Donations to the EFF are tax-deductible in the US, too.
I just read some silly article in Yahoo! mag that my coworker had about Geeks (vs Suits) and it became newly clear to me how far the divide is. Your average morlock has no idea how threatened their future rights are; they just don't understand the issues.
The EFF does, and someone's gotta do the icky lawyering....
I want DVD readability on all systems, and I want the ability to copy my DVDs, but I don't want to circumvent the security mechanisms in place that allow companies to make money so they can make films and make DVDs.
While your comments on Napster are cogent, you really fall apart on DeCSS; you clearly haven't thought out the issues. No one will ever get the right to play DVD on their platform of choice by waiting for the corporate Gods to grant us our wish. DeCSS is a realistic response. Pirates are not deterred by the obstacles that existed before DeCSS; CDs are not encrypted, and yet people still buy music; and with DeCSS out in the wild, the rights and abilities of TW/AOL etc to prosecute pirates are in no way abrogated.
How about this; I encrypt every book and newspaper that you own, and I say when and where you can read it? That you cannot read it in a Honda or East of Avenue C? It's part of the End Reader's License that I wrote inside the cover of the book. Wow, what a score for freedom.
The priciples of fair use are based on the idea that when I have purchased a copyrighted work, I myself have the right to enjoy that work, period. What would you prefer, "We control the volume, we control what you will hear and see. Do not attempt to adjust the controls?" DeCSS is another tool to help realize these rights. And the Digital Constitution Mangling Asininity is a clear, vicious, anti-American, anti-artist curtailing of those rights, by quasi-legally stuffing them back into the hands of corporations, not artists, not individuals, and not end users. The DeCSS suit (and DVD by design - read Lessig's Code and get a clue) is a clear attempt to restrict the ability of anyone but the c. 400 licensed key holders to make DVDs. Anyone who thinks that the entertainment industry have the interests of artists in mind have clearly never seen up close how it operates, or are too busy sniffing cocaine off Michael Ovitz's buttocks to notice.
Like a lot of "new" areas of culture, the Internet floats good stuff up largely because it is unmediated. Like heavy metal or punk in their days, or like rap was for a long time; but the key here is a short feedback loop between the audience and the producers. Once the usual intermediaries come lumbering in - MPAA, Major Labels, etc - that touch is lost and you have to suffer 10,000 Brittany Spears crowding Sonic Youth (fine, don't like'em, insert your fave here) away from public view. So the intrusion of those usual suspects (yes, in the criminal sense) is doubly unwelcome to the audience here.
Forget the usual sky-is-falling conservative rant ("the right blah blah without responsibility for blah blah the content of blah blah are depleted"): the point is really that the expressive tools available to any individual's intellect and experience are limited, and this can be used to triangulate the speaker, if enough speech is available to do so. Of course, this isn't really a scientific process, and without a lot of sample text - as was available in the Unabomber case - it's not much more reliable than a police psychic. And of course, in the Unabomber case, the source really wanted his views and intellect known, so it would have been difficult for him to resist leaking out key details such as literary sources.
In the case of AC's degradation of message, this is more representative of the phenomenon that communities become more diffuse in their cultural focus as they get larger. Yeah, I like "underground" too, but at some point the reactionary dispair over the lack of Quality and Values (whether or not it is masquerading in hipster fashion) becomes a call to continue living in caves. Go ahead, caveman.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
If you want to stand up and be counted, why hide yourself?
Fear of retribution. Duh. They did march. They were assaulted physically by an unmasked man who talked his way past the police barrier. New York's laws are not universal. There have been anti-mask laws on the books for a century, but I don't believe they've ever stood a really high-level test at all.
I'd hate to think that we'd never get good tips or info here on./ because AC's were censored. I myself have given information that I could not safely give without the veil of anonymity.
Just because you use polite language does not excuse you from thinking before you speak.
Adolescent males are hungry for attention and peer approval. Why else flame at all?
I can't tell if Katz is serious here. I seriously hope not. It's a really sad statement on the narcissism of those who prefer restriction through archtitecture. As many have pointed out many, many, many, many times, flames are sometimes a way of enforcing useful and civil discussions through social norms, as opposed to eliminating freedom through re-coding slashdot.
That being said, a prime reason for the adolescent variety of flames is a sense of power - one that only comes from the constrast with restrictive and repressive environments found elsewhere. Should Slashdot ever choose to eliminate AC posting, it will become one of those environments and direct the Molotov postings somewhere else. And I will never visit Slashdot again.
