No, the PS2 games didn't look as good as the demos. The legendary Sony hype machine aside, those Unreal 3 engine demos were realtime, and they looked a hell of a lot like pre-rendered. Very impressive, end of story.
Cell is a very cool design. I suggest you read the design docs linked to in the news item. IBM, Toshiba and Sony are fairly reputable - this is not some vaporware. If you were trolling about Infinium Labs and the Phantom, I'd understand, but PS3? Come on...
First, I never objected to selling Open Source Software. You're simply misreading me in that regard.
Second, I never said that their enterprise distro wasn't open. It has been, and as far as I can tell, will continue to be.
My beef is that they took a product I most valued them for (a desktop, personal OS) and made a move that *reduced* their ownership of that product. They handed is back to the community, in effect, offering a substantial amount of support. It was not, as you say, simply a renaming of their current technology. You said yourself that they provided a ""fairly robust" support framework. It would be "totally robust" if they still treated it as *their* product, not the community's product that they have a big hand in creating.
This annoyed me. For some distros, I *want* company ownership. I want SuSe to sell a "professional" version that is officially supported for consumer level end-users. I wanted Red Hat to continue to sell their desktop version of the OS, providing support all the way. Companies that offer those products to *individual* end users are an asset to the community.
I viewed Red Hat's move as a step away from that ownership, which was accurate, in light of this latest news. They were backing off from that market, and continue to, as this news indicates. This is what annoyed me, and what I was referring to.
As to the other guy who says I'm bitching about free stuff, well, call me crazy, but I like having some commercial alternatives for end users, and some free alternatives. I don't know if you guys used Fedora.95 (or even Core 1) after using Red Hat 9, but it was not the same product. I simply didn't want to see THE commercial end user Linux desktop OS turn to pure-free. That's what Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, and a thousand others are for. I liked having SuSe, Red Hat and Xandros out there, sitting on a shelf for sale. Then when I try to tell my dad to try Linux and he asks "But is there support I can call if I need help?" I can say "Yes, there is!" I would have liked to do that with Red Hat, but it is simply not an option as it was but before the Fedora switch (sites like http://support.marko.net/ notwithstanding).
The open source community isn't always centered around enterprise solutions. When RedHat removed their "personal" distro and focused only on enterprise, they alienated a lot of people, even though they continued to contribute to OSS in a big way.
I was one of them...I used RedHat exclusively on all my machines, but the move to Fedora pushed me away (the last FC I tried was.95, and it drove me nuts), and drove me to Debian, and now finally Gentoo, which I have run on all my machines for the past 13 months or so. I don't ever see myself going back to RedHat or Fedora on my main machine, though I may try out FC4 on some spare hardware to see how I like it (I'm sure it has come a *long* way since.95).
Anyway, it was that move that annoyed people in the OS community, and I think it was what GP was referring to.
Yes, but the damages are much less. Further, distributing small segments of copyrighted works is sometimes protected under fair use.
It tends to make your case much less compelling...you cannot claim astronomical damages because a person saw 1 minute of your film as easily as you could if you said they saw the whole film. After all, what are previews?
I work with Java professionally as a software engineer for a defense contractor. I would readily assert that there is a memory overhead associated with using a VM, but there is not much of a performance overhead.
The net is littered with old pages filled with comparisons between C and Java running the 1.1 VM on Windows 95. These benchmarks were done years ago, and do not interest me.
More recent benchmarks are available that give more relevant results. The first thing to note is the sheer number of VMs tested in this benchmark alone, and the vast performance differences between them. Saying things like "this horrid VM system" means nothing - it's like you're complaining about "this horrid car". Which car?
VM to VM comparison handled by the SPEC JVM98 is not interesting in our discussion, though it does illustrate the point that not all VMs are equal. More interesting is the Scimark 2.0 in Java, C#, and C/C++. It is worth noting that, on average, C/Visual C++ comes out on top, but only by around 1-2%. In second place is 1.4.2 JDK, third Sun's 1.5.0 JDK (both server VMs). The top benchmarks are 329/324/316 respectively, and then we start plumetting into 266 for gcc/-O2, a handful of JDKs, and then C#/.NET(release) down at 240. That's native code, just so we're clear.
