Well, if you don't know anything about swordfighting, obviously your best bet is to not get in a swordfight.
However, if you find yourself in one, you still shouldn't flail around randomly. If they are, then remain calm and just hit their side with the sword, edge on, when they are recovering from a particularly silly flail, like having their sword pointed down and slightly backwards, which will eventually happen if they just start waving it around like loons.
A danger of just flailing randomly that your sword will be intercepted and flipped away from you, or hitting their sword wrong and it just flying out of your hands without them even intending it. Or it will get caught at a weird angle, not actually hurting anything, but leaving it trapped. Or that you'll sprain your wrist if it's a broadsword.
The point of swordfighting, in case people aren't aware of it, is to stop their sword from hitting you, not to, really, hit them. Hitting them is secondary. It's like riding a motorcycle...the main point is to not fall over...while you're not doing that, then you can move from point A to point B. Flailing wildly is akin to operating the throttle before sitting on the bike, in an attempt to get there faster. Um, no.
Even people with no skill at swordfighting can beat people who flail randomly. Just keep backing up, wait for them to do some really stupid move, and slash them while they're recovering. At least, that's what I would do. If you can't back up...jump on them. It's nearly impossible for an unskilled person to kill someone with a sword while wrestling with them, they don't have the leverage to cause any damage.
Disclaimer: I don't actually know anything about swordfighting, but I do know some stuff about physics and how the human body works.
And I wish that every rich bastard in this kleptocracy we live in was taught a class on capitalism by a formerly rich bastard that suffered communism, too.
Continuging the absurd dispartity between the poor and the rich is a good way to have the poor start stealing and a collapse into communism.(1) Unlike many idiots, I don't think this is a good thing, but it is justifiable self-defense by the poor.(2) The only way to avoid it is for the rich to start helping the poor, or the poor will get past the stranglehold the rich have on the government and just take from the rich.
Marx was almost 100% right in what has happening (Stealing from the workers.) and what would happen if it continued. (Overthrow of the government.) He wasn't right about the next step, where it turned from a 'rich stealing from the poor' to, basically, 'everyone stealing from everyone', but that doesn't make him wrong about the first part.
This happens anytime the poor are at a hugely different standard of living than the rich, and with the state of healthcare the way it is, they are arguably, right now, at an infinitely lower one. It's not something that you can just squaw 'free market free market you're a Marxist help help police' at and it will go away.
1) By collapse, I mean either an actual overthrow of the government, or a demagogue rising to power and changing the whole system.
2) It's justifiable in the sense that the only reason the rich are richer is that the government says they are riche, and the rich control the government.
When the masses say they want iPod support, they mean 100% support, including the iTunes music store and technical support. Windows can offer this compatability, Linux, regardless of what kludge you add to it, cannot.
So, in your universe, it's 'Windows' that offers technical support for the iPod? And 'Windows' that offers iTunes?
Apparently, there is. Type ipod:/ in the addressbar. Nautilis, the Gnome file manager, has it automatic, but apparently in KDE you have to ipod:/ to access the special services. (Otherwise it just looks like a USB drive.)
What I'm really wondering is, why, with all the firmware hacks for the iPod and even an alternate boot enviroment, why there isn't a program that creates the db for music automatically that people just load onto their iPod that scans for music files. I mean, that would even be useful to Windows users who don't want to install iTunes on every computer, but would like to be able to plug in a iPod at their friends house, grab some music, and have it instantly show up, instead of then having to track down an installation of iTunes and copy the music back off and then back on their iPod.
As to Linux iPod support, I don't know enough to comment. But I'm guessing that it's not as simply as the auto-syncing thing that iTunes does. Yes, many power-users prefer the drag and drop approach. But it is nice to be able to sort everything out computer-side before even plugging in the iPod. Plus I'm sceptical about how a non-technical user who already uses iPod/iTunes would take it.
I'm sorry, but if you haven't used an iPod on Linux, be quiet. There are half a dozen applications, from ones that behave almost exactly like iTunes with the syncing, to drag-and-drop file browsing, to command-line syncers.
Would a statically compiled binary solve the multiple-distros problem?
It doesn't have anything to do with that. Apple won't provide the music store on Linux because it is trivial to crack any DRM on Linux.
