How so? I paid for a license (a while back now, so I haven't renewed any) and I'd be delighted in it being open sourced. I paid because I wanted NaN to be profitable and keep working on the product. I don't have time to work on a full 3d modeller myself, but I have plenty of use for one, so I'll pay someone else to work on it.
Exactly right.
I was going to spend some of my tax refund on a copy of blender (they'd just gone to a "pay and get new features now, or don't pay and get the same features in a few months" model), and I wouldn't have felt cheated if they'd GPLed the pay version a day later. Why? Because if it had been GPLed I would have known that the software would never die, and the hundreds of hours of animation work I had invested... worth far more to me than the price I would have paid for the software itself... would remain useful for the forseeable future.
Indeed, I would pay a fair chunk of change to see it get GPLed.
As any real blender user will tell you, once you learn the interface it's one of the fastest modelers out there.
That is absolutely correct.
I've been working on a film project using blender for some time, and have tried other 3d animation products on other platforms and blender was, hands down, the best at nearly everything one needs to do to make good, high quality animations. There were, of course, failings, and some things for which one would choose to use another tool, but for the vast majority of tasks it was excellent and, as you say, once you learn the interface, the most intuitive without sacrificing power and features.
This is really tragic. I really, really hope they GPL the source so that the project may live on, but I have a feeling this is going to be an example where the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman's much maligned stance of "avoid proprietary software at all costs, you'll pay in the end if you don't" may very well be vindicated, in the form of hundreds of hours of animation work that will become less and less usable as the existing binaries age and become more and more difficult to get running (as glibc and other libraries change with time).
If anyone from NaN is reading, please, please, please GPL the blender code.
As an aside I am surprised they didn't go with the "you pay for the release today, or wait 12 months and get the features in the GPLed version." Many would have paid, and the delayed, GPLed version would have been insurance against this kind of thing happening. Oh well, twenty-twenty hindsight and all that...
Normally I wouldn't respond to my own post like this, but today while perusing the dvdrtools user mailing list archive I came across this encouraging tidbit:
> I just like to inform you about some preliminary wip howto-draft I've > put up at http://www.vcdimager.org/dvdv.phtml
I've successfully written a video DVD with dvdrecord (mastered on a friend's windoze partition though, as we don't have vob/ifo generators yet), so steps 3 and 4 are working.
ifo files will be a large problem - they're (mostly) undocumented, and require all sorts of weird stuff (such as start sectors of vob files, which probably can't be determined by anything running prior to mkisofs).
Do you have any code to start from yet? (I do, but it doesn't do too much yet. Mostly analyzes existing ifo files to help figuring out their layout.)
Looks like we're closer than I thought to being able to burn our home videos to DVD, all with free(dom) software!
I've been searching via google for a while now and trying to find information on burning dvds with linux. There's cdrecord-PRO but its only for data.
It is also impossible to get any information out of the author on how to actually go about paying the $100 he wants for cdrecord-PROdvd, as I and many others who wanted to buy the product discovered. The author didn't answer any of the three separate emails (on three different occasions) I sent, nor any of the questions posted in public forums (USENET in particular) by numerous people. One guy who asked he flamed into oblivion, others he told "email me", and still others, myself included, were simply ignored.
This delayed my purchase of a Pioneer DVR-A03 DVD-RW burner by about a year. However, three days after the Free Software Foundations fork of cdrtools, entitled dvdrtoos, made its appearance I purchased a Pioneer drive (since that is what the software fork's author has) and have been burning data DVDs ever since.
The author's goal is to support the burning of video DVDs, but the software isn't there yet. However, I'm still waiting for a better CODEC was well... the color space limitatino of DV (4:1:1) coupled with the MPEG2 artifacts of DVD make the two in combination somewhat undesirable for me. I'd rather burn a half hour of good quality video onto a DVD and be required to use a computer to watch it (hell, my computer IS my television, anyway), at better resolutions and without the ugly artifacts, than accept the compromises of both DV and DVD just so I can play it in grandma's region-coded, MPAA crippled DVD player. Far better to build her a small computer with the appropriate software on it, instead.
So here's to holding out for ogg-tarkin!
In the meantime, at least I have a place to burn my high-bitrate MPEG4 recordings of Star Trek Enterprise to (two episodes a disk and far better quality than videotape will allow, though still with enough annoying artifacts that I don't want to use it for my own work).
I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. It looks like Seattle are trying to levy something that smells awfully like a property type tax, in which case they'll tax you on their percieved value of the software, not on revenue you generate from selling it.
Fine. So anyone with a grain of intelligence moves out of Washington State, and a once progressive area becomes a technological and economic backwater.
Come to think of it, with M$ located there, and Boeing already bailing out, they're already well on their way. *duck*
No becuase NDS is owned by NewsCorp which is a US-based corporation. That's why they are suing in the US.
Well, more accurately they are suing in the United States because their web of interlocking companies in their conglomerate gives them the choice of pretty much any venue and the United States, as a company run (mostly) by lawyers, who pass and sign legislation designed to employ and empower more lawyers, which are in turn reviewed and interpreted by still more lawyers, is the most friendly nation to litigation of any sort on the entire planet.
Which of course means it comes as no surprise that we not only are the most litigious society on the planet, but everyone else in the world who wants to sue seems to prefer doing it here as well.
So basically it is the user's fault they used the software simply because software is free speech? That is a silly argument.
Not really. He's saying that the consumer has a responsibility to make an informed purchase, and that creating liability and a pork barrel for lawyers is not a good solution. He's right.
All of the information to warn a would-be purchaser that Microsoft Exchange Server is probably the worst possible choice one could make for a mail server if security is any concern whatsoever was widely and publicly available. Clearly the person or persons who made the decision to go with Microsoft, when demonstrably more secure (by orders of magnitude) options were available at little or no cost, either grossly neglected their duty and did no research, or were in a sweatheart agreement of some kind with Microsoft's salespeople, or Microsoft itself. That, or they opted for the product when it was still in the vaporware stage, which is even doubly incompetent.
Either way, the person or persons who made this incompetent, and very possibly corrupt, decision should indeed be the ones to pay for it... with their careers.
A true map (100% correct - however see my comment below) cannot be currently made, the science behind the calculations needed to make such a map is uncertain (dark matter, universal expansion speeds, unpredictable effects effects of undiscovered objects - black holes, etc, astrophysics is evolving all the time) and you'd a Beowulf cluster of processors the size of a galaxy to do the math.
While the last portion of your comment (needing a cluster the size of a galaxy to do the math) isn't really true, you are correct in your assertion that we lack the scientific knowledge, and likely the computational power, to make an accurate map of our galaxy as it is today. In other words, if we invented superluminal propulsion today we'd have to make our maps the old fashioned way... by going there and surveying the space a la Star Trek.
However,
In fact, even if we had all the science needed to make the calculations and the equipment to do so, a true map is theoretically impossible, based on the Uncertainty Principle it is impossible to determine with 100% accuracy the state of even an atom, let alone a universe.
