Efforts to force inclusion of hardware copy protection are simply the work of a special-interest group. It's as if Microsoft or Sun wanted a law that mandated that every computer have the Java or.NET runtime included, or if AOL wanted to madate inclusion of AOL software(Ironically, MS, Sun, and AOL have been pretty successful at distribution of their clients, even without legislation).
Yeah, except in general, a JVM adds functionality to your computer. It doesn't interfere with your ability to use your computer for anything you would have used it for before. This argument would apply to the CLR as well except that I'm guessing the CLR either has copyright management capabilities either built in already, or has architecture to enforce a copy protection standard once one is announced. That by itself doesn't mean much- just don't use software that requires the CLR- unless MS succeeds in putting the CLR in charge of the machine so that normal win32 programs have to constantly ask it for permissions. In that case, Jack Valenti owns your box.
As for AOL, well, that's a bad example too. Putting an AOL disk in a computer doesn't add functionality as much as it screws up the machine beyond repair.:)
if RF lighting exists at "[a] frequency that humans can't even see" then how the fuck can it illuminate anything?!?
Here's a fun little stunt: Put a small fluorescent tube in a microwave and "cook" it for a few seconds. (The tube won't survive this treatment because the filaments on each end burn out.) I remember a microwave salesman showing this to my parents, back in the seventies when microwave ovens were the next Big Thing and there was such a thing as a microwave salesman.
The oven won't be harmed. Or at least my college roommate's microwave still worked after I tried it on his.
Ah, what the heck. I think I'll post this with my +1. I honestly don't know if this will hit 5 Insightful or -1 Troll but I bet it will be one of the two.
You didn't do it right. You have to say "I'm going to be modded down for this" to get to 5. If you say "I know I'm going to be modded up or modded down" then you get modded down, because you're presenting a choice to the feeble-minded moderator instead of a clear reverse psychology directive. Moderators need to be told which way not to mod your post.
People are not going to send 25 cents when they get the mp3 from somewhere else.
Yeah, this is why nobody pays for software, right?
Speak for yourself. I'd buy a ton of MP3s if the cartel would sell them to me at a fair price with no ads, expiry dates, copy protection, or other control-freak bullshit.
>>>Come on. Netscape's engine didn't follow the Java spec. In fact, it had more violations that Microsoft's engine. >>That comment is not insightful >>It's just a statement with no supporting evidence. > Hey; don't complain - the same scheme worked > for YOUR comment; you got modded up.
He didn't make any statement that needed any more supporting evidence than the post he was responding to.
I don't really know the answer here. Send teams of people to Korea to volunteer to fix the servers? Short of that, I don't know of anything that will work.
You would think the FCC should probably be given the job of doing stuff like this, instead of worrying about how to implement a magic standard for uncopyable bits so we can be offered more pay-per-view crap from Hollywood.
How would Microsoft react if suddenly the open-source community decided that anything under the GNU could not inter-operate with microsoft products? I think MS would flip out kill whole town. Microsoft would love this development; it would prevent them from having to do the dirty work themselves. Windows doesn't depend on interoperability with GNU stuff quite as much as GNU depends on interoperability with Windows.
I wonder how Nevada could be proud of being the official "most worthless place on the continent" as judged by the government which decided that if some place must be irradiated, it might as well be Nevada, because it's not really much of a loss.
Nevada relies heavily on tourism. Of course there are the idiots who go to Vegas, and the people who are attracted by Nevada's marriage and prostitution laws. Aside from that, Nevada has a strong appeal as an extremely desolate place- and it's the right kind of desolation, with Indian reservations and weird rocks and nuclear testing grounds. Not flat desolation like you see in the Plains States.
If you're wanting to see the Milky Way, or you're wanting to take some pictures with your new Canon D-30, or you're looking to justify your SUV purchase (and you don't realize that your Ford Explorer is going to need a tow truck), you could do a lot worse than Nevada. Of course, the nearest large population center is the west coast, and California itself has a lot of cool places to visit. Nevada's problem is that it's surrounded by states with similar terrain and features, so it doesn't get the fair share of tourists that it deserves. So they are always looking for things that make them stick out from AZ, CA, UT, etc., like gambling, prostitution, marriage laws, etc. (Utah might have funny marriage laws as well but if it does, they're of a different sort because I never heard of anyone going to Utah just to get married.)