Apple could, in theory, provide iTunes without that, or even with the music store but without the ability to play the music, just copy it to the iPod (As another Linux application can apparently do.), but there's no damn point in it, Linux already has perfectly good media players and iPod syncers.
It is perhaps correct to say 'You cannot use the Apple music store under Linux', and call that a Linux shortcoming. (Except, apparently, you can, which really startles me, as I thought iTunes did decryption/reencryption for the device.) It's not one, it is a delibrate Apple business decision not to provide software for Linux, but I can see why, to some people, the distinction doesn't matter.
It is not correct to say that Linux doesn't support the iPod, however, or that's a 'shortcoming'. Linux supports the iPod just fine.
And I did explain it in English. To recap and correct with new knowledge of SharpMusique:
1) If you have music you didn't purchase from Apple, Linux supports everything you want to do it whether it was ripped from CDs or gained from others as mp3s. You can continue to do both those activities under Linux and put the results on your iPod or other MP3 players or play them within Linux.
2) If you have music you did purchase from Apple, you can continue to purchase the music and listen to it on your iPod. However you cannot listen to it within Linux itself. Legally only Apple can provide software and devices to listen to the purchased music, and they haven't done that for Linux. (You also will not be able to play this music on any other MP3 player, regardless of whether you use Linux or not, for the same reason.)
That's it, that should be the whole answer any of this 'under 30' people need. It's not complicated, 95% of the people are purely under 1), and the implication of the article and the probable misquote of ESR is idiotic.
However, almost a year ago I bought a Creative Zen Vision (due to the new iPod haven't arrived on my country yet, plus this Zen Vision has audio recording and FM radio capability). To this day I haven't been able to use Linux to upload my songs. Sigh.
Becuase, of course, you have failed to actually plug it.
At least, that's the only explaination I can think of, because that's just a damn standard USB drive, and thus will magically appear when you plug it in, allowing you to copy files to. At least on any distro modern enough to have amarok.
That's not why. The DRM files couldn't be copied that way anyway (Well, they could, but wouldn't play.) and the other files you can copy as much as you want anyway.
No, it's because Apple doesn't want people plugging in an iPod and having a drive pop up and having them drag music to it, and it not working.
This is because of their dumb design decision to have a database on the drive, which is good, but it's maintained by the computer, instead of the iPod itself, which means that just copying music won't work right.
This reminds me of the time I was talking to someone online who asked 'How do I use a USB flash drive under Linux?'.
My answer?
1. Plug it in.
2. Get a root command line up and type 'dmesg' to see what it was named. It will be/dev/something
3. Type 'mount/dev/something/directory/to/mount/it/in'
And they broke in and said 'Wait, wait, when I plugged it in it popped up on my screen. I'll just use that.'.
I was laughing at both myself and them for five minutes.
Incidentally, that's not an apples-to-apples comparison, as I'm fairly certainly you have to install iTunes, or another loader, to use an iPod under Windows. You can use it as a USB drive without that, but to put music on it you need a program specifically designed to do that, like under Linux, but unlike Linux, Windows doesn't come with one.
While I'm no fan of DRM, Apple supposedly does lets you reset all your authorization, for every computer you've ever authorized, from within your account. Then, I suppose, you have to reactive the computers you actually use. I don't know how that works, click around the authorization area until you find it.
And it's a mess because some of us don't want to use one application and one brand of MP3 player for the rest of our life. I've tried iTunes and I don't like it, and I certainly don't want to be weilded to it. The fact it isn't even available on Linux, which I don't currently use but have in the past and probably will in the future, is just icing on the cake.
Any proprietory format is a mess. Any proprietory format it is illegal for anyone else to support is a huge mess.
And the fact you have 'authorization', which means that if all this ever goes away, it will be DiVX all over again, except instead of DVDs you can't play anymore you'll have files you can't decode anymore.
Linux can't do something Windows and Mac OS X can do.
That is simply not true.
The correct, sane way to phrase that is:
iTunes has not been ported to Linux. Ergo, anything you can only do in iTunes, you cannot do within Linux. This is basically anything to do with the Apple music store. The reason only iTunes can do anything WRT to Apple music store is that cracking DRM is illegal, which is why you can't do those things in other Windows or Mac applications either.
