When you distribute, you actively spend effort to give out the goods. Linking is just telling someone where the goods are; they have to go get the goods themselves. While it is very very easy for the user to click on the link, it is still the end user that takes action to obtain the goods; you have not touched or in any way moved the goods yourself. For instance: you witness robbers take bags of stolen money from a bank and hide it in a nearby park. You then tell someone where you saw the money being dumped, and that it is stolen. No matter who you told, you have not done anything illegal, even though it is trivial for the people you tell to help themselves to stolen property. ("Aiding" theft is another matter - but if you do not spend every possible effort to track down the robbers and arrest them, then relative to what you could be doing, you are technically "aiding" the robbers' escape.)
So...if newspapers post the URLs of ("non-electronic links to") any URL from which illegal material can be linked to (directly or indirectly, via however many steps), are these newspapers now illegal too?
without compromising either of the first two priorities.
More like while also achieving at better quality the first two priorities. A deteriorating disk can be copied to another disk at 100% accuracy more easily than a deteriorating book can be copied to another piece of paper. And with the ease of searching digital archives, does this not make the information therein more available to the U.S. Congress?
Certain basic skills need to be learned before a student can even use a computer; a child who can't read won't gain from having a computer.
Even if the computer teaches people how to read?
Actually, let's take that a bit further. Take yesterday's model laptop. Ruggedize it for use by the clueless (including no CD-ROM, floppy, or any other I/O device or port save stuff to interact with the user - like keyboard, screen, speaker, microphone, maybe touchpad or other mouse-equivalent, and possibly a camera and touchscreen/stylus - and nothing that requires a cable outside the unit). Encase it in solar panels - extra large, if desired - so that the user need never change batteries or plug it in (or even, at first, know what "battery" or "plug" is). Load it with ultra-basic educational software - reading, writing, arithmetic - and maybe some advanced stuff (bio/chem/physics) that is only unlocked once the basic lessons are completed; one would probably also need to communicate in the early lessons that this unit needs light to work. Mass-produce these to where the cost, including hardware, is less than a dollar per unit. (With no way to add I/O, they're useless as regular computers, and therefore unlikely to get stolen. The cost is to ease replacements for the inevitable broken units, and encourage wide distribution.)
Now, distribute these to those who might have trouble getting regular education - rural, adult learners, as foreign aid to countries without public education (after adding an initial module to teach English proficiency from whatever the local language is, so you don't have to translate all your content), and so forth. In areas which already have working schools, maybe use this as a supplement for elementary education, but not a replacement...or, perhaps, use it as a replacement for the academic part, and let the schools focus on teaching interaction with other people (kind of an advanced day care). (The lack of 'Net access is deliberate here: the unit should be entirely self-contained, partly to concentrate the user's attention on the material, partly to mollify knowledgable parties who wish to verify what the unit allows access to, and partly to allow it to be used without fear of tracing if one's neighbors view education as inherently evil - which would be the case in some areas where such a device would be most needed.)
I believe this suggestion has been made before, but it bears repeating...
Send an encrypted email to every member of Parliament, and to any other government employee that you do not particularly like.
Cc some relevant law enforcement authorities who are not too pleased with their bosses. (Even LEAs employ some geeks.)
File a police report (and tell the press) that you generated the encryption keys, and that you saw logs of these keys being downloaded by the officials before someone thoroughly reformatted the disks of the server that held these keys. (If the LEAs ask you for the key, provide the wiped server as evidence.)
This probably would not actually result in the entire government getting arrested, but it would get your point across.
As it became clear that this Big Business had deliberately circumvented their protection system, in order to use these DVDs on their internal platform of choice, as opposed to the platforms for which it was available, they took steps to prevent the circulation of the code which allowed this circumvention.
I'm sorry, you lost me right there. It doesn't matter if it's a big guy picking on a small, or a small guy picking on a big. Hacking is hacking, and if I wish to accomplish an end but the only "legitimate" (read: legal) means to do so are not within my capabilities, then I must resort to non-legitimate means.
