The getting past CSS part is questionable, but there are plenty of legitimate for something like that.
But do I have a right to make a backup copy of the DVD I just bought, with CSS intact? For when my two-year old tries to eat the original?
The MPAA's answer is "no." They know these things wear out, and lets face it it hurts their sales if I only have to buy it once.
Legally, I can photocopy every page of a book that I own. I might want to do that to put it into a binder and make notes in the margins for a class. The MPAA thinks you don't have the right to do that with their content.
They want to control what you do with the stuff after you've bought it. I can see why they would try to make that hard (witness - they have CSS in the first place) and something that the Average Joe isn't going to do.
The MPAA and RIAA are using the Bad Cop / Bad Cop routine on us, knowing that if enough of us knuckle under the rest of us will grudgingly give in to the concept that the fair use rights you have for digital portrayals of information are significantly restricted in ways that "analog" technologies tied to physical media are not.
Many people here on SlashDot take the stand that they support copyright laws and going after the "pirates". But I think that's anachronistic. Isn't one of technologies main functions to eliminiate scarcity? Whereas the paradigm of the guilds that run Hollywood is a selfish inclusiveness against ousiders.
My hope is that the huge media companies will be hurt by Napster and Tivo and that TV and the Big Six (or however many there are) media conglomerates will lose their stranglehold on culture.
If that happens, technology will have made the world a better place:)
Segway costing $6000 or $2000 or $10000 or however much it is sucks too. I will buy a car at any of those price points, I'm sorry to say, before I get a Segway.
They should make the Segway go faster and allow them on the roads. That thing has got to be able to do 20 MPH, which is faster than most cyclists. I dont think "it" takes up significantly more lane space than a bicycle, either.
Dammit, I want Segway to kill commuter cars. But it's not happening! Hey Segway, give me one for free and I'll ride it around Seattle for ya!
The word is "immanentize." I seem to recall it has the root "manna," which we all know from playing Magic or Diablo II or what have you. I only know this because I became interested in that sig when I saw it months ago and decided to figure out what the hell you were talking about.
Yeah, it's gone. It was his sig -- which read "Is your browser retarded?" which in turn HREFfed to some attbi.com site... http://home.attbi.com/~bconway31/test.html I think. Anyway, that site shows a blank page in most browsers but crashes IE6. The source is some bizarre Windows CLSID string or something like that.
Sorry for the confusion. I usually try to include in italics whatever I'm responding to. This also has the added bonus of getting fewer -1 Offtopics.
Of course, you don't need Photoshop to fabricate evidence. It's just another tool that can be used.
A lot of people have complained that who knows what the authorities might do with Photoshop -- enhancing evidence and such. That's a valid point but you should take a step back and realize how scientifically flawed fingerprinting is in the first place. (In my opinion, of course.)
Fingerprinting came about around the turn of the twentieth century as a replacement for a failed biometrics system, in which certain mesaurements of a person (size of head, length of arm, stuff like that) were being tabulated, and recorded to make a database of known criminals. Problem is, two people could have the same measurements.
Likewise, there is no "guarantee" that two individuals have the same fingerprints. Observation has shown that two people probably don't have the same prints, but that's no guarantee. I don't believe the medical community even really understands what makes fingerprints "grow" in the first place.
Fingerprinting is not a "science" in the way physics, chemistry, etc. are. (Legally, this is called the Daubert Test.) Where is the peer review? If fingerprinting were truly a science, as American courts have determined science to be, the national fingerprint database should be publicly accessible. It is not. The formula/algorithm by which fingerprint examinters determine a "match" would be public. The method that the computer uses to match fingerprints would be public knowledge, but it is not.
I'm not trying to say that fingerprinting doesn't provide valuable evidence, and I certainly do believe that fingerprint evidence is a good indicator that somebody touched something. But is it iron-clad proof? No. And worse than that, is is a closed-source, proprietary system.
Were fingerprinting evidence to be invented today, the courts would probably not allow it. It has not withstood (likely it cannot withstand) the same sort of scientific scrutiny that DNA identification has. However, they have significant enough momentum behind them that even though they may not be an "exact science" they are good enough for the purposes of the criminal justice system.
how is the US Government and/or Adobe going to compensate Dmitri
A free lifetime supply of e-books?
But seriously, they're not going to give him diddly. Things are frequently never made "right," esp. when the criminal justice system is involved.
It's not like you get restitution for when the cops pull you over, give you a warning, and let you go. Though technically you were detained for a few minutes while they ran your registration. What happened to Dmitry is the same thing but on a larger scale.
