First of all, no system is 100% secure. There is no system that can't be hacked
by people determined enough hack it, and exploited by those determined enough
to exploit it.
Second, the system you're proposing sounds overly draconian, and would raise
a lot of flags with a lot of the slashdot crowd, the EFF, and liberals everywhere.
Things like implanted RFID chips, finger print/retinal scan identification built
in to your computer, hardware based ID chips. All a step up in security, and
all circumventable and exploitable.
You can only make it harder for the thieves, not completely secure, and the
more readily identifiable you become, the less freedom you have. Would you
really give up 20% of your freedom for an 80% increase in security?
By going undercover on the Shadowcrew.com Web site, investigators were
able to find out which of the site's 4,000 members were actively taking part in
criminal conduct, according to a Secret Service statement. The investigation led
to two other Web sites--Cardplanet and Darkprofits--that the Secret Service alleges
are the online portals to other financial-crimes organizations.
You'd think by now these underground websites would learn that you can't just
let anyone in to your trusted network. I've actually recieved spam-style emails
asking me to join CarderPlanet.com, which was one of the sites involved in the
ring. Gee, how hard was it to find them? Sheesh.
Nothing has connected the fraud ring to any known terrorist group,
Townsend said.
Um... Yeah. Terrorists. I guess that was one of those pre-emptive statements
because... you know... someone reading the article would think I hope
they weren't going to use my credit card to commit some sort of terrorist act.
The
ShadowCrew homepage sans music
For those of you who can't see it because it was slashdotted.
My assumption is that this is a form of geurilla marketing. Basically, Nintendo discovered that Hot Goth Girls like their games, and they wanted to publicize that fact. They did so spectacularly well, not only does the whole Suicide Girl community know this, all of Slashdot does too now.
According to the developer of the PSP in an interview,
the PSP should be about as powerful as the PS2, and the batteries are replaceable,
so you can carry a spare. Judging by the size of the new PS2, it's easy to believe
they fit that kind of power in to a handheld. The question is: Do people really
want to be able to take Metal
Gear with them wherever they go? By the way, look at that trailer!! Wow if
the graphics are that gorgeous, people could be buying a PSP to keep alongside
their PS2 as another console.
As far as I understand Berne, the person downloading from the USA is the one committing the infringement, and liable under US copyright law. But the person in Australia serving the text which isn't copyrighted there is not commiting any crime.
Actually, the president of Yahoo was tried in France for "crimes against humanity" so I don't think the Yahoo thing is really about copyright or sale so much as it is about "you can't display any Nazi images in France" or something like that.
I use T-Mobile (long story), and on my phone, even before the merger, I could go in to the phone and manually select the network I was on. I got two options - T-Mobile and AT&T. I called customer service to check that I wouldn't be charged roaming for this, and since I'm on a national plan, I'm not.
So I had to ask myself - is T-Mobile any worse than AT&T/Cingular because it seems to be able to piggyback off of it's network, or at least the AT&T part.
A magazine article I read several months back that mentioned the merger said that the increased coverage (Cingular + AT&T) would benefit some rural customers, but Verizon would still likely be king of the urban sprawl. I also found it odd that AT&T promotes it's "New GSM America" that "Added umpteen new towers" for the "bets network ever" and "how many bars do you have?" but Cingular, who has the worst reputation (everyone knows Verizon = Good, Cingular = Bad) said nothing about it.
Actually, Yahoo was sued by a French organization for selling Nazi memorobelia
on their website, and the court ruling is still up in the air. Yahoo's former
president was tried in France for War Crimes.
Yahoo!
cleared in Nazi case (Wednesday February 12, 2003)
Then in a separate legal attack, three different French Jewish groups launched
a second action, accusing Yahoo!'s former president Tim Koogle of justifying
war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The court ruled yesterday that justifying war crimes meant glorifying,
praising, or at least presenting the crimes in question favourably,
and that Yahoo! manifestly did not fit that description.
US court
overturns Yahoo Nazi memorabilia ruling (Thursday, August 26, 2004)
A United States appeals court has ruled that a lower tribunal had no right
to decide on a case brought against US Internet giant Yahoo by two French
groups trying to halt online sales of Nazi memorabilia. ...
Yahoo must wait for LICRA and UEJF to come to the United States to enforce
the French judgment before it is able to raise its First Amendment claim.
However it was not wrongful of the French organisations to place Yahoo in
this position, wrote Judge Warren Ferguson.
