Reality check: Genetically engineering food to increase crop yields and food quality is a little different from building nuclear weapons.
Monsanto is taking ordinary vegetables, which are about as unlike nuclear weapons as possible, and modifying them slightly. While it's possible that those modifications might make the food dangerous, I'm pretty sure that's not Monsanto's intent. I am also sure that if Monsanto knew that a certain modification was dangerous, they would stop using it, or suffer the legal consequences. Regardless of what their PR guy says, Monsanto would of course be liable if they knowingly sold a dangerous product.
There's a difference between saying "It's not my responsibility to decide if this product is safe," which seems to be Monsanto's position, and saying "We will claim that this product is safe irrespective of any evidence to the contrary."
Your interpretation of Monsanto's position, on the other hand, seems to be "Let's see how many people we can kill with our vegetables!" Making baseless (implied) accusations is a good way to get people to "scream their heads off", but I think a rational consideration of the situation is more appropriate.
It seems to me that their argument hinges on the following point:
On information and belief, this proprietary information was obtained by willfully "hacking" and/or improperly reverse engineering software created by CSS licensee Xing Technology Corporation ("Xing"). Xing's software is and was licensed to users under a license agreement which specifically prohibits reverse engineering.
Now, the authors DeCSS have openly stated that their crack was based on information found in Xing's binaries, right? So aren't they in the wrong here?
I suspect the situation is more complicated than that, but IANAL, so I'd appreciate if someone would punch some holes in this particular part of the case.
(It occurs to me as I write this that a violation of Xing's license agreement is Xing's business, not DVD CCA's, so they might not have standing. Is that how it works?)
Like I said, it was a generic example. I think we're more concerned about open source games in general than about a particular 5 (?) year old program, anyway. Regardless of what data you're actually transferring (how about the position of your opponent?), in practice you're going to end up spending a lot of time waiting for the server.
Your suggestion is an excellent one, and I hadn't thought of it in this context before. (Although it comes up a lot whenever we discuss open source distributed computing. It would solve 90% of the problem, but ironically, it doesn't help in the particular case that I described: What happens when the server needs to hide information from a player, but the client needs that information to provide reasonable performance? I.e. the location of an invisible player. Once the server gives up that information, it has absolutely no way of ensuring that the client software will hide it from the player.
You're abosultely correct that "game security" should be enforced by the server, and the server API should disallow any request from the client that would violate the rules.
But there's a huge practical problem in implementing that. When rule processing is done on the server, the client must wait for the server to process each rule. Even if you have a lightning fast network connection, eventually relativity limits the speed at which that sort of communication can travel. (Congrats, Al!)
For example: Let's say player A has some sort of invisibility power turned on. (I know very little about Quake, so I'm speaking generically.) Ideally, the server will not report player A's position to any other client, since the other players aren't supposed to know. But what happens when player A steps right in front of player B, turns off his invisibility, and starts shooting? Player B's client now needs to download all of player A's properties from the server. (Maybe even custom textures, sounds, or other bandwidth-intensive data.) And the client needs to do this fast enough to seem instantaneous to player B.
That's generally not possible, and that's why network games often need to place some trust in their clients.
Don't let the title of the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act" fool you. It's not the same as traditional copyright law... if it was, then there'd be no need for a new law, of course.
According to established copyright rules, Real has no basis whatsoever for preventing folks from decoding, translating, or recording their streams. (In particular, they have no standing, because they generally don't own the copyrights on the data itself!)
The DMCA is a whole different ballgame. Basically, it makes it illegal to intentionally circumvent copy-protection mechanisms. If data is encoded transparently, and you just translate it into a different code, that's fine. But if it's encrypted, and by that I mean deliberately encoded in such as way as to make it difficult to decode it, then it's covered by the DMCA.
