Im not a lawyer.
But I don't think that they can enforce that. It's the same as a CD. You're not supposed to play it for a large group of people, but you can play it for a small group of people. Same with NFL football games or whatever. You can tape them and watch them with a group of friends, but you can't play them for a large audience at like a banquet or something without permission. And they use pretty vague wording for that too...Something about rebroadcast. So, it's likely that you are aloud to read it for a few people, such as a spouse/child/whatever. But not for a group, such as a book reading at the library or whatever. Yes, I know it doesn't spell it out, and they need to do that. But How the hell are they going to enforce that? Are they going to burst in and fine me for reading to a kid? I don't think so. That's way too much bad publicity. THey should just rewrite the damn thing to be more clear. I'm probably talking out of my ass though.
See, the thing here, if you acutally follow the link for the patent, is that the slashdot story is slightly misleading as to the severity of this.
Here is the patent summary...
Entertainment content complementary to a musical recording is delivered to a user's computer by means of a computer network link. The user employs a browser to access the computer network. A plug-in for the browser is able to control an audio CD or other device for playing the musical recording. A script stored on the remote computer accessed over the network is downloaded. The script synchronizes the delivery of the complementary entertainment content with the play of the musical recording.
That has nothing to do with every other database on the planet...that would be ludicrous. This is actually something that they more or less "invented" and can patent it. As for the prior license stuff, I dont pretend to know squat about that. But have no fear that this patent is trying to stop all database searches or anything like that. That would just be obnoxious and overturned in two seconds...But then again I may just be talking out of my ass. I have a habit of that.
Yes, this is offtopic, but too bad. Just don't read below the line if you don't care about this at all...
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OK, The "idea base" behind Communism is good at first glance, but if you think about it, it really isn't that good. One of the things that makes "capitalism" or whatever work is the fact that hard work and talent is paid with rewards. With communism, where the fuck is my incentive to work hard? If I get the same stuff for working just hard enough to get fired as I would get for working my ass off, what the hell would I want to work my ass off for? This begs for the retort that I should be doing something I love and working hard at it because I love it, but many people really hate their jobs, and they only work hard at them to get money. Like it or not, we are a dollar(ruble(sp?) or franc or whatever) driven society, in all nations, and it will stay that way. That is the "fatal flaw" of communism. In general, people won't work hard if they dont get a reward from it. Watch Office Space, hehe. But seriously, it isn't that Americans hate communism because we are afraid or threatened or predjudiced towards it, we dislike it because it has so many flaws, and it goes against what we believe in. It sounds dirty to say it, but the skilled computer programmer or whatever who works hard and makes huge advances in his or her field actually does deserve more money than the equally hard working and whatnot Joe Welder because Joe Welder, while hard working and probably a great family man who deserves a lot, really isn't making any advances that further mankind or anything like that. Sure, the world would do just fine without Windows 20030023, but they would also do fine with a slightly less properly welded job done by a poor worker. At least more people benefit from the programmer's work, so he deserves more money. It sounds dirty to say all of that, I know, but in actuality that is how things work and I kind of think how they should be. Not probably to quite the extent that they are (you were right by saying that 20x is too much) but they should be more than you think they should be (the benefits, that is). THis is ranting, I am done now.
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Slashdot, Your mom is a lameness filter. Just because I put in 12 '-'s to make a line doesn't mean I am putting in an army of junk characters. You need to fix something with that!
you DO put a small description header on your C files, dont you? As stupid as it is to do all the inane commenting that they have you do in CS classes, it is important to put some form of header on your C files so that it is obvious at a glance what the file does, because unless you have obnoxiously long filenames, it isn't always obvious what the C file contains from the filename. Just a thought, but that actually is a useful feature to me.
Just fyi, You can have more than one root user in linux unless I am way out of the ballpark.
Just specify -u 0 when you add the user.
This effectively sets the userid of whatever user you just added to the same as root, so that user can do whatever root can, but they're not technically root, as they don't have the 'root' username. They have their own.
I may be way off base and wrong, but what nobody seems to be thinking of here is the RAM issue. First of all, by booting the operating system off of the CD you pretty much _have_ to load it into a RAMDISK, which takes a sizeable chunk of RAM up. Unless you do some UMSDOS stuff, or have a free partition or a linux partition, I don't really see any alternative for that. That's a bad thing right there.
Problem two involving ram is the swap file/virtual memory (depending on what OS you like...)
