Hydrogen is no worse than, say, kerosene or gasoline. And as was pointed out last year, jumbo jets powered by hydrogen and running into buildings wouldn't spill liquid fuel all over the place where it can burn and melt steel. The gas would rise up and disperse very quickly.
Oh, by the way, can you tell me what the fatality rate for the Hindenburg blowup was? 35 dead out of 97? You know, I can't recall the last time a plane crash landed so spectacularly and still had 2 out of every 3 people on board survive.
The universe is far too simple to be explained by mathematics.
Well, it can. Sort of. Pure mathematics is great for predicting a single event of a simple system. For modeling the complex behavior of many interacting systems (nuclear reactions, protein folding, sociology), we've got no single equation that can do it. You can't predict it, but you can simulate it, using the basic equations to predict one event at a time. We don't have an equation of gravity that works for more then two bodies of mass, but what we can do is model each pair interaction for a short time interval, modify the system accordingly, advance the timer one tick, and repeat.
you are saying that Microsoft products will dominate the software market if the Hollings bill passes?
Well, on the one hand, there's M$'s apparent eagerness to get into the anti-piracy club. Their patent on a DRM OS, the WinXP activation nonsense, etc.
On the other hand, there's their historic ineptitude in matters involving security.
So yeah. Microsoft will dominate the market. But get this: they will do so for the exact opposite reasons that they dominate the home PC market today. Right now, they own it because they have the most features and ease of use and this unfortunately results in poor security. Post-SSSCA, they'd have poor security fortunately resulting in the greatest allowance of features and ease of fair use.
The funny thing about Geodesic domes is that the bigger you build it, the stronger it gets. From the picture in the article, this one is downright tiny. Small wonder it's 'only' lasted 48 years, 30 of them with little or no maintenance.
That's exactly what copyright law does. It makes it illegal for you to copy.
Copyright is, or at any rate should be, keeping me making money off of, or claiming as my own, someone else's work.
That's certainly not what it is.
[shrug] Your's is a view of copyright which is far more applicable to a pre-Internet/PC age. And even then it was unenforcable. All you could do was get the guys who did it to make money, since Joe Smith copying tapes in his den was just as unstoppable as Joe Jr. ripping his CDs is today. So while copyright is in theory stopping any copying whatsoever, it has in reality always worked the way I said. Now, when copying has gotten even easier and less controllable, the IP overlords want to actually use the precise meaning of copyright. All the while totally ignoring the fact that is was never even remotely doable in the past, much less in the future.
It may be an exercise in futility, but it's precisely what copyright law does.
It has been my experience that when a law cannot be enforced most, some, nor even a vanishingly small percent of the time, it ends up getting used in grudges and power games rather than in applicable cases. The anti-sodomy (read: literally anything but normal sex) laws still on the books in dozens of states get used by estranged heterosexual couples in nasty divorces and custody battles more often than anything else. It's actually a good parallel to the DMCA. Both are generally unenforcable. Both are banning something not proven to be harmful. Both are being misused and neither of them is accomplishing whatever it was they were originally supposed to do. Prohibition and the War on Drugs, especially the Property Seizure laws associated with it, are another example.
The DMCA on the other hand mainly focuses on those trying to profit off of copyright infringement. People like Slyarov, and companies like Elcomsoft.
...and Professor Felten who was specifically not profitting from his work, and the guy who cracked the Aibo code for fun, and 2600 who got no money whatsoever for posting and linking DeCSS (has anyone?), and so forth and so on. Even if you were right and this is at its heart a great piece of legislation (which I have already vehemently argued against), it is so poorly written that it is being misused far, far more often than it is being used to do any good.
So if I want to copy your slashdot posts and distribute them on my site, I may do that?
Go for it. You have my blessing. The only thing I would ask is that you attribute them correctly. But as there's really no way I can force you to do that, I won't lose too much sleep if you don't.
And you think that making it illegal to be a potential criminal is a good thing.
The insanity of that statement is self-evident.
