Out of curiousity, are you referring to the "Paladin Press" book? I don't recall much, but do remember what seemed to be a pretty hostile (to the publisher) story on, hrm, _60 Minutes_ early on.
For those that aren't aware of the case, here is an AP story. The case involved a lawsuit against relatives of the victims of one murderer who apparently used the book as an instruction manual.
According to the AP story, Paladin Press settled, and agreed to stop publishing it plus paid substantial damages.
We're free to believe or express ideas such as the concept that we're too free. That's part of the beauty of the system.
I'm free to be an agnostic. Nobody ever came after me for not vocalizing "under God" when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance; and, so far, to my knowledge nobody's ever came after me for anything I've wrote or said.
On the other hand, the same holds for, say, devout Christian fundamentalists. They're free to say that Church and State should be one, and that our republic should be replaced by a theocracy if they wish. I'm fine with their right to believe that, and they can express that as much as they like.
But what they CANNOT legally do, without sufficient numbers in order to get an amendment passed, is impose those ideas on the rest of the nation via the force of law. That's a key point. Fundies can control a local school board, but only with the consent of the governed. If they then wish to oppose elements of best-selling children's literature because it conflicts with their deeply held beliefs, then again, they can be voted out if the community decides they've gone too far. That's local control, and I'm not going to argue that a more permissive community should be able to force a less permissive community to open up any more than I'd argue the other way around, except in unusual, extreme cases such as if a cult community decided to teach something blatantly disproven such as the Ptolemaic theory of the solar system, or otherwise extremely unacceptable such as raising kids to form organized crime syndicates with an eye towards defrauding or extorting the rest of us. At that point, we start wandering into the areas of child welfare and criminal conspiracy, respectively...
I presume you mean to the political parties. Otherwise, folks from the FEC should have some quiet chats with some donors about the differences between hard and soft money, and limits thereof... in jail cells.
a) Because the parties ask them.
Somebody's going to win, and it's not going to be either Nader or Buchanan (Does Vegas do elections? Hm. I wonder what the odds-against are on Nader getting >5% in CA.) If you don't give to the winning party, they'll remember, and vice versa.
Lots of people had some pretty expensive coffee at the White House over the past several years. The brew might be good, but it can't be THAT good.
b) It's possible some folks give to both sides in recognition of the fact that it's inordinately expensive to run.
If you don't believe that money (or, more importantly, the lack of it) should hurt a party, and you're well-off enough to give, you should probably donate what you can. After all, beyond a certain healthy amount the relative warchests won't matter THAT much; and the more that is given from donors NOT looking for favors, the less dependent are politicions on donors that ARE looking for favors.
c) Because neither major candidate is crazy enough to really be THAT draconian, despite their ranting about the pernicious influences of Hollywood and predators on the 'net.
The Republicans would look silly arguing for both greater local control AND massive central-government-imposed censorship simultaneously, while the Democrats really shouldn't be going on cultural jihads while taking vast amounts of money from Streisand, Spielberg, and other entertainers.
People worrying about nanoweapons? I'm not sure I'd find that many outside of a Trekkie convention.
Folks might actually worry more about the human genome project if they considered the possible ramifications of, say, collecting statistics regarding differences among ethnic groups. Finding expressed gene sequences highly concentrated among small groups might lead to interesting ramifications, eh? Perhaps mitochrondrial DNA could be used for similar purposes. I would be quite surprised if there were no labs studying such possibilities.
...and less about, say, biotech foods, when they calm down and realize that none of the food we consume daily has ever been truly proven safe. Peanuts and shellfish, most likely, have killed people through allergic reactions. Potatoes have weak toxins, particularly in their leaves and skin. Hamburgers, french fries, and their ilk have probably claimed vast numbers of lives through contributing to heart disease -- certainly more than any risk posed by, say, the taco shells themselves. And so forth. I suppose that to ask the anti-GMers to cast down their feelings in favor of careful deliberation is to ask too much of them.
I'm also not convinced that people SHOULD feel victimized. After all, many would not exist were it not for improvements in medicine, sanitation, and so forth... and concepts like 'grandparents' and 'leisure time' were invented as consequences of innnovation and technology. Instead of being silenced by a sovereign or his vassals, or any nobleman, I'm free to broadcast this opinion w/ the implicit permission of Andover; and if they blocked me, there are countless other methods for me to reach far more than my mere voice could carry.
I don't even need to write a 'Letter to the Editor' to a paper which may not have the space to print my particular missive, these days; but even my whispers can be propagated to the corner of the globe should I desire, and listeners willing.
