Once you decide to share your work with the public, then that is exactly what you have done. It is completely unreasonable that you should be able to thereafter control society's general use of the material beyond, perhaps, reasonable laws preventing others from profiting from it for a time. If we are to progress beyond the 20th century, we cannot permit the existence of arbitrary veto of cultural dissemination of artworks. We would stagnate, shrivel up and die (well, culturally speaking anyway).
Some random commenter in the dark depths of the internet should be able to say whatever they damn well please . .. The internet has precious few dark depths. If I was considering buying a Traffic-Power product, I might do a google search on them in order to find out more. Google is good at dredging the dark depths, and I would likely stumble upon the blog in question and it might affect my decision. Hence, the speech should reasonably be subject to libel laws etc.
I will respond to your various points without quoting their text:
(1) Existing devices will eventually be phased out, due to loss, destruction and general degradation. Ubiqutous DRM isn't a short-term plan - it will take decades at least to pull off.
(2) Key distribution will certainly be an interesting problem. It comes as no surprise that the CSS scheme used for DVD has become useless for this reason (i.e., it has/no/ key distribution beyond the initial pool). And the scheme proposed for the new high-def DVDs (Blu-Ray? Don't remember which one off hand) seems both clumsy and high-risk (update keysets from time to time, punish owners of blacklisted equipment, etc.). Nevertheless, if your thumbtop audio recorder doesn't permit you to record a given key, it doesn't help you much if you know what the key is so long as the recorder doesn't let you reprogram its DRM.
(3) Watermarks will need to be designed so that they never accidentally occur in nature. This is only a matter of making them sufficiently unique. Moreover, a high-end device should be able to distinguish the part of the signal not to record from the one to record. If you take a camcorder on your holiday, you may find that the picture frames in the museum are completely blank on your film because the pictures were watermark-protected while the frames and wall were not. Your audio track might be missing the background music in the elevator because it was DRM'd while your conversation is still there. There will, however, still need to exist equipment that is watermark-ignorant, as you suggest. This is likely to be restricted military grade equipment that you cannot legally own, which is why I said that there would be no equipment you can _legally obtain_ that would let you ignore DRM.
(4) If the copying process is sufficiently lossy in terms of quality, it is unlikely that this copying will have much impact on the market, so this will likely not be a deterrant to the introduction of ubiqutous DRM.
Encryption of watermarked content in order to hide the watermark will only be effective as a transport mechanism. That is, you may be able to tunnel it through DRM-enabled internet routers to another computer, but in order to play it back you will need to send the unencrypted DRM'd file to your playback device.
Besides, your OS wouldn't allow you to manipulate a DRM'd file in the first place so you couldn't really encrypt it unless the DRM allowed it.
I agree that DRM isn't copyright. DRM is introduced specifically to get more control over content than what copyright law allows. I am not a supporter of DRM so I am the wrong person to answer your concluding questions.
Most of the effort that goes into creating practical watermarks is spent exactly in this area: robustness in the face of determined tampering. As techniques improve, it is likely to become very difficult to get rid of the watermark simply by tweaking the audio. At best, you may be able to get rid of the watermark at considerable quality cost. But even then, you can never really know that the watermark is gone because you won't know how to detect its presence. While complete knowledge of the watermarking process would give you an easy job, this is hardly very useful as the knowledge you need to obtain includes knowledge of the key that was used for that particular mark. The problem then becomes one of obtaining keys, one we are familiar with from the field of encryption. This is generally not considered to be particularly easy.
Artists who don't like the business model involved with making digital artworks should stick to good, old-fashioned physical manifestations of their art. They will certainly be challenged by other artists who do wish to publish digital artworks. If these challengers manage to find a business model they consider worth-while, then they may out-compete their non-digital colleagues. If they cannot, then digital art is simply not meant to be at this time. There is no need to legislate a solution to a problem that is going to sort out itself through regular market forces anyway. Let the market find out on its own which products are in demand and how much (or little) profit producers are prepared to accept for their work.
If you can hear it, you can record it. This is only true so long as DRM is in its infancy. Once the technology matures and entrenches itself in legislation, all protected content will be watermarked when performed (played, displayed, etc.) and any recording equipment that you can legally acquire will refuse to record such watermarked content. The current generation of DRM is ineffective, and the rights holders know it. It has to start _somewhere_, however, and we are currently seeing the first stepping stone towards proper, ubiqutous DRM.
