Let me repeat TWO of the disclaimers that I put in my original post:
Obviously I don't know the details of the exploit,
(This example is probably way too simple and is likely NOT how the actual phone exploit works; it is just to illustrate the point.)
And you seem to have missed the very next paragraph in the Wikipedia article where it talks about multi-segment SMS, which (from just the/. summary) sounds like what this exploit targets.
Obviously I don't know the details of the exploit, but no phone software would willingly execute code that they have no control over. These exploits take advantage of security bugs in the phone software to get them to execute code.
A simple naive example is the classic stack buffer overflow. I might send a malformed SMS that encodes a 200-byte message (140 bytes is the byte limit for SMS). If the software that processes the SMS didn't check that the byte count is less than 140, it might happily write those 200 bytes into a stack-allocated 160-byte character array (160 being the character limit for SMS). Now you've overflowed that fixed-size 160-byte buffer by 40 bytes. Some of those 40 bytes are going to scribble over the return address of the called function. When the function returns, you now are controlling where it returns to. That's the "exploit". (This example is probably way too simple and is likely NOT how the actual phone exploit works; it is just to illustrate the point.)
The second part of the exploit is the "payload", which is located somewhere else in that extra 40 bytes. If you can do it right, you can construct your exploit such that you point the return address *into* the payload, and now when the function returns, the payload is where you're executing from. You have now effectively gained control of the phone, because it's executing code that you gave it. It didn't willingly execute it for you, you took advantage of a security flaw to do so.
Of course the kinetic energy isn't free, but you're forgetting about how that energy goes to waste when non-hybrid cars brake. In a parking lot, chances are the car is braking and slowing down quite frequently. Also, many parking lots have speed bumps to control speed anyway. Unless every car there is a hybrid that uses regenerative braking to recharge a battery, my bet is that they're harnessing some kinetic energy that would otherwise be completely wasted via braking/slowing for the speed bumps.
Architects??? Photocopy is cheap. Engineers make drawings, they do not build it up, the workers do. The workers get nothing.
Thanks for the pedantry. Architects and engineers design physical goods. You're right, they don't construct them. Which is completely irrelevant to the simple point that the goods have both an "IP" component (the design) and a physical component (the actual physical thing). Architects and engineers do the IP component, but that IP component isn't worth that much without the physical component too.
All the famous musicians seems to have wealth far higher than "value", so your calculation does not end up.
So you are now the determiner of the value of some work? If IP goods should be able to be copied for $0, does that mean they are worthless? How much would you say the design of your computer's CPU is worth to you?
Don't lie! Practically no one want to do that! (just check GPL discussions).
That's right, creators of GPL-licensed software want to get something back for the value they have produced.
So has many, many others in the last few centuries. "Adapt or die".
And then I asked what replaces it, because I LIKE the business model where I only pay 1/10,000,000 of the cost of something, and so do a lot of other people (but apparently none on Slashdot). So far no one has offered me any suggestions other than commissioned works, which I addressed in the next sentence.
Even that would be better than current infinite copyright.
That is completely a statement of opinion, and I completely disagree with it.
You actually making my point for me with your McMansion example.
The "design" or "IP creation" process happens once, and then is duplicated for public consumption, many times. We're in agreement about this, I think, right? This creation process applies to music, software, CPU designs, McMansion designs, car designs, drug designs, whatever.
The difference between some of those things is in the ability of the company to charge for the duplication, because duplication costs money or is difficult. Physical goods, goods that cannot easily be duplicated for little or no cost, have some value because they are physical goods. Because of that, they can charge for the cost of duplication PLUS some fractional amount to cover the cost of creation.
Example: do you think home builders sell the homes they build at *construction cost*? No. They sell the home at construction cost PLUS some markup, so that they can cover other costs, such as paying the architect that they may have commissioned for the ONE design of the McMansion (yes, I know what a McMansion is, asshole). If they sell enough McMansions, they will have covered their architect's commission fee.