Instead of being restricted to a rather narrow region in terms of trade (or, alternately, condemned to dangerous, slow travel over poorly maintained roads fraught with highwaymen) we can initiate transactions with mere twitches of the fingers (or, conversely, by driving great distances while conveying far heavier cargo than ever before).
The fact that I post here, as do many others, suggests that we are not constrained to working constantly, but in fact have time that we can call our own without suffering drastic losses in productivity... and, as a matter of fact, the same technology offers choices of forums. None of us (well, except maybe the editors, and that is by choice...) are confined to this forum, no more than any of us is constrained to purchasing via Amazon versus Powells' or a brick-and-mortar Borders or Half-Price Books. Transaction records? Devices like the new AMEX disposable numbers offer interesting possibilities.
And so forth... technology has for the greatest part, in fact, empowered the humanity, rather than victimized it.
DVDs seem to suffice for 2-hour movies right now, so a new codec probably matters most for movies sent over the network.
And those are... what --
* movie trailers
* short-and-strange movies (such as http://www.myboot.com/movies.html)
* demos (both in the sense of product and technical-competition)
* pirated H'wood movies for those with REALLY high bandwidth (a DVD's capacity is, what, in the 4+ GB range, no? So even with the fastest DSL this would take a while...)
* porn
and I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that the last category has the greatest traffic of 'em all.
But anybody who wants to transfer a 2+-hour DVD probably will be REALLY interested in a good space-efficient codec, while those dealing in short clips need not care that much...
A TechWeb article from late July (Click 'about mayo', and then mayo in the news) states that the new version does not use any MSFT software. Not quite the same thing as saying that it's written from scratch, and it's not from the horse's mouth, but there it is.
Nah. The Democrats *want* more Hispanic immigration (a) as a bone to throw to one of their constituencies, b) to enlarge it (by making it easier on the illegals). Which, of course, encourages only more illegal immigration...
I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that recently naturalized Hispanics tend to vote Democratic; heck, even *illegal* immigrants have been bussed to polls in order to vote Democratic as in the case of Loretta Sanchez (who, coincidentally, had changed her name from something more Anglo IIRC) vs. "B-1" Bob Dornan.
If they'd gotten it attached to the bill, probably a number of GOPers would vote to kill the whole thing instead, while the Dems would have at least a minor victory.
It's an election year. Who wants to let the other party claim credit for *anything* in an election year?
Of course, they're every two years o'er here for those House folks and a third of the Senate every time as well. So in an off-year, they can busy themselves raising money for the next election year...
</cynic>
I wonder if a digitally signed affidavit, if it were strongly linked to a verified, actual, physical, real-world identity, plus a Beam-It-style series of random spot checks on a CD would suffice to absolve them of liability.
Otherwise, it would seem to be an impossible problem.
A has a valid, legitimate CD bought from, say, Tower Records or a NRM.
B can, among a nearly infinite variety of possible actions,
1) buy the CD from A online, perhaps even pseudo-anonymously;
2) buy the CD in person, using cash rather than credit or something else that generates a trail,
3) buy the CD from A, who surreptiously burned a copy (which he kept and uses) and duplicated anything else that came with it
4) break into A's apartment and steal the CD and all associated materials,
In case 1, the only copy is legal, but it wasn't noted in any registry (of which I doubt any exists...). Electronic payment probably generated a trail, 'tho.
In case 2, ditto, minus trail but plus probable memories of faces.
In case 3, A and B *both* have copies, plus all the materials that may be needed to "authenticate" legal ownership. Thing is, at most one of them IS legal. So who's MPPP or its ilk going to trust?
In case 4, B now has everything required to authenticate and there are no other identical CDs running around to cause (in theory) serial number problems, yet it's an illegal copy. Unless A recorded all such unique IDs, reported them to police as stolen, and then this information is made available to MPPP or its ilk... Hm.
And we don't, say, have stores custom-burning CDs tied to one's retinal scan or other biometrics (which admittedly would make this verification problem a LOT easier, but cripple end-user sales).
So one hopes that "proof" would be interpreted a bit less rigorously than *absolute incontrovertible proof*.
FWIW, this is H,R. 5275, submitted 25-Sep-2000 it seems to the Committee on the Judiciary. (from the Congressional Record.
But why, one must ask, does it only cover music? The same logic theoretically should apply to all dual-media creative works, such as books (at least for methods that preserve exact formatting, like PDF and PS, in constrast to ASCII text), visual arts (paintings as JPEGs, and so forth), and likewise.