The uncertainty principle only applies to subatomic scales at the quantum level, not to macro objects like planets, stars, and galaxies, or even smaller objects like grains of sand. Calculating the location of every star and planet, if we had the scientific knowledge and computational capacity to do so, is perfectly possible in theory... just not practical given the current state of the art (and our current ignorance, as you pointed out before, with respect to undiscovered objects, dark matter, etc.).
The software industry confronted the unpleasant reality that their product could be perfectly copied, against their will and in violation of their copyright, without limit. Naturally, the software industry feared the potential loss of revinues.
The industry tried copy protection, and even before the recent mathematical proof proving that secure copy protection, or DRM, was impossible the industry learned from its own experience that copy restrictive technologies were both ineffective in stopping copyright violation, and harmful to their legitimate customers and, therefor, to their product.
The industry learned, however, that even a modicum of personal accountability suffices to stop most forms of copyright violation, and that nothing short of a depopulated world will ever stop it all. The solution was quite simple: serialize the product and/or stamp the user's identity onto each piece of software sold. We don't know if there is a mechanism in place to trace serial number N of product P to the credit card number used to purchase it, and hence to the purchaser, but we as consumers do know it is certainly possible, and that alone makes the vast majority of people reluctant to share software illegally, even with their close friends.
Not everyone, mind you, as warez sites obviously demonstrate, but the vast majority. So much so that the software industry thrives, despite a complete lack of copy restriction technologies, or DRM, whatsoever, and despite a much greater vulnerability to such copying than eBooks, music, or film will ever be. Software has no equivelent alternative revinue streams like live concerts or cinemas, yet it has learned to thrive and prosper in an environment that copyright-obsessed yet technology-naive control freaks, like the sort currently lobbying congress to gut, even outlaw, technologies fundamental to the internet and personal computing, would assume to be inimical.
The problem of copyright violation and the "threat" the ability to make unlimited, perfect copies of a product has already been confronted, addressed, and successfully solved by the software industry, without DRM, without laws like the SSSCA, and finally without, and prior to, the DMCA.
eBook authors, musicians, and movie producers need to learn this, and need to seriously look at the motives their publishers, recording companies, and studios have for persuing technological restrictions on a problem for which an elegant social and legal solution stressing personal accountability have already solved. That motive, of course, is to secure their parasitical place as dominant middleman, with power over both the artists and their fans, at the expense of both and at the expense of the art they have usurped "ownership" over.
Problem with this: "most" websites do not link to sites with similar content. Most websites link to "partner" sites that have nothing in common with them -- after all, who links to a competitor?
Good websites link to similar sites -- academic websites link to simialr sites and sources.
Combine the algorithm described in this article with google's approach (or some other contextual approach to deterimining relevance) and you not only have a way of identifying "communities," you have a way of easilly identifying "marketdroid mazes of worthless links" as well.
Since the content of most marketdroid sites is usually next to worthless, the hits for a given search could be ordered accordingly. Sites, and groups of sites, that clearly form communities related to the topic you're interested in at the top, single websites as yet to be linked to somehwere in the middle, and marketdroid "partner" sites at the very bottom.
This would actually produce better, more useful results than either approach alone.
I largely agree with what you said, but I think part of John's complaint which you missed is that Verio is making the decision for their customers as to whether or not to accept email from John's open relay, and not allowing their customers to make that decision themselves.
As long as Verio is being upfront and honest with their customers that they are using RBL, then their customers have made the choice, by choosing Verio. It would be nice if verio provided a facility for their customers to opt in or out of using the RBL list, but really that is just a convinience: their customers can easilly opt out of the RBL by choosing another ISP.
As a previous post said, "everyone is right." John has the right to run an open relay, Verio has the right to sell him service (or not), and I (as well as Verio) have the right to filter his site because I don't like his actions. His rights stop at my home's router (whether I've chosen to block him of my own accord, or because of RBL's recommendation, or not at all, is my buisiness, not his).
Frankly, the idea of compiling absolutely everything from source 'just because' seems a little bit of a waste of time. The vast majority of software will only see very very minimal performance increase compared to a well built Debian package with the usual careful choice of compiler flags.
Our enterprise is currently using Debian for many tasks. However, we are evaluating Sorcerer and Gentoo as a replacement.
Why?
1) Compiling everything from source 'just because' isn't a waste of time. What you overlook in your truncated 'just because' is that by compiling the source optimized for your hardware, against the library versions on your machine, you insure a level of compatability, and reliablity, that cannot be insured when mixing and matching binary libraries and applications. In short, you are compiling everything from source just because that is the only way to insure maximum performance and reliability on a given machine.
2) The speed increases are notable. Your assertion that architecture tweaks vs. generic compilations make little difference are not born out by real world, emperical testing. Debian (my favorite distro before trying Sorcerer and Gentoo), even Mandrake compiled with i586 optimizations, is noticably slower in performing many tasks (like video capture and editing, smooth window scrolling in KDE, web browsing in mozilla) than either Sorcerer or Gentoo compiled from source on the same hardware.
3) Distributions introduce their own level of bugs. Source compilations against existing libraries minimizes distribution-specific and distribution-induced bugs. Things like library version mismatches, subtle changes in behavior that break things but are unobvious, plague Debian, Mandrake, et. al. but are virtually eliminated by Gentoo and Sorcerer. What is more, the source based distros tend to stick closer to what the software authors intend in the installation of their software, reducing bugs that result from shuffling files or doing other "non-standard" things (from the orignial source author's point of view) in order to comply with the distro's file placement policies (for example). This isn't eliminated, as gentoo and sorcerer both have their policies, but it is reduced significantly vs. Mandrake, RedHat, and Debian.
4) What is more, gentoo and sorcerer are able to remain closer to the current state of development. While one may initially dismiss this as "upgraditis" and, at best "nice but risky and not necessary," it turns out to offer significant advantages, advantages that in my experience outweigh any disadvantages. - one gets bug fixes immediately - as important, the cycle of develope/test/report bugs to the author/fix bugs is tightened dramatically, with the author getting feedback in days instead of weeks or months - one gets important new features immediately - finally, if one doesn't like the current version (e.g. X 4.2 vs 4.1) using the older version instead is a trivial matter, with recompilation of dependent packages a relatively painless process when the version is changed, be it upward to a newer version, or a reversion back to an older version.
I cannot emphesize enough how many longstanding bugs, particularly distribution-related bugs, that have dogged us from RedHat to Mandrake to Debian, simply do not exist when running gentoo or sorcerer. What is more, we can use X 4.2 today, not months from now when it finally gets into Debian unstable. More importantly, we can use X 4.2 in a very stable environment, with one complete heirarchy of distro-induced bugs virtually eliminated.
Furthermore, from what I saw of Sorcerer, the chosen compiler flags are system-wide instead of being based on the individual packages needs. This is not wise.
