Prison rape is there because of a lack of supervision. You can have the Panopticon concept, like Joliet in Illinois where no inmates are housed together and everyone is watched constantly 24 hours a day. But that is extremely expensive to build and operate. So expensive that the concept has been virtually abandoned.
So instead we house four or five inmates per cell and trust that nothing bad is going to happen. When bad things do happen inmates that report it are punished by fellow inmates. Because of the lack of supervision there is no stopping it.
So we can choose to spend 5 or 10 times as much on prisons or we can close our eyes to it. As we have pretty much disproven the idea of rehabilitation, it means that a lot of crimes result in life inprisonment - either through repeat offenses or through three-strikes laws. Either way, the criminals are going to end up in prison for most of their lives because you can't really rehabilitate them and make law-abiding citizens out of them. Increasing spending on prisons isn't going to help this, all it is going to do is divert more and more money towards maintaining a population that cannot coexist with the rest of society.
By turning a blind eye to illegal immigration you are fostering an evironment which allows employers to continue to have unsafe working conditions and pay below-market wages. If these people were not present in the US, these employers would either have to move to Mexico and employ local people or pay US citizens real wages.
Why do you think prices at fast food restaurants have pretty much been frozen for 30 years? Because their labor costs have not increased.
Why is it that we have 10, 15 or even 20% unemployment in areas of the US with high populations of undocumented workers? Because it is cheaper to pay these people than legal workers, even when the employers are fined. If we had stronger employment verification laws, like E-Verify, we just might have significantly less unemployment among US citizens and legal workers. Instead, we are continuing to create an environment where we are importing cheap labor to be abused. Then, as we continue to see from the current administration, we are going to give them all an amnesty so they can be a permanent underclass - that will vote for their amnesty sponsors.
This isn't a good way to run a country or a labor force. Having illegal, underpaid and abused workers available to displace legal workers just means we are going to be paying more in unemployment and welfare for the legal workers. While the illegals actually are out there working. Doesn't sound right or even like a sensible policy. The answer is not to make them legal in hopes they then will deserve (and get) higher wages and less abuse. The answer is to make it less attractive to stay and to stop importing these low-wage workers.
Who will do the work then? Well, when there is 20% unemployment plenty of people will line up for jobs. And in cases where the pay is too low and the abuse too much, maybe the employers will either relocate elsewhere or decide to improve conditions. Leaving the illegals in place does nothing except continue the existing practices indefinately. The amnesty in 1986 didn't change anything in this regard and the amnesty in 2009 will not change anything either. Except maybe providing a new crop of grateful Democrat voters.
You mention copyright violation by an individual. Well. as soon as it hits a P2P sharing program, it is no longer an individual. It is potentially everone on the planet.
Of course, the biggest limiting factor is knowledge. iTunes exists because people do not know how to obtain digital goods for free. The folks that know aren't paying any more, so the system is now supported on the backs of the ignorant.
As long as you have a computing system that can have more than one item in memory at one time, it starts to get very important how these things interact. Microsoft learned this a long time ago that applications could interact in destructive ways.
Maybe the folks a Palm figured that out as well. Do you not think it possible that your third-party application could impact Palm applications? And that it might be an important clue that thousands of dumps come in with each and every one of them having the same mysterious application instaled?
Would you rather the attitude be that if you install software this removes any support obligation from Palm?
Simple - all their Internet active is already monitored, logged and remotely reported. So once there is a law about where you cannot visit without violating your parole, you better not go there.
Oh, and using any computer without monitoring is a parole violation. So if during a visit to your home an unregistered laptop is spotted, off to prison you go. No trial, you violated your parole. Nearly all of the registered sex offenders there are are actually out on parole.
It is not like it is a secret about how much these people are tracked already.
So a better question would be how could they not enforce this?
I see a lot of comments about how effective this could be - like with the offender just making up a screen name and lying about his status.
Sorry, won't work. Most sex offenders have mandatory logging on all Internet activity. So if the law says they can't have a MySpace account and the log shows they are going to MySpace - BUSTED. And that likely as not is a violation of their parole, so it is back to prison.
Sex offenders have pretty much zero civil rights today. Your actions online are monitored and if you tamper with the monitoring you are violated. If the monitoring (which is collected remotely) shows you are doing something wrong, you are violated. There are really few differences between life in prison and life for a sex offender on the street today.
And the registration laws make it even more interesting. You might as well just have people wear a bright yellow star on their clothes to indicate their status as an outcast. Oh, I guess that has been tried before. It did seem to work for a while, but only for a while.
Maybe we can get a country set aside for sex offenders.
Everyone knows how to get incorrect laws overturned. The Surpreme Court. Pretty much, until they rule on the matter the law stands. A higher level court than this one could possibly decide in favor of Real, but it would not be overturning the law, just coming up with a reason it doesn't apply in this case. Which is unlikely as hell.
