Reading about this today, I found that the scope of this particular decision is less scary than I initially assumed -- it's limited to prisoners who meet a standard as being "sexually dangerous", so they're not just being held without due process. Apparently this applies to about 100 prisoners nationwide.
I found this quite scary. One of the petitioners in the case was sentenced to just over 3 years for receipt of child pornography. Essentially, for possessing verboten images. Fine. He knew it was illegal or should have known, so 3 years in prison for possessing images--not touching a child, just obtaining illicit images of a child--is arguably fair and just. But...now he's subject to civil commitment FOR LIFE, not for sexually abusing a child (life incarceration for that would be arguably fair and just), but for possessing images?
The possibility of life in prison not for harming a child, but for merely receiving images of such harm--and after a sentence limited to 3 years was justly imposed by a judge knowing the facts of the case, and served by the offender--does not seem at all fair and just. V for Vendetta was on BBC America last night, and as much as it pains me to make the comparison, I'm reminded of the secret hoards of illicit art and verboten books kept by V and by Stephen Fry's character--will possessing a copy of Nabokov's Lolita one day make you subject first to a short obscenity sentence and then an indefinite civil commitment because anyone who enjoys the book must be a potentially sexually dangerous person? Will there be secret collections of David Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Jock Sturges prints, because their owners have to fear being civilly committed if they're ever incarcerated for an unrelated crime? Exactly where will these lines in the sand be drawn, once the tides come in?
This is a dangerous precedent. And, there should be truth in sentencing, period--ten years in jail should be ten years in jail, not five in jail and five on parole, or ten in jail then indefinite civil confinement.
Please oh please, with so many tech enthusiats here on/., please tell me *someone* knows where I can download a crusty old copy of Microsoft Bob. It is undeniably the greatest flop in the history of operating systems/environments, and I've been looking for a copy to situate on a VMware file or a partition right next to Windows 1.01, MS OS/2 Server 1.3, AT&T System V, and all the rest I've collected.
What can I say--I'm an ancient OS and old game enthusiast. So, with all the vast resources here, can anyone point me to the fabled Microsoft Bob? And no, a Google search yielded nada in the downloads department. Bob was too useless a program even for the Abandonware people to keep...;-)
But to get back on topic, WinXP won't be a failure--it will bring the moderate stability of WinNT (which is more than enough for Joe and Jane Average) to the gaming compatibility of Win9x/DOS. It is bound to be a success, particularly since OEMs will start shipping most new PCs with it. Like it or not, XP will ship on time and it will have enough new features to get Joe Average jazzed. Remember that just because geeks like us can run cd burning apps, image managers, etc., doesn't mean that the average guy or gal can figure them out or wants to spend the time finding and configuring them--but if it comes with the OS and is dumbed down for the typical consumer, that's a different story. That's why both Apple and MS are integrating functions that traditionally belonged to external apps, into the OS.
And with all the OSes I have to choose from, I use Win98SE modified by 98lite. Not because it's better than anything else--it isn't--but because it runs more games.:-( Crappy reason, but that's how it goes. I just use what does the most, and since I love gaming, Win98SE currently does the most.
The same will be true of WinXP when it comes out, and therefore it will be a success, like it or not. Pragmatism usually wins in the end, although idealism looks prettier.
I was drinking hot coffee when I read your comment. You made me laugh, you bastard--have you ever chuckled hot coffee out your nose? It's not pleasant, I assure you...;-)
The people who think that the government might try to block release of WinXP are quite frankly suffering from dementia, hysteria, or are just plain on crack.
Doesn't anyone here read the financial news or watch CNN or FoxNews financial reports? The government is trying to expedite things because Microsoft has been in settlement talks with some of the States who've filed suit. Arizona (or was it New Mexico? I think Arizona) has already withdrawn itself from the suit.
The fact is that the MS case is waning, and the world at large just wants to get it over with "for the sake of the [stock] market". A few geeks like us who hate Microsoft, and a few competitors who *really* hate Microsoft, do not make up for all the ordinary people who use Microsoft products at home and work every day, and who see it as just a benign thing on their computer that helps them do stuff.
Like it or not, face it: the Court of Appeals has basically said that MS will not get broken up. Sure, their reasoning for remand was that Jackson misbehaved, but in reality do you think the next judge is going to order a break-up after the prior Appeals Court Smack-Down? Fuck no. Microsoft will get some injunctions handed to it not to engage in certain anti-competitive practices, such as forbidding OEMs from installing software (like AOL--you know AOL will make deals with big OEMs to get on the WinXP desktop, since their dealings with MS have crumbled), get a few fines, and that will be the end of it.
None of it will affect you or I or Microsoft even. The game is nearly over, and like it or not, even though Microsoft lost, they won--in that they will not be broken up, and they will most likely receive a little slap on the wrist now that the new DOJ and some of the States have changed tune.
It was grand--he made a four foot by three foot refracting lens out of a block of glass. I don't know how he ground and polished that huge hunk of glass, but he made a rather odd-looking rectangular refracting lens mounte quite high in a mobile wooden frame, with the point of convergence far enough from the ground to keep it from starting fires when out in the sun. Our astronomy class got to play with it on a bright day, and it's amazing what a large refractor can do. We got a can of Mountain Dew to come to a quick boil, and of course the refractor vaporized the coloring from the outside of the aluminum can in short order. Lighting my cigar in it was instantaneous of course, though I did manage to scorch my knuckles painfully in the process (no real damage, but--ouch!).
...because I hear those cement overshoes can be a bitch to get off. Especially once you've somehow found yourself at the bottom of a river...
Some of the online casinos are apparently run by some very shady characters. Some are just enterprising businessmen with a sporting bent. But some have friends with accents, da?;-)
If you thought the original Italian mafia was bad, wait until a surly Russian gentleman comes to your door and force-feeds you gallons of borscht until you're begging to pay up...
But that doesn't matter because Microsoft, in this political climate, cannot get away with it like they got away with pressuring IBM many a year ago. HP, with its sizable resources, could afford lawyers as good as Microsoft's and get not just a judgement against Microsoft for illegal anticompetitive practices, but a judgement for actual and punitive damages more than large enough to cover attorney's fees and reinvigorate their bottom line. After all, MS may have gotten the break-up order vacated on appeal because of improper actions by Judge Jackson, but they've still been found guilty of anticompetitive practices and await resentencing.
Microsoft can pull that shit with the little guys, but not with the big ones, not in this day and age. Aside from which, they wouldn't want to pull that stuff with the big boys--they make too much money off HP, and the Linux market would be just a niche market overall--which is why HP doesn't sell Linux desktops in the first place. Not enough people want them.
Hell, not enough people wanted them to keep VA Linux in the hardware business, either, and they had a ton of ads here, in the heart of the Linux community! You don't need to attribute to malice what can easily and more provably be explained by a simple lack of market. Aside from some businesses and some government entities, the only people using Linux on the desktop are geeks. Geeks almost always either build our own PCs, or buy them from specialty sources, not from mainstream vendors. therefore it wouldn't be cost-effective for most mainstream vendors to offer Linux desktops. Why interrupt your perfect assembly line somewhere so that you can install Linux on a tiny fraction of one percent of the machines? It's not worth the overhead. And then, factor in support--why on Earth would HP want to provide Linux support staff in addition to its Windows people? I guess they could sell the Linux boxen sans support services, but then a fraction of users would still be returning the hardware because of some software glitch, and they'd have to have Linux staff to track down the issue and determine whether it's the hardware or the software, and then they'd have to resell the machine at a markdown. What a pain in the ass.
See, that's why most big manufacturers don't do Linux desktops. It isn't fear of Microsoft--look at what IBM and other companies, who do use MS software in some of their products, are doing to promote Linux, without a fear of MS. It's just that the Linux desktop userbase is already smaller than their Windows base, and most of them wouldn't buy an HP or Compaq or whatever box in the first place, being technically savvy and able to roll their own or buy online or from a local shop at a very reduced price.
So if you rweally want an HP desktop without Windows, get a whole lot of people to ask HP for one. Then they'll offer it. But it's not going to happen because there aren't enough interested people. HP deals in economies of scale, not in what a small subset of a small subset of PC users may or may not want as an option.
What kind of self-respecting geek wants an HP?
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Microsoft and the GPL
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· Score: 2
You know, if you want to buy a Windows PC, then yes, it *IS* your fault and your problem that it isn't available without Windows. Buy another machine, build another machine, or even better complain to HP and tell them to sell you a computer without an operating system pre-installed. If they won't, well, don't give them your business and eventually, when they get lots of calls and letters from people who want a Windows-less option, they will realize that they're missing out on a significant market. But it is their right to put whatever OS they want on their brand of PC. Bitch to them, not to me.
