Witness the lack of a TV in my apartment (by way of mentioning... I don't actually want you to visit my apartment).
I think the general mood/hope here is that after the IP owners have made it too difficult, dangerous, and or expensive to consume their wares, people will just stop. Unfortunately, I don't think it's that easy. The image of success (spawned in America, and taken up in many other parts of the world) is a suburban home with a two-car garage (containing vehicles), a glut of consumer electronics, nice cushy furniture, a backyard with a grill and a lawnmower, and a couple of kids. The mentality that these things are an indication of success is firmly ingrained in the United States. I can't speak for other countries except to say that it is spreading. One of the problems with this "success image" is that if Joe Blow's version of it isn't "complete" then his perception of his own success is diminished.
My point is that many of us geeky/free software/homemade electronics types would give up on TV fairly easily. So would many activist types. But if you suggest to the average middle class American family that they don't need to own their own home, own or drive a car, or own a TV, they'll balk. It may be a knee-jerk reaction, but they'll even start their defense by saying "Yes I do!" WRT TV, they'll talk about their favorite shows and that they like to get the news and the weather. If you mention that they could spend the time they watch their favorite shows raising their kids or getting exercise instead, and that there are many other higher quality sources of news and weather, the defense with only deepen. Such is life when someone feels that their high perception of their own success is being challenged.
The solution is really pretty easy. Make it illegal to:
a)use a false or incorrect return
b)not have a return
c)not have a standard solicitors identification.
And without any identifying information, and with fragmented juridictions, and with open relays a-plenty enforcement should be a snap!
Do you have any suggestions on how to track down the spammers that break your law? Did you even think about that?
It's quite simple really. I can go to one site a be entertained for a while for some money, or I can go to a different site and be entertained for a while gratis. Which would you pick?
Failing the availability of sites that don't charge for content (ha ha), there's always coding which we're all supposed to be doing right now anyway... right?....right?:-P
I scan my own boxes to check for anything suspicious.
I scan my friends' (who have requested it) boxes to do same.
I scan boxes that have scanned me.
I scan boxes that I am having problems with in order to diagnose the problem.
One time I TCP SYN scanned my entire class B, but that was before I grew scruples.
Analogies:
Rattling all of your windows and doors to check for problems.
The same for friends who have asked.
Following a snoop home and rattling his doors and windows.
Going to meet someone (possibly a stranger) at their home and rattling all the doors and windows when they don't answer the door
Selling Avon at every door and window of every house in the neighborhood.
The third bullet is definitely questionable as far as this lawyer's analysis goes, but nmap is most certainly not illegal, witness bullet points one, two, and four. Five is just stupid.
That is a damn good idea. EFF should advertise it on their site.
Yes, even if for no other reason than to show people how much they really spend on "entertainment". Personally, I find bike riding, network building, and Perl coding more gratifying that most movies, tv, radio, and "popular" music, so I'll have to find some other way to calculate how much to donate (hardware cost matching? It would certainly generate some big revenue for EFF).
So, now that Microsoft has included copy protection (so that customers "understand when they are crossing the line . . . so they can't do the wrong thing."), does that mean Microsoft is going to start taking responsibility for future copyright infringements? I mean, if these copy protection things are really designed so that customers "can't do the wrong thing," whose fault is it if they do? Oh, right, it's that damn DMCA and its anti-circumvention clause.
Consider this: The DMCA forbids the circumvention of effective access controls and copy controls (by effective, it means that they "have the effect of"). If there are circumventable at all, are they effective? No. Does the law still forbid their circumvention? We'll just have to see what the corporate lapdogs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcourts think.
As far as the whole cancer analogy goes, if one were to just go along with it, what's the cure for Linux? Of course they want you to think Windows is the cure, but of course, it's worse than cancer, it's asphixiation. The real cure? BSD... but that's only if you buy the analogy in the first place.
This is very stupid. Right now there is a business in selling IP addresses due to scarcity, but once IPv6 is implemented, the market of selling IPs is over. Of course most providers actually "like" the current system; so they dont really care to implement IPv6 yet. While IPv6 address the issue of NATs even better than the old IPv4; it is actually supposed to be less used than it is today, or at least only used when desired; and not as an unfortunate need like it is right now with IPv4. Im really happy that Japan is so serious about implementing it; i hope more countries follow.
