Also the Constitution is (for now) in the public domain.
Arguably (and that's what lawyers do, argue), this is an copyrightable original derivative work, as are all translations. OK, then it's a plaintext derivative work, not an encrypted public domain work, so ROT-13 it again to encrypt it.;)
I used to work for a certain investigation-oriented agency of the Australian government. Once we needed to break into a password-protected Excel spreadsheet in order to try to prove that the owner was up to no good
Out of interest, what was the legal situation there? Were you doing it under a court order, or doing it (illegally, but with, ahem, "moral justification") prior to obtaining a court order, or was it perfectly legal for you to do it?
This isn't a troll! I'm genuinely interested, what with the wacky stuff that's going on in Australia right now.
Gore said the constitution should be a "living document."
So, how does that differ from "doing away with it" (and replacing it with a new document)?
I have to agree with the original poster. If you polygraphed every politician, and asked them "If you could get rid of the Consitution and were given carte blance to write a better one, do you think you could do better?". Watch their little piggy eyes light up. Sure, taking industry bribes (sorry, "contributions") is OK, but wouldn't they just love the chance to start a new chapter in the history books?
Not really, but it's one of the few jurisdictions that's got the nutsack (or stubborness) to stand up to the USA. Really guys, when billions of people are calling you the Great Satan, maybe it is time to take an honest look at yourself.
had the combination of balls and resources to take it to court yet.
(Correction to self, yes I know there are cases currently in court, but these will have to go all the way to the supremes to kill the DMCA. The 2600 case in particular is getting mired in procedure rather than having the nutsack to stick to its 1st Amendment guns)
Hell, I just finished reading Joe Halderman's Forever Peace, so I half expect Adobe to plant some ringers in some of the demonstrations to make sure things turn violent.:-)
Why the smiley? In London earlier this year, during the WTO protests, it wasn't hard to spot the gangs of burly red faced buzzcut jocks standing aside and talking into their collars, among the crowd of spindly dreadlocked vegetarians. Obvious, much?
OK, so maybe they were undercover police, there to prevent trouble, yadda yadda. I'm not saying that they were planted to cause trouble, but they were planted, and even a turgid brain could puzzle out that putting your jackboot through a window might help give your tribe the excuse they need to cut through the red tape and administer some righteous justice/common sense/wholesome family values.
Why in the world is the EFF giving them what they want?
Pure speculation (so please moderate as such), but perhaps the EFF are so stoked that Adobe are (pretending) to take them (semi)seriously, that they've forgotten what their original goal was.
1st time: Killustrator changed their name. Adobe wins, and the guy still owes Adobe's lawyers a lot of money that Adobe isn't going to pay on his behalf, nor are they asking their lawyers to stop demanding payment
Please knock it off. The lawyers in this case were an independent firm, proactively chasing the case on their own initiative. Adobe weren't even informed of what was going on before this hit the news. It sounds insane, but remember that this was in Germany, the country where 98% of the population voted in a short dark Austrian on a platform of tall blonde German superiority.
I'm in agreement with your point 2, but let's not sink to the level of corporate FUD please
You can't get sued for decoding ROT-13. At least, if you did get sued for it it would get thrown out of court
You're a supreme court judge, right? The problem with the DMCA and our associated speculations are that nobody's had the combination of balls and resources to take it to court yet.
I believe firmly that the EFF are wrong to negotiate on this one. This needs to be fought in court, all the way to the top, with the intention of having the DMCA or parts thereof ruled unworkable. Otherwise it will continue to be used as a tool of intimidation, as are all unjust laws in a society where the ability to buy lawyers decides right from wrong.
our right to march in support of Dmitry in San Jose on Monday
Sure, you have the right to march where and when you're told, or you have the right to receive punishment beatings and chemical weapon torture from masked jackbooted thugs.
we still have the means to tell a JBT to fuck off and back it up with force if necessary
With the greatest of respect, you are completely deranged. If you force a confrontation on Monday, you will get hurt, and badly. Worse, the press will describe you as activists and extremists.
Do us all a favour, don't mention "force". Just wear your smartest suit, go where you're told, and don't huck any rocks at the FBI building, huh?
