It is, but you aren't allowed to break the copy protection they put on it. They've put the content in a locked box and have said "You're free to do whatever you want with this content yourself (short of sharing it with others) just as long as you don't open the lock on this box."
Practically speaking, you'll never see someone charged with ripping DVDs for their own personal use - not unless they were also sharing out said DVD rips. What the law really does is makes distributing DVD ripping tools illegal. Again, you could write your own tool, keep it to yourself, and you wouldn't be charged, but how many people have the talent (not to mention the time) to do this? All this means is that it is harder for Joe User to get easy DVD ripping tools which means he won't be likely to rip his DVD collection for personal use.
All this is a shame because ripping DVDs to a hard drive makes them MORE useful and means it's MORE likely that one would buy DVDs. (*cough* *cough* So I've heard. *cough* *cough*)
The same graphic is true if you buy the DVD and rip it to MKV or MP4 or something. Hit enter and just play without a ton of ads/warnings. Of course, ripping a DVD - even one you've purchased yourself and thus own a valid copy of - violates the DMCA so I would never, ever do this. *whistles innocently*
It's not a very detailed story: My wife and I were going on a trip and as we passed through TSA, my wife was stopped due to an "anomaly." She got treated to the full pat down experience where they discovered that the anomaly was some spanx that my wife was wearing. Apparently, ladies' undergarments are enough to trigger the TSA's "anomaly detectors."
It's nice to know that TSA is keeping our airways safe from out-of-the-ordinary ladies undergarments. Imagine if some terrorist walked on board wearing nothing but women's undergarments. Talk about causing terror in anyone that sees him!
Amazon gets it right on their product pages - people who bought this also bought these things.
They even make it easy to order groups of items. "Order Drive Enclosure and this hard drive right now." My only gripe is that they present it as if it's a great deal (Buy X and Y for $50). When you look at the individual items, though, there's no discount. It's just the cost of the items added up (e.g. X costs $30 & Y costs $20).
Sometimes I'll search for something and then see ads based on what I was searching for - before having made a purchasing decision. All these ads do, though, is remind me "I was looking for that." They don't convince me to buy that particular item. Reviews weigh into my decision much more than ads do.
Awhile back I needed to figure out how to spell "Spanx" (the woman's undergarment) for a true story I was typing up about a TSA experience my wife had. I did what I often do and used Google as a spell-checker. For months afterwards, Google insisted on showing me graphical ads displaying women in Spanx. Lesson learned: Google Spell-Check in Incognito Mode!
I'd say actively raising money qualifies as moving beyond Internet tough guy into actual law breaking. Even if they say "we're going to use this money to hire a hit-man to kill him" and don't actually do it (using the money for pizza and computer equipment instead) then they're likely breaking laws by raising money under the guise of using it to harm someone. The people contributing are likely breaking the law as well.
Granted, knowing how tech-savvy your average police department is and that they are using bit-coins, I doubt any of the people contributing will be charged. Unless they go around bragging online about it though. (Which they just might given the online climate.)
There's push back and then there's going over the line. People saying "X should be fired for advocating this position"? Fine. They are expressing their opinion. People saying "I'm never using SOFTWARE_PACKAGE again because of the changes X made"? Also fine. Calling for someone to physically hurt X? Not fine at all. I don't mind if this person is calling for Linux to be sold to Microsoft, raising money to hire a hit-man to take him out is NOT acceptable. Anyone who thinks it is, has a serious bug in their moral compass.
Who says he's "earned" it. I can't say I've been targeted by a group of trolls online, but I was bullied growing up. The bullies followed me in groups around taunting me and blocking my entrance to class. (If I passed just one of them in the hall, they would leave me alone.) I didn't do anything to them. The reason they did all this was because they found it fun to do. It was a sick sense of humor that never once considered that their target might be an actual human with actual feelings. (They stopped when someone else confronted them with the fact that their daily torments were actually doing damage to me. I was becoming increasingly paranoid and withdrawn.)
