So...what if you do question everything (for example, religion) and come to the conclusion that the religion/God/faith that you have been questioning is actually true?
Does that make you wrong?
AFAIK no one has ever done that (or if they did, they kept it pretty quiet or the Cthulhu Cult got to them first), but if that were to happen..
No, it wouldn't mean they're wrong. But it would mean they are a selfish twit for not sharing their data. I would try to persuade them like this: "People have been looking for the Loch Ness Monster for hundreds of years, but nobody has ever produced a skeleton or even a decent photograph, and you finally found some actual evidence -- not only the first ever piece of evidence that suggests Nessie may exist, but some evidence that showed that she probably does exist? Holy crap! Hey, you don't have to share it, but it sure would be nice. Also, you'll be world-fucking-famous for thousands of years. You will scoop every religion on Earth."
There's only a small subset of society such as yourself who treat [money] as the Ultimate Goal. Keeping people alive is the ultimate goal.
I think your goal (keeping everyone alive) is just as ridiculous as (and even more unrealistic than) the money-grubbers' goal. But that's just my opinion. There was a time when such a disagreement wasn't a big deal, because in America, it used to be ok for everyone to choose their own goals. But now the One True Answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything, has finally been found. Now that we know The Truth (immortality is the goal), we need not listen to heretics and their quaint and outdated ideas about liberty.
if they can't afford it, they should choose a less expensive treatment.
Or, if such a treatment does not exist they can just let the illness kill them.
They're no worse off than if the expensive treatment didn't exist. Life's unfair. People die. I will, and you will. The existence of expensive treatments is harming no one. But having someone else pay that expense, a right? Should 200% of our GDP be sunk into giving everyone a false guarantee of immortality?
I could almost understand your position if you would just tell it like it is. Say it with me:
I would rather watch someone die of a treatable illness than to chip in for their treatment.
I would rather watch someone die, than be forced into spending lots of money on something that might not help, without even having a say in the specific case. How evil of me to want any discretionary power over my own economic output.
The start voting against God. Life's a bitch. People get sick and it can take a tremendous amount of resources to even mitigate that, and even that isn't reliable.
and any society that has the ability to prevent this has a moral duty to.
No society (yet) has the ability to keep illness from happening or from being expensive. But maybe some day we'll be able to climb into our autodocs. I'm all for encouraging technological development, and making government stop actively doing things that cause health care to be even more expensive than it would naturally be.
But shuffling around who pays for what, doesn't fix anything. All that indirection can accomplish, is create opportunities and incentives for irresponsibility and fraud. You can't have billions of dollars filtered through the government without having a lot of it disappear, and you can't have government encode how it will be spent, without removing human judgement.
If you say other governments have done it successfully, fine. I'm very skeptical, but even if I accept that, I know my government (USA) is too irresponsible and corrupt to do it. Show me they can handle a small project where the stakes are small, and maybe I'll trust them with something more important. Every time a Democrat criticizes the war in Iraq, they need to realize they are also criticizing universal health care. They're talking about having the exact same kind of people who handled one situation, handle the other.
Falling home prices hurt everyone
I don't own a house. Personall, falling prices are the best news I've ever heard. The price of houses are starting to approach the value of houses. What's wrong with that?
David Pogue recently wrote a widely read blog post in which he explains that piracy is the reason he doesn't make his books available in PDF format. But in this article, TidBITS publisher Adam Engst disagrees strongly with Pogue's opinion
So Engst says that piracy is not the reason Pogue doesn't do PDFs. Got it.
They can reverse engineer it, find out how it generates the encryption keys and reverse the algorithm - and crank out a utility that does it automatically.
Wrong. It uses PK. The virus doesn't "generate" a key; it uses a embedded key to encrypt, and that key has been "bagged" but is useless.
Their supercomputers are irrelevant; they could have a thousand times the CPU we do, and it wouldn't matter much (they crack it in a billion years instead of a trillion years -- so what?) Their budget might be relevant, if it means they managed to hire SuperMathMan, who is able to find weakness in RSA.
It displays a message when it does it, presumably so that the virus-runner will know that they need to pay someone to decrypt their file. That makes it pretty un-scary: it tells you when to restore. Of course, since your machine is compromised, maybe the "restore" really just overwrites your tape.
It might take months before I realize they are corrupted
In which case the virus writer never gets payed, since his yahoo email account is probably long disabled by then.
There's no point in delaying extortion. The kind of people who decide to run malware, are the same kind of people who don't have any backups, so they're ready to collect from, immediately.
I remember the R's always complaining about D's being too tax-hungry.
