First, determine a baseline amount of monthly usage that covers 95% of users. Charge a fixed price for this usage level, or possibly a few different prices based on max. peak bandwidth. Set an overage fee for monthly usage in excess of this amount. Voila. Now we don't have to worry about all this network neutrality crap. If all I do is check email, use google talk and browse the web, why should I have to subsidize the guy who streams 12 hours of netflix movies per day?
Just because you own the copyright doesn't mean you also own every copy you've made and sold too.
Did I say it did? The DRM I'm familiar with doesn't prevent anyone from selling media. I've bought used computer games, DVDs, etc. and never had a problem. What it may seek to prevent is someone purchasing media, making an exact copy of the information it contains, then reselling the media.
Yes, you own the physical media. Someone else owns the "information" that media contains. Hence my analogy with the car. Applying DRM to intellectual property is comparable to me locking my car, in the sense that both myself and the IP owners are attempting to erect a hurdle that deters theft. The key word is "deter" in place of "prevent". That's what people miss when they raise arguments like, "DRM is stupid because people are always going to break it, so they should just give up." That's like saying, "it's stupid to lock your car because plenty of cars get stolen every day that were locked."
Furthermore, DRM doesn't limit what you can do with your physical media, it limits what you can do with the information it contains. There is law on the books that governs what you can and can't do with your copy of that information. If you feel DRM interferes with your legitimate legal rights, then that's one thing. In most cases, though, DRM merely attempts to thwart those who would go beyond their legitimate legal rights and infringe on the rights of the copyright holder.
DRM is put in place by the owner of the intellectual property. Buying a CD does not make you the "owner" of the songs on that CD. You own the physical media containing a copy of that intellectual property, and you have certain legal rights regarding what you can do with your copy.
...such as with regard to whether I should bother to lock my car, considering anybody who really wants in can just break a window. And whether we should have police who incarcerate people for breaking into cars. Clearly we have both, and people's cars still get broken into. These measures don't eliminate break-ins, but they almost certainly lower their frequency. Same deal for copy protection and DRM. If you make it enough of a hassle for people to copy your stuff, creating a situation where someone has to be highly technical to do so, then less people will copy your stuff. The kicker here is that it only takes one highly technical person to create a tool that many less technical folks can then use.
Funny is also how almost all JavaScript library speed tests I've seen put Internet Explorer far behind the others.
This hasn't been my experience. To test if I'm just misremembering, I googled up a few JS benchmarks and ran them on FF 2.0.11 and IE6 w/ latest patches, then Opera 9.25 and Safari 3 Beta for comparison. XP Pro 32-bit on a 2.4ghz P4 Northwood:
For brevity I only listed the last two tests since they're by far the most time-consuming, plus the "Pop" test because IE did so exceptionally badly on it.
If anything, these results make me think it's a mixed bag and that all of the browsers could benefit from some targeted optimization. But I'm not sure it's really fair to say that FF blows away IE6 on every benchmark out there.
I've definitely encountered pages where JS seemed to be the bottleneck. ESPN's "player" pages come to mind. As far as I can tell they compute certain aggregate statistics "on the fly" when generating the page. Maybe that's not what's happening, but from a user's perspective I notice my CPU spike whenever loading one of these pages along with an approximately 2s delay before the page is displayed and becomes scrollable.
...is to construct a real-world test and repeat it fairly often, then tally up how each OS performs. Create a monthly or bimonthly hacking "tourney" with a money purse to properly motivate the contestants. Get "normal" IT staff (i.e. not experts hand-picked by MS or the OSS community) to "secure" the competing operating systems, then let the hackers loose.
Unfortunately this only gauges vulnerability to remote exploits, which probably aren't the most common means of penetration and which both systems probably do pretty well at preventing.
Exactly. The highest bandwidth download I've ever gotten from a site on the "larger net" (i.e. not from someone using my same ISP) was approx. 1000K/s, or 10 Mbit/s. I suppose transferring in parallel (i.e. bit torrent) might allow one to make use of a faster-than-10Mbit last mile, but that's irrelevant for the vast majority of users. I'd prefer 10Mb/10Mb down/up to 50Mb/1Mb down/up any day. Also latency values that are "consistently decent".
