We hopefully will add other popular instant messaging clients in the future but for now AIM is the top dog so we started there.
For teenage girls, maybe. GTalk is "top dog" for professionals as it's built right into GMail. That, IMHO, is a much better solution than having to install 500+ IM products. And if I really need to contact a teenage girl^W^W^W someone on AIM, there's always Meebo!
Disclaimer: The above is a humorous post and should not be consumed by old people, pregnant women, or those with a weak heart. AKAImBatman disclaims all responsibility for the reader's lack of a sense of humor.
Sacrilege! If jumping a newly formed mountain at 200MPH then scraping a tree in midair thus resulting in a barrel roll which lands you upside down as you skip off the mountain peaks before diving headlong onto the track where you mysteriously manage to land upright AND get a speed boost for a Nice Landing doesn't bring a smile to your face, I don't know what will. That game is crazy. CRAZY, I tell you. My wife played it and managed to smash, bump, crush, ram, sink, skip, splash, slide, crash, flip, and careen her way through Fiji. Result? S-Class rating!
Excite Truck: The only racing game that rewards bad driving!:P
I'm looking for more little games like the Wii Sports ones that are fun solo, and a ton of fun with friends, and I'm willing to pay for them.
I have heard nothing but good things about Rayman and Elebits, save for that Rayman takes a little bit of time to warm up to. Both make excellent use of the Wii Remote and may be exactly what you're looking for.
He's not trolling or attempting to incite a flamewar. He's making several perfectly valid points about the knee-jerk reactions to Apple's DRM-less iTunes files.
The soft drink industry is a 40 billion dollar a year business. So this means the mainstream media and academia will accept soft drinks as a legitimate culinary art in 3...2...
(Methinks that profits aren't exactly the best way to be judging artistic merit.)
resulting in a $48.9 billion global video game market in 2011, up from $37.5 billion this year.
Nintendo has a market cap of 6.4 trillion yen (51.7 billion dollars) up from 2.7 trillion yen (21.8 billion dollars) this time last year. According to their last financial report, their net sales for last year were 966 billion yen (7.8 billion dollars) up 89% from the previous year's 509 billion yen (4.1 billion dollars) in net sales.
I think I know where your massive industry growth is sitting...
Yes, modchips could be used for some legitimate, non-piracy purpose, like homebrew. But so far, I haven't seen it in real life.
I have. I see consoles regularly modded to remove region-lockouts so the owner can play his legally-purchased Japanese-only releases of video games.
The now-defunct Dreamcast is a prime example of this sort of modchipping. It would be worlds easier to simply burn a rip of the GD-ROM onto a self-booting CD-ROM. (Yeah, piracy is pretty gosh-durn easy on that platform.) Yet quite a few people I know make the effort to use a special bootdisk to load the game (works about 90% of the time), mod their console to remove the region lockouts (works 100% AFAIK), or import a foreign console to play the game (which requires a TV converter and everything!).
So there are quite a few honest modchippers. Personally, I can't see screwing up a perfectly good console just to play a few extra games, but then I'm not really a hardcore gamer.:)
What you're proposing is a solution that's far easier said than implemented. The WINE Project has been running for a decade and a half now, and is not too much closer to full Windows support than it was when it started. ReactOS has taken the approach of reimplementing Windows itself, but is similarly hampered by the complexity and fluidity of the Win32 API set.
Ugh. That's terrible for a steam engine and suggests that they're exhausting the steam rather than recycling it in the engine. (Possibly for cooling purposes?) My only guess is that they were more worried about simplicity and torque than overall engine efficiency.
An engine that recycles its steam gets about 30-40% efficiency as a baseline. That can increase substantially (e.g. 60%+) by using combined cycles and/or the addition of waste heat recovery technologies. That's why the majority of electric power generation today is done by Steam Turbine.
This is not a steam car in the conventional sense, as it does not burn coal.
If you think a car needs to burn coal in order to be a "Steam Car", then you're seriously out of it. Conventional steam cars burn a variety of fuels, including gasoline.
