in accounts payable and I have the passwords to initiate EFTs to our vendors. I run anti-spyware software for obvious security reasons.
Now some rogue spyware installed by a very soon to be former employee has disabled my anti-spyware and this cretin captures my passwords and proceeds to use them to transfer their "instant retirement package" to their Cayman Isalnd bank account.
I see a bigger problem with spyware than with anti-spyware, and any employer who has employees handling any sort of sensituve informationshould too. (I know, that credits most bosses with WAY too many smarts...)
Will was the founder of the School of Creative Spelling. He spelled his name six different ways. (do your own google search)
Of course, maybe he spelled it so many different ways because it really was Roger Bacon doing the writing and he just didn't remember how he speeled it the last time....
Long a staple of sci-fi,coming soon to your dinner table. But what type of meat will give the best yield?
The story I remember best about this (can't recall title or author) was about a father and son from a colony planet trying to correct a bureaucratic mistake in the spelling of their world's name.
It turned out that regular barnyard animal tissue just took far more resources to grow than the tissues used by the medical establishment...and Earth was incredibly overpopulated.
(No it wasn't "Make Room Make Room" - which was immortalized in film as "Soylent Green". This was a short story and mostly satire)
He pointed out that he wanted a downloadable version, not a webcast so the bandwidth-impaired could still get it at their leisure (well their modem's leisure).
More importantly, he has an offer of enough donated bandwidth to support about 400K downloads - considerably more downloads than he has readers.
As to the "source", one of the four versions he is proposing would be the raw unedited footage. I'd love to see the raw footage for just about any regular "news" interview.
I knew that. It was a weak attempt at humor because the ten user limit ON THEIR SERVER just happened to match MSFT's hard coded limit on the MSFT workstation OS.
Dang, some people won't even let ya have fun trying to stir up a little conspiracy action...
But the only OS I know of that enforces a ten connection limit are the "Workstation" versions of NT, 2K, etc.
Microsoft put that in way back when because people were running Netscape's server apps with unlimited connections on NT WorkStation instead of paying the big bucks for NT Server. I understand they also put the ten connection limit back into XP or Win2K as a stealth "update" with a recent Service Pack.
So who really owns Redmond Linux? Could it be some other company based in that part of the country?
You may recall (if not google can help you find out), that the German govt was a tad upset over the Echelon flap and the British RIPA law. The degree of regulatory control the German gubmint already has over everday life in Germany is pretty darn impressive. Perhaps someone from Germany could weigh in with an opinion?
I'm sure if the gubmint wants to crack down on their radical right (aka neo-nazis) or outlawed religious organizations (aka COS) they won't find the nature of the encryption employed by those organizations a major problem in prosecuting the lawbreakers.
I'm not saying they don't have their own bunch of control freaks in their gubmint over there, but they also have a certain amount of recent history in favor of encryption - simply to prevent other governments from spying on their citizens (especially their corporate citizens) Face it, they recognize they have a lot to lose from "corporate espionage" if it makes German corps less competitive.
Acceleration is the change in velocity over time. A pole vaulter takes more time and distance (due to the flex in the pole)to get the vertical speed necessary to reach 20 feet than a soldier using "powered shoes" would in a simple jump. The soldier has to accelerate from zero while traveling no more than about two feet vertically.
Or to turn it around (stopping is a changein velocity also and acceleration is acceleration after all)), take a walk off the top of a twenty foot tall building onto a concrete sidewalk. When you land, remain standing. I'll allow you to flex your knees to the point that you wind up in a squat. If your body can't handle the landing from a vertical drop of that distance, then it couldn't handle the takeoff for the corresponding leap.
To the fine person who thinks that astronauts pull 10 G's... Last time I checked they did it in an acceleration couch (regardless of how many G's but I believe it is considerably less than ten) - not standing upright.
