....Not really an apt comparison for the purposes of IP logging.....
But is a good comparison. The Internet is a PUBLIC place. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves. Privacy only should apply where human eye or ears or their extensions would normally be, like in your house. Universal surveillance cuts down on random crimes of opportunity, but will never deter anyone determined to do wrong. Therefore, it is pretty useless to deter terrorists by universal monitoring of everybody. Terrorists are not random criminals and know well how to evade all monitoring efforts. Officials who advocate wholesale monitoring should know this. Therefore, their motives for wanting to monitor everybody must have other reasons. What those are can be argued about forever.
..... it makes sense to require or have this for everyone.......
Only if your basic assumptions is that everyone is guilty of some sort of crime every single day of their life and it is the job of someone to sift through all that data to find all these criminals. Would it not be more effective to monitor ONLY those who are truly suspects of a real crime? A real crime that does real damage to others? Most possession crimes do not rise to ever hurting anyone, until the illicit substance or object is actually used against someone else. The AK47 or UZZI or other weapon in someone's closet or car trunk doesn't hurt anyone until the device is actually used against a human or their property. Porn is disgusting, but someone looking at it on a computer screen doesn't really affect others. It's when the porn addict becomes a molester, the law should rightly step in.
At least 75% of prisoners are locked up because directly or indirectly because of something the were in possession of. You probably have something somewhere which is not legal for you to have. Let's put mandatory video cameras and microphones in every house and street corner, in case someone does bad stuff at any time, anywhere. Where should the line for privacy be drawn? At some point it may be more cost effective to lock up the minority of law abiding people in safe places and let the criminals run around free preying on each other.
.....Think about the reality. How many terrorists are there? And how many twisted people?.....
So why not collect an keep information ONLY on people suspected for wrongdoing? Why does data have to be kept for everybody for every minute of the day? The REAL evil people who are not totally stupid, will not be caught by these "cast a wide net tactics" in the first place. For example, there are literally millions of open wireless access points that a person bent on doing wrong can use to access the Internet. Any and every log will only contain the ip information of the particular connection point the perp used on that day. Keeping such records is a complete waste of time and I have no idea why any ISP in their right mind would spend a dime to keep such information. If the law enforcers suspect someone of illegal things, they can and do confiscate the suspect's computer and hope that it contains evidence to confirm the suspicions.
.... the equipment used to record our favorites costs even more now, which means higher rates in the studios......
The equipment needed to make a CD quality recording has never been cheaper. It's not the equipment. In brain surgery, it's not the cost of the equipment, but the skill of the surgeon that costs. The same for recording. A good recording engineer can get excellent results out of low or moderately priced equipment and a poor operator will get crummy results from the best machinery money can buy. Same goes for any skilled art or profession.
.... Combine the best of Pirate bay, iTunes Store, and eMusic, and sell DRM-free high-quality MP3s for less than $1......
I wonder how the download figures for iTunes would change if they kept everything exactly as it is today, except removed the DRM, with the blessings of the record labels of course. I suspect the sales would rise and the "piracy" would stay about the same. Apple could remove the DRM, but still keep the account information of the original downloader which is also in every file. If such marked files showed up on the Internet, the original purchasers could be asked some embarrassing questions as to how their music got there.
Such identifying information can be easily removed of course, but that means the person who did this deliberately WANTED to violate the law. I suppose though that the percentage of people who do such things are about the same as the ones who do shoplifting. That could be considered a cost of doing business.
Apple's iPod business would grow only a little, because the sources of online music available to the large number of iPod users would increase. Most music on most iPods did not get there from any legit downloads and probably not from any downloads, but ripped from the iPod owner's CD collection and from friend's CD collections.
........A blanket license would probably operate similar to how the European TV/radio tax works:.......
Any tax that lines the pockets of private persons, corporate or otherwise is bad. Taxes should be for PUBLIC good only. Governments of course have the propensity to tax anything they think they can enforce a tax upon and can and do tax communications, including computers which are really only another communications gadget.
Unlike TV sets and radios, the Internet, computers, their media and their peripherals have many uses that have nothing to do with the entertainment business and should not be thrown into the same boat with them. When the EU TV/Radio tax was instituted, there was no or little advertising. Now they collect the tax and have ads also. The same history applies for cable TV in the US.
....Though it seems that some agreement can be reached with ISPs etc. for that info to be available to the bots.......
If I have a good firewall that excludes externally initiated communications for all LAN computers, how will the ISP be able to do anything? Getting all ISP's to agree to something would need a law or some very compelling bottom line enhancement for them.
The iTunes system uses a mild DRM which probably would not exist if the record labels would ever get over their piracy fixation. Download a CD's worth of songs of your choice, burn this to a CD and add that as a backup to your CD collection bought at your friendly record store. Even if the songs did not have DRM. you'd still want to back them up wouldn't you? So far, the iTunes is the best way of getting music of your choice legally.
....There will continue to be a need for a music recording infrastructure.....
