Cloning is a "sexual circumvention device" which provides "access" to DNA outside of authorized methods provided by the Creator.
Lucas will be sued by God with penalties of 10 years in jail, a $5,000,000 fine or both. However a plea bargain may be possible if Lucas agrees to please kill off Jar Jar.
If they change what is inside, even if they notify the customer, it is food-tampering.
I guess you never seen a grocery store deli. They "gasp" open the sliced ham packages and bologna packages, make sandwitches out of them, then saran wrap them and resell them! Ye Gods the horror! Food tampering! Food tampering! Not. As long as the customer is made aware that some change has taken place, there is nothing the original food mfg can do about it.
The RIAA can go to Tower Records [and all other major music chain stores] and say, you WILL give us 100% of shelf space or we won't authorise you to sell any of our product. So the store capitulates (as going bankrupt on 'principle' is not an option).
But the consumer is largely unaware of what's going on and can't even inquire about such deals because they're "secret".
The smart RIAA will even allow slots for a tiny tiny few indie bands to throw the sharp eyed shopper off. "See, they sell indie stuff". But they don't put up enough shelf space to support the indie bands as a whole, i.e., no one indie band can rely on a small chance lottery of seeing their stuff carried at major retailers.
So the indie artist can't reliably get into the major chain stores to sell his music unless he signs with the RIAA.
The consumer has no control here. The consumer thinks he sees a fair market. The consumer has been duped. The RIAA was always in control.
Sorry, but the web jockeys using FrontPage, etc., are not programmers. I can respect the ones who actually know and edit HTML by hand and bang out cgi scripts in perl. But as for rest using cookie cutter templates? No. Not programmers for a second.
They never show the real "IT" people on the TV commercials. Yeah, I'd like to see them show a Real Programmer's cubicle. With loads of old drives, disks, PCI/ISA/EISA/VLB cards, prototype boards, cables piled all over his desk amidst the empty soda and slurpee cups; stacks of now useless code printouts filling most of his desk; with several sheets of scribbled notes shoved under his keyboard; the Belldandy wallpaper on his desktop; the safari shorts, 3-5 year old tennis shoes and black T-shirt that's frazzled around the neck and sleeves and should've been thrown away 2 years ago; the sci-fi and anime related posters all over the wall, while he wears headphones listening to a real audio stream of Rush Limbaugh; yes, the typical programmer is far to the political Right despite the popular "counterculture" image of tech people on TV. Note, though that this is not "wrong" nor counts against the programmer; a few programming charts (esp. the 'C' order of operations precedence list); the various goodies (pens, Linux bumper stickers, yo-yos) from many Comdex's past. The bad-burn CDs and line printer stuff pinned up as some kind of obscure nouveau art. The "ACHTUNG! Alles Lookenpepers" sign lifted from the jargon file near the cubicle's entrance; And a 'combat' cartridge from the Atari 2600 mounted on the cubicle wall to honor the profession's past; and of course several running computers with at least two monitors switched by switchboxes with flakey contacts so the video jitters on the red gun unti you wiggle the knob; At least one monitor with Slashdot displayed in any browser except IE. THESE are the Real Programmers who have been around long enough to remember entire teamd of long since fired "IT staff". He may be kinda wierd, but he can do the magic over and over and over and will be with the company forever until he can retire at 40.
But the worst the DVD Forum can do, according to the article, is bar the Chinese companies from using the DVD name or logo on their product!
Fine with me. Big whoop. I'll buy a "DVD compatible" player or a "binary video disc player" anyday. Yeah! Then maybe we can get some firewire outputs on 'em too. DVD could be so much better if it wasn't so closed, proprietary, s3cr33t, and litigous at any 3rd party innovations.
This is like the start of the PC clones all over again. And we all know the clones won out in the end and made PCs into deeply discounted commodoties.
