Go to the movies on Sunday, before noon if it's possible. Everybody is either in church or hung over. And don't bother going to see anything until it's been in theaters at least 2 weeks.
Ah, OK. The article suggested that it was just how he *controlled* his home theater. I confess I didn't read his site in-depth, though I did peruse the message boards.
This doesn't affect me after all: I forgot that since I use Kazaa to get rare live tracks, I am a pinko thug bastard who steals everything I want. I don't shop online.
You can get a Philips Pronto IR remote with a color touchscreen for far less than this guy spent on this thing, that would have let him control every IR device in the house. I'm all for hacking for hacking's sake, but no need to reinvent the wheel. Of course, if he just wanted a new PC and the HT control-thing was just an afterthought, then bravo.
This is a lot easier for smaller families, of course, but most people I know have a cellphone these days. If you get rid of your dial-up internet account ($20 per month) and your land-line ($30 a month where I live, that's just for the service, no long distance), you can switch to broadband for little or no added cost. It's $5 more a month for me this way.
Ha! That may be the moral thing to do if you're a record company executive, but I don't think most artists would agree. You could do what I do: if you download an album from your illegal source of choice and like it enough to keep it, send the artist a money order for $5. That's more than they'll see from the CD sale, and you cut out the middleman (the RIAA). Better yet, go see them at a live show, then they'll get their money and you get to show your support.
The phrase 'deep link' is a complete misnomer. If you know the URL for a page, you can get to it in one hop, no matter what the site's designer intended. What if I happen to know how a site structures its pages, and I use that knowledge to go straight to an article? Am I guilty of deep-linking within my own brain?
I think that once a publisher puts a piece of content on the web, they give up the right to control how other people get to it. This ruling completely fails the reality test. Imagine if you bought a magazine and it had a EULA you had to agree to before you read it:
'This publication may only be read in the order proscribed by TimeWarAOLMicro$IBM. Please proceed to the Contents page by way of the advertisements on Pages 1-13. After observing all advertisements for no less than 20 seconds each, you may proceed to the Contents page, and from there to the Article you are interested in. If you do not agree to this License, you may return this magazine for a refund'.
I can hardly wait for this same court to declare the entire Internet in contempt of court.
If there's a browser war, it's between Opera and IE right now. Mozilla 1.0 looks and feels (to me, anyway) just like the most recent versions of Netscape, which are inferior to IE. Maybe once the Moz 1 source gets out there more and people start using it as a platform for more useful browsers, we'll see the flubber fly, but until then I'll stick with Opera. If only I could cruise around without IDing myself as an IE5 surfer...
Just read the Constitution, fer chrissakes.
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It was originally designed to balance the rights of the copyright holder against those of the public, and the interests of creating an 'intellectual commons'. If we could just strip away all the BS the content industry has tacked onto copyright law over the years and go back to what we started with, that would be an improvement. Isn't the expiration of copyright now almost as long as it's been since Jefferson died?
They want to be the ultimate arbiter of information exchange. If they see that role in jeopardy because of falling hardware prices, they will lower their software prices. This is the company that annihilates other companies by giving away what everyone else is selling, they can afford to take less profit on the OS if it means prolonging their monopoly.
If what we've seen over the past few months are any indication (broadband woes, ridiculous internet laws), Australia's laws won't be too kind to file-sharing. Not that it will matter to P2P users, they can just move on to the newest P2P startup that hasn't been gobbled up yet.
I think the Simpsons is almost as bad now as X-files was when I stopped watching it. Futurama is consistently funnier, and just about all recent Simpsons episodes have failed to make me laugh even once. Fox should keep the ball rolling and start culling the dead weight.
Its up to anyone who does not like the new Napster to take the many free tools that are out there and create something new that is exactly what the public wants.
The public already has what it wants: free music (alright, stolen music) available virtually on-demand. As long as they can still get that, Napster, PressPlay, etc. will fail.
It has become a parody of itself. I understand that the company had to do this to remain in business, but I don't see why this is newsworthy. The new Napster is a poorly-conceived service that is trying to charge money for a product that is *inferior* to what's being *given away for free* by dozens of other services. Can we please stop talking about it already? It's doomed.
Perhaps the next rev of Slashcode will allow users to define their own kill filters for headlines?
If you use one of those 'shopper discount' grocery store cards, you're also providing this kind of information, in even greater detail.
When I use mine, I am providing this information on 'Mark Siegel', a person I invented who lives at a fictional address near the grocery store. Whenever anyone asks for any personal info of mine that they are not entitled to, they get fake information. Of course, this wouldn't work for something like this Microsoft TV, because if you are buying the service, they have your name and address already. I suppose we just have to decide whether the service is worth the sacrifice in privacy.
