actually, i think that the lizard in the SuSe logo thingy looks distinctly female.. not sure why it seems that way though. a gender neutral name may work better for whatever reason.. i dunno.. but i doubt they'll give it a specifically male name.
anyway, the name gecko is already taken. It happens to be the name of a certain web browser's HTML rendering engine. I'm sure the mozilla people wouldn't mind you using the name, but i seriously doubt you could get away with trademarking it if it had already been used as a major component of a different major opensource project.
seriously, doesn't the image stand alone by itself? doesn't "that SuSE iguana" convey the idea? What's the point of naming it? I guess you want to convey it with "mascot" status or something, but WHY?
Why must we stick a cutesy brand name on everything? Why can't we just have some things be purely visual symbols for once? I personally think that Tux didn't need a name.. that you shouldn't have to stick a monosyllabic verbal handle on everything in order for it to be powerful.. that in some sense you dilute the symbol and limit it by giving it a name. All of a sudden it isn't this ethereal, otherworldly, metaphorical iguana, standing for something or other; suddenly it's an iguana, one specific iguana, with a name and everything. The abstract purity the symbol once had is gone..
a haiku: now i drop my post into this sea of troll posts where no one will read
There are a couple of GIFs at that URL. They were created by opening the decss code as raw rgb values and overlaying text on them. The interesting thing is that they contain, inside their standard GIF comment block, the vertabrim source code to DeCSS. So this would mean that anyone who looks at these images has broken the law, because their web browser caches have become illegal mirrors of the DeCSS code.
the Breakout egg was in system 7.5 only. It was actually rather clever; it would print out on the screen "mac os 7.5 by: " and then a list of names. except each individual word in the list of names had a different blackground color to it, and made up a different block in the breakout game. Once you got rid of all the blocks, it would refill the screen with blocks made up of different names. If you got rid of that screen it would take you back to the first.
The egg was triggered by mac os drag&drop, which appeared for the first time in macos 7.5.. you typed out "secret about box" in some app that supported d&d, then held down option and dragged the text to the desktop. This is, btw, the same way you triggered the infamous 3d-rendered Iguana Flag easter egg in the PPC versions of 7.5.3, which is still one of the most amazing things i've ever seen.
supposedly there was some way to use resedit to extract the breakout game from the 7.5 system suitcase-- it was a desk accessory resource, i think-- and insert it into a copy of some other desk accessory, such as calculator, and thus have it be a standalone program that you could take to non-7.5 machines. never got around to trying this though.
this is the kind of crud i spent my childhood being fascinated by.
i am shocked by the incredible ignorance displayed in this article, by the way it covers such a tiny division of the programming languages in wide use, and such bad languages at that. This person seems to think that everyone in the world uses obscure, cumbersome languages like C, C++, objective C, java, perl, lisp, PHP, Bash, FORTRAN, Cobol, Forth, smalltalk or some form of assembly. What an isolated world this person must live in! He seems to have some extreme bias toward use of functional programming languages.
Specically i am very annoyed by the total lack of any discussion of INTERCAL, umlambda, or orthogonal--what i feel to be the most important languages out there, especially for games. None of these were even mentioned! Why would you write an first person shooter in C++ instead of INTERCAL? Why, as far as i'm aware there isn't even opengl available for c-based languages!
If you don't like these three above for some silly reason, at LEAST use Forth. any language where you can't redefine the value of four is for wimps. Or use Visual Basic-- its usefulness, portability, flexibility and sheer power are unparalleled. (i'm sorry, that last bit was a little over the top, wasn't it?)
-mcc hmm. that reminds me, i need to learn objective c.. 2B OR NOT 2B == FF
actually, this is a pretty good point. i would be curious as to what exactly the patent is.
i would also be curious as to whether the patent is invalidated by prior art in the form of, say, Zaks. i'm not sure if anyone here remembers Zaks [late 80s/early 90s] but they were interlocking geometric thingies that flexed where they locked together in such a way that may or may not be similar to whatever "folding" is. I wish i still had my Zaks set, they were pretty cool.
seriously though, things like legos or zaks or "expandagons" are more or less what patents were invented for.. a nonobvious, specific _implementation_ of an idea (not an idea itself), which the company in question took the time to develop.. so i don't think we should be mad at these people for patenting this expandagon thing, unless they really did patent "folding" or something. still i'm not going to buy any of these because i am not going to trust anything connected in any way with this GIF. Anything that says outright it's going to be fun usually isn't.. -_-
ok.. everyone here is simply thinking of this in simple terms of a company getting really large. that isn't really how you look at it. this is a _music industry_ merger. Music industry mergers are VERY BAD things. they are BLOODY things.
