It's part of the easing of license restrictions that currently make it difficult to incorporate Java in certain types of Free Software project, and that cause hassle for companies like RedHat and Novell/SUSE who sincerely want to distribute Java but more than that want their operating systems to be 100% Free Software.
It's funny. The prime difference between Open Source and Free Software is that OSS is married to a community based development model whereas Free Software is just the basic principle of it being Free. Everyone keeps using "Open Source" here, but Sun has, actually, been following the community based development model part of Open Source for years without making Java Free Software. If it's not Free Software, it's not Open Source, but Java's certainly proven you can have the advantages of Open Source without actually making your software open source.
So why are they doing this? Well, like I said in my first paragraph, the current license and environment is too restrictive for many significant potential adopters. They're finally recognising people want the freedom, not just an open development model.
You're a tool because you're being used by the RIAA to put out the message that they're an organization that will not rest until anyone using P2P, including the person you're talking to, has been hurt.
I thought that was obvious. I guess I was wrong.
I'm sure you feel you're sticking it to the man by not buying CDs, but you're part of a movement that's helping persuade swathes of society to stick to the straight and narrow when getting their music. 99% of people will go ahead and buy music anyway if that's the only way to obtain it in a form that means you can play the music you want when you want it.
And, to be honest, I'm glad. There are times I think the RIAA is crossing the line in moral terms, and times I don't think it is (the general principle of suing blatent copyright infringers - which is what the vast majority of its lawsuits are aimed at - is a fair one. Don't want to pay for the music? Nothing's forcing you to have it.) As a general rule, the music industry itself isn't massively profitable, the "Advance that is paid back with initial royalties - but rarely is" system isn't evil, despite the obsession by critics with painting it that way, and they do end up enabling a large number of us to access music that would never have been produced otherwise.
It's also increasingly unnecessary for musicians to use the traditional publisher model if they don't want it. Distributing MP3s is as simple as buying a $15 a month website and getting the word out. The artists whose works Slashbots so shamelessly rip off and then protest when they get into trouble clearly want something other than recognition and pocket money, otherwise they'd be using this model in droves. In the meantime, while you engage in pathetic boycotts and tell everyone how evil the RIAA is (ensuring they steer clear of P2P and buy CDs without telling you), they continue to use the fact that P2P pirates rip off their music and that the situation is out of hand to push through more draconian copyright laws that impact every one of us. Because there are two sides to every story, and just because people think the RIAA's evil, doesn't mean they think pirates are heroes. People who want the lawsuits to stop aren't going to want the P2P pirates to get off scot-free, and they'll be more than happy to see laws that make the copying harder than ever before.
The same is true of the US. However, in the early eighties, a group of largely right wing and semi-moderate justices on the Supreme Court, for some bizarre reason, decided that current patent laws as passed by Congress and as enforced by the USPTO, were too strict in terms of the types of things they allowed to be patented, and explicitly allowed a software patent (a method implemented by software on a factory controller.)
Congress, unfortunately, decided to wash its hands off the matter and promptly passed the responsibility for policy making in patents to the new Federal Circuit court system.
In fairness to Congress at that point, I don't think anyone realized either how much damage would be done by software patents, nor how absurd the concept is in general. Whether that would be the same with the EU court is open to debate, but while we have a better understanding today, we also have to face the fact that many companies know how to abuse the system, and they are aggressively lobbying for those very patents. So if a similar scenario arises, there's little guarantee the EU would actually pass laws to clarify the law in an anti-patent way.
I would imagine that the RIAA doesn't expect this to go on for that long. While three and a half thousand dollars is a lot of money, it's not something a sane, rational, person would kill over, especially if they knew, deep down, whether they see it as "fighting the man" or not, that they are, technically, in the wrong (nobody's putting guns to people's heads and forcing them to download rips of industry-issued CD of industry-funded music. Even if you're anti-the music industry, you can spend your entire life without downloading such an MP3 and still have a diverse and wonderful music collection.) My belief therefore goes back to the comment you just responded to. The RIAA will cease the lawsuits as soon as the problem is under control, and it expects the lawsuits to bring the problem under control (that's their purpose, after all.) As such, it doesn't fear whackos, because there are too few of them, and the lawsuits are not going to go on for an eternity. The chances of someone going postal are pretty minimal.
If someone does go postal, BTW, that'd probably undo much of the public's dislike of the RIAA, they'd get a lot of sympathy, and those posting here saying "Oh yes, the RIAA may be trying to scare P2P pirates, but in the long term they're just undermining support for copyright law" will find out that they're very, very, wrong.
They'll let up when the vast majority of people cease using P2P to redistribute and obtain copyrighted content without authorization. If it then becomes a problem again, they'll resume suing. As long as the P2P piracy issue is contained, it's not a problem. The purpose of the lawsuits is to contain the issue, scaring the vast majority of users "straight".
Did you forget that their primary business is selling music? It's not to prevent me and you from committing a crime. If the publicity that they acheive from this lawsuit is bad enough to make Joe Downloader never want to give them money again, they hurt their primary business by focusing too much on their...erm...secondary business.
It's always wise to read something in full before asking if there's something that was forgotten. The second paragraph of my comment actually answers your point. Please remember that the RIAA is not a record company. You cannot go into a record store and boycott "RIAA music", because no such thing exists.
And yes, the music industry is aware of the distinction and plays on it regularly. Remember the "OMG! A 13 year old is being sued. Why, we Radio DJs and Music Stars can't let this happen and we'll very publicly announce we're going to pay the fine!" BS that happened a few months back? That was staged. Good cop. Bad cop. Oldest trick in the book.
