Why not configure Gmail to automatically forward your spam to a remote host daemon process used to aggregate your spam emails by blue-pill-vendor.com http site and automatically send those compilations as a bill to each sales@bluepill.com, Oh, and be sure to CC: your chosen MyLawyer@LeagalProfession.com and Guido@collections-now.com. No buttons required! Just sit back and collect the payments.
If the money flow starts slacking off during these economic hard times, just create a few more disposable email addresses, like 48sjklfhfa@sneakemail.com (my favourite disposable email address site, but I think they are no longer free), and be sure to post them on a private no-spiders-allowed/robots.txt labelled web site. The more spam, the more money! Life is good once again...
How do you guarantee there is no malware installed in your non-ram mapped hardware devices? Such as your standard GPU's, and whole assortment of adaptor cards?
How do you guarantee that the OS that you THINK you are running on is not just a virtual machine running in hardware supported virtual space? Any attempt to scribble or read bits over/across either of these is only doomed to failure because you can never be absolutely sure what exactly you are writing too. Is it physical memory or is it actually being written to cache in a VM disk somewhere? Even using the on-board 'hardware' clock could be hacked/virtualized so your hope of using latency issues as mentioned don't work either. Go Google for 'blue pill rootkit' if you think its that easy.
In short, there are some forms of malware that can control the very infrastructure that you depend on to judge whether you are infected, so they therefore by extension control your own perception of the results of those tests. Writing to 'all' the memory that you think you see doesn't accomplish much if you are not seeing all of it in the first place.
btw - I hope your are right. I own a Prius, but not one with the problem, so I am unable to even try to help. If I did have one I would be disassembling the software system looking for potential overwrites of the variables that control the throttle calculation.
in jest (that humor itself is priceless), I certainly could not agree more. The reality of DRM is that the whole concept is flawed, by the logic alone. In that you have to give the user everything they need to run the app, or listen/watch to the media, so what is there to prevent someone skilled with IDA Pro from making it work for their own purposes after the DRM manages to sufficiently piss them off? So, you there you sit, you have the key, you have the data/code/bitstream, and you have the algorithm. Nothing prevents you from hacking apart the code and putting those three pieces back together in a different way other than what was intended, except for a few badly written laws like the DMCA. That's not a prevention, it's just a social mechanism that just serves to make the hackers self-righteous in their own mind, and therefore even 'more likely' to feel justified in 'getting back' at 'the bad-guys' (not my frame of mind, but its out there).
The sad thing is that with the use of DRM everyone looses, EXCEPT for the one peddling DRM as the 'answer to everything'. It's not. Reality could not be further from the truth. Yet these modern-day snake oil salesmen always manage to walk off with millions of dollars in their pockets while everyone else, including the owner of the copyrighted media being 'protected', get the shaft. It only hurts the owners bottom line, stiffs the purchaser who can't use the product, and the snake oil salesman lives in a big mansion somewhere on a hill. What is wrong with this picture? What we need is a new set of laws to protect us from snake oil salesmen, in that if you promise your product is going to do XYZ then you should not be legally shielded by some EULA when you promise something that is known by real experts to not be true. Selling a 'solution' under false pretences is the way I see it. If you sell snake oil you should pay the price.
btw - If you honestly believe that DRM can actually work, then Have I got a bridge for you!!...
The Utah State Assembly knows best, after all, if politicians are not the defacto-experts in the subject of 'hot air' then who is? Just because all the 'laymen scientist' on this particular topic have reams of collected data that directly contradicts the 'new policy' doesn't make their theory any more correct.