Steam engines are valued for their excellent power to weight ratios, general efficiency, and greater torque capacity. They also have fewer moving parts so maintenece schedules are quite good, as long as you don't leak your working fluid. (i.e. Water) Thankfully it's quite easy to replace lost water, and can be done as part of regular maintenece. (Think: Flushing and replacing water while changing oil.)
Or maybe you're trying to be funny. It's hard to tell.:-/
I believe these are the sections they're concerning themselves with:
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
[...]
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
The GPLv3 attempts to strengthen the language to force patent rights rather than making it a simple violation.
The encrypted binary without the DVD disc? I don't believe that works in licensed players, though I'd be interested if there is evidence to the contrary.
This is exactly how Kaleidiscope works.
Kaleidescape has its own player which has a license to the DVD CSS technology. Without that license, its custom player couldn't exist. Without its custom player, you can't play the encrypted DVD image.
Well, obviously that would be a huge fricking deal, but it wouldn't have any legal ramifications.
It *would* have some rather serious implications under the terms of the GPL license. Specifically, Microsoft would be agreeing to give patent rights with the code. Which would invalidate their request for protection money.
Or so the claims from Groklaw have been. In this particular case, Groklaw pointed it out as simply amusing. The submitter jumped the gun a bit and reported that Microsoft was "Distributing" Linux. Which was bound to cause a lot of folks to think that Microsoft had just given up their patent rights. Thus my post pointing out the error.:)
There's a difference between "distributing" and "referencing". According to TFA, Microsoft was doing the latter by sending users to CNET for the product.
This is amusing, but it will not have any of the legal implications that many would expect from Microsoft distributing Linux.
My number 1 term is "mashup". "Netiquette" doesn't bother me so much because it's just a shortening of "Internet Etiquette". Thus "netiquette" is perfectly natural. Similarly if you wanted to call "service combinations" something like "webcombos" I'd have no issue. But "mashup"?!? Who came up with that one? It sounds like it needs potatoes (!) or something.:P
Wouldn't it be relativly simple at that point to also contract with some chinese country to also make a 'DVD' disc with a writeable CSS area?
Possibly. That would be a rather major effort, however, and you'd need to prove that you're not producing the DVDs and drives as part of a "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title" (per DMCA). If a court finds you guilty of doing so, you'll get shut down and slapped with a fine faster than you can say, "What happened?"
You don't need a contract from the CCA to read bits of an arbitrarily constructed optical disk.
You are correct. Until you want to play it back. Then you need to decode it. I will ask you for the third time, how will you do that without taking illegal steps?
The CSS algorithm processes were (AFAIK) not protected by patent, but by trade secret. The California Court of Appeals has ruled that it is no longer a secret in a case the DVD-CCA was a party to; they dropped their case after that ruling and did not appeal. I cannot imagine any argument that the DVD-CCA could bring before any US judge (aside from a large suitcase filled with cash) that would cause him to overlook that ruling under basic stare decisis. Ergo, the workings of CSS are no longer protected.
Patent protection is not necessary to have an "effective" copy prevention mechanism. So we'll just discount that one off the bat.
If the courts had decided that CSS is no longer effective, then you would have a very strong point. Unfortunately, that's not the case. From the California court decision at your link (emphasis mine):
First, Pavlovich's knowledge that DeCSS could be used to illegally pirate copyrighted motion pictures on DVD's and that such pirating would harm the motion picture industry in California does not satisfy the express aiming requirement. As an initial matter, we question whether these effects are even relevant to our analysis, because DVD CCA does not assert a cause of action premised on the illegal pirating of copyrighted motion pictures.
Basically, the court was not asked to rule on the basis of the DMCA, so it didn't. It was only asked to rule on the basis of trade secret protection. I honestly don't understand this as the DMCA explicitly states:
[It is illegal to] (2) "manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in" a device, service or component which is primarily intended to circumvent "a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work", and which either has limited commercially significant other uses or is marketed for the anti-circumvention purpose.
