But for a hosting company, this is a big deal. Imagine how Fileplanet must react--they host millions of files; presumably, many of their files will get tagged by the bot. So they have to answer each letter, explaining the mistake. You can't have a bot respond to the letters, can you? Even though you can have a bot sending them out. This is worse than spam, because you can't just delete it and move on, you actually have to respond or risk legal action.
It should be interesting at least. I see no reason that the GPL should be invalid but other software licenses would be. Any lawyers have any insight into this?
I seem to recall SCO claiming that since the code was introduced so long ago, it has contaminated every build since. While the contributing code was perhaps localized at first, it's impossible to know how the code/around/ it would have evolved had their IP never been introduced. All of Linux from that point on is tainted by their code, and thus is their IP.
I have not seen the code in question, and I certainly hope that MicroSCOft loses this battle, but should they win, I could really see this claim as having some weight. Linux evolves, and parts of the kernel interact with other parts. You could, for example, take concepts from their code and use those concepts in the single-processor scheduler. It's impossible to know how far the taint has spread since the code was out there for anyone to read. It's fairly safe to localize it to Linux, though, and since this is actually just a money grab, it makes sense. And the logic behind it is fairly sound (as much as I hate to admit it).
There are cases where the opposite is true, though.
I had a Windows PC that had random crashes, etc. Typical hard-to-diagnose problems. It booted Linux just fine, but Windows would bluescreen anywhere from the Starting Windows 2000 screen to the login screen or even sometimes after logging in. Linux was (apparently) just fine. So I assumed something corrupt in Windows, and I decided to reinstall. Install wouldn't work, again, crashing at random points.
Most people who troubleshoot PCs are probably screaming "Bad RAM!" right now, and they're right. Some of the memory in the machine had gone bad. Apparently the way Windows and Linux allocate resources was different enough that Linux never hit the bad memory during the short periods I'd use it (for troubleshooting) but Windows tried to access it fairly early on in the boot cycle and crumpled.
So while there/is/ a software problem (Obligatory "Windows Sucks") the problem was hardware, and just checking it in Linux didn't help.
One of my favorite uses for Gentoo is optimizing for size rather than execution speed. As you say, the CPU is rarely the bottleneck these days, but loading files from the disk can be a factor in a program starting up. I've done the benchmarks, and some rather large programs see significantly reduced load times when optimized with -Os.
There is one explicit use where one might download songs they've already purchased: they don't have the CDs with them. I have a number of CDs in my home. All in cases. Now suppose I have a job where computer use is lenient. I am allowed to listen to music at my job. I don't want to cart my CD collection up there. I don't want to copy all my CDs (under fair use) and cart them there. I want to download the music I already own and listen to it without the hassle of CDs.
Now I'm mostly playing devil's advocate, and it mostly doesn't matter since the RIAA has yet to sue someone for/downloading/ (that I'm aware of) but it's a valid use. Maybe only.001% of people fall into that category, but it's still not worth immediately calling BS on them. Besides, what's the point in lying? To prove their point? *shrug* That's sad, but it's impossible to know if they're being legit.
Fair use dictates whether or not you may make a copy for listening on your computer. That's up to a judge. Purely based on law, you do not have that right, but judicially, it's been ruled that space-shifting is legal as long as both copies are not listened to at the same time.
Being told exactly what you may do is dangerous ground. Copyright law itself is more than sufficient to protect copyright holders, however when you begin overstipulating through the use of EULAs (they are trying to be contracts, but whether or not they are is questionable) you begin giving far too much power to the copyright holder.
You are the problem. People like you who demand to know what your rights are. That's why we have long, impossible to understand, and often contradictary EULAs in software.
Copyright law is very simple, and very specific. You don't have the right to make a copy of copyrighted material unless the owner explicitly grants you that right. All rights reserved? That means the right to copy is not granted. Same for the right to rent. The right to modify. Etc.
The only right you have when you buy a CD is the right to listen. This is an implied right based upon the medium (i.e. you have the right to read if you buy a book.)
There is no licensing. There is no little man to tell you want you can do.
