1. I suspect the majority of gun owners use their guns lawfully.
2. Guns are generally promoted for legal purposes (hunting, self defense, preventing the King of England from invading Massachussets, etc.)
3. Even if both or either of the above were untrue, Guns get a special exemption being, as they are, protected under the second amendment. The Constitution doesn't have anything similar when it comes to P2P clients:
A reliable network for the distribution of content, being necessary to the advancement of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear computers with peer-to-peer file distribution systems, shall not be infringed.
VCRs are a limited tool for "piracy". Their primary function, the reason they sold so well and what they were marketed as being for, was to ensure that you didn't miss TV programmes. You could record a programme while you were out or doing something else, and then watch it when you came home. In the BetaMax case, SCOTUS just said "Well, that type of copying is legal, and it looks like VCRs are primarily designed for that, and it'd be awkward for the majority of users to use them for more serious forms of copyright infringement, so this is cool by us."
Compare that to P2P. There's relatively little free content to distribute in the first place. It's increadibly easy to use most P2P clients to break the law, often unintentionally. In my experience, most users, whether they rationalise their use as "at the end of the day, it helps the artists" or not (that's a whole other debate), use it to receive and send content without the copyright holder's permission. So far as I can see, of the headline P2P systems, only BitTorrent has seriously bucked the trend - that is, in the early days, it was used largely for distributing ISOs of Free Software, a use that was promoted by the way it was released and the community it was released for.
All the Supreme Court has said is "Context Matters". VCRs were legal because their primary function, the function for which most users bought them, the function for which they were (honestly) marketed was legal. P2P networks simply do not have that luxury. They can be used legally. But the fact is, we probably wouldn't be using anything except BitTorrent if they were, because nobody would use these networks.
I'm not sure that's true. BitTorrent in particular started out as being used for largely legitimate purposes, it seemed, in the first year, to be used pretty much exclusively for distributing GNU/Linux ISOs and similar, freely redistributable, content.
Given this, I doubt the Supreme Court would suggest it falls into the same category as Grokster. Clearly the product was designed for legitimate, lawful, purposes.
That, ultimately, is what the Supremes said today. Context is everything.
I think the widespread availability of real news from various different sources (not just ClariNew's agency feed), shopping services (such as those offered by Amazon.com and eBay.com), the increases in technologies that offer artists ways to produce and distribute content (MPEG4, Flash, etc - even if the latter is often used for evil too), the ability to manage one's bank and credit card accounts via the web, as well as accounts for electric, telephone (mobile and fixed), and other utilities, the ability to research a car's vehicle history before you buy it, not to mention the number of large websites that would arguably be impossible to professionally maintain without sponsorship (such as IMDB et al), have all had a positive effect and been net contributions to the usefulness of the 'net.
The downside has been spam, some arguably abusive use of Flash and pop-up windows in JavaScript, and the occasional hacker - though there were plenty of those in 1990, let me tell you, and yes FTP sites and BBSes did frequently carry software infected with malware, or "Trojans" as they were referred to then. Usenet is, of course, on its last legs, but as its been replaced by numerous web-technology based forums, such as the one you're reading now, it's not as if we're worse off over-all. Besides which, Usenet started to go to pot when people started posting in HTML at a time when 90% of newsreaders didn't support it and had users, posting from Universities and other sources of shell accounts, who couldn't very well change even if they wanted to.
So I think you're wrong. I think the Internet's better than it's ever been before. And I think commercial involvement has been a big driver of that.
So you'd go before a judge and ask for a blanket search warrant based on statements made by a CEO who admitted to criminal activity, without a trial to establish fact evidence, to grab everything from a third company against which you have zero physical evidence and only an unsubstantiated allegation from your admitted crook against an intermediary.
No, you'd go to a judge to ask for a relatively specific search warrant based upon prima facia evidence of wrong doing. Trial? Are you joking? Do you think that Judges require a trial to convict someone before issuing search warrants? The entire point of search warrants is to gather evidence. And the bar for getting search warrants is not that high.
You've been watching too much TV:-)
I think you have. There's a whole bunch of myths associated with the justice system, in that it's always assumed that judges base their entire decision-making on loopholes that over-protect defendants and screw prosecutors. As a general rule, if there's just cause to gather specific types of evidence, judges can and will grant search warrants. What they will not do is grant them in obvious fishing expeditions.
Relevent evidence being examined because someone admitted a particular offense took place and there's already circumstantial evidence to back it up is not generally considered a "fishing expedition." All the prosecutor essentially has to do is say "XYZ corp's ads were being shown by SpamBeEverywhere, and their CEO admits XYZ corp paid them, specifically they were paid in cash by such-and-such an employee of XYZ corp." That's two bits of evidence right there, and it's perfectly legitimate for a judge to issue a (narrow) search warrant for relevent evidence.
