Every developer in my company is a full-time telecommuter. We have weekly meetings in person every Friday morning, but other than that, we work from business computers in our homes. We're all connected with some sort of broadband. We communicate by telephone, e-mail and Instant Messaging.
As another example, a friend of mine recently moved to Ohio from Florida. His company begged him not to quit. To benefit both parties, he agreed to continue working for them out of his home (in Ohio!) until their current project is finished in May.
So, I'd say it is feasible. As long as you can acheive good communication between the telecommuting employees and the rest of their counterparts, and can ensure that they will adhere to proper working hours, there isn't much difference! How many of us ever left our cubicles anyways???
First of all, I do believe that the original intent of DeCSS was NOT to pirate, but to enable playback on unsupported systems.
You claim DVD is a superior format. I agree that in many ways, it is. But what has happened is that the movie industry has simply made the medicine easier to swallow. Now we have to watch commercials we don't want to see. Now we have to succumb to their international market manipulation through region coding. Where is your limit? What if the material DVDs were made with was carcinogenic?
Regarding the VCD movies. I believe there are certain asian countries where the VCD industry is booming. I don't simply mean the pirate-VCD industry, but VCDs as a whole. I have no direct citations, but I do remember reading such a thing on several occasians.
The movie industry could've easily made DVD more palettable if they wanted to. How about releasing the CSS code to the world? Let the DVD players abound. Let DVDs abound. Let the movie industry become more profitable through it all. Or how about making a DVD cost $10 so no one would want to pirate it. Shoot, I'm not going to waste drive space, my time, and a hole bunch of trouble trying to find a pirated version when I could order it online from the convert of my own home for a few dollars.
Sure, the movie industry has a right to be upset that their little scheme failed. Now the DVDCCA look like morons because their uncopyable DVDs are copyable (or, as I still insist, playable on unlicensed players). Well, then if they were so careless and cheap with how they decided to protect it, DVD SHOULD BE STOPPED! Don't release any more DVD movies. Go bakc to the drawing board. If you have a hole in the road, you don't just drive around it, you fix it! Maybe while they're at it, they'll fix the rest of the Toledo-like pot holes and keep the consumer in mind.
How many times in history have people been made fools by clinging to the present-day's capacities? IBM has just released 70GB hard drives. Some machines are coming with 256MB of RAM. Banwiwdth *is* increasing ("they" just did 3+ terabits over fiber!)
You can't rely on an argument of capacity for piracy to say it won't happen. Capacity is not constant, but ever increasing.
I still submit that the battle is being fought on the wrong premise. I believe, until someone convinces me otherwise, that CSS is not copy protection, it's playback protection. The letter of the law says you cannot circumvent copy protection. What DeCSS was inteded to do was circumvent playback protection. Again, these two need to be separated.
Here are several ways that piracy could be stamped out:
Make it cheap. Right now, music and movies cost money. They're significant amounts of money, relative to what it would cost to produce and distribute digitally. Also, everyone's time is worth something. If the value of the time it takes a person to pirate a song or movie is less than the cost of getting it legally (throw in there a margin of morality), piracy will occur. Ifyou make it easier to own a legal, official copy of the work, piracy will not occur. It's that simple. If I could download songs from the record labels ina high-quality format, with organized naming, proper ID3 tags, and even notes about the songs and album cover images, all in a nice,c lean package, for say, $1-$2, I would do it. Why would anyone waste their time fiddling with rippers and sloppy pirate sites bent on making you click banners when I could get a good copy very easily and legally?
Make whatever it is that is being pirated totaly undesireable. If no one wants it in the first place, there will be no reason to pirate. Personally, I feel Hollywood and the Record Industry are both going in this direction. Its getting harder and harder to find good works through these channels.
Make the means of reproduction expensive. Of course, before the days of rampant computer usage, this was the case. CD-burners were very expensive. Disk space was also expensive. At times, RAM soared near the price of gold. It was more of a monetary barrier to pirating things as music than a technological ones. Now we just have bigger hard drives, faster CPUs, more memory and cheaper CD burners. DVD burners are still too expensive, but they're on their way.
