Put plainly, it's voter fraud. Vote-trading in the current system is nothing more than manipulating the electoral college, and that's illegal. As the site was set up specifically as a venue for such fraud to take place (by its own admission, in fact), the judge was right to stand back and let law enforcement take care of it. ----------
Both engineers and coders are needed. Perole absolutely need both skills in today's market, and this is something many colleges forget.
Designs are, of course, Good Things. They do help create better software. But they must be considered a tool, not a crutch. I know coders who are utterly paralyzed if they don't have a design in front of them, and panic if they have a design but it ever changes. This is as bad as (if not worse than) not having a design at all. You've got to be able to design, yes, but you've also got to be able to think on your feet, because no design will ever solve all problems, just as coding blindly will never solve them.
Bottom line: shy away from programs that teach coding but no design, but also avoid places that overemphasize the engineering aspect. You'll get good coders from the former, and good designers from the latter, but you won't get good programmers from either of them, because true programming has aspects of both. ----------
Standards support must be Mozilla/Netscape's top priority; anything else needs to be secondary. I'd rather have a compliant browser in a couple more months than a partially-compliant browser now. It's interesting to note, however, how few bugs are actually cited in the linked article.
About the IE comment, though... I use IE and Netscape on a regular basis, both Mac and Windows. While IE5 beats Netscape4 on both platforms, currently Mozilla beats both of them. It's progressed to the point where it's more stable than either of the two, its standards support is higher (though IE5/Mac comes close), and -much to my surprise- it's actually fast now (if your last experience with Mozilla is the Netscape preview releases, I strongly suggest you give the current nightlies another look).
That last part is actually quite a shame; if they hadn't bothered with fluff like cross-platform skinning, they'd have a damn fast browser out by now. But, so be it. It's still the best out there, and I say they should take all the time I need to just plain get it right the first time. ----------
Pro: Loads of bandwidth, great mobility.
Con: High latency, unnecessarily tied to Windows, unnecessarily tied to Radio Shack, unnecessarily tied to Dish Network.
I'll pass.
At least WildBlue, at least thus far in its development, is slated to support all major platforms (including MacOS and Linux) and isn't tied to a particular retail chain or satellite TV network. Latency is still a problem, but it's about the only one left.
But all the same, I'd rather have a cable modem or DSL. Too bad neither one is in my area yet (unless you count IDSL, which I don't). Guess I'll have to wait... ----------
No, actually copyright law was designed to establish property rights for people's creative output.
Nope; you're both wrong. It was established to enrich the public domain by encouraging artists and writers to produce more works. It did so by establishing a system like property ownership for things that can't, under ordinary circumstances, be owned (how do you own sound, or thought, or words?)
The bargain is struck thus: you have exclusive rights to your works for a limited time (enough time to make money off of the work, and then some in the case of individuals, for whom the copyright expires long after the author hasdied). But, after that time is up, you must release it into the public domain.
If I want to write a story, record a song, etc. and then stick it in a vault, and LOSE MONEY by paying a storage fee, because I don't wish for it to be distributed, that is my right as the creator.
This is very true. It is also very stupid. This is exactly why copyrights were established, so you wouldn't have to do this.
Consider the case of Stradivarius, generally considered the greatest violin-maker of all time. There was no such thing as a patent system in his time, so he kept his methods secret (as this was the only other method available for keeping his methods private). However, because of this, after he died no one knew how to continue his craft. That is why today, with all our technology, we still can't make a better violin. Had there been such a system in place, he could have disclosed his invention, secure in the knowledge that only he could make money off of it, and that after he was gone his art could be continued.
Further, the owner of the copyrighted work has every right to force upgrading, if they so wish.
No, they don't. It's generally against the law for companies to coerce customers into upgrading their products.
Are you going to claim that sculptors should be forced to sell duplicates of their sculputres, and if they don't sell at least one copy every 3-5 years then anybody should be able to sell copies?
And are you going to claim that sculptors should be able to sell duplicates of their sculptures, and can force everyone who has ever bought one of their works to keep buying the same sculpture again and again, regardless of the relative quality of the works over time? It's what you seem to be saying should be allowed.
A copyright for an individual is one thing. Certainly such copyrights should extend at least for the life of the creator (and perhaps somewhat longer, perhaps 25 years, to provide for the creator's family). The reason is simple: people need some source of income for their entire lives.
