The Kindle 2 supports a large number of e-book formats and it is possible to convert some more to the pretty common.mobi format. I have run a.LIT (Sony) to.mobi format conversion myself (free program) and the results were very good. The DX supports the same formats, plus PDF in a limited way.
The problem wtih PDF is that it is a page description langauge where the page layout has already been determined. OK, so how do you transform a generic PDF to a different page format? Short answer is, you do not. If the PDF consists of nothing but text, you might be able to extract the text and throw everything else away, but this works for such a limited number of PDFs that the Kindle developers chose not to even try.
So, the common on the DX is that if the PDF page fits on the screen and is readable like that, wonderful. Otherwise, it isn't going to be very pretty. A significantly better approach for the Kindle 2 is to convert the PDF to.mobi form and allow the device to display the text and illustrations as best it can, with text scaling and full reformatting. Does this work for all PDFs? No. PDF was designed as a page description language, not a e-book format and it does a very poor job of being an e-book format.
That sort of non-copyright system would mean that anyone could block the revenue from any sort of creative work by simply making it available non-commercially. In other words, posting it on a P2P network would be legal, downloading it would be legal and nothing could be done to stop it.
That would mean I would never have to pay for a movie ever again, and there would be no legal recourse. It would mean that nobody would ever have to pay for software ever again, because it would all be free.
Oh, except for stupid people that would not know how to use P2P for downloading. They would have to pay. Too bad for them.
I agree, it would be nice, except for anyone that is paid for software today. Or movies. Or music. Or books. I guess it would be great if you work in a WalMart, because you could now afford all that stuff. My employees would have to join you at WalMart.
The FAT file system stores 11 characters per file name in the directory entry, period. By convention, these are allocated to eight file name characters and three extension charcters. These are stored as 8-bit bytes.
No, Windows 95 is not a GUI on DOS. All Windows versions before 95 were that. Windows 95 introduced several new concepts such as the VxD and a different virtualization structure. Yes, Windows 95 through Windows Me had a primarily 16-bit kernel and a few 32-bit extensions and much of the 16-bit kernel had it roots in DOS. But it was a lot more than a GUI on DOS.
Support was added to DOS 6 for long file names, using exactly the same strategy as Windows 95.
The long file name implementation uses additional directory entries, beyond the base short file name entry, to hold a Unicode file name. The base short file name contains the starting cluster number of the file data, so it is vital that there is a short file name entry. The entries used to contain the long file name have file name bytes occupying those locations.
The long file name can occupy multiple directory entries, but they must follow the short file name - there is no pointer. So the long file name is just known to be in the following entries until the next short file name entry is encountered.
Sure, you could come up with a different way of doing it. It would be simpler to just make the directory entries bigger. But the question is how do you write it such that the Windows implementation can read the file system. There are very few options for flexibility to maintain this compatibility. The basic thing is that long file names are a very simple add-on to the FAT file system that has existed for a long time. This allows full read and write compatibility even if the writer has no knowledge of long file names.
I don't see any standard that says what, precisely, "objectionable" materials might be. If this is used only in a very limited sense, it is probably OK.
However, I suspect there might be a considerable outcry if AVG decided to make their free tool treat various BitTorrent clients as "objectionable" but their paid-for version did not. Without extremely strict well-defined guidelines for what constitutes "objectionable" this sort of thing can be used to target anything and now there is a court precedent saying you can't sue them.
Let's see, would the MPAA consider BitTorrent to be objectionable?
How about a nice web-tool for searching out and downloading child porn?
What about complete instructions for altering a cell phone to make free, untracable calls?
Should an anti-virus company be able to delete files for these sorts of things? Why not? I'm sure they are objectionable to someone.
What is needed is a portable energy source with a density that of... well, oil. Right now, there isn't any real alternative to that. Without the energy density transportation is impractical with smaller cars and even many trucks.
What does this mean? It means that if it is necessary to set up a nuclear reactor in order to extract oil from shale deposits that it will be done. There is no limit to the amount of "stationary energy" that can be put into the problem because the result is a portable, high-density energy source. There is no breakeven point at which the energy required to get oil is too great - even if the energy required exceeds the energy value of the oil, you are trading a stationary energy input for a portable energy output.
The problem with that idea is that after 30 days all the people that don't insist on being the first on their block to have a new movie get it for free. Because once it is ripped, it is available for download.
Today it is somewhat impractical to download full-resolution Blu-Ray movies. But what happens when 100Mbit connections are commonplace?
