Posts by Steven Roper

Re: the problem with DRM systems

That's why I made the point about if you were worried about quality. If the movie is still only in the cinemas then yes, cams and screeners are all you can hope for. But once the DVD or BD comes out - it's fair game.

Suppose your playback device (say a PC or set-top box) keeps the video signal encrypted even through the monitor cable, and so the monitor itself has a revokable key to decrypt the signal. At some point between the encrypted video-in port and the screen, the signal has to be decrypted so it can be displayed. A competent cracker can open up the monitor and patch in an intercept circuit that captures this unencrypted signal as it's hitting the screen. This captures the video in the original quality.

Likewise, even if the audio going to a loudspeaker is encrypted and the speaker box itself has to have a key, at some point inside that box, the signal gets decrypted so it can actuate the coil that drives the speaker cone. A cracker can capture that signal, again in its original quality, and combine it with the video to create a near-perfect copy of the original. There may be some loss depending on how he does it, but using these methods it's perfectly feasible to produce a high-quality HD copy that's visually and aurally indistinguishable from the original. And this holds true regardless of the depth and sophistication of the DRM system used.

And it is also true that this requires some technical knowhow, and so may be seen as being beyond the means of the average Joe to achieve. This is the stated object of modern DRM - to make it difficult rather than impossible to copy. But this is where Bob being Mallory comes in; the encryption only needs to broken once. As Mallory, Bob has cracked the message and can now distribute it - via bittorrent, bitlockers, USB sticks, or the P2P system du jour, whereby the average Joe can easily get a high-quality, unprotected copy. And the more the DRM imposes limitations on what Joe can do with the file, the more he will continue going to P2P to get himself a DRM-free copy - even if he's done the right thing and bought a restricted original.

Re: @Steven Roper

"but here in the real world a company is not a person"

Er - yes it is. Companies and corporations are regarded as persons having human rights for legal purposes. Their often unscrupulous exploitation of this fact is where many of the perceived social problems with them comes from.

As for the rest of your post, I can only say that your ideals sound rather Pharaonic to me. I may live in a weird entitlement utopia, but that sounds a lot better than the master-slave plutocracy you seem to be advocating.

Re: Fifty years and counting...

It took the Soviet Union more than 70, as I recall.

Not really

since I wouldn't hire anybody with that thin a skin.

Re: Mu and Lemuria

I've always thought that Lemuria was Zealandia, the massive V-shaped sunken continent east of Australia, of which New Zealand, New Caledonia, Fiji and Vanuatu are the tops of the highest mountain ranges. It's easily visible on Google Earth, or any topographic ocean-floor map of the southwest Pacific.

Re: Americanism.

Actually, I encountered "survived" in a similar context as a small child back in the 70s, learning about the wives of King Henry VIII: "Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived..."

Re: @AC 04:40 @Lusty Mixed blessing

Actually I do understand technology, better than you might think.

"Locking" electronics documents from being changed is simply not reliable or trustworthy, not now, not ever. There's not a DRM schema ever invented that hasn't been cracked. Ever heard the adage "What man can make, man can break?" There's no such thing as "uncrackable", and that means any electronic document can be untraceably altered, no matter how secure the DRM snake-oil purveyors claim the locking technique is. I know this because way back in the 80s I was a member of a well-known cracking crew and I've seen firsthand how these guys operate.

You obviously don't live in Australia, where power outages, while not that frequent, when they do occur can run to several hours. The longest one I experienced was nearly two days, during the floods in 2005. And travel across town to recharge my laptop? That wouldn't be necessary for paper records, would it? And even in a major natural disaster, paper records can be recovered a lot more readily. Even if they are fire- or flood-damaged, there's still a chance that some of the information can be recovered - which is not true of, say, a fire-damaged thumb drive.

I will grant that PDF is not likely to lose support any time soon, but as to old records being lost because of media and format issues, even with the most industrious record-keeping, archives can be forgotten until it's too late. Things turn up in basements and attics that were thought lost years ago and which could answer many unanswered questions. Yes, in most cases people will transfer data to new formats as they become available, but only if they know or remember that it's there. You know, PEBKAC - the human factor!

I'm not saying electronic storage is inferior to paper, or that every single thing should be printed out. I'm simply saying that both have their place and their uses.

Re: There's something

The media outlet that made the documentary may very well have gathered evidence. But media bias is a well-known phenomenon; in fact it's the primary driver of the witch-hunt mentality I'm concerned about. Selective evidence gathering is an obvious part of this process. What if you were in that business's position; who would you trust more - a team of police investigators out to uphold the law, or a two-bit media outlet out to make a quick sensationalist buck?

Re: Götterdämmerung

My thoughts exactly. This behaviour is symptomatic of a company that has finally woken up to the fact that its old business model has failed and is panicking over its increasing irrelevancy, hence the push to rentism to try to secure a revenue stream. And as with all such situations, everything they do merely fans the flames of their own demise, as more and more customers realise they are being shafted and start looking for alternatives.