True, However, the cost of creating an infrastructure good enough to record CD quality sound is minimal nowadays. What is not so plentiful is the supply of good engineers to use even the cheapest equipment properly. Making a great recording requires good artists who know how to make real music, a good recording engineer who knows how to use the almost universally available good equipment. High quality art is made my high quality people, not just expensive equipment.
.....That sounds like a banal world where only 'big stadium rock' bands can survive......
No, it sounds like the world of the distant past before the camera and phonograph, before technology commercialized art and copyright monopolies. In those days artists did art just because they LOVED art. They made their money like everybody else did or they found someone with money who supported them. Artists should get a day job to earn a living and then practice their art for their own and other's enjoyment. If they can persuade others to pay them, that's great, but society doesn't owe them a living.
.....DRM is way past being about music and video.....
Remember, the "D" in DRM stands for digital. It so happens that all human senses are still analog. ALL information is created by humans and started out as analog must eventually be converted back to analog. I believe they call it "the analog hole". If any analog information can be captured and stored by any conceivable technology the FIRST time, then it can be done the second or even third time. There is a loss each time the digital/analog/digital divide is crossed, but with present technology, that divide can be made acceptably small for most people. Until someone invents and enforces by law a D/A chip implant in every brain, DRM will never work.
.... produce an album with decent sound quality. It won't be CD quality.....
Compared to what the cost was years ago to record CD quality, it has become almost dirt cheap to do so today. Advertising the product is by far the biggest expense today. Somehow a SKILLFUL music group still has to get their work out to where potential buyers can become aware of it. Clever use of the Internet can reduce both the advertising and distribution costs. Still these two will be a lot higher that merely making a good sounding recording.
.....So the ISP would have to run a two-tiered service, one with the plan and oune without - that's not a big deal, they have the infrastructure already......
All you are doing is making the Internet industry take the place of part of the IRS in that they now become the cashier for the IP industry. It is always a bad idea for society to force one industry to do work on behalf of another. Let the content industry figure out how to collect money only from their own CUSTOMERS, not from the entire public or the customers of another business. This is how it works for all other businesses. Why should the **AA companies get a special deal? In a sense, they already do since government has provided them in effect with an eternal monopoly via copyright and DMCA.
.....For example, for a CD costing $15 you can assign $14 to copyright VAT.....
Except that taxes are mandatory, but I can choose whether I want to buy the CD or download a song from iTunes. However, if I use my computer just to process the pictures I take and then store these on a CD or DVD disk, why should I pay a tax to the music industry? If I use the Internet to communicate with my friends in lieu of or in addition to the phone, why should I pay a tax into the pockets of the music or film industry via a tax on my ISP? Paying taxes should be for the PUBLIC good, not to line the pockets of private individuals or companies.
AFAIK it was added in Tiger (10.4). Whether a user would click yes the first time would depend on the social engineering method the perp uses. If the user is told that the attachment has some juicy p0rn, and then is told by the system that a program wants to execute, he/she might well balk and click no. If a cool screen-saver, weather-watcher or other program is advertised, then there is a better possibility to get a yes.
Skilled social engineering and a dumb or naive user will make any and OS protection defenseless. I get around this partially by giving most users only limited access to certain programs they need. On the Mac this is easy, since there are NO programs that will not run under restricted privileges. Even games work under limited accounts. Unfortunately, there are many important programs in Windows that will not run properly or at all under a limited user account. I hope the new VISTA fixes this.
There is another hurdle both you and the person you are replying to missed. It is a dialog that asks: File xyz or program xyz is trying to run for the first time, do you want to allow this? Then there is a yes - no choice. I am not a computer or Unix expert, but it seems that OSX keeps track of which programs have run before and which have not. A new never before run program triggers a warning, not only by Safari and Mail but appears to be part of the system somewhere. I have had this warning come up even for an old OS9 program which I needed to look at some data with. Since a virus or worm has to run for the first time, the user would be given a last chance to abort the running of a program the user never heard of before. In the end of course there is no bullet proof defense against a stupid user getting his/her computer infected.
.....Another point to be made is that when your userbase is 5% of the market, it typically gets 5% of the attention. Another point to be made is that when your userbase is 5% of the market, it typically gets 5% of the attention.....
That is such an old worn out saw it won't even cut through melted butter. I'm sure that there are hackers out there who'd love to make the Mac equivalent of a "blaster" or the like that devastated the Windows universe. Many virus companies would love to sell their crap ware to Mac users and would enjoy reading about a Mac virus or worm wiping out at least thousands, if not millions of Macs. The screaming headlines in every computer and other media of a massive Mac virus would likely send the stock of the antivirus companies higher also. There is no such thing as a computer that cannot be messed up by skilled social engineering. The problem is that Windows computers cannot be connected to the Internet for long without getting infected by some nasty programs, whereas Macs don't have that problem. A Mac, out of the box, can be connected to the Internet for months or years without any sort of firewall or special software and not get bothered by this. Of course connecting any computer without a firewall is a bad idea, because it can slow the system down because it has a lot of useless network traffic to look at.