The guy responsible for the absolute turd of a game leaves, the guy responsible for the ground-breaking game takes over the top spot. This is [...] a great illustration of how things would work in an ideal world
And in the real world, the remaining guy is left in charge of a dead name, and the majority of games buyers won't know the difference, they'll just know that Ion Storm created Daikatana. Meanwhile, the teflon coated cocksucker slips off to start up another lame ass pit of fear and loathing, with a shiny new name and more experience - "Hey, finance me again, I know how not to create a game now, plus I have a Ferrari, so I must have something going for me!".
If you have a game which isn't fun, what would you change to make it fun?
(From experience) In a programmer led team, you strip ruthlesslely until you've got a fun game, even if comes down to "Left. Right. Fire." and looks like a C64 retro blaster. Then you add all the whizzo-3D, neat gimmicks and storyline that the designers and artists are churning out.
However, if you're a producer or designer or artist led team, you keep adding more and more cool ground breaking concepts and gimmicks and 5000 polygon models to fix it, until you end up with, er, Daikatana.;)
Britney oiled up a bathtub of vibrators (or whatever's next).
You're probably closer than you think
Actually, I wasn't being facetious (ok, a little). I was discussing this with some chums way back when, and we plotted the whole Britney Master Plan, from wide eyed innocent (then), to wannabe super-soft pop-rock chick (now, correct), to overweight alcoholic/junkie cum slut trailer trash (that's next, and cue dumb marriage #1), to born again puritan on a fad diet (and dumb marriage #2), to (self proclaimed) serious grown up diva (single, probably an accessory kid, possibly lesbian).
The reason that this is (honestly) relevant to this thread is that we reckoned in all seriousness that her management had "her" (i.e. insert identikit replacement) entire career plotted from day one, with marketing budgets, life crises, shifting fan bases and everything. Hell, they've probably already got her post cum slut "I was so screwed up, but I know now the Lord Jesus Christ was always with me" disclosure articles outlined and pre-signed with the gossip magazines.
Every time I think I'm being too cynical, the music industry spits out another anonymous boy band, Britney clone, or (super rich) angry young rappa and spends millions telling me how great they are, and I just grind my teeth and spin up my Stan Rogers CDs again.
Nice try in making me out to be a hypocrite, or something
Uh, no, read the (slightly modified) question.
If you're using music without paying, why would you care about using the the mp3 format without paying?
For those getting their panties in a twist, I don't care in either case, so I find it a little strange that you'd care about one and not the other. Try and not assume that every question is an attack, huh?
Yes, but flash is expensive and (electrically) fragile. It's also hellishly slow to access, but that's probably not an issue here. It's light and low powered (when reading), but again, that's not an issue in a typical battle bot.
Maybe I'm a luddite, but I'd prefer a cheap, electrically robust hard drive.
Re:Slashdot's Slashbot
on
BYO Battlebot
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· Score: 2
We will release ALL of the code that is used in the bot and out under the GPL. (But only after I've tested it all)
Kind of missing the point of open source? Release early, release often, gain strength from your screw ups, enhance your kung fu powers, and so on.
I say why not use REAL weapons: guns, flamethrowers, EMP devices, etc.
Because some of the poor beasties can barely wobble into the arena under their own power as it is, let alone if a Cyberdyne T-200 is EMP'ing the area. Explaining the importance of shielding your systems might be instructive, but it's hardly entertaining - except maybe to us, and we're hardly a mainstream audience.;)
Re:That's still retarded.
on
BYO Battlebot
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· Score: 2
there is no excuse, bar incompetence, for this competition to not consist of truly autonomous robots.
If you read the article, you'll find out exactly why there are no autonomous contenders - because they'd have to be completed by hackers.
PVC was chosen primarily because we are computer people, not mechanical people [...] we hit a column with a rubber mallet. The joint shattered (the hard plastic) and hit every wall in the garage!
the bot was retired before the armor was built [...] it never saw a fight
if certain relays were closed at the same time the system could short itself out, so care had to be taken when issuing commands to not do that!
This is what happens when you hook the batteries up backwards. A big bang, lots of smoke, and a blown cap.