Of course, that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with what I was talking about in this thread (Yep, that's me too--forgot the account password, so my work PC has a cookie for SirWinston, and my home PC has a cookie for Sir_Winston--but anyway), which is the integration into the OS of functions which have before now been done by external apps.
But, NO, it is not a violation of you the alleged "customer" that HP will probably not sell you one of their shitty PCs without Windows installed, because they as the company get to decide what they want to sell, and you as the customer get to decide whether you want to purchase it or to buy something else. It's a free market, my friend, and there are many comparable choices for almost every computer product. You can get Linux preloaded on everything from a handheld to a set-top box to a PC to a high-end IBM RISC machine. So forgive me if I don't see it as being such a cruel and unforgivable plight if you cannot buy a shitty nonstandard HP machine with Linux preloaded. If there's a sizable market, they'll do it. So start writing to them and stop whining. You have plenty of choices, like the choice to buy a competing product or to support online vendors or screwdriver shops, instead of a company like HP which is actually at least as bad as Microsoft in terms of customer support and which is in bed with Intel over their Itanium piece of crap and all manner of other negative things. You can also choose to let HP know that you want a Linux option, instead of complaining here where it makes no difference. As I said, HP wants to make money like every other company, so if enough people ask then they'll damn well give you your option, since the many options from other sources don't seem to be good enough for you.
As long as I've given up moderation in this story-
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Review: Tomb Raider
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· Score: 4
I might as well give my take on the movie. Basically, IT'S A FUCKING POPCORN FLICK, GODDAMMIT! It's not supposed to be a "film" or have any pretensions to greatness. It's entertainment, the kind of mindless entertainment that everyone except whiny pretentious little bitches like the geek comic book store guy on *The Simpsons* likes to watch every once in a while. Sometimes we want a little escapism with pretty scenery and totally outrageous and unrealistic themes and actions and characters. Sometimes this takes the form of things which actually have literary merit, like *Lord of the Rings*, or filmic value, like *Return of the Jedi*. However, the desire to be entertained and escape into a mythic universe for a couple hours is separate from any other value a movie or book may have, except for overly pretentious geeks like our friend from 'The Android's Dungeon'.
It's only that kind of poor, misguided soul who could nitpick a movie or book whose sole goal is to be enjoyable, mindless pulp fiction. You don't have to be mindless to enjoy it--you just have to want to let your frontal lobes relax after a hard bout of life, and let the more base parts enjoy a little tit, ass, action, fantasy, etc. And that's the kind of movie this was meant to be. It never tried to be more, so slamming it for being what it was intended to be is just bullshit.
After all, as someone who's seen it, I can say that it was far more entertaining than a movie like *The Phantom Menace*, which not only was a bad movie and bad science fiction, it tried to be a "film" and failed miserably. The only people who weren't disappointed in Episode I were hardcore SW and SF fans and very young children who couldn't comprehend the movie's failings and liked the shiny things and the stupid sidekick. Conversely, the only people who *are* disappointed in *Tomb Raider* are the pretentious geeks who wanted it to be serious SF or more geek-nitpicker friendly, and the critics who want all movies to be "films" with some sort of artistic, dramaturgical, or serious comedic, value, instead of accepting the truism that sometimes an entertaining movie can just be an entertaining mopvie without having to have some other value. The critics who realize that sometimes it's OK to let our higher reasoning parts take a rest and just let our visceral instincts have some mindless fun--like Roger Ebert--acknowledge that this is a good three-star action/adventure. It isn't a *Raiders of the Lost Ark*, but it does deliver the action and adventure it promises. And just because you *can* load an action/adventure movie with more meaningful themes, to make it into an Indiana Jones type film, doesn't mean you have to or even should.
If you want action and adventure and entertainment you don't have to and shouldn't analyze, then this is your summer action flick. I'f you're a nitpicking dork who can't just relax for a couple hours and enjoy it, then don't bother going. But the suggestion that all entertainment has to have some filmic or literary meaning is just plain misguided. Sometimes we want art and meaning, and sometimes we want to watch shit blow up and watch calves flex and tits strain. Criticizing *Tomb Raider* for not having a less stretchy plot and more filmic meaning is like criticizing *Holly Fucks Beavertown* or most Jackie Chan movies (though a few rhave deeper value) for the same reason.
I don't want Hollywood to *only* make mindless titty-filled action flicks. But I also wouldn't want them to *only* make meaningful films. It's like comparing RPGs that take some knowledge and thought to FPS that take mostly brute reflex and quick motor skills but only rudimentary strategic skills. Again, sometimes you want to think, and sometimes you want to see stuff explode.
The easy way to reset the CMOS is to turn the computer's power on and off several times in a row. It will make the BIOS assume that something is set incorrectly, and revert to defaults. This works on Award BIOS machines for sure, and I'd assume it's pretty standard, so that entering fucked-up values in the CMOS won't prevent the machine from running long enough to change them.
I had to do this with a motherboard once after a failed overclock attempt--it kept hanging on POST because the FSB was set too high in BIOS and the system wasn't stable enough to even start. On-off-on-off-on-off and finally the CMOS cleared.
But, some people may be a wee bit squeamish about that, if they don't trust the motherboard maker and power supply maker enough to have made a product which can take a little abuse.
Alternatively, most new motherboards have a jumper onboard to discharge CMOS manually. The reason I had to reset CMOS the hard way that one time was because it was an older mobo with no discharge jumper.
So, just RTFM for the motherboard, and discharge the CMOS through the jumper, if it has one. Of course, this guy with the laptop might not have the luxury of a manual which says or a motherboard with such a jumper, since laptop makers don't like us to crack/em open and muck about. But the odds are taking it apart would show a jumper somewhere near the CMOS chip or its battery back up, which serves the function to discharge CMOS. It's worth looking, since if it were still under warranty Fujitsu probably just would have done the reset gratis.
Actually, I think it *is* the hardware that makes the system, and I think history bears it out. Let's see:
Atari invents the home Pong console, practically the first of its kind.
Other companies build various other boxes, some of which can play more than one game. The original Pong systems were outclassed, but then--
The Atari 2600 comes on the scene and beats out the Odyssey, the Vectrex, and other consoles, mostly because of better hardware design. The cartridge format allowed for more and better games, and the hardware made better games possible. Therefore the software developers came, because the platform was powerful and relatively easy to write for.
Nintendo comes along, and no one in this country had ever heard of them. Yet their console had such technical superiority and performance that the 2600 was doomed, and game makers sold their souls into Nintendo slavery just to get the right to code for it.
Other systems, such as Sega's SMS, had good hardware, but Nintendo had already captured the mindset of the market and most of the software makers. There does come a point at which it's too late, despite technical merits, but it's technical merits which turn the tide.
That's why, fast forward to the days of the PS versus N64, the PS won. The Nintendo had a better processor, but overall the PS was more advanced--it had CDs instead of cartridges. Game developers loved the CDs and hated the cartridges. To program a game into the small space of a N64 cartridge took more effort than if you have a full 650MB at your fingertips. Also, you don't need to license a proprietary cartridge format. So ultimately it was the superiority of the hardware which won over the game developers.
I think this is going to be more and more the case, since there have been no major advances in gameplay for years. What is going to get more important is photorealism, and the platform which can offer the best realism and still have ease of programming on its side will win the developers come the next generation of consoles.
We see the same thing in the PC gaming community, with video cards. 3DFX got game developers to code to their proprietary library because the performance was so much better and the effects the game devs could create were so much more intense. That abrubtly fell off when nVidia started making cards that were as good that people started buying, so the developers dropped the 3DFX-only route in favor of DirectX and OpenGL, which can be used with any card. But there was a period when 3DFX was so superior that gamers were only buying Voodoo cards, and so it made sense to code to the 3DFX cards only.
WinBond chips do the dinky stuff that anyone could do, heck even Cyrix could make chips that do it. It's just hardware temperature monitoring and timing stuff, things that can easily be done by any other semiconductor company. They also make other chips, but the odds are that a Winbond chip on your motherboard is just there doing low-leval hardware monitoring for the BIOS etc. If Winbond chips were to have anything objectionable to the average consumer built in, then VIA, nVidia, or anyone else could quite easily make an alternative. Just recall the disaster that was the P!!! serial number--
Intel: "Look! It's good for e-commerce!"