So if Real wants to pursue it, they need to spend the dollars to take it to the Supreme Court and pretty much plead that the law makes no sense. I would not expect Real to spend the necessary money to do this unless they believed either that it was their mission to do so or they were going to get all that money back through sales of their product. I suspect neither is the case, so it will not go to the Surpreme Court.
Anyone could do this if they wanted to. They could even try to do it on the cheap by representing themselves. If enough people took the time to do this, even without spending cash on lawyers, it might have an effect. I would say your average Joe has zero chance of getting the Surpreme Court to review a case without high powered lawyers. But if 100 such cases came to the attention of the Surpreme Court, even if they did not pass muster for review, it would have an effect.
Too bad pirates really don't give a crap. They will just continue. And the sucker noobs will continue paying while others that know about TPB, isohunt and others will just keep downloading irrespective of any law to the contrary.
Move up to the federal appeliate level and things change a little. There you can have precedent. But even at this court you do not get to overturn laws. It might come out that the law while seeming to apply doesn't really in this case.
Probably this would have to go to the Supreme Court for a constitutional decision. There is where laws are overturned, not just decided that they do not apply.
There is yawning and then there is disrespectful yawning. One thing that makes judges pissed off is even the hint of disrespect to their office or their proceedings.
Yawning while a witness is testifying is one thing. Yawning while the judge is speaking can easily be interpreted as disrespectful and it is clear the judge did indeed interpret it that way.
About the only thing a judge has going for them is respect for them and their office.
Further, gaining access to the encryption scheme (legally) on a DVD involves signing agreements that say you will not do certain things. Such as, specifically, distributing a tool to decrypt DVDs and copy them.
I think what the core of this issue is about is the violation of that agreement.
CSS-protected DVDs have a title key which until the proper key is presented to the drive prevents you from copying protected sectors from the disc. So your dd command will fail when it gets to protected (aka scrambled) sectors.
Once you get the title key set correctly, the drive will then let you read all the sectors. The rest of the CSS protection involves encryption of those protected sectors. You could, in theory, put off that decryption operation until you went to play the material and just copy the encrypted sectors.
So you can copy without decryption but not unlocking access. Both are part of CSS protection and are therefore covered by DMCA. And the only way you get to find out how it works - legally - is through signing an agreement with the DVD Copy Control Authority, part of the DVD Forum. The big deal seems to be that Real violated their agreement with DVD CCA.
The problem is that there are plenty of zealots that will tell you that incorporating any GPL-licensed component in any way immediately forces the entire body of work to be released under GPL.
This can be interpreted at various times to include static linking, dynamic linking, linkage via any sort of invocation such as exec, RPC, and any other sort of connection between two pieces of code. What is the "right" answer? It isn't all that clear. It can be a matter of intent or of benefit. If the developer is benefiting from GPL code, then their project should be under GPL.
Further, what any competent lawyer will say is the objective is to avoid lawsuits. This means taking a proactive position to avoid getting into situations where some GPL zealot can potentially sue.
Essentially trying to play games with GPL can bring you into conflict with zealots. Some of these people have resources which allows them to file silly lawsuits without personally costing them a fortune. These are people to avoid coming into conflict with. So take the broadest possible interpretation of the GPL and live with it.
Uh, once the check is scanned, the life of the paper document is over. Nobody, ever, is going to want to see the "original" again.
Today, all checks are scanned and are often scanned at the point where they are deposited. Businesses that deal with a lot of checks can get their very own check scanner dor their business. Then they no longer take checks to the bank, ever.
We moved to this system a few years ago. Nobody is reading magnetic ink on the checks anymore.
The problem is that the bandwidth isn't there. It will never be there, in the US.
Today, everyone is connected to the Internet through some type of neighborhood gateway. This is then connected to some sort of concentrator that eventually connects to the Internet. The path between the neighborhood gateway and the concentrator is pretty much as fast as practical in most areas today. So you see cable Internet offered with "up to 20Mb" download speeds.
So with 500-1000 homes connected to the neighborhood gateway and 20Mb/sec download speeds advertised you would assume this gateway is connected via a pipe which can handle 20 * 1000 Mb/sec transfer, right? Well, no. There isn't any such pipe in existance.
What you get is maybe 100Mb/sec or 200Mb/sec at most. This is 100x less bandwidth than would be required for everyone to get full-time dedicated bandwidth of 20Mb/sec. This works fine for the most part because people are using anywhere near that capacity.
Don't bother worrying about all that capacity that is used by the cable TV channels. Sure, they are delivering 100 simultaneous streams to everyone - except they are delivering the identical stream to everyone so the bandwidth is only used once for everyone. This has virtually no impact on the total bandwidth requirements if everyone had their own stream.