If the construction cost were $0, they have nothing to sell after they've sold ONE McMansion. Someone can just duplicate the McMansion for $0, and now the company cannot recoup the ONE-TIME design cost by amortizing it over the sale of multiple homes.
And no, I didn't miss your first sentence, I was responding specifically to it.
Again, I'm really not understanding anything you're saying. My first sentence agreed with the parent, that IP creators should not be paid indefinitely for their work. That was the point you were making in your other post, right? That some work that was created a long time ago is still not in the public domain? I *agree* with you.
Ever see a McMansion? Was the computer you used to type up your reply signed personally by the EE who designed the circuit boards or the folk who came up with the chip designs?
I don't understand your comparison. All of those goods have both an IP component AND a physical component to them, so there's a non-zero (and non-trivial) duplication cost. Companies can and do amortize the design cost of those things over the sale of more than one of them.
Regardless, my answer is the same as it was here [slashdot.org]
You must have missed the first sentence in my reply.
Engineers don't expect a monthly check from the people who drive over the bridges built to their design.
Architects aren't getting rich off the residuals on their building designs.
Why is it that being an "Artist" should equate to "being paid forever".
I agree that it shouldn't be "forever", but it HAS to be "more than once".
Architects and engineers create physical goods that have high duplication cost. The creators/designers of bridges and buildings have no need to amortize the creation/design cost of those things over the sale of more than one of them, because no one can duplicate them for $0. Whoever paid for those things paid for the entire construction cost AND design cost up-front, for the first (and only) copy of them. In other words, civil engineers and architects get paid in full for their creation up front.
IP creators are in a different situation: they create something once, but it costs $0 to make the next million copies. To cover the creation cost and creation value (creator's time, creator's years of training in the field, creator's creativity, etc.), we came up with the possibility of allowing LOTS of people to enjoy that IP for a fraction of its value. Copyright was invented to allow the creator to a) sell the IP for a fraction of its actual value to a LOT of people so that many people can easily obtain/access it, which b) allow them to amortize the creation/design cost+value over the sale of more than one copy of the IP. Eventually the fractions add up to cover the creation cost plus some profit.
Everyone on Slashdot wants to eliminate copyright, thereby taking away this amortization/fractional payment possibility. I, for one, like the fact that I can pay $10 at a theater to see a movie that had a production budget of $100 million (I'm paying 1/10,000,000 of its production cost). If you remove the amortization possibility that copyright-controlled distribution allows, that business model goes away.
I don't know what replaces it. Everyone talks about Shakespeare and how writers wrote plenty before copyright and about community theater and people making music for the love of music and stuff. That stuff is fine, but I still enjoy my high-production-budget movies and pop music and crappy NY Times bestseller novels. You know what else happened in Shakespeare's time? Commissioned works that were not accessible to the public. I hope that's not where we're headed back to.
Device keys have to be issued by the HDCP key authority because all the HDCP device keys have special numeric properties that make the two-way handshake possible. Both sides of the connection have to arrive at the same 56-bit number to successfully encrypt/decrypt stuff. The only way to give out keys that have the correct properties that make them usable is for the HDCP key authority to control distribution of said keys [1]. And if the HDCP key authority revoked this manufacturer's keys once, they're not likely to give them more keys.
I suppose you can try to obtain a different device's HDCP key(s) and program those in. But once the HDCP authority notices that a different device's device keys have been compromised, it may revoke those keys too.
Of course, say it's one of Sony's HDTV models whose HDCP keys get compromised, and the HDCP key authority revokes those keys. Sony HDTV owners will be furious that new Blu-Ray discs don't work on their TV, and Sony will have to issue a firmware update to get new keys and somehow "protect" them better this time. All in all, a total losing proposition.
[1] See http://www.cs.rice.edu/~scrosby/pubs/hdcppaper.ps for more info. I read this a while ago and it's pretty foggy now, but it gave a good overview of HDCP and the key/encryption math behind it.
The HDCP authorities can revoke that device's HDCP key for violating whatever clause in the HDCP license agreement (not allowing analog holes, for example). Then any new Blu-Ray discs will have that device's key on a revocation list, and those discs won't play back with it. I don't think any HDCP keys have been revoked yet, and who knows if any ever will be, but the mechanism is in place to disable devices like this from being used on future media.
