Seriously, a serial code is the most simplistic and effective means of copy protection.
One key = one install
If you implement measures, that online / LAN multiplay is restricted to valid and unique CD-keys and executables cannot be cracked easily is one of the most reasonable methods to balance between players and publishers available.
It serves the following purposes: - prevent non-paying customers from using unpaid-for online servers - (inofficially) let people (via keygens) rather freely test-drive the full software, offline on their own machine with the option to buy a key and make your installation legit and online-enabled in seconds. - ban detected cheaters from online play and introduce a financial risk to cheating (you have to buy a new key when you're caught) which deters non-hardcore cheaters from trying - prevent mass copying of your software: if the same key is encountered online in the thousands, disable the key - all this encourages defined and responsible ownership of the software: if you give out your key, you possibly cannot play online anymore
- and inofficially: limit the resale-value of a used key: as a buyer, you cannot be sure if the key is not banned for cheating or shared with the entire school/workplace of the reseller.
I don't know of people who been hindered from doing legit things with their paid-for software because of a cd-key. But I know several people who "test-drove" dozens of pirated games with a keygen who found out the game was so crappy that even downloading it was a waste of money and time.
And it's also quite effective in aiding the defendants lawyers to get the case thrown out or successfully fight the verdict in a higher court.
Why not simply don't do it and wait for the answer? I want to see higher courts upholding a decision to punish defendants for not supplying clearly irrelevant documents.
Which, when it happens, calls for the Ammo Box anyway.
Well, except for the fact that one ruling concerning anonymous posters will affect ALL anonymous posters everywhere within Canada.
The Internet is all-or-nothing in this case. If you can prosecute one case of slander and libel, you can prosecute all cases, including "statement critical of the Führer and The Party", which is the scary part of it.
Combine all the efforts underway and you'll see where this is heading. Censorship because of the children, where they lock you up in prison for making the banlist public. Somehow, these banlists always include certain political opponents, but that's just a coincidence. Either way, lock everyone up who questions the Child Porn Ban List, because Children are holy.
Then ID'ing anonymous posters, next forcing webmasters to present ID when setting up a public servers and then we're very very very close to the requirement of having each and all typewriters registered with the Stalinist Party.
This ain't a slippery slope fallacy, because we're already sliding down as we speak, and we're sliding fast. They're already railing up against "unsensible" and "provocating" comments which include pro-catholic, anti-catholic and of course anti-muslim opinions. We have that in Denmark, The Netherlands and the UK already, but it's still only a handful of cases. But as I said, we're having quite a ride on the slippery slope which people have foreseen years ago and were dismissed with Godwin's Law. Well, pessimism can be true sometimes.
Well then the court orders them to KEEP logs next time. Which will just as effectively cripple free speech as going directly after the posters in the first place.
Oh and of course, not obeying a court order is spiked with a jail sentence. And they order you to not disclose the new logging ordinance to the visitors or you'll also go to jail.
The only thing you can do is take down the site and protect the first group of posters. If you setup another site, they'll dock you for not having logs on the first incident, because you should've learned the first time.
Either way, the goal is to create fear, uncertainty and doubt among anonymous posters. Which is quite the same as posters in China feel right now.
That's a piece of cake. Until you have two skilled black hats, twelve skript kiddies, twenty non-paying bandwidth hogs, an undisclosed number of perverts and one FBI party van bearing down on you.
In a world gone insane, all sane people must disclaim from everything they do, all the time. If you claim responsibility for a network like this in times like these, you're insane. Or a glutton for punishment.
Ten years down the road, people will get imprisoned for writing a practically anonymous comment like mine on a practically anonymous forum like/. - but I wouldn't want to be on the forefront of rebellion, but if you do, feel free to roll out some fiber. I would gladly pay more than my share, though, if you did it in my neighborhood. In cash only, of course.
I pay for the music I acquire. I do not pay for the music I allegedly download, allegedly offer for download or that I allegedly own pirated copies of.
If the difference between alleged and proven is claimed to be written in an ASCII textfile, I call bullshit every time.