One article mentioned using "powered shoes" to enable soldiers to clear 20 foot walls in a single bound. I suppose the reporter must have been watching too many anime - or action flicks. I hope the source for that quote was yanking the chain of the reporter. The human skeleton just isn't strong enough to handle a vertical leap like that. The hips would collapse under the acceleration. When pole vaulters make those leaps a lot of it is due to the springinness of the pole spreading the acceleration out.
Discussion? Really Mr/Ms Coward! It's easy to laugh when you don't have to take any responsibilty for your words or actions. Only weak minds "need" conspiracies to explain anything. And only weakminded individuals use gratuitous insult as their first line of debate in a "discussion".
Re-read my original post. Do I say that the "War on Drugs" created the drug trade?
The alcohol trade was a thriving business before Prohibition too.
Recreational drugs were (and still are) causing social problems, some of them pretty nasty.
My point remains that the unintended consequences of both Prohibition and the "War on Drugs" were quite severe and long lasting. I suggest that draconian laws (SSSCA,DMCA) intended to protect copyright holders will also have severe and long lasting consequences that will be generally unpredictable but quite detrimental to society overall.
As a simple example, just how many more prisons will need to be built to house all of the people who have "illegal" software or hardware?
Or do you propose that such laws be enforced selectively? What harm does selective enforcement do to a civil society? (selective enforcement of the law is generally viewed as a hallmark of corrupt government)
Or should we empty our existing prisons to make room for the new generation of copyright crooks? Who should we release? (non-violent drug offenders? but what about the War on Drugs?)
And if all the copying you want to do is to convert your brand spanking new CD to MP3 format so you can: 1> take it with you on your portable player or 2> have more convenient access through your $1500.00 audio server
Well in those cases you sure as heck have not engaged in copyright infringement, but you could be running afoul of the DMCA (if you converted that a "copy protected" CD for example).
Widespread copyright infringement is a problem, but there already laws against that. This business of adding new, more restrictive laws will solve the copyright cartels problems in exactly the same degree that Prohibition solved the problems of alcoholism and public drunkeness.
Prohibition was going to end the influence of "Demon Rum". Instead it gave us Al Capone, the Valentines Day Massacre, the near total corruption of Chicago, and Joeseph Kennedy.
The The "War on Drugs" was going to protect us from nasty addictive drugs that were destroying our moral fiber. Well, it seems to have turned illegal drugs into such a lucrative industry that entire governments have been corrupted by the drug trade. Many terrorist organizations are financed from the drug trade.
So, the question we should be asking our Congresscritters is: What would you give us by ciminalizing an activity that is very popular, but has some undesireable social effects?
If Congress determines that the threat of widespread copyright infringement is so dangerous that they need to make felons out of the majority of the citizenry, then they should be considering a retriactive and mandatory death penalty for nicotine trafficking.
"Only problem - ID's can be swapped with a friend" Yup. Sure. Assuming your "friend" has the same thumbprints -or did you miss the part about how the card carries your digitized thumbprints for use with a biometric scanner. The cop won't have to look at the picture - just swipe the card through his reader and have you put your thumb on the sensor plate...
Nope, just not gonna happen. The combined cashpiles of Microsoft's enemies do not come close to the size of Microsoft's cash pile. Although I do think MSFT needs a trip out behind the woodshed, it looks like the people who brought the gubmint into this fight as hired goons failed to consider what would happen when MSFT started hiring the same kind of goons.
Actually, the designs for the rockets were PATENTED. The patents on the J5 (I think, it's been a long time - the engine used in the second and third stages of the Saturn V anyways) expired in the late 70's so those engine designs are fully in the public domain. Of course, given how the gubmint is getting about anything that might have "security" implications, it is entirely likely that Dan Goldin has had them retroactively classified before anyone going for the 'X' prize uses them in a manned ICBM.
Other than that, remember that we are talking about experimental aircraft - the FAA doesn't do a lot with them anyways.
That is indeed a good slogan. But they could draft Charlton Heston as a spokeman too.