Why didn't the CCA go for the kill? They would have had a much stronger case than trade secret protection. My only guess is that the veil of Open Source actually worked in Pavlovich's favor. The CCA was concerned that suing over a potentially legitimate use might force a judgment about the effectiveness of their copy protection, under which fair-use could win the day. The effects of such a decision could be devastating, so they obviously didn't want to risk the legal test.
It's also possible that the CCA felt itself unable to file such a suit as it was not directly damaged by circumventing its CSS protection. The CCA does not own the works protected by the CSS system.
As it stands right now, the CSS system has not been declared ineffective. So anyone who dares to violate it does so at their own risk. Which, if you're just an average citizen, probably doesn't mean much. But if you're in the same business as Kaleidescape, you would have a lot riding on the line.
And you still haven't clarified how you're going to make a legal backup of the DVD without the necessary equipment and discs. We've already established that it's possible to read the discs. That's not the question. How are you going to write them to be compatible (or at least decode them into an non-CSS copy) without tripping over a technically illegal step?
I can create backup DVDs all I want. The software exists to do it. That doesn't mean that the steps I'm taking are legal. In fact, they are very much illegal thanks to the DMCA.
this NY Times article (registration required) suggests that the whole concept of stare decisis is not as sacred a cow as I once believed.
As the article mentions, it never was a sacred cow. Courts don't let prior decisions get in the way of a logical decision. If precedent makes sense for the current situation, then precedent will be followed. Especially if it solves a difficult dillema. If precedent would be foolhardy to follow, then precedent be damned. Courts tend to prefer logic over precedent any day of the week.
In the situation of the Betamax, Vault, and Grokster cases, the comments of the judges are in many ways more important than the decisions themselves. Those comments show that the court is extremely keen on not inhibiting the development of technology just because copyright law didn't foresee its development. In the case of the betamax decision, it was practically a stare decisis overturn unto itself.
What I'm getting at is that you are at risk any time you go to court. But with precedent on your side you at least have a strong case. With cases as recent as Grokster's reaffirming the protection of consumer rights through technology, I don't think that it's going to be overturned anytime soon. But I could be wrong!:-)
thats why its important to support your MPAA representatives
So you do work for the MPAA or member company. Thought so.
No offsense, but how about dropping the charade and logging in? Or at the very least, make an argument of your exact problem with Kaleidescape rather than taking sideswipes at their supposed use as a piracy tool. If you have a good point, then I might agree with you. But as it stands right now, you're not doing anything to reverse the generally poor impression of the MPAA and its members.
(And for what it's worth, I've often defended the MPAA as "not quite as evil as the RIAA". This move is not helping that case any.)
I won't lie to you. This is environment is generally hostile to large organizations. But if you're going to argue your case (which I would actually be interested in seeing) then do us all a favor and go all the way with it.
what happens if your aunts one copy of "its a wonderful life" broke, without the movie companies protecting their back catalogs, who's going to be there to sell her another copy?
What's my guarantee that the company owning "It's a Wonderful Life" will even publish a backup copy? I used to have tapes of a really great show called "Captain Power" that I very much enjoyed. Now they cannot be purchased. Someone has the rights to them, but I can't get a new tape or DVD unless I can find a used copy in good condition or resort to illegal copies.
This situation is the exact situation that fair-use backups are intended to cover. I may have lost my Captain Power tapes, but thanks to such backups I still have original Commodore 64 floppies. The original owners were smart enough to make a backup, then store the original. When the backup wore out, they'd pull the original and make another backup. That way the media lived on for far longer than it would have if the original media had been used.
I wish I had been as dilligent about backups when I was young. If I had been, I might still have a lot of my old tapes as well as nearly irreplaceable software such as Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego. (You may notice that the republished versions are very different games.)
So what is the MPAA member supposed to do to stay in business? Generate new content worth purchasing. Reselling the exact same content with no added value is not a business model. That's merely trying to cheat people out of their hard earned money.
