Are you sure about that? Don't the pressed discs have the same file/directory structure as BD-Rs, and so if they can play those files unencrypted on BD-Rs, why couldn't they on pressed discs?
Although I'm sure there wouldn't be too many pressed BDs that are unencrypted (Big Buck Bunny might be a rare exception, though I don't know for sure), it doesn't make much sense to unconditionally force all pressed blu-rays to be encrypted. Though, maybe they figured the extra AACS licencing fees they would get made it worthwhile anyway.
I think GP was referring to the uncensored version leaking, which it hasn't yet, and which I'm sure you don't have in your queue. Of course, the aired version would have hit the torrent sites within hours.
It's not an entirely bad idea. The major drawback of the plan is that the films are infected with DRM, making them useless on any platform but Windows, and dependant upon the reliability of DRM activation servers. From past experience with several major vendors, these are not very reliable at all. They'll be shut down in a few years, causing customers to lose access to their films, forcing them to buy again.
I would consider buying the drive if it met the following conditions:
1. DRM free. I refuse to buy any films that are infected with DRM, except DVDs, of which I own a large collection and already ripped to my hard drive. 2. If the other included films, besides Star Trek which I've already got, were any good. 3. If the cost of the drive + films were being offered for a competitive price, better than what I could get buy getting them individually elsewhere.
1. Place a black hole near by so that it consumes the star. (Techniques for locating and moving a black hole are left as an exercise for the mad scientist attempting this) 2. Use a Stargate to dial another gate on a planet near a black hole and send the gate into the star, eventually causing it to explode in a Supernova 3. Send it on a collision course with a neutron star. When they collide, the combined mass increases the gravity so much, that they explode in an even bigger supernova and result in a black hole. 4. Red matter. 5. Construct anti-matter bomb with sufficient anti-matter to annihilate the star and its solar system.
roman_mir, It would have been clearer if you referred to it as base 64 *encoding*, rathern than encryption, since it has nothing to do with cryptography.
On an unrealted note, with regards to the V8 performance test, the reason Chrome's V8 engine works well with the V8 benchmark is because the tests themselves are bias towards the specific optimisations that the Chrome developers have chosen to include in their V8 engine.
Carakan, on the the other hand, has, for various reasons, been developed to optimise for different cases. There are trade-offs here which, as a result, affect the performance of Carakan in some of the tests included in the V8 performance test.
Disclaimer: I work for Opera the on Carakan team. I cannot go into specifics about what optimisations and trade-offs have been made.
1. Publish details of brilliant invention. 2. ??? 3. Profit.
On a more serious note, I don't support patents at all and suggest that, if you do decide to patent it, you at least attach some sort of irrevocable, royalty free licence to it, which would at least let you keep it around for defensive purposes in case you get sued. Just don't become a patent troll.
Also, perhaps instead of simply publishing it publicly for everyone immediately, you could find a company involved in a similar field or a manufacturer that you can work with to get your product developed, whatever that may be. That would help to give you the first-to-market advantage, assuming your invention really is an original idea.
I think he was referring to the current Labor government who were elected in late 2007. I'm not sure what the Internet Industry Association (IIA) has to do with the government though. I could be wrong, but I believe the IIA is just a normal industry association with no formal ties to the governement.
Nah, it's encrypted using an algorithm that results in all 1's. You need to learn the key as well, so you know which bits need to be flipped to 0. But once you know the key, the actual data can be decrypted using the simple bitwise AND operation between the data (all 1's) and the key.
Child A is taught to be inquisitive about everything around him. As he encounters things in his daily life he figures out how they work, rather than accepting them as magical black boxes.
Child B sits in a classroom with 40 other students doing multiplication tables until he has them all memorized.
Who do you think is going to be a better engineer someday?
You appear to have presented these as mutually exclusive options. This is a false dichotomy; they are clearly not, as you even admit later on in your comment.
IMHO, the problem with boring classes has more to do with the teaching methods, rather than with what's being taught. If the lessons are boring for most students in a class, find better ways to engage them and get them interested in the topics.
The first series (aka. The Primary Phase) was first, followed shortly after by the first book. Both The second series (The Secondary Phase) and and the second book were released in 1980, though I think the radio series predated by the book by a few months. The subsequent series from the Tertiary through Quintessential phases weren't recorded from 2003 onwards, well after books 3 to 5.
