DRM is fool's gold for content providers on its own. What it's really there for is Palladium/Trusted Computing/... Now, if you can hear it, you can rip it, and the content providers can go fish. If TCPA is enabled in hardware (as new PDAs are beginning to do), then even if you can rip it, you can't distribute. You can't tell people how to crack the protection, because of DMCA. Each person that wants a copy (even for themselves) has to break the protection, one by one or buy from the people that have the copyright.
On its own, DRM is stupid and evil. Alloyed with TCPA, it is stupid, even, suffocating, and unavoidable. Stopping DRM is not the key - stopping Palladium is.
Which civilians are you willing to kill to NOT do the repair?
You already have to go up to put rockets on HST to be able to deorbit the satellite - otherwise we have to pray really hard it doesn't hit anything really important when it comes down. So, the astronauts are going up to HST, one way or another. The question is whether the added time of a repair and the money to fix HST is cheaper than other means of making space observations (ground telescopes, another Hubble, etc.).
The lives of the astronauts are always at stake unless they don't go anywhere (and even then, though outside of our responsibility). In this case, there isn't much difference in danger, either. Either they're going up or you're hoping that God really doesn't want to let the Hubble drop on anyone.
"And, I am sorry....tobacco use is NOT more likely to kill me than the local nuclear power plant..."
If that were the case, wouldn't we see a lot of dead people from cancer and such (probably characteristic cancers, such as leukemia, etc) with specific geographic distributions?
The main difference is not in the size of the risk (the OP's quote is probably, but not certainly correct) but in who takes the risks. We take risks from eating, smoking, and driving on a daily basis. These are risks from which we derive a benefit, and which we actively chose to take. Risks from toxic waste and nuclear power plants may (or not) be small, but we derive no benefit from those risks and are not given choices as to whether to assume them. Smoking in public provides a risk to others (although, I would probably argue, a risk that can be dealt with better by other means than banning it) and thus irritates people a lot. People don't like taking risks for the benefit of others without their consent.
I live in Columbus. The buses (and there aren't that many, anyway) shut late at night and on weekends; in addition, there are lots of places which aren't accessible by bus or which would take (easily) two or three times as long to reach. Using the bus limits anyone's options severely - to get good jobs, to be able to go to school, or shopping, or anything.
Without good public transit, giving up the car is like crippling yourself. While there are a lot of old drivers that I don't want on the roads, I can see why it would be hard to give up. If I have to depend on others to get around, I don't have independence. Bad public transit makes you live on the buses's time rather than your own - you're dependent, all over again. In addition, considering the safety net here seems to be disappearing as fast as beer at a grad student party, you'd be better off mailing yourself about than relying on public services as your sole method of transportation
In Boston or San Francisco or NY, it's easy to get around without a licence - but most (old) people can't afford to live there. Where it's cheap to live (FL, OH, etc.), the public transit is the next best thing to getting to and from distant points by crawling on broken glass. As long as giving up the car means not being able to get around, old people will fight losing their licences like wolverines.
Our people drive like they're drunk all the time. Cell phone or no cell phone, entertainment center or none, alcohol, drugs, or coffee, people can be counted on to drive as if they were trying to watch the road through their colons. The only comfort is that at least Columbus drivers are not aggressive, just clueless/negligent/stupid.
(sarcasm) Of course, why should people drive reasonably anywhere - I mean after all no one else but us really matters, right? My schedule, my time - these are the things that really matter. Other drivers - you're expendable. You can live or get out of my way. (/sarcasm)
in lots of things, we've made the decision that other people are here to make us happy - why should driving (one of the more common and universal activities in the US) be any different?
...but since teenagers apparently are capable of understanding what they do enough to be executed for it, they probably are responsible enough to vote for those that will do it to them.
And if they don't know enough but government believes they should have and holds them responsible for it anyway, perhaps it might have taken better care to teach them what they should have known in the first place.
