution of limited resources. The limited resource in question being bandwidth to remote computers, capitalism long ago arrived at the best possible solution: You can access any other computer as fast as the best effort of the intervening relays allows. Like drm, breaking network neutrality is an attempt to impose artificial scarcity where none presently exists, and that is what will fall (if anyone is ever dumb enough to actually try it).
Regardless, you clearly do not understand what N.N. is about anyway. As is made clear every time a "broadband rollout $OUTCOME in $NATION" story is posted, everyone does not have equal access to resources [e.g. bandwidth]. Those who can afford to may purchase bandwidth almost without limit. And restrictions based on type-of-service are not N.N., that's QoS which is necessary for any large network to properly function. Network Neutrality forbids filtering and traffic shaping based on source and destination of packets.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that whether or not copyright infringement is right or wrong, it's going to happen. Either the media is sent unencrypted, or one must give the encrypted data, key, and algorithms to the recipient. In the latter case, it is mathematically proven that the media can be decrypted. It doesn't matter if you hide the keys on the chip: It's possible to build a TEM and image the individual logic elements and find the key that way. That is to say, it's physically impossible for DRM to work.
:)
If it's a given that this will happen, the question is adapting to it and/or resolving the conditions that lead to excessive file sharing in the first place. So, really, let's look at file sharing. Unless it's the obsession du jour, I'll be searching for some time on one network or another. Then I have to spend hours and hours downloading a 5GB file, only to find out it's the wrong language. Or that the person who reencoded it was an idiot. So goto step 1 again and repeat until getting "The Real Deal." Why would I do this if the alternative is going to the store and getting a gauranteed-good copy (with 5.1 surround)?
Evidently, the market is deciding that the convenience of having a gauranteed-good copy isn't worth $20 to $40 (for HD disks). Which isn't all that suprising, when you think about it. People know that blank DVDs cost that much for an entire pack. Then they see the movie soundtrack on stereo CD for only $5 less than the whole kit on DVD or BluRay. On top of that, Hollywood is perceived as stagnant and unable to do anything truly new that isn't a remake or utterly formulaic. People are deciding that they don't want to gamble $20+ on whether or not they'll like the next movie.
Which brings up the question (more relevant to video than images) of whether file sharing actually hurts the music & film industry. I figure that the people who will dick around with getting a genuinely good MP3 or mpeg off Gnutella must really like movies and music. Want to bet they'll want a pressed DVD or to buy the album if they like it?
PS: Dear fucktards who modded him troll, disagreeing with you does not make him a troll. PPS: What's wrong with protecting my IP address? It's the only one I've got!
Suggested methods of sticking it to the MAFIAA:
1. Write the number and short-short-version on chalkboards around campus (I plan to do this tomorrow).
2. Set an image of it as the background on public computers you use.
3. Start mass-mailings.
4. Post the number anywhere you can in creative ways.
As the RIAA's new internet racketeering gang took over, the song Fuck the MP^h^hRIAA inexplicably cornered 100% of the streaming audio market in a single day. We will keep you up to date on this unprecedented development as more becomes available.
The pure Free Market is just like pure Communism: It's a wonderful thing, and as your description shows it's paradise on paper. And like Communism, it's a complete failure when applied to reality.
The main problems are twofold: All true market adjustments and decisions lag behind the current situation by some amount. More importantly, people do not have full, accurate information about all products. In fact, firms will very often intentionally harm people's ability to be informed with deceptive advertising (Which is in the deceiver's interest, because then people won't know not to buy their product) Without those, the notion of Pareto efficiency (there being a soluble set of differential equations with a single provable maximum) goes out the window.
When it comes to monopolies, capitalism and communism have the same problem; The monopoly just comes about a different way. With the customers being a captive audience, the monopoly finds it's easier to just rape them for all they're worth rather than continue providing superior service at a competitive price. After all, there's no other firm the consumers can go to. And since it's easier, lazy stupid humans will do it.
The best solution (in reality) is between the extremes. The market needs to be as free as practical, with government intervention to maintain the unstable equilibria. That is, to stop out-of-control monopolism and deceptive advertising, and to regulate natural monopolies.
"In the U.S. you have a government that has suspended habeas corpus, lied to the public for the purpose of invading a peaceful nation that had no ability to do you any harm, and continues to spend your children and grandchildren into poverty."
s/peaceful nation/violent nation that had been beaten down until it couldn't harm anyone anymore/
Not that it negates the truth of your statement (Bush administration lying to invade a non-threat), but let's not pretend Saddam was peaceful.