Once you let one person rip it, you have let everyone rip it. And then it is posted for everyone to download.
I think the real solution is that they make one disc and sell it for $100,000,000. Some rich Russian mafia dude buys it, rips it and makes it available for everyone else for free. Either that or movies they think have a chance of making money are released in theaters only - no DVD, ever. They get they money that way and movies continue.
Today it is just a question of waiting. When the DVD comes out, it is all free. If you know how to download. The people that do not are supporting the industry and letting the rest leech for free.
The problem is, should someone decide to "do" something or, perhaps more likely, "let's see what happens if..." we are completely vulnerable. Wide open to whatever is coming down and there isn't anything that can realistically be done about it today.
Sure, it like staring up at the noonday sky wondering if a comet is going to hit today. But you can rest assured that someday, probably sooner than later, that comet is going to come calling. And if someone figured out a distribued attack on, say, the power grid in the US, it would be a huge mess.
Can you see Obama on TV asking everyone to turn off their computers?
You point out a huge problem: today we have little redundancy and almost no wiggle room for any sort of failure. JIT inventory means that if UPS or FedEx drivers go out on strike commerce shuts down, even the stores on Main Street. Factories operate on the thinnest of margins with no reserve capacity.
So what if Something Bad happens? In 1970 it would have mean almost nothing. Today, almost any major event is going to distrupt supply chains, inventory and commerce. The result if we are talking about paper towels isn't that bad, but how about food? In 1950 the US was probably immune to any sort of distruption affecting the food supply in cities. The stockpiles would last until things were pieced back together. By 1980 the stockpiles were less and the population greater. Now, if you prevent delivery trucks from reaching stores for two days you are going to have food riots in cities.
Read the book "The Coming Dark Age" by Roberto Vacca (Amazon). Old book, but probably more true today than ever before.
I talked recently to a small farmer with a few cows. They are already required to document entry and exit of cattle into and out of each county. Since their farm has multiple fields which are in two separate counties, they are required to submit this documentation each time they move an animal between the two fields. Which is of course stupid, but the regulations were designed without any consideration for a split-county operation like this.
This person has maybe 20 head, total. With the existing regulations it is almost too much to bother with. Adding more tracking, with more hardware requirements and obviously training for all hands involved it is going to be impractical for them to continue.
Yes, there were some feed problems for cows. Most of these problems have been identified and dealt with. I suspect there are still a few, but nothing that is going to create anything like the mad cow panic. Piling more and more regulation, especially regulation that is not focused on real problems buy imaginary ones, will simply mean that all cattle are raised by factory farms.
You confuse committing a crime against the citizens of a country with committing a crime against the government of a country. Even in the US, it is quite different.
Most AC adapters these days are switching mode power supplies - no transformer at all. So, no a single transformer would not be more efficient than multiple switching power supplies. A single larger switching power supply is likely going to consume more power than a number of smaller ones unless the thing is operating at full load most of the time.
I would think a far bigger problem would be some helpful soul finding your resume and submitting it to the company where you are now working. Putting a resume out on the Internet today is a license for anyone to abuse it in any way possible. And the possibilities are endless.
This sounds like a great boon to all mankind - a single judge gets to decide something that basically means the term of copyright is now three years. Right?
Or does this sounds like it might be in actuallity something that shouldn't quite be decided this way?
Be very careful on which side you are cheering for. Neither side is approaching this very well, and certainly the daughter in this case is (a) clearly in the wrong and (b) hoping for a reprive. Maybe she will get it.
Where do you think Sony goes if all they have to do is "steal" some music, wait three years and then publish it under their own name? After all, the statute of limitations will have run out, won't it? I'll bet that someone like Sony might try this, either them or WalMart.
You see, what gets decided in the courtroom isn't just for happy little filesharers. It applies to everyone else as well, no matter what their motives might be.
The problem is simply taking articles verbatium from a newspaper (or other web site) and putting the content on your own site.
Doesn't happen? Hah. Of course it does. Because as anyone under the age of 30 will tell you, once it is on the Internet it is free to use however you want. So of course you are going to have anything and everything copied out from newapaper sites, CNN, USA Today, and whatever else there is.
Now is this what is destroying the value of news gathering in the US today? I don't really think so.
However, this is going to be a continuing problem and it is doubtful that anyone under 30 today even comprehends why it might be a bad idea to do this.