So let's assume that RealMedia is an extremely hairy file format. If it's extremely hairy because Real uses lousy programmers, then Streambox is fine. If, on the other hand, it's extremely hairy because Real doesn't want anyone else to be able to decode it, then Streambox is breaking the law.
I think it's clear that it's the latter, and Streambox is in trouble. But that's just an indication of how fundamentally wrong the whole idea of the DMCA is. It's nothing more than a tool for shoring up monopolies.
Makes you wonder why the government is going after Bill Gates like he's the antichrist, but handing more power to his competitors. (Could it have something to do with Microsoft's refusal to participate in the our system of government-by-lobbyist?)
For a while last year I was working on a massive demographic database for research purposes. At least, it was to be massive, eventually.
The core of the database was to be (is?) data from the 1990 US Census. There's a whole lot more than population counts in there, folks... The entire Census is distributed on around 60 CD-ROMs.
This information is "free," in the sense that you can find it at any official government document repository. You're "free" to lug in a wheelbarrow full of floppy disks, and copy the CD-ROMs onto them, one disk at a time. If you actually want your own copy on CDs, though, the price tag is well into the four figure range. (And let me tell you, getting a hold of the discs is only the beginning of the fun...)
I suspect that this, and the similar situation with ZIP codes, is just another example of the $17,000 toilet seat phenomenon. Presumably, $100 per CD-R is considered a reasonable "duplication fee" in the beaurau... buerau... (good god, I need to go to bed...) bureaucratic world.
don't be silly. you think it takes three months for a film to cross the atlantic from the us to ireland? i can ship books by boat faster then that. i can ship *me* by plane faster.
The film doesn't spend three months on a boat before getting to Ireland. It spend three months in US theaters.
Duplicating a film print is an extremely expensive and time-consuming process, and for that matter, you can only make so many copies before destroying the original. So instead of making a copy for every theater, studios make a limited number of copies, and force the theaters to take turns. (Usually by staggering international premieres.)
Digital "film" would solve this problem, by allowing unlimited lossless duplication.
And the idea that loading cookies from only that page is ludicrous.
I think "jamie" mispoke. He (She? Who is this person, anyway?) probably meant that cookies should only be accepted from the site that the page came from, i.e. the machine specified in the URL. This is not the way the cookie specification currently works.
Cookies may only be sent to the machine that created them, and even then only when a client initiates a connection with that machine. The problem is that loading one HTML page usually involves a number of http connections, which may or may not all be going to the same machine, and which the user (usually) has no control over. (That's why, for example, most users involuntarily visit ads.doubleclick.net several times a day.)
So the solution to most of these problems is to allow the browser to accept cookies only from the site that the user is actually visiting, or the "page". A few browsers have had a setting that did just that... I think the Mac version of IE 3.0 did, for example. But it's not around much anymore, which is a shame. (Although in recent versions of IE, you can always manually put suspicious sites in your "Restricted" list, and set the browser to refuse cookies from those sites.)
Sorry to draw this out, but... You can change the MAC address? I've seen nothing to indicate that that's possible. And it would seem unlikely, seeing as its purpose is to identify a particular NIC.
So is it illegal to sell a computer with Ethernet in Europe? (Being that you could easily write a program that would grab the MAC address from a computer and send it somewhere.)
Sorry, I forgot the most important part: I don't think the first console emulators count as great hacks because emulation in and of itself really isn't all that clever... It's just programming to conform to an interface, which is something that programmers have to do all the time anyway. It actually comes pretty naturally.
I'm not sure I'd count the first NES emu as a hack... At least not a technological hack. (It was an important social hack, since it reminded the public that "software" is information, not floppy disks and cartridges.)
On the other hand, UltraHLE was quite a hack. As I understand it, the creators of UltraHLE ("High Level Emulator") basically gave up on trying to actually duplicate an N64, which would be prohibitively complicated, and instead concentrated on emulating the most visible parts of the system. In other words, UltraHLE is kind of like Eliza... it doesn't actually emulate an N64, it just fakes it.