Whether the strategy will work in the long-run is something up for debate. I'm reading people claiming that this is all making copyright very unpopular and ultimately will result in copyright reform, but at the same time, I'm seeing copyright reform universally getting worse (and besides, I wouldn't want "copyright reform" that makes it ok to redistribute other people's copyrighted works on a network that makes them available to millions of anonymous strangers with no compensation for the artists or the bodies that funded them). At this point though, if the RIAA can just get a few people like you to post about how evil they are, then they're happy. People will avoid the P2P networks. They'll buy music Universal and Sony and BMG (actually they'll buy music from Madonna, and Bryan Adams, and Metallica, etc) like they always do. And the word "tool", far from being just an insult, will in some ways seem appropriate, because a tool is something you use to cause an effect, and the RIAA is using people - the people who think they're doing the most against them - to get the message out. You do P2P. You will be hurt.
Sony's actions WRT the PSP notwithstanding, I don't think they've ever been heavily anti-homebrew. They have dabbled a little with the system, selling an official consumer user-accessable GNU/Linux kit for the PS2, and announcing user-accessable GNU/Linux as a standard feature of the PS3.
I think the major problem with the PSP is that they don't know what to do with it, and that, more than anything else, is causing problems with them creating an officially supported home-brew environment. It's not really suitable for a crude port of GNU/Linux, and both game developers and studios are concerned enough about piracy that they can't just open up the APIs.
to be honest, I never really understood why the PSP homebrew scene is so much bigger than the DS
Audience. Plain and simple. The general gist I got from Slashdot was that people saw the PSP as a powerful console and the DS as something gimmicky. I thought they were wrong then and still think so (the DS has a flexible input device to get around the limitations of the joystick model, the PSP plays movies - how is the former more gimmicky?) but, nonetheless, whether I agree with them or not, that was the view, and more technical people seemed to favour the PSP over the DS.
Add to that the initial lack of content for the PSP, and the percieved lack of quality, fun, content for the PSP today, and add to that (finished adding yet?) the built-in memory stick reader vs the DS's proprietary cartridges, allowing homebrew once you could find an exploit without additional hardware (ok, the DS has wireless, but it's taking a while for people to get the hang of it), and essentially all the pieces were in play right from the start.
(And you shouldn't discount the DS scene. It's alive, it's just not as well known.)
He's talking about an emulator. The array would be data, as far as the DRM scheme is concerned. At least, if the DRM is so restrictive that the array cannot be "executed" even by an emulator, then programming anything under it will become pretty close to impossible. Many programming techniques involve the creation of temporary byte code. Even ordinary PostScript fonts contain byte code.
Oh crap. C'mon, did you all think for more than enough time to jerk your knees before posting the usual "The RIAA is just greedy and wants your money" BS?
The music industry is scared shitless of piracy. If people can get the music they've invested in without paying them a penny, then they're not going to make their money back. The biggest movement threat right now comprises of massive networks where people put music up for download so that millions of anonymous strangers can download it. It differs from traditional systems in that the network effects are greater. Someone can make a copy of a CD they bought for their friends, but there's a limit to how far that'll travel - the number of people who gain a copy in relation to the number of CDs sold is small. Someone can mass manufacture copies of a popular CD and try selling it on the black market, but they risk being caught and a lot of people are unhappy about paying a pirate for music anyway. Not so unauthorized peer-to-peer copying.
If Sony, Universal, et al, directly sue the people who are making the works they invested in to the public for free on this massive scale, they have to be enormously careful not to sully their image in doing so. Yet the entire point of suing is to create a deterence. Looking like nice guys does not gel with getting people afraid of you. If the RIAA does it on their behalf, the RIAA takes the "bad rap" and can "descend" to pretty much any (legal) level without it hurting Sony, Universal, et al.
The purpose of the RIAA lawsuits is not to make money from settlements. It's to scare people away from engaging in copyright infringment. As such, it's not in the interests of the RIAA to appear to have a heart.
Moreover, every single one of you who's going to go home tonight and tell your friends about the big, bad, RIAA, is doing exactly what they hope you'll do. The Slashdot editor who posted this submission is doing exactly what the RIAA hoped he'd do. The Slashbot who submitted the article is doing exactly what the RIAA hoped he'd do. You... quite honestly, the RIAA doesn't give a crap whether you think they're greedy or not, but they are glad you're commenting on the case, and they are very glad you're suggesting they're ruthless.
That's what they want you to think. That's what they want you to say. And at the end of the day, they want you to believe they'll stoop to any level. To the point, I suspect, that if resources were tight, and they had a choice between suing one legged orphans who shared the orphanarium's computer to download a single Brittney Spears song, or suing Paris Hilton for buying her entire local music store's stock, ripping it, and putting it online on a 1Tb/sec connection, they'd sue the orphanarium, even though Hilton did more damage.
It's a matter of getting the right publicity. When you're trying to stop ordinary people from doing something that hurts you, and you've reached a point that you have no options left but to create penalties for doing it, the wrong publicity is the right publicity.
In the UK, copyright law is stricter than in the US. There's no "fair use". You do, actually, need a license to perform any act that requires copying takes place. This includes copying software onto your hard drive (otherwise known as "installing" it) or possibly even into memory.
Now, if a license doesn't come with a piece of software, it's arguable that you have an implied right, under the Sale of Goods Act, to run it. If you can't run it without installing it (ie it doesn't run from the disk), then you may have an implied right to install it. Once. No back-ups. But if it does come with a license, or an EULA (which provides licenses if you agree to certain acts on your part), and the license is compatible with using the product in its intended way, then yes, you're obliged to either accept it, or take it back.
Is it not enforcable? Only in the sense that without draconian monitoring, some provisions of the EULA cannot be proven to have been breached. But otherwise, yes, it's enforcable, that license agreement, if provided, does indeed apply in the UK.