You're the one who said the DMCA, which does exactly that, is a good thing. You think the DMCA makes sense. The DMCA, among other things, makes it illegal to be a potential criminal; or rather, to tell people how to be potential criminals, which is just as bad. Therefore, you think that any information regarding committing crimes, especially when embodied in software, should be banned. Explain to me what part of this reasoning is 'insanity'. Try to do so without resorting to insults.
No, fair use copies are OK, and devices that aren't primarily designed to circumvent technological measures which effectively control access to copyrighted works are OK.
The whole 'primarily designed for' argument is crap. If DeCSS or the ebook crack had been bundled along with a large collection of legit features (thus making the whole program 'not primarily designed' for that purpose) nothing would have changed.
Besides, listen to your own argument: If I want to fairly use this IP that I bought a license to use, I'm not allowed to seek outside assistance in doing so? Get real.
So all copyright law is stupid.
Never said that. I said trying to keep me from copying is stupid. Copyright is, or at any rate should be, keeping me making money off of, or claiming as my own, someone else's work. Doing so moves the activity much further into public view and is far more easily enforced. Still nowhere near perfect, but trying to keep tabs on what every singe person does on their home PC is, as I said, an exercise in futility.
If you pass a law that you know you can't enforce and will only make things worse by trying, why do you bother? Principle must eventually give way to practicality.
I guess you release everything you own into the public domain?
For now we'll ignore the strange notion of 'owning' information. Do I demand that anyone who wants to make a copy of a work of mine pay me to get permission to do so? Do I demand that nobody ever try to get around any protections on said works on pain of litigation? Certainly not.
They should have let Maul escape, and had older Anakin kill him to take his place beside Palpatine. Would have been so much better in my opinion.
That would have been excellent! And it would make some scenes later on in ESB and ROTJ even better. You'd see the exact same thing happening again with the foreshadowing of Luke becoming a Sith in the swamp on Dagobah and then the Emporer telling Luke to kill Vader/Anakin and take his place. For someone who watched them in order, there'd actually be some suspense about poor Luke's fate.
Not on hotmail. I've set up email addresses on hotmail such as "sdjkleiojsel" and never used them for anything. Within a week I am receiving spam. The addresses are leaking out somehow.
There was actually an experiment done along these lines. 12 email addresses started with various providers. Some left untouched, some used exactly once with things like message boards, registering a domain, using an AOL chatroom, that kind of thing. Interesting results.
I also seem to recall an article about someone who designed a webpage with a mailto: on it such that every person who visited it saw a different email address. I can't remember where I saw it or what the results were, though.:(
And you think that making it illegal to be a potential criminal is a good thing. That punishing people despite their not having committed a crime is not only acceptable, but quite logical. You've said so here. "I just don't see the DMCA as inane. I think it makes sense."
You yourself said that scanners and OCR had to be used to make dead tree text freely accesible on a computer. Replace "scanners and OCR" with "Advanced Ebook Processor" and "dead tree" with "Adobe's ebook" and you have the situation Elcomsoft is in right now. Why isn't Memorex, the manufacturer of the scanner sitting right next to me (which came with some handy OCR software), in this bind?
You can still scan and OCR an e-book without breaking the law. Just put your handheld scanner up to the screen. What you can't do is create a device which allows consumers to bypass technological measures to instantly make perfect digital copies
Oh, but nearly perfect copies which could then be distributed flawlessly would be ok? I guess since MP3 isn't quite CD quality the RIAA should be giving its blessing to ripping and trading programs everywhere? After all, they're not perfect copies and you certainly can't get them instantly. Would a process that took 10 minutes and was only 99% perfect be ok for reading ebooks? How about an hour and 95%? A day and 90%? At what point does it become acceptable to write a program to copy this stuff? Would a perfect OCR program constitute a circumvention device to you? Never mind the unbelievable usefulness such an invention would have, it could read copy-protected books! Oh no, we have to ban it at once!
Face it; trying to keep people from copying data that is in their hands or on their computers is futile. Trying to do it with a piece of legislation is futile and stupid.
