PCSX2 doesn't really take advantage of more than 2 cores, what it cares about is single threaded performance. And Shadow of the Colossus is one of the most CPU intensive games to emulate.
It isn't the space that's the issue, its the cost of laying the fiber or cable. If you have to close a road, dig it up, and then repave it when you are done, it doesn't cost that much more to lay a 1 foot pipe than it does a fiber optic cable. You point out that there are multiple overlapping cell providers, but what about land line phone service? You don't have multiple phone companies all running lines to your house, you have 1 company that is required by law to make their lines available to multiple long distance providers.
Sorry I don't have time to fully address all of the issues you have raised, but I can only spend so much time on./ at work:)
I think the main issue on which we disagree is the number of book that will be scanned in and run through OCR software, and on the quality of the resulting ebooks. Since downloading A Song of Ice and fire, I have downloaded pirated copies of 40ish books, and have been able to find copies of almost every book I have looked, by a wide variety of authors. Usually I can to find an html copy, with the formating and any images still intact. Typos tend to be pretty rare, on the order of one every hundred pages worth of text.
The reason why book piracy is not yet very common is that, as you said, most people would rather not read a book on their computer. But when (if) ebooks readers improve enough that ebooks become mainstream, I don't see how you will be able to prevent people from using them to read the same pirated books the can downloaded right now. Even if all of the official ebook readers (the ones that can read the DRM protected ebooks) do not allow you to read arbitrary files, a PDA still will.
>>And how much would it cost to do that? And what would be the incentive?
How much time and effort do people spending cracking software?
>>And what happens when your copy contains a watermark which allows the authorities to trace the cracked copy straight back to you?
How do you plan to watermark plain text?
>>Your "crack" could be done just as easily with dead tree books - it's just as infeasible
Except that it isn't infeasible at all, it happens all of the time. The latest harry potter book, for example, was scanned, OCR'd, and on the internet within 24 hours of being released.
>>DRM doesn't have to work against every single attack, it only has to be more expensive to crack than the value of the content.
Except that once a single person, anywhere in the world, breaks that DRM and post the unprotected content to the internet, the game is over.
DRM on ebooks serves no useful purpose, but it does serve to prevent people from buying them. Example:
I am a huge fan of George R. R. Martins A Song of Ice and Fire series. When a friend who I had loaned the books to asked me a question about the series I couldn't answer, I decided that I would buy the ebooks. Unfortunately for me, I discovered that I couldn't get them in a format I could read on Linux. So instead, I turned to my favorite p2p file sharing network, and within 10 minutes had all 3 books in html format on my hard drive.
That is not entirely untrue. Most cards will not allow you to actually change their MAC address, but since it is up to the OS to read that address and broadcast it, it doesn't really matter.
Without even getting into the logic of your post, the entire thing was based of the idea that IBM is on a fishing expedition, which you have made no effort whatsoever to try and prove.
Hope you didn't visit The Register yesterday with your fully patched Win 2k or XP SP1 machine yesterday, or you might just be infected (no, fully patched SP1 machine is not an oxymoron, SP1 is still a supported OS).
Security is just a side benefit for me, the main reason I use Firefox (instead of Opera) is the extensions. Adblock, FlashBlock, BugMeNot, SpellBound, GmailNotifier, SA Last Read (incredably usefull extension for members of Something Awful), etc. With a little bit of work, Firefox can be made to work exactly the way you would like.
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PCSX2 doesn't really take advantage of more than 2 cores, what it cares about is single threaded performance. And Shadow of the Colossus is one of the most CPU intensive games to emulate.
It isn't the space that's the issue, its the cost of laying the fiber or cable. If you have to close a road, dig it up, and then repave it when you are done, it doesn't cost that much more to lay a 1 foot pipe than it does a fiber optic cable. You point out that there are multiple overlapping cell providers, but what about land line phone service? You don't have multiple phone companies all running lines to your house, you have 1 company that is required by law to make their lines available to multiple long distance providers.
From the article: "Gutierrez was chief information officer for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services (HHS)"
I think the main issue on which we disagree is the number of book that will be scanned in and run through OCR software, and on the quality of the resulting ebooks. Since downloading A Song of Ice and fire, I have downloaded pirated copies of 40ish books, and have been able to find copies of almost every book I have looked, by a wide variety of authors. Usually I can to find an html copy, with the formating and any images still intact. Typos tend to be pretty rare, on the order of one every hundred pages worth of text.
The reason why book piracy is not yet very common is that, as you said, most people would rather not read a book on their computer. But when (if) ebooks readers improve enough that ebooks become mainstream, I don't see how you will be able to prevent people from using them to read the same pirated books the can downloaded right now. Even if all of the official ebook readers (the ones that can read the DRM protected ebooks) do not allow you to read arbitrary files, a PDA still will.
How much time and effort do people spending cracking software?
>>And what happens when your copy contains a watermark which allows the authorities to trace the cracked copy straight back to you?
How do you plan to watermark plain text?
>>Your "crack" could be done just as easily with dead tree books - it's just as infeasible
Except that it isn't infeasible at all, it happens all of the time. The latest harry potter book, for example, was scanned, OCR'd, and on the internet within 24 hours of being released.
>>DRM doesn't have to work against every single attack, it only has to be more expensive to crack than the value of the content.
Except that once a single person, anywhere in the world, breaks that DRM and post the unprotected content to the internet, the game is over.
DRM on ebooks serves no useful purpose, but it does serve to prevent people from buying them. Example:
I am a huge fan of George R. R. Martins A Song of Ice and Fire series. When a friend who I had loaned the books to asked me a question about the series I couldn't answer, I decided that I would buy the ebooks. Unfortunately for me, I discovered that I couldn't get them in a format I could read on Linux. So instead, I turned to my favorite p2p file sharing network, and within 10 minutes had all 3 books in html format on my hard drive.
I just checked, and that is indeed exactly what it does.
That is not entirely untrue. Most cards will not allow you to actually change their MAC address, but since it is up to the OS to read that address and broadcast it, it doesn't really matter.
This is fixed on the trunk, so the issue should finally go away when 1.1 comes out.
Without even getting into the logic of your post, the entire thing was based of the idea that IBM is on a fishing expedition, which you have made no effort whatsoever to try and prove.
Security is just a side benefit for me, the main reason I use Firefox (instead of Opera) is the extensions. Adblock, FlashBlock, BugMeNot, SpellBound, GmailNotifier, SA Last Read (incredably usefull extension for members of Something Awful), etc. With a little bit of work, Firefox can be made to work exactly the way you would like.