. . . It takes our current perception of intelligence . .. IQ isn't based on our perception of intelligence so much as it is based on someone's perception of intelligence. The whole field is littered with controversy and until we manage to agree on a pretty solid definition of what it is, exactly, we mean with the term "intelligence", this will remain the case. It is symptomatic of this topic that whole new "types" of intelligence have sprung up in the public debate over the last years, "social intelligence" perhaps being chief among them. This would probably never have happened if not for the IQ crowd's wholesale hijacking of the term "intelligence" for their own use. "Intelligence", as understood by the common person, revolves around a whole lot more than recognizing shapes and matching words.
Copyright law doesn't give you the right to impose a profitable business model upon the copyright holder. If the holder chooses to conduct his business in such a way as to drastically reduce his earnings, then it is his right to do so. It may be stupid of him, but the law is on his side. Not long ago, a Swedish movie maker sued TV4 (I think) in Sweden for having shown one of his movies with commercial breaks in the middle. He claimed that this was a violation of his rights as the creator of the work and that this resulted in a significant reduction in quality of the end product. The courts found in the movie maker's favour even though showing the movie on national broadcasters with commercials is presumably more profitable than not doing so.
IQ test INTELLIGENCE Actually, what IQ tests test is IQ. IQ may or may not have anything to do with what we tend to refer to as "intelligence". Since we don't have a very good idea what intelligence actually is, it's currently impossible for us to measure it and consequently also impossible to say whether or not IQ is a good approximation to such measurements.
Moreover, it helps protect the identity of the receiver of the message. If you encrypt a message and upload it to, say, a.binaries usenet group, then thousands of computers all over the world will be downloading the message. It becomes practically impossible to find out which one of the thousands (or millions if it's a nudie group:-) of receivers are the enemy agent, even if the sender and/or the message themselves get compromised. A direct connection, on the other hand, provides a handy place in which to start further investigation.
The Roman voting system was slightly complicated, but the gist of the system was that the population was divided into units, and each unit would cast one collective vote determined by each individual within the unit casting lots. The size of a unit would vary a lot so that the poorer/less influential classes might have thousands of people to a unit while the more rich and powerful might have a few hundred in a unit (don't quote me on the actual numbers). So a "knight" of Rome would effectively have much more power than a street beggar. All soldiers would typically participate in casting lots for their company (or legion, or whatever - don't remember the size of army voting units). Of course, casting of lots was a public affair and the general would cast the first lot, with his direct subordinates next and so on. It would take a strong man to cast his lot different from his commander:-) And, of course, not everyone was in a voting unit at all. At first, only people from Rome and its surrounding area would be eligible to vote (and soldiers were also recruited from this area). Throughout the Republic, it could be very difficult for someone from the provinces (or even just Italy outside of Rome) to gain citizenship. Various emperors starting relaxing this, in part to gain popularity and in part because the voting aspect was no longer all that important, given that the emperor had absolute power anyway. Of course, as you say, there were numerous other benefits to being a citizen.
I would agree that the way cows tend to be fed today is both disgusting and ill conceived. Feeding cattle to cattle is just plain stupid from a medical standpoint (and I understand this has largely stopped), not to mention that cows were never meant to eat cows in the first place. Give them something they're well equipped to digest. But these are choices we make based on economy (e.g., feeding cows with waste materials from other parts of the industry can make economic sense regardless of whether it is a long-term benefit for the cow) and market demand (e.g., if cow fed on honey tastes so good people will pay 100x the price for it, that's what farmers will do). If the market were to start demanding "food closer to the sun", then cattle could fill that spot with little effort. They're already custom made for the job even if that's not necessarily how we use them at the moment.
It is unlikely that man would adopt cooking just for the (alledged) taste benefits. More likely, we started cooking meat because cooked meat can be chewn and swallowed in mere minutes whileas raw meat is hell on your jaw muscles and takes forever to chew. It was a drastic economization of eating and so caught on quite rapidly. Any health benefits are probably just happy side effects as they would have been very difficult for primitive man to recognize given the poor knowledge of statistics and lack of health records at the time.
