Alright, then think of it this way: all security depends on obscurity. No matter what method you choose for protecting your property and privacy, it boils down to a secret key of one sort or another. Because those keys are capable of unlocking your valuables, their unauthorized acquisition and dissemination equals theft, in no small part due to our inability to prosecute all unauthorized uses (e.g. some guy overseas drains your bank account by purchasing a PIN number stolen by an American).
In this understanding, which may be flawed, the AACS key is no different than anyone else's secret keys used to control their property. Certainly there are more people involved in this one, and that seems to be testing the limits of folks' honor, but it's no different in principle.
Your credit card and social security numbers are only for your personal use, they have nothing to do with controlling public behaviour, which exactly what HD DVD encryption keys are for. So you can't compare disclosing someone's personal information to disclosing an encryption key for selling digital media.
What is this 'public' you speak of? Studios aren't interested in controlling anyone's behavior, other than that which directly involves their private property... exactly as you and I do by keeping our credit card numbers secret.
Just because the studios sell to many people, does not make them 'public', whatever the hell that means.
Compare being raped for an hour to
not being able to go to the pizza place on the corner because there's some guy there that the management refuses to kick out who will scream obscenities at you.
I'm sorry, this is slashdot. I need a car analogy in order to understand your point.
The hubris of thinking they can ban the mention of a number, and then turn around and say they "respect free speech", is breathtaking doublethink. Part of free speech is the right to discuss things you don't like. Part of it is the right to discuss them in as specific of terms as anyone wants. And part of it is being able to mention any number one wants to, from zero either direction to infinity. There's not a bit of respect for free speech here.
In other news, laughingcoyote's credit card number is 4770-9334-6003-0102, expires 06/09, CVN 298.
Since these are "just numbers", they could not possibly have implications for property, finances, and crime... it's a First Amendment issue! I posted these numbers as political speech!
Dude it's a number. Granted a large number, but still just a number.
+1 Funny, -1 Dishonest.
To wit: Can I publicly post your credit card number, expiration date, and CVN? They're just numbers... and how can ordinary numbers have implications for property and finances?
In fact, I have a list here of 10,000 valid bank-account and PIN numbers. My right to distribute them is a First Amendment Issue, damnit!
Is it really wrong for the Chinese goverment to do that? Copyright is purely a creation of each state - if the state decides not to honor it for certain authors that are not even citizens of that state is that truely immoral? Wouldn't that mean that copyright was somehow moral in the first place, thus a natural right and not a state-granted right?
The citizens are immoral for asking their government to establish no copyright laws. This is so because copyright laws (some form of them; not necessarily what we have here today) are demonstrably strongly conducive to the development of valuable intellectual achievements. In other words, to void copyright laws is to disincent your culture's production of intellectual assets.
Same sort of thing with other forms of property law, like real estate. What would happen to a culture that failed to establish real estate law? And so we can condemn that culture's citizens for advocating such a state of affairs for themselves.
Of course you're correct. It had never occured to me that there would be ontology spam, but of course there will be. Still, for the pure knowledge aspects (think Wikipedia on RDF) it would be a wonderful thing.
For a while, yes. But as long as there is a cash-per-page-view market, the onslaught of adverspam will reach every corner of the web. It can't be stopped as long as there is money to be made there.
Certainly the big "pure knowledge" sites will defend themselves, as Wikipedia does, but that is an arms race that will eventually exhaust the resources of any single organization.
DRM restricts what you can do with something you have paid for. How is that not a relevant freedom-related issue?
Them: "Hey, want to buy a movie?"
You: "Sure, how much?"
Them: "$100,000,000.00."
You: "F*** off."
Them: "Sorry, that was the price to purchase all rights to the movie, including redistribution and royalties. Would you like to buy a subset of those rights instead?"
You: "Sure, like what?"
Them: "How about, the right to public exhibition, and reproduction of media for sale, but no royalties? That'll be just $5,000,000.00."
You: "No thanks, too much."
Them: "How about, the right to public exhibition? Just $500,000.00."
You: "Do I look like I'm made of money?"
Them: "Sorry. How about, the right to private exhibition? Only $5."