Mods: -1 Flamebait is not a disagree mod. This post is not inflammatory, nor a troll, nor stating incorrect facts, it's merely stating an unpopular opinion. I can't see how anything in this post is offensive; even the China comments aren't any worse than other stuff I've seen here. As a Slashdotter, your options are to mod up response posts which disagree with it, or post a disagree response yourself.
I for one agree with this post and the AC below it - entertainment is a big part of the economy, and depends in large part on copyright-controlled distribution (i.e., artificial scarcity) for profit.
they only have the value because the law creates an artificial scarcity.
They have value, but the entire value (and cost) is in the creation of the first instance of that thing. Every subsequent instance (copy) can be made for $0 cost. Because of that, it's nearly impossible to make a profit by amortizing the cost of creating that thing over the sale of multiple instances of that thing. IP law attempts to create artificial scarcity (prohibiting $0 copies) such that a person or company can amortize the creation cost over multiple sales, but we are seeing that artificial scarcity fail time and time again.
The problem with this whole scheme is: what happens when a company can no longer cover the cost of creation of the first instance of that thing (i.e., paying the creator or designer a reasonable salary or wage)? The answer is that we lose that thing from having been created. Some sort of new business model needs to be developed to support profitable creation of non-tangible goods. IP/Copyright law isn't cutting it.
Your points are all valid, but they are some of the areas that virtualization systems have addressed in the past 10 years (or longer if you were running an IBM system).
Each guest needs its own kernel, so you need to allocate memory and disk space for all these kernels that are in fact identical
I'm pretty sure VMWare can detect when the same block of the same file is mapped into multiple guests, and share the physical page. Plus, the kernel's memory image is small compared to, say, the database server you're running on it. I guess there's overhead like an extra set of page tables (either nested page tables managed by the guest, or shadow page tables managed by the host). Overall a small effect I think.
TLB flushes kill performance. Recent x86 CPUs address the problem to some degree, but it's still a problem.
Any context switch between two userspace programs in a non-virtualized system needs a TLB flush too (BSD jails included). Or, if you're using a processor that has a tagged TLB, you don't need to flush it, but your virtualized guest gets the no-TLB-flush benefit too.
A guest's filesystem is on a virtual block device, so it's hard to get at it without running some kind of fileserver on the guest
Again I don't think this is a huge deal. Aren't there drivers to allow a host to see inside a guest's block device and/or filesystem?
You feel (and many others agree, myself included) that a paper book - a physical copy of an electronic document - is more valuable than the electronic document itself. When you sell the physical copy of the book, you probably don't sell it at physical printing cost, right? You set the price somewhere above the printing cost, and the difference between the two prices goes to compensate you and your editor for the time spent thinking up, writing, and polishing the words in the book.
What if you worked in an industry where a physical copy of the creative work was NOT more valuable than the electronic copy for the vast majority of people? Examples: software, music, sometimes film (DVDs for example, not to take the place of going to the local movie theater). In those examples, the electronic copy is the only thing that has value. And as we all know, electronic copies cost $0 to make, and can be made by anyone with a computer. How can you "sell" such a thing, in such a way as to compensate the creator for the time, effort, and money he or she spent creating the thing, if you have no physical item to sell, and no way to mark up the sale price to cover the creation cost? The entire value of the thing is in the creation, not any physical item.
Bringing it back to your book...if a book reader like Kindle ever becomes as nice/easy to read as a regular paper book, and as ubiquitous in society as iPods or cars or something, I would expect to see the sales of paper books to absolutely dry up.
Well then it's a good thing TPB guys didn't download anything. Maybe you should go after the actual copyright infringers?
The RIAA has done just that. Well actually, they've done the reverse, they go after people who upload files on P2P networks. But they get slammed for doing that too. I don't necessarily agree with suing potential customers, but given that you accept the concept of copyright, and copyright law [1], how exactly should the RIAA seek to get it enforced?
