I think in the end the currency will probably change--high resolution printers are just not going to go away, and the software to prohibit banknote copying can always be disabled or worked around by someone determined enough. The 'arms race' between counterfeiters and currency producers has been going on for a long time, and this is just another step.
But as to changing the overall look or size of the bills, I doubt that will happen anytime soon. And quite frankly, I'm not sure I want it to--a whole lot of people are quite fond of the look of American 'greenbacks,' myself included, and there's no particular reason why security features can't be added without a major overhaul.
I don't really see how they would have any grounds for prosecution here. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think they can in any way dictate how you use the hardware that you buy from them. The hardware is just plastic--you bought it, it's yours. Play games on it, use it as a space heater, toilet seat, piece of modern art, whatever. Same with the media and boxes that the games come on.
Where they could begin to get at you is if you ran Linux on an XBox, and then connected up to their online gaming system. If the system was designed to reject anything that wasn't running the MS XBox OS, and you spoofed it into thinking that your XBox-Linux was in fact the original OS, then you could be in trouble (because the TOS for the online service would undoubtedly prohibit you from connecting with a less-than-virgin box).
But if all you were doing was just running Linux on your XBox, just for the pure hell of it and because you can, without connecting up to their servers, I think you're probably safe. At least, I don't see how this would possibly infringe on their IP. Seems to me like they're just trying to discourage people...toss around the threat of an IP lawsuit and watch any large-scale effort to distribute an alternate XBox OS disappear.
The Coward does have one good point--just keeping your system up to date can do wonders for network security. And turning on the built-in security options in your home network (especially wireless) will make a big difference. It won't keep out a determined individual, but it will make your average script kiddie move on to the next joe on your street.
Everything depends on what your security concerns are. The expertise needed to secure a small home LAN against high-schoolers with too much free time is a lot different then the experience needed to secure a gigantic corporate WAN against determined crackers, and the training you need to do one is nothing like what you need to do the other.
First off, the songs you buy from iTMS aren't MP3. They're 128 kbps AAC files. I'm not sure whether the whole file is encrypted, or just some sort of 'ownership' header that QT6 checks before playing.
When you buy a song from iTMS, it downloads and gets stored in your library, you can play it on your machine, put it on your iPod, or burn it to a CD (audio) or DVD (computer data--won't play in your settop box, unfortunately). Using the new streaming feature in iTunes, you can stream it to computers on your network. However, every time you try to play the file, either streamed or locally, on another machine, it will ask you to "authorize" the computer using your account password, and you can only have 3 computers authorized per song. (This to play the original AAC file--there is no limit to how many CDs you can burn with a particular song on it.)
But if you really want to pirate, it's not particularly hard, you could just burn it to an audio CD, then reimport the CD to an MP3 or AAC. It would probably be a bit lossy, but a step up from the "1/8-inch stereo cable from my Walkman to audio-in" that people are always talking about being the end of all DRM schemes. But for $0.99 a song, it's barely worth the effort.
As for being able to sell the songs, I would say probably no, you can't. Same for giving away a CD as a gift, although you might have a little more wiggle room there.
The thing that I like about the iTMS system is that it lets you burn the songs in a non-DRM format (audio CD) so you can take them and play them in your car, your walkman, etc., etc. I don't own an iPod or other music player, so without this feature the whole thing would be a bit limited. Based on what I've heard about Microsoft's system, they would not allow this because there would be no way to make the songs expire.
Personally I think that if (and that's a big IF) MS comes out with a music store of their own with a membership system, Apple will probably follow suit. But for now, I think the $0.99 / song pricing is an excellent way to create new customers who want to try the service without getting into a subscription.
A setup like this might be very useful for developers and others involved in porting particularly tricky bits of BSD code to OS X. (Running NetBSD and OS X, instead of Classic, obviously.) Especially if the different OSes can access each others' partitions, it might make troubleshooting easier.
It's definately a cool setup...and interesting that OS X makes it both less useful but potentially more useful at the same time.