OK, try reading this post after these: s/(IP addresses|IP address|IPs)/recorded music s/IPv6/Napster/g s/IPv4/FTP/g s/NATs/site indexing/g
I think one of the best examples that code is an expression is the "Hello, world" program. It is typically included as a brief tutorial on some feature of a language. It has a functional aspect, it prints the phrase "Hello, world!" in a window or on the console, etc. But more importantly, it has the expressive aspect of showing a user how to perform that function (outputing a statement, constructing a program, etc) in his or her own code.
Consider also the case of code in the classroom. Last fall in an algorithms class, my professor wrote, over the course of two and a half months, probably about a dozen and a half algorithms on the blackboard in C. Anyone in the class could have gone to the lab and copied those algorithms into an actual source file and compiled them, but that wasn't the point. The point was that the professor could point to the code and say, "This is Dijkstra's algorithm. Here's what it does and how it works..." Suppose the professor had bundled these algorithms up into a file that students could download (he might have, I don't remember). The purpose of this downloadable file is to express the algorithms to the students, not to provide them for use in programs (although that would be possible). The Princeton SDMI papers are a fine example of this sort of disemination. The papers are obviously written for the legitimate purposes of academic research and study, but the RIAA has sought their censorship because those papers expose chinks in their SDMI armor. In the same way, the DeCSS program, and particularly its siblings written in Perl, exist, and are diseminated for legitimate purposes. The DeCSS program proper is incredibly cumbersome to actually use. It's primary "function" is to express in no uncertain terms the method by which a DVD disc can be decrypted. The Perl programs that reimplement DeCSS serve an altogether different purpose... two actually. One is that they are designed specifically to be the smallest possible implementations of DeCSS. Two, they are written in protest of the DMCA, accomplished by making their disemination (on T-shirts, mugs, e-mail signatures, and such) as trivial as possible by making the code small. The Perl programs could be used to actually decrypt DVDs as well, just like the DeCSS program proper, but they too are incredibly difficult to use. If at all possible, I suggest that the court should ask the MPAA lawyers to demonstrate, themselves, how DeCSS can be used to make a playable, unencrypted copy of a CSS encrypted movie.
As a result of the DeCSS program, it is now possible for DVD owners and renters to make fair use of their content. I own four DVDs. Without the DeCSS program, libcss would never have been written, and without libcss, no open source DVD player for Linux would exist. In a very clear chain of reasoning, the DeCSS program has served the purpose of expressing the decryption algorithm, allowing programmers to write libcss. The existence of libcss has allowed other programmers to write DVD player software for Linux. The existence of DVD player software for Linux has made it possible for me to watch DVDs, and therefore, practical for me to own them. Note that using this chain of reasoning, it is also plain to see that the MPAA has actually made money (from me, and people in the same situation as me) that they would not have otherwise, on account of the existence of DeCSS.
Don't know how much your local team's tickets cost, but bleacher seats at Wriggly Field are still less than $10. I had upper deck seats near 3rd for under twenty last season. Maybe it has something to do with competition. (Hint: the condos and apartments across the street from the stadium have bleachers on top of them and there isn't a damn thing the Cubs can do about it).
There is lots of money (read: businesses) in Linux now, some of them making and/or selling hardware. It would be unwise (from a business standpoint) for those hardware makers/sellers to ignore 33% of the server market (and that's just Linux, I don't know off hand where the BSDs stand). Maybe "shooting themselves in the foot" is a bit excessive. "Tripping over their own feet" is probably more accurate. As long as these conditions persist, open source software will run on future hardware.
Another thing to consider... market forces. When the used market for non-authenticating hardware goes through the roof (because consumers want cheap content with no strings attached), there will be hardware vendors that will continue to produce the stuff.
Bottom line is this: King George started taxing certain goods to death and the colonies had a revolution. If King Valenti does the same, we'll damn well have another. The United States government cannot withstand the force of 100 million pissed off American citizens, and that's less than half the country, mind you. The issue here is the duties people have to pay in order to participate in their own culture. In the 1770's it was taxes on tea and stamps. In the 2000's it will be royalties on music and movies.
I believe rw2's point is that the room was at room temperature, the chip or whatever was at 100C, and when the cooling thing was activated, the chip cooled by 7C. And he's right, that's not especially impressive. But then again, rw2 is missing the bigger point made in the Nature article, that this is something new and people are just getting their feet wet. rw2: give it a couple years and maybe they'll be able to drop the temperature by 50C.
