Sometimes the only way to get rid of bad law is to FLOUT it
Sometimes you can flout it a little at a time to take advantage of the "slippery slope" phenomenon, by pushing the limits of fair use and creating works that are barely legal (but not in the kid porn sense).
Remember YOU CANNOT DISPUTE A LAW UNTIL YOU ARE CHARGERD WITH VIOLATING IT. One cannot simply say, "I think the DMCA sucks. I'm going to sue the Fed to repeal it." No court will even listen to you.
Except that's exactly what the Eldred v. Reno case is about, suing Attorney General John Ashcroft (no relation to Richard Ashcroft of what was once the Verve, who the Perpetual Copyright Act that Congress passed during Zippergate to escape media attention. Think of it as a double "Wag the Dog": Kosovo was a cover for Lewinsky, which in turn was a cover for the Sonny Bono Act and the DMCA.
So instead of one mega OSS site, we'd have a large network of smaller machines hosting only as many projects as they could.
Once you get Freenet.sf.net hosted somewhere else, you can throw the contents of SourceForge's web space onto Freenet. Do mailing lists through Yahoo! Groups. But you'll still need some sort of replacement for the CVS services.
A minor problem with CDs is that 600MB is not too much when making backups.
What are you trying to back up? Pr0n? Warez? Normally, I just archive those to CD-R and stuff them in the CD-ROM changer. Seriously, what type of 600MB data set on your workstation changes on a daily or even weekly basis?
But the real disadvantage is the chance of a failed write. If you burn, you'd better do nothing else with the machine.
I can't see how that'd be such a problem. Recent versions of Linux and Windows 2000 have soft realtime support, which guarantees that the burn process will get called at least once a second, which should be enough to keep a 2 MB buffer at 1200 KB/s (8x) full. Even then, newer Plextor drives have BURN-PROOF technology, which steps down burn speed when the PC starts falling behind.
Even then, what else (other than cracking RC5) are you going to be doing with your workstation while you're asleep?
And if something fails, you'll have to start over again, on a new disc of course.
Only with non-rewritable media. The newer CD-RW media can be written at 8x on newer drives.
To sum up, I'd recommend a Plextor CD-RW changer to help solve both the "650 MB is too small" problem and the "soda coaster" problem.
This would seem to say that Slashdot's use of a picture of a SPAM can to denote stories about UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail) is against their policy.
I have commented on this issue several times. I used to get moderated UP for it until somebody accused me of karma prostitution. The alternative icon that I typically suggest is an overflowing mailbox with numerous pieces of junk mail and the obligatory can of pork.
How long till all the geeks admit "hacker" is the same thing as a "cracker"?
I'd be satisfied if the media called computer crime "illegal hacking," just as it calls recreational substances "illegal drugs" to contrast with legitimate drugs such as ASPIRIN®.
how about an idea like having an application load.so libraries into RAM on system bootup or something
How about writing a short C program that calls each library's get_version() and then goes to sleep(), keeping the library code in sharable memory? It'd be similar to how the 'sticky bit' worked in old UNIX systems.
like say load all the KDE libs or GNOME libs or both on startup so when you login to your KDE or GNOME session, everything loads faster
You can already do that: graphical login. If you boot your Linux box into runlevel 5, or you do something similar on BSD, it will automatically start X and your desktop environment's display manager, causing the widgets and other libs to be loaded by the time you get the login prompt.
or is that not the core speed issue here?
The core speed issue is that we're used to graphical file managers and web browsers that share a rendering engine (Explorer and Konqueror; now I see where Konq's name comes from). A sleep()ing C program (as described above) would provide a similar speed win.
Work does not go into the public domain unless (1) the content wasn't copyrightable in the first place, (2) the copyright runs out
Do copyrights even run out anymore? I thought Congress and Disney Co. had a deal: every 20 years, Congress retroactively adds 20 years to all copyrights.
If Winamp has a plugin system (and a plugin for Vorbis audio), then why can't the portable players (that is, SMALLER than a laptop) have upgradable firmware?
