CD's are digital media. They had darn well better "rip" the same data every time, otherwise we couldn't use the same technology to store non-musical data. I would be astonished if there were any variance between "rips" (assuming the disk isn't scratched and "skips").
While there will of course be differences in compression modes and algorithms before it gets to the MP3, these happen after the CD ripping process. I assumed the original article was referring to these artifacts.
No, it doesn't depend. The term "free market" has a very specific meaning. Only those uninformed about the basics of economic theory think it means unregulated. (Alas there are too many out there.)
I refer you to the commodities and stock exchanges as a good example. They are very highly regulated by the SEC, but are as close to a perfect free market as anything out there.
While I agree that that corporations are exercising undue influence in this instance, the problem isn't that it is a free market. The problem is that it is not a free market; it's an oligopoly. The situation needs to be fixed but blaming the wrong thing will only make it worse.
The 10 Zen Monkeys is SFW. The only thing that could be objected to is the headline "Is It Legal Porn or Illegal Porn?" which is to say not very objectionable at all.
The other one contains "G-rated" images according to the link to it from the 10 Zen Monkeys article.
... convincing a jury to dismiss photographic evidence -- including video from surveillance camera...
IANAL, but I think video from surveillance cameras will be alright because all you have to do is have the person in charge of the surveillance swear the films haven't been altered. This would force the defense to posit that someone is trying to frame the defendant and is lying about the films being genuine. That would usually be considered unreasonable doubt (unless of course you've got some actual evicence and not just the accusation that the video is fake).
The problem is when it's impossible to tell the real from the fake. At that point you couldn't prosecute any of the real ones because they'll just say it's a really good fake.
The art in using brute force is in pruning down the search space.
For example, calculating the optimal tic-tac-toe game by hand is a lot easier once you notice and exploit the symmetries.
Some "brute force" algorithms move from exponential to cubic or better once you trim them down properly. So any new tricks for improving brute force are of interest.
If you take a cube apart and put it back together in random order, it may not be solvable. IIRC there are twelve sets of configurations where it is possible to get between configurations in the same set, but not between configurations not in the same set. (This obviously ignores configurations where you just took the stickers off and repasted them.)
Thank you for taking the time to explain that. That allays most of my concerns since that procedure prevents both machine-cancels-ballot-after-voter-walks-away and machine-prints-extra-ballots attacks. It also puts in perspective the gravity of those cases where the tallies haven't added up.
Someone (*wink wink*) should put up a web page explaining what e-voting systems actually work correctly and what the proper procedures entail along with the reasons behind them (e.g. the system you describe is secure *only* if proper procedure is used). It would be useful for educating the public about good vs bad implementations of e-voting. Until today I'd only heard about the bad implementations of e-voting thought I believed good implementations were possible.
Could you elaborate on how the vote is canceled? It seems to me that if the vote is canceled by a mechanism in the machine there is nothing to prevent the machine from secretly canceling the vote. How do you get around that problem?
Personally, I can only think of two solutions. The first is to make that mechanism so noisy that everyone would notice if the machine did it after the voter walked.
The second (which I think you may be implying is done but I'm not sure) is to keep a hand-tallied count of the number of vote redo's by requiring the voter to come to you to perform a redo and correlate that with the number of redo's the machine actually performed.
The goal of a voting system shouldn't be to eliminate the possibility of fraud since as you say that is impossible. Rather a good voting system should make it so that undetected fraud would require collusion among members of opposing parties. (My understanding is that parties usually send at least one representative to each precinct.)
That is actually a weak paper trail. Such machines must provide a way for the voter to "redo" their vote if the machine recorded the vote wrong. There is nothing in these machines to keep them from "redoing" the voter's vote after the voter has left.
Of course too many redo's might raise suspicion, but changing only one out of every 20 votes would be enough to swing most elections and even if you are suspicious you can't prove it since the paper trail has already been tampered with.
However, his performance of the song itself is copyrighted if fixed in a tangible medium.
That is the part that I'm not sure is true, but I really do want to understand so if you have some references to back it up I would like to see them.
The reason that I'm not sure that is true is that copyright works very differently than patent. Patent covers abstract ideas and is enforcible even in the presence of independent parallel invention. Copyright however does not.
Thus my understanding is that if I tell you a story, and you write it down and sell the story, then I can't later write it down and claim you violated my copyright. One written copy in no way derives from the other. They are both derivative of the oral story and you can't copyright an oral story. All you can copyright is the written form of the oral story, but your written form has an independent parallel creation from my written form.
The explosion may have tried hard to stop it, but the Schlock site is already back up (abet a minimal version of the site). So he still hasn't missed a daily update.
Prince had a professional recording crew there, fixing his performance in a tangible medium.
Then he would have a copyright claim on the recording that the crew made and any derivative work of that recording. Someone else recording the performance would not be a derivative of Prince's recording. So that still doesn't wash. Copyright isn't like patent; a claim requires that one be the derivative of the other, not just that they be the same.
