And the government would want to spend millions doing this, why?
Besides, credit-cards can already do the same, with the cost being borne by the various commercial interests rather than the government. Additionally, I would be a lot more worried about what the credit-card companies (and their big corporate friends) are planning to do with such information than the federal government.
Unlike the federal government, they have an obvious reason to care about where you are, what you are doing, etc. (one which doesn't involve aliens and tin-foil hats!).
You can't copyright sounds either, but you can copyright a song. Its the exact same thing, legally, it's all about intended purpose. For the purposes of locking your bike, your lock code is definitely your intellectual property.
The modding is suspicious? how? Are you accusing Slashdot employees of something, someone of hacking the system or what? Face it, they didn't like the post and it's pretty obvious why.
There is no way a US federal court would decide that the publishing of a DRM encryption code is constitutionally protected free speech. There are specific exclusions for "intellectual property rights" which is obviously what the court would rule the code is, I'd like to see you claim you just "happened to come up with that number". Its the exact same reason you can't release a song which is an exact copy of someone else's and claim "free speech" permits you to. This doesn't make the DMCA morally correct, but the law is pretty clear.
I presume moderators voted your post -1 due to it being full of such clueless bits of misinformation.
"Most importantly, the AACS are repeatedly calling the discovery of the key a "leak" - it's not a leak at all, it was discovered, not leaked."
Umm it was leaked, it was leaked by the DVDs themselves.
The only way it could have been "discovered" would have been through a brute force attempt or pure luck, both of which are almost impossible scenarios. The method through which the leak was discovered has also been quite well documented.
""The website said it was responding to legal "cease and desist" notices" Implies that Digg thought those takedown notices were legal. The legality of the takedown notices is actually highly questionable."
Obviously Digg thought cease and desist requests were legal, and I'm pretty sure most legal experts would agree with them (they did after all consult their lawyers beforehand). Whether they're morally correct is the subjective part, but it's pretty undisputed that they are legal.
It's good to see the pretty even-handed way the BBC have approached this whole issue. I fear most mainstream news agencies would probably side 100% with the AACS and their media buddies, not least due to commercial interests and parent company ownership reasons.
I guess its times like these when it is good that there still are some news organizations independent of the big media conglomerates.
BBC News is a mainstream news organization, they're hardly going to start providing detailed scientific analysis of the comparison methods used and quite frankly, I'm very glad they don't!
Even as an academic, I often don't want to read 20 pages of boring scientific detail and on the frequent occasions that I DO want to research the topic further I go to a suitable website specializing in that field or even try and get a look at the research paper.
The motto of the story is: Pick the right tool for the right job. BBC stories normally give good summaries of scientific stories (far better than our news services do anyway!) but that is all they are, summaries.
Its funny how these days, any "alternative" form of energy is automatically considered by many to be "clean", "green" or "environmentally friendly".
Just for the record: Biofuels are definitely NOT environmentally friendly and Hydro-electric plants are amongst the construction projects most often protested AGAINST on environmental grounds.
The USA will never have European style universal free health-care while the large pharmaceutical companies hold so much power. Currently pharmaceutical companies from all over the world love the USA as they can pretty much charge whatever they want.
In European countries, national health systems buy drugs in bulk and so are able to leverage massive price-cuts which the pharmaceutical companies - who know they could risk loosing an entire national market - usually agree to.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the reason for this situation is that here, unlike in the European countries, the pharmaceutical companies here give large campaign donations to both major political parties and consequently successive governments (from both sides) then give pharmaceutical companies a blank cheque to rip everyone off.
"The 18-month battery is a myth stemming from one person's bad experience: it is not a function of the design or manufacture of the iPod."
What utter bullsh!t.
Do you like work for Apple or something? It is common knowledge that iPods batteries loose their ability to power the device in an extremely short amount of time if regularly used. Many studies have consistently shown how quick the iPod breaks (some models at almost 30% within 1 year!!!!) and the fact that very few remain of the 1st generation is empirical proof of their numerous design flaws. Recent iPods are definitely better in terms of reliability but still have a comparatively high failure rate.
"The 10% discount is so you'll bring the iPod in to Apple, who can properly recycle it, instead of tossing it in the trash, where it ends up in a landfill. I'd say that's environmentally friendly."
The point is that continually replacing and recycling (on the other side of the world it should be noted) a product which could quite easily be made to last many times its current average lifespan is not environmentally friendly or ethical in any way, shape or form.
