I have a cellphone with included domestic (US) calling, but haven't heard of anyone with included world-wide long distance. Who's service do you have?
AT&T. Since it's a company account, though, I'm not sure which plan I have, exactly. But my girlfriend has an AT&T personal phone, and she also has free worldwide LD, so it's obviously available to everybody.
Why don't you just call her and ask if she needs anything instead of relying on her to randomly call you before you're at the checkout counter?
Because she's a surgical resident and she's uncallable when she's operating. But she always calls home just before the end of her shift.
Assuming you know how my family operates is going to lead you to false conclusions.
This PBX idea for *2* people in a house is about as ludicrous as...
First of all, nobody asked you. I made it clear in my submission that this is just going to be a "for fun" project with no real practical justification.
Secondly, the services that you talk about that are available from the phone company don't even begin to scratch the surface. Can I have the phone company set up a nighttime call white-list such that between certain hours the phone only rings if the caller ID matches a number on the approved list, and all other callers get routed directly to voicemail? Can I establish a global black-list such that calls from certain numbers never ring through* unless the caller enters a code? Can I establish a hunt-down list, based on caller ID, that rings the house first, then my cell phone, then my office? Can I have that hunt-down list automatically change or deactivate during certain hours of the day?
I think you're underestimating the ultimate usefulness-- not to mention just plain gee-whiz-ness-- of a home telephone automation system.
Besides, the phone company wants you to pay through the nose, every month, for the measly selection of services that they do offer. After a year, you've spent several hundred dollars on telephone services. And what do you have to show for it? Nothing at all. I'd rather invest the time and money, then own the equipment.
But then again, I suppose people like you are inevitable. Every "Ask Slashdot" has to have somebody-- or several somebodies-- who pisses in the submitter's Cheerios.
*There's nothing I can do about the policemen's benefit fund calling me. They're technically a charity, and are therefore not regulated as telemarketers. But I don't want to donate, and I don't want to take their calls. Black-list them, they get a polite message that I won't be accepting their calls, and that's the end of that problem.
You know, I went to the trouble of putting it in the second line of my submission: "I don't really have a good justification for this; it just sounds like a neat thing to have."
If you people can't be bothered to read two sentences into the story, we're going to have to resort to making the titles longer. And nobody wants that.
I have a much better plan for saving money. Works like a charm. It goes like this:
1. Get a cell phone. 2. There is no step 2.
I can't remember the last time I heard of somebody getting a cell phone that didn't include free worldwide long distance. The other night I called Sydney from my home here in North America (I won't get any more specific than that). The cost to me: thirty of the 50 bajillion non-peak minutes that my cell phone provider gives me every month.
And-- this is the best part-- the company picks up the cell phone bill!
I mean seriously, I can see the day coming soon when long distance charges are abolished. Local phone service has been deregulated, so there's competition for your local phone number now. All it'll take is for one newcomer to offer unlimited free worldwide long distance for the low, low price of $N a month, and that'll be it.
I can't speak for how they do things in Oz, but in the US you can get (for example) four lines that are assigned to what they call a rotary group, or a hunt group. That means that the four lines get used in a round-robin fashion as calls come in. The first person to dial your number gets your line 1. The next person to dial the same number rings in on line 2, and so on, until it loops around again. So basically you're getting four lines with just one phone number.
You can use a PBX with any number of incoming lines (as long as that number is at least one) and with any service from your telco. So the question of whether you buy a rotary group of lines or lines with distinct numbers is entirely up to you.
_Beowulf's Children_, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle
I was just thinking of this one myself. I don't guess it's technically a dystopia, but at the end the good guys (almost) all end up dead, so that counts for something.
In the same basic vein is the Endymion saga, by Dan Simmons. The end of the last book is accompanied by the last possible thing that you would want to see happen. There's a sort-of happy ending, but after a few minutes you end up thinking to yourself, "but want a minute, she's still going to... they're still going to...." It's wrenching.
Since you had one, what kind of talk and standby times were you getting?
Dreadful. If I left the cordless handset out of its cradle for about 36 hours, it would start giving off that high-pitched "low battery" beep. Which is an amazing thing to wake up to in the middle of the night when you've left the handset on your bedside table.