Of course, this also means that UltraHLE could never really be improved upon significantly without rewriting it from scratch.
(I apologize if some of my info about UltraHLE is wrong... I haven't paid attention to the emu scene in quite a while.)
The P3 serial number clearly violates European Law on privacy.
How exactly does it violate the law? (I apologize if the answer is in the article... I found the Babelfish translation less comprehensible than the original German version.)
I know the EU is very strict on privacy, but what exactly is it about the PIII that is so clearly illegal? Is it illegal to put a serial number on your products in Europe?
Of course, the point of the PIII serial number is that it can be transmitted to other computers for identification purposes, but that's not something that the chip does, that's the software -- software which, incidentally, doesn't exist yet, and may very well never exist.
This isn't a flame... I'm assuming you must have some reason for saying the PIII serial number violates the law, and I'd just like to hear it.
I really should rant about how hypocritical and ignorant most of the posts here are, but I don't have the energy. How about checking to see whether MS has already fixed the bug, before you complain about the lack of a solution?
Now, if you want to bitch about MSNBC for sensationalizing this, that's another issue entirely...
I don't think the movie studios are worried that you'll copy your friend's DVD instead of buying a legal copy. I don't even think they care that much if you put the entire movie up on your ftp site, unlike the RIAA.
What they are worried about, however, are the factories in Asia that now have the ability to produce millions of identical copies of big-budget DVDs. This will definitely make a dent in the DVD business... In a few months, a lot of DVD mail-order joints will probably be full of pirated merchandise. It's the exact same product, only cheaper... who could resist?
I'm really worried about this. While I wholeheartedly support efforts to reverse-engineer proprietary technology, I think maybe we should take a break from cracking DVDs for a moment, and instead try to come up with a way for the movie industry to regain their control over DVDs... because if they don't have control, they're just not going to make them.
You have the right to try to copy anything you own. And the DVD producers have a right to make it as hard for you as possible. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one.
I doubt anyone is still reading this, but a lot of people have criticized my comment, so I feel that I should defend it.
I didn't say that I lost respect for/. when I saw that comment. Nor did I imply at all that I didn't want to hear debrain's opinion. I specifically said that when I see a comment like that marked "Insightful", I lose respect for Slashdot.
I figure that for every +1 of moderation, there must be at least a few thousand Slashdot readers who agree with it. (Not counting the past few hours... it's moderation armageddon!) Selfish and ill-conceived opinions are not dangerous in and of themselves. Selfish and ill-conceived opinions that are shared by a lot of people worry me.
I don't really think that many/. readers agree that "At some point of earning money... the possession of more money is fundamentally wrong." I think that the positive reaction to debrain's rant is just the result of the knee-jerk "information must be free" attitudes that prevail around here. But that's exactly why it dissappointed me... I know that/. readers on the whole are very, very smart people. It's disturbing to see that they only apply that intelligence selectively.
When will people realize that JUST because its always been done that way in the past means it CANNOT BE DONE DIFFERENTLY IN THE FUTURE.
In the future, movies will still cost money to make. Maybe not as much as they cost today, but undoubtedly a hefty chunk of cash nonetheless.
That's the difference between "free movies" and Free Software, which I know is what most of you guys have in the back of your mind right now. Free software can be made for free (on donated time.) And it can even be profitable, if you sell services associated with your software, or maybe printed manuals.
But you have to put money in to get a movie out, and that money has to come from somewhere. And you can't really use them as a loss-leader, anyway. (Well, George Lucas could probably have given away The Phantom Menace for free and subsisted on the merchandising money, but that's an unusual situation. Besides, do we want our movies to literally be two hour long commercials?)
I understand the general animosity towards restricted IP on/., but I'm just trying to point out that movies are different. They're not just ideas, they're massive investments.
Damn, I knew I should have checked that link before I posted.
