At what point did it become a 'loss' when you failed to sell your overpriced merchandise? It sounds from the story that other label-sellers are doing this too. I just have this idea that one pair of stinking jeans are about the same as any other and the label on the back makes no difference. But that's just an idea . . .
No. Hurt them where it counts. Don't listen to their music. They are in all ways an inferior group of musicians. All they ever had going for them was their attitude and their message, which they've now bagged. Let them bag it. Let them fail. They deserve it. I used to respect them for what they had endured in the pursuit of their 'art' but now I can't. They are just a colossal joke to me.
It's irrelevant if Vint Cerf invented TCP/IP, E=MC2, or fire. His argument is an argument from authority. If it were an argument about TCP/IP, that would be one thing. But it's an argument that's fundamentally about our civil liberties, something that Vint Cerf is not a demonstrated authority on.
And besides, I'm a firm believer that someone's argument should stand on its own two legs anyway. And as far as I'm concerned, Vint Cerf's endorsement of Carnivore does not. I want to know exactly what the government is up to. I paid for this nonsense, after all. It is my life, my liberty, and my pursuit of happiness that is at stake here.
Actually, it's my opinion that the entire concept of "government secret" should be abolished. I think it should be almost a capital offense to burn government correspondence, or attempt to hide it in any way. The only way we can guarantee that we are actually living in a representative democracy is complete access to the record of activities of our government. If we can't have that, we aren't capable of choosing our representation effectively. And then what's the point of a democracy?
Einstein worked in the Swiss patent office. And that was one hundred years ago. And don't you wish he was working in the US patent office today? At the very least his critical thinking skills would be of use, even if his technical knowledge was out of date. The people who passed the one-click patent through couldn't reason their way out of a wet paper bag. . .
Having used both the poor-man's copyright and the real copyright I can attest to the fact that it's really not that expensive, but it is irritating. Don't send your only copy, for sure. The idiots lost my first check for $20 and I had to send them another, which held up the process for quite awhile, but I finally got it. The total cost in money was about $30, which is cheaper than twenty minutes with a lawyer, and probably cheaper than a secure storage facility. And I don't have to make any monthly or yearly payments. The cost in irritation was minor.
Of course, no publisher ever bit, but that's another story. Presumably, you can go to the Library of Congress and look up a title called The Worldwrights by yours truly and it will be there.
I followed your link about the lawsuit, and right now I'm doing what I consider really strange thing. I'm downloadng mp3's off of MTV.com.
I first read Adam's little sad story about being the founder of mtv's internet presence and then having it sadly yanked from under him. Sniff. Happens all the time in Corporate Amerikka, Adam. Then I decided, on a total lark, to go to Mtv.com. In no other circumstance but curiosity would I have ever visited the site.
And there I was on the front FUCKIN' page of mtv.com, surely visited by RIAA gestapo every day of their life to see what's 'hip' in the real world. And there are mp3's for FREE download. THOUSANDS of FREE downloads, it says. Some are this.wma format, which I'm sure Windows Schmedia player can interpret, and some are genuine mp3's. So I'm downloading two. One from Fastball and one from some band named mojave something that I've never heard of. I have no interest in either of the songs; I picked stuff that I imagined wouldn't make me throw up, but it's not anything I would ordinarily be interested in. I'm just not that 'hip' anymore, I guess.
I have to qualify this: I have never used Napster or Gnutella or any of the other services. I'm not shilling for anyone here. I just want to know, what in the hell is the difference between what I'm doing right now and what a zillion napster users have been doing for the last several months? I have not paid a dime for either of these songs. I was required to put in an email address -- oh its a valid address all right but I haven't checked that particular hotmail account in eight months or so and it has no visible reference back to me -- and a zip code, which I 'mistyped.' But no 'beam-it' came down to check my cd player for a valid copy of the CD. I just have to wonder, and again excuse me for being kind of obtuse about this, but WHY is this not being included in some massive DMCA-fired lawsuit against mtv.com for dropping me, a would-be music pirate, off at the scene of the crime? I read no EULA, I agreed to nothing, I paid no cash, I entered no credit card. Nothing appeared to stop me from just taking the songs. I was encouraged to do so. Am I ranting? I'll stop now. Just had to comment on this.
