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Crowding will be an issue. I don't know about everyone else, but where I went to school going to library or communications center to get on a computer meant fighting to find an available machine, and then hoping it wasn't already fracked up.
If there is no access from the dorms, and everyone has to go to the library to get on the net, they're going to need to add a whole lot of public computers at the library -- I think it's a pretty safe bet that there are a good deal many more students using the internet from their dorm rooms than there are computers in the library.
So because the locks and ignition use RFID, you assume it is of the open and insecure variety, even though highly secure RFID devices using strong encryption are available, and because you don't know how they prevent rogue signals (which as I read it only control the lights, turn indicators, etc, NOT the steering, acceleration, or braking), you assume that they must be doing nothing to prevent such signals.
Someone hasn't thought this through. Someone indeed. You.
Yes! The people of Sweden should have hidden the evidence that they were even making a phone calls! By prearranging a secret means of communication with each and every party they might ever conceivable want to contact! But they didn't! They were asking for it!
I like phylogenetic (or cladistic) taxonomy as much as the next guy, but if you're going to make a statement like this you should at least acknowledge that you are using a different (and much newer) system of classification than the person you are "correcting."
Personally, I think phylogenetic taxonomy makes a hell of a lot more sense -- but we all learned alpha taxonomy in school, and that's very clearly what all those well meaning people are using.
Spouting off about how everybody has it all wrong without pointing out which taxonomy you are using doesn't make you look smarter than everyone -- it makes you look like a dimwit who doesn't grasp context.
Ha! I like it. I was reserving my last 10 percent for "I'm wrong and it's none of the above" but what the hell -- 10 percent chance she is thrown back in time.
Only I think it will be to the dark ages, where she will fight Deadites using her appropriately modifed Viper and her knowledge of gunpowder.
Probably because nobody believes she's dead. Maybe I'm still in denial, but I just don't buy it. After all that buildup about her destiny and crap I'm supposed to accept that said destiny was to fly into a storm and explode? I don't buy it. I put the odds at 50 percent chance of some future episode revealing a barely plausible explanation for how she ejected and was picked up by the cylon heavy raider (or similar deus ex machina), 30 percent of some mystical afterlife nonsense based on "god" or "the gods" followed by a resurrection, and 10 percent chance she wakes up in a pool of goo as one of the remaining 5 cylon models.
When I move from denial to bargaining, maybe we could start an online petition! Those ALWAYS work!
And not only that, but of those who do have jobs that could be carried out over the net, how many people will actually choose to work from home when they've got frickin' bird flu? If I contract a disease with a 60 percent fatality rate, I think I'll be able to part with some accrued PTO and spend my time on something other than my job. Like say, trying not to die.
Where do you live? I'm just curious, because in my experience most stores will allow you to return anything for any reason at all within 30 days of purchase. Is this something that varies by region?
Not really. It doesn't really matter that in that particular case the defendant was convicted in both trials. The court ruled in its opinion that an offense and conspiracy to commit that offense are not the same offese for double jeapardy purposes. Even if they hadn't met the burden of proof in the first trial and gotten a conviction, the charge of conspiracy would still have been open for prosecution, as it is a separate offense.
Besides, it was only a "for example" intended to point out that double-jeapardy protection is very, very limited. It prevents you from being re-tried on the same charge, in the same jurisdiction. You can still be tried by the state and then by the feds for the same act, such as McVeigh was (convicted on both counts) or the officers that beat Rodney King (aquitted of assault by the state, then convicted by the feds of violating King's civil rights), and so on.
The fact that I am NOT a lawyer and don't memorize the details of individual cases does not imply that I am incorrect. I can still read.
Since IANAL, and clearly YANAL, Can one of the many people on slashdot who IS a lawyer please clear this up for us?
Sorry for the lame post there, I bumped the submit button when I didn't mean to. I was going to say that in practice, it is the same here in the U.S. Despite double-jeapoardy, if they find new evidence that points to your guilt after you have been aquitted, they will take the new evidence and the existing evidence, and simply charge you with a technically different crime than they did the first time around. For example, if they fail to convict you of murder, then find new evidence, they may be able to prove "conspiracy to commit murder."
