Santa Fe Texas is where the high school is that tried to make school prayer legit before football games. It went to the Supreme Court. The very justices (Scalia, etc) who dissented against separation of church in state in the decision are the ones Bush has publicly praised.
There's a Cairo, Texas also, by the way.
Perhaps November will be more meaningful if large numbers of Americans deliberately choose not to participate in this election, and make their reasons known, rather than shrugging and ignoring it. Perhaps then, the Beltway might really buckle a bit.
Katz, sometimes you actually are a menace to society instead of simply a public spectacle. This is exactly the kind of misinformed conceited viewpoint that is a danger to our democracy, and will lead us to the Tyranny of the Minority. How egotistic for anyone to think that just because you DIDN'T do something, that this is noticeable?
by NOT voting, you do not implement the check and balances that serve to restrict the elected officials. If officials only have to pander to likely voters and have no fear of the Masses' ability to throw them out, then what reform do you actually expect to take place?
its absurd to say that Politician A will think, "hmm, I was unscrupulous this term. The voters did NOT remove me from office. I guess that means they are upset with me and I shoudl mend my ways!"
the lamest excuse for not voting I often hear (disturbingly, apparemtly semi-legitimized by Slashdot itself) is that due to whatever reason (corruption, money, two-party dominance, etc.) "my vote doesn't count and not voting is a political statement".
rubbish! do some simple math, you fool.
if voter turnout is 25%, the franchisees' votes count MORE. You now have a small majority dictating for the majority - what if only the right-wing Christian conservatives ever turned out to vote? welcome to the United States of Pat Buchanan:(
and what about the remaining 75% of voters who don't vote? well, suppose some fraction of X% is not voting to make a political statement. Do you actually believe that (100-X) is not significantly greater than X ? How will that statement be distinguished from pure apathy? The statements, "my vote doesn't count" and "not voting is a statement" are two related, but NOT equivalent statements. In the end you just get drowned out by the apathetic.
if you don't vote, you are driving the system towards failure, because voting only works when eth majority participate. The Tyrranny of the Majority is more just than the Tyranny of the Minority - this is the basic premise of democracy and why people tend to immigrate to the USA at great personal risk from places like Cuba.
it's the actions of the majority that are critical - and that includes you. If you don't vote, you're the reason the system isn't working the way it was supposed to, so stop blaming the evils of politics. If you intend to not vote, then at least accept responsibility for your part in the decay of our system. If you are whining about how the system is broken and intend your lack of voting to be some big statement to draw attention to it, you are a hypocrite, because not voting breaks the system worse.
the REAL way to address issues like corruption, campaign finance, etc is to VOTE! vote anyone who disagrees with McCain-Feingold in Congress the HELL out of Congress! not-voting just lets teh problem persist because the check and balances the abuse of power are not being utilized.
Abstract: Oct. 23 -- Although he was excluded from the national debates, has no money for television advertising and rarely rises above 4 percent in national opinion polls, Ralph Nader enters the last two weeks of Campaign 2000 poised to make an important impact: According to polls and campaign officials, he could tip as many as six states from Vice President Gore to George W. Bush, making a potentially crucial difference in the Electoral College.
read the article for more details
he's right - UNIX is not an OS. neither's Mac OS X
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 3
but then, according to his definition, neither is Mac OS.:) Mac OS too is just a "kernel". Hell, MAcOS X is just a kernel on top of a kernel on top of a kernel..:
Cocoa. This is a layer on which business applications run. ie, a kernel.
Carbon. A software laye to run Mac OS apps better - ie, a kernel.
Classic. a "environment" used to run legacy Mac applications - ie, a kernel.
Aqua. a library for look and feel, to allow applications to run with a shared style interface, ie a visual GUI kernel.
QuickTime. He claims QuickTime is a "service" and not an application - therefore, other applications will use it as an embedded unit - therefore, its a media kernel.
He's very proud of the "Utilities, applications and tools, including an e-mail package" which will supposedly help make users "productive", but what about the web browser? office suite? graphics program? Oops, sorry - Adobe, Microsoft, etc make those. So when you buy Mac OS X for business or for graphic art work you aren't productive right out of the box either. at least the unix versions are free.
if you want to get REALLY pedantic, define an Operating System as that which makes the System Operate. I'd define that as the hardware, software, and the user! I TOO AM THE OS.
he's right. By HIS definition, UNIX is not an OS. of course his definitions are double-edged swords - Mac OS X isn;t much of an OS either.
