TransOrbit is planning amongst other things: The first advertising opportunity in lunar orbit Video with lunar background showing corporate logos on a sub-spacecraft
Yeah, fine, figures they want corporate sponsorship up the wazoo. But the problem is nowadays we're so used to seeing amazing images on tv and in the movies that the real images won't amaze people anymore. In fact I'd bet that when they get their HDTV pictures back from the moon, the real pictures won't look good enough and they'll be digitally post produced to make them look more like the science fiction versions.
And another thing. How will the sponsor paying know they didn't fake the whole thing? Give me a few days with tucked away in a digital editing suite with Maya and flame and I can put any logo you want on a spaceship orbiting the moon.
No, this was not on Slashdot a year ago. Did you read the article on space.com?
There was a previous article on snakebots but this article is new and goes into a lot more detail on proposed uses for the snakebots and the benefits of them.
Think of it as an update, continuuity is good, slashdot should followup on interesting articles, like remember when we mentioned cool widget foobar? Well this is where it is now.
ARM is in WinCE, except for all the WinCE devices
that instead use the MIPS processor. Which is also in your Playstation (1 & 2) and N64. Between them MIPS and ARM have pretty much got the embedded market sewn up. Although maybe Transmeta will change things.
(yes I know the PS2 is not a pure MIPS design anymore but at the heart of the fabled emotion engine there is still a MIPS cpu core.)
Movies (and even most high budget TV shows) areshot on film. It's a relatively simple matter to run an edited film print through a high definition Telecine. Bang, all of a sudden you have a HDTV film master for broadcasting. The effective resolution of film is greater than 2048x1920 so there's plenty of detail there for HDTV.
In fact ANY content that was shot on film could be turned into a high resolution HDTV master if the studio wanted too, even old tv series.
And yes when you see HDTV you will know the difference, remember the first time you saw a DVD versus a VHS tape?
Everyone comparing this to SDL is missing something. From the list of companies involved this is going to be more about video editing and compositing packages and high end 3d animation packages. i.e. standards for streaming D1 or HDTV video streams to a disk array in realtime, or standards for streaming from disk to graphics with guaranteed framesrates.
This could be a good thing for support of those applications on Linux/BSD because if hardware vendors manufacture video cards, disk arrays etc to open published standard like this it will be much easier to write drivers. At the moment on the NT platform every maker of digital video cards has their own standard for accessing the video and streaming it to a disk array.
DirectX is NOT used in this market, it's a games API and apart from some sound editing applications it's not used in content creation packages.
One of the companies in the announcement is SGI and they are widely expected to come out with linux based high end 3d workstations sometime this year so I'd expect to see a Linux implementation of these standards although it may not be OpenSource.
All of these 3d plugins are neat tricks, they have a certain gee whiz value when you first play with them.
For about 5 minutes.
But it's not something to base a whole business on. The analogy to me would be Adobe chucking away all it's products except Acrobat reader and Acrobat writer or Macromedia dropping everything except flash.
Metacreations had a range of tools widely used by consumers and professionals, now they are one more browser plugin vendor in what is, as you say, a very competitive market.
RIP Metacreations, and lets hope Corel has the sense to keep developing KPT, Painter, etc
Hang on just a second. Metacreations was a company with a small but successful niche market in prosumer content creation tools. KPT was THE standard for Photoshop plugins and their other tools had a pretty loyal base of happy customers.
And instead they've chucked it in for promoting a technology that has has plenty of internet enabled buzzwords but no real appeal.
Everything you've described could be done by VRML 2.0 in 1996. Remember how that took the world by storm?
Ah, that's right it didn't.
Do you really think it's a compelling application for consumers to be able to spin a 3d model of a widget before they buy it? And if they really want to, then you can already do this with VRML, Shout3d or QuicktimeVR.
Metacreations has chucked away a solid business based on good software for a grab at buzzword enabled IPO e-commerce madness.
At least some other company had the sense to buy their good technology when Metacreations was chucking it out for a song.
They do confirm backing by the eerily named Gold and Appel Transfers Fnord. I really wonder if that is a complete coincidence or just a very rich baby boomer with a sense of humor.
They also have some info on the the crazed fools (or visionarys) backing Mir Corp. Why does everything about this remind me of Heinleins 'Man who sold the moon'?
Good luck to em, personally if it gets things happening in space sooner I don't mind even if mir ends up plastered in golden arches and windows logos.
