Sometimes, people that make up 'The Market' have absolutely no clue what the real value of a thing is. When someone educates them, then maybe they will demand that the product or service be re-priced to a more reasonable value.
Some people, in this discussion, have pointed out that comparing downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope vs. SMS is an apples to oranges comparison. That's true, which is why it's even *more* outrageous what the phone companies charge. Let me explain: the Hubble Space Telescope is a very specialty communication. You do not have good infrastructure 'economies of scale'. I absolutely guarantee that the *real* infrastructure cost for Hubble is far more than it is for text messaging - particularly when you consider that the digital phone networks had to be built to support telephone conversations, and any additional services like SMS are, essentially, free to the phone companies. There is, basically, no additional cost incurred on them to support SMS.
One would expect, in that situation, in a functioning market, that the cost to consumers for SMS would be very close to 0, as the real cost on top of what they are already paying for their phone service (which nominally goes to maintaining the phone networks and providing the phone company with a profit) is very close to 0.
So the point of the article is to contrast the very *real* cost of the Hubble Space Telescope, vs. the artificial cost of SMS, and to thereby educate consumers that they are getting ripped off.
Of course, as most people here point out, anyone with a rudimentary understanding of digital technology (which, honestly, probably isn't anywhere close to a majority of the population) should already have figured out a long time ago that this is a ripoff, and just avoid using those services.
Personally, I almost never use Text messaging on my phone; for one thing, it's a total pain in the arse to type messages in on a numpad (I don't have a 'full' keypad like a Blackberry or similar device), and the main reason is, I refuse to pay $5-$10/mo for 'unlimited texting', or 15c per message. Even the 'flat rates' are, honestly, pretty much a ripoff.
I have to chuckle every time I see the ads, recently, for the new ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS PER MONTH unlimited plans the mobile companies are rolling out. That's just crazy expensive.
A couple points - first, kg is a unit of mass, not of weight (yes, sort of a minor difference, but in physics is an important distinction; mass is an inherent property of any object, weight is a Force acting on that object). 2nd, I suspect that, from that height, the object would reach it's terminal velocity. I think it might be hard to 'guess' what the terminal velocity of the hard drive would be.
For those unfamiliar with terminal velocity - as any object's speed through air increases, so does air resistance. When you reach a certain point, the Force of Gravity is perfectly matched by the resistive force of air resistance, so the Net Force on the object is 0. When the net force acting on an object is 0, then it's accelleration is 0 (that is, it continues to move at the same speed but does not get any faster).
Because of this, I don't think it's really possible to get any good estimate of how fast the drive hit the earth, without knowing about the drag of the drive's shape. Hard-drives, being fairly dense, with a relatively small surface area, would have a fairly low amount of drag, but it would eventually reach terminal velocity.
I have this theory that companies should be forced to choose between copyright OR DRM, but not both. Here's how it goes: People and companies should basically have the freedom to do what they want, with the main constraint being what "The Market" is willing to put up with. If "The Market" is willing to accept (i.e. pay for) your DRM'Ed work, then the government has no business telling you you *cannot* use DRM. HOWEVER, copyright is a special privilege, an artificial monopoly, created and enforced by the Government. The only authority the government (at least in the USA) has to do this comes from the Constitution.
What is the purpose of Copyright? According to the Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The only authority Congress has to enact and enforce copyright Since DRM'ed materials do not and essentially NEVER WILL contribute to the Progress of Science and Useful Arts, it is my opinion that Congress has no authority to protect those "Writings and Discoveries". So, for DRM'ed materials, there should be an open field day - who can crack it first?
Simple as that: The law *should be* If you want Copyright protection, you must not use DRM. It seems to me to be clearly unconstitutional to extend copyright protection to DRM'ed works, because such works, if the public is not allowed to crack the DRM *coughDMCAcough*, prevent fair use, prevent reverse engineering, and prevent the work from ever *effectively* entering into the Public Domain - and it is primarily by those three things that works promote the progress of science and useful arts.
One other comment, about your point about contacting representative - while I do think people should contact their representatives, I'm not sure a) that the posters to Slashdot necessarily all fit into the category of "the top CS and IT people in the world" - me, I'm a student and work doing tech support. I'm not exactly 'elite', even though I like to think I have good ideas and a good understanding of technology; and b) honestly, I don't think most congresspersons really care how 'elite' you are - unless you are also rich and powerful (I should say, I don't know this for sure, and I suppose *some* congressperson's would try to pay attention to people who are experts in their fields, but honestly, 550 people are a tiny minority - all a representative needs to worry about is what the great masses think, not what someone in an ivory tower thinks; it's sad, but that's democracy for you).
I totally agree with what you are saying, but it kind of assumes that the DMCA is legitimate, and that only the *abuses* of it are illegitimate. The problem is, the law was seeminly designed to be abused. The whole concept of a takedown letter means that if someone accuses someone else of a violation of law, they are to be presumed guilty until they prove themselves innocent. That just turns 200+ years of American legal doctrine, embodied in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, completely on it's head, in a very bad way.
In this case, we have a company that made a mistake. Yes, you are correct that they swore to something that couldn't have been true, by their own *later* admission, but they did quickly correct the mistake. I think that means something. They also then proceeded to work with the guy who maintains CoreAVC-for-linux to increase it's capability/compatibility, and they are talking about releasing official builds (gStreamer Plug-in, library, etc) for Linux.
