Let's see... third time around (right?), still just a rumor, still no confirmation from Sega. I suppose the idea here is that if we float the rumor often enough and depress the stock price far enough, it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
The press really needs some more integrity here, even if it is true, but esp. if it turns out to be false... again. These rumors hurt real people, you know, which is sad when they have no basis in reality.
(On the other hand, if the console did go down at this point, I think it would be kinda cool in a way... I'd love to pick up all the excellent Dreamcast games at bargain bin prices! Probably still couldn't afford them all before they'd disappear, there's too many good ones.)
Tell me that in ten years, Sheepdot. The stuff I mentioned has almost already happened; very similar things are already being done. Genetic privacy issues are already real and aren't going away, and may yet affect you (who has perfect genes?). Stores are collecting incredible (in the literal sense of the word) amounts of data today. It's not paranoid when it's already happening!
A good point, but are you aware how much data is being kept about yyou already without your permission? Certainly if everybody had your explicit permission, nothing would be wrong.
You are making artificial distinctions where none are warrented. There is really only one privacy problem: There exists data about me. Who is allowed to know it and what can they do with it?
Medical data, address data, demographic data, habit data, all of that is just data. Rest assured that if things continue as they are, all of these will continue to be abused. Do you think your insurance company might find it interesting to add to their profile about you that you like to visit microbrewwry web sites? (Hmmm... liver problems in the future in X% of cases.) Or add to their statistical models that as an avid computer game player, you are X% more likely to have heart and obesity problems?
As advertisements get more focused, won't your grocery store want to know what you're allergic to, or if you're lactose intolerant? Hope you're not too embarressed about these things (as some people are!) because now your grocery clerk knows about it (when you handed them your Personalized Coupon for 15% off Soybean Milk.), and who know who that bored gossiping jerk might tell? Think Microsoft might want to know if you visit Slashdot a lot? Here comes the onslaught of "Why NT is Better Then Linux" ads! Think the Federal government might just decide that frequenting Slashdot is a sign of dangerous computer skill? (Why this might be bad is left as an exercize for the reader.)
Privacy concerns can be fruitfully divided into discussions about the exact way your privacy is being violated, but at the present time with the present policies, all privacy violations are important.
In a way, the "lesser" ones are more important to Slashdot frequenters, because it's obvious how insurance company privacy violations affect people, and a lot of people will stand against it. The more subtle, but nearly as powerful taken to its extreme (where it is busily being taken to while we sit complacent) privacy violations of watching what sites you visit, what you spend, how often you spend it, where you spend it is far more difficult to understand.
Consider... if I knew your surfing habits precisely, how much would I know about you? If I read everything you ever posted? Would I be able to guess with some level of statistical certainty (which is fine with insurance companies!) that you have some disease? Dangerous political views? Personality profile? (Bet you didn't think of that!) How would you like to be rejected for a job because your Anger Index was 32 too high... back in 1992?
Privacy concerns are not overrated; indeed, the more you understand about computers, the more you really look to see what's already going on, and the more you extrapolate into the near future (to say nothing about the far future), the more you realize that they are seriously underrated... mostly because they are difficult to understand easily. Regrettably, they are still very real.
PS: As for the idea that companies need detailed data about you to function efficiently, that's just plain bullsh*t. What they need is an efficient infrastructure, good lines of internal communication, good management, all the traditional stuff. Only marketersthink they "need" detailed data about all of their hypothetical future customers. (Note nobody complains about data companies need to function... surely Amazon needs to know where to ship that book to... while this could be worked around it's not really worth the effort at this time.)
I hate to jump on this bandwagon, but this is just way over the line Slashdot! You have a staff of people, a whole freakin' staff and you seem to spend less time on the homepage of your site then I do, all alone, on my weblog! In sheer people hours spent on the site, Katz appears kicking the ass of the entire rest of the Slashdot crew combined!
What really ticks me off is that "The Old Media", through which many people still get their news, has latched on to Slashdot as "The New Media", meaning that Slashdot will be reflecting on my own efforts, and the efforts of anybody else trying to run a 'new media' style website. This is why I post this; Slashdot's flub-ups are personal and affect us all. The flub-ups affect people running new media sites (by tarnishing the reputation in the eyes of the Old Media press who doesn't care to dig past their original generalizations), they tarnish the reputation of Open Source (as they have been labelled the spokesperson of the Open Source movement by the same collection of media entities), and they tarnish the reputation of VA Linux. (Hey, anybody at VA listening? This is not good return on your investment!)