You have to use scanners and OCR software to exert your right to read the book on your laptop
And yet, oddly enough, there are quite a number of large US-based companies selling those items without fear of being arrested for it. Tools to copy books are legal. Tools to copy ebooks are illegal. Anyone else see the problem here?
E-book manufacturers are merely trying to receive the same protections.
How do they achieve "the same protections" by prosecuting people for doing what you describe as the equivalent of scanning and OCRing a book? Sounds to me like they are going way above and beyond the level of protection afforded by dead trees.
I guess it was because they were selling the software in the United States.
Was Sklyarov? Did he personally sell the software? No. It was the company he worked for. When France made M$ pay a few million francs, I doubt the idea of arresting whatever Microsoft programmer happened to be at hand crossed their minds.
I give up. You seem quite content with the idea of banning perfectly legitimate tools and even the discussion of those tools simply because they are sometimes used to commit crimes. "Banning the means is as good as banning the ends", as it were. I pity you.
And since the CBDTPA is just version 2 of the DMCA, you should feel right at home if and when it gets passed.
No one has been prosecuted or even sued over the DMCA for exercising fair use.
Did you even read the EFF article?
I'll even admit that I possess DeCSS and use it for fair use purposes. And no one can sue me for that, because it's legal.
"No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work".
Since DeCSS bypasses the encryption and, as you say, is primarily designed for that purpose, it is illegal.
On the other hand, if it has substantial non-infringing use it would certainly be exempt. But then why was 2600 prosecuted for posting something that is perfectly legal? The fair use applications for AEBPR (Elcomsoft's ebook program) are numerous, so it should be legal, right? AiboPet [the guy who hacked his Aibo] got no money whatsoever for his programs. Furthermore, his programs were useless if you didn't already have an Aibo so Sony wasn't losing any money on it. But they sued him anyway; if that isn't being prosecuted for fair use, I dunno what is. Bnetd is the best example yet; it is an extremely useful alternative to the crappy Battle.net and its ability to circumvent copy protection is limited only to allowing a certain type of multiplayer mode. Yet Blizzard's first proclamations claimed that it was illegal. You agree with them?
Which is why a law saying "anything that can be used to do this illegal thing is illegal itself" is so incredibly stupid.
That's not what the law says, and I suspect that you already knew that.
That is exactly what it says. See above excerpt from the DMCA.
[DeCSS rant]
Are you reading your own posts? First you say "DeCSS is legal", then you turn around and claim that it was primarily designed to be used illegally and thus falls under the DMCA and is illegal. Do make up your mind.
And do you really think that the MPAA would have left well enough alone if the first version of DeCSS fit your description? I already pointed out that the Aibo hack doesn't help you 'copy an Aibo', yet Sony prosecuted over it. Why would Valenti, a technophobe of the first order, be any different?
No but killing people, breaking windows, and crashing cars are not illegal
I'm sorry, what color is the sky in your world? Killing someone is most certainly illegal. Breaking windows, as in "someone else's window", is most certainly illegal. Deliberately crashing a car and doing damage to someone or something else is most certainly illegal.
Tell me, what is the purpose of a pistol? Do you go hunting with a.38? Handguns are designed to put holes in people. Not animals for hunting, people. Doing so is illegal, except in certain cases like self-defense. And yet there is a large industry devoted to making and selling them. And it is legal. Why is software any different?
I just don't see the DMCA as inane. I think it makes sense.
The DMCA represents preemptive law enforcement: "Let's get these criminals before they actually commit a crime". I can get a copy of DeCSS, post it on a webpage, and start getting nastygrams and subpeonas from the MPAA without ever actually using it to copy a DVD. To start prosecuting people because they _might_ commit a crime in the future is something you'd find in an Orwelling dystopia.
The SSSCA was the most disgusting law I've ever seen in my life.
I agree. But I think it is extremely hypocritical of you to call the DMCA a godsend and the SSSCA/CBDTPA disgusting. They both try to achieve the same goal: making it illegal to create or distribute tools that can be used to do something that is already illegal.
