1) Uploading of copyrighted material is illegal It's only illegal if the copyright owner is against it. If you have any reason to believe that he will not complain, you can safely upload as much as you want, even though technically you will be "violating copyright".
2) The University, as an ISP, is legally responsible for what its users do, thanks to the DMCA Thanks to DMCA it's not responsible. It only has to remove the offending material when notified by the copyright owner. It's called "safe heaven" and was especially designed to limit the liability of the ISPs.
3) ~90% of file transfers over P2P are copyrighted material and illegal It depends on which way you want to look at that.:) First, we can argue that all downloads are legal and thus 100% of file transfers are legal. Second, do you have any sources to back up this number, or are you talking out of your ass? And third, the US is not the only country with P2P and in many countries filesharing is not illegal.
4) There's no realistic way to tell if any given file being transferred over the network is legal or not And there is no realistic way to tell if any student is a serial killer or not. Guess what, it's not the responsibility of the university to police the students. Until they somehow managed to violate university's copyright by sharing (oh horror! teaching notes or lecture slides), the university has no business at all, knowing what its students upload and download.
They are not "leeches", they are "users", damn it! In the same way I can say that WWW is the cancer of the Internet, because it wastes so much resources. And I can call you a virus, because you are wasting perfectly good oxygen... Do you see the flaws in my reasoning? If you do, I hope you also understand that opposing P2P on the grounds of resource use is simply insane. If you had a 2400 modem access shared between 100 users, would that mean that images on web-pages are a plague? No, that would simply mean that your technical capabilities are inadequate for the needs of the users.
I absolutely hate it when network admins play this holier-than-thou game and pretend to know better what everyone should be doing. Surprise! Surprise! It's not for you to decide. If you work in the university, then students are the clients and they should have the final say in what is and what is not allowed on the network.
And if there is not enough bandwidth, well, then get more bandwidth. Charge students extra for the network connection if you have to. When I studied in LUT I paid 17 euros to Sonera for the 1024/256Kbit connection in my apartment without any limits whatsoever. You can also set up trafic shapers, give higher priority to non-P2P traffic, do anything else, but please don't bitch about P2P. If you are a taxi driver, it's not your fucking business where I want to go to. Shut up and get me there.
Again, it's not so you can emulate your favorite CD without having to switch CDs.
It is. In Russia I can buy licensed games (including localised Western games) for as low as 4-6$. The pirated versions are 2.5$/CD. I am perfectly willing to pay more for a legit version to support the developers (unless the game is crap, then I'm going to trade it for another for 0.6$ extra). But it drives me freaking nuts that the game will spend half a minute recognising the CD, because of the copy-restriction, and that I can't use a CD image. I usually play several games at the same time and I don't want to spend extra time changing disks. In addition to inconvenience, I simply don't like the lack of control. I bough the disk, I want to be able to do whatever I want, if not, I will buy or download pirated versions or buy nothing at all.
Win2k is much better than Win9x, that's for sure. But it still is far from perfect. It does crash, it freezes, sometimes it will simply fuck up (in creative ways). I am not even talking about non-fatal bugs, when something simply doesn't work as it should or doesn't work at all.
When I see a BSOD caused by shitty nVidia or Creative drivers, I blame these companies, I don't blame MS. But I still have lot's of opportunities to do the latter, damn you, Bill!
However, I think we'd be at least 5-7 years, and more likely 10 years, from that happening.... there's still going to be the problem of backwards compatibility
That's why it might happen sooner than you think. Phoenix will introduce support for "Windows-booting" function in all motherboards right now. 5 years later, new MS Windows starts checking the BIOS before loading up. But at that time most machines that time will already have compatible Phoenix BIOS.
At that point it is pretty easy to show that the binary diffs amount to some encoding of the copyrighted work.
What you need is plausible deniability for the file-sharers. If the file you downloaded from P2P sounds like a freeware song from some amateur artist, you can freely share it and not worry about RIAA lawsuits (the problem of extortion still remains, though). RIAA will not be able to prove that you also extracted the steganographically hidden copy of Metallica song from this MP3.
The same can be done with anything else. Take a gallery of Kournikova photos, hide child erotica/pornography into them. Share the images on P2P as a collection of Kournikova photos. After the files spread, inform others that they can download a certain file by using a certain hash-link and extract other images from there (using a key in the form of a short password).
