It is a responsibility of the consumer to allow for potential failure of devices. Some ammount of failure is impossible to eliminate and is expected.
If you ran your delivery business with a single vehicle and no provisions for a spare, you'd be liable for the financial losses if it failed, not the vehicle's maker. (Assuming that it failed in a reasonable fashion, not due to a known defect.)
Seeing as how software is part of a complex system, running on complex hardware, some failures, especially with borderline uses, are expected. The merchant should only be responsible if the bug should have been noticed with reasonable precautions, etc.
The implied warranty at purchase is that you can expect a product to be useful for the stated use, and reasonably as effective as stated. You can't expect that the product (be it mechanical or software) be perfect because it's obvious that nothing is.
There are implied warranties on anything you purchase (even things marked "as is") but I don't see how this applies to gifts or free goods.
Certainly, if an author wrote a virus and misrepresented it as a useful program, they could both prosecuted criminally and sued for damages, but that's a case of intentional misrepresentation and has many analogues in conventional law.
(Depending on country, it's a crime or an actionable offense to give false advice resulting in harm, even for free. "Sure, salt is good for cars." Lack of intent (ie, ignorance of the falsehood) is always a defense unless you're a professional or misrepresenting yourself as one.)
However, if I have a "free" bin of books, for instance, outside my store, you don't get any implied warranty. (Except that it really is a book, not a trap I've devised, etc)
If you employ the advice given in those books you can't sue me if it doesn't work. Also, you can't sue the author, because the advice wasn't paid for. (Except in some odd cases, as mentioned above.)
Seeing as how code is either speech, at which point you must see it as "advice", worth what you paid for it, or as a tool, with no implied warranty, you can't really sue if it doesn't meet your expectations.
This assumes that the author says something along the lines of "I believe this program to be safe for intended use, but it is not tested and no guarantees are made." If they claim it's perfect, knowing it's not, or knowing they didn't properly check, then you might have a case.
However, this all assumes the legal system work as intended. In the US civil suits are out of control and you can sue people for things that no sane country would consider actionable and for damages that far exceed reasonable.
My advice is much like Alan Cox's - (paraphrased) The US has dumb laws, if you live (or travel to) there, watch out.
First, it's difficult. It involves removing the platters from the drive and mounting them in a machine designed to read from that platter density.
Then, the machine can read from 0 to N generations of older data. This is dependent on the quality of the medium (I guess, better drives are less secure in this fashion) and the repeatability of the data used for overwrites.
If you overwrite something with all zeros (or ones), it's almost guaranteed to still be there later because all you did was weaken (strengthen) the signal, the variation between two signals with the same current value represents the original value.
This is why the idea is many secure overwrites. Perhaps all zeros once or twice, but interspersed with "secure" random noise. As soon as they lose track of layer N, they can't get N+1.
However, the task usually doesn't depend on getting the contents of the whole disk back, usually they can still read the meta data and know what to concentrate on (and if they can't, they know where the meta data sits, so they concentrate on that) and then they go after certain files likely to be the most useful.
Most common "secure delete" utils use low-grade PRNGs and non-random seeds. If you can figure out the output of these and then deduce the seed, you can figure out the data used for any portion of the overwrite and from that, have a pretty good chance of recovering the data.
Now, this is what I've heard, from people in the field, so don't take it as gospel. The one thing they all agreed upon though is that this level of analysis is hideously expensive. Not $500 / hour like "normal" data recovery, more like $500k up front and then $5k / hour... It involves cryptanalysis to crack the "random" overwrites and a host of other professionals. It also wouldn't be used to bust a kiddy pornographer (is that a kid who makes porn, or...) or the logs of a mob boss. It'd be used in espionage type issues, where there's more than money on the line.
It's almost always destructive analysis too; they destroy the media getting the data and they don't get 100% so they can't put it on a new drive and put it back in the computer. If this happens you're gonna know it, at best they'd substitute a different drive to make it look like yours crashed. (Maybe that's why so many potential spies were sold the IBM 75GXP series drives - plausible crashes...:)
A 600MB divx DVD rip of a 1-hour (or less, usually) show is going to be incredible quality. Anything where the source is widescreen is going to be ripped that way. The 5.1 it might not do (You can rip the audio streams directly, but I dunno if standard players will recognize and play them...)
As for downloads taking all night... that matters? Why? Just queue a few up and let them go.
And watermarks? I've never seen watermarks on a divx movie except for screeners. (You know, some guy with a handy-cam in the theatre.) Nobody bothers to watermark DVD rips, anyone with the DVD can do them, there's no glory.
It was the emperor who decided to push the war, but his power came from the people. If they refused to support him, or tried to kill him, he'd be powerless or dead.
The dividing line between enemy troops and enemy civilians is a thin and often arbitrary one.
If the war is worth killing/dying over, and the enemy civilians support the enemy troops who are trying to kill you, why shouldn't you strike back at both?
While common words "apple" can be trademarked, they can't be used in fields where they are generic descriptors.
Apple Music is okay because Apple is not a type of music. Apple Fruits is not okay because apples are a type of fruit.
A crayon is a generic drawing insturment and a computer program that allows the user to draw, as if with a crayon, should be named "Crayon" or "Electric Crayon" or something.
Whoever granted "crayon" as a trademark on anything resembling a drawing program should be fired. Just like patent examiners who slack off and grant stupid crap which innocent companies then have to defend against later. (Like, who the hell granted that laser-pointer + cat thing...)
Not quite... If I was being reported to my ISP for some suspected violation, I'd like to know.
Let's say I piss off a few people each year and they decide that a flame is "abusive email" and send it to my ISP who, for sake of argument, has a three-strikes policy.