Leave it to the politicians to 'prove a negative' simply by virtue of not understanding the subject matter completely. Which begs the question, should we then have a 'licensing system' to 'steer the Government', similar to driving a car? One that requires the comprehension of things like the laws of physics? Oh wait, never mind, the Government would be responsible for administering that program too...
lawsuits over distribution and redistribution where someone isn't getting paid
The issue here was the software needed to use/deliver the media, not the media itself. The only pirating going on was the students using a proprietary software package that they were told they needed to have/install on their personal machine in order to use the media that they already paid for through their tuition fees. Their tuition fees did not however pay for the software they needed, and the University should have known that. The company producing the software has a right to demand licensing fees from the University for the use/distribution of that software, but as for the students, they just want the content that they already paid for. Using an open standard for distribution should make all three parties happy, legally speaking. Nobody needs to pirate anything here, and that's the point.
Why on earth did they opt for Video Furnace in the first place, which is an on demand hardware based live media solution? Yup, that's like having your own on-demand cable-tv setup where you control the video stream, or deny access until subscriptions and/or per-use payments are all in order. An open standards web based solution would do them just fine, only it would allow the less technically challenged people the capability of making a private copy for later reference (i.e. like taking notes). The current configuration requires custom client side 'player' software which is apparently where the copyright violations come into play. The media lab has licensing for the player software but you average Joe on the Internet does not. The Media Lab should look at several options:
1) Control access to the site via user ID and password and licence the client software accordingly. This is not my option, as this still denies students access that don't have the required OS platform.
2) Switch to an open standard for streaming or downloadable media which does not require any special player so that _all_ OS's and browsers can be used. There are many open solutions that won't cost the University a dime to deploy. All they need is software to create a media content web server, which they already must have in order to do what they are doing now.
With the rash of card skimmers being placed on ATM's I have to wonder just how long it will be before someone "overlays" an ATM's console to grab pin numbers too. These days it pays to be observant of minor differences in hardware because these creeps are getting more and more sophisticated with microelectronics and wireless transceivers. I think it won't be long before someone puts this technology to use in some diabolical and illegal manor.
When dealing with somebody that knows what they are doing, and any major brand smart phone, it takes less than 15 seconds to r00t your phone and start to upload custom software. No 'trojan' required. All that is needed is to know your phones IP address at any point that you are online transferring data (e.g email, web, photo transfers, etc). It only takes 15 seconds, just once, and your phone no longer belongs to you. Security on the current cell phone hardware and OS's are just an after thought.
Even a novice with a little cash can purchase software, and if given physical access for 10 minutes, will own your phone. They will have access to all the data stored on it, your photos, your CC numbers, email, phone logs, and possibly even know where you are if you have a built in GPS on the phone. I have seen where the contents of the phone are compressed into an alternate stream of data in an MPEG4 video file and off loaded across the carrier network. If you think someone around you might be untrustworthy you might want to check your itemized billing records if you can get your hands on them. You may see data network usage you don't remember using. You may also notice your battery running low fairly quickly, or your phone getting warm when not in use. All these can be a clue.
I'd go into work the day the political party solicitors discover my unpublished number, and I get to return back to it later having an empty gas tank in the middle of the night. Good thing there is a phone in the car!...so I can use it to call AAA. I just hope there is some kind of timer on the phone that knows to turn off the car if its unoccupied (seat sensor not tripped).
I have a lower cost solution. I own a Prius, and the keyfob acts as a remote in the sense that it just needs to be inside the car for the car to run. The door handle also knows if you have the keyfob is in your pocket so the car will automatically unlock. All I need to do is train my dog to carry the keyfob out to the car on his collar, open the door, hop inside and step on the starter button on the dash twice to get it started. A simple tug on a rope attached to the door and the inside will warm up nicely. Getting the dog to do all that could be very easy, as he very intelligent and always wants to go for a ride! The one downside is that I will have to tell him 'No' often, since most of the time I have to go to work. Maybe its not such a good idea. Its so hard to say 'No' to those big sad eyes...