I know there are those among us who believe all proprietary software is unethical/evil, and they are entitled to their opinions, but I really don't think there is any *real* benefit to be gained here from crucifying a company that, overall, appears to want a friendly relationship OpenSource/Free Software developers and users. I say save your ire for the idiots in Congress who sponsored and voted for the DMCA, and for companies that maliciously abuse the DMCA and don't repent.
If you want to protest something, protest the poorly conceived DMCA which was enacted by a legislature that is in the pockets of certain groups of copyright holders. The DMCA requires hosting providers like Google to take downn material upon receiving a takedown letter. It's sad, really, that a law gives the power to the accuser to force legal 'remedies' to be taken against the accused, *simply* based on the word of the accuser (I guess when it comes to copyright, you're guilty until proven innocent).
I heard an old-time radio show a couple times. . .
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Second Person
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I often end up driving home from work during an hour when my local NPR affiliate radio station plays a program that airs old radio shows from the 1930's - 1950's. This program airs a variety of different shows in different genre's. There is one show (I think it is called "The Whistler"), where each episode is about a character who tries to get away with a crime (usually murder), and of course, something completely out of the character's ability to control or even predict always happens at the last second and they get busted. The show doesn't follow any regular characters, but instead a different criminal every episode. The show employs a Narrator who will often describe action sequences, and the character's internal thoughts, in the 2nd Person, "You head for the door, Jack, and as your hand reaches for the knob, you hear someone knocking on the door. You pull back behind the door, waiting for the person to go away. [Woman's voice], 'Anne, are you in there? It's Mary.'. You hear a key sliding into the lock! Quickly, after stepping back into the bedroom, you enter the dark bathroom, and quietly close the door." Etc. (Note, this is just me trying to give a sense of the show - the writing on the show is, usually, quite better than what I've provided here).
The point of using 2nd person, here, I think is to make the story more suspensful to the audience. It's, perhaps, a little more exciting when 'you' are in such a situation, where at any moment your plan could go afoul and you could be arrested for murder, than it is if it's happening to 'him'.
I do generally agree that 2nd person doesn't have as wide of an ability to be applied as first or 3rd person, but it definitely can be, and has been, employed effectively at various times, by various writers.
Seriously. I don't know for sure that someone could be successfully prosecuted for this, but I wouldn't be too surprised if AT&T could press charges for this. Whether their security system is 'lame' or not, if they have some kind of security on the system, and you take steps to gain unauthorized access, you are seriously putting yourself in a place of at least risking arrest. There are all kinds of computer security and unauthorized access laws out there just waiting to be tested by ambitious prosecutors with the backing of 'deep pockets'.
I don't know the answer, just posing the question, do you own your telephone number? I would suggest that the closest analog for IP addresses is not land, but telephone numbers. I do not believe telephone numbers are exactly treated as property (though, in certain cases, you have some rights to keep a phone number when changing providers, but I'm not sure they are still treated quite like property)?
I know when you are convicted of a computer-related crime, you are strictly forbidden from using computers. But, what about when convicted of murder? I gotta wonder, is there any reason why Hans couldn't just keep coding in prison? If he were allowed to have a small laptop and wireless connection in jail, he could probably be quite productive - after all, when you're in jail, you have all the time in the world. No distractions like a 'life', time with the kids, cleaning the house, etc (although, I suppose they may have inmates do some work around the prison to help maintain it - you always see them doing laundry and stuff like that in the movies).
Still, could he code on the inside? Does it matter if your File System is written by a convicted murder (I'd like to say here that I don't necessarily agree he's guilty, but he is definitely convicted)?
You don't need any mystical/religious crap to deal with mathematics being discovered. The ratio between a circle of *any* size and it's diameter is always the same, regardless of whether we have given it a name, or figured out an approximation. Long before this ratio was called Pi, and before we discovered that it was approximately 3.14159, it was still true that this ratio held. Same thing with the ratio of sides of a right triangle.
Now, one could argue that man invented triangles, and circles, except that, particularly circles, do occur in nature (the earth, the orbits of the celestial bodies, etc), triangles, somewhat less so, though *angles* do exist naturally, and a triangle is just closing the two 'primary sides' of an angle with a third side at some arbitrary distance along one of the sides of the angle. But, with things like shadows, angles occur naturally.
I think a great example of how mathematics is 'discovered', as opposed to invented, is something I heard about how illiterate shepherds have often used pebbles (or other physical objects) to track that they have the right number of sheep - for each sheep they start out with at the beginning of a day, they put one pebble in a bag, or pile, or pot, whatever. Then they check to make sure they have the same number of sheep as pebbles at the end of the day - without necessarily knowing anything about 'numbers' or how to count. They just remove one pebble from the collection for each sheep at the end. They just better end up with 0 pebbles or else they lost a sheep (or somehow gained one - e.g. from another herd that wandered into theirs). So, addition and subtraction work even when you don't know numbers, or how to count. I think that strongly shows that math is 'inherent' in nature.
Almost all the rest of math just flows from addition and subtraction.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for protecting people's rights from undue invasion by governments. But there is also a need for governments to get access to information for criminal investigations. It's just as unreasonable to say that government should have no access to information about suspected terrorists and pedophiles, as it is to say that the government should have access to *everyones* information.
