I agree that not linking to amazon is a fine move, and very much a good business decision that doesn't screw people over. That said, used books are not illegal copies, they are the original, and so it is nothing alike. Someone used the book and relinquished ownership to Amazon, so they had their share of that money, and the copy will be passed on...
The main thing I thought was stupid was that you were protesting price fixing among publishing companies, yet say you would pay even more for independent publishing, and I have to ask, which is it? The complaint and your resolution seem contradictory. And you said you don't buy books, yet you say you'll buy books from half and amazon... This comment is a whole lot of contradictory hot air.... A troll, and a very successful one because I felt compelled to reply....
First, under this circumstance, my copyright law would probably still penalize the company, but 1 million dollars is step unless they had a lot of MP3s (hundreds of thousands).
I would like to see a law where not only is fair use a protected right, but companies that try to inhibit fair use are subject to a penalty (i.e. the copy protected CDs, CSS, etc...). Now this wouldn't include things like WPA, as it doesn't inhibit fair use (even though it sucks, it still can be legal, you can backup the disks, and the right to backup is what I'm currently concerned with).
Now on the piracy end, people who make available for download music for which they have no right to distribute, are assessed a fee to pay to the company infringed upon, maybe equal to or slightly greater than the cost of the song proprotional to the CD is was copied from per download tha can be proven. for people downloading music, the proprtional price of the track plus a low fee (maybe $0.50 per track). Now for downloaders, this is fine, as even if they were caught, they would get a great deal. Record companies would scream abou tthis, but the fact of the matter is they don't need to spread out the good tracks to typically 1 to 3 good tracks per CD full of pure crap no one likes and charge extra for the crap. I know singles are sold, but they can never resist putting at least one song of crap even on the CDs. Some CDs are exceptions, but mostly you have to pay out the ass for a litttle bit of good stuff.
Depends on your observation point. The bug may be present, but not perceivable in network traffic (certain state of server results in internal corruption or crash or whatever). Or maybe an exceptionally rare bug (i.e. a specific 128-byte sequence which should never be seen in gameplay causes server to crash). Chances of something like that being a side effect of watching to protocol or randomly occuring are rare. I suspect though that it is something in the network protocol that Blizzard just wants to blow out of proportion..
Re:Actually, the UNIX market share is going down..
on
Unix Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 2
Well, just because things have similar look and feel, does not mean they are the same thing. Hell, Unix variants are further apart than Windows variants (try running ls from old SunOS on a different unix.. ok this doesn't work for more than just library reasons, but even if you have two true Unix systems and the same architecture, they won't run each other's binaries most of the time (exceptions like BSD's linux emulation, iBCS, etc exist, but they are jsut that, exceptions.) Now run a WfW 3.11 app on a brand new Windows install, it will 98% likely work, maybe not perfect, but it will work.
Linux achieves a very similar feel and API, but, as the GNU acronym says, GNU is not Unix, it is a Unix clone that won't pay money to get the Unix certification...
In the end I guess I agree with you that they are close enough not to matter, but you can't call them the same thing, and for all the faults of the Windows platforms, maintaining compatibility across variants isn't one of them. I still hate Windows, but I hate it on terms that are more true:)
About the first one, they never crossed the Beiring Strait, and judging by their route and the car they took, they put the thing on boat or plane to cross the Pacific Ocean (didn't read that part, but look at the route..) Certainly nothing to be scoffed at, I couldn't stand to go that far in a car (though this is basically a rich guy taking a 3 year road trip, at least it isn't *too* pampered.... except the fact he can afford to go off for three years and do this...)
LCDs have held a lot of promise, and I have been told that the Apple Cinema display was the culmination of what LCD brings, and I got a chance to use one and was extremely disappointed. Truly, I didn't see any hint of ghosting effect, and the absence of refresh is nice to know, but has no visual impact. The idea that the signal is kept digital logner doesn't make a damn bit of difference to me, but the more precise usage of the visible screen does. However, the thing still looked bad in terms of color and brightness. On smaller LCDs the field of vision is pretty good, but when you have something the size of a Cinema display, looking at any particular part of the screen makes the portions away from focus really dark. While LCD tech has drastically improved, it doesn't seem to scale well at close distances (my subjective experience). I have never seen an LCD with an adequate viewable angle. Now OLEDs may become what LCD should have been. LCDs are certainly not worth the extra cash, but an OLED display might be more tempting, all the pluses of LCD with none of the disadvantages...
Sounds good, but in another part the license suggests that you can't have it distributed as a sublicensable license, so maybe BSD is precluded after all, as it could be sublicensed as BSD....
