Microsoft and other companies in the tech community have spoken out against the SSSCA. Primarily because most everybody realizes that it would put a huge damper on new sales.
If true, that statement puts a rather large hole in your Microsoft conspiracy theory.
Not really. Microsoft doesn't want the SSSCA forced upon them where the terms are out of their control. A program that they control is another matter.
----"Microsoft holds a patent that describes a method by which hardware and software interoperate to guarantee "digital rights management" (aka fair use destruction and monopoly lock-in). The patent describes a mechanism in which there is a private/public key pair, with one half embedded in hardware (possibly the CPU). Only "authorized code" (aka Windows) can run in ring 0 (kernel space) on the CPU. Naturally, only Windows has the other half of the key."
Patent? Ohhh yeah, those things. Did anybody tell you that the US is NOT the world government? Well, not every country agrees with "Our" patent system. If that's true about PKI in the cpu, will there be ICE's? I bet so. Every encryption is breakable (by brute or bugs). Even their (e)x-box drm crap doesn't work, given the right xboxes hooked up inside the bios;-)
I'm not sure why everyone gets so scared of this patent anywhere. The moment the patent prevents a competitor from entering the digital rights management market, the patent will be dropped faster then the DoJ could say anti-trust.
Sure, you will still have the right to run your old hardware. You may or may not be able to import hardware, I wouldn't put it past the Congresscritters to propose something like that at least.
Of course, there will be no law saying that media companies will have to release ANY content in the old formats, and you can bet those formats will be dropped like a hot potato a few years after the introduction of new formats. Not too quickly, all of this would stretch out over a period of several years.. If the time period is stretched out a bit, it will be easier on consumers, and they won't feel so taken advantage of. You might not want to buy this new hardware, but if media companies only release to it, and major computer companies only ship Palladium computers (they'd be insane not to), then consumers will buy it. And it will spread.
I have a hard time trusting those disks. Why are those discs sold two-three times cheaper than almost any other brand? Would I literally be getting what I paid for?
IFF the post was correct, this is indeed Good News(tm).
Would it really be? General Unix support on IBM laptops? That would be such a huge money-loser that I would call it an "extremely foolish move" rather than a "good move." Supporting many OS's which will generate very little revenue is much more expensive than supporting one OS which generates a small amount of revenue. Given IBM's recent moves to cut traditional areas (like hard drives) that don't generate a healthy profit, I'm more inclined to believe the original poster was wrong. It goes against IBM's recent actions, and it doesn't make any sense businesswise, no matter how UNIX folks might hope for it.
Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea what happens if you take a huge file, like a DVD rip, rename it robots.txt, and stick it on your webserver?
I would guess you'd end up wasting a lot of your bandwidth, certainly far more than you'd cost anyone else. I would think that many places have a limit on how large a robots.txt they are willing to download.. or they should.
If you find things to watch because you have time on your hands you need to get a life - or at least read a book. TV is just a mind numbing time killer and there are better things to do.
Crappy books can be just as much of a mind numbing time killer as crappy TV can. There is a lot of junk on TV, but there are a number of quality shows as well.
Judge the shows by quality, don't merely dismiss them because you're elitist and it's just TV.
Finding Nemo, next summer. A little over a year from now.
It's a five-picture deal, but the deal was signed a year after the release of Toy Story. I'm not sure if A Bug's Life is included in that deal, but the deal covers at least the next two films.
And Disney is dead. Walt's been dead long time, cryogenic-rumors aside.
I wonder... those rumors aren't true, but if they were, could the Disney corporation still prevent copyrights from expiring by claiming the original author was actually still alive? That would be a bizarre turn.
I don't think so. "Gaming" machines haven't needed DVD-ROMs in the past. My Windows machine is used for pretty much just for games and video capture, and I hadn't needed to get a dvd drive, though it would come in handy.
2. What's your point with the '1000 years ago' point? I don't understand what you are trying to say.
I think he was trying to bring in the idea that the software world changes far far faster than any other engineering profession (save perhaps electrical engineering) and that, say, something designed 30 years ago in the software world is like a civil engineer trying to work with buildings built a thousand years ago. It's a fairly flawed analogy, and besides that it doesn't make much sense.
