REDUNDANT! Mark this redundant! I said it first! Me too, me too!
Well, I'm suprised I haven't been yet. When I posted this, there were no posts in the discussion thread yet. Of course, by the time I finished posting, 3 people seemed to have beaten me to the punch. I should've figured out that someone else would post about that.
Ideally Mac applications would be X-windows aware (if that concept exists) so that they could be displayed on an X term elsewhere.
Not necessary at all. Theoretically, Apple could begin using the Quartz Display PDF layer to perform the same functions as the old NeXTSTEP Display PostScript engine. Both technologies are much more efficient than X. While they wouldn't be as easy to view from other machines due to the wide market penetration of X, that's no reason to have to cripple your architecture by wedging in a hacked up protocol to an existing clean architecture.
As for the SGI comment, I'd love to see NUMA-based high-end Mac servers, but other than that SGI's hardware business is suffering. The typical strength of SGI was in the graphics market, where NVidia, 3dfx, and others are chewing them apart in the race to be the best card for gamers. The rest of what they do is done better by people like Sun.
Ick. That's the first thing I change when I get X up and running on a new UNIX account. It's a major annoyance to have to keep your mouse in the way of your window when typing on it. It also requires you to manage your window positions carefully so that no two windows overlap in a major way. Most new users I've seen run into it get confused or frustrated very quickly.
There's no way in hell Apple would ever switch their GUI behavior to that. They just recently gave in to allowing you to click on widgets in a window that did not previously have focus. Personally, I'm against that behavior since it makes it to easy to accidentally close a window, but it's not nearly as bad as the danger inherent in mouse-based focus where you could accidentally click anything in a nearby window.
Who says you need hard drives? Just use Flash RAM to hold the system. There are ways around most normal system considerations, but they're usually expensive. Of course, this isn't a hobby for cheapskates. Just how much do those Lexan exteriors that some of the bots on Battlebots use cost?
It's an ingenious tactic, but it brings forward the possibility of companies flooding Napster and Gnutella with spam MP3's containing advertising, rather than the alleged contents in the name.
Apparently, you don't use Gnutella if you haven't already seen the effects talked about in this previous article. The website seems to still be down, but I don't doubt that they'll be resurrected eventually.
I really haven't used Gnutella since the first night I tried it out and found absolutely nothing interesting but SPAM and one guy's personal vendetta against someone by having each search result return a message to e-mail his victim for more about that topic. The guy kept getting flooded by people thinking he had stuff like kiddie porn and the like. That kind of nonsense permanently gave me a bad taste for the future of the network.
One of the Fundamental differences between all Unixes and every other OS ever invented is the use of memory to buffer the filesystem.
Actually, disk caching is NOT a unique idea at all.
Macs have supported a disk cache for performance since at least System 3.0, in 1986. You can see a history of the old Mac OS here. However, I'm not sure if this is a read cache only and what form of cache writing scheme it supports if any nowdays.
While I can't really say about the DOS-based Windows variants, the NT versions of the Win32 API has lots of support for asynchronous file I/O. By default, all normal disk writes are written to a disk cache which is lazily flushed. You can specify certain options when opening a file handle with Cre ateFile() to force it to write straight through to disk rather than lazily cache it. In fact NT gets its asynchronous packet-based I/O subsystem design from VMS. (The designers of the NT kernel were ex-VMS designers.)
Finally, while I can't speak about the Amiga, I can speak about MVS's descendant OS, OS/390, which can handle asynchronous file I/O. I can't find you a good link, but most of the references I could find on this talk about OS/390's UNIX services. Apparently around release 2 of OS/390, they began to comply to the XOpen definition of a UNIX, so I guess that doesn't help that much.
No, they are not. It would be financial suicide since Apple is a hardware company. If Apple ever went to x86 -- say, if the other members of the AIM consordium don't come down from their server and embedded white towers to make a good desktop chip again -- it would probably be done in such a way as to require the OS to only run on machines for which Apple got a cut of the revenue. Apple cannot survive as just an OS vendor, and unlike MS, Apple does not have enough other high-priced, high-demand software to subsidize their OS development.
The History of Mac OS X and the x86 family
When Apple was shopping around for an OS to replace the Mac OS, they happened to be pointed the right way to NeXT, Inc. who sold this little known OS called OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP was a cross-platform, non-hardware dependent version of their original hardware-tied OS, NeXTSTEP. It ran on Intel, SPARC, m68k chips (and maybe a few others that I can't remember off the top of my head). Because of this, it had a beautifully portable code base. (It was also about $4000 per license, IIRC.)
Rhapsody is announced. Basically, this would be OPENSTEP on PPC and x86 which a Mac-ified interface and few new pieces of technology such as Java and Quicktime. The native environment will be known as the Yellow Box. All old Mac applications will run as second-class citizens in a seperate application known as the Blue Box environment. All new applications should be developed in the rich OPENSTEP APIs in Objective-C and, soon, Java.
Mac OS X would supposedly be the king of all Java platforms. If that wasn't good enough, the OPENSTEP APIs would be ported as an development layer for WinNT. (This was actually included for a while with WebObjects for NT.) This meant that there would be an extremely powerful and versatile set of APIs for universal Win NT and Mac development in two very clean OO languages -- Objective-C and Java. The first developer release of Rhapsody was shipped for PPC and x86.
Fast forward. Traditional Mac developers are threatening to abandon the Mac completely if they are going to have to abandon their old code base or forever have it run as a second-class citizen without the new benefits of the new Mac OS. Microsoft is one of these developers, and we all should know that if MS Office leaves the Mac, that's the death knell for the Mac -- at least at that time before the Mac's recovery had progressed far enough. Furthermore, MS was rumored to be upset at the prospect of the Yellow Box APIs for Windows and at having a viable competitor consumer OS on x86. Apple was also seeing little support for OEMs putting Rhapsody/x86 on their machines since they already had to pay MS for Windows on each one. Apple also realizes that if developers did adopt the new APIs, there would be less reason for people to by Apple hardware since they could get all the advantages without paying Apple -- especially since Rhapsody/x86 didn't require an Apple ROM.
So, all x86 releases are put on hold and cancelled. Rhapsody (a development name) is officially called Mac OS X (Ten, not Ehcks). The first developer's release of Mac OS X Server does not include an x86 version. In a year or two more, Yellow Box for NT would disappear from WebObjects. Originally, Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server would be different products, with Apple including licenses for some of their server software (WebObjects and Appletalk services) on the server version. Eventually, this is all scrapped in favor of one OS, since the distinctions between the two were minimal.
