DOS attacks and the like are both illegal, and generally tend to be an immature response to something that can be dealt with at a higher level (that is, you don't go busting your neighbors car up just because his kid threw an egg at your house). Additionally, if 2600 or any other organization organized a massive DOS-like system, I'm sure the MPAA would lawsuit them into oblivion for that as well.
I can't check myself, but at some point on the mpaa site, there has to be an outside link that will eventually lead to a search engine or some other site that discusses the decss code.
Therefore, by their own accusation, the MPAA are in violation of their MPAA order.
Anyone want to point this out to them?
(Needless to say, the court decision specifically mentioned "intent to link to decss code", so the average random linking that 99.9% of the links out there are harmless here.)
First, the 2600 case was only heard in the Federal Circuit that contains NY; technically, its results have no legal bearing in CA, TX, or other parts of the country (much less outside the country). The MPAA would have to initiate a court battle in each Fed. Circuit court, and get a ruling favoring them before they can legally persue more. Unfortunately, the decision of Kaplan in the 2600 case can have some bearing, but it's not an automatic win for MPAAA. What they are probably doing right now is scare tactics, knowing that they can kill the deCSS off anyone without a source of income by C&Ds, and take anyone with a foothold to court.
Second, everyone b&ms on that slashdot or yahoo or any search provider will be hunted down and shut down. If you read Kaplan's findings, the important distinction is the intent to link to the
decss source. If I linked to slashdot, with a link that read : "Visit Slashdot, News for Nerds", and sometime, Rob decided to turn slashdot into a decss code haven, I would bet that the MPAA could not do anything to me as I never intended ot link to/. code. On the other hand, if I had "Here's the DeCSS code:", MPAA could easily be over me. Places like/. or yahoo which only accumlate data without filtering would also be exempt, because of the common carrier provider aspect (although the Napster trial questions this as well).
Making linking illegal, of course, is a violation of 1st amendment rights and hopefully will be shut down on the appeals process.
There is a known potental problem with ProFTPd up to rc2, not related to the one that plagued up to.10. Namely, if you issue a "quote '%999'"
message while ftp'ing to a proftpd server, you can
kill the child process. Is this a source for a
potental problem? No exploits are known yet,
but the new nightly builds of ProFTPD do remove this problem.
Um...probably not going to be possible in a few years.
Penn. today introduced the new license plates: the gov't WEB SITE ADDRESS is now where the phrase "The Keystone State" used to be. According to the Chicago Trib, Illinios may be going that way.
And we all know that URL's are property of their owners, right? Right?
There are some benefits (non corporate) that can come from time-limited books:
True virtual libraries - Download a copy of a book from your public library with a 3week limitation. After 3weeks, it's unreadable. (Of course, when you dl a copy, it's not like you're removing it from the shelf, and therefore someone else can't get it, UNLESS books are distributed with single user licenses.)
Outdated/limited information - Remember the early Netscape betas - they expired about 3 months after release to prevent people using beta quality software sometime down the road. For fields like physics, chemistry, etc where we general restructure how we teach and view our science roughly every 10 years, a textbook published in 1970 may be teaching not only misleading but WRONG information, and thus limiting the date on these things may be useful. But you'd still want to be able to access that information as potental historical value. And unfortunately, there's not a large number of cases where this happens.
Now, as I read the associated info for this article, most of the concept with time-limited books appears to be focused at colleges, which can make some sense. How many hundreds of dollars do you pay for books a year just as a scientist or engineer in school? Look at the cost of medical books, they're even worse. However, you can most likely pick up a copy of Office for less than $100 which will last you through your school years. If you could buy all your books that you'd use for school at 25% the list price, but only be able to use them through your school, after which you'd have to pay subscriptions to continue to use them, compared to buying unlimited use at 100%, I would think most students would jump on the former. I *still* want the option of the second to be available, as many professionals end up buying textbooks as reference materials, and at this point, the initial cost isn't terribly bad.