5. 'Software is a FAR more complex art than any other form of engineering.' --- this is just sad, and shows your complete ignorance of anything outside of software development. You really need to look beyond yourself, and see that there is more to the world than your invisible cathedrals of code, man.
Actually I've heard of this before, occasionally from engineering professors with experience in many disciplines. I wouldn't go so far as the original poster and say it was "FAR more complex," and it's obvious the original poster underestimates what is required from other disciplines.
I buy a tire for my car and it blows out in thirty days- I get my money back. Why is software so different?
Because then you start getting copyright protection arguements. I used to see a few places that would rent out PC games like 7th Guest when they first came out, but you don't see that anymore, because of the piracy worries. Once you open the package, it's bonded to you for life.:P You can exchange it.. but only for the same package, since it's assumed that if the package is opened, then you still have the software installed on your computer. That's why you can't return software if you don't like it. That covers bugs and non-bug concerns.
Though it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I kind of have to agree with Mundie on this. You have to keep in mind that an OS is just a software platform for running apps; it provides interfaces and file handling and hardware control so the wheel does not have to be reinvented repeatedly. Saying an OS should be crash-proof vs bum 3rd party drivers is like saying the C programming language shouldn't let you kick over the stack with an out-of-bounds array assignment.
I think that the original poster's point was that a printer driver should never be in position to crash the OS. The driver doesn't need to be in whatever passes for "kernel space" in Windows. Unix systems can communicate with printers, yet those aren't kernel-level drivers.
Both of us have a share on one of the fileservers mounted; this share has a bunch of executable files (like winzip, acrobat reader install, etc. for times when you do a bi-monthly windows reinstall). Now, if a virus can propagate both through email and conventional means (infecting executables), which probably exists now, or at least is very trivial to make, then I am toast despite of all my good email practices and not using outlook.
Well, why is the share that holds software you install writable by either of you? Why should you be able to alter that share at all?
What sort of game are you playing that racks up the bandwidth charges? Just about every game currently designed is made so that 56k users aren't locked out. Modem users suffer more from latency problems than with bandwidth problems.
And when ATTBI hits me with this new pricing scheme, and the party is over, I will hurt them one more time. My friends and I will all send ATTBI letters, after we have UNSUBSCRIBED from their service, explaining that we are dumping them for Pac Bell DSL
You realize that ATTBI won't miss you at all, right? They want people who download 80gig/month to get the hell out and pick alternate providers. They don't want power users, they want a lot of people who use less than a gig per month. So don't think you'll somehow be hurting them. This pricing increase is merely a way to get rid of the power users or at least make them pay their fair share. Now all the users in my area will move to Pacbell DSL instead, and then they'll have to increase prices in a similar manner too. Thanks a lot.
I was going to simply going to start a new thread, but since you're the author, and this is late in the discussion, I'll reply directly to you in this thread.;)
I agree with much of your rebuttal, but there are a few points I disagree with.
So often in the Open Source community, I hear the mantra chanted over and over again "security through obscurity doesn't work." However, just about every argument I've seen about this assumes that if a layer of obscurity is added, then other security measures will be neglected. I feel a better argument would be "on its own, obscurity is a bad security model to rely on. As part of a robust security model, obscurity can be very valuable." And it can be. As long as other areas of security are not neglected, obscurity can be a useful policy.
Some open-source software comes with poor documentation, just like some proprietary software. Other free software comes with excellent documentation. It's a matter of customer choice: Choose software that has what you need.
Ehh... I've found the quality of documentation in open source software to be far worse than that turned out by the proprietary software houses. There are a few open source projects which do have high-quality documentation, granted, but they seem to be more of the exception. Documentation is something most programmers don't like to write (myself included;)), and fewer still know how to write good effective documentation.
Reverse-engineering is required only if hardware manufacturers keep the details of their software/hardware interfaces secret. The vast majority of hardware manufacturers do not keep them secret. Some which do keep them secret provide (binary-only) drivers for free software systems. Reverse-engineering is necessary only for the small minority of hardware devices which are secret.