Fast forward. Apple releases the source code to the underlying BSD layer as they had previously promised as Darwin. Fast forward again. An Apple engineer boots Darwin on x86 and announces it to the world. Carmack does a little work on porting XFree86 to Darwin.
Fast forward to today. There is no x86 Mac OS X. There is an x86 port of Darwin. No, this is not the same. There is no Apple graphics layer and no Mac or OPENSTEP APIs included -- just BSD level stuff. There will probably never be an x86 Mac OS X. It would destroy Apple financially unless they take measures to secure revenue from Mac OS X sales in ways that would also make them unpopular, such as ridiculous prices for the new OS or only letting it run on machines with a special Apple ROM for which they charge money.
In the end, Mac OS X would always be more expensive than Windows since Apple does not have Office and other software to prop up its OS development, and most OEMs have to pay the Windows tax anyway. I repeat, Apple is a hardware company. Seperating the OS and the hardware divisions into two companies or eliminating one will kill them both. Apple needs a superior OS to sell their more expensive hardware, and they need to sell their hardware to pay for developing the OS. United, they stand, divided they fall.
As an aside, this is why Apple will never open the source to the higher level APIs. If you could remove the dependency on Apple to get Apple's OS, Apple would not get any more money. Apple would die. While many Open Source advocate would have no problem with this or even love to see it happen, Apple is not that stupid. This would be destroying the OS side of Apple. See the above paragraph for what would happen to the hardware side. It won't happen -- get over it.
Let's see. Do you (a) edit 5-10% of your Classic Mac API code to match the Carbon API and run natively on Mac OS X while still running on older Macs? or (b) completely reengineer the entire product suite to run on a 100% new API that doesn't share really much of anything in common with the original code base which is probably weighs in at several million lines of code? Oo! Oo! An API for which the preferred languages are Java and Objective-C, not C++?
Errrr.... My guess MS is going for Carbon. I remember back in the days before Carbon when MS was reluctant to commit to moving to the native NeXTSTEP APIs (in Objective-C) for Rhapsody. These are the APIs that are now called Cocoa. When Apple announced Carbon, which is a new revision of the old Mac OS API set with all the crud removed, MS was one of the first supporters of the move. It's no wonder why!
No it doesn't reduce the importance of DeCSS. When you are trying to reencode video, you want the best source possible. One of my roommates is into this scene on IRC. Almost all DivX encoded material is coming off of DVDs. This only helps the MPAA's case since they are holding that without the protection of the DMCA, piracy technology will advance faster than they can. The MPAA is worried about movie distribution over the Net. Technologies like this only make it easier by reducing the file size to something manageable and reducing a movie size to the pirate's holy grail size -- a CD-R.
People still trade movies about in MPEG-1 format. Usually these are movies that are in theatres now that are ripped off by the projectionist, outside the US. Once the movies hit DVD, however, many go over to the higher quality DivX format. This is exactly what the MPAA is worried about. To be honest, I don't know how the MPAA missed this kind of piracy going on. I've only been aware of it for over 3 months.
Now it's one thing for people to nitpick about the differences between C and C++, but has anyone ever seen any implementation of Smalltalk that could be described as fast? Smalltalk is a wonderful language. The design is beautiful, powerful, and simple. However, the actual implementation of language interpreters is usually heinously slow due to a number of design issues with the language. You can't even do a simple '2 + 2' without involving objects. The beautiful, but odd block statement syntax makes interpretation very awkward and tricky as well.
My college uses an open-source Smalltalk variant known as Squeak for it's OO classes. (It was made for Disney of all people -- hence the name.) One of my favorite stories of Squeak inefficiency came from a conversation I overheard about one student having a problem with Squeak running out of memory trying to create a PostScript file. The problem was that each time you appended to the object, it made a copy of the original object and then appended to the copy. These huge copies were being passed around in memory over and over again until the VM simply ran out of room. This ridiculous waste of memory and CPU cycles comes from fundamental design problems with the language. It's wonderful but way too abstract to get real-world performance.
Who cares? I don't even see why they're "negotiating" with RMS. The man won't be happy until the software is used his license or a license that is just the GPL with another man. He's a zealot. You can't negotiate with that.
The fact is that the current license is an Open Source license. RMS just tries to use his fame to denegrate any OSS software project that doesn't agree with his radical "software wants to be Free" ideals. Witness the latest KDE & Qt nonsense. I think he's quite frankly power mad with his fame.
Actually, when Stratus was first getting started, it was long ago enough that if you weren't IBM, you weren't important in the world of mainframes. So, Stratus signed a deal with IBM to sell their machines as IBM System/88 machines. In essence, System/88 was just the name IBM gave Stratus's machines so that people would buy them. Later, when Stratus had made enough of a name for itself to strike out on their own, they began calling their OS VOS.
In the old days, VOS machines ran on m68k chips. Later, they made versions that ran on the obscure Intel i860 RISC chips. Nowdays, Continuum servers run on PA-RISC chips. (A humorous note is that a common high-volume networking card used in Stratus boxen is the IBM Arctic 960, which uses the i860's descendent, the i960 chip.) There was some effort to work towards moving to IA-64 before the buy-out by Ascend, but Ascend got the rights to that platform. I'm real sure the server half of Stratus that got split off is really crying about that one nowdays.
There was also a short-lived fault-tolerant ultra-redundant Windows NT machine called 'Radio' that won an award at Comdex the year it was debuted. However, no one wanted to pay the price for fault-tolerant hardware when the OS wasn't guaranteed to be nearly as stable. Heh.
Tandem is a whole other ballpark. Ugly, hideous OS. Much, much worse than VOS.
Thank you! I'm so glad someone else on Slashdot is aware of this bizarre and interesting server OS. I actually used to work at a subsidiary of Stratus Inc. as a customer support representative for some networking middleware and transaction processing software. (This was all before the buyout of Stratus by Ascend when all the subsidiaries were sold off to the higher bidders.)
VOS is about the opposite of UNIX in command-line structure. The default command (without abbreviations) for changing a directory is 'change_current_dir'. This is kind of an interesting throwback to the COBOL and PL/I roots of the original OS back in the old days. Compare this to the C-based design of UNIX's command shell.
The really cool thing about VOS is it's utter and complete fault tolerance. The machines they run on have dual motherboards, mirrored drives, etc. so that if one component goes wrong, it immediately switches over to the other one and calls Stratus customer support to log a request for a replacement part. If you don't spend a lot of time in your server room or reading logs, the arrival of a new motherboard in the mail may be the first sign you have that one has failed in your machine.
VOS also lets you virtually partition your whole machine in a variety of ways. Multiple motherboards or even the same motherboard can be host to several 'modules' or virtual machines which can communicate with each other and share resources. Modules on the same machine may even be on seperate server boxes, linked by serial, modem, TCP/IP, or other more obscure networking methods.
