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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.
They told me if I voted for McCain, we'd see a technology incompetent administration increasingly beholden to media conglomerates... and they were right.
I'm sure hoping for some good changes.
if it's 1" larger and considered a "tablet" you are breaking the law.
If it is considered a "tablet" you probably have more to worry about the breaking the law.
considering the freight train load of criminal activity they perpetrate every fucking day of the year for decades. and just recently what comes to mind is smuggling guns to mexico, drones murdering innocent bystanders in their lame attempt at killing militants & terrorists, bailing out banks after they criminally squandered billions of dollars, and that is just a few recent things, the list could be made so big that even /. wont let it be posted
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Of-course this is nothing else but government Mafia, which works with the industry and protects that industry and expects serious kickbacks, there is no other way to understand this but corruption.
All government involvement into business activity is corruption, there are no exceptions. Protectionism, special considerations for some businesses and not for others, special taxes for some businesses and not for others, special licensing deals, special relations with the Federal reserve, Treasury, special relationships with the departments, regulators, FBI, Congress, Senate, SCOTUS, POTUS, all of it.
All government intervention in business activity is corruption.
You can't handle the truth.
To be fair, it IS illegal to play a dvd on an unlicensed system because, well quite frankly, liddvdcss never paid the license fee and reverse engineered the rather crappy css encryption. I know that isn't what slashdot wants to hear, but the FBI is there to enforce these kinds of laws, and this IS illegal.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
The law is still fucked up, nothing to see here
'ebook reading device might be considered a tablet, as might a handheld video game device.'"
And if some corporation pays enough, it also might be considered a tractor.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
so how locked in will they let pc's get?
To the point where they can ban web sites that don't go the way they like as far as being so they can ban all Democrat or Republican web sites and only show the ones that fits there views?
post of the year!
there needs to be a top 20/100/etc list every december...
Wonder what the Librarian thinks of the French library during the French revolution. It got better, and lousy administrators lost their heads.
When my phone is as powerful as a PS3 and can connect to my HDTV over HDMI and can connect to my bluetooth wireless controllers, can I unlock it and play games on it?
It's time to stop buying these game consoles that cannot be hacked and these DVD's they don't want us to watch.
I have resisted setting up the DVD player since we moved (4 months ago) because the restrictions placed on me (Macrovision!) by the manufacturer inconveniences me. If I could buy a DVD without previews that I could have playing within 10 seconds of loading into the drive, I might be interested in spending money, but it just annoys me and I would rather not support an industry that treats their customers this way.
There, I said it, flame on.
Don't watch DVD, download higher quality .mkv from pirate bay instead.
My Betamax can still record from cable/satellite. I believe that's still legal.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
When I was in high school (early 2000's) I used to wonder how they were going to teach lawmakers and enforcers so they could cope with all the new crap that was being made. Were they going to send them all to schools to teach them how networked computers worked or maybe hire a bunch of IT advisors? I was being way too optimistic, its been a decade of incompetent, ignorant, old people making and enforcing laws without an understanding of what they are making laws about. Why is there now law requiring knowledge and education in the field for which you make and enforce laws?
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
I've bought a dozen retail DVD players (standalone and PC) over the years, each of which came with a license either in the form of internal firmware or standalone software. I have two DVD drives still in use, both in Linux PCs. I should have plenty of licenses - if that's what they in fact are. The idea that I can hold a dozen licenses and yet not be authorized to play legally obtained content on two surviving drives because someone in the MPAA doesn't like my completely legal operating system is an abomination of logic, reason, and ethics.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
So I guess I'm good then.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
to live in U$A...
I guess it's time to case mod my PS/3's into cell phones, so I can finally update the firmware, hack them, and still boot Linux.
This is Obama's Doing you want some on that will get rid of regulation. Go Romney 2012 although since most pics have hack through the power grid and NSA and India want Obama I wonder who will win.
Physics? Math? Reality? No?
They aren't real. They have no bearing on what's real. Items. Things. Bitcoins are more real than their protections. The cracking is necessary to use the things you own. End of story.
Talk about licenses all you want, fuck you for even thinking about it. Instead, consider reality. Reality is that I can build a device that will copy any optical disk bit-by-bit, or even by the half-bit, or more precise if necessary. Then the bits can be sent to a lib that will decode the bit stream into moving pictures.
That is what is technically possible.
So is murder? Murder affects others. Copying culture doesn't.