I would recommend sending the uneducated vice-principal back to school to learn what they missed in their own grade school. If a student is that far advanced that the vice-principal (aka. advanced placement teacher) doesn't understand things, then they need to be re-educated to the point of being able to actually teach again. Being an administrator is no excuse, since the path to that position is through a teaching position to begin with. Nobody should be in charge of the teachers at any school that can't do the job themselves. As an administrator, at the very least, the vice-principle should have 'known enough' to call upon the science teachers available at the school to give a proper assessment of the technology/situation, and then acted based on that information, not some uneducated knee-jerk-reaction to something they don't even understand.
Sounds to me like one of those old b-rated Sci-Fi movies:
Oh no! It's something too complicated for me to understand!! Run for your life!!!
Any device that radiates enough energy in a given frequency band to be equivalent to even the smallest battery would be illegal under the current FCC guidelines.
Doing a simple calc with the above spreadsheet at 2.4 Ghz, 1W of radiated power, patch antenna, and five meters distance from the radiated power source, you would have just 0.040 mW of usable power, and at that, not enough to light even an average LED (30-150 mW req). So, don't be looking for that 'power on' indicator on this device. At that 'available power density' the charger might almost make up for its own internal losses from the battery charging circuitry.
For any device of this kind to be useful it needs to be broad spectrum and not limited to a single frequency band such as the 2.4Ghz band stated here. If you could capture all available RF in a large enough swath of spectrum then this bulky device might have enough power to be competitive with a teeny tiny button battery.
...how to put a torrent proxy service out there to read in a torrent stream and republish those DRM'ed packets as a non-DRM'ed version of the same data, or just torrent the key itself. Once the genie is out of the bottle its always a challenge to talk that genie back into that little tiny bottle.
If they 'tax piracy' then it must be an act already paid for (i.e. reimbursed), for ANY act of piracy. Therefore it must now be Ok to conduct that piracy for which they are taxing EVERYONE, as opposed to 'taxing' the few who are actually committing that piracy. Since EVERYONE has already 'paid the tax' then by extension it must be OK for EVERYONE to now conduct piracy? After all, you ARE paying for all the piracy now it aren't you? So, now we seem to have a new business model, aka piracy as a service. It must be Ok get out there and commit all the piracy you want! Its already paid for, so there is no guilt trip any more. Just keep your 'tax receipts' just in case you are actually arrested for piracy, and perhaps you can sue the local UK Government for 'double dipping' in court. They can't have it both ways.
IANAL, So don't do anything I say here as it's probably illegal just because it was me that said it. I don't personally condone piracy in any form, but then our definitions may differ somewhat. Such as RIAA:'full fledged piracy' v.s. ME: 'just moving music I just paid for to my personal iPod so that I can actually listen to it'. Why that act would be even considered piracy by the RIAA completely alludes any sense of logic. Should they think to 'tax me', then perhaps I would not hesitate to download rather than buying something, since I already paid for it. Hint to RIAA; Be VERY careful what you ask for in legislation. You might just get it, but then you still won't 'get it'.
Seriously, if Debian is 'breaking functionality' that makes part of their own distribution unusable, wouldn't it makes sense to file a bug report directly with Debian? While you are at it take all the Perl package maintainers and have them help elevate the priority of that bug report so they can't just ignore it. Having it officially declared a bug would be a logical first step.
any DRM scheme needs to be common to all publishers
While I sympathize with your idealistic dream, and wish myself that it could work, I can assure you that it is logically infeasible to create any methodology where you give a user an algorithm, a key to use that algorithm, and the content itself, and expect it not to be used/recombined in a way not envisioned by the writer of that algorithm. If the software runs on a general purpose CPU and I have your key, I can hand you your decoded content in a matter of hours. Any Geek with a copy of IDA Pro and some real patients can do this for any platform that the software supports http://www.hex-rays.com/idapro/idaproc.htm. And if it doesn't support it there are still other ways to attack the software system.
