We in the USA have this wonderful document written by a bunch of people who knew what they were talking about when they created our government. It's over 200 years old and it claims our citizens have something called 'freedom from religion'.
Anybody want to buy it? We're not using it anymore...
- This is where actually DRM-like crap started creeping into DVD standard: MPAA wanted a "cannot skip" flag for particular section of video. Ever tryed to skip that green/red warning? - most DVD players will err with "Not Permitted" message. (In the time, everyone was afraid that cheap retailer might use that for advertisments. Thanks God that didn't happened.)
Doesn't look like anyone replied about this yet,so I hope I'm not about to dupe...
According the official spec (I may be wrong) the "do not skip" flag can only be used for the FBI warning. However, there are DVD manufacturers that use the "do not skip" flag for commercials as well. Disney comes to my mind first, though I do have DVD's (official & store-bought) from other big-name companies that make me sit through 5-10 minutes of ads before they'll let me watch my disc. It's a huge PIA and a great incentive to use my fair-use-protected-rights to make a legally-entitled personal-use-only backup of the disc just to clear the flag when I watch it...
If I remember correctly (after the altzeimers kicks in...), rumor had it the retailers were under pressure to "sell out" of the XBOX 360 and related accessories from Microsoft. MS is a legal monopoly now, so they can get away with unreasonable requirements like that. Anyway, the bundling was probably the only way BB could guarantee selling out the accessories.
And no - I don't think they're really sorry about it. They probably planned the apology weeks ago knowing that accepting returns for parts of the bundle after the inital sale wouldn't be a violation of their agreement to sell all of the accessories in the first place.
Except the RIAA, who very desperately want to keep their pay-per-play model (ie: more money than god redirected to them). That pretty much means they'll spend an obcene amount of money buying a law to make such a project illegal.
Just voicing the Devil's advocate. Personally, I like the suggestion. The only real problem is that it's a sure bet they're going to make the tax too large to satisfy everyone, and there will be a very large contingent of protesters who don't plan on using it at all who will (rightly) be claiming they're being unfairly taxed no matter how much you claim that everyone is equal under this plan. In today's political climate, this will probably need to be privatized (in the US - and probably to a crony of whichever corrupt politician is in power at the time) and introduced as either an "In or Out" option or with a tiered pricing structure. I would be behind this 100% as long as the fee wasn't extortion.
- Or, big companies will get rid of customer service. Would that be any better?
They can't get rid of customer service completely, but you know they all want to. They can, however, make it as hard as possible for you to contact them. Have you tried to find the customer support number on the website of a big company lately? If you have and you found it, I congratulate you. A couple of years ago I would have killed to have the list in TFA just for the 1-800 numbers it contains. I've spent days tracking down some of those phone numbers when I needed them.
They're getting so rare nowadays that I'd be surprised if it's not a scavenger hunt item by now.
The one city in the world where you can buy pirated DVD's on the street from the pirates themselves and they're cracking down on Bittorrent. I guess the p2p was infringing on their local economy...:)
Have you ever bought anything electronic, forgotten (or refused) to send in the warranty card, and then received a recall notice for it in the mail a couple of months later with your serial number on it? I have. Where did they get the info?
Many electronic devices that have serial numbers have a way to distinguish the serial number at the purchase point so it can be tied to the receipt. Some boxes have a cutout showing the sticker on the device directly (Nintendo), while others have a copy of the sticker on the outside of the box (laptops). I wouldn't be surprised if they use RFIDs for this too. Basically, if they really want to track a serial numbered device to the purchaser, there are ways to do it, some of which might not be obvious to the consumer at the time. If there is a deal with the government to track this info for laser printers, then it can be done.
- I've placed service calls on printer purchased directly from the manufacturer(HP) that were still on warrenty and they didn't even show that we owned it, that it was still on warrenty, or where it was located. These were $4000 printers that were purchased 100 at a time.