Um... actually, yeah they do. If you say, "I received a piece of SPAM today" (note the caps) and you're not talking about food, then you're violating their trademark. In private correspondence it'd be a non-issue, because Hormel would never find out about it. But if you put it on a web site, Hormel would have every right to take action. They could, for example, threaten to sue the shit out of Slashdot's parent company (whoever they are these days) because Slashdot uses a picture of a can of SPAM without permission. I'm sure the only reason they haven't yet is because Hormel's lawyers haven't the foggiest idea that Slashdot exists.
You're luckier than I was. As I said in another post, my Siemens system is in the attic. It shat all over my wireless LAN when I first installed it. (The LAN, I mean. The phones were there first.) I have since replaced them with inexpensive 900 MHz cordless phones.
In case anybody gives a damn, I'm using an Apple AirPort base station with some Macs that are equipped with AirPort cards and internal antennas.
I own a Siemens system now. It's in my attic. I replaced it with a couple of cheap 900 MHz phones after I put in my wireless LAN. I'd rather have 802.11 than 2.4 GHz phones.
The Siemens system is really far from being a true PBX-type system. It's just a glorified cordless phone with optional answering machine. Oh, and the cordless handsets sound terrible from the other end of the connection.
the latest print issue of Linux Journal has an article on Bayonne...
As a matter of fact, that's what inspired me to Ask Slashdot. It never occurred to me that there might be others out there who shared my idea of a home PBX until I saw that article.
I did find it a little light on practical information, though. It read like a design specification, which is all fine and good, but....
Filtering rules for callerID to serve up special messages for special people.
That's another fantastic idea. Program the phone system to send a specific message to my girlfriend: "Honey, I went to the market. If you want anything, press 1 to connect to my cell phone."
I should have entitled this article, "Share your most brilliant phone system ideas."
Now that you've learned what they mean, can you tell me (and the rest of our loyal listening audience) how, exactly, you think they apply to me in this situation? Do you think I'm trolling? Do you think I'm a paid employee of Hormel? Are you even remotely thinking these things through before you post them?
Why would you want a PBX system in your house? how many people live in your house?
Two... but that's obviously not the point.
I'm looking for features. Features like programmable voicemail and room-to-room intercomm are easy, and they're available at reasonable cost from companies like Panasonic. But the more complex stuff, like call filtering by caller ID, call forwarding by caller ID, day-night programming, and so on... those are harder. That's why I'm hoping somebody can help me out with building a scriptable, configurable system using off-the-shelf hardware and software as much as possible, and homegrown software where necessary.
I really thought I made this clear in my submission. Maybe I was wrong.
Unlike anti-gravity or cold fusion, we know that molecular manufacturing is possible, because every plant and animal on Earth is a working proof of the physics.
So you think that soon you'll be able to "grow" a car? Truly amazing. What a time to be alive.
Except, of course, for the fact that that's absurd. Organic chemistry is fundamentally different from inorganic chemistry. It's a long way from a pancreas to an assembly line. Creating proteins in catalyzed chemical reactions is one thing, but assembling components on a macroscopic scale is something else entirely.
But let's start simple. Show me a self-sustaining molecular-scale process that can produce, say, a six-inch cube of manganese. That should be pretty easy, right? After all, plants and animals have been doing "molecular manufacturing" for hundreds of millions of years.
No offense, friend, but you seem to have left most of the science out of your science fiction.
Are you sure that's what you meant to say? I've got quite a lot of "dirt" under my property that can be reassembled into the form of a truck (proprietary design or open)--not an infinite supply like with bits, but an abundant supply of molecular feedstock nonetheless, which can also be infinitely recycled because atoms don't wear out.
Okay, again with the high school chemistry. What you're talking about has a name: it's called alchemy. And it's impossible. You can't just turn an atom of silicon into an atom of iridium, at least not on a large scale.
So without magical alchemy at your disposal, you'll have to use plain old mining. Of the dirt under your house, the vast majority of it is what's called "soil solids." These solids are made up, chemically, of 50% oxygen, 30% silicon, 7% aluminum, and a measly 3% iron. The other 10% is made up of organic matter (carbon and nitrogen, mostly) and nearly everything else. Literally. All the elements from hydrogen to uranium-- the naturally occurring elements, in other words-- can be found in plain old topsoil, albeit only in trace amounts.