Sorry, the difference between broadcasting and individual streams is so incredible that it will probably never be practical for everyone in a neghborhood to have 100% full-time streaming of even SD content. HD? Forget it.
No, they aren't going to build a 20,000MB/sec pipe to the neighborhood gateway. There are hundreds of them in even a fairly small town. Sure, it would be possible - but the cost would be immense. They just replaced the cable hardline distribution with fiber distribution in the last 10 years or so. Nobody is looking at another rebuild on that scale, even if it was practical to build it. Which it isn't.
Better get used to broadcasting. It will be with us for a very long time.
It is geated for appliances, not general-purpose computers.
Now I will grant that most of what people do today would be easily fulfilled by an appliance. And we would all be far more secure with appliances that could not be subverted by botnets, viruses, trojans, etc. An email/web appliance would satisfy 99% of home users and probably could be slightly extended with web applications to work for 50-60% of business users as well.
So who is building the hot new appliance? Nobody. All previous email appliances have died, mostly from a lack of functionality. Today people see a very false progression from a full-function appliance to a "real ocmputer" as being a short leap, so why not take it? The reality is the appliance with limited (or zero) local storage and no ability to install software (or trojans, viruses, botnets, etc.) would be much, much better for everyone using the Internet.
Could you make an appliance immune to phishing? Probably.
OK, so Chrome OS would be great for an appliance... except nobody is even contemplating building an appliance today. With the thousands (millions?) of Windows-based x86 applications out there for our general-purpose computers, who is going to displace Microsoft? An OS with a rich API, multimedia capabilities and access to the full capabilities of a computer? Or an OS where the API is a browser and nothing else?
Sorry, but Chrome OS might be OK for a netbook. Maybe. It has no place on a desktop computer.
Oh, maybe the bandwidth available might play a small role.
The US infrastructure can't handle streaming to everyone, and it isn't going to for a long long time. Broadcast is like having infinite bandwidth because the same stream is going to everyone. And the cable companies know this - they aren't stupid.
So they can run 10x or 100x the fiber to the neighborhood nodes, or they can leave it like it is for a few more years. Maybe 10-15 years, probably. Works fine for "bursts", doesn't work for everyone in the neighborhood to stream constantly.
Forget it. Mobile devices can be charged up when power is available. Anything that requires a constant source of electricity to be useful is going to be useless pretty soon - unless you have your own power source.
We are going to start seeing electricity shortages and nobody is going to be building huge datacenters that need their own generators anymore. You might find some folks being real clever with solar power, but what do they do at night? The grid? Sorry, night time is for homes, daytime is for offices and commercial space. No, we no longer have the capacity for running both at the same time.
You will remember fondly the last time the referigerator ran 24 hours. You will remember the first time you came home early and found out the air conditioner wouldn't turn on for a couple more hours. All this and more are coming soon.
IT is going to be a job for people with outmoded skills that can manage the winddown of big computing. Either that, or lots of new IT-related jobs will open up. Things like Generator Tender and Power Manager. Where you have to cut the electric budget for your department by 30% somehow.
We are moving to a much more sustainable environment, but still not really sustainable. We will not be building any more power plants and we will be avoiding all that pollution - whether it is from coal smoke, radioactive waste or dead birds. We will also be ending the light pollution of big cities. We are going to need that electric power for other stuff.
Why do Americans "fear" working for a Japanese or French boss so much they are willing to nationalize a car company?
The first thing a Japanese boss would do is throw the union out, just as has been done in all of the Japanese car plants in the US. A French boss might not do that, but they might as well. I believe BMW threw the union out of their plant in the US.
So a foreign owner would probably mean no union. No Democrat administration could tolerate that. I don't think anyone in the federal government gives a rat's ass about what the American people want. Nobody likes the bailout situation and nobody is in favor of what happened with GM. That didn't stop the Executive Branch from doing it. Note that neither the House nor Senate ever voted on a plan for GM.
One of the basic reasons why GM was underwater finacially was because of pension committments made as part of union contracts. Their only way out of these, legally, was to declare bankruptcy and have the government take over the pension plans. As far as I know, no other legal transfer of them was possible, other than outright sale of the entire company.
Penion plans are written in ways to as to prevent them from being shifted around or passed over to the government except in very limited circumstances. It is done this way to make it very difficult to get out of such obligations - which is a good thing. Except the problem that nearly every major employer that has existed for more than 30 years is facing is underfunded pension obligations. The basic reason behind this was some optimistic forcasting in the 1960s and 1970s by both company management and unions. The end result is a pension plan that would have been fine if the economy of 1965 continued on today. It did not. All of the companies affected have fewer employees today than they did in the 1960s and 1970s and a completely different financial picture.
