with software that gets anywhere near valuable data or systems, trust is indeed an issue.
Do not confuse authenticity (is the copy identical or tampered?) with legality (legitimate copy or bootleg copy). An authentic bootleg copy is just as trustworthy as an authentic legit copy, they are exactly the same bits after all.
I did read the article we are discussing and the only reason it became his problem was because MS has pushed their bootlegging problem onto him. If his bootleg version never called home, he would never have been locked out.
You also don't seem to understand digital signatures, but that's the least of your problems. Especially if you want others to know the authenticity of the bits you publish.
I am well aware of how digital signatures work. In fact, I am particularly confident that my grasp of digital cryptosystems is far in excess of yours. Your original post was quite clear that you think DRM can be used to answer the question of "Is this song/software/movie a bootleg copy or a legitimate copy?"
But now, you are now talking about authenticity which is not the same question. Authenticity means verifying that the copy in hand is identical to the copy published. DRM ain't necessary for that, we do it all the time today without DRM, in many cases you don't even need public key crypto, simple MACs from MD5 or SHA-2 are often sufficient enough. So, let's keep the red-herrings to a minimum, shall we?
Back to differentiating between bootleg or legitimate copies. Just in case you haven't thought it through yet, here's why personalized copies and phone home are mandatory: One legitimate copy can be the source of a million identical bootleg copies. Because they are identical you can not distinguish between the bootleg copy and the original legit one.
So, the publisher must take two steps - make each legitimate copy unique and then somehow enforce that each copy phone home and report on its usage. If a bootleg copy is used there will be two copies phoning home and identifying themselves as being the same copy but with different usages. That's when a decision about bootleg versus legitimate can be made. And no surprise - that scheme is exactly what MS has implemented because there is no other choice, that's the only way it can be done.
So instead of being a jackass, how about answering the question asked? If you have an authentic copy, why do you care who gets paid? Or do my didactics cause you so much cognitive dissonance that all you can do is blindly flame?
The older we get the more crap we have seen and the less tolerant we are of new crap.
Especially since most new crap is just recycled old crap.
It is easy to be entertained by the "new" part of "new crap" (thus the original statement that a scene of stargate was great, it was just new to him). But once it isn't new anymore, all you are left with is crap and no one wants that.
One good source of "new" crap is foreign films. They tend to have a lot of crap in them too, but its foreign crap which is a great substitute for new crap. For example - the Ring and Ju-On movies that became hollywood remakes. The whole creepy black-haired girl genre is old old crap in Asia. But mostly unheard of in the US. So their old crap is new crap for us and can be reasonably entertaining for a while. But pretty soon it gets old over here too (see how popular the american remake of Ring 2 was - by the time there was a sequal it was already old crap which hardly anyone liked).
This is not a hypothetical concern... it's one of the big problems that code signing has been designed to solve.
Hello McFly? Did you not read my post? Code signing just proves you got the original bits, which is the premise. The OP wants to know that he got them via legitimate channels.
How do I know, when I buy a copy of some content (movie, song, app, OS, whatever) that it's "legitimate"? How do I know it's not bootlegged?
Why do you care? Its not your problem who gets paid.
what about a "copyright hash" that lets us know our transaction was made with the legitimate grantor of even limited copyrights (for our consumption)?
The only way this can work is with personalized copies and phone-home schemes. Everything else is just bits that can be duplicated. I'm sure not ready to sign up for such an orwellian system just to fix somebody else's problem.
Let me spell this out, since descriptive illustrations seem to be too complex to grasp.
C A R T E L
It is Sony's stated goal to dominate the market. If they acheive that goal, there will be NO OTHER VIABLE CHOICES. Just as today there is NO OTHER VIABLE CHOICE besides DVD.
You might dispute whether Sony will acheive that goal, but you would be missing the forest for the trees. Sony is just one example among many of what you dismiss as "dramatic."
It doesn't - I just think that we have other problems with GPL that should be adressed now, not DRM.
Well, really, really short attention spans seem to be a problem too. You go work on those other problems that you think are important. The rest of us will work on the problems we think are important.
At least most capitalists have the balls to call their ideas capitalism rather than trying to label socialism capitalism.
Oh get real!