Yahoo's
legal battle over Nazi items continues (Thursday, 26 August, 2004)
At stake is Yahoo's claim that enforcement of the French court's judgment
in the US violates Yahoo's First Amendment rights. This claim can be reviewed
by any US court able to assert jurisdiction over French plaintiffs the UEJF
and LICRA, he wrote. Jurisdiction can be obtained if LICRA and the UEJF ask
a US district court to enforce the French judgment, but they have not yet
done so, Ferguson wrote.
By some of the logic I see here, the Internet should operate according to the
lowest common denominator of law - if it's legal *somewhere* it should be legal
on everywhere the Internet. I just don't see how There should be no restrictions
on international trade over the Internet + All software should be
free can be reconciled with People in India shouldn't be allowed
to do my job.
Attack ad version of this post: MarkTAW says if it's legal *somewhere*
it should be legal on everywhere. Is this the kind of man you want posting
to/. ?
Actually, both the question and the answer can't be known in the same universe, or else the universe would self destruct and something even more bizarre would replace it. Some people think this has already happened.
Maybe, but if you get slashdotted you'll still crash and burn:
Online ordering is currently unavailable.
Our system is unable to determine if Verizon Online DSL is available on (718) xxx-xxxx.
Please try again at a later time or call (888) 662-8275 Monday-Friday 8 a.m. -9 p.m. EST or Saturday 8 a.m.-8 p.m. EST to speak with a Verizon Online representative.
Who sanctioned this CD? Most artists when they're signed to a label aren't allowed to perform for anyone else without the label's permission. That's why on every Garbage CD it says "Shirley Manson appears courtesy of..." - She's licensed to Garbage by her record label (or something like that).
So this means that all of these artists are appearing here with the permission of the record labels, though there may be a few exceptions.
An artist like the Beastie Boys can negotiate a favorable record contract with a smaller label. David Bowie does this. He sold the future royalties to all of his songs (it's amazing that he had them in the first place), and now only works with smaller record labels that are happy to have him because he's gauranteed sales, and in exchange they give him complete creative control. It's just a small step to negotiating ownership of your music as well.
An artist like Zap Mama (an excellent group, by the way) may, by virtue of being small, be able to negotiate a favorable contract because they may be able to generate income from things like touring, giving lessons and workshops and so forth, so having a record contract is just a matter of distribution more than promotion... I'm not saying this is the case for Zap Mama, they're actually fairly big, especially outside of the United States, but *perhaps* they could do this kind of thing.
But.... odds are it didn't happen this way. Odds are the record company *owns* the rights to all of these songs, and *the record company* decided to release these songs under creative commons. As ar as they're concerned, the artists may not even have needed to be asked do this.
The question then becomes - why would they do something like this? Are they being foward thinking? Didn't Apple just come out with an ipod pre-loaded with U2 songs? Could it be that the record labels are finally attempting new channels of distribution and figuring out new ways of making money in the digital age?
Another poster praised the Beasty Boys for their ability to change, and surely the Beasty Boys had *some* input into what went on their CD, and some input over the release of their songs under Creative Commons. What I want to know is - how much? And how much was the label.
While it may affect NASA, I doubt it will cripple them. Commercial flights are going to focus on getting people in to space (for large sums of money). NASA will focus on sending large, heavy payloads in to space, like communications satellites. It may actually be beneficial for NASA to partner with, say, Brazil to get the advantages of their location (though transporting all those sensitive things would be a royal PITA), but I don't think the advantage will be so large that they'll do it.
Plus, NASA has a research focus, sending things to Mars or the Moon, which simply isn't commercially interesting right now. Maybe when we discover oil on mars (because, you know, they had dinosaurs) or some benefit that would intrigue the medical research corporations, Mars or the Moon may become interesting, but until then, nobody is going to sponsor all the research NASA does. And since experimentation in a weightless environment wasn't too terribly fascinating for them, I don't think Mars would be either.
So I think NASA will pretty much stay put, but the competition will 1) make them step up their game a bit, and 2) allow them to focus their resources on the things nobody else is currently doing.
Because the closer you are to the equator, the faster you're moving already. Once you leave the ground, the fact that the Earth is spinning has little to do anything you might be doing, but the fact that you were spinning faster when you left means you have more momentum already and it's easier for you to achieve escape velocity
Think of an ice skater spinning on the ice. If they held their arm out and dropped a ball, it would go flying. If it fell off of their head it would just drop to the ground. That same force created by the spin of the earth slingshots the spacecraft into space.
Someone with more of a scientific background may be able to fill in the technical bits.