I think the original writer was more likely refering to reverse engineering software products. Such as Samba, which you mentioned later.
Reverse-engineering is perfectly legal.
It seems to depend. The article implies that if reverse engineering is prohibited by the EULA, then reverse engineering that product is illegal. I've never paid much heed to EULAs as documents I have to follow, but the big software houses that funded the article certainly do. Do not forget the Blizzard vs Bnetd case as well. If Bnetd loses that fight, it could set a dangerous precident forbidding reverse engineering in the US (and thus the rest of the world).
Carter clearly has a stereotyped view of consumers. My elderly parents, who enjoy e-mailing their grandkids, use only free software.
Stereotyped, maybe, but accurate still. Just because your grandparents use free software and went through the substantial learning curve doesn't mean all, or even most consumers can. My grandmother can't even figure out Windows 98, there's no way I'd think she could use Linux.
If my parents need help, I can SSH into their machine and fix it remotely.
Assuming that it's not a problem with the networking.;) Or some type of boot-up problem. And I'd rather not have my grandparents on the net on a Linux machine with open ports, even if it's SSH. That is a disaster waiting to happen.
Once software has been licensed under the GPL, the license cannot be retracted.
Well, you can retract a GPL license, sortof. You simply cannot enforce the license retraction on already-released versions of the software. But a software author can switch from a GPL license in foo 1.0 to a BSD license in foo 1.1. I think maybe that's what you meant, but it wasn't too clear.
The AdTI claims that free software damages members of the "IP community" (by which it means proprietary software vendors), but then fails to show how such damage occurs.
Didn't Stallman say one of the intended purposes of the GPL was to destroy copyright from the inside? Or something like that.;) Besides, the original author is probably of the mindset that "those leftist GPL/Napster/DeCSS guys are all the same."
The guy is an enemy combatant, imprisoning him is perfectly legal.
Please, tell me exactly what an 'enemy combatant' is supposed to be. Be specific. Mr. al-Mujahir was a US citizen who was imprisoned. He has not been charged with a crime. The government was quick to point out that there was no plan to detonate a bomb, but that he was 'starting to think of a plan,' and he 'had knowledge of Washington.' Those are the reasons for his imprisonment. In the United States, we do not legally have 'preventative jailing.' That is, the government cannot legally say "you haven't done anything, but we're a little worried that someday you might do something, so we'll toss you into jail just to make sure everyone's safe." That is unconstitutional, and reasonably so. Of course, unconstitutionality is irrelevant if the courts ignore the law (as it did in WWII).
There is a saying to the effect of in time of war, the Constitution is silent.
The Constitution should never be silent, even when we are at war. Besides, since Congress hasn't declared war, we cannot be at war yet.
I certainly hope so. Yahoo's auction service is terrible. It's not like ebay is terribly secure or safe to use, but Yahoo doesn't even make a flailing attempt towards security. A buyer can only email the seller if the seller agrees to it. If the buyer thinks the seller has cheated him, the buyer can file a protest (sortof like negative feedback). The catch is, the buyer can only do this twice in his lifetime.:P Utterly rediculous.
Not to mention the huge number of bugs in the system. When I clicked on the 'file protest' or 'add a comment about this item' buttons, my browser would protest "undefined.warehouse.yahoo.com" not found (backend forgot to fill in hostname). The help link pointed to http:///help/buy (another hostname the backend forgot to fill in). All in all, it just had the feel of something that wasn't finished or fully tested.
If Sealand ever actually showed up as even a blip on the radar of the RIAA and MPAA, you'd better believe they'd go down quickly. I don't think it would be too hard to convince the US government (and many others most likely) for an trade embargo with Sealand. It's known for lack of copyrights, anything else? Didn't think so.
Didn't you see the latest "PSA" from the office of the drug czar?
Yes I have. That "this is what drug money goes to" was possibly the best commercial arguing for drug legalization I've seen... even if the filmers had the exact opposite intent.;)
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You mean like.. "copyright infringement?" :)
Sorry, Moby is dead. Space Ghost ate him.