"It would be illegal for me to use a star-trek like replicator to exactly atom-for-atom replicate Ford many times"
That's interesting. What happens when that becomes possible? Most companies are, in all reality, re-using the brilliant ideas of a few. I mean the car is the car. "Fine German engineering" aside, it's still four wheels driven by gas exploding against cylinders. If you can pop one out of a replicator you don't need the Ford Motor Co., do you? You certainly don't need Mercedes-Fucking-Benz. When all that's left is the idea, I wonder how long our current social and economic system will last. A corrupt and idiotic congress may make the copying of physical objects illegal, but the law would probably be violated so much it would make the entire legal system a shambles. The whole game of supply and demand would be reduced to raw materials. And the real winners of that new economy might turn out to be the garbagemen - they would have all the raw material, of course.
There's only a SID in NT / 2k. There is no SID in 95. The reason you reboot in 9x is to re-register your PC with the local WINS server. That sequence only happens on bootup. Yeah, if there's no WINS server who gives a rip, but this is the same OS that re-installs your network drivers when you change your IP address.
In NT the SID has nothing to do with the computer name. It's a big-ass (32-bit?) field that differentiates it from other PC's. Two NT boxes with different names can have the same SID. That's why when you use disk-cloning to stamp out massive numbers of NT boxes you have to use some sid-changing utility because identical sids cause fits to the security subsystem. Fun stuff like shortcuts on one PC being mapped back to another PC happens when you don't change SID's during cloning.
In NT when you change the netbios name you have to of course re-register with the WINS server, and also if you're on a domain there's an account for your PC that allows the domain to trust it called COMPUTERNAME$. It has to re-register that account and again due to sheer laziness none of this can happen except at startup.
Don't hate me for what I know. It's just my fuckin' job.
>"Hence you can't run FOO.EXE, FOO.DRV and FOO.DLL at the same time."
Sorry. I progam in Windows. You can. You can run MULTIPLE instances of FOO.EXE if you like. As many as will fit in memory. What you can't do is overwrite one that's held open by the system (say, the network driver). If the system were designed to unload that driver, and release it, when it was being updated, this wouldn't be quite the problem that it is. The feeble solution is the.INI file. It's called wininit.ini, and it's the same in NT as in 9x. And 2000.
If you don't already know, 2000 is almost EXACTLY the same under the hood, programmatically, as NT. It's just a more stable implementation -- what they should have done way back in NT 3.1. A lot of bugfixes. I don't know where people get the 65,000 bugs from -- right now most of my problems with my 2k box are coming from my foolish decision to install IE5.5, which is a total wreck. It ran like a dream until then. This integration of shell and explorer is a dumber idea than most . . .
The real problem is Microsoft laziness, as most people have figured out. The install routine of many programs could dynamically unload and reload the associated drivers but does not. You can do a lot of things without rebooting in 2000, like change the IP address, that you couldn't in earlier versions. What causes a reboot most of the time in 2000 is actually dumb install programs that insist on restarting to refresh the registry. I frequently just ignore the "you must reboot" in 2000 because I know it's not necessary. Only when new drivers are installed and the installer is just too dim to put all the reg keys and dlls in place do I have to actually restart to run whatever's in wininit. I once had the thing up for 60 days, which for a release 1.0 of anything Microsoft is pretty impressive.
