What does this mean for my plans to start the church of DeCSS?
By being a religion DeCSS would be almost immune to law, and Church of DeCSS could even use the twisted copyright laws to it's advantage, same way as those whacko scientologists used to do it.
Anybody ready to join the congregation?
( I don't really have such a plan, but it's a sweet idea, that would be really fun to see played out in court.)
I remember back in early 90's when the growing number of AOLers started to flood USENET. Suddenly hoards of hyperactive monkeys were posting lame comments. Most of them were just shouting in to the woods to see if there was an echo.
An international community that had over many years fine-tuned the etiquette of USENET was outraged by these barbarian hordes.
Eventually the retards at AOL figured out how to make a web gateway from their proprietary network to the internet, and most of the monkeys disappeared, but USENET never recovered to it's old glory. The monkeys were gone, but instead the thigh cream industry, the pyramid schemes, and web porn sites was making up the bulk of the USENET postings.
MS: it's exactly the type of discussion Craig was hoping to foster
So, they're saying is "Craig was only trolling, and you guys ate the bait", but what is stuck in the grey unwashed masses' memory is some unspecified feeling that there is something fishy with free software licences.
Anyways I don't care. I don't give a damm what other people run on their computers anymore. Linux works well enough for me. I won't force the other suckers to get off MS-products, it's their loss. But they better not step on my toes.
If such weapons are used in a war, generals and leaders cruel or desperate enough won't care about any "bugs". Friendly fire has always happened, and casualties on your own side is something that has always been accepted by warhawks all over the world. As long as it kills more of their guys than our guys, they think it's a success.
Completely off-topic: Did yo know thar "Mother's day" was started in the 19th century, as a demonstration against war? Now over 100 years later, with more wars going on than ever, it's just a tool to sell Hallmark cards and cakes?
You bring up good points, since you've noticed that there are more than one side to this.
The kid. He might have had other problems than just the fear of going to jail. If he was 13 years old, and a bright kid, he probably knew that jail was not an option. But it is easy to think in circles, and extrapolate a minor thing until it looks really bad, and at some point you lose touch with reality. Suicide can be a very selfish thing to do, and it could have been aimed at the school. "I'll kill myself, then they'll be sorry"
The parents. The kid obviously had a very busy schedule, and he might have been under some pressure to succeed in everything. So when everything blows up like that, he thought there was no more hope for the future.
The school - Talking about jail to 13 year old for a small crime is a bit drastic. If the kid does not buy it, the threats look empty and the kid loses respect for the inspector. If he buys into it, it _could_ lead him to a better life, or to more drastic actions.
At least long enough so that he had to go back on his resolve not to cut and shave till it was finished. According to the weblog, he got rid of his beard in 2000, beacuse he looked like a terrorist, but he kept the hair.
This happens other places too. Have you tried to
get a copy of an ISO document lately? It's stupid, but
you have to pay 100's of bucks (or swiss francs)
to get a copy of ISO standards.
It is only lately that laws have been made available to the common man.
If you try to find out about trade regulations and stuff, you will need to read a few truckloads of stuff.
For example, in Norway, we had this volunteer project going, where we tried to collect all of Norwegian law online. We had too weed out footnotes that had been added by the publisher of the law books, since those were the intellectual property of the publisher. We did not trust that the publisher would not stop the project, so the homepage was moved to Switzerland.
It was easy to hold us accountable for what we did. However, it should have been the government's duty to make this information available. We shouldn't have had to act as vigilantes to make this information available. It is much harder to hold a government accountable, or force them to do something in a timely fashion. It is written in the law, that the law must be made available to all citizens, but the law fails to mention how that should be done. (Sure, it's available. Just visit the national archives, and you can peruse the documents. We're not stopping you.). The law does state, that not knowing about a law is not a valid excuse for breaking the law.
The common man must use his own common sense to try and keep his nose clean; laws are just to unwieldy to make any sense. But common sense is not enough. How many times have you said "There's gotta be some law agaist that". Or "Is that the law? who thinks up this shit?"
Common sense works great if the law was based on that. But it is not. Law is decided by politicians, who openly receive bribes (or campaign contributions as they call it). Both republican and democrats are prostitutes in this area. Do you really think there will be a campaign reform anytime soon? Forget it. Both parties get too much money, and they would not be so stupid that they would bite off the hand that feeds them . However, they should remember that they are in office toserve the public.
And the winner is... "pretty much anything except Windows{9{5|8}}|2000|Me|...". Linux, openbsd, *nix, and others do not need to be foolproof, because their user base is not certified morons. Windows however needs to be 100% secure, to get decent security.
