BS. As an acknowledged expert in the field of marketing, I ask you this question.
Let's see some credentials. You certainly don't talk like an expert in the field of marketing, much less an acknowledged one. And you give us no evidence to believe you, and plenty not to.
Who is the #1 software producer Apple or Microsoft ?
On what scale, might I ask? Here, at least, you sound like a marketer. I'll give you that much.
Answer: Microsoft, because they know when to quit coding and start MARKETING
Which also explains why most of their software is so bad (I have to give a nod to Excel, which I'm forced to admit is respectable). However, here you also talk like a marketer.
Apple have seen the light recently in this regard, but as a marketing expert with an extremely technical background (NT admin, VB developer)
Again, spoken like a true marketer. NT administration hardly qualifies as "extremely" technical (technical, yes, "extremely," no). Nor does developing in VB, which even Microsoft markets as being for non-technical people.
I have to ask the question who are Sun or Apple to tell me how to write my GUI ? Do they know my target market ?
Um, yes, they do. Both of them, especially Apple, have spent millions of dollars researching human interface design. Who are they to tell you how to design your GUI? People who know more about GUI design than you do, that's who. You could do worse than to take the advice of experts.
Are they paying my development staff ? No they are not.
Directly, no, But consider: well-designed apps lead to good reviews. Good reviews lead to better sales. Better sales lead to more profit. More profit leads to better-paid developers. So, in an indirect way, they are helping to pay your development staff.
So they can go to hell.
So you'll have company after your boss and co-workers kill you for writing buggy apps with badly-designed interfaces? I can see why you wouldn't want to be lonely, but I don't think it'll happen.
Perhaps this could be said, to some degree, for the verbal section. But math, I'm afraid, is objective no matter which way you slice it. It's a simple fact that no matter where you go, 2 + 2 = 4. You can prove this to be true if you want (although, ironically enough, a rigorous proof of this particular problem is quite large).
If you have gone to good schools (which generally means wealthy communities) then you have a better chance of doing well on the SATs.
I won't deny that some schools are better than others. Believe me, I've been to some of the best and some of the worst. But you can apply yourself and do the work anywhere. That's all it takes. Some people have to work harder than others, and some may require assistance in doing the work. But, barring certain very rare medical conditions (and no, ADD is not one of these), anyone can do the work.
That may be true if your seeped in middle american culture but it doesn't hold true for large numbers of Americans.
Math exists independent of any culture. Certain language skills also exist independent of culture; while the particulars can differ sometimes there are constants which can be drawn; ask any linguist.
Standardized tests are bullshit. They maintain the educational tradition of memorization.
There's a place for memorization. A large one, actually. Any coder knows this, or (I'm assuming you code, judging from comments you make later on) do you consult the documentation every single time you call a function?
Learning and teaching students to be learners for their entire lives is not achieved by have students regurgitate a bunch of bullshit.
Not entirely, no. But the ability to recall previously learned material is an important aspect of learning, and it's the only one that can really be tested under truly fair conditions.
Education should teach students to learn and research. As a bunch of computer geeks most people here should appreciate that.
I don't deny that a basic love of learning is important. I'd imagine it's also something a lot of Slashdotters posess. Now, how many Slashdotters got that love of learning directly from course material in school?
Not many. I know I didn't get mine that way. There are some things that can't be learned in a classroom. A general love of learning can't be taught; student have to find that on their own.
A decent geek can learn and research anything they want.
Agreed, but this doesn't apply only to geeks. Anyone with a love of knowledge can do it. Anyone without a love of knowledge can do it too, but first you have to get past that little barrier of disliking the steps you have to take to get the knowledge you seek.
Any good hacker knows that learning is the key, having someone shove a bunch of facts down your throat is useless.
There are two ways of learning something. You can discover it for yourself, or you can have it taught to you (I'm including looking things up as a part of this). Having something taught to you involves getting facts "shoved down your throat" as you so eloquently put it.
Here's the thing. You are correct that true learning comes from research and discovery. But those are only the tip of the iceberg. You still need a good foundation from which to work, or your research won't get very far. That is where the memorization comes into play. Facts are like building blocks in that regard. You start with a few facts, and a question based on them. You go, you find more facts, and your knowledge builds as a result. You can take this even further, gathering still more facts.
This reminds me of a story I saw on the news when I was little. It was about a man who was writing a new style of math textbook. The idea behind it was simple: out of the problems in the back of each chapter, only a small portion, perhaps just the first few, actually covered the new material. The rest were review of previous chapters. So the students worked over the older material again and again. These textbooks worked. Studies proved that students who used these things were doing better with the material than those who weren't using the books, and moreover they were better at incorporating new material regardless of the source. This book style died a painful death not long after their introduction, though. The reason: people who claimed that it taught the students to be "robots." Never mind that the students were learning the material.
The point is this. You've found a joy in learning through research and discovery. That's good. But you've forgotten that before you can build the house, you have to pour the foundation. And yes, it's dreary work. But it's important.
Men and women do study differently because mens' brains have a weaker corpus collostum (sp?), the bridge between the hemispheres. Men have, in general, a greater ability to think objectively. Women have greater ability to think subjectively. So women empathize and work with people better than men, but men usually make better analysts.
True. But in the end, it tends to balance out. So even if the styles are different, it comes out as a wash.
You either have many specialized tools that work well on specifics, or a few generalized ones that aren't very good at anything.
Or, more to the point, you use several tools to get the job done, each one doing what it does best and contributing to the whole.
Look. College is many different things; I'm not going to argue that. But its primary purpose is a place of study. If a student can't perform well on a test (which requires that one exercise a reasonable amount of study skills), that student simply isn't going to do very well in most collegiate enviornments.
The bit about testing leadership and other types of intelligence is, I suppose, a valid concern. But do it in addition to the tests, not instead of them.
Personally, I always saw racial preferences as one of the more wacko ideas. A person's race doesn't determine how well they'll do in a college environment at all. Religion might, depending on the tenets of the given religion, but that's exceedingly rare and a student whose religion might affect college life is very likely to choose a place where the two won't interfere with one another anyway. Sexual orientation doesn't affect study skills, or gender, or anything else along those lines. So why even put them on a college application at all? Statistics?
Statistics and such are of interest to statisticians, but in the end they're not really indicative of very much. Personally, as I see it, if you want to make college admissions fair across races, don't make all kinds of special treatment. Make the process race-blind (and gender-blind except in the case of single-sex colleges, and such). Completely eliminate the race question on the application form; if you feel you need the statistics then send the students a survey after the admissions decisions have already been made. I don't think anyone here will argue against the assertion that race and such has no place in the decision whether or not to admit a student. So why even ask the questions until the decisions have been made?
But I'm ranting again, so back to the subject...
A college is a place of study. I fail to see how objective merit is an invalid concern. The SAT's and ACT's are meant to be a measure of the skills a student needs to succeed in a college environment, namely study and reasoning skills. I think the ACT tends to do a better job of measuring this than the SAT's (since the ACT's test a broader range of skills), but both do well in their given fields. The rest, such as leadership, are of course very nice skills to have. But they have little to no effect on how well the student does in classes, and can even hinder the student in some cases, as they get involved in more activities than they can handle and their grades suffer as a result (I've seen this happen to far too many students).
So attacking merit isn't the way to go. Replacing onjective tests with subjective ones only adds the potential for more racism and bias than the terminally insecure claim exists now. Combining the two is actually something of a good idea, so long as you're careful about how that's done.
