Hoo boy. Here we go again. When are you kids going to get it straight?
- Choosing not to listen to somebody is *not* censorship. - Throwing your mail away before you open it is *not* censorship. - Choosing not to relay somebody's spam is *not* censorship. - Choosing not to broadcast somebody's TV program, even if you own a TV network, is *not* censorship. - Telling a movie producer you won't distribute his/her movie unless he/she makes cuts or changes to the subject matter is *not* censorship. - Rallying your church group together to burn books is *not* censorship. - Refusing to sell certain magazines or newspapers, if you own a newsstand, is *not* censorship.
The only way somebody can be truly "censored" is when there is no legal means for that person to get his/her speech/art/etc. produced and disseminated to the pubic. Generally speaking, the only body with that type of power is the government -- because they make the laws.
Everything else is merely an inconvenience. It may piss you off, sure, and you may wish things were different. But you can't force people to support you, encourage you, or fund you if they just don't want to. For example, people in this country (the US) *do* have a right to decide what material constitutes pornography, relative to their local community standards -- and if you don't like it, you are within your rights to move to another town.
"No censorship" does not mean being forced to look at every piece of crap that somebody wants to throw in your face, and god help us if it did.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that the CCS encytion is there to keep pirates from copying the DVD. You can copy a protected DVD till the cows come home without even worrying about the encryption. The point of it is to sew up the *hardware* side of the business model.
Eh? That's not quite true, in my understanding of it. Or at least, *technically* it's possible to do a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD and have everything, encryption and all -- but I don't know any software that will actually let you do that.
For instance, if you create a disc image of a DVD on your Apple Mac using Roxio Toast, the operation will complete. You will have successfully saved an image of that DVD to your drive. You can open the image and see all the appropriate TS_VIDEO folders etc. But the DVD Player application won't play it.
Ah, but if you fire up DVDExtractor 0.9 on the Mac, and save the image after running it through DeCSS -- *THEN* it will play.
It's not that I'm all that fond of x86, I just love the example that they are setting here. They make an executive decision, there is a public uproar, and they stop and reconsider.
Are you listening, Microsoft? It's easier than you think to make us happy.
It's not so much that we want fair, reasonable business practices based on sound market economics. What we want is MOB RULE!
I think my hard figures demonstrate how absurd that claim is. It does not follow that simply because a copy is available for free that sales will therefore be hurt. In fact, they are more likely to be helped, for the simple reason that free copies-call them "samplers," if you will-are often the necessary inducement to convince people to buy something.
I'm pretty skeptical that the figures he's citing -- "hard" though they may be -- actually prove anything about whether giving away books for free results in better sales.
On the one hand, his most convincing point is that "certainly giving books away hasn't hurt my sales any, even if it hasn't helped them." But he can't actually say that, can he? Maybe the increase in sales he noticed late in term is a result of exactly what he suggests elsewhere in his essay -- the fact that he's gained more publicity as a writer since the book first came out. In that case, isn't it entirely possible that his sales would have gone up even more if he hadn't given away free copies to a portion of his potential readers?
"But wait," you argue, "the reason he gained publicity is because he was giving the books away." But again, that's not going to be true for everyone, is it? Once every single author in existence is giving away books for free, we'll be at exactly the point we're at now, where the only people who get publicity are the ones who pay for it -- in terms of advertising, book tours, public speaking gigs, what-have-you.
This guy likes giving away books? Fine. He says it hasn't hurt him any. Fine. But his evidence isn't all that empirical. All he can really say is that even though he's giving books away, he's been satisfied with the sales he's gotten.
What's more, he could say the same if he was sending out promo copies of the dead tree version. This doesn't really say much at all about the glorious future of Internet-delivered media, from where I sit. It's just a cute experiment that one guy did. I'd like to see it reproduced by someone else -- maybe a few someones -- before really take any of it seriously.
I haven't looked at the online version, but I'm looking at a print copy right now, so maybe mine is more readable than yours. Scan down the list and peer through that translucent dock menu, though. Yep, that's right... the next highest CPU usage is the Dock itself! Higher than top, even! Heh. I love my Mac...
Oh and while we're at it, let's open another can o' worms: When Star Wars was first released to theaters, it wasn't labeled Episode IV. It was just called Star Wars, plain and simple. It wasn't until it was re-released shortly before The Empire Strikes Back came out that they started using the goofy episode-numbering system.