What this means for retirees is that the company they retired from can't afford to continue their benefits. The rules and regulations controlling pension plans and their administration require that the company go bankrupt in order to pass the obligations over to the government pension office.
So sorry, you can't treat the union penions as creditors - that isn't how the rules operate. Besides, the total value of the pension plans for GM likely exceed the GDP of the US today. Certainly, it vastly exceeds the value of GM in 2008. Or any time in recent memory.
One of the biggest problems with the whole pension idea was that it could be a pay-as-you-go funding process. So that in 1980 the pension plan had to pay out 5 million dollars so all that had to be in the pension fund was 5 million dollars. The company then ahd to pay in the same amount, plus a little more, for 1981. The pension obligations were able to be met in that way. The problem is, the pension plans were not 100% funded for the life of every retiree from the moment of their retirement. Nor was it ever calculated on the basis of how much money was available for a person from the moment of their retirement. These were all defined-benefit plans where you got X dollars a month for the rest of your life, however long that was.
This means that as retirees began living longer and longer the total value of their pension plan just kept going up and up. As per the plan. So there is no specific dollar value that could ever be assigned to a plan - it just required more and more funding from the company. In 1970 it sounded reasonable. By 1990 most companies with defined-benefit pension plans had realized there was no way the plan could possibly continue much longer. Now we have airlines, manufacturers and just about everyone else bailing out of their pension plan somehow - and the government makes it very difficult to walk away without going bankrupt. Because the only entity that can possibly take over is the government itself.
Maybe you didn't get the memo, but our current President's full name is indeed Barak Hussein Obama. You can try to deny it, but them's the facts.
So I don't understand any childish name calling. Just stating the full name of the President. Sure, lots of people would like to pretend that isn't his middle name. Sorry, but it is true.
If GM had escaped from its union contracts through a bankruptcy, it would have started a trend of other severly underwater employers using the same tactic to escape their union responsibilities. No Democrat administration could possibly allow the end of union featherbedding and union gold-plated benefits. Hence the bailout, with the assurance that the unions would continue to receive their benefits.
There was no other way it was going to happen without a Reaganesque union-busting administration at the helm. Obama is going to give us unions whether we want them or not through the fair choice act, so how could he destroy them?
I mentioned elsewhere that amazon is holding ~$500 of my sales as a seller in limbo. Well a day after I said that publicly they immediately refunded the money, but still kept $79 for themselves. I eventually tracked-down the reason - an asshole woman in California bought a Zenith DTV box from me, and even though I already provided Amazon with proof-of-delivery, they decided to keep the $79 and refund it back to this woman. So she successfully stole my property, with amazon's help.
Yup, and that is exactly what every online merchant is going to do. When the customer complains - even when it is baseless and even false. Part of the problem is that Step #2 for the customer is to then call the credit card company and complain. They will immediately issue a chargeback for the amount of money plus tack on anywhere from $25 to $100 as an additional fine.
Proof is irrelevent. What counts is the credit card company has one standard response to this sort of thing and there is no appeal process for the merchant. This mean that Amazon can either refund the woman her money or they can have the credit card company take the money back and fine them additionally. And you get the shaft.
A real problem here is that if upstream providers do this sort of thing, there is no limit to their power. We're not talking about any court action, any due process or any other legal nicity. We are talking about vigilante action and mob rule.
The idea of "net neutrality" pretty much can be agreed upon that upstream providers do not cut off users for actions that violate the laws of some jurisdiction on their own. Now this may not be a good idea, but if your ISP is prevented from cutting you off for downloading pirated music and movies then a rogue ISP better not be cut off for hosting botnet control centers and phishing web sites. Sorry, you can't have it both ways.
Of course the real problem is that there is no force of law that can successfully prosecute folks like this. They might even be violating laws in their home country - but how do law enforcement agencies conduct a highly technical investigation when they have no facilities. Not only that, but the whole idea of the Internet makes it extremely difficult to conduct investigations without effectively wiretapping and requires the cooperation of a high level provider. It is difficult to see how such an investigation can be conducted by anyone without lots of resources and financial backing. And cooperation of providers, often at their own expense.
No, prosecution of such crimes as are alleged on the Internet is very difficult without either inside information (usually bragging) or evidence collected for other court actions. For example, the ISP is sued for lack of tax payments and the servers are seized as part of discovery, which then uncovers further evidence.
No I think this vigilante action is short lived and not in the best interests of people vitally concerned with the freedom of action on the Internet. Of course, freedom of action implies freedom to commit crimes on the Internet, like copyright violation and phishing.
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Prison rape is there because of a lack of supervision. You can have the Panopticon concept, like Joliet in Illinois where no inmates are housed together and everyone is watched constantly 24 hours a day. But that is extremely expensive to build and operate. So expensive that the concept has been virtually abandoned.