Oh, one last thing. Someone talked about the idea of interviewing prospective students. Most colleges already do that. I went through a bunch of interviews, as did my sisters when they went off to college, as did everyone I know who went to or is currently at college. It's an important tool. But all tools are inherently flawed in some manner or another (even a simple hammer is flawed: it can miss the nail or worse, hit your finger); that's why only rarely can any one tool be used to get the job done well.
I hardly see how I "misrepresented" anything, but it appears I was wrong about the Internet2 being for general public use. Thank you for correcting me. Internet2 will eventually spread to general use, of course, as the current Net evolves to match and absorb it, but this isn't going to be a quick process.
In any case, your point only reinforces mine. Barring a truly major breakthrough in consumer-level (and even low- to midrenge corporate-level) connection technology, DVD-quality full-length movies simply aren't going to be practical to transfer ofer the Net for a long time.
So if I wanted to put the videos of my wedding on a DVD for my family to watch on their DVD players, I couldn't do this? Or, if I made an independent film I couldn't distribute it on DVD without licensing an encryption key?
Is that for real? Please tell me I'm mistaken.
Unfortunately, I think it's for real.
There is hope, however. Remember, those disks only fail in DVD players. DVD-ROM drives can still use them, and therefore any MPEG2 player should be able to access them.
I'm also guessing that before long someone will come up with a service where you send in an unencrypted DVD (and whatever fee they decide to charge) and they send back encrypted copies that'll work in any DVD device. This is far from an ideal situation, but there's very little that can be done about it, unless you're willing to go into the area of mod-chipping DVD players (which, while certainly doable, isn't something I'm into).
This guy is out of control. He's mostly lying, too...
Yes, there are a few movies out there on the 31337est w4r3z s173z. And they're crap. Shot with a samcorder, converted to MPEG-1 or worse, ASF... and these things are still roughly a half-gig a pop. Think for a moment, on how huge a DVD movie file is. We're talking on the order of gigabytes. Over anything short of a Gigabit Ethernet office LAN, these are still impractical to transfer over the Net. Furthermore, we're beginning to reach a speed plateau with home and business connections; until Internet2 is up and running these things are simply not going to be practical to transfer. After that could well be another matter, but by the time Internet2 is finally up the copyrights on all current DVD movies will probably have expired (and yes, I know how long corporate copyrights last; given Internet2's progress rate it'll probably take that long).
Last I checked, none of the DeCSS mirrors ever promoted piracy, as he claims. And he has the gall to accuse them of saying it when such statements can be proven false.
You cannot burn a pirate DVD disk that works in an ordinary DVD player with an ordinary DVD-RAM drive. The reason: the decryption data for a DVD is stored at a very specific place on the disk. Every DVD-RAM disk comes with that area pre-burned zeroed out. Ordinary DVD players cannot play these disks.
You can make DVD's that are usable in ordinary DVD players if you have a DVD stamper (which is very different from an ordinary burner). Current CD stampers still cost tens of thousands of dollars; DVD stampers cost more accordingly. These will be far, far out of the range of any individual except perhaps Bill Gates for decades to come, given current trends in price decreases and the current prices of your average DVD stamper. Besides which, the CSS system was never intended to defeat this method, so that point's moot anyway.
Someone also pointed out that over the past 12 months, CD sales supposedly dropped 30%. The music industry is quick to blame this on piracy. Certainly piracy accounts for some of it. But I don't think that's the real reason sales are dropping. Nor is it the fact that people are listening to more independent artists who have no deals with the record companies. I think the cause is far more simple: evolution. Technology evolves in a manner not unlike life does. When the CD came around, vinyl records died a slow and painful death; they're all but gone now, limited to a niche market(let's please not get into a vinyl vs. CD flamewar here).
It's happenning again, only this time digital music is abandoning its physical form, the CD. The record companies never saw this coming. They had their chance; if any of them had come up with a secure, open standard, put it out there for many platforms, and sold music using it at a reasonable price, it would have flown. But they ignored the "new music" and now they're paying the price as evolution leaves them in the dust. I doubt it's quite too late for them; if they can get a reasonable open standard going they can still recover. But they had better hurry, and they'd better do it right.
Digital video isn't going that way anytime soon, of course. It's still too big to transfer over most networks in a way that leaves the video quality intact while still making the transfers practical. But it will come eventually, and the entertainment industry had better be ready this time, or they're going to get trampled into the dust.
This one I only learned recently, but I hadn't seen it on Slashdot before.
Yes, we all know that the price of DVD-ROM discs is higher than the price of a DVD movie. This presents a sort of pseudo-barrier to copying, right? Of course, that barrier will drop as the prices do.
But there's another barrier, and this one is real.
Apparently, DVD players don't work with unencrypted disks (DVD-ROM drives are another matter, but most of the DVD playing machines out there are the set-top boxes). Furthermore, the key is always stored at a very specific spot on each disk.
Now, on a DVD-ROM disk, that spot is pre-burned with zeroes. Making it physically impossible to burn a disk which will work in an ordinary DVD player.
Of course the DVD CCA wouldn't let this information out normally; if people know that DeCSS still didn't let you burn practical pirate DVD's, there would be no case.
Yet another reason DeCSS doesn't promote piracy; pirated disks won't even work. In other words, this guy's spouting DeCSS FUD. Not that he hasn't before, but this is just another bit of factual evidence to add to the pile.
Strange... I've always been able to double-size clips, even in the free version. I haven't been able to do that with Web-embedded clips, no, but there's a reason for that: Web-embedded clips aren't supposed to be double-sized. All that does is screw up the page layout, and rather badly at that (truth be told, this is far more likely to be a limitation of Netscape and IE than it is to be a limitation in the QuickTime plugin. The most likely scenario is that the QuickTime plugin doesn't let you double-sixe Web-embedded clips because Netscape and IE aren't too keen on letting the user double-size media interactively. I'll grant, an "Open in Player..." function in the plugin's context menu would be nice, and it would avert this problem).
If you want to double-size a clip you find on the Web, just save it and open it in the player.
Well, how about a "save" button? Its pretty irritating to download somthing off the 'net for two hours, only to have to download it again if you want to see it again.
Strange... I've always been able to save QuickTime movies to this machine. I paid for my version, true, though I was very pissed off at having to do that. However, even that's irrelevant; there are half a billion QuickTime-supporting plugins out there, and nearly all of them DO have a save feature, you can still circumvent QuickTime's little thing there with no trouble at all.
Also, Apple aperantly decided that it's player was so great, that it should be used for everything else as well! After all, I'm sure apple knows more about the PNG format then IE or netscape, right?
Actually, at the moment it does. Have you seen the state of PNG support in current versions of IE and Netscape? It's not pretty. It's quite a shame, really; neither browser supports it fully (or even close to fully, particularly where transparency is concerned).
Mozilla's another matter entirely. But there's also no QuickTime plugin for Mozilla, on any platform. At least, not yet.
Of course, since qucktime dosn't have a save, now I can't save PNG files without some work.
I dealt with this one above.
I don't have quicktime installed, and I doubt I ever will again. I want to use the programs that I think are good, not the ones apple choses.
Then turn off the plugin for those things you don't want it to see. It's a very simple matter, not unlike the work you do to enable the plugin you do want to use.
I don't want a QT client from apple. When Apple writes its own clients, they're always MacOS-ish, regardless of the underlying architecture, and they never let you do some of the tricks you need to do.
Um... such as... what? I have no idea of anything I've ever "needed" to do in QuickTime that the client ever kept me from doing.