As an aside, I didn't get all of the rebates you mentioned. As an existing Sprint PCS customer, I wasn't eligible for the $70 rebate that was given out to new customers when they sign up for the service -- despite the fact that they made me sign a one-year contract when I upgraded my service to include data access. That's right... you read that correctly... *BECAUSE* I was an existing customer who had been using Sprint for about four years, I had to pay more. Still, my total price was $150, which is a pretty damn good deal for replacing both my 4-year-old mobile phone and my five-year old PalmPilot Pro at the same time.
Anyway, so far I've found the Kyocera to be really admirably designed. Just about everything works the way it should, though it took me a while to figure out how to paste phone numbers into the Dialer application (you highlight the number and then immediately hit the Phone shaped button that replaces the Calculator button on this model).
One great thing about this Palm/Phone combo is that it has a real keypad for dialing... a much better solution for making phone calls in the dark than a backlight, IMHO.
Thankfully, most DVD titles are actually set at a reasonable enough price point that ripping the data and recompressing it to fit on a single-layer disc probably just isn't a cost-effective solution, in terms of just how long it actually takes to do that.
On the other hand, while it's true that many commercially available DVDs use DVD-9 format (more and more all the time, it seems), not all of them do. Even fairly recent releases are still on single-layer discs. "Legally Blonde," for instance, ships on a double-sided, single-layer carrier, as does "Breaking Away." Most TV shows are only going to use single-layer discs. (One oddball exception being the final disc of "The Prisoner" box set, which is double-layer while all the rest are single-layer.)
Also, don't like the fact that "Goodfellas" still ships on a double-sided "flipper" disc instead of a remastered Special Edition? No problem -- steal the damn thing! It's obviously a single layer disc, so with a little DeCSS you should have no problem voting with your dollars.
Yeah, OK, free speech is nice... free beer is nice... but come on, a single-user license for iSilo is $17.50! Pay for it, already.
Even if you're not that concerned with downloading Web pages to your Palm, it makes for a great alternative to first-generation Doc readers. Unlike those, it can do text formatting (justification, italics, bold, header-sized fonts, images, etc.) and its files compress down to smaller sizes than Doc format.
What makes this all totally insane is that Internet file sharing is not necessarily the foe of copyright holders. True, the ease of making and distributing digital files will always present a challenge for the labels and studios. But it's also a potential gold mine: an instant, ultra-low-cost delivery system and a targeted marketing vehicle. No outlaw service can ever provide consumers with the deep libraries at guaranteed high quality that content owners can deliver. And if media companies adopted a perfectly feasible system of "digital-rights management" that allowed music fans to make a few copies for personal use, most people wouldn't bother to do the pirate thing.
Sorry, but I don't really see this guy saying anything that hasn't been said a dozen times. In the words of one of my favorite enemies of Fair Use: "I can see your lips moving, but you ain't saing a M-F thing." What's this "perfectly feasible system of digital rights management" he talks about? Cuz nobody in the DRM industry has ever shown me one. There's a lot of movement toward such a system, but nobody has actually managed to come up with an effective one yet.
So here's Mr. Levy being bothered by the SSSCA, which could allow the intellectual property industry to force consumer electronics manufacturers to include copy prevention technology in their products. And yet he still chooses the cop-out of saying that digital downloads aren't bad because somebody could come up with a "feasible" DRM system. Hello -- am I the only one who sees the contradiction? Move along, folks, nothing to see here...
Nice troll -- though you seem to have proved my point more than argued against it. Allow me to quote from the site you linked:
I store all my applications (both Classic and OSX) in a different partition. I just find it neat. There is a bug in Apple's Installer, though. It assumes all applications are kept in the original location. For example, if you move Mail.app to a folder named "Internet", update 10.1 fails to search for the moved file and create a Mail.app folder in the original location with the modified components. It's up to you to copy over the changed files into the old Mail.app. Annoying, indeed.
Go, Apple!
And BTW, I don't mean to insult you by being blunt, but something is wrong if you partition a drive and then can't mount the partitions.
Maybe the problem is that the Apple-proscribed way of managing your OS is stupid?
On the one hand, Apple brags about how its OS is based on BSD. On the other hand, Apple software (from the OS itself on down to the supremely moronic iPhoto) encourages -- nay, all but demands that you format your entire 60 GB drive as a single partition for all your application files, libraries, developer tools, logs, etc., etc.
I ask you... what legitimate BSD administrator ever worked that way?
