Hogwash! DeCSS provides a means to exercise the fair use rights that the DMCA pays lips service to.
The MPAA unquestionably wants us to believe that the actions of Mr. Pavlovich were illegal, but that
doesn't mean that they were. Under our system he is entitled to a presumption of innocence unless and
until a jury finds him guilty.
If DVD purchasers were _guaranteed_ fair use, then they'd already have the available methods to make their limitted copies or whatever fair use allows _without_ having to 'crack' anything or otherwise violate the DMCA, _or_ the DVD products themselves wouldn't be legal. If the DMCA says you cannot circumvent technical restrictions on copying, then the only fair use you can get is what the DVD providers will allow. Since the products are presumed legal, then my guess is that you are _not_ guaranteed fair use.
My decision based on that analysis is to stay away from the act of mirroring the DeCSS code. As I haven't been arrested, I would guess that my analysis is correct.
If you don't like it, go create your own website. You seem to be forgetting that this is Rob's site and he can
say pretty much what he wants on it. Or isn't he allowed to have an opinion any more, now that he gets so
much traffic?
--
Well hellll yeahhh! He gets to post what he wants. We get to laugh at him. I can see you're not the sharpest stick in the woods:-D
For crying out loud people, cmdrtaco is here for our entertainment. Thats why I come here, theres not another bigger conglomeration of morons packed elbow to elbow scrambling for karma anywhere else on the web. And you think I can easily get this kind of comedy elsewhere??? Get a grip!
Microsoft could easily produce a first generation TCP/MS and offer a unix based version. Now industry says "cool, we can keep our servers!" and jumps on board to support clients running TCP/MS. Network infrastructure is upgraded to "superior protocol."
Next version, unix gets slashed because of "lack of demand", so companies are urged to move to XP and away from the "obsolete, non compatible" unix servers. I hear concerns sounding like that for.NET.
When you have short lived "standards" like Microsoft is fond of (great revenue source from upgrades), you can do this kind of thing. If you're the monopoly, your "competitors" are constantly thrashing their troups and resources playing compatibility catchup.
I remember wordstar brought this baggage along into msdos, although I don't remember wordstar on cpm. When I moved to a different editor, I remember always seeing this random junk at the end of a file.
VMS on the other hand has very typed files, the files are much more than a simple stream of bytes. FTP'ing in ascii apparently does a bit more than simply sort out the CR/no CR thing that unix-windows xfers do. But then you get cool stuff like indexed file support in the OS, which I miss turribly. (If I'm not mistaken, re windows unix ascii ftp xfers, LF == NL.)
Re:Proposed Solution: Boycott Movies & Music
on
Still in DMCA Prison
·
· Score: 1
Also, organize concerted efforts to let your local radio and television stations know about this. Have several
friends call their "news tips" desk. Point out how the U.S. is volating Sklyarov's rights and creating an
international incident all because the record & movie companies want to make you pay every time you listen to,
or view, one of their products. The Supreme Court has said if you own it you can use it any way you want.
THOSE EVIL BASTARD RECORD AND MOVIE COMPANIES!@!@!@ HOW DARE THEY FORCE US TO, um, CHARGE, er, ASK, uh, put pricetags on, heh, never mind...
Information wants to be free. Freedom of information can co-exist with sane copyright laws.
No.
Lets please examine the issues closer and develop detailed, articulate arguments on what the problems with the DMCA really are.
Information does _not_ want to be free. Much of my personal information does _not_ scream out to be posted or sold, to give an (apparently necessary) extreme example. The majority of the USA still believes in copyright and IP.
I really don't get it. Microsoft screws up, and/.'ers bash them. Microsoft acknowledges the problem,
fixes it, and apologizes, and they still get bashed. And they continue to be bashed for problems that
haven't existed for a while. I guess I'll never understand that.