Now if police finds the images on your computer, they have no way (if you took certain precautions) to determine whether you downloaded these files as Kournikova photos or as child porn containers. It can very well be so that most people did the former thing and, since they don't know the password, they even have no way to know whether there is any steganographic content (without doing some relatively advanced analysis of the files).
So as long as there is a way to acquire popular legit freeware content of any sort, one can distribute questionable content over P2P without exposing the downloaders and subsequent sharers to risk (and the creator can announce the existence of hidden content well after the file was initially distributed and his involvement cannot be easily proved).
As I understand it, the new thing about the research described in that article is a new model simulating random investor behaviour that is very similar to actual stock market patterns, not the fact of 'random walk'.
This is mostly true, but I still think that there might be a way to use "legit insider knowledge" for long-term investment to beat the market. If you have unique knowledge of the specific industry very well and if it's not highly dependant on the overall economy/stock market climate, you might be able to predict the future cash flows of the companies better than most investors. Of course, it's difficult to sustain such advantage over time and to the outsider, who doesn't share your understanding, your advice carries the same risk as advice from anyone else...:)
Analyst predictions are little more than a guess - nobody can predict the future. If there was ever a sure-fire way to make money with no risk, well everyone would be billionaires in a day and inflation would be a real bitch.
Not exactly. The problem (or advantage) with the market is that even if one can reliably predict the future, there is still no way to turn that prediction into hard cash.:) If there is any way (that doesn't require insider information) to know what will happen to Sun in a few years, every can figure it out and those who can't do it by themselves can still read analyst reports. Of course, once everyone knows that Sun will topple Microsoft in 5 years, Sun share price will immediately skyrocket and it won't grow after that (because of this news - it might increase when additional information becomes available and it will also grow over the year as the dividend payout date becomes closer, only to drop after the dividend is paid). All available information is immediately reflected in the share price (how "correctly" is another question), so even knowing the future doesn't help to get returns that are higher than market average.
A recent article in Nature suggests that "[the] apparent randomness [of the stock prices] comes from the imperfect ability of market agents to process the complex and often incomplete information at their disposal. The best strategy is virtually impossible to find, so everyone reaches different conclusions." It's funny, but it seems that in reality the market stock prices are mostly determined by the actions of investors, not by any fundamental qualities of the companies in question. I.e. to beat the market you need to know about how it functions, not to know anything about the companies. This is made worse by the fact that even if you can successfully predict the companies' destiny, in short term the stock price movement still depends on the investors' actions, not on the "true value" of future cash flows. The only remaining option is to invest long-term and collect the dividends during 10 years or so. In this case you can succeed despite the market randomness by correctly predicting future cash flows.
There is no way every one of them has laws (with teeth to stop it. And hey, look how well laws against murder work!!), and there's no way the U.S. diplomats are going to say, "No, we'll stop our billion dollar trade unless you stop your spammers."
I don't expect the diplomats to do it, I expect ISPs to do it. If spammers move to Vanuatu, I expect most ISPs to say "Fuck Vanuatu!" and block all incoming e-mail from that country.:) That would cause a minor inconvenience for Vanuatuans, forcing them to use US-based webmail for international communications, but who the fuck cares about them.:-) Many ISPs already routinely block whole countries, such as Nigeria and Argentina, because most USians receive little legitimate mail from these countries.
So we only need to outlaw spam in the major Internet countries, such as US, EU, SEA, China, Russia, Australia, etc. And the Vanuatus of the world can do whatever they want but they should be ready for the consequences.
That's called ambitious how? We really had computers for half a century. We had Internet for about 20 years. Look what we were able to do already. Even according to very conservative estimates, computers are going to become tens of thousands times more powerful (may be much much faster). And Google says it will take 300 years to build an intelligent search agent? Talk about ambitions.
Even ignoring the possibility of Singularity this is going to happen much much sooner.
P.S. BTW, it seems that Google still hasn't restored the links to KaZaA Lite sites.
I think to be patentable the invention needs to be non-obvious. Whatever your definition of obviousness is, I doubt, that MS feature can be considered non-obvious.