And that has absolutely nothing to do with the DMCA.
I know. My point was that just because the law says you are guaranteed something, it doesn't mean you are going to get it. The DMCA says that fair use is protected, but that has been seen to be a crock of sewage.
Anything can conceivably be used illegally
Exactly. Which is why a law saying "anything that can be used to do this illegal thing is illegal itself" is so incredibly stupid. If this same logic were applied to other crimes, it would literally be illegal to be born.
All the legitimate and fair uses of DeCSS could easily be accomplished in a way which discourages illegimate and unfair uses. If the makers of the software had done that, they likely would be allowed to distribute their software. They didn't, so they aren't.
Do tell. How? If I run Linux, how do I play a DVD I purchased on a DVD drive that I purcahsed? And exactly how should Jon Johansen have written DeCSS so that it could never be used to copy an unencrypted DVD? He released the source code, you know. After it was made public he had zero control over it. But it's stupid anyway idea. Do we demand guns that can't possibly be used to kill people? Food that can't possibly be choked on? Cars that can't possibly crash? Crowbars that can't possibly be used to break windows?
I think it's clear that the primary purpose of DeCSS is to promote copyright infringement.
No, the primary purpose of DeCSS is to unencrypt the content on a DVD. That it can be used otherwise is irrelevant.
I don't like our copyright infringement laws, but I think it's within our government's rights to enact them.
True. But that doesn't mean we can't berate the dumbass politicians and companies that pass laws like this. Embracing copyleft is a good approach, but getting inane leislation like the DMCA off the books would be even better. Free (as in love) software would likely be illegal under something like the CBDTPA/SSSCA, should they ever pass it.
And we're guaranteed a right to a speedy trial, yet Dmitri spent a month in jail before he even got a bail hearing.
News flash: the infamous They don't seem to care about fair use. As long as something can conceivably be used illegally, it risks falling victim to the DMCA. The legitimate and fair uses of DeCSS are too numerous to count, yet it's illegal to post it.
Back to my previous post; not only does making the means rather than the ends illegal just as bad, it's actually worse since many legitimate activities will be included, regardless of the intent. The clause you mention is supposed to address that, but it's being ignored at every turn.
Yeah, I thought of that too. These bulbs would be able to produce the same light running on far less electricity and last practically forever. Guess those florescent bulbs are doomed now.
"They" don't take away your right to fair use. "They" make it technically difficult to exercise your right to fair use. Big difference.
And then make it illegal to get around those technical difficulties and exercise fair use. No difference. Making an activity illegal and making the means by which you perform activity A illegal amount to the same thing.
Strictly speaking, I know very little about botany, so I'm not qualified to say whether cross-pollinating plants are the exception or the rule, but you are correct, they do exist. Which is why insects that perform such services are such a popular niche.
But won't evolution stop if people just clone themselves?
Yes. But arguably evolution has pretty much stopped for humans already. Evolution involves adaptation to make optimum use the environment. We humans are advanced enough that we adapt our environment to suit us. We are the only creature that can survive in any climate, even one where there is no climate, like space. About the only selection left for us is sexual.
Also, the lizards you speak of (I haven't checked to see if they do exist) could still evolve. Single cell organisms are sexless and their offspring are essentially clones of the original, yet they managed to evolve to multi- and mega-cellular life forms. The danger is that there is no genetic exchange between members which, quite frankly, even plants do. They can adapt through mutation, but little else.
Not neccessarily. Go read "The Light of Other Days", by Benford and Barnes (I think). At the end, the post-human civilization embarks on a project to retrieve the mind of every human being ever to exist and place it in a newly cloned body.
The book itself describes what might happen if privacy was completely and utterly erased for everyone, even the rich and powerful. It's like the extreme fulfillment of David Brin's transparent society.
There is lots of research into direct implants and other "wetware" these days. But even something as simple as better ways for people to work together can be revolutationary.