I have a long and entirely credible ASCII textfile proving that Jesus was responsible for 9/11. That I also have notepad.exe installed is only a coincidence.
- Plane accidents are much much much much (well, you get the point) rarer than vehicle accidents
- if you have wife/husband and kids, you should have life insurance, just in case
- many vehicle accidents cause no severe injuries, but still cost a boatload of money to repair
- everything concerning air traffic that CAN be insured IS insured by the airline. Why do you think that is?
- you can argue about the COST of insurance, maybe this is too high, I don't know. But I question the sanity of everyone who claims they don't need insurance because they drive perfectly and/or because there are other risks including smoking and heart attacks.
Problem is, you're re-inventing the wheel several times over in the process. Hint: "a flatfile and maybe a little more" could very well be all the storage technology invented today only a few years down the road.
At first, all you need is to store key:value pairs. That works with a flat file or with Oracle. Then you need some consistency checks, which are can be modelled fast in Oracle or reasonably fast in your software. Then you need some triggers, which could be written fast in Oracle and not-so fast in your software. And so on until you have progressed through the whole platform effect with several squeaky wheels invented and thousands of hours wasted.
Any project worth doing that involves storing key:value pairs is worth a real database. Take the tiniest, lowliest member of the crowd as long as it can somehow speak SQL and allows to be linked and unlinked into the project. Everything else will require at least a medium rewrite at some point when you switch over to a real database. You could of course extend everything upon a glorified flatfile until your reinvented wheels strangles all your progress.
Lightning strikes. More people die playing golf because of lightning and other weather incidents.
You are out there, two holes from winning and a thunderstorm comes up. Competitive natures will sometimes continue playing, disregarding that they're on a flat piece of land with a thunderstorm overhead.
Golf carts aren't Faraday cages, most players are older than the typical soccer players and the golf course is a vast expanse where you can walk for some times until you reach a safe shelter. Golf kills quite a lot of unsuspecting people, really.
That's one of the reason I'm tagging ALL of the stories about the UK with
"crazykingdom"
Because I've read not a single post on/. that did not report on sheer lunacy and absolute mayhem thriving in the kingdom of the mentally insane.
And it's not just/., but all news site I ever read in several months, yes, this includes those of British newspapers. Great Britain is either on the brink of self-destruction or only n weeks before revolution, I don't know yet.
If insurance companies make such huge profits and are publicly traded on the stock markets, why don't you buy some shares?
In fact, why doesn't everyone who isn't exactly starving, if there is such an incredibly profitable investment?
And why doesn't every half witted millionaire starts a NEW insurance company with 20 percent lower premiums and 20 percent lower profits, just so every motorist in the country will be beating down his door just to get insurance with him.
Either every financially-able person in this country is totally unclever or your idea is somehow not so good. Something is regulating all the insurance premiums to somehow not exceed the actualy payouts by huge amounts. Gee, it's almost like there's some invisible hand at work here.
It is in a sense socialist, as he demands society to pay for his personal life choices and circumstances - namely supporting a full fledged and capable bus system, because otherwise he'd have trouble and expenses.
He could ride by bike or motorbike or simply walk like all poor people in poor countries do when they positively have to get somewhere in order to work. But no, he demands that everyone else pays for something they don't use so he can avoid driving a cheapo scooter bike in heavy rain.
You're using anecdotal evidence and you know it. You may be a good driver, but you're not God - you do make mistakes, maybe with just a tiny fraction of the common risk.
But in that rare case, you'd be hosed. Your victim would be hosed and their family, too.
Insurance archives are full of stories about people who think the general, aggregate, statistically-averaged risk of an individual is biased by only aggregating morons and crazies.
It is not.
If you have some time, you'd might to check out these links:
I do take personal responsibility for my actions. I drive as safely as I possibly can and I will not flee the scene after an accident, no matter if I'm guilty or not.
Employing insurance IS personal responsibility, not avoiding it. I know full well that as a human, I am fallible. I can make mistakes. As the driver of 1.5 metric tons of steel,
I know full well that some mistakes can do incredible damage which I cannot ever hope to repay even if I worked in two jobs with no weekends for three centuries.