And, there isn't a real reason to have a different client for QT and AVI and MPEG.
Agreed. However, QuickTime supports both AVI and MPEG anyway, so your point is moot. I've never found Xanim's MPEG playback to be all that great anyway; I use it for AVI but I've moved to SMPEG-based stuff for MPEG playback. So I'd love to see QuickTime ported so I could get back to one program for all of them again.
What I want to see from Apple is a QuickTime codec library.
QuickTime is NOT a codec. How many times do people have to be told that? QuickTime is nothing more than a file format. One which, I might add, is already supported under several libraries. Codecs are another matter entirely. Take Sorenson, for example. It's not a file format. Theoretically, barring the fact that there is no software to do this, you could compress an AVI with Sorenson, if you really wanted to.
MPEG is both a file format and a codec. I never saw this as much of a Good Thing. But MPEG4 drops that and uses the QuickTime file format, leaving the codec as pure MPEG.
If I'm using the LiViD player for MPEG and for AVI, I don't want a seperate, Apple-made-and feature-poor player for quicktime movies.
I haven't seen LiViD's player yet, so I can't comment on that. But if I can use one program for QtickTime, AVI, and MPEG, I'll use it. By the way, what makes everything Apple makes inherently bad, as you seem to imply? For that matter, what features is the QuickTime player missing?
LSo, pray tell, how do you determine if a site is pornagraphic? Who makes the call? And what if a site incorporates both pornagraphic and non-pornagraphic elements?
I'm going to give you a completely honest answer here. I don't know. The problem is, as I've stated before, that the definition of pornography deals with sexuality, and that's something which is a little bit different for everyone. What I consider pornographic isn't likely to agree perfectly with what any given random person on the Net considers pornographic; there'll probably be some overlap but it won't be perfect agreement.
The main problem is cultural differences. For example, many Americans consider any nudity to be pornographic (I don't, and I'd imagine few Slashdotters do, but no one here could be considered an "average American," particularly those of us who aren't even from the US). This stems, probably, from the Puritanical, fundamentalist backgrounds of American culture. Many other cultures, most notably that of Japan but also those of many European nations, are more relaxed about this, and have different definitions. There are some things that all of these cultures would agree was pornographic, but there would be a lot of disagreement on other things, particularly softcore.
I don't claim to know the answer. I'd imagine there is one, but I don't know what it is.
It strikes me that the people you're largely upset with are more or less the equivalent of phone slammers, or spammers rather than pornographers. Most pornographers are so (justifibly) paranoid that they go to extremes to avoid violating laws. False advertising laws may apply in the instance of redirection. People interested only in banner impressions are a slightly different class of people.
You know what? You're probably the only person who's challenged my post (at least thus far) and not missed the point entirely. You're exactly right; I don't like porn or hate speech, but I do recognize the right of such sites to exist. What upsets me is the ways they trick or force people into going there without knowing what they're getting into.
Re: your definition of hate speech, would then the advocation of the destruction of hate groups be considered hate speech as you're basing their annhilation (etc) based upon their beliefs?
One: No, because there's a difference between a hate group and the people affiliated with it. It is quite possible to destroy a hate group without killing the people therein. Two: I wasn't advocating the destruction of hate groups anyway. Even if I practically get physically ill when viewing the results of their recruitment of children, I do recognize their right to exist.
Perhaps more active enforcement of laws against this behavior (redirection, false advertising, wire fraud, etc.) would be in order?
That's another way of doing it, but ultimately it's not as effective. Then you get into stuff like META-tag abuse (to grab more hits from search engines) and other methods. It'd be a good place to start, though.
This is presumptive in that it would indeed prevent the right to be heard, which is why most people make a webpage or post anything on the net to begin with.
Ah, but there's the catch. You have the right to speak. Others have the right to hear you, or not hear you, as they so choose.
You, however, have no innate right to be heard. You are given that right when others exercise their right to hear you. You may not take it from those who do not exercise that right, because then you are taking away their right to not hear you. Likewise, they may not take away your right to speak, all they can do is not listen.
Many of the pariah groups on the Net (pr0n sites, hate sites, and such) have come to use sneaky tricks to try and make others read their sites. A favorite, particularly among pr0n sites, is redirection; they'll lead you to a site that looks innocent enough, but as soon as you enter (or in some cases as soon as you leave) you're automatically taken to one or several pr0n sites that you probably never intended to visit in the first place. In this way, by tricking you into entering their sites, they are forcing you to hear what you may not want to hear.
Hate sites tend to use a different tactic: misdirection. Witness the recent registration of www.MartinLutherKing.org by Storm Front, one of the oldest hate groups on the Net. They are using the connotations of the name to trick you into hearing what you do not want to hear.
And then, of course, there's the old pr0n-banner tactic. With this one, sites pay people to recruit new users. Sometimes "new user" means someone visits the site, other times the user has to actually sign up for some service. So these "recruiters" password-lock their sites, forcing you to use these services (so they make money) before you use the site. Anyone who's been on Hotline in the last four years knows about this tactic all too well.
What I'm saying is that these tricks shouldn't be allowed. It's not fair to make someone hear you by tricking them into thinking they're going to hear something else. Likewise, it's not fair to force people to do things they don't want to do before you offer them some kind of service. What I'm calling for is a way to make it such that when you enter a site, you go in knowing exactly what you're getting into. That's why the original TLD system (.com,.edu,.mil,.gov,.org, and so on) was for in the first place.
Now there's still the problem of definition. Hate speech is relatively easy to define; I've seen some challenges as replies to my original post, but these tend to miss the point entirely (for example, the post who talks about excluding people from Harvard based on SAT score, while forgetting that each person takes the SAT as an individual, and thus the score is an individual thing).
Pr0n is different. It can't be defined, at least not easily. The reason: it deals with sexuality, which is a very personal thing, and a little different for everybody. So no matter how you define it you'll wind up excluding some types of pr0n, and unless your definition is very specific you'll end up including some things that aren't. So you'll never be able to categorize all pr0n. The goal is to categorise as much of it as possible, and make it identifiable, both to make it easier to find for those who wish to see it, and easier to avoid for those who do not.
Racism is, frankly, disgusting. Not too far from my home (my real home, not my college apartment) lives one family in particular. The youngest of the three daughters is no more than eight years old (and I've known them for five years) and ever since I moved there, I've listened to them grow increasingly hateful and racist, to the point where my sisters and I can't even invite a good portion of our friends over anymore for fear that those three will come out and start harrassing them. It has to be, without a doubt, the single most sickening thing I've ever seen.
But I cannot support censorship of any kind (except for parental censorship and self-censorship). I'll grant; I'd like to see all hate speech disappear from the Net. But it's not my place, nor anyone else's, to start forcibly removing it.
In the past I've mentioned the ".xxx plan" for porn. I've always found the idea intriguing (the idea being that porn sites would have to register under that domain). It still allows porn sites to exist, but in a manner such that someone who doesn't want to see those sites can avoid them very easily. As far as I'm concerned that's even more important than making filtering easier for parents who choose to use it. I want to be able to hit AltaVista, run a search, and hit a checkbox labeled "exclude porn sites" so I don't have to wade through them while I look for what I'm really after.
Perhaps a similar plan could work for hate speech such as this (".hate" or ".kkk" or something similar). It means that you have to legally define hate speech, but that's not as difficult as defining porn.
I would submit that hate speech could be defined as the advocation of the annhilation, forced separation, or intimidation of any group of people based on beliefs, genetic factors, physical or mental prowess, or anything else other than the objective merits of the individuals within that group. Does anyone agree or disagree?