If you connect the PSP to a PC via USB, the Memory Stick will be recognised by the PC as a mass-storage device and you can write directly to the Memory Stick. For example, you can do things such as write JPEG images to the Memory Stick and then view them on the PSP.
So if the development platform was released or reverse engineered, other people could make games that could be *easily* shared amongst PSP users. Now that's cool.
In short, industry players that have embraced VC-1 fear they may have to go back to Microsoft and pony up fees for a WMVx license in the future.
Thank god someone finally recognized MS's licensing scheme for what it is: highway robbery. Basing a standard on it is a sure way to strangle an industry.
Actually, his hair couldn't have been receding during the show because he *always* wore a wig. There are even some famous stories of him stealing the spare (because it was better than anything he could afford).
And my point is that it's still more than we have today. In any case, my example was exaggerated to make a point. The more information we can store, the more redundancy we can build in if need be to correct for any potential errors
While we might not handle our hard drives directly, they are susceptible to damage due to movement, heat, or other simple failures. Hard drives are a write and read medium, so the have a whole different set of problems to deal with because the data is constantly being rewritten. Apples and Oranges maybe, but they're both still fruit.
Movies are already a pretty large amount of data per frame. Your assuming here that the technology won't keep up. The next generation of DVD players should be able to keep up with the increased amount of information per frame, not just because of error correction, but because all DVD's will he high definition. We're shrinking the amount of space data takes up and simultaneously increasing the speed at which we can read that information. I, therefore, don't see the problem. More information read in less time than before. It's the natural progression of things.
US troops were moving too fast, and a mix of high and low tech meant they couldn't
get what they needed. "Hey, we have a 7 megabyte detailed map of the area,
do you have 3 days to download it?" This is a classic sign of tech growing
pains that nearly every industry faces.
Assuming everyone had working satellite phones, and perhaps that was how they
were getting email, it seems to me that throwing more people at it could be
at least a temporary solution. Simply call up or send an email "Approaching
3 degrees north by 73 west, please advise" might elicit a human reply "20
tanks and 60 vehicles within 5 miles, may be transport. At your current speed,
you will intercept them in 30 minutes, they are 4 miles north by northwest of
you."
Farther in the future, a computer should be able to extrapolate that information
from the satellite images and transform it into plain text that the troops can
then download by logging in to a website or something, or perhaps vector graphics
and low resolution images could supply them with the information they need.
All they need to know is the enemy's position relative to theirs. While this
might sound like some sort of tank game from the mid 80's, based on the article
it would seem that this rudimentary level if information would have been invaluable
to them.
This whole thing reminds me of the book Human
Error. Tight coupling (C depends on B, which depends on A, so objective
Z will fail to be met if any of the previous 25 points fail) meant that the
otherwise available information was unavailable to the people who needed it
the most. A looser system, like the one used in Afgahnastan would have worked
in a wider range of situations. The methods of communication were flexible rather
than fixed, and could therefore be used in a wider range of situations.
Hopefully the next generation of military technology will fail gracefully. That is, still be usable even when bandwidth is low.
I also have to wonder about what will happen, as it always does, when the current
cutting edge technology is commonly available. Okay, it's not likely anyone
else will have satellites any time soon, but when our enemies can track our
movements quickly and easily, share information amongst themselves and have
their own un-manned vehicles, what strategic advantage will we have? Once you
reach the point of dimishing returns (just how detailed a map can you download
if you have broadband in your tank? How detailed does it need to be? Can it
have real time satellite images? etc.) what happens to our advantage?
I saw something about this on TV, I think on a Frontline about video games.
There were these larger-than-life screens - (3) two-meter square arranged dressing-room
mirror style - that each soldier in training interacted with. It used voice
recognition, and AI (no expanation as to what kind of AI). In the episode, the
man's task was to move a woman and her wounded daughter off the road so that
road could be used for transport. Also, there would be some danger to the woman
if she stayed.
Wargames have been used in the military for centuries. Chess is a great and
well known simulation designed to improve your critical thinking skills. Recently
it's been proven by Gary Klein in his excellent book Sources
of Power training shouldn't be academic. I think we'd all agree that it's
one thing to read about, say, being a firefighter, and quite another to run
in to a burning building and make decisions that affect dozens or hundreds of
lives. Simulations are designed to train your mind to become accustomed to these
situations, and are probably the single most effective tool in doing so.
What I want to know is how long before one of the cadets in training hacks
the computer to turn the odds in his favor.