But for corporations, which exist solely to make money and don't have the same sort of lifespan as human beings do, these copyrights should certainly exist for no longer than the life of the corporation (which has no family to provide for), and more ideally should only exist for as long as a corporation can provide a demonstrable need for it. ----------
Most of us aren't picking on the copyright system in general. What we complain about is the abuse of this system. Examples:
1) Constant lobbying for unreasonable lengths of time on corporate copyrights, such that a corporation can screw people long after their products have ceased to make them any money whatsoever.
2) "Copy-protection" measures which effectively extend a copyright indefinitely by enforcing a copyright after it has expired (when the maker no longer has any right to do so).
3) Licensing terms which abridge fair-use rights on what is, effectively, a written work. Such practices would get a person drummed out of the book publishing industry; why should it be different for software (or music, or movies, or other copyrightable works)?
Copyrights are, by and large, a Good Thing. It's the current U.S. implementation of copyright that we complain about, because it's far too open to abuse in its current form. ----------
Thanks all the same, but I'll be sticking with my Apex 600A. I prefer players with ways around the MPAA's unethical practices.
That said, I might look into this for games, when and if Square goes for the PS2. I do think DVD is a better format for games than the GD-ROM's we get with the Dreamcast and GameCube (forget the proprietariness; it's all about capacity). ----------
File types? Yet another "innovation" MacOS has had from Day One, and Microsoft is only now realizing that storing file type information in the filename is an ugly, archaic hack that needs to die sooner rather than later? BeOS has an interesting mechanism for this, by storing MIME types, but this is still inadequate, for reasons I'll get to in a second.
With filename extensions, you have the problem that only a datatype is specified, and not the app that created it. If you've ever had to deal with the hundreds of mutually-incompatible formats all with the extension.DAT, you've seen this..BIN is another common extension. And let's not leave Red Hat users out of the loop; haw many times has RealPlayer tried to play your installers, which end in.RPM?
MIME has the opposite problem. It was a great idea in theory, but in practice it broke down. Depressingly few file formats actually have registered types, and in most cases the result is that no two people can agree. I've had to register no fewer than three MIME types for Zip files, three for m3u format MP3 playlists, eight for MP3 itself, two each for QuickTime, AVI, MPEG, and RealPlayer formats, three for Stuffit, and so on and so forth.
I won't even go into ease of use issues (anything that makes it unsafe to rename a file at will is a Bad Thing); there are practical reasons that filename extensions should have died a very long time ago, and while I'm glad to see Whistler finally getting rid of the need for them, I only wish they'd done it much sooner.
This does, of course, all assume that this is in fact something Whistler is doing (no one seems to know what "type handling" means; this is my guess). ----------
Actually, I wasn't the first to use the Nazi comparisons in this thread; there were several others. Otherwise, I wouldn't have done it; I don't like to be the one to invoke that law. ----------
Well, this is an interesting dilemma...
on
FRG on W2K: No CoS
·
· Score: 3
I'm no fan of the CoS. I've read the stories. I know what they've done. I have a lot of trouble believing the "Church" bit, since they didn't start out that way and, at the time they prepended "Church of" to their name, said it was only "for tax purposes."
But still, this action leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Banning a piece of the software because the maker's CEO, who probably never so much as glanced at the code, is a scientologist and therefore a "security risk"? This seems a bit too much. Certainly it can't be considered more of a risk than any other closed-source software.
Or to put it another way, when one group uses Nazi-like policies to fight a group that uses Nazi-like policies, in the end only the Nazis win. ----------
There's a real difference between ignoring a murder in progress and not knowing about a religion.
For one thing, when you walk right by a murder in progress, you know it's happenning. In this case, there is no ignorance.
However, it's quite possible that Dubya has never had the opportunity to learn about religions such as Wicca. Need I remind you that (particularly around Halloween) Wiccans are often brought onto talk shows, regarded as a curiosity, as people sit and say things like "duh... ya mean dere's such a ting as real witches?" (typos intentional) and promptly forget they ever saw the whole thing. It's a sad statement about this country, but that doesn't make it any less true. Give the man the benefit of the doubt; he's innocent until proven guilty, just like anyone else. I could pick any ten people off the street and ask them what Wicca is, and half the time I'd bet not one of them would even know what I was talking about.
