Why Congress passed it: Supply and demand
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 2
So how does granting exclusive rights to dead people help promote science and useful arts?
The Gershwin estate's royalties on "Rhapsody in Blue" pay for the Gershwin kids' music school.
The real reason why Congress passed the Bono Act, if you're willing to ignore bri^W campaign contributions from DisneyCo and Time Warner, is that the European Union had recently harmonized its copyright law based on German law, which gave a life plus 70 year term, and American authors were threatening to become permanent residents of Europe. Congress didn't want a significant artistic brain drain, so it did what any competitive firm would do in such a supply-and-demand situation: it increased how much it was willing to pay (measured in years of monopoly) for works, to compete with what Europe was offering.
That's why I'm not buying Square's Disney-licensed RPG Kingdom Hearts, even if I do get a PS2 before the PS3 comes out.
It's commonly called the "Bono Act" for short because that's easier to say orally than "CTEA".
That's why the term "pro bono", meaning volunteer legal work, has become confusing over the last few years. It comes from Latin words that literally mean "for the good" of the public.
Don't get me wrong; I hate the Bono Act as much as anybody else here. But I still can't resist the urge to play devil's advocate:
Gershwin's estate can't do anything for progress
Wrong. The royalties from "Rhapsody in Blue" help pay for the education of those named in Gershwin's last will and testament, so that they can go to music school and eventually continue to produce new musical works.
The retroactive portion of the CTEA really pushes the outside of any reasonable definition of "limited".
According to a mathematician, infinity is still a limit. Positive infinity is the limit of 1/x as x approaches 0 from the positive side.
Repeated extension flies in face of limited Times
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 2
Copyright terms are still "limited", they're just a hell of a lot longer than they were 200 years ago.
A 19-year extension in 1978 (56 to 75 years). A 20-year extension in 1998 (75 to 95 years). If Congress continues to pass a 20-year extension every 20 years, it exploits a loophole in the Constitution to create what amounts to "perpetual copyright on the installment plan," as some legal scholars have put it. You call that "limited"?
When suing the Government...
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 5, Informative
How exactly did they suggest Ashcroft is behind this?
The U.S. Constitution prohibits people from suing Congress. So if you want a federal law invalidated, you sue the current Attorney General in his or her official capacity as Attorney General to get an injunction against enforcing the law.
try coughing up some coin to communicate faster than 2400bps...
I'm already communicating 20 times faster than that (48 kbps, the typical "56K" line speed), but it's still not enough. It's not possible to go much faster than that over the public telephone network.
but many forgot to talk about bochs: a free [freespeech] PC emulator.
Bochs emulates a PC, including the CPU. Thus, things become slow, and you may not have enough power to view an MPEG movie, but you can run x86 apps on other CPU architectures. In addition, bochs is slow enough that it runs old DOS games at the "right" speed.
Plex86, on the other hand, runs on x86 processors and "virtualizes" the environment. It emulates only the motherboard, a couple common adapter cards, and some aspects of the inner-ring modes of the CPU. It runs x86 user code natively on the processor, preserving most of the speed.
But if they can build a $200 Lindows PC, why not make a $200 "additional PC" PCI card? It would let Anonymous Coward actually build a Beowulf cluster in his PC's case.
FYI: Hard disk capacity is measured in GB these days.
If you're trying to imply "use fewer, larger disks," then how do you expect to store a database in the double digit terabytes without using a storage cluster with several hundred hard disks? If that wasn't your point, then what did you mean?
Are you kidding me? Linux has lots of games. For instance, Linux has XBill (shoot the evil computer crackers), Tux Racer (snowboarding), Tetanus On Drugs (a tetris clone with a twist, literally), all of the GNOME Games and KDE Games, and several id Software games. For more, go to SourceForge Gaming Foundry or Freshmeat's games section, both brought to you by OSDN Keiretsu.
And through emulation and virtualization, you can run even more games. Most of the 2D games run on WINE. Older PC games should run on DOSEMU, plex86, or Bochs with FreeDOS installed. If you have an NES cart reader (hard to find), Linux has every NES game ever produced, through FCE Ultra. If you have a GBA cart reader (easy to find in online stores; look for the Visoly Flash Advance Linker), Linux has every GBA game ever produced, through VisualBoyAdvance.