Keep in mind, this plan does not prohibit such speech in any way. What it does do is make it so that a person who views a site knows beforehand just what the site contains. I don't see how this is an affront to anyone's rights; frankly I find it to be a bigger affront to my own rights when people pull cure HTML tricks to redirect me from a harmless-looking personal page into a porn site. Implicit in the right to free speech are two other very important rights: the right to hear what I choose, and the right to not hear what I choose not to.
So what? A bad action is still a bad action whether or not you're making money on it or not.
Point for your side. But there's one thing: consider motives again.
Let's look at DeCSS. Why was it made? It was made so Linux (and other alternative OS users) could play legitimately-purchased DVD's. Yes, you can copy disks, but that was not the intent of the project, nor its primary use. In short, the intent of the act is benign.
DoubleClick's info-harvesting exists for one purpose only: to sell the information. Furthermore, to sell it to people who will use it in ways that DoubleClick knows will use it for the sole purpose of doing a primitive psychoanalysis on people and pushing ads based on the results. This is something that no one wants. So the intent is, albeit mildly, malicious.
Information wants to be free, yes. But it does not want to be misused. That is the difference between DeCSS and DoubleClick's data-harvesting.
Despite the story posted yesterday on Slashdot, the CSS source has not been made part of the public record in the case. The plaintiffs requested and the judge granted that the CSS source be sealed records. They are not publically available from the court nor are they in the public domain.
As of the time you posted this, you were wrong; the court had not sealed the records; the documents were quite available from the court and most definitely in the public domain.
That may have changed as of today; I don't know, because no one seems to be putting the news out. However, I know that I got my copy of the docs before they were sealed. The Constitution states that no US law, including judges' decisions, can be made ex post facto (retroactive). So even if the records were sealed, I may legally keep my copy. I cannot legally distribute it anymore, but I am allowed to keep it, study it, and use it.
You dont protest a BAD LAW by working around it, you protest a BAD LAW by NOT ABIDING BY IT. Only a crook needs to sidestep the law.
Wrong. A law is a law. You protest a bad law by fighting to change it, yes. But as long as it's in effect, you still have to at least respect it. In this case, circumventing it is the only possible way to fight the law while still respecting it by following it (if only technically).
That kind of attitude gets BAD LAWS passed. When something is UNACCEPTABLE, DONT ACCEPT IT. period.
I don't accept it. But until we can get it changed, I still have to show it the respect due the law. It is possible to respect a law while fighting to change it.
Was this technology stolen? Hardly. Saying it was stolen would be like saying Columbus stole America because Leif Ericsson technically discovered it first. They worked completely independently, and achieved similar goals; neither "stole" anything from the other.
Now, on to your points...
One, the recording industry isn't going to release the movies unless they think the format provides some method of limiting or reducing pirating.
Explain, then, why they still release movies on VHS, which has no effective copy-protection (yes, there are a few methods, but all are easy to defeat). Or why the recording industry releases unprotected CD's. Because piracy doesn't do them nearly as much damage as they'd like the public to think, and they know it. That doesn't mean it's right to pirate, but it also means that unreasonable measures such as CSS are not justifiable on the grounds of antipiracy alone.
CSS isn't about limiting piracy. It's about being able to artificially inflate the prices in the US and other regions where people who don't know any better pay through the nose, while still allowing the movies to reach markets where it has to be sold at lower but still very profitable prices. In short, it's about conning US and European customers out of more money than they should have to pay. CSS, not DeCSS, is the true theft. And if something of mine is stolen, I have the right to get it back.
There is nothing preventing a software company from licensing the technology to create DVD software that runs under Linux.
Other than millions of dollars in license fees, insanely-restrictive NDA's, threats and FUD from Microsoft, and corporate elitism, you mean? There are plenty of things preventing a software company from using the technology for Linux. The barriers aren't legal ones, but they're just as real.
It's not free, but don't the people that worked to create this format deserve a reasonable profit for their efforts?
CSS is not a format. DVD movies are encoded using the MPEG-2 format, which is free. CSS is only an encryption system, and a piss-poor one to boot.
And yes, they deserve a reasonable profit. But CSS isn't about reasonable profits; it's about artificially inflating them by forcing consumers to pay more than they should.
DVD CSS is fighting for their livelihoods. If they lose this trade secret, they have the choice of comming up with a new encryption method, and convincing hardware manufacturers and the recording industry to support it, or they're out of business.
One: it's DVD CCA, not DVD CSS. Two: DVD CCA is not a coporation. It makes no profit at all from CSS. The CCA is a group which represents the major makers of DVD's. If CCA is dissolved, no one loses any jobs, except maybe the lawyers, because CCA doesn't employ anyone per se. It's not a business, it doesn't make any profit from CSS (the profit is made by the member groups, who already get plenty of profit from DVD sales unrelated to CSS licensing).
Thanks the the Constitution, no law can be ex post facto. If you get the docs before they are sealed, you can legally keep them. You do have to stop distributing them once they are sealed, but you may keep your copy.
This will be good for the CSS Documentation project I mentioned on Monday (and which, sad to say, is probably what prompted the lawyers to hold this hearing; I apologize for that). I do intend to get this started.
However, in the end you miss the point. There is a difference between DeCSS and DoubleClick.
The difference: DeCSS was made under a non-profit situation. DoubleClick's tracking reeks of commercialism.
Information wants to be free. But DoubleClick wants to sell the information. Information it didn't even let the people know it was gathering. There is your difference for you.
I even said that legal defense funds for him should continue. There's no way I would sell this guy out, or advocate that anyone else do so. What I was saying is that the DVD-CCA, scumbags though they are, will probably win this round, so we need to take steps to ensure that even if they do we aren't set back tremendously.
By the way, does the DMCA apply in Norway? Last I checked that was a US law.
That doesn't change anything. Regardless, we're getting the source from a public document, authored by DVD-CCA.
The code is GPL'd. Therefore, to comply with the GPL, the document must also be distributable under the terms of the GPL. I believe that's what the Open-Content License is for.
So it's still possible. I didn't choose my words very well when I talked about the public-domain bit. But the idea still works.
That doesn't change anything. Regardless, we're getting the source from a public document, authored by DVD-CCA.
The code is GPL'd. Therefore, to comply with the GPL, the document must also be distributable under the terms of the GPL. I believe that's what the Open-Content License is for.
So it's still possible. I didn't choode my words very well when I talked about the public-domain bit. But the idea still works.
There's something we need to face here. In all probability, DeCSS is dead. The DVD-CCA and MPAA together have so many resources that, unethical as their use may be, they'll win out. They've won this battle.
But we will win the war. Here's how...
1) Start a new project, the "CSS Documentation Project" (or CDP for short) This project's stated goal is to document the techniques used by DeCSS for playing DVD's on Linux. Where will it get its information? The DeCSS source, of course. But not just any copy of the DeCSS source. You see, when DVD-CCA filed its nice little lawsuit against DeCSS, it included the DeCSS source in its filing. The court has to release that filing to the public, and did so. That filing, and everything in it, are now in the public domain, if I am not mistaken. What an excellent little loophole to slip through...
2) Now, this is very important: no actual code can appear in the documentation that the CDP creates. This is just to make sure MPAA and DVD-CCA can't do a damn thing about it.
3) Using the CDP's documentation, a new piece of software is written. It should probably pay homage to the original DeCSS in some manner or another. The point is, it should fill in the two holes which MPAA exploited:
It was made using publicly available documentation, which itself was made using only publicly available documents. Technically no reverse-engineering took place.