Earth's atmospheric pressure is 1 atm or converting to kPa, 100 kPa. Martian atmospheric pressure is about 1% of Earth's or about 1 kPa (10^3 Pa on the chart). Average Martian surface temperatures at the equator are -53C or 220K. Now looking at our chart again, we see that at this point, water cannot exist as a liquid, but only as a solid (ice). As day/night termperatures shift, water will alternate between solid and gas only, never even passing through the liquid state, and once a gas, not likely to collect on the ground, but remain suspended as ice crystals high in the air. So for now, the collecting frozen water from near the poles, storing it in canisters , and transporting those to any camps remains the only realistic wat of getting water on Mars.
There seems to be an attitude here that most of IRC is lamers, and who cares if they're DDOSed into oblivion. However, I fail to see what makes this unique.
The root DNS servers at [a-l].root-servers.net are just as vulnerable to this stuff.
Thanks to the BSA, software piracy is NOT A CIVIL violation anymore, it's a CRIMINAL one. The burdens of proof are much stricter in criminal cases. A guilty verdict must be UNANIMOUS instead of the easier "preponderence of the evidence" (i.e., over 50%) allowed in civil trials. Looks like the BSA made its job that much harder, eh?
What we call unauthorised copying or "piracy" is only that in nations signed to the Berne or WIPO treaties. This is hardly the entire world.
In other nations copying is seen as no more illegal than unlimited video renting which is illegal in other nations without paying %age of each rental to IP holder.
Son May records in Taiwan makes a living selling copied CDs/DVDs/VCDs/etc for cheap, usually minus all the booklets, goodies, etc. They are a legal locally licensed business. They pay taxes. They employ locals. They are doing nothing illegal. And they feel the same about complaints from self proclaimed moralists as EBAY or Yahoo does about French bitching over "illegal sale of Nazi artifacts". Pot. Kettle. Black. BTW, "Taiwan" could not sign treaties anyway since the UN does not recognize Taiwan as a separate nation. That decision is for China to make.
Today, the internet thrusts all nations local laws into one arena. So what happens when some "freelancer" sets up a legal archive of elsewhere copyrighted software is set up on a server in Taipei? Servers in Taiwan access just as easily as servers elsewhere. What will IP advocates do? Firewall an entire nation? That would cause more harm than good.
IP is a dinosaur. Just like people can no longer "own" the rights to drill for oil in their backyard, the idea of "Intellectual Property" will soon be obsolete. Oh, and as for the argument that the death of IP will mean no one creating new content, look at Taiwan's music industry. Plenty of local artists, yes? Some of them are very cool, and living an extravagant lifestyle despite no IP law.
You agreed to accept whatever it sends you the moment you connected to it, just as you agree to accept ads by turning on a television set.
Simple including the substring "mail" into a service does not upon that service bestow all the rights, priveleges, and protections afforded to real mail.
After reading through much of the article, I still fail to see how scanning a host's ports is any different from knocking on that host's various doors and windows, seeing if anybody's home, or giving that host's various telephone lines a ring.
I see port scanning as crawling around someone's house rattling doorknobs, windows, mailboxes, air ducts, rooftop hatches, basement doors, garage doors, electric panel doors, gas valves, water valves, sewer vent lines, outdoor outlets, chimney openings, stove vents. Trying all 256 codes on RF X-10 modules, using a frequency counter/scanner to check for and listen in on radio transmissions, ringing phone lines, ringing doorbells, seeing if you can turn on sprinklers/water faucets, etc.
Would you have no problem with someone doing all that? That's a port scan.
"Ringing a doorbell" is a single probe on port 80. "Ring a telephone" is a single probe on port 23. Don't bullshit yourself.
Your home is private. Internet boradcasts are not.
on
Echelon in the News
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· Score: 3
Echelon isn't like that. There are no warrants, we have no idea who approves an Echelon search, and there is no accountability to the people, because the people don't know which elected officials, if any, have oversight. If a governor appoints a judge who makes boneheaded decisions about warrants, the public can refuse to re-elect the governor. How does the public know who to NOT vote for if a mistake is made with Echelon? How does the public even know if a mistake has been made?