You're correct, of course. And as a matter of fact, it doesn't look like there are any commercial Linux DVD solutions after all.
But I still think my explanation is correct. If someone wanted to invest the (considerable) money needed to license the DVD spec, they'd have no problem writing a DVD decoder for Linux. It's only "free" (either sense) decoders that have trouble.
And truth be told, this bothers me none. The multimillion dollar movie [sic] does not help my world at all
Maybe you don't care about the movie industry (which makes me wonder why you have such a strong opinion on it), but personally, I like to watch movies. Big budget ones, and little budget ones. I would be very displeased if they ceased to exist.
That is what you're suggesting, right? Because of course, movies cost a hell of a lot of money to make. Movie companies aren't going to spend $100M+ on a movie like Titanic if they are forced to give away their movies for free. (Because they're "too rich"?) Sure, they could still charge people to see the film in theaters, but that will become increasingly irrelevant as home theater technology advances.
That reason alone is plenty explanation for why you can't copy movies. But I can't let the many snide remarks about "rich" movie companies go by without comment. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner and their peers really are completely selfish and amoral. When you steal movies from them, since they're already so rich anyway, do you think they're just going to smile and take a pay cut? Of course not. They'll close a studio, putting hundreds of minimum-wage workers out of a job... they'll cancel interesting or controversial projects, in favor of guaranteed money-makers like Big Daddy... they'll raise prices on whatever it is that they're still alowed to sell... and everyone else will be hurt.
I must say, I lose a bit of respect for/. every time I see such a childish, selfish rant like this one marked as "Insightful".
I know Rob can't personally verify every story before he posts it. But shouldn't you be a little more careful with a particularly implausible and inflammatory one, like this one? It took me ten minutes on Google to find this information.
(I hope this isn't a double post... my first version of this comment mysteriously vanished, along with about twenty other posts.)
Try extracting the nth element from a list in C++ in less than O(n) using the standard linked list data structure.
I was of course implying that I wouldn't be using a linked list when I needed to extract the nth element of a set in C++, but I didn't have that option in LISP. But...
Common Lisp has arrays just like C/C++ and they're as fast with proper type-declarations.
... I wasn't aware of that. (Seems a bit like cheating to me, though... If you allow LISP arrays in this analysis, then can I use inline assembly in C++?)
Anyway, I'm willing to believe that LISP is as fast as C++. But I still don't buy that LISP is inherently faster than C++, assuming an equally comepetent compiler, which is what jd seemed to be claiming. I find it hard to believe that any language is inherently faster than C++, other than perhaps assembly. (Whereas there are definitely languages that are inherently slower than C++... weakly typed lanugages, for example.)
Slashdot Mirror
Reality check: Genetically engineering food to increase crop yields and food quality is a little different from building nuclear weapons.
Monsanto is taking ordinary vegetables, which are about as unlike nuclear weapons as possible, and modifying them slightly. While it's possible that those modifications might make the food dangerous, I'm pretty sure that's not Monsanto's intent. I am also sure that if Monsanto knew that a certain modification was dangerous, they would stop using it, or suffer the legal consequences. Regardless of what their PR guy says, Monsanto would of course be liable if they knowingly sold a dangerous product.
There's a difference between saying "It's not my responsibility to decide if this product is safe," which seems to be Monsanto's position, and saying "We will claim that this product is safe irrespective of any evidence to the contrary."
Your interpretation of Monsanto's position, on the other hand, seems to be "Let's see how many people we can kill with our vegetables!" Making baseless (implied) accusations is a good way to get people to "scream their heads off", but I think a rational consideration of the situation is more appropriate.
I suspect the situation is more complicated than that, but IANAL, so I'd appreciate if someone would punch some holes in this particular part of the case.
(It occurs to me as I write this that a violation of Xing's license agreement is Xing's business, not DVD CCA's, so they might not have standing. Is that how it works?)