If I know about the report I can follow it up, or if I know I've been reported a few times and really was guilty, then I'll know to cool it before the plug is pulled.
Had BS (how aptly named) just accepted the complaint and stopped doing his bulk email, he'd have been fine. He was the one who decided to start the harassing behaviour, the phone calls, etc.
If there are consqeuences (that matter) to your actions against me, I'd like to know.
The only tackiness in annoucing/ignore is that people tend to do that after trying to get in the last word. "You're a poopy head! BTW, I just/ignore'd you. haha" People also usually find it necessary to broadcast this to the channel instead of using a private message.
I think the big problem with this situation is the idea that people can be so damaged from receiving a spiteful email that they should be able to sue. Well, that and the idea that they should be able to sue someone for a truthful representation of their actions. (The log of BS's emails to them.)
You know, you're as much a follower by *not* seeing a movie because of what other people say, as you are by rushing off to see one... It just means you follow the "cynical goth" crowd instead of some other group.
And you know, despite the trend of new movies getting higher ratings initially, maybe there's a reason why not a lot of old movies are on top.
When I asked three of my movie-going friends what they liked about Citizen Kane in Gone With the Wind and they had vauge undefined answers like "classic" and "original"... Not a lot of people I know actually like these movies for what they are, they say you have to understand the art of the day, etc... I want a movie that doesn't have hackneyed actings, lousy scripts, bad timing, etc.
IMHO for acting alone, you're a lot more likely to find a good film today when movies have existed for seventy years and people understand what works on film versus stage. In the early days you had actors from the stage, with no real idea of how to properly use the screen.
I'm sure that 95% of movies that come out today are overly hollywood-ed crap... stuff written by committee and okayed by "focus groups", but that other 5% is still more movies than came out in a year, sixty years ago.
A sense of history is great, and to look back and realize that people had to pioneer a lot of what we take for granted gives us an idea of the adverse conditions they worked in, but... the best movies ever. Hardly likely.
If I see a list of the best books/movies/whatever of the century/millenium, I'm tempted to rate them somewhat opposite to you. Taking away points for the older books. Not that I think they're not good, but I think reviewers (and people in general) are more likely to laud something impressive. Anyone can read a modern novel, but to read something originally written in Russian, or in (relatively) old English. Now there's pretension value.
My argument was not that a specific type of sharing is okay thus all should be. It was that sharing can take many forms. As such, your "that's not sharing" statement was a little inaccurate.
Thus, we should be careful who we let set the definitions of sharing or we wouldn't be able to have friends over while playing a CD.
While I think that creators of a work should have control over all commercial distribution (and almost all non-commercial) I don't think they should have control over the use of the item.
If you let content creators (or creators of physical items) dictate how their creations are used you end up in a world where you'd be violating your purchase "agreement" by hauling Ford parts in a GM truck and so on. Perhaps where it was only permitted to watch a movie if you wouldn't give a bad review, etc. These are powers that I don't think creators should have. After sale I think all usage rights should go to the buyer.
I actually support copyright almost as it is now. If you'd chop the term down (I think 30 years, or life + 10 would be good) and strike down things like the DMCA, I'd be 100% behind it.
What I do not support is controls on personal copying (backups), space shifting, time shifting, usage controls (region codes, etc) and the like. I think that once a person buys it they should be free to do pretty well everything except distribute copies.
I do disagree with your statement "If you don't agree with the creator or his stipulations of use, then don't use the product, get it from someone else or do it yourself." There are too many times that this could be abused. This is why I think the law should set blanket permissions for all creative works. I don't want to have to keep from publishing a bad review of an MS product just because I need to use Word and that's part of the word EULA.
Those restrictions a creator would want would often be contrary to the interests of society.
Whatever. You don't seem capable of following so I'm going to keep this short.
Calling copyright violation "piracy" is as stupid as calling it "theft". Both words have defined meanings and neither fits copyright violation. The term was coined by software publishers looking to drum up support for their arguments. If you're going to buy into it and perpetuate that, fine, but don't expect to be taken seriously.
Second, GPL violations are NOT copyright violations. If you agree to a license and violate the terms of the license, it's not a copyright violation, it's a license violation.
If you truly think these posts are trolls, don't reply. You've wasted enough of my time already.
If you're talking "piracy", you're talking the theft at sea kind. There is no other. If you use the term "software piracy" you're just making up strong-sounding terms to justify your positions.
What do you think a licence is? A copyright licence is "permission given to another person authorising him to do certain things in relation to the copyright work"
A license is what you'd use to either restrict the user past what copyright law would, or to allow the user to do things copyright law would forbid. To buy a copyrighted work and use it does *NOT* require a license, either explicit or implicit.
In other words, violation of any clause in the licence is a "violation of copyright law"
No. Licenses are contracts entered into to go beyond the default protections (either way) of copyright law. Violating a license is contract violation.
Some people call this software piracy.
And some people would be wrong. Try calling it "copyright violation" or "unlawful copying".
"an example would be importaing
or selling copies of computer software without the permission of the owner of the copyright in the software"
There are some restrictions on merchants that are not on end-users.
I think that referring to
GPL violation as software piracy is fair comment.
If you think that "software piracy" relates to unlawful copying (ie, warez) then extending it to GPL violation is technically incorrect. A GPL violation is akin to creating a derivative work. They're both copyright violations, but otherwise are much different.
The GPL isn't really a license...
it's an "offer" of a contract, whereby you will follow a certain license in trade for certain "consideration" (the right to use the source code, etc).
That's what a copyright licence is!
No, I'm being picky for a reason.
(Ok, all EULAs are invalid for reasons to do with contract law, mainly because they're post-sale, but ignoring that for a minute...)