Listen, we're on the same side, and I think we're arguing just because we are considering the question from very different perspectives. When I said that it would not take much effort, I was making a statement about the level of technical difficulty involved, which is very close to none.
I apologize if I said it more snidely than I should have, but when you called it a "big management headache" to keep track of which songs were DRMed and which weren't, I instictively keyed to the actual development tasks (managing data, not managing people). And I said "development time" specifically to exclude QA and so on. It really is a very simple issue from a technical perspective -- and by the way, plenty of things more substantial than fixing typos do take less than an hour of development time.
As for other legal considerations, hey -- you're right. For all we know Apple has agreed to DRM everything in order to strike a deal with the big 4, even though the big 4 have no right to demand copy-protection on songs they don't own. I wouldn't be surprised by this, but it's a whole other discussion that I didn't want to get into -- I mean, what are the legal ramifications of striking a deal with party A to apply DRM to party B's property? Not my area of expertise.
The lawyering and writing of policies is par for the course in a large company. I'm sure some things would have to change, but it isn't as if the filing of releases and paperwork aren't already a part of the existing process, and it certainly isn't as if there is a separate resale agreement for every track or even every artist. I'm pretty sure it's per record label. Fact of the matter is that if Apple hadn't wanted to promote DRM for their own purposes, they could have built it from the beginning to add the DRM only where required. I know that there is way more involved than just building the system. . . but with my limited powers of guestimation, I don't see the difference in effort being substantial enough to warrant applying DRM to everything, rather than to only the music from the companies that have stipulated it.
Now does all this mean that Steve is absolutely lying? No -- I can't read his mind either. And on top of that, Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. aren't the same entity. All I'm trying to say is that there is some evidence to suggest (not prove, mind you) that he may not be sincere, and that I happen to doubt his sincerity.
If you want to take him at his word, that's fine. It's also a perfectly reasonable position. But please stop implying that doubting him is somehow unreasonable.
I love how folks are attacking Jobs for not doing the extra work to split out the DRM and non-DRM as a response to his call for removing DRM all together. If the goal is to remove DRM, managing both DRM and non-DRM is wasted man-hours.
So Steve says "Get rid of DRM" and the response is "Damn you Steve, why don't you do extra work and manage both DRM and non-DRM. The logic is baffling at best.
That's not what I or anyone is saying (and you know it). Getting rid of DRM altogether would be fantastic. The whole point of this tangent is that when Steve says it, I am skeptical of the notion that he means it sincerely. It makes him look good, as if he's being forced to use it by the copyright holders, but plenty of the tunes sold by iTunes store have DRM even though the copyright holder doesn't require it -- Apple puts the DRM on just the same.
Pointing out that it wouldn't be difficult to skip the DRM when it isn't required is a point that is being presented as evidence that Steve is either being less than forthright about his views, or being something of a hypocrite. It's not being presented as something that would be better than what he suggests.
Hence my disclaimer that I haven't seen the code, and inclusion of the qualifier "I can't imagine." I'm going to give Apple's developers enough credit to assume the codebase isn't total shit.
Whether the time for the fix is one man-hour or one month, the assertion that keeping track of which songs need DRM and which don't is somehow a monumental technical obstacle requiring a herculean effort to overcome is patently ridiculous.
That's a half-good point, and I'm gonna tip my hat (half way) and give you half of a "touche'" for it.
But it still isn't quite the same situation. When we used cassette tapes, we could play them in any cassette player we wanted, regardless of who manufactured it. A cassette was a cassette was a cassette. Our tapes became obsolete because technology changed, and offered us benefits that convinced us to switch to something newer -- cds gave us track by track access and an order of magnitude better quality -- and for a time the manufacturers all put out stereos that could play your cassettes or cds.
In the case of digital audio, the iTunes DRM songs can only be played in the player(s) produced by a single manufacturer, and are incompatible with any other. There is no fundamental difference in technology between a protected iTunes track and a track encoded with mp3, ogg, or whatever. The issue of whose device you can play it on is the only significant difference between a DRMed track and a non-DRMed one).
