What's funny tho is that Telstra is also an international transit provider for Australia, meaning that if Telstra DID have to pay for the bandwidth, it would just be paying Telstra:)
Re:Great Movie, maybe not for Americans
on
Review: The Dish
·
· Score: 1
Let me just say, as an Australian... I'm sorry, dear god I'm sorry. We don't like him any more than you do:>
In Australia, public libraries have paid royalties to copyright holders for years. Every 12 months, they pick a number of authors at random and see how many of their books are on loan.. the amount paid is in relation to this.
It just seems to wrong tho.. arrrg.. I hope I die before we end up in a pay-per-use world:/
I find this observation quite correct. I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Security Science.. not comp sec, real security. I have quite an interest in tamperproof fixing devices, and I have drivers to undo most of them:) In my extensive travels, I must say that I have only ever seen Robertson head screws in Canada.. and they're absolutely everywhere:)
Undernet will not remain without channel services for very long. This is not an official statement, but I am one of the co-ordinators of the group which runs X and W on undernet, and we do have a contingency plan which we are currently ramping up for activation. Do not despair, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it isn't the lamp of a fast approaching train:)
The full text of the official press release from the ACCC is here. I'm quite impressed. It's obvious they have done their homework on this one, mentioning how it differs from the PAL/NTSC/SECAM problems.
The ACCC is a very handy branch of government which restricts what companies can do to make a profit. They can make national regulations and levy large (AU$1M+) fines towards companies that are exploiting consumers. The DVD industry looks like a damn fine target to me:) Specifically, fines could be targeted at Australian subsidiaries of the DVD Consortium. Like Warner, Sony, etc:)
With the Australian dollar as bad as it is, it's actually been cheaper to buy many DVDs locally than from amazon.com or other overseas retailers. But that's not the point, I can easily forsee a future release of something in R4 which is missing stuff found in the R1 release. If you were a true fan, you would pay extra.
I think the ACCC should mandate that the region code of players sold in Australia must be able to be reset an unlimited number of times, and that any DVD discs sold here be R0.
This was after WW2, but specifically after the Korean war. The Korean war showed that China had nuclear capabilities, which were obtained by spying on the USA.
And yes, I know that the korean war hasn't officially ended yet:)
Although it says that it will block the playback when connected to a VCR and it won't when connected to a TV, I can't see how it can differentiate between the two.
It doesn't need to differentiate between a TV and a VCR. New VCRs in the US are required by law to acknowledge the macrovision signal, and delibrately screw up any picture they see coming as an input to the VCR which has a macrovision signal. This is why you can't play DVD players through the VCR. A solution might be to look for "video stabilisers". They usually won't advertise it, but they remove the macrovision signal. This is what they mean by "enhancing and cleaning" the signal. They are about US$60.
Which is just another sign of why it's so easy for big business to buy off congress...
Anyone can pay a congressman a "campaign contribution", but congressmen in general only care about the opinion of people who can vote for them. So if you have money, they'll be more than happy to listen to you, but if you don't, they won't care as much, and will only care if you can vote for them. Also, democracy means that you don't need 100% of congressional members to vote on a bill, so big business only needs to pay campaign contributions to a majority of them.
What happens if you aren't in the constituency of those voting for the bill? Tough luck my friend, you're now forced by law to hand over your first born child to the RIAA and second born to the MPAA. You get people making decisions which affect you but who aren't answerable to you.
It sounds a little far fetched, but bear in mind that these two little organisations have already had laws made which makes it illegal for you to modify your VCR in some ways, and illegal to view content you legitimately own unless you use something made by another "co licensed company" who has paid them millions in fees.
Oh, and don't forget that RIAA would love to get rid of CDs and Cassettes because there's no "access control" restrictions to them. If they choose to stop selling CDs/cassettes, you will not have any comeback.
The revolution will be televised...
...but it will be encoded with macrovision, so you won't be able to record it for historical purposes. Fair use? What's that?