If it can, please enjoy the list of things that I am going to patent as soon as I finish this post:
It's good when jobs are lost. That means less human labour is required and it can be used for something else. Now it's the responsibility of the state and various other organisation to help people do the transition. And it only looks scary in the short-term, when you need money to pay for the mortgage and have to live unemployeed for 6 months. In the long term (more than a few years) the economy becomes more efficient and everyone benefits.
We usually tend to overestimate the importance of the short-term changes. For example, the attention we pay to the MP3 sharing issues is too great, compared with the real importance. In 5 years we will look back and see (hopefully) the weakening of traditional copyright as the logical and expected thing. Today we think about it as a revolution, a battle or something...
Go to your boss. Call that boss every foul word you can think of, and then say you were exercising your freedom of speech. Better yet, do it over an intercom at work, broadening your audience. You will probably be fired, but not wind up in court.
How about doing it while you are both on vacation? Does he have a right to fire you? He still has? Then it's not capitalism, it's fucking barbarian feodalism. You call yourself a free country? Free country my ass! You freed the blacks, didn't you? Much good it did to you - now there is no distinction between whites and blacks, but only because you all have slave mentality now.
I am not trolling. Seriously, how can anyone sane consider that normal???
Does buying from your competitor count? It's the companies like this that have slowly corrupted capitalism. It was about laissez faire, about economic freedom. Now it's apparently about economic limitations, as many as you can impose. If one of my employees did something against the interest of my business outside of his working hours, it would be none of my business. If you think otherwise, you are not the kind of person I have any respect for.
You forget that working hard helps the company and helping the company ensures it still has money to pay you. You don't have to love your employer, but you should understand that your well-being depends on the well-being of the company (while you work there).
There is one thing you do not see here. There doesn't have to be a standard way to resolve such links. Your application can select the appropriate one (and so you can select what results you get). In case of "info:palm/..." link, your browser can be set to go to pricewatch.com or to amazon.com or just open your e-shopping application that would use XML to get results from different sites and present them to you. Alternatively you can install a helpful InfoBuddy that would redirect all such links to the most generous sponsor.:) But ultimately you control how such links should be resolved.
As for the other example, info:map/... can launch your mapping application. You have video players that open AVI files and pnm://... links, you have image editors that open JPG files, you have mail clients that open mailto:... links. In the same way you can have a map viewer. Alternatively, there can be a general purpose info viewer that would use downloadable custom decoders/viewer (like WMP downloads codecs) to deal with different types of content.
The thing is you don't need much organisation here. Everyone is capable of creating and running a namespace. If it is useful, people will use it. If someone abuses it, they won't. There are already some non-server-based namespaces: ed2k and magnet for P2P, as well as others. Everyone can have a program that uses "URIs" in these namespaces, and even without control from NISO everything works fine.
It's amazing how you managed to reduce all the complexity of macroeconomics to just two variables - spendings on building the power grid and wealth. I guess most African countries should be stinking rich - after all, they didn't have to invest in power systems much...
P.S. Please, write your senator and beg him to not let the US go the Soviet way. Don't let them change the power system - any changes increase the chances of economic and then national collapse! Act before it's too late!
You mean the US have never had any nuclear accidents? Let me respectfully disagree. And Soviet planned economy was perfectly capable of learning Chernobyl's lessons. All nuclear reactors in Russia in service today are of modern designs and are safe in case of accident (they will shut down instead of exploding).
Well, may be. In Soviet Union there have been no blackouts. The worst was when a block of houses, or a city district were cut off from the grid. I don't think there ever was a significant blackout in a major city. The reason? The best power distribution network in the world. A lot of redundancy as well as capacity to transmit power across the whole country. It was built to power the European part of the country with cheap hydro energy from Siberia and reliability was a cool side-effect.
The energy industry was underinvested for more than 15 years now, but we still had no major blackouts (other than customers disconnected for not paying their bills). The United Energy System is being reformed now to make it attractive for investors. I don't know if the positive effect of much needed investment will be offset by poor reliability, but I hope that remaining government regulation and "traditions" of the industry will help us avoid freemarket-style blackouts.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Uploading of copyrighted material is illegal
:) First, we can argue that all downloads are legal and thus 100% of file transfers are legal. Second, do you have any sources to back up this number, or are you talking out of your ass? And third, the US is not the only country with P2P and in many countries filesharing is not illegal.