Now, if the ends I wish to reach are contrary to society's desires (say, if I wish my enemies dead just for being my enemies), well, that's what the law's for. But it is not society as a whole who says that Linux users must suffer by not being allowed to watch movies like Windows users can. Indeed, society as a whole says that businesses should seek to do business without discrimination on irrelevant attributes: being black or white has nothing to do with whether you can own a home (though being radioactive green might cause problems for the neighbors); what operating system you use has nothing to do with whether you can view movies (so long as your operating system supports sufficient graphics and sound capabilities, which both Windows and Linux - at least, the versions of Linux which would play movies - do).
Therefore, if the MPAA has failed to license CSS to any Linux-compatible player, then someone else is free to pick up the ball on that, so long as those who view movies on Linux pay for them just like those who view movies on Windows.
The current political candidate sites seem to be little more than political rhetoric and volunteer information. Are there any plans to treat the website differently than a brodcast medium? I mean, including interactivity, such as message areas for open discussions, polling booths to get a feel for what people are really interested in. And also perhaps for offering large amounts of data about a candidate's past actions in government, such as voting records (and perhaps reasons for the vote).
And, perhaps, where regular members of the public can ask their own questions, and see responses from the candidate? (Or, considering the volume of questions that would likely be submitted: maybe a candidate's staff could read and summarize the questions, just so long as the questions really did reach the candidate so that his responses, and not just some staffer's entirely made up responses, could be returned?)
I mean, if a candidate gave an impression that he was actually listening to the American people, that would seem likely to attract votes - even if all he did was explain why he took his positions (popular or otherwise), but even moreso if he actually let this feedback change his mind every once in a while, no?
Or we could just recycle the metal after those who lived their lives of luxury die, leaving their metal in neat little piles on Earth rather than in ores floating about somewhere in the solar system at random high velocities, and who funded and developed the technologies to get said metals - for their own use at first, but which got spread around.
The trickle-down effect might not work over periods of a few short years, but a million years ought to be long enough to distribute any technology in use today. And, who knows, maybe they'll come up with ways to allow, and then encourage, FTL access to the stars within a mere thousand years while they're joyriding around the planets rather than railing against government sanctions.
Well...perhaps a merge of the two? Stuff like declassifying, and removing any commercial restrictions on, no-longer-used military designs so that corporations (other than the Big Aerospace corps, which have shown no effective interest in this) can come up with working space vehicles without having to shell out quite as much for development? (Yeah, I know it's been done before for other areas; that's why I'm suggesting it here.)
I *doubt* you're responsible for your own backbone.
Doubt all you want. Fact is, no one but yourself can make you brave. You can get inspiration to do so from other sources, true, but only you can act on it in this way.
That's called prosthetics - though the term more often refers to actual replacement limbs (arms/legs) or other organs (like eyes/ears), rather than replacement functionality (say, speech). And while it does require mobile processing, the main work is in getting the application usable - interfacing to the user's motor nerves, for instance, is a significant software problem.
Look at it from a compatibility perspective. There's tons of existing work out there for binary systems, so...
They make a better/faster/cheaper binary system, it can be plugged right in.
They make a trinary system...whoops, there goes their investment. Almost nobody else pays much attention because everyone else is working with binary systems.
They make a quad system...the natural and overwhelmingly popular thought will be, "Hey, 4 = 2*2, so each 'bit' here is really two 'bits' that I'm used to."
The page also states that Nomad classified meteorite #12322 as "interesting". I wonder if others are classified as "funny" or "troll"...
Given the rocks' likely (lack of) combustibility, they're probably not "flamebait". But how does it avoid nervous breakdown, knowing that each one of its positive ratings is thoroughly meta-moderated?
You shouldn't be asking these questions here or in any other public forum. I, for one, will not answer these questions. It is asking for trouble to answer legal questions in places such as this.
