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It only costs the price of the modem and a broadband access to play online (a one time purchase).

Broadband is not a one-time purchase but rather a recurring monthly expense. DSL or cable would cost $200 per month for me, because the service contracts run for at least a year, and I'm only home three months out of the year. (I'm at school for the other nine months, and they've restricted all gaming and P2P ports to 14.4.) Some of my friends don't even live in an area where cable or DSL is available; your "one-time purchase" would cost upwards of $200,000 to move house. Most gamers would not be willing to pay that much, and this is why most online games (including Q3A engine games) still support dial-up connections, to reach the largest possible market.

As soon as some idiot repeals the DMCA, which grants these sites permission to do these things.

Whenever I refer to copyright law's prohibition of circumvention of access control (17 USC chapter 12), I call it "the DMCA's circumvention ban", making it clear as to to which part of the DMCA I refer: not the search engine safe harbor, not the copyright office procedural changes, not the vessel hull protection, and not the copyright term extension that was separately enacted the same week but is often incorrectly considered by media and college professors to be part of the DMCA and/or to be required by the WIPO Copyright Treaty, but the circumvention ban.

basically about.com is pulling the content and pushign it back to you

That's a proxy, and this About page is no proxy. On my machine, I have goatse.cx and www.goatse.cx assigned in .../etc/hosts to an Apache server on 127.0.0.1 (otherwise known as localhost), which mirrors pineight.com. I didn't see the ass but rather the front page of pineight.com, which means that my computer requested the content.

It's URL redirection in a frame.

how can there be any argument that a copyright term based on "life span plus years" of the creator is not in effect unlimited for the creator and thus in direct violation of the Constitution.

I'm anti-Bono, and I don't consider statutory monopolies as property, but I'll play devil's advocate here to show you what you're up against:

One of the rights associated with private property under the common law is the right to specify how it is used after you have died, in a legal instrument called a "last will and testament", or "will" for short. Under current United States law, the term of copyright granted to those persons specified in the author's will is strictly "limited" to seventy years plus any remaining time until the end of the calendar year.

If not, maybe some of the movie copyrights can be invalidated -- don't you love irony?

Lauren Vanpelt has done the math and found that Mickey Mouse has already fallen into the public domain due to a faulty copyright notice. (Back then, "© 1929" wasn't enough; it had to be "© 1929 Walt Disney".)

Therefore, because there is a public domain DVD encrypted with CSS, and because the DMCA's circumvention ban (17 USC 1201) affects only "works protected under this title" (i.e. copyrighted works), DeCSS is now legal if marketed only to decrypt public domain content on DVDs (1201(a)(2); 1201(b)(1)). Good news for Charlie Chaplin DVD collectors.

tetris

Ever tried Tetanus On Drugs for Game Boy Advance? It's like playing Tetris on LSD, except without having to run from the DEA.

have you seen the graphics on the GBA?

More than that: I've written GBA games such as Tetanus On Drugs. The GBA's graphics hardware is very similar to the Super NES's, but its sound hardware more closely resembles a Sound Blaster Pro.

I guess it would be like trying to port an application without access to the original source code.

And without access to the graphics and sound for the next 90 years (no thank you Sonny Bono!) unless you petition the publisher to let you do a port.

maybe we should wait to see if a single game even gets created.

Here's such a game: Tetanus On Drugs. It's like playing Nintendo's The New Tetris® on LSD, except without the DEA breathing down your neck.

I think in fact you are trying to make a bogus example to show that the GPL won't work. It works fine.

I aimed for Preview but hit Submit. The name of the program is Tetanus On Drugs.

Stick the video and sound assets into a seperate file

The target system uses interchangeable ROM cartridges and has only one ROM connector. I don't want the user to have to swap cartridges several times during game play, and I don't want to have to provide two expensive ROM cartridges in each package.

(like iD did with their .pak files with quake)

I'm already storing asset files in .gbfs archives. (The .gbfs format is an archive format I designed, somewhat similar to .tar, .pak, .zip, .jar, .dat used by other programs.) However, because a program on the target system can access only one file (the ROM), I have to concatenate the asset files to the end of the executable. Does concatenating several files count as "linking" if I also provide a tool to extract the individual .exe and .gbfs files?

If you want to (and I presume you do), provide compressed versions of the assets (eg make the asset library a simple zip file).

I already do that, but the assets are already 20 MB zipped before counting the lossy compression used to pack the assets into the pak file. Lossy compression of source code is not permitted by the GPL, as a lossy compressed audio or image file is no longer "the preferred form for making modifications to the work."