Both gentoo and sorcerer allow individual ebuilds and spells (respective terms for suites of scripts which download, compile, and install a piece of software) to override and/or modify their respective compilation options. The "system wide" options and optimazations one sets are defaults that work for most ebuilds/spells. This is far wiser than hoping each ebuild/spell maintainer will think to optimize their own compilation (many would not, and many others would err on the side of caution). When optimization flags cause a problem the ebuild/spell maintainer typically strips the offending optimization out of the compiler options (a small sed pipe does the trick) and the spell or ebuild builds and runs fine.
Source distros are hands down better, easier, and less buggy than binary distros, despite their young age and "green" state. I encourage you to give one or the other a try... once you've begun using source-based distros you will likely find you can no longer stomach the issues that binary based distros, even one as well engineered as Debian, bring with them.
And no, "apt-get source --compile" isn't at all comparable (though it does make Debian immensly more useful than many of its binary-distro counterparts). You still have the plethora of distro-induced bugs that comes with any binary distro as large and complex as Debian.
Gentoo and Sorcerer aren't free of bugs, mind you, but they are free of several classes of bugs that exist in binary distros in addition to bugs in the software itself, and in the distro's configuration and layout. The difference may not sound like much, but in practice it is quite significant.
I'm sorry, but your calculation seems to be way off.
Negative. You did not read the reference I provided. The Copyright Cartels are paying artists a whopping $.0023 for each song they sell on the internet, in their broken, copy-restricted, and not widely supported format.
If one out of every four people who download the same song as an.ogg or.mp3 from their favorite P2P network were to give the artist a single penny, the artist would come out $.0008 ahead. Further math is left as an excersize for the student.
Comparing CD sales to download sales is a preposterous comparison of apples and oranges... people will always be willing to pay more for a tangible product with a shiny disc than they will a few electrons pulled down from a web site.
An accurate comparison is apples to apples, namely what the Cartels are paying their artists for electronic downloads vs. what the filesharing community pays (or doesn't). And in that comparison, my calculations are accurate, based upon the figures the RIAA itself has provided.
Excellent example of the insidious nature I mentioned. This topic isn't even about open relays - it's about a mailing loop.
The two are related, as any rudimentary understanding of how mail systems work will make clear. Without the open relays the SPAM could not be sent to the mailing lists with their header information forged and hiding the sender's online identity. The offending messages resulting in these mail loops are originating from open relays, most of which are in Asia.
But be that as it may, you miss the point entirely (perhaps willfully?).
It's ridiculous.
No, its the only option the Asian providors are leaving us. Making a "newbie" mistake, as you misleadingly put it, is one thing. Willfully refusing to fix the problem when it is brought to your attention is something else again. Those "western" sites you refer to either fix their open relays (the most common response) or get blocked themselves.
What is more, for the last half decade almost all mail servers come with open relaying shut off by default, which means these "clueless newbies" almost certainly had to turn open relaying on, deliberately.
It is not unreasonable to infer from two deliberate actions, namely turning on open relaying in the first place, then refusing to fix the problem when it is abused and people complain, that the administrators of these sites are either appallingly incompetent or obscenely complacent. In either event we can be certain of one thing: if we want to stop receiving SPAM from these sites, we have to filter them. Period.
I wouldn't put too much faith in Microsoft to make an uncrackable implementation of _anything_.... let alone something people care enough about to crack like DRM.
They aren't going to make it uncrackable through technical expertise, they're going to make it uncrackable through legislation. If possession of such a utility is punishable by five years in prison and a $500,000 fine, no one in their right mind is going to have a copy of such a DRM cracking utility lying around. In effect, that makes DRM uncrackable from a practical standpoint, even if the "encryption" is the same as Adobe's laughable rehash of ROT-13.
So how does downloading music for free respect the rights of the artists who created it?
Well it does, to roughly the same degree as downloading legally purchased music from RIAA sites as documented here. If only every fourth music enthusiast were to send the artists one penny, the artists would still come out way ahead siding with the copyright violators than they would siding with the music cartels. If only one in four hundred send the artists a dollar using fairtunes, the artists come out ahead.
So called music pirates have nothing on the media cartels when it comes to causing the artist direct. verifiable, and potent financial harm, indeed based on the corrilation of P2P usage and CD sales, quite the opposite.
I'm not a Microsoft fan, but I've got to admit that idea of downloading a 700 MB.wmv file, burning it to a CD and being able to play it back in my DVD player at DVD quality is quite enticing.
And what on earth makes you think Microsoft's patented DRM will ever allow you to do that? If you want to be able to move your content from medium to medium as you see fit, without restriction, your only real long term hope is to use free software. Of course, if the SSSCA is passed theres a good chance free operating systems, such as FreeBSD and GNU/Linux, will be outlawed as a result.
There seems to be some insidious 'oh, it's those clueless Asians' thread running through so many Slashdot posts recently that I think it's time the balance was addressed.
That thread is based on the emperical experience of thousands of mail admins throughout the world (not just the US, as your slashdot bash inaccurately implies). If those whose ISPs (and in some cases, countries) are being blocked wish to demonstrate otherwise, all they have to do is administer their mail servers competently and close down their open relays.
Until then, their inaction will speak louder than your words, be they from Singapore, Korea, or wherever. As one who has travelled to those places I am reluctant to block entire countries, but my boss doesn't want his mailbox filled with SPAM and if blocking half of Asia is how I appease him, then half of Asia will be blocked, period. My personal fondness of Asia (and, for that matter, Africa, and Europe, and other places I have had the privelege of visiting in the last several years) will play absolutely no role in this decision, and no role in my opinion of the (in)competence of ISP mail adminsitrators in those locations. The only metric of any concern is how many open relays there are, and how those responsible act (or, in the case of many notorious Asian providors, particularly in Korea, don't act) when the issue is brought to their attention.
As for the differences in phone systems, you are comparing apples and oranges, and assuming one causation (lack of technical knowhow) when a completely different causation (lack of well defined, enforcable government standards resulting from a lassaiz-faire market mentality in the last several administrations) is responsible, then trying to apply the erroneous conclusion derived from your erroneous assumption back to another issue that is, in any case, completely unrelated.
Internet booths are another example of the logical fallacy you have fallen into in making this argument. In a country in which more than half the homes have their own PCs, and just about every public library is already on the net (along with many schools), internet booths would be a profound waste of money. In other words, you have brought up another completely unrelated topic and misapplied it to your original argument, namely what approaches empower the most people to use the internet under what conditions, with those conditions in Singapore quite different from the United States, which in turn is very different from the UK or the rest of Europe. Clearly that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the competency level of mail administrators in Asia, Africa, America, Antarctica, Mars, Pluto, the NGC-1 Nebula, or anywhere else for that matter.
Microsoft has 'cut off the air supply' of dozens of competitors over the years by copying their ideas and selling products at a loss until the competitor is run out of business. They've outright been proven to have stolen code from other companies such as Apple (QuickTime) and Stack. They've violated court decrees telling them not to do this, and they've falsified evidence in court (remember the videotape?). Their products are bad for productivity; look at how much time and money has been wasted fighting the viruses that keep plaguing Outlook and Internet Explorer again and again!