Too late, WinXP Professional Corporate Edition (the version that doesn't need to be activated, ever) has been making the rounds on Usenet since last week.
Was it that SDMI is dead as a doornail and they therefore know Felten's study can't do any damage to their cash flow, or that the publicity was so bad? I think we can rule out altruism as their motivation...
Rendering a movie at 320 x 240 or 640 x 480 is much easier than rendering it at the resolution and size of a movie theater's screen. If the Quadro was rendering the movie at 100 x 75 pixels, all this doesn't mean much.
While something like this does of course have many potentially unseemly and privacy-destroying uses, it has also been used for some time in Britain for a lot of very socially responsible things, like finding and helping disabled motorists, spotting purse-snatching, muggings, etc.
The cameras are so ubiquitous in some areas that crime has actually gone down, presumably because the crooks know that the chances are good they are being watched and taped.
I don't live in the UK, most of this is gleaned from watching TLC and Discovery Channel. Any locals care to comment on how video surveillance affects daily life in the UK?
Which is that in Russia, where Elcomsoft is based and where the program was written, it's Adobe who is breaking the law, not Elcomsoft. Alexander Katalov of Elcomsoft says it all:
"Actually, according to Russian law, it's sooner adobe's program that is illegal, in that it prevents one from using a bought and paid for product as the purchaser wishes. That's a violation of fair use. Also, at the time a user buys a book in Adobe's format a buyer isn't notified of these restrictions.
I think Sklyarov's arrest was actually a good thing overall: people who normally could care less about this kind of thing are starting to ask questions about the DMCA.
Although it's certainly sleazy, this practice is apparently fairly common in Germany.
Personally, I think it's worth it to Adobe to step in and pay off the lawyers: the geek backlash against them has been bad already. If those lawyers collect their fee, Adobe will be seen as complacent, at best. A mere $2000 can make them seem like a friend to the open source community.
Then again, they just had Dmitry Sklyarov detained by the FBI for breaking Acrobat's encryption, so it's probably too late for their hacker-friendly image..
I don't go making copies of CD's for friends, but if I want to make copies so I don't scratch the heck out of my originals isn't that something I should be allowed to do?
Even though fair use laws allow this, the DMCA disallows circumvention of any copy-protection mechanism, even if the reason for that circumvention is a backup, which is allowed under fair use. So, the DMCA makes it illegal for you to exercise your fair use rights on a copy-protected medium.
Slashdot Mirror
Go to the movies on Sunday, before noon if it's possible. Everybody is either in church or hung over. And don't bother going to see anything until it's been in theaters at least 2 weeks.
Ah, OK. The article suggested that it was just how he *controlled* his home theater. I confess I didn't read his site in-depth, though I did peruse the message boards.
This doesn't affect me after all: I forgot that since I use Kazaa to get rare live tracks, I am a pinko thug bastard who steals everything I want. I don't shop online.
You can get a Philips Pronto IR remote with a color touchscreen for far less than this guy spent on this thing, that would have let him control every IR device in the house. I'm all for hacking for hacking's sake, but no need to reinvent the wheel. Of course, if he just wanted a new PC and the HT control-thing was just an afterthought, then bravo.
This is a lot easier for smaller families, of course, but most people I know have a cellphone these days. If you get rid of your dial-up internet account ($20 per month) and your land-line ($30 a month where I live, that's just for the service, no long distance), you can switch to broadband for little or no added cost. It's $5 more a month for me this way.
Ha! That may be the moral thing to do if you're a record company executive, but I don't think most artists would agree. You could do what I do: if you download an album from your illegal source of choice and like it enough to keep it, send the artist a money order for $5. That's more than they'll see from the CD sale, and you cut out the middleman (the RIAA). Better yet, go see them at a live show, then they'll get their money and you get to show your support.
The phrase 'deep link' is a complete misnomer. If you know the URL for a page, you can get to it in one hop, no matter what the site's designer intended. What if I happen to know how a site structures its pages, and I use that knowledge to go straight to an article? Am I guilty of deep-linking within my own brain?
I think that once a publisher puts a piece of content on the web, they give up the right to control how other people get to it. This ruling completely fails the reality test. Imagine if you bought a magazine and it had a EULA you had to agree to before you read it:
'This publication may only be read in the order proscribed by TimeWarAOLMicro$IBM. Please proceed to the Contents page by way of the advertisements on Pages 1-13. After observing all advertisements for no less than 20 seconds each, you may proceed to the Contents page, and from there to the Article you are interested in. If you do not agree to this License, you may return this magazine for a refund'.