.....assumption that someday there will be a huge worm outbreak on Macs.....
This is actually a fervent prayer to the devil by security companies, including Symantec that SOMEBODY will come up with an effective piece of malware that will infect every Mac on Earth, whether it is connected to the Internet or not.
.....technological tools will abolish the need for government altogether....
As long as there are two or more wills in the world, there will be a need for and there will be a government. Technology cannot change this. The one who has the power to enforce his/her will on others is the real government. In the case of the US, as with all capitalistic systems, the one who controls the money is the one who is in the best position to enforce their will on those who want or need money. In the end, even the communistic system collapsed before the onslaught of the powers that control wealth.
....Solar energy is just a temporary feel-good stopgap for the naive......
Perhaps not solar energy per-se, but just the idea of converting light directly into electricity with expensive to produce materials. Plants have perfected the process of capturing solar energy and converting it into useable energy forms. It seems utilizing this tried and true process to make some kind of bio-fuel would be a preferable way to go for large scale energy production, especially for transportation. Making a flexible fuel, such as bio-diesel from plant material grown on land or sea and then using the existing fuel handling and distribution infrastructure is a more viable way to go for now. Perhaps, 20 years from now (historically ALWAYS 20 years from now) local fusion reactors will become the means of providing abundant energy. Until then, using the fusion reactor which is 93 million miles distant is the only practical long term alternative to the fossil fuels.
.....The founding fathers weren't always right. The Constitution isn't always right. The point of a democratic-like government is to allow the people to improve the body of law over time, to make it more fair and ethically just.......
Is the majority always right? Is that what you are saying here? How do we determine what is right and wrong? We know there are absolute laws in the physical world. No human legislator or democratic process determined the laws of nature. All human laws are the products of minds, processes of thought. Is it possible that the "natural" laws were also originated in a mind? Is then so improbable that the same mind that came up with these absolute natural laws could also have formulated some equally absolute moral laws? Natural laws have not changed over time, at least not so anybody can tell. Is it then so far fetched to say that moral laws are equally immutable? Human beings have no say so in determining the laws of nature, so why should we have a choice in determining moral laws? Nobody has EVER broken a natural law, but plenty of people have been broken by disobeying these laws. Equally, nobody has ever broken any moral law, but our world is filled with people who have been ruined by their breaking of these moral statutes. The Bible happens to have a good summary of these, but is by no means the only place these codes are found. Some of these codes are deeply embedded in the human psyche. Exactly how does a little child decide what is "fair"? Is it only education?
Our founding fathers firmly grasped the idea that human governments and the people as a whole were subject to a higher government and that certain inalienable rights are bestowed by the Creator on humans, that no lesser power can rightfully remove. The founding fathers codified some of these principles in the document called the Constitution of the United States.
....An abortion is NOT a state issue; it is an issue between a woman and her doctor. Period.......
The protection of life, ie. making murder illegal IS most certainly a state issue. The real question only is: Does an unborn, developing human being have the same rights as a human being that is freely breathing the air of this world? No government ever has nor can it ever give so much as a single right. An INALIENABLE right means it cannot be added to nor subtracted from by any human being. Governments can and always only have taken away rights from people that have been freely given to them by their Creator. Anyone who cannot give life, also doesn't have the right to to take it. The Government in the US has decided to take away the right for the unborn to live. In Nazi Germany and other places, the Governments have taken the right of human beings to be or remain alive for all sorts of reasons. Abortion is legal in the US and the extermination of Jews and others was legal in the Third Reich under Hitler and both are equally evil laws. There are countries today, where the extermination of humans is perfectly legal if certain criteria are met.
.....including a controversial clause that property seized via ED can never be released to private ownership - is up for vote now in the state legistlature.......
On November 7th, we here in Oregon also get to vote on whether to restrict the power of eminent domain in this way. The Supreme Court rightly decided that the Constitution only specifies that property owners should be compensated for their property, but nowhere restricts what the public body may do with this property after it is taken. It is therefore rightly up to the legislators or the people to clarify the law on this issue. The Constitution only provides a framework, mostly in the form of limits, and leaves the details of lawmaking within these limits to the legislators and/or the electorate.
.....For example, it considers building a hotel and condominiums as "public use" for the purposes of eminent domain........
Unfortunately, the constitution is silent on what a governmental entity may do with property taken under the power of eminent domain. All the Supremes rightfully said that the decision of what to do belongs to the legislative bodies in each state and ultimately to the people who elected these legislators. Many states have already voted on laws that prohibit conveying property acquired through the power of eminent domain to private parties. In this coming election we here in Oregon will get a chance to bar all legislative bodies from using their power of eminent domain to do this subverting of such property to private uses. The Supreme Court does try to follow the law, which is often difficult in the face of ambiguous and conflicting laws passed by the legislators.
.....Apple doesn't give a shit about their customers with older systems.....