I'm beginning to wonder if I'm living on the wrong side of an Ayn Rand novel.
I had this outdated theory that you sold things to people that they actually wanted. Apparently I misunderstood - what they must have meant was "We'll sell you whatever DRM-encrusted piece of crap we have, and you'll buy it." I mean, selling the paying customers a crippled version of what pirates get for free sounds like a way to win over customers to me.
No DRM works (at least until the entire network is DRMd - then the network's just useless). If it can be hacked it will be. Screwing over your customers isn't going to change that fact. If you make a great game but make it intermittently playable, you'll avoid piracy...because people won't buy your games. Except, in this case, the pirated version does everything the legal version does and plays consistently. So you handcuff your paying customers for the benefit of your enemies - sounds like a "win-win" to me.
DRM is a way to take rights from your customers at no cost to you. It doesn't prevent piracy - it makes the pirated commodity more valuable than the legal one. All it does do is assure that your customers will have to pay for things that used to be (and by law, should be) free. So, why shouldn't people complain? If they complain loud enough, maybe the people who sell DRMd material get the message: screwing your customers is a viable business model only if you are hoping to earn profits in bankruptcy.
Or, to put it another way, "If you can't be a good example, you can be a terrible warning." If enough customers complain publicly (and the others realize that the pirated copies are better than real), which one do you think Valve will be?
I'm in OH, where it's expensive (Giant Eagle) vs. expensiver (Kroger). To add insult to injury, to get prices comparable to the other chain (particularly when Big Bear existed), you had to have the Kroger card and register all of you purchases on it (because most of their products have "bonuses" for their cards). Between that and Kroger's decision to jettison half of their checkers for a "self-serve" model (high prices and I get to do my own checking. Wow!), I dislike Kroger intensely.
That said, I don't mind the cards as much as I should. If they're going to do this, though, then the card should probably be signed to George W. Bush and addressed to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Why? Then cellular companies would have to compete on price, reliability, and service instead of locking their customers into cell plans and pillaging them. The whole point of cell phone plans is to lock your customers in and beat them silly. Anything that prevents cellular companies from doing that will either be neutered or prohibited; after all, isn't it Congress's job to fund unprofitable industries for their donors^H^H^H^H^H^Hcitizens?
They want the ease and economy of digital distribution channels without lowering the costs of their product to consumers. Of course, since there's a little problem called the analog hole, they're sort of stuck. If it can be seen, it can be copied, and the same digital distribution channels they want to use to ship their product cheaply can be use to dispense copies of their content all over the place. To prevent this, they have to buy into Trusted Computing in all its glory, which will probably destroy the internet (it's not like I don't have enough places to buy stuff already).
Downloaders persist because content providers keep hosing their customers. A content protection system sufficient to prevent your customers from getting together to screw you is unlikely to be used by your customers. The **AAs want cheap distribution and high profits, while preventing their customers from aggregating to get what they want. The distribution system they want to use also allows (non)customers to distribute your product. Means to prevent that distribution destroy the users' incentive to use the internet, and thus to make your product cheaper for you.
The **AAs want to screw their customers while denying them alternatives and while using distribution channels which derive their use and benefit by their lack of restriction. You can't crap on your customers if they can go elsewhere. It would be better for them to use the distribution system to lower costs and convince their customers not to go elsewhere. Instead, they would prefer to continue to gouge their customers and intimidate them into not going elsewhere, in the process providing massive incentive for their customers to do precisely that. As long as their customers are free, they can't ensure their profits by these means.
Why wouldn't India go with OS that 1) they control (while they don't control Linux, they can more easily audit it and tailor applications to their own needs than with a commercial OS that they may/may not be able to audit), 2) costs them less up front, and 3) depends on having lots of smart people around, which coincidentally, they happen to have.