No fraud here. Lots of innuendo and FUD, but nothing arising to the legal definition of fraud. If you want to give hackers a better name, stop using the word fraudulently... uh, fraudulently.
I would make an exception to damn near any rule to protect someone in my bloodline. Must be the Sicilian in me acting up.
Plenty of people DO rat out their family members.
The Unabomber was caught after The Feds decided to "negotiate with terrorists" i.e. publish his Manifesto in several major newspapers. Then his brother recognized the text as the same sort of stuff his crazy brother was always talking about, and quietly contacted the FBI.
More recently, the Smiley Face Bomber (my favorite bomber ever, BTW) was caught in part because his dad recongnized the phrase "mailboxes are exploding!" from a letter that his son had sent shortly before the mailboxes started exploding. Dad alerted the authorities.
I'm sure there are counter-examples, but blood ties are not always so strong. Some people hate their families, after all.
On to point #2, back to the grandparent. The Fifth Amendment is a good thing. It keeps you from being compelled to testify against yourself. The older method under English law, where you were crushed to death with huge weights (not sure if they said 16 Tons) if you refused to testify, will probably be used in those military tribunal things.
You could have made that same argument before the advent of the Internet, you know. Want local news? Hang out at the barbershop. The coffee house. Talk to the kids on the street. Attend a city hall meeting.
I do agree that reading would be way better than just audio. There's simply no point to limiting the "stream" to audio-only. I can understand a bandwidth cap, but there should be a way to introduce a text stream, and maybe a video stream if exists the bandwitdh to push it without crowding out others.
It has become increasingly obvious that The Names You've Gradually Grown To Trust (like NYT) are less and less worthy of that trust -- marketing and the need for sensationalism drives their agenda and clouds their judgement. I get my news from The Economist and Funny Times and everything in between. The more sources, the better!
Why don't you call Intuit support and come up with some reason as to why their new software won't work for you. Like your small office has only one phone line and there's no ISP in your area, or your ISP went out of business or something.
Or maybe that you live on a boat, and you can easily send mail via USPS but to use the Internet requires a trip to the local cybercafe, since you can't get internet access on your cell phone?
Man, if I could get a WAV of that guy falling to his doom, that would be my new system beep. For some reason that sound has stuck with me after all these years.
Another impossible to win commodore game was Space Ace 2101. You had to amass sick amounts of money, and you only got one life.
I think my favorite was Raid On Bungeling Bay. I wore out my space bar with that game, so I cannibalized the keyboard from the VIC-20 and put it in the C-64. Then I learned how to rest the stapler on the keboard just right so that my helicopter was alwaws firing.
I must have played that game a hundred times. I was so into it that I saw all variations of the newspaper story proclaiming victory at the end, which changed depending on how many lives you had left at the end. Including the incredibly difficult-to-get funeral procession (instead of the fireworks) and day of mourning headline when you managed to steer your crashing helicopter helicopter into the last target. I was so impressed with the programmers for including that ending, and I only ever got to see it once. (In case you never played the game, after your helicopter took too much damage, you hear the rotor start to spin out of control, the screen starts flashing red, and the controls become very choppy. At that point you've got about ten seconds to live.)
When The Levee Breaks, all this DRM stuff won't matter anymore. The RIAA and their old business model is singing its Swan Song. IF they had the Presence of mind to simply say Thank You to music fans, this could be their Celebration Day. Instead, they'd rather have us Swinging From the Gallows Pole.
I mean, look at how their lawyers come after you. You could try to make a Night Flight Over The Hills and Far Away to Norway, and you'd still find No Quarter. Soon, enough, you'll be Going to California, to stand accused in The Houses of The Holy for "damages" done to Hollywood.
Okay, I had to google "led zeppelin albums" to get all those names.
OMG I remember that game. The little guy you controlled had the best scream when he inevitably fell down the cracks in the floor. AAAaaaaaaAAAAAAA!A!A!A!A!!!!gh!!
WTF was the story with that game, anyway? Maybe it's because I only played the warez version, but I could never actually tell what was going on. I remember there were these puzzle pieces you had to put together to somehow escape, but I can't remember actuall ever escaping. Anyone care to clue me in? I can't even remember what that game was called anymore...
Reading your comments again, I wonder if maybe you were being sarcastic...But you're saying that the scourge of deceptive popup ads is laudable because it represents some sort of "innovation in business?"
