Why was this posted and the article on 2 TB memory support on Alpha Linux by SuSE that I submitted rejected, not once, but twice? SPARC is very cool, but the article isn't all that exciting IMO.
I have to concur. I am generally not one to complain about editorial choices here, but 2 Terabyte memory support under Linux is IMHO much more interesting than the latest rumormongering from Sun. At the very least, both stories could have been linked.
However, a story I forwarded from the mp3.com mailing list a while back (about the RIAA suit against them) was also dumped in favor of a movie review, mere days after the Motion Picture Association of America had begun thoroughly stomping the testicles of the Open Source community in the form of lawsuits against DeCSS, etc. Even something as dramatic as that didn't seem to have much affect on/. content (I mean, come on, helping the very crooks to market their product through reviews days after they've declared war on the community you purport to support?). Given that editorial history I doubt your complaining, or mine, will have any significant effect.
However, all is not lost. Commander Taco, Hemos, et. al. have been kind enough to release the sources to slashdot under the GPL, so you and I both are free to take our sour grapes and ferment them into the wine of another, parallel open source site.:-) And despite all of the flaws, there is still sufficient good content here for me to keep coming back, reading the stories that interest me, and posting comments (most of them much more on topic than this).
As a final aside, working for a company which has nearly completed the process of dumping Sun in favor of FreeBSD and Linux solutions, I found the entire story rather amusing. While there are certainly specialized applicaitons which will demand 1000 processor in parallel hardware, just about any job can be achieved far less expensively, and with far more flexibility, simply by using a beowulf, or similar, cluster of inexpensive PCs on the Open Source operating system of your choice. Of course, Sun Marketing will undoubtably convince some that they absolutly cannot live without the latest UltraSparc Millenium Parallel Honking Machine From Hell/1000, which can be yours for a mere $8.7 x 10^16 and will even run an operating system which has no compiler included (such "add-on" parts sold seperately at still greater cost) and still, to this day, defaults to "ed" whenever an unfortunate user attempts a "crontab -e".[1]
[1]setting the EDITOR environment variable to "vi" or "emacs" will override this, but that doesn't make the default any less inane.
Closed Source. Microsoft Astroturfers. Sour Grapes.
This is an open source site, with most of us (astroturfers like you aside) far more interested in the most trivial and uninteresting patch to the ever changing development kernel of Linux, or patches to FreeBSD current, than we are in the overhyped release of a bloated, unstable, closed OS from an organization dedicated to denying all of us the freedom to chose our own platform on our own terms.
Get over it and leave the rest of us in the open source community alone to continue building the future. If the content of this site offends you so, go back to microsoft.com and hang out with your buddies there. I'm sure they will be more than willing to wallow with you in your disillusion and self-pity while the rest of us, and the future itself, leaves you weeping in its wake.
I was once very excited about java. Did a fair amount of development under Java 1.0, Java 1.1, and Java 1.2, before we as a company decided to dump the product because of Sun's mismanagement of the standard and their lackluster support of the Blackdown group and Linux in general. This may have changed for the moment, but for us (and I suspect many others) it came far too late to be of much use (c.f. "sun sucks").
Performance may now be acceptable, but at the time we dumped the product even a small, simple data entry application was too demanding of the JVM at the time (even on Sparc 10's running Solaris, much less Linux). The choice Sun gave us was stark: run the Java VM under Windows or Solaris on a high end sparc, or suffer. We chose Linux, adopted a more open development environment, and now having dumped the product we will not, in the future, ever consider going back (c.f "sun sucks" and "slow"). Using GNU configure and its associated utilities, we are able to get all the cross-platform support we require, even if it involves a quick rebuild of the sources (typing "./configure" and "make install" isn't terribly difficult) with the performance our users demand and languages we can hire developers for (c.f. "use Perl" and "Java sucks").
I enjoyed using Java (despite the, even now, still horrificly screwed up date and time classes) as a language, but the drawbacks were too severe and too critical for too long of a time, and Sun's current and future motives with respect to the openness of the standard and support for Linux, FreeBSD, and whatever other platform we may, in the future, chose to deploy, has eroded our confidence in the product too much for us to seriously consider any future use of Java. Put simply, the stumbling blocks Sun until recently put in the way of development on anything other than their "blessed" platforms far outweighed any advantage the language itself offered (and those were not inconsiderable for those of us coming from C++, with Java's simpler memory management and garbage collection and other features).
Alas, the promise of "write once, run everywhere" quickly became (and IMHO remains) "write once, run where Sun would like you to." At present Sun has chosen to become mildly friendly towards Linux. This is great! However, I would not expect this to remain a long term strategy on their part, unless there are some serious changes in the mentaility of Sun's upper management. (c.f. "blah blah blah").
hese folks have upped the resolution to 3200x2400. That's nearly impossible to read even on a 24 inch SGI monitor
I can read xterm's "tiny" font with no problem on my SGI 1600 Flat Panel at 1600x1024 resolution. The same font is unreadable on a 21" CRT monitor at 1280x1024. Comparing resolutions between CRTs and plasmas is apples to oranges - the clarity of a plasma panel is akin to getting glasses after your eyesight has gradually deteriorated: you simply can't believe how much better you can see, and how much more seldom those headaches kick in.
You are correct in noting that the resolution increase is such that all but the largest point (pixel) fonts we're used to today would become unreadable, even on a flat panel. But you (or others, anyway) would be surprised at just how clear and readable tiny print is on a flat panel, as opposed to a continuously scanning (and distorting) CRT.
The solution is, as others have said, a level of abstraction between the physical world "length" and "area" screen measurements and the digital world "size" in pixels, preferably with user definable mappings between the two for "arbitrary" virtual resolution ranging from "unreadable" to "large enough for all but the completely blind."
Maybe IBM could ship off a display in the direction of the XFree86 group...
Copyright Law has been successively extended to ever greater periods of time, primarilly to protect Disney's ownership of Mickey Mouse. (Why else would so much Disney money be flowing into congressional coffers?)
It its day the Catholic Church was nearly as powerful as the modern Media Whoremongers are today. Had the concept of intellectual ownership existed, they would most certainly have either extended copyright indefinitely, or granted a special exception to the Bible, making it owned in full by The Church in perpetuity.
Not unlike what a little weak encryption does with a video recording, under the new order of the DMCA which makes countering that encryption 500 years from now in order to view the contents of that file/disk as illegal as it is today.
Since the RIAA and the MPAA are simply two facets of the same atrocity, we need a term which encompasses both.
Media Whoremongers
Sony Bono is an example of a Media Whore, whose congressional seat was probably purchased by recording industry.
Michael Jackson, in his lame appearance at the Reagan whitehouse lobying for legislation which later passed and took DAT technology out of the hands of the casual consumer as well as added an "unauthorized copying tax" to blank media, is another. (I mention the Reagan whitehouse to underscore that not only the Clinton administration is at fault, but both parties, in both the congress and the white house, have behaved equally reprehensibly in the last several years.)
MGI is an example of a whoremonger, as are Sony, Time-Warner, and so on.
A "Sued by Media Whoremongers" banner would be applicable to MP3 sites, Linux DVD sites, and probably allot of other sites we aren't even aware of, who have quietly shut down for fear of economic ruin.
As a corallary, "Silenced by Media Whoremongers" would be a nice image to display when one is forced to remove their site, presumably with a link to other sites with detailed information on the underlying issues (e.g. LiVid).