Suppose one were to have a CRON entry that does touch /* -R every night at 3AM? For extra goodness, have it write out 4 random times and then the new time to prevent data recovery of original times. Running every day for a week, it'd be impossible to get the originals. It's impossible to prove anything, including when the script was added, as dates are overwritten constantly. Goodbye timestampiness!
Or if you're real paranoid, just get a laptop body + huge HDD + wireless and bury it in your wall and store your shit on that. Just manually mount the (encrypted) remote volume and supress NFS logging and there's zero evidence that you ever had any files.
Just remember to encrypt everything anyway. And use ext2fs to avoid a journal leaving any "suprises" behind.
And what about disk-copy utilities that duplicate a disk, timestamps and all, except you leave out certain important things (like ~/music/) from the copy? Actually, best to have some classical or nerdcore music, lest the absence of anything prove suspicious.
I guess what I'm saying is, there are many, many ways to foil the MAFIAA. You just have to implement them beforehand, and calmly cover every angle. Trying to do something *after* getting subpoenaed is a bad idea, because then you're hurrying. And as you say, one tiny mistake is all it takes, and people tend to make mistakes when they hurry.
It would be an absolute bitch, but if you really want it to last, engrave the data on a superhard oxide ceramic. Think Sapphire CD engraved ever-so-slowly by laser ablation. It'll never, ever "rot," it'll never get scratched unless you blast it with diamond powder, and it's stable forever at room temperature. Then it'll play back in an ordinary CD drive. If you're smart, engrave plates with pictures depicting the encoding method and data format, starting with basic physics of light diffraction.
What it comes down to is, "How long do you want your data to last and be readable?" The more work you're willing to put in, and the lower the data density you can tolerate, the longer it'll last. Use stronger/harder materials, use as much material as practical to represent each bit, and make sure they're 100% stable compounds/arrangements. Think Egyptian hieroglyphs from 5000 years ago still being readable today, despite all the crap in the intervening millennia.
The only reason that the Internet isn't a fascist's wet DRM dream presently is because when it started there was no need (only authorized personnel had access anyway, and the only media was ASCII porn) and by the time they (authoritarians, facists, and control freaks) first realized what was happenning, it was too late.
You better believe that if a new Internet were designed today, it would be another TV: You'd have your choice of ad-riddled corporate crap and nothing more. There would be no blogs, no personal servers, no freedom at all. Anything genuinely good would be a rare exception, not the rule. You would be locked out from doing what *you* want to do and forbidden from taking the initiative.
We're at the rising edge of a frightening tide. Governments are forcing federal spyware into the central offices and trunks of the Internet (see: AT&T installing signal splitters and roomfuls of NSA spy computers in main offices). Media corporations are perverting hardware into limiting rather than enabling you with DRM. Microsoft, Intel, and AMD are all playing along with it, putting in DRM at every level. If something isn't done, NOW, it's gonna get seriously bad. Now they want to do a ground-level rebuild of the software running the internet... You expect them not to install corporate and government control throughout if they succeed?
At any rate, this will never happen... There's far, FAR too much intertia behind the current internet. I hope.
"[RIAA's Brad] Buckles said the recording industry had never, nor would it ever, assume someone's identity to access that person's phone or bank records."
Oh, that's right, you can trust us. Because the MAFIAA has a long history of adhering to the highest standards of ethics and professional conduct in all of it's affairs, and would never engage in douchebaggery or outright lying to get what it wants. It would never bully innocent people or harass schools, because that's immoral. But you can trust us, we'd never lie about our identity to access your personal information. How's that quote about obvious abuses, denial of intent, and intent to do exactly that ASAP go?
Fuck the MPAA, Fuck the RIAA, Fuck the suits behind the BSA, and fuck them all for the DMCA!! The Recording Industry: Sometimes, the Two Minute's Hate is justified.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as as encountering a superior race. Lesser than other beings or not, humans are unambiguously sentient. Most other life is unambiguously not sentient, but some life falls in a grey area: the great apes, African grey parrots, dolphins & whales (?). If we take for granted that sentient beings are entitled to certain inalienable rights, then no other could kill us for sport or experiment because we are sentient. We likewise have no right to harm other sentient life. Then the answer to the thread title comes from deciding which properties are necessary for one to be sentient and if chimps meet them. Is a sentient one capable of symbolically representing arbitrary ideas and manipulating those symbols? One that understands that can attempt to systematically understand it's environment? One that can learn new behaviors from non-physical input (i.e. education other than reward/punishment)? One that demands it's rights as a sentient being (pretty important IMO)? The ability to create and spread technology? Creation of art?