You work for Microsoft, don't you?:)
Yeah, Enron's accounting methods were very "innovative" as well. And I have a novel new take on "beach front property" for sale in Nevada.
Ihe ads in question, which I see constantly as I visit the crappy sites I for some reason go to, are *deceptive*. Like others have said, the popups are designed to look like a Windows dialog box, and trick teh n00bs into clicking them.
When you're looking at a magazine or newspaper, the ads that sorta look like articles are clearly labelled ADVERTISEMENT across the top. Sometimes in magazines you get a whole eight pages of advertising "streamed" with the regular content, but it's definitely identifiable and identified as advertising. Those "Click here to optimize your Internet connection" fakey dialogboxes are intended to decieve.
I'm actually kinda surprised Microsoft hasn't done anything about this (of course, maybe that's what the article says. I didn't read it, and I'm not going to. Nyeah.)
It's really funny, too, how pop-ups have changed over time. Soon we are going to see a lot more of the default Windows XP "clue-free blue" motif in those ads as everyone buys new computers. Really, they ought to be putting these popups in a time capsule, and in 20 years we can all laugh about the good old days with our friends we keep in touch with, thanks to ClassMates.com.
And in conclusion, I actually do hate everything that has anything to do with advertisement on the Internet. Except I kinda like the.NET ads here on Slashdot. They make me chuckle.
That's exactly the type of hair-splitting argument that only Johnny Cochrane can sustain.
Basically, what you're arguing for is a lot like entrapment...and it ain't gonna go down that way in a Court of Law.
And so what if you win that case? What kind of penalty is the judge going to impose on the RIAA? Five years in prison? Who goes to jail? $250,000 fine? Chicken scratch.
Nope, the DMCA is stacked pretty squarely against individuals. We know this by now.
We could then put whatever material we wanted on P2P networks, and the film and music industry representatives wouldn't even be able to find out what we were sharing without breaking the law they support
That sounds cool but I don't think it will work.
In order to qualify for protection under the DMCA, aren't you required to use encryption methods to protect copyrighted works?
I don't think you'll be covered if you use encryption to protect SOMEBODY ELSE'S copyrights. You have to have the copyright yourself.
It's not like I could encrypt my bootleg of When Animals Attack or whatever, and then distribute it, and hope to get off because The Man decrpyted it in violation of the DMCA. What I did was illegal in the first place, so the fact that The Man broke his own laws to get me is probably trivial.
I say probably, but it is conceivable that there's a judge out there who would throw out the evidence (i.e. the decrypted file) because The Man didn't have a court order or subpoena or whatever allowing the decryption. Don't bet on it.
While your plan would certainly demonstrate the stupidity of the law, most judges would overlook that transgression to get to the "root" which is the fact that all p2p users and open source advocates are, in their minds, a bunch of thieves or something. Which is funny, because I'm sure their kids or grandkids have hard drives full of mp3s, and they don't even know it. They think p2p is some freakish seamy underworld, and in fact it's as common as AOL. Heck, maybe they even trade shows on their TiVo or ReplayTV or whatever, and don't even realize what they're doing. Because TiVO has brought corporate legitimacy to p2p, and more than that they've mainstreamed themselves -- witness the "My TiVo thinks I'm gay" sitcom episodes. Without corporate backing and media buy-in, you will be viewed as an outcast. (Look at the people who live off-grid, for example.) In this case, it's obvious that ElcomSoft, a foreign company whose every product cracks files, is fighting an uphill battle. They will probably lose, and the wording will be in such a way that an appeal won't serve the purpose of challenging the DMCA.
This whole controversy smacks of the clash of generations, of "kids" threatening the power base of an older generation who has never played a FPS game or knows what a LAN party is. I don't think we'll see any victories anytime soon, but in twenty years, when copyrights are set to expire again, your Congressional Representatives might have actually grown up in a house with a computer or two in it. They will have a different outlook.
Well, I think they're supposed to be a reference to Yakov Smirnov, a semi-funny comedian that was popular under Reagan. He would make jokes like "I just moved to new apartment and had to get telephone. The man showed up at my door and installed it for me. Where I come from, we also have people who install telephone in your house. We call them K.G.B." The "In Russia" jokes are in a similar vein -- "In America, you watch government on C-SPAN. In Russia, Government watches you!"