Yes, but at what point do you consider experiments too ridiculous to bother trying? You see I just hooked an English Muffin up to a high speed 6Gev power source and created Gold!;-)
There are many seemingly ridiculous things that are accepted by fact in modern physics. For example, a vacuum is actually a continually fluctuating mass of particles and anti-particles that travel backwards in time and annhilate themselves before they were created. What???
General relativity ("go fast, get heavy") is pretty ridiculous on the surface.
These things are accepted by the general scientific community. Why is it too ridiculous that a spinning super conducter might have some affect on the gravititonal force. As I understand it gravity is actually the least understood of all the four fundamental forces, for example has anyone detected a gravity particle or a gravity wave yet?
In the article Bob Park says about Bae "One can only conclude..there are people who don't have a very solid grounding in fundamental physics".
Well sounds like he doesn't have a very good grounding in fundamentals of the scientific method. Repeat after me "the map is not the territory". There are no fundamental laws of physics. The laws of physics are just best fit theorems that happen to fit the available data. As soon as someone demonstrates a reliably reproducible experiment that goes against those laws then those laws have to be revised. Does he honsestly think that we know all of physics and that there is nothing left to learn?
Now I nothing about Dr Yevgeny Podkletnov's experiments, maybe he is a loon, but if no other scientists has tried to reproduce the experiments then you can't just ignore them.
It's hard to imagine why they would not use the DRI, it would mean supplying their own complete incompatible X Server, their own GLX implementation and probably their own implementation of Mesa or OpenGL as well. Otherwise all the pieces would not fit together, they can't replace DRI without replacing EVERYTHING.
There is two small reasons I can think why they might go to all this effort. First, performance, if you browse through the Utah-GLX list, John Carmack has expressed concerns about the design of DRI and the memory and performance limitatons of it. His feeling is that the Utah-GLX's direct rendering design is more efficient that the DRI and maybe for this reason Nvidia is going their own way.
Secondly it could be a stop gap measure. The release notes for XF86 4.0 say that the API for the DRI is still not finalised yet and may still change. Maybe Nvidia doesn't want to support it until it's final so they are putting out their own high performance drivers in the meantime.
If in the end they do support DRI but with binary only drivers it's not that bad is it? As I understand the design of the DRI, you could use multiple cards together and upgrade kernels etc without having the source to the DRI driver.
Well AI is a joke, it takes more than just computing power to make a truly intelligent machine. But as for the rest of them he forgot a few.
Much more likely than an artificially created virus is the likelyhood that a killer virus will mutate naturally in a catastrophic way. Every boeing 747 is an enormous hermetically sealed tube for spreading viruses from one part of the planet to another within days. Imagine something with the destructive power of Ebola that was airborne with the ease of contagion of the flu.
Sure science can create a vaccine, but well HIV/AIDS has been around for 20 years and although we can control it to some extent we still don't have a vaccine.
Plus there's the possibility that the continuuing extinction of species in places like the Amazon will start to form a domino effect. I.e. some vital species that many others depend on for survival go extinct causing a snowball effect and massive extinction of species.
Humanity's only longterm guaranty of survival is to spread our selves over as many biospheres as possible.
"what are you here for? We're all here, we're all here to go, earth is going to be space station and we're here to go into space, that's what we're here for. Do I hear any questions about that?"
Nvidia is working on full DRI drivers for 4.0 for TNT2 and GeForce. Yes, they will be closed source and yes they will use a licensed SGI OpenGL implementation and not Mesa. That's fine with me, MESA is great but it is NOT a complete feature implementation of OpenGL and there are many known bugs with it.
Pesonally, I'm going to wait to see the performance and stability of their closed source drivers before I condemn them. Arguably, Nvidia has the best OpenGL drivers for Windows of any of the consumer boards. (By this I mean that the Nvidia cards work flawlessly with professional application like Maya and 3D Studio MAX even though they were not designed for that market) They also have a lot of ex SGI employees and know how to design a good opengl pipeline and then drive it hard.
IMHO, as long as their drivers are fast and reliable I don't care if they are open source or not. If any company can make a stable and fast linux driver without the help of the Open Source community it's Nvidia so I'm willing to give them a chance at least.
Several postings on the Utah-GLX dev list have hinted that Nvidia has an inhouse developed SGI OpenGL GLX driver for X Free 86 ready to go. They were waiting for the final release of XF86 4.0 so that the API for DRI would not change anymore. Now 4.0 is out I reckon there will be a Nvidia XF86 4.0 driver out within 2 weeks.