All large businesses and plenty of small ones are constantly at the government's teat in the USA. Big Business in america is forever lobbying for more and more corporate socialism and calling it capitalism in order to justify it. Some entire industries are based on government subsidies - either direct money transfers like ADM gets or indirect subsidies as side effects of legislation like the big telecoms get.
I don't know what you are talking about. DRM? Well fuck it. Don't use it. It is just as simple - no other answer. You cannot prohibit it, but you can boycott it.
You might think so.
You might be wrong.
Here's an example. One of the copy-prevention measures in blu-ray is that each disc must have a cryptographically secure id that indicates the manufacturing plant which stamped it out. Else the players won't play them. That means that if you want to distribute your own videos on blu-ray, you must go get your discs manufactured by one of these officially licensed plants. Else your stuff won't work. Today, BLU-RAY is a molecule of H2O to the bucket of water that is DVD. But Sony sure as hell wants BLU-RAY to dominate like DVD has.
So, today you can avoid being impeded by DRM. But if Sony's wet dream comes true, anyone who wants to publish a hi-def video would have to suffer the effects of Sony's DRM, they would have no choice.
Similar risks are very evident with the whole "untrustworthy computing" campaign which is just another flavor of DRM.
You can say that worrying about those issues is being dramatic. I'll say that you are ignoring clearly stated business plans from some of the biggest companies on the planet.
And yet still I haven't encountered ANY problems regarding DRM.
Gee, how does this contradict my statement that DRM is not yet entrenched?
But I did encountered problems with patents
And how does this contradict my statement that software patents are entrenched?
GPL is *SOFTWARE* license - it should not get into hardware issues.
What hardware issues are that? DRM is a software issue. Really. You are just drawing arbitrary lines down the middle of software and saying "this side is software software" and "this side is hardware software."
Sure, using some bogus info for billing address works fine if you have an alternate shipping address...but (for buying items that aren't download-only) how do you expect the merchant to ship it to you if they don't have your real address?
This is a download, no shipping required. Lots of stuff gets purchased online with no physical product delivery. Subscription websites like Consumer Reports, The Economist and Wallstreet Journal, Pr0n, etc. Domain names, web hosting. Premium usenet servers. Itunes (uggh). The list is quite extensive.
Even when there is a physical product, it may be a direct-shipped gift. It's bad enough that when I send a gift I'm also giving the gift of junk mail, but I don't need to get junk mail too.
Do you agree that IF the antitrust laws are to be applied, the system also NEEDS patent/IP/copyright laws? (or else you end us with a stagnant Kraplikistan of middle ages)
Copyright at least is completely unnecessary. Patents may be as well, but their uses are significantly different from the uses of copyright that I haven't thought enough about them to say.
The reason why copyright is unneccessary is we are now at the point of societal development where distribution of information has zero marginal cost. Similarly, distribution of money could also have zero marginal cost, if we didn't have so much banking related legislation clogging up the tubes.
So, given zero cost to distribute information and zero cost to distribute money in return, it is entirely reasonable to expect a commission-based market for creative works to thrive. Just as the vast majority of white-collar workers and just about all blue-collar workers are paid for their work and not the end product, artists can be paid for the work of creating and not for the end product. And, just as the vast majority of white-collar workers and about all blue-collar workers are evaluated for FUTURE pay by the quality of the work they produce, so can artists.
Or, to put it more simply, artists are hired to produce "something" - a song, a painting, a movie, whatever. They are paid via a comission which is the sum of money paid into escrow in aggregate by all the people on the net who are willing to hire the artist. Artist releases the end result and collects the money. If the work sucks, he's going to have to accept a lower rate of payment for his next project. If it rocks, then he can expect to get a hire rate on his next project. If his work his popular enough, he may find the apparently contradictory situation where he can get a higher rate, and yet because his last work drew such a large audience that the number of new customers brings the average payment per customer down to less than what it was for the previous job. A win-win situation for all concerned.
This is true capitalism - private ownership of the means of production - the artist owns his own skills, time and equipment and sells their use for as much as the market will bear. No need for redefining information as property, property that is not a means of production but only the result of production and thus not really property under the definition of capitalism in the first place.