(Note: actual jokes are funny. Mine aren't really funny. Plus I don't know how to HTML-ize a really thick russian accent. Plan accordingly)
If I'm wrong about this, I'd love to know it. Why this meme has caught on again is beyond me. Mabye classic humor like this just won't die. Or maybe it's just popular cuz eminem rapped about it, or it's because of something that happened on TV in the past few years.
Re:Green is not the real color...
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Which books? The ones written by the Founding Fathers and their supporters? Hmmm.. I can't imagine why they wouldn't call themselves terrorists...
My whole point, though, was that by BitGeek's thresshold for terrorism, and the indiscriminant use of that word, anyone or anything could be labelled terrorist. It cheapens the debate, much as me calling George Washington the prototypical Nazi does. Regardless of whether or not it's true, all it does is start a flame war.
As I seem to have done with you, SN74S181.
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Actually, society says every day that killing people is justified because of pollution. Look at the higher rates of respiratory ailments that occur in places with poor air quailty. Look at how we still burn fossil fuels, which is what caused the problem in the first place. Look at how the USA is ready to go to war for oil, again.
Look at the ticking time bomb that is the sunken oil tanker off the coast of Spain. Your precious Capitalism justifies that, but it skips town when it comes time to clean up the mess. Actually, Capitalism justifies that too, via the corporation. One of the major functions of a corporation is to shield individuals from liability for their actions.
Society routinely kills people as a side-effect of encouraging pollution-rich behavior. In fact society makes decisions all day long that lead to somebody being dead. I just wish that more people would cop to the fact.
To respond to your first point: Clearcutting a virgin forest and replacing it with a tree farm doesn't mitigate the harm. Unless you happen to think that tree farms are nice places to hike, hunt, or get away from it all. Not many people feel that way. And have you heard of National Forests? They are public land, owned by the Department of Agriculture. As a member of the public, I seem to have approximately NO say in how they are managed. Instead, the timber rights are sold to some corporation for $$$. Then the corporation submits a bill to the USDA for the cost of building all the roads and stuff to extract the trees. Finally, the USDA spends my taxes to reimburse the timber company for their "improvements" to the forest.
Nice deal, huh? God, I just love the free market!
By the way, those people who spike trees aren't doing so with intent to harm timber workers. The typical attack is like this: Trees get spiked, call is put in to local authority that trees in area X have been spiked. The point is to keep the trees from being felled in the first place. Spiking trees is akin to planting land mines -- which the Pentagon refers to as an "Area Denial Weapon" or something. Personally I'm all in favor of it, because once you destroy virgin forest there's no bringing it back -- well, at least not in our great great great great great grandchildren's lifetime, which is way too far off the horizon for the CFO to be worried about it.
I guess this rant is a microcosm of my main problem with Libertarianism: We are SOO FAR from the Libertarian view of the market and economy that their plans just can't get enacted. There has to be some intermediate steps, you can't just pull the rug out at once. It would be too harmful in the short term. Plus, I don't mind paying taxes for things like my water supply and a monorail. I'd rather have bumbling incompetent bureaucrats running it than price-gougers like Enron who will cut off people's power to bilk an extra billion or two.
BitGeek is the communist, and WE are all capitalists!!!
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BitGeek's definition of "terrorism" seems to be something that causes DIRECT PHYSICAL HARM to a human being.
Well, what about the environmental effects of clear-cutting? 50 years down the road? 100? What about Yucca Mountain. (By the way, I'm not trying to say you're in favor of all these things.)
Maybe it's not terrorism when one tree falls, or one forest. But the overall effect is a bad one, no? Where does that line get drawn? Anyone?
Also, is terrorism such a bad thing? If the Founding Fathers hadn't been terrorists, we would still be subjects of The Crown, yes?
Yelling "terrorism" is the newspeak equivalent of calling your opponent a Nazi.
Dude - try taking them **downtown** from the top of the ave. if you're above 55th you might get a seat. you spend **forever*** getting thru the u-district -- making a stop at each block where like 20 more people get on. that part takes 20 minutes on a bad day. Once you get to the highway, it's great. Before then, it 5uxXx0rZ.
They are nice in reverse--once they stop being exprsses. I used to get off at that first stop and just walk the mile because I coudljn't stand the horrible inefficiency of the stop-at-every-block lameness.
Slashdot Mirror
The getting past CSS part is questionable, but there are plenty of legitimate for something like that.
:)
But do I have a right to make a backup copy of the DVD I just bought, with CSS intact? For when my two-year old tries to eat the original?
The MPAA's answer is "no." They know these things wear out, and lets face it it hurts their sales if I only have to buy it once.
