Uh, no it's not, unless you've got a security clearance. In fact, it's not actually 'illegal' at all, classified information is protect by a combination of executive order and just getting people to sign things before having access to it.
Anyway, despite what people think, if I stumble across documents marked CLASSIFIED on a seat on the bus, I can release them. Does no one study history anymore? We had a rather infamous court case called 'The Pentagon Papers' that decided just that...if you have classified information leaked to you, you can publish it. As long as you haven't agreed not to, aka, as long as you don't have a security clearance.
Of course, the publisher can be tried for teason, but only if, by releasing said documents, they intentionally harm the country, which 99.999% of classified information would not. The bar for treason is fairly high.
And no one has ever suggested that data that is classified that has independently been obtained through another source could be illegal to reveal. Like the satellites we're talking about. That's just absurd.
If you had that large a laser, and you're a terrorist, why the fuck would you care about satellites? Use it to light the White House on fire, or blow up the Washington monument, or recarve Mt. Rushmore. Or use it to take out military bases.
Anyway, they don't have usable lasers that powerful. For example the same reason that orbiting death lasers are impractical, the reverse is impractical. If you could make a laser that powerful, it's either nuclear (And, duh, if the terrorists have nuclear ability we're already in trouble.) or it would suck so much power they'd cut you off the power grid.
And trying to hit something four feet wide from, at minimum, 100 miles away, using standard positioning data, is just absurd. (Assuming a beam narrow enough to do anything.) It's like keeping what county you live in secret so people can't break into your house. Um, whatever.
And part of me suspects this is as intelligent as keeping the launch time for the space shuttle secret until 48 hours before the launch, but telling everyone the date....when they only had one launch window per day. If we now where the satellites were, we logically should still be able to find them. (In fact, we can find them anyway, with no data at all! They're flying overhead in the sky! We can just look for them!)
I'm actually pretty certain that blade technology has not advanced at all.
Now, they've started putting more than one blade on the head, with special strips to moisturize or whatever, so it is true you're paying for the head, not the handle, which is a twenty cent piece of plastic, but the actual razor blade is just a piece of metal.
I think the analogy is fairly broken, anyway. It used to be that razor companies did give away the expensive handle to sell you the blade, but now they give it away because it doesn't cost anything. A razor handle is no longer a loss leader. In fact, a lot of people buy a razor, use all the blades they get with it, and throw the thing away.
I have a Canon that the print head broke on that I had to throw away because no one stocked the print head anymore. There were places that sold them, but they were marking them up something like 300%.
When my mom took me to Staples with her to get a printer, I just discounted Lexmark out of hand. I'm not going with someone whose profit margin is high enough on ink that it's profitable to sue competitors. We went with an HP printer/scanner combo. (Yes, I know, HP computers suck. HP printers do not.)
Come on, folks. You know you're doing all the computer repairs around here. Well...to make the easier, you need to start weighing in on the computer purchasing.
Most companies with just names trademark the name, not any image of the name. For example, I have a Philips remote here, and it just says 'PHILIPS' in a san serif font. While, in theory, it would be possible to trademark that image, there wouldn't no point...they couldn't claim confusion with other companies using in a capital san serif font for their product name. Like 'SHARP' does, in fact.
Trademarking the image merely helps you if someone has a non-confusing-with-yours name, but a logo that's ripping you off. Like a shoe called 'Zebbs' with the Nike swoosh. The name clearly isn't confusing at all.
Yeah, his 'motives' make no sense. Whether or not it's legal to sell a 'Gaming cabinet', which I suspect it is, it has nothing to do with putting 'MAME' on the outside of said console.
In fact, the more underhanded the sellers are, the less likely they are to have MAME on the cabinet. The legit people are going to go 'We're selling a general purpose computer that looks exactly like an arcade machine, preinstalled with Linux and MAME. (Download source here.)'.
The illegit people are going to say 'Recreated game console that can play any of 4000 games' and fail to mention MAME or the fact that the games it 'can' play do not come with it and are not even obtainable legally.
You want to download the show that just aired? Fine. Give us demographic information. Here's the download, specially DRM'd so you can play it three times today. As it downloads, we put in ads we think would appeal to you. (This would be trivial to do with the correct encoding. In fact, if you're clever, you'll have already given them the ads.) Thanks to our DRM, the ads cannot be skipped. After the show is over, a web page pops up with information about the ads.
You can't tell me that somehow they'd come out behind there. Personalize advertising. And unlike a Tivo or VCR, you can't skip the ads!
Thanks to our DRM, you also cannot watch it at all after the DVD comes out, unless you buy the DVDs. (And if you buy the DVD from us, we'll turn them back on for you while you're waiting for it to ship.)