Patents can be different because they are not always a 1:1 translation into the end product. They may only be related to tools used, but not ever delivered to the customer. So there is a bit more to think about than there is for simple copyright. I tend to favor trade secrets over patents (trade secrets for which there are no laws enforcing their secrecy either, if you leak it, that's your problem, and you can't unleak it, you might sue the leaker, but that's it) but that's just a gut feeling, not one based on any analysis.
PS, I am beginning to think that companies like VISA and Mastercard are to electronic funds exchange as the MAFIAA are to electronic information exchange. They both have a vested interest in preventing society as a whole from realizing zero-marginal cost exchanges and have probably purchased pleny of legislation to keep themselves entrenched. I expect that VISA and MC are just the tip of the iceberg though.
Some credit card companies have a small program which gives you a temporary Credit Card Number which is only usable once online.
I have been using it for years. However, those numbers primarily protect the card issuer by reducing fraud. They don't do anything to protect your privacy - you still use must use your real name, real phone number and real billing address.
And, to meander far off topic -- the numbers are good for only one merchant, not only one charge - the first merchant to bill it gets a "lock" that prevents any other merchants from billing it. So you can pay for subscription services with one charge number. You can even increase the limit and expiration date after the fact.
But, in my experience the only personally valuable use is to prevent automatic charging like you described, that's a good thing for me. For example - giganews does not offer a monthly service, you can only sign-up for an account that auto-renews each month. Since their retention is 90 days or so, I don't need continuous service. So, I give them a card# good for one month, they try to renew and fail and put my account on hold. When I am ready to start using them again, I just give them a new card# good for another month. I end up getting effectively a whole year's worth of service for about half the price by only renewing every other month.
It's also good for those magazine subs where the first year is $1 but the subsequent ones are full cover price and they would normally automatically bill you for the renewal without asking. Some of them are so shady that they won't even honor unsubscribe requests, taking them on the phone and then pretending they never got them. They can't pull that stunt if you pay with one of these numbers instead.
Don't forget, it's not just $1.50 -- it's also all those personal details like full name, billing address and probably telephone number that you have to hand over to MS in order for them to process the charge against your credit card. That level of detail on each downloader is probably worth in excess of $1.50 all by itself.
I really wish credit card issuers would let us use bogus values for that information. They need it on file to bill you and contact you in an emergency like the cancellation/disablement of your card due to fraud. But for all the merchants, that info is just a fancy password to authenticate you with. But it also suffers from the same problems that SS#'s do - its a password that isn't really a secret, especially the more frequently you use your card.
To take it to extreme, in a 'free market' there is nothing to stop some asshole buying a nuclear weapon, then collecting 'protection' money from you and me.
Asshole with nuke (actually lots of nukes) CHECK! Collecting "protection money" from you and me CHECK!
That sounds suspicously like the US government to me.
I see a lot of people sign up for those classes and _still_ be lazy and end up back on their asses at McDonalds)
So Ms Rand, how is it that you see these people sign up for cc classes and then end up back at mcdonalds unless you are working at mcdonalds yourself? Hhhhm?
Either you work there too and are the worst kind of syncophant, or you are one of those freaks who goes to mcdonalds to socialize with the employees because they are hoping to can convince them to give them a job which they really have no hope of ever qualifying for.
For me patents are bigger and practical problem (we all agree that software/implementation patents are bad - do we?) than DRMed hardware - why not focus on these merits and come up with something usefull instead of rushing into controversial merits that are not so revelant?
Perhaps because we don't all agree that DRM issues "are not so relevant." For one thing, software patents are already entrenched in the USA. We can keep them out of Europe, but ripping them out of the USA is a huge undertaking.
DRM is not so entrenched, yet. But if we ignore it, it may well get there too and then we've missed the chance to kill it before it grows.
Besides, proponets of DRM have the goal to directly impeded the lives of just about every single person in the country and eventually the entire planet. Software patents only have an indirect effect on the population at large by retarding progress in software development.
When your network is open it means: Be free to use it. Not: You can use it but I will fuck up or intercept your communication.
I tend to agree with you about sharing access, its hardly any skin off your nose if someone makes reasonable use of your wifi. If you aren't paying by the byte and you've got available bandwidth, its like pouring wine into the sea. Better to let someone else drink it than let it go to waste.