May I suggest then a reading of the Anti-trust page? In brief, for the behavior to be anti-competitive, it must be an unreasonable restraint on trade or commerce. While keeping consumers from copying is a kick in the nuts, it's not a restraint on their ability to use other formats.
I have to disagree with you. This change is an unreasonable restraint on the consumer's ability to make use of their media. Both copyright law and the DMCA provide explicit fair-use exceptions for backups. The Beta-Max case demonstrated that the Supreme Court wishes to uphold the consumer's right to fair-use of content he has a legal right to. This sentiment was echoed in the Grokster case and the Vault v. Quaid case.
Nor is it a restraint on companies providing movies in other formats.
Yes it is. The DVD standard is a monopoly. Kalidoscape cannot be reasonably expected to continue their services in face of a contract change given that nearly all home movies are currently distributed on DVD discs. They have a legal license to provide the service they are providing. Crushing them with a highly targeted license change is the very definition of an anti-trust maneuver.
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For teenage girls, maybe. GTalk is "top dog" for professionals as it's built right into GMail. That, IMHO, is a much better solution than having to install 500+ IM products. And if I really need to contact a teenage girl^W^W^W someone on AIM, there's always Meebo!
Disclaimer: The above is a humorous post and should not be consumed by old people, pregnant women, or those with a weak heart. AKAImBatman disclaims all responsibility for the reader's lack of a sense of humor.
Sacrilege! If jumping a newly formed mountain at 200MPH then scraping a tree in midair thus resulting in a barrel roll which lands you upside down as you skip off the mountain peaks before diving headlong onto the track where you mysteriously manage to land upright AND get a speed boost for a Nice Landing doesn't bring a smile to your face, I don't know what will. That game is crazy. CRAZY, I tell you. My wife played it and managed to smash, bump, crush, ram, sink, skip, splash, slide, crash, flip, and careen her way through Fiji. Result? S-Class rating!
Excite Truck: The only racing game that rewards bad driving!
I have heard nothing but good things about Rayman and Elebits, save for that Rayman takes a little bit of time to warm up to. Both make excellent use of the Wii Remote and may be exactly what you're looking for.
He's not trolling or attempting to incite a flamewar. He's making several perfectly valid points about the knee-jerk reactions to Apple's DRM-less iTunes files.
The soft drink industry is a 40 billion dollar a year business. So this means the mainstream media and academia will accept soft drinks as a legitimate culinary art in 3...2...
(Methinks that profits aren't exactly the best way to be judging artistic merit.)
Nintendo has a market cap of 6.4 trillion yen (51.7 billion dollars) up from 2.7 trillion yen (21.8 billion dollars) this time last year. According to their last financial report, their net sales for last year were 966 billion yen (7.8 billion dollars) up 89% from the previous year's 509 billion yen (4.1 billion dollars) in net sales.
I think I know where your massive industry growth is sitting...
I have. I see consoles regularly modded to remove region-lockouts so the owner can play his legally-purchased Japanese-only releases of video games.
The now-defunct Dreamcast is a prime example of this sort of modchipping. It would be worlds easier to simply burn a rip of the GD-ROM onto a self-booting CD-ROM. (Yeah, piracy is pretty gosh-durn easy on that platform.) Yet quite a few people I know make the effort to use a special bootdisk to load the game (works about 90% of the time), mod their console to remove the region lockouts (works 100% AFAIK), or import a foreign console to play the game (which requires a TV converter and everything!).
So there are quite a few honest modchippers. Personally, I can't see screwing up a perfectly good console just to play a few extra games, but then I'm not really a hardcore gamer.
You might as well have said, "Colonize Mars!"
What you're proposing is a solution that's far easier said than implemented. The WINE Project has been running for a decade and a half now, and is not too much closer to full Windows support than it was when it started. ReactOS has taken the approach of reimplementing Windows itself, but is similarly hampered by the complexity and fluidity of the Win32 API set.
