Are you sure we have a "no circumventing DRM" provision in UK copyright law? I've searched the Wikipedia page on our copyright law, and while I concede it may not be authoritative I'd be surprised if such a provision existed and wasn't mentioned.
Or am I misinterpreting your post, and you're ripping the DVDs to your hard drive and playing them from there? (Which is infringing of course)
I'm curious - what (other than the DMCA) prevents you from buying the film on DVD and ripping it yourself? Technically illegal, but you're orders of magnitude less likely to get caught and you have the moral high ground of actually having paid for the film you're watching. (Which in turn is likely to sway the court in your favour, should it get to that stage)
They license their database software not by the servers it runs on, nor by the processor, but by the core... Believe it or not, they also charge extra for installed memory
I've not spoken to Oracle sales, but this page disagrees with your assertion. The only pricing options I see are per named user, and per processor. Nothing about cores or installed RAM. Furthermore while I'm not a DBA my company works with Oracle's DB a lot, and this is the first I've heard of such an insane pricing scheme. Do you have anything to back your claims up? (I'm more than happy to be proved wrong)
She has a basic human right to act as she pleases in her own home as long as it doesn't affect anyone else. Unless this guy can prove that her actions are adversely and unreasonably affecting him, he is indeed attacking her liberty.
Sorry, but I'm not running cabling all over my house and connecting/disconnecting my laptop as I go from lounge to kitchen to bedroom (etc) just because my neighbour has an imaginary sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation.
If he can prove this sensitivity to the satisfaction of an impartial third-party expert (e.g. a medical doctor or similar) then we can talk. Until that happens, I'm going to dismiss his claims as bullshit based on the fact that we are all permanently bathed in EM radiation of both natural and man-made origin.
NO, copyright does not end after distribution over HTTP.
However, copyright has nothing to do with this. If I buy a book or a newspaper, I am not allowed to copy it and give it to others; but there is nothing preventing me from taking a pair of scissors to it and removing sections I do not want to read. I could tear out every other page and burn it if I wanted to.
I really fail to see how this is any different, except that I am instructing a piece of software to do it for me.
Some of those things that the government want to keep secret will relate directly to the privacy (or even safety) of individuals though.
Sure, some of them will be things that would merely be embarrassing (like the details of excessive expense claims, etc), but some really will be a matter of life and death for those concerned.
Yes, that'll bump you up the priority - but the ambulance crew will have to wait for an armed police response unit, so you may not get quite the response you were hoping for and it may actually take longer.
"Pirating" is such a slanted, unhelpful framing of using and sharing digital material without permission.
Perhaps, but the only new thing about it is the word "digital"; piracy has been another word for copyright infringement for the last several hundred years.
These people select themselves for leadership at private school (if Tory) or at university (if Labour or Lib Dem)
What on earth makes you think the Labour and Lib Dem MPs all went to state schools? Have you forgotten the minor scandal a few years ago over certain high-profile Labour MPs sending their kids to private school?
In 2008 we had our first joe-job--we were running a business class DSL line in the office, 2 Megs, async. The backscatter *took us offline* for over two days.
I own a domain for private use, which is hosted by a friend. It's set up so that all mail to any address at that domain is delivered to me.
I was the victim of a joe-job a few years ago; at the height of the problem, I was getting 2000-3000 mails *per day* from the backscatter and spam to the faked from addresses. It didn't knock anything offline, but it was pretty bloody annoying. Thankfully it has since dropped to maybe a couple of dozen per day.
Forgetting exactly how to calculate a standard deviation is one thing, but forgetting what it actually represents is entirely another, and would certainly shake my confidence in the person's ability to interpret the results they're getting out of their tools.
if the price drops in the meantime, I get a refund
That's no different to just holding on to the cash yourself. It would send more of a message if you were willing to put your money in escrow to pay the full current retail price when the DRM is removed, even if the price subsequently drops. (As in, "I want the game, I want it at that price, but I do not want the DRM" as opposed to "I want the game, I do not want it at that price, I do not want the DRM")
In the meantime, I can download the cracked version...:)
If you do, then realise that you are a part of the problem, as you are adding your voice to the "we need DRM to prevent piracy - just look how many illegal copies we've detected" argument.
Incandescent bulbs are no longer being sold in the UK AFAIK.
No; 100W incandescents are no longer available here, other wattage ratings are still widely sold. (True, it's probably only a matter of time before they go too)
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure we have a "no circumventing DRM" provision in UK copyright law? I've searched the Wikipedia page on our copyright law, and while I concede it may not be authoritative I'd be surprised if such a provision existed and wasn't mentioned.
