Wouldn't it be funny if some organization in the US government has prior art on this patent? Say the NSA or FBI, perhaps the Army, Air Force or CIA? Somewhere in there somebody developed a computer system which encrypted every single communications which took place at the system level.
One of my projects at work was to build a database and web interface capable of distributing across the country every single document filed with the FCC every single day. Well it's finally found a purpose! Enough patting myself on the back...read the original Sirius petition here:
http://www.geocities.com/nospamcarl/sirius_fcc.pdf . (38 pages all scanned and not OCRd so it's 1.6MB) (If this doesn't work, try copy and pasting the URL directly. For some reason, it didn't work for me clicking directly from Slash.)
It's got some good info in it. At the very least, you'll find out that it's part of a bigger request for comments by the FCC on "whether it [the FCC] should change its emissions limits for the restricted bands above 38.6 GHz, and whether the Commision should apply its emissions limits to receivers that tune above 960 MHz." It's also got some of Sirius' technical evidence in support of their claims.
And here's a choice quote:
Impact on Deployment and Service to Underserved Communities
If the Commission fails in its duty to ensure SDARS [Satellite Digital Audio Radio Service] interference protection from Part 15 and Part 18 devices, the rapid deployment of digital audio radio services will be significantly threatened. As the Commission has noted in past orders,
SDARS holds the promise of providing continuous service of digital radio in the form of 200 audio channels that will offer consumers a tremendous increase in choices of audio programming. If protected from harmful interference, SDARS will dramatically reduce the disparity in access to radio by making enormous programming choices available to 45 million underserved consumers in the US, particularly those in rural areas, who currently have access to only a small number of radio stations.
BTW, this is a public document. I'm not sure if it's on fcc.gov yet but it should be someday...if you can wade through their multiple search engines and multiple data formats. You'll be able to track any replies.
Okay, I'm a newbie when comes to Wine's technical side, but what happens when Microsoft releases the.0.1 release of their APIs specifically to break Wine compatibility?
Or what happens when Microsoft updates their EULA to read: "this program must run on an officially licensed Microsoft Operating System" or starts requiring vendors who want to use the XP logo on their boxes to start including that wording also?
Heck, they could just put it all under the guise of their new security stance.
I'm not trolling, these are all possibilities when playing with MS! You can bet they've got contigency plans all ready for the day when Wine becomes a threat.
The movie studios argue that these restrictions are necessary because digital television prevents an unprecedented threat of unauthorized copying -- first, because it is of exceptionally high quality, and second, because it's much easier to make copies of digital media (like CDs) than of analog media (like VHS tapes).
So if this is the true argument, the EFF or some large consumer org should propose that analog RCA outputs be left in these new devices. All of our VCRs and PVRs would still work, satisfying those who would like to keep archives of Ace and Gary's Ambiguously Gay Duo for personal use.:-) At the same time, copying is still 1X and analog so the MPAA's argument is mooted.
As for quality, if VCRs and PVRs eventually migrated to SVideo and eventually component outputs, quality will still be lower than the original digital stream but better than what we have today.
Overall, it's a good compromise for both consumers and movie studios. As long as they're being up front with their concerns, that is. This sounds like a good thing to send to our Senators and Reps as its a middle ground solution.
Exactly: it's simple economics. If you create an artificial price floor ($17-$19 CDs for example) you also encourage a black market. This is usually the second lesson after supply and demand. Ol school Napster and its brethren are that black market. Little Johnny selling $8 CDs of music he burns from Napster at school is that black market.
My response sent to the email address on Universal's musichelponline.com site:
One concern I've got about this new copy protection scam is that in five years when Windows XP is no longer supported, I will no longer be able to play today's CDs in my computer.
Some may argue that people who bought music on 8-track tapes no longer have the ability to play those 8-track tapes and that the music companies have no obligation to guarantee future use. However, at least 8-track users had the ability (both legal and technical) to move the music from one medium to another as the technology evolved. With the advent of the DMCA and Universal's use of copy protected music discs (Phillips has stated these are not CDDA compliant and thus cannot use the CD logo), current purchasers will potentially be breaking the law just to ensure that they can listen to the CDs they purchased a few years ago.