If todays intellectual property laws were in force at the time of Martin Luthar King, the Catholic church would have been able to prevent the translation of the Bible into local languages (German, later English, etc.) and would have been able to prevent its being published at all.
No Reformation. No Renaissance. No Science. No Industrial Revolution. No exponential growth of knowledge and technology.[1]
What have we already denied ourselves and our children, in subscribing and adhering to this atrocity? What will the media lobby and our so easilly (and cheaply) sold congress take from us next?
[1] IMHO this is what we are on the cusp of losing now, along with the usual targets of such attack: civil liberties, freedom of speach and expression, and so on. How can you do any science if the cost of "standing on the shoulders of others" eats up the bulk of your research budget? In the areas of applied science and technology we already live with this to a large degree - there is a reason airplanes and automobiles have changed little in the last several decades, and it isn't because we've perfected the technology by a long way.
In the abstract that might be true. With the europeans in particular. But in this case, Reagan's original plan for a station was LARGER that the current station, and projections predict would have probably cost the american taxpayers less.
This is an interesting argument. Can you provide specific references to back it up?
Two important points:
1. We can't count on congressional budgeting for anything, much less an "American Only" space station. Without international political pressures and the political dimension in general, do you really think it likely that congress would have continued to provide funding for a project which was certain to go over budget from day one? (This is, after all, the first time we've done this, and the first time anyone has done something like this on this scale. I don't know anyone who expected it not to run into unexpected glitches and cost overruns.)
2. The political dimension should not be dismissed so quickly simply because we all, justifiably, feel a great deal of contempt for politicians. In addition to building an important scientific platform we are building social and political infrastructure and institutions to facilitate internation cooperation which I think can be expected to lead to cooperation in other areas once the IIS is a success. In a time where Austria, birthplace of Hitler, has chosen (democratically, no less!) to move back to the extreme right, when Yugoslavia has torn itself apart in genocidal madness reminiscent of World War II, when Russia stands in political and economic turmoil the consequences of which are known to know on, etc. etc. we need all of the stabalizing factors in the international milieu we can get. The ISS is a small, but physchologically (and politically) very important. Of course, the UN, which we've finally begun paying our dues to again, is a much bigger and more important component, but that is a tirade for another day.
There's also this remarkable thing about open source libraries -- I can distribute them with my product! Add to that this remarkable technology called "shell scripting" and I can have a software bundle that will install and run coherently with no real dependencies on Sun (especially if I staticly link in the clib calls, as Sun does like to introduce irritating incompatabilities between hardware updates of the same version of Solaris).
But we have gone a step further...
There's also this remarkable platform called Linux, which works wonderfully well and costs a minute fraction of what a Sun box does, for the same or even better performance, depending on the application and hardware platform.
Another remarkable product called FreeBSD works wonders as well. I'd be hard pressed to pick one over the other, and would pick both, hands down, over the proprietary alternatives.
It is cheaper to provide a complete hardware solution than to jump through Sun's hoops. And since it is in-house trading software, our only customers are the traders, who make us all millions trading on this system. Our developers are happy, our "customers" are happy, and I as a system/network administrator am happy.
Yeah, I guess my life is "dreamy" now. It's also extremely productive and well paid, allowing me to indulge in hobbies (like flying airplanes) I never would have dreamed of a few years ago, and providing the robustness and stability to give me the time to do so.
This is the kind of rewards one gets when one goes out on a limb a little and empowers oneself (and one's employer) by taking control of one's infrastructure and technology back from one's vendors.
Microsoft is an atrocity (technically and ethically) and we no longer jump through their hoops, let alone run their software
Sun is a Microsoft wannabe, and we no longer jump through their hoops either. We use their hardware platform only in as far as it pleases us, and routinely dump it for more cost effective alternatives (Dec Alpha running Linux, Power PC, Intel, depending on the application and its requirements). And no Sun box, not even their 64 processor monster, holds a candle to a well contstructed Linux Beowolf cluster. Sun's habit of keeping open source software (Linux in particular) at arms length has caused us to dump many of their software products, such as StarOffice (Applix is better and not being allowed to rot over time) and Java, which would have otherwise remained useful and continued to be used by us. Unfortunately for Sun, they have persued an idiotic strategy with respect to Open Source software, a strategy designed to benefit Sun at their customers' (i.e. our) expense. Of course we did someting about that, by dumping the aforementioned products, with prejudice.
The same goes for the so-called Open Software Foundation (which is hardly open) and MOTIF, which we had dumped long before dumping most of Sun itself.
The net result? More productivity, vastly more uptime and reliability, more wealth, and more time to spend it doing fun stuff.
Hint. It isn't anyone remotely friendly to the authors and users of Free (as in Liberty) software.
In fact, if you look at the conglomerate structure and trace back most of these magazines you find... surprise! Member conglomerates of the MPAA, the RIAA, and the DVD Forum. Remember those guys?
Now, compare that to the groups which are promoting the UCITA in its various forms and lobbied for passage of the extremely draconian Millenium Digitial Copyright Act. See any similarities? I thought you might.
We can rely on no one but ourselves to get the word out about this. Tell your family and friends, and anyone else who will listen with any tolerance. If enough people will do this the truth will spread in much the same way Linux has, by word of mouth and sneakernet. Talk yourself horse about these issues -- we all have to make up for the resounding silence the "primetime" media will maintain on a subject this close to their pocketbooks.
Organize internet wide awareness, via logos on web pages a la' the blue ribbon campaign.
Stop subscribing to these magazines, and make sure they know why (their silence on the DVD story, UCITA, and the MDCA, in other words, shoddy reporting and/or editors who have whored themselves out to their own special interest).
Please post other ideas -- currently our efforts on the DVD and mp3 front (I submitted a story days ago about yet another lawsuit against mp3.com from the RIAA which was never posted, knocked out in favor of "Phantom Menace Pre-Orders Available", no doubt -- now promoting a major product of these folks was real helpful to this struggle on slashdot's part, but I digress), as well as the DMCA and UCITA, are fairly fragmented.
We need to bring these efforts under an umbrella concept that lends itself (I shudder to say this, but must) soundbytes, banner ads, and little "click-me" buttons that can be spread around the net and made ubiquitious. It's early here in Chicago and I'm not exactly bursting with clever catchwords and phrases at the moment, but if anyone else has ideas please follow up with them.
This issue is far too critical to our personal freedom and our professional lives to be ignored or passively accepted.
We are writing our in-house (read: proprietary) software using Open Source libraries and NOT Motif. This was not true four years ago.
Our reasons for switching away from Motif and other closed-source, proprietary libraries and development tools include:
Being burned in the past with orphaned products (OI, anyone?)
Outrageously expensive development licenses (offending products shall remain anonymous to protect the guilty)
Even more outrageously priced source licenses
License Management headaches and associated downtimes (Sun C++ is one example - by no means unique - in that it is completely useless if flexlm hiccups or goes down, costing the company lots of money in idle developers until it can be brought back on-line)
Slow development cycle
Lack of support on desired platform (e.g. Linux)
Synchronization of upgrades (or rather, the severe lack thereof). I.e. Being forced by one product to upgrade (e.g. to Solaris 2.x) while forced by another, equally critical product, to wait until they finish their port to the same platform, perhaps months or even a year later.
The Open Source alternatives are, almost without exception, superior in quality, performance, and ease of use than their commercial counterparts. This is not universally true, but has been the case more often than not, and was most certainly true with respect to Motif vs. what we chose to replace it with. In the few cases this hasn't been true, the savings in other areas (such as those noted above) was more than sufficient to make up for any additional headaches (and they have been remarkably few).