My impression is that they take the heat energy and produce electricity ("thermoelectric"), which is just cool by itself. If a processor could recycle the heat it generates back into clock ticks, California would be all the better for it, let alone the cooling effect.
The "nm" they are referring to is not "nanometers" as we have grown to expect. The unit they are referring to in this context is "nautical miles". Even so, they're still cutting it pretty close, as there aren't that many places on Earth with no people for 2,000 nautical miles in every direction.
Personally, I feel a lot more comfortable every time a vulnerability is discovered and disclosed. The alternatives are, in no particular order:
1) no one finds it EVER (unlikely)
2) it gets silently fixed (if you fixed your code, I bet you would tell your users)
3) some misdirected yet highly talented kid discovers it and exploits it.
Or, you could just go on leading your blissful carefree computing life while your box remains a haven for the people who keep bumping into my firewall.
I can break into your car, your house, tap your phone, look through your trash to get info about you. I can kill you in your sleep.
Granted.
Just because I can doesn't mean I will though, just as most people woudn't.
Here's where the trouble begins. I grew up in a small town in Michigan. When I lived there, the chances of malicious activity randomly directed at me were staggeringly low. Now I live in Chicago, and it's much MUCH bigger. And the chances of malicious activity affecting me are much higher, but still pretty low.
But when I'm on the Internet, it is to Chicago what Chicago is to my hometown, only more so. You see what I'm getting at? When I'm online, or rather, when my box is connected (24/7), it is accessible from anyone else in the world who's on the Internet. And it is accessible in seconds. Now, I have no doubt that there are miscreants in my neighborhood here in Chicago, but they're on the order of magnitude of about a few hundred, and it will take them a lot longer than a few seconds to lay any kind of attack. When you take those numbers, and increase the number of thugs and decrease the time it will take them to get you, then you need to take precautions, regardless of how unlikely it is for any given individual to attack you.
Legions of mindless gnudroids, that cannot think themselves and mostly hang around slashdot and kuro5hin. That's who
And some smaller number of intelligent people who understand that RMS is just a man with an opinion, a plan, and some measure of success. He is a man who doesn't ask anyone to do anything they don't want to, who will personally respond to any question from any person, and who knows himself better than most people can ever hope to know themselves. It is unlikely that any one person can change his mind and this, I think, is the sticking point for most of the anti-RMS crowd. What people don't seem to understand is that he's not stubborn at all. Rather, the reason his mind is so difficult to change is because his opinions are so firmly grounded in years - decades even - of careful reasoning.
You don't have to agree with every word that comes out of his mouth (or his RJ-45 jack). I don't. But don't go lambasting those who do agree with him just because there are so many who do it without thinking. My guess is that you are one of those who lambaste without thinking.
Given the structural integrity of my apartment, my neighbors and I could probably keep the entire building from suffering osteoporosis in old age. Just one problem: It probably doesn't help the foundation rebuild itself.
Read more carefully. The article very clearly says opt-out. I very clearly said opt-in.
Don't know the difference? In this particular case, an opt-in list would be a list of people who have decided to allow spam in their accounts, and everyone not on the list defaults to not receiving spam. An opt-out list would be a list of people who decide not to receive spam, and everyone not on it defaults to receiving it.
I agree. I personally think they've got it backwards. The National Data Registry (or whatever it was called) should keep an opt-in list. If anyone wants to receive spam, they just sign up for it.
Linux runs on "real" server processors like alpha's, ultra sparcs and mips. And linux can run in large scale SMP or cluster configurations (we all know Beowulf and there was an article somewhere about Linux booting on a 32 proc Compaq Alpha system). Not to mention S390's.
You and so many other people are completely missing the point here. Sure, Linux will run on some bigger iron than most mac users can afford, but so what? The question was, given the choice between Mac OS X and Linux (both of which are one way or another related to Unix) what would a typical end-user choose, assuming that they're in the mood for a "Unix" system?
