The idea is to discourage such exchanges in the first place. At the very least, since it is DRM-free you can strip out the personal data re-encoding it to another format.
Don't be so sure, there are analog encoding schemes too... if you know what they are using, you could filter it out, but at this point nobody (outside Apple) knows...
so what happens when you send it to someone else in a "hey check out this song" kind of way, then that person is stupid and sticks it in their lime wire folder?
Then, you are the source of the leak. If you do this with the entire Beatles catalog, you might have a problem coming your way.
Partial implementation like this one are completely useless.
Much fuss is made about how useless secret encryption algorithms are - but they do take time to figure out. A big target like DVD or BluRay doesn't take long, but something like iTunes user identity - especially when the media itself is not disabled by the scheme, greatly reduces the incentive to break the secret, and thus increases the time it remains effective. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple can ride this scheme for 10 years before it's publicly broken. If they never launch any litigation based on information from the scheme, it might stay secret forever.
It's always possible to remove a watermark - if you know it's there. I doubt Apple is making public all the ways they have identified the purchaser in the file.
If they're determined, the e-mail address could be encoded into the music as sub-sonic events, making it recoverable even if copied to audio tape.
They probably put the plaintext copy in there as a warning, or a sham for h4k0rz to find and _think_ they've cleaned the file.
This is the form of copy protection I have put into my professional (medical device) software for the last decade - software won't work without a key, key is blatantly imprinted with the owner's identity.
Couldn't you correlate your purchase record, or lack thereof, to validate or disprove the claims against you in that scenario?
It seems like a quick comparative analysis there would pretty quickly mitigate *most* of that concern.
Yes, you _could_ file this information with the court, move for dismissal, etc. etc. etc.
Personally, I'd rather have my arm broken - it will be healed quicker than the court process will resolve itself, it will be cheaper to deal with, take less of my personal time to handle, and there's not the uncertainty hanging for months and months while waiting for it to be over with.
Has anyone ever recovered damages from RIAA for wrongful prosecution?
Make a real change- work from home. That's actually got tremendous potential to reduce carbon footprint. If we all do it, we can let the roads revert to dirt tracks and ride in horse drawn buggy taxis when we need to get somewhere (while captains of industry hop around in their jet powered helicopters.)
So, let's have Google deploy mini-nukes at their data centers...
Seriously, though, current economics dictate Google's carbon footprint. They (reportedly) use vast arrays of commodity hardware - due to the economics. They locate their data centers where power is cheap and reliable, and having a company of that scale do differently would be staggeringly expensive.
I think the poster's point is that Google searches aren't "free" - of course, neither is an ad sponsored program watched on television, it may be getting data to you for less CO2 emission per bit, but is it data you really want? And, if the program has a small audience, it's probably wildly expensive in terms of CO2 emissions, to deliver a broadcast over the air (think about the real-estate advertising channel...)
I'm emitting CO2 as I type this, there is a quantifiable increase in emissions due to the increased blood flow in my brain required to compose the thoughts. Maybe not as much as boiling a cup of tea, but it is there and measurable. Think we could get a grant to fund a study of that?
This is the reason why I use my CC all the damn time - I have nothing to hide in my day to day life. If I ever did have something to hide, cash is still an option today... though it is getting harder and harder to be completely cash based when traveling. Let them see my normal patterns, if I'm hiding, I'll be doing something different anyway.
Oh, and when you want to get really paranoid - think about DOT (stop-light) cameras and OCR of your license plate numbers...
Scary, yes, but this is the CPSC just looking out for your safety. Same thing (recall notice in the mail) happened to me for some rope-lights from Costco.
Any ex-FBI agents want to anonymously comment on how quickly the agency can tap this tracking system when there is "a need?"
you were thinking Micro Economics when I was talking Macro.
Ah, yes, on/. I am typically thinking of efficiency in terms of percent energy conversion from sunlight to electricity and such things, I forget that macro economics has done to the word "efficiency" what psychology has done to words like "stress" and "pressure."
Softer terms still, I would rate the present crisis as mostly based on poor risk assessment, first on the part of lenders making too many loans that were unrecoverable in default, second on the part of the borrowers taking loans they couldn't reliably repay, third on the part of the securities packagers who effectively misrepresented the risk inherent in the new "free money" mortgage backed securities, and fourth on the part of the investors who bought into those securities without questioning their risk level when it was fairly obvious to anyone that the risk had to be at historically high levels.