If you are concerned about that, just write an exception into your copy of the GPL.

I am not authorized to do that. The program includes a library (M.F.X.J. Oberhumer's LZO) under the GNU GPL, and I am not permitted to link it against anything not under the GPL. I cannot contact Mr. Oberhumer because he does not accept mail not encrypted with PGP, and I cannot use PGP because I don't know anybody who would sign my keys.

If concatenating several files in a reversible manner does not count as "linking," then I don't have a problem.

That is very cool, i'm impressed. The output looks like something an old dot matrix would have made. Am i right in looking at it that the text is made up like that, where each 'row' is a sin wave at some frequency?

Correct. Look at the source code (in the zip file) to see how I did it. You can also use TED to edit the font if you want.

The correct term is tetralingual, not quadrilingual.

"Quadri" comes from Latin. "Lingual" is from Latin. "Tetra" comes from Greek. In general, a compound will be all-Greek or all-Latin, with the occasional exception such as "homosexual".

Quadrilingual is used in 1,210 pages, whereas tetralingual is used in only 14.

I assume your Game Boy reference alluded to Tetris®. In that case, the existence of Quadra negates any "by default, go with the name of the block game" rule. In other words, you need to lay off the drugs ;-)

What's needed is a plain-English interpretation describing the legitimate activities which were crimilized under the DMCA (with the existing legal examples likewise described in plain English), in terms that make Joe Public think "Omighod, that could happen to me!!"

Here are a couple papers I wrote a while back (when the CBDTPA was still called SSSCA):
The Politics of Copy Protection Technology
DMCA in Plain English

You might also find this paper helpful: What's Wrong With Copy Protection by John Gilmore.

Broadband is nice.

Broadband is nice but expensive. What would you rather pay, $60 for a CD-ROM drive plus an install set, or $200,000 for a house in an area served by broadband?

I rarely use my CD-ROM to install software, since 'apt-get' directly off HTTP is almost as fast

"Rarely" meaning "only for games," right? Most PC games are non-free because artists, musicians, and level designers have a tougher time accepting the free software or open source philosophy than coders do. Because they sell their product at retail, they have 700 MB (capacity of a CD) to work in rather than 20 MB (the maximum attention span of a user behind 56K). (The fact that PC games are available primarily for Windows is beside my point, partly because Wine can run the vast majority of 2D Windows games.)

I never really understood the need for game reviews. The reviews, in my experience, never come close to when I actually play the game.

Because it's illegal to rent PC games in the USA, that's why. The first sale doctrine (17 USC 109) makes an exception for copyright holders of PC software, allowing them to monopolize all rentals of their software. (Rentals of software designed for computers sold explicitly as Video Game Consoles are subject to ordinary first-sale rules.) Yes, in theory, it's possible to license those rights, but I've never visited a rental shop that has done so.

Because not everybody has eight hours to spend online downloading a 120 MB game demo, and not everybody has upwards of $200,000 to spend on moving to an area where broadband is available.

The files have to go over the network, and through the listener's computer and audio card and such in order to be heard. If the listener's computer can play the music, then it can also make a copy.

Unless the audio is strongly encrypted (128+ bits) over the network and the playback application uses a Secure Audio Path. If an app does not shut off all digital outputs when the Secure Audio Path is turned on, Microsoft will not sign it.

However, nothing can stop line out line in. Even Hollings's current proposal prohibits the copyright industry from requiring technologies that would make fair use next to impossible.

He/She is talking about computers. You can't test a pentium IV cpu in gaming consoles.

If the U.S. Congress manages to pass the CBDTPA, what's the difference between a computer in the U.S. and a video game console in the U.S.?

Yes, you can test a P4 CPU in gaming consoles: run an emulator. However, a PIII/866 is sufficient for everything up to and including Game Boy Advance. And no, not all emulation is piracy.

You were trying to make a joke by comparing the costs of hardware to the costs of network infrastructure. Your joke doesn't add up. For some users in the United States, initially setting up broadband Internet access can cost a hundred times more than the price of a relatively high-end computer system. In some cases, adding broadband Internet access to a family's telecommunications package may cost upwards of $200,000.

After all, it's their network. If you don't like it, go to another ISP.

For $200,000? Give me a break. Sometimes, an ISP may have a monopoly in a given geographical area.

I have Windows XP using ClearType, and I'm using a CRT. Everything is nice and smooth

That's because XP's ClearType reverts to traditional high-quality anti-aliasing on displays whose color components aren't misaligned, such as CRTs. ClearType as we know it is a display technology designed to hop on the phase carrier created by the misalignment of the red, green, and blue planes of a typical color LCD panel to triple the apparent horizontal resolution.