We may not have book-digitizing services now (to my knowledge, but I haven't been looking), but when PDAs or other devices are developed that ARE pleasing for books, or if good-enough laptops become common -- then there may be a potential market.
a) MPPP didn't arrange for redistribution rights, which by default they don't have. Finis. End of their non-existent legal case. If they had started AFTER this bill becomes a law (which is by no means certain, I'd think), then they'd be on incontrovertible legal ground one suspects, but they did not bother pushing for a change in the law first, so they really should not bother whining about this.
b) No artist is REQUIRED to deal with the RIAA. They can't force you to sign a contract with them if you intend to, say, distribute your music electronically. Musicians sign over their rights *voluntarily*, and then the RIAA should defend those acquired rights vigorously.
The other is that they'd probably *ask* you for the passphrase and record it. Why should, say, Feds, let you use the computer (and if they DID, they're well aware of things like TEMPEST ELINT and whatnot)? They'd do the study of it...
Then they nail you for destruction of evidence / obstruction of justice, make another copy, and ask again. You'd have the option of increasing your sentence as much as you like.
Offhand, I'd have to wonder how the keys themselves would be stored/accessed, as that might be the weakest point -- perhaps a magstripe card reader? Or -- is rice paper scannable? (Heh.)
The other is that for many public-key systems (if not all?), you'd need one version of each file for *every* private key meant to decrypt it, which in some settings might be a bit much if one runs into problems assigning groups.
Root could easily be given access under such a system by always having one copy encrypted using the root key, or alternately, key escrow, if it were critical that root have such (Not necessarily, say, for an ISP admin, but perhaps for a system with classified material...).
That's not a terribly unusual argument, however. Handguns are banned in D.C. for that very same argument if memory serves, as are all long guns in NYC. Of course, the usefulness of such laws is rather dubious...
A problem right now with internet crime is jurisdiction. Without treaties, it's unclear how international unauthorized access should get handled -- especially since different nations have different ideas on what is or is not illegal, let alone different judicial systems and standards. It's probably a good idea to formalize guidelines...
Bad analogy. Using most firearms isn't exactly a complicated skill if you're only looking at unarmed, unsuspecting targets several feet away. Even a chimp could probably use a semi-auto shotgun...
A closer one would be advising somebody on the vulnerabilities of a bank's security systems. That takes some non-obvious technical knowledge, and in most cases also would demonstrate intent and conspiracy...
You're complaining about a treaty you haven't even seen, and which an article merely casts vague aspersions about? There's no hint of a public draft, let alone reliable information on a final version or exact terminology ("hacking device" perhaps being a reporter's term. It certainly was used unquoted in articles distributed widely in January on "rumor" sites, with an alleged document in Dutch).
They could easily define it as "a device whose primary purpose is facilitating unauthorized access to network services" or somesuch. And judges, well, there's a reason why we have expert witnesses, no?
Gore, if memory serves, adds an option 4 -- divert general revenue to Social Security and count on budget surpluses. This could be seen as *covertly* increasing SSA taxes.
Bush suggests a weird variation of 3; IIRC, his method would reduce guaranteed Gov't benefits if you opt for investing with your contribution.
But y'all use a parliamentary system over there, right? Do you require a majority and hold run-offs if nobody gets it the first time around?
O'er here in the US, it's been known for a President to get elected with a mere 45% or so of the popular vote. We've had Presidents that have been elected despite *losing* the popular vote, c/o our mostly winner-take-all electoral college system.
Representation is also based solely on winner-take-all pluralities; even if Buchanan got 15% of the popular vote (about as likely as a mutant mouse eating the moon tomorrow...), those votes would probably be distributed in such a way that he and his allies would probably come up with exactly zero federal offices, not, say, 15%.
Knowing this, a third party can be largely ignored, because their typical impact on the distribution of seats is negligible. Unless a third party comes up with a heavy concentration of votes (like, say, the Greens sweeping the Left Coast), they're not going to have much leverage in terms of posing any significant electoral threat to the major parties.
One reason to have representatives in the first place is to avoid the tyranny of the majority. Another is so that these folks compromise...
Neither of these is terribly compatible with a remote-control legislator; the former, because it's subject to the whims of people who frankly have lives *beyond* poring over relevant documents (Do you specialize in, say, automotive engineering? I certainly don't. Are you qualified to judge whether a particular Spiffy Mk II Armored Fighting Vehicle deserves funding? I'm not. Do you really want folks like me voting on things like this, perhaps just 'coz we feel they're "cool" or "uncool"? Hopefully not.).
It's also not compatible with compromise, since it merely comes down to screaming hordes...
We make silly enough choices already (Try running a short, balding chap with fishbowl glasses as a candidate versus, say, a clone of JFK. It shouldn't matter, but it does).