Another VOS strength is its support for various ancient networking protocols. The most common service our company's software provided was to set up a fault-tolerant means of data exchange between legacy systems and the modern world. VOS was a bizarre beast, but I really liked it in many ways.
But what are the non speech elements associated with distributing a text file?
No, code itself contains significant nonspeech elements. Code is inherently a functional "machine" of sorts as well as being a method of communicating to humans how to make a computer go about a task. It is both a description of a task and the task itself. Thus code itself may be regulated. That is the argument here.
In the case of other forms of illegal speech, such as libel and obscenity, it doesn't matter what the transmission method is, such as "distributing a text file." It's the speech itself that is illegal, and the distribution of it can also be made illegal. This is the unfortunate case with the DMCA.
The judge cited cases because he had nothing else to work with, but there have been other cases involving things like schools attempting to ban messages on t-shirts, and appellate court rulings where the government was unsuccessful in stopping the posting of cryptographic source code that are by far more similar to the present case. I didn't see the judge spending any time distinguishing this case from those. I don't believe he could credibly do so.
Actually, in any case where you are potentially going up against the legal cannon that is the First Amendment, you have to really shore up your defense with precendents like US vs. O'Brien. Kaplan did acknowledge Bernstein vs. US DOJ, where the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that current crypto export legislation was unlawful prior restraint on code as a form of speech. It was with this in mind that he spent 40+ pages dealing with the legal justifications of restricting code in light of its speech elements. That's why he spent significant time covering the validity of censoring code under its non-speech elements.
But before we hang the judge out to dry, it's important to realize how limited his ruling really is.
It's unfortunately worse than you think. The American court system is riddled with precedents. Any significant ruling in a case that tests a law contains exhaustive reference to the judgements of other judges, not necessarily all at the federal level. Kaplan's ruling affirming the DMCA may lead to a whole new level of legislation restricting our actions. The injunctions you refer to were covered previously in the case. The ruling is something else entirely. Punitive damages have been awarded to the MPAA. Round one is already lost. We just have to see if we can survive round two.
Have you ever considered the fact that the only reason you have this right is because another group of people deemed it so? Previous to the creation of the Bill of Rights, no government has such "inalienable" rights for its citizens. This supposedly intrinsic right that everyone supposedly gets by existing did not exist before that except in the rhetoric of natural law philosophers such as Locke.
Don't fool yourself. All rights are priviledges that other people extend to one another. There are no intrinsic human rights -- not even the right to be born anymore. It may not be too long before medical science allows the right to die to be taken away.
While I believe that the DMCA is a seriously bad piece of legislation, Kaplan's words in the ruling rang very true -- that the First Amendment is not a suicide pact for the government. Would you really like to live in a country where people were free to fire-bomb houses and roll over cars without impunity because it is a form of expression? Would you really like to live in a country that couldn't have ruled in favor of the government in Rowan vs. U.S. Post Office; a country where the government cannot stop commercial advertisers from forcing junk mail on you even after telling them you don't want it? Would you really like to live in a country where the expressiveness of an act could be used to justify any criminal action?
"Your honor, I am suing because his throwing me out of his house squelched my freedom to speak about the wonders of my church."
"Your honor, I realize that those secrets about nuclear weapon design could hurt the U.S. if passed into the wrong hands, but it is my right to tell them to whoever I want, wherever I want, and whenever I want."
"Your honor, there is nothing illegal about telling a group of people, even a violently upset group, to kill that black man. That they did it is their problem, not mine."
"Yes your honor, Company X was the original author of that piece of software, but there's nothing wrong with freely copying it, is there? After all, code is a form of speech. So what if it took them 3 years and millions of dollars to research? They should've invested some of that money in better server security. My freedom of speech supercedes their ownership."
"Your honor, my forcing of affections on the young lady over there were merely a positive expression of her good looks."
The fact is that all of the above examples are things that our government system -- the one that originated this "inalienable" right -- does rightfully reject each and every one of those arguments. Oh, and by the way, treasonous speech is illegal. Check the Constitution itself. However, rich case histories have shown that even Communist philosophers speaking of the overthrowing the American capitalist system were well within their rights to do so. (Gitlow vs. New York 1925) How do you think that square with the rich history of protest speech in America?
I swear, some people should get off their "inalienable" rights soapboxes and do some research on how the real world actually works.
Yes. Once again -- U.S. vs. O'Brien. The core of this Supreme Court case was O'Brien's argument that in burning the draft card as an act of protest, his actions took on First Amendment protections that superceded the 1965 amendment to the Selective Service act prohibiting the defacement and destruction of draft cards. This case was all about whether doing something illegal in an expressive manner as a means of protest made it legal. The clear precedent was established that, no, you cannot.
Thus, linking to DeCSS as a protest against the MPAA, which is exactly what 2600 was doing, is indeed not protected under the First Amendment according to Judge Kaplan's ruling. I disagree very strongly with the DMCA, but if you assume that it is indeed legal, then unfortunately you can only logically follow that linking in that fashion as protest is also illegal according to current case law.
Sucks, huh? I hope they find a good way to challenge DMCA itself. Kaplan really kind of glossed over that by saying that Congress must've considered the ramifications of the law and giving superficial supporting analysis. In math terms, DMCA was considered a postulate, not a theorem to be proven in its own right. Kind of ignores the whole purpose behind judicial review, doesn't it?
An example would've been a link to 2600.com back when they actually hosted the code for purposes of linking to a hacker magazine. That would've have been illegal.
You certainly are not a constitutional scholar. Apparently you misssed that bit in the Constitution that begins with the phrase, "Congress shall make no law...." There is not a lot of wiggle room there
There are actually quite a number of ways that speech can be limited under our judicial system, some, if not all, of which you should be familiar with from high school Civics classes:
Violence -- Speech may not take the form of violence nor incite violence.
Property Damage -- Same as above.
Criminal Speech -- Some forms of speech are criminal in nature. Treason, conspiracy to commit a crime, etc.
Encroaching on the Rights of Others -- This is why pro-life protesters can be made to stop blocking a clinic.
Trespass -- Freedom of speech does not equal the right to speak wherever and whenever you want. I can't deliver a political (or otherwise) speech in your house without permission.
Forms of expression outside the First Amendment -- Libel and obscenity have been prohibited from the very beginning.
Burden on Government function -- This is the basis of upholding the law against burning draft cards.
Copyright violations -- The Constitutional right of copyright supercedes most Free Speech rights.
Speech containing sufficient nonspeech elements -- Here is where code is most affected.