If you have lots of people and some money, the tolerance for throwing people at a problem is greater than that of throwing money at a problem. The past histories of OSes and the desire of their manufacturers for control (MS, for example, with its integration of various apps. into the OS) and their desires either for subscriptions for software or for "software solutions" (meaning we won't tell you how much it will cost so that you can't find a cheaper alternative) indicate that lots of places might be better off investing in its own OS than buying a commercial one.
The theory goes that when you do well, you get paid well because of it. At least, that's the theory, although it doesn't quite jive with the explanation I get for why CEOs make twenty times what I do and get raises whether or not the company does well.
If companies have the rights of people, why shouldn't I expect them to behave as I am expected to? Perhaps that's the point - companies and their investors get the benefits of an entity with the rights of a person and which is exempt from the responsibilities that that person would have. You can't eat the seed corn and expect there to be a harvest next fall, but hey that corn tastes good, doesn't it?
This sense of fairness is amplified by the nearness many people here might have towards the employees. The people getting fired could be them, after all - people who like their work but don't feel like getting squeezed when times are good and screwed when times are bad. And all along, those that made the good/bad decisions for which they paid walk away with their pockets full.
This is just business as usual. I guess it's too much to hope for that the usual wouldn't suck so badly.
...you may need to have a PhD in accounting to understand them. When Enron was coming down, I knew someone in the business school at OSU, taking classes in accounting. When discussing Enron's books, his professor said (approximately) "I have 2 PhD's in accounting, and I still can't understand them [Enron's books]." If the company is shady, they may use differing approximations of accepted accounting practices, and the products of those accountings may be hard to correlate to reality. Without significant accounting knowledge, you may not recognize deviations from normaity and/or how big the deviations are.
W: We need a new astronomical observation technique that can replace the Hubble Space Telescope, and so I've asked Congress to requisition binoculars for NASA. That should be OK, right?
NASA: What about during the day, Mr. President?
W: I've also asked Congress for sunglasses.
But seriously, why does it matter - it's not like the truth of W's statements matters to the populace - as long as they keep electing him, he'll continue his economy with the truth.
As someone else pointed out on this thread, the problem isn't so much DRM as it is Trusted Computing. As of now, if the DRM is cracked, both the crack and the cracked material will be on the Web shortly. New DRM leads to new cracks which quickly follow.
The "Trusted Computing/Palladium/whatever title we come up with to disguise our intentions" initiative is more threatening. In that case, unless it is cracked as well, which will be harder because of strong crypto and no analog hole, each person that wants to remove the DRM on their copy has to break it themselves, which is not going to happen. They will be unable to download the crack, DMCA will prevent mass distribution of a physical crack, and the de-DRM'd material won't be available (because the OS won't let you). Once each crack has to be done individually, they can DRM to the heart's delight and it will be very hard for their victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconsumers to stop them.
A system with the customers as the enemy is stable if 1) the users can't gang up (TC : check) and 2) they have no alternative to get content. (politician purchase and redemption program : check). DRM is a speed bump. TC is like nuking all of the cars and most of the roads, and making everyone use public transit which only stops at stores.
the hardware providers aren't doing anything to the content providers - that's what CONSUMERS are for. That way, when hardware manufacturers and the content providers get together, they can take turns doing to consumers what they want. They might even make some bad porn (although when the consumers figure out what's been done to them and to copyright law it may end up being a snuff film of sorts).
if Congress makes a law that allows private individuals to suppress speech they don't like, it would also contravene the 1st Amendment. The Bill of Rights enumerates rights of the people, rights independent of government; while it protects those rights from gov't interference, it also implies their existence as rights held by everyone as such.
Tactically, this doesn't seem like a good idea...
on
Think Secret Gets Lawyer
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Apple wants its leaker, so they decide to sue because a website editor in a place not friendly to them revealed a "trade secret" that Apple would reveal publically not long later. For its lawyers' fees, Apple gets...
1) publicity for its opponents' website.
2) a black eye for going after people who don't like them
3) no leaker if he took any sort of precautions.