Iain M Bank's most unusually structured novel and IMHO his best sci fi novel is "Use of Weapons". One story starts in the past and works forward, the other starts in the present and works backwards, and of course they meet in the end. You have to read it as least twice to really piece together all the subtleties in it.
If you're new to Iain M Banks work, read "Use of Weapons" or "Consider Pheblas" first of his culture novels. "Inversions" and "Excession" are much better read once you understand the culture background.
Imagine for a second if in 1993 Apple had ported A/UX to PPC, then added transparent Classic Mac OS windowing and a migration path to it. Maybe it would have taken another two years but they then would have had a decent OS in 1995.
Instead they wasted 3 years on the Fabled MacOS 8 or Rhapsody or whatever the hell is was called then trying like hell to expand System 7 for proper protected memory and multitasking.
Then they threw all that away, dithered for another year and THEN started with a unix kernel and added the goodies they needed.
Between 1994-1997 there was no significant technological change in the MacOS. Apple wasted three years of development time when they had the right approach all the time and threw it away.
You know it's really really funny. Apple basically had Mac OS X running in 1993!!
Apple's A/UX was unix (I believe an early Mach kernel) with Apple look and feel and I believe even the ability to run Mac OS 7 applications via an emulator.
And Mac OS X is what? The above with a pretty flashy interface on it.
Alas, A/UX was 68040 only and was never ported to PowerPC.
I find it so ironic that apple had a working next generation OS with preemptive multitasking back in 1993 when NT was what? a joke still.
Most SGI engineers are willing to "lend" you an SGI 5.3 IDO CD if you ask them in the right way and make the point that it's for a non commercial and hobby system. If you spent less time bashing SGI and approached them in the right way you might get somewhere!
Although to some degree you have a point, since IRIX 5.3 is now obsolete and only useful on older (MIPS R3K) hardware they should just release it for free download.
Actually the human eye can see much more than 24 bit. Consider this, 24 bit equals 8 bits per red, green and blue component. So that means you only have 256 distinct steps between pure white and pure black if you make a gradient.
Even on a monitor this can be noticeable but it is really a problem with graphics made for cinema or hi definition television. In these cases they often use 12 bit per rgb component (36 bit colour!) to avoid obvious banding effects.
So the human eye only seeing 24 bit is, like the supposed 30 frames per second thing, a myth.
hey, for anyone who hasn't read it you just gave away a MAJOR plot point in Quarentine, i.e. the mystery of the bubble. Don't read the above post if you haven't read Greg Egan's Quarentine and you intend too!
Free Mongolia? Don't you mean Tibet?
on
China and the MPA
·
· Score: 2
Uh, I think you mean "Free Tibet".
Mongolia is an independent country, Tibet was invaded in 1954 and the Chinese government is practising a systematic cultural and ethnic genocide through imigration of ethnic chinese and suppression of Tibetan culture.
It is currently illegal to posses a picture of the dalai lama in Tibet so most tibetans keep an empty yellow picture frame in their home as a symbolic gesture.
>Currently, we have CDs with no copy protection whatsoever, and the recording industry has remained very rich despite that.
Uh, just to play devil's advocate here. The Music industry has been heavily affected in recent years by the widespread use of CDR burners and MP3. I've seen some estimates that in the last 12 months sales of audio CD's have dropped 30%.
Of course there is a good argument to make that the big 5 record companies have colluded on prices for years and CD's were overpriced. Of course the sensible answer for the music industry is to drop prices to the level where people would rather pay for the original product with nice packaging than copy it.
Of course that's not the course they intend to take: encrypted audio cd's here we come.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, fine, figures they want corporate sponsorship up the wazoo. But the problem is nowadays we're so used to seeing amazing images on tv and in the movies that the real images won't amaze people anymore. In fact I'd bet that when they get their HDTV pictures back from the moon, the real pictures won't look good enough and they'll be digitally post produced to make them look more like the science fiction versions.
And another thing. How will the sponsor paying know they didn't fake the whole thing? Give me a few days with tucked away in a digital editing suite with Maya and flame and I can put any logo you want on a spaceship orbiting the moon.
No, this was not on Slashdot a year ago. Did you read the article on space.com?
There was a previous article on snakebots but this article is new and goes into a lot more detail on proposed uses for the snakebots and the benefits of them.