How about:
"Keep your stinking laws off my computer you filthy apes!" (the real "Planet Of the Apes")
"Pop culture is people!" ("Soylent Green")
There have to be some good possibilities from "the Ten Commandments" and "The Omega Man", but I just can't think of them...
It's a pity those quotes couldn't be used while playing the clips from the movie they almost came from - it wouldn't quite make the fiar use criteria.:(
Whoa there! I could take the time to make a point by point refutation of your comments (complete with bullet points even!), but instead let me just say that your browser apparently did not process my sarcasm tags properly.
I clearly understand WIPO and its supporting treaties and legislation to be a hobnailed boot on the neck of all who would threaten to bypass current power structures (and the forunes of those who benefit from them) via technological advances.
Naturally, those with power will (ab)use that power. So of course Disney et al will put ever longer advertising messages on their DVDs, and via the current control systems require you to sit through them since the fast forward and chapter skips will be disabled. There is a market based feedback mechanism at work here - if they try to ram too much down our throats at once it will backfire on them. It will take a few years to nurture sufficient arrogance in the people making the decisions as to how much advertising is too much. Then we will see some idiot sell advertising in the last 30 seconds of each DVD chapter - with FF disabled - and this will fail miserably, but there will not be a product recall. Ten years later interchapter advertising will be the norm.
You have not purchased unlimited rights to view/listen to a work. You implied that you have, but until you get a WTO court decision to back you up you have nothing but your rather naive belief against the legally codified property rights of the corporate marketplace.
Things may well not be as bleak as I am painting them. I seem to recall that some of the "rich and powerful" are starting to wonder if they have gone too far. Even if they do make the decision to "ease up" a bit, these sort of institutionalized movements have really enormous inertia... kind of like big dinosaurs recognizing the threat of itsy bitsy mammals - and ignoring that asteroid on a collision course with Yucatan.
As the article not so clearly states. The treaty came first, then the same fine folks who wrote the treaty for WIPO wrote the DMCA for the US. Don't worry, once the bugs are worked out, they will run "DMCA v2.0" through babelfish and then trot the "localized versions" off to be rubberstamped by all the other WIPO members.
Please remember that the purpose of the treaty, and the WIPO international patent system is not to stifle creativity. The purpose is to facilitate the commerce of ideas by having a simple single point of reference to check for ownership of all intellectual property. Everyone is still just as free to create as they were before, but if your creation builds on the IP of others, then they will be protected from being damaged by the dissemination of your obviously derivative works.
That this new IP "clearinghouse" might turn out to be biased in favor of the organizations that pay its bills is completely irrelevant.And so is the fact that whenever I see WIPO I think of it as a "professional" version of the IOC, and the sort of organization that ICANN wishes it were.
So what that says to me is that you will be changing the layout of/. such that we will see only two or three comments "per page" rather than loading up all the comments in a single page as happens now.This reeks of the worst practices of some online magazines and their ten page "top ten" lists where 80% of each page is advertising.
I am less than enthused by your subscription system. Lose the metering, make it a flat rate for an ad-free slashdot, then you'll see some of my money. But putting it on a meter really puts me off and noxious advertising will drive me off.
If 20 bucks a year would handle 80% of your visitors, then charge 5 bucks per quarter. Someone mentioned allowing moderation of the reject bin. Do that, and while you're at it, allow moderation of selected stories as well. If you want to have paying customers, give some serious thought to what we want and how to implement it.
Hmm... your point is that it won't be completely perfect, and my point is that it will be "good enough" (to borrow a phrase) to prevent the vast majority of casual copiers - and the legal sanctions available will tend to stop most others.
Consider the recent "adventures in law enforcement" that Johansen and Skylarov have experienced. Consider the experiences of Felten with regards to weaknesses in the SDMI. Consider 2600 and publishing links to the DeCSS source code.
Now who wants to publish and disseminate information on how to modify a televsion to enable capture of the decrypted video stream?
A> The SSSCA passes or B> The industry "self regulates" to such a degree that the SSSCA is not needed.
