Do politicians ever take pay cuts? Instead of cutting pay for the useful people, I'd rather them (like that would ever happen) cut pay for the nearly useless people.
In the UK, yes. Significant paycuts.
Much more is saved by reducing the number of labour-introduced quangos (the word seems to have no official translation, I think "pig troughs for friends of the party" would be a good attempt). The question was asked "who will do all their work when they abolish these quangos" with the counter-question "and who will notice if it doesn't get done". There is also a start in the cuts on British benefits madness, where decent working people are financially worse off because they hold a job, compared to some lazy scrounger who lives on benefits. Plus random cuts for "rich" people. Apparantly a family living in London with 3 children and a single earner making £44,000 a year before taxes is "rich".
The UK is going down the shitter fast. It has been mis-managed for decades and there simply aren't any reserves left. There is nothing left to sell off, no maintenance that can be delayed any further without the country falling apart.
I really liked your analysis of the British economy. However, living there, and seeing what is actually going on right now, I am actually getting quite optimistic, and find your opinion not founded in any reality.
While they did ultimately tell him that they wanted it back, what if he had thrown it out before then? Could they have held him responsible for the loss of their property when they never informed him in the first place that he was not supposed to discard it?
Interesting question. It was the property of the FBI, and they kept track of it. Destroying it or throwing it in the trash would make you liable for replacement. You can't destroy someone else's property without their permission (and not telling you that you can't isn't giving you permission). I think taking it off the car and putting it into any reasonably safe location where they can pick it up would be fine.
if they (or anyone) installs something on MY property without my permission I consider that an act of personal invasion, almost personal war. this is crossing a line WAY too big even for this 'we dont care, we dont have to' government.
In a personal war between you and the FBI, who do you think would end up the winner? But that's not the question that should concern you, which would be: What would it cost you?
Now THAT I would love to see make it to court. The anonymous party (FBI) "abandoned" or disposed of the device. There's no way one should know that it should be preserved or even that it's owned by the "good guys."
The FBI was actively tracking the location of the device. So any claim that the device was either lost or abandoned is pure nonsense. "Lost" implies that the owner doesn't know where it is. The FBI knew. "Abandoned" implies that the owner didn't want it anymore. The FBI did want it.
Couple that with mandatory clauses in all auto-insurance policies that render the policy null and void if an accident is related to texting-while-driving. I'm sure the insurance companies would love that, and maybe after a few high-profile bankruptcies and ruined lives people will start to take this seriously.
Careful. Third party liability insurance is there to protect those that get damaged by a driver. So the insurance shouldn't be void, it should pay out to the victims but with the provision that they can recover the money from the person responsible. I suppose that would be the situation if you cause an accident while seriously drunk as well.
We have seen plenty of specific HDCP breaks that can decrypt a limited set of movies; this is the general break, which does not care much about the HW and firmware (optical drive) details.
Still people who don't understand what HDCP does. It has nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with movies. It encrypts whatever your graphics card displays, and decrypts it on the monitor. If Windows bluescreens then the blue screen will dutifully be encrypted between your PC and the monitor.
The way I understand tax law of various countries (UK included), is that every country OTHER than the US, does NOT tax it's citizens based on foreign income.
You've got that quite wrong.
In the UK, income tax is calculated by finding your income world wide, calculating the correct amount of tax for that income according to UK law, and subtracting income tax paid in certain countries that the UK have tax agreements with.
In Germany, income tax is calculated by finding your income world wide, calculating what percentage of that income would have to be paid in tax according to German law, then finding your total income in Germany, and charging the tax rate (percentage) calculated for world wide income on the money earned in Germany.
That's the only two countries where I know the tax laws, and in both these cases you are wrong.
Fact is that your mobile phone will send a stronger signal if it notices that the cell tower is far away, so that the signal can be received there. So if you vary the distance from the cell tower, radiation from the tower will get less when you move further away, but radiation from your phone will get more. There is an optimal spot in between where the total radiation hitting you is minimised.
I would assume that this optimal point is less than 1500 feet from the tower. If that is the case, then anyone using their phone in these "protected" places will receive more radiation.