While you're at it with your socialist rant, please add "everything I need to live well" to your wishlist, because in reality, that's what you're really requesting by that.
Cheating on taxes is unethical, but way more ethical than skimping on car insurance. Because you're hurting The State financially, but your the impact is so low that society as a whole can probably cope with if only some people doing this.
If you're skipping car insurance and hurt someone, you're against ONE single selected individual and you can bankrupt them for decades or the rest of their lives.
So choose if you're hurting our anonymous society a small bit or destroy one individual with name and face for the rest of their lives.
I would rather start a revolution than to ruin an innocent family, I tell you.
Have you ever thought about forming carpools? There's carpool lanes everywhere and you'd probably find someone living somwhere in the vicinity who can take you to work for a small shared costs.
If you're living next to nowhere, have no bike, no sidewalks, no buses and no money to buy any old car or call a cab or employ another jobless guy WITH a car to do your driving, well, you're hosed.
But that still doesn't allow you to skimp on insurance, because when you cause an accident, you still hurt people or make them unable to do THEIR jobs. Mandatory insurance is NOTHING about you and all about the other people that may cross your path and fender.
Airline pricing is impossible for laymen to understand but somehow most people should know by now that travel distance has absolutely nothing to do with the price of the ticket.
Transcontinental 14h, 3-stop flights EU to Asia cost HALF than a 2-stop flight with the EU. From the same airport with the same airline via the same first stopover at the airline's transfer hub. You literally get the same connecting flight and still pay double for a tenth of the flight distance. Economy class, mind you, and the transcontinental flight has two meals, video on demand with 40 movies to choose from and an all-you-can drink including alcohol. On the EU-internal route, all you get is a coke - newspapers and candy bars is for first-class only.
Once your company has grasped this bizzare situation you get jetted all around the globe and not just to the adjacent countries/states. After all, your ticket price doesn't really change. If you like sitting for 12 hours inside a cramped noisy aluminium tube, there's your chance:=)
Well, don't argue over language in English, where people don't drive in a driveway, don't park in a parkway and don't rest in the restroom. At least some people still bathe in their bathrooms sometimes.
If you're running a blog critical of the government in China, you've got to be pretty fearless, a lot stubborn and above all idealistic.
The obstacles They will throw in your way are worse than a thousand cuts but at least as numerous.
This guy was a complete strawman from the beginning, they have bribed him beyond anything imaginable or he's genuine.
It would be a pretty useless, threatening him or his family - They could not do anything without seriously exposing them to public outrage. The Chinese public is a bit tender right now due to widespread loss of jobs, a hard drought hitting the northeast, the overspending of money and conflicts over housing for the Beijing Olympics, the riots in Tibet last year and the aftermath of the earthquake disaster in Sichuan province.
Nope, I don't think the Party will risk anything in these times. China has come a long way towards wealth and peace in only the last ten years and it would be a shame and absolutely unreasonable to even the most simplistic peasant somewhere in Guandong to endanger this progress.
After all, this is a corruption like everywhere else in the world and nothing that couldn't be solved by executing the conspiracy leaders. China has quite a track record in executing even high Party officials when they committed serious and verifiable crimes- and they did it publicly.
Then I assume the post-DAC circuitry is where the hard science lies. I'm not talking about high-end audiophile technobabble here, but the line-level outputs of a really cheap cd player and that of a medium-prized one's sound different. We're a long distance below Mark Levinsons, tube amps, specially-wound speaker cables and gold-plated power cables, but in consumer territory.
This difference is noticeable between phones, too. An iPhone has a higher quality DAC and post-DAC implementation than a cheap Motorola, that's a fact I invite you to check for yourself.
And I'm still not convinced that devices which include a wireless radio don't interfere with analog signal lines. I'd like to see an optical TOSLINK between the device with the broadcast antenna and the actual amplifier, but digital audio over some kind of copper link could be acceptable as well. I just don't want to hear any interference from the phone's transmitter and that's probably impossible to solve perfectly when low-level audio circuitry runs only a few inches distant from the antenna, on the same circuit board, even.