What should be obvious in the patent system, and is not, is that if a company patents some concept and immediately finds dozens of people using it out there, the existence of prior art ought to be made self-evident. There needs to be a mechanism put into the patent process; maybe a 'trial period' like you get at your job. If you patent your idea and go out into the world to litigate and immediately find a half-dozen people using 'such a system' without any prior knowledge of what you're doing, that ought to immediately disqualify you the patenter and your absurd patent. And maybe qualify you for a court date on charges of fraud and attempted extortion.
After all, when a company does as is suggested in your sig here, it's clear that the only real goal was to bilk people out of a fee for doing something they already knew how to do before the patent was ever inked. . .
Thank you. That is EXACTLY what I was getting at. Knowing how to thieve is NOT the same as actual thieving. That is the difference between a free society and a society in which thought is controlled. And not only that, your example points up the absurdity of trying to control people's presumed intentions rather than dealing with the consequences of their acts. Confiscating all hammers wouldn't be enough -- rocks would have to be made illegal!
I agree with the last half of your post. But you misread my intent; the strength or weakness of the encryption scheme is not society's problem. Businesses accept a certain level of risk when they go out into the world to do their business. If they're not willing to accept the risk of piracy, for example, for easily and perfectly copied media, they need to just get out of that business. If that risk becomes part of public concern and policy to negate, then we have our government controlling the economy, and putting legal means in to ensure that a business which should in a free market, fail because of their own poor decisions, does not. What does that remind you of?
Well, it's definitely not on the same level as, say, "Hey Jude" or "Stairway to Heaven." But I gotta like it. Did you actually rehearse that? Or did you just play chords and read the code aloud. However you did it, it's a recorded work of music, and copyrightable. And free speech.
Actually listening to your song made me think of something else rather frightening. I have spent quite a lot of time and effort 'reverse engineering' the recordings of various bands and artists. In fact I used to get paid pretty regularly for other bass players to come over to my house, give me a tape of whatever they wanted to know, and have me transcribe it for them in tablature. Under the logic being applied in the DMCA, that act may be a violation of the intellectual property rights of (insert lame top 40 artist here). I've 'reverse engineered' hundreds of songs. I wonder if this analogy would make sense if someone took it, inscribed it on a bass guitar, and smacked Judge Kaplan over the head with it. Repeatedly. The fact that I can KNOW and understand how a song was played, and make that knowledge available to others, does not mean I am pirating the work in question or taking away profits from the originator of the work. It's a rarer ability than the ability to, for example, understand the words (at least until the last 10 years or so of music). But that is essentially what DeCSS is all about. Someone with good 'programming' ears transcribed the encryption scheme that was very plain to them in the CSS algorithm and made it public. Just like someone like me can very plainly understand a bass line and chord structure that is so much mojo to even another bass player . . . it's something I think I am going to write to my congressbeing(s) about.
You've been had by the MPAA's 'logic' if you can't see this. It doesn't matter if it was a good encryption scheme or it was a feeble one. Once the scheme was known it was broken, gone, and voided. MPAA wants to rewrite the history of that event in a very Orwellian fashion, by making it illegal to know about it. Apply this to a larger context, and it becomes illegal to publicize other feeble encryption schemes. This makes sites like Bugtraq illegal, and the l0pht, instead of providing a service by embarrasing Microsoft, is now illegaly reverse-engineering their encryption scheme.
Which puts people like me right behind the eight-ball. It's my job to seek out those kinds of vulernabilities and protect my very real production system against them. But under the DMCA the act of seeking out vulnerabilities is now 'sneaky' and 'hackerlike' behavior. Regardless of whether it's to keep ahead of genuine theives or become one myself, the ruling that Kaplan has laid down doesn't differentiate. The MPAA has people snowed on this piracy thing. The fundamental truth is, it is not the problem of the law, the justice system, or the community at large that the MPAA chose such a childish, feeble scheme to protect their works. It's out in the open now and it is not my responsibility or yours or anyone else's to give up our constitutional rights to talk about what we choose to talk about or think about what we choose to think about just to protect their lame-ass scheme. They are left with exactly the tools that they've always had to defend against piracy, which are 1) punishing pirates when they're caught. And 2) punishing pirates when they're caught. Prevention of the means of piracy should not be the public's problem. But the DMCA makes it the public's problem, and in the process stomps on our right to THINK about piracy. It's the beginning of thought control and it's absolutely terrifying.