That's in the UK though. In the US, where the "Sale of Goods Act" has no juristiction, EULAs occupy a murkier area.
The complaint about Fisher Price was that the style looked gaudy and childish. If Apple truly followed Fisher Price design principles, they'd be making some of the strongest computers out there (think about it for a few seconds: how much abuse did your FP toy house or garage take without breaking when you were a kid? Would an iMac or Dell Dimension survive a day of the same treatment?)
Nothing about the article implies that the wiretap was anything out of the ordinary. There is no debate as to whether proper, judge-approved, wiretaps aren't a reasonable tool in fighting crime. The debate is as to whether warrantless, mass-phone-taps, with millions of people being monitored, are an absurd extreme.
The article doesn't say that the phone tap was Judge-approved (or that it wasn't) but it is clear that the phone tap was of a specific person, with there being reasonable cause to decide to tap that person's phone in the first place. I'm trying to work out how this adds to the phone tapping debates, except as handwaving from the "WE MUST TAP ALL PHONES TO STOP THE TERORIRSTS!!!" mob. If no warrant was issued for this tap, I'd like to know why, and if the reason is nobody applied for one, I'd like to know why too.
There are several problems with congress today. One is that the politicians keep passing unconstitutional and/or dumbass laws for populist reasons. The other is they're corrupt, so corrupt they've actually legalized corruption and called it "lobbying" and "campaign contributions".
Your proposal would guarantee the second type of problem, the corruption, would become the defining fault with congress, with every politician being for sale on election.
You go to the kiosk, insert your credit card, select the obscure movie that'd be out of print otherwise, and within a few minutes you get a DVD with the movie.
So far as I can tell, this doesn't have a lot to do with "downloaded movies".
you mean like how I can copy any DVD right now without effort?
No, I mean like you can't do without committing a criminal offense under the DMCA. By you I mean you personally, plus the makers or importers of the product that did the copying.
You "can" copy any DVD in the same sense as you "can" smoke a joint. What the DVD-CCA fears is you legally copying DVDs, and the introduction of consumer level DVD burning hardware that can write to the CSS key parts of DVDs would result in you being able to do that.
The RIAA's members continue to sell unencumbered media for the most part. The DVD-CCA has merely announced a minor modification to CSS (actually probably to recordable DVD media) that will allow DVD-burning kiosks to be set up. These DVD burning kiosks will still end up generating discs that are illegal - as in jailtime - to play with an unlicensed DVD player.
I haven't seen the RIAA pushing for jailtime against people who write audio ripping software let alone CD players. And while there may be occasional glitches in its current stategy, so far it seems to be aiming to punish only those who actually willfully infringe copyright (by putting copies of their member's music onto file copying networks.)
Neither are perfect bodies, but the RIAA so far hasn't tried to micromanage how I listen to music. The MPAA really does think, very strongly, that you should only watch its member's content on it's members defined terms, and is willing to promote mechanisms with draconian legal backing to enforce this. They're a bunch of scumbags, and this article does nothing to disabuse me of that notion.
...then it probably involves some revision of the actual writable DVDs rather than CSS. The problem with burning a writable DVD at the moment with CSS encoding is that you have nowhere to store the keys. These are kept in a part of the DVD that has deliberately been unwritable on writable discs.
The articles I'm reading suggest the service will be limited to kiosks. This makes sense, as any consumer based DVD burner that can burn CSS discs will be ultimately possible to modify such that it can copy regular DVDs too.
This quarter, yes, the quarter before that no, it was in decline (went from 2.2%MS to 2.0%, IIRC.)
The thing to remember is that now is not a good time to be making any statements on the Mac's market share growth. For 5 of the last 13 months, Apple has essentially been selling a range of machines it had all but publicly declared obsolete. Since January, individual machines have been updated, but until last Monday at least one popular range of Macs was still selling solely in the "obsolete" form. As a result, there's been a period where nobody's wanted to buy a Mac, and then spikes where six to thirteen months of pent-up demand has finally been satisfied.
I don't think anyone should judge where Apple is going for another year at the earliest.
I think you're exaggerating (probably unintentionally) the situation in the US and underexaggerating the situation in Europe.
Cingular runs GSM, with UMTS rolled out in a few areas. It'll be supporting GSM for many years, probably decades to come. Cingular customers roam on T-Mobile's network, and in some places T-Mobile users can roam on Cingular's. It's nice.
UMTS is essentially the next version of GSM. It's undergone a name change largely because the telcos were running out of bandwidth and wanted to try to persuade governments to release more spectrum. They came up with this concept called "3G", which is like what we have right now, only with Internet and video phones, and promised they'd try to find a more efficient way of using the new spectrum allocated to them.
GSM was thus modified to support a "WCDMA" air interface (similar to the air interface in IS-95, as used by Sprint and Verizon. Note that's the only similarity. Ethernet has more in common with Token Ring than UMTS does with IS-95) which is considered more efficient with bandwidth than GSM's old air interface system, a few additional higher level protocols were added, and the product rebranded as "UMTS", and "3G". UMTS isn't compatible with phones that only support GSM, but phones that support both technologies can use a network that supports a mixture of both: that is, if you're in the middle of a conversation on a Cingular phone and walk out of range of a UMTS transmitter, and the only strong signals are from a "GSM classic" transmitter, the phone will hop to that tower seamlessly without dropping the call. And vice-versa. Usually. When it works.
So in that sense, Cingular's running "all recent versions of GSM", while T-Mobile's running "almost all recent versions of GSM". T-Mobile and Cingular both support EDGE, for example, which is yet another air-interface bolted on to GSM.