I'm sure there are even more ways, but these are the ones that came to me off the top of my head. It seems to the first option would be best for the industry. They could maintain quite a bit of control, still make the same margins (since distribution would be far less expensive), and all the while seem like good guys to the vast majority of the public.
Oh, wait! What am I thinking? That would only make sense... duh!
The DMCA makes certain things illegal, such as circumventing copy protection.
Isn't there some sort of Home Recording Act that allows consumer's to make up to 5 copies or so of whatever media they buy -- so long as they make it for their own use?
I'm no legal expert, Assuming such an act does exist, it would seem that the DMCA steps on the toes of this act. Preventing copying where copying is illegal.
If they don't want it copied for illegal reason, fine. Give us ways to copy it in legal manners for use on systems such as linux and BeOS.
It seems the judge's decision is based on the premise that the CSS that was reverse-engineered is a form of copy protection.
I can copy an encrypted ZIP file, a PGP'ed piece of e-mail, an ROT13 usenet message, or anything other encrypted content I want. The encryption does not prevent me copying. The encryption prevents me from VIEWING it.
If CSS were copy protection, I would agree. But CSS is simply NOT COPYPROTECTION.
Someone please inform the media of this.
This news needs to be made mainstream
on
RIAA Sues MP3.com
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· Score: 2
I'm afraid this might onw fair so well.
I fully support mp3.com (and the EFF defending against the MPAA, etc.) in their quest to harbor in a new era of digital audio and video, but how much of the public knows about this?
Let's face it, public perception is key to suits like these. If the well-known RIAA (and MPAA in their case) can convince the public a bunch of hackers are trying to stela the stuff which will ultimately raise prices, the majority will side with the big guys.
To people like my mother, or computer illiterate friends, a hacker is a bad person. Is a hacker responsible for it? Well, no, but unless the whole story gets out there no one will ever know it. And unfortunately, most major news services have reporters who fit into this same under-tech-educated majority ofthe public.
Someone needs to find a way to bring these topics, in their entire truth, to the public in a manner they can understand. The RIAA has the power to do it. Do we?
Not to defend the RIAA -- I am in full support of MP3.com -- but what about security? It sounds like Beam-it just checks your CD to see its ID or tracks and once it determines its a valid CD, it says "OK" and lets you listen. Well, how long will it be until someone stubs this process and forges the messages back and forth to MP3.com from a stubbed Beam-it?
Seems to be a lot of ATI slamming going on. I for one know that ATI has NEVER made the fastest card in the market (although their marketing department seems to think so).
But, I do have an ATI AIW 128 (not Pro). Boy is it nice to watch TV, or record a TV magazine for later. Its nice to be able to broadcast video in netmeeting or CUSeeMe. Its nice to be able to do all of this on one board. I have OpenGL driver support (even in NT!). I have DirectX support. It compensates DVD playback. Its a very well rounded board. And what's more, I get very decent game play at 32bit (whereas most traditional 3D boards cringe at 32-bit color and stick to 16-bit).
Now, there were two ways to proceed in enhancing game performance:
Put more of the rendering onto the chip (i.e. T&L)
Use more chips
GeForce did one and ATI did the other. The reviews I've seen place them very close. No which one of these guys will figure out how to use TWO T&L chips first?
Anyways, I just wanted to point out that ATI is most prominently a marketing company selling to an OEM market. And they're doing a DAMN GOOD job at that. Their boards are not the best, but they're certainly far from the worst.
I hear ya. It doesn't sound like bad idea to me. The protocol would be find. As long as the client and UI is completely different.
But doesn't IRC have the problem of a slew of isolated networks. i.e. if you're on one, and your friend is on the other, you can't chat until one of you switches to a server in the other's network?
Forgive me if I am off here -- when I used IRC, I never got heavily into it.
The IETF is currently organizaing a standard, and I believe MS and AOL are in on it, amazingly.
But who cares if they do have a standard? It doesn't mean anyone's going to use it. If none of the big guys implement it, or implement it strictly to the standard, we'll be stuck with clients that don't intercommunicate.
Now, if someone started an open source project, following the IETF developments, and there was a public effort to convince everyone to use these open clients rather than AIM, MSNMessenger, etc.
I for one, would certainly use it, and promote it to my friends and co-workers. I'd keep AIM on until enough of my "buddies" were phased over.