Consumers: "Fuck you, we don't want serial numbers on our hardware that can get read by our software and sent to other people."
Intel: "We're making a utility available to turn it off and it won't be a 'feature' of the next chip revision. Sorry."
When push comes to shove, some other company will provide hard drives, chipsets, etc., with no copy protection restrictions, and some enterprising hackers will provide software to emulate the protection measures so that SDMI or other "protected" bits and bytes will work on any system.
Peopla often think of the fans as noise culprits, but you're right to point out that hard drives can be just as bad or worse. As an example, the older Quantum Fireballs sounded like there was a little jet inside your PC case whenever spinning up, down, or doing a lot of seeking.
But the recent Quantum Fireball 1ct drives are the quietest, bar none. The 1ct is their budget line, meaning that performance is mediocre, which is fine as long as you're not compressing a lot of video or doing other high-bandwidth things that would make the HD a bottleneck. They're so quiet though that StorageReview decided to use them in their testbed system, so that the noisiness of other hard drives could be judged.
Of course, with Quantum getting gobbled by Maxtor recently, buy a 1ct fast if you're in the market for a very, very quiet drive. Quantum's quality has always been considered good, and Maxtor will probably be honoring Quantum's warrantees for a while.
Also, since Maxtor has a bunch of Quantum drives to get rid of, they've been using them in place of their own cheap brands in the store-brand drive lines, like for CompUSA. I headed to the local CompUSA store last week for their Memorial Day Sale since they advertised 20GB drives for $49.95 after the mail-in rebate, and bought several since I needed redundant storage and drive speed didn't matter. All were regular Quantum Fireball 1ct drives, with a little note from Maxtor (who usually make the CompUSA brand drives) saying that they'd purchased Quantum and that the enclosed drive was "up to their high standards of quality" or some such. I was happy, since the Fireball 1ct drives are much faster than the Maxtor drives usually sold under the CompUSA brand, and quieter too. So I now have a very, very quiet RAID.:-)
>There are lots of non-Sony, non-Sharp, non-Toshiba, non-Philips makers
But almost all of them use Sony or Mitsubishi parts. The Trinitron and Diamondtron tubes are standard in most good CRTs, and while I don't know much about LCDs, I'm sure there's probably a similar situation where 2 or 3 manufacturers make some of the important components or license some necessary IP used in almost all. So if all the major companies back content protection, they can say "include content protection or we won't sell you [needed widget]." Then you have the market effectively in total control by the content barons. Another possibility is to create a content encryption and playback system which will not work at all with standard, non-protected ports.
Naturally, there will be hardware hacks to remove protection from monitors, or to make non-protected monitors work with protected content. But they will be illegal circumvention devices under the DMCA, so impossible for consumers to legally obtain unless they live in a truly free country. Even so, they will require too much technical expertise for the former, or be too esoteric for the latter, to ever reach the average consumer.
What we have is a few large conglomerates setting themselves up as IP barons, just as we had the robber barons of the 19th century or the nobility of the feudal systems in earlier centuries. IP barons will have rights and opportunities and modes of existence far removed from what the average citizen ever sees. And that's not the way it's supposed to work. Unregulated capitalism is as evil and crushing and divisive as any system ever conjured in history. I'm all for capitalism, but with responsible consumer protection.
> In the FBI's defense, they are saddled with "justifying" everything within the law.
> The CIA and NSA, on the other hand, can break the law all day long and get away with it.
> Different structures, different sets of accountability.
Well, the FBI gets singled out because, of all the agencies you mention, the FBI is the only one that's a consistent threat to the American people themselves. The FBI and ATF together are, in my opinion, the most egregeous threat to civil liberties in this country. Waco and Ruby Ridge aren't even what I'm talking about, although they were absolutely horrendous. What I'm talking about is the fact that the FBI, even after J. Edgar Hoover's reign of terror, has spied on citizens without cause or warrant, kept dossiers on people based merely on political beliefs, and with the ATF seems to raid everyone who collects legal guns as per our 2nd Amendment rights if a "flag" goes up--i.e., don't own too many guns, or just a few guns and have non-mainstream political ideals.
Contrast this with the NSA and CIA. The latter doesn't even investigate Americans, and even if they did they're concerned with intelligence. The CIA doesn't care if you have a bunch of fanatical religious followers living with you in Texas, have unusual political beliefs and a survivalist mentality, own two hundred firearms, operate a terabyte RAID array of copyrighted mp3s, pirated DivXs, and hardcore child pornography, grow massive fields of marijuana and coca, evade your taxes, and do all sorts of other major and minor violations. In fact, they'd likely just discard any such information unless it could prove useful to them, since they are interested in things with important international ramifications or at least intelligence interest, not minor domestic affairs. They probably would just destroy info on you, or at least lock it up rather than passing it on, if you are a U.S. citizen caught up in their intel. And I say this as someone who used to have lengthy dinners with a former Deputy Director of the CIA each weekend, who was fond of talking policy if understandably not willing to talk about some things. The only threat the CIA ever posed to us was their experimentation with drugs and radiation on some unsuspecting citizens back in the 50s and 60s, which was horrible but confined to a small number of people and would be too risky to do these days.
And as for the NSA, they're charged with domestic intelligence and security issues and do not care about most things the FBI and ATF would be all over. They may consult on code cracking, but all in all they're not much of a threat compared to the FBI and ATF.
And then there's the IRS, but that's another matter entirely...;-)
It's about the fact that the entire cultures of the Web and also of USENET are changing. Content providers aren't just not offering freebies, which as you point out is economically understandable; they are also putting in absurd "copy protection" mechanisms, digital watermarking, etc.
As an example, the number of sites I run across with stupid and ineffectual but nonetheless annoying "anti-copy scripts" is increasing exponentially. Usually they try to disable right-clicking to get a context menu, by throwing up an inane message about not being allowed to copy content. Naturally, the scripts can be disabled by any competent person, or can be bypassed by simply right-clicking and pressing return to get rid of the box and right-clicking again fast enough. But they represent an altogether alarming shift in attitude. No longer are people sharing information, data, resources--they're "displaying" those resources, but not allowing them to be "used" and reused.
The most obvious examples are images and multimedia. If I go to a website, sometimes I see a nice background pattern or image I'd like to save to use on my desktop. But, oh, wait, someone has disabled right-clicking. Bah. I can get around it easily, but most average net surfers will not be able to. Ditto for images--for example, my father was on a website with tractor images, and for some godforsaken reason he actually collects antique tractors; he saw pictures of the same model tractor he has, but in a beautiful already-restored condition, and wanted to save them. Bang, disabled. What would it possibly hurt him to have those images available locally? And of course RealMedia and the Microsoft asf/wmf formats exist mainly for the purpose of streaming video or audio without the user being able to save the clips.
I don't know about you, but I don't like what that represents. The sad part is that even podunk personal sites are getting into the act and restricting content from being copied to a local disk. This is just not in the spirit of sharing and goodwill and community; it's extending meatspace limits on property into the digital realm where those limits are entirely artificial and do not belong. If you release something into the digital webbified world, you should expect people to want to copy it, and you should welcome that as the result of a cyberworld where copying items has virtually no cost. Otherwise, release it somewhere else, not on the net.
To make matters worse, this is a very short-sighted attitude. Web sites disappear all the time, and if no one can copy their content locally, that content will disappear along with the website if the content was copy-protected and view-only.
Plus, the whole attitude behind that is just selfish and contrary to the principles the Web and USENET were founded on. Just think of the recent story about gaming sites closing right and left--this didn't involve copy-protection, but it does involve that attitude of not being part of the community so much as being a business first last and always. Many excellent gaming sites had worthwhile, even unique content, and were forced to close. Yet I can't recall a single one making their resources available to the rest of the community, say by giving a free licence to host any of the dead site's resources on other more successful gaming sites, temporarily at least. Funny, I thought gaming was such a community thing, and that gaming sites are an outgrowth of that community. Yet no one seems to share like a community; if a site dies, usually all its unique content dies with it, never to be seen again.
Another issue is the artificial restrictions and dangers created by digital watermarking. Today watermarking is used almost exclusively on images, but the applications for the future are unlimited. Today, it is most commonly membership sites that insert personally identifiable UserID and date and IP information into images, so that if those images turn up elsewhere, someone particular can be blamed and kicked out. But with the technologies companies like Microsoft are pushing, even non-membership sites could watermark content and persecute people for noncommercial copying of it. Watermarks will turn up in audio and video streams, background images, every kind of data. And when that happens, there will be no community on the Net; resources will never again be shared; the rules of meatspace will effectively have been artificially grafted onto cyberspace.