When you're in your home, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Your home is your your owned personal space. Your to control and keep others out of. If law enforcements wants to tap in and watch/listen, then yes, they need a warrant from a judge.
The internet is a distributed cooperative network. You do not own it. No one person owns the net. And on the net, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Hence no warrant is needed to look at email or sniff your packets as they pass by 3rd party sites. It's no different than a cop patrolling streets looking for crime. He's in a public area looking for trouble. The internet is the same.
Neither is e-mail private. People see the substring "mail" and instantly want to assign it all the rights and priveleges afforded to real mail. e-mail is not a gov't protected nor a paid private carrier protected point to point service. E-mail is the equivalent of writing a note on a postcard for a friend across the classroom and handing to the person in front of you saying "psssst. pass it on to "Joe@FrontOfCLass". It moves through many hands on its way any of which can read it as it goes by. Including that FBI agent seated 3 rows in front of you.
Now if you encrypt that message, you are making an effort to keep it private. You now do have a reasonable expectation of privacy. And IMO, echelon should not be allowed to try to crack encrypted net traffic. But plaintext data? I see nothing wrong there.
It's like how can companies say [insert service] fees are billed monthly in advance and they assess you "late fees" on payments received less than one month in advance for services not yet received?
Verisign can't have a policy list without implicitly admitting that some kind of group approval is needed to make decisions. Hence, the list was whacked by the now self-proclaimed gods.
There is no end to what people will pirate(and I personally don't mind that one bit)."
Huh? What are you smoking? How can you call something piracy when it's given away free to anyone who wants it?
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with what the word BROADCAST means as applied to television. It means programs are transmitted from an antenna to anyone interested in buying a device capable of reception. It is not point to point. It is not subscriber based. Receivers are not tracked nor counted nor registered. Anyone is welcome to listen in. It's a give away.
It is not possible to pirate things freely given away.
So some satellite owners got a hold of the BROADCAST early and distributed copies. That's supposed to be "piracy"? Did the east coast PIRATE the Voyager finale because they saw it three hours before I did in Los Angeles? Get a life!
Either keep it private, charge fees, and keep the program safely SHOVED UP YOUR ASS in the beforetime or boradcast it and shut the fuck up about piracy.
I, in the US, import a lot of region 2 titles from Japan. DVDs with appeal only to a niche US audience which will never see a region 1 release, because the limited number of buyers cannot justify the expense of production. This is not just an issue for people outside region 1.
To the MPAA: The audio CD format is universal. Any CD plays in any CD player in the world. How has this "harmed" the music industry? How do you perceive the movie industry as being any different and in need of a protection scheme?
No. Everybody advances until they're incompetent!
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 2
Think about it. If you do well in your job, you're promoted. Excel there, and get promoted again. Eventually, you're promoted into a job you can barely handle. To the boss you just look like an incompetent boob. Repeat this with everyone and you'll find that most people are incompetent, because they reached the point from which they can reach no further.
Which is why I deny promotions that separate me from the hardware. As a pilot once said in response to why he didn't like promotions, he said, "Too many promotions and they don't let you fly."
Unfortunately, for reasons I do not understand, refusing promotions is grounds for firing at many companies. WTF?
The revisionists want you to think "the civil war was about slavery".
BULL SHIT.
The civil war was about states that didn't want the federal government controlling their states internal affairs. The rampant increase of Federal powers we've seen since then only proves they were right.
This so called "durable media" isn't... when compared to VHS. Yes, virginis, this MORE FRAGILE MEDIA has a far greater NEED FOR CONSUMERS TO BE ABLE TO BACK UP.
Blockbuster is PISSED that DVDs are only good for about 7 to 10 rentals before they gradually become unplayable without major skipping and such. Then angry renters demand their money back because their rental has unwatchable segments.