The basic problem with hardware documentation comes from the hardware manufacturer's need to get paid. If everyone would just work for free, this problem would evaporate. Unfortunately, what happens is the hardware itself is pretty much a commodity - chips are chips. Lots of application notes from the chip manufacturers that say how to build a device that does X. The problem is, you need a driver and firmware to make X really do its job.
So anybody in China can produce the hardware for a tenth of the price of anyone else in the world. Mostly because they pay the people less than a tenth of what they would make anywhere else in the world. But in order to put the original manufacturer out of business, they need to have that software - the driver and the firmware. They can just steal the object code, and believe me, it has been done. But if they can get documentation about how it is all supposed to work - and maybe some internal specifications - then they can produce the software as well.
End result is everything, and I do mean everything, is made in China. Of course the folks that came up with the idea originally get nothing out of it except a nice bankruptcy.
Come up with an idea of how to preserve the original "innovator" investment in R&D and you'll really have something. Right now, it is try to block the folks that want to camp on success of others with cheap manufacturering and ultra-cheap engineering.
If you believe in AGW, or accept the idea there is some sort of concensus among climate scientists there is one little fact that keeps popping up.
Climate change is being caused by people. Fewer people, less climate change.
Sure, if we could reduce the impact of all of those people it might get better. But do you understand that each and every human outputs about the same heat as a 75 watt lightbulb? Oh, and if they are doing anything it goes up to almost 200 watts.
Let's see, 6 billion people... that would be about 450,000,000,000 watts of energy being released every hour. Now, it takes a awful lot of energy to affect the planet's temperature, but regardless of anything else don't you think that 450 BILLION watts might make a difference?
We could easily turn this down to 200 billion watts within a few years. This might make all the difference in the world.
We are building an entire world from the ground up where everyone believes they are free to use (borrow, steal, whatever) anything they can find on the Internet in whatever way they feel like.
Music, movies, books, software, whatever. The idea of creative ownership - I created this and therefore nobody else can use it unless I say so - is rapidly disappearing in younger people's minds. The result of this is of course there will be lots of "unattributed use" because when nobody respects this kind of ownership, there isn't any reason not to.
So plagiarism is just the first step. Expect to see more.
The problem with trying to tie the damages to something real, like the number of songs is that she is being sued not for having the songs or downloading them but for redistributing them. So having them counts for nothing.
Now, if there was clear evidence that the songs were redistributed "n" times I suppose you could compute some sort of actual damage estimate based on that. Unfortunately, there is no evidence at all of how many times the songs were redistributed, only that it was possible for them to be so. Whether it was 1 time or 1000 times nobody knows - there are no logs. And, furthermore, she attempted to hide the evidence of this by having the hard drive replaced. So even if there were logs by the actions of the defendent, these would have been lost.
The courts have a solution for this - statutory damages.
Unfortunately, the defendent chose to try to evade the whole process. By changing out the hard drive. By lying under oath. By trying to obfuscate her actions with a lot of irrelevent crap. None of this impressed the jury, which is what I think led to the judgement nearly 10 times the original one.
Whisper campaign? Well, let's see. If the end-game for Vonage is to replace the existing hardwired telephone service there is one little problem - they need the wires to be maintained for their customer's DSL links. Nobody really believes that the wireline maintenance is going to be covered by the revenue generated by selling naked DSL service.
The end result of this is Vonage can be a bit player off to the side but should they "succeed" they really fail. Not a good overall strategy. Yes, I guess you could say they don't own the value-drivers. More importantly, they desperately need their competition in order to survive. And their competition has to be both doing well enough to support their business and make it possible for them to compete.
Worse yet for Vonage and their ilk is that the government has mandated the wireline telephone companies have to provide for data services and bulk-purchased voice services to be priced below real costs. As long as these services are provided to a few players and the main part of the telco revenue is still providing telephone service everything will be fine. But, again, should Vonage or any of their sort really "succeed", they fail.
Would the right answer be to forcibly separate the wireline facilities from the telco voice providers? Sure, except under current rules no wireline facility could operate because the services that are sold today to outside companies are done so at a loss. There are a lot of wires out there and the maintenance of this is quite costly. Today that bill is paid for by voice services, mostly for business customers that have entirely different billing arrangements than residential customers do.
So pulling the facilities management away from the telcos would simply require the data and bulk services to be sold at real prices. So the $14.99 DSL service would be more like $99. At today's pricing it makes sense for an individual to drop their $25 telephone and $15 DSL to something like $15 DSL and Magic Jack at $20 a year. If the DSL service was priced including wireline maintenance costs, it wouildn't be practical at all. The real problem there would be lost of people can't afford $1200 a year for Internet and would drop it. Loss of market share like this would cripple plenty of things and would change the landscape of Internet service providers in the US.