By your own statement, only XYZ Corp would be under the spotlight at that point, not any company making payments to it. You would have to establish the connection (not just an allegation) between XYZ Corp and SpamBeEverywhere Inc before you'd be allowed to go on a fishing expedition for payments made TO XYZ Corp by any 3rd party
The above comment makes no sense whatsoever in the context of the comment I was making. I think this is because I simplified the scenario a little to get to the meat of the issue (XYZ Corp is an alleged client of SpamBeEverywhere. The latter is the entity responsible for the spyware, it's creation and propogation. We can add hundreds of companies with different roles here: developers, the company that "owns" the spyware product, selling advertising and buying spaces in installed applications, and even clients of the latter like Sharman Networks) Some of the comments above though are false anyway, but to try to cover both:
There are at least two parties that are under the spotlight. XYZ Corp and SpamBeEverywhere. Nobody has alleged any payments would be made to XYZ corp. SpamBeEverywhere has received payments from XYZ to put their ads in spyware. So, for example, XYZ might be Brand Name Cola Products Inc, and SpamBeEverywhere might be Cydoor.
At least two connections exist. (1) The CEO of SpamBeEverywhere has admitted to receiving payments from XYZ Corp to show their ads. (2) SpamBeEverywhere has shown XYZ Corp's ads.
The purpose of an investigation is to examine an allegation. The trial afterwards determines whether the evidence uncovered during the investigation proves the allegation is true (and that the allegation involves unlawful activity.) Saying "not just an allegation" is nonsense. Everything up to the trial is a set of allegations. Nothing before any judge issuing a search warrant constitutes anything but an allegation, in the eyes of the law.
What fishing investigation? It'd be a fishing investigation if there was no evidence of illegal conduct, or if the investigation unnecessarily included gathering irrelevent material to the allegations involved.
Generally speaking, the reason to collect evidence like this is to create opportunities to collect further evidence. It's a lot easier to say "We need all records of all emails and payments made to J. Blogs of XYZ Corp as we believe he was used to funnel money to SpamBeEverywhere Inc in return for advertising, according to this sworn statement by the CEO of SpamBeEverywhere Inc" to a judge and get a warrant than it is to say "Er, we need, well, all emails ever sent in the last year and all records of all payments made to anyone by XYZ Corp because we know SpamBeEverywhere Inc showed their ads."
Interestingly there was an 8 bit version of IDE. I know this because Commodore made a bolt-on for the Amiga A500/A500+/A1000 computers called the A590, which supported SCSI and "8-bit IDE" (referred to as XTIDE, for obvious reasons) drives.
I think this fits in with the grandparent's assertion that IDE, in some ways, was the natural successor to the hard card and was probably inspired by it. You essentially had the originals, then someone at Seagate (? - I can't remember who pioneered the format) realising that you could put all the circuitry that was on the hardcard onto the drive itself, where the drive's side of the controller would normally be, and reduce the role of an adapter card to being just something to convert ISA (XT, AT, whatever) to a form that can run over a ribbon cable.
At one point, SCO was suing AutoZone for supposedly violating its license, by switching from SCO Unix to GNU/Linux.
The whole thing was a little wierd, and never fully explained. Initially, SCO gave everyone the impression this was the first of their "$699" lawsuits, but over time it became apparent this was some kind of contract dispute, though one that was still a little shakey.
Good lord! That's the type of experienced C programmer they have at Sony, one who doesn't understand the *printf() functions?
I'm genuinely amazed at this. This is the type of mistake you make by bluffing your way into a project rather than actually knowing enough about the technologies you're using.
Cuban's argument was flawed. He argued it should be $5 per month, but said this should replace lawsuits against uploaders.
If the logic is to remain internally consistant, Cuban should have argued that the fines against uploaders were $5 per individual who downloaded music in any month. So if in any month 1,000 people obtain music from a particular node, that node operator should be fined $5,000 per month he or she was operating. Say, $60,000 for someone who got away with doing this for a year.
That would actually be worse than many RIAA fines were in practice!
No. They charge you per song. You then get the option of getting cheaper songs in future if you offer them some of your bandwidth.
If you decide you don't actually want more music, you don't need to give them bandwidth. Likewise, if you do, but it just isn't worth giving up some of your precious bandwidth for cheaper music, you don't need to either.
It doesn't sound like a bad deal to me, especially if you can earn your credits by leaving your client open when you're asleep and at work.
Piracy is the act of robbing ships at sea, not of duplicating part or all of a copyrighted CD or DVD.
Piracy is indeed (unauthorized) duplicating part or all of a copyrighted CD or DVD. The term has been in use for decades, and this definition is listed in most dictionaries. The fact that the same word is also used to describe "robbing ships at sea" is hardly grounds for suggesting that it cannot possibly mean copyright infringement, any more than the fact "mean" means "is defined as" means it doesn't mean "An average calculated by dividing the total by the size of the sample" or "unpleasant to other people" or "reluctant to part with money, not generous."
