Which means that there's nothing stopping, say, AOL Time Warner from paying someone to sink your data haven in international waters, slaughtering everyone on board in the process. And there are many hired guns who may be willing to do such a job; if one of the South African mercenary contractors won't do it then surely a pirate crew can be found in South East Asia who are not averse to doing a bit of extra work and making a few hundred thousand on the side.
Wasn't there another similar project a few years ago called Oceania, only founded more explicitly on Libertarian/Objectivist ideology? Are they still around, or have they disappeared?
A long time ago, Apple had an alliance with Netscape (then still a stellarly successful browser company). Then MS invested $100m in Apple, and consequently Apple dropped Netscape and standardised on MSIE.
Now that Apple are adopting Kerberos, what's to say that it will not be proprietary Microsoft Kerberos? If MS could get Apple to support their fork of Kerberos, it'd make it more likely to win the standards battle. (And official standards mean little in the fast-moving IT game; witness what happened to HTML 3.0.)
I return to large perl projects with no problems at all.... Which is why I maintain that writing managable code is the burden of the programmer and not the language.
Though the choice of language can make manageability easier or harder. Manageability is built into the structure of, say, Python, and comes naturally from it. In Perl, however, writing manageable code requires more effort and discipline; it requires the programmer to specifically concentrate on the task of arranging their code in a manageable way, rather than the myriad other ways Perl is just as happy with.
I'll grant that if you are a real OO purist, Perl and C++ aren't for you.
Oddly enough, I don't find C++ to be anywhere near as messy as Perl. Though I wouldn't call it a proper OO language either; it's more of a code generation tool.
Obsfuscated Perl is the fault of the programmer, not the language. You can write gross code in any language. I agree that some languages do make it easier to write obsfuscated code, but ultimately the programmer is still one to blame.
Though Perl makes writing neat, easily manageable code on any large scale more of an effort than other languages. And the most carefully written Perl program will still look messier than an equally carefully written program in, say, Python (or Smalltalk or [insert true OO language here]).
Perl was not designed for system development or large-scale coding. You can use it for that, and at some things it excels (processing data, for one), though it is a suboptimal choice. (Have you ever had the feeling of returning to a large Perl project you wrote months ago, say a complex CGI system or such, and almost getting a headache from looking at it?)
If a language makes good design a chore, that is a fault in the language.
The other arguments, while sound under current law, would probably never stand up to a constitutional challenge. Considering how valuable DMCA coverage is to MS, I doubt they would ever do to much to risk a real challenge to it.
Though, if it came to that, there'd be a lot of other parties joining forces with Microsoft. Our old friends the MPAA and RIAA, to name two, would definitely want to defend the DMCA. You might even see bitter enemies of Microsoft from the software industry putting their differences aside and join the effort.
Microsoft may have been masters of spin in the past, but the past has caught up with them. Nowadays you can't look at an online news site without seeing details of Microsoft's dirty tricks and shabby dealings. Microsoft's PR ability stemmed from their control of the market and their ability to destroy anyone who slighted them. In the wake of the antitrust case, it's going to be hard for anybody to trust a word of what Microsoft says.
Look at the press on this incident so far; most, if not all, of it recognises what a thuggish dirty trick this is. There is very little sympathy left for Microsoft.
Apparently NSI's agreement allows them to revoke your domain if you make any attempt to transfer it to another registrar. Not sure if they've ever done this, though.
Trent Reznor is a musician of modest talent, but a great marketing man. NIN's real innovation is to take industrial out of the fringes and make it more marketable to angst-ridden teenagers. If you listen to any song from Pretty Hate Machine, you will notice that they are structurally more similar to catchy pop songs than obscure industrial pieces.
The only time one finds any innovative or experimental elements in NIN is in the absolute minimum quantities to get cred from the pretentious goth crowd who wish to put themselves above the Marilyn Manson crowd. (It's no coincidence that Manson, who successfully commercialised the goth genre and injected new life into Anton LaVey's failing Nietzche/Ayn Rand rip-off Church of Satan, was all but created by Trent Reznor.)