I'm all for alternative testing to get into college, but it's only a step in the process. Jusrt getting disadvantaged students into college does not guarantee their success. Traditional curricula also need to be adjusted.
Getting "disadvanted" folks into college is a laudable goal, as long as you aren't throwing more qualified applicants out to do so. If you are, then you are at best merely substitutied one unfairness for another. More likely you have chucked a reasonably fair and objective system for a very unfair one, which happens to favor whatever disadvantaged group you are wishing to promote at the expense of everyone else.
Indeed, if you substitute arbitrary standards (or worse still, subjective interviews) for reasonably objective standards, you eliminate any degree of fairness whatsoever from the system and replace it with an economy of favors and influence.
If there is a group of "disadvantaged" people who can't cut it in academia as it now stands (due to "test paralysis" or whatever), feel free to establish an alternative university with different standards and metrics designed for that group. But do not deny those of us who are capable of excelling at academics a good education to do so by dumming down our existing universities, or so slanting entrance standards to such a point that they become meaningless.
What is next? Getting rid of exams altogether (after all, if you can't pass an entrance exam what makes you think you can pass the first semester's mid-terms or finals)? Social promoting? ("It just isn't fair that someone with a BS makes a better living than a high school graduate, so everyone gets a BS!") Some other nebulous notion of achievement based on some administrator's completley subjective notion on how well a student did (and how do you document this "performance" to insure even a modicum of fairness?), as opposed to imperfect tests which at least strive to be fairly objective and which, for whatever other weaknesses they possess, can at least be referred to, reviewed, even regraded if necessary)? That might actually fly in areas with a great deal of subjectivity anyway (e.g. some of the Arts and Humanities), but in areas of hard science such an approach would be absurd in the extreme.
As for objectivity being a myth, or unattainable, as another poster suggested, that is simply hogwash. Perfect objectivity may be unattainable, just as a perfectly (i.e. 100%) effecient engine isn't possible to build, but high degrees of objectivity and fairness are achievable (just as highly effecient motors which run quite well, if not "perfectly", are). The effort to achieve objectivity is certainly not something to be discarded in favor of selection methods which are fundamentally subjective and completely unfair altogether (as the proposed "interview" approach would be), or simply so off-target as to be meaningless (as the "Lego" approach is).
Well, as some of my posts undoubtably underscore (spelling in particular), my rather high score on the ACT was NOT due to the English portion of the exam.:-)
The standardized test (and later the net, with it's emphesis on typing and not writing by hand) also enabled me to do well despite my appalling handwriting.
Standardized tests do work pretty well, albeit imperfectly. Smart people with significant failings in other areas can and do do very well, with those weaknesses hilighted by their respective scores.
As an aside, the fact that two private firms came up with two competing, national tests (the ACT and the SAT), and their subsequent success, clearly shows there was an unfulfilled need for a national standard whereby colleges could judge the relative educational level of prospective students coming from diverse backgrounds and school systems of widely varying quality. These tests may be imperfect, but they are far more functional (and useful) than building with legos.
The only real "argument" with respect to national standards tests is not whether or not they are needed, but whether or not they should be designed and maintained by private companies or by some kind of public (government or acedemic) institution. As stubborn Americans we may steadfastly refuse to learn from our European and Asian neighbors (who have had standardized testing on the national level for a long time), but we can hardly ignore our own free market, which we hold in such high, almost religious, regard, and which has very unambiguously demonstrated a need for the same kind of national standards right here in the good ol' US of A.
Tests are imperfect at best and misplaced at worst, but reducing admissions to the level of "job" interviews is far, far worse than even the most poorly designed and executed test.
A test has at least the possibility, and if adminstered correctly, probability of giving objective results. The criteria may be misplaced or imperfect, but the results will generally stand on their own, all imperfections aside.
An interview can never even aspire to be resonably objective. Subjective prejudices in terms of personality, appearance, gender, and culture are intrinsic to any interviewing process. The result will not be some utiopian "fair deal" for those who score poorly on tests but would have made good students anyway, but a system so completely weighted by the personal opinions of admissions interviewers that fairness of any kind will not be even remotely possible. Ultimately it will no longer even be expected, or strived for.
Standardized testing, for all of its flaws, at least eliminates the worst of the cultural and personal bias of the admissions process, by stating more or less "you are required to know a modicum of the following, if you don't, learn it and come back for another try." Far more fair, even for the disadvantaged (however one defines the term) than an interviewer commenting "You really aren't State U material, sorry kid" become some arrongant jerk doesn't like your accent, your nose ring, your hair style, or your skin color. Or worse, they've simply had a bad day and just feel peaved enough that playing God with your future makes them feel better. (If you don't believe both of these happen quite often in the private sector, I suggest working for a time in the personnel department of any large firm.)
No system is perfect, but your proposal amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, then chucking most of the nursery out the window as well.
As to the notion of using legos for colleges admissions, I can only cringe at the value a college education received in the United States will have fifteen or twenty years from now. All of the arrogant posturing by Europeans with respect to the American system of Higher Education will become appallingly accurate if this silliness continues.
I was about to say "the same moderator(s) who moderate up absurd accusations that cracking the css algorithm had nothing to do with playing DVDs under Linux" (which any perusal of the various linux DVD mailing lists will debunk in about two seconds flat).
However, you will notice that the information, which I will repeat here at a default score of "2", was posted anonymously. Anonymous Coward posts default to a score of 0: the post was not moderated down by anyone.
The links he referred to (NOT hyperlinked, merely reported as plain text as is, for now, still my constitutional right in this country (the US):
While the above scenario may be unlikely, it's only for the reason that there's little use for the derived information today.
Your scenerio is not at all unlikely. In fact, given market forces and political trends in the world today, I think it is nearly certain that something like this will happen quite soon. Doubleklick is the tip of a very large, very ugly emerging iceberg.
It doesn't have to be a large, well financed governmental body relatively free of public oversite (e.g. American NSA, CIA, FBI, Russian KGB, etc.) who collects and distributes this information, though it would be foolish to discount that possibility. Just as easilly, and perhaps more probably, it could be a couple of enterprising entrepeneurs with a high level of technical skill, the right connections, and a regrettable lack of respect for the privacy of others. Once the information is collected, finding a market to sell it to is child's play, with the medical insurance companies being just the first in a very, very long line of customers.
Bad advice. If the intent of the author is to release something to the community, then he probably wants to be sure that it would be possible for others to use his work. Releasing the code or documentation anonymously would not help anyone, because they would have to prove that the original information was obtained legally, which would be impossible if it comes from an anonymous source.
If the author is in a country where reverse engineering has been made illegal (probably at the behest of Software and Media Mogules such as Microsoft, the RIAA, MPAA, and DVD Forum), then he or she is probably not in a position to take on the overfunded lawyers of these organizations (or other, similar entities), much less have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. However, you are correct, anonymous release of trade secrets doesn't do anyone any good, because we can't show it was obtained legally and therefor can't use it safely.
But, the author could find a friendly party in a safe country and have them take credit for the release. In this way, the author gets the protection of anonymouty (especially if he or she uses an anonymous (e.g. cypherpunk) mail forwarding service to maintain true anonymouty throughout (which I would recommend in case the "friendly party" turns out to be a malicious plant). At the same time, the community gets the benefit of a product which has been legally reverse engineered and made available.