Meanwhile in Europe, the situation is the same. Mobile phone companies split into those running GSM, those running UMTS, and those running both. The only major difference is that, for the most part, those only running UMTS are running it on a special frequency. GSM is available on 900 and 1800MHz. UMTS somewhere in the 2GHz range.
Both Europe and America are preparing for a roll-out of WiMax.
What's the difference between Europe and America? Both run GSM on two frequencies, and have a mixture of both regular GSM and UMTS available. Both are planning roll-outs of WiMax. Both have a few esoteric standards intended to replace trunked radio (eg. Nextel's iDEN and Europe's TETRA.) In addition to legacy standards (both Europe and America have them), and the failed European initiatives for microcellular networks (CT2, DECT - the latter lives on in non-commercial settings) the only major difference is that some American phone companies use a third standard IS-95 ("CDMA"). That's it. That's the only addition to the alphabet soup.
HDTV is a third state of broadcast and the closest thing to looking through a window until we get 3D.
You really feel this way? I don't know. I've been in to Circuit City, Best Buy, Sears, et al, and gazed at the screens, and you know, they're nice, and I appreciate the higher quality, but I certainly wouldn't say they approach "looking through a window", not even from a distance.
Considering they're generally lower resolution than the average computer monitor, and blown up to about six times the size, even the greater distance from the eye to the screen doesn't exactly help.
Apple didn't "get" Open Source (that's fine, many of us Free Software enthusiasts don't "get" Open Source either) and began deprecating it when it started to interfere with their other plans in general. The first to be deprecated was the open-sourciness, with Apple releasing code but generally not in a "community friendly" way and rarely making it easy for the community to contribute directly back.
There's no evil in that, if you're strongly opinionated about the direction code should take, and you have the resources to write it yourself, you don't necessarily want to spend time trying to integrate everyone else's changes with your own.
Some people noticed. In particular, the KHTML people got a little fed up with people pointing out that WebKit supported some feature or other that hadn't made it into KHTML yet. They explained that the changes to WebKit weren't easy to track and back-port. This was interpreted by the meeja, including Slashdot, as KHTML slapping down Apple, rather than slapping down the people who assume that simply because X is based on Y, Y can easily incorporate changes to X, and who keep flaming the developers of Y for not doing this.
Then Apple closed XNU-Intel. Yes, they did. There are several releases of XNU-Intel for which source code apparently will never be released (though who would want them?)
Some people noticed. They pointed this out and were immediately hounded by a bunch of, for the most part, obnoxious Mac zealots who claimed this wasn't true because at some point in the future, Apple might change their mind, and any way, who said their mind had been made up, I mean, Apple hasn't made an official announcement, right? To make matters worse, Apple's one comment on this was so inane it simply fueled the fire. One developer at Apple, posting on an Apple mailing list, said that the talk of XNU-Intel being "closed" was "speculation" and people shouldn't assume anything.
This was meaningless and largely wrong. Those saying it was closed were right: it was. You couldn't download the source to XNU-Intel. When you're stating a fact, you're not engaging in speculation.
There was much anger at this point because many people felt lied to. Apple had been advertising the openness of Darwin for a long time, and "Team Apple*" had been loud in repeating this supposed advantage, and now, without any explanation, the core of Darwin was now closed. Team Apple responded by claiming the Apple developer who said "speculation" had actually used the word "yet", and the "yet" word was used in pretty much every response to anyone critical of Apple or simply pointing out the fact that XNU-Intel was closed. Team Apple changed tact on the "Open Source is an advantage of Mac OS X" thing too, claiming it was never Apple's intention to release a useful operating system as open source, and that nobody cares about operating system kernels anyway. Needless to say, this intensified the anger.
What do we have today?
Apple has taken considerable steps to undo the damage. There's still no real explanation as to why XNU-Intel was closed. No technologies were announced yesterday whose existance could be discerned by looking at the kernel - which has supported the Intel architecture since its original release, which has supported the Xeon CPU range even back in the Panther days, and probably long before. It was not necessary to withhold the XNU source before the release of the PowerMac G5, or, indeed, any of the recent radical changes in architecture. Meanwhile, the software-related announcements this week don't appear to have anything to do with the Tiger kernel.
So, anyway, leaving aside the nonsense that it's "been confirmed" that the withholding of the source "was due to Apple's policy of not commenting upon unreleased products", we don't have an explanatio
I think the "problems" are the elitist programmers who haven't realised yet that they actually aren't perfect...;-)
Ooohh! Ooooh! -5 Flamebait! Go on, I dare you!
Seriously though, the major problem is that Java's advantages are rarely what the loudest advocates suggest. They'll talk incessantly about how they were able to get their app out in Java in only six weeks, and that it's all about making the programmer's life easier. That's not really it. What Java does is trap more errors, and moves from an insanity (manual memory management) to a more natural, free flowing, yet structured, memory model (at the end of the day, it's not even about garbage collection, that's just a side benefit of the memory model). And moreover, it prevents programmers from making common mistakes. And some programmers think that they are good enough to avoid those mistakes. But, you know what? I seriously doubt that. And I'm sometimes the guy who's running your program. And I don't trust you. You trust you. I don't. I'm being asked to trust you when I run your software, or when I add your software to mine, and I'd rather not. Not because I'm being insulting, or hate you, or anything like that, I'm just realistic. Even Knuth has had a few bugs to fix in TeX.
Java doesn't guarantee correctness, but it catches more bugs, and it makes some of the more dangerous ones - the buffer overflows, the stack overflows, etc, etc - practically impossible. I'd be curious to know if Objective C does the same thing, or if the obsession with the GC aspect of Java has gotten the better of everyone, again.
That's called typosquatting. A page is served up with ads because you mis-typed a domain name, and someone "registered" that mis-spelling hoping people would type it by accident. Cameroon wants to make money from people who mis-spell ".com", as well as people who mis-spell domain names under.cm.
