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Feds Continue To Consider Linux Users Criminals For Watching DVDs
An anonymous reader sent in a link to an article in Wired about the latest DMCA loophole hearing. Bad news: the federal government rejected requests that would make console modding and breaking DRM on DVDs to watch them legal. So, you dirty GNU/Linux hippies using libdvdcss better watch out: "Librarian of Congress James Billington and Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante rejected the two most-sought-after items on the docket, game-console modding and DVD cracking for personal use and 'space shifting.' Congress plays no role in the outcome. The regulators said that the controls were necessary to prevent software piracy and differentiated gaming consoles from smart phones, which legally can be jailbroken. ... On the plus side, the regulators re-authorized jailbreaking of mobile phones. On the downside, they denied it for tablets, saying an 'ebook reading device might be considered a tablet, as might a handheld video game device.'"
So you can jailbreak a phone, but if it's 1" larger and considered a "tablet" you are breaking the law.
I believe the OP was trying to make the point that there's no fucking difference between Republicans and Democrats, their all beholden to their political sponsors, and he was completely correct in that...
I'm so tired of this sort of shit that gets spouted and thought of as rational. Just because they may be similar in an area that pisses you off doesn't make them the same -- it makes you intellectually lazy.
For starters, Republicans think the U.S. wasn't founded on separation of church & state, and that women, minorities, homosexuals, or anyone else that isn't a straight, white, Christian male are generally inferior. They also want you to think your body is something to be ashamed of and that abstinence-only education is the way to go despite mountains of data.
It might be fashionable right now to be apathetic and claim the two parties are the same, but one party is genuinely fucked in the head. You might not like the way either party handles certain issues, but FFS at least don't vote for the party that wants to take us back to the stone age.
The same excuse we always get. If Bush were still in charge, the /. readers would be cursing him. But since it's your guy, it's the lame "well they're ALL corrupt".
If G. W. Bush were still in charge, a lot of us wouldn't just be cursing him, we'd be trying to shoot him. We'd be conducting a revolution due to him illegally claiming a third term. Don't ever doubt that.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
(Same person here, second account)
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You are putting the cart before the horse. Businesses create ALL the public good that exists, governments steal it and redistribute it according to whatever politicians find to be the most profitable at the moment (buying votes and padding up their bank accounts mostly).
There shouldn't be gov't standing between me and any drug manufacturer in the world, today is the age of maximum information proliferation, I don't want gov't telling me what I can and cannot buy as a drug, it's up to me to decide. FDA, EPA are simply extensions of largest corporations, keeping their monopolies intact, stealing private property from others to do it.
Maybe you should pose that 'hazardous material' question to your governments as is, because BP had 75Million dollar liability cap provided by gov't, so what gives? The free market does not provide liability caps, the free market does not provide protection against competition with licenses and permits and special taxes, etc. Free market does not bail out failure at the expense of the public. Free market does not create moral hazard, which inflates bubbles, be it in equities (like the nineties) or housing (like in the last decade and like the Fed is trying to do now) or bonds and dollars (Fed, Treasury).
Companies should be able to do what they want and the only limit for them is like for individuals - the criminal code and the contract court. Gov't has a role: protection of individual rights, and the most important right to protect is the right to own and operate private property. All other rights are only an extension and a facilitator of this most fundamental most important right, without which we are only slaves to the system and the largest special interests.
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Free market requires strong defense of private property rights, and this immediately ensures liability, you don't know what you are saying or you are being intentionally crass.
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