Dave, seriously. You are being trolled. Don't egg them on or they'll keep pestering you.
Ugh. That's terrible for a steam engine and suggests that they're exhausting the steam rather than recycling it in the engine. (Possibly for cooling purposes?) My only guess is that they were more worried about simplicity and torque than overall engine efficiency.
An engine that recycles its steam gets about 30-40% efficiency as a baseline. That can increase substantially (e.g. 60%+) by using combined cycles and/or the addition of waste heat recovery technologies. That's why the majority of electric power generation today is done by Steam Turbine.
If you think a car needs to burn coal in order to be a "Steam Car", then you're seriously out of it. Conventional steam cars burn a variety of fuels, including gasoline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_car
Steam engines are valued for their excellent power to weight ratios, general efficiency, and greater torque capacity. They also have fewer moving parts so maintenece schedules are quite good, as long as you don't leak your working fluid. (i.e. Water) Thankfully it's quite easy to replace lost water, and can be done as part of regular maintenece. (Think: Flushing and replacing water while changing oil.)
Or maybe you're trying to be funny. It's hard to tell.
The GPLv3 attempts to strengthen the language to force patent rights rather than making it a simple violation.
The encrypted binary without the DVD disc? I don't believe that works in licensed players, though I'd be interested if there is evidence to the contrary.
Kaleidescape has its own player which has a license to the DVD CSS technology. Without that license, its custom player couldn't exist. Without its custom player, you can't play the encrypted DVD image.
It *would* have some rather serious implications under the terms of the GPL license. Specifically, Microsoft would be agreeing to give patent rights with the code. Which would invalidate their request for protection money.
Or so the claims from Groklaw have been. In this particular case, Groklaw pointed it out as simply amusing. The submitter jumped the gun a bit and reported that Microsoft was "Distributing" Linux. Which was bound to cause a lot of folks to think that Microsoft had just given up their patent rights. Thus my post pointing out the error.
There's a difference between "distributing" and "referencing". According to TFA, Microsoft was doing the latter by sending users to CNET for the product.
This is amusing, but it will not have any of the legal implications that many would expect from Microsoft distributing Linux.
My number 1 term is "mashup". "Netiquette" doesn't bother me so much because it's just a shortening of "Internet Etiquette". Thus "netiquette" is perfectly natural. Similarly if you wanted to call "service combinations" something like "webcombos" I'd have no issue. But "mashup"?!? Who came up with that one? It sounds like it needs potatoes (!) or something. :P
You didn't read anything I wrote, did you? :-/
Possibly. That would be a rather major effort, however, and you'd need to prove that you're not producing the DVDs and drives as part of a "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title" (per DMCA). If a court finds you guilty of doing so, you'll get shut down and slapped with a fine faster than you can say, "What happened?"
You are correct. Until you want to play it back. Then you need to decode it. I will ask you for the third time, how will you do that without taking illegal steps?
Patent protection is not necessary to have an "effective" copy prevention mechanism. So we'll just discount that one off the bat.
If the courts had decided that CSS is no longer effective, then you would have a very strong point. Unfortunately, that's not the case. From the California court decision at your link (emphasis mine):
Basically, the court was not asked to rule on the basis of the DMCA, so it didn't. It was only asked to rule on the basis of trade secret protection. I honestly don't understand this as the DMCA explicitly states:
Why didn't the CCA go for the kill? They would have had a much stronger case than trade secret protection. My only guess is that the veil of Open Source actually worked in Pavlovich's favor. The CCA was concerned that suing over a potentially legitimate use might force a judgment about the effectiveness of their copy protection, under which fair-use could win the day. The effects of such a decision could be devastating, so they obviously didn't want to risk the legal test.
It's also possible that the CCA felt itself unable to file such a suit as it was not directly damaged by circumventing its CSS protection. The CCA does not own the works protected by the CSS system.