Re:denials by SDMI preserves our rights to fair-us
on
Yet More SDMI fallout
·
· Score: 2
Except the DMCA makes it illegal to exercise your fair use rights by subject you to an RIAA lawsuit everytime you decode an RIAA music file for space-shifting or distribution. It's bullshit, but that's what this new law accomplishes & shit judge's like Kaplan stand behind it while reaming the consumer in the ass.
The DMCA is unconstitutional. Until it is thrown out, I see no immorality in ignoring it. I will continue to excercise my fair-use rights. The failure of SDMI helps me do so. Just like the freedom to bear arms, we now have the freedom to bear code! to defend our rights. What the Government giveth, the Corporations cannot taketh away. If they try, well.. let them try.
Well, looks like Rambus did serve as a positive force after all. Because of Rambus, Intel has lost *serious* ground on the low-end processor front. Canceling Timna was a major setback and how long do we expect the Celeron line to last under increased pressure from dirt-cheap Athlons? Because of Intel's dalliance with Rambus, now AMD has a major boost in the low-end of the processor market. Couple that with the fact it isnt easy to overclock newer Celerons anymore and soon every PC under $1000 is gonna be AMD Inside:) Sure, Intel still owns the top end of the server market but its the low end that really matters. Cheap PC's are heading towards telephone status in terms of ubiquity - we aren't there yet by a longshot, but I think we are on that path.
denials by SDMI preserves our rights to fair-use
on
Yet More SDMI fallout
·
· Score: 3
The whole point of SDMI is not to protect artists' IP but to protect the RIAA's monopoly on distribution. The funny thing is that the RIAA's corporate urges are going to work against them, finally, instead of for them. In this case, since Corporate Culture demands that if you spend money on something it Must Be a Success to Save Face, they will press on blindly with SDMI and try to minimize/ignore that 1. it was cracked and 2. watermarking is a foolish method of protection when dealing with lossy compression algorithms anyway. So we will probably get SDMI forced on us despite its obvious flaw. That's fantastic! Because even if all of us wake up tomorrow with SDMI-compliant CD players substituted for our old ones, we can just continue to burn MP3's for time/space-shifting, distribution with friends, sharing, etc as we have always done legally, as is our right. The big fear was that SDMI would take away our fair-use rights. But since SDMI has been proven to be as much a joke as we all knew it would be, SDMI will fail to achieve its primary purpose (taking away our rights). We should all now cheer SDMI on!
remember, there will always be Analog Out, and soundcards, and wave recorders, and Ogg. Only the hard-core audiophiles will find these tools to be insifficent, and those are the people who will buy Super-CD or DVD-A's anyway. But for casual listeners of music, we will always have the tools available to enjoy and legally share music as is our right under fair-use.
How do you define Free Speech? How will you protect it? I am especially interested in your commentary on the deCSS case (see this article and visit this gallery) - do you support the MPAA in their lawsuit? are you concerned about the effects on free speech that might result?
if you can't get to WhiteHouse.gov, there's always WhiteHouse.com...
one poster below casually mentioned that all these agencies are effectively the same thing. That's patently false. That's like claiming the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines are all one big happy family, which is a fallacy you'd have noticed immediately from following the recent hearings on funding for readiness and deployment. Why do you think the Marines have their own air wing?
actually there is fierce competetion between these enforcement agencies, not just for funding, but also for jurisdiction and information. They will fight each other fiercely and it usually takes significant arm-twisting to get cooperation.
FBI Directory Freeh actually has a lot of power on Capitol Hill - read this article for one analysis of how he functions almost as a lone wolf separate from Reno.
It makes great sense to only have people with classified clearances work on Carnivore - after all, they would be most compatible with the mindset of trying to keep information PRIVATE. Think about it - people with clearances (I used to have a Secret clearance myself) are trained to protect information.
And just because these guys from the NSA, DoD, Treasury, etc. are working on it doesn't mean that the integrity of their work is automatically compromised, or that they will rubber stamp anything. In fact these are IIT faculty who work with (but are not directly employed by) these organizations, just like professors at Caltech receive clearances from NASA to work at JPL. And even if these guys were hard-core NSA/DoD freaks and not IIT faculty, their interests would be in hindering Carnivore, not helping it, because if the FBI is allowed to use Carnivore and teh NSA isn;t that shifts the balance of power - something the NSA would be foolish to accept willingly.