Even if we do come up with a razor-sharp definition, it will still never be clear when a species crosses the line, because evolution doesn't magically make the whole next generation smart. Do any members of any species who meet the requirements get called sentient? The species as a whole, when the member's mean intelligence crosses the threshold? Are rights granted all at once, or proportional to how close a species is to sentient? The proportional approach is basically what we have today for research involving animals. Nobody has a second thought about using bacteria as slaves to make proteins for us, (AFAIK) mice must generally be treated humanely, and senseless torture of chimps and monkeys is forbidden.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H L Mencken
Most of the rest of the world doesn't have to count a hundred and fifty million ballots covering dozens of issues in the shortest possible time.
I agree that "in the shortest possible time" is logically bullshit, but this is what happens when TeeVee gives everyone ADD. The sad thing is that this should be the perfect application for computers, since it's literally nothing but adding 1 to selected counters. *sigh*
If you and a friend buy the same thing, you'll get a stream S mixed with watermarks X and Y (S+X, S+Y). XOR them together; Make zero anything in both files that's 1 in the XOR: The data is the same, and is zero when XORed with itself, whereas a watermark will be ~50% 1 and 50% 0. So, S+X + (random) AND (S+X XNOR S+Y) will destroy a mean of half the watermark bits in X's file.
Disclaimer: IANACryptologist.
"Oh, and basic things like remembering window size and location. Konqueror, I'm talking to you. It also sucks that I have to remember how many windows I have open. Close-window is C-w, but if it's the last one, I have to C-q to quit. AarrgH!"
Go to Konqueror -> Settings -> Configure Shortcuts. Enter 'quit' or 'close' in the search box and you can set them to the same quick-key.
First open up some website relating to NSLs on your computer screen or write something in Notepad. Then tell the friend who's asking you questions "I need to go to the bathroom. I will return to this room in precisely three minutes and ten seconds. I expect you to be gone by then; Please do not look at my computer screen." Either they get the hint or they're too dumb to risk telling anything to anyway.
Augh, why does everyone talk about Hiroshima when they need to compare something to a big explosion? As far as other nuclear bombs or natural super-disasters go, it honestly wasn't that big. Ivy Mike had 500 times the yield of Hiroshima. Tsar Bomba had 3000 times the yield. Then again, saying "twice the force of Ivy Mike per second" doesn't sound as impressive.
How about volumes of revolution?
For example, SL could let you define a curve y(x) using simple polynomial functions and some other basic math (ln, e^x, sin, cos, etc) that's revolved around the x axis to generate a complex shape (the aforementioned cowboy hat, for example) without muddling in chopping up prims. But because it's still defined by a simple math function, computing important physics properties (They probably want volume / geometric center, mass / center of mass, and moments of inertia about the axes) remains trivial to a computer algebra system as long as the equations are integrable over the given bounds. Or, for extra fun, ask the user for the answers! So you might make, say, a neat hourglass by defining y(x) = 1.1 + cos(x) from x = 0 to 2pi and revolving it from 0 to 2pi radians.
On the other hand, solving for intersections of volumes of revolution is another task all together. If all else fails, solve for a set of discrete points over the surface and compute plane intersections.
But regardless, they've got more than enough processing power at their disposal: Tens of thousands of clients, some with GPUs capable of hundreds of gigaflops per second in multiply-accumulate tasks. The problem of trusting the client is mostly-solvable; Assuming a large majority of users can be trusted to return the right calculations, sending the same task to n clients (a fraction B of which try to corrupt things) will give only B^n probability that a corrupter goes un-caught. So if you can trust 95% of users, sending the same task to 3 clients gives ~99.99% trust in the result, right? Plenty for a game.
Disclaimer: It's 3am right now, so I may very well be talking nonsense in all regards.