If you had actually read the ruling, you would've realized that over half the ruling deals with code as Free Speech and how it can be limited. The First Amendment does not mean that the government is powerless, and it is realms where a form of expression contains significant nonspeech elements, such as code, where the government typically has the most power to limit speech.
While I certainly am not a constitutional scholar, I am at least familiar with:
United States vs. O'Brien (1969)
Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire (1942)
Rowan vs. Post Office (1970)
All three are excellent examples of the government limiting forms of expression and the Supreme Court backing them up. Research them sometime.
If that is a direct link to DeCSS on your page, then you are guilty of breaking the DMCA. (Boo hoo, IMHO.) However, your professor did not link to your page for the purposes of distributing DeCSS code. Neither he, nor anyone else further up the chain, are guilty of violating the DMCA. To hold otherwise would be to be in violation of the "chilling effect" principle often cited in First Amendment cases.
While I have issues with the judge's attitude towards 2600 and the guy who wrote DeCSS ("if that's truly the purpose it was written for"), his arguments on the constitutionality of limiting linking are very, very well argued.
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Get your DeCSS protest t-shirt right here. One of the few remaining legal DeCSS links.
I think there's still a difference here. The actual "illegal" action is copying and decrypting the movie, correct? Not downloading DeCSS or reading about DeCSS.
Well, in U.S. v. O'Brien (1969), the actual illegal action was the "destruction or mutilation" of a draft card. In Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), the actual illegal action was "any offensive, derisive, or annoying word to any other person who is lawfully in the street." The illegal actions in the DeCSS case are:
Copying the movie for non-fair use purposes.
Breaking encryption used for copy-protection purposes without the permission of the copyright holder.
Distributing tools to aid in breaking decryption used for copy-protection without the permission of the copyright holder.
The Free Speech component is the distribution of the code. The first is already illegal, and as for the second, there isn't really any constitutional protection on methods of reading, so it can "safely" be limited.
No one's managed to make the Anarchist's Cookbook illegal yet, have they? And anytime a building blows up, the media gets to report about how they made the bombs, yes? This is only differnet because it doesn't even cause physical damage to people.
I honestly have no clue how come the Anarchist's Cookbook isn't illegal. Doesn't it incite violence? I know that that's illegal. I don't honestly know why it isn't illegal. Maybe there isn't a law against distributing bomb-making plans. I don't see why there isn't, though, as far as I understand constitutional law.
So now, if I ever want to see a movie in the future, it has to be on an MPAA approved machine and software? Even if its operation in the near future requires connection to a telephone for activation? If thier devices are buggy and crash after watching the manditory 10 minutes of commercials at the beginning of each movie?
Ah, yes. Now you see the whole danger of the DMCA. DIVX was the first shot in the war on consumer property rights, but the pay-per-use annoyance-ware model has not yet died. Witness the recent Slashdot story about the evil subscription textbooks that one company is pushing. In particular, read their PR page. They don't care about their customers -- students and campus bookstores. They don't have to. As long as they can lock you into paying for the rest of you life for something you could pay once for nowdays, and as long as they can prevent you for reselling your copy to someone else, they can keep pumping every student for money as much as possible. As a student who recently had to pay $300 for textbooks, at least 2 of which I will be using for years to come if not the rest of my life, I am very angry about this trend.
We are beginning a new age of corporate control over our lives and our very fundamental freedoms. As much as I disagree with him on other issues, Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read" is dead on the money. Keep these times fresh in your mind -- you'll be telling your grandkids one day what the "good old days" were like.
Yes and no. If a user of the ISP sets up the mailer service, then it's the user who may be sued and not the ISP. (Avoids the deep pockets problem.) However, if the ISP itself sets up the service, then the ISP may be sued. The provision in the DMCA protects ISPs from their users, but it doesn't give the ISPs the freedom to break any laws they want themselves.
If I link to a page [that links to a page]* that links to a DeCss, am I in trouble?
If so, I'm removing my links to search engines...
Well, if you read the ruling, the judge acknowledges that you cannot outright ban linking to pages that contain direct links DeCSS among other content if you are not explicitly linking for the purpose of taking someone to the DeCSS link. This would have what is know as the "chilling effect" where people would be afraid to link to search engines, as you imply above. The "chilling effect" is unfortunately well covered in his ruling.
Basically, if I say, "Here's DeCSS!" and provide a direct link, then I am in violation of the clause of the DMCA prohibiting trafficking in copy-protection thwarting decryption software -- as I obviously should be under the letter of the law. I mean, just because it's not on my site doesn't mean I'm not guilty of helping people to get it. It's all transparent to the end user whether they are grabbing it from a server I own or a server owned by someone else.
However, you can't make a link illegal to a site that you didn't know contained DeCSS or a link that was made for other purposes. An example would've been a link to 2600.com back when they actually hosted the code for purposes of linking to a hacker magazine. That would've have been illegal. The grey area, I think, is if you linked to their DeCSS links page and told people what it is. I'm not sure about that one.
Anyway, don't worry about search engines. The acknowledged "chilling effect" prevents them from being a problem. Read the ruling. A grounding in constitutional law helps. (IANAL, but this is a big area of interest of mine.)
Yes. If you say, "Kill him!" It's the same idea. You're encouraging something which shouldn't be, but is in fact illegal. You're also performing an act that is itself explicitly illegal due to the WIPO-mandated travesty that is the DMCA.
Unfortunately, the First Amendment isn't the blanket on censorship everyone thinks it is. Take the Supreme Court case U.S. vs O'Brien. This is the infamous draft card burning case, where O'Brien claimed that the 1st Amendment superceded the 1965 amendment to the Selective Service Act that prohibited the defacement of draft cards. To quote Justice Warren's opinion of the court:
This Court has held that when 'speech' and 'nonspeech' elements are combined in the same course of conduct, a sufficiently importatn governmental interest in regulation the nonspeech eleemtn can justify incidental limitatios on First Amendment freedoms."
This case is frequently brought up in cases like the DeCSS case, where nonspeech elements are important considerations and in the early commercial speech cases. This is the reason why flipping over someone's car because you were "expressing" your happiness that the Bulls won the championship game is still illegal. Unfortunately, the judge in the DeCSS case argued very intelligently about the constitutionality of limiting speech with the DMCA (with the exception of his "Congress must've considered this" arguments). Over half of his 90+ page ruling covers this issue. It's a good read.
While I severely disagree with the DMCA's ramifications, it is currently legal and looks to stay that way.
Okay, how is this different from sci-fi author Niven's "organ bootlegging?" Oh, right. We're making it legal. After all, they're not really human. Their humanity is a "personal, private issue."