There are no technical reasons that iTunes has not been ported to Linux. It is purely an Apple business decision.
Now, that might, indeed, be a legitimate reason not to switch to to Linux. It is not, however, a 'Linux shortcoming', anymore than the fact you can't purchase Civ 4 for Linux is a 'Linux shortcoming'. It's an iTunes shortcoming. Linux, and in fact all third-parties, are legally barred from producing something that can do everything iTunes can.
Does anyone have any fucking clue what anyone else is talking about in this discussion? Have anyone here even tried to use an iPod under Linux? There's a dozen tools to do it, it's not like the iPod's database is rocket science, and there's a library to do it, which lists half a dozen projects using it, including amaroK, the most popular Linux mp3 player.
It's slightly more complicated than other mp3 players, where you can just drag and drop, but that's exactly as true under Windows. (And, under Linux, there apparently is, indeed, a user space filesystem that lets you drag and drop, although setting that up is more complicated than just using amaroK or Rhythmbox.)
The only shortcomings on Linux is you can't use iTunes and the Apple music store, which are, indeed, shortcomings, but they're hardly Linux's fault, or an iPod support issue. It's due solely to the fact that the Apple music store or whatever the name is, is limited solely to working within iTunes. The word 'iPod' didn't even appear in that sentence. If Apple would port iTunes to Linux, the store would work perfectly fine.(1)
If the question is 'Can I used my Apple purchased music in, and copy it to my iPod from within, Linux?', people under 30, the answer is 'No'. That music, as you probably were told when you purchased it, required a Mac or PC. If you do not use the Apple store, you are completely and perfectly supported under Linux.
And, as an added bonus, almost all music copy protection schemes either fail completely, aka, the autorun ones like the recent Sony debacle, or can be trivially corrected for, like the incorrectly formatted CDs designed to trick computers. (Most of the time this correction is automatic.)
1) Of course, they can't do that, because it would utterly trivial to crack iTunes's DRM on Linux. OTOH, it's utterly trivally to 'crack' it anyway by burning it to a CD and ripping it again. You can even use a single CD-RW repeatedly. (I'm not sure if there's such a trivial way to crack the video DRM, though.)
There is not as much a right to keep from incriminating yourself in the UK as in the US. I don't know if this is allowable under their framework of laws, but various people have pointed out it is unworkable even if it is 'constitutional' or whatever the UK equiv is.
There was a group out there planning to commits minor crimes like vandalizing park benches, record that electonically, encrypt them, and mail the resultant CD to their MPs, then having other people turn them in. By law, the MPs would have to turn over the encryption keys they don't, in fact, have, or go to jail. Even when the people are perfectly law-abiding, and not incriminating themselves, like these hypothetical MPs, the Law. Doesn't. Work.
But I have a feeling the law wouldn't pass muster in the US for both fifth amendment reasons, and the fact the court can't prove you are, in fact, withholding anything you know.
It will probably keep the peace, but it's not justice, it's not right, and it's about 1000 years of backwards.
Almost right, except it won't keep the peace. People will just avoid the justice system completely. And all you have to look at the number of drug deals that end in violence, or the number of prostitutes beaten, or who drug and roll men and throw them back on the street, to see exactly what happens when all parties wish the non-involvement of the justice system and hence avoid it.
And the grandparent here is just completely fucking stupid and I have no idea why people are even responding to him.
Sometimes, very very rarely, a kid can show a little strength and not be picked on. That has become a bit of a cliche precicely because adults like to imagine that children can stop being bullied, which of course means adults don't have to solve the fucking problem. However, I suspect it's true in maybe 15% of the cases.
What do kids do when the bullies are in a gang of four and they're one person? (Wait, I know this one. Columbine happens.)
What do they do when the bullying is purely verbal?
What do they do is they simply aren't strong enough? (Guns, the great equalizer.)