Because Apple is primarily a hardware maker, they have kept up with Integrated circuit progress by having the various 68xxx processors, then the PPC family starting with the 601 and ending with the G5 and now in the last year, switched to Intel 88x types.
Your assertion about old Mac software not working on a modern computer and OS from Apple piqued my curiosity, so I decided to dig out some of my old Mac stuff from the ancient of days of Appledom. I am sharing this with you and anyone else that may come across this. Office 97 may not run on the new VISTA windows, but a lot of old Mac stuff still runs on a modern Mac. I would think that some old DOS programs might still work under XP? Keep in mind that some of these ancient programs are written for the original Mac with the 68000 processors! Windows has always run under the x86 chips.
Here is a list of programs that still run on my OSX 10.4.8 G5 2Ghz system, all running under classic OS9 mode:
Adobe Acrobat 4.0 - 1999 Adobe Illustrator 88 - 1988 Adobe Illustrator 3.2 - 1991 Adobe Photoshop 2.5 from 1993 AOL 5.0 - 2000 Apple Hypercard 2.1 - 1991 American Heritage Deluxe dictionary - 1994 Canvas 3.5.4 - 1995 Cronos Consultant Contact Manager 2.2 -- 1995 Filemaker 4 - 1998 iTunes 2.03 -2001 MS Internet Explorer 5.1 - 2001 MS Excel 4.0 - 1992 MS Word 5.1 - 1992 Quicken 4 -1993 Street Atlas 6.0 - 1999 Weathertracker 2.2.4 - 1995
Of course I did not test the total functionality of each program, but the above actually came up without hanging or crashing. The simple main functions did work in each program. For example AOL did log in and IE browsed Apple Web site OK. For some games I had to change the display to 480x640 and 256 colors for games and then it worked.
I also, just for fun tested some old Mickey Mouse games to see if any of them still work. These below did surprisingly well.
Jewelbox - 1991 3D.Checkers - 1989 Down'n'dirty Blackjack - 1992 Where in the World is Carmen San Diego - 1992 Checkmate 1.01 - 1991 Dark Corona Spaceship - 1997 Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 - 1991 Galactic Empire 2.03 - 1994 Desert Trek 1.02 - 1994 (survival management) Galaxis 1.1 -1992 (space resource manage) Gold Pusher - 1994 HyperGobbledygook Hypercard game - 1991 Jotto 1.1 - 1993 (letter guessing) LodeRunner - 1984 (collect gold) -oldest program, amazingly still works! MacSokoban - 1994 (warehouse keeper board game) Memory - 1986 (picture flash card remembering) Monopoly 4.02 - 1987 (trading board game) Operation DIVA - 1993 (collect objects board game) Professor 3.03 - 1989 hypercard (Eliza Psychologist) Quagmire - 1993 (rescue hero) Space Adventure - 1993 (learn about space) Tetris Max 1.1 - 1992 Ultimate Pool 1.1 1996 (billiard simulation) Valley of Peril - 1994 ( text based adventure) Where in Time is Carmen San Diego - 1991
Now that Apple has switched to the Intel architecture, none of these classic apps will run any more because Rosetta cannot run OS9 and its software.
Security is a non-problem with any Mac software before OSX came out. Because of the old Apple fork system (data and resource forks), getting any program into a Mac over a network connection, even if it was a wanted program, was a circuitous procedure. With OSX Apple has to pay attention to security in a way they never had to bother under OS9 and before.
.....The reason apple has less virus problems is because the marketshare isn't there for people to bother. If OS X or linux ever took say 25% marketshare,.........
The marketshare argument is bogus. Apache server has a a larger marketshare than MS Information server and has fewer security problems. Historically, the largest numbers of computers have been in the business world. MS basically rode in on the coattails of IBM and managed to stay there. Now, with the Internet, the number of computers owned by consumers is steadily increasing. Of that number, Apple is getting an increasing share. I have never seen any market breakdown on systems only sold to consumers by brand.
Neither Apple not MS had a multi-user system since the computers they were run on were PERSONAL computers, which by definition were and still are essentially single user machines. Apple abandoned their single user OS heritage and, as you wrote, bought a UNIX flavor system that was conceived from the ground up as a multiuser computer with a basic security foundation upon which to build. MS Windows is STILL a single user system at heart, with various attempts at security bolted on afterwards. VISTA is not going to change that, because if it did, EVERY single PC program in existence would no longer run under it. Unlike Apple, MS could not, has not and will not abandon essentially their entire application base, especially in the corporate market. Apple's emphasis on the consumer segment, as well as the fact that they build their own hardware gives them a much larger latitude to radically change their application compatibility structure. The processor switch to INTEL, for example, it means that not even ONE OS9 program or earlier will run on their current crop of machines. There are too many legacy programs in much of the enterprise establishment that are still in daily use. MS cannot afford to break them all overnight and therefore cannot ever provide the kind of security that Apple and Linux can bring to the table. In view of their difficulty, MS is doing remarkably well and will likely be the cornerstone of computing, at least in the enterprise, for a long time.
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....Not really an apt comparison for the purposes of IP logging.....