Mergers usually contain downsizing, but you cant look at downsizing in the music industry the way you can look at it other places. Remember this is maybe the only industry left that is selling a mass-produced artistic product created by individal artisans (as opposed to the massive centralized committeework that produces movies.. you could maybe claim movies are still an artistic, but i wouldn't say so. you don't often have a person or a small group of persons making a movie with total artistic freedom, and you certainly can't ahve a movie that was made by one person working alone..). If, say, warner cable and TCI cable merge, you're probably going to see a bunch of accountants and managers and people who do whatever it is you do if you work for a cable company lose their jobs. Well, whatever. One accountant is the same as another; any accountant can do the same work as any accountant. Music doesn't work that way. When the label drops a musician, they're losing something specific that only that musician can do.
When Universal bought Polygram last year, there was a _lot_ of bands getting dropped and a _lot_ of pain. I can't remember the number that lived and the number that stayed came "bloody thursday" (the day they released the list of who got pink slips) but it was fairly sickening.
This bbc article kind of irritates me for its lack of considering what effect this is going to have on non-mainstream artists. "The company would unite artists like The Spice Girls, Madonna, Robbie Williams and the Rolling Stones - and hits might be made available on the internet. " ?? please. This is NOT a good thing.
i would insert something here about hoping that they make up for a small amount of the lost artists by firing all the management at Neglectra records.. but i doubt it would really be appropriate here.
well.. i don't know if i like how these came out, but here they are. I went ahead and made them for some reason. I don't really like what they say. "This GIF is illegal" maybe isn't the best way to put it. I'm not quite sure. And it may or may not be true depending on your definition of "illegal". (And they maybe oughta have the LZW compression removed via ungif, just so we can all have rhetorical purity.:P)
The idea behind these images (spread public awareness, a la the blue ribbon campaign) only works if it's somehow centralised-- i mean, if images like these wind up in widespread usage, any usage of them should link to some central page that explains what the MPAA is doing and why it's wrong. In which case the "this gif is illegal" should be added to with "click here to find out why". From there it could probably explain what source code is, why it should be considered speech, the purpose of DeCSS, the purpose of CSS, the reason DeCSS does not help piracy (seeing as you can pirate DVDs just as easily without DeCSS just by copying the dvd without decoding or writing a fake video driver before playing it in windows), the reason the MPAA/DVD forum brought this on themselves (by refusal to give any support the unices, the one group most likely to understand how to reverse-engineer), the constitutionality of the Digital Millineum Copyright act with regards to the first amendment and the copyright clause of the constitution, and how the DVD forum in general is basically trying to prevent the spread of information. Y'know, how they are absusing the legal system to try to prevent people from distributing information about how to defeat a copyright protection measure (which sounds to me like it should be covered by freedom of speech and freedom of the press, even if said speech is in the language of C++ and said press is printing on TCP/IP packets instead of paper), or even distributing the location [URLs, links] of that information (which i know is speech, and which there is no basis whatsoever to prevent talking about.) Oh, and maybe some stuff thrown in about monopolies, the sherman antitrust act, and the fact that crushing DeCSS is clearly not to prevent piracy and protect the MPAAs profits and help the artists involved, but simply to preserve the MPAA's power as a political entity/robber baron. And everything else i forgot; what the MPAA/DVD forum is doing is wrong on so many levels you could go on for pages about it. We know all this already, you could do it solely based on compiling slashdot posts, i could write it myself if i weren't so damned tired and i didn't have to go to bed so i can take the SATs tomorrow.
As for the GIFs themselves, the kind of murky colored stuff in the background is actually the DeCSS code itself, with the ASCII interpreted as raw color values. Kinda nifty how the hex values at the end come out as just patterns of lines. On the big one i enlarged it and blurred it over a bit to fit more text, but i wouldn't use that one if i were you cuz the file size is unneccicarily large (like 40k.. i think it's better as small as possible). As promised, both contain the entire source code to DeCSS in their comment fields. If you feel like it (hell, do whatever you want-- they contain GPLed code, so they're GPLed images, so i have no control over what you do with them:) ) you can go ahead and put either on any web page you may have with a little note about how the person viewing the page has just broken the law by storing illegal information about defeating copy protection in their browser caches. But, i still think this needs to be more organized.