I thought with the PyStar case that PyStar had actually bought the copies of the OS off of the shelf, so Apple couldn't hit them for the full cost of the software. They ended up having to go with a much less effective "breaking the EULA on 750 copies of the software" case instead, which is why the judgement in that part was so low. Of course Apple was able to nail them with the DMCA violations instead, which have much sharper teeth because it was written by the recording industry.
Please look up the details on Groklaw. Starting with the name, which is "Psystar", there is about nothing that is correct in what you say.
Case 1: Psystar buys 750 boxes with MacOS X, unpacks them, installs each DVD on a Macintosh, and sells the Macs: Legal.
Case 2: Psystar buys 750 boxes with MacOS X, unpacks _one_, installs the DVD on 750 Macs, and sells the Macs: Illegal, but Apple won't complain.
Case 3: Psystar buys 750 boxes with MacOS X, unpacks them, installs each DVD on a Psystar computer and sells them: Illegal because the EULA doesn't allow it, so this is coyright infringement. Important: It is not "breaking the EULA 750 times", it is 750 times copyright infringement.
Case 4: Psystar buys 750 boxes with MacOS X, unpacks _one_, installs the DVD on 750 Psystar computers, and sells the them: Illegal and copyright infringement. The EULA doesn't even matter.
(4) is what Psystar did. Their copyright infringement didn't even have anything to do with the EULA.
The reason that this was only $30,000 is that the fine is $750 to $30,000 per work infringed (and it was only one work), independent of the value of that work. There is another limit of $150,000 for "willful infringement", and apparently Apple didn't see the infringement as "willful", while the RIAA sees putting a file into a sharing folder as "willful". In this case, Apple could have asked for actual damages, likely more than $30,000, but couldn't be bothered because Psystar is broke anyway. If Dell sold a million computers with illegal copies of MacOS X, statutory damages would again be limited to $30,000 ($150,000 if "willful"); in that case Apple would go for actual damages. The whole affair just demonstrates how far off the RIAA is with their demands.
We all know the girl was a bit stupid ("I didn't know it was illegal"? Seriously? That's your defense?) What should be focused on is the judgement...$750 per track? What's bad is that's on the low-end compared to some of their other lawsuits:/
I'll give you another lawsuit: Apple Inc. vs. Psystar. Psystar was found guilty of making about 750 illegal copies of MacOS X and was ordered to pay $30,000 for copyright infringement. That is just $40 for each copy of software that retailed for $129. (There was a small matter of DMCA violation as well, but that wouldn't be the case here). And you think $750 for a copy of a $0.99 song is anywhere near reasonable?
There was a recent case where the judge overruled the jury on the grounds that anything over $2,250 is so extraordinarily wrong that the judge cannot possibly allow it and has a duty to overrule the jury. That doesn't mean that $2,250 would be right, it means that it is not so extraordinarily wrong that the judge is forced to overrule it, he usually has to let decisions of the jury stand even if he disagrees with them. Unless they are so unworldly bad that they cannot be allowed.
Apple couldn't use the DMCA against Psystar because OS X isn't DRMed/copy protected
Walk over to Groklaw and check the court rulings. And of course it is copy protected; it won't run on a non-Apple computer unless you do some clever things like changing EFI to simulate a chip containing a 64 bit code that is missing on your non-Apple motherboard.
There may be some Chinese manufacturers putting out a few cheaper devices, but anything the average consumer will buy at Best Buy still has to license HDCP from Intel.
I thought about that, and it doesn't seem to be correct. I don't think that creating an HDCP compatible device that cannot be used to circumvent any DRM, like a TV that can display HDCP content, or a Blu Ray player that outputs HDCP encrypted video, without having an HDCP license, would be covered by the DMCA.
Someone will leak the C code for a HDCP decryptor into pastebin (ala DeCSS) and everybody will be happy (except for intel and the copy providers).
It seems you haven't figured out yet what HDCP does. C code is useless. Someone could release the complete plans for a connector that accepts HDCP protected DVI or HDMI on one end and outputs unprotected DVI or HDMI on the other end.