You scepticism is rightly placed when it comes to the MPAA and cronies in the entertainment industry. Remember when they said that region encoding would only be used on the newest release DVDs?
I went to my local DVD vendor to have a look at their range. Out of over 100 DVDs available from them, there were only two which weren't regionally encoded, and both of those were classical music performances. With no joke, after looking at all the regionally encoded disks, and reading about the lengths the MPAA has gone to to "keep honest people honest", I feel truely violated.
Amoung those movies with regional encoding.. Twister (1996) and Gone With the wind (some time in the 40s?). Neither of those could be considered as new releases by any person.
You can't trust the MPAA. I really really hope that FCC stops them before they go too far. I know none of the players here are really looking after our best interests, but it's really the best chance we've got.
Under several US laws and by precident (that Genie case), being a common carrier gives them protection from lawsuit over content on their network. If you start to moderate content you become liable for it.
Solution? Sue em cause of what one of their users did and see how much they start to not care about their users' activities;)
Espy was a friend of many on the Undernet network, including myself. We have added an in memorium notice to one of our more frequently visited homepages for him.
Because the data about the problems has been mainly unscientific. The number of variables envolved in this is really large, ie location of the passenger in the aircraft, type of phone, location of aircraft, type of aircraft, weather conditions. It's widely accepted by pilots that these things do cause problems.
I know of a pilot who was experiancing problems which seemed to be from RF emissions from something, and suspected a mobile phone. So he had the stewards do a walkthrough of the plane and see if anyone was suing a mobile phone/computer. They didn't find anyone, and the interference continued. So he tuned the radio in cockpit to the frequency used by analog mobile phones and hey presto... "*ring*ring* Hello?" "Hi, this is James Smith calling about my appointment..". So he checked the passenger manifest, found this person's seat and asked "Can I have a look at your mobile phone?". The guy handed it over, pilot said thanks and handed back the phone, sans battery. The person had been delibrately hiding the phone when they were searching the plane.
If a technological solution is decided on, it means either every aircraft used for MPT (Mass Public Transport) or every cell phone will need to have something done to it. Neither is going to happen.
Which is why there needs to be a legal solution. After the first few people get locked up/fined large sums of money, the public will get to know the airlines mean business.
Reminds me of a recent situation with Apple.. some of their G4 500MHz chips only had 450MHz stamped on them. Apple's tech note on it said that the chips did not need to be replaced. I've heard a number of computer dealers have been telling people who complain that messing with their motherboard/heatsink voids their warrenty, so stop looking. Hehehe
The other thing is that living in Perth, I can attest to how downright dishonest some of our computer dealers are. I wouldn't put it past some of them.
Would have been interesting to see the chip before it got crushed:P
By charging you a royalty for the blank CD-R media, they are, in effect, making any copies you make onto that CD legal. You've paid the royalties for the music already when you bought the CD-R. So you can fill it with MP3s, or burn your own mixed CD's, and it's 100% legal:)
I've been writing CGI scripts for years.. one of the things I ALWAYS do is to make sure people can't submit HTML tags to any form which will display the output on a webpage. This is nothing new, but I guess newbies need to learn these things too.
Re:Is it just me, or...
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 1
I think we need to see how much NASA is getting and perhaps have them redirect some funding.
To where? finacing for Kevin Costner movies?:-)
At least with NASA projects, there's a chance they will be of benefit to humankind. The Postman? Forget it, email is the next generation:-)
An email address for every physical address is not really do-able. It would be a pain, and, as has been stated, would lead to unheard-of amounts of spam. Which would mean the expenses for bandwidth that people would only complain about.
There are definately some issues here, but it is doable. In Australia, every postal address has a unique identifier. It wouldn't be that hard to translate it to an email address, like say n537_smith_st@north.perth.mail.gov.au
Slashdot Mirror
What's funny tho is that Telstra is also an international transit provider for Australia, meaning that if Telstra DID have to pay for the bandwidth, it would just be paying Telstra :)
Let me just say, as an Australian... I'm sorry, dear god I'm sorry. We don't like him any more than you do :>
Hmm well the biggest fan of the sims I know is female, so go figure :P
Weird.. I have two Blockbuster cards, one from Canada and one from Australia, and they are both bar coded
In Australia, public libraries have paid royalties to copyright holders for years. Every 12 months, they pick a number of authors at random and see how many of their books are on loan.. the amount paid is in relation to this.
