However, I also like to actually have my own copy of a lot of books, just so I can re-read whatever I'm in the mood for whenever I like. Don't have to actually _go_ to the library (can go to bookstore ahead of time, buy a book and not read it for 2 weeks if something crops up, and not have to worry about having to return it before getting around to reading it).
I can also participate in 'My dick's bigger than yours because my personal book collection's more extensive' competitions with friends:-)
Or, the media people could just let all the content be free, and charge people not for the information, but for meatspace goods.
Don't know about the rest of you, but if I had full access to all the books ever published & all the music ever played, I'd _still_ go out and buy the 'officially released' meatspace versions.
Hell, how many times have you taped a movie off the TV and then gone out and bought it on video as well? More than a few I bet. And not just for the quality increase either.
There's something nice about having a real book in my hands. Something about having the proper CD with the liner notes printed on paper. I reckon people will still buy that stuff, no matter what.
It might become a little bit more of a luxury item, and perhaps sales will drop some, but it's probably cheaper than all those lawyers they're hiring at the moment:)
Also, if downloading stuff aint illegal anymore, and a lot of it's freely available, people won't really be able to have those 'my dick's bigger than yours cos I've got more ripped MP3s that you' competitions. Hell, they might go back to having 'My dick's bigger than yours because I've got a bigger real CD collection than you' competitions, restimulating the market.
Not to mention all the 'I'd never have bought that if I'd not heard it for free first' arguments....
Movies. Watch 'em in the theater and buy DVD's as you see fit. The MPAA has a lock on this one, we don't have much legal opportunity to fight back (ideas anyone?)
Yeah. Don't give them your money by not buying DVDs. They're not worth the price you pay anyway with the region encoding + forced adverts + no fair use quoting.
It's not like having home copies of movies is essential to life or anything. Just stop buying them and encourage your friends to stop doing so as well.
If you _really_ hate the MPAA for the shit they pull (such as the DeCSS lawsuit & getting Norwgian kids arrested) then don't give them _any_ money and stop going to the theatres as well.
Watching movies is _not_ a prerequisite for life. Take up another hobby. Read more books. The special effects are better anyway:)
Hello. My name is Karellen, and I used to be a movie addict. I would sometimes go to the cinema 2 or 3 times a week to get my fix. I would search out widescreen and 'scope formats of directors cuts on video. But I've been MPAA free since February.
"Do you guys really want to see tampax commercials, or do you pay more attention to things like Frys/Comp USA/Best Buy/Computer stuff?"
I pay more attention to the Tampon ads. I don't need another computer right now, and certainly not from the places that advertise most. I also don't need tampons.
But - the tampon ads have much cuter women in them. Yay!
Uhhh...AFAIK trademarks have always been allowed to exist for eternity, as long as the company that owns them continue to use them, and prosecute infringers to prevent its 'dilution'.
Uh - how can people in Hong Kong commit an offense under the DMCA, as they don't live in the U.S.A.?
Yes, they can commit offenses under international copyright laws (such as making copies unauthorised by the copyright holder that do not fall under the heading of 'fair use'), but I have this strange feeling that the fscked up shit that went into the DMCA (like circumventing & reverse-engineering access control mechanisms) doesn't quite fall under that heading.
I thought up the following point while considering the DeCSS ruling.
The Judge did point out that object (machine) code could not be considered "speech" to get 1st amendment protection as it was not expressive enough.
If the object code is not artistically expressive though, is it copyrightable?
There's a lot of overlap between 'copyrightable' & 'free speech' - I was hard pressed to think of things that fell into one category and not the other. Anyone?
It's an interesting point that I thought up while considering the DeCSS ruling.
The Judge did point out that object (machine) code could not be considered "speech" to get 1st amendment protection as it was not expressive enough.
If the object code is not artistically expressive though, is it copyrightable?
There's a lot of overlap between 'copyrightable' & 'free speech' - I was hard pressed to think of things that fell into one category and not the other. Anyone?