I still agree, however, that Mac OS X and Linux are apples and oranges (oops, I just made a pun). Linux is still a much much more exposed system than Mac OS, despite X's BSD ancestry. Mac OS X is still a much much more pampering environment than Linux, despite all the dressing up with desktop environments. The end user market is very much a segmented market and these two operating systems don't even wave at each other as they pass. They don't really even tread on each other all that much when divide the market into "sheep" (MS users) and "cats" (users who refuse to be herded).
Sony also sells records (Epic). Any lengths Sony takes in its home electronics to restrict your ability to copy or to play copies wouldn't surprise me in the least. To my knowledge, Sony is the only company in both the recording and home electronics markets.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't want to pay, don't use it.
Witness the lack of a TV in my apartment (by way of mentioning... I don't actually want you to visit my apartment).
I think the general mood/hope here is that after the IP owners have made it too difficult, dangerous, and or expensive to consume their wares, people will just stop. Unfortunately, I don't think it's that easy. The image of success (spawned in America, and taken up in many other parts of the world) is a suburban home with a two-car garage (containing vehicles), a glut of consumer electronics, nice cushy furniture, a backyard with a grill and a lawnmower, and a couple of kids. The mentality that these things are an indication of success is firmly ingrained in the United States. I can't speak for other countries except to say that it is spreading. One of the problems with this "success image" is that if Joe Blow's version of it isn't "complete" then his perception of his own success is diminished.
My point is that many of us geeky/free software/homemade electronics types would give up on TV fairly easily. So would many activist types. But if you suggest to the average middle class American family that they don't need to own their own home, own or drive a car, or own a TV, they'll balk. It may be a knee-jerk reaction, but they'll even start their defense by saying "Yes I do!" WRT TV, they'll talk about their favorite shows and that they like to get the news and the weather. If you mention that they could spend the time they watch their favorite shows raising their kids or getting exercise instead, and that there are many other higher quality sources of news and weather, the defense with only deepen. Such is life when someone feels that their high perception of their own success is being challenged.
The solution is really pretty easy. Make it illegal to:
a)use a false or incorrect return
b)not have a return
c)not have a standard solicitors identification.
And without any identifying information, and with fragmented juridictions, and with open relays a-plenty enforcement should be a snap!
Do you have any suggestions on how to track down the spammers that break your law? Did you even think about that?
It's quite simple really. I can go to one site a be entertained for a while for some money, or I can go to a different site and be entertained for a while gratis. Which would you pick?
....right? :-P
Failing the availability of sites that don't charge for content (ha ha), there's always coding which we're all supposed to be doing right now anyway... right?
Analogies:
The third bullet is definitely questionable as far as this lawyer's analysis goes, but nmap is most certainly not illegal, witness bullet points one, two, and four. Five is just stupid.
That is a damn good idea. EFF should advertise it on their site.
Yes, even if for no other reason than to show people how much they really spend on "entertainment". Personally, I find bike riding, network building, and Perl coding more gratifying that most movies, tv, radio, and "popular" music, so I'll have to find some other way to calculate how much to donate (hardware cost matching? It would certainly generate some big revenue for EFF).
So, now that Microsoft has included copy protection (so that customers "understand when they are crossing the line . . . so they can't do the wrong thing."), does that mean Microsoft is going to start taking responsibility for future copyright infringements? I mean, if these copy protection things are really designed so that customers "can't do the wrong thing," whose fault is it if they do? Oh, right, it's that damn DMCA and its anti-circumvention clause.
Consider this: The DMCA forbids the circumvention of effective access controls and copy controls (by effective, it means that they "have the effect of"). If there are circumventable at all, are they effective? No. Does the law still forbid their circumvention? We'll just have to see what the corporate lapdogs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcourts think.
As far as the whole cancer analogy goes, if one were to just go along with it, what's the cure for Linux? Of course they want you to think Windows is the cure, but of course, it's worse than cancer, it's asphixiation. The real cure? BSD... but that's only if you buy the analogy in the first place.
OK, try reading this post after these:
s/(IP addresses|IP address|IPs)/recorded music
s/IPv6/Napster/g
s/IPv4/FTP/g
s/NATs/site indexing/g
Interesting reading, eh?