:/
It just seems to wrong tho.. arrrg.. I hope I die before we end up in a pay-per-use world
I find this observation quite correct. I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Security Science.. not comp sec, real security. I have quite an interest in tamperproof fixing devices, and I have drivers to undo most of them :) In my extensive travels, I must say that I have only ever seen Robertson head screws in Canada.. and they're absolutely everywhere :)
:D
Canada is a cool place
Undernet will not remain without channel services for very long. This is not an official statement, but I am one of the co-ordinators of the group which runs X and W on undernet, and we do have a contingency plan which we are currently ramping up for activation. Do not despair, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it isn't the lamp of a fast approaching train :)
The full text of the official press release from the ACCC is here. I'm quite impressed. It's obvious they have done their homework on this one, mentioning how it differs from the PAL/NTSC/SECAM problems.
Check out www.firmware.com.bi for a great list of RPC-1 hacks for DVD-ROM/RAM drives
The ACCC is a very handy branch of government which restricts what companies can do to make a profit. They can make national regulations and levy large (AU$1M+) fines towards companies that are exploiting consumers. The DVD industry looks like a damn fine target to me :) Specifically, fines could be targeted at Australian subsidiaries of the DVD Consortium. Like Warner, Sony, etc :)
With the Australian dollar as bad as it is, it's actually been cheaper to buy many DVDs locally than from amazon.com or other overseas retailers. But that's not the point, I can easily forsee a future release of something in R4 which is missing stuff found in the R1 release. If you were a true fan, you would pay extra.
I think the ACCC should mandate that the region code of players sold in Australia must be able to be reset an unlimited number of times, and that any DVD discs sold here be R0.
This was after WW2, but specifically after the Korean war. The Korean war showed that China had nuclear capabilities, which were obtained by spying on the USA.
:)
And yes, I know that the korean war hasn't officially ended yet
Although it says that it will block the playback when connected to a VCR and it won't when connected to a TV, I can't see how it can differentiate between the two.
It doesn't need to differentiate between a TV and a VCR. New VCRs in the US are required by law to acknowledge the macrovision signal, and delibrately screw up any picture they see coming as an input to the VCR which has a macrovision signal. This is why you can't play DVD players through the VCR. A solution might be to look for "video stabilisers". They usually won't advertise it, but they remove the macrovision signal. This is what they mean by "enhancing and cleaning" the signal. They are about US$60.
At the risk of sounding like an AOLer... "Me too". They're not that impressive. I was pretty disappointed in them actually.
NZ might be introducing laws like this, yes, but at least the NZ gov't has the balls to say that region protected DVD players can't be sold in NZ :)
Which is just another sign of why it's so easy for big business to buy off congress...
:)
Anyone can pay a congressman a "campaign contribution", but congressmen in general only care about the opinion of people who can vote for them. So if you have money, they'll be more than happy to listen to you, but if you don't, they won't care as much, and will only care if you can vote for them. Also, democracy means that you don't need 100% of congressional members to vote on a bill, so big business only needs to pay campaign contributions to a majority of them.
What happens if you aren't in the constituency of those voting for the bill? Tough luck my friend, you're now forced by law to hand over your first born child to the RIAA and second born to the MPAA. You get people making decisions which affect you but who aren't answerable to you.
It sounds a little far fetched, but bear in mind that these two little organisations have already had laws made which makes it illegal for you to modify your VCR in some ways, and illegal to view content you legitimately own unless you use something made by another "co licensed company" who has paid them millions in fees.
Oh, and don't forget that RIAA would love to get rid of CDs and Cassettes because there's no "access control" restrictions to them. If they choose to stop selling CDs/cassettes, you will not have any comeback.
The revolution will be televised...