Given the current quality of most software out there, any behaviour that promotes the "natural selection" of quality software over crap software is ethical and positive.
I think that the software license agreement that you have to agree to in order to run MS software includes an agreement that prevents you from suing MS for lost profits, though. And I think that lost profits are really the only damages that could really come from a computer glitch in most people's PCs. It's not like the nuclear power plants run Windows....I hope.
I do think that an operating system company has a responsibility to keep all of it's users aware of possible security risks--regardless of whether or not they've been patched--so that sysops can take proper preventative measures. If I found a killer Windows security hole, I would email Microsoft....but I would call CNN.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I think that, in general, there are more bugs in Microsoft's software because there are fewer people looking at the code, not because there are more people looking at the end product.
On another note, I'm not sure that Microsoft has any grounds for demanding to be notified about flaws in the final releases of their software. If they want to keep bugs from becoming huge public brouhahas, then they should either fix them in-house while the software is still beta, or open the source up and let other people actually fix it. They're out of line to say that people should find bugs in their ware, tell them, and then sit on their discovery while some cubicle slave works to make a patch, and Microsoft takes the credit for saving the day.
I have a CD-R, and I use it on average of about three times a week to back up my hard drive or move big DV files and projects into offline storage. I buy Imation 16x CD-R blanks in thinline half-height jewelcases in packs of 50, and they cost around sixty cents a piece. When I see a new CD that I want, I add it to a list and when I get 12 of them, I do one of those 12-for-1 offers from BMG music.
What really galls me is that the RIAA assumes that the only use for CD-R blanks in the world is to pirate their damn music. They already have some sort of surcharge on the home-audio blanks, the ones most frequently used by artists who are recording their own music and don't have the money to spend on media.
If I have to start paying a surcharge on my CDRs that ends up going to the RIAA, that will be my signal that I'm obviously not getting my money's worth, and I ought to start duping CDs left and right so that I'm not lining the RIAA's pockets without taking something out first.
I worked at both a grocery store and at a music/computer store (MediaPlay, actually) for some time, and in both situations, the stores have to deal with what in the business world is called "shrink." This is the tendency for merchandise to disappear between the time it leaves the distributer and when it gets to the store shelves, and as it sits on the shelves.
In retail business, shrink is simply a fact of life. Different schemes have been created for minimizing it, but in the end it just gets taken out of the bottom line.
The RIAA and the music industry (the people who sell the music, not the physical CDs) are whining because now they, too, have to deal with shrink. Except that, unlike people shoving Tool CDs down their pants in the aisles of MediaPlay, digital 'shrink' is impossible to measure.
Theoretically, there are lost profits, but theoretically there are profits gained when a thousand people download one song from a CD on Napster and then go out and buy the CD. It seems bizarre to me that the Canadian government would give money to media vendors for lost profits that might or might not exist.
Although, seeing as I am sitting in the home country of the DMCA, I guess I can't really say much about the evils of corporate influence in big government.
I have a feeling that these chips are probably pretty pricey, and they won't be exactly willing to send a lot of them away as samples.
If you really wanted to get your hands on a freebie, a good way might be to get involved in coding for the Linux4tv project, and then see if they'd send you one. If my programming experience included anything other than AppleSoft BASIC, I'd probably be over there signing up now.
I'm looking forward to seeing how they manage conditional access. I haven't been into the groups or register-to-download portions of the site, but from what I've seen so far, you might not have to deal with anything related to the cable system, if the Linux4tv just plugs into the output from whatever decoder you already use. But if you do that, it's basically just a glorified VCR.
In my area, the cable converter is a large black box the size of a VCR (if you have digital cable) manufactured by General Instruments. Cable goes in, video feed goes out. How would a device like the Linux4tv work in a situation like mine? Unless the L4tv had a way of talking back to the big converter box, it wouldn't have any way of changing channels. And since the converter doesn't have any controls other than the remote (no control ports on the back, I checked), I don't see how you would get a set-top box to work.