Some folks have deep fundamental concerns with how
Microsoft conducts business. I know I do. Microsoft causes me problems, because I chose to become a Microsoft customer in certain areas (my biggest concern now is with their server software), I now have new problems directly resulting from Microsoft practices and products. I feel I was sold a piece'o'crap, and spent some time thinking about why I feel this way. It turns out that Microsoft simply rejects many practices that I and others hold to be sound, ie., 'the right stuff.' Therefore, I myself will view with suspicion anything else that comes from Redmond. While Microsoft may fix problems that are so obvious that even the suits would say "thats broke," in other more subtle (and sometimes very important) areas, they remain as stubborn as ever and will not budge.
Theres no need for _me_ to iterate the problems I personally see with Microsoft, as my solution is easy. At some point I'll express my regret in making this choice (actually already have), recommend to my superiors that they find somebody more willing and better able to deal with Microsoft, then I will be happily on my way to whatever job better suits me. Believe me, flipping burgers will be a move up, for all you M$ fans ready to bash my obvious lack of skills;-) I'll certainly not argue about any of that.
I hope this helps you see why some folks bash Microsoft. Some of us simply don't like doing business with them anymore and therefore view their every move with mistrust. Cheers!
Private property is the key difference between our system and Communism. I hope everyone is as
disturbed as I am by Slashdot's bizarre and insupportable belief that intellectual property is a "special case"
deserving of less protection under the law than any other kind of property.
I subscribe to the belief that patenting the obvious is nothing more than theft of common knowledge and 'tools of the trade.' While I believe that there may be some genuinely patentable software or processes, the current state of affairs is pretty sorry. Essentially, the patent office is rubberstamping anything that passes under their nose.
Checksums, hashes, etc are part of computer science, they've always been a cost saving way of computing value for identification. You'll usually end up 'storing' them. Checksums (and hashes, crc's, whatever) for 'fingerprinting' strings and things are common knowledge, why hack off a particular special case and say 'this is ours, you may never again use commonly known processes against _this particular case_, because we had lawyers and you didn't.' What has happened here is that they've patented a fundamental concept used everywhere because they were willing to use this on a relatively new (?) type of file. If I wanted to be that stupid, why don't I grab the CRC patent space on html files?
I just pkzip'ed T.HTM, I can list a CRC-32, gee, why don't I patent this? I'll tell you why, I work for a living, I'm not a thief, and even better, I'm not a scum sucking patent lawyer such as we're seeing with these trivial patents lately. But most importantly, this is _common knowledge_ among folks who work with computers and software, and I'll be a bum before I try to steal from common knowlege and prevent folks from creating new stuff.
There you have it. I support property, I support the ability to make a living.
I support intellectual property because I support making stuff for a living. I support copyrights, heck, I even pay M$, I need to use their stuff. But excuse me for not supporting the patent office's aiding theft from the body of common knowlege that folks use in their daily jobs.
Sheesh, how can thinking folks post in support of these trivial patents? I tell you one thing, "Fearsome Badgers", you'd better hope nobody patents making buttheaded stupid posts to slashdot, or lots of folks will need a new hobby (yeah, me included hehe)
Of course it could have been worse. If the conservatives weren't busy killing abortion doctors, lynching minority citizens, raping the environment, or otherwise wallowing in glorious republican nazi warmongering and hate for humanity, they may have posted a troll like, er, wait a minute, they did post one, the very one I'm following up!
Oh well, guess I'll try one of the other topics, this one looks a bit too inflamatory for me.
Carry on!
Re:The last vestiges of irrational exuburance!!
on
Mars Odyssey begins
·
· Score: 1
The activities of companies such as Microsoft made billions of dollars for people - not just for their
employees but for the economy. Now recently as these companies have started to do less well, beset by
open source, antitrust and so on, the economy has done badly. The results of this have been layoffs,
reduced consumer confidence (which means, eventually, that the guy who runs the bagel shop on the corner
loses his job) and general economic decline.
Interesting point, but you could look at it a number of ways. Reduced expense for business means higher profit. Enhanced stability in API's mean more commercial opportunity for ISV's. The fact that I don't need a 256mb Pentium XVIII to run a web server means that I can communicate cheaper. If Microsoft loses (for whatever reason), wealth will simply shift. Open source or otherwise highly available product is simply a good thing, if for nothing more than freeing up labor/money that would otherwise simply keep Ms. Gates supplied with fine handcrafted leather dominatrix... er... nice clothes.