The vast majority of the mass of your car is steel (i.e., iron) and aluminum. So if you wanted to make a car out of the stuff under your house, you'd have to dig up enough iron and aluminum to roughly equal the mass of your car. According to the Alcoa people, the average car's frame contains 1/7th of a ton of aluminum. (Actually, they said that one ton of aluminum can make seven cars. Flip it on its head to get tons per car.) So let's figure that you need 1/7th car's worth of aluminum and 6/7ths car's worth of iron.
Assuming that you can get the necessary aluminum and iron from the same load of dirt, that comes to approximately 57 tons of dirt.
Compacted dirt weighs 110 pounds per cubic foot. So 57 tons of dirt would occupy a volume of about 1,030 cubic feet. That's a cube a little over ten feet on each side. In other words, big. Very big.
Once you've gotten that out of the ground, you still haven't tackled the problem of how to get the iron (which is probably all tied up in iron oxide) and aluminum (ditto) out. I'm going to assume that you'll resort to "nanotechnology" or "molecular manufacturing" at this point and hand-wave that problem away.
As I said before, if you want to try to manufacture a car out of the stuff under your house, be my guest.
HD TV displays are, to make them sellable to Joe Public, going to require about four times as many pixels on screen as ordinary PAL/NTSC.
Check your math.
720 x 480 = 345,600 pixels in an NTSC picture
1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels in a 1080 picture
That's exactly six times as many pixels, not four.
(Oh, and for the record, 720 pictures have 2.25 times as many pixels as NTSC pictures.)
If they want four times as many pixels on screen, the designers are going to have to use a record media with a higher data transfer rate
Again, just for the record, 1080i--including a Dolby Digital audio track-- compressed to about 20 Mbps is acceptable. (OTA HD is encoded at slightly over 19 Mbps and it's usually very good, while D-VHS at 25 Mbps is exceptional.)
Superbit DVDs are encoded at around 7 Mbps. So the difference between today's DVDs and HD-DVD-- not counting capacity, of course-- is only about a factor of 3. That wouldn't be too hard to achieve.
Then there's the capacity problem. I'd hate to have to buy a twenty disc set of a movie and have to flip discs every three minutes.
It's apparent that you don't understand the Audio Home Recording Act 1992.
I do. Do you? In the case of RIAA v. Diamond, 1999, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that computers, and by extension MP3 players, are not audio recording equipment, and are therefore not covered by the 1992 amendments to Title 17. The AHRA doesn't apply to questions of computer-based recording or encoding.
Otherwise you wouldn't be allowed to video tape a television program....
You're thinking of Sony v. Universal, 1983. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld that in-home time-shifting of television broadcasts is legitimate fair use. But that's very different from making MP3s from CDs.
They are quite clearly extendible to the mp3 recording for personal use.
Except the court doesn't agree. Again, see RIAA v. Diamond.
A more likely example would be Microsoft's attempts to prevent security groups from publicly announcing vulnerabilities so as to avoid any further publicity embarrassments.
Saying, "There's a security vulnerability in SurfOS 1.0," is okay. You can even get fairly specific. Saying, "Here's how you exploit a security vulnerability in SurfOS 1.0," is not. Saying, "Here's a copy of my program to exploit the security vulnerability in SurfOS 1.0," is also not okay.
As long as you stay on this side of that line, you're in the clear. But if you cross it, have your lawyer on speed-dial.
Now, that said, anybody can threaten anybody else with a lawsuit, with or without merit. Threatening somebody with a lawsuit isn't against the law, nor should it be. If you decide, for whatever reason, to back down because of the a baseless threat, then that's not a sign of a bad law. It's a sign that you had the wrong attorney.
Any high-definition movie disc standard has a strong chance of being tightly encrypted and would likely use the encrypted digital-out DVI standard.
Agree on the encryption point, disagree on the DVI point. I would be amazed if HD-DVD players only included a digital video output. There's way too much gear out there-- including my HDTV-- that accepts analog component YUV video, and component output components (sorry) are very cheap to build and buy.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could buy DVD players with DVI outputs as an option, but I'd be astounded if they were the only outputs.
However, if you have legally purchased an original DVD and you'd like to play it on your PC (running Linux say) - then you need to be able to decrypt it. That's what DeCSS is for - and when I use it this way, I wasn't breaking any laws....until DMCA came along.