What is the real answer? I suspect it is to abandon wireline maintenance completely and replace it with new fiber optic links from a completely new company. In about 50 years. In the meantime, we will have the existing wires in the ground and on the poles until they need repair. And with nobody repairing it, people will just do without wired connections.
Region coding is a technique that allows different countries to have different censorship (aka Movie Ratings). WIthout this or something like it a DVD must satisfy UK, Japan and USA requirements. This isn't going to happen very easily except for My Little Pony animated cartoons. Take a look sometime what they are forced to cut out to be able to sell a movie in Japan that was already edited for UK.
There basically is no such thing as child porn in Japan. So showing nearly naked 12-year-olds having sex is fine there. However, one pubic hair will get the movie banned from import. It pretty much is the exact opposite in USA and UK. For most of Europe there better not be anything that could be construed as pro-Nazi in any way. So those parts have to be cut out.
You want one region for DVDs? My Little Pony is probably OK. Oh, and Strawberry Shortcake.
As far as copyright infringement is concerned, I don't know anyone that can use a computer that pays for music anymore. Why would they, when it is all free for the taking? Pay? Why? Movies are next on the list, I assure you. As the pirate sites get better and better and the bandwidth keeps increasing there will be no reason not to download movies. And nobody is going to pay, ever again. Most infringers already know the price they have to pay is zero and only the silly noobs pay. This is absolutely the future we are headed towards.
Everyone wants locally grown food, until the announcement of the new pig farm moving in next door.
Everyone wants locally grown food, until the farm field across the road is plowed and their home and yard are covered in dust from it.
Everyone wants locally grown food... until they find out what growing food is really like and just how local it is going to be.
Sorry, it isn't going to happen. Not with current population levels. Who went to school with someone that said "I want to be a farmer when I grow up." Nobody, that's who.
First, you need to kill off about 90% of the people currently living on the planet. Then you can have a sustainable environment.
In most cases the homeless are homeless because of a lack of ability to cope with their former lives. This can be some psychological problem or it can just be a utter lack of motivation to cope. Sometimes coping is hard work and in today's society it can be a difficult task just to keep going. Some people aren't going to want to bother.
There can be other reasons for temporarily being homeless. But in general from what I have seen the people that are temporarily homeless take advantage of every possible way to get themselves out of being homeless. And they will succeed eventually. Usually it doesn't take that long. But I firmly believe that you take your average highly motivated individual and strip them of everything worldly and drop them in some inner city somewhere and you will find them back in control of their lives in a short period of time. Not much longer and they will be back with all the material goods and trappings of a well-off life.
On the other hand, you take some total slacker or persoh suffering from severe depression and give them everything they need to have a meaningful life and you will find them homeless without a penny in six months.
It has nothing to do with what society has done to these people and everything to do with what they are personally capable of. 60 years ago the answer was obvious - you put the people that can't cope in hospitals because they are sick. Well, around 1970 we emptied the hospitals because it was inhumane to keep them there. Is it any less humane to have dumped them on the streets?
The real problem with getting a warrent in many cases is that while there may be strong indications that something is going on, there is nothing that a judge would consider probable cause.
This can even extend to siuations where it is clear to someone technically inclined that someone is involved in probably illicit digital traffic but it is not at all clear to someone less technical. This comes up with botnets and compromized computers - you see a computer hammering away at sending spam or a brute-force attack. It is clear from simply looking at traffic statistics that something is going on. Is this cause for someone to take action? Usually not, because there is no "real world" evidence of this other than some ephemeral digital indication, which isn't good enough.
Requiring physical, real-world "probable cause" in order to examine digital information would seem to be a sure guarantee that there is no digital crime. Since it can't be identified, it therefore doesn't exist. And I am sure there are plenty of judges that cannot conceive of anything beyond physical, real world probable cause and will not grant a warrant based on anything digital at all.
I do find this interesting that this comes up on the same day as an article about Sweden's court rejecting IP identification. Clearly nobody knows what is going on and the courts in different places are utterly lost.
I would imagine that storing logs that show someone trying to brute-force attack your server would also be against the law. I would hope that any illegal act would be made pretty much impossible to prosecute because of a lack of identifying information from this.