Or am I misinterpreting your post, and you're ripping the DVDs to your hard drive and playing them from there? (Which is infringing of course)
I'm curious - what (other than the DMCA) prevents you from buying the film on DVD and ripping it yourself? Technically illegal, but you're orders of magnitude less likely to get caught and you have the moral high ground of actually having paid for the film you're watching. (Which in turn is likely to sway the court in your favour, should it get to that stage)
They license their database software not by the servers it runs on, nor by the processor, but by the core... Believe it or not, they also charge extra for installed memory
I've not spoken to Oracle sales, but this page disagrees with your assertion. The only pricing options I see are per named user, and per processor. Nothing about cores or installed RAM. Furthermore while I'm not a DBA my company works with Oracle's DB a lot, and this is the first I've heard of such an insane pricing scheme. Do you have anything to back your claims up? (I'm more than happy to be proved wrong)
But a quanta of Time
Minor nit-pick, but I can't help myself - the singular form of quanta is quantum.
That's what people forget - no other application has opened people up to identity theft just by operating it.
All the people who fell for 419 and similar scams by reading and replying to emails would beg to differ.
She has a basic human right to act as she pleases in her own home as long as it doesn't affect anyone else. Unless this guy can prove that her actions are adversely and unreasonably affecting him, he is indeed attacking her liberty.
Sorry, but I'm not running cabling all over my house and connecting/disconnecting my laptop as I go from lounge to kitchen to bedroom (etc) just because my neighbour has an imaginary sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation.
If he can prove this sensitivity to the satisfaction of an impartial third-party expert (e.g. a medical doctor or similar) then we can talk. Until that happens, I'm going to dismiss his claims as bullshit based on the fact that we are all permanently bathed in EM radiation of both natural and man-made origin.
The problem with that theory is that they *must* update the hardware eventually, or lose out to the competition.
Did you hear a whooshing sound too?
Reminds me of a joke I heard a few years ago:
Q. How do you tell if a programmer is an extrovert?
A. He spends all night staring at your shoes.
I seem to recall the links used to go to Barnes & Noble
They did, back when Slashdot cared about Amazon's one-click patent.
Wrong answer. You don't lay hands on someone unless they are a direct threat
The bully was a direct threat to the kid's mental well-being, even if he wasn't a direct physical threat.
You mean "maxim", not maximum. (Although it's more like a soundbite than a maxim really)
NO, copyright does not end after distribution over HTTP.
However, copyright has nothing to do with this. If I buy a book or a newspaper, I am not allowed to copy it and give it to others; but there is nothing preventing me from taking a pair of scissors to it and removing sections I do not want to read. I could tear out every other page and burn it if I wanted to.
I really fail to see how this is any different, except that I am instructing a piece of software to do it for me.
Some of those things that the government want to keep secret will relate directly to the privacy (or even safety) of individuals though.
Sure, some of them will be things that would merely be embarrassing (like the details of excessive expense claims, etc), but some really will be a matter of life and death for those concerned.
Well, the service is valuable. That doesn't necessarily mean it's being delivered in a cost-effective, efficient manner however.
My daughter's mother received a letter about this scheme a couple of weeks ago. It is very much alive and well.
Yes, that'll bump you up the priority - but the ambulance crew will have to wait for an armed police response unit, so you may not get quite the response you were hoping for and it may actually take longer.
Over here in the UK, "the Continent" means (western) Europe - as in "he found driving on the Continent very different to Britain" (source).
"Pirating" is such a slanted, unhelpful framing of using and sharing digital material without permission.
Perhaps, but the only new thing about it is the word "digital"; piracy has been another word for copyright infringement for the last several hundred years.
These people select themselves for leadership at private school (if Tory) or at university (if Labour or Lib Dem)
What on earth makes you think the Labour and Lib Dem MPs all went to state schools? Have you forgotten the minor scandal a few years ago over certain high-profile Labour MPs sending their kids to private school?
In 2008 we had our first joe-job--we were running a business class DSL line in the office, 2 Megs, async. The backscatter *took us offline* for over two days.
I own a domain for private use, which is hosted by a friend. It's set up so that all mail to any address at that domain is delivered to me.
I was the victim of a joe-job a few years ago; at the height of the problem, I was getting 2000-3000 mails *per day* from the backscatter and spam to the faked from addresses. It didn't knock anything offline, but it was pretty bloody annoying. Thankfully it has since dropped to maybe a couple of dozen per day.
Forgetting exactly how to calculate a standard deviation is one thing, but forgetting what it actually represents is entirely another, and would certainly shake my confidence in the person's ability to interpret the results they're getting out of their tools.
if the price drops in the meantime, I get a refund
That's no different to just holding on to the cash yourself. It would send more of a message if you were willing to put your money in escrow to pay the full current retail price when the DRM is removed, even if the price subsequently drops. (As in, "I want the game, I want it at that price, but I do not want the DRM" as opposed to "I want the game, I do not want it at that price, I do not want the DRM")
In the meantime, I can download the cracked version... :)
If you do, then realise that you are a part of the problem, as you are adding your voice to the "we need DRM to prevent piracy - just look how many illegal copies we've detected" argument.
Incandescent bulbs are no longer being sold in the UK AFAIK.
No; 100W incandescents are no longer available here, other wattage ratings are still widely sold. (True, it's probably only a matter of time before they go too)