It does not allow the user to copy DVD movies. At least the first version of the software should only be able to play the movies on the fly. Yes, this leaves people with DVD drives and slower machines out in the cold, at least for a while. But it's more important that the software is first established to be totally legal, or at least legal enough that DVD-CCA can rant till it's old and grey but can't do anything else about it.
At least at first, it would probably be best if the original DeCSS authors didn't work on this project. Just as addeed insurance that DVD-CCA can't do anything about it; we have to tread very carefully until the software is established as legal.
That would be a constructive way of fighting the DVD-CCA. Of course legal funds for the DeCSS author are also good, and should continue to be pursued; he shouldn't have to suffer when he's committed no crime. But we need to work on this as well; a new version of the software that can't be attacked like DeCSS has.
Now, all we need is a real start for the project. Any vounteers?
DeCSS is not illegal. No one has passed any law which this software breaks. This is just a bunch of unethical, profiteering gluttons flexing their "legal" muscles in an effort to scare him off. If that doesn't work and they actually try to bring him to crominal court, their case will deflate quickly because he hasn't broken the law.
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BS. As an acknowledged expert in the field of marketing, I ask you this question.
Let's see some credentials. You certainly don't talk like an expert in the field of marketing, much less an acknowledged one. And you give us no evidence to believe you, and plenty not to.
Who is the #1 software producer Apple or Microsoft ?
On what scale, might I ask? Here, at least, you sound like a marketer. I'll give you that much.
Answer: Microsoft, because they know when to quit coding and start MARKETING
Which also explains why most of their software is so bad (I have to give a nod to Excel, which I'm forced to admit is respectable). However, here you also talk like a marketer.
Apple have seen the light recently in this regard, but as a marketing expert with an extremely technical background (NT admin, VB developer)
Again, spoken like a true marketer. NT administration hardly qualifies as "extremely" technical (technical, yes, "extremely," no). Nor does developing in VB, which even Microsoft markets as being for non-technical people.
I have to ask the question who are Sun or Apple to tell me how to write my GUI ? Do they know my target market ?
Um, yes, they do. Both of them, especially Apple, have spent millions of dollars researching human interface design. Who are they to tell you how to design your GUI? People who know more about GUI design than you do, that's who. You could do worse than to take the advice of experts.
Are they paying my development staff ? No they are not.
Directly, no, But consider: well-designed apps lead to good reviews. Good reviews lead to better sales. Better sales lead to more profit. More profit leads to better-paid developers. So, in an indirect way, they are helping to pay your development staff.
So they can go to hell.
So you'll have company after your boss and co-workers kill you for writing buggy apps with badly-designed interfaces? I can see why you wouldn't want to be lonely, but I don't think it'll happen.
This is stupid. SATs are in no way objective.
Perhaps this could be said, to some degree, for the verbal section. But math, I'm afraid, is objective no matter which way you slice it. It's a simple fact that no matter where you go, 2 + 2 = 4. You can prove this to be true if you want (although, ironically enough, a rigorous proof of this particular problem is quite large).
If you have gone to good schools (which generally means wealthy communities) then you have a better chance of doing well on the SATs.
I won't deny that some schools are better than others. Believe me, I've been to some of the best and some of the worst. But you can apply yourself and do the work anywhere. That's all it takes. Some people have to work harder than others, and some may require assistance in doing the work. But, barring certain very rare medical conditions (and no, ADD is not one of these), anyone can do the work.
That may be true if your seeped in middle american culture but it doesn't hold true for large numbers of Americans.
Math exists independent of any culture. Certain language skills also exist independent of culture; while the particulars can differ sometimes there are constants which can be drawn; ask any linguist.
Standardized tests are bullshit. They maintain the educational tradition of memorization.
There's a place for memorization. A large one, actually. Any coder knows this, or (I'm assuming you code, judging from comments you make later on) do you consult the documentation every single time you call a function?
Learning and teaching students to be learners for their entire lives is not achieved by have students regurgitate a bunch of bullshit.
Not entirely, no. But the ability to recall previously learned material is an important aspect of learning, and it's the only one that can really be tested under truly fair conditions.
Education should teach students to learn and research. As a bunch of computer geeks most people here should appreciate that.
I don't deny that a basic love of learning is important. I'd imagine it's also something a lot of Slashdotters posess. Now, how many Slashdotters got that love of learning directly from course material in school?
Not many. I know I didn't get mine that way. There are some things that can't be learned in a classroom. A general love of learning can't be taught; student have to find that on their own.
A decent geek can learn and research anything they want.
Agreed, but this doesn't apply only to geeks. Anyone with a love of knowledge can do it. Anyone without a love of knowledge can do it too, but first you have to get past that little barrier of disliking the steps you have to take to get the knowledge you seek.
Any good hacker knows that learning is the key, having someone shove a bunch of facts down your throat is useless.
There are two ways of learning something. You can discover it for yourself, or you can have it taught to you (I'm including looking things up as a part of this). Having something taught to you involves getting facts "shoved down your throat" as you so eloquently put it.
Here's the thing. You are correct that true learning comes from research and discovery. But those are only the tip of the iceberg. You still need a good foundation from which to work, or your research won't get very far. That is where the memorization comes into play. Facts are like building blocks in that regard. You start with a few facts, and a question based on them. You go, you find more facts, and your knowledge builds as a result. You can take this even further, gathering still more facts.
This reminds me of a story I saw on the news when I was little. It was about a man who was writing a new style of math textbook. The idea behind it was simple: out of the problems in the back of each chapter, only a small portion, perhaps just the first few, actually covered the new material. The rest were review of previous chapters. So the students worked over the older material again and again. These textbooks worked. Studies proved that students who used these things were doing better with the material than those who weren't using the books, and moreover they were better at incorporating new material regardless of the source. This book style died a painful death not long after their introduction, though. The reason: people who claimed that it taught the students to be "robots." Never mind that the students were learning the material.
The point is this. You've found a joy in learning through research and discovery. That's good. But you've forgotten that before you can build the house, you have to pour the foundation. And yes, it's dreary work. But it's important.
Men and women do study differently because mens' brains have a weaker corpus collostum (sp?), the bridge between the hemispheres. Men have, in general, a greater ability to think objectively. Women have greater ability to think subjectively. So women empathize and work with people better than men, but men usually make better analysts.
True. But in the end, it tends to balance out. So even if the styles are different, it comes out as a wash.
You either have many specialized tools that work well on specifics, or a few generalized ones that aren't very good at anything.
Or, more to the point, you use several tools to get the job done, each one doing what it does best and contributing to the whole.
Ludicrous.
Look. College is many different things; I'm not going to argue that. But its primary purpose is a place of study. If a student can't perform well on a test (which requires that one exercise a reasonable amount of study skills), that student simply isn't going to do very well in most collegiate enviornments.
The bit about testing leadership and other types of intelligence is, I suppose, a valid concern. But do it in addition to the tests, not instead of them.
Personally, I always saw racial preferences as one of the more wacko ideas. A person's race doesn't determine how well they'll do in a college environment at all. Religion might, depending on the tenets of the given religion, but that's exceedingly rare and a student whose religion might affect college life is very likely to choose a place where the two won't interfere with one another anyway. Sexual orientation doesn't affect study skills, or gender, or anything else along those lines. So why even put them on a college application at all? Statistics?