Even if you lock the decoding into a a special chip, on a board a closed and completely undocumented device, someone will eventually take the lid off of it, for fun, and reverse the logic on the chip http://www.flylogic.net/blog/. Unless you have the where-with-all of a Nation's State with vast resources able to be pored into advanced anti-tamper technology that self-destructs the core of the chip upon entry, then its just a matter of time. Piss off one capable Geek and your entire 'DRM dream of mass profits' will be history, with the work intentionally published on the Internet just to spite you. We have to face the facts that you can't rationalize/argue with a sick mind, and a pissed off Geek doesn't want to listen to the 'economics' or about what is good for someone's content delivery business. A pissed off Geek is a dangerous antagonist that won't be swayed by even the legal ramifications of what they do.
In my opinion, its a sad situation that so many people actually believe in the software equivalent of 'snake oil' (aka DRM).
I do have a reason for such a device, sans the DRM. I commute to work, and spend hours on the road each week. I like to listen to audiobooks but have completely exhausted the inventory of available 'highly technical audio books' in my various fields of science. The 'top seller list' doesn't cut it for me, and the content providers are never going to think of paying someone to record what I need to listen to. They would never recover the costs of that audiobook unless they sell it as an astronomical price and someone is dumb enough to actually pay that price. With me, anything over $30-40 is a non starter.
What I do is collect scientific papers, internet documents, and ebooks and have the Kindle read them to me while I drive. I have been converting them myself to a format that is supported by the Kindle. I have the Kindle connected to my car stereo, and the text-to-speech, while it takes getting used to, is not that bad. Granted it totally screws up when translating complex formulas, can't do much for programming languages, won't read another language, won't read image/scanned PDF's, and gets the pronunciation of many words 'correct' by syllable inflections rules but not spoken the way it is commonly done in English. All that being said, I could not live without it. When Amazon sells an ebook with the text-to-speech enabled for an advanced topic I am interested in I have to think long and hard before I decide to purchase a DRM encumbered work unless it is the only way to learn the material. They could sell me a lot more books if there was no DRM involved, because I never would know/trust that they would disable the text-to-speech for that book after I purchase it. They do after all force software updates on you if you ever connect to the built in wireless Internet service.
If DRM is not locked inside of a closed black metal box, with anti-tamper seals, then it can always be reverse engineered. Once Kindle readers became available on the PC I knew it would be a matter of time before the DRM format was broken and utilities made available. What did surprise me here was that much headway had already been made by the ones hacking the Kindle hardware/OS already. The DRM had long been defeated.
The sad part is that the people that pay for all that DRM 'technology' (the people who buy the DRM'ed books) are never going to be able to easily use the great software such as Calibre, which could make managing all these devices so much easier, sans the DRM. The legal aspects with circumventing DRM will always prevent the ability to have a ubiquitous software platform capable of reading any format that happens to be available from any publisher. I for one would buy much more from any publisher who would publish 'real books' (i.e. not best sellers list only) in a format I can really use. One day they will realize that all the money was wasted on DRM technology, and was merely passing for modern day 'snake oil'. DRM is a loosing battle that need not be fought because it only takes one disgruntled geek to undo all the millions spent on that failed technology. DRM will never increase sales, as the market forces are still just a matter of supply and demand. There is no upside to DRM except for those selling the technology itself. Everyone else, including the content providers themselves, loose in the long run.
I can just see it now.... You will even be able to "twitter" your money away. Well they "twitter" about everything else in life, why not how much you spend or how much you make? Sounds like a really dumb idea, so I wonder how long before someone actually implements it?
According to current theory, absolutely everything on Earth, heavier than lithium, came from extraterrestrial origin rather than from the initial Big Bang. Without supernova's there would simply be no Earth, so I fail to see any productive insight to be taken from this article. It must be a slow 'science news day' at Wired.com. Either that or they now only employ 'slow' writers that have forgotten to check their facts with any 'real' scientists.
On the contrary, its 'the people' just saying that the vendors are not doing enough! If you think for a minute that people are stupid, well you may be partially right, but they won't be that way forever. Once they realize it doesn't have to be that way (by talking to others that already know the truth) they will demand more before they spend their next dime. Talking to a person not a party to the software itself will certainly educate them. In this day and age the vendors need to make their products a lot better before the masses will just fork over all their money.