Gee, sbaker, what part of "licensed" is unclear to you? If there's no licensed DVD player software for your operating system, then there's no licensed DVD player software for your operating system. That doesn't make it okay for you to crack the encryption scheme and do what you will with the data on the disc. Legitimately licensed DVD players-- both hardware and software-- are widely available. The correct-- and legal-- course of action in your case is to play your DVD on any licensed DVD player. Period. If you don't have one, get one. If you don't want to get one, then don't play the DVD.
I really don't understand what's unclear about "you aren't allowed."
WRONG! Copyright law does not forbid you from doing anything in the privacy of your own home. [...] What is illegal is doing that and then distributing the derived works.
:sigh:
Title 17, section 106, says, in whole (emphasis mine):
Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize
any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
So you see, it's against the law for you to do any of those things without permission. It's a oft-repeated falsehood that copyright violation only occurs if you distribute the work. Distributing the work alters the degree to which the injured party is entitled to seek damages, but that's all.
Now, there are specific and well-defined exceptions to the exclusivity of the rights of the copyright holder. For example, in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios the Supreme Court upheld the District Court's decision that time-shifting in the privacy of the home is legitimate fair use.
The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 amended Title 17 to state (paraphrasing here) that no copyright violation action could be brought against any individual for the noncommercial in-home use of digital or analog recording equipment. So in that specific circumstance, you're right. You can make copies of music for noncommercial purposes, using audio recording equipment, in the privacy of your home.
But in RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc., however, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals made two very interesting findings. First, they found that a computer, and by extension a computer-based portable MP3 player, is not an audio recording device, and as such is not covered by the 1992 amendment to Title 17. However, they also found that the use of a portable MP3 player to make personal copies of rightfully purchased music "is paradigmatic noncommercial personal use entirely consistent with the purposes of the Act."
So the specific instance of making copies of rightfully purchased music CDs to a portable MP3 player is allowed. But that doesn't extend to "you can do anything you want in your own home." In particular, it has nothing to say about your example of turning a DVD into a digital movie file on your computer. Furthermore, altering the movie in the way you describe would clearly be in violation.
Of course, it's unlikely that you'll ever get caught if you keep it in you own home. But it's still technically illegal.
Now that that's out of the way, I'll address your examples of what you call "abuses of DRM law." I'm not going to address them individually, because they're all examples of the same basic principle.
Copyright protection circumvention is against the law. In other words, if a publisher takes measures to prevent the copying or other unauthorized use of their works, and an individual or group comes up with a system or device for circumventing those measures of prevention, then you've broken the law. If you share that system or device, then you've broken the law.
That's the law of the land. It was passed by Congress and rightfully signed by the President. If you don't like it, that's fine, but by definition, enforcing the law is not abuse of it.
If you stand up and say, "There are four ways to decode a DVD without a licensed DVD player," you haven't broken any laws. If you say, "Here's how you decode a DVD without a licensed DVD player," you may have broken the law, depending on how much detail you provide. And if you say, "Here's my program for decoding a DVD without a licensed DVD player," you have definitely broken the law. Furthermore, if somebody else says, "Here's his program for decoding a DVD without a licensed DVD player," that party has also broken the law, because they're also distributing your system or device.
It's another common misconception (we're surrounded by those this morning, aren't we?) that the DMCA makes it illegal to talk about flaws in encryption systems. That's not true. The DMCA makes it illegal to actually circumvent encryption systems, or to distribute systems or devices for circumventing encryption systems. They're very different things.
By analogy, it's illegal to break into a person's home. It's not, however, illegal to talk about breaking into a person's home. But in most jurisdictions, it's illegal to sell or distribute, or possibly possess, devices used to break into people's homes. You can talk about locks, you can talk about security systems, but you can't sell lockpicks. (Again, in most jurisdictions.)
And here's the most important thing: it's illegal to break into someone's home even if you only did so to demonstrate that their home can be broken into. You can tell somebody that their home is vulnerable. You can even tell them how, exactly, it's vulnerable. But if you get fed up with their reluctance to put double locks on their doors and decide to break in just to prove your point, then you've gone too far.
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I have a cellphone with included domestic (US) calling, but haven't heard of anyone with included world-wide long distance. Who's service do you have?
AT&T. Since it's a company account, though, I'm not sure which plan I have, exactly. But my girlfriend has an AT&T personal phone, and she also has free worldwide LD, so it's obviously available to everybody.