So instead we house four or five inmates per cell and trust that nothing bad is going to happen. When bad things do happen inmates that report it are punished by fellow inmates. Because of the lack of supervision there is no stopping it.
So we can choose to spend 5 or 10 times as much on prisons or we can close our eyes to it. As we have pretty much disproven the idea of rehabilitation, it means that a lot of crimes result in life inprisonment - either through repeat offenses or through three-strikes laws. Either way, the criminals are going to end up in prison for most of their lives because you can't really rehabilitate them and make law-abiding citizens out of them. Increasing spending on prisons isn't going to help this, all it is going to do is divert more and more money towards maintaining a population that cannot coexist with the rest of society.
By turning a blind eye to illegal immigration you are fostering an evironment which allows employers to continue to have unsafe working conditions and pay below-market wages. If these people were not present in the US, these employers would either have to move to Mexico and employ local people or pay US citizens real wages.
Why do you think prices at fast food restaurants have pretty much been frozen for 30 years? Because their labor costs have not increased.
Why is it that we have 10, 15 or even 20% unemployment in areas of the US with high populations of undocumented workers? Because it is cheaper to pay these people than legal workers, even when the employers are fined. If we had stronger employment verification laws, like E-Verify, we just might have significantly less unemployment among US citizens and legal workers. Instead, we are continuing to create an environment where we are importing cheap labor to be abused. Then, as we continue to see from the current administration, we are going to give them all an amnesty so they can be a permanent underclass - that will vote for their amnesty sponsors.
This isn't a good way to run a country or a labor force. Having illegal, underpaid and abused workers available to displace legal workers just means we are going to be paying more in unemployment and welfare for the legal workers. While the illegals actually are out there working. Doesn't sound right or even like a sensible policy. The answer is not to make them legal in hopes they then will deserve (and get) higher wages and less abuse. The answer is to make it less attractive to stay and to stop importing these low-wage workers.
Who will do the work then? Well, when there is 20% unemployment plenty of people will line up for jobs. And in cases where the pay is too low and the abuse too much, maybe the employers will either relocate elsewhere or decide to improve conditions. Leaving the illegals in place does nothing except continue the existing practices indefinately. The amnesty in 1986 didn't change anything in this regard and the amnesty in 2009 will not change anything either. Except maybe providing a new crop of grateful Democrat voters.
You mention copyright violation by an individual. Well. as soon as it hits a P2P sharing program, it is no longer an individual. It is potentially everone on the planet.
Of course, the biggest limiting factor is knowledge. iTunes exists because people do not know how to obtain digital goods for free. The folks that know aren't paying any more, so the system is now supported on the backs of the ignorant.
As long as you have a computing system that can have more than one item in memory at one time, it starts to get very important how these things interact. Microsoft learned this a long time ago that applications could interact in destructive ways.
Maybe the folks a Palm figured that out as well. Do you not think it possible that your third-party application could impact Palm applications? And that it might be an important clue that thousands of dumps come in with each and every one of them having the same mysterious application instaled?
Would you rather the attitude be that if you install software this removes any support obligation from Palm?
Simple - all their Internet active is already monitored, logged and remotely reported. So once there is a law about where you cannot visit without violating your parole, you better not go there.
Oh, and using any computer without monitoring is a parole violation. So if during a visit to your home an unregistered laptop is spotted, off to prison you go. No trial, you violated your parole. Nearly all of the registered sex offenders there are are actually out on parole.
It is not like it is a secret about how much these people are tracked already.
So a better question would be how could they not enforce this?
I see a lot of comments about how effective this could be - like with the offender just making up a screen name and lying about his status.
Sorry, won't work. Most sex offenders have mandatory logging on all Internet activity. So if the law says they can't have a MySpace account and the log shows they are going to MySpace - BUSTED. And that likely as not is a violation of their parole, so it is back to prison.
Sex offenders have pretty much zero civil rights today. Your actions online are monitored and if you tamper with the monitoring you are violated. If the monitoring (which is collected remotely) shows you are doing something wrong, you are violated. There are really few differences between life in prison and life for a sex offender on the street today.
And the registration laws make it even more interesting. You might as well just have people wear a bright yellow star on their clothes to indicate their status as an outcast. Oh, I guess that has been tried before. It did seem to work for a while, but only for a while.
Maybe we can get a country set aside for sex offenders.
Everyone knows how to get incorrect laws overturned. The Surpreme Court. Pretty much, until they rule on the matter the law stands. A higher level court than this one could possibly decide in favor of Real, but it would not be overturning the law, just coming up with a reason it doesn't apply in this case. Which is unlikely as hell.