Not really. Microsoft doesn't want the SSSCA forced upon them where the terms are out of their control. A program that they control is another matter.
I'm not sure why everyone gets so scared of this patent anywhere. The moment the patent prevents a competitor from entering the digital rights management market, the patent will be dropped faster then the DoJ could say anti-trust.
Of course, there will be no law saying that media companies will have to release ANY content in the old formats, and you can bet those formats will be dropped like a hot potato a few years after the introduction of new formats. Not too quickly, all of this would stretch out over a period of several years.. If the time period is stretched out a bit, it will be easier on consumers, and they won't feel so taken advantage of. You might not want to buy this new hardware, but if media companies only release to it, and major computer companies only ship Palladium computers (they'd be insane not to), then consumers will buy it. And it will spread.
Would it really be? General Unix support on IBM laptops? That would be such a huge money-loser that I would call it an "extremely foolish move" rather than a "good move." Supporting many OS's which will generate very little revenue is much more expensive than supporting one OS which generates a small amount of revenue. Given IBM's recent moves to cut traditional areas (like hard drives) that don't generate a healthy profit, I'm more inclined to believe the original poster was wrong. It goes against IBM's recent actions, and it doesn't make any sense businesswise, no matter how UNIX folks might hope for it.
I would guess you'd end up wasting a lot of your bandwidth, certainly far more than you'd cost anyone else. I would think that many places have a limit on how large a robots.txt they are willing to download.. or they should.
Crappy books can be just as much of a mind numbing time killer as crappy TV can. There is a lot of junk on TV, but there are a number of quality shows as well. Judge the shows by quality, don't merely dismiss them because you're elitist and it's just TV.
Finding Nemo, next summer. A little over a year from now.
It's a five-picture deal, but the deal was signed a year after the release of Toy Story. I'm not sure if A Bug's Life is included in that deal, but the deal covers at least the next two films.
I wonder... those rumors aren't true, but if they were, could the Disney corporation still prevent copyrights from expiring by claiming the original author was actually still alive? That would be a bizarre turn.
I don't think so. "Gaming" machines haven't needed DVD-ROMs in the past. My Windows machine is used for pretty much just for games and video capture, and I hadn't needed to get a dvd drive, though it would come in handy.
I think he was trying to bring in the idea that the software world changes far far faster than any other engineering profession (save perhaps electrical engineering) and that, say, something designed 30 years ago in the software world is like a civil engineer trying to work with buildings built a thousand years ago. It's a fairly flawed analogy, and besides that it doesn't make much sense.
5. 'Software is a FAR more complex art than any other form of engineering.' --- this is just sad, and shows your complete ignorance of anything outside of software development. You really need to look beyond yourself, and see that there is more to the world than your invisible cathedrals of code, man.
Actually I've heard of this before, occasionally from engineering professors with experience in many disciplines. I wouldn't go so far as the original poster and say it was "FAR more complex," and it's obvious the original poster underestimates what is required from other disciplines.
I buy a tire for my car and it blows out in thirty days- I get my money back. Why is software so different?
Because then you start getting copyright protection arguements. I used to see a few places that would rent out PC games like 7th Guest when they first came out, but you don't see that anymore, because of the piracy worries. Once you open the package, it's bonded to you for life. :P You can exchange it.. but only for the same package, since it's assumed that if the package is opened, then you still have the software installed on your computer. That's why you can't return software if you don't like it. That covers bugs and non-bug concerns.
I think that the original poster's point was that a printer driver should never be in position to crash the OS. The driver doesn't need to be in whatever passes for "kernel space" in Windows. Unix systems can communicate with printers, yet those aren't kernel-level drivers.
Well, why is the share that holds software you install writable by either of you? Why should you be able to alter that share at all?
What sort of game are you playing that racks up the bandwidth charges? Just about every game currently designed is made so that 56k users aren't locked out. Modem users suffer more from latency problems than with bandwidth problems.
