No.. you can add a new room. And I suppose you could.. add.. a new.. room to your.. PS2? (I must admit I don't see where you are going with this..)
If you want to do anything with your PS2 than just what it was designed for, then you need a mod chip. Otherwise it's like a house where you can't add a new room.
The article wasn't about making it illegal to "modify you PS2 in any way, whatsoever."
You can't modify your PS2 in any meaningful way. Is a society where we can use company-approved stickers on company-approved gameboys in company-approved clothes where we want to go? "Sure, you can modify your suit. You can dye it; you just can't adjust the lengths."
You seem to miss the point of the article that says "MOD chips (and their sale and usage) are illegal."
But that's exactly what we're arguing about, whether it should be illegal. You can do that in free nations, you know. It's not a dangerous weapon, or something designed to or by hurting someone. It's a tool designed to let you use your PS/2 in a way it wasn't designed for, included imported games and home-designed games.
But don't tap into the neighborhood cable box and get free HBO in your house!
This doesn't let you run cable around the house to let you make your own version of Big Brother, or distribute video around the house, even if it's video you own and have every right to send to every TV in the house.
This isn't about illegal acts. This is about how far the government can restrict your freedom because you might do illegal acts.
the high profile cases seem to be people who've been grabbing pictures of babies and 4 year olds,
That's because they're easier to publicize and easier to convict. But I guess you missed the 15 year old girl who was arrested recently for taking sexual pictures of herself.
Man is by nature a polygamist, but U.S. law makes that illegal, so we don't do it.
That is absurd in so many ways. Marriage is not a natural thing, so man can not be by nature a polygamist. Men by nature wants to have sex with a lot of women, and he does, even where the law prohibits it. In a lot of cases, people who want to be polygamist are, either by marrying religiously instead of civilly or by doing illegal things.
we cannot ignore [laws] because it may be against our nature.
We can and usually do. In New York State, in the twenty years before the adultury law was repealed, there were 20,000 divorces a year on the grounds of adultury.
if I have some selecting my music for me, I hope they have my interests in mind and not just their own...
Again, an executive who ignores the interests of his market is soon out of business.
Just as importantly, I chose my religion. I chose my university. I wouldn't let anyone else in the world take those choices away from me. But, for the most part, music is just background music. I could spend hours cruising the net and bars looking for new bands, but it's not worth it to me.
Sure, it's worth it to some people. And as a community, those people who push new musicians and new forms of music do a service to humanity by helping keep variety in music. But that doesn't make them "rebels" and superior to the rest of us.
There are very few rebels because being a rebel is about being alone
That's what you tell yourself. In reality, no one has changed the world alone. There is not just one signature on the American Declaration of Independence. There was not just one person at Harper's Ferry. Martin Luther King didn't march alone. People who are alone rarely matter to anyone.
why does nothing ever change?
If nothing ever changes, then nothing really matters. All your "rebelling" is just posturing.
Of course, I live in a country where I get to vote for my leader. I live in a country without slaves. I live in a country that has freedom of religion. All of these things are things that would have surprised my ancestors, and none of them were created by lone people.
But you need us arrogant assholes
No, we don't. You've already said that nothing ever changes, so why do we need people who are assholes and rock the boat?
That is why I am laughing at you. I see you stampeding straight into the slaughter house. Have fun being a good little rebel on the human production line. You are doing exactly what the world demands of you.
Nice usage of imagery, but no real meaning. You act like music must be more than just something to listen to.
The bell tolls for thee as much as for me. But the "stampede into the slaughter house" was just unoriginal imagery, devoid of actual meaning, wasn't it.
I'd like to know your real name. The last rebel who was alone I heard about got the title of the Unabomber, and in case there's another mad bomber, I like to be able to tell them who you are. You obviously don't care about the sheep; why not blow them up for a good cause?
I think you are still one of those kids who think they are rebelling by buying music targgetted at them by big companies to get the kids pocket money.
And I guess you're one of those smug little assholes who likes looking down on other people because they're part of a tribe, like sane hominids are and have always been.
Most of them don't give a damn about the big companies. They aren't rebelling against the big companies. They're rebelling against their parents, who hate this type of music.
There are no rebels in a herd just mindless cattle
And you're such an individual, like all the other people who buy non-mainstream, poor produced music so they can be "rebels". And you really show your intelligence by what music you listen to. Unh huh. I always wanted to have to search through the sludge pile for my next piece of music, instead of having someone find a selection of good stuff for me.
following where the cowboy (company executive) wants them to go.
