Australia has a problem with region coding, and Australians generally don't see why they shouldn't buy the cheaper legal releases from their neighbours in Indonesia and Hong Kong.
If the "content" "industry" has a problem with their stuff being cheaper somewhere, they should swallow their pill just like all the other people whose lives have been adversely affected by that "globalization" thing. Like if only adverse consequences for one's acts were only mandated for poor or ordinary people.
Curious. Apple seem to only let you change the DVD region several times in their PCs. I wonder if I could complain somewhere?
So do other DVD-rom drives. The number of region changes is part of the official DVD specification, thus forcing users to use illegal-in-the-US-and-other-braindead-countries DVD decrypting software.
Here down under, region free DVD players are quite legal AFAIK. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has stated previously that region codings are anti-competitive and should be banned.
Conversely, we'd like to hear someoen tell us under which U.S. law they would be illegal in the USA... (sounds of crickets chirping)
t's also because things might be considered copyrighted (e.g. Peter Pan in Britain), hateful (e.g. Nazism in Germany or France), or otherwise prohibited in one country but not in another.
So what? If some content is illegal somewhere, it's up to the authorities there to go after the possessors. The media player manufacturer have no business doing the content-police's work, so if they put things like "region codes" in their hardware, it's for other reasons, price-fixing being the most blatantly obvious one.
Region coding was mandated to be part of the DVD specification by governments. Mostly, European if I remember correctly.
Total oxdung. If it were so, multiregion DVDs would be explicitly illegal. And, no, "not compliant with the DVD-Forum" nor "not MPAA-wetdream-compliant" are **NOT** illegal.
No, region-coding is in reality a price-fixing scheme that masquarades as a copy-deterrent system.
Maybe you are right and they do sell more expensive licenses that remove some of these requirements... but the licenses I read about require both. It would be possible for chinese/taiwanese/etc. manufacturers to male logo-less, macrovision-free and region-less players but these may not be legal for import (due to studio lobbying / DMCA and equivalents) in some key markets, like the USA.
With the "war on (some) drugs" going on, it's unlikely that the US customs will take keenly in making sure that ever DVD player shipped into the US is RIAA-wetdream-compliant...
Microsoft bussiness model:
Control the distribution channel (CD's/preinstalled)
Pay for programs, not conent. Google bussiness model:
Control the distribution channel (WEB-HOSTS-SERVICES/WI-FI)
Pay for conent, not programs.
50 years (and more) ago, this was precisely IBM's business model, which rented data-processing equipment, and SOLD Hollerith (punch) cards, making it's money with the punch card volume.
We all know what happenned to the big bad IBM of yesterday...
Never mind the "stealing music is/is not theft" arguments.
Never mind the "artists are hurting" arguments.
Never midn all those economic arguments.
The fact is that the $CONTENT industries have been displaying an incredible amount of arrogance during the last 5-10 years by BUYING
legislature to pass assinine legislation that would fly in the face of logic; remember the law that would ask for every hard disk to check if it was copying copyrighted stuff??? and thus attempt to dictate to the whole society how it should use it's computers???
For this alone, the $CONTENT industry needs nothing less than a good whacking, and what better way to deliver it by having, WE, THE PEOPLE deliver the blows in the form of not paying for it's content?
Let this be construed as showing the croporate world that the people's will is always supreme!
Movie files are so big, they will have to make sure that they can positively downloaded completely and reliably by techmorons before their buyers can be charged for them, because as soon as someone gets billed for a file he can't download, you can guess the uproar that will cause...
Preface Spammers have screwed up so much of what was once usable. Yet most users of the Internet are entirely unaware of it. They see spam only as part of being online. They think it's like other advertising, and some even think it's their ISP doing it.
William R. James March 10, 2003
Thank the Spammers Oddly enough, I remember a time when closing a relay was considered extremely rude. In the early days of the Internet, everyone who connected to it took some responsibility in helping to ensure that all the Internet's traffic was routed to its destination. Some places had better connections than others and some connections were unavailable at times for various reasons. So part of connecting your machine to the network was sharing the load and donating little bits of bandwidth here and there so the Internet ran smoothly for everyone. Relays were important because sometimes a user's home server was unavailable.
