@ployntabs, there is no DRM. It's just a series of JPEG files with a little javascript to flip between pages.

There are things one might complain about here (tiny one-character "next page" link; use of JPEG format for line-art, rather than PNG or GIF) but DRM isn't one of them. There is no DRM here.

Yes, because a series of JPEG files is so much harder to alter and parody than a PDF file...

#10 If it's no longer possible to own the music I buy, why are we still saying that we buy the music instead of renting it?

Cynical voices would claim it's because RIAA members have to pay artists much greater royalties for renting than for selling.

#21 Traditional DRM is being misused.

Hmm, what you describe is not DRM. In fact, whenever anyone tries to describe a DRM that's not evil, they end up describing something else. Here, you're describing Authentication.

@madsci, while specific hidden function would be difficult, I suspect a generic "no longer work" feature would be plausible enough. Just disable the chip and hope its function was important enough for that to neutralise the plane or satellite.

You could try for a voltage multiplier to try to disable adjacent circuits, but I suspect that would be too obvious, too easy to find.

Receiving the signal would be a little doubtful, but would probably work at least some of the time...

@velocity girl #1: to start with an empty inbox, create a new folder called "pre-2008-04" and move all messages from the inbox into that.

Also handy for when you come back from a break...

Effectively, it's a softer version of "email bankruptcy": the mail is still there, in case you need to search through it, or if you want to go back to a particular correspondent, subject or thread, but it's out of the way and doesn't interfere with new stuff entering your inbox.

@Carlos Leyva, the Flynn effect rather pre-dates computer games. Games in general, of course, have been used as educational tools for millennia.

Hmm, a riding is a hundred thousand people, three quarters of whom vote. "The Internet" can command 200 people on the ground in Toronto. In a solid day of door-knocking, that's about a minute per.

Probably not a real threat to someone with a 20-point lead, but...

@Comstock: sexual reproduction, obviously :-)

By mixing up the genes, it keeps microevolution elastic, able to respond to short-term changes then spring back to the long-term-viable norm. With such a small population, it doesn't really work, so macroevolution gets a chance. Usually, of course, it heads straight down the drain; but it doesn't have to work often.

#6, #7: In many countries, un-DRMing would be illegal under the DMCA or similar laws. In others, while legal to do it yourself, it may be illegal to help anyone else do so or provide tools.

I'm sure you're not advocating that anyone break the law.

#4: Well, if the scheme was pushed on them by others, it might make sense to undermine it. They certainly claim that this is the case, though most observers do not believe them.

Hmm, now *this* is theft of unique and valuable intellectual property. (Namely, copyright. It's created when you press the shutter, the officer's action deprived the owner of it.)

You wouldn't make someone burn their handbag...

Cory @#19, you don't even need to invent new hypotheticals. There's a story, although possibly apocryphal, that the automatic exchange was invented because a telephone operator favoured one business (her husbands') at the expense of another (the inventor's), misdirecting calls for the latter to the former. The new automatic exchange, the story continues, wouldn't have such bias.

The situation here is similar. It's done for money rather than nepotism, but the end result is the same.

I guess it takes a week or so for a story like this to make its way to the English-speaking world...

Looks like 'text entered was wrong' is what Rob Sherman in the article got, too... (though he didn't get the 'try again').

What is to prevent a culture of Free music from killing the music industry? Nothing. That's the idea behind the Creative Commons "share alike" license (by-sa).

Would that be a bad thing? Probably not.

(I've no idea why you'd consider Free music to be dishonest; as long as it's the artist putting the music in, not somebody else against the artist's wishes, what's to be dishonest about?)

You will note a similar culture exists in computer software, with programs like Firefox and Apache being available freely for all.

Hmm, two comments spring to mind. Firstly, 20 years of data seems rather minimal, given that the effect would be expected to have 11 years as its shortest period.

Secondly, it is relatively uncontroversial that solar forcing was a major factor before 1950. Finding the mechanism of that forcing would be interesting quite independent of any current environmental concerns and useful insofar as it improves knowledge of climate mechanisms.