Here's the info I got on the Geode SC1200, which is going to be at the heart of the Linux4tv. It's actually quite a little chip....more info available here.
(This ripped mercilessly from the above URL.)
32-bit x86 processor, up to 266 MHz, with MMX instruction set support
Memory controller with 64-bit SDRAM interface
2D graphics accelerator
TV controller with hardware video accelerator
CCIR-656 video input port with direct video for full screen display
PC AT functionality
PCI bus controller
IDE interface
USB, three ports, OpenHCI 1.0 compliant
Audio, AC97/AMC97 2.0 compliant
Virtual System Architecture (VSA™) support
Power management, ACPI 1.0 compliant
EBGA package
32-bit x86, up to 266 MHz, with MMX compatible instruction set support
16 KB unified L1 cache
Integrated Floating Point Unit (FPU)
Re-entrant SMM enhanced for VSA
It's got IDE support, PCI, serial and parallel, video capture. Quite an impressive device. I wonder if once the Linux4tv guys get a distribution for it, whether it would be possible to buy a few and create a low-cost parallel processing array. Of course, I haven't seen a price on it yet...
Thanks for the info on the TiVO GPLed code, maroberts.
I think you have a point, but of all the companies you could be sponsored by, I think National is probably one of the better choices.
National is a good choice because it no interest in any of the current sticky issues surrounding content protection, digital rights management, etc. They are going to make and sell chips regardless of what happens--either way, people are going to want set top boxes.
They're going to make a killing in the near future off of the embedded processor market. Every digital TV, settop box, DVD player, and a host of devices that are only being blueprinted now are going to use embedded processors. From National's angle, getting a foot in the door now means unimaginable profits later.
Is National using the open source community as a source of free code? Sure--but that's what it's there for. That is a good thing, because it will ensure that important things related to digital television are GPLed and not proprietary. The more corporations that follow this lead, the more otherwise-closed areas will open up as open-source. At this point in time, National's goals and the open-source community's are complementary.
-National wants to sell a lot of embedded processors and get into the lucrative consumer television market.
-Open source software must find a way into digital television and set-top systems, or risk being closed out by proprietary systems and closed 'black boxes'.
So National provides the hardware, and the open source/free software community provides the software under the GPL. Is it a good thing to get too tied to one hardware vendor? Absolutely not. But is it good to have an ally against corporations like Intel, Sony, and Microsoft? Hell yes.
Site got/.ed before it even officially opened? I guess that's impressive.
They seem pretty set on using the SC1200 semi, but never really say why...I mean, there are a lot of chips to choose from, and I would be interested to know why the SC1200 is the one to use. Oh...okay. I get it: National Semiconductor is one of the sponsors.
But that's not bad, though. Personally I've had good experiences ordering parts from National. I wonder, when they get this done, could you choose to get the schematics and parts lists and build it yourself? Or maybe just get the printed circuit boards and key components as a kit?
I read something yesterday that said that TiVo (http://www.tivo.com) used GPLed code in their set-top system, and released the source code to the public. I am looking around on their site right now and haven't found it yet, but I would think that Linux4tv would be silly not to try to use it, if possible.
Their web site doesn't give a whole heck of a lot of information on it, but I'll give them some slack, seeing as it only launched "officially" twelve minutes ago.
I like the.TV TLD, though. Wonder if it was a bargain or if they had to pay a premium? And why the heck do you have to register to download?
You're right, but when consumer-grade DVD writers achiveve similar market penetration as have CD-Rs (which I suspect will happen in a few years, given the demand for cheap mass storage that exists), an 8cm, DVD-R, MP3/OGG portable player seems like a natural extension of the technology.
The mysterious sixth porn search would be 'lolita'.
I suppose that you could make a case that the people in question were actually just searching for the book "Lolita" by Vladimirovich Nabokov, about a middle aged man who is sexually obsessed with a 12-year old girl; or I suppose they could be looking for the movie directed by Stanley Kubrick; but on the whole, I'd be willing to bet they were just cruising for kiddie porn.