Slashdot editors, wake up! You are not invincible. You can be replaced, and in Internet time, too. Please get some ethics, before you convince thousands or millions that the New Media doesn't have any!
I do not 100% agree with these rulings, but don't fall into the trap of 100% disagreeing with it either.
"Everybody must be allowed to access web resources" is a statement from the POV of the accessors. Consider that statement from the point of view of the server managers: "We must allow everybody to access our resources in any way they choose."
Do you really want to make that statement? If you put up a public resource, must you allow people to abuse it if they wish? Or can you take actions to stop such abuse, esp. as it nearly always does real, if not always a lot of, damage. In the case of Bidder's Edge vs. eBay, eBay was suffering real slow-down of service, which affects its bottom line. Must eBay allow it?
Perhaps the real danger is not so much the rulings per se, but the legal doctrines being used to make them: "Under the reasoning in the Register.com case, "you don't have to prove harm or show any evidence of harm," he said. "Harm will be presumed." He said that he fears the Register.com case will "spread like Kudzu" through the court system."
At any rate, just recognize that things are somewhat more complicated then they may seem at first. It's tempting to oversimplify in either direction, but the truth is probably complicated.
Woah, woah, woah, there, pardner! I reckon you have the wrong letter in there. Shouldn't it read, "the world is only a limited number of steps away from US domination"?
Usually the two are difficult to tell apart, but I do mean the UN because there are things that only the UN will do, for legitimacy reasons. Example (albiet extreme): Which, given the current conditions, is likely to form the kernel of a hypothetical One World Government? Answer: Almost certainly the UN. For the reasons that is the answer, I choose to pick on the UN.
For another example, I expect that any large-scale international IP agreement (which is in very real danger of occurring and curtailing our freedoms) would come from the UN, even if initiated by the UN.
I'm not quite as pessimistic as my original post sounded... but still, there's a lot of things the UN could do that would screw a lot of countries up, and have significantly more 'legitimacy' then a US-imposed treaty/international law could.
(PS: I'm amused some moderator saw fit to mark that original post as 'troll'! If that's a troll, then so was every legitimate answer given to the question!)
I would recommend pursuing a program of aggresive space colonization and then trying to live there. This suggestion is probably nearly infeasible, but it is not sarcastic. Historically speaking, governments rarely get less repressive over time, and now, the world is only a limited number of steps away from UN domination in this area, which has been strongly pro-business and anti-person.
That said, if there is a country that would be able to pull it off with little or no bloodshed, it's the US. More realistically then the previous suggestion, stay here and keep fighting the good fight. With the American system, it is possible to win, just not easy. (It's never easy under any system.)
All of a sudden, you have an incredibly secure system, with the same useability(maybe a little slowdown for encryption/decryption, but there are fast, secure algorithms availble). So no I've already refuted the "inversely proportional" part.
No, you haven't. Current security systems are bastardized, ignored, and just plain not implemented well. What you are talking about are cheap, easy ways of increasing our crappy security.
Pretend for a moment that we take the computer you are currently using, and remove all processor cache from it. Now, someone could say "There are always tradeoffs involved with processor design; if you increase the performance of one thing, you will degrade the performance of another." Your response would be to say "That's nuts... all I need to do is add cache to it and look, it works great." You are correct, but only because the processor is so piss-poor designed that there were still easy design additions that could be made for big wins.
However, once you've made all the easy decisions, suddenly the tradeoffs rule comes back in full force. To improve, say, an Athlon, with current technology, would be a difficult undertaking. Because the chip functions as a gestalt, a unified whole, the easy answers don't work. Speed up the FPUs, and do nothing else, and your performance will hardly change at all, because the data can't come in fast enough. The easy gains are gone.
Security is much the same way. Yeah, we can graft some easy stuff onto our crappy systems nearly for free, but as you approach 100% secure, the ease-of-use goes down the toilet. OK, so the drive's encrypted... maybe only the people who know the password should be allowed to use it. Now the user has to enter a password. What if they leave the partition mounted and leave the machine? Should they be forced to re-enter the password every so often? That cuts into ease-of-use. Are they allowed to conduct big transactions without checking again that they are still the authorized person?