No, I don't have any specific examples of Trojans from Windows shareware sites, because I don't use them.:)
The point is, just because the shareware _site_ is well established, do they in fact check all the _programs_ on it for all known virii & trojan signatures _themselves_, _regularly_? Because the trojan (or virus) may be unknown at the time of initial upload if it's one the author has just written.
As for the 'standard command-line apps' - OK, gif2jpg isn't standard on unix, so you can't do that one.
/me looks silly.
However, the point I was making in that the tools you _do_ get allow you to do a _lot_ more (such as the bulk renaming) than the default Windows tools. Administering a UNIX system, and doing complex things with it that the designers never explicitly planned for is a viable option out of the box. I don't think the same could be said for Windows.
They had a two-step process to make it even cleaner. The first group of people studied the chip and noted exactly what it did in all circumstances. They then wrote down exactly what the chip had to do, but no more.
A second group of people then implemented the new chip from the decriptions given to them by the first.
This two-step approach was made to ensure (and provide documentary evidence) that the people who created the new chip had provably not seen any of the original's 'code'.
"There is no reason that KDE and Gnome need to either be rivals or be merged."
Huh?? If they're not merged then they remain two distinct projects, with the essentially the same goal - to provide the best possible desktop available on.*n.x
I have just read the response sent to slashdot (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/09/05/05482 11) sent by you and just had a couple of comments to make.
First of all, you seem to be under the impression that the drivers and decoders for the:CueCat people have reverse-engineered and built are Digital:Convergence's intellectual property. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
The code and drivers that Digital:Convergence wrote are their IP, granted. And if anyone was to copy that code and claim it as their own, that would indeed be copyright infringement.
However, all the drivers and decoders I have seen claim to be reimplementations, reverse-engineered from the output of the:CueCat device. You yourself mention that they are reverse-engineered implementations in your response, implying that you do not believe that they are copies of Digital:Convergence's own code. This means that they are the IP of their individual authors, not of Digital:Convergence.
Secondly, (in case you are confronted with a case of copyright infringement in the future) the 'Enforce it or lose it' principle with regard to IP is only applicable to trademarks. Copyright (which covers computer code) does not come under this rule. Copyright owners can choose not to prosecute some infringers, and lose no rights when it comes to prosecuting others. (It is in fact the cornerstone of one of GNU/Linux's foundations - the Free Software Foundation's General Public License (GPL))
Hope that this helps with Digital:Convergence's position on this subject.
"I dont know: whats easier, adding stability to Windows, or adding hardware support and UI to linux?"
I'll counter this with a Pearl Of Wisdom (tm) I heard about optimisations.
"It's easier to make a correct program run quick, than it is to make a quick program run correctly"
Ditto the story about the shop with the in-house misson-critical app that would crash on occasion. Despite having the source, they couldn't fix it & hired an external consultant to help. He was given the original code, went through it and rewrote it from scratch over the weekend. When showing it to the other developers who were unable to get the original version to work, the head developer said "But your program takes a second per transaction, while mine only takes one one hundredth of a second." To which the consultant replied "Yes, but my program works. If it doesn't have to work, I can get it to run in zero time and take up zero resources"
Two points being:
1) I think GNU/Linux (plus the other free OSs) have the easier task.
2) I think they did the right thing from the beginning anyway. I'd rather have something that does a few things well that something else that does a lot of things poorly.
And as a sysadmin you routinely download and run binaries from internet servers?
Can you say 'trojan'
Hope you don't end up admining my network anytime soon. What _will_ you do if you're on a closed intranet with no internet access for security reasons? Bring it in on a floppy? Oh, great.
Point being, with.*n.x you can do those, and more, with the standard command-line utilities. There is no need for 3rd party binaries written by some random hacker you've never met who might very well be a cracker.
Still, at least it easy under NT to run those programs as a user with zero privs who can fuck up nothing. Much easier than "su nobody[enter] password[enter] some_command_here[enter] exit[enter]" I'll bet.