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The Kindle 2 supports a large number of e-book formats and it is possible to convert some more to the pretty common .mobi format. I have run a .LIT (Sony) to .mobi format conversion myself (free program) and the results were very good. The DX supports the same formats, plus PDF in a limited way.
The problem wtih PDF is that it is a page description langauge where the page layout has already been determined. OK, so how do you transform a generic PDF to a different page format? Short answer is, you do not. If the PDF consists of nothing but text, you might be able to extract the text and throw everything else away, but this works for such a limited number of PDFs that the Kindle developers chose not to even try.
So, the common on the DX is that if the PDF page fits on the screen and is readable like that, wonderful. Otherwise, it isn't going to be very pretty. A significantly better approach for the Kindle 2 is to convert the PDF to .mobi form and allow the device to display the text and illustrations as best it can, with text scaling and full reformatting. Does this work for all PDFs? No. PDF was designed as a page description language, not a e-book format and it does a very poor job of being an e-book format.
That sort of non-copyright system would mean that anyone could block the revenue from any sort of creative work by simply making it available non-commercially. In other words, posting it on a P2P network would be legal, downloading it would be legal and nothing could be done to stop it.
That would mean I would never have to pay for a movie ever again, and there would be no legal recourse. It would mean that nobody would ever have to pay for software ever again, because it would all be free.
Oh, except for stupid people that would not know how to use P2P for downloading. They would have to pay. Too bad for them.
I agree, it would be nice, except for anyone that is paid for software today. Or movies. Or music. Or books. I guess it would be great if you work in a WalMart, because you could now afford all that stuff. My employees would have to join you at WalMart.
Uh, no.
The FAT file system stores 11 characters per file name in the directory entry, period. By convention, these are allocated to eight file name characters and three extension charcters. These are stored as 8-bit bytes.
No, Windows 95 is not a GUI on DOS. All Windows versions before 95 were that. Windows 95 introduced several new concepts such as the VxD and a different virtualization structure. Yes, Windows 95 through Windows Me had a primarily 16-bit kernel and a few 32-bit extensions and much of the 16-bit kernel had it roots in DOS. But it was a lot more than a GUI on DOS.
Support was added to DOS 6 for long file names, using exactly the same strategy as Windows 95.
The long file name implementation uses additional directory entries, beyond the base short file name entry, to hold a Unicode file name. The base short file name contains the starting cluster number of the file data, so it is vital that there is a short file name entry. The entries used to contain the long file name have file name bytes occupying those locations.
The long file name can occupy multiple directory entries, but they must follow the short file name - there is no pointer. So the long file name is just known to be in the following entries until the next short file name entry is encountered.
Sure, you could come up with a different way of doing it. It would be simpler to just make the directory entries bigger. But the question is how do you write it such that the Windows implementation can read the file system. There are very few options for flexibility to maintain this compatibility. The basic thing is that long file names are a very simple add-on to the FAT file system that has existed for a long time. This allows full read and write compatibility even if the writer has no knowledge of long file names.
I don't see any standard that says what, precisely, "objectionable" materials might be. If this is used only in a very limited sense, it is probably OK.
However, I suspect there might be a considerable outcry if AVG decided to make their free tool treat various BitTorrent clients as "objectionable" but their paid-for version did not. Without extremely strict well-defined guidelines for what constitutes "objectionable" this sort of thing can be used to target anything and now there is a court precedent saying you can't sue them.
Let's see, would the MPAA consider BitTorrent to be objectionable?
How about a nice web-tool for searching out and downloading child porn?
What about complete instructions for altering a cell phone to make free, untracable calls?
Should an anti-virus company be able to delete files for these sorts of things? Why not? I'm sure they are objectionable to someone.
You miss the point of oil, probably completely.
What is needed is a portable energy source with a density that of ... well, oil. Right now, there isn't any real alternative to that. Without the energy density transportation is impractical with smaller cars and even many trucks.
What does this mean? It means that if it is necessary to set up a nuclear reactor in order to extract oil from shale deposits that it will be done. There is no limit to the amount of "stationary energy" that can be put into the problem because the result is a portable, high-density energy source. There is no breakeven point at which the energy required to get oil is too great - even if the energy required exceeds the energy value of the oil, you are trading a stationary energy input for a portable energy output.
The problem with that idea is that after 30 days all the people that don't insist on being the first on their block to have a new movie get it for free. Because once it is ripped, it is available for download.
Today it is somewhat impractical to download full-resolution Blu-Ray movies. But what happens when 100Mbit connections are commonplace?