Think of it as an update, continuuity is good, slashdot should followup on interesting articles, like remember when we mentioned cool widget foobar? Well this is where it is now.
Want more video game beats?
Find Aphex Twins, "Pac man power pill" and
"tetris medley".
Knowing this guy he's probably done some more
video game inspired music but those are the only two I know of.
Go here, no clickthru to agree to and src rpms and src tarballs are here:
l ish/XFree86_40/
l ish/XFree86_40/
ftp://ftp1.detonator.nvidia.com/pub/drivers/eng
and
ftp://ftp2.detonator.nvidia.com/pub/drivers/eng
Um, I think their marketdroids just put their standard click thru license agreement on without actually burning any cpu cycles on it.
l ish/XFree86_40/
Because there is src rpms available right here:
ftp://ftp1.detonator.nvidia.com/pub/drivers/eng
No reverse engineering required.
Of course they may be obfuscated, still waiting for the download (damn the slashdot effect).
ARM is in WinCE, except for all the WinCE devices
that instead use the MIPS processor. Which is also in your Playstation (1 & 2) and N64. Between them MIPS and ARM have pretty much got the embedded market sewn up. Although maybe Transmeta will change things.
(yes I know the PS2 is not a pure MIPS design anymore but at the heart of the fabled emotion engine there is still a MIPS cpu core.)
Um, neither is movies? What sorry?
Movies (and even most high budget TV shows) areshot on film. It's a relatively simple matter to run an edited film print through a high definition Telecine. Bang, all of a sudden you have a HDTV film master for broadcasting. The effective resolution of film is greater than 2048x1920 so there's plenty of detail there for HDTV.
In fact ANY content that was shot on film could be turned into a high resolution HDTV master if the studio wanted too, even old tv series.
And yes when you see HDTV you will know the difference, remember the first time you saw a DVD versus a VHS tape?
Everyone comparing this to SDL is missing something. From the list of companies involved this is going to be more about video editing and compositing packages and high end 3d animation packages. i.e. standards for streaming D1 or HDTV video streams to a disk array in realtime, or standards for streaming from disk to graphics with guaranteed framesrates.
This could be a good thing for support of those applications on Linux/BSD because if hardware vendors manufacture video cards, disk arrays etc to open published standard like this it will be much easier to write drivers. At the moment on the NT platform every maker of digital video cards has their own standard for accessing the video and streaming it to a disk array.
DirectX is NOT used in this market, it's a games API and apart from some sound editing applications it's not used in content creation packages.
One of the companies in the announcement is SGI and they are widely expected to come out with linux based high end 3d workstations sometime this year so I'd expect to see a Linux implementation of these standards although it may not be OpenSource.
Yeah well, I've seen Cult3D as well.
All of these 3d plugins are neat tricks, they have
a certain gee whiz value when you first play with them.
For about 5 minutes.
But it's not something to base a whole business on. The analogy to me would be Adobe chucking away all it's products except Acrobat reader and Acrobat writer or Macromedia dropping everything except flash.
Metacreations had a range of tools widely used by consumers and professionals, now they are one more browser plugin vendor in what is, as you say, a very competitive market.
RIP Metacreations, and lets hope Corel has the sense to keep developing KPT, Painter, etc
Hang on just a second. Metacreations was a company with a small but successful niche market in prosumer content creation tools. KPT was THE standard for Photoshop plugins and their other tools had a pretty loyal base of happy customers.
And instead they've chucked it in for promoting a technology that has has plenty of internet enabled buzzwords but no real appeal.
Everything you've described could be done by VRML 2.0 in 1996. Remember how that took the world by storm?
Ah, that's right it didn't.
Do you really think it's a compelling application for consumers to be able to spin a 3d model of a widget before they buy it? And if they really want to, then you can already do this with VRML, Shout3d or QuicktimeVR.
Metacreations has chucked away a solid business based on good software for a grab at buzzword enabled IPO e-commerce madness.
At least some other company had the sense to buy their good technology when Metacreations was chucking it out for a song.
havne't seen this here yet.
MirCorp is at www.mirstation.com
They do confirm backing by the eerily named Gold and Appel Transfers Fnord. I really wonder if that is a complete coincidence or just a very rich baby boomer with a sense of humor.
They also have some info on the the crazed fools (or visionarys) backing Mir Corp. Why does everything about this remind me of Heinleins 'Man who sold the moon'?