The first paragraph of the Introduction section in RFC 1631 is:
"... Long-term and short-term solutions to these problems are being developed. The short-term solution is CIDR (Classless InterDomain Routing) [2]. The long-term solutions consist of various proposals for new internet protocols with larger addresses. "
if you look up the reference [2] at the bottom of the RFC, you will see:
REFERENCES
[1] Karn, P., "KA9Q", anonymous FTP from ucsd.edu
(hamradio/packet/ka9q/docs).
[2] Fuller, V., Li, T., and J. Yu, "Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) an Address Assignment and Aggregation Strategy", RFC 1519, BARRNet, cisco, Merit, OARnet, September 1993.
note that this RFC (1631) references RFC 1519 (Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR): an Address Assignment and Aggregation Strategy) which includes personnel from Cisco Systems, Inc. (Tony Li). RFC 1519 was written in 1993.
further note that RFC 1519 itself references RFC 1518 whose authors are from IBM and from Cisco.
Cisco obviously has prior work in this area well before RFC 1631. Cisco employee Tony Li contributed to the two RFCs on which RFC 1631 are based.
The article was indeed drivel as another poster pointed out. But all the scary legal compromising going on IS something to be concerned about. Fortunately, there are things we can do with existing technology to preserve our rights...
Software. Use open source. If you need Win32, don't upgrade beyond Win 98.
Hardware. Never buy RDRAM-based motherboards.
Music. Buycott the MPAA but start looking into new indie groups too. Try MOD music. Rip your CD's at home into OGG, not MP3. Share your OGGs via Gnutella. Never buy an Audio CDR - always use data CDrs.
Movies. Watch 'em in the theater and buy DVD's as you see fit. The MPAA has a lock on this one, we don't have much legal opportunity to fight back (ideas anyone?)
Privacy. Use PGP.
Vote! email and write your congressman - get informed about what the DMCA and the UCITA and the other threats are. Slashdot's YRO section is easily one of the best references. Support the EFF. get informed - and help inform.
at work, it isn't MY computer. It's THEIR computer. I am sure your job is very nice and they give you all sorts of freedoms to install whatever hardware, software, or OS you want at your/their/whosever expense, but some of us do actually reside in the real world... I spend 12 hours minimum a day here working on my research and I would just like some music, is all.
We have all seen the MP3/CD players like the Mambo-X, the MPTrip, amd the Philips eXpanium. These are far more useful than standalone MP3-only players (despite being bulkier, of course). But what would be really cool is a software implementation, for your PC's CD-ROM drive.
Why, you ask? well, not all PC's have sound cards. Especially at work - my only source of entertainment is the CD player on my PC and it would be keen to have a mass of MP3's (er, ripped from my legitimate collection of CDs;) to listen to.
Such a software app would have to read the MP3's from the drive, and redirect the audio to the CD-rom's audio output. Some combination of Sonique and Axialis. How difficult is this to do? has it already been done?
we could even hack it to run on Wince and subvert the Auto-PC:)
Web: As noted, there's cached web content. However, it's not all just static crap. Partnerships with various places and search engines will allow searches, online orders, etc, in flight.
I think you're going to have serious limitations on web connectivity with Tenzing's scheme. A Major Application of in-flight web access is travel scheduling, and there is no way you will be able to upload the entire search space of travel information/connections etc. A small subset of the search space, no doubt culled from your content-providers, will not be useful. When people make changes to their travel itinerary, they need access to *all* the possible permutations of schedules/airlines/hotels/fares etc., unless I am missing something I just don't see how you will be able to povide that kind of functionality. And if you are offerring web access without a real-time travel-planning capability, then you'll lose a major chunk of the functionality and subsequent revenue.
If I am sitting in flight and I suddenly need to change my itinerary, I am not gonna be happy if the only travel website I can reach is MSN Expedia. And give me a break - will these content-providers have any reason to give me the full selection of discount fares that I can select from? More likely I will get less choice and higher prices than a land-based travel planner. On a plane, you're the ultimate Captive Audience.