So, for the cost of some lawyers, Apple gets to publically crap on the 1st Amendment while not getting their leak plugged. Slick move, guys.
As another poster suggested, why not use a Canary Trap to tag the leaker - change a few decimals in specs before publication. If there's only one source, then the editor of ThinkSecret has to use the numbers he's given (numbers that are really vague won't get him any hits), and the numbers will reveal sets of sources that can be narrowed down. You don't spook the leaker, and you can dispose of him at your leisure. Another alternative might be to sue for potential stock value losses due to the timing of the leak - but that probably will neither look much better or have a better chance of winning.
...is a scam? It'll do precisely what big business^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hour voters told it to do - we think that society should own you and not the other way around.
The Constitution is simply a backward document, designed for a world without terrorists and cats. Now, that world has changed - the only way to safeguard your rights and money is for you to give them to us. That way, when we give the keys to the businesses that pay us, we don't to worry about our citizens^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconsumers not doing what our masters want - our masters already own them and so they have no choice.
The "Ownership Society" is like being a low-level manager - all the responsibilities of power without the benefits - because we want your lack of success to fall on your head rather than on those of our campaign contributors. Eventually you'll get tired of being blamed for our failures that you'll ask us to take over to be free of the guilt and blame we've managed to hand off. You don't need that pesky free will anyway.
...the social welfare programs that the Republicans want to kill are probably the more effective things that the federal government does. SS generates money for the rest of the government (money that it's not supposed to have - both parties can eat blame for that) and is (according the NYT Magazine article discussed yesterday) running with low overhead. I believe (but don't have the source) that Medicare runs on a 2% overhead, in contrast to the private insurance plans that would replace it which spend about 20% in overhead. The structure of welfare here is screwed up (for that I blame Clinton), and so its fiscal status is only part of the story, but fiscally the programs run better than much of the fed. gov't.
The Republicans' plans to limit federal gov't rest on transferring its roles to the states. Problem is, the states don't seem more efficient than the feds - so transferring the roles to the states doesn't save money (the mailing address just changes). More likely, it provides motive to push services lower because businesses go to low-tax environments. Anecdotally, I live in OH, a state with the worst of both worlds - rapidly increasing taxes with decreasing services - and it will likely have the business base to match. Ultimately, you get businesses to come to low-tax states by giving up the revenue they generate and placing more of the tax on your citizens. You don't create busineeses - they go where they can get educated help, and since education costs money, that's not here. Add to this the desire for states to privatize (meaning the gov't gets the costs and private industry gets the profits) and you get a recipe for disaster. Transferring costs to the states doesn't work unless services fall, but transferring those roles increases their size to the point of the federal government, which creats the free-rider problem (people who want more of the pie beacause they don't care where it comes from).
The Republicans haven't been able to cut spending at the federal level - because to do so would have cost them their vote base. Unless their actual intent is to bankrupt the feds so that they can't do anything (which has been suggested), their actions don't make fiscal sense or seem to lead to small government. Add that Republicans seem to favor putting funds in areas (defense/terrorism) with less oversight (and little public oversight) than most spending this presents a problem for both both the Republican/small gov't and Republican/good fiscal responsibility rhetoric.
P.S. (1st question - amount of deficit spending (not inflation corrected) - probably works as well as a % gov't spending, but FDR might take 1st)
although I'm pretty sure the/. sig refers to those in at least the last 70-80 years.
I only went after the last three Republican Presidents because in particular W and Reagan have been promoted as antidotes to big government liberalism, have desired (or claimed to desire) to decrease the role of the federal government, and to spend less money. None of these has happened during any of their administrations, and while each had differing levels of support from Congress, none have really seemed to try.
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DRM is fool's gold for content providers on its own. What it's really there for is Palladium/Trusted Computing/... Now, if you can hear it, you can rip it, and the content providers can go fish. If TCPA is enabled in hardware (as new PDAs are beginning to do), then even if you can rip it, you can't distribute. You can't tell people how to crack the protection, because of DMCA. Each person that wants a copy (even for themselves) has to break the protection, one by one or buy from the people that have the copyright.