Understatement of the century! Have you ever thought about what programming would be like if your mind had a window into a computer? Imagine having instant and perfect recall of every line of code and optimization technique, as well as documentation on all the library or API commands being but a thought away?
The downside of course is that developing an effective IDE for the mind would probably be a while in the making. But of course it's an accelerating process.
Ah, how nice to have been born late enough that I may very well live forever!
Re:The main thing I think the article misses ...
on
The Next Generation
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· Score: 2
Tip of the hat to Scott Adams...
It's obvious that the world today has three distinct classes of people, each with its own evolutionary destiny:
Knowledgeable Computer Users who will evolve into godlike noncorporeal beings who rule the universe (except for those who work in tech support).
Computer Owners who try to pass as knowledgeable but secretly use hand calculators to add totals to their Excel spreadsheets. This group will gravitate toward jobs as high school principals and operators of pet crematoriums. Eventually they will become extinct.
Non-computer Users who will grow tails, sit in zoos, and fling dung at tourists.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, by the way, can you tell me what the fatality rate for the Hindenburg blowup was? 35 dead out of 97? You know, I can't recall the last time a plane crash landed so spectacularly and still had 2 out of every 3 people on board survive.
Well, it can. Sort of. Pure mathematics is great for predicting a single event of a simple system. For modeling the complex behavior of many interacting systems (nuclear reactions, protein folding, sociology), we've got no single equation that can do it. You can't predict it, but you can simulate it, using the basic equations to predict one event at a time. We don't have an equation of gravity that works for more then two bodies of mass, but what we can do is model each pair interaction for a short time interval, modify the system accordingly, advance the timer one tick, and repeat.
Well, on the one hand, there's M$'s apparent eagerness to get into the anti-piracy club. Their patent on a DRM OS, the WinXP activation nonsense, etc.
On the other hand, there's their historic ineptitude in matters involving security.
So yeah. Microsoft will dominate the market. But get this: they will do so for the exact opposite reasons that they dominate the home PC market today. Right now, they own it because they have the most features and ease of use and this unfortunately results in poor security. Post-SSSCA, they'd have poor security fortunately resulting in the greatest allowance of features and ease of fair use.
The funny thing about Geodesic domes is that the bigger you build it, the stronger it gets. From the picture in the article, this one is downright tiny. Small wonder it's 'only' lasted 48 years, 30 of them with little or no maintenance.
Copyright is, or at any rate should be, keeping me making money off of, or claiming as my own, someone else's work.
That's certainly not what it is.
[shrug] Your's is a view of copyright which is far more applicable to a pre-Internet/PC age. And even then it was unenforcable. All you could do was get the guys who did it to make money, since Joe Smith copying tapes in his den was just as unstoppable as Joe Jr. ripping his CDs is today. So while copyright is in theory stopping any copying whatsoever, it has in reality always worked the way I said. Now, when copying has gotten even easier and less controllable, the IP overlords want to actually use the precise meaning of copyright. All the while totally ignoring the fact that is was never even remotely doable in the past, much less in the future.
It may be an exercise in futility, but it's precisely what copyright law does.
It has been my experience that when a law cannot be enforced most, some, nor even a vanishingly small percent of the time, it ends up getting used in grudges and power games rather than in applicable cases. The anti-sodomy (read: literally anything but normal sex) laws still on the books in dozens of states get used by estranged heterosexual couples in nasty divorces and custody battles more often than anything else. It's actually a good parallel to the DMCA. Both are generally unenforcable. Both are banning something not proven to be harmful. Both are being misused and neither of them is accomplishing whatever it was they were originally supposed to do. Prohibition and the War on Drugs, especially the Property Seizure laws associated with it, are another example.
The DMCA on the other hand mainly focuses on those trying to profit off of copyright infringement. People like Slyarov, and companies like Elcomsoft.
So if I want to copy your slashdot posts and distribute them on my site, I may do that?
Go for it. You have my blessing. The only thing I would ask is that you attribute them correctly. But as there's really no way I can force you to do that, I won't lose too much sleep if you don't.