The Manhattan Project sites are great things to have in your state. The bomb test areas themselves might still be radioactive and nasty places, but they have the status of historical sites, which is great for attracting tourists and so you can build tourist traps around them at a safe distance.
Yucca Mountain, on the other hand, is nothing but bad news because it cannot be leveraged to generate tourism at all- it's for waste, which repels tourists. As far as Nevada is concerned, the federal government might as well be dropping a smelly hog farm in the middle of Vegas. So you won't see Yucca Mountain plates anytime soon unless it's part of a political ploy during the next election, when Nevada's 4 electoral votes are up for grabs.
The government is not permitted to perform unreasonable searches and seizures. All rights not expressly given to the government are reserved for the people. Therefore: Private parties have the express right to perform unreasonable searches and seizures!
Immediately after the fairness doctrine was removed the electronic media began a massive and unified move to the far left - in news, entertainment, and even children's cartoons.
The change was so universal, extreme, and consistent that now even a moment of air time covering a centerist or moderately conservative view brings complaints that the network has gone to the far right. Actual right-wing viewpoints just don't make it to the air on television, nor do libertairan views, nor anything from most non left-wing-urban-US cultures.
Do you have a speck of evidence for any of this or are you just parroting what the media tells you about itself?
The more the media slides to the right, the more it screams about its "left-wing bias". But aside from empty-headed Hollywood celebrities being given free reign to have their leftish political opinions heard by a wide audience (which is worth griping about) I NEVER hear anyone express an opinion on television that is left of center.
As for cartoons- well I don't watch cartoons anymore, so maybe they're glorifying Stalinism.
because it is the goal of every (successful) species to attempt to survive.
This is incorrect. You're confusing outcome with intention. It's the goal of every individual of a species to survive. The survival of the species itself is a consequence of that.
Thinking about evolution in terms of intentions is incorrect and leads to erroneous conclusions quite easily. (E.g. "if we're all just monkeys then what's to stop us from acting like monkeys?", "Shouldn't we then just kill all animals except dogs/sheep/cows", etc.) Drawing moral perogatives is exactly what you should not do with evolution. What happens and what should happen are two very different things.
He says in the book that there's is no valid scientific reason anymore to send people into space when sending robots has turned out to be a much more cost effective way to do scientific research in space, and that the people coming up with scientific motives to justify the huge cost of manned projects like the ISS are basically grasping at straws (e.g. "It will help us understand the effects of weightlessness on the human body").
He has a point. Much as I hate to say it, humans are ill-suited for space exploration and should stay here. We weigh too much, require too many accoutrements such as life support systems, and we generally aren't willing to consider one-way trips.
Are you sure? Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe.
Well it is, especially if you look at per-mole instead of per-weight fractions. Except it's much less common on earth, and most of the hydrogen that's on earth has been stripped of its lucrative molecular electrons and is no longer in H2 form. (Translation: it's already burned.) Ocean water is 1/9th hydrogen by weight but you don't see people trading futures in it.
Am I the only one to find this strange : each time a story talks about taxing cars, taxing fuel or signing the Kyoto protocol (for example) to help solving the global warming problem, a whole lot of people come in and claim that global warming doesn't exist, that it's a natural process, or that G.W. Bush is right not to do anything to solve it.
You forgot the derisive comments making fun of the Big Bang and evolution, which are completely offtopic in these threads but always come under attack. And the suddenly atrocious spelling everyone has.
"If only they would devote a little bit of the millions of dollars they're spending on this ad campaign to help stop illegal downloading... but that wouldn't help them sell more CD burners, would it," said Hilary Rosen.
Why is it the technology industry's responsibility to "help stop illegal downloading" anyway? Isn't that the entertainment industry's perogative?
