But watching a DVD isn't the same as circumventing the protection on a DVD. If you hotwired your Sony DVD player to give you unencrypted digital output, you'd be in violation of the DMCA. The question then is, who gives Sony the right to make DVD players? If the authorization is indirectly from the MPAA to the DVD-CCA to Sony, then perhaps technically the MPAA can sue Sony for creating unauthorized DVD players. Of course, in this case, the MPAA is quite happy that Sony makes DVD players, so long as they play ball and don't give an unencrypted output.
I wonder where this leaves Apex? Their players have secret menus for unlocking DVDs, yet I've not heard of them being taken to court.
Anyone can argue that a law is unconstitutional. There are hundreds of arguments that say Marijuana prohibition is unconstitutional, but 40 years hasn't changed the law.
Breaking a law is still illegal (oddly;). You can't just break random laws and expect the Judiciary to overturn legislature in your favor. In 99.9999999% of cases, it just ain't gonna happen. That's what I mean when I say people are fundamentally misunderstanding the way the legal system works. This case just isn't important enough to anyone to warrant a judicial investigation.
I presume you're talking about the first amendment when you say the DMCA is unconstitutional. Well, we'll have to see whether this gets interpreted as an amendment to prevent the imprisonment of political non-activists, or as an amendment to allow individuals to directly attack large corporations they dislike, while hiding behind historical figures far, far greater than them.
It seems that certain Slashdot readers have a dramatic misunderstanding of how the legal system works.
The DMCA is a law. Anyone posting DeCSS is in direct violation of that law. It's really really simple.
That's all there is to this case. That's what the judge's summary says. The "information wants to be free" quip is more-or-less irrelevant. He found that the DMCA covered the case and applied it.
I mean, yeah, if I got busted with Marijuana I might complain that the law was stupid in that respect. But I wouldn't go around saying "oh, our legal system doesn't work." It does work. It upholds the law.
Regarding RDRAM, it's actually a really good product... for what it's designed for.
RDRAM allows you to design a board with an absolute minimum of components and only a handful of interconnects. It does it's memory interface in around 16 wires, rather than the 80+ which parallel RAM interfaces require. It's a really, really good choice for embedded systems.
HOWEVER, the idea that RDRAM should be used in PCs is garbage and needs debunking. RDRAM is slower than other PC technologies, and on a PC motherboard an 80-wire memory interface is no problem.
I just went to Hawaii. I was constantly confused by the similarly-sounding variable^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H place names. Imagine programming in a language where every word looks and sounds the same!
CFOs may not understand technology (why should they?) but computer programmers don't even know the most basic business economics. This 2-year-old stuff is a two-way street.
On the other hand, you could treat people with the respect they deserve and you might learn a thing or two in the process. Works for me, when talking to these "idiots" who don't know a token ring from an ethernet.
No, this is demonstrably incorrect. And I'll tell you why.
Consider, for instance, a non-ideal reconstruction filter on an audio channel. This distorts the output. Now you are saying that the input is still a point sample, but the output is distorted. This is totally the wrong way to view things. The output is "correct" - a priori. That's what you hear. There is no way to tell your ears that the actual physical output is somehow "wrong", and instruct your ears to hear the correctly-reconstructed version... your ears hear what they hear.
In which case, we have to push the interpretation back up the line, and ask the question: if this is what my signal gives me through this reconstruction filter, then what signal would give the same results through perfect reconstruction?
And THAT is the definition of what your samples mean. Therefore, the samples are only point samples if the reconstruction filter is ideal. We like reconstruction filters to be close to ideal, PURELY so we can use the point sample model, because it's much easier than any other sampling model.
This is a somewhat moot point in audio theory, since you can get arbitrarily close to perfect reconstruction; however in image processing the reconstruction filters are nowhere NEAR ideal. Therefore, it is necessary to reinterpret your number sequence as something other than point samples. Unfortunately, this doesn't fit into image processing's usage of 18th-century mathematics, so it's not even ACKNOWLEDGED by teachers of the subject - of course; when you're teaching Newtonian Dynamics you don't waste time explaining that all of it is actually incorrect.