Amen that. A few months ago I was installing a second IDE drive (Maxtor,15G) in a Sun workstation, and I thought for a while that I must have done something wrong. I could not hear any chugging or spinning, and when I put my hand on it I could feel no vibrations, so I assumed I had damaged the drive. But from the software side of things, the drive looked just fine. It's not that long ago, that standing in front of a disk array booting up, was almost like sticking your head into a jet engine.
Apropos Casettes, while we are cruising on memory lane: I remember back when I was a pimple face and the prowd owner of a 48K ZK Spectrum from Sinclair, back in 1984 or so.
The storage medium was casette, and you could save or load files by recording to or playing back from any tape recorder.
The cool thing was that I could exchange programs with a buddy of mine over the telephone, by cracking open the handset and attaching the speaker/mic wires to the appropriate Spectrum wires. I'd hit Save, my friend hit Load, and in 5 minutes or less we could transfer up to 48K. I had never heard about a modem, BBS,
internet, datacomm or anything like that. Seems pretty lame now, but back then I thought we were very clever.
In some countries, such sloppy keeping of sensitive personal data is illegal and a serious offense. I know US law is much weaker than EU laws on this, but how weak is it?
Could you have reported these customers to some government or state agency? That would definitely be the thing to do if the deal was already lost and you took the customer on their word, and acted as a sore loser. At least revenge is sweeter than nothing.
What would be really fun, would be submitting material to the court, using some lame encryption.
Offer the court some homemade device, for a stiff price, and inform the court that it would be a violation of the '98 copyright act to try to circumvent this copyright protection using any otehr device.
After all it _is_ the intellectual property of the author, and the author has the same right to protect her intellectual property as RIAA.
Then the judges may get some perspective on "fair use".
Too bad you were not lucky with your install. Debian is the easiest distribution I ever tried to install. The claim that a chicken could do it by pecking on the enter key is true.
The boot floppy automatically discovered the network card, set up the ip adress through dhcp, and retrieved the os over the network. Amazing.
And adding new packages to the system is _so_ easy. All you have to do is fire up dselect, search for the software you want, type '+', and hit enter a couple of times.
Debion's strong side is ease of install, and good security, conservative releases. The problem is that it is a bit more complicated trying to run the latest and greatest HW and software.
this is quite an achievement. If you remember, Linus Thorvalds made Linux based on Minix, which was an operating system built by A. Tannenbaum. In my OS class, back in 1988, we used AST's book, "Operating Systems", which came with the fully functional OS with source, on floppies. So if Linus is God, at least Kurt deserves to be part of the Pantheon.
Slashdot Mirror
By being a religion DeCSS would be almost immune to law, and Church of DeCSS could even use the twisted copyright laws to it's advantage, same way as those whacko scientologists used to do it.
Anybody ready to join the congregation? ( I don't really have such a plan, but it's a sweet idea, that would be really fun to see played out in court.)
I remember back in early 90's when the growing number of AOLers started to flood USENET. Suddenly hoards of hyperactive monkeys were posting lame comments. Most of them were just shouting in to the woods to see if there was an echo.
An international community that had over many years fine-tuned the etiquette of USENET was outraged by these barbarian hordes.
Eventually the retards at AOL figured out how to make a web gateway from their proprietary network to the internet, and most of the monkeys disappeared, but USENET never recovered to it's old glory. The monkeys were gone, but instead the thigh cream industry, the pyramid schemes, and web porn sites was making up the bulk of the USENET postings.
Norway is so far ahead in technology, that we chose to make the birth of the web our national day...
So, they're saying is "Craig was only trolling, and you guys ate the bait", but what is stuck in the grey unwashed masses' memory is some unspecified feeling that there is something fishy with free software licences.
Anyways I don't care. I don't give a damm what other people run on their computers anymore. Linux works well enough for me. I won't force the other suckers to get off MS-products, it's their loss. But they better not step on my toes.
If such weapons are used in a war, generals and leaders cruel or desperate enough won't care about any "bugs". Friendly fire has always happened, and casualties on your own side is something that has always been accepted by warhawks all over the world. As long as it kills more of their guys than our guys, they think it's a success. Completely off-topic: Did yo know thar "Mother's day" was started in the 19th century, as a demonstration against war? Now over 100 years later, with more wars going on than ever, it's just a tool to sell Hallmark cards and cakes?
Just because it is an ISO standard does not make it viable. Have you read your X.400 e-mail on an OSI network stack lately?