Yes, we'd need one and that is expensive. But if consumer electronics would use them, we'd have a billion units produced every year and a high chance these things would be dirt cheap by then.
Nearly all portables have USB connectors these days. Producing a simplified USB host controller could corner the market and talk to all portables available today. Build large numbers of this in cheap and small silicon and you could have some billion dollars in your pockets as every aftermarket device will use your IC. And the consumers would love it - one USB interface and they're set for everything.
Has no company seen this potential? You'd probably don't need to be a rocket scientist to downsize a USB host controller from the already pretty small Windows Mobile environment down to smallish DSP-sized silicon.
If you play your iPod through a cassette-deck-adaptor, you're doing it wrong. You can use the headphone out, because quality is going to be low anyway.
Recording from external sources should be done either digitally (quality, stationary equipment) or a stereo mic-in is sufficient (ad-hoc, improvised scenarios)
And I've presented both sites, quality/form factor issues AND cheapness. Under both arguments, including dozens of outputs on a handheld device is not the best solution. I'm just fed up with arguments for makeshift workarounds and sub-par quality connectors.
I mean, what's the use of an analog output on a phone, quality wise? The thing emits up to 2 watts of EM waves for the phone that is interfering with any amp you connect it to. Optical TOSLINK would be the best way to go in this case, but USB-streamed digital signals may work just as well.
But please, don't connect sources of EM-radiation to analog devices, the sound when a call rings in is horrible.
We already have a standard for everything and that is Universal Serial Bus.
There are class protocols for video/audio streams and whatnot and you can charge the device at the same time. We could beef up the spec for 1000mA, but everything else is there already and has been for years.
We just get around to use digital video and audio connections, but alas, the MAFIAA forbids.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, a serial code is the most simplistic and effective means of copy protection.
One key = one install
If you implement measures, that online / LAN multiplay is restricted to valid and unique CD-keys and executables cannot be cracked easily is one of the most reasonable methods to balance between players and publishers available.
It serves the following purposes:
- prevent non-paying customers from using unpaid-for online servers
- (inofficially) let people (via keygens) rather freely test-drive the full software, offline on their own machine with the option to buy a key and make your installation legit and online-enabled in seconds.
- ban detected cheaters from online play and introduce a financial risk to cheating (you have to buy a new key when you're caught) which deters non-hardcore cheaters from trying
- prevent mass copying of your software: if the same key is encountered online in the thousands, disable the key
- all this encourages defined and responsible ownership of the software: if you give out your key, you possibly cannot play online anymore
- and inofficially: limit the resale-value of a used key: as a buyer, you cannot be sure if the key is not banned for cheating or shared with the entire school/workplace of the reseller.
I don't know of people who been hindered from doing legit things with their paid-for software because of a cd-key. But I know several people who "test-drove" dozens of pirated games with a keygen who found out the game was so crappy that even downloading it was a waste of money and time.
And it's also quite effective in aiding the defendants lawyers to get the case thrown out or successfully fight the verdict in a higher court.
Why not simply don't do it and wait for the answer? I want to see higher courts upholding a decision to punish defendants for not supplying clearly irrelevant documents.
Which, when it happens, calls for the Ammo Box anyway.
Well, except for the fact that one ruling concerning anonymous posters will affect ALL anonymous posters everywhere within Canada.
The Internet is all-or-nothing in this case. If you can prosecute one case of slander and libel, you can prosecute all cases, including "statement critical of the Führer and The Party", which is the scary part of it.
Combine all the efforts underway and you'll see where this is heading. Censorship because of the children, where they lock you up in prison for making the banlist public. Somehow, these banlists always include certain political opponents, but that's just a coincidence. Either way, lock everyone up who questions the Child Porn Ban List, because Children are holy.
Then ID'ing anonymous posters, next forcing webmasters to present ID when setting up a public servers and then we're very very very close to the requirement of having each and all typewriters registered with the Stalinist Party.