If they win expect more "paper tiger" encryption and content protection systems. The teeth isn't the weak flawed crypto. The teeth is in the lawsuit potential.
Congratulations for figuring that out. Should be obvious, shouldn't it? Unbreakable DRM doesn't need legal protection. Only breakable DRM needs it.
That's why Apple could use the DMCA against Psystar, even though every decent hacker knows or can find out on the internet how to install MacOS X on a non-Apple computer. I think Psystar was ordered to pay $2,500 per DMCA violation (each computer shipped with MacOS X installed) and $30,000 total for copyright infringement (they copied _one_ program a few hundred times, so that turned out to be cheap compared to file sharers who copied two dozen songs between zero and some greater number of times and were ordered to pay more for a smaller number of a song worth $0.99).
It makes no sense for a manufactured part to work like this from a business perspective. The per-unit cost to produce these parts must be enough to cover full capability (or else they are selling at a loss, which is very sketchy to do). They can deliver the full function at the same price point, and in a 'theoretical' competitive market, this means they would be forced to do so by competition. The fact they can arbitrarily bump up the price on the same exact part by 50 bucks and get away with it is an indication of either bad business judgement or a very broken microprocessor market.
Assume there is a million people willing to pay $100 for a certain product, and half a million willing to pay $200 for a better version. Sounds quite reasonable. Now where the software market and apparently the semiconductor market are different from other markets is that a lot of cost is in developing, but actually producing the cheaper item would cost only very little less than the more expensive item. Actually, the savings from producing only one item is so much that producing 1.5 million expensive items might be cheaper than producing the mix. _And_ it is cheap and easy to disable functionality in the expensive item, and making that reversible.
And now lets say development + production cost are $130 per item if you produce 1.5 million. So what should that manufacturer produce?
They could sell the better item for $100 and sell 1.5 million - making a loss. They could sell the better item for $200 and sell half a million - making a loss because with half a million says they don't get back the development cost. Or they could sell 1 million cheaper items for $100 and half a million better items for $200 and make a profit.
Each implementation of the compression algorithm has its nuances. If the majority of an MP3 looks like it was compressed by the iTunes implementation, but then there's a range of output iTunes would not generate (particularly if the input file is known), that's very suspect.
Record same LPs to uncompressed audio files. That recording will be pretty unique. Encrypt your data any way you like, then store the encrypted data in the lowest bit of the 16 bit samples. Compress with Apple Lossless or FLAC or whatever you have.
...except that you did buy an i7, it's just that they didn't tell you about it. Just because a feature wasn't advertised doesn't mean I didn't pay for it when I bought the hardware, or that the price I paid didn't include the cost of manufacturing that extra feature. You shouldn't be going around critiquing other peoples' analogies if you're going to liken activating hardware that you've already paid for to magically teleporting new hardware into your computer...
So here are three scenarios:
1. You have a choice of buying an i5 for $200, or an i7 for $300.
2. You have a choice of buying an i7 that pretends to be an i5 for $200, or an i7 for $300.
3. You have a choice of buying an i7 that pretends to be an i5 for $200, or an i7 for $300. If you pay $200, you can later for a payment of $100 turn it into an i7.
For me, choices (1) and (2) are identical, but choice (3) is without any doubt better. There is no situation where I am worse off than with choice 1 or 2, and in some situations I'm better off.
Which raises the question of why Skyhook is not suing both Apple and Google.
This case is clearly about anti-competitive behaviour. Skyhook alleges that two companies breached their contracts with Skyhook because Google forced them to. So it didn't matter whether Skyhook's offerings were good and worth their money or not, they were prevented from competing. That's what "anti-competitive" is about: If there is a situation where it doesn't matter how good your product is, that is an anti-competitive situation.
In the Apple case, Skyhook is trying to sell their services to Apple. So does Google. Apple has the right to find out which one is better / cheaper and decide accordingly; both Google and Skyhook should try to be better than the other, and that is what we call competition. Apple can also calculate how much it would cost to do the things themselves, and if it is cheaper, they can build their own stuff. That is also competition. Now if Google said to Apple "you can't have Google maps if you use Skyhook", that is anti-competitive. If Google said "Google location services are ten percent cheaper than Skyhook", that is competitive.