Piracy is also used to describe unlicensed radio transmission on licensed bands, FWIW. If I set up a radio station in the FM broadcast radio band (about 80MHz to about 170MHz, I forget the exact boundaries) without the permission of the relevent authority of the country I'm operating in, I'm engaging in "piracy". No ships involved, unless I'm Radio Caroline, of course;-)
The index registers offset from a full 16 bit address.
That's "supplying the other eight bits". You can't use an eight bit index register to address 16 bit memory without supplying the other 8 bits some how, whether that's by "FIXED ADDRESS + X" or "FIXED PAGE * 256 + X". If the architecture lets you combine registers to create an address, then that's fine, but this isn't what we're talking about for the 6502.
There was no instructions that combined both X and Y.
You may be right, I'm trying to dig up the documentation on it and not getting anywhere which presumably means my memory is faulty - maybe I'm confusing a "liked to have" with an actually-had.
In practice it was very rare that you needed more than 8 bits to index with.
I'm going to go with "I was forced to use 8 bit addressing, so I found ways to avoid using 16 bit addresses throughout my code" as the explanation for this one.;-)
It was immensely difficult to write clean, maintainable, code in the 6502's model. Yes, you can probably find ways to reduce the amount of 16 bit pointer arithmetic in your code, but that's really the point. You're having to code in fairly arbitrary restrictions to ensure your code is relatively clean for the architecture. How often do you have a variable amount of data where you can be sure it's not going to exceed 256 bytes in size? The screen is bigger than that. Arbitrary bitmaps generally will be. Strings? Urgh.
I never used C on the 6502, but a quick Google shows Small-c and Cc65 available. Both of which appear to compile to 6502 machine code, not a VM.
Ok, that's a foot-in-mouth thing on my part. I need to check what's new in the last ten years before making such comments.;) What I do remember was it was the consensus for a very long time that anything approximating to a real C compiler (including Byte's awful "Small C") for the 6502 just wasn't practical without a VM. I'm glad to hear someone's done it. cc65 in particular seems to be an impressive work, ultimately comparable to many 1980s C compilers for low memory *80 based systems. The only obvious 6502ism I see is the limit on the amount of memory for local variables.
It's worth noting that a great deal of C is about pointers. Some very simple stuff involving pointers is going to compile into a lot of code on the '02. "while(*d++ = *s++);" is relatively trivial on most CPUs. An automatic translation of it to 6502, which requires that the compiler cannot make assumptions a human would (eg "I know I'm copying a string, I'm happy with making sure it's less than 256 bytes in length at most") is going to look pretty ugly.
the BBC Micro memory map was perfectly logical, and technically was an excellent machine for it's time.
The BBC Micro in many ways was the Atom done properly. The point about the Atom was that it was Acorn's first 6502 based machine and it didn't exactly demonstrate an affinity with elegance on the part of the designers. With Apple and Commodore chosing the 6502 when it was a sixth of the price of the 6800 and 8080, their motives were obvious. Acorn's motives are less obvious, given the machine came out in 1980, when the Z80A was already on the market and even cheaper.
I'm just baffled that a chip without proper 16 bit addressing would get the following it has. Every chip has limitations, but I think the 6502 was one of those where programmers spent time redesigning the algorithm to fit the CPU rather than as efficiently as possible designing code to implement the best algorithm.
Region coding was made so that DVDs release in one market, aren't playable in a different region where the first run has yet to occur. Many movies aren't release simultaneously.
While this might be a reason why region encoding was invented, that's not actually the case as to why it's used in practice, the vast majority of DVD releases are region encoded, despite being releases of movies that came out in the cinemas years ago.
There are two reasons here, one of which is "Why was this invented?" and "Why is it used?" Invented has really to do with shoring up the already existing distribution system across the world. Different companies typically own the rights to distribute movies in different countries. For example, for the movie Brazil, Fox owns the worldwide rights, with the exeception of North America, which belongs to Universal.
The argument goes that one distributor can undercut the other if people can just import whichever version is cheaper for their respective market, but the reasons for DVDs being cheaper in one market compared to another may vary. For example: people in Malaysia are unlikely to have the same disposable income as people in Britain. People in the US may have more disposable income than those in Britain but this may work in American's favour, they may be willing to buy more DVDs if the cost is slightly less.
As you can imagine, this creates a second reason which may, or may not, have been in the minds of the scumbags who invented the region encoding system: to try to maximise the price in areas where more revenue per unit can be obtained. This works, after a fashion, as long as the areas are politically separated and unlikely to end up with anti-marketrigging laws that straddle international boundaries. At the moment, that seems to be the case. The EU is entirely located within region 2. The US is entirely located within region 1, as are all the members of NAFTA.
For the most part, I believe the major reason most DVDs are region encoded is the second, price differentiation based, reason. I don't think the major timing differences that once meant, for example, the original Star Wars appeared in 1977 for Americans and was watched in 1978 by most British people I know, myself included, are as big a factor as they once were. There are staggered releases, but there are also many worldwide simultaneous releases. The gaps aren't that huge. And once a movie has been shown everywhere, continuing to region-encode DVDs would appear to be silly without additional reasons. So it really isn't to do with staggered release dates, just regional price maximization.