Well, you can say drugs are outlawed because people tend to do illegal things when they're high on them. Of course, drugs are never a necessity for crime. They only have a statistical relationship to it.
This is much different. The CBDTPA is designed to specifically prevent you from breaking a certain subset of laws by enforcing a technological barrier.
Re:What's the physics behind this?
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In other news, degenercy isn't a LAW. If it was, then black holes couldn't exist. It's more of an aproximation of other forces, kind of like how we define Normal forces.
Degeneracy is a fundamental feature of the quantum theory of fermions. It isn't an "approximation of other forces". The concept of a force is only applicable at a higher level. Quantum theory is concerned with interactions. Black holes exist because as a neutron star gets bigger, additional neutrons require more and more energy. All the low energy states are occupied. Soon the neutrons have more energy than you see in an accelerator, and they can react to form other particles. Particles that aren't neutrons won't compete with neutrons for the higher energy states.
That's how most of our laws are, right now. Ex post facto -- you break them, you do the punishment. The RIAA/MPAA wants to undermine this situation, and prevent people from breaking the law. We already tried this once. It was called prohibition.
I don't see how prohibition fits this definition. In fact, in the history of American law, there is no analogous legislation I can think of to what they are proposing. The closest thing I can think of is safety regulations (you can't sell a car that doesn't incorporate seat belts, for example). And smokestacks must have scrubbers, apartment buildings must have fire escapes, restaurants must have wheelchair ramps, etc. But all these things are to prevent accidents, pollution, tragedies, etc. I can't think of one that has the sole purpose of preventing you from breaking the law.
But I don't see why we should just legislate piracy out of existence. We could stop rape with technological barriers, for example, by forcing all women to wear steel chastity belts. And why can't we do this with murder as well? Surely murder is a lot worse than piracy. And a law to mandate prevention of murder would run into problems just as easily as a law like this one that mandates prevention of piracy. We would have to ban guns, knives, axes, boxcutters, chisels, wrenches, and hammers. Buckets would have to be banned too, because you can fill one with water and hold someone's head down in it. You can also kill someone by smashing their head against a wall. Therefore all walls in all houses and buildings must be covered with foam padding to prevent this. But the padding can't be stapled or nailed on, because you can kill someone with staples or nails. And it can't be glued on, because glue is also illegal (you can glue someone's mouth shut and make them starve to death). Oh well, let's just mandate that the hardware industry come up with a solution!
Of course, like the CBDTPA, a murder-preventing law like this one would contain a meaningless provision saying, in effect, "this law shall have no effect on lawful behavior." That way, any letter a Senator receives that complains about the bill's restrictions on lawful behavior (i.e. fair use) will go straight into the trash. Keep this in mind when you write your anti-CBDTPA letters.
"They seem satisfied to try to attack it in the press rather than trying to make it work," said Sen. Hollings spokesman Andy Davis. How much evidence does he need that we don't want it to work?
You and Senator Hollings are thinking of two different bills. The CBDTPA you are talking about restricts fair use rights and allows the entertainment industry to block all bit copy operations that it has not expressly approved. The CBDTPA envisioned by Senator Hollings enforces a technology that magically prevents only illegal bit copy operations. The bill specifically says that if the copying is legal then it MUST be allowed by this system. He included language mandating this, right in the bill itself (Section 103b):
(b) PERSONAL TIME-SHIFTING COPIES CANNOT BE BLOCKED. -- No person may apply a security measure that uses a certified security technology to prevent a lawful recipient from making a personal copy for time-shifting purposes of programming at the time it is lawfully performed, on an over-the-air broadcast, non-premium cable channel, or non-premium satellite channel, by a television broadcast station (as defined in section 122(j)(5)(A) of title 17, United States Code), a cable system (as defined in section 111(f) of such title), or a satellite carrier (as defined in section 119(d)(6) of such title.)
See! All your fair-use rights are automatically preserved. YOU have nothing to complain about, Mister. Unless you're thinking of doing something illegal, of course, because this wonderful technology would be smart enough to stop you in your tracks. The greatest minds in computer science have wrestled with the problem of copy protection for decades without finding a satisfactory solution. But Hollings knows that they only failed because nobody ever passed a law forcing them to come up with something that works.