So if Real wants to pursue it, they need to spend the dollars to take it to the Supreme Court and pretty much plead that the law makes no sense. I would not expect Real to spend the necessary money to do this unless they believed either that it was their mission to do so or they were going to get all that money back through sales of their product. I suspect neither is the case, so it will not go to the Surpreme Court.
Anyone could do this if they wanted to. They could even try to do it on the cheap by representing themselves. If enough people took the time to do this, even without spending cash on lawyers, it might have an effect. I would say your average Joe has zero chance of getting the Surpreme Court to review a case without high powered lawyers. But if 100 such cases came to the attention of the Surpreme Court, even if they did not pass muster for review, it would have an effect.
Too bad pirates really don't give a crap. They will just continue. And the sucker noobs will continue paying while others that know about TPB, isohunt and others will just keep downloading irrespective of any law to the contrary.
Not at the level this trial was conducted at.
Move up to the federal appeliate level and things change a little. There you can have precedent. But even at this court you do not get to overturn laws. It might come out that the law while seeming to apply doesn't really in this case.
Probably this would have to go to the Supreme Court for a constitutional decision. There is where laws are overturned, not just decided that they do not apply.
There is yawning and then there is disrespectful yawning. One thing that makes judges pissed off is even the hint of disrespect to their office or their proceedings.
Yawning while a witness is testifying is one thing. Yawning while the judge is speaking can easily be interpreted as disrespectful and it is clear the judge did indeed interpret it that way.
About the only thing a judge has going for them is respect for them and their office.
Further, gaining access to the encryption scheme (legally) on a DVD involves signing agreements that say you will not do certain things. Such as, specifically, distributing a tool to decrypt DVDs and copy them.
I think what the core of this issue is about is the violation of that agreement.
Uh, no, that is not correct.
CSS-protected DVDs have a title key which until the proper key is presented to the drive prevents you from copying protected sectors from the disc. So your dd command will fail when it gets to protected (aka scrambled) sectors.
Once you get the title key set correctly, the drive will then let you read all the sectors. The rest of the CSS protection involves encryption of those protected sectors. You could, in theory, put off that decryption operation until you went to play the material and just copy the encrypted sectors.
So you can copy without decryption but not unlocking access. Both are part of CSS protection and are therefore covered by DMCA. And the only way you get to find out how it works - legally - is through signing an agreement with the DVD Copy Control Authority, part of the DVD Forum. The big deal seems to be that Real violated their agreement with DVD CCA.
The problem is that there are plenty of zealots that will tell you that incorporating any GPL-licensed component in any way immediately forces the entire body of work to be released under GPL.
This can be interpreted at various times to include static linking, dynamic linking, linkage via any sort of invocation such as exec, RPC, and any other sort of connection between two pieces of code. What is the "right" answer? It isn't all that clear. It can be a matter of intent or of benefit. If the developer is benefiting from GPL code, then their project should be under GPL.
Further, what any competent lawyer will say is the objective is to avoid lawsuits. This means taking a proactive position to avoid getting into situations where some GPL zealot can potentially sue.
Essentially trying to play games with GPL can bring you into conflict with zealots. Some of these people have resources which allows them to file silly lawsuits without personally costing them a fortune. These are people to avoid coming into conflict with. So take the broadest possible interpretation of the GPL and live with it.
Uh, once the check is scanned, the life of the paper document is over. Nobody, ever, is going to want to see the "original" again.
Today, all checks are scanned and are often scanned at the point where they are deposited. Businesses that deal with a lot of checks can get their very own check scanner dor their business. Then they no longer take checks to the bank, ever.
We moved to this system a few years ago. Nobody is reading magnetic ink on the checks anymore.
Sorry, the $300 computer is here, and it is overwhelmingly running Windows.
No, the OS doesn't cost the OEM $100 - it is more like $20. Buy in bulk and save.
SO what Firewire connected DVRs are out there that you can purchase? I can't think of a single one. So what is the Firewire port for, actually?
The problem is that the bandwidth isn't there. It will never be there, in the US.
Today, everyone is connected to the Internet through some type of neighborhood gateway. This is then connected to some sort of concentrator that eventually connects to the Internet. The path between the neighborhood gateway and the concentrator is pretty much as fast as practical in most areas today. So you see cable Internet offered with "up to 20Mb" download speeds.
So with 500-1000 homes connected to the neighborhood gateway and 20Mb/sec download speeds advertised you would assume this gateway is connected via a pipe which can handle 20 * 1000 Mb/sec transfer, right? Well, no. There isn't any such pipe in existance.
What you get is maybe 100Mb/sec or 200Mb/sec at most. This is 100x less bandwidth than would be required for everyone to get full-time dedicated bandwidth of 20Mb/sec. This works fine for the most part because people are using anywhere near that capacity.