Please excuse the poor writing in this post. As i said, i am tired.
you could also do quite a bit with the "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in your quote. Preventing the distribution of instructions on how to go about performing a process doesn't seem to help "progress" in any way. Remember: patents illegalize the unauthorized performance of a process, but do as much as possible to spread information about how those processes are performed.
besides this, keep in mind the ever-present first amendment concerns. DeCSS is, in the end, not so much important as a tool as it is instructions on how to perform a task. This is why it is always mirrored as source code, not a binary. Source code is more or less speech, and what court cases that have ended in rulings on this subject [export of encryption software source code] has supported the idea that C++ is a language by humans for humans and therefore has freedom of speech, even if what is said in that language is describing a process that a large corporation or government doesn't want you to know how to do. Meanwhile the freedom-of-speech implications of limiting linking to the DeCSS code are horrifying. In this case the DVD forum seems to be preventing not just distributing information on how to perform a process, but simply distributing information on where such information can be located.
either way, there's a chance that any comments getting posted on a government website are going to be read by some people outside of slashdot (read: people who don't already approve of or don't already understand decss).
anything that increases public awareness of what the DVD forum is doing to restrict freedom of information is good. public opinion _does_ affect both court and law.
i was posting something last month suggesting we start some kind of blue ribbon campaign-style thing, where everyone put up a little logo image and a mirror of decss.
someone [no idea who] replied by pointing out a simpler alternative: simply use the standard GIF comment blocks to distribute the DeCSS code. Distribute a GIF banner image type thing with the DeCSS code in it and have people put it on pages. everyone who visits the page breaks the law.. -_- i'd link to the discussion, but it's long gone now.
Now take a moment to remember Martin Luther King Jr., and what he said about peaceful civil disobedience to facilitate change of an immoral system of law..
i think that the "adding content" thing doesn't imply-- the banner ads are more a totally seperate content stream than something actually being added to the tv signal itself.
as to the deradation-through-streaming thing.. well, that's an _extremely_ good point, and we can only hope the courts will decide to view realvideo as legally no different than a really bad television set.
on the other hand, if having the signal degrade in quality is "changing" the signal, then _any_ usage of the canadian law is illegal. after all, due to the very nature of analog signals, it is literally impossible to make a pristine copy-- there will _always_ be some degradation of quality. _always_. It may be possible for that degradation to be so small as to be indetectable to humans, but it will be there. So really any system where you capture and rebroadcast the signal is not going to be putting out exactly the same signal-- it's just the signal will appear the same to any human watching for all practical purposes. i'm not sure the courts will take a different view of the icravetv situation just because the difference in "signal" is rather extreme. but it's hard to tell.
if it does go into a court of law, trailing-dash names will be thrown out. this is not because of copyright issues; it's because all parties involved-- ICANN, the new registars-- signed a _contract_ saying they would not register anything that ends in a dash. what is more, i'm pretty sure none of the registrars have contracts with their customers that don't say the registrar can revoke the domain name at any time. So beyond the RFC issues already mentioned by some repliers there _is_ a legal basis. If copyright issues were important here at _all_ then the individual domains infringing on copyrights would have been dealt with individually, there wouldn't have been mass revoking.
if you had _read the article_ you would know this.
there was a mention of moderating articles.. cdmrtaco said he was having trouble trying to figure out the basis on which the numbers should be based.
i would like to suggest something slightly different: attatch a "karma" rating to articles on the main page, consisting of one point for each act of moderation (negative -or- positive) that occurs in that discussion. That would just give us some idea what it means that something as been marked 'interesting' within that article; i mean, some articles will obviously get marked much more than others, and stories that are more or less flamebait will probably get enough moderation committed within them that you shouldn't pay as much attention to a score:5 there as to a score:5 in an article almost nobody read. This would probably only work if available as an option you had to turn on, butit would be rather interesting to some of us, i think.
also it would probably be cool if you'd make a "karma is visible to other users" option in the Prefs, instead of just hiding it outright.. but i can't think of any particularly good reasons why this should happen so i won't go into it.
sorry i didn't post this at the questions session; i had forgotten about it at the time.
my GOD.. i just figured it out. i don't know why i didn't see it before.