Legislating magic is apparently worth it if it means we can get more pay-per-view crap. Hooray for us consumers.
However, limewire is the counterexample...it is at least adware, yet open sourced. I do believe that there are independent copies with ads removed floating around...and that is the protection given by open source.
To get an ad-disabled copy of Limewire you can go to their alternative downloads page and select "Other". This lets you download a.zip containing the JAR, which you can run if you have a JRE installed. The normal installers include a JRE, but they also include the adware and crap, so it's best to get the JRE elsewhere.
It's not just illegal. It's stupid. It's well known that this is not a responsible approach. There's no way to prevent such a program from causing network congestion and affecting computers that it isn't supposed to. It's a bad idea that sounds like an attractive concept. But good intent only matters so much with self-replicating programs. They can have unexpected results. Xerox PARC experimented with "good worms" in the early eighties. They wrote worms to do things like clear printer queues and install software packages. Then they wrote a worm with a bug in it, and discovered that even worms you write yourself can create a path of destruction across your network. There are other reasons why it's a bad idea. A "good worm" can be modified into an evil worm very easily. Also, you don't want to send mixed messages to an easily confused public, and make people think they can sometimes "trust" a worm. At least one malicious Outlook worm has been seen in the wild that pretends it's antivirus software from Symantec.
"The world is passing through troublous times. Young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone know everything. As for girls, they are forward, immodest, and unwomanly in speech, behavior, and dress." -Written by someone in 1274 A.D.
My grandad, viewing Earth's worn cogs, said things were going to the dogs; His grandad in the Flemish bogs said things were going to the dogs; His grandad in his old skin togs said things were going to the dogs; There's one thing that I have to state- The dogs have had a good long wait! -Anonymous
Slashdot Mirror
Efforts to force inclusion of hardware copy protection are simply the work of a special-interest group. It's as if Microsoft or Sun wanted a law that mandated that every computer have the Java or .NET runtime included, or if AOL wanted to madate inclusion of AOL software(Ironically, MS, Sun, and AOL have been pretty successful at distribution of their clients, even without legislation).
:)
Yeah, except in general, a JVM adds functionality to your computer. It doesn't interfere with your ability to use your computer for anything you would have used it for before. This argument would apply to the CLR as well except that I'm guessing the CLR either has copyright management capabilities either built in already, or has architecture to enforce a copy protection standard once one is announced. That by itself doesn't mean much- just don't use software that requires the CLR- unless MS succeeds in putting the CLR in charge of the machine so that normal win32 programs have to constantly ask it for permissions. In that case, Jack Valenti owns your box.
As for AOL, well, that's a bad example too. Putting an AOL disk in a computer doesn't add functionality as much as it screws up the machine beyond repair.
You're not being forced to live in a house either.
if RF lighting exists at "[a] frequency that humans can't even see" then how the fuck can it illuminate anything?!?
Here's a fun little stunt: Put a small fluorescent tube in a microwave and "cook" it for a few seconds. (The tube won't survive this treatment because the filaments on each end burn out.) I remember a microwave salesman showing this to my parents, back in the seventies when microwave ovens were the next Big Thing and there was such a thing as a microwave salesman.
The oven won't be harmed. Or at least my college roommate's microwave still worked after I tried it on his.
Ah, what the heck. I think I'll post this with my +1. I honestly don't know if this will hit 5 Insightful or -1 Troll but I bet it will be one of the two.
You didn't do it right. You have to say "I'm going to be modded down for this" to get to 5. If you say "I know I'm going to be modded up or modded down" then you get modded down, because you're presenting a choice to the feeble-minded moderator instead of a clear reverse psychology directive. Moderators need to be told which way not to mod your post.
People are not going to send 25 cents when they get the mp3 from somewhere else.
Yeah, this is why nobody pays for software, right?
Speak for yourself. I'd buy a ton of MP3s if the cartel would sell them to me at a fair price with no ads, expiry dates, copy protection, or other control-freak bullshit.