Pretty much any dynamic address (ie out of registers X and Y) had to have the other eight bits supplied, with the exception of one or two instructions that'd combine X and Y together. It was hell to program for. Snazzy? If by snazzy you mean dozens of options, all awful, then yeah, snazzy is one way of putting it.
Motorola got it right with the 680x series, which had proper sixteen bit index registers (which is what the 6502 should have had in the first place.) My recollection was that the MOS Technology engineers were trying to improve upon the original 6800, which had a single 16 bit index register, IX. They thought it would be a great idea to split it into eight bit registers.
The result was so mind-boggling awful, that Steve Wozniak actually felt obliged to put a VM in the original Apple II ROM to make programming easier, and to this date, nobody has written a C or Pascal compiler for the 6502 that didn't use a VM abstraction rather than raw 6502 instructions. Z80? Dozens. 6809? Plenty. 6502? Ha.
I remain to this day baffled that anyone could like the system. Wozniak chose it for the Apple I not because it was good, but because, despite being largely compatable with the 6800 in hardware terms, it was an order of magnitude cheaper. Commodore followed suit, eventually buying MOS Technologies, but never actually bothered to release a usable version. Acorn was clearly interested in it for its buzzword compatability (obvious in the original Acorn Atom manuals, which talked excitedly about its pipelining features.) (Anyone who's seen the memory map of the latter machine, incidentally, knows it wasn't technical merit that had a hand in it. This thing had RAM before and after the ROM and display memory.) So far as I can tell, its fans really only like it because it was the first CPU they were exposed to, and it was more efficient than the Z80A, MHz for MHz.
Geez, that probably comes across as a big flame. Don't take it personally, it's not you, it's that awful CPU. It makes as little sense as the segmented 808[68] CPUs (Why, Intel? Why?!) which also, for some reason, had excited fans too. There are so many absolute bodges that have come into existance in the computing world and hogged the limelight far too long. The 6502, in the field of personal computing, was arguably the first.
Kind of scary really. Imagine if the "Apple PC" had taken off and been the machine everyone cloned instead of the IBM PC. The IIGS being the "AT" of the line.
The Mac would probably have been a dead end. Apple would have seen their sales of the Apple II line as their primary source of income. Now, in fairness, the GS adopted some Macintosh technologies, running a reasonable facsimilie of the user interface and moving to 3.5" drives. So what we saw in Mac wouldn't have been completely lost.
Commodore would probably still be with us, as owners of the 6502 (They bought MOS Technologies back in the seventies, IIRC)
The PC would have been an even bigger hack than it is now. If you think Pentiums supporting the old 20-bit segmented memory map of the 8/16 bit 8088 was bad, imagine what something based on the 6502 would be like. The device was entirely 8 bit. Even addressing was 8 bit except for one instruction, meaning you had to hardcode the other eight bits of any 16 bit address in your code.
Sadly, not quite. The DMCA can be used to enforce licensing arrangements.
The deal is that the DMCA blesses something called an "Access Control Mechanism." This is something designed to limit access to copyrighted material to authorized devices. The most (infamous) of these is the CSS algorithm, used to prevent unlicensed DVD players from showing CSS'd DVDs. An unauthorized player would be one that (a) isn't willing to pay the license fee and/or (b) wants to go beyond the license, to, for example, show DVDs in an unauthorized region.
(Sidenote: While region-free DVD players exist, for the most part they exist because the DVDCCA is, largely, ignoring the issue. If they choose to, not only could they rescind the license, but they could also ensure new DVDs are not playable on the violating manufacturer's DVD players. All DVDs have a collection of encrypted keys. The algorithm goes something like "Give me the file that corresponds to the encrypted DVD key encrypted using my manufacturer's key. Ok, let me decrypt that with my manufacturer's key. Now I can decrypt the DVD." Removing keys for a specific manufacturer in new DVDs is, however, in some ways the nuclear option, because of the support issues involved.)
So yeah, Apple concievably could sue over an attempt to circumvent an access control measure that prevents non-Macintoshes from running their copyrighted software. Nice, huh?
In a world in which it costs $10 to register a new, throwaway, domain, I can assure you that having to "having to" put a fake return-address in your emails is even less necessary than it ever really was.
This is one of those utterly stupid "anti-spam" systems that just creates hastle for legitimate users while failing to take into account the actual effect it'll have on spam. It's moronic, the people proposing it are morons, and anyone blindly supporting it hasn't paid it more than a few seconds of thought.
Want to know why we have so much spam? Why it grows every year? Because the bulk of the "anti-spammers" are too myopic in their hatred of a minor technical problem to encourage and adopt solutions that'll work. Hence the ever increasing attempts to build increasingly ineffectual blacklists and whitelists. Meanwhile, the spammers simply increase the amount of stuff they send, knowing that if only 1% of their messages will get through, they have to send 100x as many messages. The entire thing has become nothing more than a game between anti-spammers creating little intellectual challenges and spammers solving them.