Once you let one person rip it, you have let everyone rip it. And then it is posted for everyone to download.
I think the real solution is that they make one disc and sell it for $100,000,000. Some rich Russian mafia dude buys it, rips it and makes it available for everyone else for free. Either that or movies they think have a chance of making money are released in theaters only - no DVD, ever. They get they money that way and movies continue.
Today it is just a question of waiting. When the DVD comes out, it is all free. If you know how to download. The people that do not are supporting the industry and letting the rest leech for free.
Absolutely, today there is no serious threat.
The problem is, should someone decide to "do" something or, perhaps more likely, "let's see what happens if ..." we are completely vulnerable. Wide open to whatever is coming down and there isn't anything that can realistically be done about it today.
Sure, it like staring up at the noonday sky wondering if a comet is going to hit today. But you can rest assured that someday, probably sooner than later, that comet is going to come calling. And if someone figured out a distribued attack on, say, the power grid in the US, it would be a huge mess.
Can you see Obama on TV asking everyone to turn off their computers?
You point out a huge problem: today we have little redundancy and almost no wiggle room for any sort of failure. JIT inventory means that if UPS or FedEx drivers go out on strike commerce shuts down, even the stores on Main Street. Factories operate on the thinnest of margins with no reserve capacity.
So what if Something Bad happens? In 1970 it would have mean almost nothing. Today, almost any major event is going to distrupt supply chains, inventory and commerce. The result if we are talking about paper towels isn't that bad, but how about food? In 1950 the US was probably immune to any sort of distruption affecting the food supply in cities. The stockpiles would last until things were pieced back together. By 1980 the stockpiles were less and the population greater. Now, if you prevent delivery trucks from reaching stores for two days you are going to have food riots in cities.
Read the book "The Coming Dark Age" by Roberto Vacca (Amazon). Old book, but probably more true today than ever before.
I talked recently to a small farmer with a few cows. They are already required to document entry and exit of cattle into and out of each county. Since their farm has multiple fields which are in two separate counties, they are required to submit this documentation each time they move an animal between the two fields. Which is of course stupid, but the regulations were designed without any consideration for a split-county operation like this.
This person has maybe 20 head, total. With the existing regulations it is almost too much to bother with. Adding more tracking, with more hardware requirements and obviously training for all hands involved it is going to be impractical for them to continue.
Yes, there were some feed problems for cows. Most of these problems have been identified and dealt with. I suspect there are still a few, but nothing that is going to create anything like the mad cow panic. Piling more and more regulation, especially regulation that is not focused on real problems buy imaginary ones, will simply mean that all cattle are raised by factory farms.
You confuse committing a crime against the citizens of a country with committing a crime against the government of a country. Even in the US, it is quite different.
Most AC adapters these days are switching mode power supplies - no transformer at all. So, no a single transformer would not be more efficient than multiple switching power supplies. A single larger switching power supply is likely going to consume more power than a number of smaller ones unless the thing is operating at full load most of the time.
I would think a far bigger problem would be some helpful soul finding your resume and submitting it to the company where you are now working. Putting a resume out on the Internet today is a license for anyone to abuse it in any way possible. And the possibilities are endless.
This sounds like a great boon to all mankind - a single judge gets to decide something that basically means the term of copyright is now three years. Right?
Or does this sounds like it might be in actuallity something that shouldn't quite be decided this way?
Be very careful on which side you are cheering for. Neither side is approaching this very well, and certainly the daughter in this case is (a) clearly in the wrong and (b) hoping for a reprive. Maybe she will get it.
Where do you think Sony goes if all they have to do is "steal" some music, wait three years and then publish it under their own name? After all, the statute of limitations will have run out, won't it? I'll bet that someone like Sony might try this, either them or WalMart.
You see, what gets decided in the courtroom isn't just for happy little filesharers. It applies to everyone else as well, no matter what their motives might be.
The problem is simply taking articles verbatium from a newspaper (or other web site) and putting the content on your own site.
Doesn't happen? Hah. Of course it does. Because as anyone under the age of 30 will tell you, once it is on the Internet it is free to use however you want. So of course you are going to have anything and everything copied out from newapaper sites, CNN, USA Today, and whatever else there is.
Now is this what is destroying the value of news gathering in the US today? I don't really think so.
However, this is going to be a continuing problem and it is doubtful that anyone under 30 today even comprehends why it might be a bad idea to do this.