What if the bullying is not directed towards them, but rather their stuff when they aren't there? (Keep away, sticking gum in chairs, stealing notebooks and trashing them, etc)
Anyone who seriously says 'Children just need to stand up to their bullies, and all will be right with the world' is such an obvious moron that, in an ideal world, they wouldn't be allowed to have children. Once in a blue moon, a bully might back off if you shove him back. Or he might lay in wait for you after school with a fucking baseball bat, or group of six people, or, if you're really impressed him, might attack your friends instead.
And how that even possibly works with 'punish both parties' is well beyond me. Both those ideas are really stupid, but combined together they reach a new level of stupidity. People would be alright if only they fought back when bullies attacked, except for the fact we'll then punish them. Wha?
Books can carry ideas, dumbass. Ideas are perfectly expressable in almost communcation media.
They still can't be violent, though. They can represent violence, but they cannot be it, because their are no actual physical actions associated with them.
Oh, and those people walking around in your TV? Yeah, they're not really there. They're just representations of people displayed on the screen.
I'm not so sure about this. For example, if you're given immunity to prosecution they CAN compel self-incriminating testimony.
No they can't. By defination, immunity makes the evidence not self-incriminating. That's what immunity means, that you cannot be incriminated with the recovered evidence. (And for some forced immunity, they have to dismiss the entire case.)
However, can they demand a key for a safe which contains incriminating evidence, regardless of immunity?
If you are holding a key, or the key is in a known location under your control (Say, in another country where they can't just seize it.), yes, they can produce a court order requiring you to hand it over. However, if you have a safe with a lock in it, they cannot say 'You must give us the hypothetical key which opens this safe or go to jail.', because they don't know if that's in your possession or if the key even exists.
I.e., they can point at that key, right there, and produce a court order demanding you hand it over, in theory. However, 99.9999% of the time, it's easier just to get an order to seize the key instead of an order making you hand it to them.
They cannot, however, make you produce the combination to a safe.
However, the analogy between a physical key and an encryption key is completely broken, for two reasons: One, encrypted doors cannot be 'forced', at least not in any reasonable time, two, there is no physical object and hence no evidence the 'key' even exists.
Like I said, a much better analogy would be treating an encryption key as a location where something is hidden. Aka, 'The location of the body'. The police cannot brute force search the entire world, and they can't demonstrate that said location, in fact, even exists, or that you know where is it. Exactly like encrypted files. It is physical evidence(1) hidden by a secret. The physical evidence is not protected, but you don't have to tell them the secret that would let them find or use it.
And we made the decision a long time ago about whether or not we can imprison someone because they refused to tell us where they hid the body, even if we have pretty good evidence they committed the murder. But just in case people aren't sure how that works, we don't get to do that...we have to convict them based on evidence we have, we don't get to lock them up until they tell us more.
And the UK's encryption law makes a complete mockery of the whole thing.
1) Yes, electronic documents are physical evidence.
You dumbass, if that worked, they'd simply not keep records. But they are not allowed to do that. Businesses have to keep records, and have to turn them over to the government, often without any court order at all.
And, incidentally, businesses are not people, and do not have a right not to incriminate themselves.
I think you misunderstood 'this forces you to incriminate yourself'. He wasn't talking about the search, but the requirement you hand over your keys.
And actually it's a pretty good arguement that's been ignored for some bullshit reason.
Let's compare two things:
1. Evidence of a crime in real life (bloody gloves)
2. Evidence of a crime on a computer (documents implimenting me in a fraud)
The police cannot make me tell them where to find 1. The best encryption analogy is, if I have them locked in a unknown safety deposit box, they can't make me tell them which one. This counts as 'incrimination', and I don't have to do it. It doesn't matter than they don't have time to search each one in each bank.
Forcing me to give them 2, by the same logic, must also count as incrimination.
Now, I forget what the UK's rule in that respect is, but I'm pretty certain they can't normally be compelled to testify either. The problem is, that might just be a law, and hence this law could trivially override it.
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Well, if you don't know anything about swordfighting, obviously your best bet is to not get in a swordfight.
However, if you find yourself in one, you still shouldn't flail around randomly. If they are, then remain calm and just hit their side with the sword, edge on, when they are recovering from a particularly silly flail, like having their sword pointed down and slightly backwards, which will eventually happen if they just start waving it around like loons.