You're able to pick up a piece of GPLed software and use it in any way that copyright law allows. There are no further restrictions. There are no licenses getting in the way. The GPL isn't in effect now. If you want to do more with this software then you can accept the author's offered contract, at which point you will have licensed the software, to go beyond the rights copyright law would have given you. The difference is that Microsoft would have you believe that their license (if it was valid) is in effect the whole time you use their software. The GPL is clear about not being active until you accept it. You're governed only by copyright law until you choose to change that.
That's why I think it's an important point.
You really should stop using the term "piracy" though. It'll help your credability. Just like the "hacker" and "cracker" thing. Big business may want to stigmatize an activity but that doesn't mean everyone needs to buy into it and play along.
Shareholders only deserve respect if they don't invest in crooked companies.
I've heard people on here say this of MS and Rambus both... "I know they did something illegal, but I hope they get off because I dumped $20k into their stock..."
IMHO if you know (or should, by following general industry news) that the company you're investing in is involved in illegal actions (MS's handling of DR Dos, Rambus's illegal claims to have patented DRAM, etc) then you deserve to be treated like a criminal. If you *only* lose your money, thank your lucky stars you were tossed in prison for theft and conspiracy.
Some thing people don't know about, like, was it ConEd in that Erin Brokovich? Many of their execs didn't know they were poisoning people, let alone shareholders.
However, with Rambus, people knew (it had been reported in a few large magazines) that the company had lied to JEDEC and obtained patents under false pretenses. They rushed out to buy stock anyway. These are the scummy ones.
Sharing works as you describe, if you have a physical item which your friend wishes to use in privacy.
If I buy a piece of art I can share it with all of my friends who wish to come over and view it. If I buy a tree, any number can come over and smell the flowers on it.
If I buy a music CD, many friends can come over and listen to it at once.
What's the big difference between making them a copy so that they listen to it at a different location? It's much the same as calling them, while it is playing, and letting them listen via telephone.
BTW, on that licensing thing... wrong again. You don't need to be licensed to use a book or CD. Use of the product is covered in copyright law, the licenses you see (EULAs) are post-sale and have no legal weight. (Copyright law even allows temporary copies that are required to use the work, such as copies of software in RAM.)
Enlightened self interest. People need to realize that if they want to have software to warez, they need to buy some as well or the market will dry up.
That said, people are under no obligation to support a business model that doesn't benefit them too. For instance, Microsoft doesn't have the right to make a profit. They have the right to try to make a profit.
People can try to sell ice to eskimos, eskimos are under no obligation to buy. The success or failure of the ice salesman isn't their concern.
The way the BSA is playing with numbers they claim that any PC without a payed-for OS is one pirating an OS (and thus, Windows). I don't care about MS and don't use their stuff (at home). They're essentially like the ice merchant, to me. Selling an unwanted product to someone who could get more, cheaper, if they wished.
That said, however, I don't feel that I should buy Windows if I install it to test something. I feel that warezing it is a valid action because I trust my judgement of potentially suffering more than I trust the law. Legally if I ever even ran the install to help walk someone though over the phone I should buy it. Morally, I don't think so, if anything I've done them a favour by increasing their userbase.
I might be more willing to accept the legal take on it, if I didn't feel so disenfranchised by the law. I have no power over the creation of law and the practicing of law is soley dependant on money. Until I feel that law is by and for the people, I'll continue trusting my morals instead.
Unlawful copying and contract violation (what breaking the GPL is) are not piracy.
Furthermore, unlawful copying isn't a violation of the license agreement (clickthrough licenses on non-free (ie, payed for) software aren't valid because they're post-sale.) it's a violation of copyright law. They do include "don't make copies" in the license but at most that's redundant.
The GPL isn't really a license, it's an "offer" of a contract, whereby you will follow a certain license in trade for certain "consideration" (the right to use the source code, etc).
This is just a quick summary, if you want more details feel free to ask.
It's not the faceless "Them", it's the malicous "Them".
Credit card companies that send out applications to everyone, including the recently bankrupt.
The malcious "Them" who invest in companies like Microsoft and Rambus.
The people at Unicef, or the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (or your equivalent) are just as faceless but you'd never hear someone bragging about ripping them off.
People steal, and happily, from people they feel are hurting them and are outside the law. Much like Robin Hood.
Rightfully so, imho, in a lot of cases.
I know people who lost their jobs because Microsoft's illegal business practices put DRI (Makers of DR Dos) out of business. I know stockholders who stood to lose money if Rambus managed to illegally gain control of the DRAM market.
Would it really be so wrong for those people to take the money they lost from the bank accounts of the CEOs who approved those actions? Or from the stock-holders who bought stock after seeing these illegal actions and who figured they might as well profit too?
I don't think so.
If you steal from me I can call the police and am likely to be compensated.
If a large corporation sues me into bankruptcy because I'm legally competing with them, what recourse do I have? Even if they were proved to be breaking the law the police won't do anything, the courts won't, and if they did, the government would overturn it. (See Microsoft.)
This moral/ethical view is the result of the fact that big faceless "Them"s can't be properly punished and thus act with impunity, even when they destroy the lives of others.
Unfortunately (for everyone else) the BSA's numbers aren't that well obtained.
They estimate (based on the number of computers sold) and the estimated lifespan (5 or so years) the number of working computers.
Then they add up MS's sales figures plus (BeOS, OS/2, whoever the other "legitimate" players are in their minds) and subtract one from the other.
That's the number of pirated OSes they think there are.
Similarly, they take the number of "business" computers and do the same with office suites, then they multiple by the percentage of workers they think need office suites. The difference in these numbers is piracy, again.