Don't get me wrong. My primary home computer is a Mac, I use it nearly every day, and my primary OS on that computer is Mac OS X. But I, like the author of this article, continue to spend a great deal of time trying to fight the OS to work the way I want to work -- or at least, trying to get the OS to stop fighting back. And I don't know why I have to do that, because from where I sit, Apple's way of doing things isn't right. Mine is.
...is that the ads on Slashdot are actually far less intrusive than those on other sites. They don't pop up extra windows in your face, they don't play dancing Flash movies. What's more, they actually do tend to be fairly well targeted toward Slashdot's reading audience.
Thus, I find that I actually... >gulp<... use the ad banners on Slashdot as a resource to find out what products and services are being marketed to Slashdot's audience. Particularly I'm interested in seeing what companies see that audience as being a valuable market segment, and how they're tailoring their promotions or corporate strategies to suit that segment.
The greedier the industry gets, the better it is for the artists and the public in general, simply because it will eventually reach the point where everybody (and, hopefully, Metallica too) will just want to bypass them.
Metallica, Metallica, Metallica. Always it's back to Metallica. You MFs trying to act like you forgot about Dre?
MOSIX/Beowulf cluster troll.
on
OpenMosix
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· Score: 2
[*] yes, the disk *is* encoded differently, but most players can convert on the fly, so you'll usually never notice unless you get a cheapo player (more likely in the US that you get one that doesn't support PAL than the reverse in Europe)
Forgive my skepticism, but it seems pretty unlikely that a DVD player sold anywhere is going to go to the extra expense to allow conversion from a TV format that doesn't exist in the region it's sold in. (Region coding, remember?)
Somewhat off-topic: My mom's husband worked for UPS for many years, and he still follows their business (he should, he has plenty of stock). I remember him being particularly miffed when the USPS inked a deal with FedEx to be their "preferred overnight delivery provider" -- in other words, you could go in to a post office and request an overnight package, and you would get it send by FedEx. Talk about favoring one corporation over another! I don't think UPS was ever given the opportunity to bid, though I could be wrong.
She protested, saying it was legit because she'd paid 5 dollars for it on her travels in Malaysia.
This is a great example of the wackiness of intellectual property law as it applies to software, in the eyes of most consumers. Because, for just about anything else except software, she'd be right!
For example, yes, it is illegal to make pirated CDs of Britney Spears albums. But it's not illegal to buy one in Malaysia, or to own one in the United States! It's not even illegal to play one in a CD player!
The software manufacturers have pulled an amazing fast one on all of us, by somehow creating a whole new set of rules to apply to their products. You can bet every other intellectual property-owning corporate entity in the world will stop at nothing until they can follow suit.
The real reason N*Sync's cameo was dropped was because Natalie Portman can't keep up with the dance steps.
Not with hot grits down her pants, anyway.
Re:same DVD-General drive?
on
New iMac Announced
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· Score: 5, Informative
I'm not sure what this post was supposed to mean. The Apple DVD-R drive does everything a CD-R burner can. In fact, it is a CD-R burner, with the additional ability of being able to write to DVD-R media.
The "SuperDrive" is not an Authoring burner, no. Those still cost, last I checked, at least $1,000 more than a General class drive, and probably wouldn't be appropriate for a consumer machine anyway. Their primary market is the professional video production industry.
As far as I can tell, the only thing you're really criticizing the DVD-R drive for is that it doesn't let you use CSS encryption on your own discs. If you're against industry copy protection to begin with, then why on earth do you see that as a problem?
And BTW, yes -- if you use DeCSS-derived software on a Mac, you can make copies of commercial DVDs. The only constraint is that the data contained on the original disc must fit within the capacity of DVD-R media, which is not yet as sophisticated as pressed DVDs. Both Authoring and General DVD-R media can only hold 4.7GB of data, which is half the size of a mass-produced, double-layer DVD disc -- the format that most commercial DVDs seem to be shipping on these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Hoo boy. Here we go again. When are you kids going to get it straight?
- Choosing not to listen to somebody is *not* censorship.
- Throwing your mail away before you open it is *not* censorship.
- Choosing not to relay somebody's spam is *not* censorship.
- Choosing not to broadcast somebody's TV program, even if you own a TV network, is *not* censorship.
- Telling a movie producer you won't distribute his/her movie unless he/she makes cuts or changes to the subject matter is *not* censorship.
