The really funny thing is that there's even an update for the Windows SDK you can install, which will undef all the "unsafe", normal C library functions, replacing them with error pragmas, and provides a whole nice suite of safe string functions. It's still a pain in the butt to re-code everything, but in most cases its a drop-in fix, and where it's not, that usually means you had a problem that needed fixing anyway. I don't really expect them to have fixed the ENTIRE codebase yet, but the multimedia and internet components you'd think would be high priority.
This is not a technological problem. It's a social problem. Buisnesses assume that you want thier products and attentions, even in the face of your denials. Imagine, if you will, a really annoying guy following you around the mall. You have every right to NOT be harrassed by him, and, likewise, you have every right to not be contacted by people you don't wish to be contacted by. When you tell someone that you aren't interested in thier product, they should be obliged to no long attempt to sell it to you - thats the point of these do not call lists, and that would be the point of a no-spam list. Note that spam is, by definition, commercial email, not private correspondance, so this isn't a freedom of expression issue.
Sadly, both spammers and telemarketers are pretty much totally morally bankrupt people - both buisnesses are based on the idea that if you bug someone enough, they'll give you money to go away.
Totally untrue. There's a number of things you might want to do with DVDs, like space/format shift them to hard drive, that would be legitimate uses of decryption. And, of course, there's just playing them in the first place.
The google toolbar does some other slick stuff, like letting you hilight search terms on the page (the way the are when you view a cached page), as well as see the pagerank and some other info. It's pretty snazzy.
Couldn't possibly know or care less about the state of forestry in general. I do however have firsthand knowledge of the specific area being talked about. The salmon industry there was thriving and is now non-existent. The clearcut areas have not and will not grow back without enormous and expensive terraforming (which won't happen aytime soon). The local lumber mill was downsized and most operations moved to Mexico when they couldn't support it anymore - all that comes out of it anymore is particleboard.
Granted that alot of these people are nutters, and don't neccesarily think clearly. But it's not as easy as just "planting more". These aren't big fields - they're steep slopes, and when you clearcut and drag logs out with cables and helicopters, you're left with huge, gaping swatches of clay because all the soil washes out. The site right next to the house I grew up in was first logged about 20 years ago and there's nothing there but a few stunted pines that aren't good for anything. It's the same with all the other sites in the area.
Pssht. The logging industry was devestated by clearcutting in the 70s, before the activists even got started, and they haven't grown back because when you strip a mountainside all the soil washes down into the river, where it kills all the salmon (no fishing in the northwest anymore, either). So all the lumber companies close the mills and move em to Mexico, and start making particleboard instead of board lumber, because there aren't any trees left big enough to mill. Get a frigging clue.
Don't forget the loggers who beat locked down activists, though:P It's not a one-sided issue. Anyway, for what it's worth, there hasn't been spiking in Norther CA for quite a while - they've been doing stuff like spiderwebbing(stringing yarn all over so you have to cut it out before you can log. Stupid.) and tree sitting instead.
I'm originally from the north coast and know alot of the activists up there. It's not as black and white as you make it out to be. The logging companies aren't especially interested in negotiation, for example. That's why there's protests. It's true that some of the activists are way over the top, but as a group, they're generally pretty rational. They understand that theres a need for logging and for harvesting of natural resources. LP, though, is pretty much just interested in getting all the money they can out of the area, just barely complying with law (and, in some cases, not complying at all).
It's not all one sided, of course. But the upper management of LP, the ones with the power to change things, are pretty much all hard set against negotiation - they take a very hard line, and use considerable influence with local government (which is largely corrupt) to get thier way.
the Leatherman e-commerce site is perhaps the best argument for the use of flash I could possibly think of. Note that it's not an advertisment. And I think re-imaging a machine just because you looked at a flash site with it is a tad paranoid and freaky, eh?