[1] Not accepting the concept of copyright, and not accepting the current copyright law, are entirely different discussions, two that I'll be perfectly glad to have with anyone here on Slashdot, but both orthogonal to the point at hand.
Citation needed. I enjoy blockbuster-style movies with huge production budgets. Please cite an example of one of those being made, and breaking even on production cost, that was financed by a means other than copyright-controlled distribution.
You're right, there's no free, ad-supported way of watching an entire season of a show other than by waiting for reruns/syndication on another network, which loses the on-demand feature of Hulu or BitTorrent. Maybe the content producers have decided that if you want to watch an entire season after that season has aired, you should put up cash in the form of renting or buying the full-season DVDs. I think that's a bad decision, but they must think the market exists to support that business model. In the past that has probably proved to be true - I know I've rented full-season DVDs for shows I wanted to watch. Hopefully they can make an ad-supported business model work for past seasons.
That said, my most commont BitTorrent use case was for watching new episodes of shows that I happened to miss when they aired the first time.
That's certainly a problem for you right now, but I don't think that's a fundamental problem with the business model or distribution method. Hulu is a relatively recent phenomenon. Eventually, someone (Microsoft probably) will have a legitimate way to watch TV shows via XBox, via Hulu or some other, similar, service.
It's not the record/movie companies I'm actually worried about; it's the people creating the content.
What happens if the people creating the content now no longer have any way of either a) producing their content, since no company will finance production because no companies like that exist anymore, or b) making a living from producing their content, since no consumers pay for their content, so they decide to stop creating it and instead get a job doing something else where they DO get paid.
TV shows available pretty much whenever I want. I watch a 1 minute commercial (or switch to another browser tab for 1 minute), and then I get the entire episode streamed. Just as convenient as torrents.
Who is paying the salaries of the journalists producing the content that people get for free on most other news websites? Advertisers, obviously. So the question then becomes, "Can a journalism business support itself solely on advertising revenue, because subscription-based support doesn't exist?" Google sure can, but they have a much wider audience than a local paper, and they've positioned themselves as both a medium for advertising (direct income from companies wishing to advertise on Google), as well as an ad service that provides ads (indirect income from companies that pay Google to supply them with ad content - AdSense). Are they the only internet business that is profitable based completely on advertising? Citations needed, please.
You're basically arguing (with evidence to support you) against subscription-supported journalism. I'm agreeing, and further arguing ad-supported "free" journalism is going to be pretty damn hard to make work for anyone other than Google. Not to mention that now the journalists are slaves to the advertisers who are effectively paying their salaries. What happens to news then? Who else will pay for people to report it? The government via taxes? I wouldn't want that either.
Hope everyone enjoys their "information wants to be free" society!
Ah yes, the classic counterpoint to my argument that I hear on Slashdot every time. All you've done is shift the money problem to someone else. Apart from commissioned works (which aren't really a viable business model), who, or what company, is going to pay someone $50,000 for a car design if they cannot recoup that $50,000 by selling more than one copy of the car?
Car manufacturers would lose out, since we'd no longer need massive factories to build cars, but car designers would still earn a living as long as the public was still hungry for new car designs.
You have to explain that to me. As soon as the car designer sells his new design to ONE customer, that design can (and will, if it's desirable) immediately be copied by everyone for $0. How does the designer, or software developer, or [fill in your favorite IP creator] earn a living?
I'm making the argument that copyright is a violation of civil rights and you're countering it with "I happen to like Lost".. and I am the one cheapening it?
Yep. Just because you use Rosa Parks to make your point does not make your argument any better or worse than someone who uses Lost. For your particular argument, it may be a decent parallel to draw, but don't sit there and grandstand about your choice of analogy.
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Let me repeat TWO of the disclaimers that I put in my original post:
Obviously I don't know the details of the exploit,
(This example is probably way too simple and is likely NOT how the actual phone exploit works; it is just to illustrate the point.)
And you seem to have missed the very next paragraph in the Wikipedia article where it talks about multi-segment SMS, which (from just the /. summary) sounds like what this exploit targets.