- Rallying your church group together to burn books is *not* censorship.
- Refusing to sell certain magazines or newspapers, if you own a newsstand, is *not* censorship.
The only way somebody can be truly "censored" is when there is no legal means for that person to get his/her speech/art/etc. produced and disseminated to the pubic. Generally speaking, the only body with that type of power is the government -- because they make the laws.
Everything else is merely an inconvenience. It may piss you off, sure, and you may wish things were different. But you can't force people to support you, encourage you, or fund you if they just don't want to. For example, people in this country (the US) *do* have a right to decide what material constitutes pornography, relative to their local community standards -- and if you don't like it, you are within your rights to move to another town.
"No censorship" does not mean being forced to look at every piece of crap that somebody wants to throw in your face, and god help us if it did.
For instance, if you create a disc image of a DVD on your Apple Mac using Roxio Toast, the operation will complete. You will have successfully saved an image of that DVD to your drive. You can open the image and see all the appropriate TS_VIDEO folders etc. But the DVD Player application won't play it.
Ah, but if you fire up DVDExtractor 0.9 on the Mac, and save the image after running it through DeCSS -- *THEN* it will play.
So you tell me. Is it just hardware licensing?
It's not so much that we want fair, reasonable business practices based on sound market economics. What we want is MOB RULE!
Leave Parker Brothers out of this!
For a minute there, I thought you were going to share an anecdote about the "Free Wife" site you'd set up...
On the one hand, his most convincing point is that "certainly giving books away hasn't hurt my sales any, even if it hasn't helped them." But he can't actually say that, can he? Maybe the increase in sales he noticed late in term is a result of exactly what he suggests elsewhere in his essay -- the fact that he's gained more publicity as a writer since the book first came out. In that case, isn't it entirely possible that his sales would have gone up even more if he hadn't given away free copies to a portion of his potential readers?
"But wait," you argue, "the reason he gained publicity is because he was giving the books away." But again, that's not going to be true for everyone, is it? Once every single author in existence is giving away books for free, we'll be at exactly the point we're at now, where the only people who get publicity are the ones who pay for it -- in terms of advertising, book tours, public speaking gigs, what-have-you.
This guy likes giving away books? Fine. He says it hasn't hurt him any. Fine. But his evidence isn't all that empirical. All he can really say is that even though he's giving books away, he's been satisfied with the sales he's gotten.
What's more, he could say the same if he was sending out promo copies of the dead tree version. This doesn't really say much at all about the glorious future of Internet-delivered media, from where I sit. It's just a cute experiment that one guy did. I'd like to see it reproduced by someone else -- maybe a few someones -- before really take any of it seriously.
I haven't looked at the online version, but I'm looking at a print copy right now, so maybe mine is more readable than yours. Scan down the list and peer through that translucent dock menu, though. Yep, that's right ... the next highest CPU usage is the Dock itself! Higher than top, even! Heh. I love my Mac...
Oh and while we're at it, let's open another can o' worms: When Star Wars was first released to theaters, it wasn't labeled Episode IV. It was just called Star Wars, plain and simple. It wasn't until it was re-released shortly before The Empire Strikes Back came out that they started using the goofy episode-numbering system.
Yes, you can. In fact, the Kyocera even includes a built-in speakerphone function, which supports voice-activated call answering.
I have one of these and I think it's great.
... you read that correctly ... *BECAUSE* I was an existing customer who had been using Sprint for about four years, I had to pay more. Still, my total price was $150, which is a pretty damn good deal for replacing both my 4-year-old mobile phone and my five-year old PalmPilot Pro at the same time.
As an aside, I didn't get all of the rebates you mentioned. As an existing Sprint PCS customer, I wasn't eligible for the $70 rebate that was given out to new customers when they sign up for the service -- despite the fact that they made me sign a one-year contract when I upgraded my service to include data access. That's right
Anyway, so far I've found the Kyocera to be really admirably designed. Just about everything works the way it should, though it took me a while to figure out how to paste phone numbers into the Dialer application (you highlight the number and then immediately hit the Phone shaped button that replaces the Calculator button on this model).
One great thing about this Palm/Phone combo is that it has a real keypad for dialing... a much better solution for making phone calls in the dark than a backlight, IMHO.
Thankfully, most DVD titles are actually set at a reasonable enough price point that ripping the data and recompressing it to fit on a single-layer disc probably just isn't a cost-effective solution, in terms of just how long it actually takes to do that.