But is a good comparison. The Internet is a PUBLIC place. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves. Privacy only should apply where human eye or ears or their extensions would normally be, like in your house. Universal surveillance cuts down on random crimes of opportunity, but will never deter anyone determined to do wrong. Therefore, it is pretty useless to deter terrorists by universal monitoring of everybody. Terrorists are not random criminals and know well how to evade all monitoring efforts. Officials who advocate wholesale monitoring should know this. Therefore, their motives for wanting to monitor everybody must have other reasons. What those are can be argued about forever.
..... it makes sense to require or have this for everyone.......
Only if your basic assumptions is that everyone is guilty of some sort of crime every single day of their life and it is the job of someone to sift through all that data to find all these criminals. Would it not be more effective to monitor ONLY those who are truly suspects of a real crime? A real crime that does real damage to others? Most possession crimes do not rise to ever hurting anyone, until the illicit substance or object is actually used against someone else. The AK47 or UZZI or other weapon in someone's closet or car trunk doesn't hurt anyone until the device is actually used against a human or their property. Porn is disgusting, but someone looking at it on a computer screen doesn't really affect others. It's when the porn addict becomes a molester, the law should rightly step in.
At least 75% of prisoners are locked up because directly or indirectly because of something the were in possession of. You probably have something somewhere which is not legal for you to have. Let's put mandatory video cameras and microphones in every house and street corner, in case someone does bad stuff at any time, anywhere. Where should the line for privacy be drawn? At some point it may be more cost effective to lock up the minority of law abiding people in safe places and let the criminals run around free preying on each other.
.....Think about the reality. How many terrorists are there? And how many twisted people?.....
So why not collect an keep information ONLY on people suspected for wrongdoing? Why does data have to be kept for everybody for every minute of the day? The REAL evil people who are not totally stupid, will not be caught by these "cast a wide net tactics" in the first place. For example, there are literally millions of open wireless access points that a person bent on doing wrong can use to access the Internet. Any and every log will only contain the ip information of the particular connection point the perp used on that day. Keeping such records is a complete waste of time and I have no idea why any ISP in their right mind would spend a dime to keep such information. If the law enforcers suspect someone of illegal things, they can and do confiscate the suspect's computer and hope that it contains evidence to confirm the suspicions.
.... the equipment used to record our favorites costs even more now, which means higher rates in the studios......
The equipment needed to make a CD quality recording has never been cheaper. It's not the equipment. In brain surgery, it's not the cost of the equipment, but the skill of the surgeon that costs. The same for recording. A good recording engineer can get excellent results out of low or moderately priced equipment and a poor operator will get crummy results from the best machinery money can buy. Same goes for any skilled art or profession.
.... Combine the best of Pirate bay, iTunes Store, and eMusic, and sell DRM-free high-quality MP3s for less than $1......
I wonder how the download figures for iTunes would change if they kept everything exactly as it is today, except removed the DRM, with the blessings of the record labels of course. I suspect the sales would rise and the "piracy" would stay about the same. Apple could remove the DRM, but still keep the account information of the original downloader which is also in every file. If such marked files showed up on the Internet, the original purchasers could be asked some embarrassing questions as to how their music got there.
Such identifying information can be easily removed of course, but that means the person who did this deliberately WANTED to violate the law. I suppose though that the percentage of people who do such things are about the same as the ones who do shoplifting. That could be considered a cost of doing business.
Apple's iPod business would grow only a little, because the sources of online music available to the large number of iPod users would increase. Most music on most iPods did not get there from any legit downloads and probably not from any downloads, but ripped from the iPod owner's CD collection and from friend's CD collections.
........A blanket license would probably operate similar to how the European TV/radio tax works:.......
Any tax that lines the pockets of private persons, corporate or otherwise is bad. Taxes should be for PUBLIC good only. Governments of course have the propensity to tax anything they think they can enforce a tax upon and can and do tax communications, including computers which are really only another communications gadget.
Unlike TV sets and radios, the Internet, computers, their media and their peripherals have many uses that have nothing to do with the entertainment business and should not be thrown into the same boat with them. When the EU TV/Radio tax was instituted, there was no or little advertising. Now they collect the tax and have ads also. The same history applies for cable TV in the US.
....Though it seems that some agreement can be reached with ISPs etc. for that info to be available to the bots.......
If I have a good firewall that excludes externally initiated communications for all LAN computers, how will the ISP be able to do anything? Getting all ISP's to agree to something would need a law or some very compelling bottom line enhancement for them.
The iTunes system uses a mild DRM which probably would not exist if the record labels would ever get over their piracy fixation. Download a CD's worth of songs of your choice, burn this to a CD and add that as a backup to your CD collection bought at your friendly record store. Even if the songs did not have DRM. you'd still want to back them up wouldn't you? So far, the iTunes is the best way of getting music of your choice legally.
....There will continue to be a need for a music recording infrastructure.....
