Wasn't the main objection to the first non-Latin translation of the Bible, the terrifying idea that suddenly ANYONE could read the Bible instead of getting it spoonfed?
Similarly, the big thing that finally convinced me to leave the Christian church, was: I decided to actually READ the Bible. Leviticus convinced me it was written by a human - one who compulsively washed his hands 80 times a day, no doubt.
The Church of Scientology isn't as dumb as it looks - it knows the truth would drive people away, for the same reason Microsoft doesn't want people publishing benchmarks.
Hubbard, a certifiable wacko, decided it was a great idea.
It IS a great idea. Religion's where the money's at, just ask Jerry Falwell.
I half considered starting a religion and changing my name to L. John Shepard.
I am told the device is a battery, a meter, and a couple wires attached to what looks like a coffee can.
L. Ron insisted that soup cans work the best. Wouldn't electrodes, or some kind of custom-manufactured, tight-tolerance handgrip be better? Nope. Hubbo's extensive knowledge of the scientific principles of the universe told him that Campbell's soup was the way to go.
The newer e-meters have variable gain, digital readout, and can cost in the low thousands - and they still hook up to Campbell's Clam Chowder. (Insert clam jokes here.)
The minute a 'church' can have its assets taken, it also means that any other organization can have its assets taken for similar reasons. M$ is a big bad company, can I post Windows XP on my site and say that I'm just doing it to expose their hypocracy?
The better analogy would be, if you found a hole or a trojan in a Microsoft product and you had to publish a substantial decompiled piece of their code (or actual source code) to illustrate it, MS would be able to use copyright law to destroy you and squelch that information.
Fair use is when copyright protection stops and freedom of speech begins. Fair use is a provision that exists because sometimes you HAVE to include a piece of someone else's work in order to make your point. And this is such a case: the only way to properly show the insanity of Scientology is to let people read OT III in its entirety.
This is NO different than the shrinkwrap laws that allow companies to specify that you cannot post benchmarks of their software. Just because a company might be harmed by what you say about them, doesn't mean they get to clean fish on the Constitution!
(Yes, fair use gets talked about a lot around here, usually regarding ways in which one may use a CD. The idea is, if you have to copy it in order to listen to it or watch it, like taping a show because you won't be home, or decrypting a DVD so you can watch it on Linux, or copying a CD to tape for your car, you should be able to do it. Usually, though, "fair use" is like "make no law" and "due process": a couple of meaningless words everybody ignores in court cases.)
Can someone please explain what this scientology is all about?
Easy simulation of Scientology:
Pay someone $300 to read Alice in Wonderland to you while you sit and say "yes" or "no" at random until the sensory deprivation makes you hallucinate and see space aliens dropping bombs into volcanoes. Do this while running low voltage through your body from a cheap lie detector. Afterwards, stop speaking to friends and family.
While it might matter to some, its hardly news or while its news, it hardly matters.
It's here because it could be YOU. Scientology, the MPAA, it's all the same - say something Those With Silly Amounts of Money and Power would rather you didn't, and they'll find or buy laws that can be used as a blunt object upside your head.
PS. Anyone know why all those Hollywood "stars" are suckered in? I've always wondered about. Seemingly intelligent people joining this alien-cult. It like status in it? I know why the crime syndicate wants rich and influencial members, but... Oh well..
Consider for a moment that you're a Hollywood star. It's not a normal life - it's life in a fishbowl. You never meet normal people. You don't have time to watch TV or go to the library, all your time is spent either on a movie set, or being jetted around to talk shows, or home reading scripts or spending a few precious moments with what little family you've been able to acquire between hectic film shoots.
One of your friends has just joined Scientology. Their mood changes, they have a different outlook on life. (They're a celebrity too, so Scientology basically pays their way.) They tell you how great it is, and you, wondering why you can't be happy despite $12 million in the bank, decide it's worth a shot - hell, it can't be any weirder than the Shirley Maclaine crap.
Of course, being a rich movie star, you aren't the type to go on the Internet and do a search for Scientology to see if anyone's had a bad experience with them. And said information can't be found anywhere else, unless you caught that A&E documentary a couple years back.