What is Sender-ID? A lemon. It solves the wrong issue. I want to be able to say "Have I given this entity permission to email me?" It says "Well, can't tell you that, but I'll tell you what, this is coming from an entity unwise enough to not protect their domain name with a list of 'legitimate' SMTP servers. So I'll junk it, because I think that's bad practice."
They're breaking email, and they don't care. As long as they can pretend it's the spammers that are at fault, like some thug that breaks all the windows of all the buildings owned by a particular landlord because one of the landlord's tenants in one particular building plays his music loudly at 3 in the morning, they can justify their actions to themselves in a fit of self-righteousness. Fuck 'em, and the horse they rode in on.
Sheepshaver is more of a (stripped down) Mac emulator than a Classic emulator:
However, you still need a copy of MacOS and a PowerMac ROM image to use SheepShaver. If you're planning to run SheepShaver on a PowerMac, you probably already have these two items.
There are probably ways in which desperate people can obtain both, but for most it'll be a legally dubious route.
Ardi's Executor is nicer solution, but as the GP says, it doesn't run non-68k apps. One has to hope that the sudden market for third party improvements in Classic compatability born from Apple's unwillingness to produce Macs that'll run older software will give Ardi, at least, an incentive to put in the long awaited PowerPC emulation support.
But as of now, I don't think anyone can legitimately say that there are real solutions for running (most) older, non-Carbonized, Mac software on the Intel Macs, sadly.
Games will suffer. Usually (not always, but usually) game ports are done by a third party. The way it goes - XYZ Corp writes a good game for the Windows platform. A company like MacSoft then expresses an interest, pays for the rights to produce a Mac version, and then puts considerable R&D into porting the game. They then have a monopoly on sales of that game for the Macintosh platform.
This model doesn't work if someone can buy the Windows version of a game and play it on their Mac. Unless the games come out at the same time and are roughly the same price (forever, not just in the weeks following release) there'll always be an incentive for Mac users to buy a Windows version of a game even if performance isn't as well as it would be for a native port. Seriously, would you spend $40-50 on a game knowing it's already a Windows Budget title, obtainable for $10 or so? Not to mention the convenience of occasionally being able to pick up a game from *Mart, Best Buy, etc, rather than ordering everything from Amazon.
I can see Wine and Codeweaver's version of it becoming a major threat to companies like MacSoft. Whether, at the end of the day, the massively increased choices will counterbalance any lower quality inherent in running games under non-native emulated APIs, is still up for debate.
This is terrible news. How on earth will an industry that is putting a lot into R&D to develop virtual beings with simulated appearances and voices going to get actors to do voice overs and appear in mini-movies?
Oh, hold on, I think I have an idea on how they can do it...
Well, we don't know if their protests were unfounded or not. One thing's clear: if you're trying to sneak something into a bill, someone waving their arms yelling "Look what he's trying to do" is going to make you step back and wait.
Whether this is similar to Y2K ("Nothing happened! Complete waste of time!" "Idiot! It only didn't happen because we did all that work!") or
like the Tiger Repellant ("What's that?" "A tiger repellant" "What for? There are no tigers in Atlanta" "Exactly. Works pretty well, huh?") is difficult to tell from the point of view of an outsider.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's not remotely similar. It's not even relevent. Sorry.
1. I suspect the majority of gun owners use their guns lawfully.
2. Guns are generally promoted for legal purposes (hunting, self defense, preventing the King of England from invading Massachussets, etc.)
3. Even if both or either of the above were untrue, Guns get a special exemption being, as they are, protected under the second amendment. The Constitution doesn't have anything similar when it comes to P2P clients:
A reliable network for the distribution of content, being necessary to the advancement of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear computers with peer-to-peer file distribution systems, shall not be infringed.
VCRs are a limited tool for "piracy". Their primary function, the reason they sold so well and what they were marketed as being for, was to ensure that you didn't miss TV programmes. You could record a programme while you were out or doing something else, and then watch it when you came home. In the BetaMax case, SCOTUS just said "Well, that type of copying is legal, and it looks like VCRs are primarily designed for that, and it'd be awkward for the majority of users to use them for more serious forms of copyright infringement, so this is cool by us."
Compare that to P2P. There's relatively little free content to distribute in the first place. It's increadibly easy to use most P2P clients to break the law, often unintentionally. In my experience, most users, whether they rationalise their use as "at the end of the day, it helps the artists" or not (that's a whole other debate), use it to receive and send content without the copyright holder's permission. So far as I can see, of the headline P2P systems, only BitTorrent has seriously bucked the trend - that is, in the early days, it was used largely for distributing ISOs of Free Software, a use that was promoted by the way it was released and the community it was released for.
