Well sure, it'd be nice to have "free" wireless access (at the taxpayers' expense). But does anyone doubt that in many (if not most) localities the access will be filtered down to the PG-13 level, to "protect the children". And how many commercial ISPs will survive as an alternative in the face of this "free" competition?
Thanks but no thanks - I'd rather pay and have an unfiltered feed.
A lot of folks have no interest in ripping TV shows and movies for distribution, but want to record them for later viewing and (the big no-no according to the TV producers) fast forward through the commercials.
As I understand it, the broadcast flag comes into play during the decoding process. What would be required in terms of circuitry, hard drive capacity and writing speed to directly record the raw digital input from cable? (Then just feed it into the TV as if it came from cable.)
after 2000 years we finally have reasonably universal agreement on a civil calendar system, and jerks like this insist on needlessly stirring up the pot of discord.
The Y2K experience was actually a good thing - most programmers now understand the Gregorian calendar algorithm.
There are relatively few people in the world who will be upset if the digital photos of your family vacations are irretrieveably lost.
But consider the loss to the world when great works of literature, music, and the arts disappear. The growing trend is for distribution of all art forms on digital media, and encrypted digital media at that. And thanks to to the DMCA and extended copyrights, it's against the law to make backup copies.
Who believes the content distributors will spend the money to maintain proper archival copies of these art forms as the artist wanes in popularity (or is never properly recognized in the first place) and sales drop to zero? Ten, twenty, or thirty years later when the original digital media has long deteriorated, the only copies of these works to survive will have been those made by "pirates". Speak of a coming Dark Age for our cultural legacy!!!
(Were it not for books moldering in libraries for many decades, the works of then-underappreciated authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald would be unknown to us today - imagine what would happen had he been published only as encrypted e-books.)
although I'm probably on their list of devil customers.
I've bought a lot of PC stuff there: UPS, hard drives, DVD ROMs, DVD R/W. Plus a lot of smaller stuff like CD media. Even bought my first copy of Red Hat there. And yes, I bought a lot of that stuff because of the rebates.
But a lot of the big items were returned or exchanged because they didn't work properly on my systems (sometimes under Linux, sometimes under Windows). And I never got a hassle from them about the return nor was I ever hit with a restocking fee.
And yes, I always received the rebate check for those rebated items I kept.
if some small Pacific or Caribbean island country passed a law granting copyright protection for 1000 years (with a very stiff copyright registration fee of course) to any resident (two weeks required to establish residency) or to any corporation chartered there. It could be a gold mine.
Someone with more knowledge of RFIDs than I can probably tell us the byte capacity of current RFID chips. But if the history of increase in size of memory chips is any guide, the capacity of RFID chips will undoubtedly be greatly increased in coming years.
"Because the goal isn't infomation handling. The goal is fake prevention. All they need is the most basic information on the RFID to compare with the printing and mag strip to verify that it is valid (or a really good fake)."
It'll probably be just as easy to fake a RFID as it is to fake a mag strip today. And one of the stated objectives is to speed the way through security checkpoints by not having to visually examine each ID card.
"What makes you think that they would store excessive personal information on the RFID when there is no reason to do so and they've said they aren't putting personal informationon it?"
How will they know if you're really the individual your RFID card says you are if there isn't some physically descriptive information to compare, such as an encoded thumbprint or retinal scan. What the government says today and what it actually does tomorrow are not necessarily consistant.
What makes you think that the state would go to the expense of RFID cards just to store a DL number when a simple printed barcode would serve that purpose as effectively and a lot less expensively?
Remember when you could backup all your data on a few 360K floppy disks, and one now-well-known person is reported to have said "Nobody will ever need more than 640K of RAM"? Keep that in mind when considering how little or how much information can be stored on a RFID card.
"it does not look like a bad idea to me. It's not like they are sticking it under your skin, for pete's sake. I have no problem with anyone knowing who I am. Kinda proud of it, actually."
