'Owned' by students for an extended time? $50 might be a low price for somebody looking to commit identity theft, if these machines haven't been thoroughly sanitized and weren't particularly locked-down for use. They've probably been used for personal e-mail, online purchases, coursework that might be useful for resale online, and so forth. You'd have to be an utter bastard to do so, but then -- you'd probably have to be an utter bastard to bring a folding chair and whack people with it, over a discounted iBook.
In fact, free copying is a critical part of process of innovation and marketing. There was a time when school children went and copies the great works. The major entertainment conglormerate copy past work, make slight changes, and sell it as somethin new. They then want the new product protected into perpetutiy. The popularity of many things hinge of the free distribution of the product.
If free copying were that critical to innovation, you might expect the People's Republic of China and perhaps Vietnam to be the most innovative places on the planet. You might also expect previous generations, which you suggest copied classics quite readily (an activity I'd normally associate with cloistered Dark Age European monks, or perhaps Confucian scholars -- both highly dynamic and innovative groups known for improving on tradition and transforming their societies), to have been significantly more creative and innovative than current times.
Of course, with patents anyway there can be a bit of silliness; too many overly-broad and obvious patents being granted means companies practically doomed to infringe on at least SOME patent need to keep a portfolio so everybody else is likely to infringe on one of their own, and to encourage settlements involving perpetual cross-licensing should any litigation arise. But I doubt that cultural development has been slowed much by the inability to duplicate Mickey Mouse screenplays without talking to Disney.
I might also suggest that popularity, while it may be related to "free" (with the obvious exception of prestige goods), need not be the primary objective of somebody who holds IP. Not infrequently, that primary objective would instead be personal gain. It's difficult to pay for gold, coke and hookers with thank-you letters from fans. Given the desire for money, it's not unreasonable to consider the downsides of making a product available for less.
Perhaps he wasn't referring to the legal aspects -- those haven't changed, as MS-DOS wasn't exactly meant to be "shared", either -- but to the more-intrusive enforcement schemes used today such as product activation involving contacting company servers rather than merely entering a product serial number.
Freedom tends to include the right to make a stupid decision wherever such is possible. If Joe Sixpack tends to pay too much attention to marketing and keeping up with his neighbors, that's his fault. If he buys designer clothes based on what somebody said about what label's "hot" every year, that's his fault for not going by criteria that make more sense.
It's not like you're going to be fined the difference if you keep your car for sixteen years rather than buying a new one every five or six, for instance. You don't *need* a music collection, unless perhaps its directly job-related; you can always divert your time and money towards other hobbies. You don't *need* to purchase cable TV, unless you absolutely depend on some feed you can't get any other way. You don't *need* to see any movies at all; if you choose to, that's your decision. It's all crap that you're not willing to pay for? Then take a hike -- literally, unless you're stuck far from anywhere it'd be interesting. Or read a book; odds are you haven't yet read everything of interest to you from the depths of human literary history. Or jog around. Or so forth; you have choices.
As for civil disobedience, such is normally not associated with anonymity; rather, it consists of people openly violating the law and actively inviting the authorities to come down on them. Hence, high-profile protests and sit-ins, and so forth -- not skulking anonymously and trying to avoid being caught.
Hell, there's more of a chance of having an excuse for being grossly overweight (hormonal problems, say) than there is for spending money on luxuries. Do it all you like, but don't pretend that you can lay all the blame on the marketers when you should be shouldering that burden.
If memory serves, copyright violations aren't a criminal offense under NETA unless they exceed a total monetary value of (some threshold) within (some period of time). It may be hard to assign a non-zero monetary value to the GPL'd software itself when it's *intended* to be legally redistributed at a monetary cost of zero.
It's still a bandwidth problem. The e-mail worms in particular can still clog your e-mail servers even if nobody at your organization can be infected because your e-mail server automatically detects and removes them; unless your peers also filter them, they'll cost you.
Sure, it's not quite as bad as having the bandwidth problems *and* having your systems compromised with the aid of clueless users or badly programmed mail/web clients, but it's still bad, and it's still better for all around if their propagation is slowed by reducing the pool of vulnerable sites.
Hm? Are you objecting to the 'proof of purchase' bit?