I post both as AC and under my username, and I have some pretty good reasons (not petrified portmans) for doing each. Sometimes I read the -1's, sometimes I read the 3's and better. The system works just fine, so those who can't take the so-called hostility must be rather masochistically reading the lower-ranked posts; "Ow, that hurt. Please, sir, can I have another?"
Frankly, if you let that sort of "pain" restrict your freedoms, then you don't deserve any.
Methinks DeCSS fits very nicely into the product lines we'll be seeing... Has Linus offered any observations on the knowledge-is-illegal DVD suits anywhwere?
This isn't a bad critique, but to me it looks like the improvements Transmeta has acheived in power consumption could really enable smart, powerful, application machines that are worth something. PC's that now cost $1000 or less can be replaced with tablets that have browsers and a few office apps on top of Linux. Let's face it, that would meet the computing needs of 90% of the populace, and having no fans makes them much more home and SOHO friendly. Storage is the only remaining obstacle to having nice little machines that do all this, and there is hope on that front as well (I seem to remember reading about a technology for 2300GB, solid state, deck-of-cards-sized, $200 drives in the next two years - just imagine your portable MP3 collection!). This might be a better way for Linux to bury windows - start with WinCE and work from there.
It's only redundant if you can actually read it already. Given the 20 min laggin g I'm getting on each page, I'm sure it's out there by now. I pity the fool.
The idea that politicians who take credit for a good economy are mostly Democrats is patently ridiculous.
I'd chalk it up to the fact that you must be about 12 years old, except that you should know that many people were talking about a bounce in the market when Bush was confirmed the winner, on the mindless supposition that only Republicans are fiscal conservatives. That bounce did not happen, which does confirm your notion that politicians have less to do with economic conditions than you might think.
I'm also a little puzzled at the idea that suing the tobacco companies has anything to do with balancing the federal budget. You gotta stop believing everything you hear on AM talk radio. Reducing spending and increasing revenue due to the economy has balanced the federal budget, and Clinton can take some credit for that.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
It's like an Oliver Stone or Spike Lee movie - it looks good at first and seems well done, but it would be ten times better if a good editor slashed it in half.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
No one posits the kind of magical, unknowable qualities to which you object to plain old matter, but that doesn't make it any more knowable.
Matter seems to keep playing this nested russian-doll trick with us. First it's four elements, or five, then 108, then it's just three magic sub-atomic particles, then it's over a hundred again, then it's just a few quarks... Ad infinitum, no doubt, and we'll never get a really good answer to "what is the universe made of," because to answer the question in the way that is being asked is impossible, and we have no reference point for the answer.
We seem to be good at finding the shapes and forms, but we're not playing with the right toolkit - if indeed there is one - for finding some ultimate, irreducible "stuff" that can be rigorously studied and is the "ultimate reality" of anything, be it matter or consciousness.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
It never ceases to amaze me the lengths that radical materialists go to trying to prove things that cannot be proven.
First off, we know very little about the brain - for all we know memory is a quantum-based feature, in which case we might find that things appear to be deterministic, but are truly unpredicatble. So you might simulate the brain without being able to predict very much reliably. This would still be a massive acheivement and I think we will see it within a few generations.
But suppose that the brain can be reduced to a complete mechanistic model. Suppose you go further and identify some quality of the matrix of electrical impulses which signifies the presence of consciousness - however you define it. In reality, you haven't explained squat, because there is nothing in your explanation that requires actual consciousness. You haven't explained why I think I exist, why I perceive. Your only way out of this mess is to reduce consciousness to a bunch of features that don't require the thing we all "think of" as consciouness. Your only way out is to reduce the interesting thing out of the equation, which is useful and will produce many useful scientific results and insights, but is really cheating as far as the topic of discussion is concerned.
This is not any kind of mumbo-jumbo at all. A rational being must accept either that everything is conscious, and we simply exhibit certain forms of it and name those things "intelligence", or that you are forever stuck in some horrible nightmare where you - and even the nightmare - don't exist. You can, of course, retreat into some 18th century ghost-in-the-machine incoherence, which is what most people do. Wake up, if you can.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
They can patent my DNA when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
But seriously, this measure isn't really enough. It's beyond me how you can patent DNA at all, but all this article means is that the PTO will not allow researchers to patent every single sequence they map in case it might coincidentally be important; they will have to prove that they can "do something" with it. I can understand patenting drugs or medical procedures BASED on these discoveries, but patenting the genes themselves is a lot like patenting algorithms; patenting the "laws of nature", which are discoveries, not inventions, and which confer unnatural monopolies that restrain the whole of human knowledge.
Biotech industries depend heavily on an unhealthy confluence of universities and corporate R&D, and this is just the most patently [sic] ridiculous extreme. The government has no cause sanctioning it. Progress [in the best 19th century sense] suffers from the relationship, and this cuts against the original purpose of patents.
