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Judge Opens Hearing On RealDVD Legal Battle
FP writes "On Friday morning, lawyers urged a federal judge to bar RealNetworks from selling software that allows consumers to copy their DVDs to computer hard drives, arguing that the Seattle-based company's product is an illegal pirating tool. RealNetworks' lawyers countered later in the morning that its RealDVD product is equipped with piracy protections that limits a DVD owner to making a single copy and is a legitimate way to back up copies of movies legally purchased. This legal battle began with a restraining order last October which stopped the sale of RealDVD. More coverage is available at NPR. The same judge who shut down Napster is presiding over the three-day trial."
Reader IonOtter points out that later in the day, Judge Patel sealed the court after DVD Copy Control Association lawyers "argued that public testimony of aspects of the CSS copy-control technology would violate trade secrets."
Sounds like a repeat of DVDXCopy. That tool only let you make one copy i believe; and it lost the legal battle.
The other day I was thinking the same thing about radio. "They can listen to our songs for free!?!"
Of course the way the RIAA is talking now, radio isn't getting a pass for much longer.
Judge Patel sealed the court after DVD Copy Control Association lawyers "argued that public testimony of aspects of the CSS copy-control technology would violate trade secrets."
They almost let the cat out of the bag!
Handbrake is the best tool that I know of.
Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X versions: http://handbrake.fr/
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Research how radio works. Unless you are talking about someone broadcasting on their own, any radio station that wants to broadcast music has to pay royalties to the owner of the songs (Generally paid through a PRO or Performance Rights Organization such as BMI). Many factors are taken into account when they determine how much is paid, but yeah, this establishment has been around for a while and makes the RIAA member companies a good chunk of change.
If it's two's complement the values would be 0 or -1.
If it's got a sign bit then it could be +0 or -0, like he said. But there are architectures that only allow the word to represent 0 if all bits in the word are 0 (e.g. floating point). If it's like the more common floating point mantissa designs I've seen, the leading 1 is implied. So in that case 0 would mean 0 (because all the bits in the word are 0), and 1 would be a value of 1 (implied) with a negative sign, thus -1.
Which of course gets us the same thing as two's complement, in this case, but via a more roundabout way. :)
So don't call him a moron until you've over-analyzed it as much as I have.
Mmm hmmm. 1-bit floating point number: one sign bit, zero mantissa bits (implied leading 1), zero exponent bits (thus 2^0 exponent). I like it.
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.