True, However, the cost of creating an infrastructure good enough to record CD quality sound is minimal nowadays. What is not so plentiful is the supply of good engineers to use even the cheapest equipment properly. Making a great recording requires good artists who know how to make real music, a good recording engineer who knows how to use the almost universally available good equipment. High quality art is made my high quality people, not just expensive equipment.
.....That sounds like a banal world where only 'big stadium rock' bands can survive......
No, it sounds like the world of the distant past before the camera and phonograph, before technology commercialized art and copyright monopolies. In those days artists did art just because they LOVED art. They made their money like everybody else did or they found someone with money who supported them. Artists should get a day job to earn a living and then practice their art for their own and other's enjoyment. If they can persuade others to pay them, that's great, but society doesn't owe them a living.
.....DRM is way past being about music and video.....
Remember, the "D" in DRM stands for digital. It so happens that all human senses are still analog. ALL information is created by humans and started out as analog must eventually be converted back to analog. I believe they call it "the analog hole". If any analog information can be captured and stored by any conceivable technology the FIRST time, then it can be done the second or even third time. There is a loss each time the digital/analog/digital divide is crossed, but with present technology, that divide can be made acceptably small for most people. Until someone invents and enforces by law a D/A chip implant in every brain, DRM will never work.
.... produce an album with decent sound quality. It won't be CD quality.....
Compared to what the cost was years ago to record CD quality, it has become almost dirt cheap to do so today. Advertising the product is by far the biggest expense today. Somehow a SKILLFUL music group still has to get their work out to where potential buyers can become aware of it. Clever use of the Internet can reduce both the advertising and distribution costs. Still these two will be a lot higher that merely making a good sounding recording.
.....So the ISP would have to run a two-tiered service, one with the plan and oune without - that's not a big deal, they have the infrastructure already......
All you are doing is making the Internet industry take the place of part of the IRS in that they now become the cashier for the IP industry. It is always a bad idea for society to force one industry to do work on behalf of another. Let the content industry figure out how to collect money only from their own CUSTOMERS, not from the entire public or the customers of another business. This is how it works for all other businesses. Why should the **AA companies get a special deal? In a sense, they already do since government has provided them in effect with an eternal monopoly via copyright and DMCA.
.....For example, for a CD costing $15 you can assign $14 to copyright VAT.....
Except that taxes are mandatory, but I can choose whether I want to buy the CD or download a song from iTunes. However, if I use my computer just to process the pictures I take and then store these on a CD or DVD disk, why should I pay a tax to the music industry? If I use the Internet to communicate with my friends in lieu of or in addition to the phone, why should I pay a tax into the pockets of the music or film industry via a tax on my ISP? Paying taxes should be for the PUBLIC good, not to line the pockets of private individuals or companies.
....What version of OSX added this feature?......
AFAIK it was added in Tiger (10.4). Whether a user would click yes the first time would depend on the social engineering method the perp uses. If the user is told that the attachment has some juicy p0rn, and then is told by the system that a program wants to execute, he/she might well balk and click no. If a cool screen-saver, weather-watcher or other program is advertised, then there is a better possibility to get a yes.
Skilled social engineering and a dumb or naive user will make any and OS protection defenseless. I get around this partially by giving most users only limited access to certain programs they need. On the Mac this is easy, since there are NO programs that will not run under restricted privileges. Even games work under limited accounts. Unfortunately, there are many important programs in Windows that will not run properly or at all under a limited user account. I hope the new VISTA fixes this.
....Run the application......
There is another hurdle both you and the person you are replying to missed. It is a dialog that asks: File xyz or program xyz is trying to run for the first time, do you want to allow this?
Then there is a yes - no choice. I am not a computer or Unix expert, but it seems that OSX keeps track of which programs have run before and which have not. A new never before run program triggers a warning, not only by Safari and Mail but appears to be part of the system somewhere. I have had this warning come up even for an old OS9 program which I needed to look at some data with. Since a virus or worm has to run for the first time, the user would be given a last chance to abort the running of a program the user never heard of before. In the end of course there is no bullet proof defense against a stupid user getting his/her computer infected.
.....Another point to be made is that when your userbase is 5% of the market, it typically gets 5% of the attention. Another point to be made is that when your userbase is 5% of the market, it typically gets 5% of the attention.....
That is such an old worn out saw it won't even cut through melted butter. I'm sure that there are hackers out there who'd love to make the Mac equivalent of a "blaster" or the like that devastated the Windows universe. Many virus companies would love to sell their crap ware to Mac users and would enjoy reading about a Mac virus or worm wiping out at least thousands, if not millions of Macs. The screaming headlines in every computer and other media of a massive Mac virus would likely send the stock of the antivirus companies higher also. There is no such thing as a computer that cannot be messed up by skilled social engineering. The problem is that Windows computers cannot be connected to the Internet for long without getting infected by some nasty programs, whereas Macs don't have that problem. A Mac, out of the box, can be connected to the Internet for months or years without any sort of firewall or special software and not get bothered by this. Of course connecting any computer without a firewall is a bad idea, because it can slow the system down because it has a lot of useless network traffic to look at.