This is what happens when you don't use fuses. Something starts to smoke... Fortunately, it was repairable and nothing expensive broke!
Everything on the bot is complete and works, except it draws too much power
Note to the easily angered, I'm not dissing these guys, this is a fun project, and well documented. But it kind of typifies the hacker culture of build one to throw one away - then get bored and go on to something else. Hell, I've got a hand built car sitting in my garage that I never drive. Like these guys, I built it to learn how to do it, not to actually drive it around or anything.;)
Absolutely NOTHING is preventing a.com from signing up independent artists and promoting and distributing their music. The only problem is that the majority of consumers don't seem to want that kind of music.
What kind of music exactly? A company with enough $$$ to effectively promote in competition with the big 5 would (I submit) quickly become no different from them. They could only afford to promote zero risk, focus group oriented teeny trash.
I suggest that the problem here is the amount of money that gets spent on promotion, and on only a few new tracks. Step 1 towards fixing that is to punish them for pushing Britney clones on us. However, they seem to have just helped us with that by killing the best source for back catalogue stuff, Napster. Now it's easier to get Metallica than Stan Rogers. Nice move, RIAA>
To think that you can change the music scene by downloading a few songs from the web is sad. [...] Are we all listening to original, cutting-edge tunes? No - people still download Britney Spears and Metallica
Patience, young padewan. The problem that I have with big labels is that they pick 10% of the (blandest) tracks they have available and then spend 90% of their budget promoting them. Promotion of their back catalogue is limited to retro movie soundtracks. For the price of one Britney video, they could run a "great music you've never heard of" promotion for a year. So why don't they? I assume because they reckon they can make more by spending it on filming Britney oiled up a bathtub of vibrators (or whatever's next).
So the first step to addressing this is to break the cycle of "big promotion bucks = big chart sales". If Bertelsmann want to pay megabucks to persuade me that Britney's next album has actual music on it (no sniggering at the back), fine, but even if they brainwash me thus far, I'll still be downloading it for nothing, simply because it's easier than buying it. (Argue the morality, but not that fact please.)
It's a small hope, but maybe, just maybe, if they get reamed on promoting bland chart twaddle, the labels will start paying radio and MTV to sample some of their back catalogue, and just maybe I'll like it so much that I'll buy it, if I can buy and download it online at a sensible price direct from them, with minimal hassle or arsing about with copy control crap, or promising them my first born son.
For me, the most ironic thing about killing Napster is that it was the best source for finding obscure back catalogue that the industry isn't bothering to promote. But if I happen to like a million dollar video in a paid MTV slot, I can still very easily get it in any of a half dozen places. The RIAA have only managed to limit sharing to the tracks that they're currently paying the most to promote! You really have to pity these guys.
So let's be patient. Let them feel the effect of their actions for a while. They're not the sharpest tools in the box, but give them a year or so and maybe, just maybe, they'll stop shooting themselves in the foot and make it easier for us to find music we like, and for us to give them money for it, a little at a time, and at our pace and not theirs.
While there are definitely legitimate RKBA concerns with the proposals to limit small-arms sales, suggesting that the U.N. is assmbling a plan to confiscate our firearms is exageration
Absolutely, it's not a U.N. plot. Your own elected officials can do it without any outside help. Although it helps that the media to keep pushing out of context schoolyard massacre stories.
Did you forget about ten round magazine limits, banning automatic weapons (meaning you can't form an effective militia, which is, according to your consitution, the reason that you should have guns), waiting periods, gun registration (presumption of guilt, and turning a "right" into a "concession"), and of course the complete banning of hand guns in some urban areas.
You've already lost the fight, you just haven't had the last of your guns taken away yet. And no, I don't think that's a good thing, I think it's horrific that only criminals and (demonstrably corrupt) government have access to deadly force. I'd like a gun for home defence. But being brutally honest, I'm seeing the USA going down exactly the same road that many European countries already have.
However, it doesn't have to be that way. In Switzerland (popular site of the Gnomes of Zurich and Illuminati HQ in Black Helicopter Times), gun ownership is mandatory and crime is low. It's like every one of Heinlein's "government by military veterans" themes come true, and it does actually work.