Even today watermarking causes problems. For a very long time USENET has been a place where people noncommercially share not just chat and other text, but any sort of data and information they are mutually interested in. There's a group my dad can post to about tractors, and even post pictures of his tractors or get images or video involving tractors. You can find groups which post high-res scans of photographic art. You can find groups for freeware and groups for pirated applications, groups for start-up sounds and groups for full mp3s, groups for pr0n and groups for bird photography. The spirit of USENET was always the spirit of noncommercial sharing of digital content, both original and borrowed from the Web and scanned from meatspace.
But, companies from the Web feel free to spam USENET with ads for commercial websites, causing my service provider costs to skyrocket, and then complain when their content is posted for free to USENET. They shouldn't spam USENET users if they don't want their stuff to be posted onto USENET. I think it's rightfully open season on content providers who spam us without our consent; we damn well should reproduce their content without their consent. Tit-for-tat.
Yet, a few days ago I was scanning through some groups and ran across a poster who was not only told by a commercial website to stop posting their images, but this commercial website posted the man's name, address, and telephone number to USENET based on matching the digital watermark in the images to a UserID and billing information in their database. He repeated the message several times. I could not believe it. They published his personal info for all to see, for posting a few images he got from them after they spammed USENET with ads. That is a violation of the highest order. And this is the sort of attitude some arrogant content providers are getting. We're not in for a rosy future.
That's all I really have to say about that, except to say that the site that published this man's personal info was http://www.photostudio17.com and I hope there's a script kiddie or haxor out there with his name on them. The USENET article in question is--aw hell, my crappy news server expired the original articles, but some message-IDs that are related are MPG.1558a2f6e185166a989de4@news.cncdsl.com kaTH6.49361$U4.11780044@news1.rdc1.tn.home.com MPG.1559893ed8cd22a6989de5@news.cncdsl.com and many others you'll find in the stated group, to corroborate the story.
In addition, does anyone have information on how to remove various types of digital watermarks? I can post the images in question somewhere, if you can't find them in the group but would like to look into the particular watermarking these abusive privacy-breakers used; but perhaps the images in the preview section of their site have similar watermarking.
I'm not really interested in these clothed pictures of late teens and twentysomethings; I'm just interested in getting back at someone who's violated internet privacy in a very real and annoying way. Comments, suggestions?
Sorry, but if you want to get all prickly about it, to be exact the article makes no mention whatever of any business models based on dialing a pay number to download ringtones. Read it again--no mention. It ju7st says that the ring tones are being made available and that some BS company with no viable business model is trying to get copyright holders to crack down on it because they're supposedly entitled to the mythical figure of 7.5c per download. Nevermind that nowhere in copyright law does it get that specific about how much a copyright holder is entitled to whenever someone gets an extract of a work.
This is why I addressed the question generally, rather than making reference to specific business practices. That is, they're altogether beside the point, because anything available for a fee is or soon will be available without one courtesy of the Internet and other burgeoning technologies. So the question isn't, "Is a company liable for copyright infringement for operating a toll number whereby people may get ringtones of Top 40 songs?" Rather, the question is, "Is a short extract of a few notes from a piece of music converted to ringtone format a violation of copyright?" You are looking at a tiny piece of the puzzle. I am looking at the whole picture.
This is why your "streetlawyering" falls sadly short. Like most lawyers, whether of the real or armchair variety, you fail to see the real, underlying issues, instead nitpickering on various tiny and ultimately insignificant cases.
It IS fair use. Compare to the case with books.
on
Ring-Tone Royalties
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· Score: 5
> It's the use of the major melodic theme of a piece of music without paying for it.
Bullshit. Last time I checked, fair use encompasses the reproduction of small portions of a copyrighted work in both derivative works and for various other reasons, including the ever-popular "just because I want to as long as it's *personal* use." For example, I am entitled to go to the library and jot down a few paragraphs from any given book. If I keep that paper with a few phrases on it in my pocket, is that a violation of copyright? No. If I show that piece of paper to people occasionally, is that violation of copyright? No. That is fair use, and is entirely personal. Now, if I were to start photocopying that piece of paper with those paragraphs on it, and handing out copies to everyone...then it starts to fall into copyright violation, even though it's just a few paragraphs, because I'm distributing it and it is obviously not a personal use.
This ring-tone nonsense is identical, only with sounds. Anyone is entitled under fair use to copy the few tones of the phrase "hit me baby one more time" for personal use, just as I am free to copy sentences out of a book and keep them in my pocket. Keeping those few musical notes on my cell-phone is the musical equivalent. It is a personal use. I am only using a very small portion of the copyrighted work. I am not distributing copies of it, it is onjly heard on my own phone when it rings. It can be heard by other people, just as I would be free to show my piece of paper with a few sentences from a book to people without violating copyright. It is a fair and personal noncommercial use of a small excerpt. Now, if I were to charge people to listen to my phone playing such musical notes, that would be a violation. If I were to make copies of the ring-tone and distribute them, then I would possibly be liable for copyright infringement--maybe, there are still arguments to be made either way. But just taking a few bars of music and programming them into my cellphone is NOT copyright infringement, it is a valid fair use.
We've all gotten used to seeing Nixon's head in a jar, so it's gained some semblance of normalcy. [Futurama!!!] But Michael Jackson's head in a jar is just too frightening...
In fact, it's easier to picture Michael Jackson's head between a young boy's legs.:-o
Several years ago--at least three--some scientists replaced the blood in a dog(?) with artificial blood and froze it for hours(?), and were able to successfully revive it.
All the (?) because I can hardly remember the story. Does anyone recall? I believe I read it in Scientific American. Please enlighten us if anyone remembers this story, and what the real details are.
My memory has always been like a seive...
But the File Manager/Interface is also key...
on
Eazel On The Ropes
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· Score: 3
I agree totally that the most important factor for any mainstream platform is applications. Everyone needs and wants them, otherwise there's no sense in having a PC. People don't stare at pretty widgets all day, they want to write, read, surf the net, e-mail, play games, look at pr0n, and wipe their monitors, though not necessarily in that order.;-) You can't do that stuff as well unless there are a lot of application choices. That's why Win9x is desktop king. That's why I still use it myself--few of the programs I love are available in Linux; in fact, I think only one is.
But the interface is key as well. Users want easy to understand and standard displays, so that they can go from home to work to a computer lab and know exactly what to do everywhere, without thinking "which shortcut is for Mac? which for Windows? Which for Linux? Why does this Linux have a shortcut panel here on the desktop, but this one has this thingy instead, and this one has nothing?" Most of all, average users need help sometimes. So, running Windows or MacOS, they can call up tech support and some random guy can tell them exactly what to do.
Not so for Linux. I can see it now: "Ma'am, are you running KDE or Gnome or Eazel? Well, umm, is there a little elf-like foot anywhere on your desktop?" Linux will never be a viable desktop operating system for non-techies until there is a standardized interface for average-joe oriented distributions. And no, a techie setting up a system for Grandma and being her own personal tech support doesn't count.
This is why the big companies, like it or not, need to back a standard for interfaces and run with it. Geeks everywhere can still choose to use whatever desktop and wm they want, or to go without one. But for average joes, we need a standard Linux interface.
Now, if Linux had one, it would have a great chance very soon. MS is going to be switching consumer desktops to Windows XP, and so a lot of the Win9x and DOS apps people use will be broken or run poorly. That would give Linux a chance to zoom onto more desktops quicker than it ever has before. I can see it now, screwdriver shops and small vendors everywhere telling customers, "Yeah, Windows XP is the new standard from Microsoft, but it won't run many older Windows programs. It'll also cost you an extra $100. But take a look at this computer with Linux--it works like Windows does, is more stable, is free, IBM backs it, and if you want this on your computer instead of Windows it not only won't cost you anything it'll come with free software to view pictures, play movies and music, edit and print text, and even make your own graphics, all for free." But it ain't going to happen because there's no standardization. But just imagine how big a threat to MS it would be if IBM and Sun backed a certain Linux interface and distribution for the average joe, and started offering it on all new IBM computers, and telling OEMs that it's the greatest thing since grated cheese and they should back it as an option.
Don't ask me why. I just do. See, I have this recurring dream involving Cowboy Neal, a wading pool full of chocolate pudding, and strangely enough a pile of old load balancers. I wonder if there's something Freudian in that. Oops, did I type that out loud?