No, ignorance is not a Good Thing. But in and of itself, it's not a Bad Thing either; only willful ignorance, once presented with the opportunity to rectify it, is bad. And let's face it: relatively few people in the US have had the opportunity to relieve their ignorance of a great many things. ----------
The quote you attribute to Bush shows only ignorance, not hate. I won't argue that Bush is a moron; that much has already been proven beyond anything even remotely resembling reasonable doubt. Consider that he's a born-again, and you'll see where the ignorance springs from; most of them don't bother learning about what their leaders, twisting the religion they claim to follow, say they're supposed to hate (a doctrine in direct opposition to that religion's actual teachings, I might add).
Give the man even a two-hour lecture on what Wicca is, and let's see if his tune changes. ----------
Oh, I'm sure there'll be an option. But then, I'm the type that considers goatse.cx tricks to be the lowest form of trolling, so I wouldn't particularly care. ----------
While it is true that Bush has said some very dumb things (let's face it: it'll take eight years just to educate him to the point where he's fit for office), your "translation" is out of line. Never once has Bush proposed a crackdown on religious minorities, despite the flagrant ignorance of such religions that he displays. That's more than can be said for some of the candidates.
More likely, the choice of religions which he listed was a botched attempt at alliteration, to make the reply sound better. Never underestimate the power of a good speech-writer. And let's hope Bush gets a few of them when and if he's elected.
If religious freedom is what you're worried about, there are far greater threats to it in this campaign than Bush. Lieberman, for example, openly seeks the erosion of church and state, as evidenced by his own admission in countless speeches. And given Gore's known wishy-washiness (is that even a word) he could easily be manipulated into giving Lieberman his wish. And there are people in this presidential race that are even worse than him, if you know where to look (hint: check the "Constitution" party out).
The point: Don't be so paranoid. Sometimes, people don't bear any malice; they really are just plain dumb. ----------
I'm impressed. It's been a long time indeed since someone has managed to trick me with a goatse.cx link. Disguising it as a part of Slashdot's own layout was a particularly nice touch.
This said, I think it's time to introduce a (-1, "goatse.cx trick") category into moderation. This is really getting out of hand, and I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of people who've seen goatse.cx never want to see it again. ----------
This was in the (admittedly scant) documentation Apple provided with OSX Public Beta. One of the major benefits they speak of is what they call "realtime support," the description of which sounds exactly like the description of a true RTOS.
Maybe I'm missing something with that; I don't know. But it certainly sounds like they're trying to claim OSX and Darwin are RTOS's. ----------
I've read some literature from Apple claiming that OSX (and, by extension, Darwin) is an RTOS. However, that's the only place I've ever heard this, and I'm not particularly certain how this claim could be backed up at this point in time. Anyone here have any ideas on that? ----------
If you look at our current tax structure, taking into account sales/property/income/excise taxes, we tax the poor, not the rich. In Washington state, the poorest 20% of the population pays 17% of their income in ALL taxes (federal, state, local). The highest 20% pays 3%. That's a lie. If you consider ALL taxes (federal, state, and local) the highest 20% pays between 50%-60%. Tell me how this is fair? ----------
You know all the "Satan's Face Found In <insert weather pattern here>!!!" articles? They're going to have a field day with this one.
My guess is we'll also see either the formation or mass suicide of at least one doomsday cult, which the media will connect with this. Mass hysteria will follow, accompanied by loads of new material for late-night talk show comedians.
And finally, someone, somewhere is going to find a way to capitalize on this. Inside of two weeks we'll see "Space Skull" T-shirts, hats, etc. ----------
Reread what the Librarian of Congredd added. He put in a rather interesting clause: the law does not affect fair use.
IANAL, but the sort of language used here does not redefine fair use. Rather, it states that fair use is an exception to any of the restrictions.
In other words, we have a very interesting legal play. If you're caught pirating, you can now be smacked around for piracy and for DMCA violation. However, if you actually are keeping it completely legit (having only MP3's of things you've bought, likewise with ROM's and DVD rips) the law can't touch you. The reason: circumvention devices are necessary to exercise fair use, and this fun little clause states that fair use overrules the DMCA.
Translation: you've got to be very careful, now, to make sure all the copyrighted stuff on your machine is legitimate, because there are now criminal as well as civil penalties. However, if it is, then nothing has changed.