Think Geek sells it, after all - if it turns out that this really is a GPL-violation (perhaps we can ask RMS?), will ThinkGeek stop selling it in protest?
the very phrase "information wants to be free" makes the distinction. That's isn't a rallying cry to abolish Intellectual Property, it's a statement about something Else. The distinction needs to be made. And it needs to be made legally, else we will lose our rights. If the legal world thinks we mean "Content" when we really mean "Information" then judges like Marilyn Hall Patel will trample all over us and we lose.
if you think all content is equal to information in the sense of "Information wants to be free" then you are wrong. And thats why judges rule against Napster. think outside the box
Streambox should release their recorder as open-source, as a big "fuck you" to the DMCA. Let it join the ranks of deCSS and Gnutella - another cat that is out of the bag and won't be going back in, EVER.
no, thats not what i am saying. I'm saying that it is currently legal to download, and play, MP3s from Napster, because the AHRA does not specifically make any distinction between you copying your friend's music and downloading music from millions of people on the web. It's still fair use.
Go ahead and use Napster, and be comforted that you are doing it legally (unless the law changes).
DONT say its legal because "information wants to be free". Music is not information. Music is content, and the rules for distribution of this specific content currently say that copying is fair use.
Keep in mind that laws may change and if they do, then Music may no longer be protected the way it currently is. For example, Music may become as controlled as software. In which case we lose our legal umbrella. Chanting "Information wants to be free" is irrelevant and misses the point.
i meant what i said. Content, by virtue of being something that a Creator creates, is the property of the Creator. Perhaps I should have said "inherently" instead of intrinsically, I did write the post in 5 minutes while procrastinating. sorry to have offended you, my pedantic friend.
Content: an expression of human creativity and effort. May be functional, artistic, or both.
While Information can and should be free, content is intrinsically the property of the creator.
So when we use Napster to download music, you CANNOT use the argument "it's ok cause music is information and information wants to be free". Music is not information, it is content.
But Napster, unlike "Crookster" is LEGAL because copying recordings is legal under FAIR USE. The inly differrence between Napster and copying your friend's tape (legal!) is the scae. Since the Audio Home Recording Act does not mention scale, we are not in violation. If the AHRA were to be amended to specify that millions of recordings en masse is bad, then we would then be illegally using Napster.
Software has no AHRA equivalent and therefore software remains illegal to reproduce no matter the distribution channel.
So use Napster legally but don't be a hypocrite. And Information SHOULD be free, but don't ingeniously label everything "Information" just to get a free ride. USE Napster because it is legal to do so and we can send a message to the RIAA. But don't confuse information with content.
Slashdot Mirror
Santa Fe Texas is where the high school is that tried to make school prayer legit before football games. It went to the Supreme Court. The very justices (Scalia, etc) who dissented against separation of church in state in the decision are the ones Bush has publicly praised. There's a Cairo, Texas also, by the way.
{ sarcasm }
when Bush gets elected, I'm gonna go to Santa Fe, Texas and read the Qur'an of al-Islam over the PA system after football games! Al'hamd o-lillah
prayer in school = pro-freedom OF religion.
school prayer = anti-freedom FROM religion.
poor Vinod - we know what hapenned to him. He got hired by Linux.com! so now the poor bastard has both MSFT *and* VA stock! must be rough.
NASDAQ is back up. Big time.
Perhaps November will be more meaningful if large numbers of Americans deliberately choose not to participate in this election, and make their reasons known, rather than shrugging and ignoring it. Perhaps then, the Beltway might really buckle a bit.
Katz, sometimes you actually are a menace to society instead of simply a public spectacle. This is exactly the kind of misinformed conceited viewpoint that is a danger to our democracy, and will lead us to the Tyranny of the Minority. How egotistic for anyone to think that just because you DIDN'T do something, that this is noticeable?
by NOT voting, you do not implement the check and balances that serve to restrict the elected officials. If officials only have to pander to likely voters and have no fear of the Masses' ability to throw them out, then what reform do you actually expect to take place?
its absurd to say that Politician A will think, "hmm, I was unscrupulous this term. The voters did NOT remove me from office. I guess that means they are upset with me and I shoudl mend my ways!"
the lamest excuse for not voting I often hear (disturbingly, apparemtly semi-legitimized by Slashdot itself) is that due to whatever reason (corruption, money, two-party dominance, etc.) "my vote doesn't count and not voting is a political statement".
rubbish! do some simple math, you fool.