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Reading about this today, I found that the scope of this particular decision is less scary than I initially assumed -- it's limited to prisoners who meet a standard as being "sexually dangerous", so they're not just being held without due process. Apparently this applies to about 100 prisoners nationwide.
I found this quite scary. One of the petitioners in the case was sentenced to just over 3 years for receipt of child pornography. Essentially, for possessing verboten images. Fine. He knew it was illegal or should have known, so 3 years in prison for possessing images--not touching a child, just obtaining illicit images of a child--is arguably fair and just. But...now he's subject to civil commitment FOR LIFE, not for sexually abusing a child (life incarceration for that would be arguably fair and just), but for possessing images?
The possibility of life in prison not for harming a child, but for merely receiving images of such harm--and after a sentence limited to 3 years was justly imposed by a judge knowing the facts of the case, and served by the offender--does not seem at all fair and just. V for Vendetta was on BBC America last night, and as much as it pains me to make the comparison, I'm reminded of the secret hoards of illicit art and verboten books kept by V and by Stephen Fry's character--will possessing a copy of Nabokov's Lolita one day make you subject first to a short obscenity sentence and then an indefinite civil commitment because anyone who enjoys the book must be a potentially sexually dangerous person? Will there be secret collections of David Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Jock Sturges prints, because their owners have to fear being civilly committed if they're ever incarcerated for an unrelated crime? Exactly where will these lines in the sand be drawn, once the tides come in?
This is a dangerous precedent. And, there should be truth in sentencing, period--ten years in jail should be ten years in jail, not five in jail and five on parole, or ten in jail then indefinite civil confinement.
Please oh please, with so many tech enthusiats here on /., please tell me *someone* knows where I can download a crusty old copy of Microsoft Bob. It is undeniably the greatest flop in the history of operating systems/environments, and I've been looking for a copy to situate on a VMware file or a partition right next to Windows 1.01, MS OS/2 Server 1.3, AT&T System V, and all the rest I've collected.
;-)
:-( Crappy reason, but that's how it goes. I just use what does the most, and since I love gaming, Win98SE currently does the most.
What can I say--I'm an ancient OS and old game enthusiast. So, with all the vast resources here, can anyone point me to the fabled Microsoft Bob? And no, a Google search yielded nada in the downloads department. Bob was too useless a program even for the Abandonware people to keep...
But to get back on topic, WinXP won't be a failure--it will bring the moderate stability of WinNT (which is more than enough for Joe and Jane Average) to the gaming compatibility of Win9x/DOS. It is bound to be a success, particularly since OEMs will start shipping most new PCs with it. Like it or not, XP will ship on time and it will have enough new features to get Joe Average jazzed. Remember that just because geeks like us can run cd burning apps, image managers, etc., doesn't mean that the average guy or gal can figure them out or wants to spend the time finding and configuring them--but if it comes with the OS and is dumbed down for the typical consumer, that's a different story. That's why both Apple and MS are integrating functions that traditionally belonged to external apps, into the OS.
And with all the OSes I have to choose from, I use Win98SE modified by 98lite. Not because it's better than anything else--it isn't--but because it runs more games.
The same will be true of WinXP when it comes out, and therefore it will be a success, like it or not. Pragmatism usually wins in the end, although idealism looks prettier.
I was drinking hot coffee when I read your comment. You made me laugh, you bastard--have you ever chuckled hot coffee out your nose? It's not pleasant, I assure you... ;-)
The people who think that the government might try to block release of WinXP are quite frankly suffering from dementia, hysteria, or are just plain on crack.
Doesn't anyone here read the financial news or watch CNN or FoxNews financial reports? The government is trying to expedite things because Microsoft has been in settlement talks with some of the States who've filed suit. Arizona (or was it New Mexico? I think Arizona) has already withdrawn itself from the suit.
The fact is that the MS case is waning, and the world at large just wants to get it over with "for the sake of the [stock] market". A few geeks like us who hate Microsoft, and a few competitors who *really* hate Microsoft, do not make up for all the ordinary people who use Microsoft products at home and work every day, and who see it as just a benign thing on their computer that helps them do stuff.
Like it or not, face it: the Court of Appeals has basically said that MS will not get broken up. Sure, their reasoning for remand was that Jackson misbehaved, but in reality do you think the next judge is going to order a break-up after the prior Appeals Court Smack-Down? Fuck no. Microsoft will get some injunctions handed to it not to engage in certain anti-competitive practices, such as forbidding OEMs from installing software (like AOL--you know AOL will make deals with big OEMs to get on the WinXP desktop, since their dealings with MS have crumbled), get a few fines, and that will be the end of it.
None of it will affect you or I or Microsoft even. The game is nearly over, and like it or not, even though Microsoft lost, they won--in that they will not be broken up, and they will most likely receive a little slap on the wrist now that the new DOJ and some of the States have changed tune.
It was grand--he made a four foot by three foot refracting lens out of a block of glass. I don't know how he ground and polished that huge hunk of glass, but he made a rather odd-looking rectangular refracting lens mounte quite high in a mobile wooden frame, with the point of convergence far enough from the ground to keep it from starting fires when out in the sun. Our astronomy class got to play with it on a bright day, and it's amazing what a large refractor can do. We got a can of Mountain Dew to come to a quick boil, and of course the refractor vaporized the coloring from the outside of the aluminum can in short order. Lighting my cigar in it was instantaneous of course, though I did manage to scorch my knuckles painfully in the process (no real damage, but--ouch!).
...because I hear those cement overshoes can be a bitch to get off. Especially once you've somehow found yourself at the bottom of a river...
;-)
Some of the online casinos are apparently run by some very shady characters. Some are just enterprising businessmen with a sporting bent. But some have friends with accents, da?
If you thought the original Italian mafia was bad, wait until a surly Russian gentleman comes to your door and force-feeds you gallons of borscht until you're begging to pay up...
But that doesn't matter because Microsoft, in this political climate, cannot get away with it like they got away with pressuring IBM many a year ago. HP, with its sizable resources, could afford lawyers as good as Microsoft's and get not just a judgement against Microsoft for illegal anticompetitive practices, but a judgement for actual and punitive damages more than large enough to cover attorney's fees and reinvigorate their bottom line. After all, MS may have gotten the break-up order vacated on appeal because of improper actions by Judge Jackson, but they've still been found guilty of anticompetitive practices and await resentencing.
Microsoft can pull that shit with the little guys, but not with the big ones, not in this day and age. Aside from which, they wouldn't want to pull that stuff with the big boys--they make too much money off HP, and the Linux market would be just a niche market overall--which is why HP doesn't sell Linux desktops in the first place. Not enough people want them.
Hell, not enough people wanted them to keep VA Linux in the hardware business, either, and they had a ton of ads here, in the heart of the Linux community! You don't need to attribute to malice what can easily and more provably be explained by a simple lack of market. Aside from some businesses and some government entities, the only people using Linux on the desktop are geeks. Geeks almost always either build our own PCs, or buy them from specialty sources, not from mainstream vendors. therefore it wouldn't be cost-effective for most mainstream vendors to offer Linux desktops. Why interrupt your perfect assembly line somewhere so that you can install Linux on a tiny fraction of one percent of the machines? It's not worth the overhead. And then, factor in support--why on Earth would HP want to provide Linux support staff in addition to its Windows people? I guess they could sell the Linux boxen sans support services, but then a fraction of users would still be returning the hardware because of some software glitch, and they'd have to have Linux staff to track down the issue and determine whether it's the hardware or the software, and then they'd have to resell the machine at a markdown. What a pain in the ass.
See, that's why most big manufacturers don't do Linux desktops. It isn't fear of Microsoft--look at what IBM and other companies, who do use MS software in some of their products, are doing to promote Linux, without a fear of MS. It's just that the Linux desktop userbase is already smaller than their Windows base, and most of them wouldn't buy an HP or Compaq or whatever box in the first place, being technically savvy and able to roll their own or buy online or from a local shop at a very reduced price.
So if you rweally want an HP desktop without Windows, get a whole lot of people to ask HP for one. Then they'll offer it. But it's not going to happen because there aren't enough interested people. HP deals in economies of scale, not in what a small subset of a small subset of PC users may or may not want as an option.
You know, if you want to buy a Windows PC, then yes, it *IS* your fault and your problem that it isn't available without Windows. Buy another machine, build another machine, or even better complain to HP and tell them to sell you a computer without an operating system pre-installed. If they won't, well, don't give them your business and eventually, when they get lots of calls and letters from people who want a Windows-less option, they will realize that they're missing out on a significant market. But it is their right to put whatever OS they want on their brand of PC. Bitch to them, not to me.