On its own, DRM is stupid and evil. Alloyed with TCPA, it is stupid, even, suffocating, and unavoidable. Stopping DRM is not the key - stopping Palladium is.
the "invisible hand" of the market (karma)...
they forgot to tell you the hand is attached to a moron, but he has a sense of justice, so it all balances out. Sort of.
Which civilians are you willing to kill to NOT do the repair?
You already have to go up to put rockets on HST to be able to deorbit the satellite - otherwise we have to pray really hard it doesn't hit anything really important when it comes down. So, the astronauts are going up to HST, one way or another. The question is whether the added time of a repair and the money to fix HST is cheaper than other means of making space observations (ground telescopes, another Hubble, etc.).
The lives of the astronauts are always at stake unless they don't go anywhere (and even then, though outside of our responsibility). In this case, there isn't much difference in danger, either. Either they're going up or you're hoping that God really doesn't want to let the Hubble drop on anyone.
"And, I am sorry....tobacco use is NOT more likely to kill me than the local nuclear power plant..."
If that were the case, wouldn't we see a lot of dead people from cancer and such (probably characteristic cancers, such as leukemia, etc) with specific geographic distributions?
The main difference is not in the size of the risk (the OP's quote is probably, but not certainly correct) but in who takes the risks. We take risks from eating, smoking, and driving on a daily basis. These are risks from which we derive a benefit, and which we actively chose to take. Risks from toxic waste and nuclear power plants may (or not) be small, but we derive no benefit from those risks and are not given choices as to whether to assume them. Smoking in public provides a risk to others (although, I would probably argue, a risk that can be dealt with better by other means than banning it) and thus irritates people a lot. People don't like taking risks for the benefit of others without their consent.
I live in Columbus. The buses (and there aren't that many, anyway) shut late at night and on weekends; in addition, there are lots of places which aren't accessible by bus or which would take (easily) two or three times as long to reach. Using the bus limits anyone's options severely - to get good jobs, to be able to go to school, or shopping, or anything.
Without good public transit, giving up the car is like crippling yourself. While there are a lot of old drivers that I don't want on the roads, I can see why it would be hard to give up. If I have to depend on others to get around, I don't have independence. Bad public transit makes you live on the buses's time rather than your own - you're dependent, all over again. In addition, considering the safety net here seems to be disappearing as fast as beer at a grad student party, you'd be better off mailing yourself about than relying on public services as your sole method of transportation
In Boston or San Francisco or NY, it's easy to get around without a licence - but most (old) people can't afford to live there. Where it's cheap to live (FL, OH, etc.), the public transit is the next best thing to getting to and from distant points by crawling on broken glass. As long as giving up the car means not being able to get around, old people will fight losing their licences like wolverines.
Our people drive like they're drunk all the time. Cell phone or no cell phone, entertainment center or none, alcohol, drugs, or coffee, people can be counted on to drive as if they were trying to watch the road through their colons. The only comfort is that at least Columbus drivers are not aggressive, just clueless/negligent/stupid.
(sarcasm)
Of course, why should people drive reasonably anywhere - I mean after all no one else but us really matters, right? My schedule, my time - these are the things that really matter. Other drivers - you're expendable. You can live or get out of my way.
(/sarcasm)
in lots of things, we've made the decision that other people are here to make us happy - why should driving (one of the more common and universal activities in the US) be any different?
that understand the difference between dependent and independent clauses.
...but since teenagers apparently are capable of understanding what they do enough to be executed for it, they probably are responsible enough to vote for those that will do it to them.
And if they don't know enough but government believes they should have and holds them responsible for it anyway, perhaps it might have taken better care to teach them what they should have known in the first place.