Would you be as proud of anybody (perhaps including your boss) knowing your Name, Current and past Addresses, Phone number, Date and Place of Birth, Social Security Number, Occupation, Religion, Marital status, Blood type, Medical history, and DNA sequence. Plus the facts that you were arrested for smoking pot or underage drinking or skinny dipping when you were in high school 30 years ago and have had two speeding violations and three stop-sign violations during your driving career.
"I thought RFID would only transmit some unique identifier. In other words, the identity information is not stored in the RFID chip, but in a database in a server somewhere; the RFID only supplies the index key to the (presumably) correct record in the server."
Were what you say true, then the RFID would provide no more utility than a barcode.
There will in fact be a lot of personal information stored in the RFID. And unless you keep it in a highly conductive sleeve in your wallet or purse, anyone with the appropriate equipment standing next to you on the street can obtain that information.
Sure, it'll be encrypted. But if some malicious cracker manages to break the code, it's not quite as simple to reprogram RFID cards for 100 million people as it would be to change the password on a few servers.
>> It will likely be overturned on the grounds that >> the original recording was illegal.
>Illegal how?
Probably unauthorized copying of a copyrighted work, i.e., the live performance, made for purposes of resale. AKA "Piracy". We'll find out for certain when the case goes to appeal.
>> Therefore the constitutional requirement that >> copyright protection (accorded to legally >> published works) be granted only for a limited >> time does not apply.
>The patent and copyright clause is the only >authority Congress has for enacting laws >restricting copying.
It would be naive to believe that lack of clear constitutional authority ever stopped Congress before, or that the convoluted logic used to justify its legislation will automatically be rejected by Federal judges.
>BTW copyright protection is not accorded only to >published works (though it should be).
True, so live performances are covered regardless of whether they're considered published or unpublished works.
"There is NO FRIGGIN WAY this is going to stand. The RIAA and MPAA will see to that. $$$"
It will likely be overturned on the grounds that the original recording was illegal. Therefore the constitutional requirement that copyright protection (accorded to legally published works) be granted only for a limited time does not apply.
I bought a new, fast PC with a big hard drive. I bought a PVR card. I spent several hours getting the PVR drivers installed. I spent several more hours getting MythTV installed
Wow, it works!.
But I forgot - there's very little on TV I have any interest in watching, much less recording.:-(
Modules manufactured by X10 (which I believe include the Radio Shack branded versions) may not be mil-spec, but they generally work perfectly satisfactorally and provide an affordable home automation solution for most people. I have over 20 modules controlling the lighting in my house and yard and have experienced only one failure in 8 years of daily service.
I've had 3 different tape drives over the years and all have failed me when I needed them most. Granted these were consumer-grade drives, but at the 150-250USD I paid for each (+ 30USD/tape for my most recent, a Travan TR-5), they weren't exactly cheap.
I wonder how much of the "Y2K problem" might have been caused by blindly following the author's code in the 1985 edition (page 51) which assumed the year 2000 was NOT a leapyear.
MS is probably smarter than to have been directly involved in any event. All it would have taken is a phone call from Bill G to one of his buddies from the old days who are no longer associated with MS and to whom 20 Million is just pocket change.
If SCO does go bankrupt, wouldn't that give IBM or Novell the chance to buy up the whole operation for a pittance? Then the buyer could put an end to the whole sorry shenanigans by releasing under the GPL any portion of Unix IP claimed by SCO which might happen to be found in the Linux code.
Slashdot Mirror
Well sure, it'd be nice to have "free" wireless access (at the taxpayers' expense). But does anyone doubt that in many (if not most) localities the access will be filtered down to the PG-13 level, to "protect the children". And how many commercial ISPs will survive as an alternative in the face of this "free" competition?
Thanks but no thanks - I'd rather pay and have an unfiltered feed.
A lot of folks have no interest in ripping TV shows and movies for distribution, but want to record them for later viewing and (the big no-no according to the TV producers) fast forward through the commercials.