A danger of just flailing randomly that your sword will be intercepted and flipped away from you, or hitting their sword wrong and it just flying out of your hands without them even intending it. Or it will get caught at a weird angle, not actually hurting anything, but leaving it trapped. Or that you'll sprain your wrist if it's a broadsword.
The point of swordfighting, in case people aren't aware of it, is to stop their sword from hitting you, not to, really, hit them. Hitting them is secondary. It's like riding a motorcycle...the main point is to not fall over...while you're not doing that, then you can move from point A to point B. Flailing wildly is akin to operating the throttle before sitting on the bike, in an attempt to get there faster. Um, no.
Even people with no skill at swordfighting can beat people who flail randomly. Just keep backing up, wait for them to do some really stupid move, and slash them while they're recovering. At least, that's what I would do. If you can't back up...jump on them. It's nearly impossible for an unskilled person to kill someone with a sword while wrestling with them, they don't have the leverage to cause any damage.
Disclaimer: I don't actually know anything about swordfighting, but I do know some stuff about physics and how the human body works.
And I wish that every rich bastard in this kleptocracy we live in was taught a class on capitalism by a formerly rich bastard that suffered communism, too.
Continuging the absurd dispartity between the poor and the rich is a good way to have the poor start stealing and a collapse into communism.(1) Unlike many idiots, I don't think this is a good thing, but it is justifiable self-defense by the poor.(2) The only way to avoid it is for the rich to start helping the poor, or the poor will get past the stranglehold the rich have on the government and just take from the rich.
Marx was almost 100% right in what has happening (Stealing from the workers.) and what would happen if it continued. (Overthrow of the government.) He wasn't right about the next step, where it turned from a 'rich stealing from the poor' to, basically, 'everyone stealing from everyone', but that doesn't make him wrong about the first part.
This happens anytime the poor are at a hugely different standard of living than the rich, and with the state of healthcare the way it is, they are arguably, right now, at an infinitely lower one. It's not something that you can just squaw 'free market free market you're a Marxist help help police' at and it will go away.
1) By collapse, I mean either an actual overthrow of the government, or a demagogue rising to power and changing the whole system.
2) It's justifiable in the sense that the only reason the rich are richer is that the government says they are riche, and the rich control the government.
When the masses say they want iPod support, they mean 100% support, including the iTunes music store and technical support. Windows can offer this compatability, Linux, regardless of what kludge you add to it, cannot.
So, in your universe, it's 'Windows' that offers technical support for the iPod? And 'Windows' that offers iTunes?
Funny, I thought that was Apple.
Apparently, there is. Type ipod:/ in the addressbar. Nautilis, the Gnome file manager, has it automatic, but apparently in KDE you have to ipod:/ to access the special services. (Otherwise it just looks like a USB drive.)
What I'm really wondering is, why, with all the firmware hacks for the iPod and even an alternate boot enviroment, why there isn't a program that creates the db for music automatically that people just load onto their iPod that scans for music files. I mean, that would even be useful to Windows users who don't want to install iTunes on every computer, but would like to be able to plug in a iPod at their friends house, grab some music, and have it instantly show up, instead of then having to track down an installation of iTunes and copy the music back off and then back on their iPod.
As to Linux iPod support, I don't know enough to comment. But I'm guessing that it's not as simply as the auto-syncing thing that iTunes does. Yes, many power-users prefer the drag and drop approach. But it is nice to be able to sort everything out computer-side before even plugging in the iPod. Plus I'm sceptical about how a non-technical user who already uses iPod/iTunes would take it.
I'm sorry, but if you haven't used an iPod on Linux, be quiet. There are half a dozen applications, from ones that behave almost exactly like iTunes with the syncing, to drag-and-drop file browsing, to command-line syncers.
Would a statically compiled binary solve the multiple-distros problem?
It doesn't have anything to do with that. Apple won't provide the music store on Linux because it is trivial to crack any DRM on Linux.
Apple could, in theory, provide iTunes without that, or even with the music store but without the ability to play the music, just copy it to the iPod (As another Linux application can apparently do.), but there's no damn point in it, Linux already has perfectly good media players and iPod syncers.