You: "Now you're talkin'!"
Them: "So we have a deal?"
You: "Yep." [you hand them a fiver, and they hand you a DVD.]
Them: "Have a nice day."
You: "Hey, wait, this DVD is copy-protected! I want to copy it!"
Them: "Yes, sorry, we didn't sell you the right to do that. If you have more money -- equal to the amount we'll lose on average for each copy-producing customer -- you can buy that right too."
You: "But I paid for this!" [you shake the DVD at them]
Them: "Do you understand that you paid for limited ownership, and that you consented to the limits stated and known to you at the time of sale?"
You: "No, I'm too dumb-stupid to grasp that. I can only handle concrete meanings of the idea of ownership."
Them: "Yeah, we figured. You probably also think HOAs are usurping your god-given right to paint your house pink, eh?"
Certainly the movie studios are obnoxiously attempting to prevent format-shifting, in order to sell you the same movie twice. But that doesn't mean they are violating any of your rights.
Please note: Wiley has responded and resolved the issue favorably [scienceblogs.com], blaming the matter on a juinor staffer...
Ah, I see that Wiley has followed Washington D.C.'s lead: before doing something objectionable, hire a junior staffer for blame absorption.
Unless, of course, anyone here actually believes that Wiley allows junior staffers to send out such demands without supervision. Uh huh.
On a more general note... these sorts of arguments about Fair Use are normal, healthy, and will occur regularly. Freedom and/or democracy means that there will be a great deal of public bickering. It's a Good Thing, because it means a) we aren't afraid to differ, b) we aren't afraid to talk about it, and c) we believe our countrymen are open to rational argument. A tolerance for this sort of tumult is a prerequisite to being a free society. Compare this to the fearful silence of a dictatorship.
And do you have any references to the actual plots they have for sale? Thanks in advance if you do.
In Texas, call Copper Station Holdings; they bought up a lot of it with an eye for resale in smaller plots to small concerns. I don't know about other states. If you
Hi. I own a pine tree farm outside of Cleveland, Texas, and I am here to reply to your assertions.
I think you will find most paper pulp comes from native hardwood forests, eg: Indonesia, Malaysia, S.America and even here in Australia.
Hardwood is a piss-poor way to generate pulpwood, because hardwood grows so slowly. The softwood pines, and some of the new varieties of grasses, are much more efficient. The majority of American industrial woodpulp comes from American and Canadian softwoods (although this is changing; see below). We are also seeing the slow rise of an industry around the pulpy grasses.
Some wealthy countries replant and/or carefully manage the natural regrowth, most just hack it down leaving large areas of barren hills.
Not in America. That means that if there is any brazen hacking going on, or urban sprawl, it is balanced by new plantings elsewhere.
In Australia we plant non-native pine trees for timber resulting in vast areas of land covered with a pine tree monoculture that is largely devoid of any other lifeforms (even the bugs refuse to live in those forests).
While the pine-trees are indeed bred to be "supertrees", their resistance is aimed at diseases and at early competition (i.e. they are bred to grow a tall canopy as fast as possible in order to beat out woody competition). The bugs don't care -- in fact I will think of your statement next time I'm in my monoculture forest swatting (or running from) the hordes of insects. For that matter, part of my land is wettish river bottomland, completely covered in random wild trees, yet the larger critters and the birds seem to prefer the drier pines.
Still, you are right that a pine forest's understory and associated critters are relatively sparse... but that is not due to monoculture; it is true of any pine forest, even the much-vaunted old-growth redwoods in California. This is because pine needles naturally acidify the soil, and most other plants can't tolerate that. It is the pine's own natural anticompetitive practice.
Either way, pines (and other softwoods) are still the fastest way to sequester large amounts of airborn carbon. Your beloved understory vegetation has a fast grow/die/rot cycle which does not permanently sequester any carbon, and which slows down the trees which do. Perhaps you should disentangle your pro-carbon-sequestration argument from your pro-biodiversity argument, because the fastest and most profitable way to sequester airborne carbon is also the least biodiverse. (And if you compromise on "most profitable", then brace yourself for the world's unwillingness to do it.) The reverse is also true: the most biodiverse place in the world is the rainforest, and rainforests have so much rot that they do not consume any net carbon at all. (If you think they do, I'd love to hear an explanation of where they're storing it.)