Where is that going to go? Unless you have 512 mb RAM in your system, you are going to have issues with running out of memory for almost every game you play. What are they going to do, stick that on a UMSDOS thing, too? Last I checked, UMSDOS doesn't even work that well, and what do you do if the user is trying to play without a hard drive, or they run NTFS (yes, I know they are working on support...) or some other unsupported filesystem. No swap file! This pretty much limits you to booting off of a CD to play XBill or something. As much as XBill rules, I don't think it's worth that much of a hassle. Somebody explain to me where I'm wrong if I am, please.
yeah, they changed their headline. so what? does anybody care?
and why would they have changed it in the story? In case you didn't notice, it was in a quote. You would have something to bitch about if they HAD changed it in the story. Then it would be a misquote.
OK, maybe SDMI was cracked, maybe it wasn't. We'll find out soon enough. It's ridiculous how everytime people read something on slashdot they assume its the truth. First everybody was all bouncing around that it was cracked, and it was gonna die, and all that from an unconfirmed news story at salon.com, and now everybody is calling salon.com liars and assuming that it wasn't cracked. Before you all jump to conclusions you should wait until a few more facts come in. Let's not get all up in arms and start calling salon.com liars and slanderists and whatnot. Just be patient.
Regardless of what format they use (SDMI or whatever) it will be cracked somehow. DECSS comes to mind. That was supposed to be very secure and it was cracked because Xing messed up. Any two way hash can be decrypted, and it will be in this case with music pirates dying to get their hands on music. What the RIAA should focus on is selling it cheap enough that people would actually buy it. I would personally be willing to spend 25 or 50 cents a song for mp3 music, and I think that actually most people would be willing to do that. The whole problem with the RIAA is that they say that prices need to be higher because of piracy, but piracy happens mostly because of high prices. They should run an experiment and have mp3s for download for $0.25 each or something like that, and see what the response is.
I used to be a (sort of) Assistant Manager at a Sentry Foods supermarket (One of the bigger ones owned by Fleming). We often got new products that were not entered into our system. Whenever we found one that wasn't in it, we would go enter it ourselves. Specifically, we had a Scan Coordinator who would enter in all the UPC's for anything that didn't register, and she also kept track of the pricing. As far as I know, we didn't buy any codes from the manufacturers. We could have gotten some of the codes from Fleming (the distributor) but I would have no idea if they paid for them. If they did it would have been pretty ridiculous, as it only takes a few seconds to enter in a code. Granted, for 10,000 products or whatever, that can be time consuming, but thats why you hire minimum wage Data Entry people. I seriously doubt that companies make any money from selling their UPC codes to grocery stores (or K-Mart or whatever for that matter). I could be wrong though.
Slashdot Mirror
Im not a lawyer.
But I don't think that they can enforce that. It's the same as a CD. You're not supposed to play it for a large group of people, but you can play it for a small group of people. Same with NFL football games or whatever. You can tape them and watch them with a group of friends, but you can't play them for a large audience at like a banquet or something without permission. And they use pretty vague wording for that too...Something about rebroadcast. So, it's likely that you are aloud to read it for a few people, such as a spouse/child/whatever. But not for a group, such as a book reading at the library or whatever. Yes, I know it doesn't spell it out, and they need to do that. But How the hell are they going to enforce that? Are they going to burst in and fine me for reading to a kid? I don't think so. That's way too much bad publicity. THey should just rewrite the damn thing to be more clear. I'm probably talking out of my ass though.
as i said, i was likely talking out of my ass, hehe.
That has nothing to do with every other database on the planet...that would be ludicrous. This is actually something that they more or less "invented" and can patent it. As for the prior license stuff, I dont pretend to know squat about that. But have no fear that this patent is trying to stop all database searches or anything like that. That would just be obnoxious and overturned in two seconds...But then again I may just be talking out of my ass. I have a habit of that.
Yes, this is offtopic, but too bad. Just don't read below the line if you don't care about this at all...
--------
OK, The "idea base" behind Communism is good at first glance, but if you think about it, it really isn't that good. One of the things that makes "capitalism" or whatever work is the fact that hard work and talent is paid with rewards. With communism, where the fuck is my incentive to work hard? If I get the same stuff for working just hard enough to get fired as I would get for working my ass off, what the hell would I want to work my ass off for? This begs for the retort that I should be doing something I love and working hard at it because I love it, but many people really hate their jobs, and they only work hard at them to get money. Like it or not, we are a dollar(ruble(sp?) or franc or whatever) driven society, in all nations, and it will stay that way. That is the "fatal flaw" of communism. In general, people won't work hard if they dont get a reward from it. Watch Office Space, hehe. But seriously, it isn't that Americans hate communism because we are afraid or threatened or predjudiced towards it, we dislike it because it has so many flaws, and it goes against what we believe in.