Personally, I like the radio series and the TV series better than the books. Though, I really hate the 2005 film, I saw it once when it came out and I never want to see it again.
Personally - I would suggest that copyright protection would be acceptable for "twice as long as it took you to create it, all told" - if you spent 3 years from concept/analysis to final product, then you get 6 years of profit protection for your effort. If it only took you 2 months to come up with, you only get 4 months protection. Of course, that's nearly un-enforcable and way too complicated.
Seriously, are you insane? You're totally ignoring the fact that software is generally created and then incrementally improved through successive release cycles. So, for examle, the linux kernel was initially released in 1991, and so, for argument's sake, let's say development began in 1990. Since then, it's been under continual development, and would now be in its 19th year. So by your logic, the current version would have a 38 year copyright protection. Next year, it would be up to 40. You see where I'm going with this? By 2040, the then current version would have 100 years of copyright protection.
Not only would that make the system seriously overly complex, making it virtually impossible to know when anything enters the public domain, it would end up being worse than the current system!
In reality, the ideal copyright system would have a fixed term from the date of publication, unlike the current system of life + 50 or 70 years (depending on country), so that calculating when a work enters the public domain is easy if you know the date of publication, without having to know when the author has or will die.
5 years is way too short. It shifts the balance too far in the wrong direction. It's even shorter than the original term of 14 (or 28) years. There are a significant number of works that are still worthy of protection after that short period. between 25 and 50 years is more reasonable. Beyond that, the law of diminishing returns really kicks in and the public loses out in favour of the extremely small minority, only serving to fill the pockets of the big media industry, just like in the current system.
But do competitors have the right to profit using your own trademark?
Oh, like when Pepsi referred to Coke in some of it's old commercials? That was entirely legal. And, IMHO, so is this. AIUI, trademark infringmenet can only occur when the trademark is used in a confusing or deceptive way. Simply using the trademark to refer to a competitor in an ad isn't infringment, and it's hard to see how using the trademark as a search keyword could be either.
DRM, and other artificial restrictions (e.g. regional restrictions on sales) are some of the major reasons why "piracy" persists. Drop the DRM and offer products and services for a fair price using innovative business models and you'll find that the issue of piracy will be of little concern.
The number 000 was assigned way back in the days of rotary dial phones when such issues didn't exist, so you can't retroactively assign blame to poor choice of numbers. However, I would argue otherwise that the choice of 000 was and still is the better choice because it is easier to dial than 911 (especially on rotary dial phones in use at the time), and because, IMHO, it's more memorable.
Although, I have to admit that both 000 and 911 are significantly better than having separate numbers like 110, 112 and 113 for police, fire and ambulance (I can never remember which is which), at least in Norway (I'm not sure about the rest of Europe).
So I can use a U.S. Cellular phone under contract in any other compatiable network?
In an ideal world, yes, and in other countries it's possible to get handsets independently of any contract, (or by getting one on a pre-paid plan and then paying a relatively small unlocking fee when the credit runs out). You're then free to get a contract with any carrier and use any SIM card. This is how it works in Australia, and is why, if and when I do a new iPhone 3G S, I will be buying it there, instead of going through AT&T when I move to the US later this year.
I accidentally dialed 000 (the emergency number in Australia) once on an old phone of mine because the phone allowed emergency numbers to be called without unlocking the keypad. I thought that was a really stupid feature, because it increases the chances of dialiing it accidentally and when it does happen, it just wastes the time of the emergency response staff who could be dealing with real emergencies instead.
This, please God, this. I can't stand squatters. If more people start taking them to court and their domains get taken from them then maybe this ridiculous crap will stop.
The real way to stop this crap is to forbid the sale of domain names, and only allow them to be leased by licenced registrars. Thus, in order to transfer a domain name between parties, the existing lease must either expire or be terminated, and the new registrant can lease it through any registrar they like. This would instantly kill the market for these unethical domain squatters and legitimate businesses would be able to get the domain names they like for a fair and reasonable price.
This is how the auDA successfully manages the use of Australian.au domains and they hardly suffer from the same problems that the global TLDs do.
It depends if the DVD drive has RPC-1 or RPC-2 firmware installed on it. With RPC-1 firmware, you can change the region any number of times. With RPC-2, you're limited to just 5.