I can see 2 shift keys if you were to split the space bar into three keys
The Half Keyboard for Palm devices overloads Space as a shift key to access the flip side of the keyboard. A tap and quick release produces a space; space + a letter produces the letter from the other side of the G-H line.
Eventually, I think MS might be bogged down by all the backwards compatibility. They might have to switch to an entirely new system.
Possibilities for your "entirely new system":
Xbox. Microsoft has to be compatible only with NTSC, the analog color TV standard in Japan and North America, and PAL, the analog color TV standard in Europe. Microsoft is almost certain to release an upgrade package that turns Xbox into a "real computer" that can run a subset of Office.
Win64. Microsoft can run Win32 in a complete virtual machine, as it did with Win16 on NT.
This would mean that users would have to pick between the MS stuff without software
Microsoft would actually make some effort to have launch titles. That's what happened with NT; virtualization let all the old Win3.1 stuff and some of the DOS stuff still run.
congratulations, you are stupid (unless you were being soooo sarcastic that i didn't pick up on it). What the origional poster was refering to was the simpsons episode where they showed the exact same thing you described.
Does not having seen every episode of The Simpsons make a fellow stupid? If so, is being stupid all that bad? Not everybody has seven wires running into their head (think "Trip Like I Do" video), one from each major network (PBS Fox CBS WB NBC UPN ABC). I picked up the motion-capture concept not from The Simpsons but from a show on Discovery or TLC or something.
get on efnet, download the episode and see. s12e9.
Where do I start? I have never downloaded movies from an IRC network and have only a dial-up connection to the Internet (dial-up is currently limited to 50 kbit/s); therefore, I am a newbie and am likely to be shunned as a l4m3r. I chose dial-up because I move around a lot; not everybody can afford point-to-point connections such as cable or DSL running into each location in each city where they may connect to the Internet, as $50/mo times number of locations really adds up.
aren't you confusing Dust Bunnies and Hush Puppies?
Have you ever read the User Friendly comic strip? Dust Puppy is the mascot of UF.
Why nintendo REALLY hates emulation: not � but...
on
BoyCott Advance
·
· Score: 2
Boycott isn't something that 10-year-old kids are going to be playing in an airport terminal.
But it is something with which 16-year-old kids are going to be developing Free Software demos and games, to sell to such 10-year-old kids (as is their right under copyright). For example, I use the LoopyNES emulator to help me develop my GNU GPL licensed NES software. Nintendo doesn't like this, as it cuts into their console software licensing revenue stream. Games are the blades for the GBA hardware razor, which nintendo sells at a slight loss so it can make up the difference in software.
But in this case, the emulator probably isn't even much of a bigger deal than the original NES emulators.
While we're temporarily on the topic of NES emulation, I'd like to warn that you should delete your copy of Bloodlust NESticle right now because its emulation accuracy is so shoddy. Use LoopyNES instead.
Well at least this article isn't about boycotting the Game Boy Advance hardware.
By voting with your dollar, you agree...
on
BoyCott Advance
·
· Score: 2
I think 3 and 4 would be ethical after a certain length of time, perhaps sixteen years? ten? five?, whatever copyright for entertainment software should be.
<sarcasm>
It should beninety-five years. If any period shorter than ninety-five years were the optimum copyright term, consumers would have already voted with their dollars.
</sarcasm>
The patent is fairly specific in regards to the actual recording process - in that the input stream is encoded to mpeg-1 - I'm not entirely sure, but I doubt VCRs used mpeg-1
You seem correct about the MPEG requirement; Apple, Microsoft, and Real could circumvent the patent by using their proprietary video encodings. From the patent:
providing at least one Input Section, wherein said Input Section converts said specific program to
an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) formatted stream for internal transfer and manipulation;
This covers not only MPEG-1 but also MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (aka DivX;-) )standards; infringing this patent requires infringing the patents on MPEG. To infringe a patent, you have to infringe one claim, but to infringe a claim, you must infringe every part of that claim. As all other claims refer back to claim 1 (and the nearly identical claim 32), a fellow could circumvent this patent by using a compression technology other than one created by MPEG, such as the Ogg Tarkin video compression technology that Xiph.org is developing.