That's a different animal. Just like insurance companies, most hardware support groups that fill warranty claims would love it if you never filed a claim. Claims cost money, so I'm never surprised when warranty information is "lost" when I call in. They're secretly hoping that I will give up after a while and just pay for service myself before they have to mysteriously "find" the info again. I had one company actually tell me that they have multiple databases containing warranty info, which was morbidly humorous considering the hard time they gave me for almost an hour before some schmuck "remembered" to check the other databases.
Like a Bill Cosby sketch: Why isn't *all* the info in one central location? "I Don't Know!" Why isn't it standard practice to query *all* the databases when looking someone up? "I Don't Know!" Why did it take so long before a whole crew of support people remembered how their own support system is set up well enough to *actually* help me? "I Don't Know!" Why give me a hard time because some trouser stain designed the system badly? "I Don't Know!" Service at its best.
The dot patterns on printouts are indicators of a deal between the government and the manufacturers to track who owns which printers. Burning a CD/DVD with the new info and forwarding it to the FBI every couple of months costs no more than a blank and a stamp. I guarantee part of the deal is to use every scrap of info the manufacturers can get their hands on, from purchasing records at the stores (part of the retail contract, I'm sure) to service calls and warranty cards. Of course the FBI would never dream of abusing the info...
Get it right: Just like the rest of us, congresscritters are supposed to act in the best interest of their own checkbooks.
It just happens to be a mere coincidence that their job titles make them perfect targets of opportunity for rich people/consortiums who want a law passed to help them get richer - regardless of whether this law will help the general populous of this country. "Lobbying" amd "Campaign Contibution" are certainly more elegant terms than "Bribing", but they all mean the exact same thing. Only the term used to describe the activity makes it legal or illegal.
- It'd be fairly difficult, I imagine, for a virus, if it got in, to disable or cripple a hardware Antivirus as opposed to a software one like Norton or McAfee.
The software hole might still exist, as the hardware would need to get new virus updates from somewhere, which would most likely be via a memory flash of some kind. Even trying to lock write access to the chip could be broken just by stealing the code from the updater program itself.
This is simply another case where the solution only inconveniences those that aren't guilty.
Copy Protection: The CD/DVD Pirates don't seem to have any trouble copying them to sell, and a significant portion of the non-pirates can't play their legal, official discs in their legal, official players.
Terrorists on planes: According to reports, the terrorists on 9/11 worked within the system. They posed as airport employees complete with working, valid security cards, and got on the plane anyway, completely avoiding the hassle the rest of the passengers had to endure. The solution after 9/11 was (of course) to increase the hassle for the regular passengers. We have to endure getting a metal detector shoved up our collective *sses while they still get to walk around the security gate.
Now we have terrorists at the border: They will simply find other ways to cross. The illegal immigrants from Mexico don't seem to be getting hassled when they cross, and I'm pretty sure we don't have a 20 foot high electified fence from sea-to-shining-sea guarding the Canadian border. I'd bet they simply walk across the border and leave the border patrols to keep the country safe from the rest of us legal border crossers.
Which would be great if the USA was still a Democracy. As I recently saw in (oddly enough) a cartoon, we're no longer a system of "Checks and Balances", but rather the more one-sided system of "Checks and Mates". We haven't been a Democracy since the politicians decided to stop asking the masses what we wanted and started waiting for people/corporations with large piles of money to come tell them what the masses are supposed to want.
On a related note, this makes me wonder if the whole point is simply to get the fingerprints in a database. The MPAA already thinks we're theives anyway, so they're just eliminating the middle-men (ie: the police) to get their own criminal record created for us.
I call previous art. Kazaa has been useless for several years because half the files out there are hash spoofed - you can't download anything on Kazaa anymore without part of the file being corrupt because of this. When was this patent filed?
Also - most sharing networks have it in their EULA saying that this type of activity will make it ok to ban the server. I say a bunch of them should sue Macrovision under their EULAs and potential DMCA infringement for unlawfully reverse engineering their "encryption" (hash method).