In short, your point about cassettes has to do with format lock-in. The issue with Apple's DRM is more about vendor lock in.
The average slashdotter is not the average consumer. What you just described is WAY too complicated for say, my sister. If you want to talk about those of us that know what we're doing, why even burn to a CD? Just visit the Hymn project and and download the appropriate tools.
But for most iPod owners, these things are arcane mysteries.
It wouldn't be remotely difficult at all. It isn't like they'd be keeping track of it with a chalk board and a system of post-it notes.
There is this thing called a "database" that the iTunes store almost certainly uses, and adding a new column to it for "DRM exempt or not" takes about as much effort farting after a good bowl of chili. Now I've never seen the code for the iTunes music store servers, but as a software engineer I can't imagine this taking more than an hour of development time.
Nor does the average matter. The statistic that would matter is this. . . what percentage of iPod owners have at least one track on their iPod that they purchased through the iTunes store? Because any iPod owner who has a single song from iTunes is "locked in" in the sense that they can't switch to a different device without giving up music they have already paid for.
Everything else is just a measure of how severely they are locked in, how much already-paid-for music it would cost them to switch. But even if the switching cost is to give up just one track that you already paid for -- lock in is lock in.
It's a distinction without a difference. There is no scenario under which Comcast's CEO is going to call up YouTube and demand that they pay or be throttled. That's not subtle enough.
They just want to set up a scenario under which anyone who doesn't pay is at a competetive disadvantage to anyone who does. They won't have to directly extort money from any specific company, because they will have succeeded in creating a scenario where everyone is extorted indirectly. The end result is the same -- you pay, or your traffic is degraded.
The evil brilliance of it is that it doesn't even matter if it is a competetor of yours that has bought priority treatment. If CNN.com buys optimal delivery, HomeDepot.com is degraded. It sets up a situation where your traffic gets worse and worse until you join the payers, no matter who you -- it's a whole new cost of doing business, pay for your connection, and then pay to not have your traffic de-prioritized.
You seem to be missing the point that charging providers for "optimal delivery" IS throttling down the bandwidth for anyone who doesn't pony up. The two ways of phrasing it are just different ways of saying the same thing. The "optimal delivery" given to those who pay isn't the result of some magic bandwidth that appears out of nowhere, it comes from prioritizing those packets over all the other packets.
Metaphor: If the network was like a system of roads, "optimal delivery" would describe what we give to emergency vehicles with their sirens and flashing lights on -- they get through, everyone else has to pull over and stop to let them by.
So if you haven't paid for optimal delivery, your packets are being slowed down. And the more providers who shell out for optimal delivery, the more it slows down the traffic of everyone who doesn't. And when at last EVERYONE is paying for optimal delivery, then what? We're back to where we started, except that now everyone is paying, and they can introduce super-duper-optimal-delivery, where your packets are prioritized over those from providers who merely paid for "regular-optimal" delivery.
That's right on. I've had plenty of ideas that were later patented, but unless you actually plan to develop and market the idea yourself, it isn't even worth seeking a patent. The minimum fee to have a qualified patent lawyer write up an application that sufficiently describes the idea and protects all the possible variations of it with well worded claims is about 12K. (This from my buddy the patent lawyer).
You can write one up yourself, but unless you are really damn good at legalese, it will have holes in it that any potential competetor could drive a truck through. And if you pay the money to have it done by a law firm, you will never see that money again unless someone else develops your idea and you sue them and win -- which can be hard, since you never developed the idea yourself and they likely have a team of corporate lawyers.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you even read what you quoted?
"Your License to Us: Unless otherwise indicated in this Site, including our Privacy Policy or in connection with one of our services, any communications or material of any kind that you e-mail, post, or transmit through the Site (excluding personally identifiable information of students and any papers submitted to the Site), including, questions, comments, suggestions, and other data and information (your "Communications") will be treated as non-confidential and non-proprietary. You grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, and otherwise use your Communications on the Site or elsewhere for our business purposes. We are free to use any ideas, concepts, techniques, know-how in your Communications for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the development and use of products and services based on the Communications."