One thing I'd really like mozilla mail to do is have a prefs checkbox option that is simply
"View all email as plain text"
So, if I get an HTML email, I see all the tags. If I get a multipart (text AND html), I see both parts, with all the fucking cruft along with that. If I get attachments, I can see the text of all of those as well.
In fact, I want 'view source' for all my emails on by default.
Yes, keep the 'headers' options, so that you can select which headers to view (all, normal, brief) as is currently, and keep the box to get a list of attachments and the option to save them each individually.
But I'd really like an option to view the text of a whole email as plain text. That's what emails were for, and that's the way I want to read mine.
That would solve _all_ of these types of bug (present and future - someone mention in the comments for that bug that if you turn off images from sites, malicious sites could put in links to stylesheets or some other resource - this may be extended in the future), and let me see at a glance all the cruft my colleagues are passing around, and ask them (politely) to stop it.
Never a smoker. Never bothered by smokers. It just doesn't affect me.
If I don't want to be in a smoky place, I just choose a pub or restaurant with a 'non-smoking' section, and eat/drink there.
I don't want other people to be forcibly "civilised" if they don't want to be for my benefit, or to be restricted from partaking in whatever they want provided no-one is forcibly harmed by their actions.
You don't like smokers & the bar you like doesn't _voluntarily_ have a non-smoking section? Don't go there. Encourage your friends not to go there.
If an "http://someaddress.tld/path.html" is found in plain text on a web page (i.e. not in <a href="...">...</a> tags) then mark it up as a link anyway, as is done for such links in plain text emails in the mail reader.
Then we won't even need to drag & drop the link into the address bar to activate plain text links (like the ones 2600 are still allowed to have).
2600 can't be expected to take down the plain text version of an address, as that's even _more_ restrictive than the current ban on linking. (And if they were restricted from this, the free speech issues would be even _stronger_ on their side)
And Mozilla can't be held responsible, as this is just an extra piece of functionality that helps in the general case, and which is mostly implemented anyway (in the mailnews module).
Pity Moz's in feature freeze. And a pity my Copious Free Time (tm) appears to have dried up right now, otherwise I might be tempted to grab a copy of the source, plow through it & have a go myself...
...and they should also accept any number of tabs, vertical tabs and spaces between tokens as well. Welcome to the world of langauges where whitespace is not significant.
That said, M$'s decision to use CR+LF for line endings (instead of just one or the other) the best part of 20 years ago has caused me _so_ many headaches over the years it's untrue. IMO, it's probably the biggest design error they've ever made for something so technically straightforward.
"The problem is we're so dependent on Hollywood for our entertainment that it won't work - how many of us will give up seeing the next Star Wars movie? Really, how many?"
Me.
"We're so dependent"? You might be. Millions of sheep out there might be. There are a number of people here on/. that aren't.
Don't think I'm not bothered about SWII. I am. I just made a decision as of about 6 months ago not to see MPAA-produced movies ever again. (Although I do still watch my old VHS collection - they already have that money and there's nothing I can do about it)
You don't like what they're selling? Or the way they're selling it? Don't buy it. Simple as that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, they are great.
:-)
However, I also like to actually have my own copy of a lot of books, just so I can re-read whatever I'm in the mood for whenever I like. Don't have to actually _go_ to the library (can go to bookstore ahead of time, buy a book and not read it for 2 weeks if something crops up, and not have to worry about having to return it before getting around to reading it).
I can also participate in 'My dick's bigger than yours because my personal book collection's more extensive' competitions with friends
Or, the media people could just let all the content be free, and charge people not for the information, but for meatspace goods.
:)
Don't know about the rest of you, but if I had full access to all the books ever published & all the music ever played, I'd _still_ go out and buy the 'officially released' meatspace versions.
Hell, how many times have you taped a movie off the TV and then gone out and bought it on video as well? More than a few I bet. And not just for the quality increase either.
