. I have often though my dream job would be programming in a scientific setting, because thats exactly where I learned to program - but have never run across such a job
Geez, go to any university campus in the western world. WE've been trying to hire a decent programmer for about six months now, but the simple fact is no one with any experience has been willing to work for the kind of salaries that a public university pays (we can offer 50k or so, for someone who would expect 100k in the private sector).
I know I could double my salary in the private sector (or at least could, before the dot-bomb) but getting two months off every year and having a fascinating job is worth more to me right now than making SUV or toilet paper ads for Madison Avenue...
---------------------------------------------
Re:This is a Good Thing
on
NSA Inside?
·
· Score: 2
it will make their job (SIGINT) and that of other Intelligence agencies more difficult
The NSA has two jobs, SIGINT is one, the other is the exact opposite -- keeping things secret on behalf of the US government (and industry).
Will the Russian government trust their secrets to a system designed by the NSA? Doubtful, even if it is hack-proof. But by building a turnkey system that immediately makes it easier for OUR armed forces and government agencies to keep secrets (with the added bonus of being able to make it available to any American corporations) is a great opportunity for them.
Also, keep in mind that the NSA has a job so long as secrets exist. The US military learned the long way that the same people who build our missile systems build missile defense systems that make them impotent. You're guaranteed a job so long as one side of the equation doesn't advance too far ahead of the other.
Its an interesting conundrum -- having two diametrically opposed requirements for doing your job, keeping secrets or cracking them? You just learn to do both better all the time...
A shiny happy tool is NOT going to save the end user when it comes to formating a new drive. You will either have to give the user the power to shoot themselves in the foot or castrate them.
Um, this means what? Of course, yes, every OS has to have the capability to format the drive. That's exactly what i said, you have to do that for any system, as well as physically installing it.
The difference is, that on *nix, you're presented with no USEFUL information on which drive is your new one unless you understand how disk partitions are allocated and tracked on that paticular system.
on Mac and Windows, the system will boot, say "hey, there's a new drive", and ask "do you want to format your new drive?" or when you go to save data on the drive it will say "hey, this is a new drive that isn't formatted, would you like to format it now so that you can save data on it?".
I assume you do all your taxes by reading all of the actual tax statues, rather than the wussy little step-by-step brochure that comes with the forms. After all, "anyone" should be able to read, fully understand, and remember with perfect recall all of the million different rules.
How can you expect to function in society if you don't know the difference between a 503(c) corporation and a 503(b)? You must just be too stupid or lazy to not know, so we're sure not going to make it easier by summarizing the differences that apply to 95%+ of the tax filers.
The ability to pipeline commands is something that currently can only be had at the command line; I have seen a couple of discussions on/. about possibly extending this concept to a GUI, but as of now, it hasn't been done.
Applescript works well. Probably even moreso in OSX.
Adding a new hard drive? Forget about it
You did read what you wrote, right? It involved fdisk, mkfs, and adding a mount point to/etc/fstab. All of which offer little guidance and great ease to screw up your system.
Windows and mac -- attatch hard drive (equally hard/easy on any system these days), when GUI comes up, click on new drive and select "format" from the OS context menu. Yes, you could accidentally format the wrong drive, but thats about the only pitfall. Of course it would be much easier to format the wrong drive with your method, seeing as how most people wouldn't know the difference between hda3 and hdg4 if their life depended on it.
Please note that this operation should require no knowledge of emacs, editing configuration files, mount points, cylinders, heads, or sectors, or logical block addressing, nor the internal OS loader designations for devices or number of partitions and order of drives.
What is up with the Lear Jet designers??? Can't they make the damn things easier for the average person to fly?
I suspect that NASA considers the multi-million dollar upgrade of User Interface to the space shuttles to be worth their while.
Could the pilots fly them before? Of course.
Is it safer, easier, faster and more reliable to fly with the new integrated graphic displays (as opposed to ten thousand switches and blinking lights)? You bet your ass.
Funny how NASA, the armed forces (along with the FAA and every airline and manufacturer) have realized that having a few context-sensitive graphical multipage displays makes it less likely for operator error to occur than the old "make everything a switch and blinking light" method of design.