What's correct? Pretend for a minute that the table tag wasn't in HTML - the only reason people keep bitching that it's not for layouts is because of that. Pretend instead that it's a subset of div that comes built-in with a bunch of CSS behaviors. If you re-implemented all the functionality of tables (including things like wrap/nowrap, dynamic sizing of itself and cells, and especially colspan and rowspan), it'd be quite a mass of CSS. Pages using that CSS would be, at best, slightly larger than pages using tables for the same layout. You can't even do some of the pre-rendering functionality of tables in CSS, so your page might load or render slower with the CSS - all in all, your BEST case is that you've done alot of work and increased the total download weight of your site for no increase in functionality. Unless a user agent that totally ignores tables or renders them in some totally non-sensical manner by default (into a tree, maybe? I can't think of any other usefull rendering for a table tag) suddenly becomes very popular, tables for layout will work and will continute to work everywhere. CSS is very obviously a work by people who are more concerned with correctness of design than with ease of use or performance - it's complicated, ill-defined, and discards perfectly good solutions () in favor of (imo) poor ones (). Why SHOULDN'T tables be used for layout? They're very well suited for it.
Maybe if someone who actually designs sites had created CSS instead of a bunch of pedantic academics, it'd be straightforward to replace table layouts with CSS. And besides, table layouts are still signifigantly more portable that CSS layouts, rending identically or near-identically on practically all browsers, including text-only ones. At this late point in the game, it's time to accept that tables are usefull for formatting, and in fact often do a better job of it than CSS does. If it bothers you, you can pretend the the table tag is called position if you want.
Basic lowdown on the speed limit : The federal government does not have the authority to specify a speed limit, because the constitution does not grant that power (remember, the constitution delinates authority, not limits of authority). Since they can't just pass a law specifying a speed limit, they instead use financial pressure (dispensation of highway funds) to press the states into passing thier own speed limit laws. That's de facto power - they don't have the authority to specify speed limits, but they hold sufficent financial power that they can force it anyway.
As for fair use - well, I personally believe that it's inherent in the social contract that the Constitution species when it gives Congress the ability to regulate copyright (for the promotion of usefull sciences and the arts). However, the Constitution does not specify any actual limits, so Congress could, as I understand it, decide that the arts are best served by letting Disney maintain total control over all aspects of it's works if it wanted to.
I don't REALLY want a government run by judges, a Congress that's actually accesible and responsive to the public would be much nicer. I'm just grumpy.
Cracking for your own use, to exercise your own fair use rights, falls squarely under the fair use exemptions of the DMCA. It's the providing of the tools and information (contributory copyright infringment) that gets pulled out the most, because the deck is stacked against you when you're any sort of "hacker". Cracking in order to distribute is, of course, illegal. The people who are disobeying here are the ones providing the tools - but by using those tools, even if people are forced to provide them anonymously, and spreading word of mouth about those tools, you raise a groundswell of people who have an interest in this issue.
As for the federal speed limit - there never was such a thing, in technical terms. It was, as you say, enforced by the spending clause - an exercise of de facto power rather than de jure power. I'm sure it was challenged constitutionally, but the SC back then was alot more nitpicky about exact wordings. I'm aware that theres lots of laws rooted in this power and that it's not novel, but none the less it IS an (arguably) unconstitutional extension of federal power at the expense of states rights. That said, I'm not a states rights freak, and the states rights stuff was put in the Constitution mainly in order to get a bunch of very individualistic states to sign up, and it's not such a big deal anymore.
At this point, I'd almost rather have the courts make law. Congress likes to pass stuff that clearly fails to pass muster for political reasons, and the courts get stuck cleaning it up anyway. I suspect that the courts will rule that, as with copyright extensions, that since fair use isn't enshrined explicitly in the constitution, that Congress has the authority to make it as broad or as narrow as they like. Since Congress is more or less totally unresponsive to voters these days (since it's easy enough to buy enough votes to get elected, you don't need to actually convince anyone), that pretty much ensures that we'll just get more and more laws supporting corporations at the expense of the public interest.