I'm beginning to wonder if I'm living on the wrong side of an Ayn Rand novel.
I had this outdated theory that you sold things to people that they actually wanted. Apparently I misunderstood - what they must have meant was "We'll sell you whatever DRM-encrusted piece of crap we have, and you'll buy it." I mean, selling the paying customers a crippled version of what pirates get for free sounds like a way to win over customers to me.
No DRM works (at least until the entire network is DRMd - then the network's just useless). If it can be hacked it will be. Screwing over your customers isn't going to change that fact. If you make a great game but make it intermittently playable, you'll avoid piracy...because people won't buy your games. Except, in this case, the pirated version does everything the legal version does and plays consistently. So you handcuff your paying customers for the benefit of your enemies - sounds like a "win-win" to me.
DRM is a way to take rights from your customers at no cost to you. It doesn't prevent piracy - it makes the pirated commodity more valuable than the legal one. All it does do is assure that your customers will have to pay for things that used to be (and by law, should be) free. So, why shouldn't people complain? If they complain loud enough, maybe the people who sell DRMd material get the message: screwing your customers is a viable business model only if you are hoping to earn profits in bankruptcy.
Or, to put it another way, "If you can't be a good example, you can be a terrible warning." If enough customers complain publicly (and the others realize that the pirated copies are better than real), which one do you think Valve will be?
I'm in OH, where it's expensive (Giant Eagle) vs. expensiver (Kroger). To add insult to injury, to get prices comparable to the other chain (particularly when Big Bear existed), you had to have the Kroger card and register all of you purchases on it (because most of their products have "bonuses" for their cards). Between that and Kroger's decision to jettison half of their checkers for a "self-serve" model (high prices and I get to do my own checking. Wow!), I dislike Kroger intensely.
That said, I don't mind the cards as much as I should. If they're going to do this, though, then the card should probably be signed to George W. Bush and addressed to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Why? Then cellular companies would have to compete on price, reliability, and service instead of locking their customers into cell plans and pillaging them. The whole point of cell phone plans is to lock your customers in and beat them silly. Anything that prevents cellular companies from doing that will either be neutered or prohibited; after all, isn't it Congress's job to fund unprofitable industries for their donors^H^H^H^H^H^Hcitizens?
They want the ease and economy of digital distribution channels without lowering the costs of their product to consumers. Of course, since there's a little problem called the analog hole, they're sort of stuck. If it can be seen, it can be copied, and the same digital distribution channels they want to use to ship their product cheaply can be use to dispense copies of their content all over the place. To prevent this, they have to buy into Trusted Computing in all its glory, which will probably destroy the internet (it's not like I don't have enough places to buy stuff already).
Downloaders persist because content providers keep hosing their customers. A content protection system sufficient to prevent your customers from getting together to screw you is unlikely to be used by your customers. The **AAs want cheap distribution and high profits, while preventing their customers from aggregating to get what they want. The distribution system they want to use also allows (non)customers to distribute your product. Means to prevent that distribution destroy the users' incentive to use the internet, and thus to make your product cheaper for you.
The **AAs want to screw their customers while denying them alternatives and while using distribution channels which derive their use and benefit by their lack of restriction. You can't crap on your customers if they can go elsewhere. It would be better for them to use the distribution system to lower costs and convince their customers not to go elsewhere. Instead, they would prefer to continue to gouge their customers and intimidate them into not going elsewhere, in the process providing massive incentive for their customers to do precisely that. As long as their customers are free, they can't ensure their profits by these means.
Why wouldn't India go with OS that 1) they control (while they don't control Linux, they can more easily audit it and tailor applications to their own needs than with a commercial OS that they may/may not be able to audit), 2) costs them less up front, and 3) depends on having lots of smart people around, which coincidentally, they happen to have.