Obviously I don't know the details of the exploit, but no phone software would willingly execute code that they have no control over. These exploits take advantage of security bugs in the phone software to get them to execute code.
A simple naive example is the classic stack buffer overflow. I might send a malformed SMS that encodes a 200-byte message (140 bytes is the byte limit for SMS). If the software that processes the SMS didn't check that the byte count is less than 140, it might happily write those 200 bytes into a stack-allocated 160-byte character array (160 being the character limit for SMS). Now you've overflowed that fixed-size 160-byte buffer by 40 bytes. Some of those 40 bytes are going to scribble over the return address of the called function. When the function returns, you now are controlling where it returns to. That's the "exploit". (This example is probably way too simple and is likely NOT how the actual phone exploit works; it is just to illustrate the point.)
The second part of the exploit is the "payload", which is located somewhere else in that extra 40 bytes. If you can do it right, you can construct your exploit such that you point the return address *into* the payload, and now when the function returns, the payload is where you're executing from. You have now effectively gained control of the phone, because it's executing code that you gave it. It didn't willingly execute it for you, you took advantage of a security flaw to do so.
Of course the kinetic energy isn't free, but you're forgetting about how that energy goes to waste when non-hybrid cars brake. In a parking lot, chances are the car is braking and slowing down quite frequently. Also, many parking lots have speed bumps to control speed anyway. Unless every car there is a hybrid that uses regenerative braking to recharge a battery, my bet is that they're harnessing some kinetic energy that would otherwise be completely wasted via braking/slowing for the speed bumps.
Ladies and gentlemen, your 2009 Slashdot contributors!
Architects??? Photocopy is cheap. Engineers make drawings, they do not build it up, the workers do. The workers get nothing.
Thanks for the pedantry. Architects and engineers design physical goods. You're right, they don't construct them. Which is completely irrelevant to the simple point that the goods have both an "IP" component (the design) and a physical component (the actual physical thing). Architects and engineers do the IP component, but that IP component isn't worth that much without the physical component too.
All the famous musicians seems to have wealth far higher than "value", so your calculation does not end up.
So you are now the determiner of the value of some work? If IP goods should be able to be copied for $0, does that mean they are worthless? How much would you say the design of your computer's CPU is worth to you?
Don't lie! Practically no one want to do that! (just check GPL discussions).
That's right, creators of GPL-licensed software want to get something back for the value they have produced.
So has many, many others in the last few centuries. "Adapt or die".
And then I asked what replaces it, because I LIKE the business model where I only pay 1/10,000,000 of the cost of something, and so do a lot of other people (but apparently none on Slashdot). So far no one has offered me any suggestions other than commissioned works, which I addressed in the next sentence.
Even that would be better than current infinite copyright.
That is completely a statement of opinion, and I completely disagree with it.
You actually making my point for me with your McMansion example.
The "design" or "IP creation" process happens once, and then is duplicated for public consumption, many times. We're in agreement about this, I think, right? This creation process applies to music, software, CPU designs, McMansion designs, car designs, drug designs, whatever.
The difference between some of those things is in the ability of the company to charge for the duplication, because duplication costs money or is difficult. Physical goods, goods that cannot easily be duplicated for little or no cost, have some value because they are physical goods. Because of that, they can charge for the cost of duplication PLUS some fractional amount to cover the cost of creation.
Example: do you think home builders sell the homes they build at *construction cost*? No. They sell the home at construction cost PLUS some markup, so that they can cover other costs, such as paying the architect that they may have commissioned for the ONE design of the McMansion (yes, I know what a McMansion is, asshole). If they sell enough McMansions, they will have covered their architect's commission fee.
If the construction cost were $0, they have nothing to sell after they've sold ONE McMansion. Someone can just duplicate the McMansion for $0, and now the company cannot recoup the ONE-TIME design cost by amortizing it over the sale of multiple homes.
And no, I didn't miss your first sentence, I was responding specifically to it.