And for all this, they're effectively being given a slap on the wrist and told 'don't do it again.' Microsoft has learned a very important lesson: laws can be broken.
If that had been all they had learned, freedom and progress might still have had a chance in the United States. Unfortunately, Microsoft has learned much more. They have learned that, not only can they break the laws they don't like without any repercussions to speak of, they can purchase new laws to actively legislate their monopoly into perminance.
Consider: Microsoft owns most, if not all, of the patents on DRM technology as applied to computers. Microsoft is the only major software company promoting the SSSCA that will mandate this technology into every PC sold in the United States, while every other player in the industry, bar none, vehemently opposes this legislation.
We are about to make the Microsoft Monopoly the only legal operating system in the United States, modulo those unthreatening "competitors" they might choose to license the patents to, for a heafty fee. Anyone taking any bets on the survival of GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, or any new OS startups within the United States if and when the SSSCA passes?
It will soon become time to emigrate folks, I kid you not.
2. They have a policy that all their clients should have fully qualified (opted in) lists, any client found to be breaking this rule becomes an ex-client. As they are in Australia this would be in breach of the privacy act, and they have no wish to be associated with criminal activity no matter how petty.
This is the critical point. If one "opts in" for mailings, then by definition it isn't SPAM as it is not "unsolicited." If I check "send me notices of good deals" on some web site I'm buying something at, then I've opted-in, ie solicited, the bulk emailings.
SPAM is unsolicited bulk email (mostly, but not always, commercial, but again, the emphesis is on unsolicited bulk email).
If someone uses my servers, and my hard disk space, to store their unsolicited advertisments then as far as I (and several states, but alas, not Illinois) am concerned they are guilty of tresspass and should be treated accordingly: with stiff fines and some jail time. If, on the other hand, they are sending a mass, but soliticed, mailing (for example, I get mass mailings from AOPA all the time, which I have explicitly asked for), then there is absolutely no abuse and all is kosher.
You claim to not be in the habit of sending unsolicted bulk emails. Excellent. In this case you run a legitimate, inoffensive business and I wish you the best. If, on the other hand, this claim should turn out to be untrue, then I would be the first to cheer for the legions of system crackers tapping at your electronic Windows and smashing your servers.
When writing your congressman about the stupidity of the SSSCA, please take note of the following:
Copyright is an asset and as such needs protection. I disagree with the term of copyright and repreated extensions, but the rationale for having it in the first place is sound.
DRM is a first line of protection of copyright, and should prevent casual tresspass or theft. A successful DRM does not completely prevent duplication; it prevents casual duplication and should present a barrier for illegal mass duplication.
DRM is worthless for achieving those goals. This will become evident to the Media Cartels, and even to our thickheaded congress, though it appears not before the destroy the industry most responsible for America's prosperity over the last decade.
The software industry is even more vulnerable to copyright violation than the music and film industries ever will be. It always has been, by virtue of existing within a medium in which an infinite number of perfect copies can be made at virtually no cost. As game and other software designers learned over time, no copy protection worked, even for the length of the development/sales cycle of the product. Whatever scheme they came up with could be defeated, and no amount of laws banning such activity are going to have any effect on that since the act of copyright violation is/was already illegal and the abusers were perfectly willing to disregard the law regardless.
What does work is product serialization, perhaps coupled with stamping a person's identity (e.g. name, ip address) on the product. No one with any sense of self preservation is willing to share a copy of a product that can be traced back to them, or traced back to their credit card.
Yes, there are people who trade in warez. The law already has plenty of clout to deal with them. But the vast majority of people who use proprietary software pay for it and are not willing to share it with their family and friends, precisely because of the serialization and identity coupling approach I just described.
This will work perfectly fine for movies, television, music, and any other "infinitely copyable" product you care to name, without the need for draconian laws, without the need for DRM, indeed, without the need for the DMCA.
The software industry, whose very bread and butter are most vulnerable to copyright violation, already solved this problem without running to Uncle Sam for new, coercive, draconian, indeed, some might say Orwellian, legislation. I suggest the entertainment industry do the same, and I suggest anyone writing their congresspeople make this point very clear to them.
The problem has been solved by the software industry. The RIAA and MPAA Do not need the SSSCA to protect their profits, period.
Throughout history, technology has been key to opening up new markets. It only represents a problem if it is allowed to undermine existing markets
said Buggy whip manufacturers, demanding that a one hundred year old law banning horseless carriages within the United States be renewed for another century. In other news, hundreds of eye witnesses reported a mysterious flying object high above the skies of Los Angeles. Subversive elements claim it is was an Aeroplane, the rumored heavier-than-air flying device said to have been in use in much of the rest of the world for the last seventy years or so... almost as long as Europeans are alleged by radicals to have had widespread use of the horseless carriage.
"Nonesense," said Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C. (chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee), "the United States remains the leader in world technology, and will continue to do so, without endangering the hard earned profits of buggy whip manufacturers and liveries everywhere. Anyone alleging the existence of horseless carriages or mysterious flying Aeroplanes is Unamerican and a traitor to the republic."
Thankfully, our leadership in the early part of the twentieth century was nowhere near as pathetic as it has become today.
I've been following this whole thing out of idle curiosity, and have come to a few conclusions.
1) We need USENET back, now more than ever. Web forums such as this simply are not an adequate replacement
- they are too susceptable to government censorship (one server, or at least one entity, to shut down vs. a distributed discussion system)
- they are too susceptable to local censorship, in this case slashdot's.
2) moderates can moderate a single post only once. If there was a "moderator" war it was between moderator's of differing opinions or, if one believes the more sinister interpretation, between user moderators and slashdot editors.
3) slashdot editors, if indeed they did the moderating of that (I agree, in that context offtopic but in this context on-topic) thread, showed extreme lack of judgement. However, the appear to have learned from their mistakes, as this thread has not been "bitchslapped" into oblivion.
4) Some people take karma and post scores way too seriously, others don't. What injustice may have been present here will be taken personally by some of those affected, less so by others. Still, it is understandable how some might have been angered (and others feel opositely).
5) If this is a user moderated site, IMHO the slashdot editors should really back off and let the users do the moderating.
And now a suggestion:
Combining the best traits of USENET and sites like slashdot. Use USENET as the underlying infrastructure (e.g. alt.slashdot newsgroup, or better yet, alt.slashdot.stories [moderated], alt.slashdot.posts [unmoderated], with subject lines parsed by slash and displayed here according to the parse:
e.g.
subject: Whatever the user's post's subject is [2002/02/27 - Story Headline]
would parse out to threads displayed under Story Headline. Moderation points, ratings, etc. could be xreferenced to a local mysql database, with USENET threading used to manage threads. USENET readers would see human readable subjects referencing related stories, the text of which would also be posted to alt.slashdot.stories (moderated) as well as displayed here.
The goal: get the convinience and ease of web forums such as this, with the strength, redundency, and distributed nature of USENET.