They wouldn't be able to use the Market though, because they can't guarantee that all applications will work with your non-standard configuration. Since your apps may not be compatible, they don't want you to have access to their market because it would likely end up tarnishing Google's reputation, not the assholes who designed an incompatible system.
Isn't that exactly the argument that Intel used against AMD? And look where it got them. "We don't know if AMDs implementation of SSE are compatible with ours, therefore our high performance libraries will go through the slowest code path we could think of when they are run on an AMD processor". And maybe you are old enough to remember the argument that Microsoft used to kill DRDos.
The definition of anti-competitive is that you prevent someone from competing, that is you make it impossible for them to sell their products no matter how good (or how bad) they are. Google prevents Skyhook from installing their software on Android phones; Skyhook's software _might_ be incompatible, or it might work better to Google's APIs than Google's own software, but it doesn't matter, the OEM won't install it because if they do, they lose access to lots of other Google software. And Google has the power to do that, because they are in control of Android and valuable extensions to Android that the OEM's want.
Well, that's what you have a court case for, to find out what the truth is.
f the HDCP master keys are widely published, then HDCP no longer effectively protects access to the work, because simple methods of copying despite the protection are well known and readily available, e.g. the protection is ineffective...
You are wrong. That was for example taken into consideration in Apple vs. Psystar. Just because it is known how to crack some encryption doesn't make it not effective encryption. The whole point of the DMCA is to give the encryption _legal_ protection so that the encrypter isn't forced to enter an arms race with the cracker. Devices that can get around HDCP encryption will be forever illegal.
It seems these guys don't know what HDCP actually does.
With the HDCP master key, one can build hardware that decrypts HDCP encrypted signals (that is the easy and well documented part) and is accepted by the HDCP encoder on the other side (that is the hard part). You still need rather sophisticated hardware. Not that easily built by your average software hacker.
That in turn allows you to record the signal coming out of your video card or Bluray player. That's about 200 MB per second. I don't have any hardware lying around that can record the output of a DVI card for two hours and neither does your average slashdot poster.
So this doesn't allow _you_ to backup your Blu ray discs. It will allow some rather sophisticated pirate organisation to pirate Blu ray discs, and they will produce Blu ray discs that again you cannot copy. So you as the end user won't gain anything from this.
The day is coming where I can finally hook up my media center to my TV without having the sound or video go out because HDCP decided it didn't like the fact the computer goes to sleep.
Wrong. It means someone can build a connector that lets you connect your video card to a TV without HDCP support. But if that connector doesn't like your computer going to sleep, then you are just as stuffed as you are now.
On a properly working HDCP system, the computer would check about 64 times per second whether the encryption is still working and that graphics card and TV are in sync. Not to keep you from turning encryption off, but to make sure that the signal is properly decrypted because otherwise you see just snow. If the graphics card comes back from sleep, it should realise very quickly that something is wrong. In that case it should turn off the signal for a second, reset the HDCP connectors on the graphics card and on the TV, and turn encryption on again. So the worst you should get is snow for a tenth of a second, black screen for a second, and then a correct signal. What you see is either the graphics card or the TV connector not working correctly. If that connector that could now be built doesn't work better than the TV connector, or if it is the fault of the graphics card in the first place, there will be no improvement.
What harm does it do to a paying customer? It makes it hard for me to rip a DVD I OWN and put it on my personal media player.
No, HDCP doesn't make ripping your DVDs any harder. It has nothing to do with that. HDCP encrypts the signal between the output of your graphics card and the input of the monitor. HDCP doesn't affect you in any way - except when you don't have an HDCP compatible monitor, and then it doesn't stop you only from ripping your DVD, it stops you from displaying that DVD at all.
There is of course copy protection on your DVD that makes life hard for honest people - but that is not HDCP.
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Do politicians ever take pay cuts? Instead of cutting pay for the useful people, I'd rather them (like that would ever happen) cut pay for the nearly useless people.