This doesn't guaruntee the community complete safety. After all, the CSS algorithm was legally reverse engineered abroad and that hasn't appeared to slow down the MPAA and DVD Forum from sending the secret police in to drag children from their farms, or go after every Tom, Dick, and Harry for having a link on their web page which might, somewhere, lead to the offending (though perfectly legal) code. Alas, there is no complete safety when taking on powerful, established entities with a monopoly or (in the DVD case) quasi-legal trust to protect.
Document everything - be as anal retentive about this as humanly possible, and have multiple backups in safe places, with at least one completely outside of your legal jurisdiction (ie foreign country)
Find someone in a friendly country where what you are doing is legally and let them take the credit (and risks) for releasing the product. By being a citizen of a country where reverse engineering is still legal it will be more difficult for the powers that be to (legally) go after them, though that probably won't stop them. It should also force jurisdiction into the local courts, more likely to adhere to local law, though there's no guaruntee, as the American courts seem to feel they have planetwide jurisdiction (and our illustrious military is all to willing to back that perverse notion up, alas).
Join the EFF, or at least send a donation there way.
Perhaps giving the EFF a heads up at release time would be a good idea (can anyone more in the "know" on this comment?). Such a heads up should come from the party making the public release, not the ghost author.
You can easilly download the sourcecode and add a feature, say a command-line --titlebar, or something. Wine has this capability (--window-managed or something like that) which allows the window manager to manage Wine windows, a feature I use whenever running wine as I hate the default WABIesque behavior of sticking to my virtual desktop.
A similar feature for xmms shouldn't be that hard if you really want it, and a friendly suggestion to the developers might work wonders. Myself, I prefer not having title bars on my xmms, but freedom of choice is what Open Source is all about.
As I understand it, you can watch that illegally copied DVD with a licensed Windows player which has its own CSS authentication method. Thus, you have successfully pirated a DVD which is perfectly playable, without decrypting anything (until final playback, using DVD Forum approved software).
Then of course, there are the big-time commercial pirates, who make bit for bit copies en mass without ever decrypting the disk, and sell them to consumers who have no trouble playing them in their DVD Forum Approved players.
CSS is not about preventing piracy, it is about preventing playability, and hence open competition. The DVD Forum is interested in maintaining an illegal monopoly, nothing more.
A boycott is certainly in order. [...] It should also have a defined starting date -- how about Feb. 10, 2000?
If you are going to stop consuming the RIAA, MPAA and DVD Forum's products, start TODAY. A delayed boycott is no boycott at all.
Why do you want to wait? Is there a particular movie you want to see first? What makes you think there won't be another one just as appealing in three weeks?
If a complete boycott is too draconian for you, scale down your efforts. For example, limit your TV viewing to a couple of hours a week or less if zero is too difficult. Rent instead of buying or attending the cinema, if not watching movies at all is too difficult. It is far better for you to significantly reduce the flow of cash from your pocket to the RIAA, MPAA and DVD Forum immediately, than to put off a complete boycott until a later date, only to have it slip away altogether. A complete boycott is of course preferable, but every little bit helps and it is far better to do something limited in scope that still has some impact rather than nothing at all. Too often we end up thinking such things are an all or nothing thing, which doesn't have to be the case. Ten million people cutting their TV and movie consumption by 50% can have more of an impact that fifty thousand eliminating it altogether. The two together, plus others elsewhere on the spectrum, combine to be a mighty economic force indeed. Even if I stand alone, the cost to these jerks over the next year can be measured in thousands of US dollars, and from all appearances here and elsewhere, I hardly stand alone.
As I noted in another post, I will be removing the MPAA and DVD Forum from my life altogether, and using the time and money I would have spent consuming their products on alternative forms of entertainment instead. Remember, giving up movies and/or television doesn't have to mean that you are suddenly bored with nothing to do...
Those who OWN the media won't let the truth out
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Let's not forget who owns the vast majority of the media outlets, including two of the three major American networks. Yup, member conglomerates of the MPAA and DVD Forum. It is possible, even likely, that the same is true of most of the media in Europe as well.
Don't expect to get the whole truth on this from traditional media -- their hands and minds are hardly free of ill intent. In fact, don't expect to even get a reasonable portion of the truth from those sources.
A Fireside Renaissance as a Socioeconomic Response
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In addition to the many other positive approaches I have read here, I propose that we begin making changes in habit that will eviscerate the pocketbooks of the DVD Forum's members.
I suggest a renaissance of Fireside chats, book readings over beer and pizza, out loud with friends or family, and evenings out at the theater, comedy club, or ameteur venues. If we eliminate television and movies from our lives and replace them with alternative forms of entertainment instead, the DVD Forum will lose allot of money. I suggest doing this as part of a political movement to fight what the DVD Forum members are doing. We may not win back our government from Corporate Earth, but we can punish them for what they have done and take back a third of our lives from their clutches. If you MUST watch movies, limit yourself to independent studios not a part of the MPAA or the DVD Forum, though I believe elimitating the entire entertainment genre from our lives would do much more to scare these corporations than a simple boycott of their particular brand-name would, as it would represent a fundamental shift in our behavior that even and end to their activities might not stop.
I am not suggesting we make a major sacrifice, removing entertainment from the leisure portion of our lives, but rather substitute one form of benign entertainment for a malignant one, and to do so in a social context that encourages others to do the same.
Throw a party for friends, in which you tell each other stories or read a book aloud together over, beer, wine, or whatever poison is your choice, and let your friends know exactly why you are doing this. Encourage your friends and family to do the same. If your TV, satelite, or cable hardware supports it, turn off the ability to select channes owned by Time Warner et al. If you feel strongly enough, unplug your TV, or better yet, sell it on ebay. Use the printed media or net exlusively for your news and, if you simply can't live without it, "media" entertainment.
It isn't as important that the DVD Forum members or MPAA know why you are doing this as it is that your family and friends be well informed as to why you are doing this. I am basically proposing a grass roots movement we as individuals take part in, designed to remove the MPAA and DVD Forum from our social and ecominic lives, as a way of both freeing ourselves and punishing those that perpetrated this evil.
I say this as someone who owns thousands of dollars in Laserdisk and hundreds of dollars in DVDs that I, regrettably, bought before discovering how malignant the DVD Forum is.
I encourage others to brainstorm and post other novel, positive ways we can take back control of our own lives from these jerks and hit them in the pocketbook at the same time. We are smarter than these people. Rather than reacting emotionally and throwing stones, let's react intelligently and put them out of business.
(Apologies to the reader in advance for some more offensive imagery employed. If your world is G rated, do not continue reading.)
You are truly an idiot.
Others are risking financial ruin and even imprisonment in order to fight for our rights to free expression and fair use which morons like you take for granted, and you can't even get off your lazy ass and find some other way to entertain yourself for the duration of this fight? Words are inadequate for me to express my contempt for both you and the stance you advocate. Go back to eating your pretzels on your beer stained recliner and shut your mouth, for that is precisely the only right to expression you will have left if the attitude you espouse defines our response to this outrage, and it is indeed the only right to expression you have earned.
I suppose the thougt of reading a book instead of watching a movie never occurred to you. Most movies are based on novels, or have book versions of the scripts published at a later date. In the vast majority of such cases the book is vastly superior to the movie. Of course, reading may require a greater level of effort than your capable of, and might require you to occasionally put down your Colt 45 beer or your crack grinder in order to turn the pages.