.....assumption that someday there will be a huge worm outbreak on Macs.....
This is actually a fervent prayer to the devil by security companies, including Symantec that SOMEBODY will come up with an effective piece of malware that will infect every Mac on Earth, whether it is connected to the Internet or not.
.....technological tools will abolish the need for government altogether....
As long as there are two or more wills in the world, there will be a need for and there will be a government. Technology cannot change this. The one who has the power to enforce his/her will on others is the real government. In the case of the US, as with all capitalistic systems, the one who controls the money is the one who is in the best position to enforce their will on those who want or need money. In the end, even the communistic system collapsed before the onslaught of the powers that control wealth.
....Solar energy is just a temporary feel-good stopgap for the naive......
Perhaps not solar energy per-se, but just the idea of converting light directly into electricity with expensive to produce materials. Plants have perfected the process of capturing solar energy and converting it into useable energy forms. It seems utilizing this tried and true process to make some kind of bio-fuel would be a preferable way to go for large scale energy production, especially for transportation. Making a flexible fuel, such as bio-diesel from plant material grown on land or sea and then using the existing fuel handling and distribution infrastructure is a more viable way to go for now. Perhaps, 20 years from now (historically ALWAYS 20 years from now) local fusion reactors will become the means of providing abundant energy. Until then, using the fusion reactor which is 93 million miles distant is the only practical long term alternative to the fossil fuels.
.....The founding fathers weren't always right. The Constitution isn't always right. The point of a democratic-like government is to allow the people to improve the body of law over time, to make it more fair and ethically just.......
Is the majority always right? Is that what you are saying here? How do we determine what is right and wrong? We know there are absolute laws in the physical world. No human legislator or democratic process determined the laws of nature. All human laws are the products of minds, processes of thought. Is it possible that the "natural" laws were also originated in a mind? Is then so improbable that the same mind that came up with these absolute natural laws could also have formulated some equally absolute moral laws? Natural laws have not changed over time, at least not so anybody can tell. Is it then so far fetched to say that moral laws are equally immutable? Human beings have no say so in determining the laws of nature, so why should we have a choice in determining moral laws? Nobody has EVER broken a natural law, but plenty of people have been broken by disobeying these laws. Equally, nobody has ever broken any moral law, but our world is filled with people who have been ruined by their breaking of these moral statutes. The Bible happens to have a good summary of these, but is by no means the only place these codes are found. Some of these codes are deeply embedded in the human psyche. Exactly how does a little child decide what is "fair"? Is it only education?
Our founding fathers firmly grasped the idea that human governments and the people as a whole were subject to a higher government and that certain inalienable rights are bestowed by the Creator on humans, that no lesser power can rightfully remove. The founding fathers codified some of these principles in the document called the Constitution of the United States.
....An abortion is NOT a state issue; it is an issue between a woman and her doctor. Period.......
The protection of life, ie. making murder illegal IS most certainly a state issue. The real question only is: Does an unborn, developing human being have the same rights as a human being that is freely breathing the air of this world? No government ever has nor can it ever give so much as a single right. An INALIENABLE right means it cannot be added to nor subtracted from by any human being. Governments can and always only have taken away rights from people that have been freely given to them by their Creator. Anyone who cannot give life, also doesn't have the right to to take it. The Government in the US has decided to take away the right for the unborn to live. In Nazi Germany and other places, the Governments have taken the right of human beings to be or remain alive for all sorts of reasons. Abortion is legal in the US and the extermination of Jews and others was legal in the Third Reich under Hitler and both are equally evil laws. There are countries today, where the extermination of humans is perfectly legal if certain criteria are met.
.....including a controversial clause that property seized via ED can never be released to private ownership - is up for vote now in the state legistlature.......
On November 7th, we here in Oregon also get to vote on whether to restrict the power of eminent domain in this way. The Supreme Court rightly decided that the Constitution only specifies that property owners should be compensated for their property, but nowhere restricts what the public body may do with this property after it is taken. It is therefore rightly up to the legislators or the people to clarify the law on this issue. The Constitution only provides a framework, mostly in the form of limits, and leaves the details of lawmaking within these limits to the legislators and/or the electorate.
.....For example, it considers building a hotel and condominiums as "public use" for the purposes of eminent domain........
Unfortunately, the constitution is silent on what a governmental entity may do with property taken under the power of eminent domain. All the Supremes rightfully said that the decision of what to do belongs to the legislative bodies in each state and ultimately to the people who elected these legislators. Many states have already voted on laws that prohibit conveying property acquired through the power of eminent domain to private parties. In this coming election we here in Oregon will get a chance to bar all legislative bodies from using their power of eminent domain to do this subverting of such property to private uses. The Supreme Court does try to follow the law, which is often difficult in the face of ambiguous and conflicting laws passed by the legislators.
.....Apple doesn't give a shit about their customers with older systems.....