Yes, there are mercenary militaries which exist, but the nation does not depend upon them as the *only* defense of the country. We have a government countrolled standing military, and State controlled National Guard, which are far larger than Blackwater, and which could, if it became necessary, defense us *from* Blackwater. My main point was, without the government having a military, someone else would build their own army and conquer the country, of course, so we see that Government is the most appropriate solution for certain problems. Which, it sounds like, you agree with. =)
1) If you *really* want to use Winamp, and assuming Gracenote and FreeDb use the same protocol (I'm not sure about that?), you might be able to trick Winamp into *thinking* that it's using Gracenote, by redirecting DNS queries from Gracenote to FreeDb - e.g hack your hosts file, or setup your own nameserver and hack it to alias the Gracenote URL to to FreeDb.
2) If that's not possible, there are several open source media players (I'm not sure if they all use freedb or can be configured to, but. ..), including VLC Player, Media Player Classic, MPlayer, and others. Search engines are your friend here. Personallly, I've used VLC and Media Player Classic - MPC has a simpler interface and set of options, but VLC allows configuration to an extreme. If VLC supports song lookups at all , I suspect it uses Freedb, and also probably allows you to configure what URL to use for cd lookups (I no longer have VLC installed, so can't say for sure).
3) I don't play CD's very often, honestly - usually I rip them to wav, ogg, or flac, using AudioGrabber (which does track lookups using freedb) and store the disc safely away. You might consider doing that - then the files are tagged by AudioGrabber, and you can keep using WinAmp to listen to them, without depending on Gracenote. =)
I was thinking about that. I'm not from the South, but I have relatives down there I visit from time to time, and they've described to me what a blight Kudzu is. If it suddenly had some reasonable economic value, you might be able to get people to remove the stuff from your land for free - or even pay you to remove it from your land.
The only thing is, I'm not sure about the cellulose density of the plant. That is, my understanding is it's an extremely fast growing plant. I don't know much about it, but I would *guess* that probably a large percentage of the volume of kudzu is water. The question is, once the water is gone, is there enough cellulose left over to be worthwhile? Put another way, if the kudzu doesn't fetch a high enough price from the refiners, it just might not be worthwhile to harvest even if there is a lot of it, and even if the refiners *could* theoretically refine it.
Seriously, while I'd love to see them get to 100% efficiency and get this down to $1/gallon, at $2/gallon it's still below market (we're paying about $3.35 right now, so it sounds like it's already commercially viable to me. =) If the government really wants to help promote this technology, declare a national ban on taxing this fuel for 10 years. That way, I'd only be paying the actual cost (plus distribution), and not 30-60 cents per gallon additional for the stuff. Overnight, this stuff would be selling faster than they could produce it.
I'm not entirely convinced that hardware-based security is necessarily more secure, but as you say, because of the necessity to cache the key *somewhere*, hardware based solutions should potentially be able to be more secure.
I think the main benefit, really, is performance. Why bog down the cpu with decryption, when the drive can do it itself? Also, OS independence. I assume with this thing, during boot you provide the passphrase, and after that it looks like a normal drive to the OS? I might be wrong on that; it might actually be nice to have different partitions individually encrypted, and be able to provide the passphrase at mount time instead of boot time, but that would require OS support to implement.
I don't think they mean loss in the sense you are. Of course, the only way to prevent *data loss* is to use some sort of backup. I think they mean here that the privacy of your data is protected if the drive/laptop is stolen or lost.
Some California appeals court is not necessarily the end of the matter. This could be appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Bush and his people cried long and loud that they were appointing judges that will make a plain reading of the Constitution, that weren't so-called 'activist judges'. From the bill of rights:
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
As a US citizen, I don't see how airport security has any right whatsoever to even *turn on* my computer, let alone go through it's contents, based on the 4th ammendment. Certainly the contents of a computer fall under the category of 'papers, and effects'. I'm definitely going to have to read the CA ruling, because I'm certain this would have been the very first line of defense for any attorney trying a case like this.
"Or government could separate ownership of infrastructure from ownership of those who provide services the infrastructure can provide and require the owner to allow open access."
That might help *some* of the issues (specifically, net neutrality, because I could maybe pick an Internet 'gateway' provider who uses routing policies I like), but it still doesn't solve the problem that, fundamentally, someone still has a monopoly on the last mile. I've used a DSL ISP that had to depend on the local incumbent telco for the actual physical regional network, and you know what? While I loved that ISP, they couldn't survive. And you know why? Because customers who used the local incumbent payed $29/mo, while customers who used the 'third-party' ISP *still* had to pay $29/mo to the telco, PLUS $15/mo to the ISP.
Now, if you required that the telcos could *not* provide direct access to the Internet, and so compete with the other ISP's, that might solve that problem, but *oops* that's government regulation which, apparently, is ALWAYS EVIL. Also, it still presents you a problem where, overall, Internet access just ends up being more expensive because the *monopoly* on the last mile allows the telco/cableco to add a tax of it's choosing to every Internet connection on top of the ISP's who, of course, must charge some kind of fee in order to survive as businesses. All open access rules will do is cause the last-mile providers to still charge the same amount (don't dream they'll reduce prices, ever, unless they *must*), plus add an additional fee on top of that.
