Re:But taking it to the logical end . . .
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 1
Wages equalize? Ha, as soon as 3rd world country X's wages begin to rise, and all the companies bail out, who is going to be left to pay these higher wages? How many years before the workers will be willing to take a paycut under their original wages just to have a job again?
This cycle will continue throughout the third world as companies ravage each country one by one. Once they're done with their first circuit around the world, the country they started with would be just about ready to start over again.
This means that I have to do something that they cannot or I have to do something that they can do only better
I suppose that somehow you can be "better" at working for peanuts? Face it, these people are probably not getting paid much more than US minimum wage, if even that much. And guess what? Not a single shareholder is going to care that you can code 5K lines more per month, or have fewer errors, when they want to know why you haven't been replaced by two people half your cost, or even just one person.
The fact is, there is no longer any competition based on quality. Aside from competency in the field, its the almighty dollar that these corporations are bowing to. I've seen it even within the United States: "Sure, you've got 15 years experience with hardware development, but we have this one guy who just graduated with his EE, and we can hire him and train him for half your salary. Good luck on your job search."
In the end, the.com bubble ran a few extra months on people working for free in hopes that their company would make it. Is that the future of the entire job market in America? Shall we all work for free, just so that we can have the privilege of a job to work at?
I still have almost $30,000 in debt on a degree that is rapidly losing value. And before you suggest that I go back and get a PhD or something, my neighbor lost his job when his entire engineering department was outsourced to a company in Mexico which hired hundreds of Chinese with PhDs and MS's from universities in the United States.
Unless these people are being paid fair market value, I view this as a form of monopoly abuse: These countries are dumping their product on the labor market at below accepted value. Before someone says "But this is the accepted value in those countries" let me point out that that is why they are "third-world" countries.
People claiming that sending these jobs overseas will somehow magically improve these countries' status isn't thinking very clearly. Lets say that standards of living in these countries do increase, and cost of living increases with them. Thats just farther for them to fall back down when Company X bails out of their labor market in favor of the poorer people in yet another country. Behavior today proves that this is the ultimate goal of the companies: Hire people from country X until they get too expensive, then lay them off in favor of country Y.
In the end I am forced to admit that under the current model of "Almighty Money and Ethics Be Damned", the companies have every right to do this. I would advise everyone to write their congressperson and tell them "Sure, I would support granting companies the priviledge of protections under the bill of rights, HOWEVER, the companies must demonstrate responsibilities and ethics pursuant to these new privileges."
And beyond that? It will come down to which companies can bribe the inspectors the most and keep the wool pulled over the public's eyes.
I'm beginning to get to the point where I think we need to enact criminal penalties for this type of obvious scum-mongering.
Exactly! In this case its obvious that SBC knew exactly what it was doing when it filed for a patent on technology Netscape introduced. Now that it is attempting to claim money based on that, it is clearly fraud.
Now if someone would just take them to court and bring up the PTO as a possible co-defendant.
I suppose there will be a click through agreement:
"I agree not to use this technology to spy on CEOs to determine when to sell my stock. I also agree not to use this technology to spy on my SO, neighbors, or to get juicy blackmail bits on the person who cut me off this morning on the way to work."
Of course, with the FBI's proven track record, they'll just hit I Agree and do it anyway.
When I set up a theme on my desktop, I expect it to be constant, even if it's just the default.
Hm, I'm having a hard time figuring out if you're talking about window decorations or something else. I agree, *every* program should have a way to force it to use the wm's current window decorations.
If you're talking about something else, like some kind of widget theme, its just not going to happen. Basically you would be asking for someone to write their program in everything at once, lest they slight a GTK+ theme user, a KDE theme user, a Gnome theme user, and so on. Heck, KDE/Qt is (primarialy) C++, GTK+ is (primarialy) C. I think I've seen it done before... figure out what environment you're in, then start using the proper widget set. But that has to be *evil* to code.
Sorry, I forgot to explain what the OSDs I've had experience with were like. If your TV blocks out the screen with useless junk just because you turned the volume up, I'm sorry but you need to get a new TV.
