That makes a ton of sense. I'm willing to accept large infringements on my liberty when they help society in a way I believe in, murder laws for example, but when the laws just exist to help a few and to help them screw everyone else... No.
That's exactly what happened to me with Diablo 2, a birthday present I got a few years back. Blizzard told me to buy a new CD-ROM (yeah, right) and I tried to return it. That didn't work (of course). So I told Blizzard they'd never get another sale from me again.
I don't play WC3, but I've burned 20+ copies and given them out, hopefully many to people who would have otherwise bought the game.
The funny thing is, when D2 was new, I got kicked from the IRC channels for asking for a No-CD for it, even though I explained why I needed it. Today the help forums have people openly telling everyone to use the cracks, or, depending how pissed they are, to just warez it and play locally.
Blizzard's overly strict copy protection, and blaming users for its failure, has cost them a ton, both money and respect.
And through all this, the people who always warez things didn't notice a thing. They always use cracks, and their copies always worked.
If region coding vanishes it will be because the rest of the world (regions 2 -> 7) realize they are being screwed. Their governments will give DVD-player making companies the right to ignore certain aspects of their contracts with the DVDCA, specifically region encoding, etc.
Then this will trickle back into the US when people realize that foreigners are getting better hardware. When it's no harder to go to Amazon.co.uk to order a DVD player than to go to BestBuy.com, people will, and eventually region coding will be as good as dead.
Hollywood will *NEVER* give up region coding, it's a great price-fixing scam. The same thing that pisses off other countries makes Hollywood a ton of money. But they'll eventually make themselves irrelevant.
Anyways, they'll never plug "the analog hole" and it'll get worse the more they push. Right now I buy movies and music partly because I support the artists and partly because I'm lazy. Piss me off too much and even if all digital methods are out, I'll bring home studio-quality equipment from work and make tripod mounted high-definition, 5.1 sampled, copies of my movies and I'll distribute them. The more they push shit like Palladium, the more people will fight. Like the Star Wars quote.
There's no way to prevent analog copies of video or audio displays. There's no way to make a "perfect" watermark because you can't make something only a specific device with a specific private-key will recognize (or it's useless) so they can always be found an removed. Their battle is a losing one, but by fighting it, they earn the hatred of people who will them specifically attempt to cost them money instead of just doing so inadvertantly.
Valenti is just assuming that you need to break CSS to copy a DVD, and thus it's against the DMCA he bought. (Along with a few judges like crooked Caplan, but hey...)
He completely ignores the fact that you can do a bit-for-bit copy, with copy-prevention still intact, and press a new DVD. This is legal, if done for legal reasons (space shifting, etc.)
So really, he's prevented legal users from exercising their rights, meaning the only people capable of making a space-shifted DVD are the Asian illegal duplicators. (Or anyone else with $100k+ of machinery.)
Bleh, ignore him and his law. There's nothing reflecting morality (personal or societal) in it, it's just to protect a dead business model.
That business model argument gets old pretty quickly. I really don't care if they don't have a business model, unless they share the profits with me I'm not going to adjust to help. Just like I don't care that people uses Cue Cat scanners for their own uses. You choose a business model, YOU take the risks.
They can either take whatever steps are needed to adjust with wireless network, or go back to just selling coffee.
(And it wouldn't be hard. They could either advertise to customers that they're on a specific channel, or they can use metallic window tint, a low-power node, etc, and avoid overlap.)
Fine print on tickets is irrelevant. Completely irrelevant.
You can't expect someone to abide by restrictions they weren't informed of before they agreed to a purchase/contract.
This is why EULAs are ignorable.
Start making everyone read a sign full of restrictions before they buy the ticket. You'll sell a lot less tickets, but you might actually be able to enforce the restrictions. (Ditto with software. Show me the EULA at the register, before I buy and it'll be binding.)
I always thought this (VTEC stickers on other vehicles) was a hilarious comment on the people who obsess about having the right stickers to describe their car's engine.
You just need a car that's so obviously not a Civic... A huge Buick or something.
I don't see why people with real VTEC engines mind, it just means that they'll have an unexpected performance advantage if they ever race, because nobody expected their sticker to be real. And if they're upset because nobody can tell that they spent more... wah.
Why have a cell phone if you don't keep it with you?
