I can't believe so many people have replied to this, and not pointed out -- DeCSS IS NOT ABOUT COPYING DVDs!!!
DeCSS is about watching DVDs that I paid for on machines not approved by the MPAA, for example my two linux machines.
It also gives you back the fair use rights that the movie industry is trying so hard to steal, but the primary use for DeCSS is to watch movies on linux.
The only way DeCSS even helps DVD copying is that it allows you to do lossy compression you couldn't otherwise do. DVD "copy protection" doesn't in the least keep you from copying a DVD. I can easily copy a DVD and view it without using any unapproved decryptor.
Yaknow, I put forth this argument on kuro5hin as a set of comments about a stock story, and I was consistently rated with loads of 1s. No one had a response other than that I needed to go learn something about stocks. No other post of mine has had anything vaguely close to as bad a rating as those comments got.
I put forth my arguments in the form of a question "what value is there?", because I assumed there must be something I was missing. I would like to hear about any education you may have had wrt economics (stocks in particular). What you're saying obviously sounds right to me, but I would love to hear that someone with some formal education in economics is espousing those beliefs (or hear someone with formal education in economics debunk them).
Yes, it is easy to blame the "Big, Bad Corporations". When they're freezing the little guy out of the market, patenting things that are blatantly obvious, and abusing monopoly power to eliminate our freedom of choice, it's very easy.
Capitalism is great when it means we have people competing to produce better products so they can make more money. When it means we have companies that can afford to give their product away until they've established a marketplace in which you have to have their product, or they have enough money to buy legislation that takes away our right to produce media with established cultural icons, then the big bad companies are fucking the society and should be killed.
I'm completely offtopic here, but it really burns me up to see someone pretending that the huge corporations are generally a public good.
I don't think you're quite hitting on the reason for big corporate push for longer copyright terms. It's not about them getting to make money in 70 years on what they're doing now, or even about retaining the rights to what they're doing now.
Companies don't think in the long term, or, if they do, long term means 5 years or 10 years.
You see, the problem is that media companies have spent years telling us what our culture is; what's cool and what's not. And they've told us that what they produce is cool. If products they produced 50 years ago become available, then those products will compete with their current products. And it's easy to find ten movies (or albums, or whatever) from a 20 year period that happened 40 or 50 years ago that compare very favorably to what we have seen in the last 5 years from the media industry.
It's not about what happens to their current products in 50 years or 70 years. It's about what happens now to the products they produced 50 years ago.
Of course, they can't argue this point of view - it makes it very obvious that they're just scared of competition, and in no way can copyright period extension be seen to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts".
Gah! No wonder the country is in the fucked up, can't buy standard chemical or physics equipment state that it's in!
That same kid could wire the teacher's desk to the class outlet, or poison their lunch, or bash them in the head with a brick, or drop a giant oil slick bomb on the highway,...
Outlaw evil activities, not OWNERSHIP! The US is founded on a pioneering spirit. Legislators are doing one hell of a job of killing that spirit in favor of corporate cronyism, and you're saying we should help!?!
Killing people has been easy since the invention of the long pointed stick. Just because someone invents a new way doesn't make it any more or less acceptable to kill people.
You can whack someone by using a transformer to crank up the amperage on house current, or putting bleach in their vodka glass when they're wasted, or boiling up a bunch of apple seeds for the cyanide. Guess they should have thought of that when they invented house current, bleach, and, er, apples, huh?
Yes, I'm sure you know much more about the laws of physics than, say, someone with a PhD in Molecular Nanotechnology from MIT.
There are reputable scientists who argue against the most agressive nanotech postulates, but even they don't claim we won't build molecular systems that can produce copies of themselves in the forseeable future. They're just arguing that it will be restricted to producing a class of molecules rather than almost any possible molecule. In other words, from the consumer's point of view, they are splitting hairs.