What I expect from an OSD is: - Its small: I don't need an 80 point font to read "30:25/1:20:05" - Its semi-transparent: I can see around the letters, and through them to some extent. - Its temporary: once the operation is complete, its gone again. - Its responsive: Only the parts of the OSD called for are displayed. I don't need to navigate some menu on my TV just to turn up the volume. Likewise, changing the volume doesn't waste my screen space showing me my current channel, brightness,contrast, tint, focus settings, and the current time.
I've been thinking of my original post, and file picking probably shouldn't be an OSD feature, its just too complex and too much information on the screen at once.
I think when I get home from work today (can't do GPL stuff here) I should take a look at mplayer and see if I can't play with the OSD code some.
So where do you want your menu in full screen mode? An ugly pop up menu that blocks everything like windows media player?
Face it. On Screen Displays are the way to go. They worked for TVs, they worked for VCRs, they worked for DVDs. Sure, it might be a little more work to make an OSD pick a file without causing physical pain, but I bet someone could modify mplayer's OSD shell to become a reasonably sane file picker. You could have "play filename", "info filename", or even something like "scan 5" and go through 5 seconds of every mp3 in the directory.
In animals, gender is determined by X and Y chromosomes. The valid choices are XY (male) and XX (female). Other cases create a sterile or nonviable mutant.
Now, cells only require one X chromosome to operate. In females, therefore, every cell de-activates one of the two X chromosomes during fetal development, which becomes a Barr body and is completely genetically useless.
In cats, Black and Brown hair colors are stored on the X chromosome. Thus males can be black or brown (since they have only one X chromosome), and females can be black and brown.
Females get to be black and brown when one inherited X chromosome is black, and the other is brown. Then, when one of the chromosomes is turned into a Barr body, the patch of skin that develops from that fetal cell becomes either black, or brown. Other cells could have disabled the other chromosone, leading to splotches of other colors.
And now for the cloning: When the ovaries/eggs develop, each egg receives one of each pair of chromosomes. Thus, the eggs of a Brown/Black cat are either Brown, or Black. I am not sure what technique exactly was used in producing the clone, but if they doubled the chromosomes in each egg, the Black egg would create a Black/Black clone. If they merged two eggs together, its possible that they just happened to pick two Black eggs. If they picked a non-egg cell (unlikely) then they would have either had to swap the Barr body for a real X chromosome (in which case they could have chosen a Black/disabled cell, and added Black in again) or somehow re-activate the Barr body.
Well, considering that the entire process was highly publicized here in Houston because it looked very much like an non-objective decision, but the truth came down to the fact that SimDesk was the low bidder. And this is what we get for going with the lowest bidder.
Access to data will obviously have to be given on a need to know basis
M4d Fr33z4H n33dz t0 kn0!!1!
Seriously. Just the existance of something like this is like waving a flag reading "I AM ID10T! HAXX0R ME PLZ K THX!1!!" Pretending your medical data is going to be secure is like putting your head in a box and thinking you're invisible. Not only will the average cracker be wanting to get your ID numbers and history for a little ID theft and a credit line or two, I wouldn't doubt that some of the more-than-average crackers would be getting a little extra cash from untraceable payments made by insurance companies or just very large employers.
Of course, thats just my experience in the USA, where even calling to ask about whether something is covered by insurance is reasonable enough cause to jack the insurance rates up. Maybe in other countries, insurance is either government-provided or provided by companies who truly have the best interests of the people at heart, and seek to provide the highest quality care for the lowest prices (*snort* yeah right).
Why? Because DRM is *dead* as long as its possible to distribute the same media in a nonrestricted format. And as long as those unrestricted formats exist, it WILL be done. People will record their music in analog if they have to.
I had a friend whose family would copy tapes they rented, by using their Camcorder on a tripod they built themselves to record the video off of the TV. *Someone* will always be around to do this, no matter how strong the DRM is.
yet I don't think it's answerable based on the text.
Obviously this is terrible, nothing should ever be vague in a story, God forbid the consumers of mass media would ever have to think about something that wasn't spelled out for them. (coughDeckardisaReplicantcough)
Let me know when you hack Windows DRM 2010 to not delete mp3 files instantly. Of course, it will probably delete your email instantly, then delete you instantly for attempting it.
Yeah. Thats as likely as the RIAA hiring someone to call in bomb threats or something. Both are illegal, and this had better get *someone* in hot water, either the RIAA for hiring the computer equivalent of hitmen, or Gobbles for making stuff up.