It's a lot harder to go after downloaders for a number of reasons, not the least of which is logging. They'd have to set up sting operations, which would have questionable legality. Right now they're going after the uploaders, which is the easiest way to stem the flow of illegal music. If there are no uploaders, there can be no downloaders.
See, that's flat out incorrect. A judge could rule that what I'm doing constitutes fair use. There's plenty of precedent supporting this, just none (yet) for the DMCA.
1) Most people treat online RPGs in a similar manner to offline RPGs. That is, they treat it as a quest to go through, an item to get, etc. I have to admit that I did this when I played them, too. With such a steep levelling curve, if you don't borg, you get left behind. Now with games encouraging RP less and less, it's just magnifying the "problem." I quote that word because I'm not sure it/is/ a problem. People are paying money for these games, and unless they begin affecting other players, they should be able to do damn near whatever they want. The people who want to RP (clearly the minority) need to get together and do it, and fight off the barbarians if they try to invade (the non-RPers).
2) It's really hard to RP when everyone else around you doesn't. Even if you want to and try, you just get laughed at, scorned, or mistaken for an NPC and attacked. Situations like this/discourage/ RP in players who might otherwise have been very willing to.
If it's a 4.35GB disc, I just use DVDDecryptor. If it's larger, there are a number of things you can try.
DVDShrink allows you to shrink any given video stream on the disc and strip out some audio streams. Sometimes you can compress the extras on a disc enough so that the main movie isn't compressed at all, yet the entire DVD (including structure) still fits on one DVD-R. Failing that, you can pick and choose Titles (basically video streams) to use, but then you lose the disc structure, menus, etc. You can also compress the main movie a bit within DVDShrink, and this is almost always enough to get my backup (most of the extras I don't care about; just deleted scenes and on/some/ discs I like behind the scenes featurettes.)
If you want to keep the structure and you have some time to kill, you can reencode the DVD. DoItFastForYou, ReAuthorist, and DoCCE4You is a suite of programs designed to make this as easy as possible, but you need access to some high-dollar software (CinemaCraft Encoder, for one) are required, though. The suite can even export the output as a Sonic Scenarist (DVD Authoring software) project, however again, Scenarist is quite expensive. Information about all of the above is available at http://www.doom.net.
Finally, you can keep the structure of the DVD but delete any titles you don't want by inserting a 1 second blank clip in place of that video stream. However you really need to know the IFO structure in order to do this, and use IFOEdit (available at the above URL.)
The short answer is that many high-speed DVD-Roms limit access to CSS encrypted content to 2x. The claim is that this is to stop the spinup/spindown of CSS encrypted video discs and the stutter that this causes. The conspiracy theorists believe that this is to annoy and frustrate pirates. I tend to believe the former. Regardless, it means that if there's CSS on the disc, anything on the disc is going to operate at 2x, including ripping, where obviously stutter doesn't matter (and actually probably won't occur.) The hacked firmware fix this issue at the expense of potential stutter while watching the DVD.
There are other advantages, such as being able to put them in a binder for higher portability. It also depends upon the size of your DVD collection. For smaller collections, the cost isn't nearly as high as you might think.
Finally, once you start the initial backup, it's under two bucks to make a backup for each DVD you purchase. I don't think that's horribly expensive, particularly when discs go out of production all the time.
Just a matter of preference and priorities, some people might not want to pay that extra, and that's ok.
I picked up a Pioneer A05 (rebranded) for about $150 after a rebate. Just couldn't pass up that offer. It's now using an unofficial firmware to remove the 2x CSS read mode so I can rip my own DVDs (for backup[1]) at 7-8x. My only beef with DVD-R is that there's no official standard for 4x media, which makes it somewhat hard to come by and fairly expensive. You can find really good deals on branded 2x discs, though, which sort of makes up for it. If the 4x discs come down in price, great, I'll start buying those, but otherwise, for the price I paid, I'm not complaining.
[1] And before people accuse me of piracy, I am only backing up DVDs I've purchased. I've been the victim of multiple RSDL Rotted DVDs, and had I backed them up prior to the layer separation, I wouldn't have had to re-purchase the discs.
