(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof...
I imagine, then, that this will be interpreted as covering even hyperlinks to DeCSS. It's always rather funny to see this kind of blanket phrase included in legislation - all it does is give anyone with money a licence to interpret the law as they like.
What a nightmare.
Lucky the DMCA doesn't cover British citizens (yet).
The article speaks forever about the 2.4ghz band, without ever mentioning the word "Bluetooth" which operations on 2.402ghz. Odd.
Also, does anyone know whether this 2.4ghz band is going to work around the world? Frequency Allocation nonsense has messed up US vs World cellphones (quite apart from the fact that they also use different protocols - Time Division Multiple Access (World) vs Code Division Multiple Access (most of the US)). It would be no good to bring your nice wireless laptop to another country, try to use a network printer, and end up crashing someone else's fridge. Anyway, why do Bluetooth freaks keep using fridges as an example?
So is this problem present anywhere else except California and New York, both centres of high speed living anyway? (The article mentions "Wise County, N.C." - if that's North Carolina, not North California, then there's still no convincing correlation mentioned between the drugs seized, and the high tech aspect).
Not even mentioning the fact that most geeks don't tend to move in circles where class A drug use is a big thing.
As always, with ANY news article EVER, if you know ANYTHING about the topic, you can always spot something wrong.
As we all know from the Mitnick case, a hacker can initiate nuclear strikes just by whistling down a telephone line. I mean, that's just fact, isn't it? I think the police were very prudent in arresting him before he had time to launch.
Certainly, at the moment, it's not technically possible to ban a user - witness the success of k-lines on iRC (success == null). In the UK, where over 200 free ISPs exist (we pay for local phone calls instead), I have absolutely NO idea how they could block someone technically - and in the US, new IPs are pretty easy to come by too, I'm sure!
So asking the courts to deal with it may, perhaps, force this particular user to stop abusing the service. But then the flood of cases which would follow would totally swamp a not-very-computer-literate legal system, and lead to chaos overall.
I think I just argued myself into a corner. I have no idea what to do;-)
How can the Napster say that the RIAA is acting anti-competitively? The RIAA is attempting to enforce existing copyright laws, of course, but! it has no product of its own that Napster is encroaching on. This law seems to be totally irrelevant to the whole case.
Not quite sure what this means because certainly, there are no details worth talking about yet.
But instead of the status quo ("This software might do anything, and it's not our fault"), I can just see companies changing this to "This software might do anything, but, if used correctly, it'll do this"). Perfectly open, perfectly truthful, yet completely useless anyway.
Then, when Scandisk destroys your partitions (It's actually happened to me, somehow, no idea why) Microsoft will just stand up and say "well, the user obviously wasn't using the software correctly".
5 hour keynote speech? 5 HOUR? Good god. Castro could learn from this man.
When Emperor Nero of Rome gave speeches, it was said that there were spies in the audience, and when he finished (eventually), the first person to stop applauding would be executed. Likewise with Stalin.
5 hour speech, huh? Open source really brings out the fanatics!
IANAL etc etc, but I think the following is correct:
By using the code, the company is AGREEING to the terms and conditions of the GPL. The code is peppered with this kind of comment, and this kind of defacto agreement has been upheld by the courts before, principally with those shrink wrap license farces ("By opening this, you agree to sell your mother to Microsoft, and never ask for a refund"). So a contract IS established.
Secondly, it would take a HELL of a lot of cheek for a company to stand up in court and say that they took someone's code, which was COVERED with the GPL, and just used it for their own purposes without even considering their legal standpoint.
Does this new Supreme Drive work on other sound formats? If not, Ogg/Vorbis is on its way - maybe Kenwood should focus on that instead.
Is this new tech actually just guessing the new high frequencies based on the sound it "hears"? If so, that's adding to the music in ways that might not actually work. And this has been done already - see Wowthing, which although being pretty cool, can murder some songs (I'm thinking Bon Jovi, here;-)
People who really really really *really* care about enhanced quality are probably going to buy the original CDs anyway, and won't be interested in buying (I'm assuming buying) Kenwood's Drive.