Then came the spammers. Because they abused the relays, like they abuse everything else, the relays had to be turned off. They found that they could abuse the relays and cost others hundreds or even thousands of dollars, but it prevented them from losing the $10 dialup account or free NetZero account. It's like a thief who steals a $1000 wedding ring with priceless sentimental value just to sell it for a $20 cocaine fix. Old software which ran perfectly well had to be replaced just to close the hole which was so important to leave open before. Yeah, thank the spammers for that.
But that's not the only thing the spammers have ruined. Free ISPs were growing. These services weren't perfect, they came with ads which were intentionally in the way, but that paid for the service, so it was OK. Over all, NetZero's service was actually pretty good even if it did have that open window in the way. But spammers learned that they could abuse those too, and their mind-set is "abuse it quickly before it goes away" knowing that the abuse is what will make it go away. But each spammer wants to be the one to milk it dry before the next spammer does, and all of them combined make it useless. Thanks, spammers, thanks a lot.
Try querying any database which has email addresses anywhere in it. They have to either make it pay only, or make you type in something associated with an image before you can retrieve data. Why? Because spammers found out there were valid email addresses in them and started hammering the servers with automated software, grabbing the entire database, using up all the bandwidth 1000 times over, just to harvest a handful of addresses from it to abuse as well. So to defend themselves and keep their servers from crashing, database owners had to make it impossible to query automatically. Thank the spammers.
And let's not forget Usenet. Munging addresses was once considered blatant abuse. Now very few people post with a valid address. If you want to discuss something off-line or off-topic with a poster, you either can't do it via email or you have to manually "decode" and type in their address. Thank spammers for that too.
The spammers claim to be running legitimate businesses, but legitimate businesses who ask for email addresses when you download their product get 99.9% garbage addresses now. Sign up for anything online and you have to use an email address which you don't expect to keep. The trust is rightfully gone. Again, that's something else for which you can thank spammers.
If you happen to run an authentic, legitimate business, you can't even post your own email address on your web site anymore. If you do, any addresses you publish for use by customers are instead harvested and added to thousands of spammers' lists. They become no longer usable in a very short time. So even though it may mean fewer orders, and the customer has to type more and may lose trust in your business because you can't give them an email address, you have to use contact forms and hide your address. Thanks, spammers.
And what about those contact forms? They are also targe
But what if the security guys say 'Aw, crap: something wrong with the This Guy Has A Bomb! machine again' and just ignore the false positives? Well, that's when you strap on your boom belt, shout Allahu Akbar and get on a plane...
I didn't know that Admiral Akbar would ever shout anything else than "It's a trap!!!"...
Arranging matters so that everyone in an airport sets off the 'this guy has a bomb!' machine will cause colossal disruption. Outbound flights will be delayed for hours while the mess is sorted out. Inbound flights will circle till fuel runs low then divert elsewhere, thereby disrupting traffic across a whole region. Nobody's been killed, but tens of thousands have been enormously pissed off, at an economic cost that will eventually run into many millions.
The IRA understood this principle very well; every time it phoned-in a phony bomb threat, it incurred considerable cost to the limeys by stopping economic activity in the affected area...
With peak-oil, fusion **STILL** 20 years in the future and croporate governments that foster unprecedented social inequity, that Kurzweil guy has to be on crack to see anything positive in the future.
Seeing a terminal in the local pub running Windows of any kind just makes me cringe! A Treo is capable enough to do the job, just doesn't come with the big fancy touch screen.
Our subway system is controlled by four 25 year-old PDP dinosaurs... On a recent media tour of the control center, the head of operations went near the computers, pulled-out an organizer from his pocket and said that his agenda had more computing power than the four big irons there...
I work as a cashier at a grocery store, and they run MS XP Embedded. We have at least 1 till crash at least once a day. Causing major headaches, I wish we had them running on Linux...
LOL! I do my groceries at a wholesaler next to my place, and their registers run on Windoze. They have the default "clang" beep, and each time they beep, I jump...
If I were bankrupted, I'd most definitely leak-out the source code through untraceable channel, just to show the banks and the other assholes who bankrupted me that their money doesn't mean that they can always have their own way.
Slashdot Mirror
(sounds of crickets chirping)
Total oxdung. If it were so, multiregion DVDs would be explicitly illegal. And, no, "not compliant with the DVD-Forum" nor "not MPAA-wetdream-compliant" are **NOT** illegal.
No, region-coding is in reality a price-fixing scheme that masquarades as a copy-deterrent system.We all know what happenned to the big bad IBM of yesterday...
Never mind the "artists are hurting" arguments.
Never midn all those economic arguments.