Legally, I can photocopy every page of a book that I own. I might want to do that to put it into a binder and make notes in the margins for a class. The MPAA thinks you don't have the right to do that with their content.
They want to control what you do with the stuff after you've bought it. I can see why they would try to make that hard (witness - they have CSS in the first place) and something that the Average Joe isn't going to do.
The MPAA and RIAA are using the Bad Cop / Bad Cop routine on us, knowing that if enough of us knuckle under the rest of us will grudgingly give in to the concept that the fair use rights you have for digital portrayals of information are significantly restricted in ways that "analog" technologies tied to physical media are not.
Many people here on SlashDot take the stand that they support copyright laws and going after the "pirates". But I think that's anachronistic. Isn't one of technologies main functions to eliminiate scarcity? Whereas the paradigm of the guilds that run Hollywood is a selfish inclusiveness against ousiders.
My hope is that the huge media companies will be hurt by Napster and Tivo and that TV and the Big Six (or however many there are) media conglomerates will lose their stranglehold on culture.
If that happens, technology will have made the world a better place
I haven't read the article or anything, but
that sucks.
Segway costing $6000 or $2000 or $10000 or however much it is sucks too. I will buy a car at any of those price points, I'm sorry to say, before I get a Segway.
They should make the Segway go faster and allow them on the roads. That thing has got to be able to do 20 MPH, which is faster than most cyclists. I dont think "it" takes up significantly more lane space than a bicycle, either.
Dammit, I want Segway to kill commuter cars. But it's not happening! Hey Segway, give me one for free and I'll ride it around Seattle for ya!
Your sig says "Don't let them..."
The word is "immanentize." I seem to recall it has the root "manna," which we all know from playing Magic or Diablo II or what have you. I only know this because I became interested in that sig when I saw it months ago and decided to figure out what the hell you were talking about.
Yeah, it's gone. It was his sig -- which read "Is your browser retarded?" which in turn HREFfed to some attbi.com site... http://home.attbi.com/~bconway31/test.html I think. Anyway, that site shows a blank page in most browsers but crashes IE6. The source is some bizarre Windows CLSID string or something like that.
Sorry for the confusion. I usually try to include in italics whatever I'm responding to. This also has the added bonus of getting fewer -1 Offtopics.
Of course, you don't need Photoshop to fabricate evidence. It's just another tool that can be used.
A lot of people have complained that who knows what the authorities might do with Photoshop -- enhancing evidence and such. That's a valid point but you should take a step back and realize how scientifically flawed fingerprinting is in the first place. (In my opinion, of course.)
Fingerprinting came about around the turn of the twentieth century as a replacement for a failed biometrics system, in which certain mesaurements of a person (size of head, length of arm, stuff like that) were being tabulated, and recorded to make a database of known criminals. Problem is, two people could have the same measurements.
Likewise, there is no "guarantee" that two individuals have the same fingerprints. Observation has shown that two people probably don't have the same prints, but that's no guarantee. I don't believe the medical community even really understands what makes fingerprints "grow" in the first place.
Fingerprinting is not a "science" in the way physics, chemistry, etc. are. (Legally, this is called the Daubert Test.) Where is the peer review? If fingerprinting were truly a science, as American courts have determined science to be, the national fingerprint database should be publicly accessible. It is not. The formula/algorithm by which fingerprint examinters determine a "match" would be public. The method that the computer uses to match fingerprints would be public knowledge, but it is not.
I'm not trying to say that fingerprinting doesn't provide valuable evidence, and I certainly do believe that fingerprint evidence is a good indicator that somebody touched something. But is it iron-clad proof? No. And worse than that, is is a closed-source, proprietary system.
Were fingerprinting evidence to be invented today, the courts would probably not allow it. It has not withstood (likely it cannot withstand) the same sort of scientific scrutiny that DNA identification has. However, they have significant enough momentum behind them that even though they may not be an "exact science" they are good enough for the purposes of the criminal justice system.
Here are some good links:
Federal Judge Slams Fingerprint "Science"
Cornell News: Fingerprint Study
Latent Print Examination disagrees with most of what I say...Click the Ressam link...if you don't support fingerprint evidence, then you support terrorism!
I couldn't tell if my browser is retarded. What is the point of your attbi page?
IE6 crashed, mozilla shows nothing. What's up?
how is the US Government and/or Adobe going to compensate Dmitri
... uh, fraudulently.
A free lifetime supply of e-books?