I can't see this yet being popular for average joe: even getting away from physcially holding a book and curling up with it before bed, there's still the probably of the fact that you don't buy the book, you license it. It may lead to cheaper book prices (get Tom Clancy's latest for only $5 for a 3yr limiation as opposed to $25 for no limitation), but it can also easily lead to pay-per-page, especially if it uses any net verification to make sure that you are reading your book. Password protection would be shunned - there's something in sharing a book with a friend that adding the password layer would ruin.
Frames: Bad NS-ism, and unfortunately now mainstream. There's more than enough problems with frames, the two largest being the lack of bookmarking anything inside a framed site and how you can suddenly switch to an outside site and still be framed in the first site (which can be potental lawsuit material from a case about 2 years ago). Guess what: thanks to tables and SSI, any site 'effect' that can be done in frames can be done without frames. And if done right, it's just as easy to write a site that has both framed and nonframed versions without sacrifice (there *is* a tag that many authors forget).
Image maps: Just add a simple line like at the bottom of any/. page *in addition to* the image map. Also, there are ALT tags for image maps that work the same as normal images - lynx handles them nicely.
Tables: Tables, surprisingly, only work poorly when you specify absolute sizes. Relative size tables work nearly flawlessly across the browser board (including text browsers), as long as you don't try to force the size of the table off the screen by including huge images or whatnot inside them. Most web creatores that complain about tables failing are ones that tend to design for a certain browser size (1024x768) and are agast when the 640x480 results suck. The only recommendation on the size of the window is loosely based on the WinTV size (512x4--) and even that is only tentatively suggested. Wait till 320x240 lcd panels on your toaster are common.
Style-sheets - Browsers that don't understand style sheets will completely ignore style sheets. Newer browsers (IE5, NS4.5+, Moz, Opera4) have no major problems with style sheets, though some are more compliant than others. The killer is IE3, which supports style sheets but so poorly it breaks pages more than helps them as CSS is supposed to do. (as I mentioned NS4.0 has some significant problems with parsing that can be worked around by a careful CSS writer). So generally, as long as you use style sheets as intended, you aren't going to be breaking anything on any browser save for IE3, and most people aren't using that anymore.
Remember, if NS and IE stuck to the W3C specs from Mosaic 0.9 on, most of the problems with the web accessibility today would be gone. And even today, NS and IE want to vary from the specs (above and beyond buggy compatibility), and the browser war has done significant damage to the webspace. But we are slowly recovering, as many many sites realize that content is king over appearence, and many major sites start striving to be fully HTML4.0 compatible.
Yes, you can build web sites that are interesting and full of eye-candy, yet still be fully features-compliant such that it will work with all browsers [*] on all platforms, for disabled users, for cel-phones, for text-only display, or whatever other situation that we have yet to envision. It doesn't require a lot of extra work from the start, and is probably easier to develop and maintain. You can still use CSS, Java, JS, Flash, or other plug in features as well. This is the whole point of HTML - the browser, whatever it may be, decides how to render what you wrote, ignoring tags as necessary to make sense for that particular enviornment (e.g. ignoring in text browsers).
99% of broken sites out there can be easily fixed with ALT tags and text menus for image maps. Most other problems stem from JS-only navigation. If you want to add eye candy with images not needed to get the content of the site, ALT="" is quite valid and will not disrupt a page on lynx or other text browsers. There's plenty more easy accessibility tips that you can add, and it's much easier to add them at the start than the end, but even completed web sites can add them easily.
[*] There are browser problems where the HTML rendering is coding completely wrong, unfortunately, and one had to code around it. CSS on IE3 and NS4 are two good examples: it's just broken yet functioning in IE3, and for no good reason, you have to have JS enabled to use CSS in NS4, and your CSS has to be whitespaced just right lest you run into problems.
At least they choose probably one of the few dev environments that, in my experience, tends to avoid propriatary enhancements to the language. That is, as long as you avoid anything GUI and the course is mainly for C++ programming, you can probably port the code from a *nix style environ to CW with minor hassles (project management).
I doubt that it's that easy with Borland or MS given what I read in programming trade journals.
Of course, the key thing in any C++ programming: AVOID PRAGMAS, as this seems to be the largest area of differences between win dev environs.