Of course, even if they counted Linux they wouldn't count downloaded copies, just purchases of boxed copies. My old work had 5-10 linux computers and we'd purchased one copy of Redhat + docs/books, the rest of the boxes just got the generic stuff.
At home I've got a Linux PC (among others) that I installed off of discs I downloaded, that machine shows up in the BSA stats as a pirated copy of Windows.
Then, to make their stats even worse, they take the number of "pirated copies", multiply by full MSRP and claim it as a LOSS. This assumes that not only is every PC without a "proper" OS running a pirated one, but that the owner would have shelled out for the OS if they had to.
Win2k and WinXP Pro are fairly popular home OSes, they wouldn't be if people have to pay for them. People would still be using Win98/se and would be happy to stay there for years.
Now, I'm not saying there's no piracy, but it's nowhere near their numbers from what I've seen. (And as a consultant I've seen many work and home machines from a fairly wide cross-section of society.) Even if their numbers were right, their claiming of loses (when a 12-yo pirates Win2k AdvServ) is ridiculous and should be illegal.
Y'know, the brainwashing you suffered is having nasty side-effects. It's leading to you posting semi-intelligible messages on public webpages.
Your lord god semi-mighty seems to agree with the "informating wants to be free" crowd.
Remember Mana? Food from the heavens. Your bible claims your god decided that feeding the starving people was the proper thing. He didn't care that Mana-fed people wouldn't be supporting the food-sellers.
It's similar now. We can see how mana-type foods might be possible in a few years. But they'd never be used to feed the poor, those people can't pay for them. Instead we'd use them to feed cattle to produce steak and hamburgers.
I'm afraid your hippie god wouldn't agree with this. He'd want to **STEAL** that intellectual property from the good mega-corps and distribute it to all those filthy **THIEVES**. (read: starving people)
btw, you're misusing the word "Steal" which is defined as the act of "Theft" which is defined as depriving the original owner of his property.
Making copies of something does not qualify as theft. Use the correct term "Unlawful copying".
Full of even more religion nutcases than N.A. or Europe. Ugh, no thanks. (And I say this out of frustration with stifling religious nonscense, not out of post 9/11 sentiment.)
Let's try countries where people never get stoned for marrying the wrong people. Where there are no castes. Where women (or men) aren't property.
Until those and other simple goals are met, India is NOT a beautiful country. It's a festering cesspool that happens to have nice scenery.
Strange, all the CEOs I've seen lead companies into bankruptcy have come out of it with millions of dollars. That's the whole "golden parachute" they talk about.
John Roth, ex-CEO of Nortel got a retirement package (not of stock) that was worth millions, during the layoffs of aproximately half his workforce (~45k layoffs) and a claimed loss of 19.2*Billion* in one quarter.
What's-his-name, from Rambus. He cashed in and sold a bunch of his stock just after their stock skyrocketed when they started suing everyone. Now the stock is in the toilet but he'll never have to repay anything. (Ha! Investors in a company like that deserve to lose their money.)
There are thousands of examples. CEOs getting huge bonuses in years that companies are laying off staff like crazy. (Soon before bankruptcy, not like they were just pruning an unneeded workforce.)
Seems to me like the least risky place to be is at the top. The low-level employees have virtually no employment protection, the upper-levels have secure jobs. The low-levels don't get paid well, the upper-levels do. etc.
I'd really like to bite the bullet the way CEOs do. That'd be the $20-Million bullet. Oh, terrible life.
Worse than that, why does ~100k of text and formatting bloat into a 4mb.doc file? The fact that it then takes 200MB to load it is to be expected after that.
And ugh, have you ever output to.html from word? Not only is it completely *not* compliant HTML, but it's so very redundant... In a way that a 1st year comp-sci student could fix too.
I rate films based on how they make me feel about the film in question.
I'd rate Galaxy Quest a 9 or 10 because it's very good at doing what it sets out to do.
Perhaps there are "better" films, but if I watch them and don't feel the story was presented as well, or that the actors very good, I'm not going to rate it as high.
I tend to dock points if movies could have been more than they were. Star Wars loses points here IMHO. It was good I suppose but it had so many point where it would have been great but they dropped the ball.
However my rankings are done irregardless of other films. My view of SW won't go down now that I've seen FotR even though FotR pretty well succeeded everywhere SW didn't.
Also, my ratings are of how well a movie achieves its goals. I'd rate a Dr Seuss movie a 10 if I thought it represented the pinacle of Dr Seuss movies. I wouldn't compare it to Godfather, or anything else. I would also dock Godfather points because it wasn't an untimate mob movie, even though if you put the two movies side-by-side Godfather would be the "best" by my personal standards of enjoyment. I do this because it bugs me to see a movie do something stupid or miss an oportunity to be much better, within its context. (For instance, if I liked car chases, I wouldn't penalize FotR for not having any.)
I see the IMDB top 250 list as being the top movies in the sense that they satisfied their intended targets the best, not were the "best" in some univeral objective list.
The "favorite" movie list depends too much on the people doing the voting. I personally don't care much for mob movies, Godfather wouldn't feature on my list.
But... if you look at it, this whole 17 years thing is really kinda silly.
I think it would have made the movie needlessly hard to understand if they'd said "17 years later" right after Gandalf had basically forced Bilbo to leave the ring and had a nasty flash as he reached for it.
Even in the book it always seemed weak. In the movie it would have seemed worse, imho.
And thank god they didn't include Frodo selling Bagend and the complete lineage of the hobbits at the parties. Snooze-a-rama.
I think they should have kept Bombadil. Not because I liked him, honestly I almost slept through the book until Bree and annoying poems didn't help. But, this is one of the only whole sections it appears that they removed.