Sick. If this research goes anywhere, it'll open up a whole new world of mining dead babies for medical resources. I'm sure that once some benefit comes from it, people will all demand that it's their right as well. It's this kind of shrugging off ethics once something profits you that's the core of everything that's wrong in society from corporate pollution to drug dealing.
Slashdot Mirror
REDUNDANT! Mark this redundant! I said it first! Me too, me too!
Well, I'm suprised I haven't been yet. When I posted this, there were no posts in the discussion thread yet. Of course, by the time I finished posting, 3 people seemed to have beaten me to the punch. I should've figured out that someone else would post about that.
Such is life.
Ideally Mac applications would be X-windows aware (if that concept exists) so that they could be displayed on an X term elsewhere.
Not necessary at all. Theoretically, Apple could begin using the Quartz Display PDF layer to perform the same functions as the old NeXTSTEP Display PostScript engine. Both technologies are much more efficient than X. While they wouldn't be as easy to view from other machines due to the wide market penetration of X, that's no reason to have to cripple your architecture by wedging in a hacked up protocol to an existing clean architecture.
As for the SGI comment, I'd love to see NUMA-based high-end Mac servers, but other than that SGI's hardware business is suffering. The typical strength of SGI was in the graphics market, where NVidia, 3dfx, and others are chewing them apart in the race to be the best card for gamers. The rest of what they do is done better by people like Sun.
You like the focus to follow the mouse?
Ick. That's the first thing I change when I get X up and running on a new UNIX account. It's a major annoyance to have to keep your mouse in the way of your window when typing on it. It also requires you to manage your window positions carefully so that no two windows overlap in a major way. Most new users I've seen run into it get confused or frustrated very quickly.
There's no way in hell Apple would ever switch their GUI behavior to that. They just recently gave in to allowing you to click on widgets in a window that did not previously have focus. Personally, I'm against that behavior since it makes it to easy to accidentally close a window, but it's not nearly as bad as the danger inherent in mouse-based focus where you could accidentally click anything in a nearby window.
Who says you need hard drives? Just use Flash RAM to hold the system. There are ways around most normal system considerations, but they're usually expensive. Of course, this isn't a hobby for cheapskates. Just how much do those Lexan exteriors that some of the bots on Battlebots use cost?
It's an ingenious tactic, but it brings forward the possibility of companies flooding Napster and Gnutella with spam MP3's containing advertising, rather than the alleged contents in the name.
Apparently, you don't use Gnutella if you haven't already seen the effects talked about in this previous article. The website seems to still be down, but I don't doubt that they'll be resurrected eventually.
I really haven't used Gnutella since the first night I tried it out and found absolutely nothing interesting but SPAM and one guy's personal vendetta against someone by having each search result return a message to e-mail his victim for more about that topic. The guy kept getting flooded by people thinking he had stuff like kiddie porn and the like. That kind of nonsense permanently gave me a bad taste for the future of the network.
One of the Fundamental differences between all Unixes and every other OS ever invented is the use of memory to buffer the filesystem.
Actually, disk caching is NOT a unique idea at all.
Macs have supported a disk cache for performance since at least System 3.0, in 1986. You can see a history of the old Mac OS here. However, I'm not sure if this is a read cache only and what form of cache writing scheme it supports if any nowdays.
While I can't really say about the DOS-based Windows variants, the NT versions of the Win32 API has lots of support for asynchronous file I/O. By default, all normal disk writes are written to a disk cache which is lazily flushed. You can specify certain options when opening a file handle with Cre ateFile() to force it to write straight through to disk rather than lazily cache it. In fact NT gets its asynchronous packet-based I/O subsystem design from VMS. (The designers of the NT kernel were ex-VMS designers.)
Finally, while I can't speak about the Amiga, I can speak about MVS's descendant OS, OS/390, which can handle asynchronous file I/O. I can't find you a good link, but most of the references I could find on this talk about OS/390's UNIX services. Apparently around release 2 of OS/390, they began to comply to the XOpen definition of a UNIX, so I guess that doesn't help that much.
There should be a FAQ...
Anyone know if Apple are planning a port to x86?
No, they are not. It would be financial suicide since Apple is a hardware company. If Apple ever went to x86 -- say, if the other members of the AIM consordium don't come down from their server and embedded white towers to make a good desktop chip again -- it would probably be done in such a way as to require the OS to only run on machines for which Apple got a cut of the revenue. Apple cannot survive as just an OS vendor, and unlike MS, Apple does not have enough other high-priced, high-demand software to subsidize their OS development.
The History of Mac OS X and the x86 family
When Apple was shopping around for an OS to replace the Mac OS, they happened to be pointed the right way to NeXT, Inc. who sold this little known OS called OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP was a cross-platform, non-hardware dependent version of their original hardware-tied OS, NeXTSTEP. It ran on Intel, SPARC, m68k chips (and maybe a few others that I can't remember off the top of my head). Because of this, it had a beautifully portable code base. (It was also about $4000 per license, IIRC.)
Rhapsody is announced. Basically, this would be OPENSTEP on PPC and x86 which a Mac-ified interface and few new pieces of technology such as Java and Quicktime. The native environment will be known as the Yellow Box. All old Mac applications will run as second-class citizens in a seperate application known as the Blue Box environment. All new applications should be developed in the rich OPENSTEP APIs in Objective-C and, soon, Java.
Mac OS X would supposedly be the king of all Java platforms. If that wasn't good enough, the OPENSTEP APIs would be ported as an development layer for WinNT. (This was actually included for a while with WebObjects for NT.) This meant that there would be an extremely powerful and versatile set of APIs for universal Win NT and Mac development in two very clean OO languages -- Objective-C and Java. The first developer release of Rhapsody was shipped for PPC and x86.
Fast forward. Traditional Mac developers are threatening to abandon the Mac completely if they are going to have to abandon their old code base or forever have it run as a second-class citizen without the new benefits of the new Mac OS. Microsoft is one of these developers, and we all should know that if MS Office leaves the Mac, that's the death knell for the Mac -- at least at that time before the Mac's recovery had progressed far enough. Furthermore, MS was rumored to be upset at the prospect of the Yellow Box APIs for Windows and at having a viable competitor consumer OS on x86. Apple was also seeing little support for OEMs putting Rhapsody/x86 on their machines since they already had to pay MS for Windows on each one. Apple also realizes that if developers did adopt the new APIs, there would be less reason for people to by Apple hardware since they could get all the advantages without paying Apple -- especially since Rhapsody/x86 didn't require an Apple ROM.