Speaking of cost, how much do you think it costs to cut a ton of timber, turn it into chips, ship it from Australia to Japan and then turn it into paper that is shipped all over the planet. I will wager those costs are far more than the cost of an extra garbage run to collect a ton of used paper that is ready for pulping. Having worked at a sawmill many moons ago the waste timber that was chipped on site was collected by a truck and driven ~200miles to a sea port.
True enough. Domestic timber production is the answer... and indeed was the answer here in America. We had a great pulp market until the feds, under pressure from Environmentalists, banned logging in national forestlands. That drove a lot of the domestic mills out of business, and when they died, the bottom fell out of the pulp market. Presently, I will be paid $0 for the pulpwood take from this year's thinning. Now what effect do you suppose that will have on
Then I realized a possible explanation. Perhaps every time another milestone is passed, the new understanding moves us closer to fusion and thus on to the next unexpected hurdle. Sort of like being able to see the second mountain that was previously obscured by the first.
Or maybe it's just researchers looking to grab headlines in order to obtain more funding. Either way.:)
This whole situation reminds me of Bruce Schneier's observation that when deep quality metrics are unavailable, customers will base their decisions on shallow metrics instead. And then the market will adapt, driving bankrupt anyone who invests in quality that cannot be shallowly measured.
In this example, schools are the manufacturers, students are the products, and parents (i.e. localities) are the customers. The customers demand performance on a shallow metric, and boom, schools adapt to deliver.
It's great to know that scientists are wasting their time trying to "disprove" religion instead of working on problems that present a clear challenge to life-- you know, trivial things like poverty, disease, and alternate forms of energy.
Religion too is "a clear challenge to life", insofar as irrational modes of thought are a clear challenge to surviving in a hostile but rational place like the the Earth.
I am aware that religion is presently the most efficient way to suppress free-riding, and that's Very Important... but this is like observing that religion is "presently the most efficient way to plan crop rotations". It may be the current best solution we have to a serious problem, but what we really need is a technological solution.
Your agenda ignores the benefit of the faith-based charities that feed, clothe, house, and heal.
If by that you mean "religions are good at motivating altruistic behavior", sure... but note that the resources for those actions must first all be generated by areligious, industrious behavior. And in any event, altruistic behavior is of questionable value on the scale of a society (in which it will incentivize needfulness).
It does seem like the author entertains the notion that dinosaurs roamed the earth in plain view well into the Middle Ages. Well, at least that WOULD explain the dragon mythos in medieval Europe.
Europe isn't the only region with an untraceably old dragon mythos.
In fact, dragon myths are so common, I'd just assumed them to be the product of a race memory left over from our long epoch of scurrying beneath the feat of the great reptiles.
Some day, when the rodents dominate the Earth, will they have a "great ape" mythos?
As for the FDA decision, well, I'm all for stricter standards in food naming, generally speaking, even when it's a luxury food.
Word.
Hey, I know. If the low-end manufacturers insist on the use of the word 'chocolate' to describe whatever the hell it is they're making, then let 'em have it... and then reserve the phrase "fine chocolate" to describe chocolate made from the traditional ingredients.
Of course we would then have to go through all this again in ten years, when consumers realize the difference and the low-end folks start agitating again. *sigh* I think I'll go find some marketing people and slaughter them mercilessly now.:|
You have a really poor grasp of National Sovereignity. The ability to determine what happens with your resources is a basic property of sovereignity. Nations aren't bound by contracts, just their reputations.
Certainly they can pass laws to regulate what occurs within the bounds of their national sovereignty. That does not, however, give them the moral right to seize assets that were developed there by foreigners... especially when that development was done under a joint-ownership agreement.
A counterexample: America allows Canadian firms to mine gold and diamonds out of Utah. The mining operations are subject to American laws, of course, and to regular taxes... but the created wealth is not subject to expropriation.
The L-Zip project at http://lzip.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] seems to be down right now but it should be included in any file compression comparison. It could reduce files to 0% of their original size and it was quick too.