1) What does it take (steps,costs including any IP licensing fees) to make OS Foo boot on a TCPA computer?
2) What does it take (steps, costs including licensing fees) to make application Bar run on Foo? On any other OS?
Ignoring rampant paranoia, these are the questions that will actually affect open source development. It comes down to how much will it cost for us to run our programs?
These problems are the letter of criminal law. Until you appeal, uneducated or not, the jury (the judge *might* have a say in dismissing the case) has to rule based on the merits of the case: "Is X against law Y".
Reverse engineering an access control method or otherwise disabling it is illegal, stupid judge or not.
Ranting and raving follows
The access control provision of the DMCA breaks anti-trust laws: It allows a copyright holder to use its government-granted monopoly to leverage a new monopoly in another field (access devices).
Both access and copyright protection provisions make it basically illegal to produce programs which might be used to overcome such protections. I say basically, because the law states that it has to be the main purpose or usage. However, whether or not it is or isn't the main purpose is always going to be a matter for the courts, causing lost time and legal fees.
Now here's the real kicker. Read the dmca text (here's a link to the final joint version: http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/hr2281_dmca_law_1998102 0_pl105-304.html Since its in your web browser, do this: search for "copyright owner", "copyright holder", and any other variation you can think of. Find anything?
That would be because under the DMCA its ILLEGAL FOR THE COPYRIGHT OWNER TO BREAK ACCESS CODES TOO.
Thats right, think about that. Now take a look at the text of the law again. Suddenly, a whole new truth emerges: This law isn't about protecting copyright. This law's existence only protects the publishers and distributers of copyrighted material by "guaranteeing" that whatever format they wish to publish/distribute in, it would be "protected".
In the coming DRM-enabled world, do you get to distribute your garage band over the internet? No! Your digital recording choices will be limited to DRM no-copy file formats which won't go anywhere, and you will not be able to do anything about it legally, because its not the music that is protected by this law, its the DRM no-copy file format.
Finally, (perhaps I should have written this first) the fatal bug in the law: No exemptions are stated for the creator of the encryption too. Nothing in the DMCA says that the person who invents the encryption system has a right to produce a tool for the express purpose of decryption, nor does it say they can grant that right to other people. Do everyone a favor and report every DVD player manufacturer for DMCA violations.
For everyone else, call up your NRA buddies and preach to them of slippery slopes. It's now illegal to produce software that might commit a crime. How long will it be before its illegal to produce guns which might commit a crime?
Normal c-o-m-p-e-t-i-t-i-o-n drives innovation, as each company has to come up with the new thing to get people to buy it.
5 years ago Japanese schoolgirls had cheap cellphones with more power than your cheap cell phone. It can hardly be called "progress" when we continue playing "keep up with the Joneses" so to speak.
Recently the gap has been closing. But take a look at other countries' recent offerings (for links, just look through The Register archives).
Part of the problem is the FCC restricting the features of broadcast. Part of the problem is phone companies not wanting to invest in changing. Part of the problem is that people either don't know or don't care about what they could be getting for their money.
I'm the first to admit that I'm in that last group. I don't really like cellphones and when I am eventually forced to get one, I'll try to get the least whiz-bang model I can find because I don't care about all that extra jazz.
All of that works. And if you call the GUI for wmp9 "good", you are ON CRACK.
The interface for wmp went way downhill when it quit being a movie player and tried to become an everything-media-blitz-attack system after 6.4. It wasn't even that good in 6.4
As another poster mentioned, On-Screen-Display is the way to go. How would you like it if the only way to control your DVD player or VCR was to make this huge ugly menu pop up in the middle of your screen and block your view? These people had it right from the start, with a little text that pops up to let you know what you're doing. WMP's right click menu for control in full screen just blocks your view, and the only way to get rid of it is to pick something, or click outside of it (Which stops the movie in 6.4)
The keyboard controls for mplayer do leave something to be desired ( / and * for volume control? ) but have you seen the OSD in it? Everything provides feedback that doesn't require breaking out of full screen to see the volume level or your playback position, unlike WMP. There are no layers of menus to get to contrast/tint/brightness/etc controls. You can even run a shell in the OSD if you want.
If the camera also happens to catch me browsing through the dirty magazines then I might be embarrased. Therefore the police shouldn't be able to watch security videos, right?