In the UK, yes. Significant paycuts.
Much more is saved by reducing the number of labour-introduced quangos (the word seems to have no official translation, I think "pig troughs for friends of the party" would be a good attempt). The question was asked "who will do all their work when they abolish these quangos" with the counter-question "and who will notice if it doesn't get done". There is also a start in the cuts on British benefits madness, where decent working people are financially worse off because they hold a job, compared to some lazy scrounger who lives on benefits. Plus random cuts for "rich" people. Apparantly a family living in London with 3 children and a single earner making £44,000 a year before taxes is "rich".
The UK is going down the shitter fast. It has been mis-managed for decades and there simply aren't any reserves left. There is nothing left to sell off, no maintenance that can be delayed any further without the country falling apart.
I really liked your analysis of the British economy. However, living there, and seeing what is actually going on right now, I am actually getting quite optimistic, and find your opinion not founded in any reality.
While they did ultimately tell him that they wanted it back, what if he had thrown it out before then? Could they have held him responsible for the loss of their property when they never informed him in the first place that he was not supposed to discard it?
Interesting question. It was the property of the FBI, and they kept track of it. Destroying it or throwing it in the trash would make you liable for replacement. You can't destroy someone else's property without their permission (and not telling you that you can't isn't giving you permission). I think taking it off the car and putting it into any reasonably safe location where they can pick it up would be fine.
if they (or anyone) installs something on MY property without my permission I consider that an act of personal invasion, almost personal war. this is crossing a line WAY too big even for this 'we dont care, we dont have to' government.
In a personal war between you and the FBI, who do you think would end up the winner? But that's not the question that should concern you, which would be: What would it cost you?
Now THAT I would love to see make it to court. The anonymous party (FBI) "abandoned" or disposed of the device. There's no way one should know that it should be preserved or even that it's owned by the "good guys."
The FBI was actively tracking the location of the device. So any claim that the device was either lost or abandoned is pure nonsense. "Lost" implies that the owner doesn't know where it is. The FBI knew. "Abandoned" implies that the owner didn't want it anymore. The FBI did want it.
Couple that with mandatory clauses in all auto-insurance policies that render the policy null and void if an accident is related to texting-while-driving. I'm sure the insurance companies would love that, and maybe after a few high-profile bankruptcies and ruined lives people will start to take this seriously.
Careful. Third party liability insurance is there to protect those that get damaged by a driver. So the insurance shouldn't be void, it should pay out to the victims but with the provision that they can recover the money from the person responsible. I suppose that would be the situation if you cause an accident while seriously drunk as well.
We have seen plenty of specific HDCP breaks that can decrypt a limited set of movies; this is the general break, which does not care much about the HW and firmware (optical drive) details.
Still people who don't understand what HDCP does. It has nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with movies. It encrypts whatever your graphics card displays, and decrypts it on the monitor. If Windows bluescreens then the blue screen will dutifully be encrypted between your PC and the monitor.
The way I understand tax law of various countries (UK included), is that every country OTHER than the US, does NOT tax it's citizens based on foreign income.
You've got that quite wrong.
In the UK, income tax is calculated by finding your income world wide, calculating the correct amount of tax for that income according to UK law, and subtracting income tax paid in certain countries that the UK have tax agreements with.
In Germany, income tax is calculated by finding your income world wide, calculating what percentage of that income would have to be paid in tax according to German law, then finding your total income in Germany, and charging the tax rate (percentage) calculated for world wide income on the money earned in Germany.
That's the only two countries where I know the tax laws, and in both these cases you are wrong.
If you don't already have a Mac, iOS requires Apple hardware for development.
Another good reason to develop for iOS.
Fact is that your mobile phone will send a stronger signal if it notices that the cell tower is far away, so that the signal can be received there. So if you vary the distance from the cell tower, radiation from the tower will get less when you move further away, but radiation from your phone will get more. There is an optimal spot in between where the total radiation hitting you is minimised.
I would assume that this optimal point is less than 1500 feet from the tower. If that is the case, then anyone using their phone in these "protected" places will receive more radiation.