Actually, possession of a lock pick (or a crowbar, OR a pair of bolt cutters, or even gloves) can indeed be a crime....it falls under regulations outlawing "Burglar's Tools".
The gist of it is that you can have any of those things, but if you're using them for an illegal purpose, they suddenly transform from an innocent pair of bolt-cutters into 'Burglar's Tools', in which case you can be arrested for possessing them. The decision on whether an article is a burglar's tool or not is made by a judge.
This 'Burglar's Tools' law is what gives rise to a lot of other laws....like drug paraphenalia (sp) laws. It's not hard to see how, if the DMCA remains law, your computer could become a 'digital burglar's tool'.
E.g.: you (or Dimitri, or whomever) breaks an encryption algorithm, and get arrested. I don't think that it's out of the realm of possibility at all to imagine you also being charged with possession of burglar's tools (or something similar) because at the instant you violated the DMCA, your computer magically transformed into something that is illegal to possess. And if they couldn't find a way to slap you with this, you could bet they'd confiscate all of your gear, at the very least.
Frankly, the DMCA scares me. It opens up a whole can of worms, and needs to go. I feel sorry for Dimitri, but I'm almost glad that it happened, because until somebody got arrested, there was no chance of it going to the Supreme Court to be overturned.
What Sealand needs is an ally. One good ally, some established country without a direct conflict of interest, and they would have it (mostly) made. That ally wouldn't really have to do anything except recognise them as a nation.....maybe the government of Taiwan would do it? Or maybe the Dalai Lama and the government of Tibet in Exile (sic...it would be great PR)?
That would really soldify their 'thin ice' and would also prevent Britain or whoever operates their micro stations or satellites from cutting them off at some point in the future...if they had another nation on their side that had cables or a navy, nobody would cut their cables or their access without a really good reason, because a cable-cutting war would be absolutely disastrous.
A true data haven would have to be untouchable from physical destruction and also have enough political clout to keep from being unplugged by the governments who'd rather not have their citizens accessing it.
Ascension Island would be ideal...there are a lot of really fat cables running through there (main transatlantic telco routes) and it's about as remote as you can get. They're soverign and have a TLD, but I think the laws are basically British.
I agree that this year's MWNY keynote was....less than impressive, when you compare it to the ones we've gotten used to in the last few years of Stevedom. Although I was on the train down to NYC at the time of the keynote, I was hoping that there would be a nice 'one more thing' to feast my eyes on when I made it to the Apple section. Alas, no dice.
But with every complaint we make about the lackluster showing at the Expo, we ought to be thinking hard about all the pre-Steve expos, touting technologies that died or never caught on (R.I.P. OpenDoc...and the dog was cute, too), or that just never sold.
You may think that people are scratching the bottom of the barrel for good news to tout this time around, but take a look at some old MacWorld or MacUser issues and you'll see that Apple Computer and Mac users in general have a lot to be thankful for this Expo.
I would love to see flatpanel iMacs, or extra-cheap CRT ones for education, or ones with DVD drives, or a new form factor for the tower, or a Cube replacement, or any number of other things, but, heck, at least the company is still solvent.
For what it's worth, I agree with Henry Fool completely. Although (as others have brought up) corporations have existed since the 1600s, the corporations that we are talking about here, and the ones that any responsible citizen ought to be afraid of, are very new indeed when compared with governments.
While the idea behind government can be traced back (tens of?) thousands of years, and democracy (sort of) to the Greeks, the key idea behind a corporation is not something that there are a lot of historical precedents for in history. So, when your frame of reference is the history of all Western Civilization, corporations are relatively new.
A corporation is like a psuedo-person in the eyes of the law: it can own property, it can sue and be sued, and has to file and pay taxes, among other things. This key idea, that something other than a living, breathing person can have rights and can do stuff, is something new to our epoch of history.