This pretty well matches your summary list, except that I would say lack of regulation was more at fault than regulation. I'm not saying we need regulation against risky investment, just more transparency into the risk level of what is being offered. For example, when I invested part of my portfolio in Prudential's pLife 2010 or whatever they call it, they advertised it as "properly balanced risk for maturity in 2010" whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. What it meant in reality was 45% weighting in mortgage backed securities and losing 60% of its value over the last 9 months. What I would want for any aggregated investment product (fund) would be quarterly, or more frequent, reports in hypertext format where I am free to drill down in the various investment sectors of the product and get performance graphs on the aggregate of the investment, including volatility, relative to broader similar market segments and the market as a whole. What I get instead is an impenetrable pile of text that has some weak imitation of that buried in a bunch of unrelated and irrelevant crap, funds' quarterly reports more resemble advertisements for their product lines than a meaningful attempt to communicate any intelligence to the investor.
But... as to solutions... those are all in the realm of psychology. Since there is no king of the world, the world's richest families in effect hold more power over the world economy than any government. If any one government tries to tax their rich too heavily, the rich just move to a more money friendly country. So, there's this dance done, you can call it "increasing efficiency," or "taking our medicine and waiting for the full fallout", but what's really happening is a liquidity pullback by the big private money. They're limiting their risk, keeping their cash in "safe" places, and the way things are structured this reduces new investment and job creation. The Western upper middle class, as a group, also has significant economic power, and as a group I believe they are also pulling back at the moment, adding to the problem in a small way.
A non-tax funded trillion dollar "bailout" will effectively devalue the currency a bit, which is just another form of tax, albeit one that is distributed proportionally across every dollar everywhere instead of focused on a particular activity or group of people. If it is focused on creating low level jobs, it can get the economy moving for a bit, but until the people with "power class money" loosen up, things won't be changing much. If too much "bailout" (or war making) activity takes place, the wealth will be heading for other currencies, furthering devaluation of the dollar.
The thing that really ticks me off about the recent mess is all the immature people of means who are effectively crying "do over! I don't like the way this turned out." Regulations need to be put in place to make it really damn obvious to anyone who invests in anything risky, just what the risks are and just where they will end up if (when) things go down the tubes. If that's a place they're not willing to go, they shouldn't be allowed to play.
Random thoughts, haphazardly presented, use at your own risk.
If we pass this singularity where life expectancy advances faster than time itself, all economies are going to have a hell of a problem - most of the world is based on the idea that life is short, we all die eventually. The resulting population boom would be more than dramatic, and strains on natural resources would dwarf anything seen on Earth to date.
I hope I live to see it come to pass, but the problems we're complaining about today pale in comparison to what happens when virtual immortality is a reality.
As someone who might be an H1B visa holder in the not-too-distant future, what's your problem with them? Is it that we didn't -start out- in the U.S., or that we might leave in the future, or that we're sending envelopes stuffed with cash back home in the mean time?
The envelopes stuffed with cash are a problem, but the bigger problem still is when you fill a job at a deep discount in salary rate compared to someone who might like to live here, raise a family and possibly retire within this economy, and this gets back to the idea that you might leave in the future.
I don't have a problem working for slave wages for a few years after getting out of school - I do have a problem competing with slave wage rate laborers for my entire career.
Ever since we quit using hard currency, money has been an imaginary construct anyway, and any money the government "has" theoretically comes from taxes anyway...
The ONLY thing that creates "MORE" jobs is Efficiency
Demand creates jobs, not efficiency. You can be efficient as all hell at making buggy whips, churn them out for a penny a piece, and how many orders will you have? (assuming they are not being re-purposed for something else, which would be a way to increase demand.)
People who have (excess) money create demand when they are willing to part with said money in exchange for labor, either directly in the form of services, or indirectly in the form of goods.
The _real_ way to end a recession is to distribute a Prozac for the wealthy that makes them feel that "everything is going to be fine," which, in turn, gets them to open their wallets widely enough that those downstream also have excess money that they can also feel o.k. about spending.
I hope these jobs last longer than one year, and that they earn more than $30K per employee.
It's about time for a(nother) strong IT infrastructure push. The.com bubble put plenty of fiber in place, financed by a Wall Street boom-bust cycle (which is just as chilling on new job creation as a tax increase, perhaps more so), but there seems to be a problem getting private financing of wireless coverage. I think wireless technology is ready for a national rollout, and once it is ubiquitous, there will be a market explosion for wireless 'net connected devices and services.