I have a cell phone but I don't bother answering it unless it's that short list you mentioned (wife, family) unless I'm idle and wouldn't mind taking a call. The only reason that short list of people are on the always answer list is because they never just call to chat in the middle of the day. If they call, they've got something of at least moderate importance to say and they're okay with being told that I'm in a hurry.
But, everyone has my cell phone number. I cancelled the land line after my wife and I got 'em. If I do want to talk to someone, it's much more convenient to be able to do so at any time instead of going to a special place...
I also paid a bit more though, for a phone that had voice-ring capability, where it would say the name of the person calling. When I'm not easily able to look at the phone, having dinner, playing a game, etc, I know if it's worth even glancing at.
As someone else mentioned, I don't think we need a ton of fonts. 99% of people are going to be happy with a times, courier, and arial (and maybe a few basic others.) The people who want more are likely to be buying font packs anyways.
How much would it cost, at a guess, to hire a font designed it make a fairly basic Arial, or Times clone? Nothing weird or fancy.
On a related topic, I vote for the death penalty for font designers who make letters and numbers look alike. (To keep out the bias, I also really hate it when you run a program from the console and it spits out 100+ lines of status - how about the ten most important lines, dump the rest to foo_log.txt...)
I believe that Ultima Underworld only had walls at 90 degree angles and only on set grid lines, line Wolf3D. Had they wanted, they could have gived you the look up/down in Wolf3D as well, it's just that the ability isn't that exciting when everything is exactly the same height.
Doom actually had arbitrary walls. They had to be vertical, but otherwise you could build rooms of any shape.
The reason Q3 is a benchmark is because not only is it a popular game, but most first-person shooters are based on it. If you can play Q3 well, you can play most PC games well.
They may add monitoring software, and restrict copying, etc, etc. But they won't get rid of the ability to skip commercials and still be able to sell the product.
People who watch TV tend to hate commercials and they aren't going to settle for a device that makes them do so. They might try to retrofit this "Feature" into old PVRs, like TIVOs, but customers will resist.
With all the other lack of liberties, the average joe doesn't notice. He doesn't rip DVDs anyways, or MP3 his CDs, so the restrictions don't mean much. But take away commercial skip...
I imagine it's like localized damage. I coded a simple (height of the shot on the bounding box) damage routine for Q1 and it played well in developer test, but when users got to it they found it felt very random. Someone would run into a room and spray nails around. Two people would take a few and be moderately hurt, one guy would take a single nail and fall over dead just because he got it in the head.
More realistic I suppose, but for weapons that aren't aimed precisely it just didn't seem right.
Maybe with railguns / sniper rifles, if you could balance the gameplay issues of insta-hit, one-shot-kill...
On the subject of capitalism... I always find it amusing how die-hard capitalists insist that it's all fair labour that keeps them where they are, and then they insist on police protection and restrictive laws protection their business. Paid for, by the taxes of the lower classes.
If it was really a free, open market, they'd have to watch out for those they screwed over.
So really, these uber-independant capitalist businessmen can only thrive in an situation where they're being supported by the public.
IMHO I think a socialism, as currently practiced, is the only reasonable way in the long-term. Even if people should all succeed on their own merits, you can't expect the same of children. Schooling, nutrition, and the like are all very important. I'm not ready to damn the child because their parents are bad with money. If I dislike a welfare state I'd rather proactively make sure it doesn't perpetuate instead of just complaining about it. If that means I pay 50% tax instead of 25% and can live in a world where I won't get mugged to pay for someone's food, I'm okay with it.
What a short-term view. The entire hardware industry would be better off without MS dictating the conditions. If they all banded together, forgoing a potential short-term license discount, they'd get rid of this monkey on their back and they'd have much better prices in the end.
It's people like you that drive companies into the ground removing free pop from developers while buying lear jets instead of booking commercial flights.
Well, there are ways to get to keep your campaign money. Creative accounting and buying services from yourself. The benefit isn't just in getting elected, even politicians looking to leave can get rich from donations.
And yes, I know it'd be suicide to pass a law saying that if you crack CSS you get killed. But they're almost there now because they only need to declare terrorism to potentially have the death penalty (who would argue, it's TERRORISM!!) and to make cracking DRM terrorism when it stands to hurt a major corporation to the turn of (misrepresented accounting) billions of dollars.
Nobody would see it as a law punished hackers by death, and it'd be too dangerous for anyone to argue against because they'd be supporting terrorists. Just like McCarthy and his communism scare. (That man was evil incarnate and I'm sorry he didn't get shot for it by someone whose life was ruined by his lies.)