What if some higherup decided that your dirty magazine viewing habits indicated you had a high prediliction to raping people, and you are called in on a rape because you were seen reading Playboy?
Perhaps that idea is a little outlandish, but what if someone decides that people who read Cryptome are subversives and anarchists by nature:
Cryptome posts the next WTO conference location. People see the location. Police seize logs of cryptome, and use them to arrest everyone who has seen the location of the conference for "planning to incite a riot". The accusations may be entirely baseless, but that's for a jury to decide, isn't it?
Meanwhile the conference goes on, and innocent people are in jail along with people who were planning to protest (not that protesting is illegal in and of itself). People show up to protest anyway since cryptome wasn't the only source of information on the WTO procedures. Lots of time and taxpayer money is spent on the whole unsuccessful deal.
Innocent people might find their careers ruined because of their new criminal history. Others found that nobody else in prison cared to listen to their Speech (as in First Amendment, Free). A few people begin to protest despite captivity (or perhaps because of), and are beaten down by prison guards, who are later given a slap on the wrist for their behavior (while the angry inmates are upgraded to "assault crimes" where its their word against the guards who sustained "terrible injuries" while "fighting back the masses of rioting inmates").
I am not an imaginative person. All of the above is by no means a stretch of what little imagination I have.
Who exactly are the criminals they are protecting here? people like me who read the site? Did someone pass a law while I was sleeping: "Thou Shalt Not Read Cryptome"?
This kind of behavior should definitely be considered a "chilling effect". The/. effect is already in force so I can't get to the article, so I can't help but wonder if theres an actual criminal investigation that these logs were needed for, or if they're looking to start one from those logs. If it is an ongoing investigation, what information would be gleaned from those logs that would possibly be helpful to them? That the person in question reads cryptome?
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Wages equalize? Ha, as soon as 3rd world country X's wages begin to rise, and all the companies bail out, who is going to be left to pay these higher wages? How many years before the workers will be willing to take a paycut under their original wages just to have a job again?
This cycle will continue throughout the third world as companies ravage each country one by one. Once they're done with their first circuit around the world, the country they started with would be just about ready to start over again.
As lesser fortunate countries economically and technically advance
What dream world are you living in? As these companies advance, their people will be demanding higher salaries to get the latest widgets.
And at that moment, the companies lay everyone off and move.
Well, hopefully the whole process will be fast enough that there will still be enough people around who remember how to catch bugs to eat.
This means that I have to do something that they cannot or I have to do something that they can do only better
.com bubble ran a few extra months on people working for free in hopes that their company would make it. Is that the future of the entire job market in America? Shall we all work for free, just so that we can have the privilege of a job to work at?
I suppose that somehow you can be "better" at working for peanuts? Face it, these people are probably not getting paid much more than US minimum wage, if even that much. And guess what? Not a single shareholder is going to care that you can code 5K lines more per month, or have fewer errors, when they want to know why you haven't been replaced by two people half your cost, or even just one person.
The fact is, there is no longer any competition based on quality. Aside from competency in the field, its the almighty dollar that these corporations are bowing to. I've seen it even within the United States: "Sure, you've got 15 years experience with hardware development, but we have this one guy who just graduated with his EE, and we can hire him and train him for half your salary. Good luck on your job search."
In the end, the
I still have almost $30,000 in debt on a degree that is rapidly losing value. And before you suggest that I go back and get a PhD or something, my neighbor lost his job when his entire engineering department was outsourced to a company in Mexico which hired hundreds of Chinese with PhDs and MS's from universities in the United States.
Unless these people are being paid fair market value, I view this as a form of monopoly abuse: These countries are dumping their product on the labor market at below accepted value. Before someone says "But this is the accepted value in those countries" let me point out that that is why they are "third-world" countries.
People claiming that sending these jobs overseas will somehow magically improve these countries' status isn't thinking very clearly. Lets say that standards of living in these countries do increase, and cost of living increases with them. Thats just farther for them to fall back down when Company X bails out of their labor market in favor of the poorer people in yet another country. Behavior today proves that this is the ultimate goal of the companies: Hire people from country X until they get too expensive, then lay them off in favor of country Y.