Cows have a considerably better digestion system than humans (it occupies most of the room inside the cow), with the result that they can extract nutrition from a large range of plants that humans cannot. If cows were fed on refined human food (e.g., wheat), then we would probably lose around 90% of the energy. Since they largely feed on foods that are not edible to humans, however (such as straw), that figure is likely much much smaller. Cattle are also one of the most effecient (energy-wise) food sources we have, apart from plants. They are only one step removed from the sun whileas pretty much anything hauled out of the ocean feeds on either fish or animal plankton and ends up being 2-5 steps removed from the sun, again losing about 90% energy per step.
. . . the idea of meat which literally just sits there as it grows is really unappealing. This is just a cultural meme that can easily change over the course of a generation. What different cultures think of as appetizing or revolting is so variable such a small transition as from hoof-meat to vat-meat is likely to be relatively painless. Of course, the flip side of the coin is that two generations from now, people might think in disgust of their grandparents who ate _actual_ _animals_ *yuck*:-) Should make BSE a thing of the past too.
Not if you only intended for the protection to last a couple of years. One of the key decisions to make when choosing an encryption scheme is for how long the information is to be protected. If the answer is "until release date", then you can often get away with a very low-end encryption scheme. If the answer is "forever", then go for one time pad and it'll be secure until doomsday. Of course, one time pad is considerably more expensive in terms of administration, but as is so often the case, you get what you pay for:-)
The more law-abiding members of our community can use ones that say "Slashdot: the official precious-metal-that-cannot-be-named website of the year-not-to-be-named/another-year-not-to-be-named cold-season-not-to-be-named / warm-season-not-to-be-named event-not-to-be-named". I'm sure _that_ will pull more tourists to the city-not-to-be-named!
Trademarks aren't worth much unless they get held up in court and 1) defending every single word in the technical dictionary is just too expensive, 2) you can't really trademark real words and 3) most of them would have gotten thrown out anyway unless you could document that you actually use them a lot.
Yay! Analogy contest!:-) The case that Google won is more akin to having an ad for Company Y on the same page as the (correct) listing for Company X. This is entirely legal and even common in the case of Yellow Pages (since competitors tend to be listed right next to eachother).
Could you go out on the street and sell your own brand of soda with the label: Better than Coca Cola Probably, so long as you make it quite clear that you're not actually selling Coca Cola. (Depending somewhat on your local "truth in advertising" laws, however, you may end up having to prove your claim.)
It probably has to do with the degree of association. The more likely that a consumer would mistakenly believe that this is a Geico ad, the more likely it is to be illegal. This is most likely the result of a reasoning along the lines of "a consumer is prepared for the eventuality that searching on Foo might turn up random ads, including ones that use competing marks in a legal manner. Further, a consumer is prepared for the eventuality that if he searches on Geico, he will get ads for Geico's competitors. What he is not sufficiently prepared for, however, is when he searches on Geico, gets an ad that says Geico in it and for this not to actually be Geico". The line has to be drawn somewhere, and this appears to be that particular "somewhere".
Technically, the laws are there in order to protect the consumer, who might otherwise become confused as to which product comes from which producer. With current trademark law, I, as a consumer, can rest easy knowing that when I buy a gadget that says "Sony" on it, chances are it's Sony that marketed it. Without trademark law, Samsung could happily sell Sony-marked merchandise if they figured it would be profitable to do so.
The question of filtering and the question of whether there is objectionable or even illegal content are two completely different debates. It is a mistake to try and tackle both issues at the same time. Filtering is a problem simply because it doesn't work. It is impossible to create a filter that removes all the content that you'd like to remove and it is impossible to create a filter that doesn't remove legitimate content. For these reasons alone, filters are a really really bad idea. If and when we solve the problem of building filters that actually do the job that we want them to do, then we can start discussing what content it is we want to censor. Until that time, however, we can only appreciate the fact that whatever it is that we want to censor, no filter will actually be able to do it. Current filters only work if there is a given (relatively small) set of URLs that have been human-screened and determined to be unwanted and then only if the filtering is done on those URLs only (i.e., no wildcards). For most legitimate purposes (e.g., protect the children), this is inadequate and so not a solution. For some illegitimate purposes (e.g., block out a given union web site), it can of course be quite useful.