And neither can Blockbuster accuse SPECIFIC renters of damaging the discs because NO SINGLE RENTER caused the damage. It's a cumulative effect.
You bet there's a need to back up DVDs. Legal provisions allowing back ups often don't apply to so called "durable media". Are DVDs "durable"? Real life usage seems to say, no.
The color TV broadcasting signal we have today is still compatible with black and white sets (which are still sold in stores, usually as battery operated portables).
And according to this article, there is a way to embed the digital signal into unused portions of the standarg analog signal.
Now why do you want to forcibly obsolete analog TV again?
You must be:
(1) a MPAA/RIAA/WIPO control freak salivating at encrypted, unrecordable, pay per view everything or
(2) in the electronics inustry salivating at being able to sell everyone another couple of TV sets for more money.
Apple figured this out long ago when they came up with NuBus. Plug and Play is a crock of shit. It always breaks sooner or later.
The proper solution is to rigidly and without exception, divide up the system resources and assign them to each expansion slot. Then, as long as each card has its own slot, there will be no resource conflicts!
At the very least, add a feature to the BIOS to let the user choose plug'n'play or manually assign resources to SPECIFIC SLOTS so that from the card's point of view, it has ONLY those resources to choose from.
The latter solution would be compatible with the current PCI standard.
Want to copyright something? Then you have to pay a fee. The fee starts at one dollar and triples each year, for as long as you continue to pay. This is fair to the small inventor and limits the megacorps from eternally copyrighting things. Oh yeah, make this copyright rule retroactive to all currently copyrighted items. All current (C) holders now owe $1 for the next year of copyright, payable by 1/1/2002.
1st year of copyright costs $1.
2nd year of copyright costs $3.
3rd year of copyright costs $9.
4th year of copyright costs $27.
5th year of copyright costs $81.
6th year of copyright costs $243.
7th year of copyright costs $729.
8th year of copyright costs $2,187.
9th year of copyright costs $19,683.
10th year of copyright costs $59,049.
11th year of copyright costs $177,147.
12th year of copyright costs $531,441.
13th year of copyright costs $1,594,323.
14th year of copyright costs $4,782,969.
15th year of copyright costs $14,348,907.
16th year of copyright costs $43,046,721.
17th year of copyright costs $129,140,163.
18th year of copyright costs $387,420,489.
19th year of copyright costs $1,162,261,467.
20th year of copyright costs $3,486,784,401.
and so on...
Keep paying for as long as you wish.... No need for an expiration date. The moment you fail to pay, though, your copyright expires and your IP becomes as public domain as classical music.
You can see any movie you like. The MPAA rating means nothing... oh wait... Most if not all local governments have passed laws prohibiting movie theaters from showing films rated NC-17 or higher except in specially zoned areas of town. Hell, blockbuster (1/3 of US rental market) won't carry NC-17 films. And no, mother teresa, this isn't just "porn". The original Robocop was rated NC-17. It was EDITED for the movie theater, because NC-17 == automatic prohibition from being shown at more than 3/4 of all US theaters. "Not forced on me?" You bet it's forced on me.
I fully expect TV to do the same. It'll start off slowly, e.g., no TV-MA programs allowed on the air before 9:00pm, then it'll be no TV-PG or higher rated programming during "kids time slots", then some things will be restricted to 2:00-5:00am only. Then, "since no one is watching this" and "it's no longer profitable to the TV station", programs with too strong a rating will be dropped all together, by the TV station's choice. Then, once people are "used to this stuff not airing", it won't be hard to pass legislation to keep it from ever returning to the air waves.
You wait and see. This is how it goes. Why isn't any asking who is doing this "rating" anyway? DOn't you wonder?
All the companies I've worked for were run by management more interested in "beating the competition to the market". They don't allocate time to do things right. They want them done fast. Designing == no real work getting done, in their opinions.