I wonder if they might also make the argument that they have the copyright to the encryption keys themselves, and thus the redistribution of the keys would be illegal in most countries.
This is a very interesting point and possibly a very strong case. Of course, in reality, it would be extremely difficult to police the distribution of this piece of information.
The point that distribution of the code in areas where reverse engineering is illegal is similar, but far less powerful on both sides. The information *other* than the keys themselves - that is, the source code that results from the reverse engineering - seems to me to be really a trade secret uncovered; reverse engineering is an action, not a thing. On the other hand, restricting source code distribution would be more effective in reality. But only a real IP lawyer would know the fate of the fruits of reverse engineering.
Yah, this guy is just a crank. "Especially the children" indeed.
Because we all know that the wily Japanese hang around playgrounds cheating our kids out of valuable improvements in 4-square business models, monkey bar technology, and duck-duck-goose software.
People keep arguing that reverse-engineering of software for interoperability is sanctioned in Norway, but the question is - is it STILL sanctioned if one signs a contract saying that they will not do it?)
If the contract is null and void in the applicable jurisdiction, which would be the case if the EULA violated local law in any way, then reverse engineering would be fully sanctioned. This would be the case if an overreaching EULA (is there another kind?) declared incautiously that reverse engineering would ALWAYS be illegal, regardless of local law.
Dodging this case is the point of apparently tautological "void where prohibited" clauses.
This is excellent news! I'm glad to hear that advocacy was strong and positive. Given the DOJ/M$ case, the Linux argument (vs irrational piracy fears) is very strong. Why should I have to use an "approved" OS to have the right to use DVD hardware? Especially one deemed a monopoly!
The guy with the disks and source code was certainly taking a risk, but it does make the point that making knowledge illegal is futile.
WTO protests may get headlines, but this is a more significant event for our future. Congrats to the EFF for recognizing this as a watershed issue.
I love WFMU. Even though I live in Manhattan, I just can't get it over the air in my particular apartment. Their website has some interesting hints about how they've been getting jacked around with this... without naming names or making any accusations, of course.
WFMU may not be big enough to have clout, but sooner or later the content producers are going to get wise to how the folks at Yahoo! and RBN and Broadcast etc. use the format wars to jerk them around as well... With any luck, this will result in a universal client and a quality open source server than can play to it... Then, and only then, will streaming media have the universality necessary to break out bigtime.
What I SAID wasTechnocrat had a relevant item recently: Chuck Schumer in NY spoke in a forum (see story) where he referred to the possible need for a major review of the current "system" for granting "patents"... I have written him, and I do recommend all NY residents do as well... intelligently of course.
I'm sure Sentator Schumer could care less about your petrified Natalie Portmans.
Slashdot Mirror
This version of Apache comes with PHP3 modules and its documentation.
Try it, it's 404. Doh.
Donations to the EFF are tax-deductible in the US, too.
I just read some silly article in Yahoo! mag that my coworker had about Geeks (vs Suits) and it became newly clear to me how far the divide is. Your average morlock has no idea how threatened their future rights are; they just don't understand the issues.
The EFF does, and someone's gotta do the icky lawyering....
While your comments on Napster are cogent, you really fall apart on DeCSS; you clearly haven't thought out the issues. No one will ever get the right to play DVD on their platform of choice by waiting for the corporate Gods to grant us our wish. DeCSS is a realistic response. Pirates are not deterred by the obstacles that existed before DeCSS; CDs are not encrypted, and yet people still buy music; and with DeCSS out in the wild, the rights and abilities of TW/AOL etc to prosecute pirates are in no way abrogated.
How about this; I encrypt every book and newspaper that you own, and I say when and where you can read it? That you cannot read it in a Honda or East of Avenue C? It's part of the End Reader's License that I wrote inside the cover of the book. Wow, what a score for freedom.
The priciples of fair use are based on the idea that when I have purchased a copyrighted work, I myself have the right to enjoy that work, period. What would you prefer, "We control the volume, we control what you will hear and see. Do not attempt to adjust the controls?" DeCSS is another tool to help realize these rights. And the Digital Constitution Mangling Asininity is a clear, vicious, anti-American, anti-artist curtailing of those rights, by quasi-legally stuffing them back into the hands of corporations, not artists, not individuals, and not end users. The DeCSS suit (and DVD by design - read Lessig's Code and get a clue) is a clear attempt to restrict the ability of anyone but the c. 400 licensed key holders to make DVDs. Anyone who thinks that the entertainment industry have the interests of artists in mind have clearly never seen up close how it operates, or are too busy sniffing cocaine off Michael Ovitz's buttocks to notice.