Scientology will do its damnedest to shield you from the negative opinions. The first thing they'll do is sneakily install a proxy filter on your PC, just to make sure you don't see anything that might change your mind. Then they put the appropriate "spin" on the naysayers - something about "people who don't want to be happy, will try to prevent others from being happy" that I suppose makes sense after you've done several 2-hour sensory deprivation sessions and had low voltage run through your body every day for weeks on end. And above all, the things that drive normal people OUT of Scientology - the abuse, the money, or the ridiculous stuff they expect you to believe at the higher levels (bad science fiction, L. Ron must have written OT III on cough medication) - you'd NEVER see. They pay your way, they're nice to you and your family, and they keep you hovering somewhere below OT I just in case you aren't as gullible as you seemed. So long as you stay in the fishbowl everything's hunky dory.
The Freemasons went after judges, politicians, and so forth. L. Ron knew where the REAL influence lay in today's world, though: Hollywood.
Aside from being a rather obvious squelching of freedom of speech ("this religion is trying to defraud people and here's their ridiculous high-level 'secrets' as proof") it's a vivid illustration of how copyright law can be used as a nasty weapon by entities of great money against anyone they don't like.
There have been variants on Christianity (Gnosticism) that were similarly secretive - and variants of Christianity today that are similarly big business. It gets hard to draw the line. In fact I'm surprised we don't see MORE religious movements with tiered architectures, where you don't learn the truth about the universe until you pass a certain level.
As to the definition of a cult: seems to me the only dependable definition of cult is how many people follow it. Is it out to make money? Sure, lots of religions are - it's a great way to keep the temple in good repair, ministers have to eat, and so on. Does it harm people? All religions can harm people if they become fixated on it, just like bowling can harm people if they neglect real life for it, and "harmful" cults can still manage to accidentally help people.
Put it like this: If any of Earth's religions really had a metaphorical red phone to God in the office somewhere, I figure it'd be pretty obvious: their organization would be a model of efficiency (with an all-powerful being saying "do it this way" why wouldn't it?), no one would get away with stealing so much as a paperclip from the office supply cabinet (red phone rings, "it's God, so-and-so is pilfering stuff, and he keeps a Penthouse in the safe in his office, combination 16-33-54, check if you don't believe me"), church laws never need to be amended, and for some reason the church's members are always waiting at the hospital BEFORE one of their friends is in a car accident and is brought in. No religion on Earth has outwardly visible signs of having God's home phone number, though many CLAIM to.
Which means, from any vantage point outside a religion, they all start out with a roughly equal chance of being right - and for them to be of value, it's what they tell us about OURSELVES that's important.
Which means basically ALL religions are cults - if one is, all are, since they're all written by flawed humans and susceptible to corruption. The only difference in grade is whether the organizational aspect of the cult is actively seeking to defraud people, or whether they actually believe what they're saying. Not that this really makes a fundamental difference in the amount of damage they can cause.
When the media does this to geeks, Hellmouth reigns. When trolls do it to religion, it's approved. See the contradiction?
America's religious conservative undercurrent is the main reason the media does this to geeks - and when trolls do it to religion, it's a reaction to this.
This is a good time to call or write your congresmen and give them an intelegent opinion about the DCMA.
He said intelligent. That means no "fuck da MPAA", no l33t sp33k, no "all your base" references, and whatever you do, ues a sppel cjecker.
Seriously, let's keep in mind that whether or not a congressman is in someone's pocket, he won't appreciate being treated as though he is. Take a chance that yours wasn't bought in bulk, and be civil, intelligent, and do your best to sound like you're a white male Republican in your mid-40s, since that seems to be the tone of voice they're most likely to respond to.
NS1.1 didn't do animated GIFs as we know them today. The Fish Cam used a multipart MIME stream to tell the browser "wait, there's another file coming" and Netscape would happily replace the currently displayed GIF with the next chunk of the stream. You could even control the reload delay by simply having the server wait a few seconds before sending the next chunk. Proper GIF animations didn't show up until NS 2.0.
Neat trick for its time. I tried resurrecting this technique recently, to do a splash page of cycling random images (I'd just given up trying to do it with dhtml), and couldn't make it work properly on the current crop of browsers. Maybe I was doing something wrong.
I hope this gets appealed to Supreme Court, as it would be a very interesting and very pivotal case for the coming years in regards to Internet freedom.
You mean THAT Supreme Court? Surely you don't want to entrust Internet freedom to those jokers do you?