Of course, once the decision to go down this path is taken (I'm very much against it and agree with the description of both the equipment and the cartel), the only type of hardware legally available will be that which incorporates this particular ball and chain. Hence the end-user will have his choices removed -I suppose you could call it a "factory floor abortion" of the free marketplace and maybe get some folks from Operation Rescue interested. Should either approach be taken, I fully expect it will move forward with the same sort of speed and momentum that has characterized the triumph of VHS over BetaMax. It will take a few years, but it is do-able. Here is how:
The MPAA and RIAA will write the standard book for the new "blue laser" DVDs and the standard will specify encryption.This standard will be patented. Licensing for the new standard will be free of charge, but require no backwards compatibility with old style CDs and DVDs. No license will be granted for any use in general purpose computers. Next they will begin releasing music and movies in this new format -and it will be of better quality (extra content, higher technical standards, etc) than the same release on "alternative formats". The price for items in the new format may be lower than old style CD's and DVDs. The "Blue Laser" standard will gain market share against the older standards - after all there will be real advantages to the new formats. The studios / labels stop releasing new material on the old formats. Don't think so? Well hop on down to the record store and find any top 40 album on vinyl. How about Episode 1 on Betamax?
Note the recent news stories pointing out that people who have already purchased HDTVs will soon have some very expensive cat warmers -if they have cats - because of the (new) requirement to include copy prevention signals in the digital broadcast feed. This is evidence that an SSSCA may not be necessary for the studios to have their way. The only thing really driving the entertainment industry to push for this law is that they are by nature so ethically challenged that they can't work together without trying to screw each other over and feel that everyone else is just like them.
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in accounts payable and I have the passwords to initiate EFTs to our vendors. I run anti-spyware software for obvious security reasons.
Now some rogue spyware installed by a very soon to be former employee has disabled my anti-spyware and this cretin captures my passwords and proceeds to use them to transfer their "instant retirement package" to their Cayman Isalnd bank account.
I see a bigger problem with spyware than with anti-spyware, and any employer who has employees handling any sort of sensituve informationshould too. (I know, that credits most bosses with WAY too many smarts...)
Will was the founder of the School of Creative Spelling. He spelled his name six different ways. (do your own google search)
Of course, maybe he spelled it so many different ways because it really was Roger Bacon doing the writing and he just didn't remember how he speeled it the last time....
Long a staple of sci-fi,coming soon to your dinner table. But what type of meat will give the best yield?
The story I remember best about this (can't recall title or author) was about a father and son from a colony planet trying to correct a bureaucratic mistake in the spelling of their world's name.
It turned out that regular barnyard animal tissue just took far more resources to grow than the tissues used by the medical establishment...and Earth was incredibly overpopulated.
(No it wasn't "Make Room Make Room" - which was immortalized in film as "Soylent Green". This was a short story and mostly satire)
He pointed out that he wanted a downloadable version, not a webcast so the bandwidth-impaired could still get it at their leisure (well their modem's leisure).
More importantly, he has an offer of enough donated bandwidth to support about 400K downloads - considerably more downloads than he has readers.
As to the "source", one of the four versions he is proposing would be the raw unedited footage. I'd love to see the raw footage for just about any regular "news" interview.
Or didn't you see the part where they said how much energy would have been involved if it had hit?
The US, USSR, and France have all set of bigger bombs than that and somehow failed to wipe out everything on the Pacific Rim with tsunamis.
Remember what the Bikini atoll was famous for.
Just on NT:
this link gives some of the details on it from '96 when Netscape was making the big bucks with their web server software.
I knew that.
It was a weak attempt at humor because the ten user limit ON THEIR SERVER just happened to match MSFT's hard coded limit on the MSFT workstation OS.
Dang, some people won't even let ya have fun trying to stir up a little conspiracy action...
Now, just slap me silly and call me Susan....
But the only OS I know of that enforces a ten connection limit are the "Workstation" versions of NT, 2K, etc.