I thought with the PyStar case that PyStar had actually bought the copies of the OS off of the shelf, so Apple couldn't hit them for the full cost of the software. They ended up having to go with a much less effective "breaking the EULA on 750 copies of the software" case instead, which is why the judgement in that part was so low. Of course Apple was able to nail them with the DMCA violations instead, which have much sharper teeth because it was written by the recording industry.
Please look up the details on Groklaw. Starting with the name, which is "Psystar", there is about nothing that is correct in what you say.
Case 1: Psystar buys 750 boxes with MacOS X, unpacks them, installs each DVD on a Macintosh, and sells the Macs: Legal.
Case 2: Psystar buys 750 boxes with MacOS X, unpacks _one_, installs the DVD on 750 Macs, and sells the Macs: Illegal, but Apple won't complain.
Case 3: Psystar buys 750 boxes with MacOS X, unpacks them, installs each DVD on a Psystar computer and sells them: Illegal because the EULA doesn't allow it, so this is coyright infringement. Important: It is not "breaking the EULA 750 times", it is 750 times copyright infringement.
Case 4: Psystar buys 750 boxes with MacOS X, unpacks _one_, installs the DVD on 750 Psystar computers, and sells the them: Illegal and copyright infringement. The EULA doesn't even matter.
(4) is what Psystar did. Their copyright infringement didn't even have anything to do with the EULA.
The reason that this was only $30,000 is that the fine is $750 to $30,000 per work infringed (and it was only one work), independent of the value of that work. There is another limit of $150,000 for "willful infringement", and apparently Apple didn't see the infringement as "willful", while the RIAA sees putting a file into a sharing folder as "willful". In this case, Apple could have asked for actual damages, likely more than $30,000, but couldn't be bothered because Psystar is broke anyway. If Dell sold a million computers with illegal copies of MacOS X, statutory damages would again be limited to $30,000 ($150,000 if "willful"); in that case Apple would go for actual damages. The whole affair just demonstrates how far off the RIAA is with their demands.
We all know the girl was a bit stupid ("I didn't know it was illegal"? Seriously? That's your defense?) What should be focused on is the judgement...$750 per track? What's bad is that's on the low-end compared to some of their other lawsuits :/
I'll give you another lawsuit: Apple Inc. vs. Psystar. Psystar was found guilty of making about 750 illegal copies of MacOS X and was ordered to pay $30,000 for copyright infringement. That is just $40 for each copy of software that retailed for $129. (There was a small matter of DMCA violation as well, but that wouldn't be the case here). And you think $750 for a copy of a $0.99 song is anywhere near reasonable?
There was a recent case where the judge overruled the jury on the grounds that anything over $2,250 is so extraordinarily wrong that the judge cannot possibly allow it and has a duty to overrule the jury. That doesn't mean that $2,250 would be right, it means that it is not so extraordinarily wrong that the judge is forced to overrule it, he usually has to let decisions of the jury stand even if he disagrees with them. Unless they are so unworldly bad that they cannot be allowed.
Apple couldn't use the DMCA against Psystar because OS X isn't DRMed/copy protected
Walk over to Groklaw and check the court rulings. And of course it is copy protected; it won't run on a non-Apple computer unless you do some clever things like changing EFI to simulate a chip containing a 64 bit code that is missing on your non-Apple motherboard.
Or just check this: http://www.pcworld.com/article/182218/apple_wins_court_victory_over_mac_clone_maker_psystar.html
There may be some Chinese manufacturers putting out a few cheaper devices, but anything the average consumer will buy at Best Buy still has to license HDCP from Intel.
I thought about that, and it doesn't seem to be correct. I don't think that creating an HDCP compatible device that cannot be used to circumvent any DRM, like a TV that can display HDCP content, or a Blu Ray player that outputs HDCP encrypted video, without having an HDCP license, would be covered by the DMCA.
Someone will leak the C code for a HDCP decryptor into pastebin (ala DeCSS) and everybody will be happy (except for intel and the copy providers).