The DMCA exists to add legal "effectiveness" to just about ANY protection mechanism. That's my point: they just have to put legal threats behind it and if it looks like the threats might deter people, the protection mechanism is effective.
Please don't take the Garth Brooks approach that "used CDs = piracy."
Oh, I'm not. I'm trying to illustrate the RIAA mentality that seems to suggest that a CD is actually just a nontransferable single-site license for one person to listen to nine songs, all other uses prohibited.
For the purposes of the DMCA I don't know that it matters WHAT kind of protection mechanism is in place, only that you can't circumvent it.
A new music format could be double-rot13'ed (that is, plaintext) and if the RIAA sticks a label on it that says "This product is copy protected" then you could be sued if you reverse engineer the player software and discover that it's doing nothing, or even so much as attempt to play the format in a non-sanctioned player.
If, for some reason the RIAA was violating the DMCA, how long do you think it would be before the same lawmakers who wrote the damn thing in the first place fixed the bug in the law to make AIMster the bad guys?
Orrin Hatch, one of the key players, has already dropped strong hints that he's not happy where the DMCA has gone. I suppose next time he should READ proposed legislation before he votes for it. But anyway.
And, just curious, but totally unrelated, of course, but how much has the RIAA and its members given to the Republican party in the past year?
How 'bout the Democrats?
And more importantly, when people start flocking to independent music that doesn't pull these kinds of shenanigans, sells music for reasonable prices, and generally doesn't treat the music-buying public as the enemy.
the RIAA can just come back and say "No they're not; they're using Pig Latin now."
If they use that exact sentence in court it'll make it obvious how ridiculous the whole situation is.
Maybe.
and a bunch of sympathetic courts.
s/sympathetic/easily purchased/
At any rate, the RIAA is going to continue its war on the music-buying public no matter what happens to Napster. This is the same bunch of clods that tried to ban the selling of used CDs, remember? (Is trading songs on Napster any more or less legal than buying a CD for fifty cents at Goodwill?)
In between video frames there's a short delay called the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI). It's there to give the TV's electron beam time to go back to the top of the tube in preparation for the next frame - so the TV should ignore everything in that interval (about 80 lines worth).
Macrovision stuffs the VBI with high-intensity garbage. As you may expect, this would confuse the hell out of a VCR as it tries to lay this signal down on tape - its automatic gain control is gonna be going nuts trying to figure out how bright or how dark the signal really is.
TVs are usually unaffected by this because they are supposed to throw away everything in the vertical blank. VCRs don't have a gain control between tape playback and video output, so if you straight from VCR to TV, the VBI garbage gets ignored. We hope.
Circumventing Macrovision is easy enough: it's all in the timing - once you figure out where the frame starts and stops, you can simply black out everything in the VBI. Any device that takes apart the video signal and reassembles it - and isn't designed to specifically reinsert the macro noise - will inadvertently remove the macrovision signal. This is why some older VCRs are unaffected by Macrovision - in their attempt to clean up a signal that would probably be coming from the antenna on your roof, they'd tear down and rebuild the signal minus the garbage in the VBI.
Amusing: newer TVs sometimes use the same auto gain circuitry as VCRs, and thus are affected by Macrovision.
Neat trivia: Betamax is unaffected by Macrovision because it uses a different gain control method. I have a later Beta deck from 1985 - it happily copies Macroed tapes, garbage and all, and plays them back just fine, but the result cannot then be copied to VHS because the Macrovision is still intact on the tape! Older Beta decks probably cleaned up the incoming signal as described above.
and the free music bands will make their money selling T-shirts and concert tickets
Most acts have to do this anyway. The RIAA talks a big talk about protecting the artists, but for some reason they don't seem real keen on paying them much in the way of royalties. Touring is where the artists actually have a chance of seeing some money - Ticketmaster at least leaves some flesh on the bone.
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Wasn't the main objection to the first non-Latin translation of the Bible, the terrifying idea that suddenly ANYONE could read the Bible instead of getting it spoonfed?
Similarly, the big thing that finally convinced me to leave the Christian church, was: I decided to actually READ the Bible. Leviticus convinced me it was written by a human - one who compulsively washed his hands 80 times a day, no doubt.