I don't argue that ecommerce sites want to collect data, though what kind of data that they collect is questionable. But I do see advantages of directed advertizing, so tracking users to some extent is not that unethical. However, it's too easy to fall into hole of collecting every last bit of data then selling it.
So, the easy solution to ensure user privacy is this: Require all sites use opt-in methods as opposed to opt-out methods. Failure to do so will encure stiff fines. Make sure the user knows exactly what actions (which need to be explicit actions such as filling in a form as opposed to just clicking on a link) will opt them into the system.
Not only would this help with privacy on online sites, it would make spamming illegal unless the person requested it. Maintaining a user state across the site even if they don't opt in can still be done using session IDs as opposed to cookies but most are too lazy to use that.
Of course, it would be nice that if at this time, all databases that were collected by ecommerce were forced to be erased prior to the start of this requirement such that everyone had their clean slate, but that ain't going to happen.
(But with our DMCA-passing friends in Congress, this will never happen).
Re:GNOME vs KDE Episode 18: Pointlessness
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 3
One reason that GUIs for apps should be consistant (not necessarily similar) is twofold:
Learning the system. Sure, average/. reader knows how to find things, but the average joe *expects* "File/Save", "Edit/Cut", OK and Cancel buttons, etc. By sticking to basic conventions for all apps, it makes GNOME or KDE more user friendly to all computer users and makes Linux look better and better.
Scripting. Sure, most of the time Linux people will be scripting using/bin/bash or other shells,
or perl or tk or whatever other language. However, GUI scripting can be quite useful. From my understanding of the gtk and kde basics, the concept of scripting is there, it's more a matter of apps using it. It would be nice if, in the end, we had something similar to AppleScript, where each app has it's own mini-API for script calls, so that if I wanted to save a file during a script operation, I can call the app's 'save' function. However, until that's implemented across GUI apps, one will have to rely on the GUI's underlying toolkit to provide said calls, so that instead, I could call "menu file -> item save". Standardizing on names and orders can help very much here as well.
Of course, it should be possible for advanced users to customize the gtk/kde app, like it was possible for X Toolkit apps to use resources and change every aspect of the design. XML makes for a powerful tool here.
Re:License wars are a waste of energy
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 2
There's a good reason why TrollTech doesn't want to GPL the QT library: they make money off of it for cross platform applications. Trolltech is basically preventing people from forking the QT code, making a QT library that may be backwards compatible with the current QT library but under the GPL license, therefore, undercutting TrollTech by providing it freely.
Trolltech has probably done as much as they can given their commercial interests to help get as near to the GPL as possible. This only affects how Linux distro CDs are burned or what might be at the offical distro site; you can easily get
QT and KDE and whatever else extends from that
from third parties for whatever distro you're running. Sure, it's an extra step, but I would think that the distros could explain what KDE is and sites they might be able to obtain it from without too much question.
While I certainly agree with your statement and arguements, I don't think this is the right thing to do at this time.
The threat of 1st Amendment Rights on the net looms large in the horizon, and with the 'ease' it takes large corporations or outspoken politions or third parties to get laws enacted that threaten the 1st Am, time is running out quickly to set the standard. Yet while laws can be passed in days, court cases take months and years to work through. While the laws may latter be revoked, they are still in effect while the court cases go on, and corporations/the government can use them to threaten to get what they want.
In this particular case, I would definitely argue that Kaplan should have recused himself, but use that in addition to much of the evidence that did not appear in the final decision and other bits as part of the appeals process, as opposed to requesting a new trial, primarily for the fact that with each day the trial continues on, free speech rights are in question, and request for a speedy case. If, even after all that the appeals court only agreed to a new judge and trial before hearing the case, I'd take it, but urge the court early on to expedite the case and only call witnesses whose testimony was significantly affected by Kaplan's actions, letting the other witnesses testimony stand from the first trial's transcript.
Actaully it has been settled, well before the 2600 case. Once the DMCA was passed, it was illegal because it broke a copy-protection scheme.
The 2600 case was about distributing and referring to the illegal product.
