What I mean is, if I make my own client, I can have it appear to be 6.0
It's not necessarily like HTTP's User-agent: field. MSN Messenger 6 could be using some sort of strong encryption to keep unauthorized clients from entering the contest. In order to send a message that looks like it's from MSN Messenger 6, you may pretty much have to run the MSN Messenger 6 binary in emulation.
It goes out of its way to screw you over by refusing to route video signal through a VCR, thus rendering it inoperable with most legacy TVs.
A good VCR should only fall victim to Macrovision when the record button is pressed. Otherwise, consumers in the States can get a standalone RF modulator at Wal*Mart for $20 or a video clarifier (which happens to defeat Macrovision as well) at RadioShack for $30.
Discs usually have mandatory, can't-fast-forward-through-them FBI warnings at the beginning of disks.
Look for the searchlight. Fox tends to the FBI warning at the end of the main Title.
Skipping. Usually have to endure this once or twice per film on rentals. Lame.
Before you put a rented disc in your player, turn it over and wipe it from center to edge with a damp soft cloth. Go in-and-out rather than around because players are better at interpolating around in-and-out scratches than around scratches parallel to the groove. This will get rid of the smudges (and even crayon!) that you find, especially on family titles. If that doesn't fix it, the disc has scratches. A reputable rental shop will give you a discount off the price of your next rental if you rented a scratched disc.
VHS has a human organic type warmth to it that is really subtle.
If this "human organic type warmth" of VHS is anything like that of vinyl, then you can emulate it by low-pass filtering the signal and adding noise. People in my area like to joke that "VHS" stands for "Very Hissy Sound".
It's a string of buzzwords with no actual meaning.
I could see a lot of meaning to me. I translated it like this: Where sound is transmitted from one medium to another, or reflected off a medium, slight nonlinearities can come into play, and frequencies outside the range of human hearing can contribute to these nonlinearities. Air itself has a nonlinear response, which some tube amps mimic (explaining why some audiophiles prefer the tube sound).
The letter Ø looks almost like how some computer systems draw a zero. A Zero-Wing, or "Zig" for short, looks like the craft pictured on the cover of this book.
gamers don't want to sacrifice their smooth 60 fps framerates
Most LAN games don't update themselves every frame; instead, they predict what happens in one frame based on the velocities of the avatars. A racing game such as F-Zero, Mario Kart, or possibly Kirby's Air Ride (which I've been following since it was supposed to be an early N64 title but got back-burnered in favor of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards) can probably use much stronger prediction than some twitch game like Super Smash Bros. Melee.
We're not evil like Microsoft, so as long as they aren't pirating stuff, we won't really care.
Imagine the latency. Super Smash Bros. Melee is a twitch game just as much as Quake III: Arena ever was, and Q3A's target market is older and richer and thus more likely to have high-speed Internet access than Smash Bros.'s target market.
The GPL doesn't require the distributor to promise that modifications are runnable.
Doesn't the GNU GPL's guarantee of installation scripts imply that the author has to provide a way to run modified binaries? Here's the relevant excerpt from section 3 of the GNU GPL:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files,
plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.
The definition of "installation" on a computing device that stores programs on removable read-only media may pose an obstacle to adoption of GNU licenses for console game engines.
Yeah..... unplug the cable before you start, obviously.
Unless the box turns itself off when you unplug the cable and won't let you turn it back on until you plug it back in. Cable goes out on your block? Tough shit.
Hoik out the drive
What if the inner enclosure that contains the hard drive, decryption chip, and DAC is under an airtight seal?
Think of a sawn-off CRT that plugs into your TV chassis, and presents the appropriate impedances &c. so electronically, it is identical to a CRT.
Then you'd need a high-frequency ADC (analog to digital converter), and watch governments require licensure for ownership of such an ADC. Some drafts of the CBDTPA and broadcast flag legislation had such a requirement.
unless someone can show that non-trivial code is the same in the two implementations.
I agree that accidental copying isn't as much a problem in software as it is in music, where applying basic combinatorics to music theory almost guarantees that the main motive of a given song matches that of a published song.
"I use the GPL to encourage open source development."