Because Apple is primarily a hardware maker, they have kept up with Integrated circuit progress by having the various 68xxx processors, then the PPC family starting with the 601 and ending with the G5 and now in the last year, switched to Intel 88x types.
Your assertion about old Mac software not working on a modern computer and OS from Apple piqued my curiosity, so I decided to dig out some of my old Mac stuff from the ancient of days of Appledom. I am sharing this with you and anyone else that may come across this. Office 97 may not run on the new VISTA windows, but a lot of old Mac stuff still runs on a modern Mac. I would think that some old DOS programs might still work under XP? Keep in mind that some of these ancient programs are written for the original Mac with the 68000 processors! Windows has always run under the x86 chips.
Here is a list of programs that still run on my OSX 10.4.8 G5 2Ghz system, all running under classic OS9 mode:
Adobe Acrobat 4.0 - 1999
Adobe Illustrator 88 - 1988
Adobe Illustrator 3.2 - 1991
Adobe Photoshop 2.5 from 1993
AOL 5.0 - 2000
Apple Hypercard 2.1 - 1991
American Heritage Deluxe dictionary - 1994
Canvas 3.5.4 - 1995
Cronos Consultant Contact Manager 2.2 -- 1995
Filemaker 4 - 1998
iTunes 2.03 -2001
MS Internet Explorer 5.1 - 2001
MS Excel 4.0 - 1992
MS Word 5.1 - 1992
Quicken 4 -1993
Street Atlas 6.0 - 1999
Weathertracker 2.2.4 - 1995
Of course I did not test the total functionality of each program, but the above actually came up without hanging or crashing. The simple main functions did work in each program. For example AOL did log in and IE browsed Apple Web site OK. For some games I had to change the display to 480x640 and 256 colors for games and then it worked.
I also, just for fun tested some old Mickey Mouse games to see if any of them still work. These below did surprisingly well.
Jewelbox - 1991
3D.Checkers - 1989
Down'n'dirty Blackjack - 1992
Where in the World is Carmen San Diego - 1992
Checkmate 1.01 - 1991
Dark Corona Spaceship - 1997
Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 - 1991
Galactic Empire 2.03 - 1994
Desert Trek 1.02 - 1994 (survival management)
Galaxis 1.1 -1992 (space resource manage)
Gold Pusher - 1994
HyperGobbledygook Hypercard game - 1991
Jotto 1.1 - 1993 (letter guessing)
LodeRunner - 1984 (collect gold) -oldest program, amazingly still works!
MacSokoban - 1994 (warehouse keeper board game)
Memory - 1986 (picture flash card remembering)
Monopoly 4.02 - 1987 (trading board game)
Operation DIVA - 1993 (collect objects board game)
Professor 3.03 - 1989 hypercard (Eliza Psychologist)
Quagmire - 1993 (rescue hero)
Space Adventure - 1993 (learn about space)
Tetris Max 1.1 - 1992
Ultimate Pool 1.1 1996 (billiard simulation)
Valley of Peril - 1994 ( text based adventure)
Where in Time is Carmen San Diego - 1991
Now that Apple has switched to the Intel architecture, none of these classic apps will run any more because Rosetta cannot run OS9 and its software.
Security is a non-problem with any Mac software before OSX came out. Because of the old Apple fork system (data and resource forks), getting any program into a Mac over a network connection, even if it was a wanted program, was a circuitous procedure. With OSX Apple has to pay attention to security in a way they never had to bother under OS9 and before.
.....The reason apple has less virus problems is because the marketshare isn't there for people to bother. If OS X or linux ever took say 25% marketshare,.........
The marketshare argument is bogus. Apache server has a a larger marketshare than MS Information server and has fewer security problems. Historically, the largest numbers of computers have been in the business world. MS basically rode in on the coattails of IBM and managed to stay there. Now, with the Internet, the number of computers owned by consumers is steadily increasing. Of that number, Apple is getting an increasing share. I have never seen any market breakdown on systems only sold to consumers by brand.
Neither Apple not MS had a multi-user system since the computers they were run on were PERSONAL computers, which by definition were and still are essentially single user machines. Apple abandoned their single user OS heritage and, as you wrote, bought a UNIX flavor system that was conceived from the ground up as a multiuser computer with a basic security foundation upon which to build. MS Windows is STILL a single user system at heart, with various attempts at security bolted on afterwards. VISTA is not going to change that, because if it did, EVERY single PC program in existence would no longer run under it. Unlike Apple, MS could not, has not and will not abandon essentially their entire application base, especially in the corporate market. Apple's emphasis on the consumer segment, as well as the fact that they build their own hardware gives them a much larger latitude to radically change their application compatibility structure. The processor switch to INTEL, for example, it means that not even ONE OS9 program or earlier will run on their current crop of machines. There are too many legacy programs in much of the enterprise establishment that are still in daily use. MS cannot afford to break them all overnight and therefore cannot ever provide the kind of security that Apple and Linux can bring to the table. In view of their difficulty, MS is doing remarkably well and will likely be the cornerstone of computing, at least in the enterprise, for a long time.