In the meantime, the rest of us will pay your blithering idiocy the attention it deserves (read: none). In my case, I will no longer purchase any movies of any kind (which will cost the MPAA members a very sizable sum based on prior purchases of Laser Disks and DVDs). I may consider renting a DVD movie instead, as that vastly reduces the profits the movie industry makes. However, seeing a film in the theater or purchasing the media are no longer options for those of us unwilling to spread our ass cheecks for the MPAA.
Netscape used to be sold for around $30/license if I recall correctly. Although downloadable for free, for a time it was free only for personal use. Commercial users had to pay for a license, until Microsoft dumped IE on the market at no cost whatsoever and Netscape was forced to reply in kind or lose 100% of their market. It was clear then, as it is now, that Microsoft was leveraging their monopoly on desktop pcs to strangle Netscape's revinue stream and put them out of business.
The only thing "strange" about this case are the absurdities and mutations of fact eminating from Redmond, and being repeated here by certain (quite possibly well financed) parties.
Slashdot Mirror
Why was this posted and the article on 2 TB memory support on Alpha Linux by SuSE that I submitted rejected, not once, but twice? SPARC is very cool, but the article isn't all that exciting IMO.
/. content (I mean, come on, helping the very crooks to market their product through reviews days after they've declared war on the community you purport to support?). Given that editorial history I doubt your complaining, or mine, will have any significant effect.
:-) And despite all of the flaws, there is still sufficient good content here for me to keep coming back, reading the stories that interest me, and posting comments (most of them much more on topic than this).
I have to concur. I am generally not one to complain about editorial choices here, but 2 Terabyte memory support under Linux is IMHO much more interesting than the latest rumormongering from Sun. At the very least, both stories could have been linked.
However, a story I forwarded from the mp3.com mailing list a while back (about the RIAA suit against them) was also dumped in favor of a movie review, mere days after the Motion Picture Association of America had begun thoroughly stomping the testicles of the Open Source community in the form of lawsuits against DeCSS, etc. Even something as dramatic as that didn't seem to have much affect on
However, all is not lost. Commander Taco, Hemos, et. al. have been kind enough to release the sources to slashdot under the GPL, so you and I both are free to take our sour grapes and ferment them into the wine of another, parallel open source site.
As a final aside, working for a company which has nearly completed the process of dumping Sun in favor of FreeBSD and Linux solutions, I found the entire story rather amusing. While there are certainly specialized applicaitons which will demand 1000 processor in parallel hardware, just about any job can be achieved far less expensively, and with far more flexibility, simply by using a beowulf, or similar, cluster of inexpensive PCs on the Open Source operating system of your choice. Of course, Sun Marketing will undoubtably convince some that they absolutly cannot live without the latest UltraSparc Millenium Parallel Honking Machine From Hell/1000, which can be yours for a mere $8.7 x 10^16 and will even run an operating system which has no compiler included (such "add-on" parts sold seperately at still greater cost) and still, to this day, defaults to "ed" whenever an unfortunate user attempts a "crontab -e".[1]
[1]setting the EDITOR environment variable to "vi" or "emacs" will override this, but that doesn't make the default any less inane.
Open Source. Open Minds.
Closed Source. Microsoft Astroturfers. Sour Grapes.
This is an open source site, with most of us (astroturfers like you aside) far more interested in the most trivial and uninteresting patch to the ever changing development kernel of Linux, or patches to FreeBSD current, than we are in the overhyped release of a bloated, unstable, closed OS from an organization dedicated to denying all of us the freedom to chose our own platform on our own terms.
Get over it and leave the rest of us in the open source community alone to continue building the future. If the content of this site offends you so, go back to microsoft.com and hang out with your buddies there. I'm sure they will be more than willing to wallow with you in your disillusion and self-pity while the rest of us, and the future itself, leaves you weeping in its wake.
I was once very excited about java. Did a fair amount of development under Java 1.0, Java 1.1, and Java 1.2, before we as a company decided to dump the product because of Sun's mismanagement of the standard and their lackluster support of the Blackdown group and Linux in general. This may have changed for the moment, but for us (and I suspect many others) it came far too late to be of much use (c.f. "sun sucks").
Performance may now be acceptable, but at the time we dumped the product even a small, simple data entry application was too demanding of the JVM at the time (even on Sparc 10's running Solaris, much less Linux). The choice Sun gave us was stark: run the Java VM under Windows or Solaris on a high end sparc, or suffer. We chose Linux, adopted a more open development environment, and now having dumped the product we will not, in the future, ever consider going back (c.f "sun sucks" and "slow"). Using GNU configure and its associated utilities, we are able to get all the cross-platform support we require, even if it involves a quick rebuild of the sources (typing "./configure" and "make install" isn't terribly difficult) with the performance our users demand and languages we can hire developers for (c.f. "use Perl" and "Java sucks").
I enjoyed using Java (despite the, even now, still horrificly screwed up date and time classes) as a language, but the drawbacks were too severe and too critical for too long of a time, and Sun's current and future motives with respect to the openness of the standard and support for Linux, FreeBSD, and whatever other platform we may, in the future, chose to deploy, has eroded our confidence in the product too much for us to seriously consider any future use of Java. Put simply, the stumbling blocks Sun until recently put in the way of development on anything other than their "blessed" platforms far outweighed any advantage the language itself offered (and those were not inconsiderable for those of us coming from C++, with Java's simpler memory management and garbage collection and other features).
Alas, the promise of "write once, run everywhere" quickly became (and IMHO remains) "write once, run where Sun would like you to." At present Sun has chosen to become mildly friendly towards Linux. This is great! However, I would not expect this to remain a long term strategy on their part, unless there are some serious changes in the mentaility of Sun's upper management. (c.f. "blah blah blah").
Computer Currents has yanked the story, complete with apology for the inaccuracies:
hese folks have upped the resolution to 3200x2400. That's nearly impossible to read even on a 24 inch SGI monitor
I can read xterm's "tiny" font with no problem on my SGI 1600 Flat Panel at 1600x1024 resolution. The same font is unreadable on a 21" CRT monitor at 1280x1024. Comparing resolutions between CRTs and plasmas is apples to oranges - the clarity of a plasma panel is akin to getting glasses after your eyesight has gradually deteriorated: you simply can't believe how much better you can see, and how much more seldom those headaches kick in.
You are correct in noting that the resolution increase is such that all but the largest point (pixel) fonts we're used to today would become unreadable, even on a flat panel. But you (or others, anyway) would be surprised at just how clear and readable tiny print is on a flat panel, as opposed to a continuously scanning (and distorting) CRT.
The solution is, as others have said, a level of abstraction between the physical world "length" and "area" screen measurements and the digital world "size" in pixels, preferably with user definable mappings between the two for "arbitrary" virtual resolution ranging from "unreadable" to "large enough for all but the completely blind."
Maybe IBM could ship off a display in the direction of the XFree86 group...
It's a little late to respond, but ...
Copyright Law has been successively extended to ever greater periods of time, primarilly to protect Disney's ownership of Mickey Mouse. (Why else would so much Disney money be flowing into congressional coffers?)
It its day the Catholic Church was nearly as powerful as the modern Media Whoremongers are today. Had the concept of intellectual ownership existed, they would most certainly have either extended copyright indefinitely, or granted a special exception to the Bible, making it owned in full by The Church in perpetuity.
Not unlike what a little weak encryption does with a video recording, under the new order of the DMCA which makes countering that encryption 500 years from now in order to view the contents of that file/disk as illegal as it is today.
Since the RIAA and the MPAA are simply two facets of the same atrocity, we need a term which encompasses both.