I have written one such compression algorithm myself. And it really does work. I'm going to ship it, just as soon as I fix this one lingering bug in the decompression routine . . .
I also have a different but equally revolutionary compression algorithm under development. It can compress a file of any size down to one byte. In my proof-of-concept tests, it successfully compressed and then decompressed 256 different files, some of which were over 100GB in size! I'm working on adding support for more than 256 files, but I've got more research to do first.
Absolutely! Can't have those profits staying in the country, where they might benefit locals instead of foreign billionaires.
People don't own something just because they were born within 300 miles of it. Before the Western oil companies sank hundreds of millions of dollars into the area in order to develop that oil, it didn't exist -- not in any meaningful way. The oil belongs to whoever caused it to be accessible... and Western utilization of it does not, itself, harm the natives.
Besides, the natives already were given generous cuts of the profits, despite the total absence of justice for such generosity.
You're fooling yourself. Families often had multiple VHS players and now often have multiple DVD players. Even the hardcore AV folks are going to balk at spending $500+ per Blu-ray player after their first. Get a player under $200, though, and it looks far more attractive for the masses to replace a DVD player with an HD DVD player.
Yeppers. And I, for one, couldn't be happer: anything to quash yet ANOTHER attempt by Sony to lock us into another godforsaken proprietary format.
It's the combination of 'inviolate', which is what you become when (at long last) you love yourself, and 'violet', a color which is particularly relevant to my sense of self. It's a long boring emo story, of course, but suffice it to say: the misspelling is intentional.
Slashdot Mirror
Alright, then think of it this way: all security depends on obscurity. No matter what method you choose for protecting your property and privacy, it boils down to a secret key of one sort or another. Because those keys are capable of unlocking your valuables, their unauthorized acquisition and dissemination equals theft, in no small part due to our inability to prosecute all unauthorized uses (e.g. some guy overseas drains your bank account by purchasing a PIN number stolen by an American).
In this understanding, which may be flawed, the AACS key is no different than anyone else's secret keys used to control their property. Certainly there are more people involved in this one, and that seems to be testing the limits of folks' honor, but it's no different in principle.
What is this 'public' you speak of? Studios aren't interested in controlling anyone's behavior, other than that which directly involves their private property... exactly as you and I do by keeping our credit card numbers secret.
Just because the studios sell to many people, does not make them 'public', whatever the hell that means.
I'm sorry, this is slashdot. I need a car analogy in order to understand your point.
laughingcoyote wrote:
In other news, laughingcoyote's credit card number is 4770-9334-6003-0102, expires 06/09, CVN 298.
Since these are "just numbers", they could not possibly have implications for property, finances, and crime... it's a First Amendment issue! I posted these numbers as political speech!
+1 Funny, -1 Dishonest.
To wit: Can I publicly post your credit card number, expiration date, and CVN? They're just numbers... and how can ordinary numbers have implications for property and finances?
In fact, I have a list here of 10,000 valid bank-account and PIN numbers. My right to distribute them is a First Amendment Issue, damnit!
The citizens are immoral for asking their government to establish no copyright laws. This is so because copyright laws (some form of them; not necessarily what we have here today) are demonstrably strongly conducive to the development of valuable intellectual achievements. In other words, to void copyright laws is to disincent your culture's production of intellectual assets.
Same sort of thing with other forms of property law, like real estate. What would happen to a culture that failed to establish real estate law? And so we can condemn that culture's citizens for advocating such a state of affairs for themselves.
For a while, yes. But as long as there is a cash-per-page-view market, the onslaught of adverspam will reach every corner of the web. It can't be stopped as long as there is money to be made there.
Certainly the big "pure knowledge" sites will defend themselves, as Wikipedia does, but that is an arms race that will eventually exhaust the resources of any single organization.
Them: "Hey, want to buy a movie?"
You: "Sure, how much?"
Them: "$100,000,000.00."
You: "F*** off."
Them: "Sorry, that was the price to purchase all rights to the movie, including redistribution and royalties. Would you like to buy a subset of those rights instead?"
You: "Sure, like what?"