Again, I'm really not understanding anything you're saying. My first sentence agreed with the parent, that IP creators should not be paid indefinitely for their work. That was the point you were making in your other post, right? That some work that was created a long time ago is still not in the public domain? I *agree* with you.
Ever see a McMansion? Was the computer you used to type up your reply signed personally by the EE who designed the circuit boards or the folk who came up with the chip designs?
I don't understand your comparison. All of those goods have both an IP component AND a physical component to them, so there's a non-zero (and non-trivial) duplication cost. Companies can and do amortize the design cost of those things over the sale of more than one of them.
Regardless, my answer is the same as it was here [slashdot.org]
You must have missed the first sentence in my reply.
Engineers don't expect a monthly check from the people who drive over the bridges built to their design.
Architects aren't getting rich off the residuals on their building designs.
Why is it that being an "Artist" should equate to "being paid forever".
I agree that it shouldn't be "forever", but it HAS to be "more than once".
Architects and engineers create physical goods that have high duplication cost. The creators/designers of bridges and buildings have no need to amortize the creation/design cost of those things over the sale of more than one of them, because no one can duplicate them for $0. Whoever paid for those things paid for the entire construction cost AND design cost up-front, for the first (and only) copy of them. In other words, civil engineers and architects get paid in full for their creation up front.
IP creators are in a different situation: they create something once, but it costs $0 to make the next million copies. To cover the creation cost and creation value (creator's time, creator's years of training in the field, creator's creativity, etc.), we came up with the possibility of allowing LOTS of people to enjoy that IP for a fraction of its value. Copyright was invented to allow the creator to a) sell the IP for a fraction of its actual value to a LOT of people so that many people can easily obtain/access it, which b) allow them to amortize the creation/design cost+value over the sale of more than one copy of the IP. Eventually the fractions add up to cover the creation cost plus some profit.
Everyone on Slashdot wants to eliminate copyright, thereby taking away this amortization/fractional payment possibility. I, for one, like the fact that I can pay $10 at a theater to see a movie that had a production budget of $100 million (I'm paying 1/10,000,000 of its production cost). If you remove the amortization possibility that copyright-controlled distribution allows, that business model goes away.
I don't know what replaces it. Everyone talks about Shakespeare and how writers wrote plenty before copyright and about community theater and people making music for the love of music and stuff. That stuff is fine, but I still enjoy my high-production-budget movies and pop music and crappy NY Times bestseller novels. You know what else happened in Shakespeare's time? Commissioned works that were not accessible to the public. I hope that's not where we're headed back to.
Device keys have to be issued by the HDCP key authority because all the HDCP device keys have special numeric properties that make the two-way handshake possible. Both sides of the connection have to arrive at the same 56-bit number to successfully encrypt/decrypt stuff. The only way to give out keys that have the correct properties that make them usable is for the HDCP key authority to control distribution of said keys [1]. And if the HDCP key authority revoked this manufacturer's keys once, they're not likely to give them more keys.
I suppose you can try to obtain a different device's HDCP key(s) and program those in. But once the HDCP authority notices that a different device's device keys have been compromised, it may revoke those keys too.
Of course, say it's one of Sony's HDTV models whose HDCP keys get compromised, and the HDCP key authority revokes those keys. Sony HDTV owners will be furious that new Blu-Ray discs don't work on their TV, and Sony will have to issue a firmware update to get new keys and somehow "protect" them better this time. All in all, a total losing proposition.
[1] See http://www.cs.rice.edu/~scrosby/pubs/hdcppaper.ps for more info. I read this a while ago and it's pretty foggy now, but it gave a good overview of HDCP and the key/encryption math behind it.
The HDCP authorities can revoke that device's HDCP key for violating whatever clause in the HDCP license agreement (not allowing analog holes, for example). Then any new Blu-Ray discs will have that device's key on a revocation list, and those discs won't play back with it. I don't think any HDCP keys have been revoked yet, and who knows if any ever will be, but the mechanism is in place to disable devices like this from being used on future media.