Media Whoremongers
Sony Bono is an example of a Media Whore, whose congressional seat was probably purchased by recording industry.
Michael Jackson, in his lame appearance at the Reagan whitehouse lobying for legislation which later passed and took DAT technology out of the hands of the casual consumer as well as added an "unauthorized copying tax" to blank media, is another. (I mention the Reagan whitehouse to underscore that not only the Clinton administration is at fault, but both parties, in both the congress and the white house, have behaved equally reprehensibly in the last several years.)
MGI is an example of a whoremonger, as are Sony, Time-Warner, and so on.
A "Sued by Media Whoremongers" banner would be applicable to MP3 sites, Linux DVD sites, and probably allot of other sites we aren't even aware of, who have quietly shut down for fear of economic ruin.
As a corallary, "Silenced by Media Whoremongers" would be a nice image to display when one is forced to remove their site, presumably with a link to other sites with detailed information on the underlying issues (e.g. LiVid).
If todays intellectual property laws were in force at the time of Martin Luthar King, the Catholic church would have been able to prevent the translation of the Bible into local languages (German, later English, etc.) and would have been able to prevent its being published at all.
No Reformation.
No Renaissance.
No Science.
No Industrial Revolution.
No exponential growth of knowledge and technology.[1]
What have we already denied ourselves and our children, in subscribing and adhering to this atrocity? What will the media lobby and our so easilly (and cheaply) sold congress take from us next?
[1] IMHO this is what we are on the cusp of losing now, along with the usual targets of such attack: civil liberties, freedom of speach and expression, and so on. How can you do any science if the cost of "standing on the shoulders of others" eats up the bulk of your research budget? In the areas of applied science and technology we already live with this to a large degree - there is a reason airplanes and automobiles have changed little in the last several decades, and it isn't because we've perfected the technology by a long way.
In the abstract that might be true. With the europeans in particular. But in this case, Reagan's original plan for a station was LARGER that the current station, and projections predict would have probably cost the american taxpayers less.
This is an interesting argument. Can you provide specific references to back it up?
Two important points:
1. We can't count on congressional budgeting for anything, much less an "American Only" space station. Without international political pressures and the political dimension in general, do you really think it likely that congress would have continued to provide funding for a project which was certain to go over budget from day one? (This is, after all, the first time we've done this, and the first time anyone has done something like this on this scale. I don't know anyone who expected it not to run into unexpected glitches and cost overruns.)
2. The political dimension should not be dismissed so quickly simply because we all, justifiably, feel a great deal of contempt for politicians. In addition to building an important scientific platform we are building social and political infrastructure and institutions to facilitate internation cooperation which I think can be expected to lead to cooperation in other areas once the IIS is a success. In a time where Austria, birthplace of Hitler, has chosen (democratically, no less!) to move back to the extreme right, when Yugoslavia has torn itself apart in genocidal madness reminiscent of World War II, when Russia stands in political and economic turmoil the consequences of which are known to know on, etc. etc. we need all of the stabalizing factors in the international milieu we can get. The ISS is a small, but physchologically (and politically) very important. Of course, the UN, which we've finally begun paying our dues to again, is a much bigger and more important component, but that is a tirade for another day.
Well said.
...
There's also this remarkable thing about open source libraries -- I can distribute them with my product! Add to that this remarkable technology called "shell scripting" and I can have a software bundle that will install and run coherently with no real dependencies on Sun (especially if I staticly link in the clib calls, as Sun does like to introduce irritating incompatabilities between hardware updates of the same version of Solaris).
But we have gone a step further
There's also this remarkable platform called Linux, which works wonderfully well and costs a minute fraction of what a Sun box does, for the same or even better performance, depending on the application and hardware platform.
Another remarkable product called FreeBSD works wonders as well. I'd be hard pressed to pick one over the other, and would pick both, hands down, over the proprietary alternatives.
It is cheaper to provide a complete hardware solution than to jump through Sun's hoops. And since it is in-house trading software, our only customers are the traders, who make us all millions trading on this system. Our developers are happy, our "customers" are happy, and I as a system/network administrator am happy.
Yeah, I guess my life is "dreamy" now. It's also extremely productive and well paid, allowing me to indulge in hobbies (like flying airplanes) I never would have dreamed of a few years ago, and providing the robustness and stability to give me the time to do so.
This is the kind of rewards one gets when one goes out on a limb a little and empowers oneself (and one's employer) by taking control of one's infrastructure and technology back from one's vendors.
Microsoft is an atrocity (technically and ethically) and we no longer jump through their hoops, let alone run their software
Sun is a Microsoft wannabe, and we no longer jump through their hoops either. We use their hardware platform only in as far as it pleases us, and routinely dump it for more cost effective alternatives (Dec Alpha running Linux, Power PC, Intel, depending on the application and its requirements). And no Sun box, not even their 64 processor monster, holds a candle to a well contstructed Linux Beowolf cluster. Sun's habit of keeping open source software (Linux in particular) at arms length has caused us to dump many of their software products, such as StarOffice (Applix is better and not being allowed to rot over time) and Java, which would have otherwise remained useful and continued to be used by us. Unfortunately for Sun, they have persued an idiotic strategy with respect to Open Source software, a strategy designed to benefit Sun at their customers' (i.e. our) expense. Of course we did someting about that, by dumping the aforementioned products, with prejudice.
The same goes for the so-called Open Software Foundation (which is hardly open) and MOTIF, which we had dumped long before dumping most of Sun itself.
The net result? More productivity, vastly more uptime and reliability, more wealth, and more time to spend it doing fun stuff.
Hint. It isn't anyone remotely friendly to the authors and users of Free (as in Liberty) software.
... surprise! Member conglomerates of the MPAA, the RIAA, and the DVD Forum. Remember those guys?
In fact, if you look at the conglomerate structure and trace back most of these magazines you find
Now, compare that to the groups which are promoting the UCITA in its various forms and lobbied for passage of the extremely draconian Millenium Digitial Copyright Act. See any similarities? I thought you might.
We can rely on no one but ourselves to get the word out about this. Tell your family and friends, and anyone else who will listen with any tolerance. If enough people will do this the truth will spread in much the same way Linux has, by word of mouth and sneakernet. Talk yourself horse about these issues -- we all have to make up for the resounding silence the "primetime" media will maintain on a subject this close to their pocketbooks.
Organize internet wide awareness, via logos on web pages a la' the blue ribbon campaign.
Stop subscribing to these magazines, and make sure they know why (their silence on the DVD story, UCITA, and the MDCA, in other words, shoddy reporting and/or editors who have whored themselves out to their own special interest).
Please post other ideas -- currently our efforts on the DVD and mp3 front (I submitted a story days ago about yet another lawsuit against mp3.com from the RIAA which was never posted, knocked out in favor of "Phantom Menace Pre-Orders Available", no doubt -- now promoting a major product of these folks was real helpful to this struggle on slashdot's part, but I digress), as well as the DMCA and UCITA, are fairly fragmented.
We need to bring these efforts under an umbrella concept that lends itself (I shudder to say this, but must) soundbytes, banner ads, and little "click-me" buttons that can be spread around the net and made ubiquitious. It's early here in Chicago and I'm not exactly bursting with clever catchwords and phrases at the moment, but if anyone else has ideas please follow up with them.
This issue is far too critical to our personal freedom and our professional lives to be ignored or passively accepted.
Our reasons for switching away from Motif and other closed-source, proprietary libraries and development tools include:
The list goes on and on, but you get the idea.