Forget the usual sky-is-falling conservative rant ("the right blah blah without responsibility for blah blah the content of blah blah are depleted"): the point is really that the expressive tools available to any individual's intellect and experience are limited, and this can be used to triangulate the speaker, if enough speech is available to do so. Of course, this isn't really a scientific process, and without a lot of sample text - as was available in the Unabomber case - it's not much more reliable than a police psychic. And of course, in the Unabomber case, the source really wanted his views and intellect known, so it would have been difficult for him to resist leaking out key details such as literary sources.
In the case of AC's degradation of message, this is more representative of the phenomenon that communities become more diffuse in their cultural focus as they get larger. Yeah, I like "underground" too, but at some point the reactionary dispair over the lack of Quality and Values (whether or not it is masquerading in hipster fashion) becomes a call to continue living in caves. Go ahead, caveman.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
ROTF,LMAO. Let's get Stallman on Ricki!!!!
Fear of retribution. Duh. They did march. They were assaulted physically by an unmasked man who talked his way past the police barrier. New York's laws are not universal. There have been anti-mask laws on the books for a century, but I don't believe they've ever stood a really high-level test at all.
I'd hate to think that we'd never get good tips or info here on ./ because AC's were censored. I myself have given information that I could not safely give without the veil of anonymity.
Just because you use polite language does not excuse you from thinking before you speak.
I can't tell if Katz is serious here. I seriously hope not. It's a really sad statement on the narcissism of those who prefer restriction through archtitecture. As many have pointed out many, many, many, many times, flames are sometimes a way of enforcing useful and civil discussions through social norms, as opposed to eliminating freedom through re-coding slashdot.
That being said, a prime reason for the adolescent variety of flames is a sense of power - one that only comes from the constrast with restrictive and repressive environments found elsewhere. Should Slashdot ever choose to eliminate AC posting, it will become one of those environments and direct the Molotov postings somewhere else. And I will never visit Slashdot again.
I post both as AC and under my username, and I have some pretty good reasons (not petrified portmans) for doing each. Sometimes I read the -1's, sometimes I read the 3's and better. The system works just fine, so those who can't take the so-called hostility must be rather masochistically reading the lower-ranked posts; "Ow, that hurt. Please, sir, can I have another?"
Frankly, if you let that sort of "pain" restrict your freedoms, then you don't deserve any.
Let's see:
- Demos of systems playing DVDs
- Demos of systems running Linux
Methinks DeCSS fits very nicely into the product lines we'll be seeing... Has Linus offered any observations on the knowledge-is-illegal DVD suits anywhwere?This isn't a bad critique, but to me it looks like the improvements Transmeta has acheived in power consumption could really enable smart, powerful, application machines that are worth something. PC's that now cost $1000 or less can be replaced with tablets that have browsers and a few office apps on top of Linux. Let's face it, that would meet the computing needs of 90% of the populace, and having no fans makes them much more home and SOHO friendly. Storage is the only remaining obstacle to having nice little machines that do all this, and there is hope on that front as well (I seem to remember reading about a technology for 2300GB, solid state, deck-of-cards-sized, $200 drives in the next two years - just imagine your portable MP3 collection!). This might be a better way for Linux to bury windows - start with WinCE and work from there.
It's only redundant if you can actually read it already. Given the 20 min laggin g I'm getting on each page, I'm sure it's out there by now. I pity the fool.
I'd chalk it up to the fact that you must be about 12 years old, except that you should know that many people were talking about a bounce in the market when Bush was confirmed the winner, on the mindless supposition that only Republicans are fiscal conservatives. That bounce did not happen, which does confirm your notion that politicians have less to do with economic conditions than you might think.
I'm also a little puzzled at the idea that suing the tobacco companies has anything to do with balancing the federal budget. You gotta stop believing everything you hear on AM talk radio. Reducing spending and increasing revenue due to the economy has balanced the federal budget, and Clinton can take some credit for that.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
It's like an Oliver Stone or Spike Lee movie - it looks good at first and seems well done, but it would be ten times better if a good editor slashed it in half.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
No one posits the kind of magical, unknowable qualities to which you object to plain old matter, but that doesn't make it any more knowable.
Matter seems to keep playing this nested russian-doll trick with us. First it's four elements, or five, then 108, then it's just three magic sub-atomic particles, then it's over a hundred again, then it's just a few quarks... Ad infinitum, no doubt, and we'll never get a really good answer to "what is the universe made of," because to answer the question in the way that is being asked is impossible, and we have no reference point for the answer.