Maybe the combination of multiple last-mile providers (cable, telco, wireless) combined with mandating that the last mile providers cannot provide Internet access, but only regional network infrastructure for ISP's to connect to, *could* work, but that solution *still* depends on government regulation. People who insist that government regulation is never the answer can't see past their nose (I'm not saying the immediate parent falls into this category - I'm kind of responding to several posters at once, here), and are just as bad as people who call for regulation of everything. I may be a Christian, with regards to religion, but I'm a Buddhist when it comes to government/market policies - "Seek the middle path". It's like environmental regulations. Markets, basically, have no effective means for getting companies to not pollute if that is the easiest way to a profit. Truth in advertising - if government regulations didn't prevent false marketting claims, then false marketting would dominate (because the honest companies would have a hard time competing with less scrupulous competitors). Monopolies - if the government didn't prevent certain corporate mergers, then many types of markets would eventually devolve to entrenched monopolies.
Markets are good, but they are not a stand-alone solution. It takes government to create and maintain fair markets. It also takes government to deal with certain types of problems that markets are simply not well equipped to handle. I think most of us are fairly glad that we have a military that is subservient to a government, which is democratically responsible to it's people. What would the country be like if there were a bunch of private/mercenary armies? I personally don't think that would be a good situation. So, for people who argue that government is never the answer, I reallly must disagree with you.
I generally agree with you. But when you are dealing with government granted monopolies, doesn't the government have a responsibility, to the people, to regulate the corp to which the monopoly is granted? Unfortunately, it's impractical to let many competing companies run cables in public right-of-ways and on public utility poles, so for services which require cable-infrastructure, we limit the number of companies that can participate.
There possibly, might be *one* alternative, but it's complicated and generally ignored. Instead of auctioning off such monopolies to the highest bidder, wherein the government colludes with the monopoly-to-be to set consumer prices as high as possible, the government *could* bid out such monopolies to companies based on who guarantees the best service/price ratio. But, yeah, that's not gonna happen.
"With falling storage costs for flash storage you might see an odd shift back to early computing technology, prior to hard disks, where all the data was on portable storage media, floppy disks."
You are correct, I think, about the trend toward storing stuff on flash drives - nothing like keeping my most important data with me at all times on a key chain. But, I'd like to make a slight historical note here: While floppies do predate hard drives, hard drives didn't kill floppies, because they largely existed to solve different problems. They coexisted quite nicely. In the days before the Internet and CD-R, floppies were the basic way of transporting data from one computer to another.
I'd say CD-Rs and networking technology are largely what killed floppies, because they were vastly superior at doing exactly what floppies did - move stuff from one place another, something hard drives are not well suited for (well, external usb/firewire hard drives, but those came long after the demise of the floppy).
I don't disagree with your post in general, just that specific statement, I think, might be somewhat incorrect. But, it is somewhat correct to, in that, one could argue that, with regards to *illegal* file-sharing, sans P2P, there would be no *legal* source for that data, so that would just be less traffic, period, to move around the network and the Internet. But the problem is, there's no good way that anyone's found *yet* to discriminate between legal and illegal traffic. I still think that if the ISP's really thought about it, they'd see the benefits to themselves that P2P data exchange provides to them as an ISP - basically, local 'caching' of popular data, with the *end-users* paying for the infrastructure to cache the data (e.g. hard drive space and a computer to serve the data from)!. It's like end-users are subsidizing the ISP. . . wait, maybe ISP's should provide discounts to users who participate in P2P *grin* (yes, I say that with my tongue firmly in my cheek).
"That means stopping the things that zap their resources. I don't think anyone will disagree that BitTorrent does exactly that."
In some cases it, no doubt, does sap resources. But, let me ask you this - which is cheaper for an ISP: to move bits between users of their own network, or to move bits from other networks on the Internet to their users? Maybe I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that shuffling data around inside the ISP's network is probably much faster and cheaper than moving data across the limited links the ISP has between itself and other networks.
If I have 10000 users that all want the same data (say the latest patch for Wow - which I believe uses a customized version of bittorrent for distributing patches), I would think it would be *much* more efficient to use P2P to copy the data around almost entirely inside my fiber network, than to transfer that data 10000 times from Blizzard's server across an Internet backbone link.
If that is the case, I would think it would be entirely within the ISP's self-interest to *promote* the use of P2P, to lessen the amount of traffic on upstream Internet links. Plus, it has the potential to allow their users to appear to get much better performance from their 'unlimited broadband' links than the ISP can really give if all data has to come from the uplink, meaning happier customers paying $X/month.
Granted, the networks and advertisers are kind of taking this to a whole new level, but this isn't such a new idea.
Ever listen to old time radio? I often find myself driving home from work in the evening at a time when my local NPR station plays an hour of old radio shows. Instead of cutting from the show to commercials, they often had commercials built in as part of the broadcast of the show. Burns & Allen, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, etc all often had their skits transition directly into an announcement from Maxwell House Coffee, Crisco, Kellogg's Cereal, Kraft Foods, or any one of dozens of other brands. Even outside of the comedy/variety show, sometimes scifi and horror shows would have some 'built-in' commercials, and shows from all kinds of genres.