What really cracks me up is that if they'd just kept their mouths shut they would be having no problems. I predict very confidently that if the prices of DVD's remain at the astonishingly low rates they are now, piracy of DVD's will remain almost nonexistent no matter how easy they become to pirate. For the same reason that videotape piracy is pretty much a thing of the past; it's cheap to buy a videotape and you can be assured that you're getting a good quality copy. When videotapes were $80, they weren't worth buying, but having a friend run off a copy was worth the effort and the relatively minor risk. If DVD remains in the ~$20 range, they will never have a major problem with DVD piracy. But I imagine that just like the RIAA the MPAA is planning to jack prices up on this new format once it's taken over the market. And in order to secure their market, they think, they're doing their level best to make piracy impossible. Except that they don't seem to be very smart about it. I predict that if much more of this goes on the DVD will go exactly where DIVX went -- nowhere. The DVD section in any movie rental store I see is still a small percentage, less than 10%, usually, of the stock, and the selection is truly awful, most of the time. If the stink of what's happening in Jester Kaplan's court gets into the public's face people will stay away in droves from the new formats, and this incredible racket that the MPAA has planned for themselves will evaporate like so much vague speculation. But that's just my hope.
Only the most superficial company on earth could sue an employee (or anyone, for that matter) for revealing that its computer was designed in the shape of a common regular solid.
If it had been the Apple Dodecahedron that might have been worth suing over. But a cube?
There is actual math that supports this. I do not have my Discover magazine article conveniently in my sphincter to pull out and read, but I recall along with the highway example, a physics demonstration of the principle where a stick (or something) was being supported by several rubber-bands. And the researcher was able to make the stick rise (i.e., show it was supported _better_) when he cut some of the unneccessary supports. I apologize for my extremely vague description, but as counterintuitive as what you've seen reads, it's got some genuine examples that can be tested in the real world.
My keyboard (an MS natural which you will pry from my cold, dead, 90-WPM fingers) is almost 4 years old, and has a fine, attractive polish on the space bar where my right thumb hits it, another where my palms it it, and of course very shiny E, T, and R keys. Other keys are polished to varying degrees of perfection. It also has a fine patina of dirt on the vertical surfaces which I refuse to do anything about. And only a non-typist would complain about "extra" keys.
This is the same kind of "reasoning" that is used in property seizure laws, where your money or your house is supposed to have committed a crime, therefore it is seized by the gest^H^H^H^Hcops and, whatever, "punished" I guess. Of course since it's property it doesn't have to stand trial and neither do you.
The point is they are trying to make a whole class of things illegal because even though the individual acts are legal and they would ordinarily have no legal leg to prohibit you from doing them, the components could be brought together to make something illegal happen. In the case of dangerous explosives like gunpowder or fertilizer or nitroglycerine I could see some basic caution, but these are just IDEAS for crying out loud.
So, we are seeing the beginning of thought control, are we not? It's dangerous to KNOW how to crack the MPAA's infantile encryption scheme. That's the only thing the source code provides. You still have to perform a physical act to compile and use it, but apparently the difference between knowing how to commit a crime and actually doing so is lost on these people. . .
Just get 'em to step over a cliff . . . Seriously, there are supposed to be billions of pages of HTML in the world. Not all of them are on American soil, either. Maybe Kaplan doesn't know that yet. Can these dumkoffs seriously think they can police all of that constantly shifting digital space?
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He said it's indistinguishable from magic. Another premise which must accompany this is "a difference which makes no difference is no difference."