Simply having a brief bit of Bombadil would have allowed them to film an extra few minutes on spec, to use for an extended DVD is desired. Without having him at all it's out of their hands.
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It is a responsibility of the consumer to allow for potential failure of devices. Some ammount of failure is impossible to eliminate and is expected.
If you ran your delivery business with a single vehicle and no provisions for a spare, you'd be liable for the financial losses if it failed, not the vehicle's maker. (Assuming that it failed in a reasonable fashion, not due to a known defect.)
Seeing as how software is part of a complex system, running on complex hardware, some failures, especially with borderline uses, are expected. The merchant should only be responsible if the bug should have been noticed with reasonable precautions, etc.
The implied warranty at purchase is that you can expect a product to be useful for the stated use, and reasonably as effective as stated. You can't expect that the product (be it mechanical or software) be perfect because it's obvious that nothing is.
There are implied warranties on anything you purchase (even things marked "as is") but I don't see how this applies to gifts or free goods.
Certainly, if an author wrote a virus and misrepresented it as a useful program, they could both prosecuted criminally and sued for damages, but that's a case of intentional misrepresentation and has many analogues in conventional law.
(Depending on country, it's a crime or an actionable offense to give false advice resulting in harm, even for free. "Sure, salt is good for cars." Lack of intent (ie, ignorance of the falsehood) is always a defense unless you're a professional or misrepresenting yourself as one.)
However, if I have a "free" bin of books, for instance, outside my store, you don't get any implied warranty. (Except that it really is a book, not a trap I've devised, etc)
If you employ the advice given in those books you can't sue me if it doesn't work. Also, you can't sue the author, because the advice wasn't paid for. (Except in some odd cases, as mentioned above.)
Seeing as how code is either speech, at which point you must see it as "advice", worth what you paid for it, or as a tool, with no implied warranty, you can't really sue if it doesn't meet your expectations.
This assumes that the author says something along the lines of "I believe this program to be safe for intended use, but it is not tested and no guarantees are made." If they claim it's perfect, knowing it's not, or knowing they didn't properly check, then you might have a case.
However, this all assumes the legal system work as intended. In the US civil suits are out of control and you can sue people for things that no sane country would consider actionable and for damages that far exceed reasonable.
My advice is much like Alan Cox's - (paraphrased) The US has dumb laws, if you live (or travel to) there, watch out.
Well, it appears to be somewhat true.
...) or the logs of a mob boss. It'd be used in espionage type issues, where there's more than money on the line.
:)
First, it's difficult. It involves removing the platters from the drive and mounting them in a machine designed to read from that platter density.
Then, the machine can read from 0 to N generations of older data. This is dependent on the quality of the medium (I guess, better drives are less secure in this fashion) and the repeatability of the data used for overwrites.
If you overwrite something with all zeros (or ones), it's almost guaranteed to still be there later because all you did was weaken (strengthen) the signal, the variation between two signals with the same current value represents the original value.
This is why the idea is many secure overwrites. Perhaps all zeros once or twice, but interspersed with "secure" random noise. As soon as they lose track of layer N, they can't get N+1.
However, the task usually doesn't depend on getting the contents of the whole disk back, usually they can still read the meta data and know what to concentrate on (and if they can't, they know where the meta data sits, so they concentrate on that) and then they go after certain files likely to be the most useful.
Most common "secure delete" utils use low-grade PRNGs and non-random seeds. If you can figure out the output of these and then deduce the seed, you can figure out the data used for any portion of the overwrite and from that, have a pretty good chance of recovering the data.
Now, this is what I've heard, from people in the field, so don't take it as gospel. The one thing they all agreed upon though is that this level of analysis is hideously expensive. Not $500 / hour like "normal" data recovery, more like $500k up front and then $5k / hour... It involves cryptanalysis to crack the "random" overwrites and a host of other professionals. It also wouldn't be used to bust a kiddy pornographer (is that a kid who makes porn, or
It's almost always destructive analysis too; they destroy the media getting the data and they don't get 100% so they can't put it on a new drive and put it back in the computer. If this happens you're gonna know it, at best they'd substitute a different drive to make it look like yours crashed. (Maybe that's why so many potential spies were sold the IBM 75GXP series drives - plausible crashes...
A 600MB divx DVD rip of a 1-hour (or less, usually) show is going to be incredible quality. Anything where the source is widescreen is going to be ripped that way. The 5.1 it might not do (You can rip the audio streams directly, but I dunno if standard players will recognize and play them...)
As for downloads taking all night... that matters? Why? Just queue a few up and let them go.
And watermarks? I've never seen watermarks on a divx movie except for screeners. (You know, some guy with a handy-cam in the theatre.) Nobody bothers to watermark DVD rips, anyone with the DVD can do them, there's no glory.
Rightly so.
So did the US in dropping the bomb on Japan.
It was the emperor who decided to push the war, but his power came from the people. If they refused to support him, or tried to kill him, he'd be powerless or dead.
The dividing line between enemy troops and enemy civilians is a thin and often arbitrary one.
If the war is worth killing/dying over, and the enemy civilians support the enemy troops who are trying to kill you, why shouldn't you strike back at both?
While common words "apple" can be trademarked, they can't be used in fields where they are generic descriptors.
Apple Music is okay because Apple is not a type of music. Apple Fruits is not okay because apples are a type of fruit.
A crayon is a generic drawing insturment and a computer program that allows the user to draw, as if with a crayon, should be named "Crayon" or "Electric Crayon" or something.
Whoever granted "crayon" as a trademark on anything resembling a drawing program should be fired. Just like patent examiners who slack off and grant stupid crap which innocent companies then have to defend against later. (Like, who the hell granted that laser-pointer + cat thing...)