You realize that ATTBI won't miss you at all, right? They want people who download 80gig/month to get the hell out and pick alternate providers. They don't want power users, they want a lot of people who use less than a gig per month. So don't think you'll somehow be hurting them. This pricing increase is merely a way to get rid of the power users or at least make them pay their fair share. Now all the users in my area will move to Pacbell DSL instead, and then they'll have to increase prices in a similar manner too. Thanks a lot.
I agree with much of your rebuttal, but there are a few points I disagree with.
Ehh... I've found the quality of documentation in open source software to be far worse than that turned out by the proprietary software houses. There are a few open source projects which do have high-quality documentation, granted, but they seem to be more of the exception. Documentation is something most programmers don't like to write (myself included ;)), and fewer still know how to write good effective documentation.
I think the original writer was more likely refering to reverse engineering software products. Such as Samba, which you mentioned later.
Reverse-engineering is perfectly legal.
It seems to depend. The article implies that if reverse engineering is prohibited by the EULA, then reverse engineering that product is illegal. I've never paid much heed to EULAs as documents I have to follow, but the big software houses that funded the article certainly do. Do not forget the Blizzard vs Bnetd case as well. If Bnetd loses that fight, it could set a dangerous precident forbidding reverse engineering in the US (and thus the rest of the world).
Stereotyped, maybe, but accurate still. Just because your grandparents use free software and went through the substantial learning curve doesn't mean all, or even most consumers can. My grandmother can't even figure out Windows 98, there's no way I'd think she could use Linux.
If my parents need help, I can SSH into their machine and fix it remotely.
Assuming that it's not a problem with the networking. ;) Or some type of boot-up problem. And I'd rather not have my grandparents on the net on a Linux machine with open ports, even if it's SSH. That is a disaster waiting to happen.
Well, you can retract a GPL license, sortof. You simply cannot enforce the license retraction on already-released versions of the software. But a software author can switch from a GPL license in foo 1.0 to a BSD license in foo 1.1. I think maybe that's what you meant, but it wasn't too clear.
Didn't Stallman say one of the intended purposes of the GPL was to destroy copyright from the inside? Or something like that. ;) Besides, the original author is probably of the mindset that "those leftist GPL/Napster/DeCSS guys are all the same."
Please, tell me exactly what an 'enemy combatant' is supposed to be. Be specific. Mr. al-Mujahir was a US citizen who was imprisoned. He has not been charged with a crime. The government was quick to point out that there was no plan to detonate a bomb, but that he was 'starting to think of a plan,' and he 'had knowledge of Washington.' Those are the reasons for his imprisonment. In the United States, we do not legally have 'preventative jailing.' That is, the government cannot legally say "you haven't done anything, but we're a little worried that someday you might do something, so we'll toss you into jail just to make sure everyone's safe." That is unconstitutional, and reasonably so. Of course, unconstitutionality is irrelevant if the courts ignore the law (as it did in WWII).
There is a saying to the effect of in time of war, the Constitution is silent.
The Constitution should never be silent, even when we are at war. Besides, since Congress hasn't declared war, we cannot be at war yet.
I certainly hope so. Yahoo's auction service is terrible. It's not like ebay is terribly secure or safe to use, but Yahoo doesn't even make a flailing attempt towards security. A buyer can only email the seller if the seller agrees to it. If the buyer thinks the seller has cheated him, the buyer can file a protest (sortof like negative feedback). The catch is, the buyer can only do this twice in his lifetime. :P Utterly rediculous.
Not to mention the huge number of bugs in the system. When I clicked on the 'file protest' or 'add a comment about this item' buttons, my browser would protest "undefined.warehouse.yahoo.com" not found (backend forgot to fill in hostname). The help link pointed to http:///help/buy (another hostname the backend forgot to fill in). All in all, it just had the feel of something that wasn't finished or fully tested.
Where can I find a wma player for linux? (just curious) Any netscape/mozilla plugins?
In fact I don't know of any movie format that can't (although some of them suck ass to set up).
Quicktime with Sorenson, maybe?
Yes I have. That "this is what drug money goes to" was possibly the best commercial arguing for drug legalization I've seen... even if the filmers had the exact opposite intent. ;)