You do not have any RIGHTS to privacy under the law, only a reasonable expectation of it
Quite. Brought to you by the trite-but-true department: when my partner left her last job, we checked her contract. "You are expected to provide four weeks notice," it asserted. In her resignation letter, she regretted to inform them that their expectation was futile, and due to irreconcilable differences, she wouldn't be in on Monday. Her boss (the reason for her leaving) was furious, but (after checking with HR) had to admit that there was sod all they could do about it.
Contracts (including legal contracts between the administration, the judiciary and We, the People) mean only and exactly what they say, not what we'd like to think they say.
On TV, "IA" (Internal Affairs) may look like they're out to get the beat cops for any little thing, but in reality the Blue Wall still thrives
Just as an FYI, the new UK Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has just decided that having the police investigate themselves is pretty fairly dumb, and is putting (yet more) quangos in place to monitor complaints. About time too.
I think the cops deserve a little more respect, and the lawmakers should respect them by passing enforceable laws that don't make criminals out of most people
Well said, that poster. Also, would it kill us to be honest and just let the cops stop and search anyone they wanted without having to lie about it?
No, I don't think they should perform stop-and-search at will, but the plain fact is that they do, so we might as well be honest about it and pass a "Driving with the wrong ethnicity/in the wrong vehicle/in the wrong neighbourhood at the wrong time" law rather than forcing them to work around the system rather than within it.
Slashdot Mirror
Arguably (and that's what lawyers do, argue), this is an copyrightable original derivative work, as are all translations. OK, then it's a plaintext derivative work, not an encrypted public domain work, so ROT-13 it again to encrypt it. ;)
Out of interest, what was the legal situation there? Were you doing it under a court order, or doing it (illegally, but with, ahem, "moral justification") prior to obtaining a court order, or was it perfectly legal for you to do it?
This isn't a troll! I'm genuinely interested, what with the wacky stuff that's going on in Australia right now.
So, how does that differ from "doing away with it" (and replacing it with a new document)?
I have to agree with the original poster. If you polygraphed every politician, and asked them "If you could get rid of the Consitution and were given carte blance to write a better one, do you think you could do better?". Watch their little piggy eyes light up. Sure, taking industry bribes (sorry, "contributions") is OK, but wouldn't they just love the chance to start a new chapter in the history books?
Not really, but it's one of the few jurisdictions that's got the nutsack (or stubborness) to stand up to the USA. Really guys, when billions of people are calling you the Great Satan, maybe it is time to take an honest look at yourself.
(Correction to self, yes I know there are cases currently in court, but these will have to go all the way to the supremes to kill the DMCA. The 2600 case in particular is getting mired in procedure rather than having the nutsack to stick to its 1st Amendment guns)
Why the smiley? In London earlier this year, during the WTO protests, it wasn't hard to spot the gangs of burly red faced buzzcut jocks standing aside and talking into their collars, among the crowd of spindly dreadlocked vegetarians. Obvious, much?
OK, so maybe they were undercover police, there to prevent trouble, yadda yadda. I'm not saying that they were planted to cause trouble, but they were planted, and even a turgid brain could puzzle out that putting your jackboot through a window might help give your tribe the excuse they need to cut through the red tape and administer some righteous justice/common sense/wholesome family values.
Pure speculation (so please moderate as such), but perhaps the EFF are so stoked that Adobe are (pretending) to take them (semi)seriously, that they've forgotten what their original goal was.
Please knock it off. The lawyers in this case were an independent firm, proactively chasing the case on their own initiative. Adobe weren't even informed of what was going on before this hit the news. It sounds insane, but remember that this was in Germany, the country where 98% of the population voted in a short dark Austrian on a platform of tall blonde German superiority.
I'm in agreement with your point 2, but let's not sink to the level of corporate FUD please
You're a supreme court judge, right? The problem with the DMCA and our associated speculations are that nobody's had the combination of balls and resources to take it to court yet.
I believe firmly that the EFF are wrong to negotiate on this one. This needs to be fought in court, all the way to the top, with the intention of having the DMCA or parts thereof ruled unworkable. Otherwise it will continue to be used as a tool of intimidation, as are all unjust laws in a society where the ability to buy lawyers decides right from wrong.