ISPs won't do this because of the people who are their customers now. It's the fucking idiot masses. Here's an example:
:)
Hi, I'm the dipshit with an infected machine that's spewing viruses, spam, and ddos over it's connection. I don't care that my ignorance is damaging to the Internet. I am entitled to be on it. Who cares that it's the most complex thing humanity has ever created, I have a right to use the Internet despite knowing nothing about how to be safe on it. And don't you dare suggest I educate myself, you elitist pig! You have no right to disconnect me because of the trojans, worms, viruses, and spyware riddling my computer, stealing my information, and wasting your bandwidth. If anything goes wrong, it's entirely your fault for not seeing into the future and stopping it from happening. I demand all the privileges of being an Internet citizen with none of the responsibilities. If you dare contravene my militant ignorance, I will scream at your tech support non-stop for hours on end and go to the first alternative provider who will let me remain dumb.
In the olden days, circa the mid 90's and earlier, the technical knowledge required to become a Netzien was it's own test. Now, there should be an explicit test that one must pass before being able to get a network connection. It should cover, for example: Basic network etiquette, setting up a firewall, the signs of malware and appropriate removal tools, and safe browsing habits. When you first get the connection, all outbound connections go to a study guide and a "take test" buttom. When you pass (80+%), the connection unblocks and you're free.
If a random scan or scans for common malware flag your connection, all connections except HTTP to anti-malware sites are blocked until another scan (at your request) shows you are clean. Of course, see above for "why this will not happen." As a stopgap, ISPs should insert clauses of "You will run a firewall; If you run Windows, each machine will be scanned for malware regularly" into their TOS
I'm so terribly sorry that those horrible hackers planted a script on my server (which happens to use ext2fs) that corrupts my bootloader then runs "shred -z -n 40 /var/log/httpd/* /var/log/*; reboot". It's even worse that the bastards made it execute if I type "oh shit feds" into a terminal, as I'm prone to do when suprised... I wish I could help you find the SOBs, but all my logs got erased. Here, look for yourself:
[screen flashing 'PWNT BY CHINESE']
Fuck fascism.
- You can go shopping with friends.
- You can merchandise for quality and breakage before buying it.
- Immediacy. There are legitimate reasons for this other than stereotypical consumer-sheep-ADHD; Running out to get some cooking ingredient you ran out of, for example.
- You can ask the salesperson questions before buying (YMMV WRT QoS).
- From the store's perspective, more potential for impulse buys.
- For the paranoid among us: meatspace stores take cash.
Naw, we're going to have retail stores for quite a while yet.Sure, some people's uses of their firearms will be to defend themselves against attack, but the vast majority of uses will be shootings and drivebys in poor neighborhoods.
Sure, some people will take the 5th to avoid hurting those they love, but the vast majority who refuse to testify are corrupt corporate pigs who will use it to try and avoid paying for their crimes.
My point is, the ability to decrypt information is a tool. Freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to not testify... these are all tools, and they can't be banned because people abuse them. They can't be banned even if most uses of them are wrong or offensive, because tools aren't good or bad, they're just tools.
[Obligatory FUCK THE MAFIAA and link to everyone's favorite Fuck the MPAA song]
The wonderful thing about the Internet is that once one person decrypts it one time, anyone else can get it with ease. I love BitTorrent ^_^
Drm implies giving you the ciphertext, the plaintext, the key, and unlimited hardware access: MAFIAA fails the logic.
You do not know what a circular argument is, because neither of those statements has anything to do with each other: QoS and NN refer to filtering based on entirely different parameters. And once again, you either don't want to hear or don't understand that the market in question is "access to the rest of the Internet" which means that the very act of breaking Network Neutrality damages that market.
Capitalism is an emergent system that optimizes the distribution of limited resources. The limited resource in question being bandwidth to remote computers, capitalism long ago arrived at the best possible solution: You can access any other computer as fast as the best effort of the intervening relays allows. Like drm, breaking network neutrality is an attempt to impose artificial scarcity where none presently exists, and that is what will fall (if anyone is ever dumb enough to actually try it).
Regardless, you clearly do not understand what N.N. is about anyway. As is made clear every time a "broadband rollout $OUTCOME in $NATION" story is posted, everyone does not have equal access to resources [e.g. bandwidth]. Those who can afford to may purchase bandwidth almost without limit. And restrictions based on type-of-service are not N.N., that's QoS which is necessary for any large network to properly function. Network Neutrality forbids filtering and traffic shaping based on source and destination of packets.