@eain, I suspect that's not a sense of humour but a real warning...

NASA has had two deaths in 1981 when a group of workers entered an area that was O2-deficient (namely, it was being purged with pure nitrogen).

This puts me in mind of Fred Saberhagen's 1963 short story "Without a Thought"... you should not access whatever is behind this door while under the influence of a berserker...

Attempting to do so would be assault; succeeding in doing so would be theft.

So, would deleting the image be theft of Intellectual Property?

:-)

$12,000? How much is that in euros?

Hmm, if memory serves, it is the real Viagra that "can affect the cardiovascular system or interact with other drugs"...

The surprising part of the story is that fake drugs would contain any active ingredients at all; in a market of lemons, one would expect them to be the cheapest stuff available, not anything with any real effects.

Takuan, most wall warts these days are not transformers but rather switched-mode supplies (which also should draw no power).

However, the operative word here is "should"; since the feature is basically invisible to consumers, it doesn't generally get much attention from the manufacturers.

@william in seattle: One of the most prominent features of autism is a lack of empathy for others. This is likely caused by a severe reduction in mirror neurons.

Citation? (for the second statement, please)

One alternate explanation is that many tests of empathy use fake emotions - actors, drawings and/or dolls - which are targeted at neurotypicals. If the autistic perception is different, it's plausible that these fakes are simply less convincing and therefore elicit less empathy.

Similarly, in person, if a teacher smiles at one child while worried about the whole class or, conversely, frowns to scold while trying to hide amusement at the child’s behaviour, the resulting expression can be confusing to the autistic if the pretence is tuned to fool the neurotypical perception. Even back in the 1940s, heavily autistic children have been described as recognising (and reciprocating to) those who truly mean well by them, who give them true understanding and genuine affection; if they are not fooled by the conventional fakes, then it can be a problem, but it's hardly a deficit.

Yeah, too big to be Lego... but is it Duplo?

@morcheeba: either the weight is 10 tons, the light only lasts for 35 seconds, or the light is super-dim...

Well, the weight is stated as 50 pounds in one of the diagrams...

a topograpic map of the psyche.

lolpsyche has a flavour?

@Registrado: I mean, who can't determine atmospheric drag limits and then plot an orbit above it?

Like many things, it's a trade-off.

The atmosphere doesn't have a sharp cut-off, so atmospheric drag is a matter of degree. You have to trade that off against the extra fuel cost to reach a higher orbit and, in the case of a spy satellite, loss of resolution caused by the greater distance. If the satellite has a limited life-span for some other reason, there's no point at all; and if it has propulsion, as this one does (that's what the hydrazine is for), it may be better to use it to compensate for drag rather than select a higher orbit.

Finally, the article doesn't say whether the satellite reached its planned orbit or failed prior to that point.

#4, don't complain - by dint of concerted lobbying, we got rid of the "possession of a device without intent to infringe copyright" provision, for instance. What's to complain about?

@phreatic: Thanks for the YouTube link - at least YouTube buffers ahead when you press "pause", so if your link is running slow, you just give it a bit of a start. Whatever the thing is embedded here, it insists on stuttering no matter what you do.

As if the internet has taken the place of pheromones in an ant colony ... [b]ut why the Scientologists as the first target for assault?

The conflict between Scientology and the Internet dates back to the early to mid nineties, at least. In Internet terms, that's essentially forever. On occasion, it was network-wide news, as with the shutdown of anon.penet.fi in 1996; for most users, though, it is simply something that has always been there, referred to by old-timers obliquely in obscure in-jokes, shrouded in legend.

If the Internet is developing a subconscious, is it very surprising for Scientology to surface as the enemy?

@shawn: you'd use it as a comparison - you'd have a series of beads of standard sizes and match them against the testicles. As for the chocolate egg, it used to be roughly the standard #8 size, but much cheaper and easier to obtain.

danegeld (#1) - I like the rate-limiting idea. I'm not sure about the rate - for scanning a list, I think most people could do 10/s or so in bursts - but even then, 25 million records is way beyond the limit. A quota of 100,000 records per day is probably generous, but even just keeping count would mean that the data compliance officer could follow up on any large queries.