It's strategy. If your goal is to get people to settle so you can connect "possibility of having to pay a substantial fine" with "pirating music" in the public mind, then why go after a target (or, targets) who are likely to fight you tooth and nail?
I'm not sure I buy this. Microsoft gets slammed any time they make a mistake, not just those related to DRM. You can bet that if they'd made one this colossal and announced it publicly they'd get raked over the coals ad nauseum. This would happen even if they had discovered and announced the flaw themselves and already had a fix ready, both mitigating circumstances which are not true with regard to this FLAC issue.
Used to be you could only play certain types of games on the PC. They typically required (or benefited from, at least) a fast machine, creating a demand for new hardware purely for the sake of playing the newest games. Now that these types of games are available on consoles, many consumers may have offloaded this "task" which had previously been the domain of PCs onto their consoles. Consequently, they don't have a need to buy new hardware. The PC they bought 2 years ago is still plenty fast to perform all the non-game tasks they bought it for. Web-browsing, email, word processing, manipulating digital pictures, etc.
The 200x speedup is only if you consider 1Mbit broad band. My DSL provider's top plan is 6Mbit. So 200Mbit would be a 33x speedup. Modify that by an order of magnitude as the submitter states, and we're looking at a 3.3x speedup or 20Mbit. That's still a nice gain, especially considering it comes with little additional infrastructure, but it's not as wildly fantastic as the article might lead you to believe.
I haven't researched it. All I can say is, I'm not aware of any. If you are, then please speak up.
I'm not aware of any specific rulings, but somewhere else in this thread a guy posted who used to be in the position of the merchant, and was fairly up on the laws in his state. According to him, the rules can vary widely from state to state. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a judge somewhere has ruled in favor of a merchant who detained someone for failing to show a receipt. My wife is an attorney; I'll see if she can find anything in Westlaw.
Wouldn't be the first time!
Re: merchants being morons. Agreed. However, in this case I think the most likely explanation is that it's beneficial. It's not like Circuit City is the only store to have such a policy. At the basest level, these guys all want to maximize profit. If a receipt checking policy costs more than it saves then they're going to drop it post haste. That so many chains still have such policies suggests to me that they're actually effective to some degree. If that's the case, then I'm happy to volunteer a few seconds of my time if it means lower prices.
How sad for you. It is not cause for suspicion.
Really? Say you own a store, and you're out by the door putting up a new sign. A customer walks out with goods contained in one of your store's bags. You didn't ring them up, or see them at any point while they were shopping. The customer looks extremely nervous and is clutching the bag close to his person. You ask if you can see his receipt. He mumbles a refusal and rapidly starts walking away. Can you honestly say that in such a situation, you would have no cause to suspect this person of criminal activity? I sure would. Sure, maybe the guy is a privacy advocate who's just trying to make a statement. That's always a possibility. Or maybe he's nervous about something else entirely. But, odds are, he's concealing something criminal.
And if the government forced everyone to produce papers to buy bread, then that would be okay, because it applied to everyone equally?
Not comparable. That's the state imposing something on me involuntarily. In this case, it's a merchant policy that I can easily avoid by simply not shopping at that merchant.
It's not like you're forced to submit to search when you CHOOSE to shop there - they just want you to think you have to.
That would depend on how capable you are of resisting detainment. If you're detained by someone more capable of detaining you than you are of resisting detainment, then you're forcefully detained whether the law's on your side or not. In that sense, they very much can force you. Not to show the receipt per se, but to wait around for the cops to show up so they can force you to show the receipt.
You're missing the point; you DO NOT have to let someone check your receipt...
So you say. This blogger's experience says otherwise. Fail to show your receipt = go to jail. Maybe you get all charges dropped and win your subsequent lawsuit against the merchant. Bottom line: you don't play their game, you go to jail.
No, they can only detain you if they have reason to suspect you of shoplifting. I don't believe there's any precedent that failing to show a receipt upon request, or refusing to have your bag searched, constitutes "reasonable suspicion."
Do you know there's no such precedent, or is this just guesswork?
It IS a waste of money. They waste employees' time searching paying customers while real shoplifters walk through the door with no bags or receipts in hand.