Of course, now I have wandered somewhat off topic...
Slashdot Mirror
How so? I paid for a license (a while back now, so I haven't renewed any) and I'd be delighted in it being open sourced. I paid because I wanted NaN to be profitable and keep working on the product. I don't have time to work on a full 3d modeller myself, but I have plenty of use for one, so I'll pay someone else to work on it.
... worth far more to me than the price I would have paid for the software itself ... would remain useful for the forseeable future.
Exactly right.
I was going to spend some of my tax refund on a copy of blender (they'd just gone to a "pay and get new features now, or don't pay and get the same features in a few months" model), and I wouldn't have felt cheated if they'd GPLed the pay version a day later. Why? Because if it had been GPLed I would have known that the software would never die, and the hundreds of hours of animation work I had invested
Indeed, I would pay a fair chunk of change to see it get GPLed.
As any real blender user will tell you, once you learn the interface it's one of the fastest modelers out there.
...
That is absolutely correct.
I've been working on a film project using blender for some time, and have tried other 3d animation products on other platforms and blender was, hands down, the best at nearly everything one needs to do to make good, high quality animations. There were, of course, failings, and some things for which one would choose to use another tool, but for the vast majority of tasks it was excellent and, as you say, once you learn the interface, the most intuitive without sacrificing power and features.
This is really tragic. I really, really hope they GPL the source so that the project may live on, but I have a feeling this is going to be an example where the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman's much maligned stance of "avoid proprietary software at all costs, you'll pay in the end if you don't" may very well be vindicated, in the form of hundreds of hours of animation work that will become less and less usable as the existing binaries age and become more and more difficult to get running (as glibc and other libraries change with time).
If anyone from NaN is reading, please, please, please GPL the blender code.
As an aside I am surprised they didn't go with the "you pay for the release today, or wait 12 months and get the features in the GPLed version." Many would have paid, and the delayed, GPLed version would have been insurance against this kind of thing happening. Oh well, twenty-twenty hindsight and all that
:-(
Expect to see DRM at the filesystem level as well.
And plenty of breakage, at least in the first several iterations of the versions of Windows using the filesystem format.
Unfortunately, of course, upgrading is unlikely to be optional.
Looks like we're closer than I thought to being able to burn our home videos to DVD, all with free(dom) software!
I've been searching via google for a while now and trying to find information on burning dvds with linux. There's cdrecord-PRO but its only for data.
... the color space limitatino of DV (4:1:1) coupled with the MPEG2 artifacts of DVD make the two in combination somewhat undesirable for me. I'd rather burn a half hour of good quality video onto a DVD and be required to use a computer to watch it (hell, my computer IS my television, anyway), at better resolutions and without the ugly artifacts, than accept the compromises of both DV and DVD just so I can play it in grandma's region-coded, MPAA crippled DVD player. Far better to build her a small computer with the appropriate software on it, instead.
It is also impossible to get any information out of the author on how to actually go about paying the $100 he wants for cdrecord-PROdvd, as I and many others who wanted to buy the product discovered. The author didn't answer any of the three separate emails (on three different occasions) I sent, nor any of the questions posted in public forums (USENET in particular) by numerous people. One guy who asked he flamed into oblivion, others he told "email me", and still others, myself included, were simply ignored.
This delayed my purchase of a Pioneer DVR-A03 DVD-RW burner by about a year. However, three days after the Free Software Foundations fork of cdrtools, entitled dvdrtoos, made its appearance I purchased a Pioneer drive (since that is what the software fork's author has) and have been burning data DVDs ever since.
The author's goal is to support the burning of video DVDs, but the software isn't there yet. However, I'm still waiting for a better CODEC was well
So here's to holding out for ogg-tarkin!
In the meantime, at least I have a place to burn my high-bitrate MPEG4 recordings of Star Trek Enterprise to (two episodes a disk and far better quality than videotape will allow, though still with enough annoying artifacts that I don't want to use it for my own work).
I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. It looks like Seattle are trying to levy something that smells awfully like a property type tax, in which case they'll tax you on their percieved value of the software, not on revenue you generate from selling it.
Fine. So anyone with a grain of intelligence moves out of Washington State, and a once progressive area becomes a technological and economic backwater.
Come to think of it, with M$ located there, and Boeing already bailing out, they're already well on their way. *duck*
No becuase NDS is owned by NewsCorp which is a US-based corporation. That's why they are suing in the US.
Well, more accurately they are suing in the United States because their web of interlocking companies in their conglomerate gives them the choice of pretty much any venue and the United States, as a company run (mostly) by lawyers, who pass and sign legislation designed to employ and empower more lawyers, which are in turn reviewed and interpreted by still more lawyers, is the most friendly nation to litigation of any sort on the entire planet.
Which of course means it comes as no surprise that we not only are the most litigious society on the planet, but everyone else in the world who wants to sue seems to prefer doing it here as well.
So basically it is the user's fault they used the software simply because software is free speech? That is a silly argument.
... with their careers.
Not really. He's saying that the consumer has a responsibility to make an informed purchase, and that creating liability and a pork barrel for lawyers is not a good solution. He's right.
All of the information to warn a would-be purchaser that Microsoft Exchange Server is probably the worst possible choice one could make for a mail server if security is any concern whatsoever was widely and publicly available. Clearly the person or persons who made the decision to go with Microsoft, when demonstrably more secure (by orders of magnitude) options were available at little or no cost, either grossly neglected their duty and did no research, or were in a sweatheart agreement of some kind with Microsoft's salespeople, or Microsoft itself. That, or they opted for the product when it was still in the vaporware stage, which is even doubly incompetent.
Either way, the person or persons who made this incompetent, and very possibly corrupt, decision should indeed be the ones to pay for it
A true map (100% correct - however see my comment below) cannot be currently made, the science behind the calculations needed to make such a map is uncertain (dark matter, universal expansion speeds, unpredictable effects effects of undiscovered objects - black holes, etc, astrophysics is evolving all the time) and you'd a Beowulf cluster of processors the size of a galaxy to do the math.
... by going there and surveying the space a la Star Trek.
... just not practical given the current state of the art (and our current ignorance, as you pointed out before, with respect to undiscovered objects, dark matter, etc.).
While the last portion of your comment (needing a cluster the size of a galaxy to do the math) isn't really true, you are correct in your assertion that we lack the scientific knowledge, and likely the computational power, to make an accurate map of our galaxy as it is today. In other words, if we invented superluminal propulsion today we'd have to make our maps the old fashioned way
However,
In fact, even if we had all the science needed to make the calculations and the equipment to do so, a true map is theoretically impossible, based on the Uncertainty Principle it is impossible to determine with 100% accuracy the state of even an atom, let alone a universe.
The uncertainty principle only applies to subatomic scales at the quantum level, not to macro objects like planets, stars, and galaxies, or even smaller objects like grains of sand. Calculating the location of every star and planet, if we had the scientific knowledge and computational capacity to do so, is perfectly possible in theory
The software industry confronted the unpleasant reality that their product could be perfectly copied, against their will and in violation of their copyright, without limit. Naturally, the software industry feared the potential loss of revinues.