But Bittorrent itself hasn't been shut down, just websites with torrents of copyrighted materials. I can still host a bittorrent myself that points to a Red Hat ISO.
As far as I know.. the only sure way to hide your identity on the internet is to buy a pay-as-you-go mobile phone in a shop with no cameras... Then use an AOL cd with a fake credit card number to get a free trial... Stand in the middle of a field to make sure you can see them coming... That's how proper covert internet ops get done.
You forgot the more obvious horning in on a 802.11 network.
Ah, then pay them $40,000 a year. And require listening fees of $40,000 a year. And require in the contract that all DJs have a listening license. Not only can you now beat the RIAA at their own game, but you can deduct $40,000 per user from your taxes (as an expense) so you don't have to deal with the taxes on that $40,000 you're getting as "profits".
There are plenty of bugs and oversights in games. Metroid Prime has a number of crashes that I bet you could exploit (but to what end?). Gaming companies aren't perfect, it's not unreasonable to expect an oversight if not a flat out ignorance of the problem, particularly on one of their first foray's into this sort of thing.
Yes, but I'll go you one better. I bet there aren't any buffer overflow checks on that arcade machine. Why should there be? They've (almost) never had to worry about this sort of user input in the past. Even with the Neo Geo systems, it would be really difficult to put your own code on the memory cards, but there's a memory card available from Lik Sang that has a USB port on it so you can back up your games to the PC. All you gotta do is hack up some code, toss it on the card and plug it into the arcade game. Boom, anything from crashing the machine (and resetting high scores) to wiping people's memory cards to free games, depending on exactly how many priviledges the game code in the arcade machine has.
Slashdot Mirror
But for a hosting company, this is a big deal. Imagine how Fileplanet must react--they host millions of files; presumably, many of their files will get tagged by the bot. So they have to answer each letter, explaining the mistake. You can't have a bot respond to the letters, can you? Even though you can have a bot sending them out. This is worse than spam, because you can't just delete it and move on, you actually have to respond or risk legal action.
It should be interesting at least. I see no reason that the GPL should be invalid but other software licenses would be. Any lawyers have any insight into this?
I seem to recall SCO claiming that since the code was introduced so long ago, it has contaminated every build since. While the contributing code was perhaps localized at first, it's impossible to know how the code /around/ it would have evolved had their IP never been introduced. All of Linux from that point on is tainted by their code, and thus is their IP.
I have not seen the code in question, and I certainly hope that MicroSCOft loses this battle, but should they win, I could really see this claim as having some weight. Linux evolves, and parts of the kernel interact with other parts. You could, for example, take concepts from their code and use those concepts in the single-processor scheduler. It's impossible to know how far the taint has spread since the code was out there for anyone to read. It's fairly safe to localize it to Linux, though, and since this is actually just a money grab, it makes sense. And the logic behind it is fairly sound (as much as I hate to admit it).
There are cases where the opposite is true, though.
/is/ a software problem (Obligatory "Windows Sucks") the problem was hardware, and just checking it in Linux didn't help.
I had a Windows PC that had random crashes, etc. Typical hard-to-diagnose problems. It booted Linux just fine, but Windows would bluescreen anywhere from the Starting Windows 2000 screen to the login screen or even sometimes after logging in. Linux was (apparently) just fine. So I assumed something corrupt in Windows, and I decided to reinstall. Install wouldn't work, again, crashing at random points.
Most people who troubleshoot PCs are probably screaming "Bad RAM!" right now, and they're right. Some of the memory in the machine had gone bad. Apparently the way Windows and Linux allocate resources was different enough that Linux never hit the bad memory during the short periods I'd use it (for troubleshooting) but Windows tried to access it fairly early on in the boot cycle and crumpled.
So while there
One of my favorite uses for Gentoo is optimizing for size rather than execution speed. As you say, the CPU is rarely the bottleneck these days, but loading files from the disk can be a factor in a program starting up. I've done the benchmarks, and some rather large programs see significantly reduced load times when optimized with -Os.