Yes. Should non-Social Security funds (namely, general government revenue) be used to subsidize Social Security? One of the two major candidates puts it in his plan; the other does not.
Should the United States proceed with ABM defense against the wishes of Russia? Again, this election.
Should gasoline taxes be raised significantly in order to penalize energy consumption? One candidate has supported that in the past, but his spokesman was flustered and stumbled on national TV when asked about this not that long ago.
Is the carrot or the stick more important when dealing with the PRC? Various elections, actually.
Is donating money to a party or candidate an expression of free speech? And how and why should it be regulated?
The "Violence against Women" act (struck down by SCOTUS) was among the most hilarious examples of the bizarre contortions Congress goes through to pass a "popular" law when it really would not pass Constitutional muster. Domestic violence equals interstate commerce, eh?
But the legislators aren't alone. Have a look at executive orders and the national "state of emergency" we've been in for the last, oh, few scores of years at least if you're curious.
It depends on the speed and pervasiveness of communications and data -- on how integrated systems are. Brunner postulates a truly, utterly, wired world in which data is everything. Identities control access and power; almost all communications are monitored and even confession booths under real-time eavesdropping. Information on every aspect of life is digitized for consumption by Shalmaneser, to customize your TV, or simply to archive.
In such a world, you are a number; thus, the ability to change that number, or those of others, is power. In the end, his tapeworm achieves what it can solely because the information was all networked and thus accessible to his particular skills. Once the dirty BIG secrets of the corporations and governments are revealed, those in power find they have greater problems than merely a confidential counseling line (Hearing Aid, IIRC) or a single hacker -- they're dealing with an enraged people who apparently can absorb such information far more rapidly than a population which today gets much of its "info" from local news programs...
In the current world, such sensitive information is substantially harder to get or propagate, since a large portion of the population is still off-line or only infrequent, light users...
For instance, complexity theory isn't something that's often picked up simply by on-the-job experience -- but it's important when you have to consider whether a problem you want to solve is even possible, or whether you have to attempt an approximate solution (and what the state of the art is).
Programming languages are simply tools. What's crucial, beyond having a basic familiarity transferrable within certain groups (A lot is transferrable from C++ to Java, for instance. On the other hand, C++ code is non-trivial to port to Prolog or Scheme. ML requires a different philosophy than Perl. And so forth.), is the capability to analyze a problem and discern fundamentals; and it helps if one actually recognizes such...
Number theory, graph theory, numerical methods, and so forth all also fold into it nicely.
For me, at least, the question isn't as much related to pay from a job, as the _nature_ of the work. I have pretty much NO interest in writing mundane pieces of code for talking paper-clips, even if it paid well. Different problems, like figuring out ways to handle vast amounts of data -- e.g. data mining, example-driven search engines, and what-not -- are more to my taste, and for that, theory helps.
Not going to happen. Microsoft is really nothing without commerce and legal systems. They're dependent on, for instance, legal systems to enforce copyright -- if they move offshore to a bogus country, than that country can simply be refused jurisdiction, and if US chooses not to prosecute its own offenders FOR Sealand... well then. Add a complete embargo (no food, fuel, electricity, or anything at all), denial of travel, and so forth.
That, plus it'd be fairly trivial to snuff 'em out of existence, methinks. Tomahawks aren't often shot down, and it seems unlikely that Sealand could hold off a single carrier group...
He who controls Arrakis, controls the spice and thus the galaxy!
But seriously...
Yes. Servers, networking, and all that need
a) Digital infrastructure -- e.g. transmission towers or cables, power sources, replacement parts, and so forth.
And if you're connected, then you have to be connected to somebody who can locate or trace you (even if it's only in the general area) or an important link.
b) People to run them. People need food, space, medicine, and a miscellany of other supplies. People also tend to have some loyalty to a group (nation, city, ethnicity, religion, vocation, secret society, trashy talk show, what-have-you), and these will inevitably come into conflict given sufficient people and time.
c) Space. This happens to be a physical requirement, and can be readily taken away (along with life, limb, property, electricity, and what not) given failure to defend.
If Katz, or the authors whom he cites, can explain how cyberspace leads to a satisfactory resolution of the Jerusalem issue (namely, sovereignty; one might suggest a 'neutral' city administered by the UN and protected by the Security Council permanent members, but that has nada to do with cyberspace), of the Chechen situation, and so forth -- it should be interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Out of curiousity, are you referring to the "Paladin Press" book? I don't recall much, but do remember what seemed to be a pretty hostile (to the publisher) story on, hrm, _60 Minutes_ early on.