Sigh
It is perhaps correct to say 'You cannot use the Apple music store under Linux', and call that a Linux shortcoming. (Except, apparently, you can, which really startles me, as I thought iTunes did decryption/reencryption for the device.) It's not one, it is a delibrate Apple business decision not to provide software for Linux, but I can see why, to some people, the distinction doesn't matter.
It is not correct to say that Linux doesn't support the iPod, however, or that's a 'shortcoming'. Linux supports the iPod just fine.
And I did explain it in English. To recap and correct with new knowledge of SharpMusique:
1) If you have music you didn't purchase from Apple, Linux supports everything you want to do it whether it was ripped from CDs or gained from others as mp3s. You can continue to do both those activities under Linux and put the results on your iPod or other MP3 players or play them within Linux.
2) If you have music you did purchase from Apple, you can continue to purchase the music and listen to it on your iPod. However you cannot listen to it within Linux itself. Legally only Apple can provide software and devices to listen to the purchased music, and they haven't done that for Linux. (You also will not be able to play this music on any other MP3 player, regardless of whether you use Linux or not, for the same reason.)
That's it, that should be the whole answer any of this 'under 30' people need. It's not complicated, 95% of the people are purely under 1), and the implication of the article and the probable misquote of ESR is idiotic.
However, almost a year ago I bought a Creative Zen Vision (due to the new iPod haven't arrived on my country yet, plus this Zen Vision has audio recording and FM radio capability). To this day I haven't been able to use Linux to upload my songs. Sigh.
Becuase, of course, you have failed to actually plug it.
At least, that's the only explaination I can think of, because that's just a damn standard USB drive, and thus will magically appear when you plug it in, allowing you to copy files to. At least on any distro modern enough to have amarok.
LAME is an encoder. It can't play MP3s.
What you want is application specific. If you try to play an MP3 in a music app, it will usually tell you what to do.
That's not why. The DRM files couldn't be copied that way anyway (Well, they could, but wouldn't play.) and the other files you can copy as much as you want anyway.
No, it's because Apple doesn't want people plugging in an iPod and having a drive pop up and having them drag music to it, and it not working.
This is because of their dumb design decision to have a database on the drive, which is good, but it's maintained by the computer, instead of the iPod itself, which means that just copying music won't work right.
Where the hell are the mods, and why aren't they bitchslapping the people who post incorrect informatnion like this?
Linux supports iPods just fine. In fact, modern distros support them out of the box, whereas with PCs you have to install iTunes.
What isn't available for Linux is iTunes, and, hence, Apple won't sell you any music. If you want that, take it up with Apple.
If you don't want to compile, you wouldn't be using Gentoo, period.
I'm sure you know the actual solution is to boot into safe mode.
Of course, I'll be damned if I know how the average end user is supposed to know that.
Yup.
This reminds me of the time I was talking to someone online who asked 'How do I use a USB flash drive under Linux?'.
My answer? /dev/something /dev/something /directory/to/mount/it/in'
1. Plug it in.
2. Get a root command line up and type 'dmesg' to see what it was named. It will be
3. Type 'mount
And they broke in and said 'Wait, wait, when I plugged it in it popped up on my screen. I'll just use that.'.
I was laughing at both myself and them for five minutes.
Incidentally, that's not an apples-to-apples comparison, as I'm fairly certainly you have to install iTunes, or another loader, to use an iPod under Windows. You can use it as a USB drive without that, but to put music on it you need a program specifically designed to do that, like under Linux, but unlike Linux, Windows doesn't come with one.
While I'm no fan of DRM, Apple supposedly does lets you reset all your authorization, for every computer you've ever authorized, from within your account. Then, I suppose, you have to reactive the computers you actually use. I don't know how that works, click around the authorization area until you find it.
And it's a mess because some of us don't want to use one application and one brand of MP3 player for the rest of our life. I've tried iTunes and I don't like it, and I certainly don't want to be weilded to it. The fact it isn't even available on Linux, which I don't currently use but have in the past and probably will in the future, is just icing on the cake.
Any proprietory format is a mess. Any proprietory format it is illegal for anyone else to support is a huge mess.
And the fact you have 'authorization', which means that if all this ever goes away, it will be DiVX all over again, except instead of DVDs you can't play anymore you'll have files you can't decode anymore.