You do realize that as long as the friend isn't hurting anyone, nobody here cares?
In fact, I'm glad people do stuff like that. It highlights malicious people (who we might care about) can do it.
Not quite... If I was being reported to my ISP for some suspected violation, I'd like to know.
/ignore is that people tend to do that after trying to get in the last word. "You're a poopy head! BTW, I just /ignore'd you. haha" People also usually find it necessary to broadcast this to the channel instead of using a private message.
Let's say I piss off a few people each year and they decide that a flame is "abusive email" and send it to my ISP who, for sake of argument, has a three-strikes policy.
If I know about the report I can follow it up, or if I know I've been reported a few times and really was guilty, then I'll know to cool it before the plug is pulled.
Had BS (how aptly named) just accepted the complaint and stopped doing his bulk email, he'd have been fine. He was the one who decided to start the harassing behaviour, the phone calls, etc.
If there are consqeuences (that matter) to your actions against me, I'd like to know.
The only tackiness in annoucing
I think the big problem with this situation is the idea that people can be so damaged from receiving a spiteful email that they should be able to sue. Well, that and the idea that they should be able to sue someone for a truthful representation of their actions. (The log of BS's emails to them.)
You know, you're as much a follower by *not* seeing a movie because of what other people say, as you are by rushing off to see one... It just means you follow the "cynical goth" crowd instead of some other group.
And you know, despite the trend of new movies getting higher ratings initially, maybe there's a reason why not a lot of old movies are on top.
When I asked three of my movie-going friends what they liked about Citizen Kane in Gone With the Wind and they had vauge undefined answers like "classic" and "original"... Not a lot of people I know actually like these movies for what they are, they say you have to understand the art of the day, etc... I want a movie that doesn't have hackneyed actings, lousy scripts, bad timing, etc.
IMHO for acting alone, you're a lot more likely to find a good film today when movies have existed for seventy years and people understand what works on film versus stage. In the early days you had actors from the stage, with no real idea of how to properly use the screen.
I'm sure that 95% of movies that come out today are overly hollywood-ed crap... stuff written by committee and okayed by "focus groups", but that other 5% is still more movies than came out in a year, sixty years ago.
A sense of history is great, and to look back and realize that people had to pioneer a lot of what we take for granted gives us an idea of the adverse conditions they worked in, but... the best movies ever. Hardly likely.
If I see a list of the best books/movies/whatever of the century/millenium, I'm tempted to rate them somewhat opposite to you. Taking away points for the older books. Not that I think they're not good, but I think reviewers (and people in general) are more likely to laud something impressive. Anyone can read a modern novel, but to read something originally written in Russian, or in (relatively) old English. Now there's pretension value.
My argument was not that a specific type of sharing is okay thus all should be. It was that sharing can take many forms. As such, your "that's not sharing" statement was a little inaccurate.
Thus, we should be careful who we let set the definitions of sharing or we wouldn't be able to have friends over while playing a CD.
While I think that creators of a work should have control over all commercial distribution (and almost all non-commercial) I don't think they should have control over the use of the item.
If you let content creators (or creators of physical items) dictate how their creations are used you end up in a world where you'd be violating your purchase "agreement" by hauling Ford parts in a GM truck and so on. Perhaps where it was only permitted to watch a movie if you wouldn't give a bad review, etc. These are powers that I don't think creators should have. After sale I think all usage rights should go to the buyer.
I actually support copyright almost as it is now. If you'd chop the term down (I think 30 years, or life + 10 would be good) and strike down things like the DMCA, I'd be 100% behind it.
What I do not support is controls on personal copying (backups), space shifting, time shifting, usage controls (region codes, etc) and the like. I think that once a person buys it they should be free to do pretty well everything except distribute copies.
I do disagree with your statement "If you don't agree with the creator or his stipulations of use, then don't use the product, get it from someone else or do it yourself." There are too many times that this could be abused. This is why I think the law should set blanket permissions for all creative works. I don't want to have to keep from publishing a bad review of an MS product just because I need to use Word and that's part of the word EULA.
Those restrictions a creator would want would often be contrary to the interests of society.
Whatever. You don't seem capable of following so I'm going to keep this short.
Calling copyright violation "piracy" is as stupid as calling it "theft". Both words have defined meanings and neither fits copyright violation. The term was coined by software publishers looking to drum up support for their arguments. If you're going to buy into it and perpetuate that, fine, but don't expect to be taken seriously.
Second, GPL violations are NOT copyright violations. If you agree to a license and violate the terms of the license, it's not a copyright violation, it's a license violation.
If you truly think these posts are trolls, don't reply. You've wasted enough of my time already.
A license is what you'd use to either restrict the user past what copyright law would, or to allow the user to do things copyright law would forbid. To buy a copyrighted work and use it does *NOT* require a license, either explicit or implicit.
No. Licenses are contracts entered into to go beyond the default protections (either way) of copyright law. Violating a license is contract violation.
And some people would be wrong. Try calling it "copyright violation" or "unlawful copying".
There are some restrictions on merchants that are not on end-users.
If you think that "software piracy" relates to unlawful copying (ie, warez) then extending it to GPL violation is technically incorrect. A GPL violation is akin to creating a derivative work. They're both copyright violations, but otherwise are much different.
No, I'm being picky for a reason.
(Ok, all EULAs are invalid for reasons to do with contract law, mainly because they're post-sale, but ignoring that for a minute...)
You're able to pick up a piece of GPLed software and use it in any way that copyright law allows. There are no further restrictions. There are no licenses getting in the way. The GPL isn't in effect now. If you want to do more with this software then you can accept the author's offered contract, at which point you will have licensed the software, to go beyond the rights copyright law would have given you. The difference is that Microsoft would have you believe that their license (if it was valid) is in effect the whole time you use their software. The GPL is clear about not being active until you accept it. You're governed only by copyright law until you choose to change that.