There's a reasonably good chance that they'll start complaining again in 2009, just like they did in 1993. But now is not the time. Pretending to be conservative is for when Republicans are not in office.
if they can hurt enough individuals, maybe other individuals will be to scared to continue to download.
Unfortunately, when they adopted the ready/fire/aim model of prosecution (hurting people who didn't even download), they undermined their strategic objective. Now you face nearly the same risks whether you download or not; if you're on the internet at all, you just might get a nasty letter someday. So why not download? (Well, there are some good reasons, but fear isn't one of them.) They've managed to terrorize everyone, even the people who are acting the way they want people to.
If they want to win, they really need to work on their accuracy.
Playing and ripping are essentially the same thing, though. Both require cracking the DRM. If you write a program to do one, you can write a program to do the other. If you can't write a program to do one, you can't write a program to do the other.
Wait till the people making these videos get in charge... you haven't begun to see censorship yet.
Showing their videos is a great way to keep them from ever becoming in charge. Idiots are their own worse enemies.
If Lieberman succeeds in concealing that murderers are in favor of committing murder, then the murderers win. Personally, I hope Lieberman rethinks his values, and comes back over to the anti-murder/anti-Nazi side.
Might as well do some CGI of them and show movies to people.
Hey, that reminds me of a movie I saw. It was called Jurassic Park Park. In the movie, they managed to clone a computer from the early 1990s and had it render dinosaurs, and then.. well, I won't spoil it.
If this is truly a requirement for your system, you are screwed. You are definitely going to lose, and the question is now to which degree you're going to lose.
The problem is that Blu-Ray has not yet really been cracked. There is some proprietary Windows-only software that supposedly cracks all current titles, but if you lock yourself into that app, it's pretty much guaranteed that you're going to have numerous arbitrary limitations. If you can live within those limits, then your degree of losing will hopefully be tolerable.
If BD+ gets really cracked, such that everyone knows the crack and implementation of the crack becomes widepread (i.e. in every player) then Blu-Ray will become a viable format. Until then, though, it is bleeding edge and nobody on this planet can fully use it without having interoperability problems. Blu-Ray is just not ready yet, and has no place on a media box requirements list for someone who wants stuff to Just Work.
Stream Movies and Music from iTunes on my Mac (including some FairPlay encrypted ones unfortunately.)
Once again, if this is a requirement for the project, you are screwed. The nature of DRMed content is that you lose. Remove the DRM if you want to have diversity in players for that content.
If you want to win, then rethink the requirements, so that there's no DRMed content. Don't buy any Blu-Ray content until the format becomes viable and standardized, for example. Just remember that "standardized" means that anyone can implement it; i.e. all players contain a crack for the DRM, much as the present case for DVDs' CSS.
That doesn't help the situation. If windows goes away, the problem with just migrate to Linux.
It's true! Just a few minutes ago I was sorely tempted to type "sudo apt-get install shapeshiftvirus". If Linux gets more popular, it's just a matter of time until shapeshiftvirus gets ported to it. Then, assuming the virus is GPLed, Debian will enthusiastically put it into their repository. It'll trickle down to Ubuntu. When that happens, users all over the world are going to choose to install it, type in the installation command, and enter their password.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK no one has ever done that (or if they did, they kept it pretty quiet or the Cthulhu Cult got to them first), but if that were to happen..
No, it wouldn't mean they're wrong. But it would mean they are a selfish twit for not sharing their data. I would try to persuade them like this: "People have been looking for the Loch Ness Monster for hundreds of years, but nobody has ever produced a skeleton or even a decent photograph, and you finally found some actual evidence -- not only the first ever piece of evidence that suggests Nessie may exist, but some evidence that showed that she probably does exist? Holy crap! Hey, you don't have to share it, but it sure would be nice. Also, you'll be world-fucking-famous for thousands of years. You will scoop every religion on Earth."
(Offtopic? Sure. Troll? WTF?!)
I think your goal (keeping everyone alive) is just as ridiculous as (and even more unrealistic than) the money-grubbers' goal. But that's just my opinion. There was a time when such a disagreement wasn't a big deal, because in America, it used to be ok for everyone to choose their own goals. But now the One True Answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything, has finally been found. Now that we know The Truth (immortality is the goal), we need not listen to heretics and their quaint and outdated ideas about liberty.
The start voting against God. Life's a bitch. People get sick and it can take a tremendous amount of resources to even mitigate that, and even that isn't reliable.