It seems you haven't figured out yet what HDCP does. C code is useless. Someone could release the complete plans for a connector that accepts HDCP protected DVI or HDMI on one end and outputs unprotected DVI or HDMI on the other end.
If they win expect more "paper tiger" encryption and content protection systems. The teeth isn't the weak flawed crypto. The teeth is in the lawsuit potential.
Congratulations for figuring that out. Should be obvious, shouldn't it? Unbreakable DRM doesn't need legal protection. Only breakable DRM needs it.
That's why Apple could use the DMCA against Psystar, even though every decent hacker knows or can find out on the internet how to install MacOS X on a non-Apple computer. I think Psystar was ordered to pay $2,500 per DMCA violation (each computer shipped with MacOS X installed) and $30,000 total for copyright infringement (they copied _one_ program a few hundred times, so that turned out to be cheap compared to file sharers who copied two dozen songs between zero and some greater number of times and were ordered to pay more for a smaller number of a song worth $0.99).
It makes no sense for a manufactured part to work like this from a business perspective. The per-unit cost to produce these parts must be enough to cover full capability (or else they are selling at a loss, which is very sketchy to do). They can deliver the full function at the same price point, and in a 'theoretical' competitive market, this means they would be forced to do so by competition. The fact they can arbitrarily bump up the price on the same exact part by 50 bucks and get away with it is an indication of either bad business judgement or a very broken microprocessor market.
Assume there is a million people willing to pay $100 for a certain product, and half a million willing to pay $200 for a better version. Sounds quite reasonable. Now where the software market and apparently the semiconductor market are different from other markets is that a lot of cost is in developing, but actually producing the cheaper item would cost only very little less than the more expensive item. Actually, the savings from producing only one item is so much that producing 1.5 million expensive items might be cheaper than producing the mix. _And_ it is cheap and easy to disable functionality in the expensive item, and making that reversible.
And now lets say development + production cost are $130 per item if you produce 1.5 million. So what should that manufacturer produce?
They could sell the better item for $100 and sell 1.5 million - making a loss. They could sell the better item for $200 and sell half a million - making a loss because with half a million says they don't get back the development cost. Or they could sell 1 million cheaper items for $100 and half a million better items for $200 and make a profit.
Each implementation of the compression algorithm has its nuances. If the majority of an MP3 looks like it was compressed by the iTunes implementation, but then there's a range of output iTunes would not generate (particularly if the input file is known), that's very suspect.
Record same LPs to uncompressed audio files. That recording will be pretty unique. Encrypt your data any way you like, then store the encrypted data in the lowest bit of the 16 bit samples. Compress with Apple Lossless or FLAC or whatever you have.
...except that you did buy an i7, it's just that they didn't tell you about it. Just because a feature wasn't advertised doesn't mean I didn't pay for it when I bought the hardware, or that the price I paid didn't include the cost of manufacturing that extra feature. You shouldn't be going around critiquing other peoples' analogies if you're going to liken activating hardware that you've already paid for to magically teleporting new hardware into your computer...
So here are three scenarios:
1. You have a choice of buying an i5 for $200, or an i7 for $300.
2. You have a choice of buying an i7 that pretends to be an i5 for $200, or an i7 for $300.
3. You have a choice of buying an i7 that pretends to be an i5 for $200, or an i7 for $300. If you pay $200, you can later for a payment of $100 turn it into an i7.
For me, choices (1) and (2) are identical, but choice (3) is without any doubt better. There is no situation where I am worse off than with choice 1 or 2, and in some situations I'm better off.
Which raises the question of why Skyhook is not suing both Apple and Google.
This case is clearly about anti-competitive behaviour. Skyhook alleges that two companies breached their contracts with Skyhook because Google forced them to. So it didn't matter whether Skyhook's offerings were good and worth their money or not, they were prevented from competing. That's what "anti-competitive" is about: If there is a situation where it doesn't matter how good your product is, that is an anti-competitive situation.