Good luck to em, personally if it gets things happening in space sooner I don't mind even if mir ends up plastered in golden arches and windows logos.
There are many seemingly ridiculous things that are accepted by fact in modern physics. For example, a vacuum is actually a continually fluctuating mass of particles and anti-particles that travel backwards in time and annhilate themselves before they were created. What???
General relativity ("go fast, get heavy") is pretty ridiculous on the surface.
These things are accepted by the general scientific community. Why is it too ridiculous that a spinning super conducter might have some affect on the gravititonal force. As I understand it gravity is actually the least understood of all the four fundamental forces, for example has anyone detected a gravity particle or a gravity wave yet?
In the article Bob Park says about Bae "One can only conclude..there are people who don't have a very solid grounding in fundamental physics".
Well sounds like he doesn't have a very good grounding in fundamentals of the scientific method. Repeat after me "the map is not the territory". There are no fundamental laws of physics. The laws of physics are just best fit theorems that happen to fit the available data. As soon as someone demonstrates a reliably reproducible experiment that goes against those laws then those laws have to be revised. Does he honsestly think that we know all of physics and that there is nothing left to learn?
Now I nothing about Dr Yevgeny Podkletnov's experiments, maybe he is a loon, but if no other scientists has tried to reproduce the experiments then you can't just ignore them.
It's hard to imagine why they would not use the DRI, it would mean supplying their own complete incompatible X Server, their own GLX implementation and probably their own implementation of Mesa or OpenGL as well. Otherwise all the pieces would not fit together, they can't replace DRI without replacing EVERYTHING.
There is two small reasons I can think why they might go to all this effort. First, performance, if you browse through the Utah-GLX list, John Carmack has expressed concerns about the design of DRI and the memory and performance limitatons of it. His feeling is that the Utah-GLX's direct rendering design is more efficient that the DRI and maybe for this reason Nvidia is going their own way.
Secondly it could be a stop gap measure. The release notes for XF86 4.0 say that the API for the DRI is still not finalised yet and may still change. Maybe Nvidia doesn't want to support it until it's final so they are putting out their own high performance drivers in the meantime.
If in the end they do support DRI but with binary only drivers it's not that bad is it? As I understand the design of the DRI, you could use multiple cards together and upgrade kernels etc without having the source to the DRI driver.
Well AI is a joke, it takes more than just computing power to make a truly intelligent machine. But as for the rest of them he forgot a few.
Much more likely than an artificially created virus is the likelyhood that a killer virus will mutate naturally in a catastrophic way. Every boeing 747 is an enormous hermetically sealed tube for spreading viruses from one part of the planet to another within days. Imagine something with the destructive power of Ebola that was airborne with the ease of contagion of the flu.
Sure science can create a vaccine, but well HIV/AIDS has been around for 20 years and although we can control it to some extent we still don't have a vaccine.
Plus there's the possibility that the continuuing extinction of species in places like the Amazon will start to form a domino effect. I.e. some vital species that many others depend on for survival go extinct causing a snowball effect and massive extinction of species.
Humanity's only longterm guaranty of survival is to spread our selves over as many biospheres as possible.
"what are you here for?
We're all here, we're all here to go,
earth is going to be space station and we're here to go into space, that's what we're here for.
Do I hear any questions about that?"
William S Burroughs, Dead City Radio
Nvidia is working on full DRI drivers for 4.0 for TNT2 and GeForce. Yes, they will be closed source and yes they will use a licensed SGI OpenGL implementation and not Mesa. That's fine with me, MESA is great but it is NOT a complete feature implementation of OpenGL and there are many known bugs with it.
Pesonally, I'm going to wait to see the performance and stability of their closed source drivers before I condemn them. Arguably, Nvidia has the best OpenGL drivers for Windows of any of the consumer boards. (By this I mean that the Nvidia cards work flawlessly with professional application like Maya and 3D Studio MAX even though they were not designed for that market) They also have a lot of ex SGI employees and know how to design a good opengl pipeline and then drive it hard.
IMHO, as long as their drivers are fast and reliable I don't care if they are open source or not. If any company can make a stable and fast linux driver without the help of the Open Source community it's Nvidia so I'm willing to give them a chance at least.
Several postings on the Utah-GLX dev list have hinted that Nvidia has an inhouse developed SGI OpenGL GLX driver for X Free 86 ready to go. They were waiting for the final release of XF86 4.0 so that the API for DRI would not change anymore. Now 4.0 is out I reckon there will be a Nvidia XF86 4.0 driver out within 2 weeks.