Theres always a variety of ways to spin economics, but a great influence on economic health is always going to be peoples' perceptions, which may be the greatest impact of any Microsoft demise, much greater than any actual monetary/resource shift. And this assumes a big thing in itself, ie., that Microsoft is actually in any kind of danger. I would bet Bill can adjust his company to any new economic reality, and is already, ie., the 'ASP' thing.
How would UDP over HTTP work?, how the heck can you have an unreliable protocol over HTTP? As soon as you try to drop one damn UDP packet, you'd get a 'network unreachable.' Or would it be a 404, page not found? Damn I miss DECNET. (On the plus side, you could have traceroute implemented by hyperlinks.)
Absolutely! The RIAA would love nothing better than having the act of performing music be a 'licensed' profession, with the RIAA of course being the licensed authority.
Don't sign your rights over to a Big Recording Company for little or nothing? Performing for the love of the art, rather than filling the Big Recording Company's Bank Accounts? How bout we break your fingers then?
I run an ftp server. I charge $10 for each connection, then $5 for each 'distro sized chunk of data' downloaded. I only offer one distro. You can then go ahead and mirror it all you want, except for my customized . Hope that helps!
Open Source doesnt mean free, it means just that, its open. Once you have the product you are free to
modify it at will, and distribute it for money yourself, as long as the scorce code is tagged along with it. But
you must be doing a service, if its just a collection of other Open Source stuff you are allowed to charge a
reasonable fee for cd creation and shipping (assuming you do such things, for download you cant charge
squat). Or if its your orignal code, its deemed your work, thus chargable for said service.
You can charge for downloads of anything (if you are allowed to offer the stuff up to download in the first place). All you have to do is charge anything you want for the connection and bandwidth used, then no money is attached to the actual downloaded item. Case closed:-)
The problem is all our non-geek friends don't know how to use IRC and don't care to learn, most of mine
say even ICQ is too hard to learn and cling to their familiar AOL IM. The only way to beat this is for
someone to make a client that is as easy to use as AOL IM but uses an open protocol and then convince
everyone to use it instead. Like I said unfortunatly I guess we do have to use Aim.
I found a pretty good client. Its not as convenient as AOL IM, but its not that bad either.
Each user gets issued an ID and its cumbersome to find out who is 'available', etc, but amazingly enough the client base far exceeds any other instant message protocol that I know of.
I like it, its great, but its not free like AOL's IM:-(
Anyways, if you'd like to give it a spin, click here for a bit more info, at least thats the one I use. Cheers!
I'll slam who I want to slam, if I feel it's an appropriate use of my time to do so. I'll even use my name to do so,
unlike yourself. In this case, I freely offered the notion that fan-sites are crap, and wastes of talent and effort, as a
potential point of discussion.
Absolutely! Just because Isaac has the personality of a frog doesn't mean he can't post nonsense and trolls.
Its generous of our nature to give the limp rags of the world a forum to enhance their self worth. So lets give Isaac a break here folks. Congratulate him on his eliteness, don't shoot him down! Thanks!
(I hope this reply is more on topic, gosh knows I try.)
Of course, you're right about the common context. I personally don't like it, though. I don't like the fact that
today's "common contexts" in much of the world are properties to be owned. It's the very fact that people
build obsessive communities around pop entertainment that I find distressing. This tendency is, I feel, one
worth cautioning against, insofar as it (meaningless list snipped).
I think your missing the point. You're a dullard, and are being counterproductive. You're scaring everybody, we're so frightened of turning out to be like you that this very moment we're all racing to create new fan sites, just in the slight chance that it will keep us from becoming somebody as lifeless and depressing as you. Hope that helps!
Wait a minute, you may actually _want_ more fan sites! You tricky devil you, you had me completely fooled!
Slashdot Mirror
at least theres one server (www.cray.com) that won't get slashdotted.
If DVD purchasers were _guaranteed_ fair use, then they'd already have the available methods to make their limitted copies or whatever fair use allows _without_ having to 'crack' anything or otherwise violate the DMCA, _or_ the DVD products themselves wouldn't be legal. If the DMCA says you cannot circumvent technical restrictions on copying, then the only fair use you can get is what the DVD providers will allow. Since the products are presumed legal, then my guess is that you are _not_ guaranteed fair use.