At what point did it become a 'loss' when you failed to sell your overpriced merchandise? It sounds from the story that other label-sellers are doing this too. I just have this idea that one pair of stinking jeans are about the same as any other and the label on the back makes no difference. But that's just an idea . . .
Why don't we see if we can get Metallica to sue Vint Cerf?
No. Hurt them where it counts. Don't listen to their music. They are in all ways an inferior group of musicians. All they ever had going for them was their attitude and their message, which they've now bagged. Let them bag it. Let them fail. They deserve it. I used to respect them for what they had endured in the pursuit of their 'art' but now I can't. They are just a colossal joke to me.
It's irrelevant if Vint Cerf invented TCP/IP, E=MC2, or fire. His argument is an argument from authority. If it were an argument about TCP/IP, that would be one thing. But it's an argument that's fundamentally about our civil liberties, something that Vint Cerf is not a demonstrated authority on.
And besides, I'm a firm believer that someone's argument should stand on its own two legs anyway. And as far as I'm concerned, Vint Cerf's endorsement of Carnivore does not. I want to know exactly what the government is up to. I paid for this nonsense, after all. It is my life, my liberty, and my pursuit of happiness that is at stake here.
Actually, it's my opinion that the entire concept of "government secret" should be abolished. I think it should be almost a capital offense to burn government correspondence, or attempt to hide it in any way. The only way we can guarantee that we are actually living in a representative democracy is complete access to the record of activities of our government. If we can't have that, we aren't capable of choosing our representation effectively. And then what's the point of a democracy?
I don't give a flying fuck if he invented TCP/IP or not. His argument is not bolstered by his authority.
Einstein worked in the Swiss patent office. And that was one hundred years ago. And don't you wish he was working in the US patent office today? At the very least his critical thinking skills would be of use, even if his technical knowledge was out of date. The people who passed the one-click patent through couldn't reason their way out of a wet paper bag. . .
Having used both the poor-man's copyright and the real copyright I can attest to the fact that it's really not that expensive, but it is irritating. Don't send your only copy, for sure. The idiots lost my first check for $20 and I had to send them another, which held up the process for quite awhile, but I finally got it. The total cost in money was about $30, which is cheaper than twenty minutes with a lawyer, and probably cheaper than a secure storage facility. And I don't have to make any monthly or yearly payments. The cost in irritation was minor.
Of course, no publisher ever bit, but that's another story. Presumably, you can go to the Library of Congress and look up a title called The Worldwrights by yours truly and it will be there.
I first read Adam's little sad story about being the founder of mtv's internet presence and then having it sadly yanked from under him. Sniff. Happens all the time in Corporate Amerikka, Adam. Then I decided, on a total lark, to go to Mtv.com. In no other circumstance but curiosity would I have ever visited the site.
And there I was on the front FUCKIN' page of mtv.com, surely visited by RIAA gestapo every day of their life to see what's 'hip' in the real world. And there are mp3's for FREE download. THOUSANDS of FREE downloads, it says. Some are this .wma format, which I'm sure Windows Schmedia player can interpret, and some are genuine mp3's. So I'm downloading two. One from Fastball and one from some band named mojave something that I've never heard of. I have no interest in either of the songs; I picked stuff that I imagined wouldn't make me throw up, but it's not anything I would ordinarily be interested in. I'm just not that 'hip' anymore, I guess.
I have to qualify this: I have never used Napster or Gnutella or any of the other services. I'm not shilling for anyone here. I just want to know, what in the hell is the difference between what I'm doing right now and what a zillion napster users have been doing for the last several months? I have not paid a dime for either of these songs. I was required to put in an email address -- oh its a valid address all right but I haven't checked that particular hotmail account in eight months or so and it has no visible reference back to me -- and a zip code, which I 'mistyped.' But no 'beam-it' came down to check my cd player for a valid copy of the CD. I just have to wonder, and again excuse me for being kind of obtuse about this, but WHY is this not being included in some massive DMCA-fired lawsuit against mtv.com for dropping me, a would-be music pirate, off at the scene of the crime? I read no EULA, I agreed to nothing, I paid no cash, I entered no credit card. Nothing appeared to stop me from just taking the songs. I was encouraged to do so. Am I ranting? I'll stop now. Just had to comment on this.
