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Okay, let's get some history here:

- AVI is the Microsoft video file format.
- ASF isn't much different
- DIVX is a codec

=> ASF files can be encoded with the DIVX codec.

I'm not even talking about *my* school; I don't even use Windows. But I assure you that it is an incredibly common thing to do, especially in all or mostly Windows environments (many college dorms). The knowledgable users probably run FTP servers too, but the vast multitude don't know what FTP is, or what it stands for...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

This isn't news, and it isn't something I want to hear about...

It *is* very cool, and arguably fair use, but unfortunately, if the media ever really gets wind of this, we'll see the entire stupid mp3 war over 'mp4', only ten times worse.

Ok, I suppose it's unavoidable, but if you thought all the mp3 stuff we've heard about for the past few years was stupid, well, this will be ten times stupider with the MPAA backing it.

Also, I suppose no one will mention Microsoft in this, even though everyone traffics in '.asf' files. (Just like everyone talks about Napster, even though many college students share their hard drives, and use Windows File Sharing as their mp3-pirating platform...) Of course, the entire format/medium issue is incredibly stupid; it's just a tool. But rational argument hasn't stopped these people so far...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Bastille and OpenWall.

If you do that right, well, that's pretty good right there.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Nearly 40% of Slashdot posters surveyed said they thought karma was more important to posting than making intelligent, useful points. Only 6% said they thought posters with large amounts of karma treated their fellow posters well, and just 8% said posters did a good job of educating posters about real information related to the topic.

74% said karma whores have too much influence on Slashdot, and more than 80% agreed that slashdot comments are dominated by trollers which seek mass appeal over quality.

The Net is not only a prime battleground for the rising tensions between karma whores and trollers, it's also becoming the primary vehicle for communists who have little voice in mainstream software development houses.

Protests against DeCSS have erupted in more than 100 American mirrors, and issues ranging from the open distribution of technology to globalism to artistic control of culture to iMacs were cited in the survey. Without the news-spreading power of the Net, many of these efforts would probably have faltered.

The survey suggests that slashdot posters are finally getting upset at their unchecked power and are coming to believe -- with amazing unanimity
-- that karma whores need to be more responsible, ethical and regulated.

More than 95% of the survey's participants said they agreed with this statement:

"Karma whores should have more than one purpose. They also owe something to their moderators and the communities in which they operate, and they should sometimes sacrifice some karma for the sake of making things better for their moderators and communities."
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'll say! He xor's, like, four arrays, full of random-looking hex numbers, and that always offends the critics.

...but they just don't understand true art; sensitive programmers are always misunderstood, and held to arbitrary 'style guidelines', and expected to conform...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No; only C source code is free speech.

Therefore, you really meant to say...

----------------------------------------
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
int e=0,i=10;
for(;i--;)
e|=printf("Only C code is free speech. C++ code sucks.\n");
return e;
}
--------------------------
;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hopefully Jobs won't whine about this one like he did last time, considering how close these two are.

It'll be nice to have the PPC/PC rivalry about Linux/MacOS X (BSD, that is) for once, though, instead of the dead, beaten horse of the Windows/Mac flamewars.

In my opinion, at least now everybody wins, and is on more or less equal footing. (Look, I have a GUI and a shell prompt! Hey, me too!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yes I am; they are broadcast over the airwaves for free, and there is no charge for decoding them, and there are no monthly fees. Therefore, I "get them for free". They are a "feature", if you will, a feature that I would be willing to pay somebody to remove.

An apt analogy would be Slashdot, and JunkBuster. The only difference is that JunkBuster is free, and a 'free' (DIY Software) TiVo solution would be very nice to have as well.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

"The new iMac cluster is infinitely expandable..."

"Because there's always room for JELL-O!"

Where's Bill Cosby when you need him?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I understand his entire *house* has this sort of technology in it...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First, I never even *watch* TV.