This ain't a slippery slope fallacy, because we're already sliding down as we speak, and we're sliding fast. They're already railing up against "unsensible" and "provocating" comments which include pro-catholic, anti-catholic and of course anti-muslim opinions. We have that in Denmark, The Netherlands and the UK already, but it's still only a handful of cases. But as I said, we're having quite a ride on the slippery slope which people have foreseen years ago and were dismissed with Godwin's Law. Well, pessimism can be true sometimes.
Well then the court orders them to KEEP logs next time. Which will just as effectively cripple free speech as going directly after the posters in the first place.
Oh and of course, not obeying a court order is spiked with a jail sentence. And they order you to not disclose the new logging ordinance to the visitors or you'll also go to jail.
The only thing you can do is take down the site and protect the first group of posters. If you setup another site, they'll dock you for not having logs on the first incident, because you should've learned the first time.
Either way, the goal is to create fear, uncertainty and doubt among anonymous posters. Which is quite the same as posters in China feel right now.
That's a piece of cake. Until you have two skilled black hats, twelve skript kiddies, twenty non-paying bandwidth hogs, an undisclosed number of perverts and one FBI party van bearing down on you.
In a world gone insane, all sane people must disclaim from everything they do, all the time. If you claim responsibility for a network like this in times like these, you're insane. Or a glutton for punishment.
Ten years down the road, people will get imprisoned for writing a practically anonymous comment like mine on a practically anonymous forum like /. - but I wouldn't want to be on the forefront of rebellion, but if you do, feel free to roll out some fiber. I would gladly pay more than my share, though, if you did it in my neighborhood. In cash only, of course.
I pay for the music I acquire. I do not pay for the music I allegedly download, allegedly offer for download or that I allegedly own pirated copies of.
If the difference between alleged and proven is claimed to be written in an ASCII textfile, I call bullshit every time.
I have a long and entirely credible ASCII textfile proving that Jesus was responsible for 9/11. That I also have notepad.exe installed is only a coincidence.
No you shouldn't.
- Plane accidents are much much much much (well, you get the point) rarer than vehicle accidents
- if you have wife/husband and kids, you should have life insurance, just in case
- many vehicle accidents cause no severe injuries, but still cost a boatload of money to repair
- everything concerning air traffic that CAN be insured IS insured by the airline. Why do you think that is?
- you can argue about the COST of insurance, maybe this is too high, I don't know. But I question the sanity of everyone who claims they don't need insurance because they drive perfectly and/or because there are other risks including smoking and heart attacks.
Problem is, you're re-inventing the wheel several times over in the process. Hint: "a flatfile and maybe a little more" could very well be all the storage technology invented today only a few years down the road.
At first, all you need is to store key:value pairs. That works with a flat file or with Oracle. Then you need some consistency checks, which are can be modelled fast in Oracle or reasonably fast in your software. Then you need some triggers, which could be written fast in Oracle and not-so fast in your software. And so on until you have progressed through the whole platform effect with several squeaky wheels invented and thousands of hours wasted.
Any project worth doing that involves storing key:value pairs is worth a real database. Take the tiniest, lowliest member of the crowd as long as it can somehow speak SQL and allows to be linked and unlinked into the project. Everything else will require at least a medium rewrite at some point when you switch over to a real database. You could of course extend everything upon a glorified flatfile until your reinvented wheels strangles all your progress.
Lightning strikes. More people die playing golf because of lightning and other weather incidents.
You are out there, two holes from winning and a thunderstorm comes up. Competitive natures will sometimes continue playing, disregarding that they're on a flat piece of land with a thunderstorm overhead.
Golf carts aren't Faraday cages, most players are older than the typical soccer players and the golf course is a vast expanse where you can walk for some times until you reach a safe shelter. Golf kills quite a lot of unsuspecting people, really.
That's one of the reason I'm tagging ALL of the stories about the UK with
"crazykingdom"
Because I've read not a single post on /. that did not report on sheer lunacy and absolute mayhem thriving in the kingdom of the mentally insane.