As to the idea that an image can be "bandlimited" - I reject that idea as plain nonsense. It works mathematically, but gives (as you say) visually impaired results in practice. Images just aren't made from frequencies in the same way that sound is. They just aren't.
So, 2D signal processing is a field well-grounded in irrelevant mathematics that doesn't work in pratice. In terms of reconstructing images from samples, it's NOT provably correct, unless you take on board this ridiculous and counter-intuitive idea that images can somehow be "bandlimited". They can't!
I'm not saying that 2D image processing isn't a useful field. It clearly is; using 2D image processing ideas you can do high-quality work. BUT it is totally incorrect to try and force this MODEL from image processing down people's throats, when the MODEL is demonstrably not reality.
Or, as Stroustrup puts it in "Design and Evolution of C++": If the map and the terrain differ, trust the terrain.
None of these statements of yours hold water. No-one is saying sex is bad; that's your invention. But there's a big difference between acknowledging that children undergo sexual development (which they do) and deciding that it's OK for them to look at hardcore porn.
Quite frankly, I'd be happiest if my kids were influenced neither by harcore porn nor by right-wing fundamentalist ideology. Nor indeed by the liberal fundamentalist ideology you are touting here.
That says more about the limits of applied mathematics than it does about neurons. When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Corollory: when your only tool is the Fourier transform, everything looks like a sinewave.
Just to pick a few tiny holes in what you've said: (1) you can never prove anything as an absolute, and (2) "in truth we may all be wrong" is a meaningless statement. Which both boil down to the point that there are no absolutes and "right" and "wrong" are a priori judgement calls, made by ourselves or (more usually) collectively. Unless, of course, you believe in gospel truth!
But what you say is entirely true, given that pedantic nitpicking of mine. I think we are in perfect agreement; the slant of my post was targetted at the idea that we should always stick to our ideals. We should always stick to our ideals... but we must allow our ideals to evolve as we gain more information. It seemed that the original poster was ignoring the new information and recommending he stick to his old ideals, and that is what I take issue with.
The fact you haven't heard the term "voxel" before is more an indicator of your ignorance than anything else. The term voxels goes back at least twenty years, if not thirty.
And one big disadvantage: the card would have to have the entire scene in fast, local RAM.
The performance wouldn't be close to what you can get with polygons. A certain console renders a flat polygon in 2 cycles. TWO CYCLES! You can get a lot further with that sort of power than you can having complex recursive algorithms-on-a-chip.
Only half true. Everyone who's ever used a low-res monitor knows that a pixel really is a little square (or at least a little rectangle). This image-processing stuff is of tenuous applicability - it applies to 1D waveforms, not 2D images. And it works for 1D waveforms, because the basic unit of perception is the tone - a 1D sinewave. The basic unit of visual perception is NOT a 2D sinewave. The fact that JPEG works at all is a fluke; the nastiness of actual JPEG implementations shows how inapplicable this model really is.
In any case, show me a monitor that does correct 2D reconstruction of an image from these samples. Can't? That's because it doesn't exist. In 1D audio processing there are known ways to reconstruct the 1D "image" given the samples. There is no such postprocessing on any modern monitors. And all this image processing stuff tacitly assumes there is. Ergo, again, it is not applicable.
To ram the point home, remember that "little square" and "sample" are just two MODELS of limited applicability in different situations. Mankind DOES NOT HAVE a model for image processing which is in any way "correct".
Calling it the "path to the Dark Side" is just silly.
That's easy to say. What we see here is a young man with ideals, meeting the real world. Slashdot is full of young men with ideals who have yet to do this. It's good that the issue has been brought up... it may lead to greater maturity among the Slashdot readership.