>>>Come on. Netscape's engine didn't follow the Java spec. In fact, it had more violations that Microsoft's engine.
>>That comment is not insightful
>>It's just a statement with no supporting evidence.
> Hey; don't complain - the same scheme worked
> for YOUR comment; you got modded up.
He didn't make any statement that needed any more supporting evidence than the post he was responding to.
I don't really know the answer here. Send teams of people to Korea to volunteer to fix the servers? Short of that, I don't know of anything that will work.
You would think the FCC should probably be given the job of doing stuff like this, instead of worrying about how to implement a magic standard for uncopyable bits so we can be offered more pay-per-view crap from Hollywood.
How would Microsoft react if suddenly the open-source community decided that anything under the GNU could not inter-operate with microsoft products? I think MS would flip out kill whole town.
Microsoft would love this development; it would prevent them from having to do the dirty work themselves. Windows doesn't depend on interoperability with GNU stuff quite as much as GNU depends on interoperability with Windows.
hhmmm, 2048, multiple of 8... as in bits in a byte. Consipiracy or coincidence?
:)
Yeah, I noticed it after I subtracted 1 and did an XOR with the result.
I wonder how Nevada could be proud of being the official "most worthless place on the continent" as judged by the government which decided that if some place must be irradiated, it might as well be Nevada, because it's not really much of a loss.
Nevada relies heavily on tourism. Of course there are the idiots who go to Vegas, and the people who are attracted by Nevada's marriage and prostitution laws. Aside from that, Nevada has a strong appeal as an extremely desolate place- and it's the right kind of desolation, with Indian reservations and weird rocks and nuclear testing grounds. Not flat desolation like you see in the Plains States.
If you're wanting to see the Milky Way, or you're wanting to take some pictures with your new Canon D-30, or you're looking to justify your SUV purchase (and you don't realize that your Ford Explorer is going to need a tow truck), you could do a lot worse than Nevada. Of course, the nearest large population center is the west coast, and California itself has a lot of cool places to visit. Nevada's problem is that it's surrounded by states with similar terrain and features, so it doesn't get the fair share of tourists that it deserves. So they are always looking for things that make them stick out from AZ, CA, UT, etc., like gambling, prostitution, marriage laws, etc. (Utah might have funny marriage laws as well but if it does, they're of a different sort because I never heard of anyone going to Utah just to get married.)
The Manhattan Project sites are great things to have in your state. The bomb test areas themselves might still be radioactive and nasty places, but they have the status of historical sites, which is great for attracting tourists and so you can build tourist traps around them at a safe distance.
Yucca Mountain, on the other hand, is nothing but bad news because it cannot be leveraged to generate tourism at all- it's for waste, which repels tourists. As far as Nevada is concerned, the federal government might as well be dropping a smelly hog farm in the middle of Vegas. So you won't see Yucca Mountain plates anytime soon unless it's part of a political ploy during the next election, when Nevada's 4 electoral votes are up for grabs.
The government is not permitted to perform unreasonable searches and seizures.
All rights not expressly given to the government are reserved for the people.
Therefore: Private parties have the express right to perform unreasonable searches and seizures!
Step 4 - Profit!
Immediately after the fairness doctrine was removed the electronic media began a massive and unified move to the far left - in news, entertainment, and even children's cartoons.
The change was so universal, extreme, and consistent that now even a moment of air time covering a centerist or moderately conservative view brings complaints that the network has gone to the far right. Actual right-wing viewpoints just don't make it to the air on television, nor do libertairan views, nor anything from most non left-wing-urban-US cultures.
Do you have a speck of evidence for any of this or are you just parroting what the media tells you about itself?
The more the media slides to the right, the more it screams about its "left-wing bias". But aside from empty-headed Hollywood celebrities being given free reign to have their leftish political opinions heard by a wide audience (which is worth griping about) I NEVER hear anyone express an opinion on television that is left of center.
As for cartoons- well I don't watch cartoons anymore, so maybe they're glorifying Stalinism.
because it is the goal of every (successful) species to attempt to survive.