And it's not just /., but all news site I ever read in several months, yes, this includes those of British newspapers. Great Britain is either on the brink of self-destruction or only n weeks before revolution, I don't know yet.
If insurance companies make such huge profits and are publicly traded on the stock markets, why don't you buy some shares?
In fact, why doesn't everyone who isn't exactly starving, if there is such an incredibly profitable investment?
And why doesn't every half witted millionaire starts a NEW insurance company with 20 percent lower premiums and 20 percent lower profits, just so every motorist in the country will be beating down his door just to get insurance with him.
Either every financially-able person in this country is totally unclever or your idea is somehow not so good. Something is regulating all the insurance premiums to somehow not exceed the actualy payouts by huge amounts. Gee, it's almost like there's some invisible hand at work here.
It is in a sense socialist, as he demands society to pay for his personal life choices and circumstances - namely supporting a full fledged and capable bus system, because otherwise he'd have trouble and expenses.
He could ride by bike or motorbike or simply walk like all poor people in poor countries do when they positively have to get somewhere in order to work. But no, he demands that everyone else pays for something they don't use so he can avoid driving a cheapo scooter bike in heavy rain.
You're using anecdotal evidence and you know it. You may be a good driver, but you're not God - you do make mistakes, maybe with just a tiny fraction of the common risk.
But in that rare case, you'd be hosed. Your victim would be hosed and their family, too.
Insurance archives are full of stories about people who think the general, aggregate, statistically-averaged risk of an individual is biased by only aggregating morons and crazies.
It is not.
If you have some time, you'd might to check out these links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neglect_of_probability
and especially this one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcome_bias
I do take personal responsibility for my actions. I drive as safely as I possibly can and I will not flee the scene after an accident, no matter if I'm guilty or not.
Employing insurance IS personal responsibility, not avoiding it. I know full well that as a human, I am fallible. I can make mistakes. As the driver of 1.5 metric tons of steel,
I know full well that some mistakes can do incredible damage which I cannot ever hope to repay even if I worked in two jobs with no weekends for three centuries.
That's why I drive safely AND pay for insurance.
While you're at it with your socialist rant, please add "everything I need to live well" to your wishlist, because in reality, that's what you're really requesting by that.
Cheating on taxes is unethical, but way more ethical than skimping on car insurance. Because you're hurting The State financially, but your the impact is so low that society as a whole can probably cope with if only some people doing this.
If you're skipping car insurance and hurt someone, you're against ONE single selected individual and you can bankrupt them for decades or the rest of their lives.
So choose if you're hurting our anonymous society a small bit or destroy one individual with name and face for the rest of their lives.
I would rather start a revolution than to ruin an innocent family, I tell you.
Have you ever thought about forming carpools? There's carpool lanes everywhere and you'd probably find someone living somwhere in the vicinity who can take you to work for a small shared costs.
If you're living next to nowhere, have no bike, no sidewalks, no buses and no money to buy any old car or call a cab or employ another jobless guy WITH a car to do your driving, well, you're hosed.
But that still doesn't allow you to skimp on insurance, because when you cause an accident, you still hurt people or make them unable to do THEIR jobs. Mandatory insurance is NOTHING about you and all about the other people that may cross your path and fender.
Yep, second that.
Airline pricing is impossible for laymen to understand but somehow most people should know by now that travel distance has absolutely nothing to do with the price of the ticket.
Transcontinental 14h, 3-stop flights EU to Asia cost HALF than a 2-stop flight with the EU. From the same airport with the same airline via the same first stopover at the airline's transfer hub. You literally get the same connecting flight and still pay double for a tenth of the flight distance. Economy class, mind you, and the transcontinental flight has two meals, video on demand with 40 movies to choose from and an all-you-can drink including alcohol. On the EU-internal route, all you get is a coke - newspapers and candy bars is for first-class only.
Once your company has grasped this bizzare situation you get jetted all around the globe and not just to the adjacent countries/states. After all, your ticket price doesn't really change. If you like sitting for 12 hours inside a cramped noisy aluminium tube, there's your chance :=)
When doctors make mistakes, people die. Be sure to double check the abbreviations for milligrams and micrograms, just in case.