Why don't you just call her and ask if she needs anything instead of relying on her to randomly call you before you're at the checkout counter?
Because she's a surgical resident and she's uncallable when she's operating. But she always calls home just before the end of her shift.
Assuming you know how my family operates is going to lead you to false conclusions.
This PBX idea for *2* people in a house is about as ludicrous as...
First of all, nobody asked you. I made it clear in my submission that this is just going to be a "for fun" project with no real practical justification.
Secondly, the services that you talk about that are available from the phone company don't even begin to scratch the surface. Can I have the phone company set up a nighttime call white-list such that between certain hours the phone only rings if the caller ID matches a number on the approved list, and all other callers get routed directly to voicemail? Can I establish a global black-list such that calls from certain numbers never ring through* unless the caller enters a code? Can I establish a hunt-down list, based on caller ID, that rings the house first, then my cell phone, then my office? Can I have that hunt-down list automatically change or deactivate during certain hours of the day?
I think you're underestimating the ultimate usefulness-- not to mention just plain gee-whiz-ness-- of a home telephone automation system.
Besides, the phone company wants you to pay through the nose, every month, for the measly selection of services that they do offer. After a year, you've spent several hundred dollars on telephone services. And what do you have to show for it? Nothing at all. I'd rather invest the time and money, then own the equipment.
But then again, I suppose people like you are inevitable. Every "Ask Slashdot" has to have somebody-- or several somebodies-- who pisses in the submitter's Cheerios.
*There's nothing I can do about the policemen's benefit fund calling me. They're technically a charity, and are therefore not regulated as telemarketers. But I don't want to donate, and I don't want to take their calls. Black-list them, they get a polite message that I won't be accepting their calls, and that's the end of that problem.
I mean really why?
You know, I went to the trouble of putting it in the second line of my submission: "I don't really have a good justification for this; it just sounds like a neat thing to have."
If you people can't be bothered to read two sentences into the story, we're going to have to resort to making the titles longer. And nobody wants that.
I have a much better plan for saving money. Works like a charm. It goes like this:
1. Get a cell phone.
2. There is no step 2.
I can't remember the last time I heard of somebody getting a cell phone that didn't include free worldwide long distance. The other night I called Sydney from my home here in North America (I won't get any more specific than that). The cost to me: thirty of the 50 bajillion non-peak minutes that my cell phone provider gives me every month.
And-- this is the best part-- the company picks up the cell phone bill!
I mean seriously, I can see the day coming soon when long distance charges are abolished. Local phone service has been deregulated, so there's competition for your local phone number now. All it'll take is for one newcomer to offer unlimited free worldwide long distance for the low, low price of $N a month, and that'll be it.
I can't speak for how they do things in Oz, but in the US you can get (for example) four lines that are assigned to what they call a rotary group, or a hunt group. That means that the four lines get used in a round-robin fashion as calls come in. The first person to dial your number gets your line 1. The next person to dial the same number rings in on line 2, and so on, until it loops around again. So basically you're getting four lines with just one phone number.
You can use a PBX with any number of incoming lines (as long as that number is at least one) and with any service from your telco. So the question of whether you buy a rotary group of lines or lines with distinct numbers is entirely up to you.
_Beowulf's Children_, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle
I was just thinking of this one myself. I don't guess it's technically a dystopia, but at the end the good guys (almost) all end up dead, so that counts for something.
In the same basic vein is the Endymion saga, by Dan Simmons. The end of the last book is accompanied by the last possible thing that you would want to see happen. There's a sort-of happy ending, but after a few minutes you end up thinking to yourself, "but want a minute, she's still going to... they're still going to...." It's wrenching.
Since you had one, what kind of talk and standby times were you getting?
Dreadful. If I left the cordless handset out of its cradle for about 36 hours, it would start giving off that high-pitched "low battery" beep. Which is an amazing thing to wake up to in the middle of the night when you've left the handset on your bedside table.
Okay, thanks.
Um... actually, yeah they do. If you say, "I received a piece of SPAM today" (note the caps) and you're not talking about food, then you're violating their trademark. In private correspondence it'd be a non-issue, because Hormel would never find out about it. But if you put it on a web site, Hormel would have every right to take action. They could, for example, threaten to sue the shit out of Slashdot's parent company (whoever they are these days) because Slashdot uses a picture of a can of SPAM without permission. I'm sure the only reason they haven't yet is because Hormel's lawyers haven't the foggiest idea that Slashdot exists.