Re: sad all around

The complete breakdown in civility is a direct result of anger and rage at the insatiable greed behind the massive virtual land grab you refer to. The two are related; civility fails when greed prevails.

Re: Spider Robinson covered this a few years ago

James Blish also examined this "bubble universe" topic in 1959 with his Cities In Flight saga. In the final book, A Clash of Cymbals, he describes a collision between two universes (this one of matter and another of antimatter, since the Higgs wasn't known about back then) and how this entire universe would be engulfed as a result.

Re: About this proposed ban

If you have radical feminists in your government you need to vote them out now, especially the male ones. During my nearly two decades of egalitarian* activism, I've noticed that the vast majority of male feminists I've encountered, are invariably the most radical self-righteous hypocritical bigots this side of the Taliban. And this Ögmundur Jónasson fits the profile perfectly.

Ironically, most female feminists I've encountered, even those who are lesbians, are actually quite reasonable in comparison. After all, their agenda is to get a fair go for their own sex, not to disenfranchise men, which I've never had a problem with. It's the anti-male demonisation and disenfranchisement, most of which is driven by male feminists with a small smattering of hard-core female man-haters, which I oppose with such vehemence. And this anti-porn bill, such as you describe, is a typical modus operandi of such people.

So the old stereotype (and oft-used strawman) of the butch lesbian feminist man-basher is exactly that: a stereotype. It's the male feminists you have to watch out for. Warn your friends and get that bugger out of office come the next election, if you value your people's freedom and dignity at all.

* Egalitarian means advocacy of equal rights, with no preferential treatment, for all people regardless of gender, race or whatever. Some feminists (again mostly male ones) try to make the weasel claim that feminism is about equal rights for all, but that is a deception intended to validate their misandrist worldview. Feminism is, and has always been, about female rights in particular; that is why it is called feminism. Treat with suspicion anyone who makes this claim - and I'll give better than ten-to-one odds it's a male making it.

Wikipedia has its uses, with caveats

As long as the subject you are researching isn't politically charged (e.g. climate change, World War II or the Kennedy assassination) it is usually fairly accurate. In particular its articles on politically neutral subjects like mathematics or physics are a good starting point if all you need is a working understanding of the topic.

For example, the Wikipedia article on Mersenne primes explains the concept quite effectively (that is, that a Mersenne prime is a prime number one less than a power of two) without any political overhead or agenda. There is no dispute about what these numbers are or are not, just the simple fact of their existence and how they are calculated. For citation purposes of course you would look up the referenced articles at the bottom of the page for more authoritative discussion of the subject.

The danger comes when an article carries a political agenda. A good example, discussed on your findingdulcinea.com link above, is climate change. (TL;DR - A UK scientist, William Connolley, gained Admin authority on Wikipedia and used it to push a pro-climate change agenda while banning opposing contributors) In these cases, of course the references at the bottom will also all be in favour of the agenda in question by virtue of their being selected to support the article. This makes it very difficult to even locate opposing views from the references.

So as in all things, use your better judgement. If your topic of research is even slightly politically charged, don't go near Wikipedia at all. Use a variety of search engines (not just Google) and give equal attention to points made for and against. But for purely scientific or mathematical research where no political agenda is involved, Wikipedia makes as good a starting point as anywhere.

@JDX

"We're not dinosaurs, reliant on a certain climate or delicate environment..."

I recommend you look up a book/documentary called "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. He's an anthropologist who spent 30 years researching why Eurasian civilisations dominated the world over other cultures, and his thesis states that geography - specifically the temperate conditions that allowed certain species of food plants (wheat, oats, barley) and animals (goats, cattle, horses) to exist - is what gave the Eurasian cultures their edge, by freeing them from the exigencies of survival and enabling specialisation. When they attempted to colonise the tropics, their traditional survival methods failed because the plants and animals upon which our civilisation depends were not adapted to survive there.

So we do need surprisingly specific conditions to survive, or at least to maintain the structures of advanced civilisation. Without our temperate-zone climate, wheat and other staple foods don't grow, and without them civilisation as we know it cannot stand.

In a post-impact Earth, survival alone becomes only a thin possibility. If we look at past extinction events - the Permian-Triassic or the Cretaceous-Tertiary, for example - we see that the climate changes that resulted from them weren't measured in decades or even millennia. The lushness of the Permian gave way to the deserts of the Triassic; likewise with the verdant Cretaceous and the barren Tertiary, both of which lasted for millions of years before the Earth recovered.

In a mass-extinction event of this magnitude, large, complex lifeforms cannot survive. Only the smallest, simplest creatures can eke out an existence, and give rise to new evolved forms over time; the dinosaurs from the Permian-Triassic, and the mammals from the Cretaceous-Tertiary. The poisonous atmosphere, the centuries of global winter darkness resulting from an impact - these effects would last far longer than our civilisation has already existed and developed, and so the chances of anything much more complex than a frog surviving them are marginal at best.

So "re-colonising Earth" is simply not a viable proposition in the aftermath of such an event. Not unless we can maintain a civilisation in underground bunkers for a few million years at a stretch, until the Earth becomes inhabitable again...