On the hardware side, Linux supports game port joypads, USB joypads, and even game console joypads connected through a parallel port adapter.
because it was written by a bunch of stupid communists.
So what is porting AOL over to linux going to acchieve ?
Compatibility with a dial-up protocol that Linux currently doesn't support. Linux currently supports PPP and SLIP; with AOL's contribution, it'll support AOL-Dial as well, probably through some sort of proprietary network interface driver for aol0 (analogous to ppp0 or eth0).
Every time you run an app using WINE, you take one more incentive away from app makers to move away from Windows.
Yet you give one more incentive to app makers to make their Windows binaries run well on WINE as well as Microsoft's flavors of Windows. Here's the game plan for proprietary software publishers:
Read feedback form results that ask politely for a port of your software (which is currently at version 2.2) to Linux.
Make version 3.0 of your software work on WINE.
Work "Optimized for WINE" into your box art. Possibly license the Lindows logo.
Sell version 3.0 to users of x86 Linux and x86 *BSD.
Profit.
As you maintain 3.x for Windows, you find that the feedback is now asking you for a "native" port to non-x86 operating systems.
Port version 3.5 of your software to Winelib (an implementation of the Win32 API in a *n?x shared library) for more predictable performance across the *n?x spectrum. This should be relatively straightforward, as you did most of the dirty work on the Windows side when you got rid of the calls that Wine doesn't support.
Your app is now *n?x native. Work that fact into the box design.
Ship version 3.5 with Linux, BSD, Solaris, and Win32 binaries.
I guess anyone with CygWin loaded on a Win2k box should call it GNU/Microsoft Windows.
I detect sarcasm in your comment, but what you claim is actually the case. The name "Cygwin" was originally short for "Cygnus GNU/Windows" or something like that. Even the stripped down version of Cygwin based on msvcrt.dll rather than cygwin1.dll is named MinGW, for "Minimalist GNU/Windows".
[To view Region 1 DVDs in Region 2,] Modify / flash your player.
This may not be legal in the UK, which adopted a circumvention ban (UK copyright law section 296) in 1988, ten years before the US Congress voice-voted the DMCA.
Do electronics shops in the UK modify DVD players to be region-switchable under the table?
Now that was a good fighting game, better than C(r)apcom's Street Fighter. But you have to mention where Ehrgeiz came from: it was essentially a texture-mapped version of Square's earlier Tobal No. 1, with obstacles.
The processor WILL NOT RUN UNSIGNED CODE IN RING 0.
Unless you go to BIOS and turn off Palladium. Microsoft's Palladium specification requires hardware vendors to provide that option. However, you lose all Palladium hardware features until you power-cycle the system.
Now guess where the Linux kernel has to run? Yup. Ring 0.
Not necessarily. It could be running in a virtualized sandbox. This happens, for example, in User Mode Linux (which runs in ring 3) and in Linux for PlayStation 2 (which doesn't allow direct hardware access to the chipset).
Now they're going to add a TON of code whose whole purpose is to make the PC NOT work under certain circumstances.
Palladium doesn't take anything away that you already have. Palladium conforming systems MUST allow the user to temporarily disable Palladium hardware in BIOS configuration, and Windows will still boot, just without Palladium support.
when the PC is booting under Palladium, the PC is trying NOT to load its device drivers and other critical OS components, under certain circumstances.
Palladium won't make untrusted drivers Not Load; it'll only make untrusted drivers Not Load With Palladium Privileges. Apps such as Winamp that don't use Palladium features will not be affected at all. Frankly, the Windows OS won't be able to tell the difference between Winamp and the MPEG or Ogg background music in several video games, and Microsoft doesn't want to kill video games because games are Windows's biggest edge over BSD and GNU/Linux operating systems.
The only thing Palladium will do in connection with digital restrictions management is this: it will provide an infrastructure for publishers to make copies of works available for rental. If an independent publisher wants to make copies available for sale or for free download, then the publisher can just choose not to lock the document.
Microsoft will stop this by only allowing "authorized programs" to run.
That's not Palladium; that's Xbox. Microsoft, in its its Palladium Initiative Technical FAQ, shows no intention of releasing a Microsoft Windows OS for PCs that prevents any application that doesn't load palladium.dll from running.