That's why I think it's an important point.
You really should stop using the term "piracy" though. It'll help your credability. Just like the "hacker" and "cracker" thing. Big business may want to stigmatize an activity but that doesn't mean everyone needs to buy into it and play along.
Shareholders only deserve respect if they don't invest in crooked companies.
..."
I've heard people on here say this of MS and Rambus both... "I know they did something illegal, but I hope they get off because I dumped $20k into their stock
IMHO if you know (or should, by following general industry news) that the company you're investing in is involved in illegal actions (MS's handling of DR Dos, Rambus's illegal claims to have patented DRAM, etc) then you deserve to be treated like a criminal. If you *only* lose your money, thank your lucky stars you were tossed in prison for theft and conspiracy.
Some thing people don't know about, like, was it ConEd in that Erin Brokovich? Many of their execs didn't know they were poisoning people, let alone shareholders.
However, with Rambus, people knew (it had been reported in a few large magazines) that the company had lied to JEDEC and obtained patents under false pretenses. They rushed out to buy stock anyway. These are the scummy ones.
You are incorrect.
Sharing works as you describe, if you have a physical item which your friend wishes to use in privacy.
If I buy a piece of art I can share it with all of my friends who wish to come over and view it. If I buy a tree, any number can come over and smell the flowers on it.
If I buy a music CD, many friends can come over and listen to it at once.
What's the big difference between making them a copy so that they listen to it at a different location? It's much the same as calling them, while it is playing, and letting them listen via telephone.
BTW, on that licensing thing... wrong again. You don't need to be licensed to use a book or CD. Use of the product is covered in copyright law, the licenses you see (EULAs) are post-sale and have no legal weight. (Copyright law even allows temporary copies that are required to use the work, such as copies of software in RAM.)
Enlightened self interest. People need to realize that if they want to have software to warez, they need to buy some as well or the market will dry up.
That said, people are under no obligation to support a business model that doesn't benefit them too. For instance, Microsoft doesn't have the right to make a profit. They have the right to try to make a profit.
People can try to sell ice to eskimos, eskimos are under no obligation to buy. The success or failure of the ice salesman isn't their concern.
The way the BSA is playing with numbers they claim that any PC without a payed-for OS is one pirating an OS (and thus, Windows). I don't care about MS and don't use their stuff (at home). They're essentially like the ice merchant, to me. Selling an unwanted product to someone who could get more, cheaper, if they wished.
That said, however, I don't feel that I should buy Windows if I install it to test something. I feel that warezing it is a valid action because I trust my judgement of potentially suffering more than I trust the law. Legally if I ever even ran the install to help walk someone though over the phone I should buy it. Morally, I don't think so, if anything I've done them a favour by increasing their userbase.
I might be more willing to accept the legal take on it, if I didn't feel so disenfranchised by the law. I have no power over the creation of law and the practicing of law is soley dependant on money. Until I feel that law is by and for the people, I'll continue trusting my morals instead.
Strictly speaking, piracy is theft at sea.
Unlawful copying and contract violation (what breaking the GPL is) are not piracy.
Furthermore, unlawful copying isn't a violation of the license agreement (clickthrough licenses on non-free (ie, payed for) software aren't valid because they're post-sale.) it's a violation of copyright law. They do include "don't make copies" in the license but at most that's redundant.
The GPL isn't really a license, it's an "offer" of a contract, whereby you will follow a certain license in trade for certain "consideration" (the right to use the source code, etc).
This is just a quick summary, if you want more details feel free to ask.
It's not the faceless "Them", it's the malicous "Them".
Credit card companies that send out applications to everyone, including the recently bankrupt.
The malcious "Them" who invest in companies like Microsoft and Rambus.
The people at Unicef, or the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (or your equivalent) are just as faceless but you'd never hear someone bragging about ripping them off.
People steal, and happily, from people they feel are hurting them and are outside the law. Much like Robin Hood.
Rightfully so, imho, in a lot of cases.
I know people who lost their jobs because Microsoft's illegal business practices put DRI (Makers of DR Dos) out of business. I know stockholders who stood to lose money if Rambus managed to illegally gain control of the DRAM market.
Would it really be so wrong for those people to take the money they lost from the bank accounts of the CEOs who approved those actions? Or from the stock-holders who bought stock after seeing these illegal actions and who figured they might as well profit too?
I don't think so.
If you steal from me I can call the police and am likely to be compensated.
If a large corporation sues me into bankruptcy because I'm legally competing with them, what recourse do I have? Even if they were proved to be breaking the law the police won't do anything, the courts won't, and if they did, the government would overturn it. (See Microsoft.)
This moral/ethical view is the result of the fact that big faceless "Them"s can't be properly punished and thus act with impunity, even when they destroy the lives of others.
Unfortunately (for everyone else) the BSA's numbers aren't that well obtained.
They estimate (based on the number of computers sold) and the estimated lifespan (5 or so years) the number of working computers.
Then they add up MS's sales figures plus (BeOS, OS/2, whoever the other "legitimate" players are in their minds) and subtract one from the other.
That's the number of pirated OSes they think there are.
Similarly, they take the number of "business" computers and do the same with office suites, then they multiple by the percentage of workers they think need office suites. The difference in these numbers is piracy, again.
Of course, even if they counted Linux they wouldn't count downloaded copies, just purchases of boxed copies. My old work had 5-10 linux computers and we'd purchased one copy of Redhat + docs/books, the rest of the boxes just got the generic stuff.
