Holy moly! Games testing username/password against a DRM server: gee, we haven't seen THAT before! Brilliant! Well worth spending a whole/. article on!
Any DRM which prevents lawful re-use of a legally purchased copy should itself be illegal, but of course our corrupt congress which only cares about pandering to rich lobbyists don't care about flushing a century of copyright law down the toilet.
Therein lies the problem, doesn't it? One way to put this, indeed, is to say Congress is corrupt. The other is to simply see Congress as the embodiment of the reality that the U.S. is run by Big Business, and that all this "We, the people" stuff is long since dead (unless you read: "We, the rich people.")
Were greed not the main drive for your fine Congressmen, DRM would have been declared illegal a long time ago. And for no greater reason than that it cripples your software. Which is to say, it mangles your software in such a way that, statistically, a proven percentage of the buyers will experience problems with it. That's like selling defective cars, on purpose, saying: "We know 20% of our paying customers will not be able to use our product because of our deliberate efforts to cripple it, but f*** em, we sell it anyway." Like any number of legitimatelly bought CDs that don't play because debilitating copy-protection. In any other time-frame this would have been considered highly illegal, but no longer.
You're being too hard on yourself. I submit that what you feel is no Schadenfreude, but a sense of vindication, a sense of joy and relief over a world that, every now and then, briefly comes to its senses and removes a loonie from its tunes. There's no shame in that, good Sir.
The RIAA is also backing legislation in states such as Illinois and Tennessee that would require schools that get a certain number of notices to begin installing deep packet monitoring equipment on their internet and intranets.
Read: this is RIAA's deliberate and now publicly documented attempt to commit state-level fraud: overnight they artificallly increase the number of notices, by an order of magnitude, in order to produce faux 'evidence' of the required X number of notices to state legislators. That's gotta be a Federal offence. Fraud, and conspiracy to commit fraud, ought to be illegal, really, Oh wait, they already are!
It's time the Justice Department stepped in.
People who YELL A LOT and start comparing soneone/something to Hitler, really ought not to be getting a +5.
Other than that, I'm not overly worried. Anyone see Enemy of the State? (Where they pull that bull spying-from-satelite crap) And yet, in reality, despite all their big toys, they still can't even find Bin Laden.
The Daniel_k business, quite positively, has got to be the lamest, 'sore loser' response Creative ever came up with.
Vista driver support for the X-Fi Fidelity is, and has been, dismal, and so far below any acceptible standard, that even the joke that it is ain't funny any more. Pray-tell, where is my Dolby/DTS support? I'm still waiting for it. For frel's sake, I still can't even perform such a basic function as regulating the output of my bass speaker!!
And now what do they do?? They send 'cease and desist' letters to the one person who actually SOLVED their driver issues! Well, actually, those weren't even real problems: Creative just never even bothered to implement the features! Couldn't stand that Daniel_k made em look bad, eh? Yeah, and you think this is making them look good??
And the sad irony of it all is, they're only after Daniel_k because he put his drivers on the map -- a situation which wouldn't even exist if they hadn't remained so grossly derelict to their customers to begin with! And instead of finally picking up the ball, and do their own homework, as opposed to being humiliated by a guy whose stuff actually WORKS, they act like a sore loser, STILL not stepping up to the plate to fix their drivers, but determined nonetheless to remove the one person who actually did.
And don't give me this legalese crap about him effectively stealing profit from them. Who's the Yotz that came up with that brilliant marketing strategy?? Don't you get it? Daniel_k, and his superb driver support, have been vastly contributing to folks not giving up on Creative cards altogether! I'd be watching their sales in the coming months, if I were them!
What a load of dren this is! Shockingly, my next card won't be Creative.
Ford also expects money for their products. If you never change the oil and the engine blows up, that's ford's problem? That's pretty sad if that is the best reasoning you can come up with.
No, silly, I expect to be able to change the oil without my car breaking down! It's pretty sad if that's too much asking.