Say I wanted to use the GPL for a program designed to run on a video game console. Most consoles enforce some sort of "approved binaries only" policy during the boot process. How would it be possible to place, say, a PS2 game under the GPL?
If something were viral, you could end up "catching" it even if you didn't want to, but the only way to get yourself into a situation where your code must be distributed under the GPL is if you want that to happen, or if you don't bother checking the terms of use+distribution of the software you're using.
It's possible to copy a substantial portion of a work and infringe its copyright without even realizing that you're copying anything. See Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs.
Theft is a criminal offence. Copyright violation is a civil offence. That is a very big difference
Did you mean to imply that copyright violation is not a crime? In the United States at least, copyright infringement is a crime. Almost any infringement can be considered for "financial gain"; read the definition of financial gain in 17 USC 101 if you don't believe me.
You were confused. Therefore, NBC TV has a case. In fact, I read somewhere that NBC had to threaten trademark action against CNN and Fox News in order to get them to switch from the "NBC" abbreviation to "WMD" for "weapons of mass destruction".
There already exists a (-1, Predictable) moderation in Slash; it's called (-1, Redundant). For more detailed information, please read my guide to moderation "reasons".
The federal law is explicitly saying "we give you permission to do what you want with respect to these defined issues."
The point being that if a hole exists in a law's supremacy, some state or city is bound to exploit it.
Your "hypothetical" law does not conflict either
Entirely the point. It's possible to make DRM vendors' lives harder without violating the supremacy of the U.S. Code.
and does NOT make federal law "harder to enforce."
If a labeling provision were to become law in a few states, then products that invoke the DMCA (namely digital restrictions management devices) would have to carry a label in those states. This would raise consumer awareness of DRM and make it harder for vendors to sell DRM devices in those states. If nobody's buying DRM devices, then it's pretty hard to enforce the DMCA, no?
In addition, I'm guessing that it would prove more expensive for a national maker of DRM devices to label only those shipments going to a given state than to label every package in every state. According to Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope, this is the same reason that some food packages distributed outside of Pennsylvania are labeled "Reg. Penna Dept. Agr."
manufacturers can argue that the DMCA implicitly gives them the right to include access control technology, so the states cannot do anything restricting that right. Pure Supremacy Clause stuff here. Federal law says yes, state law says no, fed law wins.
Along similar lines, a manufacturer might argue that some federal law on the books implicitly gives it the right to sell devices that kill people, invalidating states' product safety laws.
The DMCA does contain such a provision, codified as 17 USC 1201(f), but the courts have in effect nullified it in Universal v. Reimerdes by refusing to recognize DeCSS as having been "reverse engineered for purposes of interoperability".
Because of the practical design of Canon's print systems (replaceable print heads with reasonably-priced separate ink cartridges), I strongly recommend Canon inkjet printers to anybody who uses Windows and wants an inkjet printer. However, I've read that Canon has given no help in publishing enough documentation to let Microsoft's competitors develop drivers to make recent Canon inkjet printers work on operating systems other than Windows.
Unless the products that contain DRM are conspicuously labeled as such, how can you argue that the buyer had granted an informed consent? The labeling on a product, especially a consumer product, is the only place I can think of where a contract's Offer can be made.
Federal law, 17 USC 1201: "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." That is, you can't sell devices that defeat DRM.
Hypothetical state law: "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that contains one or more technological measures that effectively control access to a work, as defined in Title 17, United States Code, section 1201, if the device's packaging does not carry a conspicuous label that discloses the restrictions enforced by such measures." That is, you can't sell DRM that isn't labeled.
I don't see a supremacy problem here. The federal law bans black boxes; the state law merely requires labeling.
How does any self-employed person retire? Why would an IRA or 401(k) be different for an author than for anybody else?
I'd like to see 14+14 years, the same copyright term provided by the Copyright Act of 1790. If it worked in 1803, I don't see what's wrong with it in 2003.
The word "terms" when applied to copyright refers not to which exclusive rights go to the author but rather to how long those exclusive rights last. They have expanded from an average 32-year copyright term in the early 1960s (28+28, but few copyrights were valuable enough to be bookkept and renewed) to a 95+-year copyright term in the 2000s (renewal is automatic since 1992, affecting works in 1964 and later, and the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft recognized a power of Congress to enact an unlimited number of copyright term "harmonizations").