However, this illegality is not permanent yet. As most people, I expect this case will be used to challenge the DMCA at the federal level starting with the appeals process (Kaplan's decision did throw doubt on the draconianess of the DMCA, but he had to follow the letter of the law in his decision). When the DMCA is declared unconstitutional, then DeCSS will no longer be illegal. HOWEVER, MPAA may still sue for civil damages as opposed to criminal ones due to the money they claim they lost on sales, but they won't have the DMCA to support their case.
Instead of government mandates, have NS and IE incorporate PICS such that any site that lacks a correct PICS identification is immediately concerned of highest blocking requirements; by adding the appropriate PICS ratings does your page become viewable on most browsers. Sort of an opt-in view of publishing. And if you, for sake of getting the page on the net even though the page content is highly questionable and use the wrong ratings intentionally, you can then be prosecuted for false advertizing.
Unfortunately, this would have been ideal when browsers were just coming out; using an old browser if the new browsers supported it would simply defeat the process. Additionally, the gov't could easily step in here as overseer even though the process started as voluntary or industry cooperation.
PICS rating systems are drastically underutilized and could make for a better replacement for filtering, but there is potental for abuse if not gov't regulated, and just plain trouble if regulated.
I still read works by Ray Bradbury, listen to works of Glenn Miller, and enjoy the early Looney Toons, all which have enjoyed periods of revival in the past decade due to one thing or another, and yet are over 30 years old, so they don't make your cut. Should we extend the line to protect these works as well? Corporations want to, but at some point, based on my interpretions and readings of the thoughts of the founding fathers in copyright issues, a work has enjoyed sufficient time to sufficiently saturate the nation and that it should fall into the public domain regardless of any future spurts of popularity. That line that is drawn needs to be a function of the technological means to distribute material and the area it was to be distributed across. In the 1800s, most information had to be printed by presses, and distributed by ground transportation, so a copyright expiry time of 30 years makes sense.
Today, information can be gotten in seconds, and anything much more than 5 years seems crazy. If you also consider that on a per population basis, there is more IP around compared to 1800, and the fact that much of it is stagnent due to corporate profits will eventually lead to stagnation in all aspects of life.
1) Reduce the terms on copyrights to 10 years from public release. There is no reason why it should take more than this time for copyright holders today to rake in the wealth they can get from this given the ease of obtaining legal copies of the work either from brick and morter or from the internet. Of course, this would be retroactive like all other copyright extention bills of late.
2) Force all copyrights to be held by up to 4 individuals each with at least 25% contribution to the copyrighted work. Prevent corporations from holding any copyrights. This would force people like MPAA, RIAA, publishers, and broadcasters to become clearing houses for information instead of guardians of it. Such a law would probably change the RIAA and others completely, but as with most people, this is probably not a bad thing.
Sure, I doubt this will ever happen, but I strongly believe that most of the copyright issues that are we dealing with today is a direct result from the fact that corporations can hold copyrights.
It's been a while since I had to reinstall mysql, but I'm pretty sure that not only in the manual but in a pre or post install script, the system YELLS at you that the password is default and to change it ASAP (If not inserted by mysql, then the.rpms and.debs have been set to do this).
Only one court in the nation has the ability to declare a federal law unconstitutional, and that is the 9 boys and girls in WashDC. If any judge had that power hypothetically, then their ruling would only hold in the region where his court had power (as in this case, only the circuit that contains NY (9th?)), while remaining valid in all other parts of the country. What if two similar cases were filed in two district courts simulatenously, and the judges had different opinions on the outcome? (RIAA is currently in such a situation) A judge can certainly raise issues of constitutionality that may make for an appeals but cannot make a law unconstitutional. That's all parts of the checks and balances that are set up by the Founding Fathers.
Now, if you start talking state laws and the like, a federal judge may be able to declare these unconstitution wrt to the US constitution, but they will generally not see these: state law disputes typically go from state supreme court to the US supreme court unless issues of interstate commerce come up.
Does the UK have any law similar to the American Disabilities Act? Most readers for sight-impared people don't broadcast themselves as NN or IE, and therefore would be unable to use this site. Which is practically the same as not providing ramps to get into a brick and mortar store.
And remember, there *are* pending lawsuits by disabled people against AOL and others for just this reason.
If the UK has similar laws, you may want to kindly write Tesco to remind them that said disabled users won't be able to access their site.