It's there because not all illegitimate copies are obvious illegitimate copies; counterfeiters have gotten quite good at duplicating packaging. In addition, there may be vendors which mislead people into thinking that they're buying a fairly cheap legitimate copy when in fact they're selling an unauthorized copy.
This provides a way to "go straight" for those taken in by that; since it's apparently at the common OEM price, and probably comes with similar restrictions (licensed to a single machine, non-transferable, that sort of thing), it shouldn't provide an incentive to go out and deliberately buy unauthorized copies in order to get that discount.
They might be able to threaten a suit for copyright infringement, if they could show that you almost certainly knew what you were doing -- e.g. purchasing an MS Windows XP download from www.r4nd0W4r3zsp4mM3r.com for $10 -- but I doubt they can threaten extrajudicial punishment without it being considered extortion.
Even if you've obviously, knowingly infringed on their rights that does not grant them arbitrary power to infringe on yours in order to bypass the legal system. Locking one's personal files is something that Microsoft would not have the right to do.
While I'm not familiar with Deus Ex, and your argument may be precisely correct within the context of that game, in the general case it may not be so.
If, for instance, one considered a hypothetical dystopian world in which a fascist state used ubiquituous 24/7 surveillance of movements and communications to maintain security and stability at the complete cost of political freedom and private property, would somebody who advised peaceful collaboration be considered "good"? Would somebody who advocated violence to overthrow said system necessarily be a monster?
Each course of action depends on the circumstances- but devoid of any circumstances, wouldn't one always think of peace as good and violence as bad? Isn't this what people teach their children?
I'd think that a lot of children, at least boys, probably get encouraged to stand up for themselves and to push back if necessary. That's probably particularly true if the people attempting the beating are people the victims have to face on a regular basis, and who might get their jollies beating their victims multiple times a week or so, unless the faculty / staff are really up on things and put a stop to it.
If the choice is being beaten up while not fighting back, versus fighting back and possibly getting beat less -- that is, they're not against completely unbalanced odds -- wouldn't many fathers tell their sons to choose the latter?
(1) Go Monarchy, then Republic ASAP. (2) Grow, kick neighbor ass as need be. (3) Develop science base through sheer numbers. (4) Turn Fundamentalist + Hi-Tech Military Aggressor.
seemed to be a much more viable strategy than it should have been. It kept the citizens in line (no unhappiness) and reduced support costs, but you could be a *pragmatic* fundamentalist militarist who invaded when useful rather than immediately declaring a religious war against all empires on the planet if you weren't ready. You could wage genocidal warfare all you liked, and your own people weren't bothered at all.
SMAC, on the other hand, might have been a gift to the Green movement with the difficulty of managing pollution if you actually made use of the high-end industrial production bonuses.
It's probably not going to disrupt internal communications too much, which means that resistance can still be organized.
If you're going around committing atrocities, word might still get out via satellite links or perhaps the cell phone system of a neighboring country, even if there are no land telephony connections over the borders.
It's a nonsensical rationale, since you can't practically steal a nation's oil through force without a *massive* occupation and incredibly secure logistics; the infrastructure required to transport vast volumes of liquid is simply too fragile in the age of ubiquituous explosives and AK-47s. You can, perhaps, threaten to remove a government if it refuses to comply, but if you actually remove it and leave a security vacuum, you're now stuck with securing the pipelines, roads for tankers, oil fields, and shipping terminals. That might be fine if you're waging total war with massive drafts and manpower on a Second World War scale, or if you have a vast and brutally repressive intelligence service operating there, but it's not too practical otherwise. That's in addition to the usual tendency of the war itself to degrade the infrastructure.
Instead, it's usually the other way around: "no war" for oil, at least when the potentially targetted government is doing a reasonable job at maintaining sufficient order to keep the oil flowing. Consider, for instance, which nations argued most vehemently against war in Iraq, and intersect that list with the nations that had substantial oil contracts with Iraq just waiting for the sanctions to drop. If you want the oil, it may be the most economical to deal with a stable kleptocratic dictatorship and offer kickbacks to those in power, rather than a democracy that might insist on a fairer price or an unstable post-war mess in which oil extraction and transportation becomes much less safe.