As it stands right now, the CSS system has not been declared ineffective. So anyone who dares to violate it does so at their own risk. Which, if you're just an average citizen, probably doesn't mean much. But if you're in the same business as Kaleidescape, you would have a lot riding on the line.
And you still haven't clarified how you're going to make a legal backup of the DVD without the necessary equipment and discs. We've already established that it's possible to read the discs. That's not the question. How are you going to write them to be compatible (or at least decode them into an non-CSS copy) without tripping over a technically illegal step?
I can create backup DVDs all I want. The software exists to do it. That doesn't mean that the steps I'm taking are legal. In fact, they are very much illegal thanks to the DMCA.
As the article mentions, it never was a sacred cow. Courts don't let prior decisions get in the way of a logical decision. If precedent makes sense for the current situation, then precedent will be followed. Especially if it solves a difficult dillema. If precedent would be foolhardy to follow, then precedent be damned. Courts tend to prefer logic over precedent any day of the week.
In the situation of the Betamax, Vault, and Grokster cases, the comments of the judges are in many ways more important than the decisions themselves. Those comments show that the court is extremely keen on not inhibiting the development of technology just because copyright law didn't foresee its development. In the case of the betamax decision, it was practically a stare decisis overturn unto itself.
What I'm getting at is that you are at risk any time you go to court. But with precedent on your side you at least have a strong case. With cases as recent as Grokster's reaffirming the protection of consumer rights through technology, I don't think that it's going to be overturned anytime soon. But I could be wrong!
You can modify your DVD's ROM to read it. But how are you going to write it without a shiny plastic disc containing the CSS area?
If you answer "DeCSS", my answer is going to be "DMCA". And that's why you can't sell a 100% legal backup device without a license from the DVD CCA.
Yes I did. Good catch! :)
So you do work for the MPAA or member company. Thought so.
No offsense, but how about dropping the charade and logging in? Or at the very least, make an argument of your exact problem with Kaleidescape rather than taking sideswipes at their supposed use as a piracy tool. If you have a good point, then I might agree with you. But as it stands right now, you're not doing anything to reverse the generally poor impression of the MPAA and its members.
(And for what it's worth, I've often defended the MPAA as "not quite as evil as the RIAA". This move is not helping that case any.)
I won't lie to you. This is environment is generally hostile to large organizations. But if you're going to argue your case (which I would actually be interested in seeing) then do us all a favor and go all the way with it.
What's my guarantee that the company owning "It's a Wonderful Life" will even publish a backup copy? I used to have tapes of a really great show called "Captain Power" that I very much enjoyed. Now they cannot be purchased. Someone has the rights to them, but I can't get a new tape or DVD unless I can find a used copy in good condition or resort to illegal copies.
This situation is the exact situation that fair-use backups are intended to cover. I may have lost my Captain Power tapes, but thanks to such backups I still have original Commodore 64 floppies. The original owners were smart enough to make a backup, then store the original. When the backup wore out, they'd pull the original and make another backup. That way the media lived on for far longer than it would have if the original media had been used.
I wish I had been as dilligent about backups when I was young. If I had been, I might still have a lot of my old tapes as well as nearly irreplaceable software such as Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego. (You may notice that the republished versions are very different games.)
So what is the MPAA member supposed to do to stay in business? Generate new content worth purchasing. Reselling the exact same content with no added value is not a business model. That's merely trying to cheat people out of their hard earned money.
I have to disagree with you. This change is an unreasonable restraint on the consumer's ability to make use of their media. Both copyright law and the DMCA provide explicit fair-use exceptions for backups. The Beta-Max case demonstrated that the Supreme Court wishes to uphold the consumer's right to fair-use of content he has a legal right to. This sentiment was echoed in the Grokster case and the Vault v. Quaid case.
Yes it is. The DVD standard is a monopoly. Kalidoscape cannot be reasonably expected to continue their services in face of a contract change given that nearly all home movies are currently distributed on DVD discs. They have a legal license to provide the service they are providing. Crushing them with a highly targeted license change is the very definition of an anti-trust maneuver.