Not a Brit, but been there twice (once in the last few years) to know that there is very little, if any, competition to Tesco for groceries. *Maybe* Marks and Sparks, but since they're mostly a department store with specality food items, I doubt you can 'grocery shop' with them. There's another chain that I saw up in the Kinston-Upon-Hull area (ASDF?) but didn't see anything like that near London, which may be regional constraints.
Slashdot Mirror
Therefore, by their own accusation, the MPAA are in violation of their MPAA order.
Anyone want to point this out to them?
(Needless to say, the court decision specifically mentioned "intent to link to decss code", so the average random linking that 99.9% of the links out there are harmless here.)
Second, everyone b&ms on that slashdot or yahoo or any search provider will be hunted down and shut down. If you read Kaplan's findings, the important distinction is the intent to link to the decss source. If I linked to slashdot, with a link that read : "Visit Slashdot, News for Nerds", and sometime, Rob decided to turn slashdot into a decss code haven, I would bet that the MPAA could not do anything to me as I never intended ot link to /. code. On the other hand, if I had "Here's the DeCSS code:", MPAA could easily be over me. Places like /. or yahoo which only accumlate data without filtering would also be exempt, because of the common carrier provider aspect (although the Napster trial questions this as well).
Making linking illegal, of course, is a violation of 1st amendment rights and hopefully will be shut down on the appeals process.
Penn. today introduced the new license plates: the gov't WEB SITE ADDRESS is now where the phrase "The Keystone State" used to be. According to the Chicago Trib, Illinios may be going that way.
And we all know that URL's are property of their owners, right? Right?
True virtual libraries - Download a copy of a book from your public library with a 3week limitation. After 3weeks, it's unreadable. (Of course, when you dl a copy, it's not like you're removing it from the shelf, and therefore someone else can't get it, UNLESS books are distributed with single user licenses.)
Outdated/limited information - Remember the early Netscape betas - they expired about 3 months after release to prevent people using beta quality software sometime down the road. For fields like physics, chemistry, etc where we general restructure how we teach and view our science roughly every 10 years, a textbook published in 1970 may be teaching not only misleading but WRONG information, and thus limiting the date on these things may be useful. But you'd still want to be able to access that information as potental historical value. And unfortunately, there's not a large number of cases where this happens.
Now, as I read the associated info for this article, most of the concept with time-limited books appears to be focused at colleges, which can make some sense. How many hundreds of dollars do you pay for books a year just as a scientist or engineer in school? Look at the cost of medical books, they're even worse. However, you can most likely pick up a copy of Office for less than $100 which will last you through your school years. If you could buy all your books that you'd use for school at 25% the list price, but only be able to use them through your school, after which you'd have to pay subscriptions to continue to use them, compared to buying unlimited use at 100%, I would think most students would jump on the former. I *still* want the option of the second to be available, as many professionals end up buying textbooks as reference materials, and at this point, the initial cost isn't terribly bad.
I can't see this yet being popular for average joe: even getting away from physcially holding a book and curling up with it before bed, there's still the probably of the fact that you don't buy the book, you license it. It may lead to cheaper book prices (get Tom Clancy's latest for only $5 for a 3yr limiation as opposed to $25 for no limitation), but it can also easily lead to pay-per-page, especially if it uses any net verification to make sure that you are reading your book. Password protection would be shunned - there's something in sharing a book with a friend that adding the password layer would ruin.
Image maps: Just add a simple line like at the bottom of any /. page *in addition to* the image map. Also, there are ALT tags for image maps that work the same as normal images - lynx handles them nicely.
Tables: Tables, surprisingly, only work poorly when you specify absolute sizes. Relative size tables work nearly flawlessly across the browser board (including text browsers), as long as you don't try to force the size of the table off the screen by including huge images or whatnot inside them. Most web creatores that complain about tables failing are ones that tend to design for a certain browser size (1024x768) and are agast when the 640x480 results suck. The only recommendation on the size of the window is loosely based on the WinTV size (512x4--) and even that is only tentatively suggested. Wait till 320x240 lcd panels on your toaster are common.