MP3 is still proprietry. This is not a good state of affairs. Kenwood developing for this is not what I want to see =)
This isn't good for anyone, not even for Rambus. Cyclically, companies who behave like this will have a brief period (or no not so brief - look at IBM, they managed for decades) of dominance, verging on monopoly - but their nemesis will come. Rambus is quite happily shooting itself in the foot for short-term gains. *sigh*
Peta.org is down, seemingly. The DNS points nowhere anymore. Looks like they (or their hosters) are complying with the order, although the WHOIS information is still available.
I don't think the HHGTTG can claim be the first, in that succeeding similar ideas (such as Everything) rip it off. It's just too much of a broad concept. However, once DNA saw the possibilities (read: commercial) in Everything, *then* he created H2G2.
As for your last point, no, I think it's astonishingly precocious if an author does not care about his audience, and still expects to be taken seriously. Some artists claim that their work is for themself, and others liking it is just a lucky chance, but that sounds desperately conceited. DNA is quite happy to reap the rewards of his popularity, but if it was more widely known that he is, at least metaphorically, raising the finger to his audience, his income would drop.
And stop flamebaiting. I have more personal relationships than you have (Insert comical yet insulting value here).
It's really annoying to have to discover the "real" author underneath those great works. He's not concerned with pleasing his fans anymore - far more with creating new opportunities, making the most of his product's potential, etc etc, to actually care about his long term fans. Ok, so I might be inclined to do that too, if Hollywood was waving six figure amounts at me, but it's still a shame.
Oh, and I think it goes without saying that he's not got the slightest interest in slashdot, except as a vehicle to push all his latest and greatest creations, including (INCLUDING!) h2g2, the commercial ripoff of Everything.
Beginning to program is a wildly confusing experience - or at least, it was for me;-) This book sounds like it'll help people along greatly.
However (there's always a however):
There is absolutely no substitute for the hacker-type mindset - the obsessive compulsive (say it ain't so) need to explore a system for yourself, to produce programs which should be beyond your capabilities - and which were, until you put your mind to them. If someone doesn't have that raw curiosity and the need (the NEED) to know everything about a system, then they're never going to be anything more than a "quite good" programmer.
Speaking purely from my own flawed memory, I seem to remember that governments collect an awful lot of fines on late taxes (random speculative perhaps-from-memory figure: half a billion pounds), and so on. Is it really to their advantage to lose this revenue by enabling Joe Citizen to pay on time?
I mean, why the heck do they have to make so much light? Those little LEDs in the keyboard and the power, turbo (totally redundant!) and HDD activity indicator are so bright! Whenever I'm doing a long rendering job, I find it TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE to get to sleep at night, with those little lights just BLAZING into my eyes. I think it's totally irresponsible of computer designers to FORCE the user to CONFRONT these eye-blasting nuisances. I, for one, will not stand for it any longer.
You know, if Salon was paper print, I'd use it as toilet paper.
Or possibly to mop up when my cat is sick...
Anyone want to do a 101 uses for a paper Salon list?
The fact remains that playstation, nintendo, and I suppose sega (yeah right) dominate the scene. Microsoft will make a big entry too, RSN, due to their marketing budget being able to push the X-box pretty well - and let's admit it, the X-box could actually be rather good.
Consoles, particularly Nintendo, are targeted at people who do not want to piddle around with the petty details - tell them they need to upgrade their GPU and they will look at you with a blank moronic stare before resuming their game of frogger (or whatever, so I can't think of any cool console games:-)
In a recent New Scientist article (sorry, can't source it better than that) I read that Google has "4000 linux computers each with 80gb of diskspace". Well, that works out to be 312tb and that's only to index a small portion of the web - 20% is it? (as I understand it, Google stores the whole webpage in order to serve a cached version on demand). So, how could 40tb be enough? Even assuming that this new company compressed the data to a higher degree than Google (which needs to serve pages fast), this just couldn't be enough to be useful.
Slashdot Mirror
(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof...
I imagine, then, that this will be interpreted as covering even hyperlinks to DeCSS. It's always rather funny to see this kind of blanket phrase included in legislation - all it does is give anyone with money a licence to interpret the law as they like.
What a nightmare.
Lucky the DMCA doesn't cover British citizens (yet).
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The article speaks forever about the 2.4ghz band, without ever mentioning the word "Bluetooth" which operations on 2.402ghz. Odd.