You'll want to have a look at two recent Supreme Court rulings, then, in which the generally left-aligned statists such as Stevens and Ginsburg allied with "moderates" to officially sanction a vast expansion of government power.
One, they ruled that the Federal government has jurisdiction over anything that *affects* interstate commerce. This is practically any activity on the planet, given how indirect they allow the chain to be.
Two, they ruled that "public use" for the purposes of forcibly seizing property goes not only towards the obvious roles (turning private land into public land, such as for public roads) but justifies taking from one private owner and giving to another, if *some* benefit can be argued on behalf of the state such as an additional dollar of tax revenue.
These decisions essentially steamroll over the concepts of private property and federalism.
It's a bit more complicated than that, since a rather large portion of the political power in Iran lies in the hands of *unelected* mullahs on the Guardian Council who can largely override the elected officials. It makes their elections a bit less meaningful, really.
If you're an entrepreneur, and especially a non-local one, you may have a vested interest in a transparent state with an independent judiciary and a fundamental respect for property rights, lest your investments be nationalized, your profits be siphoned for kickbacks, or your bids handicapped by favoritism or outright espionage on behalf of the locals.
If there's an encryption scheme, there's a key. And depending on who's looking for it, they may resort to coercive measures to get that key. Or, for that matter, attempting to get the key and the medium simultaneously -- e.g raiding your place and seizing anything that could provide the key, including you.
The greater the physical destruction and the lower probability that the data would be recoverable, however, the less productive it becomes for someone to try, and the less likely that even if they DO try that the information will be compromised.
Eh, it might be rather more interesting from their point of view to let you in, but under constant surveillance so they can later investigate everybody you had contact with in case any of them happen to be dissidents -- or if it would be convenient to frame any of them as dissidents. Then, they can trumpet your involvement with this shindig as "evidence", and go drive up some good ol' fashioned anti-foreigner, nationalistic fervor.
Well, judging by the article, Mastercard specifically told the processor *not* to retain information -- and the latter did, anyway. The policy already existed.
No, to block things you'd need to do more than tell them not to retain information. You'd need to make sure that even if they did, it was useless. This might point towards requiring people to generate one-time passwords, which would probably be a fair expensive.
If you're reviewing for "the ultra-gamer", however, you should measure what effect the ultra-gamer is likely to see.
That ultra-gamer is likely NOT going to be running an unaccelerated graphics card at low resolution. If, in fact, he probably won't, and because of this he's unlikely to see any significant speed gain, then that's a perfectly fair result to present and arguably one much more relevant to said ultra-gamer.
Depending on the final objective, I could see time being spent learning SQL, SPSS, SAS, and so forth, and working on an industrial project of reasonable size to be extremely advantageous. Extra points if in the process a security clearance is earned.
The doctoral degree is essentially required for university-level academic positions, and only slightly less necessary for industrial research tasks, but building up the skill set may be more helpful if he doesn't want to aim for either of these tracks. Even then, building some industrial experience may be helpful prior towards entering a Ph.D. program.
To a degree, yes (to a degree only; there are a number of ways to remove watermarks in a digital image, unless it's something very obvious such as a huge, clearly legible copyright notice running on the diagonal of the image. You could, for instance, print and re-scan, or convert the image through multiple formats including additional lossy compression, clone areas of the image, or so forth.)
The bigger problem is that while the existence of a detectable watermark would indicate that somebody probably cares about his copyright, the lack of a detectable watermark does not indicate the reverse.
Still, it's an annoying policy. If I were going to have pictures printed in a brick-and-mortar joint, it'd be tempting to haul my gear (camera body, multiple lenses, tripod, flashes, etc -- nontrivial stuff, really) and lay it out on the counter if they question whether I might have taken the shots. Then, set up the tripod or alternately the hefty hot-shoe flash and start shooting customers and the store staff. *shrug* It'd probably be a good way to get kicked out of the store, but it might be amusing in the meantime.
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'Owned' by students for an extended time? $50 might be a low price for somebody looking to commit identity theft, if these machines haven't been thoroughly sanitized and weren't particularly locked-down for use. They've probably been used for personal e-mail, online purchases, coursework that might be useful for resale online, and so forth. You'd have to be an utter bastard to do so, but then -- you'd probably have to be an utter bastard to bring a folding chair and whack people with it, over a discounted iBook.