So all the merchants who employ such a policy are essentially morons, in that they're wasting money for no benefit. Do you think that's very likely? As other posters have pointed out, the receipt checks are in place not only to act as a deterrent to shoplifters, but to deter collusive behavior on the part of the cashiers.
You don't think presumption of innocence until there's cause for suspicion is a worthwhile principle? Again, carrying a bag of merchandise that you have PAID FOR is in no way, shape or form a reason to be suspected of shoplifting.
I think it's a very valuable principe. However, in this case I consider refusal to submit to a receipt check to be cause for suspicion. Being asked to submit to such a check doesn't make me feel like the store suspects me of shoplifting. Mainly because they check everybody's receipt, and I know they don't actually suspect that 100% of their customers are shoplifters. If they singled me out for inspection based on a profiling method, then I might feel like my rights had been infringed.
Sure, except that you're not being asked; you're being intimidated. This case obviously demonstrates that the stores think they have powers they have no legal right to.
They are asking. It's not like I'm forced to shop at Circuit City. If I do, then I go in with the knowledge that I'm going to have to let someone check my receipt. I'm okay with that, so I go ahead and shop there. If you're not, then don't.
I agree it wouldn't constitute a contract. It would, however, be evidence that you were informed of the store's policy re: receipt inspection prior to making your purchase. The merchant could then use that to bolster its argument that failure to comply with the policy is probable cause to suspect criminal activity. I'm thinking it would also damage your credibility in court, should the incident wind up there. The store's defense lawyers could point to your signature and claim that you essentially provoked the situation, since you knew the receipt check was coming.
In other words, insult and detain your customers but let your non-customers avoid the insult and detention. Good policy.
Not at all. Make it clear to potential customers what will be required of them in order to support your anti-theft measures. This gives the "potential customer" the freedom to make an informed decision about whether he will become an actual customer or a non-customer. If he finds participation in the anti-theft program too odious, he's free to abort the purchase process and exit the store.
And as much as this annoys the just-follow-orders sheeple, refusing to follow store policies isn't a crime.
And here's the crux of the matter. You fancy yourself some sort of anti-establishment ubermensch, unwilling to "just follow orders". Unlike the rest of the unwashed sheeple. That's why you're crying bloody murder about something as relatively innocuous as receipt checks, which aren't a huge imposition and which presumably have concrete benefits for the merchant and consumer. To get back to what you wrote, though, I fully agree that refusing to follow store policies isn't a crime. Nobody has suggested it is. What's at issue is whether refusing to follow a specific store policy (receipt check) is probable cause to suspect shoplifting, which would then grant the merchant the right to detain a customer until police arrive.
Unfortunately, the answer to this question varies from state to state, and seems to hinge on case law rather than explicit statutes. So unless one of us is intimately familiar with the case law in a particular state, we really can't comment with any authority about what would hold up as "probable cause for detainment".
Aware or not, they cannot force you to show a receipt. Even if you agreed to do so and you change your mind.
Quite true. They cannot personally force anyone to show a receipt. What they can do, in certain states, is detain you if you fail to show one, using reasonable force, until the police arrive, who can examine your receipt in order to determine if a theft has occurred.
The system doesn't work, and it cannot be mandatory either, so why put up with it?
What makes you say it doesn't work? Why do Circuit City and other stores have such policies if they're entirely ineffective? Seems like a waste of money.
Oh, it's a courtesy. I see. Well, the store employees sure showed him a hell of a lot of courtesy in return, didn't they?
They treated him about like I'd expect a suspected thief to be treated. They didn't assault the guy; they used the minimal force necessary to prevent him fleeing the scene.
Oh, it's a courtesy. I see. Well, the store employees sure showed him a hell of a lot of courtesy in return, didn't they?
I don't feel as if I'm being treated like a criminal when I'm asked to show my receipt. I feel as if I'm being asked to participate in an anti-theft program that actually benefits me, the consumer.
Policy applies to store personnel - the store can require employees to check receipts; they can't require customers to show them. Customers are only bound by the law.