So, all x86 releases are put on hold and cancelled. Rhapsody (a development name) is officially called Mac OS X (Ten, not Ehcks). The first developer's release of Mac OS X Server does not include an x86 version. In a year or two more, Yellow Box for NT would disappear from WebObjects. Originally, Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server would be different products, with Apple including licenses for some of their server software (WebObjects and Appletalk services) on the server version. Eventually, this is all scrapped in favor of one OS, since the distinctions between the two were minimal.
Fast forward. Apple releases the source code to the underlying BSD layer as they had previously promised as Darwin. Fast forward again. An Apple engineer boots Darwin on x86 and announces it to the world. Carmack does a little work on porting XFree86 to Darwin.
Fast forward to today. There is no x86 Mac OS X. There is an x86 port of Darwin. No, this is not the same. There is no Apple graphics layer and no Mac or OPENSTEP APIs included -- just BSD level stuff. There will probably never be an x86 Mac OS X. It would destroy Apple financially unless they take measures to secure revenue from Mac OS X sales in ways that would also make them unpopular, such as ridiculous prices for the new OS or only letting it run on machines with a special Apple ROM for which they charge money.
In the end, Mac OS X would always be more expensive than Windows since Apple does not have Office and other software to prop up its OS development, and most OEMs have to pay the Windows tax anyway. I repeat, Apple is a hardware company. Seperating the OS and the hardware divisions into two companies or eliminating one will kill them both. Apple needs a superior OS to sell their more expensive hardware, and they need to sell their hardware to pay for developing the OS. United, they stand, divided they fall.
As an aside, this is why Apple will never open the source to the higher level APIs. If you could remove the dependency on Apple to get Apple's OS, Apple would not get any more money. Apple would die. While many Open Source advocate would have no problem with this or even love to see it happen, Apple is not that stupid. This would be destroying the OS side of Apple. See the above paragraph for what would happen to the hardware side. It won't happen -- get over it.
Let's see. Do you (a) edit 5-10% of your Classic Mac API code to match the Carbon API and run natively on Mac OS X while still running on older Macs? or (b) completely reengineer the entire product suite to run on a 100% new API that doesn't share really much of anything in common with the original code base which is probably weighs in at several million lines of code? Oo! Oo! An API for which the preferred languages are Java and Objective-C, not C++?
Errrr.... My guess MS is going for Carbon. I remember back in the days before Carbon when MS was reluctant to commit to moving to the native NeXTSTEP APIs (in Objective-C) for Rhapsody. These are the APIs that are now called Cocoa. When Apple announced Carbon, which is a new revision of the old Mac OS API set with all the crud removed, MS was one of the first supporters of the move. It's no wonder why!
No it doesn't reduce the importance of DeCSS. When you are trying to reencode video, you want the best source possible. One of my roommates is into this scene on IRC. Almost all DivX encoded material is coming off of DVDs. This only helps the MPAA's case since they are holding that without the protection of the DMCA, piracy technology will advance faster than they can. The MPAA is worried about movie distribution over the Net. Technologies like this only make it easier by reducing the file size to something manageable and reducing a movie size to the pirate's holy grail size -- a CD-R.
People still trade movies about in MPEG-1 format. Usually these are movies that are in theatres now that are ripped off by the projectionist, outside the US. Once the movies hit DVD, however, many go over to the higher quality DivX format. This is exactly what the MPAA is worried about. To be honest, I don't know how the MPAA missed this kind of piracy going on. I've only been aware of it for over 3 months.
Now it's one thing for people to nitpick about the differences between C and C++, but has anyone ever seen any implementation of Smalltalk that could be described as fast? Smalltalk is a wonderful language. The design is beautiful, powerful, and simple. However, the actual implementation of language interpreters is usually heinously slow due to a number of design issues with the language. You can't even do a simple '2 + 2' without involving objects. The beautiful, but odd block statement syntax makes interpretation very awkward and tricky as well.
My college uses an open-source Smalltalk variant known as Squeak for it's OO classes. (It was made for Disney of all people -- hence the name.) One of my favorite stories of Squeak inefficiency came from a conversation I overheard about one student having a problem with Squeak running out of memory trying to create a PostScript file. The problem was that each time you appended to the object, it made a copy of the original object and then appended to the copy. These huge copies were being passed around in memory over and over again until the VM simply ran out of room. This ridiculous waste of memory and CPU cycles comes from fundamental design problems with the language. It's wonderful but way too abstract to get real-world performance.
Who cares? I don't even see why they're "negotiating" with RMS. The man won't be happy until the software is used his license or a license that is just the GPL with another man. He's a zealot. You can't negotiate with that.
The fact is that the current license is an Open Source license. RMS just tries to use his fame to denegrate any OSS software project that doesn't agree with his radical "software wants to be Free" ideals. Witness the latest KDE & Qt nonsense. I think he's quite frankly power mad with his fame.
Actually, when Stratus was first getting started, it was long ago enough that if you weren't IBM, you weren't important in the world of mainframes. So, Stratus signed a deal with IBM to sell their machines as IBM System/88 machines. In essence, System/88 was just the name IBM gave Stratus's machines so that people would buy them. Later, when Stratus had made enough of a name for itself to strike out on their own, they began calling their OS VOS.
In the old days, VOS machines ran on m68k chips. Later, they made versions that ran on the obscure Intel i860 RISC chips. Nowdays, Continuum servers run on PA-RISC chips. (A humorous note is that a common high-volume networking card used in Stratus boxen is the IBM Arctic 960, which uses the i860's descendent, the i960 chip.) There was some effort to work towards moving to IA-64 before the buy-out by Ascend, but Ascend got the rights to that platform. I'm real sure the server half of Stratus that got split off is really crying about that one nowdays.
There was also a short-lived fault-tolerant ultra-redundant Windows NT machine called 'Radio' that won an award at Comdex the year it was debuted. However, no one wanted to pay the price for fault-tolerant hardware when the OS wasn't guaranteed to be nearly as stable. Heh.
Tandem is a whole other ballpark. Ugly, hideous OS. Much, much worse than VOS.
Ah, it feels good to reminisce...
Thank you! I'm so glad someone else on Slashdot is aware of this bizarre and interesting server OS. I actually used to work at a subsidiary of Stratus Inc. as a customer support representative for some networking middleware and transaction processing software. (This was all before the buyout of Stratus by Ascend when all the subsidiaries were sold off to the higher bidders.)
VOS is about the opposite of UNIX in command-line structure. The default command (without abbreviations) for changing a directory is 'change_current_dir'. This is kind of an interesting throwback to the COBOL and PL/I roots of the original OS back in the old days. Compare this to the C-based design of UNIX's command shell.