Well, don't argue over language in English, where people don't drive in a driveway, don't park in a parkway and don't rest in the restroom. At least some people still bathe in their bathrooms sometimes.
This thing is one of their main selling points. They'd be pretty harebrained to skimp on that.
If you're running a blog critical of the government in China, you've got to be pretty fearless, a lot stubborn and above all idealistic.
The obstacles They will throw in your way are worse than a thousand cuts but at least as numerous.
This guy was a complete strawman from the beginning, they have bribed him beyond anything imaginable or he's genuine.
It would be a pretty useless, threatening him or his family - They could not do anything without seriously exposing them to public outrage. The Chinese public is a bit tender right now due to widespread loss of jobs, a hard drought hitting the northeast, the overspending of money and conflicts over housing for the Beijing Olympics, the riots in Tibet last year and the aftermath of the earthquake disaster in Sichuan province.
Nope, I don't think the Party will risk anything in these times. China has come a long way towards wealth and peace in only the last ten years and it would be a shame and absolutely unreasonable to even the most simplistic peasant somewhere in Guandong to endanger this progress.
After all, this is a corruption like everywhere else in the world and nothing that couldn't be solved by executing the conspiracy leaders. China has quite a track record in executing even high Party officials when they committed serious and verifiable crimes- and they did it publicly.
Then I assume the post-DAC circuitry is where the hard science lies. I'm not talking about high-end audiophile technobabble here, but the line-level outputs of a really cheap cd player and that of a medium-prized one's sound different. We're a long distance below Mark Levinsons, tube amps, specially-wound speaker cables and gold-plated power cables, but in consumer territory.
This difference is noticeable between phones, too. An iPhone has a higher quality DAC and post-DAC implementation than a cheap Motorola, that's a fact I invite you to check for yourself.
And I'm still not convinced that devices which include a wireless radio don't interfere with analog signal lines. I'd like to see an optical TOSLINK between the device with the broadcast antenna and the actual amplifier, but digital audio over some kind of copper link could be acceptable as well. I just don't want to hear any interference from the phone's transmitter and that's probably impossible to solve perfectly when low-level audio circuitry runs only a few inches distant from the antenna, on the same circuit board, even.
Yes, we'd need one and that is expensive. But if consumer electronics would use them, we'd have a billion units produced every year and a high chance these things would be dirt cheap by then.
Nearly all portables have USB connectors these days. Producing a simplified USB host controller could corner the market and talk to all portables available today. Build large numbers of this in cheap and small silicon and you could have some billion dollars in your pockets as every aftermarket device will use your IC. And the consumers would love it - one USB interface and they're set for everything.
Has no company seen this potential? You'd probably don't need to be a rocket scientist to downsize a USB host controller from the already pretty small Windows Mobile environment down to smallish DSP-sized silicon.
If you play your iPod through a cassette-deck-adaptor, you're doing it wrong. You can use the headphone out, because quality is going to be low anyway.
Recording from external sources should be done either digitally (quality, stationary equipment) or a stereo mic-in is sufficient (ad-hoc, improvised scenarios)
And I've presented both sites, quality/form factor issues AND cheapness. Under both arguments, including dozens of outputs on a handheld device is not the best solution. I'm just fed up with arguments for makeshift workarounds and sub-par quality connectors.
I mean, what's the use of an analog output on a phone, quality wise? The thing emits up to 2 watts of EM waves for the phone that is interfering with any amp you connect it to. Optical TOSLINK would be the best way to go in this case, but USB-streamed digital signals may work just as well.
But please, don't connect sources of EM-radiation to analog devices, the sound when a call rings in is horrible.
We already have a standard for everything and that is Universal Serial Bus.
There are class protocols for video/audio streams and whatnot and you can charge the device at the same time. We could beef up the spec for 1000mA, but everything else is there already and has been for years.
We just get around to use digital video and audio connections, but alas, the MAFIAA forbids.