No, in earnest, Vista has real issues. Sure, I like it, too: it's pretty, and me likes pretty.:) But, primarily, it's sluggish. Ever tried to delete JBOF (Just a Bunch of Files) in a dir? Say, a hundred or so rar files? It will keep busy for ever before it will finally delete them. That's because Vista is larded with mucho (stealth) DRM crapola. And no, my hardware is more than sufficient: quadcore at 3.2Ghz, 4G RAM, fast SATA II disks, 8800GTX, etc. File copying is horribly slow, too (same DRM shite). But it's stable, I'll give you that. But so was XP.
Not quite, a better analogy might be that it's like going to restaurant, seeing that they 'upgraded' the menu: half of it is only half-baked now, but costs you twice as much.
Issue the subpoenas, investigate these abuses, and, yes, impeach the president.
And who issues those subpoenas? Exactly, the same folks who have been committing these abuses! Sigh. I fear that, at this point, only a massive uprise from the people will turn the tide. Fortunately, as these things go, you don't actually need a full 'revolution': just turn far enough for the idle masses to realize that they've been playing the wrong team and finally dare to stand up.
In eight years, I've seen your country turn from a free, law-abiding nation, into a near totalitarian police state. And I've said it before, just because you are 'free' to make a lot of money and go to McDonald's, doesn't mean you're not living in a police state. Your Bush/FBI has effectively bypassed your Constitution. And that's a dangerous president... erm, meant 'precedent' (chalk that up as a willful Freudian slip).
It's really sad that the need for disclosure is even an issue. This way the RIAA gets to destroy people's lives, literally over nothing.
RIAA Lawyer: We have proof, Your Honor!
Judge: Great! Can I see it?
RIAA Lawyer: Nah!
Judge: That doesn't sound too lawyerly.
RIAA Lawyer: Well, I could call it "proprietary and confidential!"
Judge: Uhm, okay then.
"This is kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet having the local pro football team stopping by for supper after practice five times a week. After a while, the restaraunt starts to loose money. They then have three choices:
1) Raise prices.
2) Put limits on the service.
3) Go out of business."
Nope, you forgot the fourth, and most relevant option:
4) Don't lie about offering an "all-you-can-eat" buffet. THAT's the scam these companies are running: reeling you in with "unlimited" accounts, whereas they are, in fact, not unlimited. So be honest enough to say that. But they're not gonna do that, of course, because "unlimited" sells better than "limited". But it's still a scam.
"If Comcast wants to throttle the bandwidth on my torrents, so be it. I can live with that. But ABORTING a torrent is just plain nasty on their part. Delay the packets, fine. Drop a few packets, fine. But to inject an abort signal, dirty trick."
Your cheerful readiness to accept a "Big Brother" society, in which ISPs monitor your every Internet action, is as mindblowing as it is disturbing.
Your complacent willingness to play along with it also displays a staggering ignorance. It's not at all about a company having the right to throttle bandwidth: it's about the monitoring of your traffic (!) that leads to them throttling your bandwidth, which is the real and grotesque infringement of privacy.
Like it or not, you ARE living in a police state! Derision and scoffing on your part won't change that.
Truth is, your media is government controlled.
Truth is, illegal wire-taps are becoming institutionalized. Internet traffic, international phone-calls, you lost all your privacy over it.
Truth is, under the guise of a terrorist threat, you can be seized, held, and prosecuted completely outside the Court system.
Just because you can make a lot of money, or can go to McDonalds, doesn't mean you're not living in a police state. That's what makes your level of ignorance so obscene: you blind yourself to only wanting to see blatant, outward markings of the 'old-style' iron curtain kinda police state. And thus you fool yourself into believing that as long as you don't see it happen, or it doesn't immediately affect you, that therefore it isn't occurring.
Except, there never was a "description of MP3 as a perfect copy!" First the Brief says (emphasis mine):
"The purchase of a single CD could be levered into the distribution within days or even hours of millions of identical, NEAR-PERFECT copies of the music recorded on the CD)."