Well, maybe when people say "Viola" they intend you to hear the zing of a chord being played on the viola.
"It would be illegal for me to use a star-trek like replicator to exactly atom-for-atom replicate Ford many times"
That's interesting. What happens when that becomes possible? Most companies are, in all reality, re-using the brilliant ideas of a few. I mean the car is the car. "Fine German engineering" aside, it's still four wheels driven by gas exploding against cylinders. If you can pop one out of a replicator you don't need the Ford Motor Co., do you? You certainly don't need Mercedes-Fucking-Benz. When all that's left is the idea, I wonder how long our current social and economic system will last. A corrupt and idiotic congress may make the copying of physical objects illegal, but the law would probably be violated so much it would make the entire legal system a shambles. The whole game of supply and demand would be reduced to raw materials. And the real winners of that new economy might turn out to be the garbagemen - they would have all the raw material, of course.
There's only a SID in NT / 2k. There is no SID in 95. The reason you reboot in 9x is to re-register your PC with the local WINS server. That sequence only happens on bootup. Yeah, if there's no WINS server who gives a rip, but this is the same OS that re-installs your network drivers when you change your IP address.
In NT the SID has nothing to do with the computer name. It's a big-ass (32-bit?) field that differentiates it from other PC's. Two NT boxes with different names can have the same SID. That's why when you use disk-cloning to stamp out massive numbers of NT boxes you have to use some sid-changing utility because identical sids cause fits to the security subsystem. Fun stuff like shortcuts on one PC being mapped back to another PC happens when you don't change SID's during cloning.
In NT when you change the netbios name you have to of course re-register with the WINS server, and also if you're on a domain there's an account for your PC that allows the domain to trust it called COMPUTERNAME$. It has to re-register that account and again due to sheer laziness none of this can happen except at startup.
Don't hate me for what I know. It's just my fuckin' job.
>"Hence you can't run FOO.EXE, FOO.DRV and FOO.DLL at the same time."
.INI file. It's called wininit.ini, and it's the same in NT as in 9x. And 2000.
Sorry. I progam in Windows. You can. You can run MULTIPLE instances of FOO.EXE if you like. As many as will fit in memory. What you can't do is overwrite one that's held open by the system (say, the network driver). If the system were designed to unload that driver, and release it, when it was being updated, this wouldn't be quite the problem that it is. The feeble solution is the
If you don't already know, 2000 is almost EXACTLY the same under the hood, programmatically, as NT. It's just a more stable implementation -- what they should have done way back in NT 3.1. A lot of bugfixes. I don't know where people get the 65,000 bugs from -- right now most of my problems with my 2k box are coming from my foolish decision to install IE5.5, which is a total wreck. It ran like a dream until then. This integration of shell and explorer is a dumber idea than most . . .
The real problem is Microsoft laziness, as most people have figured out. The install routine of many programs could dynamically unload and reload the associated drivers but does not. You can do a lot of things without rebooting in 2000, like change the IP address, that you couldn't in earlier versions. What causes a reboot most of the time in 2000 is actually dumb install programs that insist on restarting to refresh the registry. I frequently just ignore the "you must reboot" in 2000 because I know it's not necessary. Only when new drivers are installed and the installer is just too dim to put all the reg keys and dlls in place do I have to actually restart to run whatever's in wininit. I once had the thing up for 60 days, which for a release 1.0 of anything Microsoft is pretty impressive.