It's only illegal if the copyright owner is against it. If you have any reason to believe that he will not complain, you can safely upload as much as you want, even though technically you will be "violating copyright".
2) The University, as an ISP, is legally responsible for what its users do, thanks to the DMCA
Thanks to DMCA it's not responsible. It only has to remove the offending material when notified by the copyright owner. It's called "safe heaven" and was especially designed to limit the liability of the ISPs.
3) ~90% of file transfers over P2P are copyrighted material and illegal
It depends on which way you want to look at that.
4) There's no realistic way to tell if any given file being transferred over the network is legal or not
And there is no realistic way to tell if any student is a serial killer or not. Guess what, it's not the responsibility of the university to police the students. Until they somehow managed to violate university's copyright by sharing (oh horror! teaching notes or lecture slides), the university has no business at all, knowing what its students upload and download.
They are not "leeches", they are "users", damn it! In the same way I can say that WWW is the cancer of the Internet, because it wastes so much resources. And I can call you a virus, because you are wasting perfectly good oxygen... Do you see the flaws in my reasoning? If you do, I hope you also understand that opposing P2P on the grounds of resource use is simply insane. If you had a 2400 modem access shared between 100 users, would that mean that images on web-pages are a plague? No, that would simply mean that your technical capabilities are inadequate for the needs of the users.
I absolutely hate it when network admins play this holier-than-thou game and pretend to know better what everyone should be doing. Surprise! Surprise! It's not for you to decide. If you work in the university, then students are the clients and they should have the final say in what is and what is not allowed on the network.
And if there is not enough bandwidth, well, then get more bandwidth. Charge students extra for the network connection if you have to. When I studied in LUT I paid 17 euros to Sonera for the 1024/256Kbit connection in my apartment without any limits whatsoever. You can also set up trafic shapers, give higher priority to non-P2P traffic, do anything else, but please don't bitch about P2P. If you are a taxi driver, it's not your fucking business where I want to go to. Shut up and get me there.
Again, it's not so you can emulate your favorite CD without having to switch CDs.
It is. In Russia I can buy licensed games (including localised Western games) for as low as 4-6$. The pirated versions are 2.5$/CD. I am perfectly willing to pay more for a legit version to support the developers (unless the game is crap, then I'm going to trade it for another for 0.6$ extra). But it drives me freaking nuts that the game will spend half a minute recognising the CD, because of the copy-restriction, and that I can't use a CD image. I usually play several games at the same time and I don't want to spend extra time changing disks. In addition to inconvenience, I simply don't like the lack of control. I bough the disk, I want to be able to do whatever I want, if not, I will buy or download pirated versions or buy nothing at all.
Win2k is much better than Win9x, that's for sure. But it still is far from perfect. It does crash, it freezes, sometimes it will simply fuck up (in creative ways). I am not even talking about non-fatal bugs, when something simply doesn't work as it should or doesn't work at all.
When I see a BSOD caused by shitty nVidia or Creative drivers, I blame these companies, I don't blame MS. But I still have lot's of opportunities to do the latter, damn you, Bill!
However, I think we'd be at least 5-7 years, and more likely 10 years, from that happening. ... there's still going to be the problem of backwards compatibility
That's why it might happen sooner than you think. Phoenix will introduce support for "Windows-booting" function in all motherboards right now. 5 years later, new MS Windows starts checking the BIOS before loading up. But at that time most machines that time will already have compatible Phoenix BIOS.
At that point it is pretty easy to show that the binary diffs amount to some encoding of the copyrighted work.
What you need is plausible deniability for the file-sharers. If the file you downloaded from P2P sounds like a freeware song from some amateur artist, you can freely share it and not worry about RIAA lawsuits (the problem of extortion still remains, though). RIAA will not be able to prove that you also extracted the steganographically hidden copy of Metallica song from this MP3.
The same can be done with anything else. Take a gallery of Kournikova photos, hide child erotica/pornography into them. Share the images on P2P as a collection of Kournikova photos. After the files spread, inform others that they can download a certain file by using a certain hash-link and extract other images from there (using a key in the form of a short password).