Decades later, I was targeted online by a lone troll who saw herself as a prophet of god. What did I do to her? Well, I liked photography and another of her targets liked photography so, in her twisted mind, this meant we were the same person and I was lying about everything when I said I wasn't. She harassed me online as much as she could, including threatening to file police reports on me to report me for horrible crimes. Granted, from what I could glean from her rantings, her view of "filing a police report" likely involved e-mailing the precinct to tell them god told her X committed Y crimes and thinking that they would immediately arrest X. Still, it was scary to have someone stalking you like this.
In the latter case, this person stalked me less than she possibly could since I used a pseudonym for the account she targeted. The other guy used his real name and got his relatives and place of business attacked as well. Change one off-kilter person to a gang of people who think someone has committed some horrible crime (i.e. expressing an opinion contrary to the one they hold true) and who have the time and resources to track down everything about this person and you can see how some online communities can be scary places.
1) They honestly didn't think the American public would pay attention and comment like this. They thought they'd get 200 or so comments which they could safely ignore.
2) They will come up with a "compromise" solution that they can point to as having "listened" to the American people. This compromise will, in fact, be a total capitulation to what the ISPs want dressed up with some totally ineffective "now don't abuse it you scamps" finger wagging.
It should also be noted that most Network Neutrality proponents would, ideally, not want the government getting involved. The only reason we're doing so is that the ISPs have made their plans clear to violate Network Neutrality and, given that they are large monopolies, we the people can't rely on "the free market" to push them back in line. Our last resort is the government saying "You can't do this." Is it ideal? No, but it's better than having your video shoved into the slow lane because your monopoly ISP decided the provider didn't pay enough protection mon... I mean "fast lane access fees."
Moreover, it's the ISPs that want to change things. Previously, if you tried to get a video from YouTube, NetFlix, or some website owned by your cable company, they would have been treated the same. ISPs then realized three things:
1) Those Internet video upstarts were making the ISPs' own cable TV offerings less popular. 2) Those Internet video upstarts were making lots of money. (Cue dollar signs in the eyes of the ISPs.) 3) They (the ISPs) were duopolies or monopolies in most areas and thus can do whatever they want without fear of competition.
With this realization, they implemented caps and overages to "manage network traffic" (really to make it more expensive for you to utilize Internet video to replace cable TV) and they want to make "Internet fast lanes" to extort money out of Internet Video providers (further raising the cost of these) or to slow them down (making them unusable and making cable TV seem better by comparison).
It's the ISPs that want to change the status quo of every bit being treated equally so they should be the ones presenting proof as to why they need to do so. So far, they haven't presented anything compelling. Unfortunately, their lobbyist money and political influence might count as "compelling arguments" to the FCC even when the vast majority of the public scream against it.
The "models aren't 100% accurate therefore we shouldn't trust them until they are" argument is essentially the same as the ones the anti-vaxxers use: Vaccines aren't 100% safe and therefore we shouldn't use them until they are 100% safe.
The fact is that the groups plan on never trusting climate models or vaccines because they realize that neither will never reach 100%. Even if we were able to improve climate models by leaps and bounds above the current ones (which themselves are pretty accurate), there would still be *some* uncertainty. We might get it to 99.999%, but there would still be that 0.001% that deniers would point to. Same with the anti-vax groups. If one person gets sick due to a vaccine (e.g compromised immune system & shouldn't have gotten the vaccine or allergy that wasn't known at the time) then this will be proof that vaccines aren't 100% safe and therefore shouldn't be used. Never mind that a 99% safe vaccine is orders of magnitude more preferable than any of the vaccine preventable diseases.
I always joked that I had no sense of smell. It was there, but something had to really stink to get up my nose. Considering that I also couldn't breathe through one of my nostrils, this made sense to me. Finally, after much testing and worried about sleep apnea, we found the cause of my blocked airways. A structure in my nose was trying to grow a third airway. Doing this pushed my septum over and made my one nostril's airway extremely narrow. I had surgery a few months ago to remove this structure and to fix my deviated septum. My breathing is amazingly better. (Being able to breathe through both nostrils still feels weird.) I'm waiting to see if it improves my sense of smell as my nose adjusts to its new normal.