I'd only buy such music in practice though, if it's distributed in a lossless format (.wav,.aiff, FLAC, whatever)
The 16-bit linear PCM formats (.wav,.aiff, FLAC, whatever) are still lossy. They lose everything below -120 dBFS to the PCM noise floor even with good dithering, they lose everything above 0 dBFS to hypercompression, and they lose everything above 22kHz to the Nyquist filter. The term "lossless" means only that conversion from one "lossless" format to another creates no additional noise.
However, I will acknowledge that CD-spec PCM (44100 Hz, 16-bit) does preserve everything that a grown-up listener hears. Some children may hear above 22kHz, but few adults hear any significant energy above 18kHz. For the golden ears, there's SACD or DVD Audio.
because I might want to encode it to mp3 to listen to on a personal player
MP3 files encoded for portable players don't need stereo separation, as stereo separation is only a distraction when trying to navigate Real Life's corridors and listen to music at the same time. In mono, under urban ambient noise conditions, one can get away with MP3 at a data rate of 96 kbps or possibly even lower. In my experience, transcoding from 192 kbps stereo MP3 to 96 kbps mono MP3 doesn't introduce objectionable artifacts.
or Vorbis to copy it to a friend online
Unless you do such copying in a way that doesn't compete with MP3 sales, you're breaking the law.
.50 per mp3 is sometihng people would be willing to pay if you are good, if you arent all that good,.25 per mp3.
Eight cents of that goes to the songwriter's publisher (who typically splits it 50-50 with the songwriter); copyright law dictates that this royalty per copy will increase in step with the Consumer Price Index. And don't tell me you claim to write your own original songs, because it's impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
What I mean is, if I make my own client, I can have it appear to be 6.0
It's not necessarily like HTTP's User-agent: field. MSN Messenger 6 could be using some sort of strong encryption to keep unauthorized clients from entering the contest. In order to send a message that looks like it's from MSN Messenger 6, you may pretty much have to run the MSN Messenger 6 binary in emulation.
It goes out of its way to screw you over by refusing to route video signal through a VCR, thus rendering it inoperable with most legacy TVs.
A good VCR should only fall victim to Macrovision when the record button is pressed. Otherwise, consumers in the States can get a standalone RF modulator at Wal*Mart for $20 or a video clarifier (which happens to defeat Macrovision as well) at RadioShack for $30.
Discs usually have mandatory, can't-fast-forward-through-them FBI warnings at the beginning of disks.
Look for the searchlight. Fox tends to the FBI warning at the end of the main Title.
Skipping. Usually have to endure this once or twice per film on rentals. Lame.
Before you put a rented disc in your player, turn it over and wipe it from center to edge with a damp soft cloth. Go in-and-out rather than around because players are better at interpolating around in-and-out scratches than around scratches parallel to the groove. This will get rid of the smudges (and even crayon!) that you find, especially on family titles. If that doesn't fix it, the disc has scratches. A reputable rental shop will give you a discount off the price of your next rental if you rented a scratched disc.
VHS has a human organic type warmth to it that is really subtle.
If this "human organic type warmth" of VHS is anything like that of vinyl, then you can emulate it by low-pass filtering the signal and adding noise. People in my area like to joke that "VHS" stands for "Very Hissy Sound".
It's a string of buzzwords with no actual meaning.
I could see a lot of meaning to me. I translated it like this: Where sound is transmitted from one medium to another, or reflected off a medium, slight nonlinearities can come into play, and frequencies outside the range of human hearing can contribute to these nonlinearities. Air itself has a nonlinear response, which some tube amps mimic (explaining why some audiophiles prefer the tube sound).
The letter Ø looks almost like how some computer systems draw a zero. A Zero-Wing, or "Zig" for short, looks like the craft pictured on the cover of this book.
gamers don't want to sacrifice their smooth 60 fps framerates
Most LAN games don't update themselves every frame; instead, they predict what happens in one frame based on the velocities of the avatars. A racing game such as F-Zero, Mario Kart, or possibly Kirby's Air Ride (which I've been following since it was supposed to be an early N64 title but got back-burnered in favor of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards) can probably use much stronger prediction than some twitch game like Super Smash Bros. Melee.