Don't forget that Bush has the highest popularity rating in history, people are idiots and only see that he's doing something, they don't care what as long as it involves bombing someone. Nobody scrutinizes what government does, at least nobody who would be listened to by the public.
Worldcom not only misstated billions, which as you can clearly see took money from the pockets of the stockholders and the employees' retirement funds, but they've also committed criminal fraud in hundreds of instances.
If you know you're going bankrupt it's illegal (toss you in jail type illegal) to buy anything on credit, or to try to hide your non-protected assets from foreclosure. Worldcom did both, to the estimated tune of a few more billion. Or course, that's standard in today's economy and it doesn't get reported until someone breaks other laws like WC did.
In fact, they're a large part of the reason Cisco and companies that actually created a product are going under. WC bought a ton of stuff on credit while going under. This equipment won't end up going back to Cisco though, it'll be auctioned off for pennies on the dollar, further cutting into Cisco's sales. Not only did someone who wouldn't have paid take a product, but they blocked a sale to someone who would have paid.
That's just a piece of it though. Just about every business that bought or sold a product or service to Worldcom reported that they weren't being paid and/or they didn't get what they paid for.
That's theft.
The only way to restore public trust is to treat everyone equally. Toss every exec who knew about this in jail under conspiracy charges, toss the ones who did it in jail under other charges too. Take back every cent they made from illegal stock manipulation and fine them on top of it. Make the people an example by breaking them and garnishing their incomes from their future jobs as fry clerks.
It's what happens to anyone else who repeatedly breaks the law, why doesn't it happen to execs?
Fuck, I'd like to see treason charges for the politicians who push to let them get away with this. That's economic terrorism, letting all confidence in the economy drain away because your golfing buddy doesn't want to be punished.
Wouldn't be hard to do actually. Treason and likely other similar crimes have the death penalty.
Now, all they'd need to do was say that anyone who committed terrorism against his home nation is committing treason. And of course terrorism would be extended to disabling (or telling someone how to) a security system vital for the "education the nation's youth in the field of eye-hand coordination", or whatever.
There, hacking the XBox or a DVD player (both are protected and to break them would potentially hurt the nation's economy in a serious way) is now terrorism; a supposed attempt to bring the nation to economic ruin, after all MS and the MPAA collective both are a large part of the markets. This terrorism, if committed by a citizen or resident of the US would then be treason, and there's the theoretical death-penalty for it.
And you can see that these half-way laws are both fairly realistic (have they already passed them?) in today's post 9-11 world.
Would anyone actually get put to death? No. But they don't really care as long as you cooperate. Few people actually get charged for DMCA violation now, normally it's enough to threaten. Who would risk it?
I honestly believe that it'd be possible for them to pass laws making DVD hacking technically punishable by the death penatly (even if such that it would never be actually used) inside of a year, with the right campaign contributions.
I think people should follow the "book test" when talking about copyright. If you substitute a book for the copyrighted material, does the intended action seem reasonable.
In this case, can I get you to rip pages out of a book that I own, for me. Hell yeah.
Apply it to Gator and it gives the other answer. Is it okay for someone hired to do a specific job to sneak into your house and rip pages out of your books, without permission (well, they claimed they asked, whispered, while you were sleeping...)
Apply it to the DVD issue. If you buy a book, can you read it anywhere in the world despite the wishes of the distributor? Again, hell yeah.
Software? Can you buy a book and read it even if you don't agree to a contract you found tucked into the book, after you bought it? Yeah, contracts don't work that way, do what you want with it.
People are getting ripped off by lawyers trying to convince them that copyright law applies differently to everything else.
Two things. One, the copyright expired (if there was such a thing, there, then) long ago. Two, if you buy a copy of something you can edit it, it's buying something and copying it that copyright covers.
Think of it with a book. Can you buy a book, rip out a page, and sell it? Yes, it's done all the time. You simply can't represent it as a complete work anymore, you have to say it's been modified. (Or, in the usual case, that it's used and you don't know if it's intact.)
So if you can do it once, with a book, why can't you do it multiple times? And why not with a movie?
You're still not making extra copies, and you're not depriving the author of any money.
But, the movie industry owns the government, so expect to see a bunch of new laws...
If you have paid (perhaps $0) for each copy you modify, and don't create copies, go for it.