And as diakka said, two tuner cards in one box (or even in one household) could by a reasonable stretch of the imagination be considered infringement.
The real question comes if Tivo tries to enforce their patent based on principle rather than process - claiming rights to ANY digital recording of one TV signal while watching another, regardless of medium or compression format used.
You're referring to the "doctrine of equivalents," which was recently severely narrowed. The patent explicitly names MPEG, and it does not say "or any other media encoding technology."
(Of course, nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice.)
If your card is rendering 200fps you may never see most of the frames, but the important thing is that none of the slow frames takes more than 1/60th of a second to render.
I agree with this post. But another technique is that if you know you have a high-poly or a high-overdraw scene to render, you can render it at a lower quality (drop from 1280 to 640 pixels across, or turn off full-scene anti-aliasing, or decrease light map res or mip-map bias, or do several other tricks). The eye can't see as much detail in a quickly moving scene as it can in a still scene.
Very few cartoons are broadcast live; it's a terrible strain on the animators' wrists
Here's how to take the strain off animators' wrists (i.e. make it even possible to do live animation): motion capture cartooning. Essentially, it involves motion-capturing actors (who now have the freedom to gesture at the same time that they're voice-acting), moving skeletal models to match the actors' movements, and rendering the result non-photorealistically.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes the only way to get rid of bad law is to FLOUT it
Sometimes you can flout it a little at a time to take advantage of the "slippery slope" phenomenon, by pushing the limits of fair use and creating works that are barely legal (but not in the kid porn sense).
Remember YOU CANNOT DISPUTE A LAW UNTIL YOU ARE CHARGERD WITH VIOLATING IT. One cannot simply say, "I think the DMCA sucks. I'm going to sue the Fed to repeal it." No court will even listen to you.
Except that's exactly what the Eldred v. Reno case is about, suing Attorney General John Ashcroft (no relation to Richard Ashcroft of what was once the Verve, who the Perpetual Copyright Act that Congress passed during Zippergate to escape media attention. Think of it as a double "Wag the Dog": Kosovo was a cover for Lewinsky, which in turn was a cover for the Sonny Bono Act and the DMCA.
How about [the SourceForge engine] for a replacement for the CVS services...
But my original question was who will pay to host it if VA Linux Systems Inc. goes under?
It's open source. Just not free software.
Bull. A program that cannot be redistributed in source form violates provisions 1 and 2 of the Open Source Definition.
So instead of one mega OSS site, we'd have a large network of smaller machines hosting only as many projects as they could.
Once you get Freenet.sf.net hosted somewhere else, you can throw the contents of SourceForge's web space onto Freenet. Do mailing lists through Yahoo! Groups. But you'll still need some sort of replacement for the CVS services.
A minor problem with CDs is that 600MB is not too much when making backups.
What are you trying to back up? Pr0n? Warez? Normally, I just archive those to CD-R and stuff them in the CD-ROM changer. Seriously, what type of 600MB data set on your workstation changes on a daily or even weekly basis?
But the real disadvantage is the chance of a failed write. If you burn, you'd better do nothing else with the machine.
I can't see how that'd be such a problem. Recent versions of Linux and Windows 2000 have soft realtime support, which guarantees that the burn process will get called at least once a second, which should be enough to keep a 2 MB buffer at 1200 KB/s (8x) full. Even then, newer Plextor drives have BURN-PROOF technology, which steps down burn speed when the PC starts falling behind.
Even then, what else (other than cracking RC5) are you going to be doing with your workstation while you're asleep?
And if something fails, you'll have to start over again, on a new disc of course.
Only with non-rewritable media. The newer CD-RW media can be written at 8x on newer drives.
To sum up, I'd recommend a Plextor CD-RW changer to help solve both the "650 MB is too small" problem and the "soda coaster" problem.
"aspirin" used to be a registered trademark?