Mods: -1 Flamebait is not a disagree mod. This post is not inflammatory, nor a troll, nor stating incorrect facts, it's merely stating an unpopular opinion. I can't see how anything in this post is offensive; even the China comments aren't any worse than other stuff I've seen here. As a Slashdotter, your options are to mod up response posts which disagree with it, or post a disagree response yourself.
I for one agree with this post and the AC below it - entertainment is a big part of the economy, and depends in large part on copyright-controlled distribution (i.e., artificial scarcity) for profit.
they only have the value because the law creates an artificial scarcity.
They have value, but the entire value (and cost) is in the creation of the first instance of that thing. Every subsequent instance (copy) can be made for $0 cost. Because of that, it's nearly impossible to make a profit by amortizing the cost of creating that thing over the sale of multiple instances of that thing. IP law attempts to create artificial scarcity (prohibiting $0 copies) such that a person or company can amortize the creation cost over multiple sales, but we are seeing that artificial scarcity fail time and time again.
The problem with this whole scheme is: what happens when a company can no longer cover the cost of creation of the first instance of that thing (i.e., paying the creator or designer a reasonable salary or wage)? The answer is that we lose that thing from having been created. Some sort of new business model needs to be developed to support profitable creation of non-tangible goods. IP/Copyright law isn't cutting it.
Each guest needs its own kernel, so you need to allocate memory and disk space for all these kernels that are in fact identical
I'm pretty sure VMWare can detect when the same block of the same file is mapped into multiple guests, and share the physical page. Plus, the kernel's memory image is small compared to, say, the database server you're running on it. I guess there's overhead like an extra set of page tables (either nested page tables managed by the guest, or shadow page tables managed by the host). Overall a small effect I think.
TLB flushes kill performance. Recent x86 CPUs address the problem to some degree, but it's still a problem.
Any context switch between two userspace programs in a non-virtualized system needs a TLB flush too (BSD jails included). Or, if you're using a processor that has a tagged TLB, you don't need to flush it, but your virtualized guest gets the no-TLB-flush benefit too.
A guest's filesystem is on a virtual block device, so it's hard to get at it without running some kind of fileserver on the guest
Again I don't think this is a huge deal. Aren't there drivers to allow a host to see inside a guest's block device and/or filesystem?
Memory management is an absolute clusterfuck.
In a naive hypervisor, yes. In more mature hypervisors, not really. See the following articles for solutions on fully virtualized and paravirtualized guests, respectively: http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi02/tech/waldspurger/waldspurger_html/node6.html
http://lwn.net/Articles/198380/
Your point raises a classic question in IP.
You feel (and many others agree, myself included) that a paper book - a physical copy of an electronic document - is more valuable than the electronic document itself. When you sell the physical copy of the book, you probably don't sell it at physical printing cost, right? You set the price somewhere above the printing cost, and the difference between the two prices goes to compensate you and your editor for the time spent thinking up, writing, and polishing the words in the book.
What if you worked in an industry where a physical copy of the creative work was NOT more valuable than the electronic copy for the vast majority of people? Examples: software, music, sometimes film (DVDs for example, not to take the place of going to the local movie theater). In those examples, the electronic copy is the only thing that has value. And as we all know, electronic copies cost $0 to make, and can be made by anyone with a computer. How can you "sell" such a thing, in such a way as to compensate the creator for the time, effort, and money he or she spent creating the thing, if you have no physical item to sell, and no way to mark up the sale price to cover the creation cost? The entire value of the thing is in the creation, not any physical item.
Bringing it back to your book...if a book reader like Kindle ever becomes as nice/easy to read as a regular paper book, and as ubiquitous in society as iPods or cars or something, I would expect to see the sales of paper books to absolutely dry up.
Well then it's a good thing TPB guys didn't download anything. Maybe you should go after the actual copyright infringers?
The RIAA has done just that. Well actually, they've done the reverse, they go after people who upload files on P2P networks. But they get slammed for doing that too. I don't necessarily agree with suing potential customers, but given that you accept the concept of copyright, and copyright law [1], how exactly should the RIAA seek to get it enforced?