I have 802.11b and no interference
You're luckier than I was. As I said in another post, my Siemens system is in the attic. It shat all over my wireless LAN when I first installed it. (The LAN, I mean. The phones were there first.) I have since replaced them with inexpensive 900 MHz cordless phones.
In case anybody gives a damn, I'm using an Apple AirPort base station with some Macs that are equipped with AirPort cards and internal antennas.
We went away for the weekend -- when we returned, we found that the answering machine had been answering the front door! Oops!
;-)
Doesn't sound like an "oops" to me. Sounds like a feature.
I own a Siemens system now. It's in my attic. I replaced it with a couple of cheap 900 MHz phones after I put in my wireless LAN. I'd rather have 802.11 than 2.4 GHz phones.
The Siemens system is really far from being a true PBX-type system. It's just a glorified cordless phone with optional answering machine. Oh, and the cordless handsets sound terrible from the other end of the connection.
the latest print issue of Linux Journal has an article on Bayonne...
;-)
As a matter of fact, that's what inspired me to Ask Slashdot. It never occurred to me that there might be others out there who shared my idea of a home PBX until I saw that article.
I did find it a little light on practical information, though. It read like a design specification, which is all fine and good, but....
wha? you don't subscribe? tsk...
Wha? Linux Journal isn't free? tsk...
Filtering rules for callerID to serve up special messages for special people.
That's another fantastic idea. Program the phone system to send a specific message to my girlfriend: "Honey, I went to the market. If you want anything, press 1 to connect to my cell phone."
I should have entitled this article, "Share your most brilliant phone system ideas."
If you would like to stop looking foolish, you might consider backing that statement up somehow.
Like I said, that's only if you want to stop looking foolish.
Encodes voicemail to MP3 and forwards it to my email box.
That's a fantastic idea. I mean really fantastic. Can't believe I've never thought of that.
I hope somebody has a good suggestion on this subject.
Now that you've learned what they mean, can you tell me (and the rest of our loyal listening audience) how, exactly, you think they apply to me in this situation? Do you think I'm trolling? Do you think I'm a paid employee of Hormel? Are you even remotely thinking these things through before you post them?
Why would you want a PBX system in your house? how many people live in your house?
Two... but that's obviously not the point.
I'm looking for features. Features like programmable voicemail and room-to-room intercomm are easy, and they're available at reasonable cost from companies like Panasonic. But the more complex stuff, like call filtering by caller ID, call forwarding by caller ID, day-night programming, and so on... those are harder. That's why I'm hoping somebody can help me out with building a scriptable, configurable system using off-the-shelf hardware and software as much as possible, and homegrown software where necessary.
I really thought I made this clear in my submission. Maybe I was wrong.
I'm really not sure if you're Trolling, or astroturfing...
Do you actually know what either of those words means? Seriously, can you define them?
Unlike anti-gravity or cold fusion, we know that molecular manufacturing is possible, because every plant and animal on Earth is a working proof of the physics.
So you think that soon you'll be able to "grow" a car? Truly amazing. What a time to be alive.
Except, of course, for the fact that that's absurd. Organic chemistry is fundamentally different from inorganic chemistry. It's a long way from a pancreas to an assembly line. Creating proteins in catalyzed chemical reactions is one thing, but assembling components on a macroscopic scale is something else entirely.
But let's start simple. Show me a self-sustaining molecular-scale process that can produce, say, a six-inch cube of manganese. That should be pretty easy, right? After all, plants and animals have been doing "molecular manufacturing" for hundreds of millions of years.
No offense, friend, but you seem to have left most of the science out of your science fiction.
Are you sure that's what you meant to say? I've got quite a lot of "dirt" under my property that can be reassembled into the form of a truck (proprietary design or open)--not an infinite supply like with bits, but an abundant supply of molecular feedstock nonetheless, which can also be infinitely recycled because atoms don't wear out.
Okay, again with the high school chemistry. What you're talking about has a name: it's called alchemy. And it's impossible. You can't just turn an atom of silicon into an atom of iridium, at least not on a large scale.