Of course if I am completely off base here, the important bits would always be BSD and therefore a company seeking to do closed source, profitable work can get the credit information from the GPL distribution (as BSD license requires credit be given where credit is due) and skip the GPL and go for the BSDed codebase...
Nope, they don't want the boxes, they want you to replace every tv in the house with TVs with the boxes built in..... Why should the government only make consumers pay a couple of hundred to TV manufacturers when they can force consumers to pay thousands? I mean, after all the government is out to maximize profit for companies at the cost of the people. That is why the U.S. war for independence was fought, right?
Yeah, I hate how they try to make everyone think that digital tech makes things automatically clearer all the time, unconditionally. Of course, at least nowadays most all phones negotiate a digital connection when the signal seems to be in pretty good shape (i.e. errors are minor enough to be cleaned up by the error correction mechanisms and sound better), and failover to analog when digital encounters too many transmission errors to be effective, and then let the human perceptive system take over to correct....
It might be nice for places with *almost* perfect signals (content delivered by coax/people very close to transmission towers/satellite in an area that is clear most of the time), just to clean up the little fuzz here and there. Of course their descriptions of the possiblities of digital that aren't possible with analog are ludicrous. For example, saying that digital technology makes it possible for a channel to show 4 shows at once a viewer can switch between, it isn't due to the digital, it's due to the extra bandwidth, if they had equivalent bandwidth they could show 4 channels. Maybe they can't provide convenient labels to each channel, but still....
While I in general agree with the point it isn't a bad thing, it is not the point of a watermark to go away with a copy, it is meant to not be removable, and just let anyone who has a copy know where it came from, maybe a copyright notice.
So scanning machines to see which are watermarked and which are not don't help. Now with checks and money, watermarks do mean stuff that doesn't copy easily, but in the multimedia world, it is used to preserve copyright information (little logos at the corner of images are also called 'watermarks')
Except for the large masses of people who use modems... And also figuring out who owns equipment with a particularly MAC address is no small feat, as they would have to have that machine directly hooked up to the ISP, with no sort of gateway in between (NAT networks hide this), and that ISP would have to track this info and provide it to the media industry, which may violate privacy agreements with customers... If this were widely deployed and known, you would see the minority using NICs directly connected to the world putting some sort of gateway between them and their ISP...
Not only is it cheaper, but both multimedia and 3d functionality of the card works under linux. With the 8500DV, there is no accelerated 3D support. I don't think the released version of GATOS has the right PCI IDs, but I get the impression that in CVS it is supported great.
Re:My wife uses KDE and likes it..
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2
Same kind of situation here. Linux is the preferred operating system. The problem is the only reason it works that way is because I'm around to configure things and fix things that may break, or provide more insight into errors she encounters. Unix systems can be a fantastic boon for usability, stability, and flexibility, *but* I admit that without someone with decent computer administration skills, linux is less usable. Of course windows gets messed up without knowledgeable care, but it remains more usable than linux even in such a state... If user without a lot of knowledge can explain their needs to someone with expertise, it works great, they can set up a pretty static configuration that the user will have a hard time breaking. But if they have to do it themselves, or become root to try to change things themselves, trouble is likely to ensue...
I would imagine that it is nothing more complicated than that (except perhaps a bit more horsepower than a 486..).
I would imagine it could probably copy playstation discs (presuming they use disc-at-once mode, and if they claim to bypass some copy protection, it most likely is). Of course you would still need a modchip (can't put the information into the CD hub that is needed. I don't know what safedisc is even:)
cdrdao works great for PSX backup... I'll never have to open my Lunar box sets to play ever again.
Actually, CSS is about copy protection, like MacroVision. Region coding is separate from CSS IIRC. Region-free, but CSS encrypted DVDs are possible, just as you can have an unencrypted DVD with a region code.
Yeah, the fonts pretty much suck, I use fonts from Windows, but better hinting in the fonts wont help much for most people's default freetype installations, as the proper bytecode interpreter by default is disabled, and the crappy auto-hinter is enabled by default. But don't blame the freetype people for this, blame Apple's patent. I would think by merely shipping freetype with the bytecode interpreter, enabled or not, is a big risk. Anyway, enabling proper hinting takes a recompile, the include file include/freetype/config/ftoption.h has the option specified on line 435 or thereabouts..
Of course, the problem here is that the native players don't support Sorenson, and since that by and large is the format of quicktime on the interne,t it is a moot point. I'll stick with wine..
I really hope that you meant the bugs got *fixed* in 0.9.9, and not implemented. If you submitted bugs to be implemented in 0.9.9 and they were, well that would certainly explain why mozilla has taken so long...