This is incorrect. You're confusing outcome with intention. It's the goal of every individual of a species to survive. The survival of the species itself is a consequence of that.
Thinking about evolution in terms of intentions is incorrect and leads to erroneous conclusions quite easily. (E.g. "if we're all just monkeys then what's to stop us from acting like monkeys?", "Shouldn't we then just kill all animals except dogs/sheep/cows", etc.) Drawing moral perogatives is exactly what you should not do with evolution. What happens and what should happen are two very different things.
What is the connection?
He says in the book that there's is no valid scientific reason anymore to send people into space when sending robots has turned out to be a much more cost effective way to do scientific research in space, and that the people coming up with scientific motives to justify the huge cost of manned projects like the ISS are basically grasping at straws (e.g. "It will help us understand the effects of weightlessness on the human body").
He has a point. Much as I hate to say it, humans are ill-suited for space exploration and should stay here. We weigh too much, require too many accoutrements such as life support systems, and we generally aren't willing to consider one-way trips.
I suspected your post was going to be stupid as soon as I saw the red light next to your ID. And it turns out I was right!
:-)
Makes me wonder what you said before that pissed me off.
Are you sure? Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe.
Well it is, especially if you look at per-mole instead of per-weight fractions. Except it's much less common on earth, and most of the hydrogen that's on earth has been stripped of its lucrative molecular electrons and is no longer in H2 form. (Translation: it's already burned.) Ocean water is 1/9th hydrogen by weight but you don't see people trading futures in it.
Am I the only one to find this strange : each time a story talks about taxing cars, taxing fuel or signing the Kyoto protocol (for example) to help solving the global warming problem, a whole lot of people come in and claim that global warming doesn't exist, that it's a natural process, or that G.W. Bush is right not to do anything to solve it.
You forgot the derisive comments making fun of the Big Bang and evolution, which are completely offtopic in these threads but always come under attack. And the suddenly atrocious spelling everyone has.
"If only they would devote a little bit of the millions of dollars they're spending on this ad campaign to help stop illegal downloading ... but that wouldn't help them sell more CD burners, would it," said Hilary Rosen.
Why is it the technology industry's responsibility to "help stop illegal downloading" anyway? Isn't that the entertainment industry's perogative?
Well, you can say drugs are outlawed because people tend to do illegal things when they're high on them. Of course, drugs are never a necessity for crime. They only have a statistical relationship to it.
This is much different. The CBDTPA is designed to specifically prevent you from breaking a certain subset of laws by enforcing a technological barrier.
In other news, degenercy isn't a LAW. If it was, then black holes couldn't exist. It's more of an aproximation of other forces, kind of like how we define Normal forces.
Degeneracy is a fundamental feature of the quantum theory of fermions. It isn't an "approximation of other forces". The concept of a force is only applicable at a higher level. Quantum theory is concerned with interactions.
Black holes exist because as a neutron star gets bigger, additional neutrons require more and more energy. All the low energy states are occupied. Soon the neutrons have more energy than you see in an accelerator, and they can react to form other particles. Particles that aren't neutrons won't compete with neutrons for the higher energy states.
That's how most of our laws are, right now. Ex post facto -- you break them, you do the punishment. The RIAA/MPAA wants to undermine this situation, and prevent people from breaking the law. We already tried this once.
It was called prohibition.
I don't see how prohibition fits this definition. In fact, in the history of American law, there is no analogous legislation I can think of to what they are proposing. The closest thing I can think of is safety regulations (you can't sell a car that doesn't incorporate seat belts, for example). And smokestacks must have scrubbers, apartment buildings must have fire escapes, restaurants must have wheelchair ramps, etc. But all these things are to prevent accidents, pollution, tragedies, etc. I can't think of one that has the sole purpose of preventing you from breaking the law.