The difference is, when people mess up at the control of a plane, people die. Unfortunately, the same isn't true of most computer systems, so there's been little incentive to fix glaring usability errors that every single user runs across. If every time you missplelled something at a command prompt someone died, I have a feeling lots of Unix folks would reconsider the usefulness of well-designed user interfaces...
Does this mean that sections of your constitution don't apply to private schools? How so, I thought the constitution was all-powerful (or am I misunderstanding this?)
The constitution is a document that explains the powers of the State in relation to the people, and the bill of rights explicitly spells out some of the rights that the people reserve from the State.
The constitution only limits what the government may do.Originally it was only the federal government limited by the constitution -- each state could make laws to establish religion, etc -- it was just to prevent a central government from "taking over" the autonomy of the states.
Of course, we amended the constitution so that now it DOES apply to the individual states, but it does not apply to private companies or individuals. The reason most folks get confused is because frequently private groups that accept federal funding (for example schools that offer government education loans) suddenly are considered to be under the authority of the constitution, because using tax dollars makes them quasi-governmental. So you DO hear all the time about schools especially that get into trouble with citizen's rights, but its because they have CHOSEN to accept that responsibility in exchange for being able to offer government programs.
Many private schools (particularly religious or very conservative schools) refuse federal funding for exactly this reason. It sounds like this school doesn't accept government money, and thus has no responsibility to respect the students' freedom of speech.
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Re:This ought to really catch on with Americans
on
Fiddler on the RUF
·
· Score: 2
It'll take America by storm!
If only we could somehow incorporate the Metric system!...
Why would Compaq support UCITA? Don't they owe their existence to reverse engineering?
Microsoft exists because IBM was too afraid of antitrust scrutiny to buy them or demand exclusive licensing rights to DOS. Hypocrisy doesn't really seem to bother anyone these days...
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Re:Who's their targetted audience?
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 4
So anyone who doesn't already own a cellphone because of the expense isn't going to be able to afford this any better. So, they'll have to be selling to people based on its convenience. That means tourists and criminals, and I'm not sure which one is worse
or people like me. I don't have a cel phone because its way too much money for the amount of time I spend on the phone, and the devices are way too big for the low frequency I would use it. If you told me I could buy a phone to put in my wallet and forget about until I needed it, as long as it wasn't ridiculously expensive I'd buy it.
As it is if you want a small phone to carry with you you'll have to spend a couple hundred bucks to get something tiny enough to be convenient, and then pay monthly charges (with a contract!) for the privlege. The current disposable/no-contract plans don't have phones that are at all convenient in size.
And there are plenty of times when i would have liked to have a phone for say, a week. For ten bucks, this is perfect for many of the people on earth who DON'T feel compelled to be available 24 hours a day, but would stil like the occassional convenience.
The biggest probelem cel companies have right now is that everyone who is obsessively on the phone already has one -- they have to make it much more convenient for the REST of us if they want to grow their customer base at all...
Remember - the telephone and the TV are luxuries, only a tiny fraction of the world's population has them.... Drinking water is a luxury to large sections of the world.
What's scary is that, quite truthfully, MORE people on earth have TVs and telephones than safe drinking water. I don't think many folks in the US realize what an unusual thing it is to be able to drink right out of the tap...
By that logic, it would only be illegal for me to transmit an entire CD to you. Transmitting only track 3 should be just fine
No, because track 3 is still a creative work by itself. An individual file name is not a creative work, it's a piece of factual data that is not covered by copyright (this is assuming you have typical "track number - artist - song.mp3" naming, if you name your files with Haikus then it might well BE a creative work.)
The only POSSIBLE copyright claim you could have would be on the collective file system, because it took you work to organize things in a particular way, and the organization itself is a valuable service.
You can quote individual numbers from the phone book all you like, because its a collection of FACTS, and facts are always in the public domain. The collective phone book, however, is copyrighted by your phone company.
In other news, a car propelled entirely by water has been developed. The only waste produced by the vehicle is Beer.
Please note that the HDTV over analog and water-powered car inventors have been shot. All documentation has been destroyed, we now return you to your regularly scheduled channel (one of which we got for free!)...
I compiled the list, so I hold the copyright. I am, therefore, entitled to control access to the list according to any criteria I see fit.