The basic problem with hardware documentation comes from the hardware manufacturer's need to get paid. If everyone would just work for free, this problem would evaporate. Unfortunately, what happens is the hardware itself is pretty much a commodity - chips are chips. Lots of application notes from the chip manufacturers that say how to build a device that does X. The problem is, you need a driver and firmware to make X really do its job.
So anybody in China can produce the hardware for a tenth of the price of anyone else in the world. Mostly because they pay the people less than a tenth of what they would make anywhere else in the world. But in order to put the original manufacturer out of business, they need to have that software - the driver and the firmware. They can just steal the object code, and believe me, it has been done. But if they can get documentation about how it is all supposed to work - and maybe some internal specifications - then they can produce the software as well.
End result is everything, and I do mean everything, is made in China. Of course the folks that came up with the idea originally get nothing out of it except a nice bankruptcy.
Come up with an idea of how to preserve the original "innovator" investment in R&D and you'll really have something. Right now, it is try to block the folks that want to camp on success of others with cheap manufacturering and ultra-cheap engineering.
If you believe in AGW, or accept the idea there is some sort of concensus among climate scientists there is one little fact that keeps popping up.
Climate change is being caused by people. Fewer people, less climate change.
Sure, if we could reduce the impact of all of those people it might get better. But do you understand that each and every human outputs about the same heat as a 75 watt lightbulb? Oh, and if they are doing anything it goes up to almost 200 watts.
Let's see, 6 billion people... that would be about 450,000,000,000 watts of energy being released every hour. Now, it takes a awful lot of energy to affect the planet's temperature, but regardless of anything else don't you think that 450 BILLION watts might make a difference?
We could easily turn this down to 200 billion watts within a few years. This might make all the difference in the world.
We are building an entire world from the ground up where everyone believes they are free to use (borrow, steal, whatever) anything they can find on the Internet in whatever way they feel like.
Music, movies, books, software, whatever. The idea of creative ownership - I created this and therefore nobody else can use it unless I say so - is rapidly disappearing in younger people's minds. The result of this is of course there will be lots of "unattributed use" because when nobody respects this kind of ownership, there isn't any reason not to.
So plagiarism is just the first step. Expect to see more.
The problem with trying to tie the damages to something real, like the number of songs is that she is being sued not for having the songs or downloading them but for redistributing them. So having them counts for nothing.
Now, if there was clear evidence that the songs were redistributed "n" times I suppose you could compute some sort of actual damage estimate based on that. Unfortunately, there is no evidence at all of how many times the songs were redistributed, only that it was possible for them to be so. Whether it was 1 time or 1000 times nobody knows - there are no logs. And, furthermore, she attempted to hide the evidence of this by having the hard drive replaced. So even if there were logs by the actions of the defendent, these would have been lost.
The courts have a solution for this - statutory damages.
Unfortunately, the defendent chose to try to evade the whole process. By changing out the hard drive. By lying under oath. By trying to obfuscate her actions with a lot of irrelevent crap. None of this impressed the jury, which is what I think led to the judgement nearly 10 times the original one.
Whisper campaign? Well, let's see. If the end-game for Vonage is to replace the existing hardwired telephone service there is one little problem - they need the wires to be maintained for their customer's DSL links. Nobody really believes that the wireline maintenance is going to be covered by the revenue generated by selling naked DSL service.
The end result of this is Vonage can be a bit player off to the side but should they "succeed" they really fail. Not a good overall strategy. Yes, I guess you could say they don't own the value-drivers. More importantly, they desperately need their competition in order to survive. And their competition has to be both doing well enough to support their business and make it possible for them to compete.
Worse yet for Vonage and their ilk is that the government has mandated the wireline telephone companies have to provide for data services and bulk-purchased voice services to be priced below real costs. As long as these services are provided to a few players and the main part of the telco revenue is still providing telephone service everything will be fine. But, again, should Vonage or any of their sort really "succeed", they fail.
Would the right answer be to forcibly separate the wireline facilities from the telco voice providers? Sure, except under current rules no wireline facility could operate because the services that are sold today to outside companies are done so at a loss. There are a lot of wires out there and the maintenance of this is quite costly. Today that bill is paid for by voice services, mostly for business customers that have entirely different billing arrangements than residential customers do.
So pulling the facilities management away from the telcos would simply require the data and bulk services to be sold at real prices. So the $14.99 DSL service would be more like $99. At today's pricing it makes sense for an individual to drop their $25 telephone and $15 DSL to something like $15 DSL and Magic Jack at $20 a year. If the DSL service was priced including wireline maintenance costs, it wouildn't be practical at all. The real problem there would be lost of people can't afford $1200 a year for Internet and would drop it. Loss of market share like this would cripple plenty of things and would change the landscape of Internet service providers in the US.