I mean, I can think of a completely workable model here. Yes, people will break the DRM, but is that any worse than people trading ad-less DVD and HDTV rips on Usenet, which is happening right now? At least this way, the ads would remain intact, unless someone edited them out, at which point we're exactly where we are now!
As for speed and quality...anyone on DSL can download high quality video in roughly the amount of time it takes to watch it. So buffer it for five minutes, which is about the amount of time it takes to get ready to watch, and then play it.
Or...
If you're really worried about copy protection, make it all in a set top box with an ethernet jack, and don't even give it a hard drive, just two gigs of memory, which should be enough for four hours of TV. (Remember, with DSL, all you really need is a buffer.) Assuming an encrypted connection back to home base, this is basically uncrackable without hardware alteration. (Which, yes, is breakable, but there's no point when you can just rip DVDs and HDTV broadcasts.) You can do this for very cheap, especially if you don't try to make it a Tivo...just make them use a real computer to get the shows, it's just the playback device, like a DVD player. You want to 'change DVDs', you have to go back to your computer. Think of it as iTelevision.
And then they can do really clever things, like taking their entire library and putting the 'most interesting' episode of each show up for free...but just that episode. Want more, you have to buy the DVD. Which, remember, you can do from them, and immediately unlock the rest of the shows. It's a frickin gold mine.
I mean, honestly. Any geek could figure out how to do this very cheaply, and even keep it cheapish while utterly securing it. (A hell of a lot more secure than DVDs.) So what's the hold up?
Yeah, but you could do the same with a Japanese strip mall. Well, barring the obvious fact that everyone's Japanese and so are the signs.
However, it's trivial to see large differences in the landscape. We have two mountain ranges, huge prairie, giant deserts, salt flats, a long staight coastline, a cove-filled coastline, a string of tropic islands that you can drive a hundred miles down, including one bridge that's seven miles long, etc. We even have artic tundra and volcanic islands, if you count Alaska and Hawaii.
Me? I can tell if I'm in the north or the south of my state simply by looking around. The north has mountains, the south does not.
Because most of us see nothing wrong with downloading content we'd get for free.
For example, I missed Wednesday's Alias. And thus I downloaded it using a torrent. I feel no guilt here...the show came into my house for free, I simply didn't record it. I will watch it and delete it.
What about commercials, you say? I have to point out that the vast majority of TV shows are broadcast using satellites unencrypted, and thus you can quite legally pick them up without commercials if you have the right equipment. Even cable channels. What you're paying the cable company for, 99% of the time, is running a satellite receiver farm, along with a bunch of correctly aimed antennas for broadcasts. (Some channels are encrypted, and thus the cable company has to pay to get them, like the sci-fi channel.)
So the question becomes why, if would have been legal for me to purchase a satellite dish, aim it correctly, record Alias, timeshift it to later, and then delete it, in accordance with copyright law, why exactly is it illegal for me to do the same thing with a broadband connection instead of a dish? (I hope you realize when I talk about a satellite disk, I mean those big-ass things, not those mini-dishes that require subscriptions.)
And while it is illegal, I see nothing unethical about it at all.
Actually, what I meant by that second statement was that it was impossible for a landlord to turn off mail delivery.
Even for minors. Although parents can individually reject each piece of mail. Although that would be pointless, as they can receive them and open them on behalf of their kid.
However, all that means is that the minor has to get to the letters first, or have them delivered elsewhere. Like General Delivery. The parent would have to constantly go down there and refuse each letter, at least in theory.
But that makes no sense. Logically, if it's how much privacy the person invading your privacy things you have, than a rather sound argument can be made that the police think you have no privacy and thus they can invade your privacy all you want.
No, I'm forced to conclude 'expectation of privacy' has nothing to do with kids. They have no privacy because they are kids.
You know, that's crazy circular logic, and I don't think it holds up at all. Kids think they have a hell of a lot more privacy than they do, and they think it is utterly unreasonable when their rooms are searched.
If 'legal level of privacy' had anything to do with 'expected level of privacy', kids would have an incredibly high level.
Which is why if kids want to keep things secret, they should just mail it. It's illegal to tamper with the mail at all. (And before anyone gets any clever ideas, it's impossible to legally block mail getting delivered to someone living on your property.)
Which is why she shouldn't have tried to submit it. She should have recorded logs, figured out where they were meeting, and documented it.
Fruit from the posion tree only goes so far for non-cops. If I break into your house and find dead bodies, you can't throw out the dead bodies as evidence, like could happen if it was the police illegally breaking in.