Witness the Perfect Drug video. There Reznor does his best Andrew Eldritch impression in backdrops inspired by Edwaed Gorey's drawings, both in attempts to cater to the "sophisticated goth" demographic. Pity that his songs haven't progressed beyond recycled teen angst,
For a long time, Perl was my language of choice. Its regular expressions are excellent, and its syntax is very nimble. However, there are various design flaws (such as lists not being intrinsically nestable without using a lot of ugly reference kludges). Perl's object orientation is somewhat of an afterthought. Also, because of its flexibility of syntax, Perl encourages unstructured coding.
A few months ago I looked at Python, and after going through the tutorial, I was hooked. It really is a much more elegant language for programming. Also, it has a first-class collection of classes and utility functions.
These days, I use Perl for writing short text-processing hacks and the like, and Python for anything larger, which includes most CGIs.
Under some readings of the DMCA and the WTO treaty, unencrypted media formats that compete with encrypted ones (i.e., SDMI, DVD) could be considered a circumvention device, and thus illegal. How the courts read the law is yet undecided, but the RIAA have billions to spend on persuading them to see things their way.
If the rumoured settlement does happen and the RIAA gets control of mp3.com, it will be interesting to see how mp3.com changes its technical aspects. Will downloaded MP3s be wrapped in a serialised player/decryptor EXE (Windows/Mac only, presumably), or replaced with a SDMI format?
The RIAA have allegedly been trying to manipulate mp3.com's stock price for some time to push it out of business.
There are now rumours of a settlement in the case, which would give the RIAA (i.e., tbe Big 4 record companies, Warner, Seagram, Sony and BMG) control of mp3.com. Given that the verdict is in effect a signed death warrant for mp3.com, the RIAA can dictate the terms of any settlement; letting Michael Robertson and so keep a minority stake in a viable company can be considered most conciliatory.
You mentioned that we need laws banning file-sharing software such as Napster. How far should these laws go? If in 10 years time, computer users labour under draconian restrictions on communications software under what is titled the Lars Ulrich Digital Copy Enforcement Act, to the effect that sharing music files (of any sort) without the digital signature of a major record label or copyright authority becomes grounds for loss of Internet access and/or legal sanctions, how will you feel about the fans and small-time bands whose attempts at networking are crippled by these restrictions?
If you're thinking of buying some Metallica, you may want to check out the free alternatives. There is one mp3.com artist who sounds rather like 80s Metallica with a bit of electronics (and a somewhat eccentric concept).
Maybe that's the reason for the delay in introducing DVD-Audio; they're trying to work out how to include UCITA-compliant click-wrap licenses with audio DVDs.
Owning a CD is no defense; well, it wasn't in the mp3.com case anyway. Fair use does not apply under the DMCA, because it's a law bought by the copyright cartels.
Metallica aren't goth; they're more hessian/bogan with a touch of 90s grunge for the marketability. You must have gotten them confused with Guns'n'Roses or someone.
1) What's the substantial difference between Napster and old-media cassette tape copying?
Scale. Giving a tape to a friend is one thing; you typically know the recipient, and it costs you time and money to prepare the tape, so you can only do it in small quantities. Putting MP3s on Napster is another; then anyone in the world can search for them and download them. That and a cable modem can allow you to distribute your favourite CDs to thousands of strangers automatically. I'd say there's a big difference between that and making a tape for a friend.
4) Does Metallica or Electra Records have any plans in the works to offer music online? Do they have any ideas to offer the Internet Generation other than a Luddite-like prohibitionist stance?
They're working on SDMI and such. (And wasn't it Universal Music, not Elektra (a Warner label)? I believe Universal actually have their own encrypted downloadable format.)
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't their constitution based primarily on the writings of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein?
Which means that there's nothing stopping, say, AOL Time Warner from paying someone to sink your data haven in international waters, slaughtering everyone on board in the process. And there are many hired guns who may be willing to do such a job; if one of the South African mercenary contractors won't do it then surely a pirate crew can be found in South East Asia who are not averse to doing a bit of extra work and making a few hundred thousand on the side.