The question of what destroyed the Roman empire is, I believe, somewhat more complex than what is being indicated in this subthread. The direct reasons for its downfall are myriad, but if we are to point to one single, dominant, ultimate reason I would choose the following: The Roman empire fell because it became an empire in the first place. This allowed the seeds of corruption that were present already in the Republic to grow and be concentrated in one single institution (the Caesar, or emperor) when during the Republic it had been dispersed over a number of different public officials (senators, tribunes, consuls, etc.) and so been kept mostly in check. The republic became an empire in large part as a side effect of Hannibal's sacking of the Italian countryside and subsequent destruction (well, pretty much) of the previously powerful landholding classes in lands adjacent to Rome. This left a power vacuum that allowed generals of the legions to step in and assume much more political power than what was previously the case. Eventually, this led to the empire, in which the man would rule who had the backing of the most troops (a simplistic explanation, but one that makes the salient point). Towards the end of the empire, the bulk of Roman legions was made up of barbarians, which seems to contradict the suggestion that massive immigration was the root of Rome's downfall. The immigrants were rather quite happy to be permitted to live within the empire and were quite prepared to help defend it.
I think this may be close, but inaccurate. It doesn't reduce the psychic's information (unless he didn't know he was a psychic), but rather the information in the system. Let's say there exists a person, Alfred, who is a psychic. Nobody knows he is a psychic (except perhaps himself), but he is. He is approached by Bill, who has Â$55 in his wallet. Alfred senses the $55. There is now information in the system that "Alfred is a psychic" because if he tells Bill about the $55 without Bill showing them to him first, Bill will know that Alfred is a psychic. Before this can happen, however, Bill shows Alfred the contents of his wallet. If Alfred now tells Bill about the $55, Bill will not be impressed and will have no reason to believe that Alfred is a psychic. So by opening his wallet, Bill removed information from the system. The system in this case being Alfred and Bill. (Of course, they really should be handling this experiment in a proper, scientific manner before anyone went out and pronounced Alfred a psychic, but the point remains the same.)
Slashdot Mirror
Once you decide to share your work with the public, then that is exactly what you have done. It is completely unreasonable that you should be able to thereafter control society's general use of the material beyond, perhaps, reasonable laws preventing others from profiting from it for a time.
If we are to progress beyond the 20th century, we cannot permit the existence of arbitrary veto of cultural dissemination of artworks. We would stagnate, shrivel up and die (well, culturally speaking anyway).
Some random commenter in the dark depths of the internet should be able to say whatever they damn well please . . .
The internet has precious few dark depths. If I was considering buying a Traffic-Power product, I might do a google search on them in order to find out more. Google is good at dredging the dark depths, and I would likely stumble upon the blog in question and it might affect my decision. Hence, the speech should reasonably be subject to libel laws etc.
I will respond to your various points without quoting their text:
/no/ key distribution beyond the initial pool). And the scheme proposed for the new high-def DVDs (Blu-Ray? Don't remember which one off hand) seems both clumsy and high-risk (update keysets from time to time, punish owners of blacklisted equipment, etc.). Nevertheless, if your thumbtop audio recorder doesn't permit you to record a given key, it doesn't help you much if you know what the key is so long as the recorder doesn't let you reprogram its DRM.
(1) Existing devices will eventually be phased out, due to loss, destruction and general degradation. Ubiqutous DRM isn't a short-term plan - it will take decades at least to pull off.
(2) Key distribution will certainly be an interesting problem. It comes as no surprise that the CSS scheme used for DVD has become useless for this reason (i.e., it has
(3) Watermarks will need to be designed so that they never accidentally occur in nature. This is only a matter of making them sufficiently unique. Moreover, a high-end device should be able to distinguish the part of the signal not to record from the one to record. If you take a camcorder on your holiday, you may find that the picture frames in the museum are completely blank on your film because the pictures were watermark-protected while the frames and wall were not. Your audio track might be missing the background music in the elevator because it was DRM'd while your conversation is still there. There will, however, still need to exist equipment that is watermark-ignorant, as you suggest. This is likely to be restricted military grade equipment that you cannot legally own, which is why I said that there would be no equipment you can _legally obtain_ that would let you ignore DRM.