Consider also the case of code in the classroom. Last fall in an algorithms class, my professor wrote, over the course of two and a half months, probably about a dozen and a half algorithms on the blackboard in C. Anyone in the class could have gone to the lab and copied those algorithms into an actual source file and compiled them, but that wasn't the point. The point was that the professor could point to the code and say, "This is Dijkstra's algorithm. Here's what it does and how it works..." Suppose the professor had bundled these algorithms up into a file that students could download (he might have, I don't remember). The purpose of this downloadable file is to express the algorithms to the students, not to provide them for use in programs (although that would be possible). The Princeton SDMI papers are a fine example of this sort of disemination. The papers are obviously written for the legitimate purposes of academic research and study, but the RIAA has sought their censorship because those papers expose chinks in their SDMI armor. In the same way, the DeCSS program, and particularly its siblings written in Perl, exist, and are diseminated for legitimate purposes. The DeCSS program proper is incredibly cumbersome to actually use. It's primary "function" is to express in no uncertain terms the method by which a DVD disc can be decrypted. The Perl programs that reimplement DeCSS serve an altogether different purpose... two actually. One is that they are designed specifically to be the smallest possible implementations of DeCSS. Two, they are written in protest of the DMCA, accomplished by making their disemination (on T-shirts, mugs, e-mail signatures, and such) as trivial as possible by making the code small. The Perl programs could be used to actually decrypt DVDs as well, just like the DeCSS program proper, but they too are incredibly difficult to use. If at all possible, I suggest that the court should ask the MPAA lawyers to demonstrate, themselves, how DeCSS can be used to make a playable, unencrypted copy of a CSS encrypted movie.
As a result of the DeCSS program, it is now possible for DVD owners and renters to make fair use of their content. I own four DVDs. Without the DeCSS program, libcss would never have been written, and without libcss, no open source DVD player for Linux would exist. In a very clear chain of reasoning, the DeCSS program has served the purpose of expressing the decryption algorithm, allowing programmers to write libcss. The existence of libcss has allowed other programmers to write DVD player software for Linux. The existence of DVD player software for Linux has made it possible for me to watch DVDs, and therefore, practical for me to own them. Note that using this chain of reasoning, it is also plain to see that the MPAA has actually made money (from me, and people in the same situation as me) that they would not have otherwise, on account of the existence of DeCSS.
Don't know how much your local team's tickets cost, but bleacher seats at Wriggly Field are still less than $10. I had upper deck seats near 3rd for under twenty last season. Maybe it has something to do with competition. (Hint: the condos and apartments across the street from the stadium have bleachers on top of them and there isn't a damn thing the Cubs can do about it).
There is lots of money (read: businesses) in Linux now, some of them making and/or selling hardware. It would be unwise (from a business standpoint) for those hardware makers/sellers to ignore 33% of the server market (and that's just Linux, I don't know off hand where the BSDs stand). Maybe "shooting themselves in the foot" is a bit excessive. "Tripping over their own feet" is probably more accurate. As long as these conditions persist, open source software will run on future hardware.
Another thing to consider... market forces. When the used market for non-authenticating hardware goes through the roof (because consumers want cheap content with no strings attached), there will be hardware vendors that will continue to produce the stuff.
Bottom line is this: King George started taxing certain goods to death and the colonies had a revolution. If King Valenti does the same, we'll damn well have another. The United States government cannot withstand the force of 100 million pissed off American citizens, and that's less than half the country, mind you. The issue here is the duties people have to pay in order to participate in their own culture. In the 1770's it was taxes on tea and stamps. In the 2000's it will be royalties on music and movies.
If I was smoking crack I would've thought it was funny. Sober, I would've picked informative or interesting.
I believe rw2's point is that the room was at room temperature, the chip or whatever was at 100C, and when the cooling thing was activated, the chip cooled by 7C. And he's right, that's not especially impressive. But then again, rw2 is missing the bigger point made in the Nature article, that this is something new and people are just getting their feet wet. rw2: give it a couple years and maybe they'll be able to drop the temperature by 50C.
My impression is that they take the heat energy and produce electricity ("thermoelectric"), which is just cool by itself. If a processor could recycle the heat it generates back into clock ticks, California would be all the better for it, let alone the cooling effect.
The "nm" they are referring to is not "nanometers" as we have grown to expect. The unit they are referring to in this context is "nautical miles". Even so, they're still cutting it pretty close, as there aren't that many places on Earth with no people for 2,000 nautical miles in every direction.