All the Supreme Court has said is "Context Matters". VCRs were legal because their primary function, the function for which most users bought them, the function for which they were (honestly) marketed was legal. P2P networks simply do not have that luxury. They can be used legally. But the fact is, we probably wouldn't be using anything except BitTorrent if they were, because nobody would use these networks.
Given this, I doubt the Supreme Court would suggest it falls into the same category as Grokster. Clearly the product was designed for legitimate, lawful, purposes.
That, ultimately, is what the Supremes said today. Context is everything.
The downside has been spam, some arguably abusive use of Flash and pop-up windows in JavaScript, and the occasional hacker - though there were plenty of those in 1990, let me tell you, and yes FTP sites and BBSes did frequently carry software infected with malware, or "Trojans" as they were referred to then. Usenet is, of course, on its last legs, but as its been replaced by numerous web-technology based forums, such as the one you're reading now, it's not as if we're worse off over-all. Besides which, Usenet started to go to pot when people started posting in HTML at a time when 90% of newsreaders didn't support it and had users, posting from Universities and other sources of shell accounts, who couldn't very well change even if they wanted to.
So I think you're wrong. I think the Internet's better than it's ever been before. And I think commercial involvement has been a big driver of that.
No, you'd go to a judge to ask for a relatively specific search warrant based upon prima facia evidence of wrong doing. Trial? Are you joking? Do you think that Judges require a trial to convict someone before issuing search warrants? The entire point of search warrants is to gather evidence. And the bar for getting search warrants is not that high.
I think you have. There's a whole bunch of myths associated with the justice system, in that it's always assumed that judges base their entire decision-making on loopholes that over-protect defendants and screw prosecutors. As a general rule, if there's just cause to gather specific types of evidence, judges can and will grant search warrants. What they will not do is grant them in obvious fishing expeditions.
Relevent evidence being examined because someone admitted a particular offense took place and there's already circumstantial evidence to back it up is not generally considered a "fishing expedition." All the prosecutor essentially has to do is say "XYZ corp's ads were being shown by SpamBeEverywhere, and their CEO admits XYZ corp paid them, specifically they were paid in cash by such-and-such an employee of XYZ corp." That's two bits of evidence right there, and it's perfectly legitimate for a judge to issue a (narrow) search warrant for relevent evidence.
The above comment makes no sense whatsoever in the context of the comment I was making. I think this is because I simplified the scenario a little to get to the meat of the issue (XYZ Corp is an alleged client of SpamBeEverywhere. The latter is the entity responsible for the spyware, it's creation and propogation. We can add hundreds of companies with different roles here: developers, the company that "owns" the spyware product, selling advertising and buying spaces in installed applications, and even clients of the latter like Sharman Networks) Some of the comments above though are false anyway, but to try to cover both:
Generally speaking, the reason to collect evidence like this is to create opportunities to collect further evidence. It's a lot easier to say "We need all records of all emails and payments made to J. Blogs of XYZ Corp as we believe he was used to funnel money to SpamBeEverywhere Inc in return for advertising, according to this sworn statement by the CEO of SpamBeEverywhere Inc" to a judge and get a warrant than it is to say "Er, we need, well, all emails ever sent in the last year and all records of all payments made to anyone by XYZ Corp because we know SpamBeEverywhere Inc showed their ads."
I think this fits in with the grandparent's assertion that IDE, in some ways, was the natural successor to the hard card and was probably inspired by it. You essentially had the originals, then someone at Seagate (? - I can't remember who pioneered the format) realising that you could put all the circuitry that was on the hardcard onto the drive itself, where the drive's side of the controller would normally be, and reduce the role of an adapter card to being just something to convert ISA (XT, AT, whatever) to a form that can run over a ribbon cable.
The whole thing was a little wierd, and never fully explained. Initially, SCO gave everyone the impression this was the first of their "$699" lawsuits, but over time it became apparent this was some kind of contract dispute, though one that was still a little shakey.
If you call the BSA anonymously, they will not know who you are. So when they sue your employer, you'll get sued too.
I'm genuinely amazed at this. This is the type of mistake you make by bluffing your way into a project rather than actually knowing enough about the technologies you're using.
If the logic is to remain internally consistant, Cuban should have argued that the fines against uploaders were $5 per individual who downloaded music in any month. So if in any month 1,000 people obtain music from a particular node, that node operator should be fined $5,000 per month he or she was operating. Say, $60,000 for someone who got away with doing this for a year.
That would actually be worse than many RIAA fines were in practice!
If you decide you don't actually want more music, you don't need to give them bandwidth. Likewise, if you do, but it just isn't worth giving up some of your precious bandwidth for cheaper music, you don't need to either.
It doesn't sound like a bad deal to me, especially if you can earn your credits by leaving your client open when you're asleep and at work.