Why is it more not unethical to break those laws?
Well, would YOU argue that murder is not worse than downloading porn?
That's the exact same reason I'm stoned right now, smoking a joint, and rolling the next. For the reason that it doesn't harm you, and thus is not unethical, period.
If I listen to music without having paid anything, it harms no one.
And I'm still hosting a DJ in my house since he lost his, going out twice a month to raves that pay their DJs and concerts that pay their musicians, buying their albums and uploading them on the 'Net so that YOU can listen to them across half a planet, where the shit isn't sold at all forever so stop complaining and enjoy what I'm doing for you. And the creators.
I am right. Because I do no wrong.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
The media you paid for isn't owned by you, you just paid a fixed amount for the right to use it for an undetermined period. The media-player you just paid for isn't owned by you either, you have paid a fixed amount for the right to use... blah blah blah. Basicall: spread your legs further for this big corporate d**k, please.
You pay for your DVDs and have the audacity to want to watch them too?
Screw off Fedaralis! viva Linux!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Isn't lock in a form of anti-trust?
Live free
Seriously what is wrong with these fucktards? Why do they go around destroying websites, when they could be destroying actual infrastructure? Last I checked the penalty for putting an RJ-45 plug on the end of an extension cord and plugging one end into a switch and the other into the wall(plain old vandalism) was a lot less than hacking a website just to put a lame picture or statement on it.
america is now officially the Britain of America's history...
backwards stool pusher!
Plenty of comments about how many laws there are and how it's virtually impossible to be a citizen of the US and not be a criminal then questions about how we got here.
I saw a comment on a news channel about the current sitting of the House and Senate and they were rating the performance not by the quality of the laws passed, whether the laws were good, bad or cleaned up already existing problems with existing laws. They simply rated the performance of the current sitting by how many laws they passed and how other sittings had done better by passing more laws.
How idiotic can we get? Simply saying that the current sitting passed more or less laws makes it a successful or unsuccessful sitting is ridiculous.
Ha. the confirmation word was "parsed". It would be interesting to create a legal compiler and feed it the current code to find all the conflicts, dead ends, laws that have no meaning, laws that are inconsistent with basic rights, etc. Put a lot of lawyers out of work but we might end up with a set of laws the common man could understand.
Fuck you , fuck congress, fuck the RIAA and fuck the MPAA.
If you think your stupid motherfucking laws are going to keep people from enjoying things they pay for (or don't for that matter) you're a fucking moron.
This has nothing to do with copyright. That is a strawman.
This is really about destroying open computing systems, which is an obstacle to building a police state.
The idea is to lock down, data, and technology and only allow it to be in the hands of anyone who has an approved license.
This means ebooks, technology instruction, mathematics or anything with critical independent thinking which is critical to a free society.
Right now they are testing the waters.
They will never stop until they get either everyone dead, what they want or they themselves are destroyed.
Many of these people are at the point of media control and propaganda, including Ted Turner which is one of the most diabolical globalists I can think of in the areas of information control and dissemination/disinformation and programming.
These people are incredibly arrogant and brag that they think you should be dead, and that watching anything else except Globalist News Channels on T.V. makes you a radical and a terrorist.
They continually enforce the ideas of nullification of anying except communism and fascism with constant messages driving home the fact that you cannot own _anything_ you buy, you are not permitted to use _any_ information unless it is authorized by they themselves.
These people have access to military hardware and advanced weaponry to enforce their brutal tyranny with anything from SWAT teams entering homes to execute any who resist if they are found simply copying or downloading DVD's.
They are incredibly dangerous people and they become more dangerous by the hour.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Russell Means: Welcome To The Reservation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LA-S64QY3o
It's long, so make time for it. It explains all about 64 ounce cokes, ban on out door smoking, cannabis crackdown, homeless booby-trapping
You won't listen to a veteran tell you to uphold the constutution
How about a Lakota?
Buy all your DVDs/Blu-Rays used, or borrow them from your local public library. Why waste money on illegal to use junk that usually forces you to watch ads to boot.
People stop adhering to the law.
“ebook reading device might be considered a tablet, as might a handheld video game device.”
I can sort of see the logic of an ebook reading device, but a handheld video game device? No.
Smart Phones are Mini tablets. They can run the same OS, same Apps. (IOS & Android). This is only shows how stupid the people in charge are.
Be seeing you...