I don't know what you think it isn't, but typo-squatting is pretty much exactly what it is. If it isn't typo-squatting, then me registering "salshdot.org" and serving up "helpful" ads isn't typo-squatting either.
Slashdot Mirror
It's part of the easing of license restrictions that currently make it difficult to incorporate Java in certain types of Free Software project, and that cause hassle for companies like RedHat and Novell/SUSE who sincerely want to distribute Java but more than that want their operating systems to be 100% Free Software.
It's funny. The prime difference between Open Source and Free Software is that OSS is married to a community based development model whereas Free Software is just the basic principle of it being Free. Everyone keeps using "Open Source" here, but Sun has, actually, been following the community based development model part of Open Source for years without making Java Free Software. If it's not Free Software, it's not Open Source, but Java's certainly proven you can have the advantages of Open Source without actually making your software open source.
So why are they doing this? Well, like I said in my first paragraph, the current license and environment is too restrictive for many significant potential adopters. They're finally recognising people want the freedom, not just an open development model.
You're a tool because you're being used by the RIAA to put out the message that they're an organization that will not rest until anyone using P2P, including the person you're talking to, has been hurt.
I thought that was obvious. I guess I was wrong.
I'm sure you feel you're sticking it to the man by not buying CDs, but you're part of a movement that's helping persuade swathes of society to stick to the straight and narrow when getting their music. 99% of people will go ahead and buy music anyway if that's the only way to obtain it in a form that means you can play the music you want when you want it.
And, to be honest, I'm glad. There are times I think the RIAA is crossing the line in moral terms, and times I don't think it is (the general principle of suing blatent copyright infringers - which is what the vast majority of its lawsuits are aimed at - is a fair one. Don't want to pay for the music? Nothing's forcing you to have it.) As a general rule, the music industry itself isn't massively profitable, the "Advance that is paid back with initial royalties - but rarely is" system isn't evil, despite the obsession by critics with painting it that way, and they do end up enabling a large number of us to access music that would never have been produced otherwise.
It's also increasingly unnecessary for musicians to use the traditional publisher model if they don't want it. Distributing MP3s is as simple as buying a $15 a month website and getting the word out. The artists whose works Slashbots so shamelessly rip off and then protest when they get into trouble clearly want something other than recognition and pocket money, otherwise they'd be using this model in droves. In the meantime, while you engage in pathetic boycotts and tell everyone how evil the RIAA is (ensuring they steer clear of P2P and buy CDs without telling you), they continue to use the fact that P2P pirates rip off their music and that the situation is out of hand to push through more draconian copyright laws that impact every one of us. Because there are two sides to every story, and just because people think the RIAA's evil, doesn't mean they think pirates are heroes. People who want the lawsuits to stop aren't going to want the P2P pirates to get off scot-free, and they'll be more than happy to see laws that make the copying harder than ever before.
Thanks for nothing.
The same is true of the US. However, in the early eighties, a group of largely right wing and semi-moderate justices on the Supreme Court, for some bizarre reason, decided that current patent laws as passed by Congress and as enforced by the USPTO, were too strict in terms of the types of things they allowed to be patented, and explicitly allowed a software patent (a method implemented by software on a factory controller.)
Congress, unfortunately, decided to wash its hands off the matter and promptly passed the responsibility for policy making in patents to the new Federal Circuit court system.
In fairness to Congress at that point, I don't think anyone realized either how much damage would be done by software patents, nor how absurd the concept is in general. Whether that would be the same with the EU court is open to debate, but while we have a better understanding today, we also have to face the fact that many companies know how to abuse the system, and they are aggressively lobbying for those very patents. So if a similar scenario arises, there's little guarantee the EU would actually pass laws to clarify the law in an anti-patent way.
I would imagine that the RIAA doesn't expect this to go on for that long. While three and a half thousand dollars is a lot of money, it's not something a sane, rational, person would kill over, especially if they knew, deep down, whether they see it as "fighting the man" or not, that they are, technically, in the wrong (nobody's putting guns to people's heads and forcing them to download rips of industry-issued CD of industry-funded music. Even if you're anti-the music industry, you can spend your entire life without downloading such an MP3 and still have a diverse and wonderful music collection.) My belief therefore goes back to the comment you just responded to. The RIAA will cease the lawsuits as soon as the problem is under control, and it expects the lawsuits to bring the problem under control (that's their purpose, after all.) As such, it doesn't fear whackos, because there are too few of them, and the lawsuits are not going to go on for an eternity. The chances of someone going postal are pretty minimal.
If someone does go postal, BTW, that'd probably undo much of the public's dislike of the RIAA, they'd get a lot of sympathy, and those posting here saying "Oh yes, the RIAA may be trying to scare P2P pirates, but in the long term they're just undermining support for copyright law" will find out that they're very, very, wrong.
They'll let up when the vast majority of people cease using P2P to redistribute and obtain copyrighted content without authorization. If it then becomes a problem again, they'll resume suing. As long as the P2P piracy issue is contained, it's not a problem. The purpose of the lawsuits is to contain the issue, scaring the vast majority of users "straight".
They're trying to scare you. If you know they're even willing to sue the decendants of P2P pirates, you know they have no reason to ignore you.
It's always wise to read something in full before asking if there's something that was forgotten. The second paragraph of my comment actually answers your point. Please remember that the RIAA is not a record company. You cannot go into a record store and boycott "RIAA music", because no such thing exists.
And yes, the music industry is aware of the distinction and plays on it regularly. Remember the "OMG! A 13 year old is being sued. Why, we Radio DJs and Music Stars can't let this happen and we'll very publicly announce we're going to pay the fine!" BS that happened a few months back? That was staged. Good cop. Bad cop. Oldest trick in the book.