I'm all for alternative testing to get into college, but it's only a step in the process. Jusrt getting disadvantaged students into college does not guarantee their success. Traditional curricula also need to be adjusted.
Getting "disadvanted" folks into college is a laudable goal, as long as you aren't throwing more qualified applicants out to do so. If you are, then you are at best merely substitutied one unfairness for another. More likely you have chucked a reasonably fair and objective system for a very unfair one, which happens to favor whatever disadvantaged group you are wishing to promote at the expense of everyone else.
Indeed, if you substitute arbitrary standards (or worse still, subjective interviews) for reasonably objective standards, you eliminate any degree of fairness whatsoever from the system and replace it with an economy of favors and influence.
If there is a group of "disadvantaged" people who can't cut it in academia as it now stands (due to "test paralysis" or whatever), feel free to establish an alternative university with different standards and metrics designed for that group. But do not deny those of us who are capable of excelling at academics a good education to do so by dumming down our existing universities, or so slanting entrance standards to such a point that they become meaningless.
What is next? Getting rid of exams altogether (after all, if you can't pass an entrance exam what makes you think you can pass the first semester's mid-terms or finals)? Social promoting? ("It just isn't fair that someone with a BS makes a better living than a high school graduate, so everyone gets a BS!") Some other nebulous notion of achievement based on some administrator's completley subjective notion on how well a student did (and how do you document this "performance" to insure even a modicum of fairness?), as opposed to imperfect tests which at least strive to be fairly objective and which, for whatever other weaknesses they possess, can at least be referred to, reviewed, even regraded if necessary)? That might actually fly in areas with a great deal of subjectivity anyway (e.g. some of the Arts and Humanities), but in areas of hard science such an approach would be absurd in the extreme.
As for objectivity being a myth, or unattainable, as another poster suggested, that is simply hogwash. Perfect objectivity may be unattainable, just as a perfectly (i.e. 100%) effecient engine isn't possible to build, but high degrees of objectivity and fairness are achievable (just as highly effecient motors which run quite well, if not "perfectly", are). The effort to achieve objectivity is certainly not something to be discarded in favor of selection methods which are fundamentally subjective and completely unfair altogether (as the proposed "interview" approach would be), or simply so off-target as to be meaningless (as the "Lego" approach is).
Well, as some of my posts undoubtably underscore (spelling in particular), my rather high score on the ACT was NOT due to the English portion of the exam. :-)
The standardized test (and later the net, with it's emphesis on typing and not writing by hand) also enabled me to do well despite my appalling handwriting.
Standardized tests do work pretty well, albeit imperfectly. Smart people with significant failings in other areas can and do do very well, with those weaknesses hilighted by their respective scores.
As an aside, the fact that two private firms came up with two competing, national tests (the ACT and the SAT), and their subsequent success, clearly shows there was an unfulfilled need for a national standard whereby colleges could judge the relative educational level of prospective students coming from diverse backgrounds and school systems of widely varying quality. These tests may be imperfect, but they are far more functional (and useful) than building with legos.
The only real "argument" with respect to national standards tests is not whether or not they are needed, but whether or not they should be designed and maintained by private companies or by some kind of public (government or acedemic) institution. As stubborn Americans we may steadfastly refuse to learn from our European and Asian neighbors (who have had standardized testing on the national level for a long time), but we can hardly ignore our own free market, which we hold in such high, almost religious, regard, and which has very unambiguously demonstrated a need for the same kind of national standards right here in the good ol' US of A.
Tests are imperfect at best and misplaced at worst, but reducing admissions to the level of "job" interviews is far, far worse than even the most poorly designed and executed test.
A test has at least the possibility, and if adminstered correctly, probability of giving objective results. The criteria may be misplaced or imperfect, but the results will generally stand on their own, all imperfections aside.
An interview can never even aspire to be resonably objective. Subjective prejudices in terms of personality, appearance, gender, and culture are intrinsic to any interviewing process. The result will not be some utiopian "fair deal" for those who score poorly on tests but would have made good students anyway, but a system so completely weighted by the personal opinions of admissions interviewers that fairness of any kind will not be even remotely possible. Ultimately it will no longer even be expected, or strived for.
Standardized testing, for all of its flaws, at least eliminates the worst of the cultural and personal bias of the admissions process, by stating more or less "you are required to know a modicum of the following, if you don't, learn it and come back for another try." Far more fair, even for the disadvantaged (however one defines the term) than an interviewer commenting "You really aren't State U material, sorry kid" become some arrongant jerk doesn't like your accent, your nose ring, your hair style, or your skin color. Or worse, they've simply had a bad day and just feel peaved enough that playing God with your future makes them feel better. (If you don't believe both of these happen quite often in the private sector, I suggest working for a time in the personnel department of any large firm.)
No system is perfect, but your proposal amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, then chucking most of the nursery out the window as well.
As to the notion of using legos for colleges admissions, I can only cringe at the value a college education received in the United States will have fifteen or twenty years from now. All of the arrogant posturing by Europeans with respect to the American system of Higher Education will become appallingly accurate if this silliness continues.
I was about to say "the same moderator(s) who moderate up absurd accusations that cracking the css algorithm had nothing to do with playing DVDs under Linux" (which any perusal of the various linux DVD mailing lists will debunk in about two seconds flat).
l
However, you will notice that the information, which I will repeat here at a default score of "2", was posted anonymously. Anonymous Coward posts default to a score of 0: the post was not moderated down by anyone.
The links he referred to (NOT hyperlinked, merely reported as plain text as is, for now, still my constitutional right in this country (the US):
people.a2000.nl/mwielaar/dvd-css/csspaper/css.htm
www.lemuria.org/DeCSS/crypto.gq.nu/
www.derfrosch.de/decss/
While the above scenario may be unlikely, it's only for the reason that there's little use for the derived information today.
Your scenerio is not at all unlikely. In fact, given market forces and political trends in the world today, I think it is nearly certain that something like this will happen quite soon. Doubleklick is the tip of a very large, very ugly emerging iceberg.
It doesn't have to be a large, well financed governmental body relatively free of public oversite (e.g. American NSA, CIA, FBI, Russian KGB, etc.) who collects and distributes this information, though it would be foolish to discount that possibility. Just as easilly, and perhaps more probably, it could be a couple of enterprising entrepeneurs with a high level of technical skill, the right connections, and a regrettable lack of respect for the privacy of others. Once the information is collected, finding a market to sell it to is child's play, with the medical insurance companies being just the first in a very, very long line of customers.
Bad advice. If the intent of the author is to release something to the community, then he probably wants to be sure that it would be possible for others to use his work. Releasing the code or documentation anonymously would not help anyone, because they would have to prove that the original information was obtained legally, which would be impossible if it comes from an anonymous source.
If the author is in a country where reverse engineering has been made illegal (probably at the behest of Software and Media Mogules such as Microsoft, the RIAA, MPAA, and DVD Forum), then he or she is probably not in a position to take on the overfunded lawyers of these organizations (or other, similar entities), much less have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. However, you are correct, anonymous release of trade secrets doesn't do anyone any good, because we can't show it was obtained legally and therefor can't use it safely.
But, the author could find a friendly party in a safe country and have them take credit for the release. In this way, the author gets the protection of anonymouty (especially if he or she uses an anonymous (e.g. cypherpunk) mail forwarding service to maintain true anonymouty throughout (which I would recommend in case the "friendly party" turns out to be a malicious plant). At the same time, the community gets the benefit of a product which has been legally reverse engineered and made available.