But I don't see why we should just legislate piracy out of existence. We could stop rape with technological barriers, for example, by forcing all women to wear steel chastity belts. And why can't we do this with murder as well? Surely murder is a lot worse than piracy. And a law to mandate prevention of murder would run into problems just as easily as a law like this one that mandates prevention of piracy. We would have to ban guns, knives, axes, boxcutters, chisels, wrenches, and hammers. Buckets would have to be banned too, because you can fill one with water and hold someone's head down in it. You can also kill someone by smashing their head against a wall. Therefore all walls in all houses and buildings must be covered with foam padding to prevent this. But the padding can't be stapled or nailed on, because you can kill someone with staples or nails. And it can't be glued on, because glue is also illegal (you can glue someone's mouth shut and make them starve to death). Oh well, let's just mandate that the hardware industry come up with a solution!
Of course, like the CBDTPA, a murder-preventing law like this one would contain a meaningless provision saying, in effect, "this law shall have no effect on lawful behavior." That way, any letter a Senator receives that complains about the bill's restrictions on lawful behavior (i.e. fair use) will go straight into the trash. Keep this in mind when you write your anti-CBDTPA letters.
"They seem satisfied to try to attack it in the press rather than trying to make it work," said Sen. Hollings spokesman Andy Davis.
How much evidence does he need that we don't want it to work?
You and Senator Hollings are thinking of two different bills. The CBDTPA you are talking about restricts fair use rights and allows the entertainment industry to block all bit copy operations that it has not expressly approved. The CBDTPA envisioned by Senator Hollings enforces a technology that magically prevents only illegal bit copy operations. The bill specifically says that if the copying is legal then it MUST be allowed by this system. He included language mandating this, right in the bill itself (Section 103b):
(b) PERSONAL TIME-SHIFTING COPIES CANNOT BE BLOCKED. -- No person may apply a security measure that uses a certified security technology to prevent a lawful recipient from making a personal copy for time-shifting purposes of programming at the time it is lawfully performed, on an over-the-air broadcast, non-premium cable channel, or non-premium satellite channel, by a television broadcast station (as defined in section 122(j)(5)(A) of title 17, United States Code), a cable system (as defined in section 111(f) of such title), or a satellite carrier (as defined in section 119(d)(6) of such title.)
See! All your fair-use rights are automatically preserved. YOU have nothing to complain about, Mister. Unless you're thinking of doing something illegal, of course, because this wonderful technology would be smart enough to stop you in your tracks.
The greatest minds in computer science have wrestled with the problem of copy protection for decades without finding a satisfactory solution. But Hollings knows that they only failed because nobody ever passed a law forcing them to come up with something that works.
Legislating magic is apparently worth it if it means we can get more pay-per-view crap. Hooray for us consumers.
However, limewire is the counterexample...it is at least adware, yet open sourced. I do believe that there are independent copies with ads removed floating around...and that is the protection given by open source.
.zip containing the JAR, which you can run if you have a JRE installed. The normal installers include a JRE, but they also include the adware and crap, so it's best to get the JRE elsewhere.
To get an ad-disabled copy of Limewire you can go to their alternative downloads page and select "Other". This lets you download a
It's not just illegal. It's stupid. It's well known that this is not a responsible approach. There's no way to prevent such a program from causing network congestion and affecting computers that it isn't supposed to.
It's a bad idea that sounds like an attractive concept. But good intent only matters so much with self-replicating programs. They can have unexpected results. Xerox PARC experimented with "good worms" in the early eighties. They wrote worms to do things like clear printer queues and install software packages. Then they wrote a worm with a bug in it, and discovered that even worms you write yourself can create a path of destruction across your network.
There are other reasons why it's a bad idea. A "good worm" can be modified into an evil worm very easily. Also, you don't want to send mixed messages to an easily confused public, and make people think they can sometimes "trust" a worm. At least one malicious Outlook worm has been seen in the wild that pretends it's antivirus software from Symantec.
"The world is passing through troublous times. Young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone know everything. As for girls, they are forward, immodest, and unwomanly in speech, behavior, and dress." -Written by someone in 1274 A.D.
My grandad, viewing Earth's worn cogs,
said things were going to the dogs;
His grandad in the Flemish bogs
said things were going to the dogs;
His grandad in his old skin togs
said things were going to the dogs;
There's one thing that I have to state-
The dogs have had a good long wait!
-Anonymous