OK, right, this must be why I haven't experienced a power outage in the UK in the last decade, while after living in California for 6 months I've experienced one every 6 weeks.
The phone lines are 30dB noisier too. And you don't want to get me started on NTSC!
Not to mention that the very first RISC microcomputer, the Acorn Archimedes, was British - the StrongARM evolved from that CPU, and indeed I seem to remember you guys were using 286s or Mac Classics at the time.
Meanwhile, I'll take the comparison to Asian products as a national compliment, since Japanese consumer goods are far superior to anything else on the planet.
The DMCA does not "allow Mattel to claim the rights to CPHack".
Mattel "bought" the rights to CPHack in settlement of their case. This is a unique aspect of this specific case and bugger-all to do with the DMCA.
I wish the Slashdot editorial would read the stories they link to before commenting upon them. They might get a reputation for sensationalising the news they report...
No, the ruling is specifically that SOURCE CODE is protected by the 1st Amendment.
This in no way affects the distribution of OBJECT CODE (applications) either way.
Read the ruling... he says source code is "the primary means of communication amongst programmers" and that's the basis of the decision.
And the FSF and open source projects already had the GPL which was the legal backing for their business model.
Don't be fooled into thinking that the 1st Amendment is "specific legal backing" for anything. It's a catch-all. Don't get me wrong, it's GREAT that this has been passed, but it actually permits very little that wasn't permitted already.
I await the DeCSS repercussions with fascination...
I want one with an Emotion Engine inside
on
Sony's Palm PDA
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· Score: 1
Now that would be a cool hacker's box. And once many-layer optical discs come out (so we can fit a DVD movie onto a 1" 8-layer disc) it would be a great little portable movie and game device.
... and then once cold fusion is discovered we might even be able to power the thing without a 10lb battery
About filtering out bad language from movies
on
Quickielanche
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· Score: 1
Is there going to be a version that puts the bad language back in to movies on TV?
I'm used to UK TV (where they show films as they were intended rather than cutting them to fit the slot and removing all the swearing as they do here). Now I live in the states, and even when it's way past 9pm they still turn all the M*th*rf*ck*rs into Melon Farmers.
Not so bad on the standard Hollywood rubbish, but Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels without swearing is like Slashdot without... er... news.
Quote: "It was the latter [removing such material when alerted to it] that Demon refused to do."
Quote: "The case now threatens to put a huge burden on all English ISPs as they could be forced to monitor all material trafficking through their systems"
Do these sentences seem contradictory to anyone else? Nowhere here is there any suggestion that Demon should have monitored UseNet, the story is quite specifically about Demon refusing to honor their legal duties once alterted to them.
OK, so slashdotters may not agree with the law, but to say that this puts such a huge burden of monitoring on English ISPs is quite simply bullshit.
I am not an RIAA employee, but this post is just a thinly-veiled justification for theft. As are most of the other posts here.
You clearly see yourself as somehow morally superior to the record industry executives who get fat off the artists. Get this - you're not!
You guys are *worse* than those people. Like the article says, they may screw the artists over, but at least they give *something* in return. You Napster users give nothing in return and then have the gall to claim this as your God-given right.
You *are* an immoral pirate. *Everyone* loves music. Not everyone steals it. And not everyone justifies their "right" to steal it.
Katz' article totally ignores the fundamental problem we've had since the Fall of the Garden of Eden.
People need to work to live.
If we make all creative output free (as in beer) there would be no way to make a living in any creative field.
If you deny the intrisic value of a form of information, you deny the right of the creators of that form of information to make a living.
Which, in the long run, means that those creators are creating part-time, as amateurs, and have to have a "real" job to pay the rent. And all the decent "real" jobs are, by hypothesis, gone, leaving just the soul-destroying and tedious ones.
If you don't agree with me, why not ask the opinion of those who's livelihood you wish to take away - musicians. Ask musicians if they would rather be paid to make music or if they would prefer to work at McDonald's and just make music in their spare time (oh, and forgetting any alternative spare-time plans they might have, like raising a family).
You may say, "but hardly any musicians get paid to write music now!" And I would say - yes, and we want that number to go up, not down. We certainly don't want to legislate so the number can never get above zero!
The number can naturally go up by removing the middle men from the loop, for which the Internet is a very useful tool, and the RIAA is right to be scared.
But the arguments contained in the article remove not only the middle men, but everyone except the consumer, which sort of begs the question, "where does all this content come from in the first place?"
Ed xxx
By the way, "Conceptions of property, ownership and value since the eruption of the accidental empire that is the Net, in ways few institutions have begun to consider rationally." is not a sentence - it has no verb.
I find it shocking that the people of/. seem to view this issue on a par with important landmark cases such as deCSS.
deCSS is a challenge to the lawmakers in that there is an intrinsic claim that "fair use" should include the ability for a person to decrypt and generally "play with" the data on a DVD which that person owns. It is a challenge to the lawyers because the letter of the law says this is illegal - there is a need to prove that the deCSS case is against the spirit of the law. Let's hope the spirit of the law can stand up in court.