Like I said, it was a generic example. I think we're more concerned about open source games in general than about a particular 5 (?) year old program, anyway. Regardless of what data you're actually transferring (how about the position of your opponent?), in practice you're going to end up spending a lot of time waiting for the server.
Your suggestion is an excellent one, and I hadn't thought of it in this context before. (Although it comes up a lot whenever we discuss open source distributed computing. It would solve 90% of the problem, but ironically, it doesn't help in the particular case that I described: What happens when the server needs to hide information from a player, but the client needs that information to provide reasonable performance? I.e. the location of an invisible player. Once the server gives up that information, it has absolutely no way of ensuring that the client software will hide it from the player.
You're abosultely correct that "game security" should be enforced by the server, and the server API should disallow any request from the client that would violate the rules.
But there's a huge practical problem in implementing that. When rule processing is done on the server, the client must wait for the server to process each rule. Even if you have a lightning fast network connection, eventually relativity limits the speed at which that sort of communication can travel. (Congrats, Al!)
For example: Let's say player A has some sort of invisibility power turned on. (I know very little about Quake, so I'm speaking generically.) Ideally, the server will not report player A's position to any other client, since the other players aren't supposed to know. But what happens when player A steps right in front of player B, turns off his invisibility, and starts shooting? Player B's client now needs to download all of player A's properties from the server. (Maybe even custom textures, sounds, or other bandwidth-intensive data.) And the client needs to do this fast enough to seem instantaneous to player B.
That's generally not possible, and that's why network games often need to place some trust in their clients.
Don't let the title of the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act" fool you. It's not the same as traditional copyright law... if it was, then there'd be no need for a new law, of course.
According to established copyright rules, Real has no basis whatsoever for preventing folks from decoding, translating, or recording their streams. (In particular, they have no standing, because they generally don't own the copyrights on the data itself!)
The DMCA is a whole different ballgame. Basically, it makes it illegal to intentionally circumvent copy-protection mechanisms. If data is encoded transparently, and you just translate it into a different code, that's fine. But if it's encrypted, and by that I mean deliberately encoded in such as way as to make it difficult to decode it, then it's covered by the DMCA.
So let's assume that RealMedia is an extremely hairy file format. If it's extremely hairy because Real uses lousy programmers, then Streambox is fine. If, on the other hand, it's extremely hairy because Real doesn't want anyone else to be able to decode it, then Streambox is breaking the law.
I think it's clear that it's the latter, and Streambox is in trouble. But that's just an indication of how fundamentally wrong the whole idea of the DMCA is. It's nothing more than a tool for shoring up monopolies.
Makes you wonder why the government is going after Bill Gates like he's the antichrist, but handing more power to his competitors. (Could it have something to do with Microsoft's refusal to participate in the our system of government-by-lobbyist?)
(IA, of course, NAL.)
For a while last year I was working on a massive demographic database for research purposes. At least, it was to be massive, eventually.
The core of the database was to be (is?) data from the 1990 US Census. There's a whole lot more than population counts in there, folks... The entire Census is distributed on around 60 CD-ROMs.
This information is "free," in the sense that you can find it at any official government document repository. You're "free" to lug in a wheelbarrow full of floppy disks, and copy the CD-ROMs onto them, one disk at a time. If you actually want your own copy on CDs, though, the price tag is well into the four figure range. (And let me tell you, getting a hold of the discs is only the beginning of the fun...)
I suspect that this, and the similar situation with ZIP codes, is just another example of the $17,000 toilet seat phenomenon. Presumably, $100 per CD-R is considered a reasonable "duplication fee" in the beaurau... buerau... (good god, I need to go to bed...) bureaucratic world.
Duplicating a film print is an extremely expensive and time-consuming process, and for that matter, you can only make so many copies before destroying the original. So instead of making a copy for every theater, studios make a limited number of copies, and force the theaters to take turns. (Usually by staggering international premieres.)
Digital "film" would solve this problem, by allowing unlimited lossless duplication.