It also depends on whether the drive enforces the region encoding in the firmware, or whether it's left to the software. In the latter case, software such as VLC can easily bypass the region encoding. But in the former case, since it's the drive itself enforcing it, it can't. This is the case with the shitty Matshitsu drives that Apple commonly ships. Luckily, for some drives, there's RPC-1 firmware available from rpc1.org so you can reflash the drive.
Something like this won't get off the ground as long as there are people willing to fight against it, and we've got no shortage of those around here.
Just because there is a lot of vocal opposition to some proposal, doesn't mean it doesn't stand a chance of passing. There is a lot of unpopular legislation in many countries that get passed despite significant protests. For example, the DMCA in the USA, and the Australian free trade agreement that gave us DMCA-like crap of our own to live with.
Besides, the article doesn't say for sure whether the plan would be dropped. Conroy basically just said the legislation wouldn't be needed if the ISPs just agreed to do it voluntarily. But the reality Conroy is insane to think that the ISPs would even consider voluntary implementation given their opposition to the plan.
They have merely said that you don't have to pay to use the patents before 2010, but if you use the patents after that, you may need to pay (depending on volume).
No, they didn't say that at all. If you read the MPEG LA news release linked from the summary, it says:
To encourage early marketplace adoption and start-up, the License will provide for a grace period in which no Participation Fees will be payable for products or services sold before January 1, 2006.
So if you're a bar, you can't refuse admittance to a 9-year-old, and refuse to sell them an alcoholic drink that they're too young to safely imbibe? On the basis of age discrimination being illegal?
No, in that case, the denial of service is not merely based on age alone, but rather on the law that prohibits the sale of alcohol to underage people.
Oh, by the way... political beliefs and political party associations aren't in that list!
Yes, that's what the GP was pointing out when he said "political discrimination is not protected" in his country.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure about that? Don't the pressed discs have the same file/directory structure as BD-Rs, and so if they can play those files unencrypted on BD-Rs, why couldn't they on pressed discs?
Although I'm sure there wouldn't be too many pressed BDs that are unencrypted (Big Buck Bunny might be a rare exception, though I don't know for sure), it doesn't make much sense to unconditionally force all pressed blu-rays to be encrypted. Though, maybe they figured the extra AACS licencing fees they would get made it worthwhile anyway.
Already have it in my utorrent queue!
I think GP was referring to the uncensored version leaking, which it hasn't yet, and which I'm sure you don't have in your queue. Of course, the aired version would have hit the torrent sites within hours.
It's not an entirely bad idea. The major drawback of the plan is that the films are infected with DRM, making them useless on any platform but Windows, and dependant upon the reliability of DRM activation servers. From past experience with several major vendors, these are not very reliable at all. They'll be shut down in a few years, causing customers to lose access to their films, forcing them to buy again.
I would consider buying the drive if it met the following conditions:
1. DRM free. I refuse to buy any films that are infected with DRM, except DVDs, of which I own a large collection and already ripped to my hard drive.
2. If the other included films, besides Star Trek which I've already got, were any good.
3. If the cost of the drive + films were being offered for a competitive price, better than what I could get buy getting them individually elsewhere.
Possible ways to destroy a star:
1. Place a black hole near by so that it consumes the star. (Techniques for locating and moving a black hole are left as an exercise for the mad scientist attempting this)
2. Use a Stargate to dial another gate on a planet near a black hole and send the gate into the star, eventually causing it to explode in a Supernova
3. Send it on a collision course with a neutron star. When they collide, the combined mass increases the gravity so much, that they explode in an even bigger supernova and result in a black hole.
4. Red matter.
5. Construct anti-matter bomb with sufficient anti-matter to annihilate the star and its solar system.
roman_mir, It would have been clearer if you referred to it as base 64 *encoding*, rathern than encryption, since it has nothing to do with cryptography.
On an unrealted note, with regards to the V8 performance test, the reason Chrome's V8 engine works well with the V8 benchmark is because the tests themselves are bias towards the specific optimisations that the Chrome developers have chosen to include in their V8 engine.
Carakan, on the the other hand, has, for various reasons, been developed to optimise for different cases. There are trade-offs here which, as a result, affect the performance of Carakan in some of the tests included in the V8 performance test.
Disclaimer: I work for Opera the on Carakan team. I cannot go into specifics about what optimisations and trade-offs have been made.