The question "Which is better: government or corporations?" is a moot point, or at least a purely academic one. You need to have both: a government because, without it, people would kill each other and society would descend into chaos; and corporations because they don't die and allow institutions to continue beyond the generation which gave birth to them.
The DMCA is a stupid, shortsighted law. In today's world, the effect it has is to disarm the citizenry (us) of the weapons we might use against an oppressive corporation. The things that the DMCA prohibits are the 'ultimate equalizers' between corporations and the citizenry; things to use when a corporation is outside the pale and there is no other recourse--very much like weapons are between the government and the people. Unfortunately, there's no 'digital Second Amendment' protecting a citizen's rights to hacking tools.
In short, in today's world, a citizen should be worried about both governmental and corporate oppression, and have something in his closet to keep the government in check, and something on his hard drive for corporate Big Brother.
The real problem here is the legal snafu that has opened up: which applies here, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (bletch) or the Audio Home Recording Act. The DMCA says that it's illegal to intentionally overcome copyright-protection schemes, but the AHRA says that you cannot be sued for making personal copies of music that you have bought.
I am not a lawyer but to me, since the 'copyright protection' scheme in this instance is nothing more than digitally introduced noise, it would be fairly easy to make an argument that removing the noise is not in violation of the DMCA.
After all, since the CDs are not marked as to whether they are copyright protected, how would you know whether the noise that you are reducing is a copyright protection scheme or simply annoying noise, or a scratchy CD? The record companies' insistance on doing this secretly works against them here. A utility that would digitally 'clean' the bitstream flowing from a CD as it is ripped before it is CDRed or MP3 encoded would not violate the DMCA because it would have hundreds of legit purposes, like saving otherwise unrecoverable CDs, other than removing intentionally added 'clicks and pops.'
Does such a utility exist? Anyway, that was my thought...get a utility out that eliminates this sound quality problem, and the record companies will probably have to go back to the drawing board and come up with something that isn't quite so retarded.
So, if you had one of these clocks and put it in a GPS satellite, wouldn't it mean that you could get the GPS system that much more accurate? As I understand it, at the heart of GPS sats are atomic clocks; would more accurate clocks = more accurate positioning?
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But as to changing the overall look or size of the bills, I doubt that will happen anytime soon. And quite frankly, I'm not sure I want it to--a whole lot of people are quite fond of the look of American 'greenbacks,' myself included, and there's no particular reason why security features can't be added without a major overhaul.
For info on how to detect 'digifeited' bills, check out the United States Secret Service's web site.
Where they could begin to get at you is if you ran Linux on an XBox, and then connected up to their online gaming system. If the system was designed to reject anything that wasn't running the MS XBox OS, and you spoofed it into thinking that your XBox-Linux was in fact the original OS, then you could be in trouble (because the TOS for the online service would undoubtedly prohibit you from connecting with a less-than-virgin box).
But if all you were doing was just running Linux on your XBox, just for the pure hell of it and because you can, without connecting up to their servers, I think you're probably safe. At least, I don't see how this would possibly infringe on their IP. Seems to me like they're just trying to discourage people...toss around the threat of an IP lawsuit and watch any large-scale effort to distribute an alternate XBox OS disappear.
Everything depends on what your security concerns are. The expertise needed to secure a small home LAN against high-schoolers with too much free time is a lot different then the experience needed to secure a gigantic corporate WAN against determined crackers, and the training you need to do one is nothing like what you need to do the other.
When you buy a song from iTMS, it downloads and gets stored in your library, you can play it on your machine, put it on your iPod, or burn it to a CD (audio) or DVD (computer data--won't play in your settop box, unfortunately). Using the new streaming feature in iTunes, you can stream it to computers on your network. However, every time you try to play the file, either streamed or locally, on another machine, it will ask you to "authorize" the computer using your account password, and you can only have 3 computers authorized per song. (This to play the original AAC file--there is no limit to how many CDs you can burn with a particular song on it.)