Well, for carbon based nanotech the raw materials would be the same as for plants - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, energy, and minute amounts of a few metals. I.e. air & impure water. So it's not something for nothing; it's something for air, sunlight & water.
There's a project on sourceforge for this. (True for just about anything, no?) It's Movix.
Movix helps you build a really lightweight linux distro on a cd or dvd for the purpose of autobooting and displaying multimedia content. It uses standard linux tools like mplayer.
So, just put the codec on the dvd along with the content. As long as you can find an x86 compatible machine or an emulator, you can access the content. Put the cd or dvd in the machine and boot from it. You shouldn't have to know or care that it is running linux; just watch your movie.
Caveat - I don't really know anything about Movix more than what I listed here. I just happened to read about it yesterday from the list of highest activity projects on sourceforge.
patents were created for instructions on how to construct a device, and not software
software patents give patent holders the power to control who can make programs that are actually usable (by disallowing interoperability)
the whole concept of intellectual property is supposed to be a bargain made by the public to encourage innovation. Monopoly is not a right of IP holders.
don't come into play at all, right?
If a law is bad, campaign against it. That's what Bruce is suggesting. Legal != good. It's our obligation to try to make the law promote the good.
I disagree completely. Yes, there are PCs that Knoppix doesn't install on automatically. However, on about 5/6 of the machines that I've heard of friends (or me) trying to install Knoppix on, it worked automatically. Knoppix is indeed all that. I'm running on a Knoppix machine at home, and I had the "installed completely in 15 minutes" experience too.
I have a complaint -- you didn't list any Java games.
I am the lead server developer for Magicosm, a java/java3d persistent online world. Sun showcased us at the Game Developer's Conference last year. There are also several very nice java games by FullSail as well as a few others.
Magicosm won't be available for purchase for at least a year, but we hope to have a closed beta test late this year or early next.
Well, I agree with you wholeheartedly except about one point... writing your own GCC. Per copyright law, the copyright on derivative works is owned by the originator of the work. As you pointed out, copyright law still applies independent of the licensing scheme.
Hmm, unless the GPL explicitly gives up copyright on derivative works. I'm not sure on that one, and I'm too lazy to look it up:)
The New Scientist reporter said that Watson said stupidity was an inherited disorder. Then, they give a quote of Watson saying that he would call stupidity a disease. I think the dipshit journalist got "Watson says stupidity is an inherited disorder!" from "I would call stupidity a disease." Even if Watson did say stupidity is an inherited disorder, that's a far cry from saying we've found the gene for it.
From your post, I'm guessing the gene is linked to cowardice.
That's what I read. I still don't see where that says they've identified genes that cause stupidity. He explicitly says "I would call that a disease." The new scientist article even has another researcher replying to Watson's comments later pointing out that they're more meant to be inflammatory than informative.
However, I did miss the phrase where the article says "Watson says that low intelligence is an inherited disorder". I still doubt that Watson said that they had identified the genes causing low intelligence. I think it's just sensationalism by New Scientist, who in my experience doesn't show the journalistic restraint I expect. The quote that they give from Watson (which you included in your post) absolutely doesn't say they can identify stupidity genes. It says Watson would call stupidity a disease, which sounds like an opinion rather than any scientific statement.
If someone had identified a gene that commonly causes stupidity, we would be seeing information about it in more than just an oblique phrase in a New Scientist article.
That link says nothing that could be interpreted to say they've discovered a "stupid gene" or can eliminate it. They list a few diseases that cause retardation that they can identify genetically, but I think you're taking a casual comment by James Watson and making more of it than is there.
These glasses use stored data about the terrain to generate a computer image. The sandstorm is then completely irrelevant, assuming that you know where you are, because your image of the outside is generated from data taken when there was no sandstorm.
If that data included the location of power lines, they should show up just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe so many people have replied to this, and not pointed out -- DeCSS IS NOT ABOUT COPYING DVDs!!!
DeCSS is about watching DVDs that I paid for on machines not approved by the MPAA, for example my two linux machines.