The only reasonable way to do this is to sell a filtering web proxy now, but yeah, if you can get people to buy a web proxy that changes my posts, go for it. Just make it clear what it's doing, full disclosure is a legal requirement.
If you want to buy a book I wrote and circle typos, or rip out a few pages and resell it, go for it. Just make sure it's marked as being used and modified so that people don't get it expecting the original. That'd be misrepresentation which is illegal.
But the people buying these movies *want* an edited copy, they know what they're getting.
That's a valid question, but really I think it's the newbies who would most benefit from Linux.
People want a computer that doesn't crash, that "does email" and lets them write a letter, etc.
A Linux PC can do that. Give them an icon that says "Internet / WWW", "EMail", and "Word Processor" and that's 90% of what they want to do. Linux can boot extremely quickly without all the general-use stuff running, and can be locked down very tight so the users can screw it up.
Hell, you know how Linux users say that "Virus can't wipe out the system, just the user files!", that's just begging for a cron job backing things up, saving the diffs. Got a virus (trojan really, or deleted something accidentally)? Just go into the wayback machine and grab an old copy.
Toss it on a journalling FS and you have something that'll survive being unplugged while running.
It's the intermediate users, those who have been taught to click "Outlook" for email, "IE" for web, and "MS Word" for word processing who are the hardest to convert. They know enough to do what they want and are desperately afraid of losing that ability, they need much convincing before being willing to switch, even if they acknowledge that crashes and email viruses lose data for them all the time.
You can make and sell a $350 computer that does what most people want, never crashes, is *very* reliable wrt losing data, and is remotely adminable without opening up huge security holes (ie, cheap support costs.) With DeCSS (and another $50 for a DVD player) you can even make it an entertainment center. Sell it for $400 and make a profit on it.
That's the use the "average" person has for Linux.
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Actually, it would be considered unprofessional to present a quote and edit it transparently.
And what's the harm with reading something with stilted English? It did come from someone who likely didn't speak English natively...
If you don't like it here, leave. Seriously, I wish you would.
It's an easy movie (and series, with PM before AotC) to boycoot.
.divx, and saw the second when my family took me as a suprise. I didn't want to be rude.
I saw the first on
Now, if I was going to boycott LotR, that'd be hard. As is, it's the only one I'm going to see, perhaps ever again, in the theatre.
That makes a ton of sense. I'm willing to accept large infringements on my liberty when they help society in a way I believe in, murder laws for example, but when the laws just exist to help a few and to help them screw everyone else... No.
That's exactly what happened to me with Diablo 2, a birthday present I got a few years back. Blizzard told me to buy a new CD-ROM (yeah, right) and I tried to return it. That didn't work (of course). So I told Blizzard they'd never get another sale from me again.
I don't play WC3, but I've burned 20+ copies and given them out, hopefully many to people who would have otherwise bought the game.
The funny thing is, when D2 was new, I got kicked from the IRC channels for asking for a No-CD for it, even though I explained why I needed it. Today the help forums have people openly telling everyone to use the cracks, or, depending how pissed they are, to just warez it and play locally.
Blizzard's overly strict copy protection, and blaming users for its failure, has cost them a ton, both money and respect.
And through all this, the people who always warez things didn't notice a thing. They always use cracks, and their copies always worked.
If region coding vanishes it will be because the rest of the world (regions 2 -> 7) realize they are being screwed. Their governments will give DVD-player making companies the right to ignore certain aspects of their contracts with the DVDCA, specifically region encoding, etc.
Then this will trickle back into the US when people realize that foreigners are getting better hardware. When it's no harder to go to Amazon.co.uk to order a DVD player than to go to BestBuy.com, people will, and eventually region coding will be as good as dead.
Hollywood will *NEVER* give up region coding, it's a great price-fixing scam. The same thing that pisses off other countries makes Hollywood a ton of money. But they'll eventually make themselves irrelevant.
Anyways, they'll never plug "the analog hole" and it'll get worse the more they push. Right now I buy movies and music partly because I support the artists and partly because I'm lazy. Piss me off too much and even if all digital methods are out, I'll bring home studio-quality equipment from work and make tripod mounted high-definition, 5.1 sampled, copies of my movies and I'll distribute them. The more they push shit like Palladium, the more people will fight. Like the Star Wars quote.