There is one explicit use where one might download songs they've already purchased: they don't have the CDs with them. I have a number of CDs in my home. All in cases.
/downloading/ (that I'm aware of) but it's a valid use. Maybe only .001% of people fall into that category, but it's still not worth immediately calling BS on them. Besides, what's the point in lying? To prove their point? *shrug* That's sad, but it's impossible to know if they're being legit.
Now suppose I have a job where computer use is lenient. I am allowed to listen to music at my job. I don't want to cart my CD collection up there. I don't want to copy all my CDs (under fair use) and cart them there. I want to download the music I already own and listen to it without the hassle of CDs.
Now I'm mostly playing devil's advocate, and it mostly doesn't matter since the RIAA has yet to sue someone for
I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
Fair use dictates whether or not you may make a copy for listening on your computer. That's up to a judge. Purely based on law, you do not have that right, but judicially, it's been ruled that space-shifting is legal as long as both copies are not listened to at the same time.
Being told exactly what you may do is dangerous ground. Copyright law itself is more than sufficient to protect copyright holders, however when you begin overstipulating through the use of EULAs (they are trying to be contracts, but whether or not they are is questionable) you begin giving far too much power to the copyright holder.
I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
You are the problem. People like you who demand to know what your rights are. That's why we have long, impossible to understand, and often contradictary EULAs in software.
Copyright law is very simple, and very specific. You don't have the right to make a copy of copyrighted material unless the owner explicitly grants you that right. All rights reserved? That means the right to copy is not granted.
Same for the right to rent.
The right to modify.
Etc.
The only right you have when you buy a CD is the right to listen. This is an implied right based upon the medium (i.e. you have the right to read if you buy a book.)
There is no licensing.
There is no little man to tell you want you can do.
It's all very, very simple.
80% of Slashdot headlines also appear on Fark.
It's a lot harder to go after downloaders for a number of reasons, not the least of which is logging. They'd have to set up sting operations, which would have questionable legality. Right now they're going after the uploaders, which is the easiest way to stem the flow of illegal music. If there are no uploaders, there can be no downloaders.
See, that's flat out incorrect. A judge could rule that what I'm doing constitutes fair use. There's plenty of precedent supporting this, just none (yet) for the DMCA.
Two points to make:
/is/ a problem. People are paying money for these games, and unless they begin affecting other players, they should be able to do damn near whatever they want. The people who want to RP (clearly the minority) need to get together and do it, and fight off the barbarians if they try to invade (the non-RPers).
/discourage/ RP in players who might otherwise have been very willing to.
1) Most people treat online RPGs in a similar manner to offline RPGs. That is, they treat it as a quest to go through, an item to get, etc. I have to admit that I did this when I played them, too. With such a steep levelling curve, if you don't borg, you get left behind. Now with games encouraging RP less and less, it's just magnifying the "problem." I quote that word because I'm not sure it
2) It's really hard to RP when everyone else around you doesn't. Even if you want to and try, you just get laughed at, scorned, or mistaken for an NPC and attacked. Situations like this
If it's a 4.35GB disc, I just use DVDDecryptor. If it's larger, there are a number of things you can try.
/some/ discs I like behind the scenes featurettes.)
DVDShrink allows you to shrink any given video stream on the disc and strip out some audio streams. Sometimes you can compress the extras on a disc enough so that the main movie isn't compressed at all, yet the entire DVD (including structure) still fits on one DVD-R. Failing that, you can pick and choose Titles (basically video streams) to use, but then you lose the disc structure, menus, etc. You can also compress the main movie a bit within DVDShrink, and this is almost always enough to get my backup (most of the extras I don't care about; just deleted scenes and on
If you want to keep the structure and you have some time to kill, you can reencode the DVD. DoItFastForYou, ReAuthorist, and DoCCE4You is a suite of programs designed to make this as easy as possible, but you need access to some high-dollar software (CinemaCraft Encoder, for one) are required, though. The suite can even export the output as a Sonic Scenarist (DVD Authoring software) project, however again, Scenarist is quite expensive. Information about all of the above is available at http://www.doom.net.