This just in from AP News (be-ee-de-ep, de-de-p,deep);
AV product company XYZ says a new form of computer malware now gives a whole new meaning to the term "pushing someone's button". Instead of keyboard sniffers the extortionists instead are doing keyboard injection into the computer's keyboard input queue if the PC owner doesn't comply with their demands. Word has it that people are simply ignoring the threats.
In other news... Congress is in session drafting new legislation to enact laws against the latest "Peter Wolf Syndrome" which is currently gridlocking the legal system and has the courts running in circles. Nobody seems to know why so many people are hitting their Internet panic buttons for no apparent reason. More on this new breaking story at 11:00.
I believe that phrase refers to the mapping of 'point size' of the fonts in the document to the size of the graphic to render to match the height of the current font being used. Basically a table of size mappings, which is an OBVIOUS requirement for any such embeded graphic rendering system. Sure, you can create a formula to calculate the size mapping, but what is the real difference? A table probably is fewer bites of memory than the code required to generate the mapping dynamically.
Big deal. Obvious. Stupid. So they patented it, because they could. Now that they did, they can now threaten more frivolous patent law suits against their competitors when ever its advantageous. So remind me USPTO, Exactly how does this patent help the general public? Never mind the stupid and obvious criteria, but rather how and why should such a patent even exist under the 'defined purpose' that our founding fathers had envisioned/intended?
In theory you are right, but the real world presents many problems for such technology. For one, an aircraft flying through a chaotic air stream has a real problem with keeping the laser on target, hence the funding for the airborne missile defence laser getting yanked by Congress. A fighter will bounce around a lot more than a 747 class aircraft, so if you can't knock it out in a couple of nanoseconds of burst, good luck with trying to heat it up as it travels through the atmosphere cooling off. Most thing that travel fast are designed to take the heat, as friction can play a major role in military equipment and is designed into most anything that matters. And all that is still assuming that the target is steady and the air refraction at that wavelength of light is optimal for the distance, humidity, and air pressure you are operating at. Light bends when it travels through air of varying densities.
My take is its hard enough to hit something using a stationary laser, so good luck with one that is bouncing around at even a short distance, unless it is VERY powerful. A Gigajoule laser would be helpful but you won't find one of them in a fighter-jet any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
If the money flow starts slacking off during these economic hard times, just create a few more disposable email addresses, like 48sjklfhfa@sneakemail.com (my favourite disposable email address site, but I think they are no longer free), and be sure to post them on a private no-spiders-allowed/robots.txt labelled web site. The more spam, the more money! Life is good once again...
How do you guarantee that the OS that you THINK you are running on is not just a virtual machine running in hardware supported virtual space? Any attempt to scribble or read bits over/across either of these is only doomed to failure because you can never be absolutely sure what exactly you are writing too. Is it physical memory or is it actually being written to cache in a VM disk somewhere? Even using the on-board 'hardware' clock could be hacked/virtualized so your hope of using latency issues as mentioned don't work either. Go Google for 'blue pill rootkit' if you think its that easy.
In short, there are some forms of malware that can control the very infrastructure that you depend on to judge whether you are infected, so they therefore by extension control your own perception of the results of those tests. Writing to 'all' the memory that you think you see doesn't accomplish much if you are not seeing all of it in the first place.
btw - I hope your are right. I own a Prius, but not one with the problem, so I am unable to even try to help. If I did have one I would be disassembling the software system looking for potential overwrites of the variables that control the throttle calculation.
in jest (that humor itself is priceless), I certainly could not agree more. The reality of DRM is that the whole concept is flawed, by the logic alone. In that you have to give the user everything they need to run the app, or listen/watch to the media, so what is there to prevent someone skilled with IDA Pro from making it work for their own purposes after the DRM manages to sufficiently piss them off? So, you there you sit, you have the key, you have the data/code/bitstream, and you have the algorithm. Nothing prevents you from hacking apart the code and putting those three pieces back together in a different way other than what was intended, except for a few badly written laws like the DMCA. That's not a prevention, it's just a social mechanism that just serves to make the hackers self-righteous in their own mind, and therefore even 'more likely' to feel justified in 'getting back' at 'the bad-guys' (not my frame of mind, but its out there).