Crowding will be an issue. I don't know about everyone else, but where I went to school going to library or communications center to get on a computer meant fighting to find an available machine, and then hoping it wasn't already fracked up.
If there is no access from the dorms, and everyone has to go to the library to get on the net, they're going to need to add a whole lot of public computers at the library -- I think it's a pretty safe bet that there are a good deal many more students using the internet from their dorm rooms than there are computers in the library.
So because the locks and ignition use RFID, you assume it is of the open and insecure variety, even though highly secure RFID devices using strong encryption are available, and because you don't know how they prevent rogue signals (which as I read it only control the lights, turn indicators, etc, NOT the steering, acceleration, or braking), you assume that they must be doing nothing to prevent such signals.
Someone hasn't thought this through. Someone indeed. You.
Yes! The people of Sweden should have hidden the evidence that they were even making a phone calls! By prearranging a secret means of communication with each and every party they might ever conceivable want to contact! But they didn't! They were asking for it!
Or the best mixed metaphor ever --
"If we can hit that bullseye, all the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate."
I like phylogenetic (or cladistic) taxonomy as much as the next guy, but if you're going to make a statement like this you should at least acknowledge that you are using a different (and much newer) system of classification than the person you are "correcting."
Personally, I think phylogenetic taxonomy makes a hell of a lot more sense -- but we all learned alpha taxonomy in school, and that's very clearly what all those well meaning people are using.
Spouting off about how everybody has it all wrong without pointing out which taxonomy you are using doesn't make you look smarter than everyone -- it makes you look like a dimwit who doesn't grasp context.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics
Ha! I like it. I was reserving my last 10 percent for "I'm wrong and it's none of the above" but what the hell -- 10 percent chance she is thrown back in time.
Only I think it will be to the dark ages, where she will fight Deadites using her appropriately modifed Viper and her knowledge of gunpowder.
Probably because nobody believes she's dead. Maybe I'm still in denial, but I just don't buy it. After all that buildup about her destiny and crap I'm supposed to accept that said destiny was to fly into a storm and explode? I don't buy it. I put the odds at 50 percent chance of some future episode revealing a barely plausible explanation for how she ejected and was picked up by the cylon heavy raider (or similar deus ex machina), 30 percent of some mystical afterlife nonsense based on "god" or "the gods" followed by a resurrection, and 10 percent chance she wakes up in a pool of goo as one of the remaining 5 cylon models.
When I move from denial to bargaining, maybe we could start an online petition! Those ALWAYS work!
I'm a dragon, you insensitive clod!
And not only that, but of those who do have jobs that could be carried out over the net, how many people will actually choose to work from home when they've got frickin' bird flu? If I contract a disease with a 60 percent fatality rate, I think I'll be able to part with some accrued PTO and spend my time on something other than my job. Like say, trying not to die.
Where do you live? I'm just curious, because in my experience most stores will allow you to return anything for any reason at all within 30 days of purchase. Is this something that varies by region?
Not really. It doesn't really matter that in that particular case the defendant was convicted in both trials. The court ruled in its opinion that an offense and conspiracy to commit that offense are not the same offese for double jeapardy purposes. Even if they hadn't met the burden of proof in the first trial and gotten a conviction, the charge of conspiracy would still have been open for prosecution, as it is a separate offense.
Besides, it was only a "for example" intended to point out that double-jeapardy protection is very, very limited. It prevents you from being re-tried on the same charge, in the same jurisdiction. You can still be tried by the state and then by the feds for the same act, such as McVeigh was (convicted on both counts) or the officers that beat Rodney King (aquitted of assault by the state, then convicted by the feds of violating King's civil rights), and so on.
The fact that I am NOT a lawyer and don't memorize the details of individual cases does not imply that I am incorrect. I can still read.
Since IANAL, and clearly YANAL, Can one of the many people on slashdot who IS a lawyer please clear this up for us?
United States v Felix (1992).