So without magical alchemy at your disposal, you'll have to use plain old mining. Of the dirt under your house, the vast majority of it is what's called "soil solids." These solids are made up, chemically, of 50% oxygen, 30% silicon, 7% aluminum, and a measly 3% iron. The other 10% is made up of organic matter (carbon and nitrogen, mostly) and nearly everything else. Literally. All the elements from hydrogen to uranium-- the naturally occurring elements, in other words-- can be found in plain old topsoil, albeit only in trace amounts.
The vast majority of the mass of your car is steel (i.e., iron) and aluminum. So if you wanted to make a car out of the stuff under your house, you'd have to dig up enough iron and aluminum to roughly equal the mass of your car. According to the Alcoa people, the average car's frame contains 1/7th of a ton of aluminum. (Actually, they said that one ton of aluminum can make seven cars. Flip it on its head to get tons per car.) So let's figure that you need 1/7th car's worth of aluminum and 6/7ths car's worth of iron.
Assuming that you can get the necessary aluminum and iron from the same load of dirt, that comes to approximately 57 tons of dirt.
Compacted dirt weighs 110 pounds per cubic foot. So 57 tons of dirt would occupy a volume of about 1,030 cubic feet. That's a cube a little over ten feet on each side. In other words, big. Very big.
Once you've gotten that out of the ground, you still haven't tackled the problem of how to get the iron (which is probably all tied up in iron oxide) and aluminum (ditto) out. I'm going to assume that you'll resort to "nanotechnology" or "molecular manufacturing" at this point and hand-wave that problem away.
As I said before, if you want to try to manufacture a car out of the stuff under your house, be my guest.
HD TV displays are, to make them sellable to Joe Public, going to require about four times as many pixels on screen as ordinary PAL/NTSC.
Check your math.
720 x 480 = 345,600 pixels in an NTSC picture
1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels in a 1080 picture
That's exactly six times as many pixels, not four.
(Oh, and for the record, 720 pictures have 2.25 times as many pixels as NTSC pictures.)
If they want four times as many pixels on screen, the designers are going to have to use a record media with a higher data transfer rate
Again, just for the record, 1080i--including a Dolby Digital audio track-- compressed to about 20 Mbps is acceptable. (OTA HD is encoded at slightly over 19 Mbps and it's usually very good, while D-VHS at 25 Mbps is exceptional.)
Superbit DVDs are encoded at around 7 Mbps. So the difference between today's DVDs and HD-DVD-- not counting capacity, of course-- is only about a factor of 3. That wouldn't be too hard to achieve.
Then there's the capacity problem. I'd hate to have to buy a twenty disc set of a movie and have to flip discs every three minutes.
It's apparent that you don't understand the Audio Home Recording Act 1992.
I do. Do you? In the case of RIAA v. Diamond, 1999, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that computers, and by extension MP3 players, are not audio recording equipment, and are therefore not covered by the 1992 amendments to Title 17. The AHRA doesn't apply to questions of computer-based recording or encoding.
Otherwise you wouldn't be allowed to video tape a television program....
You're thinking of Sony v. Universal, 1983. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld that in-home time-shifting of television broadcasts is legitimate fair use. But that's very different from making MP3s from CDs.
They are quite clearly extendible to the mp3 recording for personal use.
Except the court doesn't agree. Again, see RIAA v. Diamond.
A more likely example would be Microsoft's attempts to prevent security groups from publicly announcing vulnerabilities so as to avoid any further publicity embarrassments.
Saying, "There's a security vulnerability in SurfOS 1.0," is okay. You can even get fairly specific. Saying, "Here's how you exploit a security vulnerability in SurfOS 1.0," is not. Saying, "Here's a copy of my program to exploit the security vulnerability in SurfOS 1.0," is also not okay.
As long as you stay on this side of that line, you're in the clear. But if you cross it, have your lawyer on speed-dial.
Now, that said, anybody can threaten anybody else with a lawsuit, with or without merit. Threatening somebody with a lawsuit isn't against the law, nor should it be. If you decide, for whatever reason, to back down because of the a baseless threat, then that's not a sign of a bad law. It's a sign that you had the wrong attorney.
Any high-definition movie disc standard has a strong chance of being tightly encrypted and would likely use the encrypted digital-out DVI standard.
Agree on the encryption point, disagree on the DVI point. I would be amazed if HD-DVD players only included a digital video output. There's way too much gear out there-- including my HDTV-- that accepts analog component YUV video, and component output components (sorry) are very cheap to build and buy.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could buy DVD players with DVI outputs as an option, but I'd be astounded if they were the only outputs.