You're making a pretty clear decision by making it available to anyone on Napster. AFAIK, Napster does allow you to block users but beyond that has no provisions for negotiating licensing arrangements in return for access privleges. The act of sharing a directory is not passive, you have given Napster (also by their user agreement) and by extension others on the Napster network the ability to peruse your file list.
And Napster does not return your complete file list (when searching) -- only those entries that match a user search. And individual file results would not be covered under copyright regardless of your licensing statements (or else it would be illegal for me to look up a phone number in the book and tell it to you!)
That's not what I (or the courts) said. Only creative works are eligible for copyright, functionality has nothing to do with it. Its completely possible for a work to be both creative and functional, and generally creativity is a VERY low bar to clear. But purely factual information ("this song is by britney spears. This song is 'oops, i did it again', this song is 3:00 long", etc) is not creative in any way, and limiting the ability of people to republish those facts would be VERY counter-productive of copyright law.
Particular arrangements of facts (dictionaries, encyclopedias, phone books, etc) are creative in that the arrangement of the collective work itself is an act of creation, even though the constituent facts are not creative. So you can republish all the phone numbers you like, but you can't list them exactly the same way as the phone company does in their phone book.
As to the file list/ directory structure, it would be an interesting question where the threshold is. Since you are sharing the information to anyone with Napster (there is no discrimination as far as I know for RIAA Napster accounts) you could hardly claim it was a violation of your rights for them to view your files (especially since they have no way of NOT viewing them when they search -- Napster decides which search results to return to a client).
If you encrypted your drive structure, and left the encrypted text file containing that info on a public drive, and the RIAA brute-forced it open to find out you have MP3 files, they would be violating the DMCA. But "encrypting" the individual files with pig latin and publishing the individual file names on Napster makes it a much harder argument to make.
If you had all your MP3 files saved as a tar file named "myfiles.tar.mp3" and the tar file was encrypted, I doubt they would be able to legally assault the tar file to determine its contents. If your had an UNencrypted tar file named "myfiles.tar.mp3" and they just decompressed it (which is similar to what is being done with piglatin -- a very common code is being used) you wouldn't have a leg to stand on (anti-circumvention-wise).
that's absolutely correct -- so if your file and directory structure (which would legitimately be considered valuable information) is encrypted, the RIAA couldn't republish that information. But that's hardly what they're doing, they're searching for file names/ID3 tags that are publically accessable and marking down folks who have a given match...
The idea is that the filenames are a copyright of the user & thus attempts to decrypt the filename fall under that clause
If you are sharing your files via napster, you could hardly claim that it was invasive for someone to look at the shared file names.
And no, a file name would not have a copyright -- only creative works are entitled to copyright, so a purely functional title such as "artist - track.mp3" is not going to be protected in any way. Even in pig latin or french or any other language...
my experience in working with pc's, Dell is the one manufacturer that customizes it's install of Windows the most
Dell is nothing compared to the stuff that Compaq does to windows. I've seen compaq systems that won't even BOOT without using Compaq's version of windows because they screw around with so much of the hardware support...
You'll hear lots of complaints by people who are unable to copy videos correctly, but you'll never hear a complaint by anyone about how macrovision has degraded their signal -- it hasn't.
I take it you've never had one of those visit's to a friend's house where they complain because no matter what they do, they can't get the DVD/VHS player to work right. Oh, yeah, you can't plug a DVD player into a VCR that's connected to a TV. Or a VHS player through a cable box, or a DSS box, or anything else becasue the Macrovision screws it all up.
God forbid someone should desire to plug all their stuff into the TV at once -- you're trying to rip off the content producers!...
At long last, the stability of windows with the broad application base of Linux -- we could make a less useful computer if we really put our minds to it!...
As for things like the 1917 War Powers Act, it's clear that they arn't really enforcable. I was merely pointing out that the laws exist, and are technically in effect.
That's what i was trying to say -- they AREN'T in effect any more. The Conspiracy nuts who claim we're still in a state of war from the time of Lincoln are quick to point to the War Powers Act of 1917 as proof -- but fail to point out the War Powers Act of 1976 (which completely replaces it -- after the turmoil of the Vietnam War, having Presidents blatantly lie to Congress, the legislature quickly curbed the President's ability to act unilaterally).