It also gives you back the fair use rights that the movie industry is trying so hard to steal, but the primary use for DeCSS is to watch movies on linux.
The only way DeCSS even helps DVD copying is that it allows you to do lossy compression you couldn't otherwise do. DVD "copy protection" doesn't in the least keep you from copying a DVD. I can easily copy a DVD and view it without using any unapproved decryptor.
Yaknow, I put forth this argument on kuro5hin as a set of comments about a stock story, and I was consistently rated with loads of 1s. No one had a response other than that I needed to go learn something about stocks. No other post of mine has had anything vaguely close to as bad a rating as those comments got.
I put forth my arguments in the form of a question "what value is there?", because I assumed there must be something I was missing. I would like to hear about any education you may have had wrt economics (stocks in particular). What you're saying obviously sounds right to me, but I would love to hear that someone with some formal education in economics is espousing those beliefs (or hear someone with formal education in economics debunk them).
Yes, it is easy to blame the "Big, Bad Corporations". When they're freezing the little guy out of the market, patenting things that are blatantly obvious, and abusing monopoly power to eliminate our freedom of choice, it's very easy.
Capitalism is great when it means we have people competing to produce better products so they can make more money. When it means we have companies that can afford to give their product away until they've established a marketplace in which you have to have their product, or they have enough money to buy legislation that takes away our right to produce media with established cultural icons, then the big bad companies are fucking the society and should be killed.
I'm completely offtopic here, but it really burns me up to see someone pretending that the huge corporations are generally a public good.
When she told him that, he wasn't. She said maybe in the next life -- when did he become "the One"? After coming back to life.
I don't think you're quite hitting on the reason for big corporate push for longer copyright terms. It's not about them getting to make money in 70 years on what they're doing now, or even about retaining the rights to what they're doing now.
Companies don't think in the long term, or, if they do, long term means 5 years or 10 years.
You see, the problem is that media companies have spent years telling us what our culture is; what's cool and what's not. And they've told us that what they produce is cool. If products they produced 50 years ago become available, then those products will compete with their current products. And it's easy to find ten movies (or albums, or whatever) from a 20 year period that happened 40 or 50 years ago that compare very favorably to what we have seen in the last 5 years from the media industry.
It's not about what happens to their current products in 50 years or 70 years. It's about what happens now to the products they produced 50 years ago.
Of course, they can't argue this point of view - it makes it very obvious that they're just scared of competition, and in no way can copyright period extension be seen to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts".
Did you RTFA? Check out why you should be using Firebird. It's in there.
Your sig sucks.
Gah! No wonder the country is in the fucked up, can't buy standard chemical or physics equipment state that it's in!
...
That same kid could wire the teacher's desk to the class outlet, or poison their lunch, or bash them in the head with a brick, or drop a giant oil slick bomb on the highway,
Outlaw evil activities, not OWNERSHIP! The US is founded on a pioneering spirit. Legislators are doing one hell of a job of killing that spirit in favor of corporate cronyism, and you're saying we should help!?!
Killing people has been easy since the invention of the long pointed stick. Just because someone invents a new way doesn't make it any more or less acceptable to kill people.
You can whack someone by using a transformer to crank up the amperage on house current, or putting bleach in their vodka glass when they're wasted, or boiling up a bunch of apple seeds for the cyanide. Guess they should have thought of that when they invented house current, bleach, and, er, apples, huh?
Amusing. Cretins. Lobbeth. And I am one of those cretins.
Uh, so you can just tell the Tivo what programs you like and then forget about when they come on, essentially ending up with a video on demand?
You seem to have missed that the free service also doesn't include season passes, the thing that makes Tivo so yummy.
Yes, I'm sure you know much more about the laws of physics than, say, someone with a PhD in Molecular Nanotechnology from MIT.