I can hardly wait for this same court to declare the entire Internet in contempt of court.
If there's a browser war, it's between Opera and IE right now. Mozilla 1.0 looks and feels (to me, anyway) just like the most recent versions of Netscape, which are inferior to IE. Maybe once the Moz 1 source gets out there more and people start using it as a platform for more useful browsers, we'll see the flubber fly, but until then I'll stick with Opera. If only I could cruise around without IDing myself as an IE5 surfer...
It was originally designed to balance the rights of the copyright holder against those of the public, and the interests of creating an 'intellectual commons'. If we could just strip away all the BS the content industry has tacked onto copyright law over the years and go back to what we started with, that would be an improvement. Isn't the expiration of copyright now almost as long as it's been since Jefferson died?
Cue the Imperial March, I think the United States is about to pay the price for its lack of vision.
They want to be the ultimate arbiter of information exchange. If they see that role in jeopardy because of falling hardware prices, they will lower their software prices. This is the company that annihilates other companies by giving away what everyone else is selling, they can afford to take less profit on the OS if it means prolonging their monopoly.
I knew that American Revolution would come back and bite us in the ass!
If what we've seen over the past few months are any indication (broadband woes, ridiculous internet laws), Australia's laws won't be too kind to file-sharing. Not that it will matter to P2P users, they can just move on to the newest P2P startup that hasn't been gobbled up yet.
I think the Simpsons is almost as bad now as X-files was when I stopped watching it. Futurama is consistently funnier, and just about all recent Simpsons episodes have failed to make me laugh even once. Fox should keep the ball rolling and start culling the dead weight.
Its up to anyone who does not like the new Napster to take the many free tools that are out there and create something new that is exactly what the public wants.
The public already has what it wants: free music (alright, stolen music) available virtually on-demand. As long as they can still get that, Napster, PressPlay, etc. will fail.
It has become a parody of itself. I understand that the company had to do this to remain in business, but I don't see why this is newsworthy. The new Napster is a poorly-conceived service that is trying to charge money for a product that is *inferior* to what's being *given away for free* by dozens of other services. Can we please stop talking about it already? It's doomed.
Perhaps the next rev of Slashcode will allow users to define their own kill filters for headlines?
When I use mine, I am providing this information on 'Mark Siegel', a person I invented who lives at a fictional address near the grocery store. Whenever anyone asks for any personal info of mine that they are not entitled to, they get fake information. Of course, this wouldn't work for something like this Microsoft TV, because if you are buying the service, they have your name and address already. I suppose we just have to decide whether the service is worth the sacrifice in privacy.
Too late, WinXP Professional Corporate Edition (the version that doesn't need to be activated, ever) has been making the rounds on Usenet since last week.
Metricom couldn't keep Ricochet profitable, but neighborhood wireless is taking off. Maybe information really does want to be free.
Was it that SDMI is dead as a doornail and they therefore know Felten's study can't do any damage to their cash flow, or that the publicity was so bad? I think we can rule out altruism as their motivation...
Rendering a movie at 320 x 240 or 640 x 480 is much easier than rendering it at the resolution and size of a movie theater's screen. If the Quadro was rendering the movie at 100 x 75 pixels, all this doesn't mean much.
The cameras are so ubiquitous in some areas that crime has actually gone down, presumably because the crooks know that the chances are good they are being watched and taped.
I don't live in the UK, most of this is gleaned from watching TLC and Discovery Channel. Any locals care to comment on how video surveillance affects daily life in the UK?
"Actually, according to Russian law, it's sooner adobe's program that is illegal, in that it prevents one from using a bought and paid for product as the purchaser wishes. That's a violation of fair use. Also, at the time a user buys a book in Adobe's format a buyer isn't notified of these restrictions.
I think Sklyarov's arrest was actually a good thing overall: people who normally could care less about this kind of thing are starting to ask questions about the DMCA.
Personally, I think it's worth it to Adobe to step in and pay off the lawyers: the geek backlash against them has been bad already. If those lawyers collect their fee, Adobe will be seen as complacent, at best. A mere $2000 can make them seem like a friend to the open source community.
Then again, they just had Dmitry Sklyarov detained by the FBI for breaking Acrobat's encryption, so it's probably too late for their hacker-friendly image..
Even though fair use laws allow this, the DMCA disallows circumvention of any copy-protection mechanism, even if the reason for that circumvention is a backup, which is allowed under fair use. So, the DMCA makes it illegal for you to exercise your fair use rights on a copy-protected medium.