There's no way to prevent analog copies of video or audio displays. There's no way to make a "perfect" watermark because you can't make something only a specific device with a specific private-key will recognize (or it's useless) so they can always be found an removed. Their battle is a losing one, but by fighting it, they earn the hatred of people who will them specifically attempt to cost them money instead of just doing so inadvertantly.
Valenti is just assuming that you need to break CSS to copy a DVD, and thus it's against the DMCA he bought. (Along with a few judges like crooked Caplan, but hey...)
He completely ignores the fact that you can do a bit-for-bit copy, with copy-prevention still intact, and press a new DVD. This is legal, if done for legal reasons (space shifting, etc.)
So really, he's prevented legal users from exercising their rights, meaning the only people capable of making a space-shifted DVD are the Asian illegal duplicators. (Or anyone else with $100k+ of machinery.)
Bleh, ignore him and his law. There's nothing reflecting morality (personal or societal) in it, it's just to protect a dead business model.
That business model argument gets old pretty quickly. I really don't care if they don't have a business model, unless they share the profits with me I'm not going to adjust to help. Just like I don't care that people uses Cue Cat scanners for their own uses. You choose a business model, YOU take the risks.
They can either take whatever steps are needed to adjust with wireless network, or go back to just selling coffee.
(And it wouldn't be hard. They could either advertise to customers that they're on a specific channel, or they can use metallic window tint, a low-power node, etc, and avoid overlap.)
Fine print on tickets is irrelevant. Completely irrelevant.
You can't expect someone to abide by restrictions they weren't informed of before they agreed to a purchase/contract.
This is why EULAs are ignorable.
Start making everyone read a sign full of restrictions before they buy the ticket. You'll sell a lot less tickets, but you might actually be able to enforce the restrictions. (Ditto with software. Show me the EULA at the register, before I buy and it'll be binding.)
I always thought this (VTEC stickers on other vehicles) was a hilarious comment on the people who obsess about having the right stickers to describe their car's engine.
... wah.
You just need a car that's so obviously not a Civic... A huge Buick or something.
I don't see why people with real VTEC engines mind, it just means that they'll have an unexpected performance advantage if they ever race, because nobody expected their sticker to be real. And if they're upset because nobody can tell that they spent more
Why have a cell phone if you don't keep it with you?
I have a cell phone but I don't bother answering it unless it's that short list you mentioned (wife, family) unless I'm idle and wouldn't mind taking a call. The only reason that short list of people are on the always answer list is because they never just call to chat in the middle of the day. If they call, they've got something of at least moderate importance to say and they're okay with being told that I'm in a hurry.
But, everyone has my cell phone number. I cancelled the land line after my wife and I got 'em. If I do want to talk to someone, it's much more convenient to be able to do so at any time instead of going to a special place...
I also paid a bit more though, for a phone that had voice-ring capability, where it would say the name of the person calling. When I'm not easily able to look at the phone, having dinner, playing a game, etc, I know if it's worth even glancing at.
As someone else mentioned, I don't think we need a ton of fonts. 99% of people are going to be happy with a times, courier, and arial (and maybe a few basic others.) The people who want more are likely to be buying font packs anyways.
...)
How much would it cost, at a guess, to hire a font designed it make a fairly basic Arial, or Times clone? Nothing weird or fancy.
On a related topic, I vote for the death penalty for font designers who make letters and numbers look alike. (To keep out the bias, I also really hate it when you run a program from the console and it spits out 100+ lines of status - how about the ten most important lines, dump the rest to foo_log.txt
What was the weakest link thing? I didn't hear anything about it, let alone good or bad.
I believe that Ultima Underworld only had walls at 90 degree angles and only on set grid lines, line Wolf3D. Had they wanted, they could have gived you the look up/down in Wolf3D as well, it's just that the ability isn't that exciting when everything is exactly the same height.
Doom actually had arbitrary walls. They had to be vertical, but otherwise you could build rooms of any shape.
The reason Q3 is a benchmark is because not only is it a popular game, but most first-person shooters are based on it. If you can play Q3 well, you can play most PC games well.
Doom3 will be just as big.
They may add monitoring software, and restrict copying, etc, etc. But they won't get rid of the ability to skip commercials and still be able to sell the product.
People who watch TV tend to hate commercials and they aren't going to settle for a device that makes them do so. They might try to retrofit this "Feature" into old PVRs, like TIVOs, but customers will resist.