Only for people living in jurisdictions where that is outlawed. For everyone else, it's fine. And, yes, the "safe" answer is to ask a lawyer - but many people, thinking together, can come up with solutions that any one single expert might miss. Even a lawyer.
Assuming you beat any legal rap thrown at you over this (at least under Norwegian law, and maybe also if the MPAA ultimately loses their suits in the US), do you have any business plans to profit from this affair yet? Or would your only direct personal benefit be resume fodder? (Not that that's a bad thing...);)
Re:Is Censorship/control ALWAYS bad?
on
China and the MPA
·
· Score: 1
Truth is, in any country where education isn't sufficiently high and skepticism isn't strongly in place, the free flow of information can hurt much more than it can help.
So, you're saying that freedom is the American imperialist tool of oppression?;)
How is it companies that you do business with are free to give any information you give them to a marketing company, but the marketing company will not give you information about *their* customers?
Because you're not paying them lots of $. If you were a millionaire willing to shell out the bucks, you might be able to get their info...of course, you'd also have to convince them that you're more of an aid to their business than a threat.
Want free movies, or at least cheaper movies? Keep this code and forward it to as many friends as you can. This is the key to sticking it to the Powers That Be - and if you don't tell anyone you don't personally trust that you've got it, you're safe, 'cause the enforcers will be too busy tracking down people who boast to the world about having the goods. When the time comes, if the time comes, someone you know will know how to use it.
Our ideals of freedom and debates about encryption are one thing, but there might just be enough resentment among the general public to make this appeal work.
Slashdot Mirror
I define hate mail as a message with the word "hate" in it
;)
Excerpt from some friendly email:
> My mailbox was full of spam again today. I
> hate spam.
So do I.
This is hate mail?
When you distribute, you actively spend effort to give out the goods. Linking is just telling someone where the goods are; they have to go get the goods themselves. While it is very very easy for the user to click on the link, it is still the end user that takes action to obtain the goods; you have not touched or in any way moved the goods yourself. For instance: you witness robbers take bags of stolen money from a bank and hide it in a nearby park. You then tell someone where you saw the money being dumped, and that it is stolen. No matter who you told, you have not done anything illegal, even though it is trivial for the people you tell to help themselves to stolen property. ("Aiding" theft is another matter - but if you do not spend every possible effort to track down the robbers and arrest them, then relative to what you could be doing, you are technically "aiding" the robbers' escape.)
So...if newspapers post the URLs of ("non-electronic links to") any URL from which illegal material can be linked to (directly or indirectly, via however many steps), are these newspapers now illegal too?
without compromising either of the first two priorities.
More like while also achieving at better quality the first two priorities. A deteriorating disk can be copied to another disk at 100% accuracy more easily than a deteriorating book can be copied to another piece of paper. And with the ease of searching digital archives, does this not make the information therein more available to the U.S. Congress?
Certain basic skills need to be learned before a student can even use a computer; a child who can't read won't gain from having a computer.
Even if the computer teaches people how to read?
Actually, let's take that a bit further. Take yesterday's model laptop. Ruggedize it for use by the clueless (including no CD-ROM, floppy, or any other I/O device or port save stuff to interact with the user - like keyboard, screen, speaker, microphone, maybe touchpad or other mouse-equivalent, and possibly a camera and touchscreen/stylus - and nothing that requires a cable outside the unit). Encase it in solar panels - extra large, if desired - so that the user need never change batteries or plug it in (or even, at first, know what "battery" or "plug" is). Load it with ultra-basic educational software - reading, writing, arithmetic - and maybe some advanced stuff (bio/chem/physics) that is only unlocked once the basic lessons are completed; one would probably also need to communicate in the early lessons that this unit needs light to work. Mass-produce these to where the cost, including hardware, is less than a dollar per unit. (With no way to add I/O, they're useless as regular computers, and therefore unlikely to get stolen. The cost is to ease replacements for the inevitable broken units, and encourage wide distribution.)