IANAL, like I said, but does anyone see any holes here? ----------
While you are correct that mot all commercially available players let you read the whole disk, this is not important, because this is an efficiency issue. There is nowhere to copy the disk to, therefore if the player were to let ytou read a whole disk it would take several gigs of memory, which most desktop computers don't have, let alone DVD players.
I might add, by the way, that DVD drives do let you read the whole disk, and these are certainly legal. Therefore, you still have a legal way to copy the disk, because you are not altering the work and everything is performing precisely as it was designed to perform, therefore you cannot be considered to be circumventing any measures. ----------
US law isn't supposed to have any effect on other nations, unless they pass similar laws.
However, the US is known for "persuading" (read: pressuring) other nations into going along with its more totalitarian ideas. Witness Wassenar for an example of that (an attempt, among other things, to bring the US' draconian encryption regulations overseas). WIPO as another.
In other words, while it doesn't affect other nations yet, get ready for a fight, because it's coming. ----------
Actually, circumventing the copy-control aspect of CSS is quite easy. It's called dd (or rawrite, or DiskCopy, or whatever the appropriate equivalent for your OS of choice is). Note that this saves the stream in its original, unencrypted state, so you have not altered the stream.
As for circumventing access controls, DeCSS doesn't do that either. It uses a key that has been defined as valid by the MPAA. Since encryption is designed to allow people through it if they have a valid key, it is clearly not circumvention, which disables the control. Therefore, you're in the clear (IANAL, of course).
What you could not do is decrypt the stream and then save it. However, if you copied the encrypted stream, and then played it using a player designed to play encrypted streams (which we've already determined is not circumventing the access control), then you should still be good.
...now that the law definitively builds presumption of guilt into its language, now it may be possible to sue to have the law repealed outright.
Honestly, this is bad news. I do find it interesting that filtering blacklists were specifically exempted from this law; at least the LoC still doesn't support the bookburners. But this is still an unconstitutional provision of the law, based on nothing more than presumption of guilt where access controls are concerned. ----------
Slashdot Mirror
Put plainly, it's voter fraud. Vote-trading in the current system is nothing more than manipulating the electoral college, and that's illegal. As the site was set up specifically as a venue for such fraud to take place (by its own admission, in fact), the judge was right to stand back and let law enforcement take care of it.
----------
Both engineers and coders are needed. Perole absolutely need both skills in today's market, and this is something many colleges forget.
Designs are, of course, Good Things. They do help create better software. But they must be considered a tool, not a crutch. I know coders who are utterly paralyzed if they don't have a design in front of them, and panic if they have a design but it ever changes. This is as bad as (if not worse than) not having a design at all. You've got to be able to design, yes, but you've also got to be able to think on your feet, because no design will ever solve all problems, just as coding blindly will never solve them.
Bottom line: shy away from programs that teach coding but no design, but also avoid places that overemphasize the engineering aspect. You'll get good coders from the former, and good designers from the latter, but you won't get good programmers from either of them, because true programming has aspects of both.
----------
Standards support must be Mozilla/Netscape's top priority; anything else needs to be secondary. I'd rather have a compliant browser in a couple more months than a partially-compliant browser now. It's interesting to note, however, how few bugs are actually cited in the linked article.
About the IE comment, though... I use IE and Netscape on a regular basis, both Mac and Windows. While IE5 beats Netscape4 on both platforms, currently Mozilla beats both of them. It's progressed to the point where it's more stable than either of the two, its standards support is higher (though IE5/Mac comes close), and -much to my surprise- it's actually fast now (if your last experience with Mozilla is the Netscape preview releases, I strongly suggest you give the current nightlies another look).
That last part is actually quite a shame; if they hadn't bothered with fluff like cross-platform skinning, they'd have a damn fast browser out by now. But, so be it. It's still the best out there, and I say they should take all the time I need to just plain get it right the first time.
----------
Pro: Loads of bandwidth, great mobility.
Con: High latency, unnecessarily tied to Windows, unnecessarily tied to Radio Shack, unnecessarily tied to Dish Network.
I'll pass.
At least WildBlue, at least thus far in its development, is slated to support all major platforms (including MacOS and Linux) and isn't tied to a particular retail chain or satellite TV network. Latency is still a problem, but it's about the only one left.