In the end I am forced to admit that under the current model of "Almighty Money and Ethics Be Damned", the companies have every right to do this. I would advise everyone to write their congressperson and tell them "Sure, I would support granting companies the priviledge of protections under the bill of rights, HOWEVER, the companies must demonstrate responsibilities and ethics pursuant to these new privileges."
And beyond that? It will come down to which companies can bribe the inspectors the most and keep the wool pulled over the public's eyes.
I'm beginning to get to the point where I think we need to enact criminal penalties for this type of obvious scum-mongering.
Exactly! In this case its obvious that SBC knew exactly what it was doing when it filed for a patent on technology Netscape introduced. Now that it is attempting to claim money based on that, it is clearly fraud.
Now if someone would just take them to court and bring up the PTO as a possible co-defendant.
I suppose there will be a click through agreement:
"I agree not to use this technology to spy on CEOs to determine when to sell my stock. I also agree not to use this technology to spy on my SO, neighbors, or to get juicy blackmail bits on the person who cut me off this morning on the way to work."
Of course, with the FBI's proven track record, they'll just hit I Agree and do it anyway.
When I set up a theme on my desktop, I expect it to be constant, even if it's just the default.
Hm, I'm having a hard time figuring out if you're talking about window decorations or something else. I agree, *every* program should have a way to force it to use the wm's current window decorations.
If you're talking about something else, like some kind of widget theme, its just not going to happen. Basically you would be asking for someone to write their program in everything at once, lest they slight a GTK+ theme user, a KDE theme user, a Gnome theme user, and so on. Heck, KDE/Qt is (primarialy) C++, GTK+ is (primarialy) C. I think I've seen it done before... figure out what environment you're in, then start using the proper widget set. But that has to be *evil* to code.
Sorry, I forgot to explain what the OSDs I've had experience with were like. If your TV blocks out the screen with useless junk just because you turned the volume up, I'm sorry but you need to get a new TV.
What I expect from an OSD is:
- Its small: I don't need an 80 point font to read "30:25/1:20:05"
- Its semi-transparent: I can see around the letters, and through them to some extent.
- Its temporary: once the operation is complete, its gone again.
- Its responsive: Only the parts of the OSD called for are displayed. I don't need to navigate some menu on my TV just to turn up the volume. Likewise, changing the volume doesn't waste my screen space showing me my current channel, brightness,contrast, tint, focus settings, and the current time.
I've been thinking of my original post, and file picking probably shouldn't be an OSD feature, its just too complex and too much information on the screen at once.
I think when I get home from work today (can't do GPL stuff here) I should take a look at mplayer and see if I can't play with the OSD code some.
So where do you want your menu in full screen mode? An ugly pop up menu that blocks everything like windows media player?
Face it. On Screen Displays are the way to go. They worked for TVs, they worked for VCRs, they worked for DVDs. Sure, it might be a little more work to make an OSD pick a file without causing physical pain, but I bet someone could modify mplayer's OSD shell to become a reasonably sane file picker. You could have "play filename", "info filename", or even something like "scan 5" and go through 5 seconds of every mp3 in the directory.
There is another economic definition called supply and demand.
You see, once you buy your shiny new X-Box, the demand has increased by that much, and Microsoft produces a new shiny new X-Box to fill the gap.
Now they're out $400.
Genetics lesson, from the basics:
In animals, gender is determined by X and Y chromosomes. The valid choices are XY (male) and XX (female). Other cases create a sterile or nonviable mutant.
Now, cells only require one X chromosome to operate. In females, therefore, every cell de-activates one of the two X chromosomes during fetal development, which becomes a Barr body and is completely genetically useless.
In cats, Black and Brown hair colors are stored on the X chromosome. Thus males can be black or brown (since they have only one X chromosome), and females can be black and brown.
Females get to be black and brown when one inherited X chromosome is black, and the other is brown. Then, when one of the chromosomes is turned into a Barr body, the patch of skin that develops from that fetal cell becomes either black, or brown. Other cells could have disabled the other chromosone, leading to splotches of other colors.
And now for the cloning:
When the ovaries/eggs develop, each egg receives one of each pair of chromosomes. Thus, the eggs of a Brown/Black cat are either Brown, or Black. I am not sure what technique exactly was used in producing the clone, but if they doubled the chromosomes in each egg, the Black egg would create a Black/Black clone. If they merged two eggs together, its possible that they just happened to pick two Black eggs. If they picked a non-egg cell (unlikely) then they would have either had to swap the Barr body for a real X chromosome (in which case they could have chosen a Black/disabled cell, and added Black in again) or somehow re-activate the Barr body.