"Make it work now, any way you can. Can you? Is there a way? Mr. Junior Programmer here says he can(*). Why can't you? OK. Then do it. Go back and smooth out the design later. Programmers always want to redesign/rewrite everything."
Of course, "later" never comes. By then, the list of "required features" now has ultimate priority. Bug fixes are high priority too, but IMO wouldn't be so prevalent if the software had been designed correctly from the start. Good design also leaves well defined hooks to make new features easier to add later. Mgmt will hear none of this.
(*) Management also seems to like to play Junior programmers, not yet appreciative of good design, off against Senior Programmers. So us geezers are forced to sacrifice our principles and do dirty, but fast work, to avoid being fired and not being able to support our families. The Junior Programmer, is single and does not carry this responsibility.
This is just going to result in games that are edited and sanitzed not because the players want it, not because the game makers want it that way, but to satisfy some OUTSIDE THIRD PARTY that thinks that's the way it ought to be.
Arcades that are not licensed as "adult establishments" (which is, oh I don't know, NO ARCADES) will not be able to put out the NC17/X/UltraViolence video games. If no one buys them, game makers won't make them.
This is the same with movies. Robocop was originally rated NC17 (for excessive violence), so the studio EDITS it down to an R because many local zoning ordinances prohibit theaters from even showing NC17 films. Ditto Basic Instinct, and other films.
This also results in two home versions. The "movie" version.... and IF there's demand (hmmm, stifiling creativity here?)... and "unrated" release.
Why are we jumping through these hoops? Again, it's for OUTSIDE THIRD PARTIES who, beyond rating it, will never see the movie or video game ever agian.
Something is really fucked up here. And I see no "problem" that needs to be solved with new restrictions. Games are games. Reality is reality. The rating boards need to figure this out and quit trying to correleate one with the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Lucas will be sued by God with penalties of 10 years in jail, a $5,000,000 fine or both. However a plea bargain may be possible if Lucas agrees to please kill off Jar Jar.
I guess you never seen a grocery store deli. They "gasp" open the sliced ham packages and bologna packages, make sandwitches out of them, then saran wrap them and resell them! Ye Gods the horror! Food tampering! Food tampering! Not. As long as the customer is made aware that some change has taken place, there is nothing the original food mfg can do about it.
But the consumer is largely unaware of what's going on and can't even inquire about such deals because they're "secret".
The smart RIAA will even allow slots for a tiny tiny few indie bands to throw the sharp eyed shopper off. "See, they sell indie stuff". But they don't put up enough shelf space to support the indie bands as a whole, i.e., no one indie band can rely on a small chance lottery of seeing their stuff carried at major retailers.
So the indie artist can't reliably get into the major chain stores to sell his music unless he signs with the RIAA.
The consumer has no control here. The consumer thinks he sees a fair market. The consumer has been duped. The RIAA was always in control.
They never show the real "IT" people on the TV commercials. Yeah, I'd like to see them show a Real Programmer's cubicle. With loads of old drives, disks, PCI/ISA/EISA/VLB cards, prototype boards, cables piled all over his desk amidst the empty soda and slurpee cups; stacks of now useless code printouts filling most of his desk; with several sheets of scribbled notes shoved under his keyboard; the Belldandy wallpaper on his desktop; the safari shorts, 3-5 year old tennis shoes and black T-shirt that's frazzled around the neck and sleeves and should've been thrown away 2 years ago; the sci-fi and anime related posters all over the wall, while he wears headphones listening to a real audio stream of Rush Limbaugh; yes, the typical programmer is far to the political Right despite the popular "counterculture" image of tech people on TV. Note, though that this is not "wrong" nor counts against the programmer; a few programming charts (esp. the 'C' order of operations precedence list); the various goodies (pens, Linux bumper stickers, yo-yos) from many Comdex's past. The bad-burn CDs and line printer stuff pinned up as some kind of obscure nouveau art. The "ACHTUNG! Alles Lookenpepers" sign lifted from the jargon file near the cubicle's entrance; And a 'combat' cartridge from the Atari 2600 mounted on the cubicle wall to honor the profession's past; and of course several running computers with at least two monitors switched by switchboxes with flakey contacts so the video jitters on the red gun unti you wiggle the knob; At least one monitor with Slashdot displayed in any browser except IE. THESE are the Real Programmers who have been around long enough to remember entire teamd of long since fired "IT staff". He may be kinda wierd, but he can do the magic over and over and over and will be with the company forever until he can retire at 40.