After the easy gains, easy-to-use and secure are mutually exclusive, because easy-to-use implies that there are fewer steps and checks being made, and that implies there are fewer steps and checks to bypass/fake if you are trying to breach security.
Of course, the true picture is more complex, this is a simplification. There are other axises in question, like complexity of the security implementation, complexity of the security use, expense, etc. Perhaps we point a camera at the user and try to make sure the face never leaves or changes. But then, perhaps a mask on the face can bypass this, so if we want to prevent that eventuality, perhaps we need to make some other check.
If you've had physics, it's like pressure, volume, and temperature in a gas. All three are related, and all else being equal, less pressure means more volume. All else being equal, more security means less ease-of-use. The full picture is more complicated, but the rule-of-thumb is still quite true.
(And to get back on topic, another one of those axises involves the security of the rest of the system. The entire point of the article is that Windows has now been proven to be weak on that axis as well, along with the ones we are so familiar with.)
I've been toying around with and experimenting with virtual communities for a while, and there's one interesting community that truly does have a as high a level of discourse as you could want: the weblog community. I wrote an essay entitled Weblog Communities exploring the nature of the communities, and why it works so well. (As I believe it was Dave Winer who said, it really helps that every has their own little area, rather then a communal area that is easy to pollute.)
To further enhance the connections, I created the LinkBack program, to help independent websites see when someone has linked to them.
Much of what Katz said is essentially true, though I believe he really belabored the point. We've been using message boards in one form or another for the past 20 years, and we can all see how well that works. Perhaps a different approach altogether is what is called for.
I'd like to write a patch for Mozilla that probably take me about 10 minutes to implement... but 10-20 hours to figure out how to implement correctly, which I don't have.
Would somebody who knows Mozilla be interested in writing a patch that eliminates the window.onload and window.onclose events and whacking the window.open function? Yeah, it'll break a couple of pages... w00p. Ideally, it'd be a pref. For extra bonus points, only allow window.open when it's in a javascript link that I clicked on, since the rare site does actually use that.
These simple measures would make the web a lot more pleasent to use.
As an unrelated comment... does the web really have the "usability" reserves to pull stunts like this? A normal user might not actually close windows, but allow them to float to the back. How are 'normal' users going to feel when they wonder why their computer is so sluggish while browsing, so they close the browser, only to discover 40 windows frantically flashing advertising and "special offers" at them? How many people will be chased away by these policies?
At least banners were more-or-less unobtrusive... of course, that's their main crime, isn't it? Not obtrusive enough. Sickening.
FWIW, if you've implemented Java on it, it's at least a Turing machine, but no less. It could be a superset, but no superset has been shown to exist (which isn't to say that it doesn't).
Proof left as an exercise to the reader. (Hint: Java is itself Turing complete, which implies...)
Do you believe in magic... in an old platform's heart, where the marketing's all true and the processor's smart, it's magic, when five megabytes, can make twenty plaforms move like dancers in tights...
So, with just five megabytes in any environment, Amiga can solve every cross-platform issue known to man, and implement a real-time OS on top of non-real-time OS's? This I have got to see. Sign me up for the first game that runs on my Dreamcast, my windows computer, and my linux computer with this groovy five megabyte magic addition. I expect it to run faster then the equivalent Java game!
Only then will this little voice inside of me stop composing mocking ditties set to old sixties music.
This isn't about copyright violation, it's about access restriction circumvention. This hoopla about the copyright is a red herring.
Indeed, this is part of the problem with the DMCA. It goes way beyond traditional copyright. By giving access restriction such holy status, it allows device manufacturors to control us in these ways, despite the fact we own the copyright. That's my very point!
Oh for petes sake, who gives a damn how it breaks? Perhaps the circuit board cushioned the hard drive, they can handle surprisingly large shocks. Maybe it sustained a large electrical shock that the hard drive didn't get in the way of. Maybe it was zapped by aliens who happen to have a soft spot in their heart for hard drives. Sheesh! Things break.
BTW, that's high school bands, not bands in general. And I figured I should clarify before you decide that I'm still wrong.
The composers have a copyright on the music. If you do not have the right to play it, then you can't, period. However, the recording is a seperate copyright. This means that if you want to play a recording in the store, you technically need both the composer copyright and the recorder copyright to do so.
Of course, in real life, this is absurd, so in the real music business, the recorders obtain the rights to the composer copyright (not exclusive, just enough), and take care of the finances on their end, so the player doesn't have to.