Iain M Bank's most unusually structured novel and IMHO his best sci fi novel is "Use of Weapons".
One story starts in the past and works forward, the other starts in the present and works backwards, and of course they meet in the end. You have to read it as least twice to really piece together all the subtleties in it.
If you're new to Iain M Banks work, read "Use of Weapons" or "Consider Pheblas" first of his culture novels. "Inversions" and "Excession" are much better read once you understand the culture background.
Hey, look I said "If only apple had persisted".
Imagine for a second if in 1993 Apple had ported A/UX to PPC, then added transparent Classic Mac OS windowing and a migration path to it. Maybe it would have taken another two years but they then would have had a decent OS in 1995.
Instead they wasted 3 years on the Fabled MacOS 8 or Rhapsody or whatever the hell is was called then trying like hell to expand System 7 for proper protected memory and multitasking.
Then they threw all that away, dithered for another year and THEN started with a unix kernel and added the goodies they needed.
Between 1994-1997 there was no significant technological change in the MacOS. Apple wasted three years of development time when they had the right approach all the time and threw it away.
That's my point.
You know it's really really funny. Apple basically had Mac OS X running in 1993!!
Apple's A/UX was unix (I believe an early Mach kernel) with Apple look and feel and I believe even the ability to run Mac OS 7 applications via an emulator.
And Mac OS X is what? The above with a pretty flashy interface on it.
Alas, A/UX was 68040 only and was never ported to PowerPC.
I find it so ironic that apple had a working next generation OS with preemptive multitasking back in 1993 when NT was what? a joke still.
And they threw it away.
it makes me laugh. (otherwise I would cry)
Most SGI engineers are willing to "lend" you an
SGI 5.3 IDO CD if you ask them in the right way and make the point that it's for a non commercial and hobby system. If you spent less time bashing SGI and approached them in the right way you might get somewhere!
Although to some degree you have a point, since IRIX 5.3 is now obsolete and only useful on older
(MIPS R3K) hardware they should just release it for free download.
Actually the human eye can see much more than 24 bit. Consider this, 24 bit equals 8 bits per red, green and blue component. So that means you only have 256 distinct steps between pure white and pure black if you make a gradient.
Even on a monitor this can be noticeable but it is really a problem with graphics made for cinema or hi definition television. In these cases they often use 12 bit per rgb component (36 bit colour!) to avoid obvious banding effects.
So the human eye only seeing 24 bit is, like the supposed 30 frames per second thing, a myth.
Marginally on topic... asteroid mining, elite, frontier, open source, elite open source code... ok give me some points for trying.
For anyone who fondly remembers elite and might not have heard of recent developments.
Frontier developments is now working on Elite 4 and there is a plan to make the full source of the original elite games open in a limited fashion.
see here: http://www.frontier.co.uk/eliteclub.html
Also, the BBC source code was posted unofficially to the net and is available here:
http://home.clara.net/cjpinder/elite.html
Oh yeah, in elite 3 you could go into orbit round asteroids and even land on them.
See it is on topic after all...
hey, for anyone who hasn't read it you
just gave away a MAJOR plot point in Quarentine, i.e. the mystery of the bubble. Don't read the above post if you haven't read Greg Egan's Quarentine and you intend too!
Uh, I think you mean "Free Tibet".
Mongolia is an independent country, Tibet was invaded in 1954 and the Chinese government is practising a systematic cultural and ethnic genocide through imigration of ethnic chinese and suppression of Tibetan culture.
It is currently illegal to posses a picture of the dalai lama in Tibet so most tibetans keep an empty
yellow picture frame in their home as a symbolic gesture.
see www.tibet.org and www.tibet.com for info
>Currently, we have CDs with no copy protection whatsoever, and the recording industry has remained very rich despite that.
Uh, just to play devil's advocate here. The Music industry has been heavily affected in recent years by the widespread use of CDR burners and MP3. I've seen some estimates that in the last 12 months sales of audio CD's have dropped 30%.
Of course there is a good argument to make that the big 5 record companies have colluded on prices for years and CD's were overpriced. Of course the sensible answer for the music industry is to drop prices to the level where people would rather pay for the original product with nice packaging than copy it.
Of course that's not the course they intend to take: encrypted audio cd's here we come.