But second, if I wanted a device that would get rid of ads for me, the one thing I *wouldn't* do is pay for a subscription to the *device* to get MORE ADS! Do you see how inane that is?

Of course, the next step is 'product placement', which they do all the time in movies as well... (My favorite is probably the blatant "Sell-Out" section in Wayne's World; that's hilarious...)

...and I don't want to pirate anything. I don't own a TiVo; I haven't been watching TV. But if I *did* have one of these devices, I'd want to use it. What's so illegal about that? I'd do the same with my VCR. Chill out, man...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Oh damn, that's beautiful...

I haven't been to segfault in so long; probably not since they stopped the polls because of the petrified stuff... I'll have to check it out again.

Thanks!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Why would I want to *pay for* ads and promotions? I don't want them, and yet I already 'get them for free'; I'll pay a company who gets it, to ensure that I *don't* get ads of any sort.

So; show of hands. Who has already ripped video from their Tivo? From the FAQ, it looks like they're working on this...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Now that I've seen a picture of one of those Mac Cubes in action, (as it were) I can't believe no one mentioned (or took a picture of) the obvious use for it!

It's a TOASTER! It always was a toaster, and it always will be! Forget NeXT, forget the Amiga, the Cube is the right boxy shape, *and* it has the slots for BREAD!

That's awesome; I want one of those to go with those iMac aquariums Apple sells. In fact, why don't they ditch the whole computer line and go into home furnishings?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Why don't more people use Emacs LISP? It has the features Java has, and a 'friendly' development environment. And everybody's favorite, the LISP language syntax! Therefore, no one cares that it's byte-compiled, architecture-neutral, blah, blah, blah...

That's what it all comes back down to: syntax and style. People don't use Smalltalk because they learned C, and procedural modes of thought (BASIC instead of LOGO, FORTRAN instead of LISP...).

Also, back then the paradigm was new, too; real hardcore OO Programmers still tend to migrate back to Smalltalk, if they find out about it, so you'll probably see more people using it, but not that many more. Lots of people aren't comfortable with functional programming, either.

Also, I don't know what sort of extensions Smalltalk supports now, but that's also a compelling reason to use a language. C, C++, Java and Perl all have a lot of built-in API functionality, and have gained a lot of third-party contributions. Many less popular languages don't, and therefore haven't.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I don't think so, but more than one poster has mentioned something about a userdata persistence option...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Try w3m; it's really usable in a big xterm, especially with the mouse support and whatnot.

However, if you need a graphical browser on that box... well... There are a few browsers around designed for low-end machines, like Arachne, but they probably work better in DOS. And some other ones that tend to be pretty were generally designed primarily as file-browsers, like kfm...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, IE 5.0 is released for the Mac, too, and it supports DHTML, so it probably has this loophole in it as well. And it's ugly, and completely IE-specific. "Client-side cookies", basically, which is a really dumb idea. I'd trust server info to persist, but not client info...

I think Gates is past that phase; now its all about control...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

A "feature".

...like a VW with the license plate "feature", right?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Any player can do this, including a licensed one; all you have to do is capture the bitstream that it outputs, and that requires no knowledge of CSS whatsoever.

Also, the CSS module for Linux is 'css-auth'; all it does is allow the drive to play its content, and its purpose *is* to allow users to watch DVDs under Linux.

However, this is another red herring, because the real pirates will still be the ones burning unlicensed DVDs with fake cover-art and whatnot...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hey, I completely agree; the same arguments apply in the home, too. (manager->parent; employee->child)

There are a couple of other solutions, too. If you actually filter incoming *content*, then you can block what actually gets to the user; this could be done by having a proxy/firewall for the business, and only allowing web access to that. (unless you implement, say, a DNS/HTTP tunnel, or something equally ludicrous. ;)

The problem with that is, content filtering doesn't work very well. Often, people can't correctly identify or distinguish offensive material from art or literature, or have differing opinions, ("Huckleberry Finn", for example; I say it is literature, and relatively accurate period historical fiction; other people obviously don't know enough about the period...) so you really can't expect a computerized regexp parser to be even *that* good. ...and when it comes to analyzing, identifying and parsing images, well, a 5-year-old does a better job of that, still.