With all the other lack of liberties, the average joe doesn't notice. He doesn't rip DVDs anyways, or MP3 his CDs, so the restrictions don't mean much. But take away commercial skip...
I imagine it's like localized damage. I coded a simple (height of the shot on the bounding box) damage routine for Q1 and it played well in developer test, but when users got to it they found it felt very random. Someone would run into a room and spray nails around. Two people would take a few and be moderately hurt, one guy would take a single nail and fall over dead just because he got it in the head.
More realistic I suppose, but for weapons that aren't aimed precisely it just didn't seem right.
Maybe with railguns / sniper rifles, if you could balance the gameplay issues of insta-hit, one-shot-kill...
On the subject of capitalism... I always find it amusing how die-hard capitalists insist that it's all fair labour that keeps them where they are, and then they insist on police protection and restrictive laws protection their business. Paid for, by the taxes of the lower classes.
If it was really a free, open market, they'd have to watch out for those they screwed over.
So really, these uber-independant capitalist businessmen can only thrive in an situation where they're being supported by the public.
IMHO I think a socialism, as currently practiced, is the only reasonable way in the long-term. Even if people should all succeed on their own merits, you can't expect the same of children. Schooling, nutrition, and the like are all very important. I'm not ready to damn the child because their parents are bad with money. If I dislike a welfare state I'd rather proactively make sure it doesn't perpetuate instead of just complaining about it. If that means I pay 50% tax instead of 25% and can live in a world where I won't get mugged to pay for someone's food, I'm okay with it.
What a short-term view. The entire hardware industry would be better off without MS dictating the conditions. If they all banded together, forgoing a potential short-term license discount, they'd get rid of this monkey on their back and they'd have much better prices in the end.
It's people like you that drive companies into the ground removing free pop from developers while buying lear jets instead of booking commercial flights.
Well, there are ways to get to keep your campaign money. Creative accounting and buying services from yourself. The benefit isn't just in getting elected, even politicians looking to leave can get rich from donations.
And yes, I know it'd be suicide to pass a law saying that if you crack CSS you get killed. But they're almost there now because they only need to declare terrorism to potentially have the death penalty (who would argue, it's TERRORISM!!) and to make cracking DRM terrorism when it stands to hurt a major corporation to the turn of (misrepresented accounting) billions of dollars.
Nobody would see it as a law punished hackers by death, and it'd be too dangerous for anyone to argue against because they'd be supporting terrorists. Just like McCarthy and his communism scare. (That man was evil incarnate and I'm sorry he didn't get shot for it by someone whose life was ruined by his lies.)
Don't forget that Bush has the highest popularity rating in history, people are idiots and only see that he's doing something, they don't care what as long as it involves bombing someone. Nobody scrutinizes what government does, at least nobody who would be listened to by the public.
Bullshit.
Worldcom not only misstated billions, which as you can clearly see took money from the pockets of the stockholders and the employees' retirement funds, but they've also committed criminal fraud in hundreds of instances.
If you know you're going bankrupt it's illegal (toss you in jail type illegal) to buy anything on credit, or to try to hide your non-protected assets from foreclosure. Worldcom did both, to the estimated tune of a few more billion. Or course, that's standard in today's economy and it doesn't get reported until someone breaks other laws like WC did.
In fact, they're a large part of the reason Cisco and companies that actually created a product are going under. WC bought a ton of stuff on credit while going under. This equipment won't end up going back to Cisco though, it'll be auctioned off for pennies on the dollar, further cutting into Cisco's sales. Not only did someone who wouldn't have paid take a product, but they blocked a sale to someone who would have paid.
That's just a piece of it though. Just about every business that bought or sold a product or service to Worldcom reported that they weren't being paid and/or they didn't get what they paid for.
That's theft.
The only way to restore public trust is to treat everyone equally. Toss every exec who knew about this in jail under conspiracy charges, toss the ones who did it in jail under other charges too. Take back every cent they made from illegal stock manipulation and fine them on top of it. Make the people an example by breaking them and garnishing their incomes from their future jobs as fry clerks.
It's what happens to anyone else who repeatedly breaks the law, why doesn't it happen to execs?
Fuck, I'd like to see treason charges for the politicians who push to let them get away with this. That's economic terrorism, letting all confidence in the economy drain away because your golfing buddy doesn't want to be punished.
Wouldn't be hard to do actually. Treason and likely other similar crimes have the death penalty.