Bit-for-bit backups might be possible, but I'd argue that format shifted copies/backups should be allowed also. Say I own a DVD and I rip the movie to MP4. I put that file on my own personal server, on my own network. No one outside my network can access these files. Finally, I stream that movie (and others) to my TV.
Have I broken the law?
In the US, the answer would be "Yes." By breaking the DRM, I've broken the law even though I haven't passed the file on to anyone. However, it's unlikely that I would be prosecuted for doing this unless I did something like showed people how to do this multiple times in a very public manner. (e.g. I had a very popular YouTube channel where I showed people what tools to use and what steps were involved.) Even then, it's not certain I'd be sued so long as I'm not sharing these files with other people.
This is where the law is messed up. Yes, sharing these rips with other people is against the law. We can argue whether this is right or not, but let's accept it for the moment. Why do we need another law that says merely creating these files - before you've even shared them out - is illegal also? It's just another charge to tack onto someone who was caught sharing. If I was in charge, I'd keep it illegal to share copyrighted content without permission (albeit with drastically changed penalties) but I'd make it legal to break DRM for personal use.
As a web developer, I *NEVER* trust the data. Especially if it's coming from an untrustworthy source. And the most untrustworthy source is the user. ("Enter a number" "1; Delete * from Users") Of course, I build protections in my code to prevent this bad data from causing problems. I can't say the same for every program, though. Some programs will take bad data and turn it into an exploit. Yes, it is the program that is at fault, but you can't be too careful and shouldn't just trust something because it is "data" and not "a program."
This works because Windows hides file extensions by default. (I change this on my boxes.) It also handles Zip files as if they were folders. So you would (if you took all the steps the virus author hopes you'll take) download "Really_Important_Document" (with the.zip hidden), open it up and see "Really_Important_Document.doc" (with a.scr on the end hidden). Seeing this, you'd forget all about this hidden file extension stuff and say ".doc is a Word document, I'll open it!" Of course, it would lauch the Windows screensaver executable and infect you. Hiding file extensions might help some users confused by all that.xyz stuff, but it also hurts that same crowd who don't realize that the.doc isn't really a Word document because it is really.doc.exe. (Not that you should open random Word documents you are sent, but that's a different topic.)
Maybe he's referring to the fact that plants take CO2 out of our atmosphere and return oxygen to it. Of course, the problem with this is that plants are a temporary CO2 sink. When the plant dies, it decomposes and releases CO2 back into the atmosphere. If you're talking about the normal levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, this helps regulate CO2 levels (some plants are absorbing CO2 while others are decomposing and releasing it). The problem is that we've dug deep into the Earth, pulled out coal and oil, burned it, and released additional CO2 into the atmosphere (as well as lots of other compounds). This additional CO2 can't be compensated for by a few plants.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. Of course, if an argument can be made that terrorists will be stopped or children will be protected by doing so, anything goes."
Legend of Zelda - if done right - might actually make a pretty good movie. Sort of a mini-Lord Of The Rings. You could take the plot of Link To The Past (and perhaps a few other Zelda games), adapt it a bit, and wind up with a very nice movie. If you do it right, you could even get a Zelda Trilogy out of it.
I'd much rather see another Super Mario Brothers movie (actually based off of the video games instead of whatever that 80's film was) than Tetris: The Movie.
The rest of the shoreline isn't changing, though. If it was tide-related, you'd expect the entire shoreline to change, not just one section in the middle of the sea.
I guess this means that the NFL can still blackout the games but they can't say "Don't be mad at us! The big, bad government made us do it." In other words, they can blackout games but they will be the ones in the fans scream at.
Slashdot Mirror
It is, but you aren't allowed to break the copy protection they put on it. They've put the content in a locked box and have said "You're free to do whatever you want with this content yourself (short of sharing it with others) just as long as you don't open the lock on this box."