I always laugh when I hear this complaint about the Harry Potter movies. As someone else already pointed out, the characters are aging and the kids will only be a few years older than their characters are by the time Movie 7 comes out. There's a little thing you have to remember when watching a movie: willful suspension of disbelief. It happens all the time - while watching a movie you convince yourself that something you know to be false is believable in an effort to enjoy the experience. Personally, I think it would be much easier to believe the original actors can play 17 year-olds when they're 21 instead of getting different 17 year-old actors who might not look enough like the originals to be believable.
Visually, they can do great things to change appearance of age. Check out the actress that played Moaning Myrtle in Movie 2. I don't think the character's age has ever been said, but she has to be younger than 17, and is probably closer to 14 because she hits on Harry when he was 12/14. How many of you knew the actress was 37 when that movie came out, and will be 40 this year playing the same character in GoF?
- Even DVD's here look the same as the originals - minus the glossy little book inside though.
No glossy little book? It's an unfortunate trend here in the states not to have one in the legit DVD's either, so it's nice to hear that the counterfeiters are doing a great job keeping up.
While I agree with the concept, I differ about the Lego analogy.
Creativity and Lego still go hand in hand, but you need to step back a little from the shelf when shopping to see it. Looking at a Lego car or boat with less than 100 non-brick shaped pieces and saying the creativity is gone is just plain wrong. Step back and look at the other sets next to it and ask your creativity what you can make if you had 5 or 10 different 100-piece car/boat sets to work with. Just because they're not bricks doesn't mean they go together one and only one way.
The Star Wars sets are a prime example. Go get a few different large ship sets and check out the pieces you end up with. There are only a few pieces that are unique to that set, and the vast majority are interchangable between sets and are most likely made of the same colors. With a few of these sets, you now have large piles of many of the basic space-ship building blocks that can be used to make any ship your heart desires - not just the Falcon or a cheesy X-Wing according to the instruction manual.
And before anyone says I missed the point - I know there are pieces that really can't be used for anything except following the instruction manual. These are usually found in those $5.99 sub-50 piece kits that are supposed to represent some movie scene or other. I don't buy those. I'd much rather buy the large ships for the purpose I outlined above. Build the ship for the memory of knowing I built it, then add the pieces into my large rubbermaid bucket (aka, the shipyard) as spare parts for future endeavors. For the odd one-purpose piece that comes in the large sets, there's only two things that can be done. I can either bitch about not being able to use them, or I can view it as a building challenge. Guess which one is more productive?
btw, Lego Jar-Jar's head looks great in that Lego guillotine set...:)
- And rightly so. His First Amendment rights are being violated.
Didn't you hear? The US government has officially declared that the first amendment must have been a "typo". They argue that it would have been easily edited out if they had used a program like Microsoft Word, but it wasn't so easy to edit once they had it down using ink and paper...
Everyone seemed to know these terms during the Netscape/IE antitrust trial just fine. But then the new Regime took over just before the penalty phase and made monopolies legal in every way except in the law books.
We've all pretty much given up on these terms really meaning anything anymore. Microsoft made a mockery of the court during the trial, blew their nose on the judicial system, and were found guilty of anti-competitive behavior. And oh yeah, they got away with it, too.
I vote. I write letters to congress. I would love to be able to do my part, but my letters don't seem to be heavy enough to be opened, if you know what I mean.
This country was founded on Democracy, with a heavy dose of Competition and Commercialism. Our "elected" officials (I say this because our wonderful electoral college system makes it possible to elect the losing candidate) are just like us - always looking for the better deal, and a little bit greedy to boot. When it comes to getting your elected officals to do something, ten million registered voters writing letters simply cannot compete with one (possibly un)registered voter with a $10,000,000 check.
- Despite the corporate personhood implied by Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), corporations have not been allowed to vote or excercize similar rights.
Right. Which is why they simply buy the candidates directly instead. Eliminates the middleman and takes the voters out of the equation.
Slashdot Mirror
We in the USA have this wonderful document written by a bunch of people who knew what they were talking about when they created our government. It's over 200 years old and it claims our citizens have something called 'freedom from religion'.
Anybody want to buy it? We're not using it anymore...