The insanity of that statement is self-evident.
You're the one who said the DMCA, which does exactly that, is a good thing. You think the DMCA makes sense. The DMCA, among other things, makes it illegal to be a potential criminal; or rather, to tell people how to be potential criminals, which is just as bad. Therefore, you think that any information regarding committing crimes, especially when embodied in software, should be banned. Explain to me what part of this reasoning is 'insanity'. Try to do so without resorting to insults.
No, fair use copies are OK, and devices that aren't primarily designed to circumvent technological measures which effectively control access to copyrighted works are OK.
The whole 'primarily designed for' argument is crap. If DeCSS or the ebook crack had been bundled along with a large collection of legit features (thus making the whole program 'not primarily designed' for that purpose) nothing would have changed.
Besides, listen to your own argument: If I want to fairly use this IP that I bought a license to use, I'm not allowed to seek outside assistance in doing so? Get real.
So all copyright law is stupid.
Never said that. I said trying to keep me from copying is stupid. Copyright is, or at any rate should be, keeping me making money off of, or claiming as my own, someone else's work. Doing so moves the activity much further into public view and is far more easily enforced. Still nowhere near perfect, but trying to keep tabs on what every singe person does on their home PC is, as I said, an exercise in futility.
If you pass a law that you know you can't enforce and will only make things worse by trying, why do you bother? Principle must eventually give way to practicality.
I guess you release everything you own into the public domain?
For now we'll ignore the strange notion of 'owning' information. Do I demand that anyone who wants to make a copy of a work of mine pay me to get permission to do so? Do I demand that nobody ever try to get around any protections on said works on pain of litigation? Certainly not.
That would have been excellent! And it would make some scenes later on in ESB and ROTJ even better. You'd see the exact same thing happening again with the foreshadowing of Luke becoming a Sith in the swamp on Dagobah and then the Emporer telling Luke to kill Vader/Anakin and take his place. For someone who watched them in order, there'd actually be some suspense about poor Luke's fate.
Ahhh, but what if the person who wants to copy books and the Kinko's employee are the same person?
There was actually an experiment done along these lines. 12 email addresses started with various providers. Some left untouched, some used exactly once with things like message boards, registering a domain, using an AOL chatroom, that kind of thing. Interesting results.
I also seem to recall an article about someone who designed a webpage with a mailto: on it such that every person who visited it saw a different email address. I can't remember where I saw it or what the results were, though. :(
And you think that making it illegal to be a potential criminal is a good thing. That punishing people despite their not having committed a crime is not only acceptable, but quite logical. You've said so here. "I just don't see the DMCA as inane. I think it makes sense."
You yourself said that scanners and OCR had to be used to make dead tree text freely accesible on a computer. Replace "scanners and OCR" with "Advanced Ebook Processor" and "dead tree" with "Adobe's ebook" and you have the situation Elcomsoft is in right now. Why isn't Memorex, the manufacturer of the scanner sitting right next to me (which came with some handy OCR software), in this bind?
You can still scan and OCR an e-book without breaking the law. Just put your handheld scanner up to the screen. What you can't do is create a device which allows consumers to bypass technological measures to instantly make perfect digital copies
Oh, but nearly perfect copies which could then be distributed flawlessly would be ok? I guess since MP3 isn't quite CD quality the RIAA should be giving its blessing to ripping and trading programs everywhere? After all, they're not perfect copies and you certainly can't get them instantly. Would a process that took 10 minutes and was only 99% perfect be ok for reading ebooks? How about an hour and 95%? A day and 90%? At what point does it become acceptable to write a program to copy this stuff? Would a perfect OCR program constitute a circumvention device to you? Never mind the unbelievable usefulness such an invention would have, it could read copy-protected books! Oh no, we have to ban it at once!
Face it; trying to keep people from copying data that is in their hands or on their computers is futile. Trying to do it with a piece of legislation is futile and stupid.