[1] Not accepting the concept of copyright, and not accepting the current copyright law, are entirely different discussions, two that I'll be perfectly glad to have with anyone here on Slashdot, but both orthogonal to the point at hand.
Citation needed. I enjoy blockbuster-style movies with huge production budgets. Please cite an example of one of those being made, and breaking even on production cost, that was financed by a means other than copyright-controlled distribution.
You're right, there's no free, ad-supported way of watching an entire season of a show other than by waiting for reruns/syndication on another network, which loses the on-demand feature of Hulu or BitTorrent. Maybe the content producers have decided that if you want to watch an entire season after that season has aired, you should put up cash in the form of renting or buying the full-season DVDs. I think that's a bad decision, but they must think the market exists to support that business model. In the past that has probably proved to be true - I know I've rented full-season DVDs for shows I wanted to watch. Hopefully they can make an ad-supported business model work for past seasons.
That said, my most commont BitTorrent use case was for watching new episodes of shows that I happened to miss when they aired the first time.
That's certainly a problem for you right now, but I don't think that's a fundamental problem with the business model or distribution method. Hulu is a relatively recent phenomenon. Eventually, someone (Microsoft probably) will have a legitimate way to watch TV shows via XBox, via Hulu or some other, similar, service.
It's not the record/movie companies I'm actually worried about; it's the people creating the content.
What happens if the people creating the content now no longer have any way of either a) producing their content, since no company will finance production because no companies like that exist anymore, or b) making a living from producing their content, since no consumers pay for their content, so they decide to stop creating it and instead get a job doing something else where they DO get paid.
TV shows available pretty much whenever I want. I watch a 1 minute commercial (or switch to another browser tab for 1 minute), and then I get the entire episode streamed. Just as convenient as torrents.
Sigh. "Free" is a misleading word here.
Who is paying the salaries of the journalists producing the content that people get for free on most other news websites? Advertisers, obviously. So the question then becomes, "Can a journalism business support itself solely on advertising revenue, because subscription-based support doesn't exist?" Google sure can, but they have a much wider audience than a local paper, and they've positioned themselves as both a medium for advertising (direct income from companies wishing to advertise on Google), as well as an ad service that provides ads (indirect income from companies that pay Google to supply them with ad content - AdSense). Are they the only internet business that is profitable based completely on advertising? Citations needed, please.
You're basically arguing (with evidence to support you) against subscription-supported journalism. I'm agreeing, and further arguing ad-supported "free" journalism is going to be pretty damn hard to make work for anyone other than Google. Not to mention that now the journalists are slaves to the advertisers who are effectively paying their salaries. What happens to news then? Who else will pay for people to report it? The government via taxes? I wouldn't want that either.
Hope everyone enjoys their "information wants to be free" society!
Ah yes, the classic counterpoint to my argument that I hear on Slashdot every time. All you've done is shift the money problem to someone else. Apart from commissioned works (which aren't really a viable business model), who, or what company, is going to pay someone $50,000 for a car design if they cannot recoup that $50,000 by selling more than one copy of the car?
Agreed completely. Your thoughts mirror my own; I said almost exactly the same things, minus the escrow ideas, numerous times in the past.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1059301&cid=26084387
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1119611&cid=26765661
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1156061&cid=27146281
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1156061&cid=27146489
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1156061&cid=27154313
Car manufacturers would lose out, since we'd no longer need massive factories to build cars, but car designers would still earn a living as long as the public was still hungry for new car designs.
You have to explain that to me. As soon as the car designer sells his new design to ONE customer, that design can (and will, if it's desirable) immediately be copied by everyone for $0. How does the designer, or software developer, or [fill in your favorite IP creator] earn a living?
I'm making the argument that copyright is a violation of civil rights and you're countering it with "I happen to like Lost".. and I am the one cheapening it?
Yep. Just because you use Rosa Parks to make your point does not make your argument any better or worse than someone who uses Lost. For your particular argument, it may be a decent parallel to draw, but don't sit there and grandstand about your choice of analogy.