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Sometimes, people that make up 'The Market' have absolutely no clue what the real value of a thing is. When someone educates them, then maybe they will demand that the product or service be re-priced to a more reasonable value.
Some people, in this discussion, have pointed out that comparing downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope vs. SMS is an apples to oranges comparison. That's true, which is why it's even *more* outrageous what the phone companies charge. Let me explain: the Hubble Space Telescope is a very specialty communication. You do not have good infrastructure 'economies of scale'. I absolutely guarantee that the *real* infrastructure cost for Hubble is far more than it is for text messaging - particularly when you consider that the digital phone networks had to be built to support telephone conversations, and any additional services like SMS are, essentially, free to the phone companies. There is, basically, no additional cost incurred on them to support SMS.
One would expect, in that situation, in a functioning market, that the cost to consumers for SMS would be very close to 0, as the real cost on top of what they are already paying for their phone service (which nominally goes to maintaining the phone networks and providing the phone company with a profit) is very close to 0.
So the point of the article is to contrast the very *real* cost of the Hubble Space Telescope, vs. the artificial cost of SMS, and to thereby educate consumers that they are getting ripped off.
Of course, as most people here point out, anyone with a rudimentary understanding of digital technology (which, honestly, probably isn't anywhere close to a majority of the population) should already have figured out a long time ago that this is a ripoff, and just avoid using those services.
Personally, I almost never use Text messaging on my phone; for one thing, it's a total pain in the arse to type messages in on a numpad (I don't have a 'full' keypad like a Blackberry or similar device), and the main reason is, I refuse to pay $5-$10/mo for 'unlimited texting', or 15c per message. Even the 'flat rates' are, honestly, pretty much a ripoff.
I have to chuckle every time I see the ads, recently, for the new ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS PER MONTH unlimited plans the mobile companies are rolling out. That's just crazy expensive.
A couple points - first, kg is a unit of mass, not of weight (yes, sort of a minor difference, but in physics is an important distinction; mass is an inherent property of any object, weight is a Force acting on that object). 2nd, I suspect that, from that height, the object would reach it's terminal velocity. I think it might be hard to 'guess' what the terminal velocity of the hard drive would be.
For those unfamiliar with terminal velocity - as any object's speed through air increases, so does air resistance. When you reach a certain point, the Force of Gravity is perfectly matched by the resistive force of air resistance, so the Net Force on the object is 0. When the net force acting on an object is 0, then it's accelleration is 0 (that is, it continues to move at the same speed but does not get any faster).
Because of this, I don't think it's really possible to get any good estimate of how fast the drive hit the earth, without knowing about the drag of the drive's shape. Hard-drives, being fairly dense, with a relatively small surface area, would have a fairly low amount of drag, but it would eventually reach terminal velocity.
I have this theory that companies should be forced to choose between copyright OR DRM, but not both. Here's how it goes: People and companies should basically have the freedom to do what they want, with the main constraint being what "The Market" is willing to put up with. If "The Market" is willing to accept (i.e. pay for) your DRM'Ed work, then the government has no business telling you you *cannot* use DRM. HOWEVER, copyright is a special privilege, an artificial monopoly, created and enforced by the Government. The only authority the government (at least in the USA) has to do this comes from the Constitution.
What is the purpose of Copyright? According to the Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The only authority Congress has to enact and enforce copyright Since DRM'ed materials do not and essentially NEVER WILL contribute to the Progress of Science and Useful Arts, it is my opinion that Congress has no authority to protect those "Writings and Discoveries". So, for DRM'ed materials, there should be an open field day - who can crack it first?
Simple as that: The law *should be* If you want Copyright protection, you must not use DRM. It seems to me to be clearly unconstitutional to extend copyright protection to DRM'ed works, because such works, if the public is not allowed to crack the DRM *coughDMCAcough*, prevent fair use, prevent reverse engineering, and prevent the work from ever *effectively* entering into the Public Domain - and it is primarily by those three things that works promote the progress of science and useful arts.
One other comment, about your point about contacting representative - while I do think people should contact their representatives, I'm not sure a) that the posters to Slashdot necessarily all fit into the category of "the top CS and IT people in the world" - me, I'm a student and work doing tech support. I'm not exactly 'elite', even though I like to think I have good ideas and a good understanding of technology; and b) honestly, I don't think most congresspersons really care how 'elite' you are - unless you are also rich and powerful (I should say, I don't know this for sure, and I suppose *some* congressperson's would try to pay attention to people who are experts in their fields, but honestly, 550 people are a tiny minority - all a representative needs to worry about is what the great masses think, not what someone in an ivory tower thinks; it's sad, but that's democracy for you).
I totally agree with what you are saying, but it kind of assumes that the DMCA is legitimate, and that only the *abuses* of it are illegitimate. The problem is, the law was seeminly designed to be abused. The whole concept of a takedown letter means that if someone accuses someone else of a violation of law, they are to be presumed guilty until they prove themselves innocent. That just turns 200+ years of American legal doctrine, embodied in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, completely on it's head, in a very bad way.
In this case, we have a company that made a mistake. Yes, you are correct that they swore to something that couldn't have been true, by their own *later* admission, but they did quickly correct the mistake. I think that means something. They also then proceeded to work with the guy who maintains CoreAVC-for-linux to increase it's capability/compatibility, and they are talking about releasing official builds (gStreamer Plug-in, library, etc) for Linux.