This doesn't guaruntee the community complete safety. After all, the CSS algorithm was legally reverse engineered abroad and that hasn't appeared to slow down the MPAA and DVD Forum from sending the secret police in to drag children from their farms, or go after every Tom, Dick, and Harry for having a link on their web page which might, somewhere, lead to the offending (though perfectly legal) code. Alas, there is no complete safety when taking on powerful, established entities with a monopoly or (in the DVD case) quasi-legal trust to protect.
You can easilly download the sourcecode and add a feature, say a command-line --titlebar, or something. Wine has this capability (--window-managed or something like that) which allows the window manager to manage Wine windows, a feature I use whenever running wine as I hate the default WABIesque behavior of sticking to my virtual desktop.
A similar feature for xmms shouldn't be that hard if you really want it, and a friendly suggestion to the developers might work wonders. Myself, I prefer not having title bars on my xmms, but freedom of choice is what Open Source is all about.
As I understand it, you can watch that illegally copied DVD with a licensed Windows player which has its own CSS authentication method. Thus, you have successfully pirated a DVD which is perfectly playable, without decrypting anything (until final playback, using DVD Forum approved software).
Then of course, there are the big-time commercial pirates, who make bit for bit copies en mass without ever decrypting the disk, and sell them to consumers who have no trouble playing them in their DVD Forum Approved players.
CSS is not about preventing piracy, it is about preventing playability, and hence open competition. The DVD Forum is interested in maintaining an illegal monopoly, nothing more.
A boycott is certainly in order. [...] It should also have a defined starting date -- how about Feb. 10, 2000?
...
If you are going to stop consuming the RIAA, MPAA and DVD Forum's products, start TODAY. A delayed boycott is no boycott at all.
Why do you want to wait? Is there a particular movie you want to see first? What makes you think there won't be another one just as appealing in three weeks?
If a complete boycott is too draconian for you, scale down your efforts. For example, limit your TV viewing to a couple of hours a week or less if zero is too difficult. Rent instead of buying or attending the cinema, if not watching movies at all is too difficult. It is far better for you to significantly reduce the flow of cash from your pocket to the RIAA, MPAA and DVD Forum immediately, than to put off a complete boycott until a later date, only to have it slip away altogether. A complete boycott is of course preferable, but every little bit helps and it is far better to do something limited in scope that still has some impact rather than nothing at all. Too often we end up thinking such things are an all or nothing thing, which doesn't have to be the case. Ten million people cutting their TV and movie consumption by 50% can have more of an impact that fifty thousand eliminating it altogether. The two together, plus others elsewhere on the spectrum, combine to be a mighty economic force indeed. Even if I stand alone, the cost to these jerks over the next year can be measured in thousands of US dollars, and from all appearances here and elsewhere, I hardly stand alone.
As I noted in another post, I will be removing the MPAA and DVD Forum from my life altogether, and using the time and money I would have spent consuming their products on alternative forms of entertainment instead. Remember, giving up movies and/or television doesn't have to mean that you are suddenly bored with nothing to do
Let's not forget who owns the vast majority of the media outlets, including two of the three major American networks. Yup, member conglomerates of the MPAA and DVD Forum. It is possible, even likely, that the same is true of most of the media in Europe as well.
Don't expect to get the whole truth on this from traditional media -- their hands and minds are hardly free of ill intent. In fact, don't expect to even get a reasonable portion of the truth from those sources.
In addition to the many other positive approaches I have read here, I propose that we begin making changes in habit that will eviscerate the pocketbooks of the DVD Forum's members.
I suggest a renaissance of Fireside chats, book readings over beer and pizza, out loud with friends or family, and evenings out at the theater, comedy club, or ameteur venues. If we eliminate television and movies from our lives and replace them with alternative forms of entertainment instead, the DVD Forum will lose allot of money. I suggest doing this as part of a political movement to fight what the DVD Forum members are doing. We may not win back our government from Corporate Earth, but we can punish them for what they have done and take back a third of our lives from their clutches. If you MUST watch movies, limit yourself to independent studios not a part of the MPAA or the DVD Forum, though I believe elimitating the entire entertainment genre from our lives would do much more to scare these corporations than a simple boycott of their particular brand-name would, as it would represent a fundamental shift in our behavior that even and end to their activities might not stop.
I am not suggesting we make a major sacrifice, removing entertainment from the leisure portion of our lives, but rather substitute one form of benign entertainment for a malignant one, and to do so in a social context that encourages others to do the same.
Throw a party for friends, in which you tell each other stories or read a book aloud together over, beer, wine, or whatever poison is your choice, and let your friends know exactly why you are doing this. Encourage your friends and family to do the same. If your TV, satelite, or cable hardware supports it, turn off the ability to select channes owned by Time Warner et al. If you feel strongly enough, unplug your TV, or better yet, sell it on ebay. Use the printed media or net exlusively for your news and, if you simply can't live without it, "media" entertainment.
It isn't as important that the DVD Forum members or MPAA know why you are doing this as it is that your family and friends be well informed as to why you are doing this. I am basically proposing a grass roots movement we as individuals take part in, designed to remove the MPAA and DVD Forum from our social and ecominic lives, as a way of both freeing ourselves and punishing those that perpetrated this evil.
I say this as someone who owns thousands of dollars in Laserdisk and hundreds of dollars in DVDs that I, regrettably, bought before discovering how malignant the DVD Forum is.
I encourage others to brainstorm and post other novel, positive ways we can take back control of our own lives from these jerks and hit them in the pocketbook at the same time. We are smarter than these people. Rather than reacting emotionally and throwing stones, let's react intelligently and put them out of business.
(Apologies to the reader in advance for some more offensive imagery employed. If your world is G rated, do not continue reading.)
You are truly an idiot.
Others are risking financial ruin and even imprisonment in order to fight for our rights to free expression and fair use which morons like you take for granted, and you can't even get off your lazy ass and find some other way to entertain yourself for the duration of this fight? Words are inadequate for me to express my contempt for both you and the stance you advocate. Go back to eating your pretzels on your beer stained recliner and shut your mouth, for that is precisely the only right to expression you will have left if the attitude you espouse defines our response to this outrage, and it is indeed the only right to expression you have earned.
I suppose the thougt of reading a book instead of watching a movie never occurred to you. Most movies are based on novels, or have book versions of the scripts published at a later date. In the vast majority of such cases the book is vastly superior to the movie. Of course, reading may require a greater level of effort than your capable of, and might require you to occasionally put down your Colt 45 beer or your crack grinder in order to turn the pages.
In the meantime, the rest of us will pay your blithering idiocy the attention it deserves (read: none). In my case, I will no longer purchase any movies of any kind (which will cost the MPAA members a very sizable sum based on prior purchases of Laser Disks and DVDs). I may consider renting a DVD movie instead, as that vastly reduces the profits the movie industry makes. However, seeing a film in the theater or purchasing the media are no longer options for those of us unwilling to spread our ass cheecks for the MPAA.
Netscape used to be sold for around $30/license if I recall correctly. Although downloadable for free, for a time it was free only for personal use. Commercial users had to pay for a license, until Microsoft dumped IE on the market at no cost whatsoever and Netscape was forced to reply in kind or lose 100% of their market. It was clear then, as it is now, that Microsoft was leveraging their monopoly on desktop pcs to strangle Netscape's revinue stream and put them out of business.
The only thing "strange" about this case are the absurdities and mutations of fact eminating from Redmond, and being repeated here by certain (quite possibly well financed) parties.