But you have to admit that the potential "what the fuck?" effect of subtling screwing with them is very tempting. I think the article would have been much more interesting if he had figured out a way to report his neighbor's reactions to his data tampering. A geek version of candid-camera based on this could probably provide a good 30 minutes worth of entertainment if you were able to mess with the right sort of people.
I highly recommend index funds too. They outperform something like 90% of all managed funds. They also have lower fees since you don't have to pay for that manager who would probably be losing you money.
BUT, the first and best thing to do with your money is pay of any and all debt starting with the higest interest stuff first. If you have a credit card balance at say 15%, if you pay it off that is guaranteed 15% rate of return you've just earned yourself by paying it off. Its damn hard to get a guaranteed rate of return above ~6% on CDs and such now, so anything with interests rates above that is worth it. Loans with lower interest rates may be worth it too depending on how highly you value the hassle of dealing with it on a continuing basis.
I read that as the sabotage of FreeBSD by their own license, although in hindsight I can see it the other way as well. Original author is welcome to clarify his point.
Frankly, it's sad to see how the more extreme Linux zealots are using the BSDs as a scapegoat for all of Linux's shortcommings.
Huh wuh? OpenDarwin was frozen out of the information and code required to remain relevant, but what you hear are people blaming BSD for Linux's problems? I don't see anyone talking about problems with linux here, after all linux is thriving and opendarwin is, well, deceased. Doesn't sound like a shortcoming to me.
You'd think Congress would be investigating, if for no other reason than to say "Concerned citizens, we have looked into your complaints and everything is fine"
They can say that anyway. After all they lie to us about all kinds of other stuff, what's one more?
The real reason to expect Congress to investigate is protect their own powerbase.
The more they let the executive branch act arbitrarily, the less power they have of their own. It's use it or lose it in many ways. But so far congress has been mostly content to lose it, apparently believing that allegience to their party is more important than allegience to their jobs (and don't even mention allegience to country, they only trot that out for the dittoheads).
They will come to regret it, when they find themselves with a president of a different party in control of the executive branch they'll realize just how much the precedent they have allowed to develop has weakened their own positions.
Actually, the "deli" type installations are part of the impulse buy category and are almost always towards the front. It isn't the people go to the market for a meal, but rather that they go to the market to shop and then realize that they are hungry enough to pick up a snack as they walk through the "deli" to get to the pedestrian stuff.
Funnel the customer through a gauntlet of racks of impulse buy goods before the can get to the check out*
Grocery floorplaning and mechandising is already a highly studied science. They already run you by a ton of impluse buys - as soon as you walk in the store. If you are there for any sort of pedestrian good you always have to walk the entire length of the store to get it. In the process you usually pass all kinds of knicknacks and quickees.
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with software that gets anywhere near valuable data or systems, trust is indeed an issue.
Do not confuse authenticity (is the copy identical or tampered?) with legality (legitimate copy or bootleg copy). An authentic bootleg copy is just as trustworthy as an authentic legit copy, they are exactly the same bits after all.
I am well aware of how digital signatures work. In fact, I am particularly confident that my grasp of digital cryptosystems is far in excess of yours. Your original post was quite clear that you think DRM can be used to answer the question of "Is this song/software/movie a bootleg copy or a legitimate copy?"
But now, you are now talking about authenticity which is not the same question. Authenticity means verifying that the copy in hand is identical to the copy published. DRM ain't necessary for that, we do it all the time today without DRM, in many cases you don't even need public key crypto, simple MACs from MD5 or SHA-2 are often sufficient enough. So, let's keep the red-herrings to a minimum, shall we?
Back to differentiating between bootleg or legitimate copies. Just in case you haven't thought it through yet, here's why personalized copies and phone home are mandatory: One legitimate copy can be the source of a million identical bootleg copies. Because they are identical you can not distinguish between the bootleg copy and the original legit one.
So, the publisher must take two steps - make each legitimate copy unique and then somehow enforce that each copy phone home and report on its usage. If a bootleg copy is used there will be two copies phoning home and identifying themselves as being the same copy but with different usages. That's when a decision about bootleg versus legitimate can be made. And no surprise - that scheme is exactly what MS has implemented because there is no other choice, that's the only way it can be done.
So instead of being a jackass, how about answering the question asked? If you have an authentic copy, why do you care who gets paid? Or do my didactics cause you so much cognitive dissonance that all you can do is blindly flame?