However, if you have legally purchased an original DVD and you'd like to play it on your PC (running Linux say) - then you need to be able to decrypt it. That's what DeCSS is for - and when I use it this way, I wasn't breaking any laws....until DMCA came along.
Gee, sbaker, what part of "licensed" is unclear to you? If there's no licensed DVD player software for your operating system, then there's no licensed DVD player software for your operating system. That doesn't make it okay for you to crack the encryption scheme and do what you will with the data on the disc. Legitimately licensed DVD players-- both hardware and software-- are widely available. The correct-- and legal-- course of action in your case is to play your DVD on any licensed DVD player. Period. If you don't have one, get one. If you don't want to get one, then don't play the DVD.
I really don't understand what's unclear about "you aren't allowed."
:sigh:
So you see, it's against the law for you to do any of those things without permission. It's a oft-repeated falsehood that copyright violation only occurs if you distribute the work. Distributing the work alters the degree to which the injured party is entitled to seek damages, but that's all.Title 17, section 106, says, in whole (emphasis mine):
Now, there are specific and well-defined exceptions to the exclusivity of the rights of the copyright holder. For example, in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios the Supreme Court upheld the District Court's decision that time-shifting in the privacy of the home is legitimate fair use.
The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 amended Title 17 to state (paraphrasing here) that no copyright violation action could be brought against any individual for the noncommercial in-home use of digital or analog recording equipment. So in that specific circumstance, you're right. You can make copies of music for noncommercial purposes, using audio recording equipment, in the privacy of your home.
But in RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc., however, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals made two very interesting findings. First, they found that a computer, and by extension a computer-based portable MP3 player, is not an audio recording device, and as such is not covered by the 1992 amendment to Title 17. However, they also found that the use of a portable MP3 player to make personal copies of rightfully purchased music "is paradigmatic noncommercial personal use entirely consistent with the purposes of the Act."
So the specific instance of making copies of rightfully purchased music CDs to a portable MP3 player is allowed. But that doesn't extend to "you can do anything you want in your own home." In particular, it has nothing to say about your example of turning a DVD into a digital movie file on your computer. Furthermore, altering the movie in the way you describe would clearly be in violation.
Of course, it's unlikely that you'll ever get caught if you keep it in you own home. But it's still technically illegal.
(You can-- and, evidently, should-- read Title 17 for yourself at http://www.copyright.gov/title17/.)
Now that that's out of the way, I'll address your examples of what you call "abuses of DRM law." I'm not going to address them individually, because they're all examples of the same basic principle.
Copyright protection circumvention is against the law. In other words, if a publisher takes measures to prevent the copying or other unauthorized use of their works, and an individual or group comes up with a system or device for circumventing those measures of prevention, then you've broken the law. If you share that system or device, then you've broken the law.
That's the law of the land. It was passed by Congress and rightfully signed by the President. If you don't like it, that's fine, but by definition, enforcing the law is not abuse of it.
If you stand up and say, "There are four ways to decode a DVD without a licensed DVD player," you haven't broken any laws. If you say, "Here's how you decode a DVD without a licensed DVD player," you may have broken the law, depending on how much detail you provide. And if you say, "Here's my program for decoding a DVD without a licensed DVD player," you have definitely broken the law. Furthermore, if somebody else says, "Here's his program for decoding a DVD without a licensed DVD player," that party has also broken the law, because they're also distributing your system or device.
It's another common misconception (we're surrounded by those this morning, aren't we?) that the DMCA makes it illegal to talk about flaws in encryption systems. That's not true. The DMCA makes it illegal to actually circumvent encryption systems, or to distribute systems or devices for circumventing encryption systems. They're very different things.
By analogy, it's illegal to break into a person's home. It's not, however, illegal to talk about breaking into a person's home. But in most jurisdictions, it's illegal to sell or distribute, or possibly possess, devices used to break into people's homes. You can talk about locks, you can talk about security systems, but you can't sell lockpicks. (Again, in most jurisdictions.)
And here's the most important thing: it's illegal to break into someone's home even if you only did so to demonstrate that their home can be broken into. You can tell somebody that their home is vulnerable. You can even tell them how, exactly, it's vulnerable. But if you get fed up with their reluctance to put double locks on their doors and decide to break in just to prove your point, then you've gone too far.