The best explanation I've been able to come up with is if Prince (1) composed an arrangement, (2) wrote down that arrangement ahead of time, and (3) delivered his performance based on that arrangement. Then he still wouldn't have a copyright on the performance per say, but the performance and any recording of that performance would become a derivative work of the arrangement which got the copyright when it was written down.
Unless the performance has creative elements which stand on their own, i.e. the arrangement, the guitar solo, the intonations chosen when singing the lyrics, etc.
Wait a second. Doesn't copyright require putting the creative elements in a fixed medium? What is the fixed medium here?
I would understand if Prince wrote down the intonations, etc., then that written form became copyrighted. But in the absence of a fixed medium, how can their be any copyright?
I could be wrong here but I believe 506(a)(1)(C) only applies when the work has yet to be released. The work has to be in the process of "being prepared for commercial distribution". Thus most music piracy would not be criminal. This is spelled out in detail in 506(a)(3).
The intent seems to be to distinguish between competing in the copyright holder's monopoly (and thus reducing their income) which would be civil and distributing before the copyright holder even gets started making money which would be criminal. Basically they are trying to stop leaks.
(Of course, things aren't quite that simple either. For some reason, theater movies have their own special clause to get them some extra protection. A movie that is in theaters, but not yet on DVD or VHS is considered to still be "being prepared". See 506(a)(3)(b).)
First, the statement you called "bullshit" on was a qualifier in order to avoid the whole DVD to VHS scenario (i.e. read it as "Even if DVD prevents copying to VHS it doesn't prevent copying to DVD"). Second your call of "bullshit" is only half right.
CSS prevents copying a DVD to VHS because it prevents every Tom, Dick and Harry from building their own DVD decoder. If they can't decode the CSS then they can't write it to VHS. In order to get the keys that will allow you to decode CSS, you have to sign a contract or get the plans certified or some such requiring you to use macrovision. (Well, that's the idea; DeCSS broke that pipe dream.)
Now maybe you don't consider that copy protection so much as macrovision enforcement, but it is part of a chain the provides (in theory from some people's perspective) copy protection from DVD to VHS. I say again, my statement was a qualifier to rule out that set of objections without getting into the messy stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
CD's are digital media. They had darn well better "rip" the same data every time, otherwise we couldn't use the same technology to store non-musical data. I would be astonished if there were any variance between "rips" (assuming the disk isn't scratched and "skips").
While there will of course be differences in compression modes and algorithms before it gets to the MP3, these happen after the CD ripping process. I assumed the original article was referring to these artifacts.
More counter examples:
Whether flat rate can work for internet may be an open question, but you claim that flat rate never works for anything is simply false.
He means the other guy has legal costs of 1m.
Counter example: Local phone access. Flat rates have worked for that for decades.
No, it doesn't depend. The term "free market" has a very specific meaning. Only those uninformed about the basics of economic theory think it means unregulated. (Alas there are too many out there.)
I refer you to the commodities and stock exchanges as a good example. They are very highly regulated by the SEC, but are as close to a perfect free market as anything out there.
While I agree that that corporations are exercising undue influence in this instance, the problem isn't that it is a free market. The problem is that it is not a free market; it's an oligopoly. The situation needs to be fixed but blaming the wrong thing will only make it worse.
Darn! I guess I better use my home IP number that I have memorized when I SSH to my computer.
You're thinking of an unregulated market. A free market is highly regulated to ensure that power is not consolidated.
The 10 Zen Monkeys is SFW. The only thing that could be objected to is the headline "Is It Legal Porn or Illegal Porn?" which is to say not very objectionable at all.
The other one contains "G-rated" images according to the link to it from the 10 Zen Monkeys article.
... convincing a jury to dismiss photographic evidence -- including video from surveillance cameraIANAL, but I think video from surveillance cameras will be alright because all you have to do is have the person in charge of the surveillance swear the films haven't been altered. This would force the defense to posit that someone is trying to frame the defendant and is lying about the films being genuine. That would usually be considered unreasonable doubt (unless of course you've got some actual evicence and not just the accusation that the video is fake).
The problem is when it's impossible to tell the real from the fake. At that point you couldn't prosecute any of the real ones because they'll just say it's a really good fake.
The art in using brute force is in pruning down the search space.
For example, calculating the optimal tic-tac-toe game by hand is a lot easier once you notice and exploit the symmetries.
Some "brute force" algorithms move from exponential to cubic or better once you trim them down properly. So any new tricks for improving brute force are of interest.
If you take a cube apart and put it back together in random order, it may not be solvable. IIRC there are twelve sets of configurations where it is possible to get between configurations in the same set, but not between configurations not in the same set. (This obviously ignores configurations where you just took the stickers off and repasted them.)