Finally, for a personal recording for archival purposes that will not be distributed, even in the unlikely event that this is some theoretical violation of copyright, damages are precisely zero and thus the composer can't "sue the recorder into oblivion".
Yes, but how are you to bypass? You can't produce a device to do it, that's not excepted. You can't obtain a device to do it, that's not excluded. Anyone who creates a device to circumvent in this instance is in trouble for the creation, not the circumvention. God help the creator if they lend it to a friend, now they're distributing it.
You are incorrect. The composer does not hold copyrights on the recording, which should be plainly obvious.
Bands buy the right to perform the songs when they buy the sheet music, which should also be obvious that it works that way. Check your facts before you correct, please.
I wanted to keep this stuff seperate from the scenario:
I know you want brevity, but it's better IMHO to establish a real story and explain it well enough that it seems plausible. (Anything that can be explained in 3 sentances is probably full of holes.)
To heck with the DMCA banning fair use, under some circumstances, the DMCA bans use, period. Even if the copyright belongs to you. This point needs to be made.
If you want to contact me, follow my webpage link (see this message's header) and look at the "feedback" page (or just post a note on that site).
Let us suppose a hard drive sound recording device in the near future. It consists of a microphone, a hard drive, and a power supply necessary to drive it. Very portable, very convenient. It has a high-speed computer interface that allows you to move recordings off of it onto a computer, where you can of course do anything, like send it to your friends in Paris or place it on the Web.
However, in order to prevent you from pirating music with it (by plugging in the output of your music system to this thing's input), it has a copyright protection device on it, SDMI compliant. If it detects a SDMI watermark, it will record it but subsequently refuse to allow you to extract it to your own computer. Thus, it encrypts all recordings on it's internal hard drive so you can't just take the hard drive out, plug it into your computer, and extract the copyrighted audio. Thus, under the terms of the DMCA, this is an access control device.
So, having gotten a great deal on a device that records hundreds of hours of sound in a high-quality sound format, you decide to record your daughters band recital, where she has a very difficult flute solo. She pulls it off and brings tears to everybody's eyes, and the device captures it with ultra high fidelity.
Unfortunately, on the way out to the car, you drop the device. The hard drive and the recording is intact, but you cracked the circuit board the rest of the device relies on to communicate with a computer, and it's not ever communicating with a computer again. Unfortunately, the manufacturor has made it impossible to repair or move the hard drive to a new version of that device, because for security purposes, all of the devices use different factory-set encryption keys. (They don't want you to repair it, they want you to buy a new one.) The circuit board can't be repaired either, because you basically can't repair circuit boards that badly damaged.
If you could attach the device's hard drive to the computer, you could still extract your own recording, if it wasn't encrypted so you can't use the device to pirate. (It is safe to assume that somebody would come up with a way to decrypt the data if they can get at it, with brute force if nothing else.) It is, however, illegal to circumvent this protection measure, illegal to create a program that can decrypt this device's encryption format, and illegal to possess one. The DMCA makes it illegal to obtain your own recording because the access protection measure it is behind, put there to protect other people's recordings, is broken.
(Technically, you are allowed to break the protection under the exception it give you, but you must somehow do this without creating or obtaining a method or device to break the protection.)
Allow me to clarify: If you are already reading a web article, i.e. on Slashdot, it is relatively difficult to load up a news reader when you can just type into a TEXTAREA. (Certainly, if you were reading Slashdot somehow in your newsreader right now, the converse would be true: It would be relatively difficult to load a web browser to reply to something when the "r" button is so close at hand.)
Slashdot Mirror
The press really needs some more integrity here, even if it is true, but esp. if it turns out to be false... again. These rumors hurt real people, you know, which is sad when they have no basis in reality.
(On the other hand, if the console did go down at this point, I think it would be kinda cool in a way... I'd love to pick up all the excellent Dreamcast games at bargain bin prices! Probably still couldn't afford them all before they'd disappear, there's too many good ones.)
Tell me that in ten years, Sheepdot. The stuff I mentioned has almost already happened; very similar things are already being done. Genetic privacy issues are already real and aren't going away, and may yet affect you (who has perfect genes?). Stores are collecting incredible (in the literal sense of the word) amounts of data today. It's not paranoid when it's already happening!
A good point, but are you aware how much data is being kept about yyou already without your permission? Certainly if everybody had your explicit permission, nothing would be wrong.