But the worst the DVD Forum can do, according to the article, is bar the Chinese companies from using the DVD name or logo on their product!
Fine with me. Big whoop. I'll buy a "DVD compatible" player or a "binary video disc player" anyday. Yeah! Then maybe we can get some firewire outputs on 'em too. DVD could be so much better if it wasn't so closed, proprietary, s3cr33t, and litigous at any 3rd party innovations.
This is like the start of the PC clones all over again. And we all know the clones won out in the end and made PCs into deeply discounted commodoties.
Earth's atmospheric pressure is 1 atm or converting to kPa, 100 kPa. Martian atmospheric pressure is about 1% of Earth's or about 1 kPa (10^3 Pa on the chart). Average Martian surface temperatures at the equator are -53C or 220K. Now looking at our chart again, we see that at this point, water cannot exist as a liquid, but only as a solid (ice). As day/night termperatures shift, water will alternate between solid and gas only, never even passing through the liquid state, and once a gas, not likely to collect on the ground, but remain suspended as ice crystals high in the air. So for now, the collecting frozen water from near the poles, storing it in canisters , and transporting those to any camps remains the only realistic wat of getting water on Mars.
The root DNS servers at [a-l].root-servers.net are just as vulnerable to this stuff.
Thanks to the BSA, software piracy is NOT A CIVIL violation anymore, it's a CRIMINAL one. The burdens of proof are much stricter in criminal cases. A guilty verdict must be UNANIMOUS instead of the easier "preponderence of the evidence" (i.e., over 50%) allowed in civil trials. Looks like the BSA made its job that much harder, eh?
In other nations copying is seen as no more illegal than unlimited video renting which is illegal in other nations without paying %age of each rental to IP holder.
Son May records in Taiwan makes a living selling copied CDs/DVDs/VCDs/etc for cheap, usually minus all the booklets, goodies, etc. They are a legal locally licensed business. They pay taxes. They employ locals. They are doing nothing illegal. And they feel the same about complaints from self proclaimed moralists as EBAY or Yahoo does about French bitching over "illegal sale of Nazi artifacts". Pot. Kettle. Black. BTW, "Taiwan" could not sign treaties anyway since the UN does not recognize Taiwan as a separate nation. That decision is for China to make.
Today, the internet thrusts all nations local laws into one arena. So what happens when some "freelancer" sets up a legal archive of elsewhere copyrighted software is set up on a server in Taipei? Servers in Taiwan access just as easily as servers elsewhere. What will IP advocates do? Firewall an entire nation? That would cause more harm than good.
IP is a dinosaur. Just like people can no longer "own" the rights to drill for oil in their backyard, the idea of "Intellectual Property" will soon be obsolete. Oh, and as for the argument that the death of IP will mean no one creating new content, look at Taiwan's music industry. Plenty of local artists, yes? Some of them are very cool, and living an extravagant lifestyle despite no IP law.
Simple including the substring "mail" into a service does not upon that service bestow all the rights, priveleges, and protections afforded to real mail.
I see port scanning as crawling around someone's house rattling doorknobs, windows, mailboxes, air ducts, rooftop hatches, basement doors, garage doors, electric panel doors, gas valves, water valves, sewer vent lines, outdoor outlets, chimney openings, stove vents. Trying all 256 codes on RF X-10 modules, using a frequency counter/scanner to check for and listen in on radio transmissions, ringing phone lines, ringing doorbells, seeing if you can turn on sprinklers/water faucets, etc.