What should be obvious in the patent system, and is not, is that if a company patents some concept and immediately finds dozens of people using it out there, the existence of prior art ought to be made self-evident. There needs to be a mechanism put into the patent process; maybe a 'trial period' like you get at your job. If you patent your idea and go out into the world to litigate and immediately find a half-dozen people using 'such a system' without any prior knowledge of what you're doing, that ought to immediately disqualify you the patenter and your absurd patent. And maybe qualify you for a court date on charges of fraud and attempted extortion.
After all, when a company does as is suggested in your sig here, it's clear that the only real goal was to bilk people out of a fee for doing something they already knew how to do before the patent was ever inked. . .
Thank you. That is EXACTLY what I was getting at. Knowing how to thieve is NOT the same as actual thieving. That is the difference between a free society and a society in which thought is controlled. And not only that, your example points up the absurdity of trying to control people's presumed intentions rather than dealing with the consequences of their acts. Confiscating all hammers wouldn't be enough -- rocks would have to be made illegal!
I agree with the last half of your post. But you misread my intent; the strength or weakness of the encryption scheme is not society's problem. Businesses accept a certain level of risk when they go out into the world to do their business. If they're not willing to accept the risk of piracy, for example, for easily and perfectly copied media, they need to just get out of that business. If that risk becomes part of public concern and policy to negate, then we have our government controlling the economy, and putting legal means in to ensure that a business which should in a free market, fail because of their own poor decisions, does not. What does that remind you of?
Well, it's definitely not on the same level as, say, "Hey Jude" or "Stairway to Heaven." But I gotta like it. Did you actually rehearse that? Or did you just play chords and read the code aloud. However you did it, it's a recorded work of music, and copyrightable. And free speech.
Actually listening to your song made me think of something else rather frightening. I have spent quite a lot of time and effort 'reverse engineering' the recordings of various bands and artists. In fact I used to get paid pretty regularly for other bass players to come over to my house, give me a tape of whatever they wanted to know, and have me transcribe it for them in tablature. Under the logic being applied in the DMCA, that act may be a violation of the intellectual property rights of (insert lame top 40 artist here). I've 'reverse engineered' hundreds of songs. I wonder if this analogy would make sense if someone took it, inscribed it on a bass guitar, and smacked Judge Kaplan over the head with it. Repeatedly. The fact that I can KNOW and understand how a song was played, and make that knowledge available to others, does not mean I am pirating the work in question or taking away profits from the originator of the work. It's a rarer ability than the ability to, for example, understand the words (at least until the last 10 years or so of music). But that is essentially what DeCSS is all about. Someone with good 'programming' ears transcribed the encryption scheme that was very plain to them in the CSS algorithm and made it public. Just like someone like me can very plainly understand a bass line and chord structure that is so much mojo to even another bass player . . . it's something I think I am going to write to my congressbeing(s) about.
You've been had by the MPAA's 'logic' if you can't see this. It doesn't matter if it was a good encryption scheme or it was a feeble one. Once the scheme was known it was broken, gone, and voided. MPAA wants to rewrite the history of that event in a very Orwellian fashion, by making it illegal to know about it. Apply this to a larger context, and it becomes illegal to publicize other feeble encryption schemes. This makes sites like Bugtraq illegal, and the l0pht, instead of providing a service by embarrasing Microsoft, is now illegaly reverse-engineering their encryption scheme.
Which puts people like me right behind the eight-ball. It's my job to seek out those kinds of vulernabilities and protect my very real production system against them. But under the DMCA the act of seeking out vulnerabilities is now 'sneaky' and 'hackerlike' behavior. Regardless of whether it's to keep ahead of genuine theives or become one myself, the ruling that Kaplan has laid down doesn't differentiate. The MPAA has people snowed on this piracy thing. The fundamental truth is, it is not the problem of the law, the justice system, or the community at large that the MPAA chose such a childish, feeble scheme to protect their works. It's out in the open now and it is not my responsibility or yours or anyone else's to give up our constitutional rights to talk about what we choose to talk about or think about what we choose to think about just to protect their lame-ass scheme. They are left with exactly the tools that they've always had to defend against piracy, which are 1) punishing pirates when they're caught. And 2) punishing pirates when they're caught. Prevention of the means of piracy should not be the public's problem. But the DMCA makes it the public's problem, and in the process stomps on our right to THINK about piracy. It's the beginning of thought control and it's absolutely terrifying.