Practically speaking, you'll never see someone charged with ripping DVDs for their own personal use - not unless they were also sharing out said DVD rips. What the law really does is makes distributing DVD ripping tools illegal. Again, you could write your own tool, keep it to yourself, and you wouldn't be charged, but how many people have the talent (not to mention the time) to do this? All this means is that it is harder for Joe User to get easy DVD ripping tools which means he won't be likely to rip his DVD collection for personal use.
All this is a shame because ripping DVDs to a hard drive makes them MORE useful and means it's MORE likely that one would buy DVDs. (*cough* *cough* So I've heard. *cough* *cough*)
The same graphic is true if you buy the DVD and rip it to MKV or MP4 or something. Hit enter and just play without a ton of ads/warnings. Of course, ripping a DVD - even one you've purchased yourself and thus own a valid copy of - violates the DMCA so I would never, ever do this. *whistles innocently*
It's not a very detailed story: My wife and I were going on a trip and as we passed through TSA, my wife was stopped due to an "anomaly." She got treated to the full pat down experience where they discovered that the anomaly was some spanx that my wife was wearing. Apparently, ladies' undergarments are enough to trigger the TSA's "anomaly detectors."
It's nice to know that TSA is keeping our airways safe from out-of-the-ordinary ladies undergarments. Imagine if some terrorist walked on board wearing nothing but women's undergarments. Talk about causing terror in anyone that sees him!
They even make it easy to order groups of items. "Order Drive Enclosure and this hard drive right now." My only gripe is that they present it as if it's a great deal (Buy X and Y for $50). When you look at the individual items, though, there's no discount. It's just the cost of the items added up (e.g. X costs $30 & Y costs $20).
Sometimes I'll search for something and then see ads based on what I was searching for - before having made a purchasing decision. All these ads do, though, is remind me "I was looking for that." They don't convince me to buy that particular item. Reviews weigh into my decision much more than ads do.
Awhile back I needed to figure out how to spell "Spanx" (the woman's undergarment) for a true story I was typing up about a TSA experience my wife had. I did what I often do and used Google as a spell-checker. For months afterwards, Google insisted on showing me graphical ads displaying women in Spanx. Lesson learned: Google Spell-Check in Incognito Mode!
Well, to be fair trading freedom for security hasn't worked any time anyone has tried it... but they've got a good feeling about it this time!
I'd say actively raising money qualifies as moving beyond Internet tough guy into actual law breaking. Even if they say "we're going to use this money to hire a hit-man to kill him" and don't actually do it (using the money for pizza and computer equipment instead) then they're likely breaking laws by raising money under the guise of using it to harm someone. The people contributing are likely breaking the law as well.
Granted, knowing how tech-savvy your average police department is and that they are using bit-coins, I doubt any of the people contributing will be charged. Unless they go around bragging online about it though. (Which they just might given the online climate.)
There's push back and then there's going over the line. People saying "X should be fired for advocating this position"? Fine. They are expressing their opinion. People saying "I'm never using SOFTWARE_PACKAGE again because of the changes X made"? Also fine. Calling for someone to physically hurt X? Not fine at all. I don't mind if this person is calling for Linux to be sold to Microsoft, raising money to hire a hit-man to take him out is NOT acceptable. Anyone who thinks it is, has a serious bug in their moral compass.
Who says he's "earned" it. I can't say I've been targeted by a group of trolls online, but I was bullied growing up. The bullies followed me in groups around taunting me and blocking my entrance to class. (If I passed just one of them in the hall, they would leave me alone.) I didn't do anything to them. The reason they did all this was because they found it fun to do. It was a sick sense of humor that never once considered that their target might be an actual human with actual feelings. (They stopped when someone else confronted them with the fact that their daily torments were actually doing damage to me. I was becoming increasingly paranoid and withdrawn.)