50 USC 1601 officially and legally ended all states of emergency as of two years after the passage of the law (in 1976, again). So really, there is honestly and truly no suspension of Habeas Corpus, no state of war, etc. The Constitution, as of today, is 100% legally in effect and the President has nothing to say about it.
Fair Use is a legally inherent part of the Constitutionally authorized Copyright laws (at least that's what the Supreme Court said when they allowed "Fair Use" to be a defense).
So no, Congress cannot legislate Fair Use away (short of a Constitutional amendement). This is one of the arguments the EFF has been using -- that Congress simply CANNOT restrict the fair use of material even if they 100% wanted to with the DMCA (and of course, they DIDN'T intend to, which is one of the other major arguments).
The defendents never claimed they were exercising any Constitutionally protected right, they claimed that they were prosecuted under the wrong laws and that Congress had not intended to cover computer boards, etc. They made your run-of-the-mill statuatory arguments.
And no, obscenity is not considered speech, but that does not make the right of free speech contigent on offense. It makes it contingent on speech taking place (or, on speech not directly jeapordizing someone's life, as in the case of screaming "fire" in the crowded theater).
But in your less direct point -- our rights are contingent on our ability and willingness to respect, defend, and uphold them. If the Supreme Court says Playboy is obscene, then all of a sudden it's not protected speech. Or if we as a society (or just the executive branch) just decide to stop listening to the judicial, and just start hanging people for saying things, then you have government abridging the freedom of speech.
The Constitution is just a piece of paper to remind us of what believe we deserve, it doesn't have the ability to uphold itself -- so no, it isn't ABSOLUTE in that sense. Yes, it requires us to make it work on a daily basis. Short of God himself handing out magic rings and government-proof vests, I don't know what could be considered ABSOLUTE.
Slashdot Mirror
. I have often though my dream job would be programming in a scientific setting, because thats exactly where I learned to program - but have never run across such a job
Geez, go to any university campus in the western world. WE've been trying to hire a decent programmer for about six months now, but the simple fact is no one with any experience has been willing to work for the kind of salaries that a public university pays (we can offer 50k or so, for someone who would expect 100k in the private sector).
I know I could double my salary in the private sector (or at least could, before the dot-bomb) but getting two months off every year and having a fascinating job is worth more to me right now than making SUV or toilet paper ads for Madison Avenue...
---------------------------------------------
it will make their job (SIGINT) and that of other Intelligence agencies more difficult
The NSA has two jobs, SIGINT is one, the other is the exact opposite -- keeping things secret on behalf of the US government (and industry).
Will the Russian government trust their secrets to a system designed by the NSA? Doubtful, even if it is hack-proof. But by building a turnkey system that immediately makes it easier for OUR armed forces and government agencies to keep secrets (with the added bonus of being able to make it available to any American corporations) is a great opportunity for them.
Also, keep in mind that the NSA has a job so long as secrets exist. The US military learned the long way that the same people who build our missile systems build missile defense systems that make them impotent. You're guaranteed a job so long as one side of the equation doesn't advance too far ahead of the other.
Its an interesting conundrum -- having two diametrically opposed requirements for doing your job, keeping secrets or cracking them? You just learn to do both better all the time...
---------------------------------------------
A shiny happy tool is NOT going to save the end user when it comes to formating a new drive. You will either have to give the user the power to shoot themselves in the foot or castrate them.
Um, this means what? Of course, yes, every OS has to have the capability to format the drive. That's exactly what i said, you have to do that for any system, as well as physically installing it.
The difference is, that on *nix, you're presented with no USEFUL information on which drive is your new one unless you understand how disk partitions are allocated and tracked on that paticular system.
on Mac and Windows, the system will boot, say "hey, there's a new drive", and ask "do you want to format your new drive?" or when you go to save data on the drive it will say "hey, this is a new drive that isn't formatted, would you like to format it now so that you can save data on it?".
I assume you do all your taxes by reading all of the actual tax statues, rather than the wussy little step-by-step brochure that comes with the forms. After all, "anyone" should be able to read, fully understand, and remember with perfect recall all of the million different rules.
How can you expect to function in society if you don't know the difference between a 503(c) corporation and a 503(b)? You must just be too stupid or lazy to not know, so we're sure not going to make it easier by summarizing the differences that apply to 95%+ of the tax filers.