Statistics and such are of interest to statisticians, but in the end they're not really indicative of very much. Personally, as I see it, if you want to make college admissions fair across races, don't make all kinds of special treatment. Make the process race-blind (and gender-blind except in the case of single-sex colleges, and such). Completely eliminate the race question on the application form; if you feel you need the statistics then send the students a survey after the admissions decisions have already been made. I don't think anyone here will argue against the assertion that race and such has no place in the decision whether or not to admit a student. So why even ask the questions until the decisions have been made?
But I'm ranting again, so back to the subject...
A college is a place of study. I fail to see how objective merit is an invalid concern. The SAT's and ACT's are meant to be a measure of the skills a student needs to succeed in a college environment, namely study and reasoning skills. I think the ACT tends to do a better job of measuring this than the SAT's (since the ACT's test a broader range of skills), but both do well in their given fields. The rest, such as leadership, are of course very nice skills to have. But they have little to no effect on how well the student does in classes, and can even hinder the student in some cases, as they get involved in more activities than they can handle and their grades suffer as a result (I've seen this happen to far too many students).
So attacking merit isn't the way to go. Replacing onjective tests with subjective ones only adds the potential for more racism and bias than the terminally insecure claim exists now. Combining the two is actually something of a good idea, so long as you're careful about how that's done.
Oh, one last thing. Someone talked about the idea of interviewing prospective students. Most colleges already do that. I went through a bunch of interviews, as did my sisters when they went off to college, as did everyone I know who went to or is currently at college. It's an important tool. But all tools are inherently flawed in some manner or another (even a simple hammer is flawed: it can miss the nail or worse, hit your finger); that's why only rarely can any one tool be used to get the job done well.
I hardly see how I "misrepresented" anything, but it appears I was wrong about the Internet2 being for general public use. Thank you for correcting me. Internet2 will eventually spread to general use, of course, as the current Net evolves to match and absorb it, but this isn't going to be a quick process.
In any case, your point only reinforces mine. Barring a truly major breakthrough in consumer-level (and even low- to midrenge corporate-level) connection technology, DVD-quality full-length movies simply aren't going to be practical to transfer ofer the Net for a long time.
So if I wanted to put the videos of my wedding on a DVD for my family to watch on their DVD players, I couldn't do this? Or, if I made an independent film I couldn't distribute it on DVD without licensing an encryption key?
Is that for real? Please tell me I'm mistaken.
Unfortunately, I think it's for real.
There is hope, however. Remember, those disks only fail in DVD players. DVD-ROM drives can still use them, and therefore any MPEG2 player should be able to access them.
I'm also guessing that before long someone will come up with a service where you send in an unencrypted DVD (and whatever fee they decide to charge) and they send back encrypted copies that'll work in any DVD device. This is far from an ideal situation, but there's very little that can be done about it, unless you're willing to go into the area of mod-chipping DVD players (which, while certainly doable, isn't something I'm into).
Someone also pointed out that over the past 12 months, CD sales supposedly dropped 30%. The music industry is quick to blame this on piracy. Certainly piracy accounts for some of it. But I don't think that's the real reason sales are dropping. Nor is it the fact that people are listening to more independent artists who have no deals with the record companies. I think the cause is far more simple: evolution. Technology evolves in a manner not unlike life does. When the CD came around, vinyl records died a slow and painful death; they're all but gone now, limited to a niche market(let's please not get into a vinyl vs. CD flamewar here).
It's happenning again, only this time digital music is abandoning its physical form, the CD. The record companies never saw this coming. They had their chance; if any of them had come up with a secure, open standard, put it out there for many platforms, and sold music using it at a reasonable price, it would have flown. But they ignored the "new music" and now they're paying the price as evolution leaves them in the dust. I doubt it's quite too late for them; if they can get a reasonable open standard going they can still recover. But they had better hurry, and they'd better do it right.
Digital video isn't going that way anytime soon, of course. It's still too big to transfer over most networks in a way that leaves the video quality intact while still making the transfers practical. But it will come eventually, and the entertainment industry had better be ready this time, or they're going to get trampled into the dust.
This one I only learned recently, but I hadn't seen it on Slashdot before.
Yes, we all know that the price of DVD-ROM discs is higher than the price of a DVD movie. This presents a sort of pseudo-barrier to copying, right? Of course, that barrier will drop as the prices do.
But there's another barrier, and this one is real.
Apparently, DVD players don't work with unencrypted disks (DVD-ROM drives are another matter, but most of the DVD playing machines out there are the set-top boxes). Furthermore, the key is always stored at a very specific spot on each disk.
Now, on a DVD-ROM disk, that spot is pre-burned with zeroes. Making it physically impossible to burn a disk which will work in an ordinary DVD player.
Of course the DVD CCA wouldn't let this information out normally; if people know that DeCSS still didn't let you burn practical pirate DVD's, there would be no case.
Yet another reason DeCSS doesn't promote piracy; pirated disks won't even work. In other words, this guy's spouting DeCSS FUD. Not that he hasn't before, but this is just another bit of factual evidence to add to the pile.
Strange... I've always been able to double-size clips, even in the free version. I haven't been able to do that with Web-embedded clips, no, but there's a reason for that: Web-embedded clips aren't supposed to be double-sized. All that does is screw up the page layout, and rather badly at that (truth be told, this is far more likely to be a limitation of Netscape and IE than it is to be a limitation in the QuickTime plugin. The most likely scenario is that the QuickTime plugin doesn't let you double-sixe Web-embedded clips because Netscape and IE aren't too keen on letting the user double-size media interactively. I'll grant, an "Open in Player..." function in the plugin's context menu would be nice, and it would avert this problem).
If you want to double-size a clip you find on the Web, just save it and open it in the player.
Well, how about a "save" button? Its pretty irritating to download somthing off the 'net for two hours, only to have to download it again if you want to see it again.
Strange... I've always been able to save QuickTime movies to this machine. I paid for my version, true, though I was very pissed off at having to do that. However, even that's irrelevant; there are half a billion QuickTime-supporting plugins out there, and nearly all of them DO have a save feature, you can still circumvent QuickTime's little thing there with no trouble at all.
Also, Apple aperantly decided that it's player was so great, that it should be used for everything else as well! After all, I'm sure apple knows more about the PNG format then IE or netscape, right?
Actually, at the moment it does. Have you seen the state of PNG support in current versions of IE and Netscape? It's not pretty. It's quite a shame, really; neither browser supports it fully (or even close to fully, particularly where transparency is concerned).
Mozilla's another matter entirely. But there's also no QuickTime plugin for Mozilla, on any platform. At least, not yet.
Of course, since qucktime dosn't have a save, now I can't save PNG files without some work.
I dealt with this one above.
I don't have quicktime installed, and I doubt I ever will again. I want to use the programs that I think are good, not the ones apple choses.
Then turn off the plugin for those things you don't want it to see. It's a very simple matter, not unlike the work you do to enable the plugin you do want to use.
I don't want a QT client from apple. When Apple writes its own clients, they're always MacOS-ish, regardless of the underlying architecture, and they never let you do some of the tricks you need to do.
Um... such as... what? I have no idea of anything I've ever "needed" to do in QuickTime that the client ever kept me from doing.
And, there isn't a real reason to have a different client for QT and AVI and MPEG.
Agreed. However, QuickTime supports both AVI and MPEG anyway, so your point is moot. I've never found Xanim's MPEG playback to be all that great anyway; I use it for AVI but I've moved to SMPEG-based stuff for MPEG playback. So I'd love to see QuickTime ported so I could get back to one program for all of them again.
What I want to see from Apple is a QuickTime codec library.