The industry tried copy protection, and even before the recent mathematical proof proving that secure copy protection, or DRM, was impossible the industry learned from its own experience that copy restrictive technologies were both ineffective in stopping copyright violation, and harmful to their legitimate customers and, therefor, to their product.
The industry learned, however, that even a modicum of personal accountability suffices to stop most forms of copyright violation, and that nothing short of a depopulated world will ever stop it all. The solution was quite simple: serialize the product and/or stamp the user's identity onto each piece of software sold. We don't know if there is a mechanism in place to trace serial number N of product P to the credit card number used to purchase it, and hence to the purchaser, but we as consumers do know it is certainly possible, and that alone makes the vast majority of people reluctant to share software illegally, even with their close friends.
Not everyone, mind you, as warez sites obviously demonstrate, but the vast majority. So much so that the software industry thrives, despite a complete lack of copy restriction technologies, or DRM, whatsoever, and despite a much greater vulnerability to such copying than eBooks, music, or film will ever be. Software has no equivelent alternative revinue streams like live concerts or cinemas, yet it has learned to thrive and prosper in an environment that copyright-obsessed yet technology-naive control freaks, like the sort currently lobbying congress to gut, even outlaw, technologies fundamental to the internet and personal computing, would assume to be inimical.
The problem of copyright violation and the "threat" the ability to make unlimited, perfect copies of a product has already been confronted, addressed, and successfully solved by the software industry, without DRM, without laws like the SSSCA, and finally without, and prior to, the DMCA.
eBook authors, musicians, and movie producers need to learn this, and need to seriously look at the motives their publishers, recording companies, and studios have for persuing technological restrictions on a problem for which an elegant social and legal solution stressing personal accountability have already solved. That motive, of course, is to secure their parasitical place as dominant middleman, with power over both the artists and their fans, at the expense of both and at the expense of the art they have usurped "ownership" over.
You make a very interesting point:
Problem with this: "most" websites do not link to sites with similar content. Most websites link to "partner" sites that have nothing in common with them -- after all, who links to a competitor?
Good websites link to similar sites -- academic websites link to simialr sites and sources.
Combine the algorithm described in this article with google's approach (or some other contextual approach to deterimining relevance) and you not only have a way of identifying "communities," you have a way of easilly identifying "marketdroid mazes of worthless links" as well.
Since the content of most marketdroid sites is usually next to worthless, the hits for a given search could be ordered accordingly. Sites, and groups of sites, that clearly form communities related to the topic you're interested in at the top, single websites as yet to be linked to somehwere in the middle, and marketdroid "partner" sites at the very bottom.
This would actually produce better, more useful results than either approach alone.
I largely agree with what you said, but I think part of John's complaint which you missed is that Verio is making the decision for their customers as to whether or not to accept email from John's open relay, and not allowing their customers to make that decision themselves.
As long as Verio is being upfront and honest with their customers that they are using RBL, then their customers have made the choice, by choosing Verio. It would be nice if verio provided a facility for their customers to opt in or out of using the RBL list, but really that is just a convinience: their customers can easilly opt out of the RBL by choosing another ISP.
As a previous post said, "everyone is right." John has the right to run an open relay, Verio has the right to sell him service (or not), and I (as well as Verio) have the right to filter his site because I don't like his actions. His rights stop at my home's router (whether I've chosen to block him of my own accord, or because of RBL's recommendation, or not at all, is my buisiness, not his).
Frankly, the idea of compiling absolutely everything from source 'just because' seems a little bit of a waste of time. The vast majority of software will only see very very minimal performance increase compared to a well built Debian package with the usual careful choice of compiler flags.
... once you've begun using source-based distros you will likely find you can no longer stomach the issues that binary based distros, even one as well engineered as Debian, bring with them.
Our enterprise is currently using Debian for many tasks. However, we are evaluating Sorcerer and Gentoo as a replacement.
Why?
1) Compiling everything from source 'just because' isn't a waste of time. What you overlook in your truncated 'just because' is that by compiling the source optimized for your hardware, against the library versions on your machine, you insure a level of compatability, and reliablity, that cannot be insured when mixing and matching binary libraries and applications. In short, you are compiling everything from source just because that is the only way to insure maximum performance and reliability on a given machine.
2) The speed increases are notable. Your assertion that architecture tweaks vs. generic compilations make little difference are not born out by real world, emperical testing. Debian (my favorite distro before trying Sorcerer and Gentoo), even Mandrake compiled with i586 optimizations, is noticably slower in performing many tasks (like video capture and editing, smooth window scrolling in KDE, web browsing in mozilla) than either Sorcerer or Gentoo compiled from source on the same hardware.
3) Distributions introduce their own level of bugs. Source compilations against existing libraries minimizes distribution-specific and distribution-induced bugs. Things like library version mismatches, subtle changes in behavior that break things but are unobvious, plague Debian, Mandrake, et. al. but are virtually eliminated by Gentoo and Sorcerer. What is more, the source based distros tend to stick closer to what the software authors intend in the installation of their software, reducing bugs that result from shuffling files or doing other "non-standard" things (from the orignial source author's point of view) in order to comply with the distro's file placement policies (for example). This isn't eliminated, as gentoo and sorcerer both have their policies, but it is reduced significantly vs. Mandrake, RedHat, and Debian.
4) What is more, gentoo and sorcerer are able to remain closer to the current state of development. While one may initially dismiss this as "upgraditis" and, at best "nice but risky and not necessary," it turns out to offer significant advantages, advantages that in my experience outweigh any disadvantages.
- one gets bug fixes immediately
- as important, the cycle of develope/test/report bugs to the author/fix bugs is tightened dramatically, with the author getting feedback in days instead of weeks or months
- one gets important new features immediately
- finally, if one doesn't like the current version (e.g. X 4.2 vs 4.1) using the older version instead is a trivial matter, with recompilation of dependent packages a relatively painless process when the version is changed, be it upward to a newer version, or a reversion back to an older version.
I cannot emphesize enough how many longstanding bugs, particularly distribution-related bugs, that have dogged us from RedHat to Mandrake to Debian, simply do not exist when running gentoo or sorcerer. What is more, we can use X 4.2 today, not months from now when it finally gets into Debian unstable. More importantly, we can use X 4.2 in a very stable environment, with one complete heirarchy of distro-induced bugs virtually eliminated.
Furthermore, from what I saw of Sorcerer, the chosen compiler flags are system-wide instead of being based on the individual packages needs. This is not wise.
Both gentoo and sorcerer allow individual ebuilds and spells (respective terms for suites of scripts which download, compile, and install a piece of software) to override and/or modify their respective compilation options. The "system wide" options and optimazations one sets are defaults that work for most ebuilds/spells. This is far wiser than hoping each ebuild/spell maintainer will think to optimize their own compilation (many would not, and many others would err on the side of caution). When optimization flags cause a problem the ebuild/spell maintainer typically strips the offending optimization out of the compiler options (a small sed pipe does the trick) and the spell or ebuild builds and runs fine.