In fact, free copying is a critical part of process of innovation and marketing. There was a time when school children went and copies the great works. The major entertainment conglormerate copy past work, make slight changes, and sell it as somethin new. They then want the new product protected into perpetutiy. The popularity of many things hinge of the free distribution of the product.
If free copying were that critical to innovation, you might expect the People's Republic of China and perhaps Vietnam to be the most innovative places on the planet. You might also expect previous generations, which you suggest copied classics quite readily (an activity I'd normally associate with cloistered Dark Age European monks, or perhaps Confucian scholars -- both highly dynamic and innovative groups known for improving on tradition and transforming their societies), to have been significantly more creative and innovative than current times.
Of course, with patents anyway there can be a bit of silliness; too many overly-broad and obvious patents being granted means companies practically doomed to infringe on at least SOME patent need to keep a portfolio so everybody else is likely to infringe on one of their own, and to encourage settlements involving perpetual cross-licensing should any litigation arise. But I doubt that cultural development has been slowed much by the inability to duplicate Mickey Mouse screenplays without talking to Disney.
I might also suggest that popularity, while it may be related to "free" (with the obvious exception of prestige goods), need not be the primary objective of somebody who holds IP. Not infrequently, that primary objective would instead be personal gain. It's difficult to pay for gold, coke and hookers with thank-you letters from fans. Given the desire for money, it's not unreasonable to consider the downsides of making a product available for less.
Perhaps he wasn't referring to the legal aspects -- those haven't changed, as MS-DOS wasn't exactly meant to be "shared", either -- but to the more-intrusive enforcement schemes used today such as product activation involving contacting company servers rather than merely entering a product serial number.
Freedom tends to include the right to make a stupid decision wherever such is possible. If Joe Sixpack tends to pay too much attention to marketing and keeping up with his neighbors, that's his fault. If he buys designer clothes based on what somebody said about what label's "hot" every year, that's his fault for not going by criteria that make more sense.
It's not like you're going to be fined the difference if you keep your car for sixteen years rather than buying a new one every five or six, for instance. You don't *need* a music collection, unless perhaps its directly job-related; you can always divert your time and money towards other hobbies. You don't *need* to purchase cable TV, unless you absolutely depend on some feed you can't get any other way. You don't *need* to see any movies at all; if you choose to, that's your decision. It's all crap that you're not willing to pay for? Then take a hike -- literally, unless you're stuck far from anywhere it'd be interesting. Or read a book; odds are you haven't yet read everything of interest to you from the depths of human literary history. Or jog around. Or so forth; you have choices.
As for civil disobedience, such is normally not associated with anonymity; rather, it consists of people openly violating the law and actively inviting the authorities to come down on them. Hence, high-profile protests and sit-ins, and so forth -- not skulking anonymously and trying to avoid being caught.
Hell, there's more of a chance of having an excuse for being grossly overweight (hormonal problems, say) than there is for spending money on luxuries. Do it all you like, but don't pretend that you can lay all the blame on the marketers when you should be shouldering that burden.
If memory serves, copyright violations aren't a criminal offense under NETA unless they exceed a total monetary value of (some threshold) within (some period of time). It may be hard to assign a non-zero monetary value to the GPL'd software itself when it's *intended* to be legally redistributed at a monetary cost of zero.
It's still a bandwidth problem. The e-mail worms in particular can still clog your e-mail servers even if nobody at your organization can be infected because your e-mail server automatically detects and removes them; unless your peers also filter them, they'll cost you.
Sure, it's not quite as bad as having the bandwidth problems *and* having your systems compromised with the aid of clueless users or badly programmed mail/web clients, but it's still bad, and it's still better for all around if their propagation is slowed by reducing the pool of vulnerable sites.
Hm? Are you objecting to the 'proof of purchase' bit?
It's there because not all illegitimate copies are obvious illegitimate copies; counterfeiters have gotten quite good at duplicating packaging. In addition, there may be vendors which mislead people into thinking that they're buying a fairly cheap legitimate copy when in fact they're selling an unauthorized copy.