Now if police finds the images on your computer, they have no way (if you took certain precautions) to determine whether you downloaded these files as Kournikova photos or as child porn containers. It can very well be so that most people did the former thing and, since they don't know the password, they even have no way to know whether there is any steganographic content (without doing some relatively advanced analysis of the files).
So as long as there is a way to acquire popular legit freeware content of any sort, one can distribute questionable content over P2P without exposing the downloaders and subsequent sharers to risk (and the creator can announce the existence of hidden content well after the file was initially distributed and his involvement cannot be easily proved).
As I understand it, the new thing about the research described in that article is a new model simulating random investor behaviour that is very similar to actual stock market patterns, not the fact of 'random walk'.
This is mostly true, but I still think that there might be a way to use "legit insider knowledge" for long-term investment to beat the market. If you have unique knowledge of the specific industry very well and if it's not highly dependant on the overall economy/stock market climate, you might be able to predict the future cash flows of the companies better than most investors. Of course, it's difficult to sustain such advantage over time and to the outsider, who doesn't share your understanding, your advice carries the same risk as advice from anyone else... :)
Analyst predictions are little more than a guess - nobody can predict the future. If there was ever a sure-fire way to make money with no risk, well everyone would be billionaires in a day and inflation would be a real bitch.
:) If there is any way (that doesn't require insider information) to know what will happen to Sun in a few years, every can figure it out and those who can't do it by themselves can still read analyst reports. Of course, once everyone knows that Sun will topple Microsoft in 5 years, Sun share price will immediately skyrocket and it won't grow after that (because of this news - it might increase when additional information becomes available and it will also grow over the year as the dividend payout date becomes closer, only to drop after the dividend is paid). All available information is immediately reflected in the share price (how "correctly" is another question), so even knowing the future doesn't help to get returns that are higher than market average.
Not exactly. The problem (or advantage) with the market is that even if one can reliably predict the future, there is still no way to turn that prediction into hard cash.
A recent article in Nature suggests that "[the] apparent randomness [of the stock prices] comes from the imperfect ability of market agents to process the complex and often incomplete information at their disposal. The best strategy is virtually impossible to find, so everyone reaches different conclusions." It's funny, but it seems that in reality the market stock prices are mostly determined by the actions of investors, not by any fundamental qualities of the companies in question. I.e. to beat the market you need to know about how it functions, not to know anything about the companies. This is made worse by the fact that even if you can successfully predict the companies' destiny, in short term the stock price movement still depends on the investors' actions, not on the "true value" of future cash flows. The only remaining option is to invest long-term and collect the dividends during 10 years or so. In this case you can succeed despite the market randomness by correctly predicting future cash flows.
A cool brown dwarf was found nearby this year. It's a companion of Epsilon Indi Ba, another brown dwarf 11.8 light years away. See this:
6
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=1259
So my guess it's entirely impossible that an even closer star will be found in the near future.
There is no way every one of them has laws (with teeth to stop it. And hey, look how well laws against murder work!!), and there's no way the U.S. diplomats are going to say, "No, we'll stop our billion dollar trade unless you stop your spammers."
:) That would cause a minor inconvenience for Vanuatuans, forcing them to use US-based webmail for international communications, but who the fuck cares about them. :-) Many ISPs already routinely block whole countries, such as Nigeria and Argentina, because most USians receive little legitimate mail from these countries.
I don't expect the diplomats to do it, I expect ISPs to do it. If spammers move to Vanuatu, I expect most ISPs to say "Fuck Vanuatu!" and block all incoming e-mail from that country.
So we only need to outlaw spam in the major Internet countries, such as US, EU, SEA, China, Russia, Australia, etc. And the Vanuatus of the world can do whatever they want but they should be ready for the consequences.
That's called "disclosure", not "disclaimer".
That's called ambitious how? We really had computers for half a century. We had Internet for about 20 years. Look what we were able to do already. Even according to very conservative estimates, computers are going to become tens of thousands times more powerful (may be much much faster). And Google says it will take 300 years to build an intelligent search agent? Talk about ambitions.
Even ignoring the possibility of Singularity this is going to happen much much sooner.
P.S. BTW, it seems that Google still hasn't restored the links to KaZaA Lite sites.
I think to be patentable the invention needs to be non-obvious. Whatever your definition of obviousness is, I doubt, that MS feature can be considered non-obvious.