So, at least in that benchmark, Sun's Java VM is comparing quite nicely to both other VMs and native code.
Linpack is more interesting, because it was run for both 500x500 and 1000x1000. In 500x500, native code is indeed faster, by a good margin. The 1.5.0 VM is about 1/3 lower than native compiled C code. But looking at the 1000x1000, you'll see the the VMs and native code are neck and neck, barely any difference between them. That is where my statement about large scale applications came from, though doesn't really illustrate my point as well as I'd like.
The last benchmark, the Eratosthenes Sieve, simply demonstrates the vast differences between VMs, and that Java obliterates C#. No surprises there.
I hadn't seen this report before I posted here. I looked it up to make a point, and hopefully you can see my point. In no case is Java "running like a slug" compared to native code.
There are lots of other reasons why you experienced slowness in your applications. The GUI being used, your choice of VM (surprisingly, native compiled Java code using GCJ often underperforms bytecode run in a VM!), or perhaps, even the quality of the code being run. It is quite easy to program something in a sloppy way that will reduce performance.
So, I simply disgaree, and would very interested to hear of a benchmark in which a recent, performant Java VM vastly underperformed a native implementation of the same algorithm. To my knowledge, Java compares quite well in 95% of applications.
And for P2P, well, what can I say? We're not exactly taxing our systems with a P2P app, now are we? I would think it would be FAR more important that you can make a cross platform P2P solution than egding out and extra 2% performance on the GUI response time. After all, it *is* a network, and we want it running in as many places as possible.
Oh, and for the record, I'm not a Java zealot. I'm an open source/free software zealot, and for that reason, don't like the rather closed nature of Sun's VM and libraries. You can call me a Python zealot though, since Python is my language of choice for personal projecs. I only use Java for professional projects.
You know Azureus (probably the best BT client around) is written in Java? Java is very high performance...I don't know how long its been since you used the VM, but it is at LEAST equivalent to C for small scale programs, and really shines on large scale projects.
MUTE is using ant-based routing. This is basically a system that doesn't use IPs in the network very much, only directly connected nodes know each others IP. Each node instead uses a sort of psedonym, and that is the "address" that is used to route information. The beauty is that no one on the network knows the pseudonym-IP mapping, which makes the anonymity work pretty well.
In Rodi, you specifically put intermediate nodes between you and the destination, kind of like an obfuscated Gnutella-net. MUTE's routing doesn't know whether there are nodes between you and the destination, and further, doesn't even know when the packet has reached the destination. This makes MUTE very powerful because everyone is routing traffic for everyone...this makes the "C"s ubiquitous in the network, much like freenet.
That said, you are correct that every anonymous routing system "bounces" data off other nodes to anonymize it, including anonymous proxies, I2P, Tor, MUTE, Antz, Freenet, GNUNet, Rodi, you name it.
while regular BitTorrent has many legal uses, this tool does not
What? This program does everything BT does, and more. That's the point. So to say BT has uses that are legal, while this doesn't, is kind of absurd.
But I understand what you're driving at: anonymity is only useful for criminals. But that is simply not true. I have a right to encrypt my data, or exchange data with another person without having everyone on the Internet know about it. Why would I want to do this? It doesn't matter. The only thing you can reasonably deduce from me wanting to be anaonymous is that I want to be anonymous. You cannot logically conclude that I'm doing anything legal, or illegal. Simply that I want to be anonymous.
I see this technology being VERY useful as we come into a society that values IP more and more. I am quite worried that the patent system will eventually be used against F/OSS and that it will be an offense of some sort to distribute Linux, Openoffice, Firefox, the GNU tools, whatever, because of patent law. I look forward to having a robust, swarming, anonymous network that we can use to distribute Free software when/if such a situation comes to pass. Sure, it may become illegal, but that doesn't make it wrong.