Microsoft put that in way back when because people were running Netscape's server apps with unlimited connections on NT WorkStation instead of paying the big bucks for NT Server. I understand they also put the ten connection limit back into XP or Win2K as a stealth "update" with a recent Service Pack.
So who really owns Redmond Linux? Could it be some other company based in that part of the country?
You may recall (if not google can help you find out), that the German govt was a tad upset over the Echelon flap and the British RIPA law. The degree of regulatory control the German gubmint already has over everday life in Germany is pretty darn impressive. Perhaps someone from Germany could weigh in with an opinion?
I'm sure if the gubmint wants to crack down on their radical right (aka neo-nazis) or outlawed religious organizations (aka COS) they won't find the nature of the encryption employed by those organizations a major problem in prosecuting the lawbreakers.
I'm not saying they don't have their own bunch of control freaks in their gubmint over there, but they also have a certain amount of recent history in favor of encryption - simply to prevent other governments from spying on their citizens (especially their corporate citizens) Face it, they recognize they have a lot to lose from "corporate espionage" if it makes German corps less competitive.
Acceleration is the change in velocity over time. A pole vaulter takes more time and distance (due to the flex in the pole)to get the vertical speed necessary to reach 20 feet than a soldier using "powered shoes" would in a simple jump. The soldier has to accelerate from zero while traveling no more than about two feet vertically.
Or to turn it around (stopping is a changein velocity also and acceleration is acceleration after all)), take a walk off the top of a twenty foot tall building onto a concrete sidewalk. When you land, remain standing. I'll allow you to flex your knees to the point that you wind up in a squat. If your body can't handle the landing from a vertical drop of that distance, then it couldn't handle the takeoff for the corresponding leap.
To the fine person who thinks that astronauts pull 10 G's... Last time I checked they did it in an acceleration couch (regardless of how many G's but I believe it is considerably less than ten) - not standing upright.
One article mentioned using "powered shoes" to enable soldiers to clear 20 foot walls in a single bound. I suppose the reporter must have been watching too many anime - or action flicks. I hope the source for that quote was yanking the chain of the reporter. The human skeleton just isn't strong enough to handle a vertical leap like that. The hips would collapse under the acceleration. When pole vaulters make those leaps a lot of it is due to the springinness of the pole spreading the acceleration out.
Discussion? Really Mr/Ms Coward! It's easy to laugh when you don't have to take any responsibilty for your words or actions. Only weak minds "need" conspiracies to explain anything. And only weakminded individuals use gratuitous insult as their first line of debate in a "discussion".
Re-read my original post. Do I say that the "War on Drugs" created the drug trade?
The alcohol trade was a thriving business before Prohibition too.
Recreational drugs were (and still are) causing social problems, some of them pretty nasty.
My point remains that the unintended consequences of both Prohibition and the "War on Drugs" were quite severe and long lasting. I suggest that draconian laws (SSSCA,DMCA) intended to protect copyright holders will also have severe and long lasting consequences that will be generally unpredictable but quite detrimental to society overall.
As a simple example, just how many more prisons will need to be built to house all of the people who have "illegal" software or hardware?
Or do you propose that such laws be enforced selectively? What harm does selective enforcement do to a civil society? (selective enforcement of the law is generally viewed as a hallmark of corrupt government)
Or should we empty our existing prisons to make room for the new generation of copyright crooks? Who should we release? (non-violent drug offenders? but what about the War on Drugs?)
And if all the copying you want to do is to convert your brand spanking new CD to MP3 format so you can:
1> take it with you on your portable player or
2> have more convenient access through your $1500.00 audio server
Well in those cases you sure as heck have not engaged in copyright infringement, but you could be running afoul of the DMCA (if you converted that a "copy protected" CD for example).
Widespread copyright infringement is a problem, but there already laws against that. This business of adding new, more restrictive laws will solve the copyright cartels problems in exactly the same degree that Prohibition solved the problems of alcoholism and public drunkeness.
Prohibition was going to end the influence of "Demon Rum".