Decades later, I was targeted online by a lone troll who saw herself as a prophet of god. What did I do to her? Well, I liked photography and another of her targets liked photography so, in her twisted mind, this meant we were the same person and I was lying about everything when I said I wasn't. She harassed me online as much as she could, including threatening to file police reports on me to report me for horrible crimes. Granted, from what I could glean from her rantings, her view of "filing a police report" likely involved e-mailing the precinct to tell them god told her X committed Y crimes and thinking that they would immediately arrest X. Still, it was scary to have someone stalking you like this.
In the latter case, this person stalked me less than she possibly could since I used a pseudonym for the account she targeted. The other guy used his real name and got his relatives and place of business attacked as well. Change one off-kilter person to a gang of people who think someone has committed some horrible crime (i.e. expressing an opinion contrary to the one they hold true) and who have the time and resources to track down everything about this person and you can see how some online communities can be scary places.
Two theories:
1) They honestly didn't think the American public would pay attention and comment like this. They thought they'd get 200 or so comments which they could safely ignore.
2) They will come up with a "compromise" solution that they can point to as having "listened" to the American people. This compromise will, in fact, be a total capitulation to what the ISPs want dressed up with some totally ineffective "now don't abuse it you scamps" finger wagging.
It should also be noted that most Network Neutrality proponents would, ideally, not want the government getting involved. The only reason we're doing so is that the ISPs have made their plans clear to violate Network Neutrality and, given that they are large monopolies, we the people can't rely on "the free market" to push them back in line. Our last resort is the government saying "You can't do this." Is it ideal? No, but it's better than having your video shoved into the slow lane because your monopoly ISP decided the provider didn't pay enough protection mon... I mean "fast lane access fees."
Moreover, it's the ISPs that want to change things. Previously, if you tried to get a video from YouTube, NetFlix, or some website owned by your cable company, they would have been treated the same. ISPs then realized three things:
1) Those Internet video upstarts were making the ISPs' own cable TV offerings less popular.
2) Those Internet video upstarts were making lots of money. (Cue dollar signs in the eyes of the ISPs.)
3) They (the ISPs) were duopolies or monopolies in most areas and thus can do whatever they want without fear of competition.
With this realization, they implemented caps and overages to "manage network traffic" (really to make it more expensive for you to utilize Internet video to replace cable TV) and they want to make "Internet fast lanes" to extort money out of Internet Video providers (further raising the cost of these) or to slow them down (making them unusable and making cable TV seem better by comparison).
It's the ISPs that want to change the status quo of every bit being treated equally so they should be the ones presenting proof as to why they need to do so. So far, they haven't presented anything compelling. Unfortunately, their lobbyist money and political influence might count as "compelling arguments" to the FCC even when the vast majority of the public scream against it.
The "models aren't 100% accurate therefore we shouldn't trust them until they are" argument is essentially the same as the ones the anti-vaxxers use: Vaccines aren't 100% safe and therefore we shouldn't use them until they are 100% safe.
The fact is that the groups plan on never trusting climate models or vaccines because they realize that neither will never reach 100%. Even if we were able to improve climate models by leaps and bounds above the current ones (which themselves are pretty accurate), there would still be *some* uncertainty. We might get it to 99.999%, but there would still be that 0.001% that deniers would point to. Same with the anti-vax groups. If one person gets sick due to a vaccine (e.g compromised immune system & shouldn't have gotten the vaccine or allergy that wasn't known at the time) then this will be proof that vaccines aren't 100% safe and therefore shouldn't be used. Never mind that a 99% safe vaccine is orders of magnitude more preferable than any of the vaccine preventable diseases.
Both arguments use the Perfect Solution Fallacy.
I always joked that I had no sense of smell. It was there, but something had to really stink to get up my nose. Considering that I also couldn't breathe through one of my nostrils, this made sense to me. Finally, after much testing and worried about sleep apnea, we found the cause of my blocked airways. A structure in my nose was trying to grow a third airway. Doing this pushed my septum over and made my one nostril's airway extremely narrow. I had surgery a few months ago to remove this structure and to fix my deviated septum. My breathing is amazingly better. (Being able to breathe through both nostrils still feels weird.) I'm waiting to see if it improves my sense of smell as my nose adjusts to its new normal.