But all the same, I'd rather have a cable modem or DSL. Too bad neither one is in my area yet (unless you count IDSL, which I don't). Guess I'll have to wait...
----------
No, actually copyright law was designed to establish property rights for people's creative output.
Nope; you're both wrong. It was established to enrich the public domain by encouraging artists and writers to produce more works. It did so by establishing a system like property ownership for things that can't, under ordinary circumstances, be owned (how do you own sound, or thought, or words?)
The bargain is struck thus: you have exclusive rights to your works for a limited time (enough time to make money off of the work, and then some in the case of individuals, for whom the copyright expires long after the author hasdied). But, after that time is up, you must release it into the public domain.
If I want to write a story, record a song, etc. and then stick it in a vault, and LOSE MONEY by paying a storage fee, because I don't wish for it to be distributed, that is my right as the creator.
This is very true. It is also very stupid. This is exactly why copyrights were established, so you wouldn't have to do this.
Consider the case of Stradivarius, generally considered the greatest violin-maker of all time. There was no such thing as a patent system in his time, so he kept his methods secret (as this was the only other method available for keeping his methods private). However, because of this, after he died no one knew how to continue his craft. That is why today, with all our technology, we still can't make a better violin. Had there been such a system in place, he could have disclosed his invention, secure in the knowledge that only he could make money off of it, and that after he was gone his art could be continued.
Further, the owner of the copyrighted work has every right to force upgrading, if they so wish.
No, they don't. It's generally against the law for companies to coerce customers into upgrading their products.
Are you going to claim that sculptors should be forced to sell duplicates of their sculputres, and if they don't sell at least one copy every 3-5 years then anybody should be able to sell copies?
And are you going to claim that sculptors should be able to sell duplicates of their sculptures, and can force everyone who has ever bought one of their works to keep buying the same sculpture again and again, regardless of the relative quality of the works over time? It's what you seem to be saying should be allowed.
A copyright for an individual is one thing. Certainly such copyrights should extend at least for the life of the creator (and perhaps somewhat longer, perhaps 25 years, to provide for the creator's family). The reason is simple: people need some source of income for their entire lives.
But for corporations, which exist solely to make money and don't have the same sort of lifespan as human beings do, these copyrights should certainly exist for no longer than the life of the corporation (which has no family to provide for), and more ideally should only exist for as long as a corporation can provide a demonstrable need for it.
----------
Most of us aren't picking on the copyright system in general. What we complain about is the abuse of this system. Examples:
1) Constant lobbying for unreasonable lengths of time on corporate copyrights, such that a corporation can screw people long after their products have ceased to make them any money whatsoever.
2) "Copy-protection" measures which effectively extend a copyright indefinitely by enforcing a copyright after it has expired (when the maker no longer has any right to do so).
3) Licensing terms which abridge fair-use rights on what is, effectively, a written work. Such practices would get a person drummed out of the book publishing industry; why should it be different for software (or music, or movies, or other copyrightable works)?
Copyrights are, by and large, a Good Thing. It's the current U.S. implementation of copyright that we complain about, because it's far too open to abuse in its current form.
----------
Thanks all the same, but I'll be sticking with my Apex 600A. I prefer players with ways around the MPAA's unethical practices.
That said, I might look into this for games, when and if Square goes for the PS2. I do think DVD is a better format for games than the GD-ROM's we get with the Dreamcast and GameCube (forget the proprietariness; it's all about capacity).
----------
File types? Yet another "innovation" MacOS has had from Day One, and Microsoft is only now realizing that storing file type information in the filename is an ugly, archaic hack that needs to die sooner rather than later? BeOS has an interesting mechanism for this, by storing MIME types, but this is still inadequate, for reasons I'll get to in a second.
.DAT, you've seen this. .BIN is another common extension. And let's not leave Red Hat users out of the loop; haw many times has RealPlayer tried to play your installers, which end in .RPM?
With filename extensions, you have the problem that only a datatype is specified, and not the app that created it. If you've ever had to deal with the hundreds of mutually-incompatible formats all with the extension
MIME has the opposite problem. It was a great idea in theory, but in practice it broke down. Depressingly few file formats actually have registered types, and in most cases the result is that no two people can agree. I've had to register no fewer than three MIME types for Zip files, three for m3u format MP3 playlists, eight for MP3 itself, two each for QuickTime, AVI, MPEG, and RealPlayer formats, three for Stuffit, and so on and so forth.