Would you have no problem with someone doing all that? That's a port scan.
"Ringing a doorbell" is a single probe on port 80. "Ring a telephone" is a single probe on port 23. Don't bullshit yourself.
When you're in your home, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Your home is your your owned personal space. Your to control and keep others out of. If law enforcements wants to tap in and watch/listen, then yes, they need a warrant from a judge.
The internet is a distributed cooperative network. You do not own it. No one person owns the net. And on the net, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Hence no warrant is needed to look at email or sniff your packets as they pass by 3rd party sites. It's no different than a cop patrolling streets looking for crime. He's in a public area looking for trouble. The internet is the same.
Neither is e-mail private. People see the substring "mail" and instantly want to assign it all the rights and priveleges afforded to real mail. e-mail is not a gov't protected nor a paid private carrier protected point to point service. E-mail is the equivalent of writing a note on a postcard for a friend across the classroom and handing to the person in front of you saying "psssst. pass it on to "Joe@FrontOfCLass". It moves through many hands on its way any of which can read it as it goes by. Including that FBI agent seated 3 rows in front of you.
Now if you encrypt that message, you are making an effort to keep it private. You now do have a reasonable expectation of privacy. And IMO, echelon should not be allowed to try to crack encrypted net traffic. But plaintext data? I see nothing wrong there.
Verisign can't have a policy list without implicitly admitting that some kind of group approval is needed to make decisions. Hence, the list was whacked by the now self-proclaimed gods.
Huh? What are you smoking? How can you call something piracy when it's given away free to anyone who wants it?
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with what the word BROADCAST means as applied to television. It means programs are transmitted from an antenna to anyone interested in buying a device capable of reception. It is not point to point. It is not subscriber based. Receivers are not tracked nor counted nor registered. Anyone is welcome to listen in. It's a give away.
It is not possible to pirate things freely given away.
So some satellite owners got a hold of the BROADCAST early and distributed copies. That's supposed to be "piracy"? Did the east coast PIRATE the Voyager finale because they saw it three hours before I did in Los Angeles? Get a life!
Either keep it private, charge fees, and keep the program safely SHOVED UP YOUR ASS in the beforetime or boradcast it and shut the fuck up about piracy.
To the MPAA: The audio CD format is universal. Any CD plays in any CD player in the world. How has this "harmed" the music industry? How do you perceive the movie industry as being any different and in need of a protection scheme?
Which is why I deny promotions that separate me from the hardware. As a pilot once said in response to why he didn't like promotions, he said, "Too many promotions and they don't let you fly."
Unfortunately, for reasons I do not understand, refusing promotions is grounds for firing at many companies. WTF?
BULL SHIT.
The civil war was about states that didn't want the federal government controlling their states internal affairs. The rampant increase of Federal powers we've seen since then only proves they were right.
Blockbuster is PISSED that DVDs are only good for about 7 to 10 rentals before they gradually become unplayable without major skipping and such. Then angry renters demand their money back because their rental has unwatchable segments.
And neither can Blockbuster accuse SPECIFIC renters of damaging the discs because NO SINGLE RENTER caused the damage. It's a cumulative effect.
You bet there's a need to back up DVDs. Legal provisions allowing back ups often don't apply to so called "durable media". Are DVDs "durable"? Real life usage seems to say, no.
And according to this article, there is a way to embed the digital signal into unused portions of the standarg analog signal.
Now why do you want to forcibly obsolete analog TV again?
You must be:
(1) a MPAA/RIAA/WIPO control freak salivating at encrypted, unrecordable, pay per view everything or
(2) in the electronics inustry salivating at being able to sell everyone another couple of TV sets for more money.