This provides a way to "go straight" for those taken in by that; since it's apparently at the common OEM price, and probably comes with similar restrictions (licensed to a single machine, non-transferable, that sort of thing), it shouldn't provide an incentive to go out and deliberately buy unauthorized copies in order to get that discount.
They might be able to threaten a suit for copyright infringement, if they could show that you almost certainly knew what you were doing -- e.g. purchasing an MS Windows XP download from www.r4nd0W4r3zsp4mM3r.com for $10 -- but I doubt they can threaten extrajudicial punishment without it being considered extortion.
Even if you've obviously, knowingly infringed on their rights that does not grant them arbitrary power to infringe on yours in order to bypass the legal system. Locking one's personal files is something that Microsoft would not have the right to do.
While I'm not familiar with Deus Ex, and your argument may be precisely correct within the context of that game, in the general case it may not be so.
If, for instance, one considered a hypothetical dystopian world in which a fascist state used ubiquituous 24/7 surveillance of movements and communications to maintain security and stability at the complete cost of political freedom and private property, would somebody who advised peaceful collaboration be considered "good"? Would somebody who advocated violence to overthrow said system necessarily be a monster?
Each course of action depends on the circumstances- but devoid of any circumstances, wouldn't one always think of peace as good and violence as bad? Isn't this what people teach their children?
I'd think that a lot of children, at least boys, probably get encouraged to stand up for themselves and to push back if necessary. That's probably particularly true if the people attempting the beating are people the victims have to face on a regular basis, and who might get their jollies beating their victims multiple times a week or so, unless the faculty / staff are really up on things and put a stop to it.
If the choice is being beaten up while not fighting back, versus fighting back and possibly getting beat less -- that is, they're not against completely unbalanced odds -- wouldn't many fathers tell their sons to choose the latter?
*shrug*
On the other hand, I always thought that
(1) Go Monarchy, then Republic ASAP.
(2) Grow, kick neighbor ass as need be.
(3) Develop science base through sheer numbers.
(4) Turn Fundamentalist + Hi-Tech Military Aggressor.
seemed to be a much more viable strategy than it should have been. It kept the citizens in line (no unhappiness) and reduced support costs, but you could be a *pragmatic* fundamentalist militarist who invaded when useful rather than immediately declaring a religious war against all empires on the planet if you weren't ready. You could wage genocidal warfare all you liked, and your own people weren't bothered at all.
SMAC, on the other hand, might have been a gift to the Green movement with the difficulty of managing pollution if you actually made use of the high-end industrial production bonuses.
Not sure about that.
It's probably not going to disrupt internal communications too much, which means that resistance can still be organized.
If you're going around committing atrocities, word might still get out via satellite links or perhaps the cell phone system of a neighboring country, even if there are no land telephony connections over the borders.
It's a nonsensical rationale, since you can't practically steal a nation's oil through force without a *massive* occupation and incredibly secure logistics; the infrastructure required to transport vast volumes of liquid is simply too fragile in the age of ubiquituous explosives and AK-47s. You can, perhaps, threaten to remove a government if it refuses to comply, but if you actually remove it and leave a security vacuum, you're now stuck with securing the pipelines, roads for tankers, oil fields, and shipping terminals. That might be fine if you're waging total war with massive drafts and manpower on a Second World War scale, or if you have a vast and brutally repressive intelligence service operating there, but it's not too practical otherwise. That's in addition to the usual tendency of the war itself to degrade the infrastructure.
Instead, it's usually the other way around: "no war" for oil, at least when the potentially targetted government is doing a reasonable job at maintaining sufficient order to keep the oil flowing. Consider, for instance, which nations argued most vehemently against war in Iraq, and intersect that list with the nations that had substantial oil contracts with Iraq just waiting for the sanctions to drop. If you want the oil, it may be the most economical to deal with a stable kleptocratic dictatorship and offer kickbacks to those in power, rather than a democracy that might insist on a fairer price or an unstable post-war mess in which oil extraction and transportation becomes much less safe.
You'll want to have a look at two recent Supreme Court rulings, then, in which the generally left-aligned statists such as Stevens and Ginsburg allied with "moderates" to officially sanction a vast expansion of government power.