- This is where actually DRM-like crap started creeping into DVD standard: MPAA wanted a "cannot skip" flag for particular section of video. Ever tryed to skip that green/red warning? - most DVD players will err with "Not Permitted" message. (In the time, everyone was afraid that cheap retailer might use that for advertisments. Thanks God that didn't happened.)
Doesn't look like anyone replied about this yet,so I hope I'm not about to dupe...
According the official spec (I may be wrong) the "do not skip" flag can only be used for the FBI warning. However, there are DVD manufacturers that use the "do not skip" flag for commercials as well. Disney comes to my mind first, though I do have DVD's (official & store-bought) from other big-name companies that make me sit through 5-10 minutes of ads before they'll let me watch my disc. It's a huge PIA and a great incentive to use my fair-use-protected-rights to make a legally-entitled personal-use-only backup of the disc just to clear the flag when I watch it...
If I remember correctly (after the altzeimers kicks in...), rumor had it the retailers were under pressure to "sell out" of the XBOX 360 and related accessories from Microsoft. MS is a legal monopoly now, so they can get away with unreasonable requirements like that. Anyway, the bundling was probably the only way BB could guarantee selling out the accessories.
And no - I don't think they're really sorry about it. They probably planned the apology weeks ago knowing that accepting returns for parts of the bundle after the inital sale wouldn't be a violation of their agreement to sell all of the accessories in the first place.
- Everybody wins.
Except the RIAA, who very desperately want to keep their pay-per-play model (ie: more money than god redirected to them). That pretty much means they'll spend an obcene amount of money buying a law to make such a project illegal.
Just voicing the Devil's advocate. Personally, I like the suggestion. The only real problem is that it's a sure bet they're going to make the tax too large to satisfy everyone, and there will be a very large contingent of protesters who don't plan on using it at all who will (rightly) be claiming they're being unfairly taxed no matter how much you claim that everyone is equal under this plan. In today's political climate, this will probably need to be privatized (in the US - and probably to a crony of whichever corrupt politician is in power at the time) and introduced as either an "In or Out" option or with a tiered pricing structure. I would be behind this 100% as long as the fee wasn't extortion.
- 2. Give it a snappy name - words ending in an "x" always sound cool.
:)
I got one! How about Windows-X?
As a bonus, it will give MS the perfect opportunity to sue x-windows into oblivion for having a similar name well before MS took it!!!
- Or, big companies will get rid of customer service. Would that be any better?
They can't get rid of customer service completely, but you know they all want to. They can, however, make it as hard as possible for you to contact them. Have you tried to find the customer support number on the website of a big company lately? If you have and you found it, I congratulate you. A couple of years ago I would have killed to have the list in TFA just for the 1-800 numbers it contains. I've spent days tracking down some of those phone numbers when I needed them.
They're getting so rare nowadays that I'd be surprised if it's not a scavenger hunt item by now.
You don't even need to use a real gun.
That's hilarious.
:)
The one city in the world where you can buy pirated DVD's on the street from the pirates themselves and they're cracking down on Bittorrent. I guess the p2p was infringing on their local economy...
Have you ever bought anything electronic, forgotten (or refused) to send in the warranty card, and then received a recall notice for it in the mail a couple of months later with your serial number on it? I have. Where did they get the info?
Many electronic devices that have serial numbers have a way to distinguish the serial number at the purchase point so it can be tied to the receipt. Some boxes have a cutout showing the sticker on the device directly (Nintendo), while others have a copy of the sticker on the outside of the box (laptops). I wouldn't be surprised if they use RFIDs for this too. Basically, if they really want to track a serial numbered device to the purchaser, there are ways to do it, some of which might not be obvious to the consumer at the time. If there is a deal with the government to track this info for laser printers, then it can be done.
- I've placed service calls on printer purchased directly from the manufacturer(HP) that were still on warrenty and they didn't even show that we owned it, that it was still on warrenty, or where it was located. These were $4000 printers that were purchased 100 at a time.