Don't bother worrying about all that capacity that is used by the cable TV channels. Sure, they are delivering 100 simultaneous streams to everyone - except they are delivering the identical stream to everyone so the bandwidth is only used once for everyone. This has virtually no impact on the total bandwidth requirements if everyone had their own stream.
Sorry, the difference between broadcasting and individual streams is so incredible that it will probably never be practical for everyone in a neghborhood to have 100% full-time streaming of even SD content. HD? Forget it.
No, they aren't going to build a 20,000MB/sec pipe to the neighborhood gateway. There are hundreds of them in even a fairly small town. Sure, it would be possible - but the cost would be immense. They just replaced the cable hardline distribution with fiber distribution in the last 10 years or so. Nobody is looking at another rebuild on that scale, even if it was practical to build it. Which it isn't.
Better get used to broadcasting. It will be with us for a very long time.
It is geated for appliances, not general-purpose computers.
Now I will grant that most of what people do today would be easily fulfilled by an appliance. And we would all be far more secure with appliances that could not be subverted by botnets, viruses, trojans, etc. An email/web appliance would satisfy 99% of home users and probably could be slightly extended with web applications to work for 50-60% of business users as well.
So who is building the hot new appliance? Nobody. All previous email appliances have died, mostly from a lack of functionality. Today people see a very false progression from a full-function appliance to a "real ocmputer" as being a short leap, so why not take it? The reality is the appliance with limited (or zero) local storage and no ability to install software (or trojans, viruses, botnets, etc.) would be much, much better for everyone using the Internet.
Could you make an appliance immune to phishing? Probably.
OK, so Chrome OS would be great for an appliance... except nobody is even contemplating building an appliance today. With the thousands (millions?) of Windows-based x86 applications out there for our general-purpose computers, who is going to displace Microsoft? An OS with a rich API, multimedia capabilities and access to the full capabilities of a computer? Or an OS where the API is a browser and nothing else?
Sorry, but Chrome OS might be OK for a netbook. Maybe. It has no place on a desktop computer.
Oh, maybe the bandwidth available might play a small role.
The US infrastructure can't handle streaming to everyone, and it isn't going to for a long long time. Broadcast is like having infinite bandwidth because the same stream is going to everyone. And the cable companies know this - they aren't stupid.
So they can run 10x or 100x the fiber to the neighborhood nodes, or they can leave it like it is for a few more years. Maybe 10-15 years, probably. Works fine for "bursts", doesn't work for everyone in the neighborhood to stream constantly.
Forget it. Mobile devices can be charged up when power is available. Anything that requires a constant source of electricity to be useful is going to be useless pretty soon - unless you have your own power source.
We are going to start seeing electricity shortages and nobody is going to be building huge datacenters that need their own generators anymore. You might find some folks being real clever with solar power, but what do they do at night? The grid? Sorry, night time is for homes, daytime is for offices and commercial space. No, we no longer have the capacity for running both at the same time.
You will remember fondly the last time the referigerator ran 24 hours. You will remember the first time you came home early and found out the air conditioner wouldn't turn on for a couple more hours. All this and more are coming soon.
IT is going to be a job for people with outmoded skills that can manage the winddown of big computing. Either that, or lots of new IT-related jobs will open up. Things like Generator Tender and Power Manager. Where you have to cut the electric budget for your department by 30% somehow.
We are moving to a much more sustainable environment, but still not really sustainable. We will not be building any more power plants and we will be avoiding all that pollution - whether it is from coal smoke, radioactive waste or dead birds. We will also be ending the light pollution of big cities. We are going to need that electric power for other stuff.
Why do Americans "fear" working for a Japanese or French boss so much they are willing to nationalize a car company?
The first thing a Japanese boss would do is throw the union out, just as has been done in all of the Japanese car plants in the US. A French boss might not do that, but they might as well. I believe BMW threw the union out of their plant in the US.
So a foreign owner would probably mean no union. No Democrat administration could tolerate that. I don't think anyone in the federal government gives a rat's ass about what the American people want. Nobody likes the bailout situation and nobody is in favor of what happened with GM. That didn't stop the Executive Branch from doing it. Note that neither the House nor Senate ever voted on a plan for GM.
One of the basic reasons why GM was underwater finacially was because of pension committments made as part of union contracts. Their only way out of these, legally, was to declare bankruptcy and have the government take over the pension plans. As far as I know, no other legal transfer of them was possible, other than outright sale of the entire company.
Penion plans are written in ways to as to prevent them from being shifted around or passed over to the government except in very limited circumstances. It is done this way to make it very difficult to get out of such obligations - which is a good thing. Except the problem that nearly every major employer that has existed for more than 30 years is facing is underfunded pension obligations. The basic reason behind this was some optimistic forcasting in the 1960s and 1970s by both company management and unions. The end result is a pension plan that would have been fine if the economy of 1965 continued on today. It did not. All of the companies affected have fewer employees today than they did in the 1960s and 1970s and a completely different financial picture.