Get your local police to start enforcing the space shifting law for anyone wearing those iPod earphones on the street. Clearly if they have one CD ripped on their iPod the've broken the law and must be punished. A few dozen of these and Apple might put a bit of pressure on the luddites in Washington to remove this stupidity.
IANAL. But selling you a locked box you cannot open is self contradictory. The idea that you sold me something (not licensed...sold) and I can't access any part of it runs counter to every principle of private property. What if I sold you a suitcase and said, "By the way, dude, there is a locked compartment in it to which I have the key. You can't open it to take the brick out of it. So you will have to carry my brick wherever you go or I will sue you and have the authorities arrest you for theft if you break into my private compartment in your suitcase and remove my property. It is a complete fallacy to contend that I would retain any claim to that compartment if I sold you the case. And you would be well within your rights to break the box and take out the brick. To say otherwise runs counter to the very nature of the process of 'sale'.
The DMCA is beyond a miscarriage of justice it's a coat-hanger scrape job on the lady herself. Has this absurd provision ever had a constitutional test? I do not think any US Attorney has brought a case against a person for watching a DVD with unlicensed encryption software. Or for backing up a DVD. They went after the hapless dcss coder with a vengeance as I recall. But a schmo watching a DVD on Linux? Can anyone recall a case? I can't. Please correct me if I am wrong. IMHO a law no one can or will prosecute is no law at all.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Canonical lets users pay the licence fee:
"... third party application suites are available for purchase through the Canonical web-based store,[52] including software for DVD playback and media codecs [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28operating_system%29#Availability_of_third-party_software]."
Instead of crying about not being able to pirate something do what the people who made OGG and Theora did and make a better, open, format.
What feature would you recommend including that would make Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. more likely to distribute movies that people actually want to watch in such "a better, open, format"?
It's legal for my wife to jailbreak her iPhone 4s but not her iPad? Even though her iPhone can do almost everything that her iPad can do? I think we need to wipe out whatever they have written for the definition of "Arbitrary" in the dictionary and just put a link to this article.
What is the word-for-word definition of "smartphone" this time? If it's anything like it was last time, which amounted to a device capable of making voice calls through a wireless network, then one could argue that any console with a game supporting voice chat is a "smartphone".
Until all SDTVs used as secondary TVs are replaced with HDTVs, cable providers will have to keep providing analog outputs to keep people from defecting to satellite and vice versa.
Oh no, some bureaucrat thinks he can tell me what I can do with my hardware...
Liberty in your lifetime
What country do you recommend that Americans move to? Who's taking refugees from the DMCA regime?
I am sorry - differenciating between devices because of 1 inch in size doesn't make common sense! Achaic Monopolies don't have the right to control our personal technology. If you buy a piece of hardware you should be able to do with the software what ever you want.
If I bought it, I'll crack it or jailbreak it. If I want to play a DVD in my toaster oven, I will. And Congress, the Library of Congress, the President, the CIA, the FBI, the DHS, the RIAA, and the MPAA can all singly or collectively kiss my law breaking ass.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
This species is too dumb to survive anyway so we might as well get it over with.
OK, I RTFA. And I'm shocked. Shocked.
The *AAs have no problems with me space shifting a DVD I bought??? WTF??? They claim it's cool even if it's a digital copy on my hard drive??? Holy shit.
Of course Congress agrees with them, hell, the *AAs already bought and paid for Congress, so that's no surprise. And it doesn't surprise me that the Feds have problems with it. Hell, if the Feds didn't get their panties in a bunch every day, something would be seriously wrong in America!
One area where i wish these so called "get the government out of my business" types, aka libertarians and some social conservaties would get involved in is subjects such as this. If you legitamatly own something, it should be your god given right to do whatever the hell you want to do with it. If you want to hack and crack it, its your own business not the governments, if you want to modify it, upgrade it, or resell it, its your own business not the governments... but that will never happen, since big business has these guys in their back pockets and they dont even know it...
Thanks to a little known case against GE, it is now legal to break DRM to watch a move or play a game.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/07/23/29099.htm
>Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the (Digital Millennium Copyright Act's) anti-circumvention provision," Judge Garza wrote for the New Orleans-based court.
"The DMCA prohibits only forms of access that would violate or impinge on the protections that the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright owners."
This referred to GE cracking a hardware dongle to use software. If that's not a violation of the DMCA, then nothing that simply enables use is a violation.