And only then goes to proceed:
"When digital works are distributed via the Internet, every recipient is capable not only of perfectly copying plaintiffs' copyrighted works, they likewise are capable of transmitting perfect copies of the works]."
The latter just broadly talks about "digital works distributed via the Internet." And the former only says that a NEAR-PERFECT copy, under the law, is considered identical. That's a far stretch from saying "mp3s are a perfect copy."
I'd say, raid the homes of every RIAA exec, today, confiscate every computer, iPod, mp3 player in the house. You'll find their teenage kids having plenty of mp3s and youtube vids. Then sue em, in the millions of dollars. Have a dumb jury become convinvced that their teenage kids are single-handedly responsible for the demise of the entire industry. And then take everything from them. Ruin their lives over it. And don't worry too much over how you got the 'evidence'. Simply use all the shady, broad tactics the RIAA uses itself. Turnabout is fair play, right?
Do this, and tomorrow RIAA is no more. Because how are they gonna fight it? They can't. Tell the Judge it's unfair, or excessive? They can't. At least not without ruining their own racketeering scheme.
If he wanted to tell a story about love than that's what he should have done, not obscured the story with bad choices that failed the genres he tried to draw upon
He DID tell a story about love. It's just not about sex. It's a story about a Doctor who sacrifices every earthly possession to go rescue his sister. It's about family. It's about trusting others with your life; it's about living at the corner of no and where, and yet be rich for what you have with each other. Sorry if it was burried too deep for you to notice.
Firefly is about Love. In point of fact. It's about people who do for each other, and ain't always looking for the advantage. If you can't see that, all you'll see is cowboys in space. You think that's a commentary on you?
Over 99 percent spam blocking means fewer than one mistake in every 100 messages processed. That's 10 to 100 times fewer mistakes than any other available systems.
What bull! So, that would mean "other available system", doing 10 to 100 times worse, would make 100 mistakes out of 100 messages.:) Yeah, right.
Yes, we get that: they all go through the corporate email server. But its weakness is still that the spammer needs to target multiple recipients, with the same MFROM, to that same corporate email server. Even within the same SMTP dialogue session the spammer can start a new MFROM command and thus stick it to the system. So, the best this system can hope to accomplish is to catch spam sent to a lot of your corporate email server's recipients in the same envelope (RCPT TO ones), if that message wasn't already red-flagged for the same reason. What it is, really, is a tool to detect 'dumb' spam-runs against your corporate email server -- which, I must say, it seems can do fairly well. But no more than that.
SPF ties the usability of a domain in MFROM to the IP address of the connecting client, purposely remaining non-cognizant about the part before the @. Abaca, however, cannot do that: it needs to consider the entire MFROM address (otherwise things would get real messy). Hence, even while remaining within SPF bounds, spammers can very effectively thwart Abaca by changing precisely the part before the @ on each mail.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they want to sell me their cake, twice.
The Island
The future seems dangerously close.
That was sarcasm, btw.
Therein lies the problem, doesn't it? One way to put this, indeed, is to say Congress is corrupt. The other is to simply see Congress as the embodiment of the reality that the U.S. is run by Big Business, and that all this "We, the people" stuff is long since dead (unless you read: "We, the rich people.")
Were greed not the main drive for your fine Congressmen, DRM would have been declared illegal a long time ago. And for no greater reason than that it cripples your software. Which is to say, it mangles your software in such a way that, statistically, a proven percentage of the buyers will experience problems with it. That's like selling defective cars, on purpose, saying: "We know 20% of our paying customers will not be able to use our product because of our deliberate efforts to cripple it, but f*** em, we sell it anyway." Like any number of legitimatelly bought CDs that don't play because debilitating copy-protection. In any other time-frame this would have been considered highly illegal, but no longer.
You're being too hard on yourself. I submit that what you feel is no Schadenfreude, but a sense of vindication, a sense of joy and relief over a world that, every now and then, briefly comes to its senses and removes a loonie from its tunes. There's no shame in that, good Sir.