If it can, please enjoy the list of things that I am going to patent as soon as I finish this post:
Generally, eDonkey is for movies, KaZaA is for music. So it would make sense that MPAA would monitor ed2k network, but KaZaA probably doesn't need to.
It's good when jobs are lost. That means less human labour is required and it can be used for something else. Now it's the responsibility of the state and various other organisation to help people do the transition. And it only looks scary in the short-term, when you need money to pay for the mortgage and have to live unemployeed for 6 months. In the long term (more than a few years) the economy becomes more efficient and everyone benefits.
We usually tend to overestimate the importance of the short-term changes. For example, the attention we pay to the MP3 sharing issues is too great, compared with the real importance. In 5 years we will look back and see (hopefully) the weakening of traditional copyright as the logical and expected thing. Today we think about it as a revolution, a battle or something...
Go to your boss. Call that boss every foul word you can think of, and then say you were exercising your freedom of speech. Better yet, do it over an intercom at work, broadening your audience. You will probably be fired, but not wind up in court.
How about doing it while you are both on vacation? Does he have a right to fire you? He still has? Then it's not capitalism, it's fucking barbarian feodalism. You call yourself a free country? Free country my ass! You freed the blacks, didn't you? Much good it did to you - now there is no distinction between whites and blacks, but only because you all have slave mentality now.
I am not trolling. Seriously, how can anyone sane consider that normal???
Does buying from your competitor count? It's the companies like this that have slowly corrupted capitalism. It was about laissez faire, about economic freedom. Now it's apparently about economic limitations, as many as you can impose. If one of my employees did something against the interest of my business outside of his working hours, it would be none of my business. If you think otherwise, you are not the kind of person I have any respect for.
You forget that working hard helps the company and helping the company ensures it still has money to pay you. You don't have to love your employer, but you should understand that your well-being depends on the well-being of the company (while you work there).
There is one thing you do not see here. There doesn't have to be a standard way to resolve such links. Your application can select the appropriate one (and so you can select what results you get). In case of "info:palm/..." link, your browser can be set to go to pricewatch.com or to amazon.com or just open your e-shopping application that would use XML to get results from different sites and present them to you. Alternatively you can install a helpful InfoBuddy that would redirect all such links to the most generous sponsor. :) But ultimately you control how such links should be resolved.
As for the other example, info:map/... can launch your mapping application. You have video players that open AVI files and pnm://... links, you have image editors that open JPG files, you have mail clients that open mailto:... links. In the same way you can have a map viewer. Alternatively, there can be a general purpose info viewer that would use downloadable custom decoders/viewer (like WMP downloads codecs) to deal with different types of content.
The thing is you don't need much organisation here. Everyone is capable of creating and running a namespace. If it is useful, people will use it. If someone abuses it, they won't. There are already some non-server-based namespaces: ed2k and magnet for P2P, as well as others. Everyone can have a program that uses "URIs" in these namespaces, and even without control from NISO everything works fine.
It's amazing how you managed to reduce all the complexity of macroeconomics to just two variables - spendings on building the power grid and wealth. I guess most African countries should be stinking rich - after all, they didn't have to invest in power systems much...
P.S. Please, write your senator and beg him to not let the US go the Soviet way. Don't let them change the power system - any changes increase the chances of economic and then national collapse! Act before it's too late!
You mean the US have never had any nuclear accidents? Let me respectfully disagree. And Soviet planned economy was perfectly capable of learning Chernobyl's lessons. All nuclear reactors in Russia in service today are of modern designs and are safe in case of accident (they will shut down instead of exploding).
Well, may be. In Soviet Union there have been no blackouts. The worst was when a block of houses, or a city district were cut off from the grid. I don't think there ever was a significant blackout in a major city. The reason? The best power distribution network in the world. A lot of redundancy as well as capacity to transmit power across the whole country. It was built to power the European part of the country with cheap hydro energy from Siberia and reliability was a cool side-effect.
The energy industry was underinvested for more than 15 years now, but we still had no major blackouts (other than customers disconnected for not paying their bills). The United Energy System is being reformed now to make it attractive for investors. I don't know if the positive effect of much needed investment will be offset by poor reliability, but I hope that remaining government regulation and "traditions" of the industry will help us avoid freemarket-style blackouts.