It's all such BS. I bought a DellBuntu system about 6 years back and it came preinstalled with I think Feisty and CorelLinDVD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinDVD
It works great and you can watch DVDs legally in Linux. I wish it were easily available (other than through buying a computer model which Dell only sold for a short period.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This is what happens when the law is based on attributed intent and the imputed wrongdoing rather than clear principles.
And judges and juries should refrain from going beyond those principles.
These guys know what they are doing. It's not that they don't understand computers, it's that they want to help big corporations make lots of money, and hackers be damned, that's what they are going to do! What do you expect from people who were appointed by a pro-corporate party?
Palm trees and 8
Exclusion directly from the DMCA, emphasis (boldface and italics) added:
The purpose of DeCSS is not to infringe copyright. It is in order to be able to use the content one OWNS (yes, you OWN that copy, just as you OWN a book). That some use it to infringe copyright by redistributing works they do not have the right to distribute is beside the point. The primary purpose of DeCSS is interoperability. Period.
What part of running software (the DVD) on Linux-based systems is not interoperability?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
and neither baffoon will lower it and you htink better is coming....oh i feel off my chair you bastard.....haha you yanks are boned.
I'm going to jailbreak my phablet and see what happens.
I've read the DMCA. I've followed the court cases. I don't understand how jailbreaking a phone or modding a console would violate the DMCA, and I don't understand why people keep legitimizing the idea that it would by asking for DMCA exceptions. The DMCA says "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." And it defines "(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work."
What work are we talking about if you mod your gaming console? Video games aren't scrambled or encrypted and they don't require the application of information or any process or treatment. You can run a video game in an emulator without doing anything to it. You just load it and run it. And you can easily copy a video game using a DVD or Blu-Ray reader and writer and an emulator will happily play the copy. The technological measures in a video game console are about preventing the console from running unauthorized software (including unauthorized copies of games), not about protecting the content on the gaming discs. As such, I don't understand how you would be violating the DMCA by modding your console. (Mind you, video game console manufacturers could change this if they started encrypting their discs, and they might next generation, but the current gen ones don't. They're signed, but they aren't encrypted.)
Likewise, I haven't seen any evidence that jailbreaking a smartphone would circumvent a technological measure meant to protect a copyrighted work. Now, once you jailbreak a phone, there might be software on that phone which you could circumvent, but that would be a separate act. Is there logic here that I'm missing or is no one else looking at what the law actually says?
These are actually steps for the taking over of ANY democracy full of greedy shits and morons, but I've written it specifically for the US of A, reword as necessary for use with some other alleged democracy: (Note, a violent overthrow is never effective in a large, prosperous country, and there's no reason to try, especially when it's likely to be so ruinous to you, and unlikely to be successful in the face of the massive amount of force the military could bring to bear. Also, if you follow these steps, you'll find there's an easier, quieter way, unlikely to get you jailed or killed, AND, more importantly, it doesn't risk harm to the precious GDP the somnambulant populace keeps churning out each year...)
Step 1. Get a bunch of rich assholes together, convince them to form a conspiracy to rule the United States of America. (Or if you're rich enough, and you're enough of an asshole, do this all this by yourself.)
Step 2. Through a program of massive brib^H^H^H^H campaign contributions, buy control over the Republican Party.
Step 3. Through a program of massive brib^H^H^H^H campaign contributions, buy control over the Democratic Party.
Step 4. Attain control over the news media in the country; use it to distract the country from the fact that you now own the government, for all intents and purposes. Have the parties grind the government to a halt, and paralyze public discourse by chumming the political waters with bullshit that doesn't matter, like the use of the word "retarded" or, well just about any other thing, pretending that cultural minutia are somehow a more important topic of discussion than national policy. Bombard people with warning after warning about how much danger other nations' "extremists" present, so you can continue to ensure the cowardly populace will quake with fear and cede their rights to your puppet government if only it will keep them safe, as they quietly piss, not only all over themselves, but also all over the sacrifices made be the great patriots who wrested our country first from the hands of the English, then from those of the Native Americans, then from the French, the Mexicans, the Russians, and finally from the Polynesians. (No, I'll pull no punches here, as you can see.)
Step 5. Use the control you've corruptly achieved to ensure that each party picks ONLY people whom you are okay seeing get elected, to nominate for public office.