I would suggest aggregate queries should be simply subject to the same limits, but on the result rows. After all, that's what you're looking at...

Limiting aggregate queries to avoid subtraction etc is probably not workable; besides, either the person needs access to individual records in any case, so there's no point, or they shouldn't have access to the detailed data at all. They can get a sanitized copy, or if they need live data the DB admin can set up a sanitized VIEW for them.

As for a coherent security policy, one of the stories I've read claimed that there was, in fact, a manual, but it was considered too sensitive and classified above the level of the person who leaked those 25 million records. Which shows the down-side of security policies: "need to know basis" assumes that the need is accurately assessed...

#28: Heh, nice list - although if you think about it, most of these are actually quite close to real problems...

1) Dealing with the human sex drive on long-term missions is an important (if taboo) aspect of the larger human-issues side of any such missions.

2) Likewise, alterations in taste perception play into diet planning.

3) Your radar screen will show a bogie.

4) Somebody will beat you up, probably; however, medical treatment after decompression events is in its infancy. A few have been survived (on ground, not in space), but there's a lot unknown about them. There's a lot you can do with models and simulations, but at some stage you have to take actual live animals, throw them out the airlock and then try to resuscitate them. A lot of that can be done on the ground, of course.

5) The design of a space toilet is unglamorous but necessary, really.

The real problem with space research is that it's so expensive and all the experiments are designed on the ground, mostly by people who've never been in space. It's like someone who's never seen water designing a boat. However, the only real solution to that is cheap access to space, which means either better rocket engines (high-impulse high-thrust) or that elevator someone was mentioning; not something that can really be solved by better engineering.

AFAIK, you *can* do HDR with video - you just need a very expensive video camera that does HDR natively rather than piecing it together from multiple shots.

Of course, by the time these pictures get to you, they're not HDR, because your regular computer monitor can't display that. You can either buy a monitor that costs more than your car, or you can squash the dynamic range back into the usual 8 bits somehow, which is what happened here.

#2: to some extent, nobody is really sure. A few models are emerging, but which ones will turn out to be dominant, no-one knows. For software, it seems to be service (installation, management, customisation, training). For music, live performances.

For a photographer, I suspect the service path may work: people would pay you to photograph what they want, rather than what you want, and/or for expert post-processing of the images. You charge them fairly for the time you spend and let them do what they like with the photos afterwards.

In some ways, it's a "growing the pie" approach: you may get a smaller slice, but out of a bigger pie it should still work out well.

#11, just because Ford sent you a C&D letter, doesn't mean they're right.

IANAL, but fundamentally, trade mark is a consumer-protection law. Are consumers being fooled into thinking something is a Ford product which is not? For a plain photo of an actual, genuine Ford car, the answer is clearly 'no'.

Of course, the other question is whether you want to spend the next half a decade in court arguing about that. In a "might makes right" sense, they have the upper hand.

Hmm, I suspect that these days, el-cheapo housing of this kind means starting with the dimensions - 8' x 8' x 40', the size of a standard shipping container, so you can ship it at standard shipping rates.

Which is unfortunately just a little too small to be really good, especially once you take off a wall thickness on each side. Still, if you put the front door in the middle of the long wall, you can probably make a half-decent layout.

And she can say whatever stupid thing she wants, but it doesn't have the force of law unless she's writing for the majority of the SCOTUS (or relevant jurisdictional court).

Actually, it does have the force of law (well, equity) as far as her clients are concerned.

If they say something is legal in a context where you'd expect them to mean it (say, in a court of law, or on their official website), they can't then sue you for doing it.

It's called "estoppel", which is French for "put a cork in it" :-)

IANAL, though; and of course just because they can't sue you doesn't mean they won't try...

@jjasper #2: I suspect simulating an orgasm wouldn't be at all difficult.

It's been claimed that people respond to the Pleo as though it were a living creature. I guess it's easier to fool the more ancient parts of our brains — and sex is very ancient.