That's right, think about the whole next generation of kids. They're predicted to be much larger than the Baby Boomers. These kids are growing up in an environment where Macs are still viable teaching tools. These kids will grow up being media CREATORS and not just media CONSUMERS like their parents were. If you teach kids that they too can create media just as easily as they can consume it, there will be a whole generation of people who will be more willing to do it.
Think about it: a whole generation of kids who had access to iMovie and iDVD and who made video essays as part of their assignments. The whole state of Maine will be giving 7th graders access to iBooks. I now regularly watch short scripts that my 14 year old cousin puts together with his friends that are much funnier than SNL (not that that's saying much.)
You're wasting your time if you think you can teach an old dog new tricks but these kids are just puppies and they're having a great time playing around with the technology. Don't underestimate this strategy. Kids have a huge pull in what parents buy. The standard argument is that people buy the same computers they have at work. But what if you throw a wrench in that logic: what if your kid asks for an iMac because it's what he uses at school and he wants to put together a short DVD for Grandma? Maybe just enough parents will put the kid's wants before their own.
Yes, and DRM is a big reason why Firewire/1394 hasn't progressed into consumer electronics as anything more than a way to get content into your computer. A friend saw a Mitsubishi demo of a home theatre system where Firewire was the only connector used: imagine one wire from your DVD player to your HDTV tuner, to the big screen TV, to the stereo receiver, etc. He was totally impressed but that system will never see the light of day until MPAA and MLB (major league baseball (Simpsons reference)) have been assured that I can't also plug in an Apple iMac and save all the various data streams to a hard drive. Phillips simply wants to start discussions on extending this protection to wireless transmissions.
Well, there was a ruling a few years ago that stated it was legal for home owners to distribute cable feeds across the home. Not sure if the courts declared that to be under Fair Use but that ruling does apply here: the media is changed (Wi-Fi versus coax cable) but the effect is the same: I can watch my cable feed from anywhere in the home.
Hey, if you read their press release, they have a list of the their other patents in their "patent portfolio." Mostly stuff dealing with document distribution, encryption and notification.
Over the past two years, I've been working on a distributed system where an operator in Wash, DC scans 250+ pages a day and is turned into PDF, OCRd, indexed, and then distributed via the web. We're up to 9GB of data and a few mil in annual revenues. There's gotta be a patent in there somewhere if these idiots can patent this stuff. Or at least prior art!
For $119 from Easybuy2000.com, you can get a player-only model that's just as small. Who cares about having a portable CD-R drive that only writes to 3" CDs?
Get the small player and a regular CD-R drive that writes both large and small CDs and you save $100 and get a faster burner to boot.
No conspiracy theory here, 10.1 does in fact break things. There were hacked up drivers for the Lucent WaveLan wireless ethernet card that worked with 10.0.4 but broke under 10.1. Various other programs like BBEdit had smaller problems also. Alot of programs have been re-released within the past few days to address 10.1 issues that have cropped up. If you haven't seen them publicized, it's because you're not looking on Mac boards, but they're there.
Hmmm, I know a guy who would rather we wrote our Java Servlets in assembly. He can write assembly with the best of em, but give em OOP stuff or J2EE and he can't understand it for the life of him.
There's more to being a "great" programmer than just knowing assembly... He closed his mind around the time of Pascal and C and never ever wanted to learn object oriented programming. Thus, he shies away from the J2EE stuff the company is going towards now.