The fact is that the $CONTENT industries have been displaying an incredible amount of arrogance during the last 5-10 years by BUYING
legislature to pass assinine legislation that would fly in the face of logic; remember the law that would ask for every hard disk to check if it was copying copyrighted stuff??? and thus attempt to dictate to the whole society how it should use it's computers???For this alone, the $CONTENT industry needs nothing less than a good whacking, and what better way to deliver it by having, WE, THE PEOPLE deliver the blows in the form of not paying for it's content?
Let this be construed as showing the croporate world that the people's will is always supreme!
Movie files are so big, they will have to make sure that they can positively downloaded completely and reliably by techmorons before their buyers can be charged for them, because as soon as someone gets billed for a file he can't download, you can guess the uproar that will cause...
Preface
Spammers have screwed up so much of what was once usable. Yet most users of the Internet are entirely unaware of it. They see spam only as part of being online. They think it's like other advertising, and some even think it's their ISP doing it.
William R. James
March 10, 2003
Thank the Spammers
Oddly enough, I remember a time when closing a relay was considered extremely rude. In the early days of the Internet, everyone who connected to it took some responsibility in helping to ensure that all the Internet's traffic was routed to its destination. Some places had better connections than others and some connections were unavailable at times for various reasons. So part of connecting your machine to the network was sharing the load and donating little bits of bandwidth here and there so the Internet ran smoothly for everyone. Relays were important because sometimes a user's home server was unavailable.
Then came the spammers. Because they abused the relays, like they abuse everything else, the relays had to be turned off. They found that they could abuse the relays and cost others hundreds or even thousands of dollars, but it prevented them from losing the $10 dialup account or free NetZero account. It's like a thief who steals a $1000 wedding ring with priceless sentimental value just to sell it for a $20 cocaine fix. Old software which ran perfectly well had to be replaced just to close the hole which was so important to leave open before. Yeah, thank the spammers for that.
But that's not the only thing the spammers have ruined. Free ISPs were growing. These services weren't perfect, they came with ads which were intentionally in the way, but that paid for the service, so it was OK. Over all, NetZero's service was actually pretty good even if it did have that open window in the way. But spammers learned that they could abuse those too, and their mind-set is "abuse it quickly before it goes away" knowing that the abuse is what will make it go away. But each spammer wants to be the one to milk it dry before the next spammer does, and all of them combined make it useless. Thanks, spammers, thanks a lot.
Try querying any database which has email addresses anywhere in it. They have to either make it pay only, or make you type in something associated with an image before you can retrieve data. Why? Because spammers found out there were valid email addresses in them and started hammering the servers with automated software, grabbing the entire database, using up all the bandwidth 1000 times over, just to harvest a handful of addresses from it to abuse as well. So to defend themselves and keep their servers from crashing, database owners had to make it impossible to query automatically. Thank the spammers.
And let's not forget Usenet. Munging addresses was once considered blatant abuse. Now very few people post with a valid address. If you want to discuss something off-line or off-topic with a poster, you either can't do it via email or you have to manually "decode" and type in their address. Thank spammers for that too.
The spammers claim to be running legitimate businesses, but legitimate businesses who ask for email addresses when you download their product get 99.9% garbage addresses now. Sign up for anything online and you have to use an email address which you don't expect to keep. The trust is rightfully gone. Again, that's something else for which you can thank spammers.
If you happen to run an authentic, legitimate business, you can't even post your own email address on your web site anymore. If you do, any addresses you publish for use by customers are instead harvested and added to thousands of spammers' lists. They become no longer usable in a very short time. So even though it may mean fewer orders, and the customer has to type more and may lose trust in your business because you can't give them an email address, you have to use contact forms and hide your address. Thanks, spammers.
And what about those contact forms? They are also targe
Now watch Gator sue them into oblivion!!!
Isn't technology wonderful???
Quantum coherence? Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not, until curiosity kills the (Shrödinger's) cat???
Just spray a fine aerosol containing traces of the target molecules. Everyone in the airport terminal will trigger the detectors...
With peak-oil, fusion **STILL** 20 years in the future and croporate governments that foster unprecedented social inequity, that Kurzweil guy has to be on crack to see anything positive in the future.
Screw'em.
No need for a torrent. Here are all the PDFs concatenated together in a easy to download 4,289,621 bytes file.
The whole article is pure poppycock, for the very simple reason that music uploading/downloading on a p2p network is **LEGAL** in Canada!!!