But seriously, they're not going to give him diddly. Things are frequently never made "right," esp. when the criminal justice system is involved.
It's not like you get restitution for when the cops pull you over, give you a warning, and let you go. Though technically you were detained for a few minutes while they ran your registration. What happened to Dmitry is the same thing but on a larger scale.
No fraud here. Lots of innuendo and FUD, but nothing arising to the legal definition of fraud. If you want to give hackers a better name, stop using the word fraudulently
I would make an exception to damn near any rule to protect someone in my bloodline. Must be the Sicilian in me acting up.
Plenty of people DO rat out their family members.
The Unabomber was caught after The Feds decided to "negotiate with terrorists" i.e. publish his Manifesto in several major newspapers. Then his brother recognized the text as the same sort of stuff his crazy brother was always talking about, and quietly contacted the FBI.
More recently, the Smiley Face Bomber (my favorite bomber ever, BTW) was caught in part because his dad recongnized the phrase "mailboxes are exploding!" from a letter that his son had sent shortly before the mailboxes started exploding. Dad alerted the authorities.
I'm sure there are counter-examples, but blood ties are not always so strong. Some people hate their families, after all.
On to point #2, back to the grandparent. The Fifth Amendment is a good thing. It keeps you from being compelled to testify against yourself. The older method under English law, where you were crushed to death with huge weights (not sure if they said 16 Tons) if you refused to testify, will probably be used in those military tribunal things.
I'm ignorant, who is this guy and why would finding him be too embarrasing? Does he have proof that Osama is dead?
Why do I need yet another way to get information?
You could have made that same argument before the advent of the Internet, you know. Want local news? Hang out at the barbershop. The coffee house. Talk to the kids on the street. Attend a city hall meeting.
I do agree that reading would be way better than just audio. There's simply no point to limiting the "stream" to audio-only. I can understand a bandwidth cap, but there should be a way to introduce a text stream, and maybe a video stream if exists the bandwitdh to push it without crowding out others.
It has become increasingly obvious that The Names You've Gradually Grown To Trust (like NYT) are less and less worthy of that trust -- marketing and the need for sensationalism drives their agenda and clouds their judgement. I get my news from The Economist and Funny Times and everything in between. The more sources, the better!
yes it will. someone will mod this down.
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of your pants!
Why don't you call Intuit support and come up with some reason as to why their new software won't work for you. Like your small office has only one phone line and there's no ISP in your area, or your ISP went out of business or something.
Or maybe that you live on a boat, and you can easily send mail via USPS but to use the Internet requires a trip to the local cybercafe, since you can't get internet access on your cell phone?
Man, if I could get a WAV of that guy falling to his doom, that would be my new system beep. For some reason that sound has stuck with me after all these years.
Another impossible to win commodore game was Space Ace 2101. You had to amass sick amounts of money, and you only got one life.
I think my favorite was Raid On Bungeling Bay. I wore out my space bar with that game, so I cannibalized the keyboard from the VIC-20 and put it in the C-64. Then I learned how to rest the stapler on the keboard just right so that my helicopter was alwaws firing.
I must have played that game a hundred times. I was so into it that I saw all variations of the newspaper story proclaiming victory at the end, which changed depending on how many lives you had left at the end. Including the incredibly difficult-to-get funeral procession (instead of the fireworks) and day of mourning headline when you managed to steer your crashing helicopter helicopter into the last target. I was so impressed with the programmers for including that ending, and I only ever got to see it once. (In case you never played the game, after your helicopter took too much damage, you hear the rotor start to spin out of control, the screen starts flashing red, and the controls become very choppy. At that point you've got about ten seconds to live.)
Aw shucks, I'm all nostalgiac now.
When The Levee Breaks, all this DRM stuff won't matter anymore. The RIAA and their old business model is singing its Swan Song. IF they had the Presence of mind to simply say Thank You to music fans, this could be their Celebration Day. Instead, they'd rather have us Swinging From the Gallows Pole.
I mean, look at how their lawyers come after you. You could try to make a Night Flight Over The Hills and Far Away to Norway, and you'd still find No Quarter. Soon, enough, you'll be Going to California, to stand accused in The Houses of The Holy for "damages" done to Hollywood.
Okay, I had to google "led zeppelin albums" to get all those names.
OMG I remember that game. The little guy you controlled had the best scream when he inevitably fell down the cracks in the floor. AAAaaaaaaAAAAAAA!A!A!A!A!!!!gh!!