Of course, that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with what I was talking about in this thread (Yep, that's me too--forgot the account password, so my work PC has a cookie for SirWinston, and my home PC has a cookie for Sir_Winston--but anyway), which is the integration into the OS of functions which have before now been done by external apps.
But, NO, it is not a violation of you the alleged "customer" that HP will probably not sell you one of their shitty PCs without Windows installed, because they as the company get to decide what they want to sell, and you as the customer get to decide whether you want to purchase it or to buy something else. It's a free market, my friend, and there are many comparable choices for almost every computer product. You can get Linux preloaded on everything from a handheld to a set-top box to a PC to a high-end IBM RISC machine. So forgive me if I don't see it as being such a cruel and unforgivable plight if you cannot buy a shitty nonstandard HP machine with Linux preloaded. If there's a sizable market, they'll do it. So start writing to them and stop whining. You have plenty of choices, like the choice to buy a competing product or to support online vendors or screwdriver shops, instead of a company like HP which is actually at least as bad as Microsoft in terms of customer support and which is in bed with Intel over their Itanium piece of crap and all manner of other negative things. You can also choose to let HP know that you want a Linux option, instead of complaining here where it makes no difference. As I said, HP wants to make money like every other company, so if enough people ask then they'll damn well give you your option, since the many options from other sources don't seem to be good enough for you.
I might as well give my take on the movie. Basically, IT'S A FUCKING POPCORN FLICK, GODDAMMIT! It's not supposed to be a "film" or have any pretensions to greatness. It's entertainment, the kind of mindless entertainment that everyone except whiny pretentious little bitches like the geek comic book store guy on *The Simpsons* likes to watch every once in a while. Sometimes we want a little escapism with pretty scenery and totally outrageous and unrealistic themes and actions and characters. Sometimes this takes the form of things which actually have literary merit, like *Lord of the Rings*, or filmic value, like *Return of the Jedi*. However, the desire to be entertained and escape into a mythic universe for a couple hours is separate from any other value a movie or book may have, except for overly pretentious geeks like our friend from 'The Android's Dungeon'.
It's only that kind of poor, misguided soul who could nitpick a movie or book whose sole goal is to be enjoyable, mindless pulp fiction. You don't have to be mindless to enjoy it--you just have to want to let your frontal lobes relax after a hard bout of life, and let the more base parts enjoy a little tit, ass, action, fantasy, etc. And that's the kind of movie this was meant to be. It never tried to be more, so slamming it for being what it was intended to be is just bullshit.
After all, as someone who's seen it, I can say that it was far more entertaining than a movie like *The Phantom Menace*, which not only was a bad movie and bad science fiction, it tried to be a "film" and failed miserably. The only people who weren't disappointed in Episode I were hardcore SW and SF fans and very young children who couldn't comprehend the movie's failings and liked the shiny things and the stupid sidekick. Conversely, the only people who *are* disappointed in *Tomb Raider* are the pretentious geeks who wanted it to be serious SF or more geek-nitpicker friendly, and the critics who want all movies to be "films" with some sort of artistic, dramaturgical, or serious comedic, value, instead of accepting the truism that sometimes an entertaining movie can just be an entertaining mopvie without having to have some other value. The critics who realize that sometimes it's OK to let our higher reasoning parts take a rest and just let our visceral instincts have some mindless fun--like Roger Ebert--acknowledge that this is a good three-star action/adventure. It isn't a *Raiders of the Lost Ark*, but it does deliver the action and adventure it promises. And just because you *can* load an action/adventure movie with more meaningful themes, to make it into an Indiana Jones type film, doesn't mean you have to or even should.
If you want action and adventure and entertainment you don't have to and shouldn't analyze, then this is your summer action flick. I'f you're a nitpicking dork who can't just relax for a couple hours and enjoy it, then don't bother going. But the suggestion that all entertainment has to have some filmic or literary meaning is just plain misguided. Sometimes we want art and meaning, and sometimes we want to watch shit blow up and watch calves flex and tits strain. Criticizing *Tomb Raider* for not having a less stretchy plot and more filmic meaning is like criticizing *Holly Fucks Beavertown* or most Jackie Chan movies (though a few rhave deeper value) for the same reason.
I don't want Hollywood to *only* make mindless titty-filled action flicks. But I also wouldn't want them to *only* make meaningful films. It's like comparing RPGs that take some knowledge and thought to FPS that take mostly brute reflex and quick motor skills but only rudimentary strategic skills. Again, sometimes you want to think, and sometimes you want to see stuff explode.
Alright, I had to give up my chance to moderate in this story in order to point this out:
These statements are stolen nearly verbatim from Harry Knowles' review on Aint It Cool. Now moderate the idiot back down to -1, please.
The easy way to reset the CMOS is to turn the computer's power on and off several times in a row. It will make the BIOS assume that something is set incorrectly, and revert to defaults. This works on Award BIOS machines for sure, and I'd assume it's pretty standard, so that entering fucked-up values in the CMOS won't prevent the machine from running long enough to change them.
/em open and muck about. But the odds are taking it apart would show a jumper somewhere near the CMOS chip or its battery back up, which serves the function to discharge CMOS. It's worth looking, since if it were still under warranty Fujitsu probably just would have done the reset gratis.
I had to do this with a motherboard once after a failed overclock attempt--it kept hanging on POST because the FSB was set too high in BIOS and the system wasn't stable enough to even start. On-off-on-off-on-off and finally the CMOS cleared.
But, some people may be a wee bit squeamish about that, if they don't trust the motherboard maker and power supply maker enough to have made a product which can take a little abuse.
Alternatively, most new motherboards have a jumper onboard to discharge CMOS manually. The reason I had to reset CMOS the hard way that one time was because it was an older mobo with no discharge jumper.
So, just RTFM for the motherboard, and discharge the CMOS through the jumper, if it has one. Of course, this guy with the laptop might not have the luxury of a manual which says or a motherboard with such a jumper, since laptop makers don't like us to crack
Actually, I think it *is* the hardware that makes the system, and I think history bears it out. Let's see:
Atari invents the home Pong console, practically the first of its kind.
Other companies build various other boxes, some of which can play more than one game. The original Pong systems were outclassed, but then--
The Atari 2600 comes on the scene and beats out the Odyssey, the Vectrex, and other consoles, mostly because of better hardware design. The cartridge format allowed for more and better games, and the hardware made better games possible. Therefore the software developers came, because the platform was powerful and relatively easy to write for.
Nintendo comes along, and no one in this country had ever heard of them. Yet their console had such technical superiority and performance that the 2600 was doomed, and game makers sold their souls into Nintendo slavery just to get the right to code for it.
Other systems, such as Sega's SMS, had good hardware, but Nintendo had already captured the mindset of the market and most of the software makers. There does come a point at which it's too late, despite technical merits, but it's technical merits which turn the tide.
That's why, fast forward to the days of the PS versus N64, the PS won. The Nintendo had a better processor, but overall the PS was more advanced--it had CDs instead of cartridges. Game developers loved the CDs and hated the cartridges. To program a game into the small space of a N64 cartridge took more effort than if you have a full 650MB at your fingertips. Also, you don't need to license a proprietary cartridge format. So ultimately it was the superiority of the hardware which won over the game developers.
I think this is going to be more and more the case, since there have been no major advances in gameplay for years. What is going to get more important is photorealism, and the platform which can offer the best realism and still have ease of programming on its side will win the developers come the next generation of consoles.
We see the same thing in the PC gaming community, with video cards. 3DFX got game developers to code to their proprietary library because the performance was so much better and the effects the game devs could create were so much more intense. That abrubtly fell off when nVidia started making cards that were as good that people started buying, so the developers dropped the 3DFX-only route in favor of DirectX and OpenGL, which can be used with any card. But there was a period when 3DFX was so superior that gamers were only buying Voodoo cards, and so it made sense to code to the 3DFX cards only.
WinBond chips do the dinky stuff that anyone could do, heck even Cyrix could make chips that do it. It's just hardware temperature monitoring and timing stuff, things that can easily be done by any other semiconductor company. They also make other chips, but the odds are that a Winbond chip on your motherboard is just there doing low-leval hardware monitoring for the BIOS etc. If Winbond chips were to have anything objectionable to the average consumer built in, then VIA, nVidia, or anyone else could quite easily make an alternative. Just recall the disaster that was the P!!! serial number--
Intel: "Look! It's good for e-commerce!"
Consumers: "Fuck you, we don't want serial numbers on our hardware that can get read by our software and sent to other people."