The sad thing is that with the use of DRM everyone looses, EXCEPT for the one peddling DRM as the 'answer to everything'. It's not. Reality could not be further from the truth. Yet these modern-day snake oil salesmen always manage to walk off with millions of dollars in their pockets while everyone else, including the owner of the copyrighted media being 'protected', get the shaft. It only hurts the owners bottom line, stiffs the purchaser who can't use the product, and the snake oil salesman lives in a big mansion somewhere on a hill. What is wrong with this picture? What we need is a new set of laws to protect us from snake oil salesmen, in that if you promise your product is going to do XYZ then you should not be legally shielded by some EULA when you promise something that is known by real experts to not be true. Selling a 'solution' under false pretences is the way I see it. If you sell snake oil you should pay the price.
btw - If you honestly believe that DRM can actually work, then Have I got a bridge for you!!...
Leave it to the politicians to 'prove a negative' simply by virtue of not understanding the subject matter completely. Which begs the question, should we then have a 'licensing system' to 'steer the Government', similar to driving a car? One that requires the comprehension of things like the laws of physics? Oh wait, never mind, the Government would be responsible for administering that program too...
The issue here was the software needed to use/deliver the media, not the media itself. The only pirating going on was the students using a proprietary software package that they were told they needed to have/install on their personal machine in order to use the media that they already paid for through their tuition fees. Their tuition fees did not however pay for the software they needed, and the University should have known that. The company producing the software has a right to demand licensing fees from the University for the use/distribution of that software, but as for the students, they just want the content that they already paid for. Using an open standard for distribution should make all three parties happy, legally speaking. Nobody needs to pirate anything here, and that's the point.
1) Control access to the site via user ID and password and licence the client software accordingly. This is not my option, as this still denies students access that don't have the required OS platform.
2) Switch to an open standard for streaming or downloadable media which does not require any special player so that _all_ OS's and browsers can be used. There are many open solutions that won't cost the University a dime to deploy. All they need is software to create a media content web server, which they already must have in order to do what they are doing now.
With the rash of card skimmers being placed on ATM's I have to wonder just how long it will be before someone "overlays" an ATM's console to grab pin numbers too. These days it pays to be observant of minor differences in hardware because these creeps are getting more and more sophisticated with microelectronics and wireless transceivers. I think it won't be long before someone puts this technology to use in some diabolical and illegal manor.
Even a novice with a little cash can purchase software, and if given physical access for 10 minutes, will own your phone. They will have access to all the data stored on it, your photos, your CC numbers, email, phone logs, and possibly even know where you are if you have a built in GPS on the phone. I have seen where the contents of the phone are compressed into an alternate stream of data in an MPEG4 video file and off loaded across the carrier network. If you think someone around you might be untrustworthy you might want to check your itemized billing records if you can get your hands on them. You may see data network usage you don't remember using. You may also notice your battery running low fairly quickly, or your phone getting warm when not in use. All these can be a clue.
I have a lower cost solution. I own a Prius, and the keyfob acts as a remote in the sense that it just needs to be inside the car for the car to run. The door handle also knows if you have the keyfob is in your pocket so the car will automatically unlock. All I need to do is train my dog to carry the keyfob out to the car on his collar, open the door, hop inside and step on the starter button on the dash twice to get it started. A simple tug on a rope attached to the door and the inside will warm up nicely. Getting the dog to do all that could be very easy, as he very intelligent and always wants to go for a ride! The one downside is that I will have to tell him 'No' often, since most of the time I have to go to work. Maybe its not such a good idea. Its so hard to say 'No' to those big sad eyes...