Thank you for taking the time to explain that. That allays most of my concerns since that procedure prevents both machine-cancels-ballot-after-voter-walks-away and machine-prints-extra-ballots attacks. It also puts in perspective the gravity of those cases where the tallies haven't added up.
Someone (*wink wink*) should put up a web page explaining what e-voting systems actually work correctly and what the proper procedures entail along with the reasons behind them (e.g. the system you describe is secure *only* if proper procedure is used). It would be useful for educating the public about good vs bad implementations of e-voting. Until today I'd only heard about the bad implementations of e-voting thought I believed good implementations were possible.
Could you elaborate on how the vote is canceled? It seems to me that if the vote is canceled by a mechanism in the machine there is nothing to prevent the machine from secretly canceling the vote. How do you get around that problem?
Personally, I can only think of two solutions. The first is to make that mechanism so noisy that everyone would notice if the machine did it after the voter walked.
The second (which I think you may be implying is done but I'm not sure) is to keep a hand-tallied count of the number of vote redo's by requiring the voter to come to you to perform a redo and correlate that with the number of redo's the machine actually performed.
Unfortunately our stickers can be removed and replaced without breaking them. (See some of the Black Box Voting videos.)
The goal of a voting system shouldn't be to eliminate the possibility of fraud since as you say that is impossible. Rather a good voting system should make it so that undetected fraud would require collusion among members of opposing parties. (My understanding is that parties usually send at least one representative to each precinct.)
That is actually a weak paper trail. Such machines must provide a way for the voter to "redo" their vote if the machine recorded the vote wrong. There is nothing in these machines to keep them from "redoing" the voter's vote after the voter has left.
Of course too many redo's might raise suspicion, but changing only one out of every 20 votes would be enough to swing most elections and even if you are suspicious you can't prove it since the paper trail has already been tampered with.
That is the part that I'm not sure is true, but I really do want to understand so if you have some references to back it up I would like to see them.
The reason that I'm not sure that is true is that copyright works very differently than patent. Patent covers abstract ideas and is enforcible even in the presence of independent parallel invention. Copyright however does not.
Thus my understanding is that if I tell you a story, and you write it down and sell the story, then I can't later write it down and claim you violated my copyright. One written copy in no way derives from the other. They are both derivative of the oral story and you can't copyright an oral story. All you can copyright is the written form of the oral story, but your written form has an independent parallel creation from my written form.
The explosion may have tried hard to stop it, but the Schlock site is already back up (abet a minimal version of the site). So he still hasn't missed a daily update.
Then he would have a copyright claim on the recording that the crew made and any derivative work of that recording. Someone else recording the performance would not be a derivative of Prince's recording. So that still doesn't wash. Copyright isn't like patent; a claim requires that one be the derivative of the other, not just that they be the same.
The best explanation I've been able to come up with is if Prince (1) composed an arrangement, (2) wrote down that arrangement ahead of time, and (3) delivered his performance based on that arrangement. Then he still wouldn't have a copyright on the performance per say, but the performance and any recording of that performance would become a derivative work of the arrangement which got the copyright when it was written down.
Wait a second. Doesn't copyright require putting the creative elements in a fixed medium? What is the fixed medium here?
I would understand if Prince wrote down the intonations, etc., then that written form became copyrighted. But in the absence of a fixed medium, how can their be any copyright?
What are the rules about when ex parte orders can be issued? It seems like something ripe for abuse.
I could be wrong here but I believe 506(a)(1)(C) only applies when the work has yet to be released. The work has to be in the process of "being prepared for commercial distribution". Thus most music piracy would not be criminal. This is spelled out in detail in 506(a)(3).
The intent seems to be to distinguish between competing in the copyright holder's monopoly (and thus reducing their income) which would be civil and distributing before the copyright holder even gets started making money which would be criminal. Basically they are trying to stop leaks.
(Of course, things aren't quite that simple either. For some reason, theater movies have their own special clause to get them some extra protection. A movie that is in theaters, but not yet on DVD or VHS is considered to still be "being prepared". See 506(a)(3)(b).)
Well yes, unless it is a desktop style case instead of the now more common tower.
(It's hard to find non-tower cases anymore, the best example I could fine was here.)
First, the statement you called "bullshit" on was a qualifier in order to avoid the whole DVD to VHS scenario (i.e. read it as "Even if DVD prevents copying to VHS it doesn't prevent copying to DVD"). Second your call of "bullshit" is only half right.
CSS prevents copying a DVD to VHS because it prevents every Tom, Dick and Harry from building their own DVD decoder. If they can't decode the CSS then they can't write it to VHS. In order to get the keys that will allow you to decode CSS, you have to sign a contract or get the plans certified or some such requiring you to use macrovision. (Well, that's the idea; DeCSS broke that pipe dream.)
Now maybe you don't consider that copy protection so much as macrovision enforcement, but it is part of a chain the provides (in theory from some people's perspective) copy protection from DVD to VHS. I say again, my statement was a qualifier to rule out that set of objections without getting into the messy stuff.