Cookies may only be sent to the machine that created them, and even then only when a client initiates a connection with that machine. The problem is that loading one HTML page usually involves a number of http connections, which may or may not all be going to the same machine, and which the user (usually) has no control over. (That's why, for example, most users involuntarily visit ads.doubleclick.net several times a day.)
So the solution to most of these problems is to allow the browser to accept cookies only from the site that the user is actually visiting, or the "page". A few browsers have had a setting that did just that... I think the Mac version of IE 3.0 did, for example. But it's not around much anymore, which is a shame. (Although in recent versions of IE, you can always manually put suspicious sites in your "Restricted" list, and set the browser to refuse cookies from those sites.)
... that the name companies have some of the stupidest names around? Name/It? Namestormers?!?
/.ers, I think the names they sell are actually pretty clever...
It's funny, because unlike many
Sorry to draw this out, but... You can change the MAC address? I've seen nothing to indicate that that's possible. And it would seem unlikely, seeing as its purpose is to identify a particular NIC.
So is it illegal to sell a computer with Ethernet in Europe? (Being that you could easily write a program that would grab the MAC address from a computer and send it somewhere.)
Sorry, I forgot the most important part: I don't think the first console emulators count as great hacks because emulation in and of itself really isn't all that clever... It's just programming to conform to an interface, which is something that programmers have to do all the time anyway. It actually comes pretty naturally.
I'm not sure I'd count the first NES emu as a hack... At least not a technological hack. (It was an important social hack, since it reminded the public that "software" is information, not floppy disks and cartridges.)
On the other hand, UltraHLE was quite a hack. As I understand it, the creators of UltraHLE ("High Level Emulator") basically gave up on trying to actually duplicate an N64, which would be prohibitively complicated, and instead concentrated on emulating the most visible parts of the system. In other words, UltraHLE is kind of like Eliza... it doesn't actually emulate an N64, it just fakes it.
Of course, this also means that UltraHLE could never really be improved upon significantly without rewriting it from scratch.
(I apologize if some of my info about UltraHLE is wrong... I haven't paid attention to the emu scene in quite a while.)
I know the EU is very strict on privacy, but what exactly is it about the PIII that is so clearly illegal? Is it illegal to put a serial number on your products in Europe?
Of course, the point of the PIII serial number is that it can be transmitted to other computers for identification purposes, but that's not something that the chip does, that's the software -- software which, incidentally, doesn't exist yet, and may very well never exist.
This isn't a flame... I'm assuming you must have some reason for saying the PIII serial number violates the law, and I'd just like to hear it.
Win9x WinNT
Information is here.
I really should rant about how hypocritical and ignorant most of the posts here are, but I don't have the energy. How about checking to see whether MS has already fixed the bug, before you complain about the lack of a solution?
Now, if you want to bitch about MSNBC for sensationalizing this, that's another issue entirely...
I don't think the movie studios are worried that you'll copy your friend's DVD instead of buying a legal copy. I don't even think they care that much if you put the entire movie up on your ftp site, unlike the RIAA.
What they are worried about, however, are the factories in Asia that now have the ability to produce millions of identical copies of big-budget DVDs. This will definitely make a dent in the DVD business... In a few months, a lot of DVD mail-order joints will probably be full of pirated merchandise. It's the exact same product, only cheaper... who could resist?
I'm really worried about this. While I wholeheartedly support efforts to reverse-engineer proprietary technology, I think maybe we should take a break from cracking DVDs for a moment, and instead try to come up with a way for the movie industry to regain their control over DVDs... because if they don't have control, they're just not going to make them.
You have the right to try to copy anything you own. And the DVD producers have a right to make it as hard for you as possible. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one.
I doubt anyone is still reading this, but a lot of people have criticized my comment, so I feel that I should defend it.