As I understand it, the broadcast flag comes into play during the decoding process. What would be required in terms of circuitry, hard drive capacity and writing speed to directly record the raw digital input from cable? (Then just feed it into the TV as if it came from cable.)
after 2000 years we finally have reasonably universal agreement on a civil calendar system, and jerks like this insist on needlessly stirring up the pot of discord.
The Y2K experience was actually a good thing - most programmers now understand the Gregorian calendar algorithm.
There are relatively few people in the world who will be upset if the digital photos of your family vacations are irretrieveably lost.
But consider the loss to the world when great works of literature, music, and the arts disappear. The growing trend is for distribution of all art forms on digital media, and encrypted digital media at that. And thanks to to the DMCA and extended copyrights, it's against the law to make backup copies.
Who believes the content distributors will spend the money to maintain proper archival copies of these art forms as the artist wanes in popularity (or is never properly recognized in the first place) and sales drop to zero? Ten, twenty, or thirty years later when the original digital media has long deteriorated, the only copies of these works to survive will have been those made by "pirates". Speak of a coming Dark Age for our cultural legacy!!!
(Were it not for books moldering in libraries for many decades, the works of then-underappreciated authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald would be unknown to us today - imagine what would happen had he been published only as encrypted e-books.)
although I'm probably on their list of devil customers.
I've bought a lot of PC stuff there: UPS, hard drives, DVD ROMs, DVD R/W. Plus a lot of smaller stuff like CD media. Even bought my first copy of Red Hat there. And yes, I bought a lot of that stuff because of the rebates.
But a lot of the big items were returned or exchanged because they didn't work properly on my systems (sometimes under Linux, sometimes under Windows). And I never got a hassle from them about the return nor was I ever hit with a restocking fee.
And yes, I always received the rebate check for those rebated items I kept.
if some small Pacific or Caribbean island country passed a law granting copyright protection for 1000 years (with a very stiff copyright registration fee of course) to any resident (two weeks required to establish residency) or to any corporation chartered there. It could be a gold mine.
Someone with more knowledge of RFIDs than I can probably tell us the byte capacity of current RFID chips. But if the history of increase in size of memory chips is any guide, the capacity of RFID chips will undoubtedly be greatly increased in coming years.
"Because the goal isn't infomation handling. The goal is fake prevention. All they need is the most basic information on the RFID to compare with the printing and mag strip to verify that it is valid (or a really good fake)."
It'll probably be just as easy to fake a RFID as it is to fake a mag strip today. And one of the stated objectives is to speed the way through security checkpoints by not having to visually examine each ID card.
"What makes you think that they would store excessive personal information on the RFID when there is no reason to do so and they've said they aren't putting personal informationon it?"
How will they know if you're really the individual your RFID card says you are if there isn't some physically descriptive information to compare, such as an encoded thumbprint or retinal scan.
What the government says today and what it actually does tomorrow are not necessarily consistant.
What makes you think that the state would go to the expense of RFID cards just to store a DL number when a simple printed barcode would serve that purpose as effectively and a lot less expensively?
Remember when you could backup all your data on a few 360K floppy disks, and one now-well-known person is reported to have said "Nobody will ever need more than 640K of RAM"? Keep that in mind when considering how little or how much information can be stored on a RFID card.
"it does not look like a bad idea to me. It's not like they are sticking it under your skin, for pete's sake. I have no problem with anyone knowing who I am. Kinda proud of it, actually."
Would you be as proud of anybody (perhaps including your boss) knowing your Name, Current and past Addresses, Phone number, Date and Place of Birth, Social Security Number, Occupation, Religion, Marital status, Blood type, Medical history, and DNA sequence. Plus the facts that you were arrested for smoking pot or underage drinking or skinny dipping when you were in high school 30 years ago and have had two speeding violations and three stop-sign violations during your driving career.