if voter turnout is 25%, the franchisees' votes count MORE. You now have a small majority dictating for the majority - what if only the right-wing Christian conservatives ever turned out to vote? welcome to the United States of Pat Buchanan :(
and what about the remaining 75% of voters who don't vote? well, suppose some fraction of X% is not voting to make a political statement. Do you actually believe that (100-X) is not significantly greater than X ? How will that statement be distinguished from pure apathy? The statements, "my vote doesn't count" and "not voting is a statement" are two related, but NOT equivalent statements. In the end you just get drowned out by the apathetic.
if you don't vote, you are driving the system towards failure, because voting only works when eth majority participate. The Tyrranny of the Majority is more just than the Tyranny of the Minority - this is the basic premise of democracy and why people tend to immigrate to the USA at great personal risk from places like Cuba.
it's the actions of the majority that are critical - and that includes you. If you don't vote, you're the reason the system isn't working the way it was supposed to, so stop blaming the evils of politics. If you intend to not vote, then at least accept responsibility for your part in the decay of our system. If you are whining about how the system is broken and intend your lack of voting to be some big statement to draw attention to it, you are a hypocrite, because not voting breaks the system worse.
the REAL way to address issues like corruption, campaign finance, etc is to VOTE! vote anyone who disagrees with McCain-Feingold in Congress the HELL out of Congress! not-voting just lets teh problem persist because the check and balances the abuse of power are not being utilized.
A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. It's the Supreme Court, stupid. article: Nader is poised to play spoiler
Abstract: Oct. 23 -- Although he was excluded from the national debates, has no money for television advertising and rarely rises above 4 percent in national opinion polls, Ralph Nader enters the last two weeks of Campaign 2000 poised to make an important impact: According to polls and campaign officials, he could tip as many as six states from Vice President Gore to George W. Bush, making a potentially crucial difference in the Electoral College.
read the article for more details
but then, according to his definition, neither is Mac OS. :) Mac OS too is just a "kernel". Hell, MAcOS X is just a kernel on top of a kernel on top of a kernel.. :
He's very proud of the "Utilities, applications and tools, including an e-mail package" which will supposedly help make users "productive", but what about the web browser? office suite? graphics program? Oops, sorry - Adobe, Microsoft, etc make those. So when you buy Mac OS X for business or for graphic art work you aren't productive right out of the box either. at least the unix versions are free.
if you want to get REALLY pedantic, define an Operating System as that which makes the System Operate. I'd define that as the hardware, software, and the user! I TOO AM THE OS.
he's right. By HIS definition, UNIX is not an OS. of course his definitions are double-edged swords - Mac OS X isn;t much of an OS either.
Except the DMCA makes it illegal to exercise your fair use rights by subject you to an RIAA lawsuit everytime you decode an RIAA music file for space-shifting or distribution. It's bullshit, but that's what this new law accomplishes & shit judge's like Kaplan stand behind it while reaming the consumer in the ass.
The DMCA is unconstitutional. Until it is thrown out, I see no immorality in ignoring it. I will continue to excercise my fair-use rights. The failure of SDMI helps me do so. Just like the freedom to bear arms, we now have the freedom to bear code! to defend our rights. What the Government giveth, the Corporations cannot taketh away. If they try, well.. let them try.
hurrah for analog out!
Well, looks like Rambus did serve as a positive force after all. Because of Rambus, Intel has lost *serious* ground on the low-end processor front. Canceling Timna was a major setback and how long do we expect the Celeron line to last under increased pressure from dirt-cheap Athlons? Because of Intel's dalliance with Rambus, now AMD has a major boost in the low-end of the processor market. Couple that with the fact it isnt easy to overclock newer Celerons anymore and soon every PC under $1000 is gonna be AMD Inside :) Sure, Intel still owns the top end of the server market but its the low end that really matters. Cheap PC's are heading towards telephone status in terms of ubiquity - we aren't there yet by a longshot, but I think we are on that path.