Intel: "We're making a utility available to turn it off and it won't be a 'feature' of the next chip revision. Sorry."
When push comes to shove, some other company will provide hard drives, chipsets, etc., with no copy protection restrictions, and some enterprising hackers will provide software to emulate the protection measures so that SDMI or other "protected" bits and bytes will work on any system.
Peopla often think of the fans as noise culprits, but you're right to point out that hard drives can be just as bad or worse. As an example, the older Quantum Fireballs sounded like there was a little jet inside your PC case whenever spinning up, down, or doing a lot of seeking.
:-)
But the recent Quantum Fireball 1ct drives are the quietest, bar none. The 1ct is their budget line, meaning that performance is mediocre, which is fine as long as you're not compressing a lot of video or doing other high-bandwidth things that would make the HD a bottleneck. They're so quiet though that StorageReview decided to use them in their testbed system, so that the noisiness of other hard drives could be judged.
Of course, with Quantum getting gobbled by Maxtor recently, buy a 1ct fast if you're in the market for a very, very quiet drive. Quantum's quality has always been considered good, and Maxtor will probably be honoring Quantum's warrantees for a while.
Also, since Maxtor has a bunch of Quantum drives to get rid of, they've been using them in place of their own cheap brands in the store-brand drive lines, like for CompUSA. I headed to the local CompUSA store last week for their Memorial Day Sale since they advertised 20GB drives for $49.95 after the mail-in rebate, and bought several since I needed redundant storage and drive speed didn't matter. All were regular Quantum Fireball 1ct drives, with a little note from Maxtor (who usually make the CompUSA brand drives) saying that they'd purchased Quantum and that the enclosed drive was "up to their high standards of quality" or some such. I was happy, since the Fireball 1ct drives are much faster than the Maxtor drives usually sold under the CompUSA brand, and quieter too. So I now have a very, very quiet RAID.
> I pee on my software all the time. It seems to behave just like the toilet anyway.
;-)
So, I see that we have something in common--we've both installed the newest Win2k Service Pack.
C'mon, guys; it had to be said...
But, do you have to read that disclaimer before it will let you get anywhere near the USENET services? Nope.
>There are lots of non-Sony, non-Sharp, non-Toshiba, non-Philips makers
But almost all of them use Sony or Mitsubishi parts. The Trinitron and Diamondtron tubes are standard in most good CRTs, and while I don't know much about LCDs, I'm sure there's probably a similar situation where 2 or 3 manufacturers make some of the important components or license some necessary IP used in almost all. So if all the major companies back content protection, they can say "include content protection or we won't sell you [needed widget]." Then you have the market effectively in total control by the content barons. Another possibility is to create a content encryption and playback system which will not work at all with standard, non-protected ports.
Naturally, there will be hardware hacks to remove protection from monitors, or to make non-protected monitors work with protected content. But they will be illegal circumvention devices under the DMCA, so impossible for consumers to legally obtain unless they live in a truly free country. Even so, they will require too much technical expertise for the former, or be too esoteric for the latter, to ever reach the average consumer.
What we have is a few large conglomerates setting themselves up as IP barons, just as we had the robber barons of the 19th century or the nobility of the feudal systems in earlier centuries. IP barons will have rights and opportunities and modes of existence far removed from what the average citizen ever sees. And that's not the way it's supposed to work. Unregulated capitalism is as evil and crushing and divisive as any system ever conjured in history. I'm all for capitalism, but with responsible consumer protection.
> In the FBI's defense, they are saddled with "justifying" everything within the law.
;-)
> The CIA and NSA, on the other hand, can break the law all day long and get away with it.
> Different structures, different sets of accountability.
Well, the FBI gets singled out because, of all the agencies you mention, the FBI is the only one that's a consistent threat to the American people themselves. The FBI and ATF together are, in my opinion, the most egregeous threat to civil liberties in this country. Waco and Ruby Ridge aren't even what I'm talking about, although they were absolutely horrendous. What I'm talking about is the fact that the FBI, even after J. Edgar Hoover's reign of terror, has spied on citizens without cause or warrant, kept dossiers on people based merely on political beliefs, and with the ATF seems to raid everyone who collects legal guns as per our 2nd Amendment rights if a "flag" goes up--i.e., don't own too many guns, or just a few guns and have non-mainstream political ideals.
Contrast this with the NSA and CIA. The latter doesn't even investigate Americans, and even if they did they're concerned with intelligence. The CIA doesn't care if you have a bunch of fanatical religious followers living with you in Texas, have unusual political beliefs and a survivalist mentality, own two hundred firearms, operate a terabyte RAID array of copyrighted mp3s, pirated DivXs, and hardcore child pornography, grow massive fields of marijuana and coca, evade your taxes, and do all sorts of other major and minor violations. In fact, they'd likely just discard any such information unless it could prove useful to them, since they are interested in things with important international ramifications or at least intelligence interest, not minor domestic affairs. They probably would just destroy info on you, or at least lock it up rather than passing it on, if you are a U.S. citizen caught up in their intel. And I say this as someone who used to have lengthy dinners with a former Deputy Director of the CIA each weekend, who was fond of talking policy if understandably not willing to talk about some things. The only threat the CIA ever posed to us was their experimentation with drugs and radiation on some unsuspecting citizens back in the 50s and 60s, which was horrible but confined to a small number of people and would be too risky to do these days.
And as for the NSA, they're charged with domestic intelligence and security issues and do not care about most things the FBI and ATF would be all over. They may consult on code cracking, but all in all they're not much of a threat compared to the FBI and ATF.
And then there's the IRS, but that's another matter entirely...
It's about the fact that the entire cultures of the Web and also of USENET are changing. Content providers aren't just not offering freebies, which as you point out is economically understandable; they are also putting in absurd "copy protection" mechanisms, digital watermarking, etc.
As an example, the number of sites I run across with stupid and ineffectual but nonetheless annoying "anti-copy scripts" is increasing exponentially. Usually they try to disable right-clicking to get a context menu, by throwing up an inane message about not being allowed to copy content. Naturally, the scripts can be disabled by any competent person, or can be bypassed by simply right-clicking and pressing return to get rid of the box and right-clicking again fast enough. But they represent an altogether alarming shift in attitude. No longer are people sharing information, data, resources--they're "displaying" those resources, but not allowing them to be "used" and reused.
The most obvious examples are images and multimedia. If I go to a website, sometimes I see a nice background pattern or image I'd like to save to use on my desktop. But, oh, wait, someone has disabled right-clicking. Bah. I can get around it easily, but most average net surfers will not be able to. Ditto for images--for example, my father was on a website with tractor images, and for some godforsaken reason he actually collects antique tractors; he saw pictures of the same model tractor he has, but in a beautiful already-restored condition, and wanted to save them. Bang, disabled. What would it possibly hurt him to have those images available locally? And of course RealMedia and the Microsoft asf/wmf formats exist mainly for the purpose of streaming video or audio without the user being able to save the clips.
I don't know about you, but I don't like what that represents. The sad part is that even podunk personal sites are getting into the act and restricting content from being copied to a local disk. This is just not in the spirit of sharing and goodwill and community; it's extending meatspace limits on property into the digital realm where those limits are entirely artificial and do not belong. If you release something into the digital webbified world, you should expect people to want to copy it, and you should welcome that as the result of a cyberworld where copying items has virtually no cost. Otherwise, release it somewhere else, not on the net.
To make matters worse, this is a very short-sighted attitude. Web sites disappear all the time, and if no one can copy their content locally, that content will disappear along with the website if the content was copy-protected and view-only.
Plus, the whole attitude behind that is just selfish and contrary to the principles the Web and USENET were founded on. Just think of the recent story about gaming sites closing right and left--this didn't involve copy-protection, but it does involve that attitude of not being part of the community so much as being a business first last and always. Many excellent gaming sites had worthwhile, even unique content, and were forced to close. Yet I can't recall a single one making their resources available to the rest of the community, say by giving a free licence to host any of the dead site's resources on other more successful gaming sites, temporarily at least. Funny, I thought gaming was such a community thing, and that gaming sites are an outgrowth of that community. Yet no one seems to share like a community; if a site dies, usually all its unique content dies with it, never to be seen again.