(4) If the copying process is sufficiently lossy in terms of quality, it is unlikely that this copying will have much impact on the market, so this will likely not be a deterrant to the introduction of ubiqutous DRM.
Encryption of watermarked content in order to hide the watermark will only be effective as a transport mechanism. That is, you may be able to tunnel it through DRM-enabled internet routers to another computer, but in order to play it back you will need to send the unencrypted DRM'd file to your playback device.
Besides, your OS wouldn't allow you to manipulate a DRM'd file in the first place so you couldn't really encrypt it unless the DRM allowed it.
I agree that DRM isn't copyright. DRM is introduced specifically to get more control over content than what copyright law allows. I am not a supporter of DRM so I am the wrong person to answer your concluding questions.
Most of the effort that goes into creating practical watermarks is spent exactly in this area: robustness in the face of determined tampering.
As techniques improve, it is likely to become very difficult to get rid of the watermark simply by tweaking the audio. At best, you may be able to get rid of the watermark at considerable quality cost. But even then, you can never really know that the watermark is gone because you won't know how to detect its presence.
While complete knowledge of the watermarking process would give you an easy job, this is hardly very useful as the knowledge you need to obtain includes knowledge of the key that was used for that particular mark. The problem then becomes one of obtaining keys, one we are familiar with from the field of encryption. This is generally not considered to be particularly easy.
Artists who don't like the business model involved with making digital artworks should stick to good, old-fashioned physical manifestations of their art.
They will certainly be challenged by other artists who do wish to publish digital artworks. If these challengers manage to find a business model they consider worth-while, then they may out-compete their non-digital colleagues. If they cannot, then digital art is simply not meant to be at this time.
There is no need to legislate a solution to a problem that is going to sort out itself through regular market forces anyway. Let the market find out on its own which products are in demand and how much (or little) profit producers are prepared to accept for their work.
If you can hear it, you can record it.
This is only true so long as DRM is in its infancy. Once the technology matures and entrenches itself in legislation, all protected content will be watermarked when performed (played, displayed, etc.) and any recording equipment that you can legally acquire will refuse to record such watermarked content.
The current generation of DRM is ineffective, and the rights holders know it. It has to start _somewhere_, however, and we are currently seeing the first stepping stone towards proper, ubiqutous DRM.
. . . It takes our current perception of intelligence . . .
IQ isn't based on our perception of intelligence so much as it is based on someone's perception of intelligence. The whole field is littered with controversy and until we manage to agree on a pretty solid definition of what it is, exactly, we mean with the term "intelligence", this will remain the case.
It is symptomatic of this topic that whole new "types" of intelligence have sprung up in the public debate over the last years, "social intelligence" perhaps being chief among them. This would probably never have happened if not for the IQ crowd's wholesale hijacking of the term "intelligence" for their own use. "Intelligence", as understood by the common person, revolves around a whole lot more than recognizing shapes and matching words.
Copyright law doesn't give you the right to impose a profitable business model upon the copyright holder. If the holder chooses to conduct his business in such a way as to drastically reduce his earnings, then it is his right to do so.
It may be stupid of him, but the law is on his side.
Not long ago, a Swedish movie maker sued TV4 (I think) in Sweden for having shown one of his movies with commercial breaks in the middle. He claimed that this was a violation of his rights as the creator of the work and that this resulted in a significant reduction in quality of the end product. The courts found in the movie maker's favour even though showing the movie on national broadcasters with commercials is presumably more profitable than not doing so.
IQ test INTELLIGENCE
Actually, what IQ tests test is IQ. IQ may or may not have anything to do with what we tend to refer to as "intelligence". Since we don't have a very good idea what intelligence actually is, it's currently impossible for us to measure it and consequently also impossible to say whether or not IQ is a good approximation to such measurements.
Moreover, it helps protect the identity of the receiver of the message. If you encrypt a message and upload it to, say, a .binaries usenet group, then thousands of computers all over the world will be downloading the message. It becomes practically impossible to find out which one of the thousands (or millions if it's a nudie group :-) of receivers are the enemy agent, even if the sender and/or the message themselves get compromised.
A direct connection, on the other hand, provides a handy place in which to start further investigation.