...but it will be encoded with macrovision, so you won't be able to record it for historical purposes. Fair use? What's that?
Gotta love Amurrika
You scepticism is rightly placed when it comes to the MPAA and cronies in the entertainment industry. Remember when they said that region encoding would only be used on the newest release DVDs?
I went to my local DVD vendor to have a look at their range. Out of over 100 DVDs available from them, there were only two which weren't regionally encoded, and both of those were classical music performances. With no joke, after looking at all the regionally encoded disks, and reading about the lengths the MPAA has gone to to "keep honest people honest", I feel truely violated.
Amoung those movies with regional encoding.. Twister (1996) and Gone With the wind (some time in the 40s?). Neither of those could be considered as new releases by any person.
You can't trust the MPAA. I really really hope that FCC stops them before they go too far. I know none of the players here are really looking after our best interests, but it's really the best chance we've got.
Under several US laws and by precident (that Genie case), being a common carrier gives them protection from lawsuit over content on their network. If you start to moderate content you become liable for it.
;)
Solution? Sue em cause of what one of their users did and see how much they start to not care about their users' activities
Espy was a friend of many on the Undernet network, including myself. We have added an in memorium notice to one of our more frequently visited homepages for him.
Rest in peace Espy.
Because the data about the problems has been mainly unscientific. The number of variables envolved in this is really large, ie location of the passenger in the aircraft, type of phone, location of aircraft, type of aircraft, weather conditions. It's widely accepted by pilots that these things do cause problems.
:-)
I know of a pilot who was experiancing problems which seemed to be from RF emissions from something, and suspected a mobile phone. So he had the stewards do a walkthrough of the plane and see if anyone was suing a mobile phone/computer. They didn't find anyone, and the interference continued. So he tuned the radio in cockpit to the frequency used by analog mobile phones and hey presto... "*ring*ring* Hello?" "Hi, this is James Smith calling about my appointment..". So he checked the passenger manifest, found this person's seat and asked "Can I have a look at your mobile phone?". The guy handed it over, pilot said thanks and handed back the phone, sans battery. The person had been delibrately hiding the phone when they were searching the plane.
Idiots abound in the body of an aircraft
Nice idea, but I don't think so.
If a technological solution is decided on, it means either every aircraft used for MPT (Mass Public Transport) or every cell phone will need to have something done to it. Neither is going to happen.
Which is why there needs to be a legal solution. After the first few people get locked up/fined large sums of money, the public will get to know the airlines mean business.
Reminds me of a recent situation with Apple.. some of their G4 500MHz chips only had 450MHz stamped on them. Apple's tech note on it said that the chips did not need to be replaced. I've heard a number of computer dealers have been telling people who complain that messing with their motherboard/heatsink voids their warrenty, so stop looking. Hehehe
:P
The other thing is that living in Perth, I can attest to how downright dishonest some of our computer dealers are. I wouldn't put it past some of them.
Would have been interesting to see the chip before it got crushed
By charging you a royalty for the blank CD-R media, they are, in effect, making any copies you make onto that CD legal. You've paid the royalties for the music already when you bought the CD-R. So you can fill it with MP3s, or burn your own mixed CD's, and it's 100% legal :)
I've been writing CGI scripts for years.. one of the things I ALWAYS do is to make sure people can't submit HTML tags to any form which will display the output on a webpage. This is nothing new, but I guess newbies need to learn these things too.
I think we need to see how much NASA is getting and perhaps have them redirect some funding.
:-)
:-)
To where? finacing for Kevin Costner movies?
At least with NASA projects, there's a chance they will be of benefit to humankind. The Postman? Forget it, email is the next generation
An email address for every physical address is not really do-able. It would be a pain, and, as has been stated, would lead to unheard-of amounts of spam. Which would mean the expenses for bandwidth that people would only complain about.
There are definately some issues here, but it is doable. In Australia, every postal address has a unique identifier. It wouldn't be that hard to translate it to an email address, like say n537_smith_st@north.perth.mail.gov.au