Therefore, we've already shown that filtering by URL often doesn't work, and accurate content filtering is pretty much impossible with today's technology, so it's gonna be unfair, and it's not the answer.

However, I believe you can buy software like babelfish from SYSTRAN, so suggest that to your boss instead. Heck, it'd probably be quicker to do it locally, and more full-featured as well.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Babelfish is a proxy; you can use it to load blocked sites by having altavista do the heavy lifting.

See if they block the zippy filter, too... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wow; you've proven my point beautifully!

Also, what's redundant here? Redundant *across* slashdot stories? That's a new one... I guess first post would be redundant under that reasoning. Or bitching about someone else's comment... Or just about anything, actually...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Mod that up! They're working on some cool stuff...

My favorites: black holes at the center of galaxies (yeah, eventually we'll *really* have to move...), and the origin of cosmic/gamma rays. (Finally, we'll know the truth about what *really* happened to Reed Richards & company! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, I think 'storage' (i.e. copying) counts as digital recording, but I don't think it can record analog audio, no.

Of course, I also don't have one, but... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No, Karma really is meaningless now.

However, back when it was meaningful, he would have posted that without the bonus, so as to get moderated down less, and up more...

So explain to me: what is the point of being a member of the "I Hate Signal 11" club? I mean, really? Sure, he says some stupid stuff sometimes; I do too. And lots of people are members of the "I Hate Anonymous Coward" club, because he posts even *stupider* stuff. But why the vindictiveness?

I think you value Karma more than he does; that is to say, the answer here would be envy. Which is funny, since you're posting as an AC.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, a good argument against this (for us CSC folks) is as follows:

Sure, you *could* write a C interpreter/compiler in LISP, but why would you want to?

;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yes, actually. I think 'geeklawyer' does that occasionally, and I've seen it a few other times. But he was complaining that when he *does* post a lengthy explanation, no one notices... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, I was noticing those laws too; they frighten me. But you don't have to record copyright info.

Does the Rio contain anything like that internally?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

You're right, that was somewhat simplified. Napster only hosts the directory, and the clients have the files. But after a person searches for a file, then it's just like Samba: a transaction involving two people and a file, where Napster (the company) is not involved.

Good call!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I don't think they really exclude a computer, as such. They try to, but I don't think they accomplished it. Provided you keep only digital audio recordings on a drive, of course. :)

Incidentally, a Rio or a car-mp3 player would definitely qualify; apparently, it just depends on the extent to which you devote that machine to digital audio. So buy a Pentium with a 40GB HD, and burn an mp3 downloading/ripping program into ROM! ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

(3) A ''digital audio recording device'' is any machine or
device of a type commonly distributed to individuals for use by
individuals, whether or not included with or as part of some
other machine or device, the digital recording function of which
is designed or marketed for the primary purpose of, and that is
capable of, making a digital audio copied recording for private
use, except for -
(A) professional model products, and
(B) dictation machines, answering machines, and other audio
recording equipment that is designed and marketed primarily for
the creation of sound recordings resulting from the fixation of
nonmusical sounds.

(5)
(A) A ''digital musical recording'' is a material object -
(i) in which are fixed, in a digital recording format, only
sounds, and material, statements, or instructions incidental to
those fixed sounds, if any, and
(ii) from which the sounds and material can be perceived,
reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with
the aid of a machine or device.
(B) A ''digital musical recording'' does not include a material
object -
(i) in which the fixed sounds consist entirely of spoken word
recordings, or
(ii) in which one or more computer programs are fixed, except
that a digital musical recording may contain statements or
instructions constituting the fixed sounds and incidental
material, and statements or instructions to be used directly or
indirectly in order to bring about the perception,
reproduction, or communication of the fixed sounds and
incidental material.