---------------------------------------------
The ability to pipeline commands is something that currently can only be had at the command line; I have seen a couple of discussions on /. about possibly extending this concept to a GUI, but as of now, it hasn't been done.
/etc/fstab. All of which offer little guidance and great ease to screw up your system.
Applescript works well. Probably even moreso in OSX.
Adding a new hard drive? Forget about it
You did read what you wrote, right? It involved fdisk, mkfs, and adding a mount point to
Windows and mac -- attatch hard drive (equally hard/easy on any system these days), when GUI comes up, click on new drive and select "format" from the OS context menu. Yes, you could accidentally format the wrong drive, but thats about the only pitfall. Of course it would be much easier to format the wrong drive with your method, seeing as how most people wouldn't know the difference between hda3 and hdg4 if their life depended on it.
Please note that this operation should require no knowledge of emacs, editing configuration files, mount points, cylinders, heads, or sectors, or logical block addressing, nor the internal OS loader designations for devices or number of partitions and order of drives.
---------------------------------------------
What is up with the Lear Jet designers??? Can't they make the damn things easier for the average person to fly?
I suspect that NASA considers the multi-million dollar upgrade of User Interface to the space shuttles to be worth their while.
Could the pilots fly them before? Of course.
Is it safer, easier, faster and more reliable to fly with the new integrated graphic displays (as opposed to ten thousand switches and blinking lights)? You bet your ass.
Funny how NASA, the armed forces (along with the FAA and every airline and manufacturer) have realized that having a few context-sensitive graphical multipage displays makes it less likely for operator error to occur than the old "make everything a switch and blinking light" method of design.
The difference is, when people mess up at the control of a plane, people die. Unfortunately, the same isn't true of most computer systems, so there's been little incentive to fix glaring usability errors that every single user runs across. If every time you missplelled something at a command prompt someone died, I have a feeling lots of Unix folks would reconsider the usefulness of well-designed user interfaces...
---------------------------------------------
Does this mean that sections of your constitution don't apply to private schools? How so, I thought the constitution was all-powerful (or am I misunderstanding this?)
.Originally it was only the federal government limited by the constitution -- each state could make laws to establish religion, etc -- it was just to prevent a central government from "taking over" the autonomy of the states.
The constitution is a document that explains the powers of the State in relation to the people, and the bill of rights explicitly spells out some of the rights that the people reserve from the State.
The constitution only limits what the government may do
Of course, we amended the constitution so that now it DOES apply to the individual states, but it does not apply to private companies or individuals. The reason most folks get confused is because frequently private groups that accept federal funding (for example schools that offer government education loans) suddenly are considered to be under the authority of the constitution, because using tax dollars makes them quasi-governmental. So you DO hear all the time about schools especially that get into trouble with citizen's rights, but its because they have CHOSEN to accept that responsibility in exchange for being able to offer government programs.
Many private schools (particularly religious or very conservative schools) refuse federal funding for exactly this reason. It sounds like this school doesn't accept government money, and thus has no responsibility to respect the students' freedom of speech.
---------------------------------------------
It'll take America by storm!
If only we could somehow incorporate the Metric system!...
---------------------------------------------
Why would Compaq support UCITA? Don't they owe their existence to reverse engineering?
Microsoft exists because IBM was too afraid of antitrust scrutiny to buy them or demand exclusive licensing rights to DOS. Hypocrisy doesn't really seem to bother anyone these days...
---------------------------------------------
So anyone who doesn't already own a cellphone because of the expense isn't going to be able to afford this any better. So, they'll have to be selling to people based on its convenience. That means tourists and criminals, and I'm not sure which one is worse
or people like me. I don't have a cel phone because its way too much money for the amount of time I spend on the phone, and the devices are way too big for the low frequency I would use it. If you told me I could buy a phone to put in my wallet and forget about until I needed it, as long as it wasn't ridiculously expensive I'd buy it.
As it is if you want a small phone to carry with you you'll have to spend a couple hundred bucks to get something tiny enough to be convenient, and then pay monthly charges (with a contract!) for the privlege. The current disposable/no-contract plans don't have phones that are at all convenient in size.