Medical data, address data, demographic data, habit data, all of that is just data. Rest assured that if things continue as they are, all of these will continue to be abused. Do you think your insurance company might find it interesting to add to their profile about you that you like to visit microbrewwry web sites? (Hmmm... liver problems in the future in X% of cases.) Or add to their statistical models that as an avid computer game player, you are X% more likely to have heart and obesity problems?
As advertisements get more focused, won't your grocery store want to know what you're allergic to, or if you're lactose intolerant? Hope you're not too embarressed about these things (as some people are!) because now your grocery clerk knows about it (when you handed them your Personalized Coupon for 15% off Soybean Milk.), and who know who that bored gossiping jerk might tell? Think Microsoft might want to know if you visit Slashdot a lot? Here comes the onslaught of "Why NT is Better Then Linux" ads! Think the Federal government might just decide that frequenting Slashdot is a sign of dangerous computer skill? (Why this might be bad is left as an exercize for the reader.)
Privacy concerns can be fruitfully divided into discussions about the exact way your privacy is being violated, but at the present time with the present policies, all privacy violations are important.
In a way, the "lesser" ones are more important to Slashdot frequenters, because it's obvious how insurance company privacy violations affect people, and a lot of people will stand against it. The more subtle, but nearly as powerful taken to its extreme (where it is busily being taken to while we sit complacent) privacy violations of watching what sites you visit, what you spend, how often you spend it, where you spend it is far more difficult to understand.
Consider... if I knew your surfing habits precisely, how much would I know about you? If I read everything you ever posted? Would I be able to guess with some level of statistical certainty (which is fine with insurance companies!) that you have some disease? Dangerous political views? Personality profile? (Bet you didn't think of that!) How would you like to be rejected for a job because your Anger Index was 32 too high... back in 1992?
Privacy concerns are not overrated; indeed, the more you understand about computers, the more you really look to see what's already going on, and the more you extrapolate into the near future (to say nothing about the far future), the more you realize that they are seriously underrated... mostly because they are difficult to understand easily. Regrettably, they are still very real.
PS: As for the idea that companies need detailed data about you to function efficiently, that's just plain bullsh*t. What they need is an efficient infrastructure, good lines of internal communication, good management, all the traditional stuff. Only marketers think they "need" detailed data about all of their hypothetical future customers. (Note nobody complains about data companies need to function... surely Amazon needs to know where to ship that book to... while this could be worked around it's not really worth the effort at this time.)
What really ticks me off is that "The Old Media", through which many people still get their news, has latched on to Slashdot as "The New Media", meaning that Slashdot will be reflecting on my own efforts, and the efforts of anybody else trying to run a 'new media' style website. This is why I post this; Slashdot's flub-ups are personal and affect us all. The flub-ups affect people running new media sites (by tarnishing the reputation in the eyes of the Old Media press who doesn't care to dig past their original generalizations), they tarnish the reputation of Open Source (as they have been labelled the spokesperson of the Open Source movement by the same collection of media entities), and they tarnish the reputation of VA Linux. (Hey, anybody at VA listening? This is not good return on your investment!)
Slashdot editors, wake up! You are not invincible. You can be replaced, and in Internet time, too. Please get some ethics, before you convince thousands or millions that the New Media doesn't have any!
"Everybody must be allowed to access web resources" is a statement from the POV of the accessors. Consider that statement from the point of view of the server managers: "We must allow everybody to access our resources in any way they choose."
Do you really want to make that statement? If you put up a public resource, must you allow people to abuse it if they wish? Or can you take actions to stop such abuse, esp. as it nearly always does real, if not always a lot of, damage. In the case of Bidder's Edge vs. eBay, eBay was suffering real slow-down of service, which affects its bottom line. Must eBay allow it?
Perhaps the real danger is not so much the rulings per se, but the legal doctrines being used to make them: "Under the reasoning in the Register.com case, "you don't have to prove harm or show any evidence of harm," he said. "Harm will be presumed." He said that he fears the Register.com case will "spread like Kudzu" through the court system."
At any rate, just recognize that things are somewhat more complicated then they may seem at first. It's tempting to oversimplify in either direction, but the truth is probably complicated.
Well, it's good to know your credibility won't be strained, because he didn't say that. Please play again.