All these people.. sitting around, claiming that 2001 is the real millenium.. i couldn't figure out their motivation. i didn't know why it mattered. i mean, the entire date system is totally arbitrary. The only reason we say this is the year 2000 is because the vast majority of the people think it is the year 2000. there's no good reason to call it the year 2000; a lot of people in muslim countries think it's some totally different year, and their opinion is no less valid than those of us who think it's 2000. Therefore, since it's only 2000 because most people think it is, wouldn't it make sense to say 2000 is the millenium because the most people think it is? i mean, since this is all so arbitrary, can't we let the words "second millenium" be arbitrary as well? and it's not like it matters. i mean, second millenium of WHAT? 2000 years since WHAT? it's not like there's any kind of meaning to the date 1 AD; nothing special happened then. Even for you christians it has no meaning, Jesus was born in either 2 or 6 BC according to most historians. it makes about as much sense the new millenium starts 2000 years after 1 BC as 2000 years after 1 AD.
But now i've got it figured OUT!! see, you people who were claiming it mattered so much that the millenium starts in 2001.. you don't actually care about the fact there was no 0 AD!!.. it's just you all had to work late fixing the y2k bug at 12:00 1/1/00,and you're bitter!! you just want the big celebrations postponed a year to 2001 so you don't have to miss it!! You just want to place the meaningless label "millenium" on a date where you don't have to be in front of a computer when it happens!! i'm on to your little scheme here..
> Why have the trolls been on the rise for the last six months or so?
very, very simple.
there's a site called segfault.org. these people all used to post to it because they thought they were funny. eventually the site got so overwhelmed by these people (harry@angryanddrunken.com) flooding the site with natalie portman, and basically ruining the site, that segfault simply shut all comments off in disgust. this made segfault.org readable, but also to some degree no longer worth reading, because there were some neat comments if you could ignore the background noise.
meanwhile the natalie portmaners simply switched to slashdot. God knows why these people do it.
you can't blame segfault for this. it isn't their fault at ALL; you can't have expected them to keep their site in comment mode just to have shit thrown all over it every day. but you also have to note that segfault was covered in nothing but natalie portman naked/petrified for a long time, and the time they shut off the comments at segfault was the time the natalie portman posts started appearing at slashdot.
you said, and the article said, that the WebTV people could download updates to the WebTV users instantaneously to fix any bug.
How secure is this?? would it be possible for me to somehow, maybe because i have a router between the webtv user and the webtv server (this is totally hypothetical) (can webtv connect over LAN?) figure out exactly what kind of communication goes on between the user and server, then somehow spoof packets from the WebTV server towards random WebTV users such that the webtv believes it is downloading an update, but is instead downloading some malicious software..?
This is somethign i've always wondered about auto-upate, but i assume some kind of security happens in most auto-update programs because they are things like operating systems, virus update programs, etc., that would be very easy to reverse-engineer and therefore have a great need for that kind of security..
WebTV meanwhile has no such need for security and thus doesn't seem quite as likely to have the security there. Also the way people have talked about this has implied the downloads are initiated by the server, not the client, which if so is very odd, and a lot easier to fake. If the downloads are initiated by the client i don't know how you'd be able to do anything, again unless you had a router between the webtv and the webtv server.. and if you're that close to the webtv you can probably just go over and beat the crap out of it with a baseball bat anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
actually, i think that the lizard in the SuSe logo thingy looks distinctly female.. not sure why it seems that way though.
a gender neutral name may work better for whatever reason.. i dunno.. but i doubt they'll give it a specifically male name.
anyway, the name gecko is already taken. It happens to be the name of a certain web browser's HTML rendering engine. I'm sure the mozilla people wouldn't mind you using the name, but i seriously doubt you could get away with trademarking it if it had already been used as a major component of a different major opensource project.
seriously, doesn't the image stand alone by itself? doesn't "that SuSE iguana" convey the idea? What's the point of naming it? I guess you want to convey it with "mascot" status or something, but WHY?