#1 - wget? Or some other automatic website downloader?

#3: It just seems to be an explanation of the fault reporting process.

And you don't think injecting false faults into the process would be a problem? More generally, it's a listing of who's expecting a phone call from whom about what topic, which would be useful for social engineering.

If I remember the story correctly, the original had actual names and phone numbers, which the *hackers* considered too sensitive to publish - so they elided them, but Bell's $10 version didn't.

@jere7my: I suspect that (a) the point of the stop signs is that they're then missing from the label (ie, it's left with transparent "stop" signs), and (b) the serial number helps avoid the people with inkjet printers.

#10 - "... at all costs."

Are you sure?

I mean, if this were a work of fiction, your next several months would be spent finding out what "at all costs" means, the hard way...

@Marisa: while it is the case that poor scientists and outright cranks can mislead the public, scientists' blogs are likely to be the least of the problem. If anything, they're likely to be a positive.

As for this being great for students, well, in the fields of science, we are all students.

@Anertia: when they violate the license, it's terminated (automatically for GPL v2, upon notice for GPL v3). Once the license is terminated, any further copying violates copyright.

In the alternative, they never accepted the GPL and violated copyright from the beginning.

(Because you don't need to "accept" the GPL in order to get the program, you get to choose whether you want to abide by the GPL or by plain copyright law. In most cases, the GPL is more generous, so not many people choose the second option.)

@#2: Hmm, like this quote?

Making out with yourself: now an official xkcd theme? Troubling.

Coincidentally, this is from the very comic referenced in the last paragraph of the article.

(Of course, if #2 is deleted for cause and this comment moves up from #3, it'll be even more surreal!)

Hmm, they could have used an androgynous name, like Sam or something... Sam is probably too short and common for this, but there are others.

@Scoutmaster (#3)

Who says a computer will help them in any conceivable way? Wouldn't a book be a better learning tool or a qualified teacher or a school?

The computer doubles as a shelf of books, an exercise/sketch book, calculator, local telephone system, camera, sound recorder, night-light and rudimentary oscilloscope, among other things.

Yes, a book is a good learning tool - but its functionality is included in the XO.

@Crash (#10): Video games are one of the areas where the corrosive effects of non-free software are quite visible: it used to be that the lesson about sharing was "did you bring enough for everyone?" Today, we're heading toward quite a different lesson, where sharing is nasty and wrong. Is that a world we want to live in? And for what - games?

As a Faustian bargain, that's quite poor, even as Faustian bargains go.

Of course, the whole position is somewhat hypocritical: on the one hand, you want to restrict your customers much more strictly than the GPL ever does; yet on the other hand you complain that your suppliers restrict you too much with the GPL.

In the end, the choice is yours: if you don't like the GPL, don't use it.

@Mike Smith:

I use a piece of free software as a component of my not-free software product, it has not 'become proprietary'. The free software is still free. What has not happened is that my proprietary software has become 'free'.

As the author of a piece of free software, that's my price for letting you use it. I'll let you use mine if you let me use yours. It seems a fair price to me.

If you think my price is too high, shop around or write it yourself.

If I want to get paid - if I want to eat, feed my family, and afford the spare time to work on free software - I have to be able to sell not-free software.

Given that the vast majority of work in IT is in any case custom work rather than selling not-free software, I have to question the accuracy of your claim.

In custom work, the GPL becomes a customer protection covenant, but not a particularly onerous one. Mostly, you have to give your clients the source code which the clients were probably demanding anyway.

The GPL in all its incarnations is an interesting thing, but at its heart it is an attempt by one school of thought to influence and constrain the actions of others.

Yes, yes it is. A mild one - strictly opt-in - but the heart is the building of a better world. You might argue about whether it is in fact a better or worse world we're building, but that is the heart.

And if that is the heart, the "mind" of GPL is that it results in high-quality software at low cost.

@#24 (Automatt): you don't. You find a business model that works with it rather than against it.