Well, frankly, nobody knows exactly, Microsoft won't tell us much about it.
It takes 5 clocks for a particular instruction to execute on a 5-stage pipeline, yet throughput is more than 1 instruction/5 clocks.
Long pipelines are not always a Good Thing. If you have a lot of branches, and the branches are hard to predict (50% taken, 50% not), then mispredictions cause pipeline flushes that will kill you. That is, unless you can execute both sides simultaneously (speculative execution using the CMOV instruction), but that possibly has its own speed penalties. I'm predicting that MIMD (multiple instruction multiple data) technologies such as CMP (chip multiprocessing; multiple cores on one die, each with its own set of registers; IBM Power4 CPU) and SMT (two sets of ISA registers on one core) will speed up computation without speeding up clock frequencies.
Electric charges move slowly. Much more slowly. It's the electric signals that propagate with about c/2.
Electric signals lie in the changes in the voltages, which in turn lie in the movement of charges (i.e. the differences between + and - in any given location). You're thinking of the snail's pace drift of the electrons themselves, right?
True, the company sponsored the contest, and asked that you try to break it, but technically speaking, couldn't they be prosecuted for it?
The DMCA's circumvention ban applies only to access control mechanisms on copyrighted works, when such mechanisms are broken without authorization. The RC5-64 encryption is not an access control mechanism on a copyrighted work.
Wouldn't it be better to associate *.ogg with a configurable wrapper which then spawns the appropriate media player?
And then have the operating system have to search inside the file when you Start > Search > For Audio... The shell wants to know very quickly (i.e. from the directory, not from opening the file, which incurs an additional rotating-media seek per file) whether to display an "eighth note" icon or a "filmstrip" icon.
Given the palladium implementation, we'll be lucky if [MPEG audio files] play at all.
Microsoft Palladium technology does not take anything away from the user. Windows won't refuse to load an app just because it doesn't import palladium.dll. Palladium is just a way to support computer state attestation, sealed storage, and stricter process separation.
Nowadays, we're so completely divorced from the actual computer, what with APIs and hardware-abstraction-layers, why would you bother trying to squeeze every MHz out of a machine when how well the machine operates is really up to the OS maker?
Because not all computers are PCs. Ever tried programming for a handheld computer? Or for an embedded computer in a refrigerator?
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So how does granting exclusive rights to dead people help promote science and useful arts?
The Gershwin estate's royalties on "Rhapsody in Blue" pay for the Gershwin kids' music school.
The real reason why Congress passed the Bono Act, if you're willing to ignore bri^W campaign contributions from DisneyCo and Time Warner, is that the European Union had recently harmonized its copyright law based on German law, which gave a life plus 70 year term, and American authors were threatening to become permanent residents of Europe. Congress didn't want a significant artistic brain drain, so it did what any competitive firm would do in such a supply-and-demand situation: it increased how much it was willing to pay (measured in years of monopoly) for works, to compete with what Europe was offering.
That's why I'm not buying Square's Disney-licensed RPG Kingdom Hearts, even if I do get a PS2 before the PS3 comes out.
It's commonly called the "Bono Act" for short because that's easier to say orally than "CTEA".
That's why the term "pro bono", meaning volunteer legal work, has become confusing over the last few years. It comes from Latin words that literally mean "for the good" of the public.
Don't get me wrong; I hate the Bono Act as much as anybody else here. But I still can't resist the urge to play devil's advocate:
Gershwin's estate can't do anything for progress
Wrong. The royalties from "Rhapsody in Blue" help pay for the education of those named in Gershwin's last will and testament, so that they can go to music school and eventually continue to produce new musical works.
The retroactive portion of the CTEA really pushes the outside of any reasonable definition of "limited".
According to a mathematician, infinity is still a limit. Positive infinity is the limit of 1/x as x approaches 0 from the positive side.
Copyright terms are still "limited", they're just a hell of a lot longer than they were 200 years ago.
A 19-year extension in 1978 (56 to 75 years). A 20-year extension in 1998 (75 to 95 years). If Congress continues to pass a 20-year extension every 20 years, it exploits a loophole in the Constitution to create what amounts to "perpetual copyright on the installment plan," as some legal scholars have put it. You call that "limited"?