Now, distribute these to those who might have trouble getting regular education - rural, adult learners, as foreign aid to countries without public education (after adding an initial module to teach English proficiency from whatever the local language is, so you don't have to translate all your content), and so forth. In areas which already have working schools, maybe use this as a supplement for elementary education, but not a replacement...or, perhaps, use it as a replacement for the academic part, and let the schools focus on teaching interaction with other people (kind of an advanced day care). (The lack of 'Net access is deliberate here: the unit should be entirely self-contained, partly to concentrate the user's attention on the material, partly to mollify knowledgable parties who wish to verify what the unit allows access to, and partly to allow it to be used without fear of tracing if one's neighbors view education as inherently evil - which would be the case in some areas where such a device would be most needed.)
Sound feasable?
the companies assembling PCB's in Latin America and Southeast Asia
I first read that as "...assembling PHBs..." and thought, "So that's where they come from." Too bad...it would actually have made sense, in a fashion.
- Send an encrypted email to every member of Parliament, and to any other government employee that you do not particularly like.
- Cc some relevant law enforcement authorities who are not too pleased with their bosses. (Even LEAs employ some geeks.)
- File a police report (and tell the press) that you generated the encryption keys, and that you saw logs of these keys being downloaded by the officials before someone thoroughly reformatted the disks of the server that held these keys. (If the LEAs ask you for the key, provide the wiped server as evidence.)
This probably would not actually result in the entire government getting arrested, but it would get your point across.As it became clear that this Big Business had deliberately circumvented their protection system, in order to use these DVDs on their internal platform of choice, as opposed to the platforms for which it was available, they took steps to prevent the circulation of the code which allowed this circumvention.
I'm sorry, you lost me right there. It doesn't matter if it's a big guy picking on a small, or a small guy picking on a big. Hacking is hacking, and if I wish to accomplish an end but the only "legitimate" (read: legal) means to do so are not within my capabilities, then I must resort to non-legitimate means.
Now, if the ends I wish to reach are contrary to society's desires (say, if I wish my enemies dead just for being my enemies), well, that's what the law's for. But it is not society as a whole who says that Linux users must suffer by not being allowed to watch movies like Windows users can. Indeed, society as a whole says that businesses should seek to do business without discrimination on irrelevant attributes: being black or white has nothing to do with whether you can own a home (though being radioactive green might cause problems for the neighbors); what operating system you use has nothing to do with whether you can view movies (so long as your operating system supports sufficient graphics and sound capabilities, which both Windows and Linux - at least, the versions of Linux which would play movies - do).
Therefore, if the MPAA has failed to license CSS to any Linux-compatible player, then someone else is free to pick up the ball on that, so long as those who view movies on Linux pay for them just like those who view movies on Windows.
The current political candidate sites seem to be little more than political rhetoric and volunteer information. Are there any plans to treat the website differently than a brodcast medium? I mean, including interactivity, such as message areas for open discussions, polling booths to get a feel for what people are really interested in. And also perhaps for offering large amounts of data about a candidate's past actions in government, such as voting records (and perhaps reasons for the vote).
And, perhaps, where regular members of the public can ask their own questions, and see responses from the candidate? (Or, considering the volume of questions that would likely be submitted: maybe a candidate's staff could read and summarize the questions, just so long as the questions really did reach the candidate so that his responses, and not just some staffer's entirely made up responses, could be returned?)
I mean, if a candidate gave an impression that he was actually listening to the American people, that would seem likely to attract votes - even if all he did was explain why he took his positions (popular or otherwise), but even moreso if he actually let this feedback change his mind every once in a while, no?
I would DEARLY love a SlashDot interview with Jack Valenti. What do you think Rob/Jeff? Do you think you could swing it?
Count my vote for this, too. In fact, I'll submit this into the story contribution list.