I just took another look at the improvements that have been made in the protocol, and also tested a new client out (gtk-gnutella, Linux), and have to admit, I am impressed at the VAST improvements made in the past months/years.
Yeah. Because Gnutella offers downloads that scale well when new distros are released. It allows people who don't have complete copies of a high-demand file can contribute to the swarm. Searches are really fast, too, because you can immediately hop on the network and find most anything you need immediately. Also, it's network topology doesn't splinter users, in centralizes them based on what files they demand.
Oh wait...
Not to bash Gnutella, but there is a very good reason it is not used for large downloads that tend to get Slashdotted, like new Linux distro releases. Using Gnutella for downing Linux ISOs is a step backward. The Gnutella network is good for some things, but as Bit Torrent mutates into a decentralized network that can use an anonymous routing layer, Gnutella will fall off the map, I think.
Instead of talking about Gnutella, I'm surprised more posts haven't mentioned the other Linux tracker sites:
Actually, a lot of entries do use depth of field. Its pretty easy in POV, anyway.
I thought the same about render time, but one guy mentioned in his tech notes that to render a simple blue glow on some cables (OK, so it wasn't really *that* simple, but still, nothing earth shattering), took him a MONTH running on a dedicated FreeBSD machine that was "decently powered", running at niceness -19. I was stunned. Hopefully, "decently powered" didn't mean a Pentium 133.
Check the "Hall of Fame" for a great collection (plus screenies) of tons of really good entries.
As I read that, a particular phrase caught me: "No measurable gains were made in art quality or artists' standard of living."
It's funny...everyone assumes that if we legalized file sharing that artists would starve. But we have seen no such thing - perhaps even an opposite effect. As the internet has grown, and P2P with it, I think we have a bigger "media culture" than before. People get more excited about upcoming releases (of movies, music, games, whatever), and entire online communities are created that center themselves around these products.
In fact, I would be hard pressed to cite an example of an artist that STOPPED recording because his or her music was being swapped so much on the internet. There are these theoretical losses the RIAA/MPAA cite well into the billions of dollars - but I don't see "billions of dollars" less in the lifestyle of the pop stars. Metallica is just as rich as always, N Sync just as successful.
One might assert that the money is coming out of the pockets of aspiring artists, but I would disagree. The RIAA was NEVER the friend of new artists, just as Hollywood is NEVER the friend of the low-budget film maker. I would assert the opposite: with sites like Magnatune and CD Baby, aspiring artists have a better chance than ever to make a buck for their efforts, and get exposure the RIAA and MPAA could never offer.
Piracy is still piracy, but at the end of the day, you'll find that even in a society where file-swapping is legal, your artists don't starve. This has been held as the highest argument against file sharing: we're stealing from the artists. But truthfully, I simply don't see it. Sure, there's always gonna be those that would prefer to trade online and never pay, but there will also be those that will want to purchase the stuff they found because they liked it so much. Very few people go out and blindly buy music, because it doesn't make any sense. Why would you pay $15 for a CD filled with something you know nothing about? You have to get into it somehow. Back in the old days, it was radio. Then cassette tapes came around, and it was all about mix tapes that were given to your friends. I know I bought a lot of albums because of mix tapes I got from my friends. Now, its home-burned CDs, P2P AND radio.
As I see it, those "unofficial" distribution channels help artists become known. You have to hear the music somewhere first, and then you buy. P2P, radio and home-made media allow for that to happen. Most artists don't get radio play anyway. All that leaves is word of mouth and P2P for someone to get to know the music, and since few people will consistently pay $15-$20 for an album filled with music they have no clue about, this makes home copied music and P2P pretty important In an age where fewer people are listening to the radio, and more people are carrying music on a portable player, it's just silly to think that killing P2P off will HELP the industry.
Of course, this begs the question "How do we change laws to reflect this?" And that is a dicussion for another time; I don't have that answer. All I know is that the way it is right now, is wrong.
We're not discussing logic here, we're discussing what is admissable in court. I daresay you would be hard pressed to find a case in which the prosecution is able to make an argument or pursue a line of questioning that uses the fact that the defendedant took the fifth against them.