Also, does anyone know whether this 2.4ghz band is going to work around the world? Frequency Allocation nonsense has messed up US vs World cellphones (quite apart from the fact that they also use different protocols - Time Division Multiple Access (World) vs Code Division Multiple Access (most of the US)). It would be no good to bring your nice wireless laptop to another country, try to use a network printer, and end up crashing someone else's fridge. Anyway, why do Bluetooth freaks keep using fridges as an example?
More than my two pence worth.
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As admitted by Microkludge themselves:
http://support.mi cro soft.com/support/kb/articles/q216/6/41.asp
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So is this problem present anywhere else except California and New York, both centres of high speed living anyway? (The article mentions "Wise County, N.C." - if that's North Carolina, not North California, then there's still no convincing correlation mentioned between the drugs seized, and the high tech aspect).
Not even mentioning the fact that most geeks don't tend to move in circles where class A drug use is a big thing.
As always, with ANY news article EVER, if you know ANYTHING about the topic, you can always spot something wrong.
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As we all know from the Mitnick case, a hacker can initiate nuclear strikes just by whistling down a telephone line. I mean, that's just fact, isn't it? I think the police were very prudent in arresting him before he had time to launch.
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Certainly, at the moment, it's not technically possible to ban a user - witness the success of k-lines on iRC (success == null). In the UK, where over 200 free ISPs exist (we pay for local phone calls instead), I have absolutely NO idea how they could block someone technically - and in the US, new IPs are pretty easy to come by too, I'm sure!
;-)
So asking the courts to deal with it may, perhaps, force this particular user to stop abusing the service. But then the flood of cases which would follow would totally swamp a not-very-computer-literate legal system, and lead to chaos overall.
I think I just argued myself into a corner. I have no idea what to do
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How can the Napster say that the RIAA is acting anti-competitively? The RIAA is attempting to enforce existing copyright laws, of course, but! it has no product of its own that Napster is encroaching on. This law seems to be totally irrelevant to the whole case.
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Not quite sure what this means because certainly, there are no details worth talking about yet.
But instead of the status quo ("This software might do anything, and it's not our fault"), I can just see companies changing this to "This software might do anything, but, if used correctly, it'll do this"). Perfectly open, perfectly truthful, yet completely useless anyway.
Then, when Scandisk destroys your partitions (It's actually happened to me, somehow, no idea why) Microsoft will just stand up and say "well, the user obviously wasn't using the software correctly".
I see little change. It's legal mumbo jumbo.
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5 hour keynote speech? 5 HOUR? Good god. Castro could learn from this man.
When Emperor Nero of Rome gave speeches, it was said that there were spies in the audience, and when he finished (eventually), the first person to stop applauding would be executed. Likewise with Stalin.
5 hour speech, huh? Open source really brings out the fanatics!
;-)
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IANAL etc etc, but I think the following is correct:
By using the code, the company is AGREEING to the terms and conditions of the GPL. The code is peppered with this kind of comment, and this kind of defacto agreement has been upheld by the courts before, principally with those shrink wrap license farces ("By opening this, you agree to sell your mother to Microsoft, and never ask for a refund"). So a contract IS established.
Secondly, it would take a HELL of a lot of cheek for a company to stand up in court and say that they took someone's code, which was COVERED with the GPL, and just used it for their own purposes without even considering their legal standpoint.
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Does this new Supreme Drive work on other sound formats? If not, Ogg/Vorbis is on its way - maybe Kenwood should focus on that instead.
;-)
Is this new tech actually just guessing the new high frequencies based on the sound it "hears"? If so, that's adding to the music in ways that might not actually work. And this has been done already - see Wowthing, which although being pretty cool, can murder some songs (I'm thinking Bon Jovi, here
People who really really really *really* care about enhanced quality are probably going to buy the original CDs anyway, and won't be interested in buying (I'm assuming buying) Kenwood's Drive.
MP3 is still proprietry. This is not a good state of affairs. Kenwood developing for this is not what I want to see =)
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This isn't good for anyone, not even for Rambus. Cyclically, companies who behave like this will have a brief period (or no not so brief - look at IBM, they managed for decades) of dominance, verging on monopoly - but their nemesis will come. Rambus is quite happily shooting itself in the foot for short-term gains. *sigh*
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As fantastic as it is, I'd hesitate to call BSD an
;-)
established, beloved interface
Honestly.