Sounds to me like one of those old b-rated Sci-Fi movies:
Wireless Power Calculator
http://powercastco.com/wireless-power-calculator.xls
http://www.powercastco.com/resources/
Doing a simple calc with the above spreadsheet at 2.4 Ghz, 1W of radiated power, patch antenna, and five meters distance from the radiated power source, you would have just 0.040 mW of usable power, and at that, not enough to light even an average LED (30-150 mW req). So, don't be looking for that 'power on' indicator on this device. At that 'available power density' the charger might almost make up for its own internal losses from the battery charging circuitry.
For any device of this kind to be useful it needs to be broad spectrum and not limited to a single frequency band such as the 2.4Ghz band stated here. If you could capture all available RF in a large enough swath of spectrum then this bulky device might have enough power to be competitive with a teeny tiny button battery.
...how to put a torrent proxy service out there to read in a torrent stream and republish those DRM'ed packets as a non-DRM'ed version of the same data, or just torrent the key itself. Once the genie is out of the bottle its always a challenge to talk that genie back into that little tiny bottle.
If they 'tax piracy' then it must be an act already paid for (i.e. reimbursed), for ANY act of piracy. Therefore it must now be Ok to conduct that piracy for which they are taxing EVERYONE, as opposed to 'taxing' the few who are actually committing that piracy. Since EVERYONE has already 'paid the tax' then by extension it must be OK for EVERYONE to now conduct piracy? After all, you ARE paying for all the piracy now it aren't you? So, now we seem to have a new business model, aka piracy as a service. It must be Ok get out there and commit all the piracy you want! Its already paid for, so there is no guilt trip any more. Just keep your 'tax receipts' just in case you are actually arrested for piracy, and perhaps you can sue the local UK Government for 'double dipping' in court. They can't have it both ways.
IANAL, So don't do anything I say here as it's probably illegal just because it was me that said it. I don't personally condone piracy in any form, but then our definitions may differ somewhat. Such as RIAA:'full fledged piracy' v.s. ME: 'just moving music I just paid for to my personal iPod so that I can actually listen to it'. Why that act would be even considered piracy by the RIAA completely alludes any sense of logic. Should they think to 'tax me', then perhaps I would not hesitate to download rather than buying something, since I already paid for it. Hint to RIAA; Be VERY careful what you ask for in legislation. You might just get it, but then you still won't 'get it'.
Seriously, if Debian is 'breaking functionality' that makes part of their own distribution unusable, wouldn't it makes sense to file a bug report directly with Debian? While you are at it take all the Perl package maintainers and have them help elevate the priority of that bug report so they can't just ignore it. Having it officially declared a bug would be a logical first step.
While I sympathize with your idealistic dream, and wish myself that it could work, I can assure you that it is logically infeasible to create any methodology where you give a user an algorithm, a key to use that algorithm, and the content itself, and expect it not to be used/recombined in a way not envisioned by the writer of that algorithm. If the software runs on a general purpose CPU and I have your key, I can hand you your decoded content in a matter of hours. Any Geek with a copy of IDA Pro and some real patients can do this for any platform that the software supports http://www.hex-rays.com/idapro/idaproc.htm. And if it doesn't support it there are still other ways to attack the software system.
Even if you lock the decoding into a a special chip, on a board a closed and completely undocumented device, someone will eventually take the lid off of it, for fun, and reverse the logic on the chip http://www.flylogic.net/blog/. Unless you have the where-with-all of a Nation's State with vast resources able to be pored into advanced anti-tamper technology that self-destructs the core of the chip upon entry, then its just a matter of time. Piss off one capable Geek and your entire 'DRM dream of mass profits' will be history, with the work intentionally published on the Internet just to spite you. We have to face the facts that you can't rationalize/argue with a sick mind, and a pissed off Geek doesn't want to listen to the 'economics' or about what is good for someone's content delivery business. A pissed off Geek is a dangerous antagonist that won't be swayed by even the legal ramifications of what they do.