I certainly agree that there needs to be a standard. And I applaud Microsoft for saying so considering all of their media coverage, no matter what Microsoft's real perverted intentions were. And, lo-and-behold, there is an industry group workign on the standard as we speak. Let's just hope they adopt it. But, I do have a list of complaints I've seen with current IM-like products that I think should be addressed so they don't get worked into a standard. Stock/News/Weather tickers: There is a time and a place for these. I simply don't want special features cluttering my screen, memroy and disk when I'd rather use a third-party stock-ticker from elsewhere. Just don't put it in the protocol. Let the indvidual IM client software add what they want, btu keep it out of the protocol. Advertisements: Again, keep them out of the protocol. Names: OK, this really has to do with client-sofwtare only, but I'd sure like to be able to put aliases on the names in my buddy list. I can never remember who GoldenFry77 is. I'd rather see an alias as "John Smith from Work" and have the client software use GoldenFry77 in the background.
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As another example, a friend of mine recently moved to Ohio from Florida. His company begged him not to quit. To benefit both parties, he agreed to continue working for them out of his home (in Ohio!) until their current project is finished in May.
So, I'd say it is feasible. As long as you can acheive good communication between the telecommuting employees and the rest of their counterparts, and can ensure that they will adhere to proper working hours, there isn't much difference! How many of us ever left our cubicles anyways???
You claim DVD is a superior format. I agree that in many ways, it is. But what has happened is that the movie industry has simply made the medicine easier to swallow. Now we have to watch commercials we don't want to see. Now we have to succumb to their international market manipulation through region coding. Where is your limit? What if the material DVDs were made with was carcinogenic?
Regarding the VCD movies. I believe there are certain asian countries where the VCD industry is booming. I don't simply mean the pirate-VCD industry, but VCDs as a whole. I have no direct citations, but I do remember reading such a thing on several occasians.
The movie industry could've easily made DVD more palettable if they wanted to. How about releasing the CSS code to the world? Let the DVD players abound. Let DVDs abound. Let the movie industry become more profitable through it all. Or how about making a DVD cost $10 so no one would want to pirate it. Shoot, I'm not going to waste drive space, my time, and a hole bunch of trouble trying to find a pirated version when I could order it online from the convert of my own home for a few dollars.
Sure, the movie industry has a right to be upset that their little scheme failed. Now the DVDCCA look like morons because their uncopyable DVDs are copyable (or, as I still insist, playable on unlicensed players). Well, then if they were so careless and cheap with how they decided to protect it, DVD SHOULD BE STOPPED! Don't release any more DVD movies. Go bakc to the drawing board. If you have a hole in the road, you don't just drive around it, you fix it! Maybe while they're at it, they'll fix the rest of the Toledo-like pot holes and keep the consumer in mind.
How many times in history have people been made fools by clinging to the present-day's capacities? IBM has just released 70GB hard drives. Some machines are coming with 256MB of RAM. Banwiwdth *is* increasing ("they" just did 3+ terabits over fiber!)
You can't rely on an argument of capacity for piracy to say it won't happen. Capacity is not constant, but ever increasing.
I still submit that the battle is being fought on the wrong premise. I believe, until someone convinces me otherwise, that CSS is not copy protection, it's playback protection. The letter of the law says you cannot circumvent copy protection. What DeCSS was inteded to do was circumvent playback protection. Again, these two need to be separated.
I'm sure there are even more ways, but these are the ones that came to me off the top of my head. It seems to the first option would be best for the industry. They could maintain quite a bit of control, still make the same margins (since distribution would be far less expensive), and all the while seem like good guys to the vast majority of the public.
Oh, wait! What am I thinking? That would only make sense... duh!
The DMCA makes certain things illegal, such as circumventing copy protection.
Isn't there some sort of Home Recording Act that allows consumer's to make up to 5 copies or so of whatever media they buy -- so long as they make it for their own use?
I'm no legal expert, Assuming such an act does exist, it would seem that the DMCA steps on the toes of this act. Preventing copying where copying is illegal.
If they don't want it copied for illegal reason, fine. Give us ways to copy it in legal manners for use on systems such as linux and BeOS.