Source distros are hands down better, easier, and less buggy than binary distros, despite their young age and "green" state. I encourage you to give one or the other a try
And no, "apt-get source --compile" isn't at all comparable (though it does make Debian immensly more useful than many of its binary-distro counterparts). You still have the plethora of distro-induced bugs that comes with any binary distro as large and complex as Debian.
Gentoo and Sorcerer aren't free of bugs, mind you, but they are free of several classes of bugs that exist in binary distros in addition to bugs in the software itself, and in the distro's configuration and layout. The difference may not sound like much, but in practice it is quite significant.
Well, if you can show that the the sender used a modem to upload their spam, or you used a modem to download and read it, you might have a case.
Ask a lawyer (I'm not one), but a cursory glance at the text of the law sure makes it sound like you'd have a valid argument.
I'm sorry, but your calculation seems to be way off.
.ogg or .mp3 from their favorite P2P network were to give the artist a single penny, the artist would come out $.0008 ahead. Further math is left as an excersize for the student.
... people will always be willing to pay more for a tangible product with a shiny disc than they will a few electrons pulled down from a web site.
Negative. You did not read the reference I provided. The Copyright Cartels are paying artists a whopping $.0023 for each song they sell on the internet, in their broken, copy-restricted, and not widely supported format.
If one out of every four people who download the same song as an
Comparing CD sales to download sales is a preposterous comparison of apples and oranges
An accurate comparison is apples to apples, namely what the Cartels are paying their artists for electronic downloads vs. what the filesharing community pays (or doesn't). And in that comparison, my calculations are accurate, based upon the figures the RIAA itself has provided.
Excellent example of the insidious nature I mentioned. This topic isn't even about open relays - it's about a mailing loop.
The two are related, as any rudimentary understanding of how mail systems work will make clear. Without the open relays the SPAM could not be sent to the mailing lists with their header information forged and hiding the sender's online identity. The offending messages resulting in these mail loops are originating from open relays, most of which are in Asia.
But be that as it may, you miss the point entirely (perhaps willfully?).
It's ridiculous.
No, its the only option the Asian providors are leaving us. Making a "newbie" mistake, as you misleadingly put it, is one thing. Willfully refusing to fix the problem when it is brought to your attention is something else again. Those "western" sites you refer to either fix their open relays (the most common response) or get blocked themselves.
What is more, for the last half decade almost all mail servers come with open relaying shut off by default, which means these "clueless newbies" almost certainly had to turn open relaying on, deliberately.
It is not unreasonable to infer from two deliberate actions, namely turning on open relaying in the first place, then refusing to fix the problem when it is abused and people complain, that the administrators of these sites are either appallingly incompetent or obscenely complacent. In either event we can be certain of one thing: if we want to stop receiving SPAM from these sites, we have to filter them. Period.
I wouldn't put too much faith in Microsoft to make an uncrackable implementation of _anything_.... let alone something people care enough about to crack like DRM.
They aren't going to make it uncrackable through technical expertise, they're going to make it uncrackable through legislation. If possession of such a utility is punishable by five years in prison and a $500,000 fine, no one in their right mind is going to have a copy of such a DRM cracking utility lying around. In effect, that makes DRM uncrackable from a practical standpoint, even if the "encryption" is the same as Adobe's laughable rehash of ROT-13.
So how does downloading music for free respect the rights of the artists who created it?
Well it does, to roughly the same degree as downloading legally purchased music from RIAA sites as documented here. If only every fourth music enthusiast were to send the artists one penny, the artists would still come out way ahead siding with the copyright violators than they would siding with the music cartels. If only one in four hundred send the artists a dollar using fairtunes, the artists come out ahead.
So called music pirates have nothing on the media cartels when it comes to causing the artist direct. verifiable, and potent financial harm, indeed based on the corrilation of P2P usage and CD sales, quite the opposite.
I'm not a Microsoft fan, but I've got to admit that idea of downloading a 700 MB .wmv file, burning it to a CD and being able to play it back in my DVD player at DVD quality is quite enticing.
And what on earth makes you think Microsoft's patented DRM will ever allow you to do that? If you want to be able to move your content from medium to medium as you see fit, without restriction, your only real long term hope is to use free software. Of course, if the SSSCA is passed theres a good chance free operating systems, such as FreeBSD and GNU/Linux, will be outlawed as a result.
There seems to be some insidious 'oh, it's those clueless Asians' thread running through so many Slashdot posts recently that I think it's time the balance was addressed.
That thread is based on the emperical experience of thousands of mail admins throughout the world (not just the US, as your slashdot bash inaccurately implies). If those whose ISPs (and in some cases, countries) are being blocked wish to demonstrate otherwise, all they have to do is administer their mail servers competently and close down their open relays.
Until then, their inaction will speak louder than your words, be they from Singapore, Korea, or wherever. As one who has travelled to those places I am reluctant to block entire countries, but my boss doesn't want his mailbox filled with SPAM and if blocking half of Asia is how I appease him, then half of Asia will be blocked, period. My personal fondness of Asia (and, for that matter, Africa, and Europe, and other places I have had the privelege of visiting in the last several years) will play absolutely no role in this decision, and no role in my opinion of the (in)competence of ISP mail adminsitrators in those locations. The only metric of any concern is how many open relays there are, and how those responsible act (or, in the case of many notorious Asian providors, particularly in Korea, don't act) when the issue is brought to their attention.
As for the differences in phone systems, you are comparing apples and oranges, and assuming one causation (lack of technical knowhow) when a completely different causation (lack of well defined, enforcable government standards resulting from a lassaiz-faire market mentality in the last several administrations) is responsible, then trying to apply the erroneous conclusion derived from your erroneous assumption back to another issue that is, in any case, completely unrelated.
Internet booths are another example of the logical fallacy you have fallen into in making this argument. In a country in which more than half the homes have their own PCs, and just about every public library is already on the net (along with many schools), internet booths would be a profound waste of money. In other words, you have brought up another completely unrelated topic and misapplied it to your original argument, namely what approaches empower the most people to use the internet under what conditions, with those conditions in Singapore quite different from the United States, which in turn is very different from the UK or the rest of Europe. Clearly that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the competency level of mail administrators in Asia, Africa, America, Antarctica, Mars, Pluto, the NGC-1 Nebula, or anywhere else for that matter.
Microsoft has 'cut off the air supply' of dozens of competitors over the years by copying their ideas and selling products at a loss until the competitor is run out of business. They've outright been proven to have stolen code from other companies such as Apple (QuickTime) and Stack. They've violated court decrees telling them not to do this, and they've falsified evidence in court (remember the videotape?). Their products are bad for productivity; look at how much time and money has been wasted fighting the viruses that keep plaguing Outlook and Internet Explorer again and again!