The proper solution is to rigidly and without exception, divide up the system resources and assign them to each expansion slot. Then, as long as each card has its own slot, there will be no resource conflicts!
At the very least, add a feature to the BIOS to let the user choose plug'n'play or manually assign resources to SPECIFIC SLOTS so that from the card's point of view, it has ONLY those resources to choose from.
The latter solution would be compatible with the current PCI standard.
1st year of copyright costs $1.
2nd year of copyright costs $3.
3rd year of copyright costs $9.
4th year of copyright costs $27.
5th year of copyright costs $81.
6th year of copyright costs $243.
7th year of copyright costs $729.
8th year of copyright costs $2,187.
9th year of copyright costs $19,683.
10th year of copyright costs $59,049.
11th year of copyright costs $177,147.
12th year of copyright costs $531,441.
13th year of copyright costs $1,594,323.
14th year of copyright costs $4,782,969.
15th year of copyright costs $14,348,907.
16th year of copyright costs $43,046,721.
17th year of copyright costs $129,140,163.
18th year of copyright costs $387,420,489.
19th year of copyright costs $1,162,261,467.
20th year of copyright costs $3,486,784,401.
and so on...
Keep paying for as long as you wish.... No need for an expiration date. The moment you fail to pay, though, your copyright expires and your IP becomes as public domain as classical music.
I fully expect TV to do the same. It'll start off slowly, e.g., no TV-MA programs allowed on the air before 9:00pm, then it'll be no TV-PG or higher rated programming during "kids time slots", then some things will be restricted to 2:00-5:00am only. Then, "since no one is watching this" and "it's no longer profitable to the TV station", programs with too strong a rating will be dropped all together, by the TV station's choice. Then, once people are "used to this stuff not airing", it won't be hard to pass legislation to keep it from ever returning to the air waves.
You wait and see. This is how it goes. Why isn't any asking who is doing this "rating" anyway? DOn't you wonder?
All the companies I've worked for were run by management more interested in "beating the competition to the market". They don't allocate time to do things right. They want them done fast. Designing == no real work getting done, in their opinions.
"Make it work now, any way you can. Can you? Is there a way? Mr. Junior Programmer here says he can(*). Why can't you? OK. Then do it. Go back and smooth out the design later. Programmers always want to redesign/rewrite everything."
Of course, "later" never comes. By then, the list of "required features" now has ultimate priority. Bug fixes are high priority too, but IMO wouldn't be so prevalent if the software had been designed correctly from the start. Good design also leaves well defined hooks to make new features easier to add later. Mgmt will hear none of this.
(*) Management also seems to like to play Junior programmers, not yet appreciative of good design, off against Senior Programmers. So us geezers are forced to sacrifice our principles and do dirty, but fast work, to avoid being fired and not being able to support our families. The Junior Programmer, is single and does not carry this responsibility.
No wonder so much software is all fucked up.
This is just going to result in games that are edited and sanitzed not because the players want it, not because the game makers want it that way, but to satisfy some OUTSIDE THIRD PARTY that thinks that's the way it ought to be.
Arcades that are not licensed as "adult establishments" (which is, oh I don't know, NO ARCADES) will not be able to put out the NC17/X/UltraViolence video games. If no one buys them, game makers won't make them.
This is the same with movies. Robocop was originally rated NC17 (for excessive violence), so the studio EDITS it down to an R because many local zoning ordinances prohibit theaters from even showing NC17 films. Ditto Basic Instinct, and other films.
This also results in two home versions. The "movie" version.... and IF there's demand (hmmm, stifiling creativity here?)... and "unrated" release.
Why are we jumping through these hoops? Again, it's for OUTSIDE THIRD PARTIES who, beyond rating it, will never see the movie or video game ever agian.
Something is really fucked up here. And I see no "problem" that needs to be solved with new restrictions. Games are games. Reality is reality. The rating boards need to figure this out and quit trying to correleate one with the other.
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