More information is available here and here; free software to do ClearType processing on bitmap images is available here.

The artical is talking about China banning spamming outright which is a lot more then any leader in the US is even willing to think about.

US leaders have more than thought about it. With the junk fax law (part of the 1996 Telecom Act), the United States has already banned spam sent over a phone line.

Perhaps its time you ditched that 56K dial-up connection in favour of cable or DSL.

For one thing, getting cable or DSL costs $200,000 in some situations, and for another, you can only get DSL from one physical location, whereas you can get dial-up anywhere your ISP has a modem pool. This is important for mobile people such as anybody in college where the college Internet connection isn't five-nines reliable.

Levity aside, surely on a Linux system you do the simplest thing - log out of that user's system and log in again as yourself. Ta-da! Instant default interface. Or do as we do at work - share home directories, so that wherever you log in, you always get your very own preferences.

And either wait several minutes for your preferences and images to download over a 56K modem, or pay upwards of $200,000 in some areas to move to an area where broadband is available.

This story claims that it's all okay because a) it's within the law

Spam is already defined and illegal, according to the junk fax law (47 USC 227). The law defines "fax machine" so as to include any computer with a telephone modem.

NT is built upo an HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) which makes it actually seen as software so, it is obvious DRM hardware can't be 100% secure !?

Versions 5.0 and later of NT Kernel, used in Windows 2000 and Windows XP, include support for signed device drivers. When you install a device driver, the OS tells you whether or not Microsoft Hardware Compatibility Labs has digitally signed the driver. Signed audio drivers must support a function to turn off all cleartext digital outputs, and applications can choose to output only to signed drivers. See also Secure Audio Path.

However, without watermarks, Microsoft won't be able to stop D/A/D copying, and the standard SDMI watermarks have already been broken.

BTW, I hadn't ever even heard of a Flash Advance linker, but bought one for my kid the day of the Slashdot story on Zophar's store.

You mean this story

He loves it, and has been copying games like gangbusters--he probably bought his last cartridge.

I have a Flash Advance linker and a 256 megabit flash cartridge. I use them mostly for homebrew development, which is the primary purpose for which the manufacturer markets them. (Here's what I've done so far.) I don't pirate Game Boy games unless there is a clear indication that the publisher has no intention of bringing them to store shelves in the United States. (Yes, I'm referring to the Noddy and Kururin games.)

I think our perspective has changed as these sites still exist, and there is still a kind of "undernet" out there, that is often ignored by the search engines (free pages), or are simply not linked to by the "mainstream" net sites because they offer no opportunity to make a buck.

If you have a personal site, and you want Google to pick it up, go to your user info and put a link to your page in your signature. Also write some pages that you think will be informative in many different Slashdot discussions, and link to them whenever they're on-topic. Then whore to get a few +4/+5 posts that show through even when an article spills into indexed mode. Not only will you get a lot of hits directly from Slashdot, but also because Slashdot's static pages are linking directly to your site, some of Slashdot's high Google ranking will rub off on your site.

Distributing copies of the game is clearly copyright infringement.

Not if the game has been released as free software (or even free as in beer). Nintendo's titles aren't free, but mine are. I put my proofs of concept and short utilities under the Expat license and my full games under the GNU GPL. It's only copyright infringement to redistribute binaries of GPL'd software if you neglect make an offer to distribute machine-readable source code at cost.

Developing and using free software constitutes a substantial non-infringing use of the Visoly Flash Advance Pro cartridges.

I'm in Australia so Lik-Sang can still get stuff through to here

I ordered a GBA flash memory card and linker (for legit home development if you're curious; my GBA page is here) from Lik Sang and had it shipped EMS Speedpost (as opposed to UPS), and it arrived just fine. The problem is with UPS's over-restrictive customs policy.

GBA flash cards are considered illegal

How are GBA flash cards any more illegal than SmartMedia or CompactFlash cards?. If I load only free software onto a Visoly flash card for Game Boy Advance, whose copyright am I infringing? Yes, free software for GBA does exist, and copying the Nintendo boot logo is legal under Sega v. Accolade. (Read More...)

why you can't change to competent ISP

Most of the time, the answer will be that changing ISPs while keeping the same level of service costs six figures because the user's current ISP holds a geographic monopoly in the area. "Don't like our cable modem service? Tough s***. We're the only broadband provider in town."

what your static IP address is

Sometimes, a static IP costs six figures because the user's current ISP doesn't provide one to any non-corporate customer.

why you can't change to competent ISP

Most of the time, the answer will be that changing ISPs while keeping the same level of service costs six figures because the user's current ISP holds a geographic monopoly in the area. "Don't like our cable modem service? Tough s***. We're the only broadband provider in town."

what your static IP address is

Sometimes, a static IP costs six figures because the user's current ISP doesn't provide one to any non-corporate customer.