And yet, oddly enough, there are quite a number of large US-based companies selling those items without fear of being arrested for it. Tools to copy books are legal. Tools to copy ebooks are illegal. Anyone else see the problem here?
E-book manufacturers are merely trying to receive the same protections.
How do they achieve "the same protections" by prosecuting people for doing what you describe as the equivalent of scanning and OCRing a book? Sounds to me like they are going way above and beyond the level of protection afforded by dead trees.
Was Sklyarov? Did he personally sell the software? No. It was the company he worked for. When France made M$ pay a few million francs, I doubt the idea of arresting whatever Microsoft programmer happened to be at hand crossed their minds.
And since the CBDTPA is just version 2 of the DMCA, you should feel right at home if and when it gets passed.
Did you even read the EFF article?
I'll even admit that I possess DeCSS and use it for fair use purposes. And no one can sue me for that, because it's legal.
"No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work".
Since DeCSS bypasses the encryption and, as you say, is primarily designed for that purpose, it is illegal.
On the other hand, if it has substantial non-infringing use it would certainly be exempt. But then why was 2600 prosecuted for posting something that is perfectly legal? The fair use applications for AEBPR (Elcomsoft's ebook program) are numerous, so it should be legal, right? AiboPet [the guy who hacked his Aibo] got no money whatsoever for his programs. Furthermore, his programs were useless if you didn't already have an Aibo so Sony wasn't losing any money on it. But they sued him anyway; if that isn't being prosecuted for fair use, I dunno what is. Bnetd is the best example yet; it is an extremely useful alternative to the crappy Battle.net and its ability to circumvent copy protection is limited only to allowing a certain type of multiplayer mode. Yet Blizzard's first proclamations claimed that it was illegal. You agree with them?
Which is why a law saying "anything that can be used to do this illegal thing is illegal itself" is so incredibly stupid.
That's not what the law says, and I suspect that you already knew that.
That is exactly what it says. See above excerpt from the DMCA.
[DeCSS rant]
Are you reading your own posts? First you say "DeCSS is legal", then you turn around and claim that it was primarily designed to be used illegally and thus falls under the DMCA and is illegal. Do make up your mind.
And do you really think that the MPAA would have left well enough alone if the first version of DeCSS fit your description? I already pointed out that the Aibo hack doesn't help you 'copy an Aibo', yet Sony prosecuted over it. Why would Valenti, a technophobe of the first order, be any different?
No but killing people, breaking windows, and crashing cars are not illegal
I'm sorry, what color is the sky in your world? Killing someone is most certainly illegal. Breaking windows, as in "someone else's window", is most certainly illegal. Deliberately crashing a car and doing damage to someone or something else is most certainly illegal.
Tell me, what is the purpose of a pistol? Do you go hunting with a .38? Handguns are designed to put holes in people. Not animals for hunting, people. Doing so is illegal, except in certain cases like self-defense. And yet there is a large industry devoted to making and selling them. And it is legal. Why is software any different?
I just don't see the DMCA as inane. I think it makes sense.
The DMCA represents preemptive law enforcement: "Let's get these criminals before they actually commit a crime". I can get a copy of DeCSS, post it on a webpage, and start getting nastygrams and subpeonas from the MPAA without ever actually using it to copy a DVD. To start prosecuting people because they _might_ commit a crime in the future is something you'd find in an Orwelling dystopia.
The SSSCA was the most disgusting law I've ever seen in my life.
I agree. But I think it is extremely hypocritical of you to call the DMCA a godsend and the SSSCA/CBDTPA disgusting. They both try to achieve the same goal: making it illegal to create or distribute tools that can be used to do something that is already illegal.
I know. My point was that just because the law says you are guaranteed something, it doesn't mean you are going to get it. The DMCA says that fair use is protected, but that has been seen to be a crock of sewage.
Anything can conceivably be used illegally
Exactly. Which is why a law saying "anything that can be used to do this illegal thing is illegal itself" is so incredibly stupid. If this same logic were applied to other crimes, it would literally be illegal to be born.