But this iCraveTV nonsense is no such beast. It is copyright infringment, plain and simple, and not only does it clearly violate the letter of the law but it also violates the spirit in which those laws were made. It is simply not OK to just take intellectual property and rebroadcast it wholesale. The whole QuakeWorld GPL issue is exactly the same thing - IP owners standing up for their rights.
If you believe in the concept of IP at all, you must accept that IP owners have a right - perhaps even a responsibility - to protect their IP in the courts.
If you don't believe in IP at all then you have to agree with QuakeWorld's "right" to make a closed-source derivation from GPL'd code. I assume very few people fall into this category.
Can you say "paperless office"?
on
Middle Media
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· Score: 1
So people like reading stuff on paper. Why not? It's more convenient, easier on the eyes, and you don't have to wait for a bootup sequence and a modem connection. This is old news - the "paperless office" story of last decade.
I can't believe people are surprised the *second* time these predictions fail to come true.
[I can't believe people are surprised, ever, when predictions don't come true. Like some Wired journalist can predict how a decision made by millions of people will go!] The amusement value in this article is that after a crippling attack on printed media last week, followed by/. opinions that printed media are, in fact, valuable, totally backpedals and say, "hey, printed media are here to stay". Well,duh.
I found this reply rather insulting to the original poster, and also particularly inconsistent (even for Katz).
Katz bemoans the fact that his articles get flames, rather than being discussed in a more open way, and then responds to the next question by flaming the author! Katz can dish out the "who made you the major of Slashdot" flames, but he can't take them back.
Secondly, he begins his answer with "no, I don't agree" [that his articles are a digest of Geek culture written for a non-tech audience] and then he ends his answer by saying, basically, "my articles are a digest of Geek culture written to attract a non-technical audience".
Personally I agree 100% with the question-writer's perception of Jon Katz. Perhaps 99% of/. disagree, but it seemed pretty astute to me. A damned sight more astute than any of the drivel that I've seen from the Katz camp.
The Playboy article is also good for a laugh. Katz has a big rationale about *why* people resent him - his age, his non-geek-ness, his celebrity. I would say, if people do resent Katz, it is because they hate to see his nonsense being propogated to such a large audience.
Fortunately, as Katz himself points out, none of his writings go uncommented on. We on/. have the unique oppotunity to respond to his articles. You have to feel that Katz is a tenacious creature, and admire him for that, at least.
>> spirituality, consciousness and quantum physics, three disciplines not traditionally linked to one another.... unless you've read one of the other thousand books that attempt to link spiritualism, consciousness and quantum physics. This idea's been around almost as long as the A-bomb, and it's still just philosophical BS, scientifically speaking. Why can't people just accept that there are some mysteries we'll never understand? Chaos theory tells us that, without resorting to hypotheses of indeterminism. Quantum mechanics is just an algorithm for working out the probability of an ill-defined "event". You simply cannot take quantum mechanics, move to a flawed interpretation of it (and they all are), and then draw conclusions from *that* about the nature of reality. You may as well try and predict the weather next decade using Boyle's law.
Slashdot Mirror
As if! I've already ripped that site. Send me some new hardcore animal sex.
The phone lines are 30dB noisier too. And you don't want to get me started on NTSC!
Not to mention that the very first RISC microcomputer, the Acorn Archimedes, was British - the StrongARM evolved from that CPU, and indeed I seem to remember you guys were using 286s or Mac Classics at the time.
Meanwhile, I'll take the comparison to Asian products as a national compliment, since Japanese consumer goods are far superior to anything else on the planet.
Earth, that is ... do you know it?
I didn't even realize that "some net magazine interviews some game guy" even qualified as news. You could fill Slashdot with this shit.
It's Shakespeare, you know ;)
Mattel "bought" the rights to CPHack in settlement of their case. This is a unique aspect of this specific case and bugger-all to do with the DMCA.
I wish the Slashdot editorial would read the stories they link to before commenting upon them. They might get a reputation for sensationalising the news they report ...
This in no way affects the distribution of OBJECT CODE (applications) either way.
Read the ruling ... he says source code is "the primary means of communication amongst programmers" and that's the basis of the decision.
And the FSF and open source projects already had the GPL which was the legal backing for their business model.
Don't be fooled into thinking that the 1st Amendment is "specific legal backing" for anything. It's a catch-all. Don't get me wrong, it's GREAT that this has been passed, but it actually permits very little that wasn't permitted already.
I await the DeCSS repercussions with fascination ...
I'm used to UK TV (where they show films as they were intended rather than cutting them to fit the slot and removing all the swearing as they do here). Now I live in the states, and even when it's way past 9pm they still turn all the M*th*rf*ck*rs into Melon Farmers.
Not so bad on the standard Hollywood rubbish, but Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels without swearing is like Slashdot without ... er ... news.
Quote: "The case now threatens to put a huge burden on all English ISPs as they could be forced to monitor all material trafficking through their systems"
Do these sentences seem contradictory to anyone else? Nowhere here is there any suggestion that Demon should have monitored UseNet, the story is quite specifically about Demon refusing to honor their legal duties once alterted to them.
OK, so slashdotters may not agree with the law, but to say that this puts such a huge burden of monitoring on English ISPs is quite simply bullshit.