So what, with 72x more data, you can afford to put 36x more information on the disc twice.
I also don't see you arguing against your hard drive becoming more and more dense. The same problem exists there.
Just use multiple lasers to read the data, that should be able to correct for many scratches, and movie/music data is less critical than computer data, error correction is built in, and a good CD/DVD player should be able to either find, extrapolate, or simply skip over the data that's missing without us noticing unless it gets really severe.
Maybe, but one well-placed beer could likely ruin just about an supercomputer. The Bar Bot lives for it. I have some intelligent friends, terraflops alone a friend does not make. Beer, on the other hand, is the universal ingredient in all meaningful relationships.
This kind of thing has been around for a long time. The basis is a Behaviorist view of the world that says that given a certain stimulus, most of us (enough of us) will respond in a certain way. Marketing from that viewpoint becomes about pushing the right buttons, and finding better and better ways of pushing those buttons.
Your opinion on how good or evil this kind of thing is may come from how much you agree with that viewpoint. Can marketers refine their science to such a point where you have almost no choice but to buy what they tell you?
Depending on which side of the coin you fall on, this is all either smoke & mirrors, or cutting-edge research that will eventually rule the world.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, no system is 100% secure. There is no system that can't be hacked by people determined enough hack it, and exploited by those determined enough to exploit it.
Second, the system you're proposing sounds overly draconian, and would raise a lot of flags with a lot of the slashdot crowd, the EFF, and liberals everywhere. Things like implanted RFID chips, finger print/retinal scan identification built in to your computer, hardware based ID chips. All a step up in security, and all circumventable and exploitable.
You can only make it harder for the thieves, not completely secure, and the more readily identifiable you become, the less freedom you have. Would you really give up 20% of your freedom for an 80% increase in security?
You'd think by now these underground websites would learn that you can't just let anyone in to your trusted network. I've actually recieved spam-style emails asking me to join CarderPlanet.com, which was one of the sites involved in the ring. Gee, how hard was it to find them? Sheesh.
Nothing has connected the fraud ring to any known terrorist group, Townsend said.
Um... Yeah. Terrorists. I guess that was one of those pre-emptive statements because... you know... someone reading the article would think I hope they weren't going to use my credit card to commit some sort of terrorist act.
The ShadowCrew homepage sans music
For those of you who can't see it because it was slashdotted.
I think that kind of thing is actually in your phone book.
My assumption is that this is a form of geurilla marketing. Basically, Nintendo discovered that Hot Goth Girls like their games, and they wanted to publicize that fact. They did so spectacularly well, not only does the whole Suicide Girl community know this, all of Slashdot does too now.
According to the developer of the PSP in an interview, the PSP should be about as powerful as the PS2, and the batteries are replaceable, so you can carry a spare. Judging by the size of the new PS2, it's easy to believe they fit that kind of power in to a handheld. The question is: Do people really want to be able to take Metal Gear with them wherever they go? By the way, look at that trailer!! Wow if the graphics are that gorgeous, people could be buying a PSP to keep alongside their PS2 as another console.
As far as I understand Berne, the person downloading from the USA is the one committing the infringement, and liable under US copyright law. But the person in Australia serving the text which isn't copyrighted there is not commiting any crime.
Actually, the president of Yahoo was tried in France for "crimes against humanity" so I don't think the Yahoo thing is really about copyright or sale so much as it is about "you can't display any Nazi images in France" or something like that.
I use T-Mobile (long story), and on my phone, even before the merger, I could go in to the phone and manually select the network I was on. I got two options - T-Mobile and AT&T. I called customer service to check that I wouldn't be charged roaming for this, and since I'm on a national plan, I'm not.
So I had to ask myself - is T-Mobile any worse than AT&T/Cingular because it seems to be able to piggyback off of it's network, or at least the AT&T part.
A magazine article I read several months back that mentioned the merger said that the increased coverage (Cingular + AT&T) would benefit some rural customers, but Verizon would still likely be king of the urban sprawl. I also found it odd that AT&T promotes it's "New GSM America" that "Added umpteen new towers" for the "bets network ever" and "how many bars do you have?" but Cingular, who has the worst reputation (everyone knows Verizon = Good, Cingular = Bad) said nothing about it.
By some of the logic I see here, the Internet should operate according to the lowest common denominator of law - if it's legal *somewhere* it should be legal on everywhere the Internet. I just don't see how There should be no restrictions on international trade over the Internet + All software should be free can be reconciled with People in India shouldn't be allowed to do my job.