IANAL, and I certainly do not have a good background in case law, but it would seem unconstitutional to me.
Yes, but by this logic, if someone "takes the fifth", it could be used to incriminate them, which kind of destroys the purpose of the right.
Why is this relevant? Well, if he is using encryption, and they ask him for his key to decrypt the files, I'd say that would be him testifying against himself. Along those same lines, if he refuses to give the key (because he has the right NOT to incriminate himself), they are basically saying "Hey, we don't need the key, because he wouldn't be hiding anything if he had nothing to hide, so he must be guilty!"
This really represents a failure on the part of the judge. The only thing encryption represents is an unknown: not intent, not a particular set of data. You might as well hand they police a blank drive and infer from that "He must have erased it, and he wouldn't have done that unless he was guilty!"
Emphasizing something with *asterisks* doesn't make it true
I don't think people really understand what hinders sales and what doesn't. The movie industry has been proclaiming the death of profitable movies since VHS. We've got VCRs, DVDs (and burners), and Bit Torrent, and last I checked, RotS made 50 million dollars in ONE DAY.
Information is valuable to us as a society, and libraries were one of the earliest acknowledgements that information should be collected, maintained, and made available to the public free of charge.
Simply proclaiming that a search engine that indexes books *will* hinder book sales is intertesting, but far from valid.
In response to your last statement, I daresay most people that read a book they borrow from a library don't buy a hardcopy of their own, either. Not everything is about money - there are other values that are forwarded by making information available through new distribution channels.
If you know what webiste you are looking for, and the website is legally viewable, you should probably also know where to view the website from. Although one might say that a website search engine has legal uses, that argument is somewhat specious, IMO.
Further, as was pointed out in one of the first posts, this would be akin to suing Google for indexing sites that link to (possibly) infringing material. That case has never happened, and if it did, it would set an odd precedent, to say the least.
I think Bram is going to seek the same protections most search engines enjoy. No doubt if a suit came out, he would argue that he is only linking to files that link to peers. This is no more illegal than the "filetype:torrent" option on Google, and that has never been challenged. It would essentially be akin to outlawing.torrent files.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it doesn't ever "bottom out"...i.e. it can be used to hold almost anything responsible for anything. For example, RoTS couldn't be traded without TCP, the Internet, CPUs or hard drives either, so by this argument, they are responsible as well.
There are bigger points here, but I generally find it most appropriate to hold people responsible for their actions, rather than pre-existing environmental conditions.
Granted, but that is not really the point of the article. The release specifically says that Bit Torrent has provided the pirated movies.
This is obviously wrong and misleading. It is akin to saying the axe murdered the person, or it was the car that hit the guy in the crosswalk. That is simply not the case: it is the PEOPLE behind the tools that make the decision about how to use them.
This rampant demonization of peer to peer software is absurd. The fact that we have to have a case go to the supreme court to decide whether or not peer to peer software should be legal is absurd. They have to decide in the HIGHEST COURT of the land whether or not people who own computers can share data between the computers?
Again, we (as a society) love to blame the tools, rather than take personal responsibility for our actions. I, for one, grow tired of it.
Just to clarify:there are two basic approaches to creating a protected network: making every member of the network anonymous, or creating a trusted network in one way or another.
Projects like I2P and Tor go the first route of making network members anonymous. Freenet does this too, currently (we'll see what the future holds).
PeerGuardian is a tool to block nodes that are known/suspected of being untrustworthy from accessing your computer using IP filters. While this does help, it is a bit of an uphill battle, and certainly doesn't account for the edge case where the **AA simply pays some college student's tuition to report all IPs that are hosting "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith".
In the long run, trusted solutions are much harder to implement, and will become a part of networks that will grow relatively slowly. There are a couple of VPN based "metanets" around right now that follow this model, and most of us don't even know about them, much less use them. Their growth was designed to be slow.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the PS2 games didn't look as good as the demos. The legendary Sony hype machine aside, those Unreal 3 engine demos were realtime, and they looked a hell of a lot like pre-rendered. Very impressive, end of story.