I won't even go into ease of use issues (anything that makes it unsafe to rename a file at will is a Bad Thing); there are practical reasons that filename extensions should have died a very long time ago, and while I'm glad to see Whistler finally getting rid of the need for them, I only wish they'd done it much sooner.
This does, of course, all assume that this is in fact something Whistler is doing (no one seems to know what "type handling" means; this is my guess).
----------
Actually, I wasn't the first to use the Nazi comparisons in this thread; there were several others. Otherwise, I wouldn't have done it; I don't like to be the one to invoke that law.
----------
I'm no fan of the CoS. I've read the stories. I know what they've done. I have a lot of trouble believing the "Church" bit, since they didn't start out that way and, at the time they prepended "Church of" to their name, said it was only "for tax purposes."
But still, this action leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Banning a piece of the software because the maker's CEO, who probably never so much as glanced at the code, is a scientologist and therefore a "security risk"? This seems a bit too much. Certainly it can't be considered more of a risk than any other closed-source software.
Or to put it another way, when one group uses Nazi-like policies to fight a group that uses Nazi-like policies, in the end only the Nazis win.
----------
There's a real difference between ignoring a murder in progress and not knowing about a religion.
For one thing, when you walk right by a murder in progress, you know it's happenning. In this case, there is no ignorance.
However, it's quite possible that Dubya has never had the opportunity to learn about religions such as Wicca. Need I remind you that (particularly around Halloween) Wiccans are often brought onto talk shows, regarded as a curiosity, as people sit and say things like "duh... ya mean dere's such a ting as real witches?" (typos intentional) and promptly forget they ever saw the whole thing. It's a sad statement about this country, but that doesn't make it any less true. Give the man the benefit of the doubt; he's innocent until proven guilty, just like anyone else. I could pick any ten people off the street and ask them what Wicca is, and half the time I'd bet not one of them would even know what I was talking about.
No, ignorance is not a Good Thing. But in and of itself, it's not a Bad Thing either; only willful ignorance, once presented with the opportunity to rectify it, is bad. And let's face it: relatively few people in the US have had the opportunity to relieve their ignorance of a great many things.
----------
The quote you attribute to Bush shows only ignorance, not hate. I won't argue that Bush is a moron; that much has already been proven beyond anything even remotely resembling reasonable doubt. Consider that he's a born-again, and you'll see where the ignorance springs from; most of them don't bother learning about what their leaders, twisting the religion they claim to follow, say they're supposed to hate (a doctrine in direct opposition to that religion's actual teachings, I might add).
Give the man even a two-hour lecture on what Wicca is, and let's see if his tune changes.
----------
Oh, I'm sure there'll be an option. But then, I'm the type that considers goatse.cx tricks to be the lowest form of trolling, so I wouldn't particularly care.
----------
While it is true that Bush has said some very dumb things (let's face it: it'll take eight years just to educate him to the point where he's fit for office), your "translation" is out of line. Never once has Bush proposed a crackdown on religious minorities, despite the flagrant ignorance of such religions that he displays. That's more than can be said for some of the candidates.
More likely, the choice of religions which he listed was a botched attempt at alliteration, to make the reply sound better. Never underestimate the power of a good speech-writer. And let's hope Bush gets a few of them when and if he's elected.
If religious freedom is what you're worried about, there are far greater threats to it in this campaign than Bush. Lieberman, for example, openly seeks the erosion of church and state, as evidenced by his own admission in countless speeches. And given Gore's known wishy-washiness (is that even a word) he could easily be manipulated into giving Lieberman his wish. And there are people in this presidential race that are even worse than him, if you know where to look (hint: check the "Constitution" party out).
The point: Don't be so paranoid. Sometimes, people don't bear any malice; they really are just plain dumb.
----------
I'm impressed. It's been a long time indeed since someone has managed to trick me with a goatse.cx link. Disguising it as a part of Slashdot's own layout was a particularly nice touch.
This said, I think it's time to introduce a (-1, "goatse.cx trick") category into moderation. This is really getting out of hand, and I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of people who've seen goatse.cx never want to see it again.
----------
And that in-progress mass of white lego behind her? Moro the wolf god?