The Church of Scientology isn't as dumb as it looks - it knows the truth would drive people away, for the same reason Microsoft doesn't want people publishing benchmarks.
Hubbard, a certifiable wacko, decided it was a great idea.
It IS a great idea. Religion's where the money's at, just ask Jerry Falwell.
I half considered starting a religion and changing my name to L. John Shepard.
I am told the device is a battery, a meter, and a couple wires attached to what looks like a coffee can.
L. Ron insisted that soup cans work the best. Wouldn't electrodes, or some kind of custom-manufactured, tight-tolerance handgrip be better? Nope. Hubbo's extensive knowledge of the scientific principles of the universe told him that Campbell's soup was the way to go.
The newer e-meters have variable gain, digital readout, and can cost in the low thousands - and they still hook up to Campbell's Clam Chowder. (Insert clam jokes here.)
OK, fess up, who thought that was flamebait?
The minute a 'church' can have its assets taken, it also means that any other organization can have its assets taken for similar reasons. M$ is a big bad company, can I post Windows XP on my site and say that I'm just doing it to expose their hypocracy?
The better analogy would be, if you found a hole or a trojan in a Microsoft product and you had to publish a substantial decompiled piece of their code (or actual source code) to illustrate it, MS would be able to use copyright law to destroy you and squelch that information.
Fair use is when copyright protection stops and freedom of speech begins. Fair use is a provision that exists because sometimes you HAVE to include a piece of someone else's work in order to make your point. And this is such a case: the only way to properly show the insanity of Scientology is to let people read OT III in its entirety.
This is NO different than the shrinkwrap laws that allow companies to specify that you cannot post benchmarks of their software. Just because a company might be harmed by what you say about them, doesn't mean they get to clean fish on the Constitution!
(Yes, fair use gets talked about a lot around here, usually regarding ways in which one may use a CD. The idea is, if you have to copy it in order to listen to it or watch it, like taping a show because you won't be home, or decrypting a DVD so you can watch it on Linux, or copying a CD to tape for your car, you should be able to do it. Usually, though, "fair use" is like "make no law" and "due process": a couple of meaningless words everybody ignores in court cases.)
Can someone please explain what this scientology is all about?
Easy simulation of Scientology:
Pay someone $300 to read Alice in Wonderland to you while you sit and say "yes" or "no" at random until the sensory deprivation makes you hallucinate and see space aliens dropping bombs into volcanoes. Do this while running low voltage through your body from a cheap lie detector. Afterwards, stop speaking to friends and family.
Repeat until you run out of money.
I think I just got myself declared suppressive.
While it might matter to some, its hardly news or while its news, it hardly matters.
It's here because it could be YOU. Scientology, the MPAA, it's all the same - say something Those With Silly Amounts of Money and Power would rather you didn't, and they'll find or buy laws that can be used as a blunt object upside your head.
PS. Anyone know why all those Hollywood "stars" are suckered in? I've always wondered about. Seemingly intelligent people joining this alien-cult. It like status in it? I know why the crime syndicate wants rich and influencial members, but... Oh well..
Consider for a moment that you're a Hollywood star. It's not a normal life - it's life in a fishbowl. You never meet normal people. You don't have time to watch TV or go to the library, all your time is spent either on a movie set, or being jetted around to talk shows, or home reading scripts or spending a few precious moments with what little family you've been able to acquire between hectic film shoots.
One of your friends has just joined Scientology. Their mood changes, they have a different outlook on life. (They're a celebrity too, so Scientology basically pays their way.) They tell you how great it is, and you, wondering why you can't be happy despite $12 million in the bank, decide it's worth a shot - hell, it can't be any weirder than the Shirley Maclaine crap.
Of course, being a rich movie star, you aren't the type to go on the Internet and do a search for Scientology to see if anyone's had a bad experience with them. And said information can't be found anywhere else, unless you caught that A&E documentary a couple years back.
Scientology will do its damnedest to shield you from the negative opinions. The first thing they'll do is sneakily install a proxy filter on your PC, just to make sure you don't see anything that might change your mind. Then they put the appropriate "spin" on the naysayers - something about "people who don't want to be happy, will try to prevent others from being happy" that I suppose makes sense after you've done several 2-hour sensory deprivation sessions and had low voltage run through your body every day for weeks on end. And above all, the things that drive normal people OUT of Scientology - the abuse, the money, or the ridiculous stuff they expect you to believe at the higher levels (bad science fiction, L. Ron must have written OT III on cough medication) - you'd NEVER see. They pay your way, they're nice to you and your family, and they keep you hovering somewhere below OT I just in case you aren't as gullible as you seemed. So long as you stay in the fishbowl everything's hunky dory.