Or we could just recycle the metal after those who lived their lives of luxury die, leaving their metal in neat little piles on Earth rather than in ores floating about somewhere in the solar system at random high velocities, and who funded and developed the technologies to get said metals - for their own use at first, but which got spread around.
The trickle-down effect might not work over periods of a few short years, but a million years ought to be long enough to distribute any technology in use today. And, who knows, maybe they'll come up with ways to allow, and then encourage, FTL access to the stars within a mere thousand years while they're joyriding around the planets rather than railing against government sanctions.
Well...perhaps a merge of the two? Stuff like declassifying, and removing any commercial restrictions on, no-longer-used military designs so that corporations (other than the Big Aerospace corps, which have shown no effective interest in this) can come up with working space vehicles without having to shell out quite as much for development? (Yeah, I know it's been done before for other areas; that's why I'm suggesting it here.)
I *doubt* you're responsible for your own backbone.
Doubt all you want. Fact is, no one but yourself can make you brave. You can get inspiration to do so from other sources, true, but only you can act on it in this way.
How about that Pink Screen Of Death? ;)
That's called prosthetics - though the term more often refers to actual replacement limbs (arms/legs) or other organs (like eyes/ears), rather than replacement functionality (say, speech). And while it does require mobile processing, the main work is in getting the application usable - interfacing to the user's motor nerves, for instance, is a significant software problem.
Too bad the law itself isn't under CVS.
The DMCA isn't compiling. It's giving a First Amendment error.
Anyone know how to "su root" on this system?
- They make a better/faster/cheaper binary system, it can be plugged right in.
- They make a trinary system...whoops, there goes their investment. Almost nobody else pays much attention because everyone else is working with binary systems.
- They make a quad system...the natural and overwhelmingly popular thought will be, "Hey, 4 = 2*2, so each 'bit' here is really two 'bits' that I'm used to."
And so forth.How about something like this?
VVVVAAAA
VVVVAAAA
VVVVAAAAAA
VVVVAAAA
VVAAAA
The page also states that Nomad classified meteorite #12322 as "interesting". I wonder if others are classified as "funny" or "troll"...
Given the rocks' likely (lack of) combustibility, they're probably not "flamebait". But how does it avoid nervous breakdown, knowing that each one of its positive ratings is thoroughly meta-moderated?
Of course, users of modern universes will gleefully point out that, in theirs, light rarely actually swaps -- it pages using an LRU algorithm.
Just through enough storage at it, and it won't ever swap. 640 kilophotons should be enough for anyone.
You shouldn't be asking these questions here or in any other public forum. I, for one, will not answer these questions. It is asking for trouble to answer legal questions in places such as this.
Only for people living in jurisdictions where that is outlawed. For everyone else, it's fine. And, yes, the "safe" answer is to ask a lawyer - but many people, thinking together, can come up with solutions that any one single expert might miss. Even a lawyer.
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but...
;)
Assuming you beat any legal rap thrown at you over this (at least under Norwegian law, and maybe also if the MPAA ultimately loses their suits in the US), do you have any business plans to profit from this affair yet? Or would your only direct personal benefit be resume fodder? (Not that that's a bad thing...)
Truth is, in any country where education isn't sufficiently high and skepticism isn't strongly in place, the free flow of information can hurt much more than it can help.
;)
So, you're saying that freedom is the American imperialist tool of oppression?
Because you're not paying them lots of $. If you were a millionaire willing to shell out the bucks, you might be able to get their info...of course, you'd also have to convince them that you're more of an aid to their business than a threat.
How about this?
Want free movies, or at least cheaper movies? Keep this code and forward it to as many friends as you can. This is the key to sticking it to the Powers That Be - and if you don't tell anyone you don't personally trust that you've got it, you're safe, 'cause the enforcers will be too busy tracking down people who boast to the world about having the goods. When the time comes, if the time comes, someone you know will know how to use it.
Our ideals of freedom and debates about encryption are one thing, but there might just be enough resentment among the general public to make this appeal work.