The kid. He might have had other problems than just the fear of going to jail. If he was 13 years old, and a bright kid, he probably knew that jail was not an option. But it is easy to think in circles, and extrapolate a minor thing until it looks really bad, and at some point you lose touch with reality. Suicide can be a very selfish thing to do, and it could have been aimed at the school. "I'll kill myself, then they'll be sorry"
The parents. The kid obviously had a very busy schedule, and he might have been under some pressure to succeed in everything. So when everything blows up like that, he thought there was no more hope for the future.
The school - Talking about jail to 13 year old for a small crime is a bit drastic. If the kid does not buy it, the threats look empty and the kid loses respect for the inspector. If he buys into it, it _could_ lead him to a better life, or to more drastic actions.
At least long enough so that he had to go back on his resolve not to cut and shave till it was finished. According to the weblog, he got rid of his beard in 2000, beacuse he looked like a terrorist, but he kept the hair.
It is only lately that laws have been made available to the common man.
If you try to find out about trade regulations and stuff, you will need to read a few truckloads of stuff.
For example, in Norway, we had this volunteer project going, where we tried to collect all of Norwegian law online. We had too weed out footnotes that had been added by the publisher of the law books, since those were the intellectual property of the publisher. We did not trust that the publisher would not stop the project, so the homepage was moved to Switzerland.
It was easy to hold us accountable for what we did. However, it should have been the government's duty to make this information available. We shouldn't have had to act as vigilantes to make this information available. It is much harder to hold a government accountable, or force them to do something in a timely fashion. It is written in the law, that the law must be made available to all citizens, but the law fails to mention how that should be done. (Sure, it's available. Just visit the national archives, and you can peruse the documents. We're not stopping you.). The law does state, that not knowing about a law is not a valid excuse for breaking the law.
The common man must use his own common sense to try and keep his nose clean; laws are just to unwieldy to make any sense. But common sense is not enough. How many times have you said "There's gotta be some law agaist that". Or "Is that the law? who thinks up this shit?"
Common sense works great if the law was based on that. But it is not. Law is decided by politicians, who openly receive bribes (or campaign contributions as they call it). Both republican and democrats are prostitutes in this area. Do you really think there will be a campaign reform anytime soon? Forget it. Both parties get too much money, and they would not be so stupid that they would bite off the hand that feeds them . However, they should remember that they are in office toserve the public.
And the winner is ... "pretty much anything except Windows{9{5|8}}|2000|Me|...". Linux, openbsd, *nix, and others do not need to be foolproof, because their user base is not certified morons. Windows however needs to be 100% secure, to get decent security.
Clicked on any visual basic scripts lately?
Amen that. A few months ago I was installing a second IDE drive (Maxtor,15G) in a Sun workstation, and I thought for a while that I must have done something wrong. I could not hear any chugging or spinning, and when I put my hand on it I could feel no vibrations, so I assumed I had damaged the drive. But from the software side of things, the drive looked just fine. It's not that long ago, that standing in front of a disk array booting up, was almost like sticking your head into a jet engine.
The cool thing was that I could exchange programs with a buddy of mine over the telephone, by cracking open the handset and attaching the speaker/mic wires to the appropriate Spectrum wires. I'd hit Save, my friend hit Load, and in 5 minutes or less we could transfer up to 48K. I had never heard about a modem, BBS, internet, datacomm or anything like that. Seems pretty lame now, but back then I thought we were very clever.
Could you have reported these customers to some government or state agency? That would definitely be the thing to do if the deal was already lost and you took the customer on their word, and acted as a sore loser. At least revenge is sweeter than nothing.
What would be really fun, would be submitting material to the court, using some lame encryption. Offer the court some homemade device, for a stiff price, and inform the court that it would be a violation of the '98 copyright act to try to circumvent this copyright protection using any otehr device. After all it _is_ the intellectual property of the author, and the author has the same right to protect her intellectual property as RIAA. Then the judges may get some perspective on "fair use".
Too bad you were not lucky with your install. Debian is the easiest distribution I ever tried to install. The claim that a chicken could do it by pecking on the enter key is true.
The boot floppy automatically discovered the network card, set up the ip adress through dhcp, and retrieved the os over the network. Amazing.
And adding new packages to the system is _so_ easy. All you have to do is fire up dselect, search for the software you want, type '+', and hit enter a couple of times.
Debion's strong side is ease of install, and good security, conservative releases. The problem is that it is a bit more complicated trying to run the latest and greatest HW and software.
this is quite an achievement. If you remember, Linus Thorvalds made Linux based on Minix, which was an operating system built by A. Tannenbaum. In my OS class, back in 1988, we used AST's book, "Operating Systems", which came with the fully functional OS with source, on floppies. So if Linus is God, at least Kurt deserves to be part of the Pantheon.