For those that aren't aware of the case, here is an AP story. The case involved a lawsuit against relatives of the victims of one murderer who apparently used the book as an instruction manual.
According to the AP story, Paladin Press settled, and agreed to stop publishing it plus paid substantial damages.
We're free to believe or express ideas such as the concept that we're too free. That's part of the beauty of the system.
I'm free to be an agnostic. Nobody ever came after me for not vocalizing "under God" when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance; and, so far, to my knowledge nobody's ever came after me for anything I've wrote or said.
On the other hand, the same holds for, say, devout Christian fundamentalists. They're free to say that Church and State should be one, and that our republic should be replaced by a theocracy if they wish. I'm fine with their right to believe that, and they can express that as much as they like.
But what they CANNOT legally do, without sufficient numbers in order to get an amendment passed, is impose those ideas on the rest of the nation via the force of law. That's a key point. Fundies can control a local school board, but only with the consent of the governed. If they then wish to oppose elements of best-selling children's literature because it conflicts with their deeply held beliefs, then again, they can be voted out if the community decides they've gone too far. That's local control, and I'm not going to argue that a more permissive community should be able to force a less permissive community to open up any more than I'd argue the other way around, except in unusual, extreme cases such as if a cult community decided to teach something blatantly disproven such as the Ptolemaic theory of the solar system, or otherwise extremely unacceptable such as raising kids to form organized crime syndicates with an eye towards defrauding or extorting the rest of us. At that point, we start wandering into the areas of child welfare and criminal conspiracy, respectively...
I presume you mean to the political parties. Otherwise, folks from the FEC should have some quiet chats with some donors about the differences between hard and soft money, and limits thereof... in jail cells.
a) Because the parties ask them.
Somebody's going to win, and it's not going to be either Nader or Buchanan (Does Vegas do elections? Hm. I wonder what the odds-against are on Nader getting >5% in CA.) If you don't give to the winning party, they'll remember, and vice versa.
Lots of people had some pretty expensive coffee at the White House over the past several years. The brew might be good, but it can't be THAT good.
b) It's possible some folks give to both sides in recognition of the fact that it's inordinately expensive to run.
If you don't believe that money (or, more importantly, the lack of it) should hurt a party, and you're well-off enough to give, you should probably donate what you can. After all, beyond a certain healthy amount the relative warchests won't matter THAT much; and the more that is given from donors NOT looking for favors, the less dependent are politicions on donors that ARE looking for favors.
c) Because neither major candidate is crazy enough to really be THAT draconian, despite their ranting about the pernicious influences of Hollywood and predators on the 'net.
The Republicans would look silly arguing for both greater local control AND massive central-government-imposed censorship simultaneously, while the Democrats really shouldn't be going on cultural jihads while taking vast amounts of money from Streisand, Spielberg, and other entertainers.
People worrying about nanoweapons? I'm not sure I'd find that many outside of a Trekkie convention.
Folks might actually worry more about the human genome project if they considered the possible ramifications of, say, collecting statistics regarding differences among ethnic groups. Finding expressed gene sequences highly concentrated among small groups might lead to interesting ramifications, eh? Perhaps mitochrondrial DNA could be used for similar purposes. I would be quite surprised if there were no labs studying such possibilities.
...and less about, say, biotech foods, when they calm down and realize that none of the food we consume daily has ever been truly proven safe. Peanuts and shellfish, most likely, have killed people through allergic reactions. Potatoes have weak toxins, particularly in their leaves and skin. Hamburgers, french fries, and their ilk have probably claimed vast numbers of lives through contributing to heart disease -- certainly more than any risk posed by, say, the taco shells themselves. And so forth. I suppose that to ask the anti-GMers to cast down their feelings in favor of careful deliberation is to ask too much of them.
I'm also not convinced that people SHOULD feel victimized. After all, many would not exist were it not for improvements in medicine, sanitation, and so forth... and concepts like 'grandparents' and 'leisure time' were invented as consequences of innnovation and technology. Instead of being silenced by a sovereign or his vassals, or any nobleman, I'm free to broadcast this opinion w/ the implicit permission of Andover; and if they blocked me, there are countless other methods for me to reach far more than my mere voice could carry.
I don't even need to write a 'Letter to the Editor' to a paper which may not have the space to print my particular missive, these days; but even my whispers can be propagated to the corner of the globe should I desire, and listeners willing.
Instead of being restricted to a rather narrow region in terms of trade (or, alternately, condemned to dangerous, slow travel over poorly maintained roads fraught with highwaymen) we can initiate transactions with mere twitches of the fingers (or, conversely, by driving great distances while conveying far heavier cargo than ever before).