It's not illegal to do any of the things he mentioned, DMCA or no. It's only illegal (pay attention, this is the important part) to provide anyone else with tools or information that will allow them to do so!
There are provisions in the DMCA for "signifigant non-infringing use", but in the past that's never been recognized (IIRC, the 2600 people were barred from even bringing it as a defense)
It's crafting law via the backdoor - kinda like the federal speed limit. There never was any such thing, because the fed doesn't have the authority to make one - but they can end run around that and use de facto authority (highway funding) to push one. Similiarly, they can't outright remove your fair use rights(well, I suppose they could, but it's alot harder politcally speaking), but they can and will attempt to prevent you from ever gaining the knowledge needed to exercise those rights.
As for not buying it if you don't approve of the restrictions.. in more and more areas, especially entertainment, that just isn't working anymore. Your other options are limited, and, in some cases, simply don't exist. The media cartels are able to spin any boycott off as the effects of piracy (note the RIAA and CD sales), so your personal boycott has exactly the opposite effect of what you wanted - it's leverage for the company to push legislation.
In this circumstance the only effective path is to demand your fair use rights from the companies providing you with content, using third party tools if neccesary. You aren't breaking the law here - you're defending your right to free access to information from people who would sell it to you.
I don't think you've been playing the same Morrowind I have. I mean, it's a good game and the graphics are amazing, but the AI isn't anything they didn't have in final fantasy. All the NPCs are either generic or read from obvious scripts (think of a help desk monkey), and the monster combat AI is pretty much limited to "I'm a warrior, so cast spell and charge" or "I'm a caster, so run away and cast spells".
Pretty common journalistic practice to boldface a proper noun first time you use it in an article. Notice he also does it with Ralsky's name and with Apple Computer in the next article.
There are a couple differences here. The RIAA hacking proposal would have made something that is currently illegal legal, but only for them. On the other hand, what this guy does with the spam is legal (skirting the edges sometimes, with opt-out requests and whatnot), and since he maintains that it is both legal and ethical, he has no real right to complain when fed some of the same.
But wait! Your forgot Friday, which deviates totally from the formula by making the main character a WOMAN who has exciting adventures, says witty things, is unbearably clever, outsmarts the bad guys, and has sex. Not neccesarily in that order.
I actually really liked the cat that walks through walls, but I suspect thats because it was the first Heinlen I read. And Glory Road was awful even by his low standards.
A number of other posters, claiming to have seen them first hand, say that it was in fact NOT an actual circular, but a big list of items and prices. This invalidates pretty much any claim WalMart has to copyright infringment. I think all these retail chains are making the same argument for the same reason that companies and organizations have always made tenuous legal claims - because it sounds impressive and dangerous and people won't fight back.
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The really funny thing is that there's even an update for the Windows SDK you can install, which will undef all the "unsafe", normal C library functions, replacing them with error pragmas, and provides a whole nice suite of safe string functions. It's still a pain in the butt to re-code everything, but in most cases its a drop-in fix, and where it's not, that usually means you had a problem that needed fixing anyway. I don't really expect them to have fixed the ENTIRE codebase yet, but the multimedia and internet components you'd think would be high priority.
Sadly, both spammers and telemarketers are pretty much totally morally bankrupt people - both buisnesses are based on the idea that if you bug someone enough, they'll give you money to go away.
Not if you're moving, though :P
Totally untrue. There's a number of things you might want to do with DVDs, like space/format shift them to hard drive, that would be legitimate uses of decryption. And, of course, there's just playing them in the first place.
The google toolbar does some other slick stuff, like letting you hilight search terms on the page (the way the are when you view a cached page), as well as see the pagerank and some other info. It's pretty snazzy.
Couldn't possibly know or care less about the state of forestry in general. I do however have firsthand knowledge of the specific area being talked about. The salmon industry there was thriving and is now non-existent. The clearcut areas have not and will not grow back without enormous and expensive terraforming (which won't happen aytime soon). The local lumber mill was downsized and most operations moved to Mexico when they couldn't support it anymore - all that comes out of it anymore is particleboard.