Wasn't there another similar project a few years ago called Oceania, only founded more explicitly on Libertarian/Objectivist ideology? Are they still around, or have they disappeared?
A long time ago, Apple had an alliance with Netscape (then still a stellarly successful browser company). Then MS invested $100m in Apple, and consequently Apple dropped Netscape and standardised on MSIE.
Now that Apple are adopting Kerberos, what's to say that it will not be proprietary Microsoft Kerberos? If MS could get Apple to support their fork of Kerberos, it'd make it more likely to win the standards battle. (And official standards mean little in the fast-moving IT game; witness what happened to HTML 3.0.)
I return to large perl projects with no problems at all.... Which is why I maintain that writing managable code is the burden of the programmer and not the language.
Though the choice of language can make manageability easier or harder. Manageability is built into the structure of, say, Python, and comes naturally from it. In Perl, however, writing manageable code requires more effort and discipline; it requires the programmer to specifically concentrate on the task of arranging their code in a manageable way, rather than the myriad other ways Perl is just as happy with.
I'll grant that if you are a real OO purist, Perl and C++ aren't for you.
Oddly enough, I don't find C++ to be anywhere near as messy as Perl. Though I wouldn't call it a proper OO language either; it's more of a code generation tool.
Obsfuscated Perl is the fault of the programmer, not the language. You can write
gross code in any language. I agree that some languages do make it easier to write obsfuscated code, but ultimately the programmer is still one to blame.
Though Perl makes writing neat, easily manageable code on any large scale more of an effort than other languages. And the most carefully written Perl program will still look messier than an equally carefully written program in, say, Python (or Smalltalk or [insert true OO language here]).
Perl was not designed for system development or large-scale coding. You can use it for that, and at some things it excels (processing data, for one), though it is a suboptimal choice. (Have you ever had the feeling of returning to a large Perl project you wrote months ago, say a complex CGI system or such, and almost getting a headache from looking at it?)
If a language makes good design a chore, that is a fault in the language.
I think what you're quoting is patent law, not copyright law. The two are quite different.
The other arguments, while sound under current law, would probably never stand up to a constitutional challenge. Considering how valuable DMCA coverage is to MS, I doubt they would ever do to much to risk a real challenge to it.
Though, if it came to that, there'd be a lot of other parties joining forces with Microsoft. Our old friends the MPAA and RIAA, to name two, would definitely want to defend the DMCA. You might even see bitter enemies of Microsoft from the software industry putting their differences aside and join the effort.
Microsoft may have been masters of spin in the past, but the past has caught up with them. Nowadays you can't look at an online news site without seeing details of Microsoft's dirty tricks and shabby dealings. Microsoft's PR ability stemmed from their control of the market and their ability to destroy anyone who slighted them. In the wake of the antitrust case, it's going to be hard for anybody to trust a word of what Microsoft says.
Look at the press on this incident so far; most, if not all, of it recognises what a thuggish dirty trick this is. There is very little sympathy left for Microsoft.
in which case, you can't transfer any more than you can change landlords on a rented apartment, as the domain belongs to NSI.
If you've renewed, you're screwed.
Apparently NSI's agreement allows them to revoke your domain if you make any attempt to transfer it to another registrar. Not sure if they've ever done this, though.
Maybe we can put the DNS servers on the open-sourced Iridium satellites...
Demo tapes with titles like "Lars Sucks Ass?"
Or "Metallica Ate My Napster".
(It's in MP3 too...)
NIN produces songs that give a view into human pain, suffering, and anger like no music before it.
s/pain, suffering, and anger/mewling, self-indulgent teen angst/
"I hate my parents! Nobody understands me! I don't want to clean up my room! It's *so* unfaaaaair!!!"
Trent Reznor is a musician of modest talent, but a great marketing man. NIN's real innovation is to take industrial out of the fringes and make it more marketable to angst-ridden teenagers. If you listen to any song from Pretty Hate Machine, you will notice that they are structurally more similar to catchy pop songs than obscure industrial pieces.