My decision based on that analysis is to stay away from the act of mirroring the DeCSS code. As I haven't been arrested, I would guess that my analysis is correct.
Well hellll yeahhh! He gets to post what he wants. We get to laugh at him. I can see you're not the sharpest stick in the woods :-D
For crying out loud people, cmdrtaco is here for our entertainment. Thats why I come here, theres not another bigger conglomeration of morons packed elbow to elbow scrambling for karma anywhere else on the web. And you think I can easily get this kind of comedy elsewhere??? Get a grip!
Now theres a first, somebody posting and admitting to being an asshole. Gotta give you props for honesty tho.
He offered a new slant on a possible plot regarding raw sockets tho. Gibson never seemed to mention this theory.
Next version, unix gets slashed because of "lack of demand", so companies are urged to move to XP and away from the "obsolete, non compatible" unix servers. I hear concerns sounding like that for .NET.
When you have short lived "standards" like Microsoft is fond of (great revenue source from upgrades), you can do this kind of thing. If you're the monopoly, your "competitors" are constantly thrashing their troups and resources playing compatibility catchup.
--
Yes, I'm fond of "quotes."
VMS on the other hand has very typed files, the files are much more than a simple stream of bytes. FTP'ing in ascii apparently does a bit more than simply sort out the CR/no CR thing that unix-windows xfers do. But then you get cool stuff like indexed file support in the OS, which I miss turribly. (If I'm not mistaken, re windows unix ascii ftp xfers, LF == NL.)
THOSE EVIL BASTARD RECORD AND MOVIE COMPANIES!@!@!@ HOW DARE THEY FORCE US TO, um, CHARGE, er, ASK, uh, put pricetags on, heh, never mind...
No.
Lets please examine the issues closer and develop detailed, articulate arguments on what the problems with the DMCA really are.
Information does _not_ want to be free. Much of my personal information does _not_ scream out to be posted or sold, to give an (apparently necessary) extreme example. The majority of the USA still believes in copyright and IP.
Some folks have deep fundamental concerns with how Microsoft conducts business. I know I do. Microsoft causes me problems, because I chose to become a Microsoft customer in certain areas (my biggest concern now is with their server software), I now have new problems directly resulting from Microsoft practices and products. I feel I was sold a piece'o'crap, and spent some time thinking about why I feel this way. It turns out that Microsoft simply rejects many practices that I and others hold to be sound, ie., 'the right stuff.' Therefore, I myself will view with suspicion anything else that comes from Redmond. While Microsoft may fix problems that are so obvious that even the suits would say "thats broke," in other more subtle (and sometimes very important) areas, they remain as stubborn as ever and will not budge.
Theres no need for _me_ to iterate the problems I personally see with Microsoft, as my solution is easy. At some point I'll express my regret in making this choice (actually already have), recommend to my superiors that they find somebody more willing and better able to deal with Microsoft, then I will be happily on my way to whatever job better suits me. Believe me, flipping burgers will be a move up, for all you M$ fans ready to bash my obvious lack of skills ;-) I'll certainly not argue about any of that.
I hope this helps you see why some folks bash Microsoft. Some of us simply don't like doing business with them anymore and therefore view their every move with mistrust. Cheers!
I subscribe to the belief that patenting the obvious is nothing more than theft of common knowledge and 'tools of the trade.' While I believe that there may be some genuinely patentable software or processes, the current state of affairs is pretty sorry. Essentially, the patent office is rubberstamping anything that passes under their nose.
Checksums, hashes, etc are part of computer science, they've always been a cost saving way of computing value for identification. You'll usually end up 'storing' them. Checksums (and hashes, crc's, whatever) for 'fingerprinting' strings and things are common knowledge, why hack off a particular special case and say 'this is ours, you may never again use commonly known processes against _this particular case_, because we had lawyers and you didn't.' What has happened here is that they've patented a fundamental concept used everywhere because they were willing to use this on a relatively new (?) type of file. If I wanted to be that stupid, why don't I grab the CRC patent space on html files?