/. when I saw that comment. Nor did I imply at all that I didn't want to hear debrain's opinion. I specifically said that when I see a comment like that marked "Insightful", I lose respect for Slashdot.
/. readers agree that "At some point of earning money... the possession of more money is fundamentally wrong." I think that the positive reaction to debrain's rant is just the result of the knee-jerk "information must be free" attitudes that prevail around here. But that's exactly why it dissappointed me... I know that /. readers on the whole are very, very smart people. It's disturbing to see that they only apply that intelligence selectively.
I didn't say that I lost respect for
I figure that for every +1 of moderation, there must be at least a few thousand Slashdot readers who agree with it. (Not counting the past few hours... it's moderation armageddon!) Selfish and ill-conceived opinions are not dangerous in and of themselves. Selfish and ill-conceived opinions that are shared by a lot of people worry me.
I don't really think that many
Of course, that's just my opinion.
That's the difference between "free movies" and Free Software, which I know is what most of you guys have in the back of your mind right now. Free software can be made for free (on donated time.) And it can even be profitable, if you sell services associated with your software, or maybe printed manuals.
But you have to put money in to get a movie out, and that money has to come from somewhere. And you can't really use them as a loss-leader, anyway. (Well, George Lucas could probably have given away The Phantom Menace for free and subsisted on the merchandising money, but that's an unusual situation. Besides, do we want our movies to literally be two hour long commercials?)
I understand the general animosity towards restricted IP on
Damn, I knew I should have checked that link before I posted.
You're correct, of course. And as a matter of fact, it doesn't look like there are any commercial Linux DVD solutions after all.
But I still think my explanation is correct. If someone wanted to invest the (considerable) money needed to license the DVD spec, they'd have no problem writing a DVD decoder for Linux. It's only "free" (either sense) decoders that have trouble.
It's not that they don't want DVD on Linux -- as a matter of fact, DVD has been available on Linux for a while, from MpegTV, and probably others.
Rather, it's open source DVD decryption that's the problem. Security through obscurity... it's the usual story.
That is what you're suggesting, right? Because of course, movies cost a hell of a lot of money to make. Movie companies aren't going to spend $100M+ on a movie like Titanic if they are forced to give away their movies for free. (Because they're "too rich"?) Sure, they could still charge people to see the film in theaters, but that will become increasingly irrelevant as home theater technology advances.
That reason alone is plenty explanation for why you can't copy movies. But I can't let the many snide remarks about "rich" movie companies go by without comment. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner and their peers really are completely selfish and amoral. When you steal movies from them, since they're already so rich anyway, do you think they're just going to smile and take a pay cut? Of course not. They'll close a studio, putting hundreds of minimum-wage workers out of a job... they'll cancel interesting or controversial projects, in favor of guaranteed money-makers like Big Daddy... they'll raise prices on whatever it is that they're still alowed to sell... and everyone else will be hurt.
I must say, I lose a bit of respect for
You can find Title 14, Section 1211 (or rather, the lack thereof) at http://www4.law.cornell.edu/cf r/14p1211.htm#14p1211s .
I know Rob can't personally verify every story before he posts it. But shouldn't you be a little more careful with a particularly implausible and inflammatory one, like this one? It took me ten minutes on Google to find this information.
(I hope this isn't a double post... my first version of this comment mysteriously vanished, along with about twenty other posts.)
Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen... and at least one slot open for expansion.
The directory server, of course, is named Claus.
Oddly, there is a Rudolph, but there are no user accounts on it... Presumably they're waiting for a foggy night.
(751 comments and counting... If you're reading this, I'm impressed.)
Anyway, I'm willing to believe that LISP is as fast as C++. But I still don't buy that LISP is inherently faster than C++, assuming an equally comepetent compiler, which is what jd seemed to be claiming. I find it hard to believe that any language is inherently faster than C++, other than perhaps assembly. (Whereas there are definitely languages that are inherently slower than C++... weakly typed lanugages, for example.)