According to this Flash map, ASPIRIN® is still a trademark in many jurisdictions; Bayer had to give it up in the U.S. after WWI.
trademarks slopping over into public domain even before the 75-year trademark expiration date.
Bullshit. Trademark registrations can be renewed every 10 years. This renewal is legitimate, unlike the 20-year across-the-board renewals that Disney keeps buying for copyrights that severely erode the public's end of the bargain under which the Constitution authorizes certain government-granted monopolies.
And yes, I do like the taste of SPAM luncheon meat and SPAMBURGER sandwiches.
This would seem to say that Slashdot's use of a picture of a SPAM can to denote stories about UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail) is against their policy.
I have commented on this issue several times. I used to get moderated UP for it until somebody accused me of karma prostitution. The alternative icon that I typically suggest is an overflowing mailbox with numerous pieces of junk mail and the obligatory can of pork.
How long till all the geeks admit "hacker" is the same thing as a "cracker"?
I'd be satisfied if the media called computer crime "illegal hacking," just as it calls recreational substances "illegal drugs" to contrast with legitimate drugs such as ASPIRIN®.
Couldn't find any mention of it in his link, or at the Bayer site, though.
Aspirin is still a trademark in several countries. See also this Flash map.
how about an idea like having an application load .so libraries into RAM on system bootup or something
How about writing a short C program that calls each library's get_version() and then goes to sleep(), keeping the library code in sharable memory? It'd be similar to how the 'sticky bit' worked in old UNIX systems.
like say load all the KDE libs or GNOME libs or both on startup so when you login to your KDE or GNOME session, everything loads faster
You can already do that: graphical login. If you boot your Linux box into runlevel 5, or you do something similar on BSD, it will automatically start X and your desktop environment's display manager, causing the widgets and other libs to be loaded by the time you get the login prompt.
or is that not the core speed issue here?
The core speed issue is that we're used to graphical file managers and web browsers that share a rendering engine (Explorer and Konqueror; now I see where Konq's name comes from). A sleep()ing C program (as described above) would provide a similar speed win.
Mandrake refused to format my second physical hard drive and said : "swapon (hda?) error : invalid argument."
swapon is the program that sets the kernel's virtual memory settings. This should give you a start in troubleshooting the system.
Work does not go into the public domain unless (1) the content wasn't copyrightable in the first place, (2) the copyright runs out
Do copyrights even run out anymore? I thought Congress and Disney Co. had a deal: every 20 years, Congress retroactively adds 20 years to all copyrights.
Can't listen to .OGGs on my Rio, y'know.
If Winamp has a plugin system (and a plugin for Vorbis audio), then why can't the portable players (that is, SMALLER than a laptop) have upgradable firmware?
I can see 2 shift keys if you were to split the space bar into three keys
The Half Keyboard for Palm devices overloads Space as a shift key to access the flip side of the keyboard. A tap and quick release produces a space; space + a letter produces the letter from the other side of the G-H line.
Eventually, I think MS might be bogged down by all the backwards compatibility. They might have to switch to an entirely new system.
Possibilities for your "entirely new system":This would mean that users would have to pick between the MS stuff without software
Microsoft would actually make some effort to have launch titles. That's what happened with NT; virtualization let all the old Win3.1 stuff and some of the DOS stuff still run.
congratulations, you are stupid (unless you were being soooo sarcastic that i didn't pick up on it). What the origional poster was refering to was the simpsons episode where they showed the exact same thing you described.
Does not having seen every episode of The Simpsons make a fellow stupid? If so, is being stupid all that bad? Not everybody has seven wires running into their head (think "Trip Like I Do" video), one from each major network (PBS Fox CBS WB NBC UPN ABC). I picked up the motion-capture concept not from The Simpsons but from a show on Discovery or TLC or something.
get on efnet, download the episode and see. s12e9.
Where do I start? I have never downloaded movies from an IRC network and have only a dial-up connection to the Internet (dial-up is currently limited to 50 kbit/s); therefore, I am a newbie and am likely to be shunned as a l4m3r. I chose dial-up because I move around a lot; not everybody can afford point-to-point connections such as cable or DSL running into each location in each city where they may connect to the Internet, as $50/mo times number of locations really adds up.
aren't you confusing Dust Bunnies and Hush Puppies?