The older we get the more crap we have seen and the less tolerant we are of new crap.
Especially since most new crap is just recycled old crap.
It is easy to be entertained by the "new" part of "new crap" (thus the original statement that a scene of stargate was great, it was just new to him). But once it isn't new anymore, all you are left with is crap and no one wants that.
One good source of "new" crap is foreign films. They tend to have a lot of crap in them too, but its foreign crap which is a great substitute for new crap. For example - the Ring and Ju-On movies that became hollywood remakes. The whole creepy black-haired girl genre is old old crap in Asia. But mostly unheard of in the US. So their old crap is new crap for us and can be reasonably entertaining for a while. But pretty soon it gets old over here too (see how popular the american remake of Ring 2 was - by the time there was a sequal it was already old crap which hardly anyone liked).
This is not a hypothetical concern... it's one of the big problems that code signing has been designed to solve.
Hello McFly? Did you not read my post? Code signing just proves you got the original bits, which is the premise. The OP wants to know that he got them via legitimate channels.
Why do you care? Its not your problem who gets paid.
The only way this can work is with personalized copies and phone-home schemes. Everything else is just bits that can be duplicated. I'm sure not ready to sign up for such an orwellian system just to fix somebody else's problem.
Sounds just like what Ben & Jerry were saying right after they were bought out by Unilever.
Simple.
Only if you are dense.
Let me spell this out, since descriptive illustrations seem to be too complex to grasp.
C
A
R
T
E
L
It is Sony's stated goal to dominate the market. If they acheive that goal, there will be NO OTHER VIABLE CHOICES. Just as today there is NO OTHER VIABLE CHOICE besides DVD.
You might dispute whether Sony will acheive that goal, but you would be missing the forest for the trees. Sony is just one example among many of what you dismiss as "dramatic."
It doesn't - I just think that we have other problems with GPL that should be adressed now, not DRM.
Well, really, really short attention spans seem to be a problem too. You go work on those other problems that you think are important. The rest of us will work on the problems we think are important.
Oh get real!
All large businesses and plenty of small ones are constantly at the government's teat in the USA. Big Business in america is forever lobbying for more and more corporate socialism and calling it capitalism in order to justify it. Some entire industries are based on government subsidies - either direct money transfers like ADM gets or indirect subsidies as side effects of legislation like the big telecoms get.
You might be wrong.
Here's an example. One of the copy-prevention measures in blu-ray is that each disc must have a cryptographically secure id that indicates the manufacturing plant which stamped it out. Else the players won't play them. That means that if you want to distribute your own videos on blu-ray, you must go get your discs manufactured by one of these officially licensed plants. Else your stuff won't work. Today, BLU-RAY is a molecule of H2O to the bucket of water that is DVD. But Sony sure as hell wants BLU-RAY to dominate like DVD has.
So, today you can avoid being impeded by DRM. But if Sony's wet dream comes true, anyone who wants to publish a hi-def video would have to suffer the effects of Sony's DRM, they would have no choice.
Similar risks are very evident with the whole "untrustworthy computing" campaign which is just another flavor of DRM.
You can say that worrying about those issues is being dramatic. I'll say that you are ignoring clearly stated business plans from some of the biggest companies on the planet.
Gee, how does this contradict my statement that DRM is not yet entrenched? And how does this contradict my statement that software patents are entrenched? What hardware issues are that? DRM is a software issue. Really. You are just drawing arbitrary lines down the middle of software and saying "this side is software software" and "this side is hardware software."Sure, using some bogus info for billing address works fine if you have an alternate shipping address...but (for buying items that aren't download-only) how do you expect the merchant to ship it to you if they don't have your real address?
This is a download, no shipping required. Lots of stuff gets purchased online with no physical product delivery. Subscription websites like Consumer Reports, The Economist and Wallstreet Journal, Pr0n, etc. Domain names, web hosting. Premium usenet servers. Itunes (uggh). The list is quite extensive.
Even when there is a physical product, it may be a direct-shipped gift. It's bad enough that when I send a gift I'm also giving the gift of junk mail, but I don't need to get junk mail too.
Do you agree that IF the antitrust laws are to be applied, the system also NEEDS patent/IP/copyright laws? (or else you end us with a stagnant Kraplikistan of middle ages)
Copyright at least is completely unnecessary. Patents may be as well, but their uses are significantly different from the uses of copyright that I haven't thought enough about them to say.