(6) ''Distribute'' means to sell, lease, or assign a product to
consumers in the United States, or to sell, lease, or assign a
product in the United States for ultimate transfer to consumers
in the United States.

Most of what they give you either involves a couple of buttons and a headphone jack on a CD-ROM drive, a port for a digital camera, and if you pay too much for it, external versions of the usual internal devices that take up valuable space up front, or get stacked up nearby and have too many cables.

However, if you could move the power supply to the front, turn the case around, punch some holes in the back, and move at least the external drives over there, and fake some paneling, and... etc., etc.

Really, it'd be best to design your own case. If you don't know how, find some people who can make plans for it, and know how to bend metal and whatnot. If you have to, you can paint that, or build a prototype out of whatever you have lying around.

But the bottom line is, if you like it, and other people like it, then maybe you can sell it, or at least sell the idea! I'm sure it'd go great with a 'Happy Hacker Keyboard', preferably hooked up in the front too, like they used to be. (like my XT was... ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

CD's do cost too much; that's why I stopped buying them. Unfortunately, CD sales are going up, so obviously someone out there didn't get the message.

I quote: '...though we say "All information should be free", it is not. Information is power and currency of the virtual world we inhabit, so mistrust Authority.'; points for identifying the quote.

You can read the lengthier version in the actual Cyberpunk Manifesto, but I think this is what we mean when we say "Information wants to be free", or more generally, "All Information should be free"...

Actually, lots of bands give away music. I realize that radio is paid for by advertisements, but that money doesn't go to the artists; the publicity does. And yes, the RIAA does rip off artists, and I favor any system that cuts them out of the picture. Hence, me not buying CD's...

Napster won't make any money from me trying to sell demographic info; what makes you think I'd give it to them? I have no idea what their privacy policy is, either, but there's something else that needs some work...

Also, nowhere in your argument do you touch on copyright or downloading. Napster provides a service much like Samba or FTP; it's a file-sharing protocol. And once you pick a file to download, it's a point-to-point transaction. The only people involved in violating copyright law are individual people, and they might or might not be doing this on a case-by-case basis. However, in many cases, the RIAA offers no recourse even *to* copyright holders.

Let us assume for the moment that when I buy a tape, I'm actually just buying a license to listen to that music. Does that mean that I can trade in my tape for a CD? What rights do I have? If I buy a CD, and rip the mp3's, and share them, can someone else who bought the tape download my mp3's? They should have a license for the same music, and therefore no violation could take place. If I'm wrong here, please explain why in detail, because if I *didn't* buy a license, then I'd be pissed. That's how copyright is supposed to work, and that's how the RIAA claims it does. If it doesn't, well, CD's should be easily $8 cheaper, and freely distributable, or the RIAA should be sued into the ground for not giving us our rights in the first place (a class-action suit for damages over the past 50 years should cover it, thank you. This includes the consumers and the artists.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Okay, so from their definition, my 'sound card' qualifies as a digital-audio recording device, but my PC doesn't? Or, if you want to be stricter about it, at least the 'line-in' on my sound card qualifies, and my CD-ROM drive qualifies. Also, individually, they cannot perform this function without storage, so they *need* the PC to even function as a recording device!

My PC can also check e-mail and connect to the web and program and manipulate images and play video games, but it is a general-purpose machine, so attempting to assign it a specific purpose is stupidity.

Could I argue that many people use a boom-box primarily to listen to Audio CD's and the radio, and therefore it doesn't count as a 'recording device' even though it also can record?

Does my microwave not tell time?

Therefore, I argue that politicians do not represent their constituents at all because they primarily eat, sleep, and pander to corporate interests all the time, and because of this we should hold a Constitutional Convention, and design a government that *primarily* serves the people. Anyone remember that goal?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Okay, so we all know that Al Gore invented the internet, right?