Bit-for-bit backups might be possible, but I'd argue that format shifted copies/backups should be allowed also. Say I own a DVD and I rip the movie to MP4. I put that file on my own personal server, on my own network. No one outside my network can access these files. Finally, I stream that movie (and others) to my TV.
Have I broken the law?
In the US, the answer would be "Yes." By breaking the DRM, I've broken the law even though I haven't passed the file on to anyone. However, it's unlikely that I would be prosecuted for doing this unless I did something like showed people how to do this multiple times in a very public manner. (e.g. I had a very popular YouTube channel where I showed people what tools to use and what steps were involved.) Even then, it's not certain I'd be sued so long as I'm not sharing these files with other people.
This is where the law is messed up. Yes, sharing these rips with other people is against the law. We can argue whether this is right or not, but let's accept it for the moment. Why do we need another law that says merely creating these files - before you've even shared them out - is illegal also? It's just another charge to tack onto someone who was caught sharing. If I was in charge, I'd keep it illegal to share copyrighted content without permission (albeit with drastically changed penalties) but I'd make it legal to break DRM for personal use.
As a web developer, I *NEVER* trust the data. Especially if it's coming from an untrustworthy source. And the most untrustworthy source is the user. ("Enter a number" "1; Delete * from Users") Of course, I build protections in my code to prevent this bad data from causing problems. I can't say the same for every program, though. Some programs will take bad data and turn it into an exploit. Yes, it is the program that is at fault, but you can't be too careful and shouldn't just trust something because it is "data" and not "a program."
This works because Windows hides file extensions by default. (I change this on my boxes.) It also handles Zip files as if they were folders. So you would (if you took all the steps the virus author hopes you'll take) download "Really_Important_Document" (with the .zip hidden), open it up and see "Really_Important_Document.doc" (with a .scr on the end hidden). Seeing this, you'd forget all about this hidden file extension stuff and say ".doc is a Word document, I'll open it!" Of course, it would lauch the Windows screensaver executable and infect you. Hiding file extensions might help some users confused by all that .xyz stuff, but it also hurts that same crowd who don't realize that the .doc isn't really a Word document because it is really .doc.exe. (Not that you should open random Word documents you are sent, but that's a different topic.)
Maybe he's referring to the fact that plants take CO2 out of our atmosphere and return oxygen to it. Of course, the problem with this is that plants are a temporary CO2 sink. When the plant dies, it decomposes and releases CO2 back into the atmosphere. If you're talking about the normal levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, this helps regulate CO2 levels (some plants are absorbing CO2 while others are decomposing and releasing it). The problem is that we've dug deep into the Earth, pulled out coal and oil, burned it, and released additional CO2 into the atmosphere (as well as lots of other compounds). This additional CO2 can't be compensated for by a few plants.
Let's pin TERRORISTS!!!! against THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!! in a fight to the death and see who wins.
FTFY
Signed,
- Your "Friendly" National Government
Legend of Zelda - if done right - might actually make a pretty good movie. Sort of a mini-Lord Of The Rings. You could take the plot of Link To The Past (and perhaps a few other Zelda games), adapt it a bit, and wind up with a very nice movie. If you do it right, you could even get a Zelda Trilogy out of it.
I'd much rather see another Super Mario Brothers movie (actually based off of the video games instead of whatever that 80's film was) than Tetris: The Movie.
The rest of the shoreline isn't changing, though. If it was tide-related, you'd expect the entire shoreline to change, not just one section in the middle of the sea.
A methano-whale?
"We're whalers on the moon (of Saturn)! We carry a harpoon! ..."
I guess this means that the NFL can still blackout the games but they can't say "Don't be mad at us! The big, bad government made us do it." In other words, they can blackout games but they will be the ones in the fans scream at.