The fact that I post here, as do many others, suggests that we are not constrained to working constantly, but in fact have time that we can call our own without suffering drastic losses in productivity... and, as a matter of fact, the same technology offers choices of forums. None of us (well, except maybe the editors, and that is by choice...) are confined to this forum, no more than any of us is constrained to purchasing via Amazon versus Powells' or a brick-and-mortar Borders or Half-Price Books. Transaction records? Devices like the new AMEX disposable numbers offer interesting possibilities.
And so forth... technology has for the greatest part, in fact, empowered the humanity, rather than victimized it.
Makes sense, I guess.
DVDs seem to suffice for 2-hour movies right now, so a new codec probably matters most for movies sent over the network.
And those are... what --
* movie trailers
* short-and-strange movies (such as http://www.myboot.com/movies.html)
* demos (both in the sense of product and technical-competition)
* pirated H'wood movies for those with REALLY high bandwidth (a DVD's capacity is, what, in the 4+ GB range, no? So even with the fastest DSL this would take a while...)
* porn
and I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that the last category has the greatest traffic of 'em all.
But anybody who wants to transfer a 2+-hour DVD probably will be REALLY interested in a good space-efficient codec, while those dealing in short clips need not care that much...
A TechWeb article from late July (Click 'about mayo', and then mayo in the news) states that the new version does not use any MSFT software. Not quite the same thing as saying that it's written from scratch, and it's not from the horse's mouth, but there it is.
Nah. The Democrats *want* more Hispanic immigration (a) as a bone to throw to one of their constituencies, b) to enlarge it (by making it easier on the illegals). Which, of course, encourages only more illegal immigration...
I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that recently naturalized Hispanics tend to vote Democratic; heck, even *illegal* immigrants have been bussed to polls in order to vote Democratic as in the case of Loretta Sanchez (who, coincidentally, had changed her name from something more Anglo IIRC) vs. "B-1" Bob Dornan.
If they'd gotten it attached to the bill, probably a number of GOPers would vote to kill the whole thing instead, while the Dems would have at least a minor victory.
It's an election year. Who wants to let the other party claim credit for *anything* in an election year?
Of course, they're every two years o'er here for those House folks and a third of the Senate every time as well. So in an off-year, they can busy themselves raising money for the next election year...
</cynic>
I wonder if a digitally signed affidavit, if it were strongly linked to a verified, actual, physical, real-world identity, plus a Beam-It-style series of random spot checks on a CD would suffice to absolve them of liability.
Otherwise, it would seem to be an impossible problem.
A has a valid, legitimate CD bought from, say, Tower Records or a NRM.
B can, among a nearly infinite variety of possible actions,
1) buy the CD from A online, perhaps even pseudo-anonymously;
2) buy the CD in person, using cash rather than credit or something else that generates a trail,
3) buy the CD from A, who surreptiously burned a copy (which he kept and uses) and duplicated anything else that came with it
4) break into A's apartment and steal the CD and all associated materials,
In case 1, the only copy is legal, but it wasn't noted in any registry (of which I doubt any exists...). Electronic payment probably generated a trail, 'tho.
In case 2, ditto, minus trail but plus probable memories of faces.
In case 3, A and B *both* have copies, plus all the materials that may be needed to "authenticate" legal ownership. Thing is, at most one of them IS legal. So who's MPPP or its ilk going to trust?
In case 4, B now has everything required to authenticate and there are no other identical CDs running around to cause (in theory) serial number problems, yet it's an illegal copy. Unless A recorded all such unique IDs, reported them to police as stolen, and then this information is made available to MPPP or its ilk... Hm.
And we don't, say, have stores custom-burning CDs tied to one's retinal scan or other biometrics (which admittedly would make this verification problem a LOT easier, but cripple end-user sales).
So one hopes that "proof" would be interpreted a bit less rigorously than *absolute incontrovertible proof*.
...if it passes.
FWIW, this is H,R. 5275, submitted 25-Sep-2000 it seems to the Committee on the Judiciary. (from the Congressional Record.
But why, one must ask, does it only cover music? The same logic theoretically should apply to all dual-media creative works, such as books (at least for methods that preserve exact formatting, like PDF and PS, in constrast to ASCII text), visual arts (paintings as JPEGs, and so forth), and likewise.
We may not have book-digitizing services now (to my knowledge, but I haven't been looking), but when PDAs or other devices are developed that ARE pleasing for books, or if good-enough laptops become common -- then there may be a potential market.