QuickTime is NOT a codec. How many times do people have to be told that? QuickTime is nothing more than a file format. One which, I might add, is already supported under several libraries. Codecs are another matter entirely. Take Sorenson, for example. It's not a file format. Theoretically, barring the fact that there is no software to do this, you could compress an AVI with Sorenson, if you really wanted to.
MPEG is both a file format and a codec. I never saw this as much of a Good Thing. But MPEG4 drops that and uses the QuickTime file format, leaving the codec as pure MPEG.
If I'm using the LiViD player for MPEG and for AVI, I don't want a seperate, Apple-made-and feature-poor player for quicktime movies.
I haven't seen LiViD's player yet, so I can't comment on that. But if I can use one program for QtickTime, AVI, and MPEG, I'll use it. By the way, what makes everything Apple makes inherently bad, as you seem to imply? For that matter, what features is the QuickTime player missing?
LSo, pray tell, how do you determine if a site is pornagraphic? Who makes the call? And what if a site incorporates both pornagraphic and non-pornagraphic elements?
I'm going to give you a completely honest answer here. I don't know. The problem is, as I've stated before, that the definition of pornography deals with sexuality, and that's something which is a little bit different for everyone. What I consider pornographic isn't likely to agree perfectly with what any given random person on the Net considers pornographic; there'll probably be some overlap but it won't be perfect agreement.
The main problem is cultural differences. For example, many Americans consider any nudity to be pornographic (I don't, and I'd imagine few Slashdotters do, but no one here could be considered an "average American," particularly those of us who aren't even from the US). This stems, probably, from the Puritanical, fundamentalist backgrounds of American culture. Many other cultures, most notably that of Japan but also those of many European nations, are more relaxed about this, and have different definitions. There are some things that all of these cultures would agree was pornographic, but there would be a lot of disagreement on other things, particularly softcore.
I don't claim to know the answer. I'd imagine there is one, but I don't know what it is.
It strikes me that the people you're largely upset with are more or less the equivalent of phone slammers, or spammers rather than pornographers. Most pornographers are so (justifibly) paranoid that they go to extremes to avoid violating laws. False advertising laws may apply in the instance of redirection. People interested only in banner impressions are a slightly different class of people.
You know what? You're probably the only person who's challenged my post (at least thus far) and not missed the point entirely. You're exactly right; I don't like porn or hate speech, but I do recognize the right of such sites to exist. What upsets me is the ways they trick or force people into going there without knowing what they're getting into.
Re: your definition of hate speech, would then the advocation of the destruction of hate groups be considered hate speech as you're basing their annhilation (etc) based upon their beliefs?
One: No, because there's a difference between a hate group and the people affiliated with it. It is quite possible to destroy a hate group without killing the people therein.
Two: I wasn't advocating the destruction of hate groups anyway. Even if I practically get physically ill when viewing the results of their recruitment of children, I do recognize their right to exist.
Perhaps more active enforcement of laws against this behavior (redirection, false advertising, wire fraud, etc.) would be in order?
That's another way of doing it, but ultimately it's not as effective. Then you get into stuff like META-tag abuse (to grab more hits from search engines) and other methods. It'd be a good place to start, though.
This is presumptive in that it would indeed prevent the right to be heard, which is why most people make a webpage or post anything on the net to begin with.
.edu, .mil, .gov, .org, and so on) was for in the first place.
Ah, but there's the catch. You have the right to speak. Others have the right to hear you, or not hear you, as they so choose.
You, however, have no innate right to be heard. You are given that right when others exercise their right to hear you. You may not take it from those who do not exercise that right, because then you are taking away their right to not hear you. Likewise, they may not take away your right to speak, all they can do is not listen.
Many of the pariah groups on the Net (pr0n sites, hate sites, and such) have come to use sneaky tricks to try and make others read their sites. A favorite, particularly among pr0n sites, is redirection; they'll lead you to a site that looks innocent enough, but as soon as you enter (or in some cases as soon as you leave) you're automatically taken to one or several pr0n sites that you probably never intended to visit in the first place. In this way, by tricking you into entering their sites, they are forcing you to hear what you may not want to hear.
Hate sites tend to use a different tactic: misdirection. Witness the recent registration of www.MartinLutherKing.org by Storm Front, one of the oldest hate groups on the Net. They are using the connotations of the name to trick you into hearing what you do not want to hear.
And then, of course, there's the old pr0n-banner tactic. With this one, sites pay people to recruit new users. Sometimes "new user" means someone visits the site, other times the user has to actually sign up for some service. So these "recruiters" password-lock their sites, forcing you to use these services (so they make money) before you use the site. Anyone who's been on Hotline in the last four years knows about this tactic all too well.
What I'm saying is that these tricks shouldn't be allowed. It's not fair to make someone hear you by tricking them into thinking they're going to hear something else. Likewise, it's not fair to force people to do things they don't want to do before you offer them some kind of service. What I'm calling for is a way to make it such that when you enter a site, you go in knowing exactly what you're getting into. That's why the original TLD system (.com,
Now there's still the problem of definition. Hate speech is relatively easy to define; I've seen some challenges as replies to my original post, but these tend to miss the point entirely (for example, the post who talks about excluding people from Harvard based on SAT score, while forgetting that each person takes the SAT as an individual, and thus the score is an individual thing).
Pr0n is different. It can't be defined, at least not easily. The reason: it deals with sexuality, which is a very personal thing, and a little different for everybody. So no matter how you define it you'll wind up excluding some types of pr0n, and unless your definition is very specific you'll end up including some things that aren't. So you'll never be able to categorize all pr0n. The goal is to categorise as much of it as possible, and make it identifiable, both to make it easier to find for those who wish to see it, and easier to avoid for those who do not.
Racism is, frankly, disgusting. Not too far from my home (my real home, not my college apartment) lives one family in particular. The youngest of the three daughters is no more than eight years old (and I've known them for five years) and ever since I moved there, I've listened to them grow increasingly hateful and racist, to the point where my sisters and I can't even invite a good portion of our friends over anymore for fear that those three will come out and start harrassing them. It has to be, without a doubt, the single most sickening thing I've ever seen.
But I cannot support censorship of any kind (except for parental censorship and self-censorship). I'll grant; I'd like to see all hate speech disappear from the Net. But it's not my place, nor anyone else's, to start forcibly removing it.
In the past I've mentioned the ".xxx plan" for porn. I've always found the idea intriguing (the idea being that porn sites would have to register under that domain). It still allows porn sites to exist, but in a manner such that someone who doesn't want to see those sites can avoid them very easily. As far as I'm concerned that's even more important than making filtering easier for parents who choose to use it. I want to be able to hit AltaVista, run a search, and hit a checkbox labeled "exclude porn sites" so I don't have to wade through them while I look for what I'm really after.
Perhaps a similar plan could work for hate speech such as this (".hate" or ".kkk" or something similar). It means that you have to legally define hate speech, but that's not as difficult as defining porn.
I would submit that hate speech could be defined as the advocation of the annhilation, forced separation, or intimidation of any group of people based on beliefs, genetic factors, physical or mental prowess, or anything else other than the objective merits of the individuals within that group. Does anyone agree or disagree?
Keep in mind, this plan does not prohibit such speech in any way. What it does do is make it so that a person who views a site knows beforehand just what the site contains. I don't see how this is an affront to anyone's rights; frankly I find it to be a bigger affront to my own rights when people pull cure HTML tricks to redirect me from a harmless-looking personal page into a porn site. Implicit in the right to free speech are two other very important rights: the right to hear what I choose, and the right to not hear what I choose not to.