Why must we stick a cutesy brand name on everything? Why can't we just have some things be purely visual symbols for once? I personally think that Tux didn't need a name.. that you shouldn't have to stick a monosyllabic verbal handle on everything in order for it to be powerful.. that in some sense you dilute the symbol and limit it by giving it a name. All of a sudden it isn't this ethereal, otherworldly, metaphorical iguana, standing for something or other; suddenly it's an iguana, one specific iguana, with a name and everything. The abstract purity the symbol once had is gone..
a haiku:
now i drop my post
into this sea of troll posts
where no one will read
http://www.emsphone.com/Yankovic/WeirdAl/e_Even_Wo rse/i_think_im_a_clone_now.txt
GUNK?
Kind of something along the lines of this anarchy online thing.
The development process is a great deal more open, at the least.
no idea what exactly your art is, since the URLs don't work, so here's some stuff i made last month.
http://drowned.cx/decss/
There are a couple of GIFs at that URL. They were created by opening the decss code as raw rgb values and overlaying text on them.
The interesting thing is that they contain, inside their standard GIF comment block, the vertabrim source code to DeCSS. So this would mean that anyone who looks at these images has broken the law, because their web browser caches have become illegal mirrors of the DeCSS code.
Just some thought. read the page if you're bored.
the Breakout egg was in system 7.5 only. It was actually rather clever; it would print out on the screen "mac os 7.5 by: " and then a list of names. except each individual word in the list of names had a different blackground color to it, and made up a different block in the breakout game. Once you got rid of all the blocks, it would refill the screen with blocks made up of different names. If you got rid of that screen it would take you back to the first.
The egg was triggered by mac os drag&drop, which appeared for the first time in macos 7.5.. you typed out "secret about box" in some app that supported d&d, then held down option and dragged the text to the desktop. This is, btw, the same way you triggered the infamous 3d-rendered Iguana Flag easter egg in the PPC versions of 7.5.3, which is still one of the most amazing things i've ever seen.
supposedly there was some way to use resedit to extract the breakout game from the 7.5 system suitcase-- it was a desk accessory resource, i think-- and insert it into a copy of some other desk accessory, such as calculator, and thus have it be a standalone program that you could take to non-7.5 machines. never got around to trying this though.
this is the kind of crud i spent my childhood being fascinated by.
i am shocked by the incredible ignorance displayed in this article, by the way it covers such a tiny division of the programming languages in wide use, and such bad languages at that. This person seems to think that everyone in the world uses obscure, cumbersome languages like C, C++, objective C, java, perl, lisp, PHP, Bash, FORTRAN, Cobol, Forth, smalltalk or some form of assembly. What an isolated world this person must live in! He seems to have some extreme bias toward use of functional programming languages.
Specically i am very annoyed by the total lack of any discussion of INTERCAL, umlambda, or orthogonal--what i feel to be the most important languages out there, especially for games. None of these were even mentioned! Why would you write an first person shooter in C++ instead of INTERCAL? Why, as far as i'm aware there isn't even opengl available for c-based languages!
If you don't like these three above for some silly reason, at LEAST use Forth. any language where you can't redefine the value of four is for wimps. Or use Visual Basic-- its usefulness, portability, flexibility and sheer power are unparalleled. (i'm sorry, that last bit was a little over the top, wasn't it?)
-mcc
hmm. that reminds me, i need to learn objective c..
2B OR NOT 2B == FF
actually, this is a pretty good point. i would be curious as to what exactly the patent is.
i would also be curious as to whether the patent is invalidated by prior art in the form of, say, Zaks. i'm not sure if anyone here remembers Zaks [late 80s/early 90s] but they were interlocking geometric thingies that flexed where they locked together in such a way that may or may not be similar to whatever "folding" is. I wish i still had my Zaks set, they were pretty cool.
seriously though, things like legos or zaks or "expandagons" are more or less what patents were invented for.. a nonobvious, specific _implementation_ of an idea (not an idea itself), which the company in question took the time to develop.. so i don't think we should be mad at these people for patenting this expandagon thing, unless they really did patent "folding" or something.
still i'm not going to buy any of these because i am not going to trust anything connected in any way with this GIF. Anything that says outright it's going to be fun usually isn't.. -_-
ok.. everyone here is simply thinking of this in simple terms of a company getting really large. that isn't really how you look at it. this is a _music industry_ merger. Music industry mergers are VERY BAD things. they are BLOODY things.