In the Apple case, Skyhook is trying to sell their services to Apple. So does Google. Apple has the right to find out which one is better / cheaper and decide accordingly; both Google and Skyhook should try to be better than the other, and that is what we call competition. Apple can also calculate how much it would cost to do the things themselves, and if it is cheaper, they can build their own stuff. That is also competition. Now if Google said to Apple "you can't have Google maps if you use Skyhook", that is anti-competitive. If Google said "Google location services are ten percent cheaper than Skyhook", that is competitive.
They wouldn't be able to use the Market though, because they can't guarantee that all applications will work with your non-standard configuration. Since your apps may not be compatible, they don't want you to have access to their market because it would likely end up tarnishing Google's reputation, not the assholes who designed an incompatible system.
Isn't that exactly the argument that Intel used against AMD? And look where it got them. "We don't know if AMDs implementation of SSE are compatible with ours, therefore our high performance libraries will go through the slowest code path we could think of when they are run on an AMD processor". And maybe you are old enough to remember the argument that Microsoft used to kill DRDos.
The definition of anti-competitive is that you prevent someone from competing, that is you make it impossible for them to sell their products no matter how good (or how bad) they are. Google prevents Skyhook from installing their software on Android phones; Skyhook's software _might_ be incompatible, or it might work better to Google's APIs than Google's own software, but it doesn't matter, the OEM won't install it because if they do, they lose access to lots of other Google software. And Google has the power to do that, because they are in control of Android and valuable extensions to Android that the OEM's want.
Well, that's what you have a court case for, to find out what the truth is.
f the HDCP master keys are widely published, then HDCP no longer effectively protects access to the work, because simple methods of copying despite the protection are well known and readily available, e.g. the protection is ineffective...
You are wrong. That was for example taken into consideration in Apple vs. Psystar. Just because it is known how to crack some encryption doesn't make it not effective encryption. The whole point of the DMCA is to give the encryption _legal_ protection so that the encrypter isn't forced to enter an arms race with the cracker. Devices that can get around HDCP encryption will be forever illegal.
It seems these guys don't know what HDCP actually does.
With the HDCP master key, one can build hardware that decrypts HDCP encrypted signals (that is the easy and well documented part) and is accepted by the HDCP encoder on the other side (that is the hard part). You still need rather sophisticated hardware. Not that easily built by your average software hacker.
That in turn allows you to record the signal coming out of your video card or Bluray player. That's about 200 MB per second. I don't have any hardware lying around that can record the output of a DVI card for two hours and neither does your average slashdot poster.
So this doesn't allow _you_ to backup your Blu ray discs. It will allow some rather sophisticated pirate organisation to pirate Blu ray discs, and they will produce Blu ray discs that again you cannot copy. So you as the end user won't gain anything from this.
The day is coming where I can finally hook up my media center to my TV without having the sound or video go out because HDCP decided it didn't like the fact the computer goes to sleep.
Wrong. It means someone can build a connector that lets you connect your video card to a TV without HDCP support. But if that connector doesn't like your computer going to sleep, then you are just as stuffed as you are now.
On a properly working HDCP system, the computer would check about 64 times per second whether the encryption is still working and that graphics card and TV are in sync. Not to keep you from turning encryption off, but to make sure that the signal is properly decrypted because otherwise you see just snow. If the graphics card comes back from sleep, it should realise very quickly that something is wrong. In that case it should turn off the signal for a second, reset the HDCP connectors on the graphics card and on the TV, and turn encryption on again. So the worst you should get is snow for a tenth of a second, black screen for a second, and then a correct signal. What you see is either the graphics card or the TV connector not working correctly. If that connector that could now be built doesn't work better than the TV connector, or if it is the fault of the graphics card in the first place, there will be no improvement.
What harm does it do to a paying customer? It makes it hard for me to rip a DVD I OWN and put it on my personal media player.
No, HDCP doesn't make ripping your DVDs any harder. It has nothing to do with that. HDCP encrypts the signal between the output of your graphics card and the input of the monitor. HDCP doesn't affect you in any way - except when you don't have an HDCP compatible monitor, and then it doesn't stop you only from ripping your DVD, it stops you from displaying that DVD at all.
There is of course copy protection on your DVD that makes life hard for honest people - but that is not HDCP.