For software, that means charging for customising, installing and generally managing it for people.

For music, it's less settled, but one promising model is to charge for live performances.

For other media, it's even less settled; I guess the future will tell. It usually does...

I don't know about impractical - if you've got a wall that doesn't evenly divide into standard bookcase widths, these might be just the thing to take up the remainder. Although probably not at €45 each.

@noddy93: if it was 1.5 semitones sharp, that's easy to do with voice, pretty much impossible with a guitar.

@BSD: the problem with this approach is that there are thousands of software patents issued every year, while one being struck down is still rare enough to be newsworthy. Yet most or all of those thousands of patents are harmful rather than beneficial to the software industry.

Things that are a net harm ought to be abolished where possible.

@shanealeslie: >Disemvoweling is the removal of vowels from a text, used by moderators in cases where, as here, it improves the post in question.

They had a total of 17 subjects, but reported over 5000 individual datapoints. Pseudoreplication, anyone?

Well, if you follow 18 subjects over 296 time periods, you will naturally get 5300 data points. Now, you do have to analyse that as 18x296 rather than flat 5300 samples, but there's no reason to suspect they don't know their statistics.

bug_girl: "The idea that economic interactions are the best measure of sexual interest, or way to evaluate women's cycles, is pretty repugnant."

I don't think anyone was claiming it's the best measure or even a good one; simply one that's easily quantified and measured.

Science is the art of not fooling yourself. You might go "duh" at some of the conclusions; but unless you actually measure, you never know whether your intuition is right or wrong. You have to measure *something*, sooner or later, or it's not science.

@phasor3000: I don't know, "culture" and "digital feudalism" seem like half-way reasonable terms under the circumstances.

Ownership of culture is a curious phenomenon: for centuries, Cinderella was a fairy tale, the province of all. It was re-told from generation to generation. Now, suddenly, Disney "owns" it as one of "their creations". How so? Did they not build upon the work of generations?

I agree that creating free culture and spreading it under share-alike terms is a good idea. However, the arguments are not nearly as clear-cut as you make them out to be.

Hmm, RIAA members are intermediaries. The Internet disintermediates, so they're understandably unhappy. Unhappy people with resources are a problem.

@bcrowell: You're underestimating how insecure Win+IE still is.

"For at least 38 days in 2005, Internet Explorer was vulnerable to unpatched critical security flaws that were being exploited actively by viruses, worms and spyware. For at least 256 days [in 2005], Internet Explorer contained unpatched vulnerabilities where the exploit method had been publicly disclosed but was not necessarily being used." (Security Fixes Come Faster With Mozilla)

That's better than 2004, when MSIE only had 7 safe days (no known exploit) and 200 days of actively exploited holes (A Year of Bugs), but still not very good.

Anyone have the figures for 2006?

#1 - "I Remember Babylon", Playboy, March 1960; collected in "Tales of Ten Worlds" and "The Collected Stories" (p.702-710).

A decade later than you remember it :-)

As I understand it, the Indian sex statues were just a sampler; the channel itself was intended to have more varied programming.

Mind you, for SENS to work, there'd have to be a *lot* more research.

Right now, IIRC, for every year we age, we gain about a month on our life countdown clocks thanks to ongoing medical research. The aim of SENS is to make that month into a year, so that the countdown clock stops or even runs backwards.

So you need to increase the output of medical research by an order of magnitude.

To "steal" Excel from Microsoft, I would have to go to Redmond, and trash all the servers and backup tapes and offsite storage and....render Microsoft incapable of making any more copies. And that would, from a legal and, yes, moral perspective undoubtedly be a heinous crime.

I'm not sure - either it would be a heinous crime, or it would be a heroic, world-saving act.

(another poster) If my software is plastered all over the internet, few people will buy a copy, and I might as well give up and go mow lawns for money.

In fact, if you want to make software, the more effective way would be to go mow lawns for money and send it to India. They'll probably write more LoC for you than you would in the time it took to mow those lawns :-)

Of course, the real question with software isn't about piracy but about FOSS; how are you going to compete with that? If you can't compete with FOSS, piracy is rather a moot point...