But if you really want to pirate, it's not particularly hard, you could just burn it to an audio CD, then reimport the CD to an MP3 or AAC. It would probably be a bit lossy, but a step up from the "1/8-inch stereo cable from my Walkman to audio-in" that people are always talking about being the end of all DRM schemes. But for $0.99 a song, it's barely worth the effort.
As for being able to sell the songs, I would say probably no, you can't. Same for giving away a CD as a gift, although you might have a little more wiggle room there.
The thing that I like about the iTMS system is that it lets you burn the songs in a non-DRM format (audio CD) so you can take them and play them in your car, your walkman, etc., etc. I don't own an iPod or other music player, so without this feature the whole thing would be a bit limited. Based on what I've heard about Microsoft's system, they would not allow this because there would be no way to make the songs expire.
Personally I think that if (and that's a big IF) MS comes out with a music store of their own with a membership system, Apple will probably follow suit. But for now, I think the $0.99 / song pricing is an excellent way to create new customers who want to try the service without getting into a subscription.
A setup like this might be very useful for developers and others involved in porting particularly tricky bits of BSD code to OS X. (Running NetBSD and OS X, instead of Classic, obviously.) Especially if the different OSes can access each others' partitions, it might make troubleshooting easier.
It's definately a cool setup...and interesting that OS X makes it both less useful but potentially more useful at the same time.
No wonder Microsoft is so scared....
I think that the software license agreement that you have to agree to in order to run MS software includes an agreement that prevents you from suing MS for lost profits, though. And I think that lost profits are really the only damages that could really come from a computer glitch in most people's PCs. It's not like the nuclear power plants run Windows....I hope.
I do think that an operating system company has a responsibility to keep all of it's users aware of possible security risks--regardless of whether or not they've been patched--so that sysops can take proper preventative measures. If I found a killer Windows security hole, I would email Microsoft....but I would call CNN.
On another note, I'm not sure that Microsoft has any grounds for demanding to be notified about flaws in the final releases of their software. If they want to keep bugs from becoming huge public brouhahas, then they should either fix them in-house while the software is still beta, or open the source up and let other people actually fix it. They're out of line to say that people should find bugs in their ware, tell them, and then sit on their discovery while some cubicle slave works to make a patch, and Microsoft takes the credit for saving the day.
What really galls me is that the RIAA assumes that the only use for CD-R blanks in the world is to pirate their damn music. They already have some sort of surcharge on the home-audio blanks, the ones most frequently used by artists who are recording their own music and don't have the money to spend on media.
If I have to start paying a surcharge on my CDRs that ends up going to the RIAA, that will be my signal that I'm obviously not getting my money's worth, and I ought to start duping CDs left and right so that I'm not lining the RIAA's pockets without taking something out first.
In retail business, shrink is simply a fact of life. Different schemes have been created for minimizing it, but in the end it just gets taken out of the bottom line.
The RIAA and the music industry (the people who sell the music, not the physical CDs) are whining because now they, too, have to deal with shrink. Except that, unlike people shoving Tool CDs down their pants in the aisles of MediaPlay, digital 'shrink' is impossible to measure.
Theoretically, there are lost profits, but theoretically there are profits gained when a thousand people download one song from a CD on Napster and then go out and buy the CD. It seems bizarre to me that the Canadian government would give money to media vendors for lost profits that might or might not exist.
Although, seeing as I am sitting in the home country of the DMCA, I guess I can't really say much about the evils of corporate influence in big government.
If you really wanted to get your hands on a freebie, a good way might be to get involved in coding for the Linux4tv project, and then see if they'd send you one. If my programming experience included anything other than AppleSoft BASIC, I'd probably be over there signing up now.
In my area, the cable converter is a large black box the size of a VCR (if you have digital cable) manufactured by General Instruments. Cable goes in, video feed goes out. How would a device like the Linux4tv work in a situation like mine? Unless the L4tv had a way of talking back to the big converter box, it wouldn't have any way of changing channels. And since the converter doesn't have any controls other than the remote (no control ports on the back, I checked), I don't see how you would get a set-top box to work.