On the other hand, while it's true that many commercially available DVDs use DVD-9 format (more and more all the time, it seems), not all of them do. Even fairly recent releases are still on single-layer discs. "Legally Blonde," for instance, ships on a double-sided, single-layer carrier, as does "Breaking Away." Most TV shows are only going to use single-layer discs. (One oddball exception being the final disc of "The Prisoner" box set, which is double-layer while all the rest are single-layer.)
Also, don't like the fact that "Goodfellas" still ships on a double-sided "flipper" disc instead of a remastered Special Edition? No problem -- steal the damn thing! It's obviously a single layer disc, so with a little DeCSS you should have no problem voting with your dollars.
Yeah, OK, free speech is nice... free beer is nice... but come on, a single-user license for iSilo is $17.50! Pay for it, already.
Even if you're not that concerned with downloading Web pages to your Palm, it makes for a great alternative to first-generation Doc readers. Unlike those, it can do text formatting (justification, italics, bold, header-sized fonts, images, etc.) and its files compress down to smaller sizes than Doc format.
So here's Mr. Levy being bothered by the SSSCA, which could allow the intellectual property industry to force consumer electronics manufacturers to include copy prevention technology in their products. And yet he still chooses the cop-out of saying that digital downloads aren't bad because somebody could come up with a "feasible" DRM system. Hello -- am I the only one who sees the contradiction? Move along, folks, nothing to see here...
And BTW, I don't mean to insult you by being blunt, but something is wrong if you partition a drive and then can't mount the partitions.
On the one hand, Apple brags about how its OS is based on BSD. On the other hand, Apple software (from the OS itself on down to the supremely moronic iPhoto) encourages -- nay, all but demands that you format your entire 60 GB drive as a single partition for all your application files, libraries, developer tools, logs, etc., etc.
I ask you ... what legitimate BSD administrator ever worked that way?
Don't get me wrong. My primary home computer is a Mac, I use it nearly every day, and my primary OS on that computer is Mac OS X. But I, like the author of this article, continue to spend a great deal of time trying to fight the OS to work the way I want to work -- or at least, trying to get the OS to stop fighting back. And I don't know why I have to do that, because from where I sit, Apple's way of doing things isn't right. Mine is.
Thus, I find that I actually ... >gulp< ... use the ad banners on Slashdot as a resource to find out what products and services are being marketed to Slashdot's audience. Particularly I'm interested in seeing what companies see that audience as being a valuable market segment, and how they're tailoring their promotions or corporate strategies to suit that segment.
Browse at a 1 Threshhold and you shouldn't see the trolls that cause this problem.
Insert here.
Somewhat off-topic: My mom's husband worked for UPS for many years, and he still follows their business (he should, he has plenty of stock). I remember him being particularly miffed when the USPS inked a deal with FedEx to be their "preferred overnight delivery provider" -- in other words, you could go in to a post office and request an overnight package, and you would get it send by FedEx. Talk about favoring one corporation over another! I don't think UPS was ever given the opportunity to bid, though I could be wrong.
This is a great example of the wackiness of intellectual property law as it applies to software, in the eyes of most consumers. Because, for just about anything else except software, she'd be right!
For example, yes, it is illegal to make pirated CDs of Britney Spears albums. But it's not illegal to buy one in Malaysia, or to own one in the United States! It's not even illegal to play one in a CD player!
The software manufacturers have pulled an amazing fast one on all of us, by somehow creating a whole new set of rules to apply to their products. You can bet every other intellectual property-owning corporate entity in the world will stop at nothing until they can follow suit.
The "SuperDrive" is not an Authoring burner, no. Those still cost, last I checked, at least $1,000 more than a General class drive, and probably wouldn't be appropriate for a consumer machine anyway. Their primary market is the professional video production industry.
As far as I can tell, the only thing you're really criticizing the DVD-R drive for is that it doesn't let you use CSS encryption on your own discs. If you're against industry copy protection to begin with, then why on earth do you see that as a problem?
And BTW, yes -- if you use DeCSS-derived software on a Mac, you can make copies of commercial DVDs. The only constraint is that the data contained on the original disc must fit within the capacity of DVD-R media, which is not yet as sophisticated as pressed DVDs. Both Authoring and General DVD-R media can only hold 4.7GB of data, which is half the size of a mass-produced, double-layer DVD disc -- the format that most commercial DVDs seem to be shipping on these days.