Finally, you can keep the structure of the DVD but delete any titles you don't want by inserting a 1 second blank clip in place of that video stream. However you really need to know the IFO structure in order to do this, and use IFOEdit (available at the above URL.)
I still believe in Fair Use, and I don't distribute, so they'd have a hard time convincing a judge that I'm doing anything wrong.
The short answer is that many high-speed DVD-Roms limit access to CSS encrypted content to 2x. The claim is that this is to stop the spinup/spindown of CSS encrypted video discs and the stutter that this causes. The conspiracy theorists believe that this is to annoy and frustrate pirates. I tend to believe the former. Regardless, it means that if there's CSS on the disc, anything on the disc is going to operate at 2x, including ripping, where obviously stutter doesn't matter (and actually probably won't occur.) The hacked firmware fix this issue at the expense of potential stutter while watching the DVD.
There are other advantages, such as being able to put them in a binder for higher portability. It also depends upon the size of your DVD collection. For smaller collections, the cost isn't nearly as high as you might think.
Finally, once you start the initial backup, it's under two bucks to make a backup for each DVD you purchase. I don't think that's horribly expensive, particularly when discs go out of production all the time.
Just a matter of preference and priorities, some people might not want to pay that extra, and that's ok.
I picked up a Pioneer A05 (rebranded) for about $150 after a rebate. Just couldn't pass up that offer. It's now using an unofficial firmware to remove the 2x CSS read mode so I can rip my own DVDs (for backup[1]) at 7-8x. My only beef with DVD-R is that there's no official standard for 4x media, which makes it somewhat hard to come by and fairly expensive. You can find really good deals on branded 2x discs, though, which sort of makes up for it. If the 4x discs come down in price, great, I'll start buying those, but otherwise, for the price I paid, I'm not complaining.
[1] And before people accuse me of piracy, I am only backing up DVDs I've purchased. I've been the victim of multiple RSDL Rotted DVDs, and had I backed them up prior to the layer separation, I wouldn't have had to re-purchase the discs.
I believe you're misquoting. Should be something along the lines of "and Sean Connery as James Bond." ;)
But Bittorrent itself hasn't been shut down, just websites with torrents of copyrighted materials. I can still host a bittorrent myself that points to a Red Hat ISO.
As far as I know.. the only sure way to hide your identity on the internet is to buy a pay-as-you-go mobile phone in a shop with no cameras... Then use an AOL cd with a fake credit card number to get a free trial... Stand in the middle of a field to make sure you can see them coming... That's how proper covert internet ops get done.
You forgot the more obvious horning in on a 802.11 network.
I'd suggest consulting an attorney on the subject. Asking for legal advice on slashdot is somewhat foolish.
Ah, then pay them $40,000 a year. And require listening fees of $40,000 a year. And require in the contract that all DJs have a listening license. Not only can you now beat the RIAA at their own game, but you can deduct $40,000 per user from your taxes (as an expense) so you don't have to deal with the taxes on that $40,000 you're getting as "profits".
There are plenty of bugs and oversights in games. Metroid Prime has a number of crashes that I bet you could exploit (but to what end?). Gaming companies aren't perfect, it's not unreasonable to expect an oversight if not a flat out ignorance of the problem, particularly on one of their first foray's into this sort of thing.
Yes, but I'll go you one better. I bet there aren't any buffer overflow checks on that arcade machine. Why should there be? They've (almost) never had to worry about this sort of user input in the past. Even with the Neo Geo systems, it would be really difficult to put your own code on the memory cards, but there's a memory card available from Lik Sang that has a USB port on it so you can back up your games to the PC. All you gotta do is hack up some code, toss it on the card and plug it into the arcade game. Boom, anything from crashing the machine (and resetting high scores) to wiping people's memory cards to free games, depending on exactly how many priviledges the game code in the arcade machine has.
PGP would be better, in my opinion, because it's more portable. PGP your data, make the disc image, burn it. Can be read on Linux, Mac, Windows....