Ah, thanks. Yeah, we've had that problem too, mostly with ATM. Although the popular thing is to get a big truck, attach a chain to the ATM, and yank it out that way. Which is why we're seeing less and less ATMs that aren't built into buildings.
Because MS could have gotten in legal trouble due to their contract with IBM. It would have been an outright contract breach to do that to a product they themselves made and sold to IBM.
Whereas breaking DRDOS wasn't illegal, per se, it was just part of a pattern of behavior of abuse of their monopoly.
AS PC-DOS mainly came on IBM PCs, and MS got a cut of it anyway, there wouldn't have been much point.
BNR2 is a crappy client, anyway. Sure, it seems nice, but try having more than a million headers total.
While we're talking about newsgroups clients...I use nget, and it rocks, except there's no obvious way to get a listing. Amy I missing something? Should I be using other software?
In fact, I'm failing to see how explicitly stopping people using illegal copies of Windows from updating Office would even be legal. (If, however, that was 'broken', I can see them failing to 'fix' it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, despite what people think, if I stumble across documents marked CLASSIFIED on a seat on the bus, I can release them. Does no one study history anymore? We had a rather infamous court case called 'The Pentagon Papers' that decided just that...if you have classified information leaked to you, you can publish it. As long as you haven't agreed not to, aka, as long as you don't have a security clearance.
Of course, the publisher can be tried for teason, but only if, by releasing said documents, they intentionally harm the country, which 99.999% of classified information would not. The bar for treason is fairly high.
And no one has ever suggested that data that is classified that has independently been obtained through another source could be illegal to reveal. Like the satellites we're talking about. That's just absurd.
Anyway, they don't have usable lasers that powerful. For example the same reason that orbiting death lasers are impractical, the reverse is impractical. If you could make a laser that powerful, it's either nuclear (And, duh, if the terrorists have nuclear ability we're already in trouble.) or it would suck so much power they'd cut you off the power grid.
And trying to hit something four feet wide from, at minimum, 100 miles away, using standard positioning data, is just absurd. (Assuming a beam narrow enough to do anything.) It's like keeping what county you live in secret so people can't break into your house. Um, whatever.
And part of me suspects this is as intelligent as keeping the launch time for the space shuttle secret until 48 hours before the launch, but telling everyone the date....when they only had one launch window per day. If we now where the satellites were, we logically should still be able to find them. (In fact, we can find them anyway, with no data at all! They're flying overhead in the sky! We can just look for them!)
Now, they've started putting more than one blade on the head, with special strips to moisturize or whatever, so it is true you're paying for the head, not the handle, which is a twenty cent piece of plastic, but the actual razor blade is just a piece of metal.
I think the analogy is fairly broken, anyway. It used to be that razor companies did give away the expensive handle to sell you the blade, but now they give it away because it doesn't cost anything. A razor handle is no longer a loss leader. In fact, a lot of people buy a razor, use all the blades they get with it, and throw the thing away.
Being seperately replacable can have a downside.
When my mom took me to Staples with her to get a printer, I just discounted Lexmark out of hand. I'm not going with someone whose profit margin is high enough on ink that it's profitable to sue competitors. We went with an HP printer/scanner combo. (Yes, I know, HP computers suck. HP printers do not.)
Come on, folks. You know you're doing all the computer repairs around here. Well...to make the easier, you need to start weighing in on the computer purchasing.
Trademarking the image merely helps you if someone has a non-confusing-with-yours name, but a logo that's ripping you off. Like a shoe called 'Zebbs' with the Nike swoosh. The name clearly isn't confusing at all.
In fact, the more underhanded the sellers are, the less likely they are to have MAME on the cabinet. The legit people are going to go 'We're selling a general purpose computer that looks exactly like an arcade machine, preinstalled with Linux and MAME. (Download source here.)'.
The illegit people are going to say 'Recreated game console that can play any of 4000 games' and fail to mention MAME or the fact that the games it 'can' play do not come with it and are not even obtainable legally.
You can't tell me that somehow they'd come out behind there. Personalize advertising. And unlike a Tivo or VCR, you can't skip the ads!
Thanks to our DRM, you also cannot watch it at all after the DVD comes out, unless you buy the DVDs. (And if you buy the DVD from us, we'll turn them back on for you while you're waiting for it to ship.)
I mean, I can think of a completely workable model here. Yes, people will break the DRM, but is that any worse than people trading ad-less DVD and HDTV rips on Usenet, which is happening right now? At least this way, the ads would remain intact, unless someone edited them out, at which point we're exactly where we are now!