Now if they were refering to user's sharing music illegally, the term would be "copyright violation".
Now the way the MPAA and RIAA are trying to wield copyright and destroy fair use, *that* is what I would call copyright abuse. Maybe Reuters meant to say "victory" instead of setback, then they would be right..:)
As far as ebook decryption, decss, and the like, those are considered to be "circumvention devices" and are illegal by the DMCA. Kazaa simply shares data. Now if Kazaa had some weird built in support for, say decrpyting a DVD and sharing it, or to mess with a WMA's licensing some how to allow it to be easier to distribute than creator intended, then they would face trouble if they were in the U.S....
Actually, I think it is less about controlling what your kids can and not do, and more about protecting them if they were kidnapped or something. Now, the problem is, they say it is difficult to remove, but is it difficult enough to keep a kidnapper from removing it? It may be overkill, but it is not without justification. I don't think this product is aimed at people with teenage children, but more for children under 8 or 9, when they care less about privacy. Since this thing has the unfortunate side effect of violating the child's privacy, it wouldn't be as likely to be used on, say, a teenager, both because the parents should respect the wishes of their kid, and because by the time a person grows to want privacy, they have probably figured out how to disable the device on the wrist.
I don't know how this can be done fairly, except I think before 8 or 9 children for the most part could care less about privacy, and about 10-12 start to desire privacy to be more independent of their parents. I know if this had been around when I was a teenager, my parents certainly wouldn't have forced me to wear this...
Well, plus, with ssh versus telnet, telnet transmits your passwortd in plaintext, so it is even more crucial to use ssh to protect logins than normal mail. The problem with always using encrypted email is that you have to basically add a prompt to send a message to ask wheteher to encrypt or not. It isn't to the point where you can shoot off encrypted emails to anyone with the expectancy their mail reader can handle it.. I look forward to days like that..
Actually, widescreen more closely approximates the human visual system. While you may focus your attention on one character or another in widescreen, you can still perceive both simultaneously quite clearly. think about how much you can clearly see and you realize it has to bo pretty far to the side of your focus before it lacks enough detail to be ignored. FOV is close to 180 degrees for motion detection horizontally, maybe 90-100 degrees for clear vision. Vertically, visual perception is much more limited, as it was not as important in early evolutionary development (predators were much more likely to come from the side than above or below....)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that not linking to amazon is a fine move, and very much a good business decision that doesn't screw people over. That said, used books are not illegal copies, they are the original, and so it is nothing alike. Someone used the book and relinquished ownership to Amazon, so they had their share of that money, and the copy will be passed on...
The main thing I thought was stupid was that you were protesting price fixing among publishing companies, yet say you would pay even more for independent publishing, and I have to ask, which is it? The complaint and your resolution seem contradictory. And you said you don't buy books, yet you say you'll buy books from half and amazon... This comment is a whole lot of contradictory hot air.... A troll, and a very successful one because I felt compelled to reply....
First, under this circumstance, my copyright law would probably still penalize the company, but 1 million dollars is step unless they had a lot of MP3s (hundreds of thousands).
I would like to see a law where not only is fair use a protected right, but companies that try to inhibit fair use are subject to a penalty (i.e. the copy protected CDs, CSS, etc...). Now this wouldn't include things like WPA, as it doesn't inhibit fair use (even though it sucks, it still can be legal, you can backup the disks, and the right to backup is what I'm currently concerned with).
Now on the piracy end, people who make available for download music for which they have no right to distribute, are assessed a fee to pay to the company infringed upon, maybe equal to or slightly greater than the cost of the song proprotional to the CD is was copied from per download tha can be proven. for people downloading music, the proprtional price of the track plus a low fee (maybe $0.50 per track). Now for downloaders, this is fine, as even if they were caught, they would get a great deal. Record companies would scream abou tthis, but the fact of the matter is they don't need to spread out the good tracks to typically 1 to 3 good tracks per CD full of pure crap no one likes and charge extra for the crap. I know singles are sold, but they can never resist putting at least one song of crap even on the CDs. Some CDs are exceptions, but mostly you have to pay out the ass for a litttle bit of good stuff.
Depends on your observation point. The bug may be present, but not perceivable in network traffic (certain state of server results in internal corruption or crash or whatever). Or maybe an exceptionally rare bug (i.e. a specific 128-byte sequence which should never be seen in gameplay causes server to crash). Chances of something like that being a side effect of watching to protocol or randomly occuring are rare. I suspect though that it is something in the network protocol that Blizzard just wants to blow out of proportion..