Linux can't do something Windows and Mac OS X can do.
That is simply not true.
The correct, sane way to phrase that is:
iTunes has not been ported to Linux. Ergo, anything you can only do in iTunes, you cannot do within Linux. This is basically anything to do with the Apple music store. The reason only iTunes can do anything WRT to Apple music store is that cracking DRM is illegal, which is why you can't do those things in other Windows or Mac applications either.
There are no technical reasons that iTunes has not been ported to Linux. It is purely an Apple business decision.
Now, that might, indeed, be a legitimate reason not to switch to to Linux. It is not, however, a 'Linux shortcoming', anymore than the fact you can't purchase Civ 4 for Linux is a 'Linux shortcoming'. It's an iTunes shortcoming. Linux, and in fact all third-parties, are legally barred from producing something that can do everything iTunes can.
Does anyone have any fucking clue what anyone else is talking about in this discussion? Have anyone here even tried to use an iPod under Linux? There's a dozen tools to do it, it's not like the iPod's database is rocket science, and there's a library to do it, which lists half a dozen projects using it, including amaroK, the most popular Linux mp3 player.
It's slightly more complicated than other mp3 players, where you can just drag and drop, but that's exactly as true under Windows. (And, under Linux, there apparently is, indeed, a user space filesystem that lets you drag and drop, although setting that up is more complicated than just using amaroK or Rhythmbox.)
The only shortcomings on Linux is you can't use iTunes and the Apple music store, which are, indeed, shortcomings, but they're hardly Linux's fault, or an iPod support issue. It's due solely to the fact that the Apple music store or whatever the name is, is limited solely to working within iTunes. The word 'iPod' didn't even appear in that sentence. If Apple would port iTunes to Linux, the store would work perfectly fine.(1)
If the question is 'Can I used my Apple purchased music in, and copy it to my iPod from within, Linux?', people under 30, the answer is 'No'. That music, as you probably were told when you purchased it, required a Mac or PC. If you do not use the Apple store, you are completely and perfectly supported under Linux.
And, as an added bonus, almost all music copy protection schemes either fail completely, aka, the autorun ones like the recent Sony debacle, or can be trivially corrected for, like the incorrectly formatted CDs designed to trick computers. (Most of the time this correction is automatic.)
1) Of course, they can't do that, because it would utterly trivial to crack iTunes's DRM on Linux. OTOH, it's utterly trivally to 'crack' it anyway by burning it to a CD and ripping it again. You can even use a single CD-RW repeatedly. (I'm not sure if there's such a trivial way to crack the video DRM, though.)
There is not as much a right to keep from incriminating yourself in the UK as in the US. I don't know if this is allowable under their framework of laws, but various people have pointed out it is unworkable even if it is 'constitutional' or whatever the UK equiv is.
There was a group out there planning to commits minor crimes like vandalizing park benches, record that electonically, encrypt them, and mail the resultant CD to their MPs, then having other people turn them in. By law, the MPs would have to turn over the encryption keys they don't, in fact, have, or go to jail. Even when the people are perfectly law-abiding, and not incriminating themselves, like these hypothetical MPs, the Law. Doesn't. Work.
But I have a feeling the law wouldn't pass muster in the US for both fifth amendment reasons, and the fact the court can't prove you are, in fact, withholding anything you know.
It will probably keep the peace, but it's not justice, it's not right, and it's about 1000 years of backwards.
Almost right, except it won't keep the peace. People will just avoid the justice system completely. And all you have to look at the number of drug deals that end in violence, or the number of prostitutes beaten, or who drug and roll men and throw them back on the street, to see exactly what happens when all parties wish the non-involvement of the justice system and hence avoid it.
And the grandparent here is just completely fucking stupid and I have no idea why people are even responding to him.
Sometimes, very very rarely, a kid can show a little strength and not be picked on. That has become a bit of a cliche precicely because adults like to imagine that children can stop being bullied, which of course means adults don't have to solve the fucking problem. However, I suspect it's true in maybe 15% of the cases.
What do kids do when the bullies are in a gang of four and they're one person? (Wait, I know this one. Columbine happens.)
What do they do when the bullying is purely verbal?