Sorry for the lame post there, I bumped the submit button when I didn't mean to. I was going to say that in practice, it is the same here in the U.S. Despite double-jeapoardy, if they find new evidence that points to your guilt after you have been aquitted, they will take the new evidence and the existing evidence, and simply charge you with a technically different crime than they did the first time around. For example, if they fail to convict you of murder, then find new evidence, they may be able to prove "conspiracy to commit murder."
I would assume that if someone is "Not Proven" to be guilty, they could not be tried again unless new evidence is found
Listen, we're on the same side, and I think we're arguing just because we are considering the question from very different perspectives. When I said that it would not take much effort, I was making a statement about the level of technical difficulty involved, which is very close to none.
I apologize if I said it more snidely than I should have, but when you called it a "big management headache" to keep track of which songs were DRMed and which weren't, I instictively keyed to the actual development tasks (managing data, not managing people). And I said "development time" specifically to exclude QA and so on. It really is a very simple issue from a technical perspective -- and by the way, plenty of things more substantial than fixing typos do take less than an hour of development time.
As for other legal considerations, hey -- you're right. For all we know Apple has agreed to DRM everything in order to strike a deal with the big 4, even though the big 4 have no right to demand copy-protection on songs they don't own. I wouldn't be surprised by this, but it's a whole other discussion that I didn't want to get into -- I mean, what are the legal ramifications of striking a deal with party A to apply DRM to party B's property? Not my area of expertise.
The lawyering and writing of policies is par for the course in a large company. I'm sure some things would have to change, but it isn't as if the filing of releases and paperwork aren't already a part of the existing process, and it certainly isn't as if there is a separate resale agreement for every track or even every artist. I'm pretty sure it's per record label. Fact of the matter is that if Apple hadn't wanted to promote DRM for their own purposes, they could have built it from the beginning to add the DRM only where required. I know that there is way more involved than just building the system. . . but with my limited powers of guestimation, I don't see the difference in effort being substantial enough to warrant applying DRM to everything, rather than to only the music from the companies that have stipulated it.
Now does all this mean that Steve is absolutely lying? No -- I can't read his mind either. And on top of that, Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. aren't the same entity. All I'm trying to say is that there is some evidence to suggest (not prove, mind you) that he may not be sincere, and that I happen to doubt his sincerity.
If you want to take him at his word, that's fine. It's also a perfectly reasonable position. But please stop implying that doubting him is somehow unreasonable.
I love how folks are attacking Jobs for not doing the extra work to split out the DRM and non-DRM as a response to his call for removing DRM all together. If the goal is to remove DRM, managing both DRM and non-DRM is wasted man-hours.
So Steve says "Get rid of DRM" and the response is "Damn you Steve, why don't you do extra work and manage both DRM and non-DRM. The logic is baffling at best.
That's not what I or anyone is saying (and you know it). Getting rid of DRM altogether would be fantastic. The whole point of this tangent is that when Steve says it, I am skeptical of the notion that he means it sincerely. It makes him look good, as if he's being forced to use it by the copyright holders, but plenty of the tunes sold by iTunes store have DRM even though the copyright holder doesn't require it -- Apple puts the DRM on just the same.
Pointing out that it wouldn't be difficult to skip the DRM when it isn't required is a point that is being presented as evidence that Steve is either being less than forthright about his views, or being something of a hypocrite. It's not being presented as something that would be better than what he suggests.
So stop with the straw men.
Hence my disclaimer that I haven't seen the code, and inclusion of the qualifier "I can't imagine." I'm going to give Apple's developers enough credit to assume the codebase isn't total shit.
Whether the time for the fix is one man-hour or one month, the assertion that keeping track of which songs need DRM and which don't is somehow a monumental technical obstacle requiring a herculean effort to overcome is patently ridiculous.
That's a half-good point, and I'm gonna tip my hat (half way) and give you half of a "touche'" for it.