Mergers usually contain downsizing, but you cant look at downsizing in the music industry the way you can look at it other places. Remember this is maybe the only industry left that is selling a mass-produced artistic product created by individal artisans (as opposed to the massive centralized committeework that produces movies.. you could maybe claim movies are still an artistic, but i wouldn't say so. you don't often have a person or a small group of persons making a movie with total artistic freedom, and you certainly can't ahve a movie that was made by one person working alone..).
If, say, warner cable and TCI cable merge, you're probably going to see a bunch of accountants and managers and people who do whatever it is you do if you work for a cable company lose their jobs. Well, whatever. One accountant is the same as another; any accountant can do the same work as any accountant.
Music doesn't work that way. When the label drops a musician, they're losing something specific that only that musician can do.
When Universal bought Polygram last year, there was a _lot_ of bands getting dropped and a _lot_ of pain. I can't remember the number that lived and the number that stayed came "bloody thursday" (the day they released the list of who got pink slips) but it was fairly sickening.
This bbc article kind of irritates me for its lack of considering what effect this is going to have on non-mainstream artists. "The company would unite artists like The Spice Girls, Madonna, Robbie Williams and the Rolling Stones - and hits might be made available on the internet. " ?? please. This is NOT a good thing.
i would insert something here about hoping that they make up for a small amount of the lost artists by firing all the management at Neglectra records.. but i doubt it would really be appropriate here.
http://drowned.cx/decss/
:P)
:) ) you can go ahead and put either on any web page you may have with a little note about how the person viewing the page has just broken the law by storing illegal information about defeating copy protection in their browser caches. But, i still think this needs to be more organized.
well.. i don't know if i like how these came out, but here they are. I went ahead and made them for some reason. I don't really like what they say. "This GIF is illegal" maybe isn't the best way to put it. I'm not quite sure. And it may or may not be true depending on your definition of "illegal". (And they maybe oughta have the LZW compression removed via ungif, just so we can all have rhetorical purity.
The idea behind these images (spread public awareness, a la the blue ribbon campaign) only works if it's somehow centralised-- i mean, if images like these wind up in widespread usage, any usage of them should link to some central page that explains what the MPAA is doing and why it's wrong. In which case the "this gif is illegal" should be added to with "click here to find out why". From there it could probably explain what source code is, why it should be considered speech, the purpose of DeCSS, the purpose of CSS, the reason DeCSS does not help piracy (seeing as you can pirate DVDs just as easily without DeCSS just by copying the dvd without decoding or writing a fake video driver before playing it in windows), the reason the MPAA/DVD forum brought this on themselves (by refusal to give any support the unices, the one group most likely to understand how to reverse-engineer), the constitutionality of the Digital Millineum Copyright act with regards to the first amendment and the copyright clause of the constitution, and how the DVD forum in general is basically trying to prevent the spread of information. Y'know, how they are absusing the legal system to try to prevent people from distributing information about how to defeat a copyright protection measure (which sounds to me like it should be covered by freedom of speech and freedom of the press, even if said speech is in the language of C++ and said press is printing on TCP/IP packets instead of paper), or even distributing the location [URLs, links] of that information (which i know is speech, and which there is no basis whatsoever to prevent talking about.) Oh, and maybe some stuff thrown in about monopolies, the sherman antitrust act, and the fact that crushing DeCSS is clearly not to prevent piracy and protect the MPAAs profits and help the artists involved, but simply to preserve the MPAA's power as a political entity/robber baron. And everything else i forgot; what the MPAA/DVD forum is doing is wrong on so many levels you could go on for pages about it. We know all this already, you could do it solely based on compiling slashdot posts, i could write it myself if i weren't so damned tired and i didn't have to go to bed so i can take the SATs tomorrow.