Whether the strategy will work in the long-run is something up for debate. I'm reading people claiming that this is all making copyright very unpopular and ultimately will result in copyright reform, but at the same time, I'm seeing copyright reform universally getting worse (and besides, I wouldn't want "copyright reform" that makes it ok to redistribute other people's copyrighted works on a network that makes them available to millions of anonymous strangers with no compensation for the artists or the bodies that funded them). At this point though, if the RIAA can just get a few people like you to post about how evil they are, then they're happy. People will avoid the P2P networks. They'll buy music Universal and Sony and BMG (actually they'll buy music from Madonna, and Bryan Adams, and Metallica, etc) like they always do. And the word "tool", far from being just an insult, will in some ways seem appropriate, because a tool is something you use to cause an effect, and the RIAA is using people - the people who think they're doing the most against them - to get the message out. You do P2P. You will be hurt.
Sony's actions WRT the PSP notwithstanding, I don't think they've ever been heavily anti-homebrew. They have dabbled a little with the system, selling an official consumer user-accessable GNU/Linux kit for the PS2, and announcing user-accessable GNU/Linux as a standard feature of the PS3.
I think the major problem with the PSP is that they don't know what to do with it, and that, more than anything else, is causing problems with them creating an officially supported home-brew environment. It's not really suitable for a crude port of GNU/Linux, and both game developers and studios are concerned enough about piracy that they can't just open up the APIs.
Audience. Plain and simple. The general gist I got from Slashdot was that people saw the PSP as a powerful console and the DS as something gimmicky. I thought they were wrong then and still think so (the DS has a flexible input device to get around the limitations of the joystick model, the PSP plays movies - how is the former more gimmicky?) but, nonetheless, whether I agree with them or not, that was the view, and more technical people seemed to favour the PSP over the DS.
Add to that the initial lack of content for the PSP, and the percieved lack of quality, fun, content for the PSP today, and add to that (finished adding yet?) the built-in memory stick reader vs the DS's proprietary cartridges, allowing homebrew once you could find an exploit without additional hardware (ok, the DS has wireless, but it's taking a while for people to get the hang of it), and essentially all the pieces were in play right from the start.
(And you shouldn't discount the DS scene. It's alive, it's just not as well known.)
He's talking about an emulator. The array would be data, as far as the DRM scheme is concerned. At least, if the DRM is so restrictive that the array cannot be "executed" even by an emulator, then programming anything under it will become pretty close to impossible. Many programming techniques involve the creation of temporary byte code. Even ordinary PostScript fonts contain byte code.
Oh crap. C'mon, did you all think for more than enough time to jerk your knees before posting the usual "The RIAA is just greedy and wants your money" BS?
The music industry is scared shitless of piracy. If people can get the music they've invested in without paying them a penny, then they're not going to make their money back. The biggest movement threat right now comprises of massive networks where people put music up for download so that millions of anonymous strangers can download it. It differs from traditional systems in that the network effects are greater. Someone can make a copy of a CD they bought for their friends, but there's a limit to how far that'll travel - the number of people who gain a copy in relation to the number of CDs sold is small. Someone can mass manufacture copies of a popular CD and try selling it on the black market, but they risk being caught and a lot of people are unhappy about paying a pirate for music anyway. Not so unauthorized peer-to-peer copying.
If Sony, Universal, et al, directly sue the people who are making the works they invested in to the public for free on this massive scale, they have to be enormously careful not to sully their image in doing so. Yet the entire point of suing is to create a deterence. Looking like nice guys does not gel with getting people afraid of you. If the RIAA does it on their behalf, the RIAA takes the "bad rap" and can "descend" to pretty much any (legal) level without it hurting Sony, Universal, et al.
The purpose of the RIAA lawsuits is not to make money from settlements. It's to scare people away from engaging in copyright infringment. As such, it's not in the interests of the RIAA to appear to have a heart.
Moreover, every single one of you who's going to go home tonight and tell your friends about the big, bad, RIAA, is doing exactly what they hope you'll do. The Slashdot editor who posted this submission is doing exactly what the RIAA hoped he'd do. The Slashbot who submitted the article is doing exactly what the RIAA hoped he'd do. You... quite honestly, the RIAA doesn't give a crap whether you think they're greedy or not, but they are glad you're commenting on the case, and they are very glad you're suggesting they're ruthless.
That's what they want you to think. That's what they want you to say. And at the end of the day, they want you to believe they'll stoop to any level. To the point, I suspect, that if resources were tight, and they had a choice between suing one legged orphans who shared the orphanarium's computer to download a single Brittney Spears song, or suing Paris Hilton for buying her entire local music store's stock, ripping it, and putting it online on a 1Tb/sec connection, they'd sue the orphanarium, even though Hilton did more damage.
It's a matter of getting the right publicity. When you're trying to stop ordinary people from doing something that hurts you, and you've reached a point that you have no options left but to create penalties for doing it, the wrong publicity is the right publicity.
Depends on what you mean by "enforcable".
In the UK, copyright law is stricter than in the US. There's no "fair use". You do, actually, need a license to perform any act that requires copying takes place. This includes copying software onto your hard drive (otherwise known as "installing" it) or possibly even into memory.
Now, if a license doesn't come with a piece of software, it's arguable that you have an implied right, under the Sale of Goods Act, to run it. If you can't run it without installing it (ie it doesn't run from the disk), then you may have an implied right to install it. Once. No back-ups. But if it does come with a license, or an EULA (which provides licenses if you agree to certain acts on your part), and the license is compatible with using the product in its intended way, then yes, you're obliged to either accept it, or take it back.