Well, just because things have similar look and feel, does not mean they are the same thing. Hell, Unix variants are further apart than Windows variants (try running ls from old SunOS on a different unix.. ok this doesn't work for more than just library reasons, but even if you have two true Unix systems and the same architecture, they won't run each other's binaries most of the time (exceptions like BSD's linux emulation, iBCS, etc exist, but they are jsut that, exceptions.) Now run a WfW 3.11 app on a brand new Windows install, it will 98% likely work, maybe not perfect, but it will work.
:)
Linux achieves a very similar feel and API, but, as the GNU acronym says, GNU is not Unix, it is a Unix clone that won't pay money to get the Unix certification...
In the end I guess I agree with you that they are close enough not to matter, but you can't call them the same thing, and for all the faults of the Windows platforms, maintaining compatibility across variants isn't one of them. I still hate Windows, but I hate it on terms that are more true
About the first one, they never crossed the Beiring Strait, and judging by their route and the car they took, they put the thing on boat or plane to cross the Pacific Ocean (didn't read that part, but look at the route..) Certainly nothing to be scoffed at, I couldn't stand to go that far in a car (though this is basically a rich guy taking a 3 year road trip, at least it isn't *too* pampered.... except the fact he can afford to go off for three years and do this...)
Huh? I haven't had a problem with PNG alpha channels under IE in a long time..
LCDs have held a lot of promise, and I have been told that the Apple Cinema display was the culmination of what LCD brings, and I got a chance to use one and was extremely disappointed.
Truly, I didn't see any hint of ghosting effect, and the absence of refresh is nice to know, but has no visual impact. The idea that the signal is kept digital logner doesn't make a damn bit of difference to me, but the more precise usage of the visible screen does.
However, the thing still looked bad in terms of color and brightness. On smaller LCDs the field of vision is pretty good, but when you have something the size of a Cinema display, looking at any particular part of the screen makes the portions away from focus really dark. While LCD tech has drastically improved, it doesn't seem to scale well at close distances (my subjective experience). I have never seen an LCD with an adequate viewable angle. Now OLEDs may become what LCD should have been. LCDs are certainly not worth the extra cash, but an OLED display might be more tempting, all the pluses of LCD with none of the disadvantages...
Sounds good, but in another part the license suggests that you can't have it distributed as a sublicensable license, so maybe BSD is precluded after all, as it could be sublicensed as BSD....
Of course if I am completely off base here, the important bits would always be BSD and therefore a company seeking to do closed source, profitable work can get the credit information from the GPL distribution (as BSD license requires credit be given where credit is due) and skip the GPL and go for the BSDed codebase...
Nope, they don't want the boxes, they want you to replace every tv in the house with TVs with the boxes built in..... Why should the government only make consumers pay a couple of hundred to TV manufacturers when they can force consumers to pay thousands? I mean, after all the government is out to maximize profit for companies at the cost of the people. That is why the U.S. war for independence was fought, right?
Yeah, I hate how they try to make everyone think that digital tech makes things automatically clearer all the time, unconditionally.
Of course, at least nowadays most all phones negotiate a digital connection when the signal seems to be in pretty good shape (i.e. errors are minor enough to be cleaned up by the error correction mechanisms and sound better), and failover to analog when digital encounters too many transmission errors to be effective, and then let the human perceptive system take over to correct....
It might be nice for places with *almost* perfect signals (content delivered by coax/people very close to transmission towers/satellite in an area that is clear most of the time), just to clean up the little fuzz here and there. Of course their descriptions of the possiblities of digital that aren't possible with analog are ludicrous. For example, saying that digital technology makes it possible for a channel to show 4 shows at once a viewer can switch between, it isn't due to the digital, it's due to the extra bandwidth, if they had equivalent bandwidth they could show 4 channels. Maybe they can't provide convenient labels to each channel, but still....
While I in general agree with the point it isn't a bad thing, it is not the point of a watermark to go away with a copy, it is meant to not be removable, and just let anyone who has a copy know where it came from, maybe a copyright notice.
So scanning machines to see which are watermarked and which are not don't help. Now with checks and money, watermarks do mean stuff that doesn't copy easily, but in the multimedia world, it is used to preserve copyright information (little logos at the corner of images are also called 'watermarks')
Except for the large masses of people who use modems... And also figuring out who owns equipment with a particularly MAC address is no small feat, as they would have to have that machine directly hooked up to the ISP, with no sort of gateway in between (NAT networks hide this), and that ISP would have to track this info and provide it to the media industry, which may violate privacy agreements with customers... If this were widely deployed and known, you would see the minority using NICs directly connected to the world putting some sort of gateway between them and their ISP...
Not only is it cheaper, but both multimedia and 3d functionality of the card works under linux. With the 8500DV, there is no accelerated 3D support. I don't think the released version of GATOS has the right PCI IDs, but I get the impression that in CVS it is supported great.