We're not evil like Microsoft, so as long as they aren't pirating stuff, we won't really care.
So why did Nintendo sue the flash cart makers even when the devices had a substantial non-infringing use?
I'm not very sure you really work for Nintendo.
My GBA tech demos, if you're hiring game programmers and are willing to relocate me from Indiana
Imagine online Smash Bros....
Imagine the latency. Super Smash Bros. Melee is a twitch game just as much as Quake III: Arena ever was, and Q3A's target market is older and richer and thus more likely to have high-speed Internet access than Smash Bros.'s target market.
The GPL doesn't require the distributor to promise that modifications are runnable.
Doesn't the GNU GPL's guarantee of installation scripts imply that the author has to provide a way to run modified binaries? Here's the relevant excerpt from section 3 of the GNU GPL:
The definition of "installation" on a computing device that stores programs on removable read-only media may pose an obstacle to adoption of GNU licenses for console game engines.
Yeah ..... unplug the cable before you start, obviously.
Unless the box turns itself off when you unplug the cable and won't let you turn it back on until you plug it back in. Cable goes out on your block? Tough shit.
Hoik out the drive
What if the inner enclosure that contains the hard drive, decryption chip, and DAC is under an airtight seal?
Think of a sawn-off CRT that plugs into your TV chassis, and presents the appropriate impedances &c. so electronically, it is identical to a CRT.
Then you'd need a high-frequency ADC (analog to digital converter), and watch governments require licensure for ownership of such an ADC. Some drafts of the CBDTPA and broadcast flag legislation had such a requirement.
unless someone can show that non-trivial code is the same in the two implementations.
I agree that accidental copying isn't as much a problem in software as it is in music, where applying basic combinatorics to music theory almost guarantees that the main motive of a given song matches that of a published song.
"I use the GPL to encourage open source development."
Say I wanted to use the GPL for a program designed to run on a video game console. Most consoles enforce some sort of "approved binaries only" policy during the boot process. How would it be possible to place, say, a PS2 game under the GPL?
If something were viral, you could end up "catching" it even if you didn't want to, but the only way to get yourself into a situation where your code must be distributed under the GPL is if you want that to happen, or if you don't bother checking the terms of use+distribution of the software you're using.
It's possible to copy a substantial portion of a work and infringe its copyright without even realizing that you're copying anything. See Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs .
Theft is a criminal offence. Copyright violation is a civil offence. That is a very big difference
Did you mean to imply that copyright violation is not a crime? In the United States at least, copyright infringement is a crime. Almost any infringement can be considered for "financial gain"; read the definition of financial gain in 17 USC 101 if you don't believe me.
You were confused. Therefore, NBC TV has a case. In fact, I read somewhere that NBC had to threaten trademark action against CNN and Fox News in order to get them to switch from the "NBC" abbreviation to "WMD" for "weapons of mass destruction".
There already exists a (-1, Predictable) moderation in Slash; it's called (-1, Redundant). For more detailed information, please read my guide to moderation "reasons".
The federal law is explicitly saying "we give you permission to do what you want with respect to these defined issues."
The point being that if a hole exists in a law's supremacy, some state or city is bound to exploit it.
Your "hypothetical" law does not conflict either
Entirely the point. It's possible to make DRM vendors' lives harder without violating the supremacy of the U.S. Code.
and does NOT make federal law "harder to enforce."
If a labeling provision were to become law in a few states, then products that invoke the DMCA (namely digital restrictions management devices) would have to carry a label in those states. This would raise consumer awareness of DRM and make it harder for vendors to sell DRM devices in those states. If nobody's buying DRM devices, then it's pretty hard to enforce the DMCA, no?
In addition, I'm guessing that it would prove more expensive for a national maker of DRM devices to label only those shipments going to a given state than to label every package in every state. According to Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope, this is the same reason that some food packages distributed outside of Pennsylvania are labeled "Reg. Penna Dept. Agr."
manufacturers can argue that the DMCA implicitly gives them the right to include access control technology, so the states cannot do anything restricting that right. Pure Supremacy Clause stuff here. Federal law says yes, state law says no, fed law wins.