Well, considering that the entire process was highly publicized here in Houston because it looked very much like an non-objective decision, but the truth came down to the fact that SimDesk was the low bidder. And this is what we get for going with the lowest bidder.
Access to data will obviously have to be given on a need to know basis
M4d Fr33z4H n33dz t0 kn0!!1!
Seriously. Just the existance of something like this is like waving a flag reading "I AM ID10T! HAXX0R ME PLZ K THX!1!!" Pretending your medical data is going to be secure is like putting your head in a box and thinking you're invisible. Not only will the average cracker be wanting to get your ID numbers and history for a little ID theft and a credit line or two, I wouldn't doubt that some of the more-than-average crackers would be getting a little extra cash from untraceable payments made by insurance companies or just very large employers.
Of course, thats just my experience in the USA, where even calling to ask about whether something is covered by insurance is reasonable enough cause to jack the insurance rates up. Maybe in other countries, insurance is either government-provided or provided by companies who truly have the best interests of the people at heart, and seek to provide the highest quality care for the lowest prices (*snort* yeah right).
Why? Because DRM is *dead* as long as its possible to distribute the same media in a nonrestricted format. And as long as those unrestricted formats exist, it WILL be done. People will record their music in analog if they have to.
I had a friend whose family would copy tapes they rented, by using their Camcorder on a tripod they built themselves to record the video off of the TV. *Someone* will always be around to do this, no matter how strong the DRM is.
yet I don't think it's answerable based on the text.
Obviously this is terrible, nothing should ever be vague in a story, God forbid the consumers of mass media would ever have to think about something that wasn't spelled out for them. (coughDeckardisaReplicantcough)
Let me know when you hack Windows DRM 2010 to not delete mp3 files instantly. Of course, it will probably delete your email instantly, then delete you instantly for attempting it.
I dunno, worms are pretty natural... oh wait, you meant computer worms, not tapeworms...
Yeah. Thats as likely as the RIAA hiring someone to call in bomb threats or something. Both are illegal, and this had better get *someone* in hot water, either the RIAA for hiring the computer equivalent of hitmen, or Gobbles for making stuff up.
1) What does it take (steps,costs including any IP licensing fees) to make OS Foo boot on a TCPA computer?
2) What does it take (steps, costs including licensing fees) to make application Bar run on Foo? On any other OS?
Ignoring rampant paranoia, these are the questions that will actually affect open source development. It comes down to how much will it cost for us to run our programs?
Just to break your analogy, take a look at a bag of chips someday. Quite a few things let you return the unused portion for a refund.
These problems are the letter of criminal law. Until you appeal, uneducated or not, the jury (the judge *might* have a say in dismissing the case) has to rule based on the merits of the case: "Is X against law Y".
2 0_pl105-304.html
Reverse engineering an access control method or otherwise disabling it is illegal, stupid judge or not.
Ranting and raving follows
The access control provision of the DMCA breaks anti-trust laws: It allows a copyright holder to use its government-granted monopoly to leverage a new monopoly in another field (access devices).
Both access and copyright protection provisions make it basically illegal to produce programs which might be used to overcome such protections. I say basically, because the law states that it has to be the main purpose or usage. However, whether or not it is or isn't the main purpose is always going to be a matter for the courts, causing lost time and legal fees.
Now here's the real kicker. Read the dmca text (here's a link to the final joint version: http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/hr2281_dmca_law_199810
Since its in your web browser, do this: search for "copyright owner", "copyright holder", and any other variation you can think of. Find anything?
That would be because under the DMCA its ILLEGAL FOR THE COPYRIGHT OWNER TO BREAK ACCESS CODES TOO.
Thats right, think about that. Now take a look at the text of the law again. Suddenly, a whole new truth emerges: This law isn't about protecting copyright. This law's existence only protects the publishers and distributers of copyrighted material by "guaranteeing" that whatever format they wish to publish/distribute in, it would be "protected".
In the coming DRM-enabled world, do you get to distribute your garage band over the internet? No! Your digital recording choices will be limited to DRM no-copy file formats which won't go anywhere, and you will not be able to do anything about it legally, because its not the music that is protected by this law, its the DRM no-copy file format.