The company executive has the copyrights to all the bands of the 70s, the 80s and the 90s all locked up. What he wants is to take the songs that have already been recorded that have the most favorable terms to him, and keep selling them. He doesn't want to have to find new bands and work out new contracts and spend money on recording studios. But the market forces him to. Every executive, in every field of buisness, who is arrogant enough to assume the customers will follow where he wants them to go finds his buisness going under.
Try not being such an arrogant pompous asshole next time. People are not mindless cattle, even if you disagree with their behavior. Prefering to make fun of people and reducing the world to syllogisms instead of understanding people and their complexities is not a sign of intelligence.
Funny how kids always think they are rebbelling by doing exactly what all the other kids are doing. Wouldn't it be a real rebbelion for a kid not to rebel?
Kids are rebelling against their parents and against adults. Not rebelling wouldn't let them assert that release from the slavery that is childhood. If you want a society of people who can merely spout what their elders said, then, sure, it would be better for kids not to rebel.
Given the common OSS attitude of "you haven't read the docs, fuck you"
As opposed to what, "you haven't read the documentation, but we'll happily spend our time talking to you"? If you were getting paid, that's a reasonable attitude. But we didn't write the program and the documentation so we could get the privilige of explaining stuff to users that we already covered in the documentation.
enough to pack about 50 DVDs or 200VCDs on one disc!
But the people selling movies don't want to put 50 DVDs on a disk; that cuts down on their profit per movie. TV shows and the old movies they sell for cheap might not mind discs that hold more movies than DVD does, but they won't push the market.
The only compiler I know that handles it right is the Realia Cobol compiler. MS VC++ handles it the same way GCC does. On the other hand, no one has these problems on MIPS or PowerPC. The x86 FPU makes it very hard to get exactly right, so that's where the bug lies.
For example, my drive is about 25 km. A marathon run of 26 miles
First place, you're conflating metric and imperial measurements. Use one or the other, for clarity's sake.
Second place, if everyone did this, people wouldn't travel 15 miles for a job. For several months, I walked 10 blocks each way for my job. There's probably no reason beside conveniece that you live 15 miles away from your job.
It's the 21st century, and it's "Hey, do you remember that 'leggo my Eggo' commercial?".
This is what happens when we allow commercialisation to go unchecked; in any environment - unchecked - it will consume infinitely until the environment is destroyed.
That's worse than "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine"? TV does need someway to pay for itself.
If you want to look at something cynically, you can. But that same TV brought me Sesame Street, and brings me Mythbusters and offers my father an endless stream of information about the history of war. At least one cable channel brings you college lectures for free. If people aren't watching educational stuff, it's by choice.
Likewise, I have done a lot of simulations on my computer, from genetics to game theory to fractals. I have dabbled in a wide field of computer graphics, and have seen the computer enable my friend to create graphics he could never create without it. Several friends do large amounts of (classic) roleplaying work on the computer, which is also a creative endavour. Computers have been a tool to bring me a wide wealth of educational material over the net, and I have several CDs to teach me this or that. A selling feature today is the ability to make home movies on your PC. The computer is being used as a creative tool, as a simulation tool and an educational tool, and if certain people aren't interested in using it that way, I don't think that's a problem that computer programmers can solve.
If he wanted accurate results, perhaps he shouldn't have been using a x86 at all? The x86 FPU has numerous problems due to an 80 bit intermediate format that gets crunched to 64 bits in memory. Most other CPUs have more reliable floating point systems.
If you read "Advanced Programming Languages", by Raphael A. Finkel, there already was a language named Io, much more advant garde, if nearly unimplementable and unprogramable.
In the interviening time some very smart men had to discover isotope separation (extreemly hard as Uranium 235 and 238 are chemically identical),
Was it really that hard? You have two substances mixed together only differing in mass. It seems obvious to turn them into a liquid or gas (by including them in a compound, since liquid uranium is hot) and run them through a centrifuge. Of all the problems involved in nuclear weapon production, that seems rather easy.
The problem is that we are proliferating our knowledge freely and that means that the value of our knowledge is worth very little since everyone now has an access to it.