Them: "How about, the right to public exhibition, and reproduction of media for sale, but no royalties? That'll be just $5,000,000.00."
You: "No thanks, too much."
Them: "How about, the right to public exhibition? Just $500,000.00."
You: "Do I look like I'm made of money?"
Them: "Sorry. How about, the right to private exhibition? Only $5."
You: "Now you're talkin'!"
Them: "So we have a deal?"
You: "Yep." [you hand them a fiver, and they hand you a DVD.]
Them: "Have a nice day."
You: "Hey, wait, this DVD is copy-protected! I want to copy it!"
Them: "Yes, sorry, we didn't sell you the right to do that. If you have more money -- equal to the amount we'll lose on average for each copy-producing customer -- you can buy that right too."
You: "But I paid for this!" [you shake the DVD at them]
Them: "Do you understand that you paid for limited ownership, and that you consented to the limits stated and known to you at the time of sale?"
You: "No, I'm too dumb-stupid to grasp that. I can only handle concrete meanings of the idea of ownership."
Them: "Yeah, we figured. You probably also think HOAs are usurping your god-given right to paint your house pink, eh?"
Certainly the movie studios are obnoxiously attempting to prevent format-shifting, in order to sell you the same movie twice. But that doesn't mean they are violating any of your rights.
:golf clap:
:)
I wish slashdot granted everyone a single-use "+5 glorious" mod point, so that I could spend it on you.
Ah, I see that Wiley has followed Washington D.C.'s lead: before doing something objectionable, hire a junior staffer for blame absorption.
Unless, of course, anyone here actually believes that Wiley allows junior staffers to send out such demands without supervision. Uh huh.
On a more general note... these sorts of arguments about Fair Use are normal, healthy, and will occur regularly. Freedom and/or democracy means that there will be a great deal of public bickering. It's a Good Thing, because it means a) we aren't afraid to differ, b) we aren't afraid to talk about it, and c) we believe our countrymen are open to rational argument. A tolerance for this sort of tumult is a prerequisite to being a free society. Compare this to the fearful silence of a dictatorship.
In Texas, call Copper Station Holdings; they bought up a lot of it with an eye for resale in smaller plots to small concerns. I don't know about other states. If you
Hi. I own a pine tree farm outside of Cleveland, Texas, and I am here to reply to your assertions.
Hardwood is a piss-poor way to generate pulpwood, because hardwood grows so slowly. The softwood pines, and some of the new varieties of grasses, are much more efficient. The majority of American industrial woodpulp comes from American and Canadian softwoods (although this is changing; see below). We are also seeing the slow rise of an industry around the pulpy grasses.
Not in America. That means that if there is any brazen hacking going on, or urban sprawl, it is balanced by new plantings elsewhere.
While the pine-trees are indeed bred to be "supertrees", their resistance is aimed at diseases and at early competition (i.e. they are bred to grow a tall canopy as fast as possible in order to beat out woody competition). The bugs don't care -- in fact I will think of your statement next time I'm in my monoculture forest swatting (or running from) the hordes of insects. For that matter, part of my land is wettish river bottomland, completely covered in random wild trees, yet the larger critters and the birds seem to prefer the drier pines.
Still, you are right that a pine forest's understory and associated critters are relatively sparse... but that is not due to monoculture; it is true of any pine forest, even the much-vaunted old-growth redwoods in California. This is because pine needles naturally acidify the soil, and most other plants can't tolerate that. It is the pine's own natural anticompetitive practice.
Either way, pines (and other softwoods) are still the fastest way to sequester large amounts of airborn carbon. Your beloved understory vegetation has a fast grow/die/rot cycle which does not permanently sequester any carbon, and which slows down the trees which do. Perhaps you should disentangle your pro-carbon-sequestration argument from your pro-biodiversity argument, because the fastest and most profitable way to sequester airborne carbon is also the least biodiverse. (And if you compromise on "most profitable", then brace yourself for the world's unwillingness to do it.) The reverse is also true: the most biodiverse place in the world is the rainforest, and rainforests have so much rot that they do not consume any net carbon at all. (If you think they do, I'd love to hear an explanation of where they're storing it.)