Step 6. Have the "elected" officials you own appoint people to the Supreme Court of the United States who will support continued power grabbing by the legislative and executive branches, since the power the "elected" officials have is now really YOUR power, and you want to maintain and expand it until you're not only above the law, but so far above it that you are in effect, a king.
Step 7. Use the legislature you now control to ensure that certain groups of people are continuously disenfranchised, and are in a position either to starve, or have to work like virtual slaves, such as "illegal" immigrants, blacks, and anyone who can't see for himself the value of a good education.
Step 8. Use the court system you now corruptly control to issue judgements that ensure people have progressively less freedom every day, to keep money flowing into the coffers of the corporations you control, such as the movie and music industries. This will also increase the freedom and power you have through your ownership and control of corporations, which are now classed as "people". (Forgetting of course, that these "people" are functionally immortal, and cannot be punished the way a real person can, by being jailed, for instance.) Periodically siphon money out of the system through taking advantage of the poorly regulated financial sector, robbing people of their retirements, and laughing all the way to the Cayman Islands, while they continue to slave away until they're dead.
Step 9. Reduce funding for education, because, AND NEVER EVER FORGET THIS: education is your enemy. By this point, you can do most of this remotely, from som
I remember Bill Hicks, but George Carlin talked about the same things... "you have no rights, you have privileges, and they can be talking from at any time" === George Carlin
Please pay me my license fee or I'll have to send the swat team in for you.
I refuse to use any Operating System other than Linux in my own house.
And I do not like to break laws in order to watch DVDs.
Hence, i do not own a DVD. Simple.
The hand full of films in the last 15 years which i wanted to see, i saw in the movie theater.
But i refuse to PAY money for something which i cannot legally use.
There are (commercial) programs which can legally play encrypted DVDs on Linux. Now if you were looking for free (as in beer) or open-source programs, that's a separate matter ...
You mean people still watch movies on DVD? Those crazy Linux nut-jobs!! Probably listening to illegal 8-track tapes, too.
I find it absolutely insane that I cannot play a dvd I paid for (have the receipt right here) on a dvd player I paid for (have the receipt right here). "Oh, we didn't authorize....". Fucking dumb.
VLC on any OS, including Windows and OSX, uses the same code as on Linux for DVD decryption.
What's a DVD?
If my tablet has LTE, is connected to a wireless telco's network and supports placing (VOIP) phone calls, is it a wireless phone?
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
The Irony and The Software
"Does anyone else find great irony in this?
I mean, in order for most Linux users to watch these films they have to break some draconian laws when playing DVD's.
Yet, the very thing they use to create these films on is Linux.
Well, if not irony.. some kind of word ending with ony."
- http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157194&cid=13179196
from: Disney, DreamWorks, Pixar Go Linux | July 27 2005
- http://www.linux.slashdot.org/story/05/07/27/1551250/Disney-DreamWorks-Pixar-Go-Linux
And that was in 2005!
-----
Whatever happened to CyberLink's PowerDVD for Linux? Here's a PR:
CyberLink PowerDVD Linux and PowerCinema Linux Designed for Netbooks and Nettops
http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=76997
"Thursday, October 09, 2008
Taipei, Taiwan â" CyberLink Corp. (5203.TW), innovative solution provider for the connected digital lifestyle, today introduces its high-definition digital media solutions on Linux for Netbooks and Nettopsâ" CyberLink PowerDVD Linux and PowerCinema Linux. With CyberLinkâ(TM)s solution offerings, consumers can now enjoy exceptional HD digital media experience on Linux PCâ(TM)s.
CyberLink PowerDVD Linux is a compact video playback software derived from CyberLinkâ(TM)s award-winning HD movie player, PowerDVD. PowerDVD Linux supports DVD-Video playback with menu navigation, subtitle, and video rewind and fast forward. To provide the best high-definition video and audio experience on Linux PCâ(TM)s, PowerDVD Linux incorporates CyberLink TrueTheaterâ Lighting for automatic video lighting enhancement, and support for CyberLink TrueTheaterâ Surround and Dolby audio technology for excellent audio quality.
CyberLink PowerCinema Linux is a feature-rich media player for Linux OS, providing a stylish animated user interface for easy navigation of features, including watching DVDâ(TM)s and video files playback, playing music from portable music players and external plug-in devices, enhancing photos and displaying photo slideshows. PowerCinema Linux supports a wide range of video formats, which include ASF, WMV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DAT, and AVI.