All the information is in libraries and bookstores. If you want the information, a college bookstore will sell books to non-students, and even the notes for many subjects are available online, even outside stuff like this. But people who really understand the material are few and hard to find, and all the availability in the world isn't going to change that. At best, it will let a determined and intelligent student learn something without a college class, and I find that something hard to be upset about.
Most open source application software is a pain to use and quite uninspired as they try to emulate MS Office to closely.
Have you even tried TeXmacs? LyX? Tex & Emacs? Even Abiword? People want MS Office, so that's what Open Office is. If you don't want MS Office, there's several options for you to take.
application and utility development which I feel should remain in the hands of closed source developers
It's a free society; if I want to work on a program and make it open source, then I will. That's doesn't stop you from working on a closed source program. And in a capitalist society, it's may the best program win.
If people prefer the closed source programs to the open source programs (overall, money included), then they will use them. If people prefer the open source programs to closed source programs (overall, usability included), then they will use them, and in a free society no one has the right to tell them otherwise.
fighting against Microsoft's competitors on the application front only solidifies the position of MS on the desktop.
If OpenOffice only hurts Microsoft's competitors, what makes StarOffice, or any other Microsoft competitor, hurt Microsoft?
Since many billions of $$ are given in the US alone to charities, and there are charity watching groups as well, it seems to me that your assertion is handily disproven that way.
It helps that the government won't give money to charities with more than 25% overhead. Do you know what percentage of your money goes to overhead in your favorite charity? Sure, the complete frauds get weeded out, but is it going to be on the front of every newspaper if the Salvation Army goes up to 30% overhead? And even that will only affect the people who read it and care about it.
Lots of people gave to Mother Teresa on the expectation that it was going to help the poor, when much of it went to fund missionary work.
people have no real way of checking up on such organizations.
Okay, they have a way. That doesn't mean that they will use it. Again, what can you tell me about the charities you give to?
People are held individually responsible for their performance.
And guess what, it happens in governments, too. But it's not perfect in either one. Employee theft and fraud is a huge problem, even in those privately owned supermarkets and department stores.
A private system doesn't require the heavy handed and expensive processes that a system based on force does.
Not as heavy handed, but that doesn't mean they're not expensive. You've got to get people out there and beg for money, and that takes a lot of man-hours.
it is that they are done well when they are done privately.
That's one of the thins under discussion here.
By building a bureaucracy, the organization becomes less efficient. Other, more efficient organizations will satisfy the customers better, and the old one will reform or go out of business.
The customers, for a private charitable organization, are the people giving the money, who have no real way of checking up on the organization. How efficient it is will have little effect on how much money is coming it.
Very astute. And what happens when the hiring manager at IBM hires inefficient workers because of the bribe? IBM itself becomes less efficient and loses customers. Management, always looking for more efficient use of resources, fires the corrupt individual.
In the optimal world; in that same world, the government would do the same thing. In disoptimal world, the managment above this guy would not notice it, or would ignore it.
His job hangs by a thread of confidence, and by allowing incompetence to exist within the organization he himself risks his job.
So? People risk their jobs all the time. If the bribe is worth enough to him, whether it be through greed or immediate need, he will take it.
Can you name anywhere that had such problems that it wasn't the government itself complicit or directly involved?
Yes, but in those cases they're usually called warlords.
Anyone else notice the OS requirements? Seems like bloated software to me
MPlayer would usually drop frames when running DVDs on my PIII-450 so the CPU seems about right for reliably running a DVD perfectly, especially if you want to scale it. The hard drive space and memory seem a bit excessive, though.
So are Slashdotters going to thank the MPAA for addressing one of the Linux community's concerns?
I have perfectly good DVD playing software. The problem is the MPAA will harass distributers. I don't need "legal" proprietary DVD playing software; I need the MPAA to leave my current software alone. This doesn't address my needs at all.
You people who are whining that you actually have to pay for something need to get off your high horses. If you ever want to see anything supported in Linux in some fashion you need to pay for it.
But there are many things supported in Linux right now that I don't need to pay for. I've got much better support from Debian than I've got with several commerical software providers.
Slashdot Mirror
No.. you can add a new room. And I suppose you could.. add.. a new.. room to your.. PS2? (I must admit I don't see where you are going with this..)
If you want to do anything with your PS2 than just what it was designed for, then you need a mod chip. Otherwise it's like a house where you can't add a new room.
The article wasn't about making it illegal to "modify you PS2 in any way, whatsoever."