But did you know that without his help, Vinton Cerf never would have invented TCP/IP?*

Yeah. I guess I'll vote for Nader, then. :)

(*Helpful hint for ACs and moderators: read the link!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First Person Shooter: Documentary? That *has* to be a new category.

"And now, the life and times of Duke Nukem: once a side-scrolling adventurer, he finally realized his potential in Duke3D."...

No, I don't think it'll ever fly. Unless they enter 'idspispopd', of course. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No; you aren't circumventing anything. Their program is writing to your devices, and what you do with that input is your business. Devices are just files.

Any other interpretation of that is insane, so it wouldn't surprise me if it were ruled illegal regardless of sanity, as usual...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Read the preceding sentence; if they can't do that for two years (since Oct 1998) then they can't do a lot. 1201(b) looks unclear, but it looks like it attempts to make an exception to that two-year period, but doesn't really say what. 1201(c) says you have to take it up with their librarian. Oh no! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, I was wrong: it's even easier.

RealPlayer 7 on Linux uses esd, so just use esdmon to dump whatever input esd gets. Then encode it, it should be 44.1kHz, 16-bit audio by default.

I just dumped the sample sound, now I'll have to grab a decent encoder. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I believe it is, provided it isn't "circumvention" as opposed to just getting a client working.

Like, if you just re-wrote RealPlayer, you should be fine. Just don't save it to a file, because apparently decoding the file format is ok, but converting it isn't.

I know that doesn't make any sense. However, you could probably record everything that goes through /dev/audio. In that case, Real does all the circumvention for you. (Shouldn't be too hard to implement, right?)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems
(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNO-LOGICAL
MEASURES. (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a techno-logical
measure that effectively controls access to a work protected
under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence
shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the
date of the enactment of this chapter.

I have seen some code that plays older realaudio files, but that's about it. Also, I don't know a whole lot about audio codecs...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Why is this not allowed with a plug-in architecture? If RealNetworks doesn't like it, then they shouldn't have offered the functionality, or should stop everyone from using plug-ins.

More specifically, could someone tell me what StreamBox was doing that was illegal, or is it just that RealNetworks and "The Powers That Be" don't like it, and will therefore make up a reason later...

Actually, Real is probably just jealous because they don't have a name like "Ferret"... ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That looks like a handy little device, there...

WebTV on Linux, anyone?

Now, where does it say how much it costs? This might make a good, cheap X-terminal as well...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Embedded Java? On a bike?

Oh well, I guess that silly Java-on-a-wristwatch joke isn't as far away as I'd like it to be.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I couldn't find it at all; I did eventually find Capitol's website, and they have a Pink Floyd section with some entire songs in low-quality realaudio, and various different bitrates (up to 96kbps) for windows media.

However, for Dark Side of the Moon (and another 10 discs), they just link to Amazon.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Okay, I'll bite; how was my comment redundant?

I'd appreciate it if I didn't get moderated down for absolutely no reason, okay? If you do moderate either of these posts down, logout, and state your reason anonymously; I don't care about the karma, 'cause it'll take me a while to get back down to 50, high karma being meaningless now and all.....
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I believe I already got a meaningless reply to that end, and ignored it.

This is stupid philosophical tripe.

How do you know that information is meaningless without humans? Don't you think that supernatural beings, aliens, badgers, or plants might use it to make decisions? For that matter, how do you know that information doesn't have a collective consciousness, impressed upon it from its owners?

Well, these are pretty silly points I'm bringing up, but the point is, you don't know. In fact, you can't know. And if you think you do, you could still be wrong.

And that is meaningless philosophical debate.

Now let me use my anthropomorphisms in peace.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I think that's 'horsepucky'. Did the rogue spell-checker bite you, Nick?

Also, some information *does* want to be freely available, like the whois database, or the song lyrics servers, and these are freely contributed, and unlawfully (in my opinion) restrained.

...so instead of trying to cash into the Napster phenomenon, do some *real* research, and find out something new.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.