More likely, the mass of white bricks is the fur cape she wears.
Which leads one to wonder: is PETA going to storm the studio and relentlessly attach red lego bricks to the sculpture?
----------
This was in the (admittedly scant) documentation Apple provided with OSX Public Beta. One of the major benefits they speak of is what they call "realtime support," the description of which sounds exactly like the description of a true RTOS.
Maybe I'm missing something with that; I don't know. But it certainly sounds like they're trying to claim OSX and Darwin are RTOS's.
----------
I've read some literature from Apple claiming that OSX (and, by extension, Darwin) is an RTOS. However, that's the only place I've ever heard this, and I'm not particularly certain how this claim could be backed up at this point in time. Anyone here have any ideas on that?
----------
If you look at our current tax structure, taking into account sales/property/income/excise taxes, we tax the poor, not the rich. In Washington state, the poorest 20% of the population pays 17% of their income in ALL taxes (federal, state, local). The highest 20% pays 3%.
That's a lie. If you consider ALL taxes (federal, state, and local) the highest 20% pays between 50%-60%. Tell me how this is fair?
----------
You know all the "Satan's Face Found In <insert weather pattern here>!!!" articles? They're going to have a field day with this one.
My guess is we'll also see either the formation or mass suicide of at least one doomsday cult, which the media will connect with this. Mass hysteria will follow, accompanied by loads of new material for late-night talk show comedians.
And finally, someone, somewhere is going to find a way to capitalize on this. Inside of two weeks we'll see "Space Skull" T-shirts, hats, etc.
----------
Reread what the Librarian of Congredd added. He put in a rather interesting clause: the law does not affect fair use.
IANAL, but the sort of language used here does not redefine fair use. Rather, it states that fair use is an exception to any of the restrictions.
In other words, we have a very interesting legal play. If you're caught pirating, you can now be smacked around for piracy and for DMCA violation. However, if you actually are keeping it completely legit (having only MP3's of things you've bought, likewise with ROM's and DVD rips) the law can't touch you. The reason: circumvention devices are necessary to exercise fair use, and this fun little clause states that fair use overrules the DMCA.
Translation: you've got to be very careful, now, to make sure all the copyrighted stuff on your machine is legitimate, because there are now criminal as well as civil penalties. However, if it is, then nothing has changed.
IANAL, like I said, but does anyone see any holes here?
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While you are correct that mot all commercially available players let you read the whole disk, this is not important, because this is an efficiency issue. There is nowhere to copy the disk to, therefore if the player were to let ytou read a whole disk it would take several gigs of memory, which most desktop computers don't have, let alone DVD players.
I might add, by the way, that DVD drives do let you read the whole disk, and these are certainly legal. Therefore, you still have a legal way to copy the disk, because you are not altering the work and everything is performing precisely as it was designed to perform, therefore you cannot be considered to be circumventing any measures.
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US law isn't supposed to have any effect on other nations, unless they pass similar laws.
However, the US is known for "persuading" (read: pressuring) other nations into going along with its more totalitarian ideas. Witness Wassenar for an example of that (an attempt, among other things, to bring the US' draconian encryption regulations overseas). WIPO as another.
In other words, while it doesn't affect other nations yet, get ready for a fight, because it's coming.
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Actually, circumventing the copy-control aspect of CSS is quite easy. It's called dd (or rawrite, or DiskCopy, or whatever the appropriate equivalent for your OS of choice is). Note that this saves the stream in its original, unencrypted state, so you have not altered the stream.
As for circumventing access controls, DeCSS doesn't do that either. It uses a key that has been defined as valid by the MPAA. Since encryption is designed to allow people through it if they have a valid key, it is clearly not circumvention, which disables the control. Therefore, you're in the clear (IANAL, of course).
What you could not do is decrypt the stream and then save it. However, if you copied the encrypted stream, and then played it using a player designed to play encrypted streams (which we've already determined is not circumventing the access control), then you should still be good.
Anyone see any holes in that?
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...now that the law definitively builds presumption of guilt into its language, now it may be possible to sue to have the law repealed outright.
Honestly, this is bad news. I do find it interesting that filtering blacklists were specifically exempted from this law; at least the LoC still doesn't support the bookburners. But this is still an unconstitutional provision of the law, based on nothing more than presumption of guilt where access controls are concerned.
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