As for the GIFs themselves, the kind of murky colored stuff in the background is actually the DeCSS code itself, with the ASCII interpreted as raw color values. Kinda nifty how the hex values at the end come out as just patterns of lines. On the big one i enlarged it and blurred it over a bit to fit more text, but i wouldn't use that one if i were you cuz the file size is unneccicarily large (like 40k.. i think it's better as small as possible). As promised, both contain the entire source code to DeCSS in their comment fields. If you feel like it (hell, do whatever you want-- they contain GPLed code, so they're GPLed images, so i have no control over what you do with them
Please excuse the poor writing in this post. As i said, i am tired.
you could also do quite a bit with the "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in your quote. Preventing the distribution of instructions on how to go about performing a process doesn't seem to help "progress" in any way. Remember: patents illegalize the unauthorized performance of a process, but do as much as possible to spread information about how those processes are performed.
besides this, keep in mind the ever-present first amendment concerns. DeCSS is, in the end, not so much important as a tool as it is instructions on how to perform a task. This is why it is always mirrored as source code, not a binary. Source code is more or less speech, and what court cases that have ended in rulings on this subject [export of encryption software source code] has supported the idea that C++ is a language by humans for humans and therefore has freedom of speech, even if what is said in that language is describing a process that a large corporation or government doesn't want you to know how to do. Meanwhile the freedom-of-speech implications of limiting linking to the DeCSS code are horrifying. In this case the DVD forum seems to be preventing not just distributing information on how to perform a process, but simply distributing information on where such information can be located.
either way, there's a chance that any comments getting posted on a government website are going to be read by some people outside of slashdot (read: people who don't already approve of or don't already understand decss).
anything that increases public awareness of what the DVD forum is doing to restrict freedom of information is good. public opinion _does_ affect both court and law.
i was posting something last month suggesting we start some kind of blue ribbon campaign-style thing, where everyone put up a little logo image and a mirror of decss.
someone [no idea who] replied by pointing out a simpler alternative: simply use the standard GIF comment blocks to distribute the DeCSS code. Distribute a GIF banner image type thing with the DeCSS code in it and have people put it on pages.
everyone who visits the page breaks the law.. -_-
i'd link to the discussion, but it's long gone now.
Now take a moment to remember Martin Luther King Jr., and what he said about peaceful civil disobedience to facilitate change of an immoral system of law..
-mcc
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
i think that the "adding content" thing doesn't imply-- the banner ads are more a totally seperate content stream than something actually being added to the tv signal itself.
as to the deradation-through-streaming thing.. well, that's an _extremely_ good point, and we can only hope the courts will decide to view realvideo as legally no different than a really bad television set.
on the other hand, if having the signal degrade in quality is "changing" the signal, then _any_ usage of the canadian law is illegal. after all, due to the very nature of analog signals, it is literally impossible to make a pristine copy-- there will _always_ be some degradation of quality. _always_. It may be possible for that degradation to be so small as to be indetectable to humans, but it will be there. So really any system where you capture and rebroadcast the signal is not going to be putting out exactly the same signal-- it's just the signal will appear the same to any human watching for all practical purposes.
i'm not sure the courts will take a different view of the icravetv situation just because the difference in "signal" is rather extreme.
but it's hard to tell.
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
"IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!!!!"
-_-
mp3 hardware
is no longer vaporware..
Must buy one for car!!
Let us all rejoice.
C. C. has redeemed themselves
for divx
my mouse slipped a bit
as i went to click "preview"
and it hit "submit"
i had not managed
to turn off the score bonus
before this happened
i bemoan my fate
i will get moderated
score:1 offtopic
my karma is hurt
i have been knocked down a point
damn.. i need a life
limericks suck ass
they always come out tacky
and badly written
haiku are simpler
they have purity of form
they feel artistic..
But still none of this
has anything to do with
the Xerox PARC labs
if it does go into a court of law, trailing-dash names will be thrown out. this is not because of copyright issues; it's because all parties involved-- ICANN, the new registars-- signed a _contract_ saying they would not register anything that ends in a dash. what is more, i'm pretty sure none of the registrars have contracts with their customers that don't say the registrar can revoke the domain name at any time. So beyond the RFC issues already mentioned by some repliers there _is_ a legal basis. If copyright issues were important here at _all_ then the individual domains infringing on copyrights would have been dealt with individually, there wouldn't have been mass revoking.
if you had _read the article_ you would know this.
there was a mention of moderating articles.. cdmrtaco said he was having trouble trying to figure out the basis on which the numbers should be based.
i would like to suggest something slightly different: attatch a "karma" rating to articles on the main page, consisting of one point for each act of moderation (negative -or- positive) that occurs in that discussion. That would just give us some idea what it means that something as been marked 'interesting' within that article; i mean, some articles will obviously get marked much more than others, and stories that are more or less flamebait will probably get enough moderation committed within them that you shouldn't pay as much attention to a score:5 there as to a score:5 in an article almost nobody read. This would probably only work if available as an option you had to turn on, butit would be rather interesting to some of us, i think.
also it would probably be cool if you'd make a "karma is visible to other users" option in the Prefs, instead of just hiding it outright.. but i can't think of any particularly good reasons why this should happen so i won't go into it.
sorry i didn't post this at the questions session; i had forgotten about it at the time.
my GOD.. i just figured it out. i don't know why i didn't see it before.