Stated another way - US cellphone carriers are greedy bastards mired in the 1990s and they need to be taken out and spanked the way wire based phone carriers have been. Free (tax supported) nationwide wifi coverage translates to free
Skype (and similar) services everywhere - which should finally present some competition to the people who offer $0.05 each or $10/month texting services, and similarly fat voice, and fatter data services.
One benefit of national healthcare is accountability of the system. With the US insurance + uninsured system, it's "acceptable" for uninsured healthcare to be atrocious, and if you don't like your insurance plan, let us show you a more expensive one...
With the national system at least there's a humane baseline.
A 5 Megawatt factory should be putting out _lots_ of panels per hour (a "normal" house, whatever that is, consumes about 1 kilowatt on average.)
I'm not a big fan of warranties, but the panels linked to are warrantied for 20 years, if the warranty isn't blowing smoke, average panel life should be a great deal longer than that.
Payback on solar systems isn't attractive yet, thus the subsidies. All in all, I'd rather have a mini-nuke, but either of them beats coal hands down, at least in my backyard.
I don't think anybody is claiming that it is (currently) more economical to run on solar power than fossil fuel. The factories, delivery trucks and ships, and everything else runs on fossil fuels because they are plentiful and cheap - today.
If you look at the "true cost" of fossil fuel production (2 billion years to accumulate, less than 1000 years to consume completely) there is nothing less efficient, but nothing has tapped the fossil resources, ever, until the last couple of hundred years - so we're getting a really cheap ride today, and it might last another 50-100 years, but there will need to be something else, or we will have to go back to plowing the fields with muscle power.
Yep, I'd prefer the nuclear batteries to solar for just this reason alone, but to the poster's point that solar is not self sustaining, you need some perspective of scale - everyone criticizes cost of transport of materials, etc. but a solar system does this once (or, once every 5-7 years if it's using lead-acid batteries - which is their primary evil in their present incarnation) - coal plants manage to be economically self sustaining while extracting tons of fuel per day from the earth and shipping it across the country to be burned. Pile up all the coal burned in US power plants on Rhode Island, how deep would it be?
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The idea is to discourage such exchanges in the first place. At the very least, since it is DRM-free you can strip out the personal data re-encoding it to another format.
Don't be so sure, there are analog encoding schemes too... if you know what they are using, you could filter it out, but at this point nobody (outside Apple) knows...
so what happens when you send it to someone else in a "hey check out this song" kind of way, then that person is stupid and sticks it in their lime wire folder?
Then, you are the source of the leak. If you do this with the entire Beatles catalog, you might have a problem coming your way.
If information is coded into the audio itself, it can be recovered even in an analog copy.
Partial implementation like this one are completely useless.
Much fuss is made about how useless secret encryption algorithms are - but they do take time to figure out. A big target like DVD or BluRay doesn't take long, but something like iTunes user identity - especially when the media itself is not disabled by the scheme, greatly reduces the incentive to break the secret, and thus increases the time it remains effective. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple can ride this scheme for 10 years before it's publicly broken. If they never launch any litigation based on information from the scheme, it might stay secret forever.
It's always possible to remove a watermark - if you know it's there. I doubt Apple is making public all the ways they have identified the purchaser in the file.
If they're determined, the e-mail address could be encoded into the music as sub-sonic events, making it recoverable even if copied to audio tape.
They probably put the plaintext copy in there as a warning, or a sham for h4k0rz to find and _think_ they've cleaned the file.
This is the form of copy protection I have put into my professional (medical device) software for the last decade - software won't work without a key, key is blatantly imprinted with the owner's identity.
Couldn't you correlate your purchase record, or lack thereof, to validate or disprove the claims against you in that scenario?
It seems like a quick comparative analysis there would pretty quickly mitigate *most* of that concern.
Yes, you _could_ file this information with the court, move for dismissal, etc. etc. etc.
Personally, I'd rather have my arm broken - it will be healed quicker than the court process will resolve itself, it will be cheaper to deal with, take less of my personal time to handle, and there's not the uncertainty hanging for months and months while waiting for it to be over with.
Has anyone ever recovered damages from RIAA for wrongful prosecution?
"Space Katrina" sounds rather dramatic, but wouldn't the atmosphere lessen the damage?
Major portions of our communication and navigation infrastructure are above the atmosphere.
Make a real change- work from home. That's actually got tremendous potential to reduce carbon footprint. If we all do it, we can let the roads revert to dirt tracks and ride in horse drawn buggy taxis when we need to get somewhere (while captains of industry hop around in their jet powered helicopters.)
So, let's have Google deploy mini-nukes at their data centers...