So what? A bad action is still a bad action whether or not you're making money on it or not.
Point for your side. But there's one thing: consider motives again.
Let's look at DeCSS. Why was it made? It was made so Linux (and other alternative OS users) could play legitimately-purchased DVD's. Yes, you can copy disks, but that was not the intent of the project, nor its primary use. In short, the intent of the act is benign.
DoubleClick's info-harvesting exists for one purpose only: to sell the information. Furthermore, to sell it to people who will use it in ways that DoubleClick knows will use it for the sole purpose of doing a primitive psychoanalysis on people and pushing ads based on the results. This is something that no one wants. So the intent is, albeit mildly, malicious.
Information wants to be free, yes. But it does not want to be misused. That is the difference between DeCSS and DoubleClick's data-harvesting.
Despite the story posted yesterday on Slashdot, the CSS source has not been made part of the public record in the case. The plaintiffs requested and the judge granted that the CSS source be sealed records. They are not publically available from the court nor are they in the public domain.
As of the time you posted this, you were wrong; the court had not sealed the records; the documents were quite available from the court and most definitely in the public domain.
That may have changed as of today; I don't know, because no one seems to be putting the news out. However, I know that I got my copy of the docs before they were sealed. The Constitution states that no US law, including judges' decisions, can be made ex post facto (retroactive). So even if the records were sealed, I may legally keep my copy. I cannot legally distribute it anymore, but I am allowed to keep it, study it, and use it.
You dont protest a BAD LAW by working around it, you protest a BAD LAW by NOT ABIDING BY IT. Only a crook needs to sidestep the law.
Wrong. A law is a law. You protest a bad law by fighting to change it, yes. But as long as it's in effect, you still have to at least respect it. In this case, circumventing it is the only possible way to fight the law while still respecting it by following it (if only technically).
That kind of attitude gets BAD LAWS passed. When something is UNACCEPTABLE, DONT ACCEPT IT. period.
I don't accept it. But until we can get it changed, I still have to show it the respect due the law. It is possible to respect a law while fighting to change it.
Was this technology stolen? Hardly. Saying it was stolen would be like saying Columbus stole America because Leif Ericsson technically discovered it first. They worked completely independently, and achieved similar goals; neither "stole" anything from the other.
Now, on to your points...
One, the recording industry isn't going to release the movies unless they think the format provides some method of limiting or reducing pirating.
Explain, then, why they still release movies on VHS, which has no effective copy-protection (yes, there are a few methods, but all are easy to defeat). Or why the recording industry releases unprotected CD's. Because piracy doesn't do them nearly as much damage as they'd like the public to think, and they know it. That doesn't mean it's right to pirate, but it also means that unreasonable measures such as CSS are not justifiable on the grounds of antipiracy alone.
CSS isn't about limiting piracy. It's about being able to artificially inflate the prices in the US and other regions where people who don't know any better pay through the nose, while still allowing the movies to reach markets where it has to be sold at lower but still very profitable prices. In short, it's about conning US and European customers out of more money than they should have to pay. CSS, not DeCSS, is the true theft. And if something of mine is stolen, I have the right to get it back.
There is nothing preventing a software company from licensing the technology to create DVD software that runs under Linux.
Other than millions of dollars in license fees, insanely-restrictive NDA's, threats and FUD from Microsoft, and corporate elitism, you mean? There are plenty of things preventing a software company from using the technology for Linux. The barriers aren't legal ones, but they're just as real.
It's not free, but don't the people that worked to create this format deserve a reasonable profit for their efforts?
CSS is not a format. DVD movies are encoded using the MPEG-2 format, which is free. CSS is only an encryption system, and a piss-poor one to boot.
And yes, they deserve a reasonable profit. But CSS isn't about reasonable profits; it's about artificially inflating them by forcing consumers to pay more than they should.
DVD CSS is fighting for their livelihoods. If they lose this trade secret, they have the choice of comming up with a new encryption method, and convincing hardware manufacturers and the recording industry to support it, or they're out of business.
One: it's DVD CCA, not DVD CSS.
Two: DVD CCA is not a coporation. It makes no profit at all from CSS. The CCA is a group which represents the major makers of DVD's. If CCA is dissolved, no one loses any jobs, except maybe the lawyers, because CCA doesn't employ anyone per se. It's not a business, it doesn't make any profit from CSS (the profit is made by the member groups, who already get plenty of profit from DVD sales unrelated to CSS licensing).
Thanks the the Constitution, no law can be ex post facto. If you get the docs before they are sealed, you can legally keep them. You do have to stop distributing them once they are sealed, but you may keep your copy.
This will be good for the CSS Documentation project I mentioned on Monday (and which, sad to say, is probably what prompted the lawyers to hold this hearing; I apologize for that). I do intend to get this started.
However, in the end you miss the point. There is a difference between DeCSS and DoubleClick.
The difference: DeCSS was made under a non-profit situation. DoubleClick's tracking reeks of commercialism.
Information wants to be free. But DoubleClick wants to sell the information. Information it didn't even let the people know it was gathering. There is your difference for you.
I even said that legal defense funds for him should continue. There's no way I would sell this guy out, or advocate that anyone else do so. What I was saying is that the DVD-CCA, scumbags though they are, will probably win this round, so we need to take steps to ensure that even if they do we aren't set back tremendously.
By the way, does the DMCA apply in Norway? Last I checked that was a US law.
That doesn't change anything. Regardless, we're getting the source from a public document, authored by DVD-CCA.
The code is GPL'd. Therefore, to comply with the GPL, the document must also be distributable under the terms of the GPL. I believe that's what the Open-Content License is for.
So it's still possible. I didn't choose my words very well when I talked about the public-domain bit. But the idea still works.
That doesn't change anything. Regardless, we're getting the source from a public document, authored by DVD-CCA.
The code is GPL'd. Therefore, to comply with the GPL, the document must also be distributable under the terms of the GPL. I believe that's what the Open-Content License is for.
So it's still possible. I didn't choode my words very well when I talked about the public-domain bit. But the idea still works.
But we will win the war. Here's how...
1) Start a new project, the "CSS Documentation Project" (or CDP for short) This project's stated goal is to document the techniques used by DeCSS for playing DVD's on Linux. Where will it get its information? The DeCSS source, of course. But not just any copy of the DeCSS source. You see, when DVD-CCA filed its nice little lawsuit against DeCSS, it included the DeCSS source in its filing. The court has to release that filing to the public, and did so. That filing, and everything in it, are now in the public domain, if I am not mistaken. What an excellent little loophole to slip through...
2) Now, this is very important: no actual code can appear in the documentation that the CDP creates. This is just to make sure MPAA and DVD-CCA can't do a damn thing about it.
3) Using the CDP's documentation, a new piece of software is written. It should probably pay homage to the original DeCSS in some manner or another. The point is, it should fill in the two holes which MPAA exploited:
That would be a constructive way of fighting the DVD-CCA. Of course legal funds for the DeCSS author are also good, and should continue to be pursued; he shouldn't have to suffer when he's committed no crime. But we need to work on this as well; a new version of the software that can't be attacked like DeCSS has.
Now, all we need is a real start for the project. Any vounteers?
DeCSS is not illegal. No one has passed any law which this software breaks. This is just a bunch of unethical, profiteering gluttons flexing their "legal" muscles in an effort to scare him off. If that doesn't work and they actually try to bring him to crominal court, their case will deflate quickly because he hasn't broken the law.