Finally, (perhaps I should have written this first) the fatal bug in the law: No exemptions are stated for the creator of the encryption too. Nothing in the DMCA says that the person who invents the encryption system has a right to produce a tool for the express purpose of decryption, nor does it say they can grant that right to other people. Do everyone a favor and report every DVD player manufacturer for DMCA violations.
For everyone else, call up your NRA buddies and preach to them of slippery slopes. It's now illegal to produce software that might commit a crime. How long will it be before its illegal to produce guns which might commit a crime?
Normal c-o-m-p-e-t-i-t-i-o-n drives innovation, as each company has to come up with the new thing to get people to buy it.
5 years ago Japanese schoolgirls had cheap cellphones with more power than your cheap cell phone. It can hardly be called "progress" when we continue playing "keep up with the Joneses" so to speak.
Recently the gap has been closing. But take a look at other countries' recent offerings (for links, just look through The Register archives).
Part of the problem is the FCC restricting the features of broadcast. Part of the problem is phone companies not wanting to invest in changing. Part of the problem is that people either don't know or don't care about what they could be getting for their money.
I'm the first to admit that I'm in that last group. I don't really like cellphones and when I am eventually forced to get one, I'll try to get the least whiz-bang model I can find because I don't care about all that extra jazz.
All of that works. And if you call the GUI for wmp9 "good", you are ON CRACK.
The interface for wmp went way downhill when it quit being a movie player and tried to become an everything-media-blitz-attack system after 6.4. It wasn't even that good in 6.4
As another poster mentioned, On-Screen-Display is the way to go. How would you like it if the only way to control your DVD player or VCR was to make this huge ugly menu pop up in the middle of your screen and block your view? These people had it right from the start, with a little text that pops up to let you know what you're doing. WMP's right click menu for control in full screen just blocks your view, and the only way to get rid of it is to pick something, or click outside of it (Which stops the movie in 6.4)
The keyboard controls for mplayer do leave something to be desired ( / and * for volume control? ) but have you seen the OSD in it? Everything provides feedback that doesn't require breaking out of full screen to see the volume level or your playback position, unlike WMP. There are no layers of menus to get to contrast/tint/brightness/etc controls. You can even run a shell in the OSD if you want.
If the camera also happens to catch me browsing through the dirty magazines then I might be embarrased. Therefore the police shouldn't be able to watch security videos, right?
What if some higherup decided that your dirty magazine viewing habits indicated you had a high prediliction to raping people, and you are called in on a rape because you were seen reading Playboy?
Perhaps that idea is a little outlandish, but what if someone decides that people who read Cryptome are subversives and anarchists by nature:
Cryptome posts the next WTO conference location. People see the location. Police seize logs of cryptome, and use them to arrest everyone who has seen the location of the conference for "planning to incite a riot". The accusations may be entirely baseless, but that's for a jury to decide, isn't it?
Meanwhile the conference goes on, and innocent people are in jail along with people who were planning to protest (not that protesting is illegal in and of itself). People show up to protest anyway since cryptome wasn't the only source of information on the WTO procedures. Lots of time and taxpayer money is spent on the whole unsuccessful deal.
Innocent people might find their careers ruined because of their new criminal history. Others found that nobody else in prison cared to listen to their Speech (as in First Amendment, Free). A few people begin to protest despite captivity (or perhaps because of), and are beaten down by prison guards, who are later given a slap on the wrist for their behavior (while the angry inmates are upgraded to "assault crimes" where its their word against the guards who sustained "terrible injuries" while "fighting back the masses of rioting inmates").
I am not an imaginative person. All of the above is by no means a stretch of what little imagination I have.
I'll bite.
/. effect is already in force so I can't get to the article, so I can't help but wonder if theres an actual criminal investigation that these logs were needed for, or if they're looking to start one from those logs. If it is an ongoing investigation, what information would be gleaned from those logs that would possibly be helpful to them? That the person in question reads cryptome?
Who exactly are the criminals they are protecting here? people like me who read the site? Did someone pass a law while I was sleeping: "Thou Shalt Not Read Cryptome"?
This kind of behavior should definitely be considered a "chilling effect". The
Looks like they're going to be doing a lot of deleting now ;)