Have you ever read the User Friendly comic strip? Dust Puppy is the mascot of UF.
Boycott isn't something that 10-year-old kids are going to be playing in an airport terminal.
But it is something with which 16-year-old kids are going to be developing Free Software demos and games, to sell to such 10-year-old kids (as is their right under copyright). For example, I use the LoopyNES emulator to help me develop my GNU GPL licensed NES software. Nintendo doesn't like this, as it cuts into their console software licensing revenue stream. Games are the blades for the GBA hardware razor, which nintendo sells at a slight loss so it can make up the difference in software.
But in this case, the emulator probably isn't even much of a bigger deal than the original NES emulators.
While we're temporarily on the topic of NES emulation, I'd like to warn that you should delete your copy of Bloodlust NESticle right now because its emulation accuracy is so shoddy. Use LoopyNES instead.
Well at least this article isn't about boycotting the Game Boy Advance hardware.I think 3 and 4 would be ethical after a certain length of time, perhaps sixteen years? ten? five?, whatever copyright for entertainment software should be.
<sarcasm>
It should be ninety-five years. If any period shorter than ninety-five years were the optimum copyright term, consumers would have already voted with their dollars.
</sarcasm>
linux-2.4.4-ac10 ? Now an anonymous coward can add code to the kernel ?
AC -10 AWARD is also something you get if you make heavy use of Body Armor in Rare's Goldeneye 007 for N64.
The patent is fairly specific in regards to the actual recording process - in that the input stream is encoded to mpeg-1 - I'm not entirely sure, but I doubt VCRs used mpeg-1
You seem correct about the MPEG requirement; Apple, Microsoft, and Real could circumvent the patent by using their proprietary video encodings. From the patent:
This covers not only MPEG-1 but also MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (aka DivX ;-) )standards; infringing this patent requires infringing the patents on MPEG. To infringe a patent, you have to infringe one claim, but to infringe a claim, you must infringe every part of that claim. As all other claims refer back to claim 1 (and the nearly identical claim 32), a fellow could circumvent this patent by using a compression technology other than one created by MPEG, such as the Ogg Tarkin video compression technology that Xiph.org is developing.
And as diakka said, two tuner cards in one box (or even in one household) could by a reasonable stretch of the imagination be considered infringement.
The real question comes if Tivo tries to enforce their patent based on principle rather than process - claiming rights to ANY digital recording of one TV signal while watching another, regardless of medium or compression format used.You're referring to the "doctrine of equivalents," which was recently severely narrowed. The patent explicitly names MPEG, and it does not say "or any other media encoding technology."
(Of course, nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice.)If your card is rendering 200fps you may never see most of the frames, but the important thing is that none of the slow frames takes more than 1/60th of a second to render.
I agree with this post. But another technique is that if you know you have a high-poly or a high-overdraw scene to render, you can render it at a lower quality (drop from 1280 to 640 pixels across, or turn off full-scene anti-aliasing, or decrease light map res or mip-map bias, or do several other tricks). The eye can't see as much detail in a quickly moving scene as it can in a still scene.
[Theonionring.net] is free, btw, if anyone wants to snap it up and see what WIPO has to say about it.
WIPO would probably award the domain to The Onion first.
Very few cartoons are broadcast live; it's a terrible strain on the animators' wrists
Here's how to take the strain off animators' wrists (i.e. make it even possible to do live animation): motion capture cartooning. Essentially, it involves motion-capturing actors (who now have the freedom to gesture at the same time that they're voice-acting), moving skeletal models to match the actors' movements, and rendering the result non-photorealistically.
In this case, someone considering Open Motif has the choice to use an alternative that provides similar functionality.
Lesstif is source-compatible with TOG's Motif and is under Lesser GPL.
With DVDs, you don't have an alternative
VHS. Or video capture to MPEG-4.