âoeDerived from our innovative video and audio technology, CyberLink is offering Netbook and Nettop manufacturers more bundling options on the low-cost Linux PCâ(TM)s, from compact digital media applications, like PowerDVD Linux, to universal entertainment center solutions, like PowerCinema Linux,â said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink. âoeWith our line of digital solutions on Linux, consumers can finally take full advantage of the mobility and flexibility of Netbooks and Nettops while enjoying rich yet seamless digital media entertainment.â
CyberLink PowerDVD Linux and PowerCinema Linux supporting Netbooks and Nettops are ready for OEM licensing worldwide.
For more information about CyberLinkâ(TM)s complete line-up of digital multimedia solutions, please visit our website, www.cyberlink.com."
Can anyone locate it on their site?
n/t
They willingly gave up their rights
That's impossible. A man cannot volunteer himself to be subject to coercion -- as the "social contract" theory claims -- just as he cannot force another man to volunteer. The two modes of human interaction, voluntary association and coercion, are polar opposite and mutually exclusive. That is what gives them meaning: they are defined in terms of each other, as two mutually exclusive states.
I realize it's not easy to un-learn what you've been told your entire life. The only way is to let down your guard and embrace the truths of logic and reality -- whether right or wrong, moral or immoral, just or unjust.
just like our goofy firearms regulations. If it's a standard single shot per trigger pull and is 16" long and has a stock, no problem. 15.9" with stock, it's considered in the same class as a machine gun. However, take that stock off and it's a legal pistol. Sigh.
What about the Galaxy Note and Note 2 devices? They are phablets!
But if she's one day younger, you're breaking the law.
... we're all living on the B-Ark.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Excellent summary of the US political takeover. The only thing I would add is that the means for this takeover were probably a part of the "Founding Fathers" initial intent. This is one theme in Cushman's recent book "Revolution Handbook." The book mentioned does include a practical way to fight this process, by the way.
Recognizing the problem is the first step to a solution, and you clearly have done that part of the job most eloquently!
Thank you.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3207047&cid=41777167
* See you there, & thanks for the info.!
APK
P.S.=> Seriously considering a suggestion you have on WSUSOFFLINE, but need information on its mechanics (please respond there to the question I asked of you, & again, thanks!)...
... apk
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3207047&cid=41777167
* See you there, & thanks for the info. on WSUSOFFLINE...
APK
P.S.=> Seriously considering a suggestion you have on WSUSOFFLINE, but need information on its mechanics (please respond there to the question I asked of you, & again, thanks!)...
... apk
I'd give him credit for making an honest effort and expending political capital to do so, I don't fault him for the end result being less than ideal
I fault him for spending political capital on it. By his own admission, in the 2nd debate against McCain, education and energy independence were more important issues than healthcare. Spending political capital on either of those would have laid a better foundation for the next generation. A bipartisan consensus would have been easier to find on those issues, so he might have been able to tackle both of them, while having political capital left over to tackle other pressing issues (i.e., entitlement reforms and the deficit) that are far more important to our long term success than healthcare.
The ACA doesn't live up to its billing anyway. It's called the Affordable Care Act, but it doesn't do a damn thing to rein in costs. Some would argue that the coverage mandates and guaranteed issue requirement will further increase costs. This is the issue that most needed to be addressed. Guaranteed issue is nice, but in the long term it won't accomplish anything if healthcare is priced further out of reach. Here's a metric for you: In 1960 we spent <3% of GDP on healthcare, and we had a life expectancy at birth of 69. Today we spend close to 20% of GDP, with a life expectancy at birth of 77. Are eight extra years worth seven times as much money? More to the point, can you even credit the increase to the extra spending, or is it owed more to lifestyle changes, the most obvious of which would be the fact that more than half of the population smoked in 1960.
Our healthcare system needs serious structural reforms but the ACA simply takes the current system and mandates that everybody participate in it. Worse, it has further politicized healthcare. Now you can look forward to your healthcare changing every two/four/six years with the whims of the Federal electorate. This is a bad thing, regardless of which side of the aisle you call home.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
To quote my wife, "I really wish Hillary had won, she a great job the last time she was running the country."