There's something nice about having a real book in my hands. Something about having the proper CD with the liner notes printed on paper. I reckon people will still buy that stuff, no matter what.
It might become a little bit more of a luxury item, and perhaps sales will drop some, but it's probably cheaper than all those lawyers they're hiring at the moment
Also, if downloading stuff aint illegal anymore, and a lot of it's freely available, people won't really be able to have those 'my dick's bigger than yours cos I've got more ripped MP3s that you' competitions. Hell, they might go back to having 'My dick's bigger than yours because I've got a bigger real CD collection than you' competitions, restimulating the market.
Not to mention all the 'I'd never have bought that if I'd not heard it for free first' arguments....
"We're from the Government - the National Security Agency"
"Oh - so you're the guys I hear breathing on all my telephone converstions?"
"No. That's the FBI"
"So you just set up foreign dictatorships and finance black ops"
"No. That's the CIA. We're the good guys Marty."
Two spooks + Marty (Robert Redford) - Sneakers.
Yeah, just like when they changed the S-boxes in DES before it was released to make it easier for them to crack.
No - wait a minute. That secured DES against differential cryptanalysis, making it harder...
Stop your knee from jerking like that.
Yes, 'none of the above' is a positive choice that should not be confused with apathy.
:)
But 'not interested'????
How exactly do you define apathy?
Movies. Watch 'em in the theater and buy DVD's as you see fit. The MPAA has a lock on this one, we don't have much legal opportunity to fight back (ideas anyone?)
:)
Yeah. Don't give them your money by not buying DVDs. They're not worth the price you pay anyway with the region encoding + forced adverts + no fair use quoting.
It's not like having home copies of movies is essential to life or anything. Just stop buying them and encourage your friends to stop doing so as well.
If you _really_ hate the MPAA for the shit they pull (such as the DeCSS lawsuit & getting Norwgian kids arrested) then don't give them _any_ money and stop going to the theatres as well.
Watching movies is _not_ a prerequisite for life. Take up another hobby. Read more books. The special effects are better anyway
Hello. My name is Karellen, and I used to be a movie addict. I would sometimes go to the cinema 2 or 3 times a week to get my fix. I would search out widescreen and 'scope formats of directors cuts on video. But I've been MPAA free since February.
"Do you guys really want to see tampax commercials, or do you pay more attention to things like Frys/Comp USA/Best Buy/Computer stuff?"
I pay more attention to the Tampon ads. I don't need another computer right now, and certainly not from the places that advertise most. I also don't need tampons.
But - the tampon ads have much cuter women in them. Yay!
Uhhh...AFAIK trademarks have always been allowed to exist for eternity, as long as the company that owns them continue to use them, and prosecute infringers to prevent its 'dilution'.
I think you're thinking of copyright...
Uh - how can people in Hong Kong commit an offense under the DMCA, as they don't live in the U.S.A.?
Yes, they can commit offenses under international copyright laws (such as making copies unauthorised by the copyright holder that do not fall under the heading of 'fair use'), but I have this strange feeling that the fscked up shit that went into the DMCA (like circumventing & reverse-engineering access control mechanisms) doesn't quite fall under that heading.
K.
I thought up the following point while considering the DeCSS ruling.
The Judge did point out that object (machine) code could not be considered "speech" to get 1st amendment protection as it was not expressive enough.
If the object code is not artistically expressive though, is it copyrightable?
There's a lot of overlap between 'copyrightable' & 'free speech' - I was hard pressed to think of things that fell into one category and not the other. Anyone?
It *is* mixed in with a lot of trash sequences as well.
Jeez, why not actually read the article instead of just "first semi-lucent post" karma-whoring?
It's an interesting point that I thought up while considering the DeCSS ruling.
The Judge did point out that object (machine) code could not be considered "speech" to get 1st amendment protection as it was not expressive enough.
If the object code is not artistically expressive though, is it copyrightable?