Is it not enforcable? Only in the sense that without draconian monitoring, some provisions of the EULA cannot be proven to have been breached. But otherwise, yes, it's enforcable, that license agreement, if provided, does indeed apply in the UK.
That's in the UK though. In the US, where the "Sale of Goods Act" has no juristiction, EULAs occupy a murkier area.
The complaint about Fisher Price was that the style looked gaudy and childish. If Apple truly followed Fisher Price design principles, they'd be making some of the strongest computers out there (think about it for a few seconds: how much abuse did your FP toy house or garage take without breaking when you were a kid? Would an iMac or Dell Dimension survive a day of the same treatment?)
The article doesn't say that the phone tap was Judge-approved (or that it wasn't) but it is clear that the phone tap was of a specific person, with there being reasonable cause to decide to tap that person's phone in the first place. I'm trying to work out how this adds to the phone tapping debates, except as handwaving from the "WE MUST TAP ALL PHONES TO STOP THE TERORIRSTS!!!" mob. If no warrant was issued for this tap, I'd like to know why, and if the reason is nobody applied for one, I'd like to know why too.
There are several problems with congress today. One is that the politicians keep passing unconstitutional and/or dumbass laws for populist reasons. The other is they're corrupt, so corrupt they've actually legalized corruption and called it "lobbying" and "campaign contributions".
Your proposal would guarantee the second type of problem, the corruption, would become the defining fault with congress, with every politician being for sale on election.
You have to have some accountability.
Perhaps a better solution would be to knock everyone unconcious before boarding, just as when you're having a tooth pulled.
Not only would this protect us from terrorists, but it would make flying suck less. Much less. Hey, I might even start flying again if they do that.
You don't.
You go to the kiosk, insert your credit card, select the obscure movie that'd be out of print otherwise, and within a few minutes you get a DVD with the movie.
So far as I can tell, this doesn't have a lot to do with "downloaded movies".
No, I mean like you can't do without committing a criminal offense under the DMCA. By you I mean you personally, plus the makers or importers of the product that did the copying.
You "can" copy any DVD in the same sense as you "can" smoke a joint. What the DVD-CCA fears is you legally copying DVDs, and the introduction of consumer level DVD burning hardware that can write to the CSS key parts of DVDs would result in you being able to do that.
How does it prove that?
The RIAA's members continue to sell unencumbered media for the most part. The DVD-CCA has merely announced a minor modification to CSS (actually probably to recordable DVD media) that will allow DVD-burning kiosks to be set up. These DVD burning kiosks will still end up generating discs that are illegal - as in jailtime - to play with an unlicensed DVD player.
I haven't seen the RIAA pushing for jailtime against people who write audio ripping software let alone CD players. And while there may be occasional glitches in its current stategy, so far it seems to be aiming to punish only those who actually willfully infringe copyright (by putting copies of their member's music onto file copying networks.)
Neither are perfect bodies, but the RIAA so far hasn't tried to micromanage how I listen to music. The MPAA really does think, very strongly, that you should only watch its member's content on it's members defined terms, and is willing to promote mechanisms with draconian legal backing to enforce this. They're a bunch of scumbags, and this article does nothing to disabuse me of that notion.
The articles I'm reading suggest the service will be limited to kiosks. This makes sense, as any consumer based DVD burner that can burn CSS discs will be ultimately possible to modify such that it can copy regular DVDs too.
This quarter, yes, the quarter before that no, it was in decline (went from 2.2%MS to 2.0%, IIRC.)
The thing to remember is that now is not a good time to be making any statements on the Mac's market share growth. For 5 of the last 13 months, Apple has essentially been selling a range of machines it had all but publicly declared obsolete. Since January, individual machines have been updated, but until last Monday at least one popular range of Macs was still selling solely in the "obsolete" form. As a result, there's been a period where nobody's wanted to buy a Mac, and then spikes where six to thirteen months of pent-up demand has finally been satisfied.
I don't think anyone should judge where Apple is going for another year at the earliest.
I think you're exaggerating (probably unintentionally) the situation in the US and underexaggerating the situation in Europe.
Cingular runs GSM, with UMTS rolled out in a few areas. It'll be supporting GSM for many years, probably decades to come. Cingular customers roam on T-Mobile's network, and in some places T-Mobile users can roam on Cingular's. It's nice.
UMTS is essentially the next version of GSM. It's undergone a name change largely because the telcos were running out of bandwidth and wanted to try to persuade governments to release more spectrum. They came up with this concept called "3G", which is like what we have right now, only with Internet and video phones, and promised they'd try to find a more efficient way of using the new spectrum allocated to them.
GSM was thus modified to support a "WCDMA" air interface (similar to the air interface in IS-95, as used by Sprint and Verizon. Note that's the only similarity. Ethernet has more in common with Token Ring than UMTS does with IS-95) which is considered more efficient with bandwidth than GSM's old air interface system, a few additional higher level protocols were added, and the product rebranded as "UMTS", and "3G". UMTS isn't compatible with phones that only support GSM, but phones that support both technologies can use a network that supports a mixture of both: that is, if you're in the middle of a conversation on a Cingular phone and walk out of range of a UMTS transmitter, and the only strong signals are from a "GSM classic" transmitter, the phone will hop to that tower seamlessly without dropping the call. And vice-versa. Usually. When it works.
So in that sense, Cingular's running "all recent versions of GSM", while T-Mobile's running "almost all recent versions of GSM". T-Mobile and Cingular both support EDGE, for example, which is yet another air-interface bolted on to GSM.
Meanwhile in Europe, the situation is the same. Mobile phone companies split into those running GSM, those running UMTS, and those running both. The only major difference is that, for the most part, those only running UMTS are running it on a special frequency. GSM is available on 900 and 1800MHz. UMTS somewhere in the 2GHz range.