The Roman voting system was slightly complicated, but the gist of the system was that the population was divided into units, and each unit would cast one collective vote determined by each individual within the unit casting lots. The size of a unit would vary a lot so that the poorer/less influential classes might have thousands of people to a unit while the more rich and powerful might have a few hundred in a unit (don't quote me on the actual numbers). So a "knight" of Rome would effectively have much more power than a street beggar. :-)
All soldiers would typically participate in casting lots for their company (or legion, or whatever - don't remember the size of army voting units). Of course, casting of lots was a public affair and the general would cast the first lot, with his direct subordinates next and so on. It would take a strong man to cast his lot different from his commander
And, of course, not everyone was in a voting unit at all. At first, only people from Rome and its surrounding area would be eligible to vote (and soldiers were also recruited from this area). Throughout the Republic, it could be very difficult for someone from the provinces (or even just Italy outside of Rome) to gain citizenship. Various emperors starting relaxing this, in part to gain popularity and in part because the voting aspect was no longer all that important, given that the emperor had absolute power anyway. Of course, as you say, there were numerous other benefits to being a citizen.
I would agree that the way cows tend to be fed today is both disgusting and ill conceived. Feeding cattle to cattle is just plain stupid from a medical standpoint (and I understand this has largely stopped), not to mention that cows were never meant to eat cows in the first place. Give them something they're well equipped to digest.
But these are choices we make based on economy (e.g., feeding cows with waste materials from other parts of the industry can make economic sense regardless of whether it is a long-term benefit for the cow) and market demand (e.g., if cow fed on honey tastes so good people will pay 100x the price for it, that's what farmers will do). If the market were to start demanding "food closer to the sun", then cattle could fill that spot with little effort. They're already custom made for the job even if that's not necessarily how we use them at the moment.
It is unlikely that man would adopt cooking just for the (alledged) taste benefits. More likely, we started cooking meat because cooked meat can be chewn and swallowed in mere minutes whileas raw meat is hell on your jaw muscles and takes forever to chew. It was a drastic economization of eating and so caught on quite rapidly.
Any health benefits are probably just happy side effects as they would have been very difficult for primitive man to recognize given the poor knowledge of statistics and lack of health records at the time.
Cows have a considerably better digestion system than humans (it occupies most of the room inside the cow), with the result that they can extract nutrition from a large range of plants that humans cannot. If cows were fed on refined human food (e.g., wheat), then we would probably lose around 90% of the energy. Since they largely feed on foods that are not edible to humans, however (such as straw), that figure is likely much much smaller.
Cattle are also one of the most effecient (energy-wise) food sources we have, apart from plants. They are only one step removed from the sun whileas pretty much anything hauled out of the ocean feeds on either fish or animal plankton and ends up being 2-5 steps removed from the sun, again losing about 90% energy per step.
. . . the idea of meat which literally just sits there as it grows is really unappealing. :-)
This is just a cultural meme that can easily change over the course of a generation. What different cultures think of as appetizing or revolting is so variable such a small transition as from hoof-meat to vat-meat is likely to be relatively painless. Of course, the flip side of the coin is that two generations from now, people might think in disgust of their grandparents who ate _actual_ _animals_ *yuck*
Should make BSE a thing of the past too.
Not if you only intended for the protection to last a couple of years. :-)
One of the key decisions to make when choosing an encryption scheme is for how long the information is to be protected. If the answer is "until release date", then you can often get away with a very low-end encryption scheme. If the answer is "forever", then go for one time pad and it'll be secure until doomsday. Of course, one time pad is considerably more expensive in terms of administration, but as is so often the case, you get what you pay for
The more law-abiding members of our community can use ones that say "Slashdot: the official precious-metal-that-cannot-be-named website of the year-not-to-be-named/another-year-not-to-be-named cold-season-not-to-be-named / warm-season-not-to-be-named event-not-to-be-named".
I'm sure _that_ will pull more tourists to the city-not-to-be-named!
Trademarks aren't worth much unless they get held up in court and
1) defending every single word in the technical dictionary is just too expensive,
2) you can't really trademark real words and
3) most of them would have gotten thrown out anyway unless you could document that you actually use them a lot.
Yay! Analogy contest! :-)
The case that Google won is more akin to having an ad for Company Y on the same page as the (correct) listing for Company X. This is entirely legal and even common in the case of Yellow Pages (since competitors tend to be listed right next to eachother).