Usually the two are difficult to tell apart, but I do mean the UN because there are things that only the UN will do, for legitimacy reasons. Example (albiet extreme): Which, given the current conditions, is likely to form the kernel of a hypothetical One World Government? Answer: Almost certainly the UN. For the reasons that is the answer, I choose to pick on the UN.
For another example, I expect that any large-scale international IP agreement (which is in very real danger of occurring and curtailing our freedoms) would come from the UN, even if initiated by the UN.
I'm not quite as pessimistic as my original post sounded... but still, there's a lot of things the UN could do that would screw a lot of countries up, and have significantly more 'legitimacy' then a US-imposed treaty/international law could.
(PS: I'm amused some moderator saw fit to mark that original post as 'troll'! If that's a troll, then so was every legitimate answer given to the question!)
That said, if there is a country that would be able to pull it off with little or no bloodshed, it's the US. More realistically then the previous suggestion, stay here and keep fighting the good fight. With the American system, it is possible to win, just not easy. (It's never easy under any system.)
Oh, you don't have the time either? Quit lecturing.
No, you haven't. Current security systems are bastardized, ignored, and just plain not implemented well. What you are talking about are cheap, easy ways of increasing our crappy security.
Pretend for a moment that we take the computer you are currently using, and remove all processor cache from it. Now, someone could say "There are always tradeoffs involved with processor design; if you increase the performance of one thing, you will degrade the performance of another." Your response would be to say "That's nuts... all I need to do is add cache to it and look, it works great." You are correct, but only because the processor is so piss-poor designed that there were still easy design additions that could be made for big wins.
However, once you've made all the easy decisions, suddenly the tradeoffs rule comes back in full force. To improve, say, an Athlon, with current technology, would be a difficult undertaking. Because the chip functions as a gestalt, a unified whole, the easy answers don't work. Speed up the FPUs, and do nothing else, and your performance will hardly change at all, because the data can't come in fast enough. The easy gains are gone.
Security is much the same way. Yeah, we can graft some easy stuff onto our crappy systems nearly for free, but as you approach 100% secure, the ease-of-use goes down the toilet. OK, so the drive's encrypted... maybe only the people who know the password should be allowed to use it. Now the user has to enter a password. What if they leave the partition mounted and leave the machine? Should they be forced to re-enter the password every so often? That cuts into ease-of-use. Are they allowed to conduct big transactions without checking again that they are still the authorized person?
After the easy gains, easy-to-use and secure are mutually exclusive, because easy-to-use implies that there are fewer steps and checks being made, and that implies there are fewer steps and checks to bypass/fake if you are trying to breach security.
Of course, the true picture is more complex, this is a simplification. There are other axises in question, like complexity of the security implementation, complexity of the security use, expense, etc. Perhaps we point a camera at the user and try to make sure the face never leaves or changes. But then, perhaps a mask on the face can bypass this, so if we want to prevent that eventuality, perhaps we need to make some other check.
If you've had physics, it's like pressure, volume, and temperature in a gas. All three are related, and all else being equal, less pressure means more volume. All else being equal, more security means less ease-of-use. The full picture is more complicated, but the rule-of-thumb is still quite true.
(And to get back on topic, another one of those axises involves the security of the rest of the system. The entire point of the article is that Windows has now been proven to be weak on that axis as well, along with the ones we are so familiar with.)
To further enhance the connections, I created the LinkBack program, to help independent websites see when someone has linked to them.
Much of what Katz said is essentially true, though I believe he really belabored the point. We've been using message boards in one form or another for the past 20 years, and we can all see how well that works. Perhaps a different approach altogether is what is called for.
Would somebody who knows Mozilla be interested in writing a patch that eliminates the window.onload and window.onclose events and whacking the window.open function? Yeah, it'll break a couple of pages... w00p. Ideally, it'd be a pref. For extra bonus points, only allow window.open when it's in a javascript link that I clicked on, since the rare site does actually use that.
These simple measures would make the web a lot more pleasent to use.
As an unrelated comment... does the web really have the "usability" reserves to pull stunts like this? A normal user might not actually close windows, but allow them to float to the back. How are 'normal' users going to feel when they wonder why their computer is so sluggish while browsing, so they close the browser, only to discover 40 windows frantically flashing advertising and "special offers" at them? How many people will be chased away by these policies?
At least banners were more-or-less unobtrusive... of course, that's their main crime, isn't it? Not obtrusive enough. Sickening.