Style-sheets - Browsers that don't understand style sheets will completely ignore style sheets. Newer browsers (IE5, NS4.5+, Moz, Opera4) have no major problems with style sheets, though some are more compliant than others. The killer is IE3, which supports style sheets but so poorly it breaks pages more than helps them as CSS is supposed to do. (as I mentioned NS4.0 has some significant problems with parsing that can be worked around by a careful CSS writer). So generally, as long as you use style sheets as intended, you aren't going to be breaking anything on any browser save for IE3, and most people aren't using that anymore.
Remember, if NS and IE stuck to the W3C specs from Mosaic 0.9 on, most of the problems with the web accessibility today would be gone. And even today, NS and IE want to vary from the specs (above and beyond buggy compatibility), and the browser war has done significant damage to the webspace. But we are slowly recovering, as many many sites realize that content is king over appearence, and many major sites start striving to be fully HTML4.0 compatible.
99% of broken sites out there can be easily fixed with ALT tags and text menus for image maps. Most other problems stem from JS-only navigation. If you want to add eye candy with images not needed to get the content of the site, ALT="" is quite valid and will not disrupt a page on lynx or other text browsers. There's plenty more easy accessibility tips that you can add, and it's much easier to add them at the start than the end, but even completed web sites can add them easily.
[*] There are browser problems where the HTML rendering is coding completely wrong, unfortunately, and one had to code around it. CSS on IE3 and NS4 are two good examples: it's just broken yet functioning in IE3, and for no good reason, you have to have JS enabled to use CSS in NS4, and your CSS has to be whitespaced just right lest you run into problems.
Of course, the key thing in any C++ programming: AVOID PRAGMAS, as this seems to be the largest area of differences between win dev environs.
So, the easy solution to ensure user privacy is this: Require all sites use opt-in methods as opposed to opt-out methods. Failure to do so will encure stiff fines. Make sure the user knows exactly what actions (which need to be explicit actions such as filling in a form as opposed to just clicking on a link) will opt them into the system.
Not only would this help with privacy on online sites, it would make spamming illegal unless the person requested it. Maintaining a user state across the site even if they don't opt in can still be done using session IDs as opposed to cookies but most are too lazy to use that.
Of course, it would be nice that if at this time, all databases that were collected by ecommerce were forced to be erased prior to the start of this requirement such that everyone had their clean slate, but that ain't going to happen.
(But with our DMCA-passing friends in Congress, this will never happen).
Learning the system. Sure, average /. reader knows how to find things, but the average joe *expects* "File/Save", "Edit/Cut", OK and Cancel buttons, etc. By sticking to basic conventions for all apps, it makes GNOME or KDE more user friendly to all computer users and makes Linux look better and better.
Scripting. Sure, most of the time Linux people will be scripting using /bin/bash or other shells,
or perl or tk or whatever other language. However, GUI scripting can be quite useful. From my understanding of the gtk and kde basics, the concept of scripting is there, it's more a matter of apps using it. It would be nice if, in the end, we had something similar to AppleScript, where each app has it's own mini-API for script calls, so that if I wanted to save a file during a script operation, I can call the app's 'save' function. However, until that's implemented across GUI apps, one will have to rely on the GUI's underlying toolkit to provide said calls, so that instead, I could call "menu file -> item save". Standardizing on names and orders can help very much here as well.
Of course, it should be possible for advanced users to customize the gtk/kde app, like it was possible for X Toolkit apps to use resources and change every aspect of the design. XML makes for a powerful tool here.
Trolltech has probably done as much as they can given their commercial interests to help get as near to the GPL as possible. This only affects how Linux distro CDs are burned or what might be at the offical distro site; you can easily get QT and KDE and whatever else extends from that from third parties for whatever distro you're running. Sure, it's an extra step, but I would think that the distros could explain what KDE is and sites they might be able to obtain it from without too much question.
Hello, Metroid.
Have you heard about the new site, slashdot.org?
It is my source for video games news. I learned how to install Linux from it. It told me the evils of Microsoft.
I hear that 90% of the posts at slashdot.org are made by trolls.
Aahhhh, the trolls. Aaaahhhhh.