Instead it gave us Al Capone, the Valentines Day Massacre, the near total corruption of Chicago, and Joeseph Kennedy.
The The "War on Drugs" was going to protect us from nasty addictive drugs that were destroying our moral fiber.
Well, it seems to have turned illegal drugs into such a lucrative industry that entire governments have been corrupted by the drug trade. Many terrorist organizations are financed from the drug trade.
So, the question we should be asking our Congresscritters is: What would you give us by ciminalizing an activity that is very popular, but has some undesireable social effects?
If Congress determines that the threat of widespread copyright infringement is so dangerous that they need to make felons out of the majority of the citizenry, then they should be considering a retriactive and mandatory death penalty for nicotine trafficking.
"Only problem - ID's can be swapped with a friend"
Yup. Sure.
Assuming your "friend" has the same thumbprints -or did you miss the part about how the card carries your digitized thumbprints for use with a biometric scanner. The cop won't have to look at the picture - just swipe the card through his reader and have you put your thumb on the sensor plate...
Heck no.
Everybody knows the geekiness scale goes all the way to "F" (except for you trapped in a merely mortal decimal world)
Nope, just not gonna happen.
The combined cashpiles of Microsoft's enemies do not come close to the size of Microsoft's cash pile. Although I do think MSFT needs a trip out behind the woodshed, it looks like the people who brought the gubmint into this fight as hired goons failed to consider what would happen when MSFT started hiring the same kind of goons.
Actually, the designs for the rockets were PATENTED. The patents on the J5 (I think, it's been a long time - the engine used in the second and third stages of the Saturn V anyways) expired in the late 70's so those engine designs are fully in the public domain. Of course, given how the gubmint is getting about anything that might have "security" implications, it is entirely likely that Dan Goldin has had them retroactively classified before anyone going for the 'X' prize uses them in a manned ICBM.
Other than that, remember that we are talking about experimental aircraft - the FAA doesn't do a lot with them anyways.
Yeah, but they would be satirizing the proposed law - NOT the original movies, ditto for trying to claim fair use for purposes of criticism.
That is indeed a good slogan. But they could draft Charlton Heston as a spokeman too.
:(
How about:
"Keep your stinking laws off my computer you filthy apes!" (the real "Planet Of the Apes")
"Pop culture is people!" ("Soylent Green")
There have to be some good possibilities from "the Ten Commandments" and "The Omega Man", but I just can't think of them...
It's a pity those quotes couldn't be used while playing the clips from the movie they almost came from - it wouldn't quite make the fiar use criteria.
Whoa there!
I could take the time to make a point by point refutation of your comments (complete with bullet points even!), but instead let me just say that your browser apparently did not process my sarcasm tags properly.
I clearly understand WIPO and its supporting treaties and legislation to be a hobnailed boot on the neck of all who would threaten to bypass current power structures (and the forunes of those who benefit from them) via technological advances.
Naturally, those with power will (ab)use that power. So of course Disney et al will put ever longer advertising messages on their DVDs, and via the current control systems require you to sit through them since the fast forward and chapter skips will be disabled. There is a market based feedback mechanism at work here - if they try to ram too much down our throats at once it will backfire on them. It will take a few years to nurture sufficient arrogance in the people making the decisions as to how much advertising is too much. Then we will see some idiot sell advertising in the last 30 seconds of each DVD chapter - with FF disabled - and this will fail miserably, but there will not be a product recall. Ten years later interchapter advertising will be the norm.
You have not purchased unlimited rights to view/listen to a work. You implied that you have, but until you get a WTO court decision to back you up you have nothing but your rather naive belief against the legally codified property rights of the corporate marketplace.
Things may well not be as bleak as I am painting them. I seem to recall that some of the "rich and powerful" are starting to wonder if they have gone too far. Even if they do make the decision to "ease up" a bit, these sort of institutionalized movements have really enormous inertia... kind of like big dinosaurs recognizing the threat of itsy bitsy mammals - and ignoring that asteroid on a collision course with Yucatan.