Cell is a very cool design. I suggest you read the design docs linked to in the news item. IBM, Toshiba and Sony are fairly reputable - this is not some vaporware. If you were trolling about Infinium Labs and the Phantom, I'd understand, but PS3? Come on...
I wasn't going to reply, but I feel compelled to.
.95 (or even Core 1) after using Red Hat 9, but it was not the same product. I simply didn't want to see THE commercial end user Linux desktop OS turn to pure-free. That's what Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, and a thousand others are for. I liked having SuSe, Red Hat and Xandros out there, sitting on a shelf for sale. Then when I try to tell my dad to try Linux and he asks "But is there support I can call if I need help?" I can say "Yes, there is!" I would have liked to do that with Red Hat, but it is simply not an option as it was but before the Fedora switch (sites like http://support.marko.net/ notwithstanding).
First, I never objected to selling Open Source Software. You're simply misreading me in that regard.
Second, I never said that their enterprise distro wasn't open. It has been, and as far as I can tell, will continue to be.
My beef is that they took a product I most valued them for (a desktop, personal OS) and made a move that *reduced* their ownership of that product. They handed is back to the community, in effect, offering a substantial amount of support. It was not, as you say, simply a renaming of their current technology. You said yourself that they provided a ""fairly robust" support framework. It would be "totally robust" if they still treated it as *their* product, not the community's product that they have a big hand in creating.
This annoyed me. For some distros, I *want* company ownership. I want SuSe to sell a "professional" version that is officially supported for consumer level end-users. I wanted Red Hat to continue to sell their desktop version of the OS, providing support all the way. Companies that offer those products to *individual* end users are an asset to the community.
I viewed Red Hat's move as a step away from that ownership, which was accurate, in light of this latest news. They were backing off from that market, and continue to, as this news indicates. This is what annoyed me, and what I was referring to.
As to the other guy who says I'm bitching about free stuff, well, call me crazy, but I like having some commercial alternatives for end users, and some free alternatives. I don't know if you guys used Fedora
While your point is valid, so was GP's.
.95, and it drove me nuts), and drove me to Debian, and now finally Gentoo, which I have run on all my machines for the past 13 months or so. I don't ever see myself going back to RedHat or Fedora on my main machine, though I may try out FC4 on some spare hardware to see how I like it (I'm sure it has come a *long* way since .95).
The open source community isn't always centered around enterprise solutions. When RedHat removed their "personal" distro and focused only on enterprise, they alienated a lot of people, even though they continued to contribute to OSS in a big way.
I was one of them...I used RedHat exclusively on all my machines, but the move to Fedora pushed me away (the last FC I tried was
Anyway, it was that move that annoyed people in the OS community, and I think it was what GP was referring to.
Yes, but the damages are much less. Further, distributing small segments of copyrighted works is sometimes protected under fair use.
It tends to make your case much less compelling...you cannot claim astronomical damages because a person saw 1 minute of your film as easily as you could if you said they saw the whole film. After all, what are previews?
Yeah, a resolution computers have been doing since 1998.
The net is littered with old pages filled with comparisons between C and Java running the 1.1 VM on Windows 95. These benchmarks were done years ago, and do not interest me.
More recent benchmarks are available that give more relevant results. The first thing to note is the sheer number of VMs tested in this benchmark alone, and the vast performance differences between them. Saying things like "this horrid VM system" means nothing - it's like you're complaining about "this horrid car". Which car?
VM to VM comparison handled by the SPEC JVM98 is not interesting in our discussion, though it does illustrate the point that not all VMs are equal. More interesting is the Scimark 2.0 in Java, C#, and C/C++. It is worth noting that, on average, C/Visual C++ comes out on top, but only by around 1-2%. In second place is 1.4.2 JDK, third Sun's 1.5.0 JDK (both server VMs). The top benchmarks are 329/324/316 respectively, and then we start plumetting into 266 for gcc/-O2, a handful of JDKs, and then C#/.NET(release) down at 240. That's native code, just so we're clear.