That's a different animal. Just like insurance companies, most hardware support groups that fill warranty claims would love it if you never filed a claim. Claims cost money, so I'm never surprised when warranty information is "lost" when I call in. They're secretly hoping that I will give up after a while and just pay for service myself before they have to mysteriously "find" the info again. I had one company actually tell me that they have multiple databases containing warranty info, which was morbidly humorous considering the hard time they gave me for almost an hour before some schmuck "remembered" to check the other databases.
Like a Bill Cosby sketch: Why isn't *all* the info in one central location? "I Don't Know!" Why isn't it standard practice to query *all* the databases when looking someone up? "I Don't Know!" Why did it take so long before a whole crew of support people remembered how their own support system is set up well enough to *actually* help me? "I Don't Know!" Why give me a hard time because some trouser stain designed the system badly? "I Don't Know!" Service at its best.
The dot patterns on printouts are indicators of a deal between the government and the manufacturers to track who owns which printers. Burning a CD/DVD with the new info and forwarding it to the FBI every couple of months costs no more than a blank and a stamp. I guarantee part of the deal is to use every scrap of info the manufacturers can get their hands on, from purchasing records at the stores (part of the retail contract, I'm sure) to service calls and warranty cards. Of course the FBI would never dream of abusing the info...
Get it right: Just like the rest of us, congresscritters are supposed to act in the best interest of their own checkbooks.
It just happens to be a mere coincidence that their job titles make them perfect targets of opportunity for rich people/consortiums who want a law passed to help them get richer - regardless of whether this law will help the general populous of this country. "Lobbying" amd "Campaign Contibution" are certainly more elegant terms than "Bribing", but they all mean the exact same thing. Only the term used to describe the activity makes it legal or illegal.
- It'd be fairly difficult, I imagine, for a virus, if it got in, to disable or cripple a hardware Antivirus as opposed to a software one like Norton or McAfee.
The software hole might still exist, as the hardware would need to get new virus updates from somewhere, which would most likely be via a memory flash of some kind. Even trying to lock write access to the chip could be broken just by stealing the code from the updater program itself.
This is simply another case where the solution only inconveniences those that aren't guilty.
Copy Protection: The CD/DVD Pirates don't seem to have any trouble copying them to sell, and a significant portion of the non-pirates can't play their legal, official discs in their legal, official players.
Terrorists on planes: According to reports, the terrorists on 9/11 worked within the system. They posed as airport employees complete with working, valid security cards, and got on the plane anyway, completely avoiding the hassle the rest of the passengers had to endure. The solution after 9/11 was (of course) to increase the hassle for the regular passengers. We have to endure getting a metal detector shoved up our collective *sses while they still get to walk around the security gate.
Now we have terrorists at the border: They will simply find other ways to cross. The illegal immigrants from Mexico don't seem to be getting hassled when they cross, and I'm pretty sure we don't have a 20 foot high electified fence from sea-to-shining-sea guarding the Canadian border. I'd bet they simply walk across the border and leave the border patrols to keep the country safe from the rest of us legal border crossers.
- Democracy would fix this just fine.
Which would be great if the USA was still a Democracy. As I recently saw in (oddly enough) a cartoon, we're no longer a system of "Checks and Balances", but rather the more one-sided system of "Checks and Mates". We haven't been a Democracy since the politicians decided to stop asking the masses what we wanted and started waiting for people/corporations with large piles of money to come tell them what the masses are supposed to want.
On a related note, this makes me wonder if the whole point is simply to get the fingerprints in a database. The MPAA already thinks we're theives anyway, so they're just eliminating the middle-men (ie: the police) to get their own criminal record created for us.
- kevin smith
Figures, the one time I find a reply truly worth modding up, and my points expired yesterday...
I call previous art. Kazaa has been useless for several years because half the files out there are hash spoofed - you can't download anything on Kazaa anymore without part of the file being corrupt because of this. When was this patent filed?
Also - most sharing networks have it in their EULA saying that this type of activity will make it ok to ban the server. I say a bunch of them should sue Macrovision under their EULAs and potential DMCA infringement for unlawfully reverse engineering their "encryption" (hash method).