At home I've got a Linux PC (among others) that I installed off of discs I downloaded, that machine shows up in the BSA stats as a pirated copy of Windows.
Then, to make their stats even worse, they take the number of "pirated copies", multiply by full MSRP and claim it as a LOSS. This assumes that not only is every PC without a "proper" OS running a pirated one, but that the owner would have shelled out for the OS if they had to.
Win2k and WinXP Pro are fairly popular home OSes, they wouldn't be if people have to pay for them. People would still be using Win98/se and would be happy to stay there for years.
Now, I'm not saying there's no piracy, but it's nowhere near their numbers from what I've seen. (And as a consultant I've seen many work and home machines from a fairly wide cross-section of society.) Even if their numbers were right, their claiming of loses (when a 12-yo pirates Win2k AdvServ) is ridiculous and should be illegal.
Y'know, the brainwashing you suffered is having nasty side-effects. It's leading to you posting semi-intelligible messages on public webpages.
Your lord god semi-mighty seems to agree with the "informating wants to be free" crowd.
Remember Mana? Food from the heavens. Your bible claims your god decided that feeding the starving people was the proper thing. He didn't care that Mana-fed people wouldn't be supporting the food-sellers.
It's similar now. We can see how mana-type foods might be possible in a few years. But they'd never be used to feed the poor, those people can't pay for them. Instead we'd use them to feed cattle to produce steak and hamburgers.
I'm afraid your hippie god wouldn't agree with this. He'd want to **STEAL** that intellectual property from the good mega-corps and distribute it to all those filthy **THIEVES**. (read: starving people)
btw, you're misusing the word "Steal" which is defined as the act of "Theft" which is defined as depriving the original owner of his property.
Making copies of something does not qualify as theft. Use the correct term "Unlawful copying".
Full of even more religion nutcases than N.A. or Europe. Ugh, no thanks. (And I say this out of frustration with stifling religious nonscense, not out of post 9/11 sentiment.)
Let's try countries where people never get stoned for marrying the wrong people. Where there are no castes. Where women (or men) aren't property.
Until those and other simple goals are met, India is NOT a beautiful country. It's a festering cesspool that happens to have nice scenery.
Strange, all the CEOs I've seen lead companies into bankruptcy have come out of it with millions of dollars. That's the whole "golden parachute" they talk about.
John Roth, ex-CEO of Nortel got a retirement package (not of stock) that was worth millions, during the layoffs of aproximately half his workforce (~45k layoffs) and a claimed loss of 19.2*Billion* in one quarter.
What's-his-name, from Rambus. He cashed in and sold a bunch of his stock just after their stock skyrocketed when they started suing everyone. Now the stock is in the toilet but he'll never have to repay anything. (Ha! Investors in a company like that deserve to lose their money.)
There are thousands of examples. CEOs getting huge bonuses in years that companies are laying off staff like crazy. (Soon before bankruptcy, not like they were just pruning an unneeded workforce.)
Seems to me like the least risky place to be is at the top. The low-level employees have virtually no employment protection, the upper-levels have secure jobs. The low-levels don't get paid well, the upper-levels do. etc.
I'd really like to bite the bullet the way CEOs do. That'd be the $20-Million bullet. Oh, terrible life.
Worse than that, why does ~100k of text and formatting bloat into a 4mb .doc file? The fact that it then takes 200MB to load it is to be expected after that.
.html from word? Not only is it completely *not* compliant HTML, but it's so very redundant... In a way that a 1st year comp-sci student could fix too.
And ugh, have you ever output to
Ugh.
I rate films based on how they make me feel about the film in question.
I'd rate Galaxy Quest a 9 or 10 because it's very good at doing what it sets out to do.
Perhaps there are "better" films, but if I watch them and don't feel the story was presented as well, or that the actors very good, I'm not going to rate it as high.
I tend to dock points if movies could have been more than they were. Star Wars loses points here IMHO. It was good I suppose but it had so many point where it would have been great but they dropped the ball.
However my rankings are done irregardless of other films. My view of SW won't go down now that I've seen FotR even though FotR pretty well succeeded everywhere SW didn't.
Also, my ratings are of how well a movie achieves its goals. I'd rate a Dr Seuss movie a 10 if I thought it represented the pinacle of Dr Seuss movies. I wouldn't compare it to Godfather, or anything else. I would also dock Godfather points because it wasn't an untimate mob movie, even though if you put the two movies side-by-side Godfather would be the "best" by my personal standards of enjoyment. I do this because it bugs me to see a movie do something stupid or miss an oportunity to be much better, within its context. (For instance, if I liked car chases, I wouldn't penalize FotR for not having any.)
I see the IMDB top 250 list as being the top movies in the sense that they satisfied their intended targets the best, not were the "best" in some univeral objective list.
The "favorite" movie list depends too much on the people doing the voting. I personally don't care much for mob movies, Godfather wouldn't feature on my list.
But... if you look at it, this whole 17 years thing is really kinda silly.
I think it would have made the movie needlessly hard to understand if they'd said "17 years later" right after Gandalf had basically forced Bilbo to leave the ring and had a nasty flash as he reached for it.
Even in the book it always seemed weak. In the movie it would have seemed worse, imho.
And thank god they didn't include Frodo selling Bagend and the complete lineage of the hobbits at the parties. Snooze-a-rama.
I think they should have kept Bombadil. Not because I liked him, honestly I almost slept through the book until Bree and annoying poems didn't help. But, this is one of the only whole sections it appears that they removed.
Simply having a brief bit of Bombadil would have allowed them to film an extra few minutes on spec, to use for an extended DVD is desired. Without having him at all it's out of their hands.
Strange, that's just what Uri Geller used to say when he couldn't bend a spoon in front of a debunker.