So, at least in that benchmark, Sun's Java VM is comparing quite nicely to both other VMs and native code.
Linpack is more interesting, because it was run for both 500x500 and 1000x1000. In 500x500, native code is indeed faster, by a good margin. The 1.5.0 VM is about 1/3 lower than native compiled C code. But looking at the 1000x1000, you'll see the the VMs and native code are neck and neck, barely any difference between them. That is where my statement about large scale applications came from, though doesn't really illustrate my point as well as I'd like.
The last benchmark, the Eratosthenes Sieve, simply demonstrates the vast differences between VMs, and that Java obliterates C#. No surprises there.
I hadn't seen this report before I posted here. I looked it up to make a point, and hopefully you can see my point. In no case is Java "running like a slug" compared to native code.
There are lots of other reasons why you experienced slowness in your applications. The GUI being used, your choice of VM (surprisingly, native compiled Java code using GCJ often underperforms bytecode run in a VM!), or perhaps, even the quality of the code being run. It is quite easy to program something in a sloppy way that will reduce performance.
So, I simply disgaree, and would very interested to hear of a benchmark in which a recent, performant Java VM vastly underperformed a native implementation of the same algorithm. To my knowledge, Java compares quite well in 95% of applications.
And for P2P, well, what can I say? We're not exactly taxing our systems with a P2P app, now are we? I would think it would be FAR more important that you can make a cross platform P2P solution than egding out and extra 2% performance on the GUI response time. After all, it *is* a network, and we want it running in as many places as possible.
Oh, and for the record, I'm not a Java zealot. I'm an open source/free software zealot, and for that reason, don't like the rather closed nature of Sun's VM and libraries. You can call me a Python zealot though, since Python is my language of choice for personal projecs. I only use Java for professional projects.
OK, I'll feed the Troll.
You know Azureus (probably the best BT client around) is written in Java? Java is very high performance...I don't know how long its been since you used the VM, but it is at LEAST equivalent to C for small scale programs, and really shines on large scale projects.
Tor has specifically requested that NO Bittorrent data packets be routed over the network because it cannot yet handle the load.
Not really.
MUTE is using ant-based routing. This is basically a system that doesn't use IPs in the network very much, only directly connected nodes know each others IP. Each node instead uses a sort of psedonym, and that is the "address" that is used to route information. The beauty is that no one on the network knows the pseudonym-IP mapping, which makes the anonymity work pretty well.
In Rodi, you specifically put intermediate nodes between you and the destination, kind of like an obfuscated Gnutella-net. MUTE's routing doesn't know whether there are nodes between you and the destination, and further, doesn't even know when the packet has reached the destination. This makes MUTE very powerful because everyone is routing traffic for everyone...this makes the "C"s ubiquitous in the network, much like freenet.
That said, you are correct that every anonymous routing system "bounces" data off other nodes to anonymize it, including anonymous proxies, I2P, Tor, MUTE, Antz, Freenet, GNUNet, Rodi, you name it.
What? This program does everything BT does, and more. That's the point. So to say BT has uses that are legal, while this doesn't, is kind of absurd.
But I understand what you're driving at: anonymity is only useful for criminals. But that is simply not true. I have a right to encrypt my data, or exchange data with another person without having everyone on the Internet know about it. Why would I want to do this? It doesn't matter. The only thing you can reasonably deduce from me wanting to be anaonymous is that I want to be anonymous. You cannot logically conclude that I'm doing anything legal, or illegal. Simply that I want to be anonymous.
I see this technology being VERY useful as we come into a society that values IP more and more. I am quite worried that the patent system will eventually be used against F/OSS and that it will be an offense of some sort to distribute Linux, Openoffice, Firefox, the GNU tools, whatever, because of patent law. I look forward to having a robust, swarming, anonymous network that we can use to distribute Free software when/if such a situation comes to pass. Sure, it may become illegal, but that doesn't make it wrong.
I stand corrected.
I just took another look at the improvements that have been made in the protocol, and also tested a new client out (gtk-gnutella, Linux), and have to admit, I am impressed at the VAST improvements made in the past months/years.