Seriously, though, current economics dictate Google's carbon footprint. They (reportedly) use vast arrays of commodity hardware - due to the economics. They locate their data centers where power is cheap and reliable, and having a company of that scale do differently would be staggeringly expensive.
I think the poster's point is that Google searches aren't "free" - of course, neither is an ad sponsored program watched on television, it may be getting data to you for less CO2 emission per bit, but is it data you really want? And, if the program has a small audience, it's probably wildly expensive in terms of CO2 emissions, to deliver a broadcast over the air (think about the real-estate advertising channel...)
I'm emitting CO2 as I type this, there is a quantifiable increase in emissions due to the increased blood flow in my brain required to compose the thoughts. Maybe not as much as boiling a cup of tea, but it is there and measurable. Think we could get a grant to fund a study of that?
This is the reason why I use my CC all the damn time - I have nothing to hide in my day to day life. If I ever did have something to hide, cash is still an option today... though it is getting harder and harder to be completely cash based when traveling. Let them see my normal patterns, if I'm hiding, I'll be doing something different anyway.
Oh, and when you want to get really paranoid - think about DOT (stop-light) cameras and OCR of your license plate numbers...
Scary, yes, but this is the CPSC just looking out for your safety. Same thing (recall notice in the mail) happened to me for some rope-lights from Costco.
Any ex-FBI agents want to anonymously comment on how quickly the agency can tap this tracking system when there is "a need?"
you were thinking Micro Economics when I was talking Macro.
Ah, yes, on /. I am typically thinking of efficiency in terms of percent energy conversion from sunlight to electricity and such things, I forget that macro economics has done to the word "efficiency" what psychology has done to words like "stress" and "pressure."
1) Greed 2) Stupidity 3) Regulations 4) Expectations
Softer terms still, I would rate the present crisis as mostly based on poor risk assessment, first on the part of lenders making too many loans that were unrecoverable in default, second on the part of the borrowers taking loans they couldn't reliably repay, third on the part of the securities packagers who effectively misrepresented the risk inherent in the new "free money" mortgage backed securities, and fourth on the part of the investors who bought into those securities without questioning their risk level when it was fairly obvious to anyone that the risk had to be at historically high levels.
This pretty well matches your summary list, except that I would say lack of regulation was more at fault than regulation. I'm not saying we need regulation against risky investment, just more transparency into the risk level of what is being offered. For example, when I invested part of my portfolio in Prudential's pLife 2010 or whatever they call it, they advertised it as "properly balanced risk for maturity in 2010" whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. What it meant in reality was 45% weighting in mortgage backed securities and losing 60% of its value over the last 9 months. What I would want for any aggregated investment product (fund) would be quarterly, or more frequent, reports in hypertext format where I am free to drill down in the various investment sectors of the product and get performance graphs on the aggregate of the investment, including volatility, relative to broader similar market segments and the market as a whole. What I get instead is an impenetrable pile of text that has some weak imitation of that buried in a bunch of unrelated and irrelevant crap, funds' quarterly reports more resemble advertisements for their product lines than a meaningful attempt to communicate any intelligence to the investor.
But... as to solutions... those are all in the realm of psychology. Since there is no king of the world, the world's richest families in effect hold more power over the world economy than any government. If any one government tries to tax their rich too heavily, the rich just move to a more money friendly country. So, there's this dance done, you can call it "increasing efficiency," or "taking our medicine and waiting for the full fallout", but what's really happening is a liquidity pullback by the big private money. They're limiting their risk, keeping their cash in "safe" places, and the way things are structured this reduces new investment and job creation. The Western upper middle class, as a group, also has significant economic power, and as a group I believe they are also pulling back at the moment, adding to the problem in a small way.
A non-tax funded trillion dollar "bailout" will effectively devalue the currency a bit, which is just another form of tax, albeit one that is distributed proportionally across every dollar everywhere instead of focused on a particular activity or group of people. If it is focused on creating low level jobs, it can get the economy moving for a bit, but until the people with "power class money" loosen up, things won't be changing much. If too much "bailout" (or war making) activity takes place, the wealth will be heading for other currencies, furthering devaluation of the dollar.
The thing that really ticks me off about the recent mess is all the immature people of means who are effectively crying "do over! I don't like the way this turned out." Regulations need to be put in place to make it really damn obvious to anyone who invests in anything risky, just what the risks are and just where they will end up if (when) things go down the tubes. If that's a place they're not willing to go, they shouldn't be allowed to play.
Random thoughts, haphazardly presented, use at your own risk.