This seems overly... tailored, shall we say.
a) MPPP didn't arrange for redistribution rights, which by default they don't have. Finis. End of their non-existent legal case. If they had started AFTER this bill becomes a law (which is by no means certain, I'd think), then they'd be on incontrovertible legal ground one suspects, but they did not bother pushing for a change in the law first, so they really should not bother whining about this.
b) No artist is REQUIRED to deal with the RIAA. They can't force you to sign a contract with them if you intend to, say, distribute your music electronically. Musicians sign over their rights *voluntarily*, and then the RIAA should defend those acquired rights vigorously.
*shrug*
Couldn't they just image the disk first?
The other is that they'd probably *ask* you for the passphrase and record it. Why should, say, Feds, let you use the computer (and if they DID, they're well aware of things like TEMPEST ELINT and whatnot)? They'd do the study of it...
Then they nail you for destruction of evidence / obstruction of justice, make another copy, and ask again. You'd have the option of increasing your sentence as much as you like.
Offhand, I'd have to wonder how the keys themselves would be stored/accessed, as that might be the weakest point -- perhaps a magstripe card reader? Or -- is rice paper scannable? (Heh.)
The other is that for many public-key systems (if not all?), you'd need one version of each file for *every* private key meant to decrypt it, which in some settings might be a bit much if one runs into problems assigning groups.
Root could easily be given access under such a system by always having one copy encrypted using the root key, or alternately, key escrow, if it were critical that root have such (Not necessarily, say, for an ISP admin, but perhaps for a system with classified material...).
That's not a terribly unusual argument, however. Handguns are banned in D.C. for that very same argument if memory serves, as are all long guns in NYC. Of course, the usefulness of such laws is rather dubious...
A problem right now with internet crime is jurisdiction. Without treaties, it's unclear how international unauthorized access should get handled -- especially since different nations have different ideas on what is or is not illegal, let alone different judicial systems and standards. It's probably a good idea to formalize guidelines...
Bad analogy. Using most firearms isn't exactly a complicated skill if you're only looking at unarmed, unsuspecting targets several feet away. Even a chimp could probably use a semi-auto shotgun...
A closer one would be advising somebody on the vulnerabilities of a bank's security systems. That takes some non-obvious technical knowledge, and in most cases also would demonstrate intent and conspiracy...
*shrug*
You're complaining about a treaty you haven't even seen, and which an article merely casts vague aspersions about? There's no hint of a public draft, let alone reliable information on a final version or exact terminology ("hacking device" perhaps being a reporter's term. It certainly was used unquoted in articles distributed widely in January on "rumor" sites, with an alleged document in Dutch).
They could easily define it as "a device whose primary purpose is facilitating unauthorized access to network services" or somesuch. And judges, well, there's a reason why we have expert witnesses, no?
Gore, if memory serves, adds an option 4 -- divert general revenue to Social Security and count on budget surpluses. This could be seen as *covertly* increasing SSA taxes.
Bush suggests a weird variation of 3; IIRC, his method would reduce guaranteed Gov't benefits if you opt for investing with your contribution.
But y'all use a parliamentary system over there, right? Do you require a majority and hold run-offs if nobody gets it the first time around?
O'er here in the US, it's been known for a President to get elected with a mere 45% or so of the popular vote. We've had Presidents that have been elected despite *losing* the popular vote, c/o our mostly winner-take-all electoral college system.
Representation is also based solely on winner-take-all pluralities; even if Buchanan got 15% of the popular vote (about as likely as a mutant mouse eating the moon tomorrow...), those votes would probably be distributed in such a way that he and his allies would probably come up with exactly zero federal offices, not, say, 15%.
Knowing this, a third party can be largely ignored, because their typical impact on the distribution of seats is negligible. Unless a third party comes up with a heavy concentration of votes (like, say, the Greens sweeping the Left Coast), they're not going to have much leverage in terms of posing any significant electoral threat to the major parties.
Aigh!
One reason to have representatives in the first place is to avoid the tyranny of the majority. Another is so that these folks compromise...
Neither of these is terribly compatible with a remote-control legislator; the former, because it's subject to the whims of people who frankly have lives *beyond* poring over relevant documents (Do you specialize in, say, automotive engineering? I certainly don't. Are you qualified to judge whether a particular Spiffy Mk II Armored Fighting Vehicle deserves funding? I'm not. Do you really want folks like me voting on things like this, perhaps just 'coz we feel they're "cool" or "uncool"? Hopefully not.).
It's also not compatible with compromise, since it merely comes down to screaming hordes...
We make silly enough choices already (Try running a short, balding chap with fishbowl glasses as a candidate versus, say, a clone of JFK. It shouldn't matter, but it does).