Don't bother, it's actually a state owned park. And anyway, the only people to go to your multiplex are stoned out broke hippies.
Granted that alot of these people are nutters, and don't neccesarily think clearly. But it's not as easy as just "planting more". These aren't big fields - they're steep slopes, and when you clearcut and drag logs out with cables and helicopters, you're left with huge, gaping swatches of clay because all the soil washes out. The site right next to the house I grew up in was first logged about 20 years ago and there's nothing there but a few stunted pines that aren't good for anything. It's the same with all the other sites in the area.
Pssht. The logging industry was devestated by clearcutting in the 70s, before the activists even got started, and they haven't grown back because when you strip a mountainside all the soil washes down into the river, where it kills all the salmon (no fishing in the northwest anymore, either). So all the lumber companies close the mills and move em to Mexico, and start making particleboard instead of board lumber, because there aren't any trees left big enough to mill. Get a frigging clue.
Don't forget the loggers who beat locked down activists, though :P It's not a one-sided issue. Anyway, for what it's worth, there hasn't been spiking in Norther CA for quite a while - they've been doing stuff like spiderwebbing(stringing yarn all over so you have to cut it out before you can log. Stupid.) and tree sitting instead.
It's not all one sided, of course. But the upper management of LP, the ones with the power to change things, are pretty much all hard set against negotiation - they take a very hard line, and use considerable influence with local government (which is largely corrupt) to get thier way.
the Leatherman e-commerce site is perhaps the best argument for the use of flash I could possibly think of. Note that it's not an advertisment. And I think re-imaging a machine just because you looked at a flash site with it is a tad paranoid and freaky, eh?
Our in-house, enormously over-paid, amazingly lazy Delphi consultant still insists that we use the BDE. He needs a good asskicking.
What's correct? Pretend for a minute that the table tag wasn't in HTML - the only reason people keep bitching that it's not for layouts is because of that. Pretend instead that it's a subset of div that comes built-in with a bunch of CSS behaviors. If you re-implemented all the functionality of tables (including things like wrap/nowrap, dynamic sizing of itself and cells, and especially colspan and rowspan), it'd be quite a mass of CSS. Pages using that CSS would be, at best, slightly larger than pages using tables for the same layout. You can't even do some of the pre-rendering functionality of tables in CSS, so your page might load or render slower with the CSS - all in all, your BEST case is that you've done alot of work and increased the total download weight of your site for no increase in functionality. Unless a user agent that totally ignores tables or renders them in some totally non-sensical manner by default (into a tree, maybe? I can't think of any other usefull rendering for a table tag) suddenly becomes very popular, tables for layout will work and will continute to work everywhere. CSS is very obviously a work by people who are more concerned with correctness of design than with ease of use or performance - it's complicated, ill-defined, and discards perfectly good solutions () in favor of (imo) poor ones (). Why SHOULDN'T tables be used for layout? They're very well suited for it.
Maybe if someone who actually designs sites had created CSS instead of a bunch of pedantic academics, it'd be straightforward to replace table layouts with CSS. And besides, table layouts are still signifigantly more portable that CSS layouts, rending identically or near-identically on practically all browsers, including text-only ones. At this late point in the game, it's time to accept that tables are usefull for formatting, and in fact often do a better job of it than CSS does. If it bothers you, you can pretend the the table tag is called position if you want.
As for fair use - well, I personally believe that it's inherent in the social contract that the Constitution species when it gives Congress the ability to regulate copyright (for the promotion of usefull sciences and the arts). However, the Constitution does not specify any actual limits, so Congress could, as I understand it, decide that the arts are best served by letting Disney maintain total control over all aspects of it's works if it wanted to.
I don't REALLY want a government run by judges, a Congress that's actually accesible and responsive to the public would be much nicer. I'm just grumpy.