(Sorry, that damned commercial won't leave me alone!)
The threat of 1st Amendment Rights on the net looms large in the horizon, and with the 'ease' it takes large corporations or outspoken politions or third parties to get laws enacted that threaten the 1st Am, time is running out quickly to set the standard. Yet while laws can be passed in days, court cases take months and years to work through. While the laws may latter be revoked, they are still in effect while the court cases go on, and corporations/the government can use them to threaten to get what they want.
In this particular case, I would definitely argue that Kaplan should have recused himself, but use that in addition to much of the evidence that did not appear in the final decision and other bits as part of the appeals process, as opposed to requesting a new trial, primarily for the fact that with each day the trial continues on, free speech rights are in question, and request for a speedy case. If, even after all that the appeals court only agreed to a new judge and trial before hearing the case, I'd take it, but urge the court early on to expedite the case and only call witnesses whose testimony was significantly affected by Kaplan's actions, letting the other witnesses testimony stand from the first trial's transcript.
However, this illegality is not permanent yet. As most people, I expect this case will be used to challenge the DMCA at the federal level starting with the appeals process (Kaplan's decision did throw doubt on the draconianess of the DMCA, but he had to follow the letter of the law in his decision). When the DMCA is declared unconstitutional, then DeCSS will no longer be illegal. HOWEVER, MPAA may still sue for civil damages as opposed to criminal ones due to the money they claim they lost on sales, but they won't have the DMCA to support their case.
Instead of government mandates, have NS and IE incorporate PICS such that any site that lacks a correct PICS identification is immediately concerned of highest blocking requirements; by adding the appropriate PICS ratings does your page become viewable on most browsers. Sort of an opt-in view of publishing. And if you, for sake of getting the page on the net even though the page content is highly questionable and use the wrong ratings intentionally, you can then be prosecuted for false advertizing.
Unfortunately, this would have been ideal when browsers were just coming out; using an old browser if the new browsers supported it would simply defeat the process. Additionally, the gov't could easily step in here as overseer even though the process started as voluntary or industry cooperation.
PICS rating systems are drastically underutilized and could make for a better replacement for filtering, but there is potental for abuse if not gov't regulated, and just plain trouble if regulated.
Anal nitpick of the day. :D
1) Reduce the terms on copyrights to 10 years from public release. There is no reason why it should take more than this time for copyright holders today to rake in the wealth they can get from this given the ease of obtaining legal copies of the work either from brick and morter or from the internet. Of course, this would be retroactive like all other copyright extention bills of late.
2) Force all copyrights to be held by up to 4 individuals each with at least 25% contribution to the copyrighted work. Prevent corporations from holding any copyrights. This would force people like MPAA, RIAA, publishers, and broadcasters to become clearing houses for information instead of guardians of it. Such a law would probably change the RIAA and others completely, but as with most people, this is probably not a bad thing.
Sure, I doubt this will ever happen, but I strongly believe that most of the copyright issues that are we dealing with today is a direct result from the fact that corporations can hold copyrights.
Yay! A Freakazoid ref on slashdot! The world is now complete!
It's been a while since I had to reinstall mysql, but I'm pretty sure that not only in the manual but in a pre or post install script, the system YELLS at you that the password is default and to change it ASAP (If not inserted by mysql, then the .rpms and .debs have been set to do this).
Now, if you start talking state laws and the like, a federal judge may be able to declare these unconstitution wrt to the US constitution, but they will generally not see these: state law disputes typically go from state supreme court to the US supreme court unless issues of interstate commerce come up.
And remember, there *are* pending lawsuits by disabled people against AOL and others for just this reason.
If the UK has similar laws, you may want to kindly write Tesco to remind them that said disabled users won't be able to access their site.
Not a Brit, but been there twice (once in the last few years) to know that there is very little, if any, competition to Tesco for groceries. *Maybe* Marks and Sparks, but since they're mostly a department store with specality food items, I doubt you can 'grocery shop' with them. There's another chain that I saw up in the Kinston-Upon-Hull area (ASDF?) but didn't see anything like that near London, which may be regional constraints.
The answer to any question in the universe is 3. You just need to figure out the units.