WTF was the story with that game, anyway? Maybe it's because I only played the warez version, but I could never actually tell what was going on. I remember there were these puzzle pieces you had to put together to somehow escape, but I can't remember actuall ever escaping. Anyone care to clue me in? I can't even remember what that game was called anymore...
Reading your comments again, I wonder if maybe you were being sarcastic...But you're saying that the scourge of deceptive popup ads is laudable because it represents some sort of "innovation in business?"
:)
.NET ads here on Slashdot. They make me chuckle.
You work for Microsoft, don't you?
Yeah, Enron's accounting methods were very "innovative" as well. And I have a novel new take on "beach front property" for sale in Nevada.
Ihe ads in question, which I see constantly as I visit the crappy sites I for some reason go to, are *deceptive*. Like others have said, the popups are designed to look like a Windows dialog box, and trick teh n00bs into clicking them.
When you're looking at a magazine or newspaper, the ads that sorta look like articles are clearly labelled ADVERTISEMENT across the top. Sometimes in magazines you get a whole eight pages of advertising "streamed" with the regular content, but it's definitely identifiable and identified as advertising. Those "Click here to optimize your Internet connection" fakey dialogboxes are intended to decieve.
I'm actually kinda surprised Microsoft hasn't done anything about this (of course, maybe that's what the article says. I didn't read it, and I'm not going to. Nyeah.)
It's really funny, too, how pop-ups have changed over time. Soon we are going to see a lot more of the default Windows XP "clue-free blue" motif in those ads as everyone buys new computers. Really, they ought to be putting these popups in a time capsule, and in 20 years we can all laugh about the good old days with our friends we keep in touch with, thanks to ClassMates.com.
And in conclusion, I actually do hate everything that has anything to do with advertisement on the Internet. Except I kinda like the
That's exactly the type of hair-splitting argument that only Johnny Cochrane can sustain.
Basically, what you're arguing for is a lot like entrapment...and it ain't gonna go down that way in a Court of Law.
And so what if you win that case? What kind of penalty is the judge going to impose on the RIAA? Five years in prison? Who goes to jail? $250,000 fine? Chicken scratch.
Nope, the DMCA is stacked pretty squarely against individuals. We know this by now.
We could then put whatever material we wanted on P2P networks, and the film and music industry representatives wouldn't even be able to find out what we were sharing without breaking the law they support
That sounds cool but I don't think it will work.
In order to qualify for protection under the DMCA, aren't you required to use encryption methods to protect copyrighted works?
I don't think you'll be covered if you use encryption to protect SOMEBODY ELSE'S copyrights. You have to have the copyright yourself.
It's not like I could encrypt my bootleg of When Animals Attack or whatever, and then distribute it, and hope to get off because The Man decrpyted it in violation of the DMCA. What I did was illegal in the first place, so the fact that The Man broke his own laws to get me is probably trivial.
I say probably, but it is conceivable that there's a judge out there who would throw out the evidence (i.e. the decrypted file) because The Man didn't have a court order or subpoena or whatever allowing the decryption. Don't bet on it.
While your plan would certainly demonstrate the stupidity of the law, most judges would overlook that transgression to get to the "root" which is the fact that all p2p users and open source advocates are, in their minds, a bunch of thieves or something. Which is funny, because I'm sure their kids or grandkids have hard drives full of mp3s, and they don't even know it. They think p2p is some freakish seamy underworld, and in fact it's as common as AOL. Heck, maybe they even trade shows on their TiVo or ReplayTV or whatever, and don't even realize what they're doing. Because TiVO has brought corporate legitimacy to p2p, and more than that they've mainstreamed themselves -- witness the "My TiVo thinks I'm gay" sitcom episodes. Without corporate backing and media buy-in, you will be viewed as an outcast. (Look at the people who live off-grid, for example.) In this case, it's obvious that ElcomSoft, a foreign company whose every product cracks files, is fighting an uphill battle. They will probably lose, and the wording will be in such a way that an appeal won't serve the purpose of challenging the DMCA.
This whole controversy smacks of the clash of generations, of "kids" threatening the power base of an older generation who has never played a FPS game or knows what a LAN party is. I don't think we'll see any victories anytime soon, but in twenty years, when copyrights are set to expire again, your Congressional Representatives might have actually grown up in a house with a computer or two in it. They will have a different outlook.