One, they ruled that the Federal government has jurisdiction over anything that *affects* interstate commerce. This is practically any activity on the planet, given how indirect they allow the chain to be.
Two, they ruled that "public use" for the purposes of forcibly seizing property goes not only towards the obvious roles (turning private land into public land, such as for public roads) but justifies taking from one private owner and giving to another, if *some* benefit can be argued on behalf of the state such as an additional dollar of tax revenue.
These decisions essentially steamroll over the concepts of private property and federalism.
It's a bit more complicated than that, since a rather large portion of the political power in Iran lies in the hands of *unelected* mullahs on the Guardian Council who can largely override the elected officials. It makes their elections a bit less meaningful, really.
That depends.
If you're an entrepreneur, and especially a non-local one, you may have a vested interest in a transparent state with an independent judiciary and a fundamental respect for property rights, lest your investments be nationalized, your profits be siphoned for kickbacks, or your bids handicapped by favoritism or outright espionage on behalf of the locals.
Go read a decent newspaper, or support your local public radio station. TV ain't the end-all, be-all.
Depends on the threat level.
If there's an encryption scheme, there's a key. And depending on who's looking for it, they may resort to coercive measures to get that key. Or, for that matter, attempting to get the key and the medium simultaneously -- e.g raiding your place and seizing anything that could provide the key, including you.
The greater the physical destruction and the lower probability that the data would be recoverable, however, the less productive it becomes for someone to try, and the less likely that even if they DO try that the information will be compromised.
Eh, it might be rather more interesting from their point of view to let you in, but under constant surveillance so they can later investigate everybody you had contact with in case any of them happen to be dissidents -- or if it would be convenient to frame any of them as dissidents. Then, they can trumpet your involvement with this shindig as "evidence", and go drive up some good ol' fashioned anti-foreigner, nationalistic fervor.
Quite. Other nations are looking to *increase* trade with China, not to decrease it. Forget about embargos in terms of leverage against Beijing.
Hm, yes; if you can get people to carry around cards that can perform that amount of computation, and modify the POS terminals to handle it.
Well, judging by the article, Mastercard specifically told the processor *not* to retain information -- and the latter did, anyway. The policy already existed.
No, to block things you'd need to do more than tell them not to retain information. You'd need to make sure that even if they did, it was useless. This might point towards requiring people to generate one-time passwords, which would probably be a fair expensive.
If you're reviewing for "the ultra-gamer", however, you should measure what effect the ultra-gamer is likely to see.
That ultra-gamer is likely NOT going to be running an unaccelerated graphics card at low resolution. If, in fact, he probably won't, and because of this he's unlikely to see any significant speed gain, then that's a perfectly fair result to present and arguably one much more relevant to said ultra-gamer.
It depends on the eventual work desired, surely.
Depending on the final objective, I could see time being spent learning SQL, SPSS, SAS, and so forth, and working on an industrial project of reasonable size to be extremely advantageous. Extra points if in the process a security clearance is earned.
The doctoral degree is essentially required for university-level academic positions, and only slightly less necessary for industrial research tasks, but building up the skill set may be more helpful if he doesn't want to aim for either of these tracks. Even then, building some industrial experience may be helpful prior towards entering a Ph.D. program.
To a degree, yes (to a degree only; there are a number of ways to remove watermarks in a digital image, unless it's something very obvious such as a huge, clearly legible copyright notice running on the diagonal of the image. You could, for instance, print and re-scan, or convert the image through multiple formats including additional lossy compression, clone areas of the image, or so forth.)
The bigger problem is that while the existence of a detectable watermark would indicate that somebody probably cares about his copyright, the lack of a detectable watermark does not indicate the reverse.
Still, it's an annoying policy. If I were going to have pictures printed in a brick-and-mortar joint, it'd be tempting to haul my gear (camera body, multiple lenses, tripod, flashes, etc -- nontrivial stuff, really) and lay it out on the counter if they question whether I might have taken the shots. Then, set up the tripod or alternately the hefty hot-shoe flash and start shooting customers and the store staff. *shrug* It'd probably be a good way to get kicked out of the store, but it might be amusing in the meantime.