Piracy is also used to describe unlicensed radio transmission on licensed bands, FWIW. If I set up a radio station in the FM broadcast radio band (about 80MHz to about 170MHz, I forget the exact boundaries) without the permission of the relevent authority of the country I'm operating in, I'm engaging in "piracy". No ships involved, unless I'm Radio Caroline, of course ;-)
It was immensely difficult to write clean, maintainable, code in the 6502's model. Yes, you can probably find ways to reduce the amount of 16 bit pointer arithmetic in your code, but that's really the point. You're having to code in fairly arbitrary restrictions to ensure your code is relatively clean for the architecture. How often do you have a variable amount of data where you can be sure it's not going to exceed 256 bytes in size? The screen is bigger than that. Arbitrary bitmaps generally will be. Strings? Urgh.
Ok, that's a foot-in-mouth thing on my part. I need to check what's new in the last ten years before making such comments.It's worth noting that a great deal of C is about pointers. Some very simple stuff involving pointers is going to compile into a lot of code on the '02. "while(*d++ = *s++);" is relatively trivial on most CPUs. An automatic translation of it to 6502, which requires that the compiler cannot make assumptions a human would (eg "I know I'm copying a string, I'm happy with making sure it's less than 256 bytes in length at most") is going to look pretty ugly.
The BBC Micro in many ways was the Atom done properly. The point about the Atom was that it was Acorn's first 6502 based machine and it didn't exactly demonstrate an affinity with elegance on the part of the designers. With Apple and Commodore chosing the 6502 when it was a sixth of the price of the 6800 and 8080, their motives were obvious. Acorn's motives are less obvious, given the machine came out in 1980, when the Z80A was already on the market and even cheaper.I'm just baffled that a chip without proper 16 bit addressing would get the following it has. Every chip has limitations, but I think the 6502 was one of those where programmers spent time redesigning the algorithm to fit the CPU rather than as efficiently as possible designing code to implement the best algorithm.
There are two reasons here, one of which is "Why was this invented?" and "Why is it used?" Invented has really to do with shoring up the already existing distribution system across the world. Different companies typically own the rights to distribute movies in different countries. For example, for the movie Brazil, Fox owns the worldwide rights, with the exeception of North America, which belongs to Universal.
The argument goes that one distributor can undercut the other if people can just import whichever version is cheaper for their respective market, but the reasons for DVDs being cheaper in one market compared to another may vary. For example: people in Malaysia are unlikely to have the same disposable income as people in Britain. People in the US may have more disposable income than those in Britain but this may work in American's favour, they may be willing to buy more DVDs if the cost is slightly less.
As you can imagine, this creates a second reason which may, or may not, have been in the minds of the scumbags who invented the region encoding system: to try to maximise the price in areas where more revenue per unit can be obtained. This works, after a fashion, as long as the areas are politically separated and unlikely to end up with anti-marketrigging laws that straddle international boundaries. At the moment, that seems to be the case. The EU is entirely located within region 2. The US is entirely located within region 1, as are all the members of NAFTA.
For the most part, I believe the major reason most DVDs are region encoded is the second, price differentiation based, reason. I don't think the major timing differences that once meant, for example, the original Star Wars appeared in 1977 for Americans and was watched in 1978 by most British people I know, myself included, are as big a factor as they once were. There are staggered releases, but there are also many worldwide simultaneous releases. The gaps aren't that huge. And once a movie has been shown everywhere, continuing to region-encode DVDs would appear to be silly without additional reasons. So it really isn't to do with staggered release dates, just regional price maximization.
Motorola got it right with the 680x series, which had proper sixteen bit index registers (which is what the 6502 should have had in the first place.) My recollection was that the MOS Technology engineers were trying to improve upon the original 6800, which had a single 16 bit index register, IX. They thought it would be a great idea to split it into eight bit registers.
The result was so mind-boggling awful, that Steve Wozniak actually felt obliged to put a VM in the original Apple II ROM to make programming easier, and to this date, nobody has written a C or Pascal compiler for the 6502 that didn't use a VM abstraction rather than raw 6502 instructions. Z80? Dozens. 6809? Plenty. 6502? Ha.
I remain to this day baffled that anyone could like the system. Wozniak chose it for the Apple I not because it was good, but because, despite being largely compatable with the 6800 in hardware terms, it was an order of magnitude cheaper. Commodore followed suit, eventually buying MOS Technologies, but never actually bothered to release a usable version. Acorn was clearly interested in it for its buzzword compatability (obvious in the original Acorn Atom manuals, which talked excitedly about its pipelining features.) (Anyone who's seen the memory map of the latter machine, incidentally, knows it wasn't technical merit that had a hand in it. This thing had RAM before and after the ROM and display memory.) So far as I can tell, its fans really only like it because it was the first CPU they were exposed to, and it was more efficient than the Z80A, MHz for MHz.
Geez, that probably comes across as a big flame. Don't take it personally, it's not you, it's that awful CPU. It makes as little sense as the segmented 808[68] CPUs (Why, Intel? Why?!) which also, for some reason, had excited fans too. There are so many absolute bodges that have come into existance in the computing world and hogged the limelight far too long. The 6502, in the field of personal computing, was arguably the first.