I humbly suggest to you that it is not morally justifiable to advovate theft when there is reasonable democratic recourse available to you.
of course, many would argue that money and more specifically, lobbying, can get votes and laws in the US, leading one to believe that reasonable democratic recourse is only available to big rich companies.
face it, even if nothing illegal is going on (in terms of buying votes, etc.), record companies still have the resources to go to washington dc and plead their situations to congress, the president, etc. consumers don't. ordinary citizens normally complain to senators and reps by sending a letter. seriously, no one will go down to DC to plead why they should have access to napster. but record companies have many many employees just to fight it.
worse, if someday riaa takes an 18yr kid to court and shows up with million dollar lawyers vs. his $20/hour lawyer, they'll probably win, thus setting precedent, enforcing an existing law, etc.
in an ideal system yes, each citizen's voice would be equal, but the u.s. currently has a president that more than half the country didn't want! so obviously some votes mattered more than others...
wanna justify wanton piracy? last year the ftc declared the big 5 record companies were illegally price fixing with their minimum advertised pricing. here's a quote:
"The FTC estimates that U.S. consumers may have paid as much as $480 million more than they should have for CDs and other music because of these policies over the last three years. These settlements will eliminate these policies and should help restore much-needed competition to the retail music market, consisting of $15 billion in annual sales. Today's news should be sweet music to the ears of all CD purchasers," said Chairman Robert Pitofsky.
so basically alot of consumers are simply recouping that money because nowhere in that settlement did consumers get any money back.
as for "but then again, who the hell am i?", if you are a citizen of the united states, you have every right to your opinion of law as the record companies execs. the fact that they have money shouldn't play any part in law making. but these days, in washington, money is what's doing the law making.
You probably won't be paying a bill though. It's probably gonna be a monthly or annual automatic subscription (think porn sites) and most people don't bother checking their statements anymore anyway. And just like porn sites, Microsoft will probably make it just as hard to unsubscribe, ie, you've gotta call in, no online cancellation, etc. and that's assuming they're not gonna have minimum subscription requirements.
No, this will be bad. And don't get me started on.NET. But I'm sure it will fly since telling Joe Shmoe to buy Office for $750+ doesn't work for home users, but telling him, "here, use Office for a year for $99" and get him hooked and coming back like a crack whore will work. It gets the price down to comfortable consumer price points because consumers don't factor time into the purchase. Plain and simple...
And it works for businesses too: Hey Mike, go buy 5 new licenses of that Office 2002. Oh, it'll cost $2500?! Forget it!
versus: Hey Mike, go buy 5 new licenses of that Office 2002. Oh it'll cost $500/year?! Yeah, we'll worry about that next year.
Up front costs are all that people see. It's why cheap PCs sell even though they have lower reliability and will need to be repaired or replaced sooner. Microsoft is just applying the same principles to software.
There are techincal issues to the Intel port that many people overlook. While I'm sure Apple has internal ports running on x86 boxen right now, they most likely don't work with just any box out there. The problem with porting to x86 is that you'd have to also build in support for all the various hardware combinations out there now and in the future. Apple avoids this by controlling the hardware and the software.
>They clearly want to promote a free Unix to remove the amount of money they have to spend themselves.
They don't clearly want to promote Unix to get free developers. Don't forget, many in the Mac community don't have Unix knowledge or Unix programming skills so with OS X coming in a month, it'd be a good idea to start promoting the lower level abilities of the OS.
It was dismissed. I don't remember why exactly but could it be because they were different markets and thus there was no trademark dilution? Anyone know exactly why it was dismissed?
Slashdot Mirror
Why not directly sue Microsoft, Sun, HP, IBM? Somewhere along the line one of these companies offered system level encryption.
Or maybe this dinky unknown company saw a way to squeeze money out of little companies who they thought couldn't afford to fight back?
Wouldn't it be funny if some organization in the US government has prior art on this patent? Say the NSA or FBI, perhaps the Army, Air Force or CIA? Somewhere in there somebody developed a computer system which encrypted every single communications which took place at the system level.
Try reading the document here instead:
http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi? native_or_pdf=pdf&id_document=6512980637
It's got some good info in it. At the very least, you'll find out that it's part of a bigger request for comments by the FCC on "whether it [the FCC] should change its emissions limits for the restricted bands above 38.6 GHz, and whether the Commision should apply its emissions limits to receivers that tune above 960 MHz." It's also got some of Sirius' technical evidence in support of their claims.