Attack ad version of this post: MarkTAW says if it's legal *somewhere* it should be legal on everywhere. Is this the kind of man you want posting to /. ?
Actually, both the question and the answer can't be known in the same universe, or else the universe would self destruct and something even more bizarre would replace it. Some people think this has already happened.
Life, The Universe & Everything = 42
Who sanctioned this CD? Most artists when they're signed to a label aren't allowed to perform for anyone else without the label's permission. That's why on every Garbage CD it says "Shirley Manson appears courtesy of..." - She's licensed to Garbage by her record label (or something like that).
So this means that all of these artists are appearing here with the permission of the record labels, though there may be a few exceptions.
An artist like the Beastie Boys can negotiate a favorable record contract with a smaller label. David Bowie does this. He sold the future royalties to all of his songs (it's amazing that he had them in the first place), and now only works with smaller record labels that are happy to have him because he's gauranteed sales, and in exchange they give him complete creative control. It's just a small step to negotiating ownership of your music as well.
An artist like Zap Mama (an excellent group, by the way) may, by virtue of being small, be able to negotiate a favorable contract because they may be able to generate income from things like touring, giving lessons and workshops and so forth, so having a record contract is just a matter of distribution more than promotion... I'm not saying this is the case for Zap Mama, they're actually fairly big, especially outside of the United States, but *perhaps* they could do this kind of thing.
But.... odds are it didn't happen this way. Odds are the record company *owns* the rights to all of these songs, and *the record company* decided to release these songs under creative commons. As ar as they're concerned, the artists may not even have needed to be asked do this.
The question then becomes - why would they do something like this? Are they being foward thinking? Didn't Apple just come out with an ipod pre-loaded with U2 songs? Could it be that the record labels are finally attempting new channels of distribution and figuring out new ways of making money in the digital age?
Another poster praised the Beasty Boys for their ability to change, and surely the Beasty Boys had *some* input into what went on their CD, and some input over the release of their songs under Creative Commons. What I want to know is - how much? And how much was the label.
While it may affect NASA, I doubt it will cripple them. Commercial flights are going to focus on getting people in to space (for large sums of money). NASA will focus on sending large, heavy payloads in to space, like communications satellites. It may actually be beneficial for NASA to partner with, say, Brazil to get the advantages of their location (though transporting all those sensitive things would be a royal PITA), but I don't think the advantage will be so large that they'll do it.
Plus, NASA has a research focus, sending things to Mars or the Moon, which simply isn't commercially interesting right now. Maybe when we discover oil on mars (because, you know, they had dinosaurs) or some benefit that would intrigue the medical research corporations, Mars or the Moon may become interesting, but until then, nobody is going to sponsor all the research NASA does. And since experimentation in a weightless environment wasn't too terribly fascinating for them, I don't think Mars would be either.
So I think NASA will pretty much stay put, but the competition will 1) make them step up their game a bit, and 2) allow them to focus their resources on the things nobody else is currently doing.
Because the closer you are to the equator, the faster you're moving already. Once you leave the ground, the fact that the Earth is spinning has little to do anything you might be doing, but the fact that you were spinning faster when you left means you have more momentum already and it's easier for you to achieve escape velocity
Think of an ice skater spinning on the ice. If they held their arm out and dropped a ball, it would go flying. If it fell off of their head it would just drop to the ground. That same force created by the spin of the earth slingshots the spacecraft into space.
Someone with more of a scientific background may be able to fill in the technical bits.
If you connect the PSP to a PC via USB, the Memory Stick will be recognised by the PC as a mass-storage device and you can write directly to the Memory Stick. For example, you can do things such as write JPEG images to the Memory Stick and then view them on the PSP.
So if the development platform was released or reverse engineered, other people could make games that could be *easily* shared amongst PSP users. Now that's cool.
In short, industry players that have embraced VC-1 fear they may have to go back to Microsoft and pony up fees for a WMVx license in the future.
Thank god someone finally recognized MS's licensing scheme for what it is: highway robbery. Basing a standard on it is a sure way to strangle an industry.
New Toupee: $800
Trip to outer space: $210,000
Convincing the Stewardess to dress up as a green alien and join the 10,000 mile high club: Priceless
Actually, his hair couldn't have been receding during the show because he *always* wore a wig. There are even some famous stories of him stealing the spare (because it was better than anything he could afford).
Now mod me +5 Geeky.