.. it's just you all had to work late fixing the y2k bug at 12:00 1/1/00,and you're bitter!! you just want the big celebrations postponed a year to 2001 so you don't have to miss it!! You just want to place the meaningless label "millenium" on a date where you don't have to be in front of a computer when it happens!!
All these people.. sitting around, claiming that 2001 is the real millenium.. i couldn't figure out their motivation. i didn't know why it mattered. i mean, the entire date system is totally arbitrary. The only reason we say this is the year 2000 is because the vast majority of the people think it is the year 2000. there's no good reason to call it the year 2000; a lot of people in muslim countries think it's some totally different year, and their opinion is no less valid than those of us who think it's 2000. Therefore, since it's only 2000 because most people think it is, wouldn't it make sense to say 2000 is the millenium because the most people think it is? i mean, since this is all so arbitrary, can't we let the words "second millenium" be arbitrary as well? and it's not like it matters. i mean, second millenium of WHAT? 2000 years since WHAT? it's not like there's any kind of meaning to the date 1 AD; nothing special happened then. Even for you christians it has no meaning, Jesus was born in either 2 or 6 BC according to most historians. it makes about as much sense the new millenium starts 2000 years after 1 BC as 2000 years after 1 AD.
But now i've got it figured OUT!! see, you people who were claiming it mattered so much that the millenium starts in 2001.. you don't actually care about the fact there was no 0 AD!!
i'm on to your little scheme here..
> Why have the trolls been on the rise for the last six months or so?
very, very simple.
there's a site called segfault.org. these people all used to post to it because they thought they were funny. eventually the site got so overwhelmed by these people (harry@angryanddrunken.com) flooding the site with natalie portman, and basically ruining the site, that segfault simply shut all comments off in disgust. this made segfault.org readable, but also to some degree no longer worth reading, because there were some neat comments if you could ignore the background noise.
meanwhile the natalie portmaners simply switched to slashdot. God knows why these people do it.
you can't blame segfault for this. it isn't their fault at ALL; you can't have expected them to keep their site in comment mode just to have shit thrown all over it every day. but you also have to note that segfault was covered in nothing but natalie portman naked/petrified for a long time, and the time they shut off the comments at segfault was the time the natalie portman posts started appearing at slashdot.
you said, and the article said, that the WebTV people could download updates to the WebTV users instantaneously to fix any bug.
How secure is this??
would it be possible for me to somehow, maybe because i have a router between the webtv user and the webtv server (this is totally hypothetical) (can webtv connect over LAN?) figure out exactly what kind of communication goes on between the user and server, then somehow spoof packets from the WebTV server towards random WebTV users such that the webtv believes it is downloading an update, but is instead downloading some malicious software..?
This is somethign i've always wondered about auto-upate, but i assume some kind of security happens in most auto-update programs because they are things like operating systems, virus update programs, etc., that would be very easy to reverse-engineer and therefore have a great need for that kind of security..
WebTV meanwhile has no such need for security and thus doesn't seem quite as likely to have the security there. Also the way people have talked about this has implied the downloads are initiated by the server, not the client, which if so is very odd, and a lot easier to fake. If the downloads are initiated by the client i don't know how you'd be able to do anything, again unless you had a router between the webtv and the webtv server.. and if you're that close to the webtv you can probably just go over and beat the crap out of it with a baseball bat anyway.
ok now i'm curious.
Why does he need 97 million dollars??? He _bends spoons_ for a living!
I think you just answered your own question.. if bending spoons was all you had to support yourself on, you'd need $97 million, too.
Why does he need 97 million dollars??? He _bends spoons_ for a living!
I think you just answered your own question.. if bending spoons was all you had to support yourself on, you'd need $97 million, too.