And there are plenty of times when i would have liked to have a phone for say, a week. For ten bucks, this is perfect for many of the people on earth who DON'T feel compelled to be available 24 hours a day, but would stil like the occassional convenience.
The biggest probelem cel companies have right now is that everyone who is obsessively on the phone already has one -- they have to make it much more convenient for the REST of us if they want to grow their customer base at all...
---------------------------------------------
The way the entertainment industry casts actors and actresses, I suspect "teenager" is just a euphemism for "hasn't hit thirty yet".
From what I've seen of the porn industry, it isn't even THAT restrictive (g)...
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Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo, Michaelangelo
Only problem is child labor laws for hazardous work -- remember these are TEENAGERS we're talking about!...
---------------------------------------------
Remember - the telephone and the TV are luxuries, only a tiny fraction of the world's population has them. ... Drinking water is a luxury to large sections of the world.
What's scary is that, quite truthfully, MORE people on earth have TVs and telephones than safe drinking water. I don't think many folks in the US realize what an unusual thing it is to be able to drink right out of the tap...
---------------------------------------------
By that logic, it would only be illegal for me to transmit an entire CD to you. Transmitting only track 3 should be just fine
No, because track 3 is still a creative work by itself. An individual file name is not a creative work, it's a piece of factual data that is not covered by copyright (this is assuming you have typical "track number - artist - song.mp3" naming, if you name your files with Haikus then it might well BE a creative work.)
The only POSSIBLE copyright claim you could have would be on the collective file system, because it took you work to organize things in a particular way, and the organization itself is a valuable service.
You can quote individual numbers from the phone book all you like, because its a collection of FACTS, and facts are always in the public domain. The collective phone book, however, is copyrighted by your phone company.
---------------------------------------------
In other news, a car propelled entirely by water has been developed. The only waste produced by the vehicle is Beer.
Please note that the HDTV over analog and water-powered car inventors have been shot. All documentation has been destroyed, we now return you to your regularly scheduled channel (one of which we got for free!)...
---------------------------------------------
I compiled the list, so I hold the copyright. I am, therefore, entitled to control access to the list according to any criteria I see fit.
You're making a pretty clear decision by making it available to anyone on Napster. AFAIK, Napster does allow you to block users but beyond that has no provisions for negotiating licensing arrangements in return for access privleges. The act of sharing a directory is not passive, you have given Napster (also by their user agreement) and by extension others on the Napster network the ability to peruse your file list.
And Napster does not return your complete file list (when searching) -- only those entries that match a user search. And individual file results would not be covered under copyright regardless of your licensing statements (or else it would be illegal for me to look up a phone number in the book and tell it to you!)
---------------------------------------------
Purely functional works are not protected?
That's not what I (or the courts) said. Only creative works are eligible for copyright, functionality has nothing to do with it. Its completely possible for a work to be both creative and functional, and generally creativity is a VERY low bar to clear. But purely factual information ("this song is by britney spears. This song is 'oops, i did it again', this song is 3:00 long", etc) is not creative in any way, and limiting the ability of people to republish those facts would be VERY counter-productive of copyright law.
Particular arrangements of facts (dictionaries, encyclopedias, phone books, etc) are creative in that the arrangement of the collective work itself is an act of creation, even though the constituent facts are not creative. So you can republish all the phone numbers you like, but you can't list them exactly the same way as the phone company does in their phone book.
As to the file list/ directory structure, it would be an interesting question where the threshold is. Since you are sharing the information to anyone with Napster (there is no discrimination as far as I know for RIAA Napster accounts) you could hardly claim it was a violation of your rights for them to view your files (especially since they have no way of NOT viewing them when they search -- Napster decides which search results to return to a client).
If you encrypted your drive structure, and left the encrypted text file containing that info on a public drive, and the RIAA brute-forced it open to find out you have MP3 files, they would be violating the DMCA. But "encrypting" the individual files with pig latin and publishing the individual file names on Napster makes it a much harder argument to make.
If you had all your MP3 files saved as a tar file named "myfiles.tar.mp3" and the tar file was encrypted, I doubt they would be able to legally assault the tar file to determine its contents. If your had an UNencrypted tar file named "myfiles.tar.mp3" and they just decompressed it (which is similar to what is being done with piglatin -- a very common code is being used) you wouldn't have a leg to stand on (anti-circumvention-wise).