You can't modify your PS2 in any meaningful way. Is a society where we can use company-approved stickers on company-approved gameboys in company-approved clothes where we want to go? "Sure, you can modify your suit. You can dye it; you just can't adjust the lengths."
You seem to miss the point of the article that says "MOD chips (and their sale and usage) are illegal."
But that's exactly what we're arguing about, whether it should be illegal. You can do that in free nations, you know. It's not a dangerous weapon, or something designed to or by hurting someone. It's a tool designed to let you use your PS/2 in a way it wasn't designed for, included imported games and home-designed games.
But don't tap into the neighborhood cable box and get free HBO in your house!
This doesn't let you run cable around the house to let you make your own version of Big Brother, or distribute video around the house, even if it's video you own and have every right to send to every TV in the house.
This isn't about illegal acts. This is about how far the government can restrict your freedom because you might do illegal acts.
But you can't put missle launchers on *, coat your * with crack cocaine, or staple dead babies to your *.
Gee, even after I replaced all those words with *s, it's still equally valid. I can't do those to a PS2, either.
Similarly, you can paint your PS2, add NO2 stickers, and attach a bobble-head doll on it. But you can't purchase MOD chips. See? =P
So I can paint my house, but I can't add a new room or do anything substantial.
If you're referring to the quote from Traffic - the quote in full refers to two letters (not three):
It's an old joke--I believe it can be found in the fortune files--and the version there has three letters.
the high profile cases seem to be people who've been grabbing pictures of babies and 4 year olds,
That's because they're easier to publicize and easier to convict. But I guess you missed the 15 year old girl who was arrested recently for taking sexual pictures of herself.
Man is by nature a polygamist, but U.S. law makes that illegal, so we don't do it.
That is absurd in so many ways. Marriage is not a natural thing, so man can not be by nature a polygamist. Men by nature wants to have sex with a lot of women, and he does, even where the law prohibits it. In a lot of cases, people who want to be polygamist are, either by marrying religiously instead of civilly or by doing illegal things.
we cannot ignore [laws] because it may be against our nature.
We can and usually do. In New York State, in the twenty years before the adultury law was repealed, there were 20,000 divorces a year on the grounds of adultury.
if I have some selecting my music for me, I hope they have my interests in mind and not just their own...
Again, an executive who ignores the interests of his market is soon out of business.
Just as importantly, I chose my religion. I chose my university. I wouldn't let anyone else in the world take those choices away from me. But, for the most part, music is just background music. I could spend hours cruising the net and bars looking for new bands, but it's not worth it to me.
Sure, it's worth it to some people. And as a community, those people who push new musicians and new forms of music do a service to humanity by helping keep variety in music. But that doesn't make them "rebels" and superior to the rest of us.
There are very few rebels because being a rebel is about being alone
That's what you tell yourself. In reality, no one has changed the world alone. There is not just one signature on the American Declaration of Independence. There was not just one person at Harper's Ferry. Martin Luther King didn't march alone. People who are alone rarely matter to anyone.
why does nothing ever change?
If nothing ever changes, then nothing really matters. All your "rebelling" is just posturing.
Of course, I live in a country where I get to vote for my leader. I live in a country without slaves. I live in a country that has freedom of religion. All of these things are things that would have surprised my ancestors, and none of them were created by lone people.
But you need us arrogant assholes
No, we don't. You've already said that nothing ever changes, so why do we need people who are assholes and rock the boat?
That is why I am laughing at you. I see you stampeding straight into the slaughter house. Have fun being a good little rebel on the human production line. You are doing exactly what the world demands of you.
Nice usage of imagery, but no real meaning. You act like music must be more than just something to listen to.
The bell tolls for thee as much as for me. But the "stampede into the slaughter house" was just unoriginal imagery, devoid of actual meaning, wasn't it.
I'd like to know your real name. The last rebel who was alone I heard about got the title of the Unabomber, and in case there's another mad bomber, I like to be able to tell them who you are. You obviously don't care about the sheep; why not blow them up for a good cause?
I think you are still one of those kids who think they are rebelling by buying music targgetted at them by big companies to get the kids pocket money.
And I guess you're one of those smug little assholes who likes looking down on other people because they're part of a tribe, like sane hominids are and have always been.
Most of them don't give a damn about the big companies. They aren't rebelling against the big companies. They're rebelling against their parents, who hate this type of music.