We seem to be good at finding the shapes and forms, but we're not playing with the right toolkit - if indeed there is one - for finding some ultimate, irreducible "stuff" that can be rigorously studied and is the "ultimate reality" of anything, be it matter or consciousness.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
First off, we know very little about the brain - for all we know memory is a quantum-based feature, in which case we might find that things appear to be deterministic, but are truly unpredicatble. So you might simulate the brain without being able to predict very much reliably. This would still be a massive acheivement and I think we will see it within a few generations.
But suppose that the brain can be reduced to a complete mechanistic model. Suppose you go further and identify some quality of the matrix of electrical impulses which signifies the presence of consciousness - however you define it. In reality, you haven't explained squat, because there is nothing in your explanation that requires actual consciousness. You haven't explained why I think I exist, why I perceive. Your only way out of this mess is to reduce consciousness to a bunch of features that don't require the thing we all "think of" as consciouness. Your only way out is to reduce the interesting thing out of the equation, which is useful and will produce many useful scientific results and insights, but is really cheating as far as the topic of discussion is concerned.
This is not any kind of mumbo-jumbo at all. A rational being must accept either that everything is conscious, and we simply exhibit certain forms of it and name those things "intelligence", or that you are forever stuck in some horrible nightmare where you - and even the nightmare - don't exist. You can, of course, retreat into some 18th century ghost-in-the-machine incoherence, which is what most people do. Wake up, if you can.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
They can patent my DNA when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
But seriously, this measure isn't really enough. It's beyond me how you can patent DNA at all, but all this article means is that the PTO will not allow researchers to patent every single sequence they map in case it might coincidentally be important; they will have to prove that they can "do something" with it. I can understand patenting drugs or medical procedures BASED on these discoveries, but patenting the genes themselves is a lot like patenting algorithms; patenting the "laws of nature", which are discoveries, not inventions, and which confer unnatural monopolies that restrain the whole of human knowledge.
Biotech industries depend heavily on an unhealthy confluence of universities and corporate R&D, and this is just the most patently [sic] ridiculous extreme. The government has no cause sanctioning it. Progress [in the best 19th century sense] suffers from the relationship, and this cuts against the original purpose of patents.
This is a very interesting point and possibly a very strong case. Of course, in reality, it would be extremely difficult to police the distribution of this piece of information.
The point that distribution of the code in areas where reverse engineering is illegal is similar, but far less powerful on both sides. The information *other* than the keys themselves - that is, the source code that results from the reverse engineering - seems to me to be really a trade secret uncovered; reverse engineering is an action, not a thing. On the other hand, restricting source code distribution would be more effective in reality. But only a real IP lawyer would know the fate of the fruits of reverse engineering.
This page reads under "Changes":
1/10/19100 Final Y2K compliant.
Yeah, right. I've worked with professional video editing systems, and many have 32GB of RAID, not a terabyte.
I won't even speculate on the video cards or the 5GHz Athlons.
Because we all know that the wily Japanese hang around playgrounds cheating our kids out of valuable improvements in 4-square business models, monkey bar technology, and duck-duck-goose software.
GAK!
I can think of a few people who should really read the stuff on the correct deployment of coders.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
The polaroid site has been stripped to the homepage, which has a notice that is is being "upgraded" and will be available again on New Year's day.
I would suppose this to be an example of hacker fears - I would assume that they figured without server scripts they'd be that much less hackable...
If the contract is null and void in the applicable jurisdiction, which would be the case if the EULA violated local law in any way, then reverse engineering would be fully sanctioned. This would be the case if an overreaching EULA (is there another kind?) declared incautiously that reverse engineering would ALWAYS be illegal, regardless of local law.
Dodging this case is the point of apparently tautological "void where prohibited" clauses.
This is excellent news! I'm glad to hear that advocacy was strong and positive. Given the DOJ/M$ case, the Linux argument (vs irrational piracy fears) is very strong. Why should I have to use an "approved" OS to have the right to use DVD hardware? Especially one deemed a monopoly!
The guy with the disks and source code was certainly taking a risk, but it does make the point that making knowledge illegal is futile.
WTO protests may get headlines, but this is a more significant event for our future. Congrats to the EFF for recognizing this as a watershed issue.
WFMU may not be big enough to have clout, but sooner or later the content producers are going to get wise to how the folks at Yahoo! and RBN and Broadcast etc. use the format wars to jerk them around as well... With any luck, this will result in a universal client and a quality open source server than can play to it... Then, and only then, will streaming media have the universality necessary to break out bigtime.
There is a Randall Mills who got an MD from Harvard in 1986.
I'm sure Sentator Schumer could care less about your petrified Natalie Portmans.