I know there are those among us who believe all proprietary software is unethical/evil, and they are entitled to their opinions, but I really don't think there is any *real* benefit to be gained here from crucifying a company that, overall, appears to want a friendly relationship OpenSource/Free Software developers and users. I say save your ire for the idiots in Congress who sponsored and voted for the DMCA, and for companies that maliciously abuse the DMCA and don't repent.
If you want to protest something, protest the poorly conceived DMCA which was enacted by a legislature that is in the pockets of certain groups of copyright holders. The DMCA requires hosting providers like Google to take downn material upon receiving a takedown letter. It's sad, really, that a law gives the power to the accuser to force legal 'remedies' to be taken against the accused, *simply* based on the word of the accuser (I guess when it comes to copyright, you're guilty until proven innocent).
I often end up driving home from work during an hour when my local NPR affiliate radio station plays a program that airs old radio shows from the 1930's - 1950's. This program airs a variety of different shows in different genre's. There is one show (I think it is called "The Whistler"), where each episode is about a character who tries to get away with a crime (usually murder), and of course, something completely out of the character's ability to control or even predict always happens at the last second and they get busted. The show doesn't follow any regular characters, but instead a different criminal every episode. The show employs a Narrator who will often describe action sequences, and the character's internal thoughts, in the 2nd Person, "You head for the door, Jack, and as your hand reaches for the knob, you hear someone knocking on the door. You pull back behind the door, waiting for the person to go away. [Woman's voice], 'Anne, are you in there? It's Mary.'. You hear a key sliding into the lock! Quickly, after stepping back into the bedroom, you enter the dark bathroom, and quietly close the door." Etc. (Note, this is just me trying to give a sense of the show - the writing on the show is, usually, quite better than what I've provided here).
The point of using 2nd person, here, I think is to make the story more suspensful to the audience. It's, perhaps, a little more exciting when 'you' are in such a situation, where at any moment your plan could go afoul and you could be arrested for murder, than it is if it's happening to 'him'.
I do generally agree that 2nd person doesn't have as wide of an ability to be applied as first or 3rd person, but it definitely can be, and has been, employed effectively at various times, by various writers.
"Actually, at the moment I am using my MacBook in a Starbucks to type this reply, believe it or not."
An Apple user, using their Apple Laptop. . . In a Starbucks, of all places. I just *cannot* believe it.
jailbait.
Seriously. I don't know for sure that someone could be successfully prosecuted for this, but I wouldn't be too surprised if AT&T could press charges for this. Whether their security system is 'lame' or not, if they have some kind of security on the system, and you take steps to gain unauthorized access, you are seriously putting yourself in a place of at least risking arrest. There are all kinds of computer security and unauthorized access laws out there just waiting to be tested by ambitious prosecutors with the backing of 'deep pockets'.
I don't know the answer, just posing the question, do you own your telephone number? I would suggest that the closest analog for IP addresses is not land, but telephone numbers. I do not believe telephone numbers are exactly treated as property (though, in certain cases, you have some rights to keep a phone number when changing providers, but I'm not sure they are still treated quite like property)?
I know when you are convicted of a computer-related crime, you are strictly forbidden from using computers. But, what about when convicted of murder? I gotta wonder, is there any reason why Hans couldn't just keep coding in prison? If he were allowed to have a small laptop and wireless connection in jail, he could probably be quite productive - after all, when you're in jail, you have all the time in the world. No distractions like a 'life', time with the kids, cleaning the house, etc (although, I suppose they may have inmates do some work around the prison to help maintain it - you always see them doing laundry and stuff like that in the movies).
Still, could he code on the inside? Does it matter if your File System is written by a convicted murder (I'd like to say here that I don't necessarily agree he's guilty, but he is definitely convicted)?
You don't need any mystical/religious crap to deal with mathematics being discovered. The ratio between a circle of *any* size and it's diameter is always the same, regardless of whether we have given it a name, or figured out an approximation. Long before this ratio was called Pi, and before we discovered that it was approximately 3.14159, it was still true that this ratio held. Same thing with the ratio of sides of a right triangle.
Now, one could argue that man invented triangles, and circles, except that, particularly circles, do occur in nature (the earth, the orbits of the celestial bodies, etc), triangles, somewhat less so, though *angles* do exist naturally, and a triangle is just closing the two 'primary sides' of an angle with a third side at some arbitrary distance along one of the sides of the angle. But, with things like shadows, angles occur naturally.
I think a great example of how mathematics is 'discovered', as opposed to invented, is something I heard about how illiterate shepherds have often used pebbles (or other physical objects) to track that they have the right number of sheep - for each sheep they start out with at the beginning of a day, they put one pebble in a bag, or pile, or pot, whatever. Then they check to make sure they have the same number of sheep as pebbles at the end of the day - without necessarily knowing anything about 'numbers' or how to count. They just remove one pebble from the collection for each sheep at the end. They just better end up with 0 pebbles or else they lost a sheep (or somehow gained one - e.g. from another herd that wandered into theirs). So, addition and subtraction work even when you don't know numbers, or how to count. I think that strongly shows that math is 'inherent' in nature.