There are no rebels in a herd just mindless cattle
And you're such an individual, like all the other people who buy non-mainstream, poor produced music so they can be "rebels". And you really show your intelligence by what music you listen to. Unh huh. I always wanted to have to search through the sludge pile for my next piece of music, instead of having someone find a selection of good stuff for me.
following where the cowboy (company executive) wants them to go.
The company executive has the copyrights to all the bands of the 70s, the 80s and the 90s all locked up. What he wants is to take the songs that have already been recorded that have the most favorable terms to him, and keep selling them. He doesn't want to have to find new bands and work out new contracts and spend money on recording studios. But the market forces him to. Every executive, in every field of buisness, who is arrogant enough to assume the customers will follow where he wants them to go finds his buisness going under.
Try not being such an arrogant pompous asshole next time. People are not mindless cattle, even if you disagree with their behavior. Prefering to make fun of people and reducing the world to syllogisms instead of understanding people and their complexities is not a sign of intelligence.
Funny how kids always think they are rebbelling by doing exactly what all the other kids are doing. Wouldn't it be a real rebbelion for a kid not to rebel?
Kids are rebelling against their parents and against adults. Not rebelling wouldn't let them assert that release from the slavery that is childhood. If you want a society of people who can merely spout what their elders said, then, sure, it would be better for kids not to rebel.
Given the common OSS attitude of "you haven't read the docs, fuck you"
As opposed to what, "you haven't read the documentation, but we'll happily spend our time talking to you"? If you were getting paid, that's a reasonable attitude. But we didn't write the program and the documentation so we could get the privilige of explaining stuff to users that we already covered in the documentation.
enough to pack about 50 DVDs or 200VCDs on one disc!
But the people selling movies don't want to put 50 DVDs on a disk; that cuts down on their profit per movie. TV shows and the old movies they sell for cheap might not mind discs that hold more movies than DVD does, but they won't push the market.
The GCC compiler screwed up.
The only compiler I know that handles it right is the Realia Cobol compiler. MS VC++ handles it the same way GCC does. On the other hand, no one has these problems on MIPS or PowerPC. The x86 FPU makes it very hard to get exactly right, so that's where the bug lies.
For example, my drive is about 25 km. A marathon run of 26 miles
First place, you're conflating metric and imperial measurements. Use one or the other, for clarity's sake.
Second place, if everyone did this, people wouldn't travel 15 miles for a job. For several months, I walked 10 blocks each way for my job. There's probably no reason beside conveniece that you live 15 miles away from your job.
It's the 21st century, and it's "Hey, do you remember that 'leggo my Eggo' commercial?".
This is what happens when we allow commercialisation to go unchecked; in any environment - unchecked - it will consume infinitely until the environment is destroyed.
That's worse than "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine"? TV does need someway to pay for itself.
If you want to look at something cynically, you can. But that same TV brought me Sesame Street, and brings me Mythbusters and offers my father an endless stream of information about the history of war. At least one cable channel brings you college lectures for free. If people aren't watching educational stuff, it's by choice.
Likewise, I have done a lot of simulations on my computer, from genetics to game theory to fractals. I have dabbled in a wide field of computer graphics, and have seen the computer enable my friend to create graphics he could never create without it. Several friends do large amounts of (classic) roleplaying work on the computer, which is also a creative endavour. Computers have been a tool to bring me a wide wealth of educational material over the net, and I have several CDs to teach me this or that. A selling feature today is the ability to make home movies on your PC. The computer is being used as a creative tool, as a simulation tool and an educational tool, and if certain people aren't interested in using it that way, I don't think that's a problem that computer programmers can solve.
WTF are you talking about?
Try this post, on the GCC mailing list, to start with.
how was it NOT important to get accurate results?
If he wanted accurate results, perhaps he shouldn't have been using a x86 at all? The x86 FPU has numerous problems due to an 80 bit intermediate format that gets crunched to 64 bits in memory. Most other CPUs have more reliable floating point systems.
a small programming language [iolanguage.com]
If you read "Advanced Programming Languages", by Raphael A. Finkel, there already was a language named Io, much more advant garde, if nearly unimplementable and unprogramable.
In the interviening time some very smart men had to discover isotope separation (extreemly hard as Uranium 235 and 238 are chemically identical),
Was it really that hard? You have two substances mixed together only differing in mass. It seems obvious to turn them into a liquid or gas (by including them in a compound, since liquid uranium is hot) and run them through a centrifuge. Of all the problems involved in nuclear weapon production, that seems rather easy.