As for speed and quality...anyone on DSL can download high quality video in roughly the amount of time it takes to watch it. So buffer it for five minutes, which is about the amount of time it takes to get ready to watch, and then play it.
Or...
If you're really worried about copy protection, make it all in a set top box with an ethernet jack, and don't even give it a hard drive, just two gigs of memory, which should be enough for four hours of TV. (Remember, with DSL, all you really need is a buffer.) Assuming an encrypted connection back to home base, this is basically uncrackable without hardware alteration. (Which, yes, is breakable, but there's no point when you can just rip DVDs and HDTV broadcasts.) You can do this for very cheap, especially if you don't try to make it a Tivo...just make them use a real computer to get the shows, it's just the playback device, like a DVD player. You want to 'change DVDs', you have to go back to your computer. Think of it as iTelevision.
And then they can do really clever things, like taking their entire library and putting the 'most interesting' episode of each show up for free...but just that episode. Want more, you have to buy the DVD. Which, remember, you can do from them, and immediately unlock the rest of the shows. It's a frickin gold mine.
I mean, honestly. Any geek could figure out how to do this very cheaply, and even keep it cheapish while utterly securing it. (A hell of a lot more secure than DVDs.) So what's the hold up?
But everyone is authorized to use any software they possess. Use is not covered under copyright law.
There are only two things I can't stand: people who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch.
However, it's trivial to see large differences in the landscape. We have two mountain ranges, huge prairie, giant deserts, salt flats, a long staight coastline, a cove-filled coastline, a string of tropic islands that you can drive a hundred miles down, including one bridge that's seven miles long, etc. We even have artic tundra and volcanic islands, if you count Alaska and Hawaii.
Me? I can tell if I'm in the north or the south of my state simply by looking around. The north has mountains, the south does not.
For example, I missed Wednesday's Alias. And thus I downloaded it using a torrent. I feel no guilt here...the show came into my house for free, I simply didn't record it. I will watch it and delete it.
What about commercials, you say? I have to point out that the vast majority of TV shows are broadcast using satellites unencrypted, and thus you can quite legally pick them up without commercials if you have the right equipment. Even cable channels. What you're paying the cable company for, 99% of the time, is running a satellite receiver farm, along with a bunch of correctly aimed antennas for broadcasts. (Some channels are encrypted, and thus the cable company has to pay to get them, like the sci-fi channel.)
So the question becomes why, if would have been legal for me to purchase a satellite dish, aim it correctly, record Alias, timeshift it to later, and then delete it, in accordance with copyright law, why exactly is it illegal for me to do the same thing with a broadband connection instead of a dish? (I hope you realize when I talk about a satellite disk, I mean those big-ass things, not those mini-dishes that require subscriptions.)
And while it is illegal, I see nothing unethical about it at all.
Even for minors. Although parents can individually reject each piece of mail. Although that would be pointless, as they can receive them and open them on behalf of their kid.
However, all that means is that the minor has to get to the letters first, or have them delivered elsewhere. Like General Delivery. The parent would have to constantly go down there and refuse each letter, at least in theory.
No, I'm forced to conclude 'expectation of privacy' has nothing to do with kids. They have no privacy because they are kids.
If it's a video tape of a converstation on the screen, no, that won't work.
If 'legal level of privacy' had anything to do with 'expected level of privacy', kids would have an incredibly high level.
Which is why if kids want to keep things secret, they should just mail it. It's illegal to tamper with the mail at all. (And before anyone gets any clever ideas, it's impossible to legally block mail getting delivered to someone living on your property.)
Fruit from the posion tree only goes so far for non-cops. If I break into your house and find dead bodies, you can't throw out the dead bodies as evidence, like could happen if it was the police illegally breaking in.
Then he'd have a fairly obvious sexual harrassment case against her.
Ah, thanks. Yeah, we've had that problem too, mostly with ATM. Although the popular thing is to get a big truck, attach a chain to the ATM, and yank it out that way. Which is why we're seeing less and less ATMs that aren't built into buildings.
Did no one read the fucking article?
Hell, it makes glibc an API emulator.
In the real world, WINE is an implimentation of the Windows API.
Whereas breaking DRDOS wasn't illegal, per se, it was just part of a pattern of behavior of abuse of their monopoly.
AS PC-DOS mainly came on IBM PCs, and MS got a cut of it anyway, there wouldn't have been much point.
While we're talking about newsgroups clients...I use nget, and it rocks, except there's no obvious way to get a listing. Amy I missing something? Should I be using other software?
In fact, I'm failing to see how explicitly stopping people using illegal copies of Windows from updating Office would even be legal. (If, however, that was 'broken', I can see them failing to 'fix' it.)