Along similar lines, a manufacturer might argue that some federal law on the books implicitly gives it the right to sell devices that kill people, invalidating states' product safety laws.
The DMCA does contain such a provision, codified as 17 USC 1201(f), but the courts have in effect nullified it in Universal v. Reimerdes by refusing to recognize DeCSS as having been "reverse engineered for purposes of interoperability".
Because of the practical design of Canon's print systems (replaceable print heads with reasonably-priced separate ink cartridges), I strongly recommend Canon inkjet printers to anybody who uses Windows and wants an inkjet printer. However, I've read that Canon has given no help in publishing enough documentation to let Microsoft's competitors develop drivers to make recent Canon inkjet printers work on operating systems other than Windows.
making a product for sale by mutual consent
Unless the products that contain DRM are conspicuously labeled as such, how can you argue that the buyer had granted an informed consent? The labeling on a product, especially a consumer product, is the only place I can think of where a contract's Offer can be made.
Seems like North Carolina forgot about a little thing in the Constitution called the Supremacy Clause.
In general, states can't nullify federal laws, but they can make federal laws much harder to enforce. For example, the City of Arcata banned compliance with the "optional" suggestions of the USAPATRIOT act.
Federal law, 17 USC 1201: "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." That is, you can't sell devices that defeat DRM.
Hypothetical state law: "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that contains one or more technological measures that effectively control access to a work, as defined in Title 17, United States Code, section 1201, if the device's packaging does not carry a conspicuous label that discloses the restrictions enforced by such measures." That is, you can't sell DRM that isn't labeled.
I don't see a supremacy problem here. The federal law bans black boxes; the state law merely requires labeling.
I don't think there is precedent for the tax being so high that it effectively kills the market.
They happen all the time. Ask anybody who has studied international economics about "prohibitive tariffs," and you'll learn the full story.
it doesn't allow creative people to retire.
How does any self-employed person retire? Why would an IRA or 401(k) be different for an author than for anybody else?
I'd like to see 14+14 years, the same copyright term provided by the Copyright Act of 1790. If it worked in 1803, I don't see what's wrong with it in 2003.
The word "terms" when applied to copyright refers not to which exclusive rights go to the author but rather to how long those exclusive rights last. They have expanded from an average 32-year copyright term in the early 1960s (28+28, but few copyrights were valuable enough to be bookkept and renewed) to a 95+-year copyright term in the 2000s (renewal is automatic since 1992, affecting works in 1964 and later, and the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft recognized a power of Congress to enact an unlimited number of copyright term "harmonizations").
I'd only buy such music in practice though, if it's distributed in a lossless format (.wav, .aiff, FLAC, whatever)
The 16-bit linear PCM formats (.wav, .aiff, FLAC, whatever) are still lossy. They lose everything below -120 dBFS to the PCM noise floor even with good dithering, they lose everything above 0 dBFS to hypercompression, and they lose everything above 22kHz to the Nyquist filter. The term "lossless" means only that conversion from one "lossless" format to another creates no additional noise.
However, I will acknowledge that CD-spec PCM (44100 Hz, 16-bit) does preserve everything that a grown-up listener hears. Some children may hear above 22kHz, but few adults hear any significant energy above 18kHz. For the golden ears, there's SACD or DVD Audio.
because I might want to encode it to mp3 to listen to on a personal player
MP3 files encoded for portable players don't need stereo separation, as stereo separation is only a distraction when trying to navigate Real Life's corridors and listen to music at the same time. In mono, under urban ambient noise conditions, one can get away with MP3 at a data rate of 96 kbps or possibly even lower. In my experience, transcoding from 192 kbps stereo MP3 to 96 kbps mono MP3 doesn't introduce objectionable artifacts.
or Vorbis to copy it to a friend online
Unless you do such copying in a way that doesn't compete with MP3 sales, you're breaking the law.
Eight cents of that goes to the songwriter's publisher (who typically splits it 50-50 with the songwriter); copyright law dictates that this royalty per copy will increase in step with the Consumer Price Index. And don't tell me you claim to write your own original songs, because it's impossible.