The really cool thing about VOS is it's utter and complete fault tolerance. The machines they run on have dual motherboards, mirrored drives, etc. so that if one component goes wrong, it immediately switches over to the other one and calls Stratus customer support to log a request for a replacement part. If you don't spend a lot of time in your server room or reading logs, the arrival of a new motherboard in the mail may be the first sign you have that one has failed in your machine.
VOS also lets you virtually partition your whole machine in a variety of ways. Multiple motherboards or even the same motherboard can be host to several 'modules' or virtual machines which can communicate with each other and share resources. Modules on the same machine may even be on seperate server boxes, linked by serial, modem, TCP/IP, or other more obscure networking methods.
Another VOS strength is its support for various ancient networking protocols. The most common service our company's software provided was to set up a fault-tolerant means of data exchange between legacy systems and the modern world. VOS was a bizarre beast, but I really liked it in many ways.
But what are the non speech elements associated with distributing a text file?
No, code itself contains significant nonspeech elements. Code is inherently a functional "machine" of sorts as well as being a method of communicating to humans how to make a computer go about a task. It is both a description of a task and the task itself. Thus code itself may be regulated. That is the argument here.
In the case of other forms of illegal speech, such as libel and obscenity, it doesn't matter what the transmission method is, such as "distributing a text file." It's the speech itself that is illegal, and the distribution of it can also be made illegal. This is the unfortunate case with the DMCA.
The judge cited cases because he had nothing else to work with, but there have been other cases involving things like schools attempting to ban messages on t-shirts, and appellate court rulings where the government was unsuccessful in stopping the posting of cryptographic source code that are by far more similar to the present case. I didn't see the judge spending any time distinguishing this case from those. I don't believe he could credibly do so.
Actually, in any case where you are potentially going up against the legal cannon that is the First Amendment, you have to really shore up your defense with precendents like US vs. O'Brien. Kaplan did acknowledge Bernstein vs. US DOJ, where the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that current crypto export legislation was unlawful prior restraint on code as a form of speech. It was with this in mind that he spent 40+ pages dealing with the legal justifications of restricting code in light of its speech elements. That's why he spent significant time covering the validity of censoring code under its non-speech elements.
But before we hang the judge out to dry, it's important to realize how limited his ruling really is.
It's unfortunately worse than you think. The American court system is riddled with precedents. Any significant ruling in a case that tests a law contains exhaustive reference to the judgements of other judges, not necessarily all at the federal level. Kaplan's ruling affirming the DMCA may lead to a whole new level of legislation restricting our actions. The injunctions you refer to were covered previously in the case. The ruling is something else entirely. Punitive damages have been awarded to the MPAA. Round one is already lost. We just have to see if we can survive round two.
Okay, this deserves a response.
Have you ever considered the fact that the only reason you have this right is because another group of people deemed it so? Previous to the creation of the Bill of Rights, no government has such "inalienable" rights for its citizens. This supposedly intrinsic right that everyone supposedly gets by existing did not exist before that except in the rhetoric of natural law philosophers such as Locke.
Don't fool yourself. All rights are priviledges that other people extend to one another. There are no intrinsic human rights -- not even the right to be born anymore. It may not be too long before medical science allows the right to die to be taken away.
While I believe that the DMCA is a seriously bad piece of legislation, Kaplan's words in the ruling rang very true -- that the First Amendment is not a suicide pact for the government. Would you really like to live in a country where people were free to fire-bomb houses and roll over cars without impunity because it is a form of expression? Would you really like to live in a country that couldn't have ruled in favor of the government in Rowan vs. U.S. Post Office; a country where the government cannot stop commercial advertisers from forcing junk mail on you even after telling them you don't want it? Would you really like to live in a country where the expressiveness of an act could be used to justify any criminal action?
"Your honor, I am suing because his throwing me out of his house squelched my freedom to speak about the wonders of my church."
"Your honor, I realize that those secrets about nuclear weapon design could hurt the U.S. if passed into the wrong hands, but it is my right to tell them to whoever I want, wherever I want, and whenever I want."
"Your honor, there is nothing illegal about telling a group of people, even a violently upset group, to kill that black man. That they did it is their problem, not mine."
"Yes your honor, Company X was the original author of that piece of software, but there's nothing wrong with freely copying it, is there? After all, code is a form of speech. So what if it took them 3 years and millions of dollars to research? They should've invested some of that money in better server security. My freedom of speech supercedes their ownership."
"Your honor, my forcing of affections on the young lady over there were merely a positive expression of her good looks."
The fact is that all of the above examples are things that our government system -- the one that originated this "inalienable" right -- does rightfully reject each and every one of those arguments. Oh, and by the way, treasonous speech is illegal. Check the Constitution itself. However, rich case histories have shown that even Communist philosophers speaking of the overthrowing the American capitalist system were well within their rights to do so. (Gitlow vs. New York 1925) How do you think that square with the rich history of protest speech in America?
I swear, some people should get off their "inalienable" rights soapboxes and do some research on how the real world actually works.
Yes. Once again -- U.S. vs. O'Brien. The core of this Supreme Court case was O'Brien's argument that in burning the draft card as an act of protest, his actions took on First Amendment protections that superceded the 1965 amendment to the Selective Service act prohibiting the defacement and destruction of draft cards. This case was all about whether doing something illegal in an expressive manner as a means of protest made it legal. The clear precedent was established that, no, you cannot.
Thus, linking to DeCSS as a protest against the MPAA, which is exactly what 2600 was doing, is indeed not protected under the First Amendment according to Judge Kaplan's ruling. I disagree very strongly with the DMCA, but if you assume that it is indeed legal, then unfortunately you can only logically follow that linking in that fashion as protest is also illegal according to current case law.
Sucks, huh? I hope they find a good way to challenge DMCA itself. Kaplan really kind of glossed over that by saying that Congress must've considered the ramifications of the law and giving superficial supporting analysis. In math terms, DMCA was considered a postulate, not a theorem to be proven in its own right. Kind of ignores the whole purpose behind judicial review, doesn't it?
An example would've been a link to 2600.com back when they actually hosted the code for purposes of linking to a hacker magazine. That would've have been illegal.
That wouldn't have been illegal.
Violence -- Speech may not take the form of violence nor incite violence.
Property Damage -- Same as above.
Criminal Speech -- Some forms of speech are criminal in nature. Treason, conspiracy to commit a crime, etc.
Encroaching on the Rights of Others -- This is why pro-life protesters can be made to stop blocking a clinic.
Trespass -- Freedom of speech does not equal the right to speak wherever and whenever you want. I can't deliver a political (or otherwise) speech in your house without permission.
Forms of expression outside the First Amendment -- Libel and obscenity have been prohibited from the very beginning.