It's a simple 3 step process:
1. Publish details of brilliant invention.
2. ???
3. Profit.
On a more serious note, I don't support patents at all and suggest that, if you do decide to patent it, you at least attach some sort of irrevocable, royalty free licence to it, which would at least let you keep it around for defensive purposes in case you get sued. Just don't become a patent troll.
Also, perhaps instead of simply publishing it publicly for everyone immediately, you could find a company involved in a similar field or a manufacturer that you can work with to get your product developed, whatever that may be. That would help to give you the first-to-market advantage, assuming your invention really is an original idea.
I think he was referring to the current Labor government who were elected in late 2007. I'm not sure what the Internet Industry Association (IIA) has to do with the government though. I could be wrong, but I believe the IIA is just a normal industry association with no formal ties to the governement.
Nah, it's encrypted using an algorithm that results in all 1's. You need to learn the key as well, so you know which bits need to be flipped to 0. But once you know the key, the actual data can be decrypted using the simple bitwise AND operation between the data (all 1's) and the key.
Here's a hypothetical for you:
Child A is taught to be inquisitive about everything around him. As he encounters things in his daily life he figures out how they work, rather than accepting them as magical black boxes.
Child B sits in a classroom with 40 other students doing multiplication tables until he has them all memorized.
Who do you think is going to be a better engineer someday?
You appear to have presented these as mutually exclusive options. This is a false dichotomy; they are clearly not, as you even admit later on in your comment.
IMHO, the problem with boring classes has more to do with the teaching methods, rather than with what's being taught. If the lessons are boring for most students in a class, find better ways to engage them and get them interested in the topics.
The subsequent series from the Tertiary through Quintessential phases weren't recorded from 2003 onwards, well after books 3 to 5.
Oops, I meant the phases were recorderd from 2003 onwards.
The first series (aka. The Primary Phase) was first, followed shortly after by the first book. Both The second series (The Secondary Phase) and and the second book were released in 1980, though I think the radio series predated by the book by a few months. The subsequent series from the Tertiary through Quintessential phases weren't recorded from 2003 onwards, well after books 3 to 5.
Personally, I like the radio series and the TV series better than the books. Though, I really hate the 2005 film, I saw it once when it came out and I never want to see it again.
Personally - I would suggest that copyright protection would be acceptable for "twice as long as it took you to create it, all told" - if you spent 3 years from concept/analysis to final product, then you get 6 years of profit protection for your effort. If it only took you 2 months to come up with, you only get 4 months protection. Of course, that's nearly un-enforcable and way too complicated.
Seriously, are you insane? You're totally ignoring the fact that software is generally created and then incrementally improved through successive release cycles. So, for examle, the linux kernel was initially released in 1991, and so, for argument's sake, let's say development began in 1990. Since then, it's been under continual development, and would now be in its 19th year. So by your logic, the current version would have a 38 year copyright protection. Next year, it would be up to 40. You see where I'm going with this? By 2040, the then current version would have 100 years of copyright protection.
Not only would that make the system seriously overly complex, making it virtually impossible to know when anything enters the public domain, it would end up being worse than the current system!
In reality, the ideal copyright system would have a fixed term from the date of publication, unlike the current system of life + 50 or 70 years (depending on country), so that calculating when a work enters the public domain is easy if you know the date of publication, without having to know when the author has or will die.
5 years is way too short. It shifts the balance too far in the wrong direction. It's even shorter than the original term of 14 (or 28) years. There are a significant number of works that are still worthy of protection after that short period. between 25 and 50 years is more reasonable. Beyond that, the law of diminishing returns really kicks in and the public loses out in favour of the extremely small minority, only serving to fill the pockets of the big media industry, just like in the current system.
Eric Flint argued for a 40 to 42 year term, and I think that's just about right.
http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos3
But do competitors have the right to profit using your own trademark?
Oh, like when Pepsi referred to Coke in some of it's old commercials? That was entirely legal. And, IMHO, so is this. AIUI, trademark infringmenet can only occur when the trademark is used in a confusing or deceptive way. Simply using the trademark to refer to a competitor in an ad isn't infringment, and it's hard to see how using the trademark as a search keyword could be either.
DRM, and other artificial restrictions (e.g. regional restrictions on sales) are some of the major reasons why "piracy" persists. Drop the DRM and offer products and services for a fair price using innovative business models and you'll find that the issue of piracy will be of little concern.