Anyone entering the store should be aware that Circuit City's policy is to check receipts. If the blog author was aware of this and had a problem with complying, then he should never have made a purchase. If he was not aware, then when asked he should have refused and immediately returned whatever it was he purchased. It comes down to a matter of courtesy. Circuit City is a business that's trying to cut down on theft, which in turn allows them to be more competitive in the market and offer me, the consumer, lower prices. It benefits me to aid them in that endeavor. So, I'm quite willing to flash my receipt on the way out if it means a tougher time for people who are actually shoplifting. But in order for such a system to work the check cannot be optional. If it were, then anyone with something to hide would merely opt out. The poster knew this. If he didn't want to give them the courtesy of playing along, then don't shop there. Voila.
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First, determine a baseline amount of monthly usage that covers 95% of users. Charge a fixed price for this usage level, or possibly a few different prices based on max. peak bandwidth. Set an overage fee for monthly usage in excess of this amount. Voila. Now we don't have to worry about all this network neutrality crap. If all I do is check email, use google talk and browse the web, why should I have to subsidize the guy who streams 12 hours of netflix movies per day?
Yes, you own the physical media. Someone else owns the "information" that media contains. Hence my analogy with the car. Applying DRM to intellectual property is comparable to me locking my car, in the sense that both myself and the IP owners are attempting to erect a hurdle that deters theft. The key word is "deter" in place of "prevent". That's what people miss when they raise arguments like, "DRM is stupid because people are always going to break it, so they should just give up." That's like saying, "it's stupid to lock your car because plenty of cars get stolen every day that were locked."
Furthermore, DRM doesn't limit what you can do with your physical media, it limits what you can do with the information it contains. There is law on the books that governs what you can and can't do with your copy of that information. If you feel DRM interferes with your legitimate legal rights, then that's one thing. In most cases, though, DRM merely attempts to thwart those who would go beyond their legitimate legal rights and infringe on the rights of the copyright holder.
DRM is put in place by the owner of the intellectual property. Buying a CD does not make you the "owner" of the songs on that CD. You own the physical media containing a copy of that intellectual property, and you have certain legal rights regarding what you can do with your copy.
http://www.videogamehouse.net/parsec.html Also, the kid across the street had a Magnavox "Odyssey 2": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey_2
...such as with regard to whether I should bother to lock my car, considering anybody who really wants in can just break a window. And whether we should have police who incarcerate people for breaking into cars. Clearly we have both, and people's cars still get broken into. These measures don't eliminate break-ins, but they almost certainly lower their frequency. Same deal for copy protection and DRM. If you make it enough of a hassle for people to copy your stuff, creating a situation where someone has to be highly technical to do so, then less people will copy your stuff. The kicker here is that it only takes one highly technical person to create a tool that many less technical folks can then use.
This hasn't been my experience. To test if I'm just misremembering, I googled up a few JS benchmarks and ran them on FF 2.0.11 and IE6 w/ latest patches, then Opera 9.25 and Safari 3 Beta for comparison. XP Pro 32-bit on a 2.4ghz P4 Northwood:
http://www.computerbytesman.com/js/jsbench/dobench.htm?
FF: 2078ms, IE: 1313ms, Opera: 875ms, Safari: NaN (some tests failed)
http://www.rahul.net/rhn/bench.js.html
primes: FF: 0.015s, IE: 0.016s, Opera: 0.015s, Safari: 0.015s
pgap: FF: 0.25s, IE: 0.125s, Opera: 0.110s, Safari: 0.140s
sieve: FF: 0.032s, IE: 0.031s, Opera: 0.031s, Safari: 0.062s
fib(20): FF: 0.015s, IE: 0.078s, Opera: 0.031s, Safari: 0.031s
tak: FF: 0.047s, IE: 0.234s, Opera: 0.078s, Safari: 0.141s
mb100: FF: 1.188s, IE: 0.344s, Opera: 0.235s, Safari: 0.500s
http://www.jorendorff.com/articles/javascript/speed-test.html
Pop: FF: 1.718s, IE: 56.3s, Opera: 1.544s, Safari: 0.891s
Parsing: with sloppy regular expression: FF: 10.232s, IE: 9.530s, Opera: 11.172s, Safari: 25.8s
Parsing: with sloppy hand-coded loop: FF: 82.100s, IE: 199.250s, Opera: 146.625s, Safari: 87.5s
For brevity I only listed the last two tests since they're by far the most time-consuming, plus the "Pop" test because IE did so exceptionally badly on it.