As for the federal speed limit - there never was such a thing, in technical terms. It was, as you say, enforced by the spending clause - an exercise of de facto power rather than de jure power. I'm sure it was challenged constitutionally, but the SC back then was alot more nitpicky about exact wordings. I'm aware that theres lots of laws rooted in this power and that it's not novel, but none the less it IS an (arguably) unconstitutional extension of federal power at the expense of states rights. That said, I'm not a states rights freak, and the states rights stuff was put in the Constitution mainly in order to get a bunch of very individualistic states to sign up, and it's not such a big deal anymore.
At this point, I'd almost rather have the courts make law. Congress likes to pass stuff that clearly fails to pass muster for political reasons, and the courts get stuck cleaning it up anyway. I suspect that the courts will rule that, as with copyright extensions, that since fair use isn't enshrined explicitly in the constitution, that Congress has the authority to make it as broad or as narrow as they like. Since Congress is more or less totally unresponsive to voters these days (since it's easy enough to buy enough votes to get elected, you don't need to actually convince anyone), that pretty much ensures that we'll just get more and more laws supporting corporations at the expense of the public interest.
There are provisions in the DMCA for "signifigant non-infringing use", but in the past that's never been recognized (IIRC, the 2600 people were barred from even bringing it as a defense)
It's crafting law via the backdoor - kinda like the federal speed limit. There never was any such thing, because the fed doesn't have the authority to make one - but they can end run around that and use de facto authority (highway funding) to push one. Similiarly, they can't outright remove your fair use rights(well, I suppose they could, but it's alot harder politcally speaking), but they can and will attempt to prevent you from ever gaining the knowledge needed to exercise those rights.
As for not buying it if you don't approve of the restrictions.. in more and more areas, especially entertainment, that just isn't working anymore. Your other options are limited, and, in some cases, simply don't exist. The media cartels are able to spin any boycott off as the effects of piracy (note the RIAA and CD sales), so your personal boycott has exactly the opposite effect of what you wanted - it's leverage for the company to push legislation.
In this circumstance the only effective path is to demand your fair use rights from the companies providing you with content, using third party tools if neccesary. You aren't breaking the law here - you're defending your right to free access to information from people who would sell it to you.
I don't think you've been playing the same Morrowind I have. I mean, it's a good game and the graphics are amazing, but the AI isn't anything they didn't have in final fantasy. All the NPCs are either generic or read from obvious scripts (think of a help desk monkey), and the monster combat AI is pretty much limited to "I'm a warrior, so cast spell and charge" or "I'm a caster, so run away and cast spells".
Pretty common journalistic practice to boldface a proper noun first time you use it in an article. Notice he also does it with Ralsky's name and with Apple Computer in the next article.
There are a couple differences here. The RIAA hacking proposal would have made something that is currently illegal legal, but only for them. On the other hand, what this guy does with the spam is legal (skirting the edges sometimes, with opt-out requests and whatnot), and since he maintains that it is both legal and ethical, he has no real right to complain when fed some of the same.
Yeah, but there's all these annoying french people there. And they like to supprese speech that the government fears. So fuck em.
But wait! Your forgot Friday, which deviates totally from the formula by making the main character a WOMAN who has exciting adventures, says witty things, is unbearably clever, outsmarts the bad guys, and has sex. Not neccesarily in that order. I actually really liked the cat that walks through walls, but I suspect thats because it was the first Heinlen I read. And Glory Road was awful even by his low standards.
A number of other posters, claiming to have seen them first hand, say that it was in fact NOT an actual circular, but a big list of items and prices. This invalidates pretty much any claim WalMart has to copyright infringment. I think all these retail chains are making the same argument for the same reason that companies and organizations have always made tenuous legal claims - because it sounds impressive and dangerous and people won't fight back.
I'm well educated, well trained, and competent. I also have no degree. I also have a good job. I must be that 1 on a hundred :/