Thanks for the response.
So wait, some guy expressing a US-bashing political opinion in a thread about A NEW HEATSINK gets +5 Insightful?
What happened to -37, So Absurdly Offtopic It's Not Even Funny?
Oh wait...
Not to bash Gnutella, but there is a very good reason it is not used for large downloads that tend to get Slashdotted, like new Linux distro releases. Using Gnutella for downing Linux ISOs is a step backward. The Gnutella network is good for some things, but as Bit Torrent mutates into a decentralized network that can use an anonymous routing layer, Gnutella will fall off the map, I think.
Instead of talking about Gnutella, I'm surprised more posts haven't mentioned the other Linux tracker sites:
Linuxtracker
The Linux Mirror Project
Actually, a lot of entries do use depth of field. Its pretty easy in POV, anyway.
I thought the same about render time, but one guy mentioned in his tech notes that to render a simple blue glow on some cables (OK, so it wasn't really *that* simple, but still, nothing earth shattering), took him a MONTH running on a dedicated FreeBSD machine that was "decently powered", running at niceness -19. I was stunned. Hopefully, "decently powered" didn't mean a Pentium 133.
Check the "Hall of Fame" for a great collection (plus screenies) of tons of really good entries.
As I read that, a particular phrase caught me:
"No measurable gains were made in art quality or artists' standard of living."
It's funny...everyone assumes that if we legalized file sharing that artists would starve. But we have seen no such thing - perhaps even an opposite effect. As the internet has grown, and P2P with it, I think we have a bigger "media culture" than before. People get more excited about upcoming releases (of movies, music, games, whatever), and entire online communities are created that center themselves around these products.
In fact, I would be hard pressed to cite an example of an artist that STOPPED recording because his or her music was being swapped so much on the internet. There are these theoretical losses the RIAA/MPAA cite well into the billions of dollars - but I don't see "billions of dollars" less in the lifestyle of the pop stars. Metallica is just as rich as always, N Sync just as successful.
One might assert that the money is coming out of the pockets of aspiring artists, but I would disagree. The RIAA was NEVER the friend of new artists, just as Hollywood is NEVER the friend of the low-budget film maker. I would assert the opposite: with sites like Magnatune and CD Baby, aspiring artists have a better chance than ever to make a buck for their efforts, and get exposure the RIAA and MPAA could never offer.
Piracy is still piracy, but at the end of the day, you'll find that even in a society where file-swapping is legal, your artists don't starve. This has been held as the highest argument against file sharing: we're stealing from the artists. But truthfully, I simply don't see it. Sure, there's always gonna be those that would prefer to trade online and never pay, but there will also be those that will want to purchase the stuff they found because they liked it so much. Very few people go out and blindly buy music, because it doesn't make any sense. Why would you pay $15 for a CD filled with something you know nothing about? You have to get into it somehow. Back in the old days, it was radio. Then cassette tapes came around, and it was all about mix tapes that were given to your friends. I know I bought a lot of albums because of mix tapes I got from my friends. Now, its home-burned CDs, P2P AND radio.
As I see it, those "unofficial" distribution channels help artists become known. You have to hear the music somewhere first, and then you buy. P2P, radio and home-made media allow for that to happen. Most artists don't get radio play anyway. All that leaves is word of mouth and P2P for someone to get to know the music, and since few people will consistently pay $15-$20 for an album filled with music they have no clue about, this makes home copied music and P2P pretty important In an age where fewer people are listening to the radio, and more people are carrying music on a portable player, it's just silly to think that killing P2P off will HELP the industry.
Of course, this begs the question "How do we change laws to reflect this?" And that is a dicussion for another time; I don't have that answer. All I know is that the way it is right now, is wrong.
We're not discussing logic here, we're discussing what is admissable in court. I daresay you would be hard pressed to find a case in which the prosecution is able to make an argument or pursue a line of questioning that uses the fact that the defendedant took the fifth against them.
IANAL, and I certainly do not have a good background in case law, but it would seem unconstitutional to me.