Sure, you have the right to march where and when you're told, or you have the right to receive punishment beatings and chemical weapon torture from masked jackbooted thugs.
With the greatest of respect, you are completely deranged. If you force a confrontation on Monday, you will get hurt, and badly. Worse, the press will describe you as activists and extremists.
Do us all a favour, don't mention "force". Just wear your smartest suit, go where you're told, and don't huck any rocks at the FBI building, huh?
And in the real world, the remaining guy is left in charge of a dead name, and the majority of games buyers won't know the difference, they'll just know that Ion Storm created Daikatana. Meanwhile, the teflon coated cocksucker slips off to start up another lame ass pit of fear and loathing, with a shiny new name and more experience - "Hey, finance me again, I know how not to create a game now, plus I have a Ferrari, so I must have something going for me!".
(From experience) In a programmer led team, you strip ruthlesslely until you've got a fun game, even if comes down to "Left. Right. Fire." and looks like a C64 retro blaster. Then you add all the whizzo-3D, neat gimmicks and storyline that the designers and artists are churning out.
However, if you're a producer or designer or artist led team, you keep adding more and more cool ground breaking concepts and gimmicks and 5000 polygon models to fix it, until you end up with, er, Daikatana. ;)
- Britney oiled up a bathtub of vibrators (or whatever's next).
You're probably closer than you thinkActually, I wasn't being facetious (ok, a little). I was discussing this with some chums way back when, and we plotted the whole Britney Master Plan, from wide eyed innocent (then), to wannabe super-soft pop-rock chick (now, correct), to overweight alcoholic/junkie cum slut trailer trash (that's next, and cue dumb marriage #1), to born again puritan on a fad diet (and dumb marriage #2), to (self proclaimed) serious grown up diva (single, probably an accessory kid, possibly lesbian).
The reason that this is (honestly) relevant to this thread is that we reckoned in all seriousness that her management had "her" (i.e. insert identikit replacement) entire career plotted from day one, with marketing budgets, life crises, shifting fan bases and everything. Hell, they've probably already got her post cum slut "I was so screwed up, but I know now the Lord Jesus Christ was always with me" disclosure articles outlined and pre-signed with the gossip magazines.
Every time I think I'm being too cynical, the music industry spits out another anonymous boy band, Britney clone, or (super rich) angry young rappa and spends millions telling me how great they are, and I just grind my teeth and spin up my Stan Rogers CDs again.
Uh, no, read the (slightly modified) question.
If you're using music without paying, why would you care about using the the mp3 format without paying?
For those getting their panties in a twist, I don't care in either case, so I find it a little strange that you'd care about one and not the other. Try and not assume that every question is an attack, huh?
Yes, but flash is expensive and (electrically) fragile. It's also hellishly slow to access, but that's probably not an issue here. It's light and low powered (when reading), but again, that's not an issue in a typical battle bot.
Maybe I'm a luddite, but I'd prefer a cheap, electrically robust hard drive.
Kind of missing the point of open source? Release early, release often, gain strength from your screw ups, enhance your kung fu powers, and so on.
Because some of the poor beasties can barely wobble into the arena under their own power as it is, let alone if a Cyberdyne T-200 is EMP'ing the area. Explaining the importance of shielding your systems might be instructive, but it's hardly entertaining - except maybe to us, and we're hardly a mainstream audience. ;)
If you read the article, you'll find out exactly why there are no autonomous contenders - because they'd have to be completed by hackers.
Note to the easily angered, I'm not dissing these guys, this is a fun project, and well documented. But it kind of typifies the hacker culture of build one to throw one away - then get bored and go on to something else. Hell, I've got a hand built car sitting in my garage that I never drive. Like these guys, I built it to learn how to do it, not to actually drive it around or anything. ;)
What kind of music exactly? A company with enough $$$ to effectively promote in competition with the big 5 would (I submit) quickly become no different from them. They could only afford to promote zero risk, focus group oriented teeny trash.