Almost all the rest of math just flows from addition and subtraction.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for protecting people's rights from undue invasion by governments. But there is also a need for governments to get access to information for criminal investigations. It's just as unreasonable to say that government should have no access to information about suspected terrorists and pedophiles, as it is to say that the government should have access to *everyones* information.
Yes, there are mercenary militaries which exist, but the nation does not depend upon them as the *only* defense of the country. We have a government countrolled standing military, and State controlled National Guard, which are far larger than Blackwater, and which could, if it became necessary, defense us *from* Blackwater. My main point was, without the government having a military, someone else would build their own army and conquer the country, of course, so we see that Government is the most appropriate solution for certain problems. Which, it sounds like, you agree with. =)
1) If you *really* want to use Winamp, and assuming Gracenote and FreeDb use the same protocol (I'm not sure about that?), you might be able to trick Winamp into *thinking* that it's using Gracenote, by redirecting DNS queries from Gracenote to FreeDb - e.g hack your hosts file, or setup your own nameserver and hack it to alias the Gracenote URL to to FreeDb.
.), including VLC Player, Media Player Classic, MPlayer, and others. Search engines are your friend here. Personallly, I've used VLC and Media Player Classic - MPC has a simpler interface and set of options, but VLC allows configuration to an extreme. If VLC supports song lookups at all , I suspect it uses Freedb, and also probably allows you to configure what URL to use for cd lookups (I no longer have VLC installed, so can't say for sure).
2) If that's not possible, there are several open source media players (I'm not sure if they all use freedb or can be configured to, but. .
3) I don't play CD's very often, honestly - usually I rip them to wav, ogg, or flac, using AudioGrabber (which does track lookups using freedb) and store the disc safely away. You might consider doing that - then the files are tagged by AudioGrabber, and you can keep using WinAmp to listen to them, without depending on Gracenote. =)
I was thinking about that. I'm not from the South, but I have relatives down there I visit from time to time, and they've described to me what a blight Kudzu is. If it suddenly had some reasonable economic value, you might be able to get people to remove the stuff from your land for free - or even pay you to remove it from your land.
The only thing is, I'm not sure about the cellulose density of the plant. That is, my understanding is it's an extremely fast growing plant. I don't know much about it, but I would *guess* that probably a large percentage of the volume of kudzu is water. The question is, once the water is gone, is there enough cellulose left over to be worthwhile? Put another way, if the kudzu doesn't fetch a high enough price from the refiners, it just might not be worthwhile to harvest even if there is a lot of it, and even if the refiners *could* theoretically refine it.
Seriously, while I'd love to see them get to 100% efficiency and get this down to $1/gallon, at $2/gallon it's still below market (we're paying about $3.35 right now, so it sounds like it's already commercially viable to me. =) If the government really wants to help promote this technology, declare a national ban on taxing this fuel for 10 years. That way, I'd only be paying the actual cost (plus distribution), and not 30-60 cents per gallon additional for the stuff. Overnight, this stuff would be selling faster than they could produce it.
I'm not entirely convinced that hardware-based security is necessarily more secure, but as you say, because of the necessity to cache the key *somewhere*, hardware based solutions should potentially be able to be more secure.
I think the main benefit, really, is performance. Why bog down the cpu with decryption, when the drive can do it itself? Also, OS independence. I assume with this thing, during boot you provide the passphrase, and after that it looks like a normal drive to the OS? I might be wrong on that; it might actually be nice to have different partitions individually encrypted, and be able to provide the passphrase at mount time instead of boot time, but that would require OS support to implement.
I don't think they mean loss in the sense you are. Of course, the only way to prevent *data loss* is to use some sort of backup. I think they mean here that the privacy of your data is protected if the drive/laptop is stolen or lost.
Some California appeals court is not necessarily the end of the matter. This could be appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Bush and his people cried long and loud that they were appointing judges that will make a plain reading of the Constitution, that weren't so-called 'activist judges'. From the bill of rights:
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
As a US citizen, I don't see how airport security has any right whatsoever to even *turn on* my computer, let alone go through it's contents, based on the 4th ammendment. Certainly the contents of a computer fall under the category of 'papers, and effects'. I'm definitely going to have to read the CA ruling, because I'm certain this would have been the very first line of defense for any attorney trying a case like this.
"Or government could separate ownership of infrastructure from ownership of those who provide services the infrastructure can provide and require the owner to allow open access."
That might help *some* of the issues (specifically, net neutrality, because I could maybe pick an Internet 'gateway' provider who uses routing policies I like), but it still doesn't solve the problem that, fundamentally, someone still has a monopoly on the last mile. I've used a DSL ISP that had to depend on the local incumbent telco for the actual physical regional network, and you know what? While I loved that ISP, they couldn't survive. And you know why? Because customers who used the local incumbent payed $29/mo, while customers who used the 'third-party' ISP *still* had to pay $29/mo to the telco, PLUS $15/mo to the ISP.
Now, if you required that the telcos could *not* provide direct access to the Internet, and so compete with the other ISP's, that might solve that problem, but *oops* that's government regulation which, apparently, is ALWAYS EVIL. Also, it still presents you a problem where, overall, Internet access just ends up being more expensive because the *monopoly* on the last mile allows the telco/cableco to add a tax of it's choosing to every Internet connection on top of the ISP's who, of course, must charge some kind of fee in order to survive as businesses. All open access rules will do is cause the last-mile providers to still charge the same amount (don't dream they'll reduce prices, ever, unless they *must*), plus add an additional fee on top of that.