Personally, I feel a lot more comfortable every time a vulnerability is discovered and disclosed. The alternatives are, in no particular order:
1) no one finds it EVER (unlikely)
2) it gets silently fixed (if you fixed your code, I bet you would tell your users)
3) some misdirected yet highly talented kid discovers it and exploits it.
Or, you could just go on leading your blissful carefree computing life while your box remains a haven for the people who keep bumping into my firewall.
I can break into your car, your house, tap your phone, look through your trash to get info about you. I can kill you in your sleep.
Granted.
Just because I can doesn't mean I will though, just as most people woudn't.
Here's where the trouble begins. I grew up in a small town in Michigan. When I lived there, the chances of malicious activity randomly directed at me were staggeringly low. Now I live in Chicago, and it's much MUCH bigger. And the chances of malicious activity affecting me are much higher, but still pretty low.
But when I'm on the Internet, it is to Chicago what Chicago is to my hometown, only more so. You see what I'm getting at? When I'm online, or rather, when my box is connected (24/7), it is accessible from anyone else in the world who's on the Internet. And it is accessible in seconds. Now, I have no doubt that there are miscreants in my neighborhood here in Chicago, but they're on the order of magnitude of about a few hundred, and it will take them a lot longer than a few seconds to lay any kind of attack. When you take those numbers, and increase the number of thugs and decrease the time it will take them to get you, then you need to take precautions, regardless of how unlikely it is for any given individual to attack you.
who the fuck cares what RMS thinks anyways?
Legions of mindless gnudroids, that cannot think themselves and mostly hang around slashdot and kuro5hin. That's who
And some smaller number of intelligent people who understand that RMS is just a man with an opinion, a plan, and some measure of success. He is a man who doesn't ask anyone to do anything they don't want to, who will personally respond to any question from any person, and who knows himself better than most people can ever hope to know themselves. It is unlikely that any one person can change his mind and this, I think, is the sticking point for most of the anti-RMS crowd. What people don't seem to understand is that he's not stubborn at all. Rather, the reason his mind is so difficult to change is because his opinions are so firmly grounded in years - decades even - of careful reasoning.
You don't have to agree with every word that comes out of his mouth (or his RJ-45 jack). I don't. But don't go lambasting those who do agree with him just because there are so many who do it without thinking. My guess is that you are one of those who lambaste without thinking.
I had exactly the same thought...
Given the structural integrity of my apartment, my neighbors and I could probably keep the entire building from suffering osteoporosis in old age. Just one problem: It probably doesn't help the foundation rebuild itself.
Or in other words....
A device that could be built into the hand of a robot so that the robot can "feel" how hard it's squeezing whatever it is that it's holding.
89 seconds, set in 1995
Do crayons and a scanner count as native Linux tools?
Read more carefully. The article very clearly says opt-out. I very clearly said opt-in.
Don't know the difference? In this particular case, an opt-in list would be a list of people who have decided to allow spam in their accounts, and everyone not on the list defaults to not receiving spam. An opt-out list would be a list of people who decide not to receive spam, and everyone not on it defaults to receiving it.
I agree. I personally think they've got it backwards. The National Data Registry (or whatever it was called) should keep an opt-in list. If anyone wants to receive spam, they just sign up for it.
Linux runs on "real" server processors like alpha's, ultra sparcs and mips. And linux can run in large scale SMP or cluster configurations (we all know Beowulf and there was an article somewhere about Linux booting on a 32 proc Compaq Alpha system). Not to mention S390's.
You and so many other people are completely missing the point here. Sure, Linux will run on some bigger iron than most mac users can afford, but so what? The question was, given the choice between Mac OS X and Linux (both of which are one way or another related to Unix) what would a typical end-user choose, assuming that they're in the mood for a "Unix" system?
I still agree, however, that Mac OS X and Linux are apples and oranges (oops, I just made a pun). Linux is still a much much more exposed system than Mac OS, despite X's BSD ancestry. Mac OS X is still a much much more pampering environment than Linux, despite all the dressing up with desktop environments. The end user market is very much a segmented market and these two operating systems don't even wave at each other as they pass. They don't really even tread on each other all that much when divide the market into "sheep" (MS users) and "cats" (users who refuse to be herded).
Sony also sells records (Epic). Any lengths Sony takes in its home electronics to restrict your ability to copy or to play copies wouldn't surprise me in the least. To my knowledge, Sony is the only company in both the recording and home electronics markets.