Could you go out on the street and sell your own brand of soda with the label: Better than Coca Cola
Probably, so long as you make it quite clear that you're not actually selling Coca Cola. (Depending somewhat on your local "truth in advertising" laws, however, you may end up having to prove your claim.)
It probably has to do with the degree of association. The more likely that a consumer would mistakenly believe that this is a Geico ad, the more likely it is to be illegal.
This is most likely the result of a reasoning along the lines of "a consumer is prepared for the eventuality that searching on Foo might turn up random ads, including ones that use competing marks in a legal manner. Further, a consumer is prepared for the eventuality that if he searches on Geico, he will get ads for Geico's competitors. What he is not sufficiently prepared for, however, is when he searches on Geico, gets an ad that says Geico in it and for this not to actually be Geico".
The line has to be drawn somewhere, and this appears to be that particular "somewhere".
Technically, the laws are there in order to protect the consumer, who might otherwise become confused as to which product comes from which producer.
With current trademark law, I, as a consumer, can rest easy knowing that when I buy a gadget that says "Sony" on it, chances are it's Sony that marketed it. Without trademark law, Samsung could happily sell Sony-marked merchandise if they figured it would be profitable to do so.
The question of filtering and the question of whether there is objectionable or even illegal content are two completely different debates. It is a mistake to try and tackle both issues at the same time.
Filtering is a problem simply because it doesn't work. It is impossible to create a filter that removes all the content that you'd like to remove and it is impossible to create a filter that doesn't remove legitimate content. For these reasons alone, filters are a really really bad idea.
If and when we solve the problem of building filters that actually do the job that we want them to do, then we can start discussing what content it is we want to censor. Until that time, however, we can only appreciate the fact that whatever it is that we want to censor, no filter will actually be able to do it.
Current filters only work if there is a given (relatively small) set of URLs that have been human-screened and determined to be unwanted and then only if the filtering is done on those URLs only (i.e., no wildcards). For most legitimate purposes (e.g., protect the children), this is inadequate and so not a solution. For some illegitimate purposes (e.g., block out a given union web site), it can of course be quite useful.
The question of what destroyed the Roman empire is, I believe, somewhat more complex than what is being indicated in this subthread. The direct reasons for its downfall are myriad, but if we are to point to one single, dominant, ultimate reason I would choose the following:
The Roman empire fell because it became an empire in the first place. This allowed the seeds of corruption that were present already in the Republic to grow and be concentrated in one single institution (the Caesar, or emperor) when during the Republic it had been dispersed over a number of different public officials (senators, tribunes, consuls, etc.) and so been kept mostly in check.
The republic became an empire in large part as a side effect of Hannibal's sacking of the Italian countryside and subsequent destruction (well, pretty much) of the previously powerful landholding classes in lands adjacent to Rome. This left a power vacuum that allowed generals of the legions to step in and assume much more political power than what was previously the case. Eventually, this led to the empire, in which the man would rule who had the backing of the most troops (a simplistic explanation, but one that makes the salient point).
Towards the end of the empire, the bulk of Roman legions was made up of barbarians, which seems to contradict the suggestion that massive immigration was the root of Rome's downfall. The immigrants were rather quite happy to be permitted to live within the empire and were quite prepared to help defend it.
I think this may be close, but inaccurate. It doesn't reduce the psychic's information (unless he didn't know he was a psychic), but rather the information in the system.
Let's say there exists a person, Alfred, who is a psychic. Nobody knows he is a psychic (except perhaps himself), but he is. He is approached by Bill, who has Â$55 in his wallet. Alfred senses the $55. There is now information in the system that "Alfred is a psychic" because if he tells Bill about the $55 without Bill showing them to him first, Bill will know that Alfred is a psychic.
Before this can happen, however, Bill shows Alfred the contents of his wallet. If Alfred now tells Bill about the $55, Bill will not be impressed and will have no reason to believe that Alfred is a psychic. So by opening his wallet, Bill removed information from the system. The system in this case being Alfred and Bill.
(Of course, they really should be handling this experiment in a proper, scientific manner before anyone went out and pronounced Alfred a psychic, but the point remains the same.)