There's a lot of overlap between 'copyrightable' & 'free speech' - I was hard pressed to think of things that fell into one category and not the other. Anyone?
Nicely spotted. :)
My bet is that the 7% that haven't used "The Web" don't actually know what it is, and have just been using "The Internet" with Internet Explorer.
Or just been using AOL.
No, I don't have any specific examples of Trojans from Windows shareware sites, because I don't use them. :)
The point is, just because the shareware _site_ is well established, do they in fact check all the _programs_ on it for all known virii & trojan signatures _themselves_, _regularly_? Because the trojan (or virus) may be unknown at the time of initial upload if it's one the author has just written.
As for the 'standard command-line apps' - OK, gif2jpg isn't standard on unix, so you can't do that one.
/me looks silly.
However, the point I was making in that the tools you _do_ get allow you to do a _lot_ more (such as the bulk renaming) than the default Windows tools. Administering a UNIX system, and doing complex things with it that the designers never explicitly planned for is a viable option out of the box. I don't think the same could be said for Windows.
Not quite.
They had a two-step process to make it even cleaner. The first group of people studied the chip and noted exactly what it did in all circumstances. They then wrote down exactly what the chip had to do, but no more.
A second group of people then implemented the new chip from the decriptions given to them by the first.
This two-step approach was made to ensure (and provide documentary evidence) that the people who created the new chip had provably not seen any of the original's 'code'.
HTH
Karellen
"There is no reason that KDE and Gnome need to either be rivals or be merged."
.*n.x
Huh?? If they're not merged then they remain two distinct projects, with the essentially the same goal - to provide the best possible desktop available on
How can they not be rivals?
Doug Davis,
2 11) sent by you and just had a couple of comments to make.
:CueCat people have reverse-engineered and built are Digital:Convergence's intellectual property. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
:CueCat device. You yourself mention that they are reverse-engineered implementations in your response, implying that you do not believe that they are copies of Digital:Convergence's own code. This means that they are the IP of their individual authors, not of Digital:Convergence.
I have just read the response sent to slashdot (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/09/05/0548
First of all, you seem to be under the impression that the drivers and decoders for the
The code and drivers that Digital:Convergence wrote are their IP, granted. And if anyone was to copy that code and claim it as their own, that would indeed be copyright infringement.
However, all the drivers and decoders I have seen claim to be reimplementations, reverse-engineered from the output of the
Secondly, (in case you are confronted with a case of copyright infringement in the future) the 'Enforce it or lose it' principle with regard to IP is only applicable to trademarks. Copyright (which covers computer code) does not come under this rule. Copyright owners can choose not to prosecute some infringers, and lose no rights when it comes to prosecuting others. (It is in fact the cornerstone of one of GNU/Linux's foundations - the Free Software Foundation's General Public License (GPL))
Hope that this helps with Digital:Convergence's position on this subject.
Adam Spragg.
"I dont know: whats easier, adding stability to Windows, or adding hardware support and UI to linux?"
I'll counter this with a Pearl Of Wisdom (tm) I heard about optimisations.
"It's easier to make a correct program run quick, than it is to make a quick program run correctly"
Ditto the story about the shop with the in-house misson-critical app that would crash on occasion. Despite having the source, they couldn't fix it & hired an external consultant to help. He was given the original code, went through it and rewrote it from scratch over the weekend. When showing it to the other developers who were unable to get the original version to work, the head developer said "But your program takes a second per transaction, while mine only takes one one hundredth of a second." To which the consultant replied "Yes, but my program works. If it doesn't have to work, I can get it to run in zero time and take up zero resources"
Two points being:
1) I think GNU/Linux (plus the other free OSs) have the easier task.
2) I think they did the right thing from the beginning anyway. I'd rather have something that does a few things well that something else that does a lot of things poorly.
Nice idea.
.*n.x you can do those, and more, with the standard command-line utilities. There is no need for 3rd party binaries written by some random hacker you've never met who might very well be a cracker.