Of course, there is a reason why everybody is waxing nostalgically for him. Our wars looked like video games, with zero American casualties, we had a growing economy, and the reality TV show that is Washington DC was incredibly entertaining to say the least. Today the economy sucks, we've lost thousands of troops, and the ratings for Washington DC are in the toilet.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The fact that Linux has dozens of other perfectly legitimate uses seems to me to be largely irrelevant in light of this, since the concept of copying something for strictly personal use is traditionally seen as an exemption to copyright infringement anyways, since when the use is genuinely personal, nobody else would ever even know that it had occurred in the first place, nor would anybody else in any way, shape, or form, ever hope to be affected by it (at least if you distribute to somebody else, an argument exists that somebody else is being affected by the copy, but even this modest impact doesn't apply when the use is *entirely* personal).
But in my opinion, the strongest argument that copying for personal use should always be an exemption to copyright infringement lies in the concept of human memories, which can be not unreasonably interpreted as a type of copy of our experiences. If personal use is not an exception to copyright infringement, then simply remembering your experience of seeing a copyrighted work performed could also be seen as infringing on copyright. The fact that nobody else is affected by such recollection would be just as irrelevant as the fact that nobody else is affected by any other form of personal use copying.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Good luck finding a laptop that doesn't have Windows installed on it.
Well gee, that one wasn't too hard. /sarcasm
Try this one. If that list is a little too complicated to follow, then try ZDnet's top five vendors (desktop a& laptop) from last year.
And of course you can always take pride from the DIY route.
Seriously, do you even care about sticking it to the man? It just seems to me like you're just being lazy.
Than breaking the unjust law that serves only inequality and preference by sponsorship.
It's how the nation was founded.
Be AMERICAN and break the laws frequently. 100% non-compliance is unenforceable. And it is true patriotism for the principles on which that nation was established.
Or save up all your crying for the Queen.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Who even watches DVDs on their PCs anymore? I rarely do. usually, I watch streaming video through Amazon.com.
right now I'm in college so I don't have a job so I live with my grandparents in the meantime, they do have a Netflix subscription, but I still download the exact same movies and shows on Netflix from TPB (even with a Netflix subscription) because they're more reliable when the movie is stored locally and the movies from TPB don't have DRM. so it seems DRM is causing piracy to increase because it's just giving an even bigger reason to do so.
while
How true of the same stupid stuff from both parties. I saw a sign during a political protest the said...."Same Shit Different Asshole"
Temporarily circumventing copyright restriction is not specified in copyright law and as such would not be "piracy."
The key is that it is temporary.
REVERSE ENGINEERING any mechanical, electronic, software, biological, chemical, etc.... is perfectly legal, even if you circumvent the DRM. IT'S IN THE LAW for crying out loud. If the sell the product you reversed engineered and is exactly the same as the original you will face legal consequences, but, if your product is totally different from the original and functions the same or better than it's perfectly legal. This is why you don't see the unix owner novell going after linux even though it functions like unix but internally constructed differently.
What we have today is corporate power trying to take over this country and it's people. U.S has the balls to force countries to extradite the hackers to the u.s to face trial but when it comes to u.s government creating viruses to circumvent another countries security to steal or cause harm it's perfectly legal.
All three issues, education, energy independence, and healthcare reform, are obviously extremely complex issues. I don't think it's reasonable to think that Obama could have chosen one to solve, and had he gone with, say, energy independence, that would have been solved instead. And, honestly, I think healthcare was the one he had the best opportunity to improve on. Education is a local issue with local factors weighing much more heavily than the federal government. I don't expect the federal government to do much besides set national standards, tell schools they can't intrude on student's rights and can't force religion on them, and fund the schools, and that's about it. I'd like to see school funding be set by need rather than local property taxes, but THAT truly would be a waste of political capital, trying to take funding away from rich suburban schools and divert them to poorer schools.
Energy I don't know much about, but it seems to me that there's no obvious solution.
From what I've read, it's not clear whether it will reduce healthcare costs or not. There are predictions that it will. It's a complex package, I'm not familiar with the specifics, but I know it does more than "simply takes the current system and mandates that everyone participate in it." That might describe the individual mandate part of it, but not all of it. And the mandate could lower healthcare costs as well. People skipping out on their bill, not getting preventative care, or having to deal with collections agencies, these are things which could be reduced or eliminated with the mandate.
It's also hard for me to care about people being "forced" to get health insurance, given the fact that people who skipped getting health insurance generally didn't curl up and die in their homes when they got sick, they just forced others to pay for it.