Sticking to your ideals isn't imperative by any means. What most people think are "ideals" are just preconceptions about the way things are and the way things "should" be. Whenever you examine your preconceptions under a bright light, you find them to be not quite so black and white as you first thought.
I'd go even further, in fact. It is imperative that you not stick to your ideals. Your response should be appropriate to the circumstances, not just a knee-jerk reaction because of your preconceptions. It is quite immature, and logically falacious, to say that one preconception overrides all other concerns.
Witness the pro-life groups. Would you say they are right to kill doctors for their ideals? It's a tricky issue, and you can't answer complex questions like these by using your dogma and preconceptions.
You use the term "something you feel strongly about". If only more people would think about the world, rather than try and feel their way through it. Emotions are unreliable indicators.
The fact that the original poster admitted that Slashdot has "indoctrinated" him into these ideals is also quite telling...
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder where this leaves Apex? Their players have secret menus for unlocking DVDs, yet I've not heard of them being taken to court.
Breaking a law is still illegal (oddly ;). You can't just break random laws and expect the Judiciary to overturn legislature in your favor. In 99.9999999% of cases, it just ain't gonna happen. That's what I mean when I say people are fundamentally misunderstanding the way the legal system works. This case just isn't important enough to anyone to warrant a judicial investigation.
I presume you're talking about the first amendment when you say the DMCA is unconstitutional. Well, we'll have to see whether this gets interpreted as an amendment to prevent the imprisonment of political non-activists, or as an amendment to allow individuals to directly attack large corporations they dislike, while hiding behind historical figures far, far greater than them.
But I'm putting my money on the MPAA.
The DMCA is a law. Anyone posting DeCSS is in direct violation of that law. It's really really simple.
That's all there is to this case. That's what the judge's summary says. The "information wants to be free" quip is more-or-less irrelevant. He found that the DMCA covered the case and applied it.
I mean, yeah, if I got busted with Marijuana I might complain that the law was stupid in that respect. But I wouldn't go around saying "oh, our legal system doesn't work." It does work. It upholds the law.
Now, you wanna change the law? Let's talk ...
Says who?
RDRAM allows you to design a board with an absolute minimum of components and only a handful of interconnects. It does it's memory interface in around 16 wires, rather than the 80+ which parallel RAM interfaces require. It's a really, really good choice for embedded systems.
HOWEVER, the idea that RDRAM should be used in PCs is garbage and needs debunking. RDRAM is slower than other PC technologies, and on a PC motherboard an 80-wire memory interface is no problem.
You're misreading the comment. Tell me to look in a dictionary? Get a freaking clue about how the English language works, dickhead.
So I hope that was a joke to poke fun at the other whiners, etc. etc. etc.
When did anyone on /. ever claim to be open-minded?
Corel screwed Xara years before they screwed Debian.
That's ReBirth, isn't it?
Taxi drivers in LA, for instance.
Nothing is beneath this community.
If you want us to buy your CDs, give us a link to where we can buy them.
I just went to Hawaii. I was constantly confused by the similarly-sounding variable^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H place names. Imagine programming in a language where every word looks and sounds the same!
Didn't the Japanese bomb Perl Harbor?
On the other hand, you could treat people with the respect they deserve and you might learn a thing or two in the process. Works for me, when talking to these "idiots" who don't know a token ring from an ethernet.
Consider, for instance, a non-ideal reconstruction filter on an audio channel. This distorts the output. Now you are saying that the input is still a point sample, but the output is distorted. This is totally the wrong way to view things. The output is "correct" - a priori. That's what you hear. There is no way to tell your ears that the actual physical output is somehow "wrong", and instruct your ears to hear the correctly-reconstructed version ... your ears hear what they hear.
In which case, we have to push the interpretation back up the line, and ask the question: if this is what my signal gives me through this reconstruction filter, then what signal would give the same results through perfect reconstruction?
And THAT is the definition of what your samples mean. Therefore, the samples are only point samples if the reconstruction filter is ideal. We like reconstruction filters to be close to ideal, PURELY so we can use the point sample model, because it's much easier than any other sampling model.