But it still isn't quite the same situation. When we used cassette tapes, we could play them in any cassette player we wanted, regardless of who manufactured it. A cassette was a cassette was a cassette. Our tapes became obsolete because technology changed, and offered us benefits that convinced us to switch to something newer -- cds gave us track by track access and an order of magnitude better quality -- and for a time the manufacturers all put out stereos that could play your cassettes or cds.
In the case of digital audio, the iTunes DRM songs can only be played in the player(s) produced by a single manufacturer, and are incompatible with any other. There is no fundamental difference in technology between a protected iTunes track and a track encoded with mp3, ogg, or whatever. The issue of whose device you can play it on is the only significant difference between a DRMed track and a non-DRMed one).
In short, your point about cassettes has to do with format lock-in. The issue with Apple's DRM is more about vendor lock in.
The average slashdotter is not the average consumer. What you just described is WAY too complicated for say, my sister. If you want to talk about those of us that know what we're doing, why even burn to a CD? Just visit the Hymn project and and download the appropriate tools.
But for most iPod owners, these things are arcane mysteries.
It wouldn't be remotely difficult at all. It isn't like they'd be keeping track of it with a chalk board and a system of post-it notes.
There is this thing called a "database" that the iTunes store almost certainly uses, and adding a new column to it for "DRM exempt or not" takes about as much effort farting after a good bowl of chili. Now I've never seen the code for the iTunes music store servers, but as a software engineer I can't imagine this taking more than an hour of development time.
Nor does the average matter. The statistic that would matter is this. . . what percentage of iPod owners have at least one track on their iPod that they purchased through the iTunes store? Because any iPod owner who has a single song from iTunes is "locked in" in the sense that they can't switch to a different device without giving up music they have already paid for.
Everything else is just a measure of how severely they are locked in, how much already-paid-for music it would cost them to switch. But even if the switching cost is to give up just one track that you already paid for -- lock in is lock in.
It's a distinction without a difference. There is no scenario under which Comcast's CEO is going to call up YouTube and demand that they pay or be throttled. That's not subtle enough.
They just want to set up a scenario under which anyone who doesn't pay is at a competetive disadvantage to anyone who does. They won't have to directly extort money from any specific company, because they will have succeeded in creating a scenario where everyone is extorted indirectly. The end result is the same -- you pay, or your traffic is degraded.
The evil brilliance of it is that it doesn't even matter if it is a competetor of yours that has bought priority treatment. If CNN.com buys optimal delivery, HomeDepot.com is degraded. It sets up a situation where your traffic gets worse and worse until you join the payers, no matter who you -- it's a whole new cost of doing business, pay for your connection, and then pay to not have your traffic de-prioritized.
You seem to be missing the point that charging providers for "optimal delivery" IS throttling down the bandwidth for anyone who doesn't pony up. The two ways of phrasing it are just different ways of saying the same thing. The "optimal delivery" given to those who pay isn't the result of some magic bandwidth that appears out of nowhere, it comes from prioritizing those packets over all the other packets.
Metaphor: If the network was like a system of roads, "optimal delivery" would describe what we give to emergency vehicles with their sirens and flashing lights on -- they get through, everyone else has to pull over and stop to let them by.
So if you haven't paid for optimal delivery, your packets are being slowed down. And the more providers who shell out for optimal delivery, the more it slows down the traffic of everyone who doesn't. And when at last EVERYONE is paying for optimal delivery, then what? We're back to where we started, except that now everyone is paying, and they can introduce super-duper-optimal-delivery, where your packets are prioritized over those from providers who merely paid for "regular-optimal" delivery.
Fun!
That's right on. I've had plenty of ideas that were later patented, but unless you actually plan to develop and market the idea yourself, it isn't even worth seeking a patent. The minimum fee to have a qualified patent lawyer write up an application that sufficiently describes the idea and protects all the possible variations of it with well worded claims is about 12K. (This from my buddy the patent lawyer).
You can write one up yourself, but unless you are really damn good at legalese, it will have holes in it that any potential competetor could drive a truck through. And if you pay the money to have it done by a law firm, you will never see that money again unless someone else develops your idea and you sue them and win -- which can be hard, since you never developed the idea yourself and they likely have a team of corporate lawyers.