"I thought RFID would only transmit some unique identifier. In other words, the identity information is not stored in the RFID chip, but in a database in a server somewhere; the RFID only supplies the index key to the (presumably) correct record in the server."
Were what you say true, then the RFID would provide no more utility than a barcode.
There will in fact be a lot of personal information stored in the RFID. And unless you keep it in a highly conductive sleeve in your wallet or purse, anyone with the appropriate equipment standing next to you on the street can obtain that information.
Sure, it'll be encrypted. But if some malicious cracker manages to break the code, it's not quite as simple to reprogram RFID cards for 100 million people as it would be to change the password on a few servers.
>> It will likely be overturned on the grounds that
>> the original recording was illegal.
>Illegal how?
Probably unauthorized copying of a copyrighted work, i.e., the live performance, made for purposes of resale. AKA "Piracy". We'll find out for certain when the case goes to appeal.
>> Therefore the constitutional requirement that
>> copyright protection (accorded to legally
>> published works) be granted only for a limited
>> time does not apply.
>The patent and copyright clause is the only
>authority Congress has for enacting laws
>restricting copying.
It would be naive to believe that lack of clear constitutional authority ever stopped Congress before, or that the convoluted logic used to justify its legislation will automatically be rejected by Federal judges.
>BTW copyright protection is not accorded only to
>published works (though it should be).
True, so live performances are covered regardless of whether they're considered published or unpublished works.
"There is NO FRIGGIN WAY this is going to stand. The RIAA and MPAA will see to that. $$$"
It will likely be overturned on the grounds that the original recording was illegal. Therefore the constitutional requirement that copyright protection (accorded to legally published works) be granted only for a limited time does not apply.
.."seemingly perpetual protection."
Isn't that the point of copyright laws? to protect the author/creator/composer/whatever?
The US Constititution grants Congress the power to provide copyright protection "for a limited time".
(In practise in recent years this means that whenever the "limited time" is close to expiration, Congress extends it for another "limited time".)
I bought a new, fast PC with a big hard drive.
:-(
I bought a PVR card.
I spent several hours getting the PVR drivers installed.
I spent several more hours getting MythTV installed
Wow, it works!.
But I forgot - there's very little on TV I have any interest in watching, much less recording.
BottleRocket (http://mlug.missouri.edu/~tymm/) for
controlling the X10 Firecracker computer interface under Linux.
Heyu2 (http://www.heyu.org/heyu2/) for controlling X10's CM11A computer interface under Linux/Unix/Mac OSX.
Both are Open Source standalone command-line executables.
Modules manufactured by X10 (which I believe include the Radio Shack branded versions) may not be mil-spec, but they generally work perfectly satisfactorally and provide an affordable home automation solution for most people. I have over 20 modules controlling the lighting in my house and yard and have experienced only one failure in 8 years of daily service.
being championed by M$ in partnership with content providers: Stores your credit card information and adds a key marked "Pay now".
When I first got cable TV I subscribed to the premium movie channels for about 3 months. Almost every movie on those channels would make the list.
I've had 3 different tape drives over the years and all have failed me when I needed them most. Granted these were consumer-grade drives, but at the 150-250USD I paid for each (+ 30USD/tape for my most recent, a Travan TR-5), they weren't exactly cheap.
I probably would have emailed you, had there been email in those days. I'm too lazy to sit down and write a letter. :-)
I wonder how much of the "Y2K problem" might have been caused by blindly following the author's code in the 1985 edition (page 51) which assumed the year 2000 was NOT a leapyear.
The initial call yes, but not the investment.
MS is probably smarter than to have been directly involved in any event. All it would have taken is a phone call from Bill G to one of his buddies from the old days who are no longer associated with MS and to whom 20 Million is just pocket change.
If SCO does go bankrupt, wouldn't that give IBM or Novell the chance to buy up the whole operation for a pittance? Then the buyer could put an end to the whole sorry shenanigans by releasing under the GPL any portion of Unix IP claimed by SCO which might happen to be found in the Linux code.