How exactly did they suggest Ashcroft is behind this?
The U.S. Constitution prohibits people from suing Congress. So if you want a federal law invalidated, you sue the current Attorney General in his or her official capacity as Attorney General to get an injunction against enforcing the law.
try coughing up some coin to communicate faster than 2400bps...
I'm already communicating 20 times faster than that (48 kbps, the typical "56K" line speed), but it's still not enough. It's not possible to go much faster than that over the public telephone network.
But for XP, and far worse, OSX, it gets worse and worse.
Mac OS X's animations can be turned off. Windows XP can be set with a couple clicks to look like Windows 2000.
but many forgot to talk about bochs: a free [freespeech] PC emulator.
Bochs emulates a PC, including the CPU. Thus, things become slow, and you may not have enough power to view an MPEG movie, but you can run x86 apps on other CPU architectures. In addition, bochs is slow enough that it runs old DOS games at the "right" speed.
Plex86, on the other hand, runs on x86 processors and "virtualizes" the environment. It emulates only the motherboard, a couple common adapter cards, and some aspects of the inner-ring modes of the CPU. It runs x86 user code natively on the processor, preserving most of the speed.
But if they can build a $200 Lindows PC, why not make a $200 "additional PC" PCI card? It would let Anonymous Coward actually build a Beowulf cluster in his PC's case.
If you're trying to imply "use fewer, larger disks," then how do you expect to store a database in the double digit terabytes without using a storage cluster with several hundred hard disks? If that wasn't your point, then what did you mean?
Linux has no useful apps or games
Are you kidding me? Linux has lots of games. For instance, Linux has XBill (shoot the evil computer crackers), Tux Racer (snowboarding), Tetanus On Drugs (a tetris clone with a twist, literally), all of the GNOME Games and KDE Games, and several id Software games. For more, go to SourceForge Gaming Foundry or Freshmeat's games section, both brought to you by OSDN Keiretsu.
And through emulation and virtualization, you can run even more games. Most of the 2D games run on WINE. Older PC games should run on DOSEMU, plex86, or Bochs with FreeDOS installed. If you have an NES cart reader (hard to find), Linux has every NES game ever produced, through FCE Ultra. If you have a GBA cart reader (easy to find in online stores; look for the Visoly Flash Advance Linker), Linux has every GBA game ever produced, through VisualBoyAdvance.
On the hardware side, Linux supports game port joypads, USB joypads, and even game console joypads connected through a parallel port adapter.
because it was written by a bunch of stupid communists.
One of the most popular video games in the world, Tetris, was written by citizens of a Communist country as well.
So what is porting AOL over to linux going to acchieve ?
Compatibility with a dial-up protocol that Linux currently doesn't support. Linux currently supports PPP and SLIP; with AOL's contribution, it'll support AOL-Dial as well, probably through some sort of proprietary network interface driver for aol0 (analogous to ppp0 or eth0).
Every time you run an app using WINE, you take one more incentive away from app makers to move away from Windows.
Yet you give one more incentive to app makers to make their Windows binaries run well on WINE as well as Microsoft's flavors of Windows. Here's the game plan for proprietary software publishers:
I guess anyone with CygWin loaded on a Win2k box should call it GNU/Microsoft Windows.
I detect sarcasm in your comment, but what you claim is actually the case. The name "Cygwin" was originally short for "Cygnus GNU/Windows" or something like that. Even the stripped down version of Cygwin based on msvcrt.dll rather than cygwin1.dll is named MinGW, for "Minimalist GNU/Windows".
[To view Region 1 DVDs in Region 2,] Modify / flash your player.
This may not be legal in the UK, which adopted a circumvention ban (UK copyright law section 296) in 1988, ten years before the US Congress voice-voted the DMCA.
Do electronics shops in the UK modify DVD players to be region-switchable under the table?
Kingdom Hearts
More like "I Got You Babe".
Ehrgeiz
Now that was a good fighting game, better than C(r)apcom's Street Fighter. But you have to mention where Ehrgeiz came from: it was essentially a texture-mapped version of Square's earlier Tobal No. 1, with obstacles.
( Exception being for portable Squaresoft games. No portable Sony system. )
Vaio?