And here's a choice quote:
BTW, this is a public document. I'm not sure if it's on fcc.gov yet but it should be someday...if you can wade through their multiple search engines and multiple data formats. You'll be able to track any replies.Okay, I'm a newbie when comes to Wine's technical side, but what happens when Microsoft releases the .0.1 release of their APIs specifically to break Wine compatibility?
Or what happens when Microsoft updates their EULA to read: "this program must run on an officially licensed Microsoft Operating System" or starts requiring vendors who want to use the XP logo on their boxes to start including that wording also?
Heck, they could just put it all under the guise of their new security stance.
I'm not trolling, these are all possibilities when playing with MS! You can bet they've got contigency plans all ready for the day when Wine becomes a threat.
So if this is the true argument, the EFF or some large consumer org should propose that analog RCA outputs be left in these new devices. All of our VCRs and PVRs would still work, satisfying those who would like to keep archives of Ace and Gary's Ambiguously Gay Duo for personal use. :-) At the same time, copying is still 1X and analog so the MPAA's argument is mooted.
As for quality, if VCRs and PVRs eventually migrated to SVideo and eventually component outputs, quality will still be lower than the original digital stream but better than what we have today.
Overall, it's a good compromise for both consumers and movie studios. As long as they're being up front with their concerns, that is. This sounds like a good thing to send to our Senators and Reps as its a middle ground solution.
Exactly: it's simple economics. If you create an artificial price floor ($17-$19 CDs for example) you also encourage a black market. This is usually the second lesson after supply and demand. Ol school Napster and its brethren are that black market. Little Johnny selling $8 CDs of music he burns from Napster at school is that black market.
My response sent to the email address on Universal's musichelponline.com site:
One concern I've got about this new copy protection scam is that in five years when Windows XP is no longer supported, I will no longer be able to play today's CDs in my computer.
Some may argue that people who bought music on 8-track tapes no longer have the ability to play those 8-track tapes and that the music companies have no obligation to guarantee future use. However, at least 8-track users had the ability (both legal and technical) to move the music from one medium to another as the technology evolved. With the advent of the DMCA and Universal's use of copy protected music discs (Phillips has stated these are not CDDA compliant and thus cannot use the CD logo), current purchasers will potentially be breaking the law just to ensure that they can listen to the CDs they purchased a few years ago.
That's right, think about the whole next generation of kids. They're predicted to be much larger than the Baby Boomers. These kids are growing up in an environment where Macs are still viable teaching tools. These kids will grow up being media CREATORS and not just media CONSUMERS like their parents were. If you teach kids that they too can create media just as easily as they can consume it, there will be a whole generation of people who will be more willing to do it.
Think about it: a whole generation of kids who had access to iMovie and iDVD and who made video essays as part of their assignments. The whole state of Maine will be giving 7th graders access to iBooks. I now regularly watch short scripts that my 14 year old cousin puts together with his friends that are much funnier than SNL (not that that's saying much.)
You're wasting your time if you think you can teach an old dog new tricks but these kids are just puppies and they're having a great time playing around with the technology. Don't underestimate this strategy. Kids have a huge pull in what parents buy. The standard argument is that people buy the same computers they have at work. But what if you throw a wrench in that logic: what if your kid asks for an iMac because it's what he uses at school and he wants to put together a short DVD for Grandma? Maybe just enough parents will put the kid's wants before their own.
Yes, and DRM is a big reason why Firewire/1394 hasn't progressed into consumer electronics as anything more than a way to get content into your computer. A friend saw a Mitsubishi demo of a home theatre system where Firewire was the only connector used: imagine one wire from your DVD player to your HDTV tuner, to the big screen TV, to the stereo receiver, etc. He was totally impressed but that system will never see the light of day until MPAA and MLB (major league baseball (Simpsons reference)) have been assured that I can't also plug in an Apple iMac and save all the various data streams to a hard drive. Phillips simply wants to start discussions on extending this protection to wireless transmissions.
Well, there was a ruling a few years ago that stated it was legal for home owners to distribute cable feeds across the home. Not sure if the courts declared that to be under Fair Use but that ruling does apply here: the media is changed (Wi-Fi versus coax cable) but the effect is the same: I can watch my cable feed from anywhere in the home.