If an ISP doesn't fulfil your specific needs, or has policies you disagree with, then there is nothing preventing you from using a different one.

If your ISP is the only one that serves your geographical area, then switching to a different ISP can cost upwards of six figures.

If I can hear it, I can copy it. Total Recorder

Will not be signed by Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't sign any audio driver unless it has a way of letting applications disable all digital outputs (such as Total Recorder's waveOut to waveIn redirection) that users cannot override. (Read More...)

The tree dump you're complaining about is actually generated by an XSL stylesheet that's provided in an IE resource file, and used when the XML document doesn't specify a stylesheet

Thank you. (Hint to moderators: parent is Informative.) One question remains, though: which standard stylesheet should I use for XHTML documents? And why isn't it seeing the stylesheet I specify in <link rel="stylesheet" href="/de.css" /> ? (Yes, I do name stylesheets de.css.)

many may not have heard of SHN vs. mp3 (debates for or against these 2 can cause a war), but SHN is a lossless compression of a WAV file, and it compresses the wav file approximately 50%. This is compared to mp3's where they are lossly compressed about 90%, but it throws out information in the original wav.

For one thing, FLAC performs a few percent better than SHN and has a more free license. For another, tests performed by r3mix.net have shown that it's possible to encode MP3 at a variable bit rate centered about 192 kbps and lose nothing audible. (Whether this is legal under the Fraunhofer patents is a different story.) MP3 and Ogg Vorbis produce significant quality loss in only the following situations: 1. low bit-rate operation, 2. crappy encoders, and 3. repeated conversions of wav -> compressed -> wav.

A lot of the hard-core collectors of the live music refuse to collect mp3's due to the loss in quality from original wav->mp3

What about the loss in quality from analog->wav? It's negligible, but it's still a measurable loss.

I still think of my linux boxen as development platforms or servers, I don't play games on them, I program and do real work. Putting mere games on them would be demeaning to them!

I use my Linux boxes to play games because I use my Linux boxes to develop. Otherwise, how would I test the games I'm developing?

Ya gotta love the RIAA going against the DMCA or whatever that anti-reverse-engineering thing is called.

According to this PDF from the US Library of Congress, law enforcement officers operating in the line of duty are exempt from the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. (Read More...)

The computers I've seen that have a video-out(Composite or S-Video) usually allow for the output to TV to be set to either NTSC or PAL.

Yes, but they also allow apps (such as DVD player) to override such a setting. Otherwise, the drivers probably won't get Microsoft's signature. I haven't read anything important about this exact issue, but if MS Secure Audio Path is any indication of the direction Microsoft is heading for the operating system that will come with your next PC...

Besides, the telecine method is different. With a 50Hz video technology like PAL, they just speed the 24Hz film up 4% and draw each film frame into two video fields. In 60Hz formats such as NTSC or PAL-M, they draw each frame for three fields, then two, then three, then two... I doubt that most DVD players can convert NTSC telecine to PAL telecine or vice versa, so they just output the format that most closely matches the encoded frame-rate.

In addition to the advantages and drawbacks given in this section of the article, color LCD technology is inherently sharper than CRT. Because of the inherent misregistration of the red, green, and blue planes of pixels, it's possible to address sub-pixels individually, resulting in a nearly threefold improvement in the effective horizontal resolution. More info is available here, Slashdot covered it here, and software to sharpen bitmap images on LCDs is available here.

My prediction is that, unless antitrust legislation in the U.S. gets some teeth between now and then, the PC will become a Gameboy within fifteen years. Enjoy computers while they last.

Game Boy is a bad example. The Game Boy Advance is an open system, fully documented to the point that anybody with GCC can write software and run it on the GBA without taking a vow of silence or paying the big N. The only things the GBA checks before running your code are 1. the very simple checksum on the header and 2. a bit pattern that produces the Nintendo logo but is legal to copy under the Sega v. Accolade precedent. So go get GCC for ARM and an MBV2 cable from lik-sang.com and get hacking.

$article =~ s/become a Gameboy/become an XBox/; and it becomes more accurate.