@Pork Musket: The standards you're trying to apply are themselves based on the axioms (and/or rules of inference; shouldn't forget those) which belong to the evidence-based worldview. They may or may not be applicable to a faith-based worldview.

I'm pretty sure a reasonable system could be constructed accounting for the de-emphasis of some verses and re-interpretation of others and all the other things that go on in a real faith. It'd probably be fascinating to construct (or read; odds are somebody's already done the actual work). It might or might not be pretty, and it might or might not have unrestricted modus ponens, but neither of those are a requirement.

As for the existence of axioms, one generally believes in their truth not because it would be self-evident, but because the consequences are intuitively appealing :-)

Now now...

Would you believe your own, fallible eyes over the revealed Word of God?

Ultimately, that's what it comes down to: a choice of axioms, those statements which are the basis of reasoning. Now, different axioms lead to different conclusions — sometimes very different conclusions, as here. They may have different utility for achieving practical goals, or even paint different goals as desirable or undesirable.

However, unless they're technically deficient in some way (inconsistent, unintelligible), there isn't really anything to prefer one set of axioms over all others.

The article isn't clear, but it sounds like it's the *checked* bag that was the problem, not carry-on. How else would you be paged first and find out it was about your bag later?

Which is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Of course, as the comments on the linked story say, shrinkwrap machines aren't that expensive. That won't help you much on the return leg, but even so that could be very useful (both in a good way and in a bad way).

Hmm, it probably varies, but in a lot of places anything that comes unsolicited in the mail is yours (under the rubric of "unsolicited goods"). Which would make their public ostracism false, probably actionable and possibly criminal.

@William Morriss: There are differences between DRM and the situation in companies; if you work out the list of who's protecting what from whom on whose machines, the companies are in a much better position. It's still hard, but doable.

In particular, the company owns the machines. Thus, it can control them to a degree that would be unacceptable in a consumer product. The techniques are well-known, if you're willing to pay the cost.

Which, of course, is the nub: there's a cost to security as well as benefit. Banks do it, because the benefit outweighs the cost, to the extent the benefit outweighs the cost. For most other businesses, the cost of security breaches is pretty much negligible, so they don't.

As a side point, just because Microsoft can't get security right doesn't mean it can't be done. It's another case of cost and benefit: until a few years ago, the cost to Microsoft of viruses and worms was so small that they did nothing at all about security. They are trying to do better now, but fixing a decade's worth of accumulated security problems is not easy — and even today the cost to them is fairly small.

I hear they're working on that speed of light thing...

The thing about that is that it's a blue-sky pure science research project. It's not engineering.

Engineering is the application of *known* principles to solve problems. There is no known principle to do DRM securely, therefore secure DRM is not an engineering problem. Assigning engineers to the task annoys the engineers (who generally know better) and, predictably, yields no results.

Finding new principles is the task of scientists.

Unfortunately, one difference between pure research and engineering is that (as a rough guide) pure science is expected to pay off in 50 years or more, while engineering is expected to pay off in 5 or less. (The area in between, 5-50 years, is applied science.)

I get the impression people aren't that patient. If you're willing to wait 50+ years, you might get a secure DRM system — or you might not, or you might get something completely other. Science is like that, especially pure.

anonymous #2: War on Terror, War on Drugs...

Perhaps next time we can have a War on Someone who Deserves it For a Change

What, like Saddam Hussein?

@Brian: Well, yes.

At the moment, Microsoft Windows is particularly visible because (a) it has a large market share and (b) the new version, Vista, contains DRM to a much greater extent than previous versions did.

On the other hand, as far as anyone can tell Apple would use DRM just as much if it thought it could get away with it; certainly their iTunes service is very much run that way.

So, as it says in the title, you should prefer Free Software... (Which in practice means Open Source, even though the underlying principles differ greatly.)

η

"What's good for a hangover?"
"Drinking heavily the night before."

This would seem to be a macabre version of the same joke!

"What's good for troubled children?"
...

η