Maybe the combination of multiple last-mile providers (cable, telco, wireless) combined with mandating that the last mile providers cannot provide Internet access, but only regional network infrastructure for ISP's to connect to, *could* work, but that solution *still* depends on government regulation. People who insist that government regulation is never the answer can't see past their nose (I'm not saying the immediate parent falls into this category - I'm kind of responding to several posters at once, here), and are just as bad as people who call for regulation of everything. I may be a Christian, with regards to religion, but I'm a Buddhist when it comes to government/market policies - "Seek the middle path". It's like environmental regulations. Markets, basically, have no effective means for getting companies to not pollute if that is the easiest way to a profit. Truth in advertising - if government regulations didn't prevent false marketting claims, then false marketting would dominate (because the honest companies would have a hard time competing with less scrupulous competitors). Monopolies - if the government didn't prevent certain corporate mergers, then many types of markets would eventually devolve to entrenched monopolies.
Markets are good, but they are not a stand-alone solution. It takes government to create and maintain fair markets. It also takes government to deal with certain types of problems that markets are simply not well equipped to handle. I think most of us are fairly glad that we have a military that is subservient to a government, which is democratically responsible to it's people. What would the country be like if there were a bunch of private/mercenary armies? I personally don't think that would be a good situation. So, for people who argue that government is never the answer, I reallly must disagree with you.
I generally agree with you. But when you are dealing with government granted monopolies, doesn't the government have a responsibility, to the people, to regulate the corp to which the monopoly is granted? Unfortunately, it's impractical to let many competing companies run cables in public right-of-ways and on public utility poles, so for services which require cable-infrastructure, we limit the number of companies that can participate.
There possibly, might be *one* alternative, but it's complicated and generally ignored. Instead of auctioning off such monopolies to the highest bidder, wherein the government colludes with the monopoly-to-be to set consumer prices as high as possible, the government *could* bid out such monopolies to companies based on who guarantees the best service/price ratio. But, yeah, that's not gonna happen.
"With falling storage costs for flash storage you might see an odd shift back to early computing technology, prior to hard disks, where all the data was on portable storage media, floppy disks."
You are correct, I think, about the trend toward storing stuff on flash drives - nothing like keeping my most important data with me at all times on a key chain. But, I'd like to make a slight historical note here: While floppies do predate hard drives, hard drives didn't kill floppies, because they largely existed to solve different problems. They coexisted quite nicely. In the days before the Internet and CD-R, floppies were the basic way of transporting data from one computer to another.
I'd say CD-Rs and networking technology are largely what killed floppies, because they were vastly superior at doing exactly what floppies did - move stuff from one place another, something hard drives are not well suited for (well, external usb/firewire hard drives, but those came long after the demise of the floppy).
I don't disagree with your post in general, just that specific statement, I think, might be somewhat incorrect. But, it is somewhat correct to, in that, one could argue that, with regards to *illegal* file-sharing, sans P2P, there would be no *legal* source for that data, so that would just be less traffic, period, to move around the network and the Internet. But the problem is, there's no good way that anyone's found *yet* to discriminate between legal and illegal traffic. I still think that if the ISP's really thought about it, they'd see the benefits to themselves that P2P data exchange provides to them as an ISP - basically, local 'caching' of popular data, with the *end-users* paying for the infrastructure to cache the data (e.g. hard drive space and a computer to serve the data from)!. It's like end-users are subsidizing the ISP. . . wait, maybe ISP's should provide discounts to users who participate in P2P *grin* (yes, I say that with my tongue firmly in my cheek).
"That means stopping the things that zap their resources. I don't think anyone will disagree that BitTorrent does exactly that."
In some cases it, no doubt, does sap resources. But, let me ask you this - which is cheaper for an ISP: to move bits between users of their own network, or to move bits from other networks on the Internet to their users? Maybe I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that shuffling data around inside the ISP's network is probably much faster and cheaper than moving data across the limited links the ISP has between itself and other networks.
If I have 10000 users that all want the same data (say the latest patch for Wow - which I believe uses a customized version of bittorrent for distributing patches), I would think it would be *much* more efficient to use P2P to copy the data around almost entirely inside my fiber network, than to transfer that data 10000 times from Blizzard's server across an Internet backbone link.
If that is the case, I would think it would be entirely within the ISP's self-interest to *promote* the use of P2P, to lessen the amount of traffic on upstream Internet links. Plus, it has the potential to allow their users to appear to get much better performance from their 'unlimited broadband' links than the ISP can really give if all data has to come from the uplink, meaning happier customers paying $X/month.
Granted, the networks and advertisers are kind of taking this to a whole new level, but this isn't such a new idea.
Ever listen to old time radio? I often find myself driving home from work in the evening at a time when my local NPR station plays an hour of old radio shows. Instead of cutting from the show to commercials, they often had commercials built in as part of the broadcast of the show. Burns & Allen, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, etc all often had their skits transition directly into an announcement from Maxwell House Coffee, Crisco, Kellogg's Cereal, Kraft Foods, or any one of dozens of other brands. Even outside of the comedy/variety show, sometimes scifi and horror shows would have some 'built-in' commercials, and shows from all kinds of genres.