Nearly ever connected person to whom I speak has broadband /available/, if not at the price they want.

Yeah, for $200,000 for moving to a different town or part of town, or $1000+ per month for a T1. Hardly reasonable for all but the richest folk.

The big problem is that for a game to boot up on a GBA, the ROM has to have the correct header information, which includes code copyrighted by Nintendo (part of which is the NINTENDO logo that appears when you turn on the GBA with a kart in)

It's copyrighted, but copying it does not constitute infringement. From the Sega v. Accolade decision, if a game console checks for a magic cookie in the software, even the 14 KB magic cookie in the Dreamcast boot sector, copying the magic cookie for interoperability counts as Fair Use(TM). Just make sure you follow the Bleem developers' example and display "CORRECTION: This software is not licensed by Nintendo" once your code gets control.

Yeah, sure GBA is great, when you can actually see whats on the screen.

That's because early games' palettes didn't correct for the GBA display's gamma of 4. Newer games compensate for this with a lookup table.

I want a fuckin' backlight.

"Fuckin" and "back" I can't help you with, but "light" is coming very soon. Watch this site for updates.

Well, if you chose to live in the boondocks

Not everybody chooses where to live. Some people don't have upwards $200,000 to move house.

The PS2 plays PS1 games.

The Game Boy Advance is about as powerful as Atari Jaguar (i.e. twice as powerful as Super NES) and also plays Game Boy Color games. It also connects to a TV with the third-party TV de Advance.

Nintendo seems to have really raunchy business policies. Suing people, compromising design decisions to protect license fees, etc.

I guess Nintendo messed up when it designed GBA. GBA has absolutely NO independent software creation prevention measures other than checksumming the header and looking for the Nintendo logo (which is legal to reproduce under Sega v. Accolade). Learn how to develop your own software at gbadev.org.

but since bandwidth is cheap (if you have high speed access then each marginal byte you send is virtually free)

But there are still fixed costs involved, such as $200,000 to move house to an area where non-draconian broadband is available.

It is dumb to think (and perhaps you don't), that all of these changes came about because of some Machiavellian instinct among our politicians to stay in power. Each one of these bans has a compelling social justification. I guess some people don't agree.

What's the social justification for (say) perpetually banning the free use of all works created in the time period 1923 to 1925? And doing it by anonymous voice vote when the news media are looking other way during Kosovo and Lewinsky? I'm pretty sure it was campaign contributions from DisneyCo and TimeWarner.

It might give people confidence with Linux to know that it runs right on their box, not just their mb/gpu/soundcard/modem/USB controller, etc. We all know that if they build it, Linux will come.

Unless the system's BIOS requires the operating system's kernel to be cryptographically signed by the system manufacturer, and the system manufacturer is under contract not to sign any operating system but Microsoft Windows XP or its successors.

Just wait till cable starts carrying digital signals

It's called digital cable. It's also called a cable modem. Comcast (for example) offers both services.

I'm sure there will be a device to write the digital data directly to the hard drive

No. Any company with the financial resources to build a device that decrypts digital cable potentially opens itself up to a big lawsuit (DMCA in the US, contributory copyright infringement elsewhere). Few hardware manufacturers have the legal funds to fight the MPAA studios on a level playing field, except for manufacturers such as Sony that are themselves MPAA studios.

RedHat costs about 3 hours of downloading if you have good bandwidth

Red Hat Linux 7.1 is on 4 CDs. That's 2.6 GB. Divide by 3 hours and get 0.25 megabyte/s. That's faster than even T1, which runs at about the speed of a 1X CD-ROM. Who has the money for that kind of bandwidth in a private residence? And who has the money to move house to an area with broadband whose hardware, software, and TOS are compatible with your Free OS of choice?

I couldn't just call my Playstation 2 game Tetris

Correct. I wrote a thorough essay on the legal issues surrounding Tetris. To sum up, TETRIS is a trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, but there are no U.S. Patents on the game itself, and the game's graphics are simple enough that any source code or audiovisual work copyright can be circumvented by a simple clean room cloning project such as freepuzzlearena, which produced the Tetanus engine (soon to be renamed to Lockjaw to distance it further from the TETRIS Mark).

Want a taste of LSD? Try TOD, a falling tetramino game with nine screen distortion effects. Includes static DOS binaries plus GPL sources for recompiling on Win32 or X11 systems. Only dependency is libc + Allegro + your window system's libraries.

just because there's no tetris on the game system yet

Apparently, you've never played The Next TETRIS for PlayStation and Wintendo9x.