The only time one finds any innovative or experimental elements in NIN is in the absolute minimum quantities to get cred from the pretentious goth crowd who wish to put themselves above the Marilyn Manson crowd. (It's no coincidence that Manson, who successfully commercialised the goth genre and injected new life into Anton LaVey's failing Nietzche/Ayn Rand rip-off Church of Satan, was all but created by Trent Reznor.)
Witness the Perfect Drug video. There Reznor does his best Andrew Eldritch impression in backdrops inspired by Edwaed Gorey's drawings, both in attempts to cater to the "sophisticated goth" demographic. Pity that his songs haven't progressed beyond recycled teen angst,
For a long time, Perl was my language of choice.
Its regular expressions are excellent, and its syntax is very nimble. However, there are various design flaws (such as lists not being intrinsically nestable without using a lot of ugly reference kludges). Perl's object orientation is somewhat of an afterthought. Also, because of its flexibility of syntax, Perl encourages unstructured coding.
A few months ago I looked at Python, and after going through the tutorial, I was hooked. It really is a much more elegant language for programming. Also, it has a first-class collection of classes and utility functions.
These days, I use Perl for writing short text-processing hacks and the like, and Python for anything larger, which includes most CGIs.
Under some readings of the DMCA and the WTO treaty, unencrypted media formats that compete with encrypted ones (i.e., SDMI, DVD) could be considered a circumvention device, and thus illegal. How the courts read the law is yet undecided, but the RIAA have billions to spend on persuading them to see things their way.
If the rumoured settlement does happen and the RIAA gets control of mp3.com, it will be interesting to see how mp3.com changes its technical aspects. Will downloaded MP3s be wrapped in a serialised player/decryptor EXE (Windows/Mac only, presumably), or replaced with a SDMI format?
The RIAA have allegedly been trying to manipulate mp3.com's stock price for some time to push it out of business.
There are now rumours of a settlement in the case, which would give the RIAA (i.e., tbe Big 4 record companies, Warner, Seagram, Sony and BMG) control of mp3.com. Given that the verdict is in effect a signed death warrant for mp3.com, the RIAA can dictate the terms of any settlement; letting Michael Robertson and so keep a minority stake in a viable company can be considered most conciliatory.
You mentioned that we need laws banning file-sharing software such as Napster. How far should these laws go? If in 10 years time, computer users labour under draconian restrictions on communications software under what is titled the Lars Ulrich Digital Copy Enforcement Act, to the effect that sharing music files (of any sort) without the digital signature of a major record label or copyright authority becomes grounds for loss of Internet access and/or legal sanctions, how will you feel about the fans and small-time bands whose attempts at networking are crippled by these restrictions?
Jon Katz vs. Metallica, in a no-holds-barred steel cage match.
If you're thinking of buying some Metallica, you may want to check out the free alternatives.
There is one mp3.com artist who sounds rather like 80s Metallica with a bit of electronics (and a somewhat eccentric concept).
Maybe that's the reason for the delay in introducing DVD-Audio; they're trying to work out how to include UCITA-compliant click-wrap licenses with audio DVDs.
Owning a CD is no defense; well, it wasn't in the mp3.com case anyway. Fair use does not apply under the DMCA, because it's a law bought by the copyright cartels.
Metallica aren't goth; they're more hessian/bogan with a touch of 90s grunge for the marketability. You must have gotten them confused with Guns'n'Roses or someone.
1) What's the substantial difference between Napster and old-media cassette tape copying?
Scale. Giving a tape to a friend is one thing; you typically know the recipient, and it costs you time and money to prepare the tape, so you can only do it in small quantities. Putting MP3s on Napster is another; then anyone in the world can search for them and download them. That and a cable modem can allow you to distribute your favourite CDs to thousands of strangers automatically. I'd say there's a big difference between that and making a tape for a friend.
4) Does Metallica or Electra Records have any plans in the works to offer music online? Do they have any ideas to offer the Internet Generation other than a Luddite-like prohibitionist stance?
They're working on SDMI and such. (And wasn't it Universal Music, not Elektra (a Warner label)? I believe Universal actually have their own encrypted downloadable format.)