Healthcare being politicized, I think it already was, given how much we spend on it, medicare, and health insurance lobby. Anyway, I'll take that as a cost of no longer having to worry about preexisting health conditions being used by the health insurance industry to skip out on paying medical bills.
PS. Obamacare isn't mutually exclusive with doing anything more to lower healthcare costs. If it doesn't solve the problem, then we haven't lost the opportunity to fix it, if the republicans allow it.
Back circa 1984, my history professor told our class "Don't *think* Nazi Germany can't happen here... it starts with passing little laws that affect a certain percentage of the populace, & then passing MORE laws that affect even LARGER percentages of the population, & so on..." pretty much stating what you have as to the rest of it.
* Personally though, on the topic itself here? Well - as long as a person PAID for the DVD itself in question, & don't have other technological means of playing it (as in Linux is their OS of choice & all they have is that PC device in order to enjoy the DVD's content they paid for)?
Then, WHAT is the problem?? I mean, the person in question HAS to have a means to use the damned thing in the 1st place!
APK
P.S.=> As to "reverse-engineering"? Heh - I've worked enough times in the Fortune 100-500 to tell you 1 thing: IT GOES ON LIKE MAD, & I've seen it, 1st hand (not the one doing it, but colleagues were) in Corporate America (and the rest of the globe too), but I suppose "it's ok if/when a large corporation does it"...
... apk
That's why you should have immigrated to Canada, the last bastion of freedom, where the government would never dream of passing Bill 31 that would criminalize all DRM circumvention regardless of cause and intent.
Oh, wait... Never mind.
Thank you, Harper.
It's a complex package, I'm not familiar with the specifics, but I know it does more than "simply takes the current system and mandates that everyone participate in it."
Well, to pick one of my many pet peeves with the legislation, they imposed excise taxes on medical devices, which covers everything from pacemakers to hearing aids to contact lenses. How exactly are new taxes on medical products going to bring down costs? Why should a pacemaker be taxed at all? It's not exactly a luxury item.
And the mandate could lower healthcare costs as well. People skipping out on their bill, not getting preventative care, or having to deal with collections agencies, these are things which could be reduced or eliminated with the mandate.
Except they won't be. For starters, the legislation specifically denies the IRS any enforcement power whatsoever. You can simply refuse to pay the penalty and the most they can do is send you a strongly worded letter. They can't put liens on your property, haul you into court, audit you, or use any of the other enforcement mechanisms at their disposal. More to the point, it's cheaper to pay the penalty than it is to carry health insurance. With guaranteed issue why bother having insurance at all, until you need it? An analogy here would be if you had the ability to buy flood insurance as the upstream levee failed, or the ability to purchase homeowners insurance after the house caught on fire.
Notwithstanding all of the above, the costs imposed on the medical system by deadbeats are vastly overstated, and even at that the mandate won't do much to address them. Deadbeats play a small part in the inflation of healthcare costs, bigger issues not addressed by the ACA include the ever increasing cost of malpractice insurance, an overly burdensome regulatory system, a broken patent system, a shortage of primary care providers, and the incomprehensible nightmare that is medical billing. The latter is something that nobody outside of the industry ever talks about, as a overly simple analogy, imagine the PITA it would be to go through your car insurance carrier to pay for oil changes and wiper blades.
This is one of the best articles I've ever read about our healthcare system. It does not push a left or right wing agenda. It outlines issues with the system that both the Republicans and Democrats refuse to talk about. Give it a read, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about it.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'd like to see school funding be set by need rather than local property taxes, but THAT truly would be a waste of political capital, trying to take funding away from rich suburban schools and divert them to poorer schools.
The first part is something I agree with. It would help to undo some of the remaining harm done as a result of so many years of racist policies, and make the nation as a whole stronger. Parents that are well off financially are also likely to have more time to supplement what the schools do, or the money to pay for private schools, so wealthy districts have less need for extra money.
It's not really clear this would be a waste of political capital, or impossible to achieve. That probably would depend on the approach taken. It certainly would take a long time, which is always difficult in the American system.
Property taxes should really only be used to be for emergency services, such as fire departments. Everything else could be paid for by income taxes. In some places, the property taxes are so high they essentially force people to rent their homes from the government, which undermines the strong property rights so neccesary for a country to be free.
That or spitting on the sidewalk. I like the comparison. But why posted as AC I wonder? Really.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
What if I'm using libdvdcss on my laptop? It's the only way Linux will let me watch DVDs!