This is a somewhat moot point in audio theory, since you can get arbitrarily close to perfect reconstruction; however in image processing the reconstruction filters are nowhere NEAR ideal. Therefore, it is necessary to reinterpret your number sequence as something other than point samples. Unfortunately, this doesn't fit into image processing's usage of 18th-century mathematics, so it's not even ACKNOWLEDGED by teachers of the subject - of course; when you're teaching Newtonian Dynamics you don't waste time explaining that all of it is actually incorrect.
As to the idea that an image can be "bandlimited" - I reject that idea as plain nonsense. It works mathematically, but gives (as you say) visually impaired results in practice. Images just aren't made from frequencies in the same way that sound is. They just aren't.
So, 2D signal processing is a field well-grounded in irrelevant mathematics that doesn't work in pratice. In terms of reconstructing images from samples, it's NOT provably correct, unless you take on board this ridiculous and counter-intuitive idea that images can somehow be "bandlimited". They can't!
I'm not saying that 2D image processing isn't a useful field. It clearly is; using 2D image processing ideas you can do high-quality work. BUT it is totally incorrect to try and force this MODEL from image processing down people's throats, when the MODEL is demonstrably not reality.
Or, as Stroustrup puts it in "Design and Evolution of C++": If the map and the terrain differ, trust the terrain.
Quite frankly, I'd be happiest if my kids were influenced neither by harcore porn nor by right-wing fundamentalist ideology. Nor indeed by the liberal fundamentalist ideology you are touting here.
That says more about the limits of applied mathematics than it does about neurons. When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Corollory: when your only tool is the Fourier transform, everything looks like a sinewave.
But what you say is entirely true, given that pedantic nitpicking of mine. I think we are in perfect agreement; the slant of my post was targetted at the idea that we should always stick to our ideals. We should always stick to our ideals ... but we must allow our ideals to evolve as we gain more information. It seemed that the original poster was ignoring the new information and recommending he stick to his old ideals, and that is what I take issue with.
If you see what I mean :-)
The fact you haven't heard the term "voxel" before is more an indicator of your ignorance than anything else. The term voxels goes back at least twenty years, if not thirty.
The performance wouldn't be close to what you can get with polygons. A certain console renders a flat polygon in 2 cycles. TWO CYCLES! You can get a lot further with that sort of power than you can having complex recursive algorithms-on-a-chip.
In any case, show me a monitor that does correct 2D reconstruction of an image from these samples. Can't? That's because it doesn't exist. In 1D audio processing there are known ways to reconstruct the 1D "image" given the samples. There is no such postprocessing on any modern monitors. And all this image processing stuff tacitly assumes there is. Ergo, again, it is not applicable.
To ram the point home, remember that "little square" and "sample" are just two MODELS of limited applicability in different situations. Mankind DOES NOT HAVE a model for image processing which is in any way "correct".
Calling it the "path to the Dark Side" is just silly.
Sticking to your ideals isn't imperative by any means. What most people think are "ideals" are just preconceptions about the way things are and the way things "should" be. Whenever you examine your preconceptions under a bright light, you find them to be not quite so black and white as you first thought.
I'd go even further, in fact. It is imperative that you not stick to your ideals. Your response should be appropriate to the circumstances, not just a knee-jerk reaction because of your preconceptions. It is quite immature, and logically falacious, to say that one preconception overrides all other concerns.
Witness the pro-life groups. Would you say they are right to kill doctors for their ideals? It's a tricky issue, and you can't answer complex questions like these by using your dogma and preconceptions.
You use the term "something you feel strongly about". If only more people would think about the world, rather than try and feel their way through it. Emotions are unreliable indicators.
The fact that the original poster admitted that Slashdot has "indoctrinated" him into these ideals is also quite telling...
Fucking dickhead moderators. The post I was replying to was -1: Flamebait. This was -1: Flame. Get a fucking clue or don't fucking moderate.