True enough. Domestic timber production is the answer... and indeed was the answer here in America. We had a great pulp market until the feds, under pressure from Environmentalists, banned logging in national forestlands. That drove a lot of the domestic mills out of business, and when they died, the bottom fell out of the pulp market. Presently, I will be paid $0 for the pulpwood take from this year's thinning. Now what effect do you suppose that will have on
Yeah. I came here to make the same quip.
Then I realized a possible explanation. Perhaps every time another milestone is passed, the new understanding moves us closer to fusion and thus on to the next unexpected hurdle. Sort of like being able to see the second mountain that was previously obscured by the first.
Or maybe it's just researchers looking to grab headlines in order to obtain more funding. Either way. :)
This whole situation reminds me of Bruce Schneier's observation that when deep quality metrics are unavailable, customers will base their decisions on shallow metrics instead. And then the market will adapt, driving bankrupt anyone who invests in quality that cannot be shallowly measured.
In this example, schools are the manufacturers, students are the products, and parents (i.e. localities) are the customers. The customers demand performance on a shallow metric, and boom, schools adapt to deliver.
Religion too is "a clear challenge to life", insofar as irrational modes of thought are a clear challenge to surviving in a hostile but rational place like the the Earth.
I am aware that religion is presently the most efficient way to suppress free-riding, and that's Very Important... but this is like observing that religion is "presently the most efficient way to plan crop rotations". It may be the current best solution we have to a serious problem, but what we really need is a technological solution.
If by that you mean "religions are good at motivating altruistic behavior", sure... but note that the resources for those actions must first all be generated by areligious, industrious behavior. And in any event, altruistic behavior is of questionable value on the scale of a society (in which it will incentivize needfulness).
Europe isn't the only region with an untraceably old dragon mythos.
In fact, dragon myths are so common, I'd just assumed them to be the product of a race memory left over from our long epoch of scurrying beneath the feat of the great reptiles.
Some day, when the rodents dominate the Earth, will they have a "great ape" mythos?
Human head asplodes?
/terribly sorry
//really
///heh
Word.
Hey, I know. If the low-end manufacturers insist on the use of the word 'chocolate' to describe whatever the hell it is they're making, then let 'em have it... and then reserve the phrase "fine chocolate" to describe chocolate made from the traditional ingredients.
Of course we would then have to go through all this again in ten years, when consumers realize the difference and the low-end folks start agitating again. *sigh* I think I'll go find some marketing people and slaughter them mercilessly now. :|
I'm guessing that Duke Nukem Forever is dependent on some unique feature of the WinFS filesystem...
Certainly they can pass laws to regulate what occurs within the bounds of their national sovereignty. That does not, however, give them the moral right to seize assets that were developed there by foreigners... especially when that development was done under a joint-ownership agreement.
A counterexample: America allows Canadian firms to mine gold and diamonds out of Utah. The mining operations are subject to American laws, of course, and to regular taxes... but the created wealth is not subject to expropriation.
There's actually a good way to set that up.
I have written one such compression algorithm myself. And it really does work. I'm going to ship it, just as soon as I fix this one lingering bug in the decompression routine . . .
I also have a different but equally revolutionary compression algorithm under development. It can compress a file of any size down to one byte. In my proof-of-concept tests, it successfully compressed and then decompressed 256 different files, some of which were over 100GB in size! I'm working on adding support for more than 256 files, but I've got more research to do first.
People don't own something just because they were born within 300 miles of it. Before the Western oil companies sank hundreds of millions of dollars into the area in order to develop that oil, it didn't exist -- not in any meaningful way. The oil belongs to whoever caused it to be accessible... and Western utilization of it does not, itself, harm the natives.
Besides, the natives already were given generous cuts of the profits, despite the total absence of justice for such generosity.
Yeppers. And I, for one, couldn't be happer: anything to quash yet ANOTHER attempt by Sony to lock us into another godforsaken proprietary format.
It's the combination of 'inviolate', which is what you become when (at long last) you love yourself, and 'violet', a color which is particularly relevant to my sense of self. It's a long boring emo story, of course, but suffice it to say: the misspelling is intentional.