Proof left as an exercise to the reader. (Hint: Java is itself Turing complete, which implies...)
where the marketing's all true and the processor's smart,
it's magic,
when five megabytes,
can make twenty plaforms move like dancers in tights...
So, with just five megabytes in any environment, Amiga can solve every cross-platform issue known to man, and implement a real-time OS on top of non-real-time OS's? This I have got to see. Sign me up for the first game that runs on my Dreamcast, my windows computer, and my linux computer with this groovy five megabyte magic addition. I expect it to run faster then the equivalent Java game!
Only then will this little voice inside of me stop composing mocking ditties set to old sixties music.
Don't just absorb the environmentalist line, think about it. They're only about half right.
Indeed, this is part of the problem with the DMCA. It goes way beyond traditional copyright. By giving access restriction such holy status, it allows device manufacturors to control us in these ways, despite the fact we own the copyright. That's my very point!
Yes, but simply recording the concert has nothing to do with the DMCA!
Oh for petes sake, who gives a damn how it breaks? Perhaps the circuit board cushioned the hard drive, they can handle surprisingly large shocks. Maybe it sustained a large electrical shock that the hard drive didn't get in the way of. Maybe it was zapped by aliens who happen to have a soft spot in their heart for hard drives. Sheesh! Things break.
The composers have a copyright on the music. If you do not have the right to play it, then you can't, period. However, the recording is a seperate copyright. This means that if you want to play a recording in the store, you technically need both the composer copyright and the recorder copyright to do so.
Of course, in real life, this is absurd, so in the real music business, the recorders obtain the rights to the composer copyright (not exclusive, just enough), and take care of the finances on their end, so the player doesn't have to.
Finally, for a personal recording for archival purposes that will not be distributed, even in the unlikely event that this is some theoretical violation of copyright, damages are precisely zero and thus the composer can't "sue the recorder into oblivion".
Yes, but how are you to bypass? You can't produce a device to do it, that's not excepted. You can't obtain a device to do it, that's not excluded. Anyone who creates a device to circumvent in this instance is in trouble for the creation, not the circumvention. God help the creator if they lend it to a friend, now they're distributing it.
Bands buy the right to perform the songs when they buy the sheet music, which should also be obvious that it works that way. Check your facts before you correct, please.
However, in order to prevent you from pirating music with it (by plugging in the output of your music system to this thing's input), it has a copyright protection device on it, SDMI compliant. If it detects a SDMI watermark, it will record it but subsequently refuse to allow you to extract it to your own computer. Thus, it encrypts all recordings on it's internal hard drive so you can't just take the hard drive out, plug it into your computer, and extract the copyrighted audio. Thus, under the terms of the DMCA, this is an access control device.
So, having gotten a great deal on a device that records hundreds of hours of sound in a high-quality sound format, you decide to record your daughters band recital, where she has a very difficult flute solo. She pulls it off and brings tears to everybody's eyes, and the device captures it with ultra high fidelity.
Unfortunately, on the way out to the car, you drop the device. The hard drive and the recording is intact, but you cracked the circuit board the rest of the device relies on to communicate with a computer, and it's not ever communicating with a computer again. Unfortunately, the manufacturor has made it impossible to repair or move the hard drive to a new version of that device, because for security purposes, all of the devices use different factory-set encryption keys. (They don't want you to repair it, they want you to buy a new one.) The circuit board can't be repaired either, because you basically can't repair circuit boards that badly damaged.
If you could attach the device's hard drive to the computer, you could still extract your own recording, if it wasn't encrypted so you can't use the device to pirate. (It is safe to assume that somebody would come up with a way to decrypt the data if they can get at it, with brute force if nothing else.) It is, however, illegal to circumvent this protection measure, illegal to create a program that can decrypt this device's encryption format, and illegal to possess one. The DMCA makes it illegal to obtain your own recording because the access protection measure it is behind, put there to protect other people's recordings, is broken.
(Technically, you are allowed to break the protection under the exception it give you, but you must somehow do this without creating or obtaining a method or device to break the protection.)
Allow me to clarify: If you are already reading a web article, i.e. on Slashdot, it is relatively difficult to load up a news reader when you can just type into a TEXTAREA. (Certainly, if you were reading Slashdot somehow in your newsreader right now, the converse would be true: It would be relatively difficult to load a web browser to reply to something when the "r" button is so close at hand.)