Another issue is the artificial restrictions and dangers created by digital watermarking. Today watermarking is used almost exclusively on images, but the applications for the future are unlimited. Today, it is most commonly membership sites that insert personally identifiable UserID and date and IP information into images, so that if those images turn up elsewhere, someone particular can be blamed and kicked out. But with the technologies companies like Microsoft are pushing, even non-membership sites could watermark content and persecute people for noncommercial copying of it. Watermarks will turn up in audio and video streams, background images, every kind of data. And when that happens, there will be no community on the Net; resources will never again be shared; the rules of meatspace will effectively have been artificially grafted onto cyberspace.
Even today watermarking causes problems. For a very long time USENET has been a place where people noncommercially share not just chat and other text, but any sort of data and information they are mutually interested in. There's a group my dad can post to about tractors, and even post pictures of his tractors or get images or video involving tractors. You can find groups which post high-res scans of photographic art. You can find groups for freeware and groups for pirated applications, groups for start-up sounds and groups for full mp3s, groups for pr0n and groups for bird photography. The spirit of USENET was always the spirit of noncommercial sharing of digital content, both original and borrowed from the Web and scanned from meatspace.
But, companies from the Web feel free to spam USENET with ads for commercial websites, causing my service provider costs to skyrocket, and then complain when their content is posted for free to USENET. They shouldn't spam USENET users if they don't want their stuff to be posted onto USENET. I think it's rightfully open season on content providers who spam us without our consent; we damn well should reproduce their content without their consent. Tit-for-tat.
Yet, a few days ago I was scanning through some groups and ran across a poster who was not only told by a commercial website to stop posting their images, but this commercial website posted the man's name, address, and telephone number to USENET based on matching the digital watermark in the images to a UserID and billing information in their database. He repeated the message several times. I could not believe it. They published his personal info for all to see, for posting a few images he got from them after they spammed USENET with ads. That is a violation of the highest order. And this is the sort of attitude some arrogant content providers are getting. We're not in for a rosy future.
That's all I really have to say about that, except to say that the site that published this man's personal info was http://www.photostudio17.com and I hope there's a script kiddie or haxor out there with his name on them. The USENET article in question is--aw hell, my crappy news server expired the original articles, but some message-IDs that are related are MPG.1558a2f6e185166a989de4@news.cncdsl.com kaTH6.49361$U4.11780044@news1.rdc1.tn.home.com MPG.1559893ed8cd22a6989de5@news.cncdsl.com and many others you'll find in the stated group, to corroborate the story.
In addition, does anyone have information on how to remove various types of digital watermarks? I can post the images in question somewhere, if you can't find them in the group but would like to look into the particular watermarking these abusive privacy-breakers used; but perhaps the images in the preview section of their site have similar watermarking.
I'm not really interested in these clothed pictures of late teens and twentysomethings; I'm just interested in getting back at someone who's violated internet privacy in a very real and annoying way. Comments, suggestions?
Sorry, but if you want to get all prickly about it, to be exact the article makes no mention whatever of any business models based on dialing a pay number to download ringtones. Read it again--no mention. It ju7st says that the ring tones are being made available and that some BS company with no viable business model is trying to get copyright holders to crack down on it because they're supposedly entitled to the mythical figure of 7.5c per download. Nevermind that nowhere in copyright law does it get that specific about how much a copyright holder is entitled to whenever someone gets an extract of a work.
This is why I addressed the question generally, rather than making reference to specific business practices. That is, they're altogether beside the point, because anything available for a fee is or soon will be available without one courtesy of the Internet and other burgeoning technologies. So the question isn't, "Is a company liable for copyright infringement for operating a toll number whereby people may get ringtones of Top 40 songs?" Rather, the question is, "Is a short extract of a few notes from a piece of music converted to ringtone format a violation of copyright?" You are looking at a tiny piece of the puzzle. I am looking at the whole picture.
This is why your "streetlawyering" falls sadly short. Like most lawyers, whether of the real or armchair variety, you fail to see the real, underlying issues, instead nitpickering on various tiny and ultimately insignificant cases.
> It's the use of the major melodic theme of a piece of music without paying for it.
Bullshit. Last time I checked, fair use encompasses the reproduction of small portions of a copyrighted work in both derivative works and for various other reasons, including the ever-popular "just because I want to as long as it's *personal* use." For example, I am entitled to go to the library and jot down a few paragraphs from any given book. If I keep that paper with a few phrases on it in my pocket, is that a violation of copyright? No. If I show that piece of paper to people occasionally, is that violation of copyright? No. That is fair use, and is entirely personal. Now, if I were to start photocopying that piece of paper with those paragraphs on it, and handing out copies to everyone...then it starts to fall into copyright violation, even though it's just a few paragraphs, because I'm distributing it and it is obviously not a personal use.
This ring-tone nonsense is identical, only with sounds. Anyone is entitled under fair use to copy the few tones of the phrase "hit me baby one more time" for personal use, just as I am free to copy sentences out of a book and keep them in my pocket. Keeping those few musical notes on my cell-phone is the musical equivalent. It is a personal use. I am only using a very small portion of the copyrighted work. I am not distributing copies of it, it is onjly heard on my own phone when it rings. It can be heard by other people, just as I would be free to show my piece of paper with a few sentences from a book to people without violating copyright. It is a fair and personal noncommercial use of a small excerpt. Now, if I were to charge people to listen to my phone playing such musical notes, that would be a violation. If I were to make copies of the ring-tone and distribute them, then I would possibly be liable for copyright infringement--maybe, there are still arguments to be made either way. But just taking a few bars of music and programming them into my cellphone is NOT copyright infringement, it is a valid fair use.
We've all gotten used to seeing Nixon's head in a jar, so it's gained some semblance of normalcy. [Futurama!!!] But Michael Jackson's head in a jar is just too frightening...
:-o
In fact, it's easier to picture Michael Jackson's head between a young boy's legs.
Several years ago--at least three--some scientists replaced the blood in a dog(?) with artificial blood and froze it for hours(?), and were able to successfully revive it.
All the (?) because I can hardly remember the story. Does anyone recall? I believe I read it in Scientific American. Please enlighten us if anyone remembers this story, and what the real details are.
My memory has always been like a seive...
I agree totally that the most important factor for any mainstream platform is applications. Everyone needs and wants them, otherwise there's no sense in having a PC. People don't stare at pretty widgets all day, they want to write, read, surf the net, e-mail, play games, look at pr0n, and wipe their monitors, though not necessarily in that order. ;-) You can't do that stuff as well unless there are a lot of application choices. That's why Win9x is desktop king. That's why I still use it myself--few of the programs I love are available in Linux; in fact, I think only one is.
But the interface is key as well. Users want easy to understand and standard displays, so that they can go from home to work to a computer lab and know exactly what to do everywhere, without thinking "which shortcut is for Mac? which for Windows? Which for Linux? Why does this Linux have a shortcut panel here on the desktop, but this one has this thingy instead, and this one has nothing?" Most of all, average users need help sometimes. So, running Windows or MacOS, they can call up tech support and some random guy can tell them exactly what to do.
Not so for Linux. I can see it now: "Ma'am, are you running KDE or Gnome or Eazel? Well, umm, is there a little elf-like foot anywhere on your desktop?" Linux will never be a viable desktop operating system for non-techies until there is a standardized interface for average-joe oriented distributions. And no, a techie setting up a system for Grandma and being her own personal tech support doesn't count.
This is why the big companies, like it or not, need to back a standard for interfaces and run with it. Geeks everywhere can still choose to use whatever desktop and wm they want, or to go without one. But for average joes, we need a standard Linux interface.
Now, if Linux had one, it would have a great chance very soon. MS is going to be switching consumer desktops to Windows XP, and so a lot of the Win9x and DOS apps people use will be broken or run poorly. That would give Linux a chance to zoom onto more desktops quicker than it ever has before. I can see it now, screwdriver shops and small vendors everywhere telling customers, "Yeah, Windows XP is the new standard from Microsoft, but it won't run many older Windows programs. It'll also cost you an extra $100. But take a look at this computer with Linux--it works like Windows does, is more stable, is free, IBM backs it, and if you want this on your computer instead of Windows it not only won't cost you anything it'll come with free software to view pictures, play movies and music, edit and print text, and even make your own graphics, all for free." But it ain't going to happen because there's no standardization. But just imagine how big a threat to MS it would be if IBM and Sun backed a certain Linux interface and distribution for the average joe, and started offering it on all new IBM computers, and telling OEMs that it's the greatest thing since grated cheese and they should back it as an option.
It would be damn nice.
Don't ask me why. I just do. See, I have this recurring dream involving Cowboy Neal, a wading pool full of chocolate pudding, and strangely enough a pile of old load balancers. I wonder if there's something Freudian in that. Oops, did I type that out loud?