Well, I think they're supposed to be a reference to Yakov Smirnov, a semi-funny comedian that was popular under Reagan. He would make jokes like "I just moved to new apartment and had to get telephone. The man showed up at my door and installed it for me. Where I come from, we also have people who install telephone in your house. We call them K.G.B." The "In Russia" jokes are in a similar vein -- "In America, you watch government on C-SPAN. In Russia, Government watches you!"
(Note: actual jokes are funny. Mine aren't really funny. Plus I don't know how to HTML-ize a really thick russian accent. Plan accordingly)
If I'm wrong about this, I'd love to know it. Why this meme has caught on again is beyond me. Mabye classic humor like this just won't die. Or maybe it's just popular cuz eminem rapped about it, or it's because of something that happened on TV in the past few years.
Which books? The ones written by the Founding Fathers and their supporters? Hmmm.. I can't imagine why they wouldn't call themselves terrorists...
My whole point, though, was that by BitGeek's thresshold for terrorism, and the indiscriminant use of that word, anyone or anything could be labelled terrorist. It cheapens the debate, much as me calling George Washington the prototypical Nazi does. Regardless of whether or not it's true, all it does is start a flame war.
As I seem to have done with you, SN74S181.
Actually, society says every day that killing people is justified because of pollution. Look at the higher rates of respiratory ailments that occur in places with poor air quailty. Look at how we still burn fossil fuels, which is what caused the problem in the first place. Look at how the USA is ready to go to war for oil, again.
Look at the ticking time bomb that is the sunken oil tanker off the coast of Spain. Your precious Capitalism justifies that, but it skips town when it comes time to clean up the mess. Actually, Capitalism justifies that too, via the corporation. One of the major functions of a corporation is to shield individuals from liability for their actions.
Society routinely kills people as a side-effect of encouraging pollution-rich behavior. In fact society makes decisions all day long that lead to somebody being dead. I just wish that more people would cop to the fact.
To respond to your first point: Clearcutting a virgin forest and replacing it with a tree farm doesn't mitigate the harm. Unless you happen to think that tree farms are nice places to hike, hunt, or get away from it all. Not many people feel that way. And have you heard of National Forests? They are public land, owned by the Department of Agriculture. As a member of the public, I seem to have approximately NO say in how they are managed. Instead, the timber rights are sold to some corporation for $$$. Then the corporation submits a bill to the USDA for the cost of building all the roads and stuff to extract the trees. Finally, the USDA spends my taxes to reimburse the timber company for their "improvements" to the forest.
Nice deal, huh? God, I just love the free market!
By the way, those people who spike trees aren't doing so with intent to harm timber workers. The typical attack is like this: Trees get spiked, call is put in to local authority that trees in area X have been spiked. The point is to keep the trees from being felled in the first place. Spiking trees is akin to planting land mines -- which the Pentagon refers to as an "Area Denial Weapon" or something. Personally I'm all in favor of it, because once you destroy virgin forest there's no bringing it back -- well, at least not in our great great great great great grandchildren's lifetime, which is way too far off the horizon for the CFO to be worried about it.
I guess this rant is a microcosm of my main problem with Libertarianism: We are SOO FAR from the Libertarian view of the market and economy that their plans just can't get enacted. There has to be some intermediate steps, you can't just pull the rug out at once. It would be too harmful in the short term. Plus, I don't mind paying taxes for things like my water supply and a monorail. I'd rather have bumbling incompetent bureaucrats running it than price-gougers like Enron who will cut off people's power to bilk an extra billion or two.
BitGeek is the communist, and WE are all capitalists!!!
BitGeek's definition of "terrorism" seems to be something that causes DIRECT PHYSICAL HARM to a human being.
Well, what about the environmental effects of clear-cutting? 50 years down the road? 100? What about Yucca Mountain. (By the way, I'm not trying to say you're in favor of all these things.)
Maybe it's not terrorism when one tree falls, or one forest. But the overall effect is a bad one, no? Where does that line get drawn? Anyone?
Also, is terrorism such a bad thing? If the Founding Fathers hadn't been terrorists, we would still be subjects of The Crown, yes?
Yelling "terrorism" is the newspeak equivalent of calling your opponent a Nazi.
Dude - try taking them **downtown** from the top of the ave. if you're above 55th you might get a seat. you spend **forever*** getting thru the u-district -- making a stop at each block where like 20 more people get on. that part takes 20 minutes on a bad day. Once you get to the highway, it's great. Before then, it 5uxXx0rZ.
They are nice in reverse--once they stop being exprsses. I used to get off at that first stop and just walk the mile because I coudljn't stand the horrible inefficiency of the stop-at-every-block lameness.