What is the real answer? I suspect it is to abandon wireline maintenance completely and replace it with new fiber optic links from a completely new company. In about 50 years. In the meantime, we will have the existing wires in the ground and on the poles until they need repair. And with nobody repairing it, people will just do without wired connections.
For an example of this, I heartily recommend Maren Song.
Home recording at its best.
Region coding is a technique that allows different countries to have different censorship (aka Movie Ratings). WIthout this or something like it a DVD must satisfy UK, Japan and USA requirements. This isn't going to happen very easily except for My Little Pony animated cartoons. Take a look sometime what they are forced to cut out to be able to sell a movie in Japan that was already edited for UK.
There basically is no such thing as child porn in Japan. So showing nearly naked 12-year-olds having sex is fine there. However, one pubic hair will get the movie banned from import. It pretty much is the exact opposite in USA and UK. For most of Europe there better not be anything that could be construed as pro-Nazi in any way. So those parts have to be cut out.
You want one region for DVDs? My Little Pony is probably OK. Oh, and Strawberry Shortcake.
As far as copyright infringement is concerned, I don't know anyone that can use a computer that pays for music anymore. Why would they, when it is all free for the taking? Pay? Why? Movies are next on the list, I assure you. As the pirate sites get better and better and the bandwidth keeps increasing there will be no reason not to download movies. And nobody is going to pay, ever again. Most infringers already know the price they have to pay is zero and only the silly noobs pay. This is absolutely the future we are headed towards.
Everyone wants locally grown food, until the announcement of the new pig farm moving in next door.
Everyone wants locally grown food, until the farm field across the road is plowed and their home and yard are covered in dust from it.
Everyone wants locally grown food... until they find out what growing food is really like and just how local it is going to be.
Sorry, it isn't going to happen. Not with current population levels. Who went to school with someone that said "I want to be a farmer when I grow up." Nobody, that's who.
First, you need to kill off about 90% of the people currently living on the planet. Then you can have a sustainable environment.
In most cases the homeless are homeless because of a lack of ability to cope with their former lives. This can be some psychological problem or it can just be a utter lack of motivation to cope. Sometimes coping is hard work and in today's society it can be a difficult task just to keep going. Some people aren't going to want to bother.
There can be other reasons for temporarily being homeless. But in general from what I have seen the people that are temporarily homeless take advantage of every possible way to get themselves out of being homeless. And they will succeed eventually. Usually it doesn't take that long. But I firmly believe that you take your average highly motivated individual and strip them of everything worldly and drop them in some inner city somewhere and you will find them back in control of their lives in a short period of time. Not much longer and they will be back with all the material goods and trappings of a well-off life.
On the other hand, you take some total slacker or persoh suffering from severe depression and give them everything they need to have a meaningful life and you will find them homeless without a penny in six months.
It has nothing to do with what society has done to these people and everything to do with what they are personally capable of. 60 years ago the answer was obvious - you put the people that can't cope in hospitals because they are sick. Well, around 1970 we emptied the hospitals because it was inhumane to keep them there. Is it any less humane to have dumped them on the streets?
The real problem with getting a warrent in many cases is that while there may be strong indications that something is going on, there is nothing that a judge would consider probable cause.
This can even extend to siuations where it is clear to someone technically inclined that someone is involved in probably illicit digital traffic but it is not at all clear to someone less technical. This comes up with botnets and compromized computers - you see a computer hammering away at sending spam or a brute-force attack. It is clear from simply looking at traffic statistics that something is going on. Is this cause for someone to take action? Usually not, because there is no "real world" evidence of this other than some ephemeral digital indication, which isn't good enough.
Requiring physical, real-world "probable cause" in order to examine digital information would seem to be a sure guarantee that there is no digital crime. Since it can't be identified, it therefore doesn't exist. And I am sure there are plenty of judges that cannot conceive of anything beyond physical, real world probable cause and will not grant a warrant based on anything digital at all.
I do find this interesting that this comes up on the same day as an article about Sweden's court rejecting IP identification. Clearly nobody knows what is going on and the courts in different places are utterly lost.
I would imagine that storing logs that show someone trying to brute-force attack your server would also be against the law. I would hope that any illegal act would be made pretty much impossible to prosecute because of a lack of identifying information from this.
That is the idea, isn't it?