I always laugh when I hear this complaint about the Harry Potter movies. As someone else already pointed out, the characters are aging and the kids will only be a few years older than their characters are by the time Movie 7 comes out. There's a little thing you have to remember when watching a movie: willful suspension of disbelief. It happens all the time - while watching a movie you convince yourself that something you know to be false is believable in an effort to enjoy the experience. Personally, I think it would be much easier to believe the original actors can play 17 year-olds when they're 21 instead of getting different 17 year-old actors who might not look enough like the originals to be believable.
Visually, they can do great things to change appearance of age. Check out the actress that played Moaning Myrtle in Movie 2. I don't think the character's age has ever been said, but she has to be younger than 17, and is probably closer to 14 because she hits on Harry when he was 12/14. How many of you knew the actress was 37 when that movie came out, and will be 40 this year playing the same character in GoF?
- Even DVD's here look the same as the originals - minus the glossy little book inside though.
No glossy little book? It's an unfortunate trend here in the states not to have one in the legit DVD's either, so it's nice to hear that the counterfeiters are doing a great job keeping up.
While I agree with the concept, I differ about the Lego analogy.
:)
Creativity and Lego still go hand in hand, but you need to step back a little from the shelf when shopping to see it. Looking at a Lego car or boat with less than 100 non-brick shaped pieces and saying the creativity is gone is just plain wrong. Step back and look at the other sets next to it and ask your creativity what you can make if you had 5 or 10 different 100-piece car/boat sets to work with. Just because they're not bricks doesn't mean they go together one and only one way.
The Star Wars sets are a prime example. Go get a few different large ship sets and check out the pieces you end up with. There are only a few pieces that are unique to that set, and the vast majority are interchangable between sets and are most likely made of the same colors. With a few of these sets, you now have large piles of many of the basic space-ship building blocks that can be used to make any ship your heart desires - not just the Falcon or a cheesy X-Wing according to the instruction manual.
And before anyone says I missed the point - I know there are pieces that really can't be used for anything except following the instruction manual. These are usually found in those $5.99 sub-50 piece kits that are supposed to represent some movie scene or other. I don't buy those. I'd much rather buy the large ships for the purpose I outlined above. Build the ship for the memory of knowing I built it, then add the pieces into my large rubbermaid bucket (aka, the shipyard) as spare parts for future endeavors. For the odd one-purpose piece that comes in the large sets, there's only two things that can be done. I can either bitch about not being able to use them, or I can view it as a building challenge. Guess which one is more productive?
btw, Lego Jar-Jar's head looks great in that Lego guillotine set...
- And rightly so. His First Amendment rights are being violated.
Didn't you hear? The US government has officially declared that the first amendment must have been a "typo". They argue that it would have been easily edited out if they had used a program like Microsoft Word, but it wasn't so easy to edit once they had it down using ink and paper...
Everyone seemed to know these terms during the Netscape/IE antitrust trial just fine. But then the new Regime took over just before the penalty phase and made monopolies legal in every way except in the law books.
We've all pretty much given up on these terms really meaning anything anymore. Microsoft made a mockery of the court during the trial, blew their nose on the judicial system, and were found guilty of anti-competitive behavior. And oh yeah, they got away with it, too.
I vote. I write letters to congress. I would love to be able to do my part, but my letters don't seem to be heavy enough to be opened, if you know what I mean.
This country was founded on Democracy, with a heavy dose of Competition and Commercialism. Our "elected" officials (I say this because our wonderful electoral college system makes it possible to elect the losing candidate) are just like us - always looking for the better deal, and a little bit greedy to boot. When it comes to getting your elected officals to do something, ten million registered voters writing letters simply cannot compete with one (possibly un)registered voter with a $10,000,000 check.
Welcome to the new U$A.
...is that they'll have already downloaded and seen the movie before the premier.
:)
The MPAA would frown on them admitting it to the press, so you won't find this in any article about them.
- Despite the corporate personhood implied by Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), corporations have not been allowed to vote or excercize similar rights.
Right. Which is why they simply buy the candidates directly instead. Eliminates the middleman and takes the voters out of the equation.