Read: this is RIAA's deliberate and now publicly documented attempt to commit state-level fraud: overnight they artificallly increase the number of notices, by an order of magnitude, in order to produce faux 'evidence' of the required X number of notices to state legislators. That's gotta be a Federal offence. Fraud, and conspiracy to commit fraud, ought to be illegal, really, Oh wait, they already are! It's time the Justice Department stepped in.
Other than that, I'm not overly worried. Anyone see Enemy of the State? (Where they pull that bull spying-from-satelite crap) And yet, in reality, despite all their big toys, they still can't even find Bin Laden.
Vista driver support for the X-Fi Fidelity is, and has been, dismal, and so far below any acceptible standard, that even the joke that it is ain't funny any more. Pray-tell, where is my Dolby/DTS support? I'm still waiting for it. For frel's sake, I still can't even perform such a basic function as regulating the output of my bass speaker!!
And now what do they do?? They send 'cease and desist' letters to the one person who actually SOLVED their driver issues! Well, actually, those weren't even real problems: Creative just never even bothered to implement the features! Couldn't stand that Daniel_k made em look bad, eh? Yeah, and you think this is making them look good??
And the sad irony of it all is, they're only after Daniel_k because he put his drivers on the map -- a situation which wouldn't even exist if they hadn't remained so grossly derelict to their customers to begin with! And instead of finally picking up the ball, and do their own homework, as opposed to being humiliated by a guy whose stuff actually WORKS, they act like a sore loser, STILL not stepping up to the plate to fix their drivers, but determined nonetheless to remove the one person who actually did.
And don't give me this legalese crap about him effectively stealing profit from them. Who's the Yotz that came up with that brilliant marketing strategy?? Don't you get it? Daniel_k, and his superb driver support, have been vastly contributing to folks not giving up on Creative cards altogether! I'd be watching their sales in the coming months, if I were them!
What a load of dren this is! Shockingly, my next card won't be Creative.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/27/038227
No, silly, I expect to be able to change the oil without my car breaking down! It's pretty sad if that's too much asking.
No, in earnest, Vista has real issues. Sure, I like it, too: it's pretty, and me likes pretty. :) But, primarily, it's sluggish. Ever tried to delete JBOF (Just a Bunch of Files) in a dir? Say, a hundred or so rar files? It will keep busy for ever before it will finally delete them. That's because Vista is larded with mucho (stealth) DRM crapola. And no, my hardware is more than sufficient: quadcore at 3.2Ghz, 4G RAM, fast SATA II disks, 8800GTX, etc. File copying is horribly slow, too (same DRM shite). But it's stable, I'll give you that. But so was XP.
Not quite, a better analogy might be that it's like going to restaurant, seeing that they 'upgraded' the menu: half of it is only half-baked now, but costs you twice as much.
And who issues those subpoenas? Exactly, the same folks who have been committing these abuses! Sigh. I fear that, at this point, only a massive uprise from the people will turn the tide. Fortunately, as these things go, you don't actually need a full 'revolution': just turn far enough for the idle masses to realize that they've been playing the wrong team and finally dare to stand up. In eight years, I've seen your country turn from a free, law-abiding nation, into a near totalitarian police state. And I've said it before, just because you are 'free' to make a lot of money and go to McDonald's, doesn't mean you're not living in a police state. Your Bush/FBI has effectively bypassed your Constitution. And that's a dangerous president... erm, meant 'precedent' (chalk that up as a willful Freudian slip).
RIAA Lawyer: We have proof, Your Honor!
Judge: Great! Can I see it?
RIAA Lawyer: Nah!
Judge: That doesn't sound too lawyerly.
RIAA Lawyer: Well, I could call it "proprietary and confidential!"
Judge: Uhm, okay then.
Nope, you forgot the fourth, and most relevant option:
4) Don't lie about offering an "all-you-can-eat" buffet. THAT's the scam these companies are running: reeling you in with "unlimited" accounts, whereas they are, in fact, not unlimited. So be honest enough to say that. But they're not gonna do that, of course, because "unlimited" sells better than "limited". But it's still a scam.