I just pkzip'ed T.HTM, I can list a CRC-32, gee, why don't I patent this? I'll tell you why, I work for a living, I'm not a thief, and even better, I'm not a scum sucking patent lawyer such as we're seeing with these trivial patents lately. But most importantly, this is _common knowledge_ among folks who work with computers and software, and I'll be a bum before I try to steal from common knowlege and prevent folks from creating new stuff.
There you have it. I support property, I support the ability to make a living.
I support intellectual property because I support making stuff for a living. I support copyrights, heck, I even pay M$, I need to use their stuff. But excuse me for not supporting the patent office's aiding theft from the body of common knowlege that folks use in their daily jobs.
Sheesh, how can thinking folks post in support of these trivial patents? I tell you one thing, "Fearsome Badgers", you'd better hope nobody patents making buttheaded stupid posts to slashdot, or lots of folks will need a new hobby (yeah, me included hehe)
Oh well, guess I'll try one of the other topics, this one looks a bit too inflamatory for me.
Carry on!
hehe tit-usville hehe
Interesting point, but you could look at it a number of ways. Reduced expense for business means higher profit. Enhanced stability in API's mean more commercial opportunity for ISV's. The fact that I don't need a 256mb Pentium XVIII to run a web server means that I can communicate cheaper. If Microsoft loses (for whatever reason), wealth will simply shift. Open source or otherwise highly available product is simply a good thing, if for nothing more than freeing up labor/money that would otherwise simply keep Ms. Gates supplied with fine handcrafted leather dominatrix... er... nice clothes.
Theres always a variety of ways to spin economics, but a great influence on economic health is always going to be peoples' perceptions, which may be the greatest impact of any Microsoft demise, much greater than any actual monetary/resource shift. And this assumes a big thing in itself, ie., that Microsoft is actually in any kind of danger. I would bet Bill can adjust his company to any new economic reality, and is already, ie., the 'ASP' thing.
--
Feel free to call it Xwindows
(Score -1, Gullible)
How would UDP over HTTP work?, how the heck can you have an unreliable protocol over HTTP? As soon as you try to drop one damn UDP packet, you'd get a 'network unreachable.' Or would it be a 404, page not found? Damn I miss DECNET. (On the plus side, you could have traceroute implemented by hyperlinks.)
I'll hire him. I have a vacancy in our janitorial department.
Don't sign your rights over to a Big Recording Company for little or nothing? Performing for the love of the art, rather than filling the Big Recording Company's Bank Accounts? How bout we break your fingers then?
Unmoderated forums have been done. Do a websearch for 'usenet'. Hope that helps!
I run an ftp server. I charge $10 for each connection, then $5 for each 'distro sized chunk of data' downloaded. I only offer one distro. You can then go ahead and mirror it all you want, except for my customized . Hope that helps!
You can charge for downloads of anything (if you are allowed to offer the stuff up to download in the first place). All you have to do is charge anything you want for the connection and bandwidth used, then no money is attached to the actual downloaded item. Case closed :-)
I found a pretty good client. Its not as convenient as AOL IM, but its not that bad either. Each user gets issued an ID and its cumbersome to find out who is 'available', etc, but amazingly enough the client base far exceeds any other instant message protocol that I know of.
I like it, its great, but its not free like AOL's IM :-(
Anyways, if you'd like to give it a spin, click here for a bit more info, at least thats the one I use. Cheers!
Absolutely! Just because Isaac has the personality of a frog doesn't mean he can't post nonsense and trolls.
Its generous of our nature to give the limp rags of the world a forum to enhance their self worth. So lets give Isaac a break here folks. Congratulate him on his eliteness, don't shoot him down! Thanks!
(I hope this reply is more on topic, gosh knows I try.)
I think your missing the point. You're a dullard, and are being counterproductive. You're scaring everybody, we're so frightened of turning out to be like you that this very moment we're all racing to create new fan sites, just in the slight chance that it will keep us from becoming somebody as lifeless and depressing as you. Hope that helps!
Wait a minute, you may actually _want_ more fan sites! You tricky devil you, you had me completely fooled!