Yes, but by this logic, if someone "takes the fifth", it could be used to incriminate them, which kind of destroys the purpose of the right.
Why is this relevant? Well, if he is using encryption, and they ask him for his key to decrypt the files, I'd say that would be him testifying against himself. Along those same lines, if he refuses to give the key (because he has the right NOT to incriminate himself), they are basically saying "Hey, we don't need the key, because he wouldn't be hiding anything if he had nothing to hide, so he must be guilty!"
This really represents a failure on the part of the judge. The only thing encryption represents is an unknown: not intent, not a particular set of data. You might as well hand they police a blank drive and infer from that "He must have erased it, and he wouldn't have done that unless he was guilty!"
Emphasizing something with *asterisks* doesn't make it true
I don't think people really understand what hinders sales and what doesn't. The movie industry has been proclaiming the death of profitable movies since VHS. We've got VCRs, DVDs (and burners), and Bit Torrent, and last I checked, RotS made 50 million dollars in ONE DAY.
Information is valuable to us as a society, and libraries were one of the earliest acknowledgements that information should be collected, maintained, and made available to the public free of charge.
Simply proclaiming that a search engine that indexes books *will* hinder book sales is intertesting, but far from valid.
In response to your last statement, I daresay most people that read a book they borrow from a library don't buy a hardcopy of their own, either. Not everything is about money - there are other values that are forwarded by making information available through new distribution channels.
Google isn't handing out free copies. They allow you to view a page a time. And rarely (if ever) do they allow one user to view the entire work.
Your point may be valid, but not in the context of Google and scanning books for the purpose of searching.
If you know what webiste you are looking for, and the website is legally viewable, you should probably also know where to view the website from. Although one might say that a website search engine has legal uses, that argument is somewhat specious, IMO.
Wait, what?
By the way, downloading absolutely IS a infringement of copyright. It is simply easier to seek astronomical damages if you sue an uploader.
Further, as was pointed out in one of the first posts, this would be akin to suing Google for indexing sites that link to (possibly) infringing material. That case has never happened, and if it did, it would set an odd precedent, to say the least.
.torrent files.
I think Bram is going to seek the same protections most search engines enjoy. No doubt if a suit came out, he would argue that he is only linking to files that link to peers. This is no more illegal than the "filetype:torrent" option on Google, and that has never been challenged. It would essentially be akin to outlawing
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it doesn't ever "bottom out"...i.e. it can be used to hold almost anything responsible for anything. For example, RoTS couldn't be traded without TCP, the Internet, CPUs or hard drives either, so by this argument, they are responsible as well.
There are bigger points here, but I generally find it most appropriate to hold people responsible for their actions, rather than pre-existing environmental conditions.
This is obviously wrong and misleading. It is akin to saying the axe murdered the person, or it was the car that hit the guy in the crosswalk. That is simply not the case: it is the PEOPLE behind the tools that make the decision about how to use them.
This rampant demonization of peer to peer software is absurd. The fact that we have to have a case go to the supreme court to decide whether or not peer to peer software should be legal is absurd. They have to decide in the HIGHEST COURT of the land whether or not people who own computers can share data between the computers?
Again, we (as a society) love to blame the tools, rather than take personal responsibility for our actions. I, for one, grow tired of it.
Methlabs' PeerGuardian does not anonymize.
Just to clarify:there are two basic approaches to creating a protected network: making every member of the network anonymous, or creating a trusted network in one way or another.
Projects like I2P and Tor go the first route of making network members anonymous. Freenet does this too, currently (we'll see what the future holds).
PeerGuardian is a tool to block nodes that are known/suspected of being untrustworthy from accessing your computer using IP filters. While this does help, it is a bit of an uphill battle, and certainly doesn't account for the edge case where the **AA simply pays some college student's tuition to report all IPs that are hosting "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith".
In the long run, trusted solutions are much harder to implement, and will become a part of networks that will grow relatively slowly. There are a couple of VPN based "metanets" around right now that follow this model, and most of us don't even know about them, much less use them. Their growth was designed to be slow.