Your cheerful readiness to accept a "Big Brother" society, in which ISPs monitor your every Internet action, is as mindblowing as it is disturbing.
Your complacent willingness to play along with it also displays a staggering ignorance. It's not at all about a company having the right to throttle bandwidth: it's about the monitoring of your traffic (!) that leads to them throttling your bandwidth, which is the real and grotesque infringement of privacy.
Truth is, your media is government controlled.
Truth is, illegal wire-taps are becoming institutionalized. Internet traffic, international phone-calls, you lost all your privacy over it.
Truth is, under the guise of a terrorist threat, you can be seized, held, and prosecuted completely outside the Court system.
Just because you can make a lot of money, or can go to McDonalds, doesn't mean you're not living in a police state. That's what makes your level of ignorance so obscene: you blind yourself to only wanting to see blatant, outward markings of the 'old-style' iron curtain kinda police state. And thus you fool yourself into believing that as long as you don't see it happen, or it doesn't immediately affect you, that therefore it isn't occurring.
You need to wake up, dude!
Except, there never was a "description of MP3 as a perfect copy!" First the Brief says (emphasis mine):
"The purchase of a single CD could be levered into the distribution within days or even hours of millions of identical, NEAR-PERFECT copies of the music recorded on the CD)."
And only then goes to proceed:
"When digital works are distributed via the Internet, every recipient is capable not only of perfectly copying plaintiffs' copyrighted works, they likewise are capable of transmitting perfect copies of the works]."
The latter just broadly talks about "digital works distributed via the Internet." And the former only says that a NEAR-PERFECT copy, under the law, is considered identical. That's a far stretch from saying "mp3s are a perfect copy."
I'd say, raid the homes of every RIAA exec, today, confiscate every computer, iPod, mp3 player in the house. You'll find their teenage kids having plenty of mp3s and youtube vids. Then sue em, in the millions of dollars. Have a dumb jury become convinvced that their teenage kids are single-handedly responsible for the demise of the entire industry. And then take everything from them. Ruin their lives over it. And don't worry too much over how you got the 'evidence'. Simply use all the shady, broad tactics the RIAA uses itself. Turnabout is fair play, right?
Do this, and tomorrow RIAA is no more. Because how are they gonna fight it? They can't. Tell the Judge it's unfair, or excessive? They can't. At least not without ruining their own racketeering scheme.
He DID tell a story about love. It's just not about sex. It's a story about a Doctor who sacrifices every earthly possession to go rescue his sister. It's about family. It's about trusting others with your life; it's about living at the corner of no and where, and yet be rich for what you have with each other. Sorry if it was burried too deep for you to notice.
Firefly is about Love. In point of fact. It's about people who do for each other, and ain't always looking for the advantage. If you can't see that, all you'll see is cowboys in space. You think that's a commentary on you?
Well, if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak.
What bull! So, that would mean "other available system", doing 10 to 100 times worse, would make 100 mistakes out of 100 messages.
Yes, we get that: they all go through the corporate email server. But its weakness is still that the spammer needs to target multiple recipients, with the same MFROM, to that same corporate email server. Even within the same SMTP dialogue session the spammer can start a new MFROM command and thus stick it to the system. So, the best this system can hope to accomplish is to catch spam sent to a lot of your corporate email server's recipients in the same envelope (RCPT TO ones), if that message wasn't already red-flagged for the same reason. What it is, really, is a tool to detect 'dumb' spam-runs against your corporate email server -- which, I must say, it seems can do fairly well. But no more than that. SPF ties the usability of a domain in MFROM to the IP address of the connecting client, purposely remaining non-cognizant about the part before the @. Abaca, however, cannot do that: it needs to consider the entire MFROM address (otherwise things would get real messy). Hence, even while remaining within SPF bounds, spammers can very effectively thwart Abaca by changing precisely the part before the @ on each mail.