If you have lots of people and some money, the tolerance for throwing people at a problem is greater than that of throwing money at a problem. The past histories of OSes and the desire of their manufacturers for control (MS, for example, with its integration of various apps. into the OS) and their desires either for subscriptions for software or for "software solutions" (meaning we won't tell you how much it will cost so that you can't find a cheaper alternative) indicate that lots of places might be better off investing in its own OS than buying a commercial one.
The theory goes that when you do well, you get paid well because of it. At least, that's the theory, although it doesn't quite jive with the explanation I get for why CEOs make twenty times what I do and get raises whether or not the company does well.
If companies have the rights of people, why shouldn't I expect them to behave as I am expected to? Perhaps that's the point - companies and their investors get the benefits of an entity with the rights of a person and which is exempt from the responsibilities that that person would have. You can't eat the seed corn and expect there to be a harvest next fall, but hey that corn tastes good, doesn't it?
This sense of fairness is amplified by the nearness many people here might have towards the employees. The people getting fired could be them, after all - people who like their work but don't feel like getting squeezed when times are good and screwed when times are bad. And all along, those that made the good/bad decisions for which they paid walk away with their pockets full.
This is just business as usual. I guess it's too much to hope for that the usual wouldn't suck so badly.
With those hours and bonuses, how do you manage to 1) stay awake to patrol your home and 2) keep yourself in shotgun shells?
At that rate, unless you hire out, all the thieves have to do is wait until you pass out and then begin to pillage.
...you may need to have a PhD in accounting to understand them. When Enron was coming down, I knew someone in the business school at OSU, taking classes in accounting. When discussing Enron's books, his professor said (approximately) "I have 2 PhD's in accounting, and I still can't understand them [Enron's books]." If the company is shady, they may use differing approximations of accepted accounting practices, and the products of those accountings may be hard to correlate to reality. Without significant accounting knowledge, you may not recognize deviations from normaity and/or how big the deviations are.
someone else internally would be, and they could find out who that person is. or group of people, and narrow it down further...
If they know someone will leak them? I don't know.
W: We need a new astronomical observation technique that can replace the Hubble Space Telescope, and so I've asked Congress to requisition binoculars for NASA. That should be OK, right?
NASA: What about during the day, Mr. President?
W: I've also asked Congress for sunglasses.
But seriously, why does it matter - it's not like the truth of W's statements matters to the populace - as long as they keep electing him, he'll continue his economy with the truth.
As someone else pointed out on this thread, the problem isn't so much DRM as it is Trusted Computing. As of now, if the DRM is cracked, both the crack and the cracked material will be on the Web shortly. New DRM leads to new cracks which quickly follow.
The "Trusted Computing/Palladium/whatever title we come up with to disguise our intentions" initiative is more threatening. In that case, unless it is cracked as well, which will be harder because of strong crypto and no analog hole, each person that wants to remove the DRM on their copy has to break it themselves, which is not going to happen. They will be unable to download the crack, DMCA will prevent mass distribution of a physical crack, and the de-DRM'd material won't be available (because the OS won't let you). Once each crack has to be done individually, they can DRM to the heart's delight and it will be very hard for their victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconsumers to stop them.
A system with the customers as the enemy is stable if 1) the users can't gang up (TC : check) and 2) they have no alternative to get content. (politician purchase and redemption program : check). DRM is a speed bump. TC is like nuking all of the cars and most of the roads, and making everyone use public transit which only stops at stores.
the hardware providers aren't doing anything to the content providers - that's what CONSUMERS are for. That way, when hardware manufacturers and the content providers get together, they can take turns doing to consumers what they want. They might even make some bad porn (although when the consumers figure out what's been done to them and to copyright law it may end up being a snuff film of sorts).
if Congress makes a law that allows private individuals to suppress speech they don't like, it would also contravene the 1st Amendment. The Bill of Rights enumerates rights of the people, rights independent of government; while it protects those rights from gov't interference, it also implies their existence as rights held by everyone as such.