The problem is that we are proliferating our knowledge freely and that means that the value of our knowledge is worth very little since everyone now has an access to it.
All the information is in libraries and bookstores. If you want the information, a college bookstore will sell books to non-students, and even the notes for many subjects are available online, even outside stuff like this. But people who really understand the material are few and hard to find, and all the availability in the world isn't going to change that. At best, it will let a determined and intelligent student learn something without a college class, and I find that something hard to be upset about.
Most open source application software is a pain to use and quite uninspired as they try to emulate MS Office to closely.
Have you even tried TeXmacs? LyX? Tex & Emacs? Even Abiword? People want MS Office, so that's what Open Office is. If you don't want MS Office, there's several options for you to take.
application and utility development which I feel should remain in the hands of closed source developers
It's a free society; if I want to work on a program and make it open source, then I will. That's doesn't stop you from working on a closed source program. And in a capitalist society, it's may the best program win.
If people prefer the closed source programs to the open source programs (overall, money included), then they will use them. If people prefer the open source programs to closed source programs (overall, usability included), then they will use them, and in a free society no one has the right to tell them otherwise.
fighting against Microsoft's competitors on the application front only solidifies the position of MS on the desktop.
If OpenOffice only hurts Microsoft's competitors, what makes StarOffice, or any other Microsoft competitor, hurt Microsoft?
Since many billions of $$ are given in the US alone to charities, and there are charity watching groups as well, it seems to me that your assertion is handily disproven that way.
It helps that the government won't give money to charities with more than 25% overhead. Do you know what percentage of your money goes to overhead in your favorite charity? Sure, the complete frauds get weeded out, but is it going to be on the front of every newspaper if the Salvation Army goes up to 30% overhead? And even that will only affect the people who read it and care about it.
Lots of people gave to Mother Teresa on the expectation that it was going to help the poor, when much of it went to fund missionary work.
people have no real way of checking up on such organizations.
Okay, they have a way. That doesn't mean that they will use it. Again, what can you tell me about the charities you give to?
People are held individually responsible for their performance.
And guess what, it happens in governments, too. But it's not perfect in either one. Employee theft and fraud is a huge problem, even in those privately owned supermarkets and department stores.
A private system doesn't require the heavy handed and expensive processes that a system based on force does.
Not as heavy handed, but that doesn't mean they're not expensive. You've got to get people out there and beg for money, and that takes a lot of man-hours.
it is that they are done well when they are done privately.
That's one of the thins under discussion here.
By building a bureaucracy, the organization becomes less efficient. Other, more efficient organizations will satisfy the customers better, and the old one will reform or go out of business.
The customers, for a private charitable organization, are the people giving the money, who have no real way of checking up on the organization. How efficient it is will have little effect on how much money is coming it.
Very astute. And what happens when the hiring manager at IBM hires inefficient workers because of the bribe? IBM itself becomes less efficient and loses customers. Management, always looking for more efficient use of resources, fires the corrupt individual.
In the optimal world; in that same world, the government would do the same thing. In disoptimal world, the managment above this guy would not notice it, or would ignore it.
His job hangs by a thread of confidence, and by allowing incompetence to exist within the organization he himself risks his job.
So? People risk their jobs all the time. If the bribe is worth enough to him, whether it be through greed or immediate need, he will take it.
Can you name anywhere that had such problems that it wasn't the government itself complicit or directly involved?
Yes, but in those cases they're usually called warlords.
Anyone else notice the OS requirements? Seems like bloated software to me
MPlayer would usually drop frames when running DVDs on my PIII-450 so the CPU seems about right for reliably running a DVD perfectly, especially if you want to scale it. The hard drive space and memory seem a bit excessive, though.
So are Slashdotters going to thank the MPAA for addressing one of the Linux community's concerns?
I have perfectly good DVD playing software. The problem is the MPAA will harass distributers. I don't need "legal" proprietary DVD playing software; I need the MPAA to leave my current software alone. This doesn't address my needs at all.
You people who are whining that you actually have to pay for something need to get off your high horses. If you ever want to see anything supported in Linux in some fashion you need to pay for it.
But there are many things supported in Linux right now that I don't need to pay for. I've got much better support from Debian than I've got with several commerical software providers.