If anything, these results make me think it's a mixed bag and that all of the browsers could benefit from some targeted optimization. But I'm not sure it's really fair to say that FF blows away IE6 on every benchmark out there.
I've definitely encountered pages where JS seemed to be the bottleneck. ESPN's "player" pages come to mind. As far as I can tell they compute certain aggregate statistics "on the fly" when generating the page. Maybe that's not what's happening, but from a user's perspective I notice my CPU spike whenever loading one of these pages along with an approximately 2s delay before the page is displayed and becomes scrollable.
...is to construct a real-world test and repeat it fairly often, then tally up how each OS performs. Create a monthly or bimonthly hacking "tourney" with a money purse to properly motivate the contestants. Get "normal" IT staff (i.e. not experts hand-picked by MS or the OSS community) to "secure" the competing operating systems, then let the hackers loose.
Unfortunately this only gauges vulnerability to remote exploits, which probably aren't the most common means of penetration and which both systems probably do pretty well at preventing.
Idiocracy sucked ass. Amazingly so. So much that it caused me to lose faith in Rotten Tomatoes, which scored it at 69%.
Exactly. The highest bandwidth download I've ever gotten from a site on the "larger net" (i.e. not from someone using my same ISP) was approx. 1000K/s, or 10 Mbit/s. I suppose transferring in parallel (i.e. bit torrent) might allow one to make use of a faster-than-10Mbit last mile, but that's irrelevant for the vast majority of users. I'd prefer 10Mb/10Mb down/up to 50Mb/1Mb down/up any day. Also latency values that are "consistently decent".
It's strategy. If your goal is to get people to settle so you can connect "possibility of having to pay a substantial fine" with "pirating music" in the public mind, then why go after a target (or, targets) who are likely to fight you tooth and nail?
I'm not sure I buy this. Microsoft gets slammed any time they make a mistake, not just those related to DRM. You can bet that if they'd made one this colossal and announced it publicly they'd get raked over the coals ad nauseum. This would happen even if they had discovered and announced the flaw themselves and already had a fix ready, both mitigating circumstances which are not true with regard to this FLAC issue.
You know if this was a flaw in WMV we'd see tags like "defectivebydesign", "m$sucks", etc. Where's the (lack of) love for Xiph.org?
Used to be you could only play certain types of games on the PC. They typically required (or benefited from, at least) a fast machine, creating a demand for new hardware purely for the sake of playing the newest games. Now that these types of games are available on consoles, many consumers may have offloaded this "task" which had previously been the domain of PCs onto their consoles. Consequently, they don't have a need to buy new hardware. The PC they bought 2 years ago is still plenty fast to perform all the non-game tasks they bought it for. Web-browsing, email, word processing, manipulating digital pictures, etc.
The 200x speedup is only if you consider 1Mbit broad band. My DSL provider's top plan is 6Mbit. So 200Mbit would be a 33x speedup. Modify that by an order of magnitude as the submitter states, and we're looking at a 3.3x speedup or 20Mbit. That's still a nice gain, especially considering it comes with little additional infrastructure, but it's not as wildly fantastic as the article might lead you to believe.
This is one of the sillier things I've ever heard.
And here's the crux of the matter. You fancy yourself some sort of anti-establishment ubermensch, unwilling to "just follow orders". Unlike the rest of the unwashed sheeple. That's why you're crying bloody murder about something as relatively innocuous as receipt checks, which aren't a huge imposition and which presumably have concrete benefits for the merchant and consumer. To get back to what you wrote, though, I fully agree that refusing to follow store policies isn't a crime. Nobody has suggested it is. What's at issue is whether refusing to follow a specific store policy (receipt check) is probable cause to suspect shoplifting, which would then grant the merchant the right to detain a customer until police arrive.
Unfortunately, the answer to this question varies from state to state, and seems to hinge on case law rather than explicit statutes. So unless one of us is intimately familiar with the case law in a particular state, we really can't comment with any authority about what would hold up as "probable cause for detainment".