And for all this, they're effectively being given a slap on the wrist and told 'don't do it again.' Microsoft has learned a very important lesson: laws can be broken.
If that had been all they had learned, freedom and progress might still have had a chance in the United States. Unfortunately, Microsoft has learned much more. They have learned that, not only can they break the laws they don't like without any repercussions to speak of, they can purchase new laws to actively legislate their monopoly into perminance.
Consider: Microsoft owns most, if not all, of the patents on DRM technology as applied to computers. Microsoft is the only major software company promoting the SSSCA that will mandate this technology into every PC sold in the United States, while every other player in the industry, bar none, vehemently opposes this legislation.
We are about to make the Microsoft Monopoly the only legal operating system in the United States, modulo those unthreatening "competitors" they might choose to license the patents to, for a heafty fee. Anyone taking any bets on the survival of GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, or any new OS startups within the United States if and when the SSSCA passes?
It will soon become time to emigrate folks, I kid you not.
2. They have a policy that all their clients should have fully qualified (opted in) lists, any client found to be breaking this rule becomes an ex-client. As they are in Australia this would be in breach of the privacy act, and they have no wish to be associated with criminal activity no matter how petty.
This is the critical point. If one "opts in" for mailings, then by definition it isn't SPAM as it is not "unsolicited." If I check "send me notices of good deals" on some web site I'm buying something at, then I've opted-in, ie solicited, the bulk emailings.
SPAM is unsolicited bulk email (mostly, but not always, commercial, but again, the emphesis is on unsolicited bulk email).
If someone uses my servers, and my hard disk space, to store their unsolicited advertisments then as far as I (and several states, but alas, not Illinois) am concerned they are guilty of tresspass and should be treated accordingly: with stiff fines and some jail time. If, on the other hand, they are sending a mass, but soliticed, mailing (for example, I get mass mailings from AOPA all the time, which I have explicitly asked for), then there is absolutely no abuse and all is kosher.
You claim to not be in the habit of sending unsolicted bulk emails. Excellent. In this case you run a legitimate, inoffensive business and I wish you the best. If, on the other hand, this claim should turn out to be untrue, then I would be the first to cheer for the legions of system crackers tapping at your electronic Windows and smashing your servers.
When writing your congressman about the stupidity of the SSSCA, please take note of the following:
Copyright is an asset and as such needs protection. I disagree with the term of copyright and repreated extensions, but the rationale for having it in the first place is sound.
DRM is a first line of protection of copyright, and should prevent casual tresspass or theft. A successful DRM does not completely prevent duplication; it prevents casual duplication and should present a barrier for illegal mass duplication.
DRM is worthless for achieving those goals. This will become evident to the Media Cartels, and even to our thickheaded congress, though it appears not before the destroy the industry most responsible for America's prosperity over the last decade.
The software industry is even more vulnerable to copyright violation than the music and film industries ever will be. It always has been, by virtue of existing within a medium in which an infinite number of perfect copies can be made at virtually no cost. As game and other software designers learned over time, no copy protection worked, even for the length of the development/sales cycle of the product. Whatever scheme they came up with could be defeated, and no amount of laws banning such activity are going to have any effect on that since the act of copyright violation is/was already illegal and the abusers were perfectly willing to disregard the law regardless.
What does work is product serialization, perhaps coupled with stamping a person's identity (e.g. name, ip address) on the product. No one with any sense of self preservation is willing to share a copy of a product that can be traced back to them, or traced back to their credit card.
Yes, there are people who trade in warez. The law already has plenty of clout to deal with them. But the vast majority of people who use proprietary software pay for it and are not willing to share it with their family and friends, precisely because of the serialization and identity coupling approach I just described.
This will work perfectly fine for movies, television, music, and any other "infinitely copyable" product you care to name, without the need for draconian laws, without the need for DRM, indeed, without the need for the DMCA.
The software industry, whose very bread and butter are most vulnerable to copyright violation, already solved this problem without running to Uncle Sam for new, coercive, draconian, indeed, some might say Orwellian, legislation. I suggest the entertainment industry do the same, and I suggest anyone writing their congresspeople make this point very clear to them.
The problem has been solved by the software industry. The RIAA and MPAA Do not need the SSSCA to protect their profits, period.
In an alternate history near you:
... almost as long as Europeans are alleged by radicals to have had widespread use of the horseless carriage.
Throughout history, technology has been key to opening up new markets. It only represents a problem if it is allowed to undermine existing markets
said Buggy whip manufacturers, demanding that a one hundred year old law banning horseless carriages within the United States be renewed for another century. In other news, hundreds of eye witnesses reported a mysterious flying object high above the skies of Los Angeles. Subversive elements claim it is was an Aeroplane, the rumored heavier-than-air flying device said to have been in use in much of the rest of the world for the last seventy years or so
"Nonesense," said Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C. (chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee), "the United States remains the leader in world technology, and will continue to do so, without endangering the hard earned profits of buggy whip manufacturers and liveries everywhere. Anyone alleging the existence of horseless carriages or mysterious flying Aeroplanes is Unamerican and a traitor to the republic."
Thankfully, our leadership in the early part of the twentieth century was nowhere near as pathetic as it has become today.
I've been following this whole thing out of idle curiosity, and have come to a few conclusions.
1) We need USENET back, now more than ever. Web forums such as this simply are not an adequate replacement
- they are too susceptable to government censorship (one server, or at least one entity, to shut down vs. a distributed discussion system)
- they are too susceptable to local censorship, in this case slashdot's.
2) moderates can moderate a single post only once. If there was a "moderator" war it was between moderator's of differing opinions or, if one believes the more sinister interpretation, between user moderators and slashdot editors.
3) slashdot editors, if indeed they did the moderating of that (I agree, in that context offtopic but in this context on-topic) thread, showed extreme lack of judgement. However, the appear to have learned from their mistakes, as this thread has not been "bitchslapped" into oblivion.
4) Some people take karma and post scores way too seriously, others don't. What injustice may have been present here will be taken personally by some of those affected, less so by others. Still, it is understandable how some might have been angered (and others feel opositely).
5) If this is a user moderated site, IMHO the slashdot editors should really back off and let the users do the moderating.
And now a suggestion:
Combining the best traits of USENET and sites like slashdot. Use USENET as the underlying infrastructure (e.g. alt.slashdot newsgroup, or better yet, alt.slashdot.stories [moderated], alt.slashdot.posts [unmoderated], with subject lines parsed by slash and displayed here according to the parse:
e.g.
subject: Whatever the user's post's subject is [2002/02/27 - Story Headline]
would parse out to threads displayed under Story Headline. Moderation points, ratings, etc. could be xreferenced to a local mysql database, with USENET threading used to manage threads. USENET readers would see human readable subjects referencing related stories, the text of which would also be posted to alt.slashdot.stories (moderated) as well as displayed here.
The goal: get the convinience and ease of web forums such as this, with the strength, redundency, and distributed nature of USENET.
Of course, now I have wandered somewhat off topic...