The reason why copyright is unneccessary is we are now at the point of societal development where distribution of information has zero marginal cost. Similarly, distribution of money could also have zero marginal cost, if we didn't have so much banking related legislation clogging up the tubes.
So, given zero cost to distribute information and zero cost to distribute money in return, it is entirely reasonable to expect a commission-based market for creative works to thrive. Just as the vast majority of white-collar workers and just about all blue-collar workers are paid for their work and not the end product, artists can be paid for the work of creating and not for the end product. And, just as the vast majority of white-collar workers and about all blue-collar workers are evaluated for FUTURE pay by the quality of the work they produce, so can artists.
Or, to put it more simply, artists are hired to produce "something" - a song, a painting, a movie, whatever. They are paid via a comission which is the sum of money paid into escrow in aggregate by all the people on the net who are willing to hire the artist. Artist releases the end result and collects the money. If the work sucks, he's going to have to accept a lower rate of payment for his next project. If it rocks, then he can expect to get a hire rate on his next project. If his work his popular enough, he may find the apparently contradictory situation where he can get a higher rate, and yet because his last work drew such a large audience that the number of new customers brings the average payment per customer down to less than what it was for the previous job. A win-win situation for all concerned.
This is true capitalism - private ownership of the means of production - the artist owns his own skills, time and equipment and sells their use for as much as the market will bear. No need for redefining information as property, property that is not a means of production but only the result of production and thus not really property under the definition of capitalism in the first place.
Patents can be different because they are not always a 1:1 translation into the end product. They may only be related to tools used, but not ever delivered to the customer. So there is a bit more to think about than there is for simple copyright. I tend to favor trade secrets over patents (trade secrets for which there are no laws enforcing their secrecy either, if you leak it, that's your problem, and you can't unleak it, you might sue the leaker, but that's it) but that's just a gut feeling, not one based on any analysis.
PS, I am beginning to think that companies like VISA and Mastercard are to electronic funds exchange as the MAFIAA are to electronic information exchange. They both have a vested interest in preventing society as a whole from realizing zero-marginal cost exchanges and have probably purchased pleny of legislation to keep themselves entrenched. I expect that VISA and MC are just the tip of the iceberg though.
I have been using it for years. However, those numbers primarily protect the card issuer by reducing fraud. They don't do anything to protect your privacy - you still use must use your real name, real phone number and real billing address.
And, to meander far off topic -- the numbers are good for only one merchant, not only one charge - the first merchant to bill it gets a "lock" that prevents any other merchants from billing it. So you can pay for subscription services with one charge number. You can even increase the limit and expiration date after the fact.
But, in my experience the only personally valuable use is to prevent automatic charging like you described, that's a good thing for me. For example - giganews does not offer a monthly service, you can only sign-up for an account that auto-renews each month. Since their retention is 90 days or so, I don't need continuous service. So, I give them a card# good for one month, they try to renew and fail and put my account on hold. When I am ready to start using them again, I just give them a new card# good for another month. I end up getting effectively a whole year's worth of service for about half the price by only renewing every other month.
It's also good for those magazine subs where the first year is $1 but the subsequent ones are full cover price and they would normally automatically bill you for the renewal without asking. Some of them are so shady that they won't even honor unsubscribe requests, taking them on the phone and then pretending they never got them. They can't pull that stunt if you pay with one of these numbers instead.
Don't forget, it's not just $1.50 -- it's also all those personal details like full name, billing address and probably telephone number that you have to hand over to MS in order for them to process the charge against your credit card. That level of detail on each downloader is probably worth in excess of $1.50 all by itself.
I really wish credit card issuers would let us use bogus values for that information. They need it on file to bill you and contact you in an emergency like the cancellation/disablement of your card due to fraud. But for all the merchants, that info is just a fancy password to authenticate you with. But it also suffers from the same problems that SS#'s do - its a password that isn't really a secret, especially the more frequently you use your card.
Collecting "protection money" from you and me CHECK!
That sounds suspicously like the US government to me.
I see a lot of people sign up for those classes and _still_ be lazy and end up back on their asses at McDonalds)
So Ms Rand, how is it that you see these people sign up for cc classes and then end up back at mcdonalds unless you are working at mcdonalds yourself? Hhhhm?