The number 000 was assigned way back in the days of rotary dial phones when such issues didn't exist, so you can't retroactively assign blame to poor choice of numbers. However, I would argue otherwise that the choice of 000 was and still is the better choice because it is easier to dial than 911 (especially on rotary dial phones in use at the time), and because, IMHO, it's more memorable.
See:
http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_100580
Although, I have to admit that both 000 and 911 are significantly better than having separate numbers like 110, 112 and 113 for police, fire and ambulance (I can never remember which is which), at least in Norway (I'm not sure about the rest of Europe).
So I can use a U.S. Cellular phone under contract in any other compatiable network?
In an ideal world, yes, and in other countries it's possible to get handsets independently of any contract, (or by getting one on a pre-paid plan and then paying a relatively small unlocking fee when the credit runs out). You're then free to get a contract with any carrier and use any SIM card. This is how it works in Australia, and is why, if and when I do a new iPhone 3G S, I will be buying it there, instead of going through AT&T when I move to the US later this year.
I accidentally dialed 000 (the emergency number in Australia) once on an old phone of mine because the phone allowed emergency numbers to be called without unlocking the keypad. I thought that was a really stupid feature, because it increases the chances of dialiing it accidentally and when it does happen, it just wastes the time of the emergency response staff who could be dealing with real emergencies instead.
According to Opera's press releases, 27 June 2001 was the launch date for the service.
http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2001/06/27_3/
Sure, with today's coinage, a 1 pound coin doesn't weight that much. But, originally, it was based on the value of a pound (mass) of silver.
This, please God, this. I can't stand squatters. If more people start taking them to court and their domains get taken from them then maybe this ridiculous crap will stop.
The real way to stop this crap is to forbid the sale of domain names, and only allow them to be leased by licenced registrars. Thus, in order to transfer a domain name between parties, the existing lease must either expire or be terminated, and the new registrant can lease it through any registrar they like. This would instantly kill the market for these unethical domain squatters and legitimate businesses would be able to get the domain names they like for a fair and reasonable price.
This is how the auDA successfully manages the use of Australian .au domains and they hardly suffer from the same problems that the global TLDs do.
It depends if the DVD drive has RPC-1 or RPC-2 firmware installed on it. With RPC-1 firmware, you can change the region any number of times. With RPC-2, you're limited to just 5.
It also depends on whether the drive enforces the region encoding in the firmware, or whether it's left to the software. In the latter case, software such as VLC can easily bypass the region encoding. But in the former case, since it's the drive itself enforcing it, it can't. This is the case with the shitty Matshitsu drives that Apple commonly ships. Luckily, for some drives, there's RPC-1 firmware available from rpc1.org so you can reflash the drive.
Something like this won't get off the ground as long as there are people willing to fight against it, and we've got no shortage of those around here.
Just because there is a lot of vocal opposition to some proposal, doesn't mean it doesn't stand a chance of passing. There is a lot of unpopular legislation in many countries that get passed despite significant protests. For example, the DMCA in the USA, and the Australian free trade agreement that gave us DMCA-like crap of our own to live with.
Besides, the article doesn't say for sure whether the plan would be dropped. Conroy basically just said the legislation wouldn't be needed if the ISPs just agreed to do it voluntarily. But the reality Conroy is insane to think that the ISPs would even consider voluntary implementation given their opposition to the plan.
They have merely said that you don't have to pay to use the patents before 2010, but if you use the patents after that, you may need to pay (depending on volume).
No, they didn't say that at all. If you read the MPEG LA news release linked from the summary, it says:
To encourage early marketplace adoption and start-up, the License will provide for a grace period in which no Participation Fees will be payable for products or services sold before January 1, 2006.
So if you're a bar, you can't refuse admittance to a 9-year-old, and refuse to sell them an alcoholic drink that they're too young to safely imbibe? On the basis of age discrimination being illegal?
No, in that case, the denial of service is not merely based on age alone, but rather on the law that prohibits the sale of alcohol to underage people.
Oh, by the way... political beliefs and political party associations aren't in that list!
Yes, that's what the GP was pointing out when he said "political discrimination is not protected" in his country.
How many LOC are there in the project?
The FAQ says:
...the total number of lines of core Miro code, excluding blanks, is 46,258, but changing all the time.