The whole point of SDMI is not to protect artists' IP but to protect the RIAA's monopoly on distribution. The funny thing is that the RIAA's corporate urges are going to work against them, finally, instead of for them. In this case, since Corporate Culture demands that if you spend money on something it Must Be a Success to Save Face, they will press on blindly with SDMI and try to minimize/ignore that 1. it was cracked and 2. watermarking is a foolish method of protection when dealing with lossy compression algorithms anyway. So we will probably get SDMI forced on us despite its obvious flaw. That's fantastic! Because even if all of us wake up tomorrow with SDMI-compliant CD players substituted for our old ones, we can just continue to burn MP3's for time/space-shifting, distribution with friends, sharing, etc as we have always done legally, as is our right. The big fear was that SDMI would take away our fair-use rights. But since SDMI has been proven to be as much a joke as we all knew it would be, SDMI will fail to achieve its primary purpose (taking away our rights). We should all now cheer SDMI on!
remember, there will always be Analog Out, and soundcards, and wave recorders, and Ogg. Only the hard-core audiophiles will find these tools to be insifficent, and those are the people who will buy Super-CD or DVD-A's anyway. But for casual listeners of music, we will always have the tools available to enjoy and legally share music as is our right under fair-use.
How do you define Free Speech? How will you protect it? I am especially interested in your commentary on the deCSS case (see this article and visit this gallery) - do you support the MPAA in their lawsuit? are you concerned about the effects on free speech that might result?
if you can't get to WhiteHouse.gov, there's always WhiteHouse.com...
one poster below casually mentioned that all these agencies are effectively the same thing. That's patently false. That's like claiming the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines are all one big happy family, which is a fallacy you'd have noticed immediately from following the recent hearings on funding for readiness and deployment. Why do you think the Marines have their own air wing?
actually there is fierce competetion between these enforcement agencies, not just for funding, but also for jurisdiction and information. They will fight each other fiercely and it usually takes significant arm-twisting to get cooperation.
FBI Directory Freeh actually has a lot of power on Capitol Hill - read this article for one analysis of how he functions almost as a lone wolf separate from Reno.
It makes great sense to only have people with classified clearances work on Carnivore - after all, they would be most compatible with the mindset of trying to keep information PRIVATE. Think about it - people with clearances (I used to have a Secret clearance myself) are trained to protect information.
And just because these guys from the NSA, DoD, Treasury, etc. are working on it doesn't mean that the integrity of their work is automatically compromised, or that they will rubber stamp anything. In fact these are IIT faculty who work with (but are not directly employed by) these organizations, just like professors at Caltech receive clearances from NASA to work at JPL. And even if these guys were hard-core NSA/DoD freaks and not IIT faculty, their interests would be in hindering Carnivore, not helping it, because if the FBI is allowed to use Carnivore and teh NSA isn;t that shifts the balance of power - something the NSA would be foolish to accept willingly.
Carnivore = Echelon? good grief!
The first paragraph of the Introduction section in RFC 1631 is:
if you look up the reference [2] at the bottom of the RFC, you will see:
note that this RFC (1631) references RFC 1519 (Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR): an Address Assignment and Aggregation Strategy) which includes personnel from Cisco Systems, Inc. (Tony Li). RFC 1519 was written in 1993.
further note that RFC 1519 itself references RFC 1518 whose authors are from IBM and from Cisco.
Cisco obviously has prior work in this area well before RFC 1631. Cisco employee Tony Li contributed to the two RFCs on which RFC 1631 are based.
The article was indeed drivel as another poster pointed out. But all the scary legal compromising going on IS something to be concerned about. Fortunately, there are things we can do with existing technology to preserve our rights...
Software. Use open source. If you need Win32, don't upgrade beyond Win 98.
Hardware. Never buy RDRAM-based motherboards.
Music. Buycott the MPAA but start looking into new indie groups too. Try MOD music. Rip your CD's at home into OGG, not MP3. Share your OGGs via Gnutella. Never buy an Audio CDR - always use data CDrs.
Movies. Watch 'em in the theater and buy DVD's as you see fit. The MPAA has a lock on this one, we don't have much legal opportunity to fight back (ideas anyone?)
Privacy. Use PGP.
Vote! email and write your congressman - get informed about what the DMCA and the UCITA and the other threats are. Slashdot's YRO section is easily one of the best references. Support the EFF. get informed - and help inform.
it's completely impossible? there isnt any theoretical way around that?
*total ignorance admitted freely*
at work, it isn't MY computer. It's THEIR computer. I am sure your job is very nice and they give you all sorts of freedoms to install whatever hardware, software, or OS you want at your/their/whosever expense, but some of us do actually reside in the real world... I spend 12 hours minimum a day here working on my research and I would just like some music, is all.
We have all seen the MP3/CD players like the Mambo-X, the MPTrip, amd the Philips eXpanium. These are far more useful than standalone MP3-only players (despite being bulkier, of course). But what would be really cool is a software implementation, for your PC's CD-ROM drive.