It sounds dirty to say it, but the skilled computer programmer or whatever who works hard and makes huge advances in his or her field actually does deserve more money than the equally hard working and whatnot Joe Welder because Joe Welder, while hard working and probably a great family man who deserves a lot, really isn't making any advances that further mankind or anything like that. Sure, the world would do just fine without Windows 20030023, but they would also do fine with a slightly less properly welded job done by a poor worker. At least more people benefit from the programmer's work, so he deserves more money. It sounds dirty to say all of that, I know, but in actuality that is how things work and I kind of think how they should be. Not probably to quite the extent that they are (you were right by saying that 20x is too much) but they should be more than you think they should be (the benefits, that is). THis is ranting, I am done now.
----
Slashdot, Your mom is a lameness filter. Just because I put in 12 '-'s to make a line doesn't mean I am putting in an army of junk characters. You need to fix something with that!
you DO put a small description header on your C files, dont you? As stupid as it is to do all the inane commenting that they have you do in CS classes, it is important to put some form of header on your C files so that it is obvious at a glance what the file does, because unless you have obnoxiously long filenames, it isn't always obvious what the C file contains from the filename. Just a thought, but that actually is a useful feature to me.
Just fyi, You can have more than one root user in linux unless I am way out of the ballpark. Just specify -u 0 when you add the user. This effectively sets the userid of whatever user you just added to the same as root, so that user can do whatever root can, but they're not technically root, as they don't have the 'root' username. They have their own.
I may be way off base and wrong, but what nobody seems to be thinking of here is the RAM issue. First of all, by booting the operating system off of the CD you pretty much _have_ to load it into a RAMDISK, which takes a sizeable chunk of RAM up. Unless you do some UMSDOS stuff, or have a free partition or a linux partition, I don't really see any alternative for that. That's a bad thing right there. Problem two involving ram is the swap file/virtual memory (depending on what OS you like...) Where is that going to go? Unless you have 512 mb RAM in your system, you are going to have issues with running out of memory for almost every game you play. What are they going to do, stick that on a UMSDOS thing, too? Last I checked, UMSDOS doesn't even work that well, and what do you do if the user is trying to play without a hard drive, or they run NTFS (yes, I know they are working on support...) or some other unsupported filesystem. No swap file! This pretty much limits you to booting off of a CD to play XBill or something. As much as XBill rules, I don't think it's worth that much of a hassle. Somebody explain to me where I'm wrong if I am, please.
yeah, they changed their headline. so what? does anybody care? and why would they have changed it in the story? In case you didn't notice, it was in a quote. You would have something to bitch about if they HAD changed it in the story. Then it would be a misquote.
OK, maybe SDMI was cracked, maybe it wasn't. We'll find out soon enough. It's ridiculous how everytime people read something on slashdot they assume its the truth. First everybody was all bouncing around that it was cracked, and it was gonna die, and all that from an unconfirmed news story at salon.com, and now everybody is calling salon.com liars and assuming that it wasn't cracked. Before you all jump to conclusions you should wait until a few more facts come in. Let's not get all up in arms and start calling salon.com liars and slanderists and whatnot. Just be patient.
Now I know why the plants I watered with the Martian(tm) brand bottled water are flourishing...
Regardless of what format they use (SDMI or whatever) it will be cracked somehow. DECSS comes to mind. That was supposed to be very secure and it was cracked because Xing messed up. Any two way hash can be decrypted, and it will be in this case with music pirates dying to get their hands on music. What the RIAA should focus on is selling it cheap enough that people would actually buy it. I would personally be willing to spend 25 or 50 cents a song for mp3 music, and I think that actually most people would be willing to do that. The whole problem with the RIAA is that they say that prices need to be higher because of piracy, but piracy happens mostly because of high prices. They should run an experiment and have mp3s for download for $0.25 each or something like that, and see what the response is.
I used to be a (sort of) Assistant Manager at a Sentry Foods supermarket (One of the bigger ones owned by Fleming). We often got new products that were not entered into our system. Whenever we found one that wasn't in it, we would go enter it ourselves. Specifically, we had a Scan Coordinator who would enter in all the UPC's for anything that didn't register, and she also kept track of the pricing. As far as I know, we didn't buy any codes from the manufacturers. We could have gotten some of the codes from Fleming (the distributor) but I would have no idea if they paid for them. If they did it would have been pretty ridiculous, as it only takes a few seconds to enter in a code. Granted, for 10,000 products or whatever, that can be time consuming, but thats why you hire minimum wage Data Entry people. I seriously doubt that companies make any money from selling their UPC codes to grocery stores (or K-Mart or whatever for that matter). I could be wrong though.