What really cracks me up is that if they'd just kept their mouths shut they would be having no problems. I predict very confidently that if the prices of DVD's remain at the astonishingly low rates they are now, piracy of DVD's will remain almost nonexistent no matter how easy they become to pirate. For the same reason that videotape piracy is pretty much a thing of the past; it's cheap to buy a videotape and you can be assured that you're getting a good quality copy. When videotapes were $80, they weren't worth buying, but having a friend run off a copy was worth the effort and the relatively minor risk. If DVD remains in the ~$20 range, they will never have a major problem with DVD piracy. But I imagine that just like the RIAA the MPAA is planning to jack prices up on this new format once it's taken over the market. And in order to secure their market, they think, they're doing their level best to make piracy impossible. Except that they don't seem to be very smart about it. I predict that if much more of this goes on the DVD will go exactly where DIVX went -- nowhere. The DVD section in any movie rental store I see is still a small percentage, less than 10%, usually, of the stock, and the selection is truly awful, most of the time. If the stink of what's happening in Jester Kaplan's court gets into the public's face people will stay away in droves from the new formats, and this incredible racket that the MPAA has planned for themselves will evaporate like so much vague speculation. But that's just my hope.
Only the most superficial company on earth could sue an employee (or anyone, for that matter) for revealing that its computer was designed in the shape of a common regular solid.
If it had been the Apple Dodecahedron that might have been worth suing over. But a cube?
There is actual math that supports this. I do not have my Discover magazine article conveniently in my sphincter to pull out and read, but I recall along with the highway example, a physics demonstration of the principle where a stick (or something) was being supported by several rubber-bands. And the researcher was able to make the stick rise (i.e., show it was supported _better_) when he cut some of the unneccessary supports. I apologize for my extremely vague description, but as counterintuitive as what you've seen reads, it's got some genuine examples that can be tested in the real world.
My keyboard (an MS natural which you will pry from my cold, dead, 90-WPM fingers) is almost 4 years old, and has a fine, attractive polish on the space bar where my right thumb hits it, another where my palms it it, and of course very shiny E, T, and R keys. Other keys are polished to varying degrees of perfection. It also has a fine patina of dirt on the vertical surfaces which I refuse to do anything about. And only a non-typist would complain about "extra" keys.
You can buy blank DVD's without the keytrack space burnt out. You just have to know where. . .
Hey! No fair! You're illegally providing people with un-filtered access to their elected representatives! Stop that at once!
This is the same kind of "reasoning" that is used in property seizure laws, where your money or your house is supposed to have committed a crime, therefore it is seized by the gest^H^H^H^Hcops and, whatever, "punished" I guess. Of course since it's property it doesn't have to stand trial and neither do you.
The point is they are trying to make a whole class of things illegal because even though the individual acts are legal and they would ordinarily have no legal leg to prohibit you from doing them, the components could be brought together to make something illegal happen. In the case of dangerous explosives like gunpowder or fertilizer or nitroglycerine I could see some basic caution, but these are just IDEAS for crying out loud.
So, we are seeing the beginning of thought control, are we not? It's dangerous to KNOW how to crack the MPAA's infantile encryption scheme. That's the only thing the source code provides. You still have to perform a physical act to compile and use it, but apparently the difference between knowing how to commit a crime and actually doing so is lost on these people. . .
Just get 'em to step over a cliff . . . Seriously, there are supposed to be billions of pages of HTML in the world. Not all of them are on American soil, either. Maybe Kaplan doesn't know that yet. Can these dumkoffs seriously think they can police all of that constantly shifting digital space?