Why, you ask? well, not all PC's have sound cards. Especially at work - my only source of entertainment is the CD player on my PC and it would be keen to have a mass of MP3's (er, ripped from my legitimate collection of CDs ;) to listen to.
Such a software app would have to read the MP3's from the drive, and redirect the audio to the CD-rom's audio output. Some combination of Sonique and Axialis. How difficult is this to do? has it already been done?
we could even hack it to run on Wince and subvert the Auto-PC :)
I think you're going to have serious limitations on web connectivity with Tenzing's scheme. A Major Application of in-flight web access is travel scheduling, and there is no way you will be able to upload the entire search space of travel information/connections etc. A small subset of the search space, no doubt culled from your content-providers, will not be useful. When people make changes to their travel itinerary, they need access to *all* the possible permutations of schedules/airlines/hotels/fares etc., unless I am missing something I just don't see how you will be able to povide that kind of functionality. And if you are offerring web access without a real-time travel-planning capability, then you'll lose a major chunk of the functionality and subsequent revenue.
If I am sitting in flight and I suddenly need to change my itinerary, I am not gonna be happy if the only travel website I can reach is MSN Expedia. And give me a break - will these content-providers have any reason to give me the full selection of discount fares that I can select from? More likely I will get less choice and higher prices than a land-based travel planner. On a plane, you're the ultimate Captive Audience.
Think Geek sells it, after all - if it turns out that this really is a GPL-violation (perhaps we can ask RMS?), will ThinkGeek stop selling it in protest?
--
the very phrase "information wants to be free" makes the distinction. That's isn't a rallying cry to abolish Intellectual Property, it's a statement about something Else. The distinction needs to be made. And it needs to be made legally, else we will lose our rights. If the legal world thinks we mean "Content" when we really mean "Information" then judges like Marilyn Hall Patel will trample all over us and we lose. if you think all content is equal to information in the sense of "Information wants to be free" then you are wrong. And thats why judges rule against Napster. think outside the box
Streambox should release their recorder as open-source, as a big "fuck you" to the DMCA. Let it join the ranks of deCSS and Gnutella - another cat that is out of the bag and won't be going back in, EVER.
no, thats not what i am saying. I'm saying that it is currently legal to download, and play, MP3s from Napster, because the AHRA does not specifically make any distinction between you copying your friend's music and downloading music from millions of people on the web. It's still fair use. Go ahead and use Napster, and be comforted that you are doing it legally (unless the law changes). DONT say its legal because "information wants to be free". Music is not information. Music is content, and the rules for distribution of this specific content currently say that copying is fair use. Keep in mind that laws may change and if they do, then Music may no longer be protected the way it currently is. For example, Music may become as controlled as software. In which case we lose our legal umbrella. Chanting "Information wants to be free" is irrelevant and misses the point.
i meant what i said. Content, by virtue of being something that a Creator creates, is the property of the Creator. Perhaps I should have said "inherently" instead of intrinsically, I did write the post in 5 minutes while procrastinating. sorry to have offended you, my pedantic friend.
his analogy is flawed - music is not software - purely for legal reasons. And Napster is NOT illegal whereas his "Crookster" would be.
Note that illegality is irrelevant to morality.
some definitions:
Information: ideas, concepts (ex. democracy, peer-reviewed scientific research, education)
Content: an expression of human creativity and effort. May be functional, artistic, or both.
While Information can and should be free, content is intrinsically the property of the creator.
So when we use Napster to download music, you CANNOT use the argument "it's ok cause music is information and information wants to be free". Music is not information, it is content.
But Napster, unlike "Crookster" is LEGAL because copying recordings is legal under FAIR USE. The inly differrence between Napster and copying your friend's tape (legal!) is the scae. Since the Audio Home Recording Act does not mention scale, we are not in violation. If the AHRA were to be amended to specify that millions of recordings en masse is bad, then we would then be illegally using Napster.
Software has no AHRA equivalent and therefore software remains illegal to reproduce no matter the distribution channel.
So use Napster legally but don't be a hypocrite. And Information SHOULD be free, but don't ingeniously label everything "Information" just to get a free ride. USE Napster because it is legal to do so and we can send a message to the RIAA. But don't confuse information with content.
heh, good point.
but why should the MPAA have a monopoly on hypocrisy?
"I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes."
-- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
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