The processor WILL NOT RUN UNSIGNED CODE IN RING 0.
Unless you go to BIOS and turn off Palladium. Microsoft's Palladium specification requires hardware vendors to provide that option. However, you lose all Palladium hardware features until you power-cycle the system.
Now guess where the Linux kernel has to run? Yup. Ring 0.
Not necessarily. It could be running in a virtualized sandbox. This happens, for example, in User Mode Linux (which runs in ring 3) and in Linux for PlayStation 2 (which doesn't allow direct hardware access to the chipset).
Now they're going to add a TON of code whose whole purpose is to make the PC NOT work under certain circumstances.
Palladium doesn't take anything away that you already have. Palladium conforming systems MUST allow the user to temporarily disable Palladium hardware in BIOS configuration, and Windows will still boot, just without Palladium support.
when the PC is booting under Palladium, the PC is trying NOT to load its device drivers and other critical OS components, under certain circumstances.
Palladium won't make untrusted drivers Not Load; it'll only make untrusted drivers Not Load With Palladium Privileges. Apps such as Winamp that don't use Palladium features will not be affected at all. Frankly, the Windows OS won't be able to tell the difference between Winamp and the MPEG or Ogg background music in several video games, and Microsoft doesn't want to kill video games because games are Windows's biggest edge over BSD and GNU/Linux operating systems.
The only thing Palladium will do in connection with digital restrictions management is this: it will provide an infrastructure for publishers to make copies of works available for rental. If an independent publisher wants to make copies available for sale or for free download, then the publisher can just choose not to lock the document.
Microsoft will stop this by only allowing "authorized programs" to run.
That's not Palladium; that's Xbox. Microsoft, in its its Palladium Initiative Technical FAQ, shows no intention of releasing a Microsoft Windows OS for PCs that prevents any application that doesn't load palladium.dll from running.
Well, frankly, nobody knows exactly, Microsoft won't tell us much about it.
Then read the Palladium Technical FAQ.
It takes 5 clocks for a particular instruction to execute on a 5-stage pipeline, yet throughput is more than 1 instruction/5 clocks.
Long pipelines are not always a Good Thing. If you have a lot of branches, and the branches are hard to predict (50% taken, 50% not), then mispredictions cause pipeline flushes that will kill you. That is, unless you can execute both sides simultaneously (speculative execution using the CMOV instruction), but that possibly has its own speed penalties. I'm predicting that MIMD (multiple instruction multiple data) technologies such as CMP (chip multiprocessing; multiple cores on one die, each with its own set of registers; IBM Power4 CPU) and SMT (two sets of ISA registers on one core) will speed up computation without speeding up clock frequencies.
Electric charges move slowly. Much more slowly. It's the electric signals that propagate with about c/2.
Electric signals lie in the changes in the voltages, which in turn lie in the movement of charges (i.e. the differences between + and - in any given location). You're thinking of the snail's pace drift of the electrons themselves, right?
Even if biomed engineers manage to create a way to regenerate natural limbs, would such a technique work for people born without legs?
True, the company sponsored the contest, and asked that you try to break it, but technically speaking, couldn't they be prosecuted for it?
The DMCA's circumvention ban applies only to access control mechanisms on copyrighted works, when such mechanisms are broken without authorization. The RC5-64 encryption is not an access control mechanism on a copyrighted work.
Wouldn't it be better to associate *.ogg with a configurable wrapper which then spawns the appropriate media player?
And then have the operating system have to search inside the file when you Start > Search > For Audio... The shell wants to know very quickly (i.e. from the directory, not from opening the file, which incurs an additional rotating-media seek per file) whether to display an "eighth note" icon or a "filmstrip" icon.
Given the palladium implementation, we'll be lucky if [MPEG audio files] play at all.
Microsoft Palladium technology does not take anything away from the user. Windows won't refuse to load an app just because it doesn't import palladium.dll. Palladium is just a way to support computer state attestation, sealed storage, and stricter process separation.
Nowadays, we're so completely divorced from the actual computer, what with APIs and hardware-abstraction-layers, why would you bother trying to squeeze every MHz out of a machine when how well the machine operates is really up to the OS maker?
Because not all computers are PCs. Ever tried programming for a handheld computer? Or for an embedded computer in a refrigerator?