Yes. Should non-Social Security funds (namely, general government revenue) be used to subsidize Social Security? One of the two major candidates puts it in his plan; the other does not.
Should the United States proceed with ABM defense against the wishes of Russia? Again, this election.
Should gasoline taxes be raised significantly in order to penalize energy consumption? One candidate has supported that in the past, but his spokesman was flustered and stumbled on national TV when asked about this not that long ago.
Is the carrot or the stick more important when dealing with the PRC? Various elections, actually.
Is donating money to a party or candidate an expression of free speech? And how and why should it be regulated?
And so forth.
Perhaps you're just not paying enough attention.
The "Violence against Women" act (struck down by SCOTUS) was among the most hilarious examples of the bizarre contortions Congress goes through to pass a "popular" law when it really would not pass Constitutional muster. Domestic violence equals interstate commerce, eh?
But the legislators aren't alone. Have a look at executive orders and the national "state of emergency" we've been in for the last, oh, few scores of years at least if you're curious.
I'd have to disagree.
It depends on the speed and pervasiveness of communications and data -- on how integrated systems are. Brunner postulates a truly, utterly, wired world in which data is everything. Identities control access and power; almost all communications are monitored and even confession booths under real-time eavesdropping. Information on every aspect of life is digitized for consumption by Shalmaneser, to customize your TV, or simply to archive.
In such a world, you are a number; thus, the ability to change that number, or those of others, is power. In the end, his tapeworm achieves what it can solely because the information was all networked and thus accessible to his particular skills. Once the dirty BIG secrets of the corporations and governments are revealed, those in power find they have greater problems than merely a confidential counseling line (Hearing Aid, IIRC) or a single hacker -- they're dealing with an enraged people who apparently can absorb such information far more rapidly than a population which today gets much of its "info" from local news programs...
In the current world, such sensitive information is substantially harder to get or propagate, since a large portion of the population is still off-line or only infrequent, light users...
There should be more to a job than programming.
For instance, complexity theory isn't something that's often picked up simply by on-the-job experience -- but it's important when you have to consider whether a problem you want to solve is even possible, or whether you have to attempt an approximate solution (and what the state of the art is).
Programming languages are simply tools. What's crucial, beyond having a basic familiarity transferrable within certain groups (A lot is transferrable from C++ to Java, for instance. On the other hand, C++ code is non-trivial to port to Prolog or Scheme. ML requires a different philosophy than Perl. And so forth.), is the capability to analyze a problem and discern fundamentals; and it helps if one actually recognizes such...
Number theory, graph theory, numerical methods, and so forth all also fold into it nicely.
For me, at least, the question isn't as much related to pay from a job, as the _nature_ of the work. I have pretty much NO interest in writing mundane pieces of code for talking paper-clips, even if it paid well. Different problems, like figuring out ways to handle vast amounts of data -- e.g. data mining, example-driven search engines, and what-not -- are more to my taste, and for that, theory helps.
Not going to happen. Microsoft is really nothing without commerce and legal systems. They're dependent on, for instance, legal systems to enforce copyright -- if they move offshore to a bogus country, than that country can simply be refused jurisdiction, and if US chooses not to prosecute its own offenders FOR Sealand... well then. Add a complete embargo (no food, fuel, electricity, or anything at all), denial of travel, and so forth.
That, plus it'd be fairly trivial to snuff 'em out of existence, methinks. Tomahawks aren't often shot down, and it seems unlikely that Sealand could hold off a single carrier group...
He who controls Arrakis, controls the spice and thus the galaxy!
But seriously...
Yes. Servers, networking, and all that need
a) Digital infrastructure -- e.g. transmission towers or cables, power sources, replacement parts, and so forth.
And if you're connected, then you have to be connected to somebody who can locate or trace you (even if it's only in the general area) or an important link.
b) People to run them. People need food, space, medicine, and a miscellany of other supplies. People also tend to have some loyalty to a group (nation, city, ethnicity, religion, vocation, secret society, trashy talk show, what-have-you), and these will inevitably come into conflict given sufficient people and time.
c) Space. This happens to be a physical requirement, and can be readily taken away (along with life, limb, property, electricity, and what not) given failure to defend.
If Katz, or the authors whom he cites, can explain how cyberspace leads to a satisfactory resolution of the Jerusalem issue (namely, sovereignty; one might suggest a 'neutral' city administered by the UN and protected by the Security Council permanent members, but that has nada to do with cyberspace), of the Chechen situation, and so forth -- it should be interesting.
I'd side with the cynics here.