If we pass this singularity where life expectancy advances faster than time itself, all economies are going to have a hell of a problem - most of the world is based on the idea that life is short, we all die eventually. The resulting population boom would be more than dramatic, and strains on natural resources would dwarf anything seen on Earth to date.
I hope I live to see it come to pass, but the problems we're complaining about today pale in comparison to what happens when virtual immortality is a reality.
Where I live, the roads work better than the municipal WiFi.
As someone who might be an H1B visa holder in the not-too-distant future, what's your problem with them? Is it that we didn't -start out- in the U.S., or that we might leave in the future, or that we're sending envelopes stuffed with cash back home in the mean time?
The envelopes stuffed with cash are a problem, but the bigger problem still is when you fill a job at a deep discount in salary rate compared to someone who might like to live here, raise a family and possibly retire within this economy, and this gets back to the idea that you might leave in the future.
I don't have a problem working for slave wages for a few years after getting out of school - I do have a problem competing with slave wage rate laborers for my entire career.
Spending money the government does not have
Ever since we quit using hard currency, money has been an imaginary construct anyway, and any money the government "has" theoretically comes from taxes anyway...
The ONLY thing that creates "MORE" jobs is Efficiency
Demand creates jobs, not efficiency. You can be efficient as all hell at making buggy whips, churn them out for a penny a piece, and how many orders will you have? (assuming they are not being re-purposed for something else, which would be a way to increase demand.)
People who have (excess) money create demand when they are willing to part with said money in exchange for labor, either directly in the form of services, or indirectly in the form of goods.
The _real_ way to end a recession is to distribute a Prozac for the wealthy that makes them feel that "everything is going to be fine," which, in turn, gets them to open their wallets widely enough that those downstream also have excess money that they can also feel o.k. about spending.
I hope these jobs last longer than one year, and that they earn more than $30K per employee.
It's about time for a(nother) strong IT infrastructure push. The .com bubble put plenty of fiber in place, financed by a Wall Street boom-bust cycle (which is just as chilling on new job creation as a tax increase, perhaps more so), but there seems to be a problem getting private financing of wireless coverage. I think wireless technology is ready for a national rollout, and once it is ubiquitous, there will be a market explosion for wireless 'net connected devices and services.
Stated another way - US cellphone carriers are greedy bastards mired in the 1990s and they need to be taken out and spanked the way wire based phone carriers have been. Free (tax supported) nationwide wifi coverage translates to free Skype (and similar) services everywhere - which should finally present some competition to the people who offer $0.05 each or $10/month texting services, and similarly fat voice, and fatter data services.
Can we calculate how many jobs are lost as the indirect result of pulling $30 billion out of the economy via taxation?
Well, let's look back at the Iraq occupation and extrapolate from there.
One benefit of national healthcare is accountability of the system. With the US insurance + uninsured system, it's "acceptable" for uninsured healthcare to be atrocious, and if you don't like your insurance plan, let us show you a more expensive one...
With the national system at least there's a humane baseline.
A 5 Megawatt factory should be putting out _lots_ of panels per hour (a "normal" house, whatever that is, consumes about 1 kilowatt on average.)
I'm not a big fan of warranties, but the panels linked to are warrantied for 20 years, if the warranty isn't blowing smoke, average panel life should be a great deal longer than that.
Payback on solar systems isn't attractive yet, thus the subsidies. All in all, I'd rather have a mini-nuke, but either of them beats coal hands down, at least in my backyard.
Agreed: Nuclear is better than Solar, at least until we've got orbiting mirrors that make solar-thermal cost-effective.
I don't think anybody is claiming that it is (currently) more economical to run on solar power than fossil fuel. The factories, delivery trucks and ships, and everything else runs on fossil fuels because they are plentiful and cheap - today.
If you look at the "true cost" of fossil fuel production (2 billion years to accumulate, less than 1000 years to consume completely) there is nothing less efficient, but nothing has tapped the fossil resources, ever, until the last couple of hundred years - so we're getting a really cheap ride today, and it might last another 50-100 years, but there will need to be something else, or we will have to go back to plowing the fields with muscle power.
Yep, I'd prefer the nuclear batteries to solar for just this reason alone, but to the poster's point that solar is not self sustaining, you need some perspective of scale - everyone criticizes cost of transport of materials, etc. but a solar system does this once (or, once every 5-7 years if it's using lead-acid batteries - which is their primary evil in their present incarnation) - coal plants manage to be economically self sustaining while extracting tons of fuel per day from the earth and shipping it across the country to be burned. Pile up all the coal burned in US power plants on Rhode Island, how deep would it be?