Apple wants its leaker, so they decide to sue because a website editor in a place not friendly to them revealed a "trade secret" that Apple would reveal publically not long later. For its lawyers' fees, Apple gets...
1) publicity for its opponents' website.
2) a black eye for going after people who don't like them
3) no leaker if he took any sort of precautions.
So, for the cost of some lawyers, Apple gets to publically crap on the 1st Amendment while not getting their leak plugged. Slick move, guys.
As another poster suggested, why not use a Canary Trap to tag the leaker - change a few decimals in specs before publication. If there's only one source, then the editor of ThinkSecret has to use the numbers he's given (numbers that are really vague won't get him any hits), and the numbers will reveal sets of sources that can be narrowed down. You don't spook the leaker, and you can dispose of him at your leisure. Another alternative might be to sue for potential stock value losses due to the timing of the leak - but that probably will neither look much better or have a better chance of winning.
...is a scam? It'll do precisely what big business^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hour voters told it to do - we think that society should own you and not the other way around.
The Constitution is simply a backward document, designed for a world without terrorists and cats. Now, that world has changed - the only way to safeguard your rights and money is for you to give them to us. That way, when we give the keys to the businesses that pay us, we don't to worry about our citizens^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconsumers not doing what our masters want - our masters already own them and so they have no choice.
The "Ownership Society" is like being a low-level manager - all the responsibilities of power without the benefits - because we want your lack of success to fall on your head rather than on those of our campaign contributors. Eventually you'll get tired of being blamed for our failures that you'll ask us to take over to be free of the guilt and blame we've managed to hand off. You don't need that pesky free will anyway.
...the social welfare programs that the Republicans want to kill are probably the more effective things that the federal government does. SS generates money for the rest of the government (money that it's not supposed to have - both parties can eat blame for that) and is (according the NYT Magazine article discussed yesterday) running with low overhead. I believe (but don't have the source) that Medicare runs on a 2% overhead, in contrast to the private insurance plans that would replace it which spend about 20% in overhead. The structure of welfare here is screwed up (for that I blame Clinton), and so its fiscal status is only part of the story, but fiscally the programs run better than much of the fed. gov't.
The Republicans' plans to limit federal gov't rest on transferring its roles to the states. Problem is, the states don't seem more efficient than the feds - so transferring the roles to the states doesn't save money (the mailing address just changes). More likely, it provides motive to push services lower because businesses go to low-tax environments. Anecdotally, I live in OH, a state with the worst of both worlds - rapidly increasing taxes with decreasing services - and it will likely have the business base to match. Ultimately, you get businesses to come to low-tax states by giving up the revenue they generate and placing more of the tax on your citizens. You don't create busineeses - they go where they can get educated help, and since education costs money, that's not here. Add to this the desire for states to privatize (meaning the gov't gets the costs and private industry gets the profits) and you get a recipe for disaster. Transferring costs to the states doesn't work unless services fall, but transferring those roles increases their size to the point of the federal government, which creats the free-rider problem (people who want more of the pie beacause they don't care where it comes from).
The Republicans haven't been able to cut spending at the federal level - because to do so would have cost them their vote base. Unless their actual intent is to bankrupt the feds so that they can't do anything (which has been suggested), their actions don't make fiscal sense or seem to lead to small government. Add that Republicans seem to favor putting funds in areas (defense/terrorism) with less oversight (and little public oversight) than most spending this presents a problem for both both the Republican/small gov't and Republican/good fiscal responsibility rhetoric.
P.S. (1st question - amount of deficit spending (not inflation corrected) - probably works as well as a % gov't spending, but FDR might take 1st)
although I'm pretty sure the /. sig refers to those in at least the last 70-80 years.
I only went after the last three Republican Presidents because in particular W and Reagan have been promoted as antidotes to big government liberalism, have desired (or claimed to desire) to decrease the role of the federal government, and to spend less money. None of these has happened during any of their administrations, and while each had differing levels of support from Congress, none have really seemed to try.