Both Europe and America are preparing for a roll-out of WiMax.
What's the difference between Europe and America? Both run GSM on two frequencies, and have a mixture of both regular GSM and UMTS available. Both are planning roll-outs of WiMax. Both have a few esoteric standards intended to replace trunked radio (eg. Nextel's iDEN and Europe's TETRA.) In addition to legacy standards (both Europe and America have them), and the failed European initiatives for microcellular networks (CT2, DECT - the latter lives on in non-commercial settings) the only major difference is that some American phone companies use a third standard IS-95 ("CDMA"). That's it. That's the only addition to the alphabet soup.
You really feel this way? I don't know. I've been in to Circuit City, Best Buy, Sears, et al, and gazed at the screens, and you know, they're nice, and I appreciate the higher quality, but I certainly wouldn't say they approach "looking through a window", not even from a distance.
Considering they're generally lower resolution than the average computer monitor, and blown up to about six times the size, even the greater distance from the eye to the screen doesn't exactly help.
Neither.
Apple didn't "get" Open Source (that's fine, many of us Free Software enthusiasts don't "get" Open Source either) and began deprecating it when it started to interfere with their other plans in general. The first to be deprecated was the open-sourciness, with Apple releasing code but generally not in a "community friendly" way and rarely making it easy for the community to contribute directly back.
There's no evil in that, if you're strongly opinionated about the direction code should take, and you have the resources to write it yourself, you don't necessarily want to spend time trying to integrate everyone else's changes with your own.
Some people noticed. In particular, the KHTML people got a little fed up with people pointing out that WebKit supported some feature or other that hadn't made it into KHTML yet. They explained that the changes to WebKit weren't easy to track and back-port. This was interpreted by the meeja, including Slashdot, as KHTML slapping down Apple, rather than slapping down the people who assume that simply because X is based on Y, Y can easily incorporate changes to X, and who keep flaming the developers of Y for not doing this.
Then Apple closed XNU-Intel. Yes, they did. There are several releases of XNU-Intel for which source code apparently will never be released (though who would want them?) Some people noticed. They pointed this out and were immediately hounded by a bunch of, for the most part, obnoxious Mac zealots who claimed this wasn't true because at some point in the future, Apple might change their mind, and any way, who said their mind had been made up, I mean, Apple hasn't made an official announcement, right? To make matters worse, Apple's one comment on this was so inane it simply fueled the fire. One developer at Apple, posting on an Apple mailing list, said that the talk of XNU-Intel being "closed" was "speculation" and people shouldn't assume anything.
This was meaningless and largely wrong. Those saying it was closed were right: it was. You couldn't download the source to XNU-Intel. When you're stating a fact, you're not engaging in speculation.
There was much anger at this point because many people felt lied to. Apple had been advertising the openness of Darwin for a long time, and "Team Apple*" had been loud in repeating this supposed advantage, and now, without any explanation, the core of Darwin was now closed. Team Apple responded by claiming the Apple developer who said "speculation" had actually used the word "yet", and the "yet" word was used in pretty much every response to anyone critical of Apple or simply pointing out the fact that XNU-Intel was closed. Team Apple changed tact on the "Open Source is an advantage of Mac OS X" thing too, claiming it was never Apple's intention to release a useful operating system as open source, and that nobody cares about operating system kernels anyway. Needless to say, this intensified the anger.
What do we have today?
Apple has taken considerable steps to undo the damage. There's still no real explanation as to why XNU-Intel was closed. No technologies were announced yesterday whose existance could be discerned by looking at the kernel - which has supported the Intel architecture since its original release, which has supported the Xeon CPU range even back in the Panther days, and probably long before. It was not necessary to withhold the XNU source before the release of the PowerMac G5, or, indeed, any of the recent radical changes in architecture. Meanwhile, the software-related announcements this week don't appear to have anything to do with the Tiger kernel.
So, anyway, leaving aside the nonsense that it's "been confirmed" that the withholding of the source "was due to Apple's policy of not commenting upon unreleased products", we don't have an explanatio
I think the "problems" are the elitist programmers who haven't realised yet that they actually aren't perfect... ;-)
Ooohh! Ooooh! -5 Flamebait! Go on, I dare you!
Seriously though, the major problem is that Java's advantages are rarely what the loudest advocates suggest. They'll talk incessantly about how they were able to get their app out in Java in only six weeks, and that it's all about making the programmer's life easier. That's not really it. What Java does is trap more errors, and moves from an insanity (manual memory management) to a more natural, free flowing, yet structured, memory model (at the end of the day, it's not even about garbage collection, that's just a side benefit of the memory model). And moreover, it prevents programmers from making common mistakes. And some programmers think that they are good enough to avoid those mistakes. But, you know what? I seriously doubt that. And I'm sometimes the guy who's running your program. And I don't trust you. You trust you. I don't. I'm being asked to trust you when I run your software, or when I add your software to mine, and I'd rather not. Not because I'm being insulting, or hate you, or anything like that, I'm just realistic. Even Knuth has had a few bugs to fix in TeX.
Java doesn't guarantee correctness, but it catches more bugs, and it makes some of the more dangerous ones - the buffer overflows, the stack overflows, etc, etc - practically impossible. I'd be curious to know if Objective C does the same thing, or if the obsession with the GC aspect of Java has gotten the better of everyone, again.
That's called typosquatting. A page is served up with ads because you mis-typed a domain name, and someone "registered" that mis-spelling hoping people would type it by accident. Cameroon wants to make money from people who mis-spell ".com", as well as people who mis-spell domain names under .cm.
I don't know what you think it isn't, but typo-squatting is pretty much exactly what it is. If it isn't typo-squatting, then me registering "salshdot.org" and serving up "helpful" ads isn't typo-squatting either.