It seems the judge's decision is based on the premise that the CSS that was reverse-engineered is a form of copy protection.
I can copy an encrypted ZIP file, a PGP'ed piece of e-mail, an ROT13 usenet message, or anything other encrypted content I want. The encryption does not prevent me copying. The encryption prevents me from VIEWING it.
If CSS were copy protection, I would agree. But CSS is simply NOT COPYPROTECTION.
Someone please inform the media of this.
I fully support mp3.com (and the EFF defending against the MPAA, etc.) in their quest to harbor in a new era of digital audio and video, but how much of the public knows about this?
Let's face it, public perception is key to suits like these. If the well-known RIAA (and MPAA in their case) can convince the public a bunch of hackers are trying to stela the stuff which will ultimately raise prices, the majority will side with the big guys.
To people like my mother, or computer illiterate friends, a hacker is a bad person. Is a hacker responsible for it? Well, no, but unless the whole story gets out there no one will ever know it. And unfortunately, most major news services have reporters who fit into this same under-tech-educated majority ofthe public.
Someone needs to find a way to bring these topics, in their entire truth, to the public in a manner they can understand. The RIAA has the power to do it. Do we?
My mother just doesn't read slashdot. Does yours?
Not to defend the RIAA -- I am in full support of MP3.com -- but what about security? It sounds like Beam-it just checks your CD to see its ID or tracks and once it determines its a valid CD, it says "OK" and lets you listen. Well, how long will it be until someone stubs this process and forges the messages back and forth to MP3.com from a stubbed Beam-it?
Seems to be a lot of ATI slamming going on. I for one know that ATI has NEVER made the fastest card in the market (although their marketing department seems to think so).
But, I do have an ATI AIW 128 (not Pro). Boy is it nice to watch TV, or record a TV magazine for later. Its nice to be able to broadcast video in netmeeting or CUSeeMe. Its nice to be able to do all of this on one board. I have OpenGL driver support (even in NT!). I have DirectX support. It compensates DVD playback. Its a very well rounded board. And what's more, I get very decent game play at 32bit (whereas most traditional 3D boards cringe at 32-bit color and stick to 16-bit).
Now, there were two ways to proceed in enhancing game performance:
GeForce did one and ATI did the other. The reviews I've seen place them very close. No which one of these guys will figure out how to use TWO T&L chips first?
Anyways, I just wanted to point out that ATI is most prominently a marketing company selling to an OEM market. And they're doing a DAMN GOOD job at that. Their boards are not the best, but they're certainly far from the worst.
But doesn't IRC have the problem of a slew of isolated networks. i.e. if you're on one, and your friend is on the other, you can't chat until one of you switches to a server in the other's network?
Forgive me if I am off here -- when I used IRC, I never got heavily into it.
The IETF is currently organizaing a standard, and I believe MS and AOL are in on it, amazingly.
But who cares if they do have a standard? It doesn't mean anyone's going to use it. If none of the big guys implement it, or implement it strictly to the standard, we'll be stuck with clients that don't intercommunicate.
Now, if someone started an open source project, following the IETF developments, and there was a public effort to convince everyone to use these open clients rather than AIM, MSNMessenger, etc.
I for one, would certainly use it, and promote it to my friends and co-workers. I'd keep AIM on until enough of my "buddies" were phased over.
I certainly agree that there needs to be a standard. And I applaud Microsoft for saying so considering all of their media coverage, no matter what Microsoft's real perverted intentions were. And, lo-and-behold, there is an industry group workign on the standard as we speak. Let's just hope they adopt it. But, I do have a list of complaints I've seen with current IM-like products that I think should be addressed so they don't get worked into a standard. Stock/News/Weather tickers: There is a time and a place for these. I simply don't want special features cluttering my screen, memroy and disk when I'd rather use a third-party stock-ticker from elsewhere. Just don't put it in the protocol. Let the indvidual IM client software add what they want, btu keep it out of the protocol. Advertisements: Again, keep them out of the protocol. Names: OK, this really has to do with client-sofwtare only, but I'd sure like to be able to put aliases on the names in my buddy list. I can never remember who GoldenFry77 is. I'd rather see an alias as "John Smith from Work" and have the client software use GoldenFry77 in the background.