---------------------------------------------
that's absolutely correct -- so if your file and directory structure (which would legitimately be considered valuable information) is encrypted, the RIAA couldn't republish that information. But that's hardly what they're doing, they're searching for file names/ID3 tags that are publically accessable and marking down folks who have a given match...
---------------------------------------------
The idea is that the filenames are a copyright of the user & thus attempts to decrypt the filename fall under that clause
If you are sharing your files via napster, you could hardly claim that it was invasive for someone to look at the shared file names.
And no, a file name would not have a copyright -- only creative works are entitled to copyright, so a purely functional title such as "artist - track.mp3" is not going to be protected in any way. Even in pig latin or french or any other language...
---------------------------------------------
my experience in working with pc's, Dell is the one manufacturer that customizes it's install of Windows the most
Dell is nothing compared to the stuff that Compaq does to windows. I've seen compaq systems that won't even BOOT without using Compaq's version of windows because they screw around with so much of the hardware support...
---------------------------------------------
You'll hear lots of complaints by people who are unable to copy videos correctly, but you'll never hear a complaint by anyone about how macrovision has degraded their signal -- it hasn't.
I take it you've never had one of those visit's to a friend's house where they complain because no matter what they do, they can't get the DVD/VHS player to work right. Oh, yeah, you can't plug a DVD player into a VCR that's connected to a TV. Or a VHS player through a cable box, or a DSS box, or anything else becasue the Macrovision screws it all up.
God forbid someone should desire to plug all their stuff into the TV at once -- you're trying to rip off the content producers!...
---------------------------------------------
At long last, the stability of windows with the broad application base of Linux -- we could make a less useful computer if we really put our minds to it!...
---------------------------------------------
Oh, yes.
---------------------------------------------
As for things like the 1917 War Powers Act, it's clear that they arn't really enforcable. I was merely pointing out that the laws exist, and are technically in effect.
That's what i was trying to say -- they AREN'T in effect any more. The Conspiracy nuts who claim we're still in a state of war from the time of Lincoln are quick to point to the War Powers Act of 1917 as proof -- but fail to point out the War Powers Act of 1976 (which completely replaces it -- after the turmoil of the Vietnam War, having Presidents blatantly lie to Congress, the legislature quickly curbed the President's ability to act unilaterally).
50 USC 1601 officially and legally ended all states of emergency as of two years after the passage of the law (in 1976, again). So really, there is honestly and truly no suspension of Habeas Corpus, no state of war, etc. The Constitution, as of today, is 100% legally in effect and the President has nothing to say about it.
---------------------------------------------
Fair Use is a concept defined by copyright law
Fair Use is a legally inherent part of the Constitutionally authorized Copyright laws (at least that's what the Supreme Court said when they allowed "Fair Use" to be a defense).
So no, Congress cannot legislate Fair Use away (short of a Constitutional amendement). This is one of the arguments the EFF has been using -- that Congress simply CANNOT restrict the fair use of material even if they 100% wanted to with the DMCA (and of course, they DIDN'T intend to, which is one of the other major arguments).
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See, for example, U.S. v. Thomas
The defendents never claimed they were exercising any Constitutionally protected right, they claimed that they were prosecuted under the wrong laws and that Congress had not intended to cover computer boards, etc. They made your run-of-the-mill statuatory arguments.
And no, obscenity is not considered speech, but that does not make the right of free speech contigent on offense. It makes it contingent on speech taking place (or, on speech not directly jeapordizing someone's life, as in the case of screaming "fire" in the crowded theater).
But in your less direct point -- our rights are contingent on our ability and willingness to respect, defend, and uphold them. If the Supreme Court says Playboy is obscene, then all of a sudden it's not protected speech. Or if we as a society (or just the executive branch) just decide to stop listening to the judicial, and just start hanging people for saying things, then you have government abridging the freedom of speech.
The Constitution is just a piece of paper to remind us of what believe we deserve, it doesn't have the ability to uphold itself -- so no, it isn't ABSOLUTE in that sense. Yes, it requires us to make it work on a daily basis. Short of God himself handing out magic rings and government-proof vests, I don't know what could be considered ABSOLUTE.
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