What this means for retirees is that the company they retired from can't afford to continue their benefits. The rules and regulations controlling pension plans and their administration require that the company go bankrupt in order to pass the obligations over to the government pension office.
So sorry, you can't treat the union penions as creditors - that isn't how the rules operate. Besides, the total value of the pension plans for GM likely exceed the GDP of the US today. Certainly, it vastly exceeds the value of GM in 2008. Or any time in recent memory.
One of the biggest problems with the whole pension idea was that it could be a pay-as-you-go funding process. So that in 1980 the pension plan had to pay out 5 million dollars so all that had to be in the pension fund was 5 million dollars. The company then ahd to pay in the same amount, plus a little more, for 1981. The pension obligations were able to be met in that way. The problem is, the pension plans were not 100% funded for the life of every retiree from the moment of their retirement. Nor was it ever calculated on the basis of how much money was available for a person from the moment of their retirement. These were all defined-benefit plans where you got X dollars a month for the rest of your life, however long that was.
This means that as retirees began living longer and longer the total value of their pension plan just kept going up and up. As per the plan. So there is no specific dollar value that could ever be assigned to a plan - it just required more and more funding from the company. In 1970 it sounded reasonable. By 1990 most companies with defined-benefit pension plans had realized there was no way the plan could possibly continue much longer. Now we have airlines, manufacturers and just about everyone else bailing out of their pension plan somehow - and the government makes it very difficult to walk away without going bankrupt. Because the only entity that can possibly take over is the government itself.
Maybe you didn't get the memo, but our current President's full name is indeed Barak Hussein Obama. You can try to deny it, but them's the facts.
So I don't understand any childish name calling. Just stating the full name of the President. Sure, lots of people would like to pretend that isn't his middle name. Sorry, but it is true.
If GM had escaped from its union contracts through a bankruptcy, it would have started a trend of other severly underwater employers using the same tactic to escape their union responsibilities. No Democrat administration could possibly allow the end of union featherbedding and union gold-plated benefits. Hence the bailout, with the assurance that the unions would continue to receive their benefits.
There was no other way it was going to happen without a Reaganesque union-busting administration at the helm. Obama is going to give us unions whether we want them or not through the fair choice act, so how could he destroy them?
I mentioned elsewhere that amazon is holding ~$500 of my sales as a seller in limbo. Well a day after I said that publicly they immediately refunded the money, but still kept $79 for themselves. I eventually tracked-down the reason - an asshole woman in California bought a Zenith DTV box from me, and even though I already provided Amazon with proof-of-delivery, they decided to keep the $79 and refund it back to this woman. So she successfully stole my property, with amazon's help.
Yup, and that is exactly what every online merchant is going to do. When the customer complains - even when it is baseless and even false. Part of the problem is that Step #2 for the customer is to then call the credit card company and complain. They will immediately issue a chargeback for the amount of money plus tack on anywhere from $25 to $100 as an additional fine.
Proof is irrelevent. What counts is the credit card company has one standard response to this sort of thing and there is no appeal process for the merchant. This mean that Amazon can either refund the woman her money or they can have the credit card company take the money back and fine them additionally. And you get the shaft.
A real problem here is that if upstream providers do this sort of thing, there is no limit to their power. We're not talking about any court action, any due process or any other legal nicity. We are talking about vigilante action and mob rule.
The idea of "net neutrality" pretty much can be agreed upon that upstream providers do not cut off users for actions that violate the laws of some jurisdiction on their own. Now this may not be a good idea, but if your ISP is prevented from cutting you off for downloading pirated music and movies then a rogue ISP better not be cut off for hosting botnet control centers and phishing web sites. Sorry, you can't have it both ways.
Of course the real problem is that there is no force of law that can successfully prosecute folks like this. They might even be violating laws in their home country - but how do law enforcement agencies conduct a highly technical investigation when they have no facilities. Not only that, but the whole idea of the Internet makes it extremely difficult to conduct investigations without effectively wiretapping and requires the cooperation of a high level provider. It is difficult to see how such an investigation can be conducted by anyone without lots of resources and financial backing. And cooperation of providers, often at their own expense.
No, prosecution of such crimes as are alleged on the Internet is very difficult without either inside information (usually bragging) or evidence collected for other court actions. For example, the ISP is sued for lack of tax payments and the servers are seized as part of discovery, which then uncovers further evidence.
No I think this vigilante action is short lived and not in the best interests of people vitally concerned with the freedom of action on the Internet. Of course, freedom of action implies freedom to commit crimes on the Internet, like copyright violation and phishing.