And as a sysadmin you routinely download and run binaries from internet servers?
Can you say 'trojan'
Hope you don't end up admining my network anytime soon. What _will_ you do if you're on a closed intranet with no internet access for security reasons? Bring it in on a floppy? Oh, great.
Point being, with
Still, at least it easy under NT to run those programs as a user with zero privs who can fuck up nothing. Much easier than "su nobody[enter] password[enter] some_command_here[enter] exit[enter]" I'll bet.
K.
One thing I'd really like mozilla mail to do is have a prefs checkbox option that is simply
"View all email as plain text"
So, if I get an HTML email, I see all the tags. If I get a multipart (text AND html), I see both parts, with all the fucking cruft along with that. If I get attachments, I can see the text of all of those as well.
In fact, I want 'view source' for all my emails on by default.
Yes, keep the 'headers' options, so that you can select which headers to view (all, normal, brief) as is currently, and keep the box to get a list of attachments and the option to save them each individually.
But I'd really like an option to view the text of a whole email as plain text. That's what emails were for, and that's the way I want to read mine.
That would solve _all_ of these types of bug (present and future - someone mention in the comments for that bug that if you turn off images from sites, malicious sites could put in links to stylesheets or some other resource - this may be extended in the future), and let me see at a glance all the cruft my colleagues are passing around, and ask them (politely) to stop it.
"A couple of years ago, people didn't expect to have Word Processors to check your spelling as you type."
Yeah, and that sucks too.
It slows me (and everyone else I know who can type) down no end by interrupting and destroying a chain of thought, or just the general flow of typing.
Turn it all off. Spell check at the end and fix problems then. It takes less time in the long run cos you're spending less time context switching.
Never a smoker. Never bothered by smokers. It just doesn't affect me.
If I don't want to be in a smoky place, I just choose a pub or restaurant with a 'non-smoking' section, and eat/drink there.
I don't want other people to be forcibly "civilised" if they don't want to be for my benefit, or to be restricted from partaking in whatever they want provided no-one is forcibly harmed by their actions.
You don't like smokers & the bar you like doesn't _voluntarily_ have a non-smoking section? Don't go there. Encourage your friends not to go there.
How about a new feature for Mozilla:
If an "http://someaddress.tld/path.html" is found in plain text on a web page (i.e. not in <a href="...">...</a> tags) then mark it up as a link anyway, as is done for such links in plain text emails in the mail reader.
Then we won't even need to drag & drop the link into the address bar to activate plain text links (like the ones 2600 are still allowed to have).
2600 can't be expected to take down the plain text version of an address, as that's even _more_ restrictive than the current ban on linking. (And if they were restricted from this, the free speech issues would be even _stronger_ on their side)
And Mozilla can't be held responsible, as this is just an extra piece of functionality that helps in the general case, and which is mostly implemented anyway (in the mailnews module).
Pity Moz's in feature freeze. And a pity my Copious Free Time (tm) appears to have dried up right now, otherwise I might be tempted to grab a copy of the source, plow through it & have a go myself...
...and they should also accept any number of tabs, vertical tabs and spaces between tokens as well. Welcome to the world of langauges where whitespace is not significant.
That said, M$'s decision to use CR+LF for line endings (instead of just one or the other) the best part of 20 years ago has caused me _so_ many headaches over the years it's untrue. IMO, it's probably the biggest design error they've ever made for something so technically straightforward.
*sigh*
"The problem is we're so dependent on Hollywood for our entertainment that it won't work - how many of us will give up seeing the next Star Wars movie? Really, how many?"
/. that aren't.
Me.
"We're so dependent"? You might be. Millions of sheep out there might be. There are a number of people here on
Don't think I'm not bothered about SWII. I am. I just made a decision as of about 6 months ago not to see MPAA-produced movies ever again. (Although I do still watch my old VHS collection - they already have that money and there's nothing I can do about it)
You don't like what they're selling? Or the way they're selling it? Don't buy it. Simple as that.