I suggest that the problem here is the amount of money that gets spent on promotion, and on only a few new tracks. Step 1 towards fixing that is to punish them for pushing Britney clones on us. However, they seem to have just helped us with that by killing the best source for back catalogue stuff, Napster. Now it's easier to get Metallica than Stan Rogers. Nice move, RIAA>
Patience, young padewan. The problem that I have with big labels is that they pick 10% of the (blandest) tracks they have available and then spend 90% of their budget promoting them. Promotion of their back catalogue is limited to retro movie soundtracks. For the price of one Britney video, they could run a "great music you've never heard of" promotion for a year. So why don't they? I assume because they reckon they can make more by spending it on filming Britney oiled up a bathtub of vibrators (or whatever's next).
So the first step to addressing this is to break the cycle of "big promotion bucks = big chart sales". If Bertelsmann want to pay megabucks to persuade me that Britney's next album has actual music on it (no sniggering at the back), fine, but even if they brainwash me thus far, I'll still be downloading it for nothing, simply because it's easier than buying it. (Argue the morality, but not that fact please.)
It's a small hope, but maybe, just maybe, if they get reamed on promoting bland chart twaddle, the labels will start paying radio and MTV to sample some of their back catalogue, and just maybe I'll like it so much that I'll buy it, if I can buy and download it online at a sensible price direct from them, with minimal hassle or arsing about with copy control crap, or promising them my first born son.
For me, the most ironic thing about killing Napster is that it was the best source for finding obscure back catalogue that the industry isn't bothering to promote. But if I happen to like a million dollar video in a paid MTV slot, I can still very easily get it in any of a half dozen places. The RIAA have only managed to limit sharing to the tracks that they're currently paying the most to promote! You really have to pity these guys.
So let's be patient. Let them feel the effect of their actions for a while. They're not the sharpest tools in the box, but give them a year or so and maybe, just maybe, they'll stop shooting themselves in the foot and make it easier for us to find music we like, and for us to give them money for it, a little at a time, and at our pace and not theirs.
Uh, if you're ripping copyrighted music, why would you care that it's in a open source format rather than a proprietary one?
Absolutely, it's not a U.N. plot. Your own elected officials can do it without any outside help. Although it helps that the media to keep pushing out of context schoolyard massacre stories.
Did you forget about ten round magazine limits, banning automatic weapons (meaning you can't form an effective militia, which is, according to your consitution, the reason that you should have guns), waiting periods, gun registration (presumption of guilt, and turning a "right" into a "concession"), and of course the complete banning of hand guns in some urban areas.
You've already lost the fight, you just haven't had the last of your guns taken away yet. And no, I don't think that's a good thing, I think it's horrific that only criminals and (demonstrably corrupt) government have access to deadly force. I'd like a gun for home defence. But being brutally honest, I'm seeing the USA going down exactly the same road that many European countries already have.
However, it doesn't have to be that way. In Switzerland (popular site of the Gnomes of Zurich and Illuminati HQ in Black Helicopter Times), gun ownership is mandatory and crime is low. It's like every one of Heinlein's "government by military veterans" themes come true, and it does actually work.
Quite. Brought to you by the trite-but-true department: when my partner left her last job, we checked her contract. "You are expected to provide four weeks notice," it asserted. In her resignation letter, she regretted to inform them that their expectation was futile, and due to irreconcilable differences, she wouldn't be in on Monday. Her boss (the reason for her leaving) was furious, but (after checking with HR) had to admit that there was sod all they could do about it.
Contracts (including legal contracts between the administration, the judiciary and We, the People) mean only and exactly what they say, not what we'd like to think they say.
Just as an FYI, the new UK Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has just decided that having the police investigate themselves is pretty fairly dumb, and is putting (yet more) quangos in place to monitor complaints. About time too.
Well said, that poster. Also, would it kill us to be honest and just let the cops stop and search anyone they wanted without having to lie about it?
No, I don't think they should perform stop-and-search at will, but the plain fact is that they do, so we might as well be honest about it and pass a "Driving with the wrong ethnicity/in the wrong vehicle/in the wrong neighbourhood at the wrong time" law rather than forcing them to work around the system rather than within it.