All the legitimate and fair uses of DeCSS could easily be accomplished in a way which discourages illegimate and unfair uses. If the makers of the software had done that, they likely would be allowed to distribute their software. They didn't, so they aren't.
Do tell. How? If I run Linux, how do I play a DVD I purchased on a DVD drive that I purcahsed? And exactly how should Jon Johansen have written DeCSS so that it could never be used to copy an unencrypted DVD? He released the source code, you know. After it was made public he had zero control over it. But it's stupid anyway idea. Do we demand guns that can't possibly be used to kill people? Food that can't possibly be choked on? Cars that can't possibly crash? Crowbars that can't possibly be used to break windows?
I think it's clear that the primary purpose of DeCSS is to promote copyright infringement.
No, the primary purpose of DeCSS is to unencrypt the content on a DVD. That it can be used otherwise is irrelevant.
I don't like our copyright infringement laws, but I think it's within our government's rights to enact them.
True. But that doesn't mean we can't berate the dumbass politicians and companies that pass laws like this. Embracing copyleft is a good approach, but getting inane leislation like the DMCA off the books would be even better. Free (as in love) software would likely be illegal under something like the CBDTPA/SSSCA, should they ever pass it.
Hey, is there a patent on the process of separating fools from their money by means of comvincing hoaxes? Quick, gotta call my lawyer!
News flash: the infamous They don't seem to care about fair use. As long as something can conceivably be used illegally, it risks falling victim to the DMCA. The legitimate and fair uses of DeCSS are too numerous to count, yet it's illegal to post it.
Back to my previous post; not only does making the means rather than the ends illegal just as bad, it's actually worse since many legitimate activities will be included, regardless of the intent. The clause you mention is supposed to address that, but it's being ignored at every turn.
Yeah, I thought of that too. These bulbs would be able to produce the same light running on far less electricity and last practically forever. Guess those florescent bulbs are doomed now.
And then make it illegal to get around those technical difficulties and exercise fair use. No difference. Making an activity illegal and making the means by which you perform activity A illegal amount to the same thing.
Strictly speaking, I know very little about botany, so I'm not qualified to say whether cross-pollinating plants are the exception or the rule, but you are correct, they do exist. Which is why insects that perform such services are such a popular niche.
Yes. But arguably evolution has pretty much stopped for humans already. Evolution involves adaptation to make optimum use the environment. We humans are advanced enough that we adapt our environment to suit us. We are the only creature that can survive in any climate, even one where there is no climate, like space. About the only selection left for us is sexual.
Also, the lizards you speak of (I haven't checked to see if they do exist) could still evolve. Single cell organisms are sexless and their offspring are essentially clones of the original, yet they managed to evolve to multi- and mega-cellular life forms. The danger is that there is no genetic exchange between members which, quite frankly, even plants do. They can adapt through mutation, but little else.
And artificial wombs theoretically make women unnecessary. So if we have both, then we don't actually need humans anymore!
Really, I'm as worried that women will try to make men extinct as I am the other way around. Read: not at all.
The book itself describes what might happen if privacy was completely and utterly erased for everyone, even the rich and powerful. It's like the extreme fulfillment of David Brin's transparent society.
Understatement of the century! Have you ever thought about what programming would be like if your mind had a window into a computer? Imagine having instant and perfect recall of every line of code and optimization technique, as well as documentation on all the library or API commands being but a thought away?
The downside of course is that developing an effective IDE for the mind would probably be a while in the making. But of course it's an accelerating process.
Ah, how nice to have been born late enough that I may very well live forever!
It's obvious that the world today has three distinct classes of people, each with its own evolutionary destiny:
Knowledgeable Computer Users who will evolve into godlike noncorporeal beings who rule the universe (except for those who work in tech support).
Computer Owners who try to pass as knowledgeable but secretly use hand calculators to add totals to their Excel spreadsheets. This group will gravitate toward jobs as high school principals and operators of pet crematoriums. Eventually they will become extinct.
Non-computer Users who will grow tails, sit in zoos, and fling dung at tourists.