Either you work there too and are the worst kind of syncophant, or you are one of those freaks who goes to mcdonalds to socialize with the employees because they are hoping to can convince them to give them a job which they really have no hope of ever qualifying for.
For me patents are bigger and practical problem (we all agree that software/implementation patents are bad - do we?) than DRMed hardware - why not focus on these merits and come up with something usefull instead of rushing into controversial merits that are not so revelant?
Perhaps because we don't all agree that DRM issues "are not so relevant." For one thing, software patents are already entrenched in the USA. We can keep them out of Europe, but ripping them out of the USA is a huge undertaking.
DRM is not so entrenched, yet. But if we ignore it, it may well get there too and then we've missed the chance to kill it before it grows.
Besides, proponets of DRM have the goal to directly impeded the lives of just about every single person in the country and eventually the entire planet. Software patents only have an indirect effect on the population at large by retarding progress in software development.
When your network is open it means: Be free to use it. Not: You can use it but I will fuck up or intercept your communication.
I tend to agree with you about sharing access, its hardly any skin off your nose if someone makes reasonable use of your wifi. If you aren't paying by the byte and you've got available bandwidth, its like pouring wine into the sea. Better to let someone else drink it than let it go to waste.
But you have to admit that the potential "what the fuck?" effect of subtling screwing with them is very tempting. I think the article would have been much more interesting if he had figured out a way to report his neighbor's reactions to his data tampering. A geek version of candid-camera based on this could probably provide a good 30 minutes worth of entertainment if you were able to mess with the right sort of people.
You misunderstand. Your dumb is like your taint. Down under my butt. Showing your dumb to someone is like mooning them.
I highly recommend index funds too. They outperform something like 90% of all managed funds. They also have lower fees since you don't have to pay for that manager who would probably be losing you money.
BUT, the first and best thing to do with your money is pay of any and all debt starting with the higest interest stuff first. If you have a credit card balance at say 15%, if you pay it off that is guaranteed 15% rate of return you've just earned yourself by paying it off. Its damn hard to get a guaranteed rate of return above ~6% on CDs and such now, so anything with interests rates above that is worth it. Loans with lower interest rates may be worth it too depending on how highly you value the hassle of dealing with it on a continuing basis.
I read that as the sabotage of FreeBSD by their own license, although in hindsight I can see it the other way as well. Original author is welcome to clarify his point.
Frankly, it's sad to see how the more extreme Linux zealots are using the BSDs as a scapegoat for all of Linux's shortcommings.
Huh wuh? OpenDarwin was frozen out of the information and code required to remain relevant, but what you hear are people blaming BSD for Linux's problems? I don't see anyone talking about problems with linux here, after all linux is thriving and opendarwin is, well, deceased. Doesn't sound like a shortcoming to me.
You'd think Congress would be investigating, if for no other reason than to say
"Concerned citizens, we have looked into your complaints and everything is fine"
They can say that anyway. After all they lie to us about all kinds of other stuff, what's one more?
The real reason to expect Congress to investigate is protect their own powerbase.
The more they let the executive branch act arbitrarily, the less power they have of their own. It's use it or lose it in many ways. But so far congress has been mostly content to lose it, apparently believing that allegience to their party is more important than allegience to their jobs (and don't even mention allegience to country, they only trot that out for the dittoheads).
They will come to regret it, when they find themselves with a president of a different party in control of the executive branch they'll realize just how much the precedent they have allowed to develop has weakened their own positions.
Actually, the "deli" type installations are part of the impulse buy category and are almost always towards the front. It isn't the people go to the market for a meal, but rather that they go to the market to shop and then realize that they are hungry enough to pick up a snack as they walk through the "deli" to get to the pedestrian stuff.
Funnel the customer through a gauntlet of racks of impulse buy goods before the can get to the check out*
Grocery floorplaning and mechandising is already a highly studied science. They already run you by a ton of impluse buys - as soon as you walk in the store. If you are there for any sort of pedestrian good you always have to walk the entire length of the store to get it. In the process you usually pass all kinds of knicknacks and quickees.
And it would be xenuphobia if he didn't like to use a cashier lane staffed by a scientologist.