The Freemasons went after judges, politicians, and so forth. L. Ron knew where the REAL influence lay in today's world, though: Hollywood.
Aside from being a rather obvious squelching of freedom of speech ("this religion is trying to defraud people and here's their ridiculous high-level 'secrets' as proof") it's a vivid illustration of how copyright law can be used as a nasty weapon by entities of great money against anyone they don't like.
This could be you.
There have been variants on Christianity (Gnosticism) that were similarly secretive - and variants of Christianity today that are similarly big business. It gets hard to draw the line. In fact I'm surprised we don't see MORE religious movements with tiered architectures, where you don't learn the truth about the universe until you pass a certain level.
As to the definition of a cult: seems to me the only dependable definition of cult is how many people follow it. Is it out to make money? Sure, lots of religions are - it's a great way to keep the temple in good repair, ministers have to eat, and so on. Does it harm people? All religions can harm people if they become fixated on it, just like bowling can harm people if they neglect real life for it, and "harmful" cults can still manage to accidentally help people.
Put it like this: If any of Earth's religions really had a metaphorical red phone to God in the office somewhere, I figure it'd be pretty obvious: their organization would be a model of efficiency (with an all-powerful being saying "do it this way" why wouldn't it?), no one would get away with stealing so much as a paperclip from the office supply cabinet (red phone rings, "it's God, so-and-so is pilfering stuff, and he keeps a Penthouse in the safe in his office, combination 16-33-54, check if you don't believe me"), church laws never need to be amended, and for some reason the church's members are always waiting at the hospital BEFORE one of their friends is in a car accident and is brought in. No religion on Earth has outwardly visible signs of having God's home phone number, though many CLAIM to.
Which means, from any vantage point outside a religion, they all start out with a roughly equal chance of being right - and for them to be of value, it's what they tell us about OURSELVES that's important.
Which means basically ALL religions are cults - if one is, all are, since they're all written by flawed humans and susceptible to corruption. The only difference in grade is whether the organizational aspect of the cult is actively seeking to defraud people, or whether they actually believe what they're saying. Not that this really makes a fundamental difference in the amount of damage they can cause.
When the media does this to geeks, Hellmouth reigns. When trolls do it to religion, it's approved. See the contradiction?
America's religious conservative undercurrent is the main reason the media does this to geeks - and when trolls do it to religion, it's a reaction to this.
It's not contradiction, it's a returned favor.
They just hadn't gotten around to paying him NOT to have this opinion. They should be remedying it soon.
This is a good time to call or write your congresmen and give them an intelegent opinion about the DCMA.
He said intelligent. That means no "fuck da MPAA", no l33t sp33k, no "all your base" references, and whatever you do, ues a sppel cjecker.
Seriously, let's keep in mind that whether or not a congressman is in someone's pocket, he won't appreciate being treated as though he is. Take a chance that yours wasn't bought in bulk, and be civil, intelligent, and do your best to sound like you're a white male Republican in your mid-40s, since that seems to be the tone of voice they're most likely to respond to.
Senators are a much better deal for the money. Representatives are a bit cheaper, but you have to buy more of them.
NS1.1 didn't do animated GIFs as we know them today. The Fish Cam used a multipart MIME stream to tell the browser "wait, there's another file coming" and Netscape would happily replace the currently displayed GIF with the next chunk of the stream. You could even control the reload delay by simply having the server wait a few seconds before sending the next chunk. Proper GIF animations didn't show up until NS 2.0.
Neat trick for its time. I tried resurrecting this technique recently, to do a splash page of cycling random images (I'd just given up trying to do it with dhtml), and couldn't make it work properly on the current crop of browsers. Maybe I was doing something wrong.
I hope this gets appealed to Supreme Court, as it would be a very interesting and very pivotal case for the coming years in regards to Internet freedom.
You mean THAT Supreme Court? Surely you don't want to entrust Internet freedom to those jokers do you?