No society (yet) has the ability to keep illness from happening or from being expensive. But maybe some day we'll be able to climb into our autodocs. I'm all for encouraging technological development, and making government stop actively doing things that cause health care to be even more expensive than it would naturally be.
But shuffling around who pays for what, doesn't fix anything. All that indirection can accomplish, is create opportunities and incentives for irresponsibility and fraud. You can't have billions of dollars filtered through the government without having a lot of it disappear, and you can't have government encode how it will be spent, without removing human judgement.
If you say other governments have done it successfully, fine. I'm very skeptical, but even if I accept that, I know my government (USA) is too irresponsible and corrupt to do it. Show me they can handle a small project where the stakes are small, and maybe I'll trust them with something more important. Every time a Democrat criticizes the war in Iraq, they need to realize they are also criticizing universal health care. They're talking about having the exact same kind of people who handled one situation, handle the other.
I don't own a house. Personall, falling prices are the best news I've ever heard. The price of houses are starting to approach the value of houses. What's wrong with that?
A real Hofstadter fan/pedant would have complained about the "Hofstadter 1996" knowing it was off by a decade.
So Engst says that piracy is not the reason Pogue doesn't do PDFs. Got it.
Wrong. It uses PK. The virus doesn't "generate" a key; it uses a embedded key to encrypt, and that key has been "bagged" but is useless.
Their supercomputers are irrelevant; they could have a thousand times the CPU we do, and it wouldn't matter much (they crack it in a billion years instead of a trillion years -- so what?) Their budget might be relevant, if it means they managed to hire SuperMathMan, who is able to find weakness in RSA.
In which case the virus writer never gets payed, since his yahoo email account is probably long disabled by then.
There's no point in delaying extortion. The kind of people who decide to run malware, are the same kind of people who don't have any backups, so they're ready to collect from, immediately.
But a crimson anti-virus program can detect a rouge one.
There is no consensus as to what a fair share is. (But most people agree: their fair share is less than what they have to pay.)
Woooooo!
Unfortunately, when they adopted the ready/fire/aim model of prosecution (hurting people who didn't even download), they undermined their strategic objective. Now you face nearly the same risks whether you download or not; if you're on the internet at all, you just might get a nasty letter someday. So why not download? (Well, there are some good reasons, but fear isn't one of them.) They've managed to terrorize everyone, even the people who are acting the way they want people to.
If they want to win, they really need to work on their accuracy.
I bet I can do that, but I need you to advance me $500 to cover a transaction fee.
Playing and ripping are essentially the same thing, though. Both require cracking the DRM. If you write a program to do one, you can write a program to do the other. If you can't write a program to do one, you can't write a program to do the other.
Showing their videos is a great way to keep them from ever becoming in charge. Idiots are their own worse enemies.
If Lieberman succeeds in concealing that murderers are in favor of committing murder, then the murderers win. Personally, I hope Lieberman rethinks his values, and comes back over to the anti-murder/anti-Nazi side.
If this is truly a requirement for your system, you are screwed. You are definitely going to lose, and the question is now to which degree you're going to lose.
The problem is that Blu-Ray has not yet really been cracked. There is some proprietary Windows-only software that supposedly cracks all current titles, but if you lock yourself into that app, it's pretty much guaranteed that you're going to have numerous arbitrary limitations. If you can live within those limits, then your degree of losing will hopefully be tolerable.
If BD+ gets really cracked, such that everyone knows the crack and implementation of the crack becomes widepread (i.e. in every player) then Blu-Ray will become a viable format. Until then, though, it is bleeding edge and nobody on this planet can fully use it without having interoperability problems. Blu-Ray is just not ready yet, and has no place on a media box requirements list for someone who wants stuff to Just Work.
Once again, if this is a requirement for the project, you are screwed. The nature of DRMed content is that you lose. Remove the DRM if you want to have diversity in players for that content.
If you want to win, then rethink the requirements, so that there's no DRMed content. Don't buy any Blu-Ray content until the format becomes viable and standardized, for example. Just remember that "standardized" means that anyone can implement it; i.e. all players contain a crack for the DRM, much as the present case for DVDs' CSS.
It's true! Just a few minutes ago I was sorely tempted to type "sudo apt-get install shapeshiftvirus". If Linux gets more popular, it's just a matter of time until shapeshiftvirus gets ported to it. Then, assuming the virus is GPLed, Debian will enthusiastically put it into their repository. It'll trickle down to Ubuntu. When that happens, users all over the world are going to choose to install it, type in the installation command, and enter their password.
Microsoft didn't implement DRM enforcement "by mistake." Their software went to extra trouble to not work. It was malicious. Fire them.