And my point is that it's still more than we have today. In any case, my example was exaggerated to make a point. The more information we can store, the more redundancy we can build in if need be to correct for any potential errors
While we might not handle our hard drives directly, they are susceptible to damage due to movement, heat, or other simple failures. Hard drives are a write and read medium, so the have a whole different set of problems to deal with because the data is constantly being rewritten. Apples and Oranges maybe, but they're both still fruit.
Movies are already a pretty large amount of data per frame. Your assuming here that the technology won't keep up. The next generation of DVD players should be able to keep up with the increased amount of information per frame, not just because of error correction, but because all DVD's will he high definition. We're shrinking the amount of space data takes up and simultaneously increasing the speed at which we can read that information. I, therefore, don't see the problem. More information read in less time than before. It's the natural progression of things.
Assuming everyone had working satellite phones, and perhaps that was how they were getting email, it seems to me that throwing more people at it could be at least a temporary solution. Simply call up or send an email "Approaching 3 degrees north by 73 west, please advise" might elicit a human reply "20 tanks and 60 vehicles within 5 miles, may be transport. At your current speed, you will intercept them in 30 minutes, they are 4 miles north by northwest of you."
Farther in the future, a computer should be able to extrapolate that information from the satellite images and transform it into plain text that the troops can then download by logging in to a website or something, or perhaps vector graphics and low resolution images could supply them with the information they need. All they need to know is the enemy's position relative to theirs. While this might sound like some sort of tank game from the mid 80's, based on the article it would seem that this rudimentary level if information would have been invaluable to them.
This whole thing reminds me of the book Human Error. Tight coupling (C depends on B, which depends on A, so objective Z will fail to be met if any of the previous 25 points fail) meant that the otherwise available information was unavailable to the people who needed it the most. A looser system, like the one used in Afgahnastan would have worked in a wider range of situations. The methods of communication were flexible rather than fixed, and could therefore be used in a wider range of situations.
Hopefully the next generation of military technology will fail gracefully. That is, still be usable even when bandwidth is low.
I also have to wonder about what will happen, as it always does, when the current cutting edge technology is commonly available. Okay, it's not likely anyone else will have satellites any time soon, but when our enemies can track our movements quickly and easily, share information amongst themselves and have their own un-manned vehicles, what strategic advantage will we have? Once you reach the point of dimishing returns (just how detailed a map can you download if you have broadband in your tank? How detailed does it need to be? Can it have real time satellite images? etc.) what happens to our advantage?
I saw something about this on TV, I think on a Frontline about video games. There were these larger-than-life screens - (3) two-meter square arranged dressing-room mirror style - that each soldier in training interacted with. It used voice recognition, and AI (no expanation as to what kind of AI). In the episode, the man's task was to move a woman and her wounded daughter off the road so that road could be used for transport. Also, there would be some danger to the woman if she stayed.
Wargames have been used in the military for centuries. Chess is a great and well known simulation designed to improve your critical thinking skills. Recently it's been proven by Gary Klein in his excellent book Sources of Power training shouldn't be academic. I think we'd all agree that it's one thing to read about, say, being a firefighter, and quite another to run in to a burning building and make decisions that affect dozens or hundreds of lives. Simulations are designed to train your mind to become accustomed to these situations, and are probably the single most effective tool in doing so.
What I want to know is how long before one of the cadets in training hacks the computer to turn the odds in his favor.
So what, with 72x more data, you can afford to put 36x more information on the disc twice.
I also don't see you arguing against your hard drive becoming more and more dense. The same problem exists there.
Just use multiple lasers to read the data, that should be able to correct for many scratches, and movie/music data is less critical than computer data, error correction is built in, and a good CD/DVD player should be able to either find, extrapolate, or simply skip over the data that's missing without us noticing unless it gets really severe.
Maybe, but one well-placed beer could likely ruin just about an supercomputer. The Bar Bot lives for it. I have some intelligent friends, terraflops alone a friend does not make. Beer, on the other hand, is the universal ingredient in all meaningful relationships.
In other news, scientists create a robot that could replace half of my friends.
This kind of thing has been around for a long time. The basis is a Behaviorist view of the world that says that given a certain stimulus, most of us (enough of us) will respond in a certain way. Marketing from that viewpoint becomes about pushing the right buttons, and finding better and better ways of pushing those buttons.
Your opinion on how good or evil this kind of thing is may come from how much you agree with that viewpoint. Can marketers refine their science to such a point where you have almost no choice but to buy what they tell you?
Depending on which side of the coin you fall on, this is all either smoke & mirrors, or cutting-edge research that will eventually rule the world.