In my opinion, its a sad situation that so many people actually believe in the software equivalent of 'snake oil' (aka DRM).
What I do is collect scientific papers, internet documents, and ebooks and have the Kindle read them to me while I drive. I have been converting them myself to a format that is supported by the Kindle. I have the Kindle connected to my car stereo, and the text-to-speech, while it takes getting used to, is not that bad. Granted it totally screws up when translating complex formulas, can't do much for programming languages, won't read another language, won't read image/scanned PDF's, and gets the pronunciation of many words 'correct' by syllable inflections rules but not spoken the way it is commonly done in English. All that being said, I could not live without it. When Amazon sells an ebook with the text-to-speech enabled for an advanced topic I am interested in I have to think long and hard before I decide to purchase a DRM encumbered work unless it is the only way to learn the material. They could sell me a lot more books if there was no DRM involved, because I never would know/trust that they would disable the text-to-speech for that book after I purchase it. They do after all force software updates on you if you ever connect to the built in wireless Internet service.
If DRM is not locked inside of a closed black metal box, with anti-tamper seals, then it can always be reverse engineered. Once Kindle readers became available on the PC I knew it would be a matter of time before the DRM format was broken and utilities made available. What did surprise me here was that much headway had already been made by the ones hacking the Kindle hardware/OS already. The DRM had long been defeated. The sad part is that the people that pay for all that DRM 'technology' (the people who buy the DRM'ed books) are never going to be able to easily use the great software such as Calibre, which could make managing all these devices so much easier, sans the DRM. The legal aspects with circumventing DRM will always prevent the ability to have a ubiquitous software platform capable of reading any format that happens to be available from any publisher. I for one would buy much more from any publisher who would publish 'real books' (i.e. not best sellers list only) in a format I can really use. One day they will realize that all the money was wasted on DRM technology, and was merely passing for modern day 'snake oil'. DRM is a loosing battle that need not be fought because it only takes one disgruntled geek to undo all the millions spent on that failed technology. DRM will never increase sales, as the market forces are still just a matter of supply and demand. There is no upside to DRM except for those selling the technology itself. Everyone else, including the content providers themselves, loose in the long run.
I can just see it now.... You will even be able to "twitter" your money away. Well they "twitter" about everything else in life, why not how much you spend or how much you make? Sounds like a really dumb idea, so I wonder how long before someone actually implements it?
According to current theory, absolutely everything on Earth, heavier than lithium, came from extraterrestrial origin rather than from the initial Big Bang. Without supernova's there would simply be no Earth, so I fail to see any productive insight to be taken from this article. It must be a slow 'science news day' at Wired.com. Either that or they now only employ 'slow' writers that have forgotten to check their facts with any 'real' scientists.
On the contrary, its 'the people' just saying that the vendors are not doing enough! If you think for a minute that people are stupid, well you may be partially right, but they won't be that way forever. Once they realize it doesn't have to be that way (by talking to others that already know the truth) they will demand more before they spend their next dime. Talking to a person not a party to the software itself will certainly educate them. In this day and age the vendors need to make their products a lot better before the masses will just fork over all their money.
Oh, wait. IE8 has a bunch of other security flaws that make it insecure anyway, and nobody would think to use IE 5.x on anything worth protecting.
Big deal. Obvious. Stupid. So they patented it, because they could. Now that they did, they can now threaten more frivolous patent law suits against their competitors when ever its advantageous. So remind me USPTO, Exactly how does this patent help the general public? Never mind the stupid and obvious criteria, but rather how and why should such a patent even exist under the 'defined purpose' that our founding fathers had envisioned/intended?
My take is its hard enough to hit something using a stationary laser, so good luck with one that is bouncing around at even a short distance, unless it is VERY powerful. A Gigajoule laser would be helpful but you won't find one of them in a fighter-jet any time soon.