What do they do is they simply aren't strong enough? (Guns, the great equalizer.)
What if the bullying is not directed towards them, but rather their stuff when they aren't there? (Keep away, sticking gum in chairs, stealing notebooks and trashing them, etc)
Anyone who seriously says 'Children just need to stand up to their bullies, and all will be right with the world' is such an obvious moron that, in an ideal world, they wouldn't be allowed to have children. Once in a blue moon, a bully might back off if you shove him back. Or he might lay in wait for you after school with a fucking baseball bat, or group of six people, or, if you're really impressed him, might attack your friends instead.
And how that even possibly works with 'punish both parties' is well beyond me. Both those ideas are really stupid, but combined together they reach a new level of stupidity. People would be alright if only they fought back when bullies attacked, except for the fact we'll then punish them. Wha?
Books can carry ideas, dumbass. Ideas are perfectly expressable in almost communcation media.
They still can't be violent, though. They can represent violence, but they cannot be it, because their are no actual physical actions associated with them.
Oh, and those people walking around in your TV? Yeah, they're not really there. They're just representations of people displayed on the screen.
Yeah, GTA's a hilarious training example. If only criminals acted like that! We'd have them all off the street in a few hours!
I'm not so sure about this. For example, if you're given immunity to prosecution they CAN compel self-incriminating testimony.
No they can't. By defination, immunity makes the evidence not self-incriminating. That's what immunity means, that you cannot be incriminated with the recovered evidence. (And for some forced immunity, they have to dismiss the entire case.)
However, can they demand a key for a safe which contains incriminating evidence, regardless of immunity?
If you are holding a key, or the key is in a known location under your control (Say, in another country where they can't just seize it.), yes, they can produce a court order requiring you to hand it over. However, if you have a safe with a lock in it, they cannot say 'You must give us the hypothetical key which opens this safe or go to jail.', because they don't know if that's in your possession or if the key even exists.
I.e., they can point at that key, right there, and produce a court order demanding you hand it over, in theory. However, 99.9999% of the time, it's easier just to get an order to seize the key instead of an order making you hand it to them.
They cannot, however, make you produce the combination to a safe.
However, the analogy between a physical key and an encryption key is completely broken, for two reasons: One, encrypted doors cannot be 'forced', at least not in any reasonable time, two, there is no physical object and hence no evidence the 'key' even exists.
Like I said, a much better analogy would be treating an encryption key as a location where something is hidden. Aka, 'The location of the body'. The police cannot brute force search the entire world, and they can't demonstrate that said location, in fact, even exists, or that you know where is it. Exactly like encrypted files. It is physical evidence(1) hidden by a secret. The physical evidence is not protected, but you don't have to tell them the secret that would let them find or use it.
And we made the decision a long time ago about whether or not we can imprison someone because they refused to tell us where they hid the body, even if we have pretty good evidence they committed the murder. But just in case people aren't sure how that works, we don't get to do that...we have to convict them based on evidence we have, we don't get to lock them up until they tell us more.
And the UK's encryption law makes a complete mockery of the whole thing.
1) Yes, electronic documents are physical evidence.
You dumbass, if that worked, they'd simply not keep records. But they are not allowed to do that. Businesses have to keep records, and have to turn them over to the government, often without any court order at all.
And, incidentally, businesses are not people, and do not have a right not to incriminate themselves.
I think you misunderstood 'this forces you to incriminate yourself'. He wasn't talking about the search, but the requirement you hand over your keys.
And actually it's a pretty good arguement that's been ignored for some bullshit reason.
Let's compare two things:
1. Evidence of a crime in real life (bloody gloves)
2. Evidence of a crime on a computer (documents implimenting me in a fraud)
The police cannot make me tell them where to find 1. The best encryption analogy is, if I have them locked in a unknown safety deposit box, they can't make me tell them which one. This counts as 'incrimination', and I don't have to do it. It doesn't matter than they don't have time to search each one in each bank.
Forcing me to give them 2, by the same logic, must also count as incrimination.
Now, I forget what the UK's rule in that respect is, but I'm pretty certain they can't normally be compelled to testify either. The problem is, that might just be a law, and hence this law could trivially override it.
Your link is broken.