Hey, if you read their press release, they have a list of the their other patents in their "patent portfolio." Mostly stuff dealing with document distribution, encryption and notification.
Over the past two years, I've been working on a distributed system where an operator in Wash, DC scans 250+ pages a day and is turned into PDF, OCRd, indexed, and then distributed via the web. We're up to 9GB of data and a few mil in annual revenues. There's gotta be a patent in there somewhere if these idiots can patent this stuff. Or at least prior art!
Get the small player and a regular CD-R drive that writes both large and small CDs and you save $100 and get a faster burner to boot.
No conspiracy theory here, 10.1 does in fact break things. There were hacked up drivers for the Lucent WaveLan wireless ethernet card that worked with 10.0.4 but broke under 10.1. Various other programs like BBEdit had smaller problems also. Alot of programs have been re-released within the past few days to address 10.1 issues that have cropped up. If you haven't seen them publicized, it's because you're not looking on Mac boards, but they're there.
Hmmm, I know a guy who would rather we wrote our Java Servlets in assembly. He can write assembly with the best of em, but give em OOP stuff or J2EE and he can't understand it for the life of him. There's more to being a "great" programmer than just knowing assembly... He closed his mind around the time of Pascal and C and never ever wanted to learn object oriented programming. Thus, he shies away from the J2EE stuff the company is going towards now.
of course, many would argue that money and more specifically, lobbying, can get votes and laws in the US, leading one to believe that reasonable democratic recourse is only available to big rich companies.
face it, even if nothing illegal is going on (in terms of buying votes, etc.), record companies still have the resources to go to washington dc and plead their situations to congress, the president, etc. consumers don't. ordinary citizens normally complain to senators and reps by sending a letter. seriously, no one will go down to DC to plead why they should have access to napster. but record companies have many many employees just to fight it.
worse, if someday riaa takes an 18yr kid to court and shows up with million dollar lawyers vs. his $20/hour lawyer, they'll probably win, thus setting precedent, enforcing an existing law, etc.
in an ideal system yes, each citizen's voice would be equal, but the u.s. currently has a president that more than half the country didn't want! so obviously some votes mattered more than others...
so basically alot of consumers are simply recouping that money because nowhere in that settlement did consumers get any money back.
as for "but then again, who the hell am i?", if you are a citizen of the united states, you have every right to your opinion of law as the record companies execs. the fact that they have money shouldn't play any part in law making. but these days, in washington, money is what's doing the law making.
No, this will be bad. And don't get me started on .NET. But I'm sure it will fly since telling Joe Shmoe to buy Office for $750+ doesn't work for home users, but telling him, "here, use Office for a year for $99" and get him hooked and coming back like a crack whore will work. It gets the price down to comfortable consumer price points because consumers don't factor time into the purchase. Plain and simple...
And it works for businesses too: Hey Mike, go buy 5 new licenses of that Office 2002. Oh, it'll cost $2500?! Forget it!
versus: Hey Mike, go buy 5 new licenses of that Office 2002. Oh it'll cost $500/year?! Yeah, we'll worry about that next year.
Up front costs are all that people see. It's why cheap PCs sell even though they have lower reliability and will need to be repaired or replaced sooner. Microsoft is just applying the same principles to software.
There are techincal issues to the Intel port that many people overlook. While I'm sure Apple has internal ports running on x86 boxen right now, they most likely don't work with just any box out there. The problem with porting to x86 is that you'd have to also build in support for all the various hardware combinations out there now and in the future. Apple avoids this by controlling the hardware and the software.
>They clearly want to promote a free Unix to remove the amount of money they have to spend themselves. They don't clearly want to promote Unix to get free developers. Don't forget, many in the Mac community don't have Unix knowledge or Unix programming skills so with OS X coming in a month, it'd be a good idea to start promoting the lower level abilities of the OS.
It was dismissed. I don't remember why exactly but could it be because they were different markets and thus there was no trademark dilution? Anyone know exactly why it was dismissed?