As has been pointed out, the name W.A.V.E. is particularly unfortunate, after the book/TVM of the same name.
I just went to the W.A.V.E. site and "voiced my concerns" ... not about any students but about W.A.V.E. itself.
I suggest anyone with concerns do the same.
That self-referential novel - post-modern, yes, interactive, definitely not. Look up the word "interactive" in a dictionary, Jon, if you have one.
You clearly see yourself as somehow morally superior to the record industry executives who get fat off the artists. Get this - you're not!
You guys are *worse* than those people. Like the article says, they may screw the artists over, but at least they give *something* in return. You Napster users give nothing in return and then have the gall to claim this as your God-given right.
You *are* an immoral pirate. *Everyone* loves music. Not everyone steals it. And not everyone justifies their "right" to steal it.
People need to work to live.
If we make all creative output free (as in beer) there would be no way to make a living in any creative field.
If you deny the intrisic value of a form of information, you deny the right of the creators of that form of information to make a living.
Which, in the long run, means that those creators are creating part-time, as amateurs, and have to have a "real" job to pay the rent. And all the decent "real" jobs are, by hypothesis, gone, leaving just the soul-destroying and tedious ones.
If you don't agree with me, why not ask the opinion of those who's livelihood you wish to take away - musicians. Ask musicians if they would rather be paid to make music or if they would prefer to work at McDonald's and just make music in their spare time (oh, and forgetting any alternative spare-time plans they might have, like raising a family).
You may say, "but hardly any musicians get paid to write music now!" And I would say - yes, and we want that number to go up, not down. We certainly don't want to legislate so the number can never get above zero!
The number can naturally go up by removing the middle men from the loop, for which the Internet is a very useful tool, and the RIAA is right to be scared.
But the arguments contained in the article remove not only the middle men, but everyone except the consumer, which sort of begs the question, "where does all this content come from in the first place?"
Ed xxx
By the way, "Conceptions of property, ownership and value since the eruption of the accidental empire that is the Net, in ways few institutions have begun to consider rationally." is not a sentence - it has no verb.
deCSS is a challenge to the lawmakers in that there is an intrinsic claim that "fair use" should include the ability for a person to decrypt and generally "play with" the data on a DVD which that person owns. It is a challenge to the lawyers because the letter of the law says this is illegal - there is a need to prove that the deCSS case is against the spirit of the law. Let's hope the spirit of the law can stand up in court.
But this iCraveTV nonsense is no such beast. It is copyright infringment, plain and simple, and not only does it clearly violate the letter of the law but it also violates the spirit in which those laws were made. It is simply not OK to just take intellectual property and rebroadcast it wholesale. The whole QuakeWorld GPL issue is exactly the same thing - IP owners standing up for their rights.
If you believe in the concept of IP at all, you must accept that IP owners have a right - perhaps even a responsibility - to protect their IP in the courts.
If you don't believe in IP at all then you have to agree with QuakeWorld's "right" to make a closed-source derivation from GPL'd code. I assume very few people fall into this category.
I can't believe people are surprised the *second* time these predictions fail to come true.
[I can't believe people are surprised, ever, when predictions don't come true. Like some Wired journalist can predict how a decision made by millions of people will go!] The amusement value in this article is that after a crippling attack on printed media last week, followed by /. opinions that printed media are, in fact, valuable, totally backpedals and say, "hey, printed media are here to stay". Well ,duh.
Katz bemoans the fact that his articles get flames, rather than being discussed in a more open way, and then responds to the next question by flaming the author! Katz can dish out the "who made you the major of Slashdot" flames, but he can't take them back.
Secondly, he begins his answer with "no, I don't agree" [that his articles are a digest of Geek culture written for a non-tech audience] and then he ends his answer by saying, basically, "my articles are a digest of Geek culture written to attract a non-technical audience".
Personally I agree 100% with the question-writer's perception of Jon Katz. Perhaps 99% of /. disagree, but it seemed pretty astute to me. A damned sight more astute than any of the drivel that I've seen from the Katz camp.
The Playboy article is also good for a laugh. Katz has a big rationale about *why* people resent him - his age, his non-geek-ness, his celebrity. I would say, if people do resent Katz, it is because they hate to see his nonsense being propogated to such a large audience.
Fortunately, as Katz himself points out, none of his writings go uncommented on. We on /. have the unique oppotunity to respond to his articles. You have to feel that Katz is a tenacious creature, and admire him for that, at least.
>> spirituality, consciousness and quantum physics, three disciplines not traditionally linked to one another. ... unless you've read one of the other thousand books that attempt to link spiritualism, consciousness and quantum physics. This idea's been around almost as long as the A-bomb, and it's still just philosophical BS, scientifically speaking. Why can't people just accept that there are some mysteries we'll never understand? Chaos theory tells us that, without resorting to hypotheses of indeterminism. Quantum mechanics is just an algorithm for working out the probability of an ill-defined "event". You simply cannot take quantum mechanics, move to a flawed interpretation of it (and they all are), and then draw conclusions from *that* about the nature of reality. You may as well try and predict the weather next decade using Boyle's law.