So, they would have to go back to fingerprints. Even identical twins (naturally occuring "clones") do not have the same fingerprints.
As the article not so clearly states. The treaty came first, then the same fine folks who wrote the treaty for WIPO wrote the DMCA for the US. Don't worry, once the bugs are worked out, they will run "DMCA v2.0" through babelfish and then trot the "localized versions" off to be rubberstamped by all the other WIPO members.
Please remember that the purpose of the treaty, and the WIPO international patent system is not to stifle creativity. The purpose is to facilitate the commerce of ideas by having a simple single point of reference to check for ownership of all intellectual property. Everyone is still just as free to create as they were before, but if your creation builds on the IP of others, then they will be protected from being damaged by the dissemination of your obviously derivative works.
That this new IP "clearinghouse" might turn out to be biased in favor of the organizations that pay its bills is completely irrelevant.And so is the fact that whenever I see WIPO I think of it as a "professional" version of the IOC, and the sort of organization that ICANN wishes it were.
So what that says to me is that you will be changing the layout of /. such that we will see only two or three comments "per page" rather than loading up all the comments in a single page as happens now.This reeks of the worst practices of some online magazines and their ten page "top ten" lists where 80% of each page is advertising.
I am less than enthused by your subscription system. Lose the metering, make it a flat rate for an ad-free slashdot, then you'll see some of my money. But putting it on a meter really puts me off and noxious advertising will drive me off.
If 20 bucks a year would handle 80% of your visitors, then charge 5 bucks per quarter. Someone mentioned allowing moderation of the reject bin. Do that, and while you're at it, allow moderation of selected stories as well. If you want to have paying customers, give some serious thought to what we want and how to implement it.
Hmm... your point is that it won't be completely perfect, and my point is that it will be "good enough" (to borrow a phrase) to prevent the vast majority of casual copiers - and the legal sanctions available will tend to stop most others.
Consider the recent "adventures in law enforcement" that Johansen and Skylarov have experienced. Consider the experiences of Felten with regards to weaknesses in the SDMI. Consider 2600 and publishing links to the DeCSS source code.
Now who wants to publish and disseminate information on how to modify a televsion to enable capture of the decrypted video stream?
It presupposes only that either
A> The SSSCA passes or
B> The industry "self regulates" to such a degree that the SSSCA is not needed.
Of course, once the decision to go down this path is taken (I'm very much against it and agree with the description of both the equipment and the cartel), the only type of hardware legally available will be that which incorporates this particular ball and chain. Hence the end-user will have his choices removed -I suppose you could call it a "factory floor abortion" of the free marketplace and maybe get some folks from Operation Rescue interested. Should either approach be taken, I fully expect it will move forward with the same sort of speed and momentum that has characterized the triumph of VHS over BetaMax. It will take a few years, but it is do-able. Here is how:
The MPAA and RIAA will write the standard book for the new "blue laser" DVDs and the standard will specify encryption.This standard will be patented.
Licensing for the new standard will be free of charge, but require no backwards compatibility with old style CDs and DVDs. No license will be granted for any use in general purpose computers.
Next they will begin releasing music and movies in this new format -and it will be of better quality (extra content, higher technical standards, etc) than the same release on "alternative formats".
The price for items in the new format may be lower than old style CD's and DVDs.
The "Blue Laser" standard will gain market share against the older standards - after all there will be real advantages to the new formats.
The studios / labels stop releasing new material on the old formats.
Don't think so? Well hop on down to the record store and find any top 40 album on vinyl. How about Episode 1 on Betamax?
Note the recent news stories pointing out that people who have already purchased HDTVs will soon have some very expensive cat warmers -if they have cats - because of the (new) requirement to include copy prevention signals in the digital broadcast feed. This is evidence that an SSSCA may not be necessary for the studios to have their way.
The only thing really driving the entertainment industry to push for this law is that they are by nature so ethically challenged that they can't work together without trying to screw each other over and feel that everyone else is just like them.