The Mac would probably have been a dead end. Apple would have seen their sales of the Apple II line as their primary source of income. Now, in fairness, the GS adopted some Macintosh technologies, running a reasonable facsimilie of the user interface and moving to 3.5" drives. So what we saw in Mac wouldn't have been completely lost.
Commodore would probably still be with us, as owners of the 6502 (They bought MOS Technologies back in the seventies, IIRC)
The PC would have been an even bigger hack than it is now. If you think Pentiums supporting the old 20-bit segmented memory map of the 8/16 bit 8088 was bad, imagine what something based on the 6502 would be like. The device was entirely 8 bit. Even addressing was 8 bit except for one instruction, meaning you had to hardcode the other eight bits of any 16 bit address in your code.
It's kind of scary.
The deal is that the DMCA blesses something called an "Access Control Mechanism." This is something designed to limit access to copyrighted material to authorized devices. The most (infamous) of these is the CSS algorithm, used to prevent unlicensed DVD players from showing CSS'd DVDs. An unauthorized player would be one that (a) isn't willing to pay the license fee and/or (b) wants to go beyond the license, to, for example, show DVDs in an unauthorized region.
(Sidenote: While region-free DVD players exist, for the most part they exist because the DVDCCA is, largely, ignoring the issue. If they choose to, not only could they rescind the license, but they could also ensure new DVDs are not playable on the violating manufacturer's DVD players. All DVDs have a collection of encrypted keys. The algorithm goes something like "Give me the file that corresponds to the encrypted DVD key encrypted using my manufacturer's key. Ok, let me decrypt that with my manufacturer's key. Now I can decrypt the DVD." Removing keys for a specific manufacturer in new DVDs is, however, in some ways the nuclear option, because of the support issues involved.)
So yeah, Apple concievably could sue over an attempt to circumvent an access control measure that prevents non-Macintoshes from running their copyrighted software. Nice, huh?
This is one of those utterly stupid "anti-spam" systems that just creates hastle for legitimate users while failing to take into account the actual effect it'll have on spam. It's moronic, the people proposing it are morons, and anyone blindly supporting it hasn't paid it more than a few seconds of thought.
Want to know why we have so much spam? Why it grows every year? Because the bulk of the "anti-spammers" are too myopic in their hatred of a minor technical problem to encourage and adopt solutions that'll work. Hence the ever increasing attempts to build increasingly ineffectual blacklists and whitelists. Meanwhile, the spammers simply increase the amount of stuff they send, knowing that if only 1% of their messages will get through, they have to send 100x as many messages. The entire thing has become nothing more than a game between anti-spammers creating little intellectual challenges and spammers solving them.
What is Sender-ID? A lemon. It solves the wrong issue. I want to be able to say "Have I given this entity permission to email me?" It says "Well, can't tell you that, but I'll tell you what, this is coming from an entity unwise enough to not protect their domain name with a list of 'legitimate' SMTP servers. So I'll junk it, because I think that's bad practice."
They're breaking email, and they don't care. As long as they can pretend it's the spammers that are at fault, like some thug that breaks all the windows of all the buildings owned by a particular landlord because one of the landlord's tenants in one particular building plays his music loudly at 3 in the morning, they can justify their actions to themselves in a fit of self-righteousness. Fuck 'em, and the horse they rode in on.
Ardi's Executor is nicer solution, but as the GP says, it doesn't run non-68k apps. One has to hope that the sudden market for third party improvements in Classic compatability born from Apple's unwillingness to produce Macs that'll run older software will give Ardi, at least, an incentive to put in the long awaited PowerPC emulation support.
But as of now, I don't think anyone can legitimately say that there are real solutions for running (most) older, non-Carbonized, Mac software on the Intel Macs, sadly.
This model doesn't work if someone can buy the Windows version of a game and play it on their Mac. Unless the games come out at the same time and are roughly the same price (forever, not just in the weeks following release) there'll always be an incentive for Mac users to buy a Windows version of a game even if performance isn't as well as it would be for a native port. Seriously, would you spend $40-50 on a game knowing it's already a Windows Budget title, obtainable for $10 or so? Not to mention the convenience of occasionally being able to pick up a game from *Mart, Best Buy, etc, rather than ordering everything from Amazon.
I can see Wine and Codeweaver's version of it becoming a major threat to companies like MacSoft. Whether, at the end of the day, the massively increased choices will counterbalance any lower quality inherent in running games under non-native emulated APIs, is still up for debate.
Oh, hold on, I think I have an idea on how they can do it...
On June 15th? I doubt it.
Whether this is similar to Y2K ("Nothing happened! Complete waste of time!" "Idiot! It only didn't happen because we did all that work!") or like the Tiger Repellant ("What's that?" "A tiger repellant" "What for? There are no tigers in Atlanta" "Exactly. Works pretty well, huh?") is difficult to tell from the point of view of an outsider.