(Let the religious wars commence
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The PETA parody is currently at http://mtd.com/tasty
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Peta.org is down, seemingly. The DNS points nowhere anymore. Looks like they (or their hosters) are complying with the order, although the WHOIS information is still available.
Sad.
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I don't think the HHGTTG can claim be the first, in that succeeding similar ideas (such as Everything) rip it off. It's just too much of a broad concept. However, once DNA saw the possibilities (read: commercial) in Everything, *then* he created H2G2.
As for your last point, no, I think it's astonishingly precocious if an author does not care about his audience, and still expects to be taken seriously. Some artists claim that their work is for themself, and others liking it is just a lucky chance, but that sounds desperately conceited. DNA is quite happy to reap the rewards of his popularity, but if it was more widely known that he is, at least metaphorically, raising the finger to his audience, his income would drop.
And stop flamebaiting. I have more personal relationships than you have (Insert comical yet insulting value here).
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
It's really annoying to have to discover the "real" author underneath those great works. He's not concerned with pleasing his fans anymore - far more with creating new opportunities, making the most of his product's potential, etc etc, to actually care about his long term fans. Ok, so I might be inclined to do that too, if Hollywood was waving six figure amounts at me, but it's still a shame.
Oh, and I think it goes without saying that he's not got the slightest interest in slashdot, except as a vehicle to push all his latest and greatest creations, including (INCLUDING!) h2g2, the commercial ripoff of Everything.
Shame. SHAME, I say.
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Well pop it back in the jar, put it in the freezer again, get an account, and post something intelligent.
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Beginning to program is a wildly confusing experience - or at least, it was for me ;-) This book sounds like it'll help people along greatly.
However (there's always a however):
There is absolutely no substitute for the hacker-type mindset - the obsessive compulsive (say it ain't so) need to explore a system for yourself, to produce programs which should be beyond your capabilities - and which were, until you put your mind to them. If someone doesn't have that raw curiosity and the need (the NEED) to know everything about a system, then they're never going to be anything more than a "quite good" programmer.
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Speaking purely from my own flawed memory, I seem to remember that governments collect an awful lot of fines on late taxes (random speculative perhaps-from-memory figure: half a billion pounds), and so on. Is it really to their advantage to lose this revenue by enabling Joe Citizen to pay on time?
just a quick cynical point... =)
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I mean, why the heck do they have to make so much light? Those little LEDs in the keyboard and the power, turbo (totally redundant!) and HDD activity indicator are so bright! Whenever I'm doing a long rendering job, I find it TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE to get to sleep at night, with those little lights just BLAZING into my eyes. I think it's totally irresponsible of computer designers to FORCE the user to CONFRONT these eye-blasting nuisances. I, for one, will not stand for it any longer.
You know, if Salon was paper print, I'd use it as toilet paper.
Or possibly to mop up when my cat is sick...
Anyone want to do a 101 uses for a paper Salon list?
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http://www. google.com/search?q=cache:www.microsoft.com/+micro soft&hl=en
Need I say more?
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The fact remains that playstation, nintendo, and I suppose sega (yeah right) dominate the scene. Microsoft will make a big entry too, RSN, due to their marketing budget being able to push the X-box pretty well - and let's admit it, the X-box could actually be rather good.
:-)
Consoles, particularly Nintendo, are targeted at people who do not want to piddle around with the petty details - tell them they need to upgrade their GPU and they will look at you with a blank moronic stare before resuming their game of frogger (or whatever, so I can't think of any cool console games
Maybe it'll go somewhere. But I doubt it.
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In a recent New Scientist article (sorry, can't source it better than that) I read that Google has "4000 linux computers each with 80gb of diskspace". Well, that works out to be 312tb and that's only to index a small portion of the web - 20% is it? (as I understand it, Google stores the whole webpage in order to serve a cached version on demand). So, how could 40tb be enough? Even assuming that this new company compressed the data to a higher degree than Google (which needs to serve pages fast), this just couldn't be enough to be useful.
Gimmick or badly planned...whichever.
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I know you're all dying to read it...
http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/ spec/draft-mng-lc.html
is it just me, or is it a LOT easier to program a GIF decoder heh.... ah well, the advance of modern technology blah blah.
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