Same kind of situation here. Linux is the preferred operating system. The problem is the only reason it works that way is because I'm around to configure things and fix things that may break, or provide more insight into errors she encounters. Unix systems can be a fantastic boon for usability, stability, and flexibility, *but* I admit that without someone with decent computer administration skills, linux is less usable. Of course windows gets messed up without knowledgeable care, but it remains more usable than linux even in such a state... If user without a lot of knowledge can explain their needs to someone with expertise, it works great, they can set up a pretty static configuration that the user will have a hard time breaking. But if they have to do it themselves, or become root to try to change things themselves, trouble is likely to ensue...
I would imagine that it is nothing more complicated than that (except perhaps a bit more horsepower than a 486..).
:)
I would imagine it could probably copy playstation discs (presuming they use disc-at-once mode, and if they claim to bypass some copy protection, it most likely is). Of course you would still need a modchip (can't put the information into the CD hub that is needed. I don't know what safedisc is even
cdrdao works great for PSX backup... I'll never have to open my Lunar box sets to play ever again.
> Is everything on slashdot today a load of bollox ?
:)
And this is any different from a normal day how?
Actually, CSS is about copy protection, like MacroVision. Region coding is separate from CSS IIRC. Region-free, but CSS encrypted DVDs are possible, just as you can have an unencrypted DVD with a region code.
Yeah, the fonts pretty much suck, I use fonts from Windows, but better hinting in the fonts wont help much for most people's default freetype installations, as the proper bytecode interpreter by default is disabled, and the crappy auto-hinter is enabled by default. But don't blame the freetype people for this, blame Apple's patent. I would think by merely shipping freetype with the bytecode interpreter, enabled or not, is a big risk. Anyway, enabling proper hinting takes a recompile, the include file include/freetype/config/ftoption.h has the option specified on line 435 or thereabouts..
Of course, the problem here is that the native players don't support Sorenson, and since that by and large is the format of quicktime on the interne,t it is a moot point. I'll stick with wine..
I really hope that you meant the bugs got *fixed* in 0.9.9, and not implemented. If you submitted bugs to be implemented in 0.9.9 and they were, well that would certainly explain why mozilla has taken so long...
Not only is it a "spin", but completely wrong.
:)
Now if they were refering to user's sharing music illegally, the term would be "copyright violation".
Now the way the MPAA and RIAA are trying to wield copyright and destroy fair use, *that* is what I would call copyright abuse. Maybe Reuters meant to say "victory" instead of setback, then they would be right..
As far as ebook decryption, decss, and the like, those are considered to be "circumvention devices" and are illegal by the DMCA. Kazaa simply shares data. Now if Kazaa had some weird built in support for, say decrpyting a DVD and sharing it, or to mess with a WMA's licensing some how to allow it to be easier to distribute than creator intended, then they would face trouble if they were in the U.S....
Actually, I think it is less about controlling what your kids can and not do, and more about protecting them if they were kidnapped or something. Now, the problem is, they say it is difficult to remove, but is it difficult enough to keep a kidnapper from removing it? It may be overkill, but it is not without justification. I don't think this product is aimed at people with teenage children, but more for children under 8 or 9, when they care less about privacy. Since this thing has the unfortunate side effect of violating the child's privacy, it wouldn't be as likely to be used on, say, a teenager, both because the parents should respect the wishes of their kid, and because by the time a person grows to want privacy, they have probably figured out how to disable the device on the wrist.
I don't know how this can be done fairly, except I think before 8 or 9 children for the most part could care less about privacy, and about 10-12 start to desire privacy to be more independent of their parents. I know if this had been around when I was a teenager, my parents certainly wouldn't have forced me to wear this...
Well, plus, with ssh versus telnet, telnet transmits your passwortd in plaintext, so it is even more crucial to use ssh to protect logins than normal mail. The problem with always using encrypted email is that you have to basically add a prompt to send a message to ask wheteher to encrypt or not. It isn't to the point where you can shoot off encrypted emails to anyone with the expectancy their mail reader can handle it.. I look forward to days like that..
Actually, widescreen more closely approximates the human visual system. While you may focus your attention on one character or another in widescreen, you can still perceive both simultaneously quite clearly. think about how much you can clearly see and you realize it has to bo pretty far to the side of your focus before it lacks enough detail to be ignored. FOV is close to 180 degrees for motion detection horizontally, maybe 90-100 degrees for clear vision. Vertically, visual perception is much more limited, as it was not as important in early evolutionary development (predators were much more likely to come from the side than above or below....)