Anyone have any ideas on how they plan to do it?
(This ripped mercilessly from the above URL.)
It's got IDE support, PCI, serial and parallel, video capture. Quite an impressive device. I wonder if once the Linux4tv guys get a distribution for it, whether it would be possible to buy a few and create a low-cost parallel processing array. Of course, I haven't seen a price on it yet...
Thanks for the info on the TiVO GPLed code, maroberts.
National is a good choice because it no interest in any of the current sticky issues surrounding content protection, digital rights management, etc. They are going to make and sell chips regardless of what happens--either way, people are going to want set top boxes.
They're going to make a killing in the near future off of the embedded processor market. Every digital TV, settop box, DVD player, and a host of devices that are only being blueprinted now are going to use embedded processors. From National's angle, getting a foot in the door now means unimaginable profits later.
Is National using the open source community as a source of free code? Sure--but that's what it's there for. That is a good thing, because it will ensure that important things related to digital television are GPLed and not proprietary. The more corporations that follow this lead, the more otherwise-closed areas will open up as open-source. At this point in time, National's goals and the open-source community's are complementary.
-National wants to sell a lot of embedded processors and get into the lucrative consumer television market.
-Open source software must find a way into digital television and set-top systems, or risk being closed out by proprietary systems and closed 'black boxes'.
So National provides the hardware, and the open source/free software community provides the software under the GPL. Is it a good thing to get too tied to one hardware vendor? Absolutely not. But is it good to have an ally against corporations like Intel, Sony, and Microsoft? Hell yes.
They seem pretty set on using the SC1200 semi, but never really say why...I mean, there are a lot of chips to choose from, and I would be interested to know why the SC1200 is the one to use. Oh...okay. I get it: National Semiconductor is one of the sponsors.
But that's not bad, though. Personally I've had good experiences ordering parts from National. I wonder, when they get this done, could you choose to get the schematics and parts lists and build it yourself? Or maybe just get the printed circuit boards and key components as a kit?
I read something yesterday that said that TiVo (http://www.tivo.com) used GPLed code in their set-top system, and released the source code to the public. I am looking around on their site right now and haven't found it yet, but I would think that Linux4tv would be silly not to try to use it, if possible.
Their web site doesn't give a whole heck of a lot of information on it, but I'll give them some slack, seeing as it only launched "officially" twelve minutes ago.
I like the .TV TLD, though. Wonder if it was a bargain or if they had to pay a premium? And why the heck do you have to register to download?
You're right, but when consumer-grade DVD writers achiveve similar market penetration as have CD-Rs (which I suspect will happen in a few years, given the demand for cheap mass storage that exists), an 8cm, DVD-R, MP3/OGG portable player seems like a natural extension of the technology.
I suppose that you could make a case that the people in question were actually just searching for the book "Lolita" by Vladimirovich Nabokov, about a middle aged man who is sexually obsessed with a 12-year old girl; or I suppose they could be looking for the movie directed by Stanley Kubrick; but on the whole, I'd be willing to bet they were just cruising for kiddie porn.
I guess they can count, after all.
Actually, possession of a lock pick (or a crowbar, OR a pair of bolt cutters, or even gloves) can indeed be a crime....it falls under regulations outlawing "Burglar's Tools".
The gist of it is that you can have any of those things, but if you're using them for an illegal purpose, they suddenly transform from an innocent pair of bolt-cutters into 'Burglar's Tools', in which case you can be arrested for possessing them. The decision on whether an article is a burglar's tool or not is made by a judge.
This 'Burglar's Tools' law is what gives rise to a lot of other laws....like drug paraphenalia (sp) laws. It's not hard to see how, if the DMCA remains law, your computer could become a 'digital burglar's tool'.
E.g.: you (or Dimitri, or whomever) breaks an encryption algorithm, and get arrested. I don't think that it's out of the realm of possibility at all to imagine you also being charged with possession of burglar's tools (or something similar) because at the instant you violated the DMCA, your computer magically transformed into something that is illegal to possess. And if they couldn't find a way to slap you with this, you could bet they'd confiscate all of your gear, at the very least.