There are reputable scientists who argue against the most agressive nanotech postulates, but even they don't claim we won't build molecular systems that can produce copies of themselves in the forseeable future. They're just arguing that it will be restricted to producing a class of molecules rather than almost any possible molecule. In other words, from the consumer's point of view, they are splitting hairs.
Well, for carbon based nanotech the raw materials would be the same as for plants - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, energy, and minute amounts of a few metals. I.e. air & impure water. So it's not something for nothing; it's something for air, sunlight & water.
Movix helps you build a really lightweight linux distro on a cd or dvd for the purpose of autobooting and displaying multimedia content. It uses standard linux tools like mplayer.
So, just put the codec on the dvd along with the content. As long as you can find an x86 compatible machine or an emulator, you can access the content. Put the cd or dvd in the machine and boot from it. You shouldn't have to know or care that it is running linux; just watch your movie.
Caveat - I don't really know anything about Movix more than what I listed here. I just happened to read about it yesterday from the list of highest activity projects on sourceforge.
don't come into play at all, right?
If a law is bad, campaign against it. That's what Bruce is suggesting. Legal != good. It's our obligation to try to make the law promote the good.
No, the problem is BEING ABLE TO INTEROPERATE with other computer users.
Now, can we stop shouting?
I disagree completely. Yes, there are PCs that Knoppix doesn't install on automatically. However, on about 5/6 of the machines that I've heard of friends (or me) trying to install Knoppix on, it worked automatically. Knoppix is indeed all that. I'm running on a Knoppix machine at home, and I had the "installed completely in 15 minutes" experience too.
I am the lead server developer for Magicosm, a java/java3d persistent online world. Sun showcased us at the Game Developer's Conference last year. There are also several very nice java games by FullSail as well as a few others.
Magicosm won't be available for purchase for at least a year, but we hope to have a closed beta test late this year or early next.
Come visit our forums and say hi.
Well, I agree with you wholeheartedly except about one point... writing your own GCC. Per copyright law, the copyright on derivative works is owned by the originator of the work. As you pointed out, copyright law still applies independent of the licensing scheme.
:)
Hmm, unless the GPL explicitly gives up copyright on derivative works. I'm not sure on that one, and I'm too lazy to look it up
OK, let me explain one more time.
The New Scientist reporter said that Watson said stupidity was an inherited disorder. Then, they give a quote of Watson saying that he would call stupidity a disease. I think the dipshit journalist got "Watson says stupidity is an inherited disorder!" from "I would call stupidity a disease." Even if Watson did say stupidity is an inherited disorder, that's a far cry from saying we've found the gene for it.
From your post, I'm guessing the gene is linked to cowardice.
That's what I read. I still don't see where that says they've identified genes that cause stupidity. He explicitly says "I would call that a disease." The new scientist article even has another researcher replying to Watson's comments later pointing out that they're more meant to be inflammatory than informative.
However, I did miss the phrase where the article says "Watson says that low intelligence is an inherited disorder". I still doubt that Watson said that they had identified the genes causing low intelligence. I think it's just sensationalism by New Scientist, who in my experience doesn't show the journalistic restraint I expect. The quote that they give from Watson (which you included in your post) absolutely doesn't say they can identify stupidity genes. It says Watson would call stupidity a disease, which sounds like an opinion rather than any scientific statement.
If someone had identified a gene that commonly causes stupidity, we would be seeing information about it in more than just an oblique phrase in a New Scientist article.
That link says nothing that could be interpreted to say they've discovered a "stupid gene" or can eliminate it. They list a few diseases that cause retardation that they can identify genetically, but I think you're taking a casual comment by James Watson and making more of it than is there.
These glasses use stored data about the terrain to generate a computer image. The sandstorm is then completely irrelevant, assuming that you know where you are, because your image of the outside is generated from data taken when there was no sandstorm.
If that data included the location of power lines, they should show up just fine.
That's what we thought, until our RAID controller died catastrophically. Immediate and complete data loss.
;)
RAID is nice; daily backups are better. Both together, plus a revision controlled and journalling file system is best