Burden on Government function -- This is the basis of upholding the law against burning draft cards.
Copyright violations -- The Constitutional right of copyright supercedes most Free Speech rights.
Speech containing sufficient nonspeech elements -- Here is where code is most affected. If you had actually read the ruling, you would've realized that over half the ruling deals with code as Free Speech and how it can be limited. The First Amendment does not mean that the government is powerless, and it is realms where a form of expression contains significant nonspeech elements, such as code, where the government typically has the most power to limit speech. While I certainly am not a constitutional scholar, I am at least familiar with:
United States vs. O'Brien (1969)
Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire (1942)
Rowan vs. Post Office (1970) All three are excellent examples of the government limiting forms of expression and the Supreme Court backing them up. Research them sometime.
If that is a direct link to DeCSS on your page, then you are guilty of breaking the DMCA. (Boo hoo, IMHO.) However, your professor did not link to your page for the purposes of distributing DeCSS code. Neither he, nor anyone else further up the chain, are guilty of violating the DMCA. To hold otherwise would be to be in violation of the "chilling effect" principle often cited in First Amendment cases.
While I have issues with the judge's attitude towards 2600 and the guy who wrote DeCSS ("if that's truly the purpose it was written for"), his arguments on the constitutionality of limiting linking are very, very well argued.
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Get your DeCSS protest t-shirt right here. One of the few remaining legal DeCSS links.
Well, in U.S. v. O'Brien (1969), the actual illegal action was the "destruction or mutilation" of a draft card. In Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), the actual illegal action was "any offensive, derisive, or annoying word to any other person who is lawfully in the street." The illegal actions in the DeCSS case are:
Copying the movie for non-fair use purposes.
Breaking encryption used for copy-protection purposes without the permission of the copyright holder.
Distributing tools to aid in breaking decryption used for copy-protection without the permission of the copyright holder.
The Free Speech component is the distribution of the code. The first is already illegal, and as for the second, there isn't really any constitutional protection on methods of reading, so it can "safely" be limited.
No one's managed to make the Anarchist's Cookbook illegal yet, have they? And anytime a building blows up, the media gets to report about how they made the bombs, yes? This is only differnet because it doesn't even cause physical damage to people.
I honestly have no clue how come the Anarchist's Cookbook isn't illegal. Doesn't it incite violence? I know that that's illegal. I don't honestly know why it isn't illegal. Maybe there isn't a law against distributing bomb-making plans. I don't see why there isn't, though, as far as I understand constitutional law.
So now, if I ever want to see a movie in the future, it has to be on an MPAA approved machine and software? Even if its operation in the near future requires connection to a telephone for activation? If thier devices are buggy and crash after watching the manditory 10 minutes of commercials at the beginning of each movie?
Ah, yes. Now you see the whole danger of the DMCA. DIVX was the first shot in the war on consumer property rights, but the pay-per-use annoyance-ware model has not yet died. Witness the recent Slashdot story about the evil subscription textbooks that one company is pushing. In particular, read their PR page. They don't care about their customers -- students and campus bookstores. They don't have to. As long as they can lock you into paying for the rest of you life for something you could pay once for nowdays, and as long as they can prevent you for reselling your copy to someone else, they can keep pumping every student for money as much as possible. As a student who recently had to pay $300 for textbooks, at least 2 of which I will be using for years to come if not the rest of my life, I am very angry about this trend.
We are beginning a new age of corporate control over our lives and our very fundamental freedoms. As much as I disagree with him on other issues, Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read" is dead on the money. Keep these times fresh in your mind -- you'll be telling your grandkids one day what the "good old days" were like.
Yes and no. If a user of the ISP sets up the mailer service, then it's the user who may be sued and not the ISP. (Avoids the deep pockets problem.) However, if the ISP itself sets up the service, then the ISP may be sued. The provision in the DMCA protects ISPs from their users, but it doesn't give the ISPs the freedom to break any laws they want themselves.
If I link to a page [that links to a page]* that links to a DeCss, am I in trouble?
If so, I'm removing my links to search engines...
Well, if you read the ruling, the judge acknowledges that you cannot outright ban linking to pages that contain direct links DeCSS among other content if you are not explicitly linking for the purpose of taking someone to the DeCSS link. This would have what is know as the "chilling effect" where people would be afraid to link to search engines, as you imply above. The "chilling effect" is unfortunately well covered in his ruling.
Basically, if I say, "Here's DeCSS!" and provide a direct link, then I am in violation of the clause of the DMCA prohibiting trafficking in copy-protection thwarting decryption software -- as I obviously should be under the letter of the law. I mean, just because it's not on my site doesn't mean I'm not guilty of helping people to get it. It's all transparent to the end user whether they are grabbing it from a server I own or a server owned by someone else.
However, you can't make a link illegal to a site that you didn't know contained DeCSS or a link that was made for other purposes. An example would've been a link to 2600.com back when they actually hosted the code for purposes of linking to a hacker magazine. That would've have been illegal. The grey area, I think, is if you linked to their DeCSS links page and told people what it is. I'm not sure about that one.
Anyway, don't worry about search engines. The acknowledged "chilling effect" prevents them from being a problem. Read the ruling. A grounding in constitutional law helps. (IANAL, but this is a big area of interest of mine.)
Unfortunately, the First Amendment isn't the blanket on censorship everyone thinks it is. Take the Supreme Court case U.S. vs O'Brien. This is the infamous draft card burning case, where O'Brien claimed that the 1st Amendment superceded the 1965 amendment to the Selective Service Act that prohibited the defacement of draft cards. To quote Justice Warren's opinion of the court:
This case is frequently brought up in cases like the DeCSS case, where nonspeech elements are important considerations and in the early commercial speech cases. This is the reason why flipping over someone's car because you were "expressing" your happiness that the Bulls won the championship game is still illegal. Unfortunately, the judge in the DeCSS case argued very intelligently about the constitutionality of limiting speech with the DMCA (with the exception of his "Congress must've considered this" arguments). Over half of his 90+ page ruling covers this issue. It's a good read.
While I severely disagree with the DMCA's ramifications, it is currently legal and looks to stay that way.
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Get DeCSS -- The legal way... for now.
Okay, how is this different from sci-fi author Niven's "organ bootlegging?" Oh, right. We're making it legal. After all, they're not really human. Their humanity is a "personal, private issue."
Sick. If this research goes anywhere, it'll open up a whole new world of mining dead babies for medical resources. I'm sure that once some benefit comes from it, people will all demand that it's their right as well. It's this kind of shrugging off ethics once something profits you that's the core of everything that's wrong in society from corporate pollution to drug dealing.