Frankly, the DMCA scares me. It opens up a whole can of worms, and needs to go. I feel sorry for Dimitri, but I'm almost glad that it happened, because until somebody got arrested, there was no chance of it going to the Supreme Court to be overturned.
That would really soldify their 'thin ice' and would also prevent Britain or whoever operates their micro stations or satellites from cutting them off at some point in the future...if they had another nation on their side that had cables or a navy, nobody would cut their cables or their access without a really good reason, because a cable-cutting war would be absolutely disastrous.
A true data haven would have to be untouchable from physical destruction and also have enough political clout to keep from being unplugged by the governments who'd rather not have their citizens accessing it.
Ascension Island would be ideal...there are a lot of really fat cables running through there (main transatlantic telco routes) and it's about as remote as you can get. They're soverign and have a TLD, but I think the laws are basically British.
But with every complaint we make about the lackluster showing at the Expo, we ought to be thinking hard about all the pre-Steve expos, touting technologies that died or never caught on (R.I.P. OpenDoc...and the dog was cute, too), or that just never sold.
You may think that people are scratching the bottom of the barrel for good news to tout this time around, but take a look at some old MacWorld or MacUser issues and you'll see that Apple Computer and Mac users in general have a lot to be thankful for this Expo.
I would love to see flatpanel iMacs, or extra-cheap CRT ones for education, or ones with DVD drives, or a new form factor for the tower, or a Cube replacement, or any number of other things, but, heck, at least the company is still solvent.
While the idea behind government can be traced back (tens of?) thousands of years, and democracy (sort of) to the Greeks, the key idea behind a corporation is not something that there are a lot of historical precedents for in history. So, when your frame of reference is the history of all Western Civilization, corporations are relatively new.
A corporation is like a psuedo-person in the eyes of the law: it can own property, it can sue and be sued, and has to file and pay taxes, among other things. This key idea, that something other than a living, breathing person can have rights and can do stuff, is something new to our epoch of history.
The question "Which is better: government or corporations?" is a moot point, or at least a purely academic one. You need to have both: a government because, without it, people would kill each other and society would descend into chaos; and corporations because they don't die and allow institutions to continue beyond the generation which gave birth to them.
The DMCA is a stupid, shortsighted law. In today's world, the effect it has is to disarm the citizenry (us) of the weapons we might use against an oppressive corporation. The things that the DMCA prohibits are the 'ultimate equalizers' between corporations and the citizenry; things to use when a corporation is outside the pale and there is no other recourse--very much like weapons are between the government and the people. Unfortunately, there's no 'digital Second Amendment' protecting a citizen's rights to hacking tools.
In short, in today's world, a citizen should be worried about both governmental and corporate oppression, and have something in his closet to keep the government in check, and something on his hard drive for corporate Big Brother.
I am not a lawyer but to me, since the 'copyright protection' scheme in this instance is nothing more than digitally introduced noise, it would be fairly easy to make an argument that removing the noise is not in violation of the DMCA.
After all, since the CDs are not marked as to whether they are copyright protected, how would you know whether the noise that you are reducing is a copyright protection scheme or simply annoying noise, or a scratchy CD? The record companies' insistance on doing this secretly works against them here. A utility that would digitally 'clean' the bitstream flowing from a CD as it is ripped before it is CDRed or MP3 encoded would not violate the DMCA because it would have hundreds of legit purposes, like saving otherwise unrecoverable CDs, other than removing intentionally added 'clicks and pops.'
Does such a utility exist? Anyway, that was my thought...get a utility out that eliminates this sound quality problem, and the record companies will probably have to go back to the drawing board and come up with something that isn't quite so retarded.
So, if you had one of these clocks and put it in a GPS satellite, wouldn't it mean that you could get the GPS system that much more accurate? As I understand it, at the heart of GPS sats are atomic clocks; would more accurate clocks = more accurate positioning?