3 Napster related articles on /. within 9 hours of each other. There's something fundamentally wrong with the universe today.
Yeah. The RIAA is what's fundamentally wrong with the universe today...
And effective kind of protection mechanism.
The DMCA exists to add legal "effectiveness" to just about ANY protection mechanism. That's my point: they just have to put legal threats behind it and if it looks like the threats might deter people, the protection mechanism is effective.
At least that's how it's been used so far.
Please don't take the Garth Brooks approach that "used CDs = piracy."
Oh, I'm not. I'm trying to illustrate the RIAA mentality that seems to suggest that a CD is actually just a nontransferable single-site license for one person to listen to nine songs, all other uses prohibited.
For the purposes of the DMCA I don't know that it matters WHAT kind of protection mechanism is in place, only that you can't circumvent it.
A new music format could be double-rot13'ed (that is, plaintext) and if the RIAA sticks a label on it that says "This product is copy protected" then you could be sued if you reverse engineer the player software and discover that it's doing nothing, or even so much as attempt to play the format in a non-sanctioned player.
Well, IANAL anyway...
If, for some reason the RIAA was violating the DMCA, how long do you think it would be before the same lawmakers who wrote the damn thing in the first place fixed the bug in the law to make AIMster the bad guys?
Orrin Hatch, one of the key players, has already dropped strong hints that he's not happy where the DMCA has gone. I suppose next time he should READ proposed legislation before he votes for it. But anyway.
And, just curious, but totally unrelated, of course, but how much has the RIAA and its members given to the Republican party in the past year?
How 'bout the Democrats?
Politicians are cheaper if you buy them in bulk.
And more importantly, when people start flocking to independent music that doesn't pull these kinds of shenanigans, sells music for reasonable prices, and generally doesn't treat the music-buying public as the enemy.
the RIAA can just come back and say "No they're not; they're using Pig Latin now."
If they use that exact sentence in court it'll make it obvious how ridiculous the whole situation is.
Maybe.
and a bunch of sympathetic courts.
s/sympathetic/easily purchased/
At any rate, the RIAA is going to continue its war on the music-buying public no matter what happens to Napster. This is the same bunch of clods that tried to ban the selling of used CDs, remember? (Is trading songs on Napster any more or less legal than buying a CD for fifty cents at Goodwill?)
Please locate the gain knob for your Humor Detection circuit and turn it solidly to the notch marked 10.
OK, the five-cent tour of Macrovision:
In between video frames there's a short delay called the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI). It's there to give the TV's electron beam time to go back to the top of the tube in preparation for the next frame - so the TV should ignore everything in that interval (about 80 lines worth).
Macrovision stuffs the VBI with high-intensity garbage. As you may expect, this would confuse the hell out of a VCR as it tries to lay this signal down on tape - its automatic gain control is gonna be going nuts trying to figure out how bright or how dark the signal really is.
TVs are usually unaffected by this because they are supposed to throw away everything in the vertical blank. VCRs don't have a gain control between tape playback and video output, so if you straight from VCR to TV, the VBI garbage gets ignored. We hope.
Circumventing Macrovision is easy enough: it's all in the timing - once you figure out where the frame starts and stops, you can simply black out everything in the VBI. Any device that takes apart the video signal and reassembles it - and isn't designed to specifically reinsert the macro noise - will inadvertently remove the macrovision signal. This is why some older VCRs are unaffected by Macrovision - in their attempt to clean up a signal that would probably be coming from the antenna on your roof, they'd tear down and rebuild the signal minus the garbage in the VBI.
Amusing: newer TVs sometimes use the same auto gain circuitry as VCRs, and thus are affected by Macrovision.
Neat trivia: Betamax is unaffected by Macrovision because it uses a different gain control method. I have a later Beta deck from 1985 - it happily copies Macroed tapes, garbage and all, and plays them back just fine, but the result cannot then be copied to VHS because the Macrovision is still intact on the tape! Older Beta decks probably cleaned up the incoming signal as described above.
and the free music bands will make their money selling T-shirts and concert tickets
Most acts have to do this anyway. The RIAA talks a big talk about protecting the artists, but for some reason they don't seem real keen on paying them much in the way of royalties. Touring is where the artists actually have a chance of seeing some money - Ticketmaster at least leaves some flesh on the bone.