Now, all they'd need to do was say that anyone who committed terrorism against his home nation is committing treason. And of course terrorism would be extended to disabling (or telling someone how to) a security system vital for the "education the nation's youth in the field of eye-hand coordination", or whatever.
There, hacking the XBox or a DVD player (both are protected and to break them would potentially hurt the nation's economy in a serious way) is now terrorism; a supposed attempt to bring the nation to economic ruin, after all MS and the MPAA collective both are a large part of the markets. This terrorism, if committed by a citizen or resident of the US would then be treason, and there's the theoretical death-penalty for it.
And you can see that these half-way laws are both fairly realistic (have they already passed them?) in today's post 9-11 world.
Would anyone actually get put to death? No. But they don't really care as long as you cooperate. Few people actually get charged for DMCA violation now, normally it's enough to threaten. Who would risk it?
I honestly believe that it'd be possible for them to pass laws making DVD hacking technically punishable by the death penatly (even if such that it would never be actually used) inside of a year, with the right campaign contributions.
Heh, brave AC. I don't think I'd want to get a blowjob from an easily distracted person with a habit of chewing up pencils.
I completely agree.
I think people should follow the "book test" when talking about copyright. If you substitute a book for the copyrighted material, does the intended action seem reasonable.
In this case, can I get you to rip pages out of a book that I own, for me. Hell yeah.
Apply it to Gator and it gives the other answer. Is it okay for someone hired to do a specific job to sneak into your house and rip pages out of your books, without permission (well, they claimed they asked, whispered, while you were sleeping...)
Apply it to the DVD issue. If you buy a book, can you read it anywhere in the world despite the wishes of the distributor? Again, hell yeah.
Software? Can you buy a book and read it even if you don't agree to a contract you found tucked into the book, after you bought it? Yeah, contracts don't work that way, do what you want with it.
People are getting ripped off by lawyers trying to convince them that copyright law applies differently to everything else.
Two things. One, the copyright expired (if there was such a thing, there, then) long ago. Two, if you buy a copy of something you can edit it, it's buying something and copying it that copyright covers.
Think of it with a book. Can you buy a book, rip out a page, and sell it? Yes, it's done all the time. You simply can't represent it as a complete work anymore, you have to say it's been modified. (Or, in the usual case, that it's used and you don't know if it's intact.)
So if you can do it once, with a book, why can't you do it multiple times? And why not with a movie?
You're still not making extra copies, and you're not depriving the author of any money.
But, the movie industry owns the government, so expect to see a bunch of new laws...
If you have paid (perhaps $0) for each copy you modify, and don't create copies, go for it.
The only reasonable way to do this is to sell a filtering web proxy now, but yeah, if you can get people to buy a web proxy that changes my posts, go for it. Just make it clear what it's doing, full disclosure is a legal requirement.
If you want to buy a book I wrote and circle typos, or rip out a few pages and resell it, go for it. Just make sure it's marked as being used and modified so that people don't get it expecting the original. That'd be misrepresentation which is illegal.
But the people buying these movies *want* an edited copy, they know what they're getting.
That's a valid question, but really I think it's the newbies who would most benefit from Linux.
People want a computer that doesn't crash, that "does email" and lets them write a letter, etc.
A Linux PC can do that. Give them an icon that says "Internet / WWW", "EMail", and "Word Processor" and that's 90% of what they want to do. Linux can boot extremely quickly without all the general-use stuff running, and can be locked down very tight so the users can screw it up.
Hell, you know how Linux users say that "Virus can't wipe out the system, just the user files!", that's just begging for a cron job backing things up, saving the diffs. Got a virus (trojan really, or deleted something accidentally)? Just go into the wayback machine and grab an old copy.
Toss it on a journalling FS and you have something that'll survive being unplugged while running.
It's the intermediate users, those who have been taught to click "Outlook" for email, "IE" for web, and "MS Word" for word processing who are the hardest to convert. They know enough to do what they want and are desperately afraid of losing that ability, they need much convincing before being willing to switch, even if they acknowledge that crashes and email viruses lose data for them all the time.
You can make and sell a $350 computer that does what most people want, never crashes, is *very* reliable wrt losing data, and is remotely adminable without opening up huge security holes (ie, cheap support costs.) With DeCSS (and another $50 for a DVD player) you can even make it an entertainment center. Sell it for $400 and make a profit on it.
That's the use the "average" person has for Linux.