Unlike the electronic products of old (I still have a Sony Walkmam from the 80's which works, unlike my iPod from last year) the iPod is designed to last a pathetically small amount of time, regardless of the inevitable environmental damage caused, because Apple can then get $200 every couple of years (or less) rather than just once. To somehow try and turn that around and pretend the process is environmentally friendly is ridiculous.
Personally, its the fact that if iPods were released 20 years ago they would most probably be deemed "faulty" due to their pathetically short lifespan (particularly of their battery) that annoys me even more than the environmental concerns, but it all adds up to show how unethical a product the iPod really is (and that's not even considering the sweatshops that they are manufactured in with reports of $50 a month wages for daily 15 hr shifts etc http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=14 915).
So even if a company appears to not give a cr@p about their heavy impact on the environment, we should go easy on them, because they might be secretly investing lots of money into reducing their environmental impact?
I don't see how giving a 10% discount for replacing your iPod is environmentally friendly at all. Surely if they made iPods so they didn't have to be either thrown in the bin or replaced every 18 months (or less) then that would be far better, environmentally speaking.
It has been known for years that Apple's environmental record is absolutely terrible. Of course Steve Jobs is going to say otherwise, he's not a complete idiot, but that doesn't mean what he is saying is in anyway true.
license plate recognition systems are in use all over the UK. Several motorways (I think they're called freeways in the USA) have several such cameras on them for calculating average speed and hence detecting if speed limit has been broken (i.e. 2 cameras are placed x miles apart, if a car traversed those x miles in under y minutes then they must have been speeding). Thankfully you apparently have to be averaging 30 miles over the speed limit (so travelling at over 100 mph) to get caught by them.
They are set to be rolled out across the UK soon and tied into the national police databases (as has already been done in the city which the killers got caught). As I say though, the vast, vast majority of people here support their use for hunting criminals. It's only their speed enforcement duties which hopefully will get people worked up.
I think the major difference here as opposed to say the USA, is that vast majority of people in the UK wouldn't consider their license plate being registered on a police database somewhere as an invasion of their privacy. People in the UK are worried about corporations having their personal data, not the government; whereas it seems in the USA, the opposite is the case.
A couple of years ago there was a massive story in the U.K. about a policewoman being shot dead by a group of armed robbers. They would have gotten away with it had it not been for an automatic license plate reading camera picking up the car details a few blocks down the road.
Its instances like that which make such advanced CCTV cameras popular with the mainstream UK public. Polls asking the average person on the street in the UK consistently reveal wide spread support for advanced CCTV cameras.
"Christian values" (as with any "morale values") can be manipulated to supposably justify anything. There are countless examples of this throughout history.
What I find absurd is that despite knowing this, one of the best defences in court is to claim to be "deeply Christian" as if that somehow means they must be innocent.
By the article author's calculations, all paid music services are doomed to failure, not just free ad-supported ones.
From TFA: "don't waste your time in thinking this is going to do anything positive to the industry"
I've heard that so many times about services which have actually revolutionised industries, many of those services are no longer in business but that didn't stop them being positive influences on the industry.
Case in point: A few years ago in the U.K., Altavista advertised an flat-rate, £10 a year internet service at a time when virtually all domestic ISPs only offered per-minute deals. Several other ISPs then started offering competing flat-rate offers.
The Altavista service never even ended up launching, but it had already caused other ISPs to offer cheap flat-rate deals. As a result, Altavista are often credited with helping to give the U.K. some of the cheapest internet deals in the world.
Maybe this service won't be a massive hit, but to instantly dismiss an innovative idea is extremely stupid!
"If the company kills someone, then you could only sue the company, and not the person behind it" It depends entirely on the jurisdiction.
Most countries do have laws which allow employees/managers/bosses/executives etc. to be criminally tried for negligent actions carried out by their company.
Of course the USA doesn't (although a couple of individual states do to some extent) because as everyone knows, Capitol Hill works for - and is funded by - big business. Big business is hardly going to allow them (read: give campaign money) to introduce a law which would see their bosses get prosecuted.
It's a blue sky today here on Earth. What about your planet?
Re:Notice: Video Link
on
The BBC On RMT
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think the fact that it was a multiplayer gaming story covered by the most watched daily news program in the U.K. is also what sets the story apart. Can you imagine ABC World News reporting on gold farming?
Its certainly one of the biggest incidences of mainstream press coverage given to a purely on-line gaming story yet. Yet more evidence of societies changing attitudes towards on-line gaming.
Visa are of course an extremely qualified company to look after the IT security of the games however. Regardless of anything else they would be amongst the top couple of contenders anyway.
It is indeed a strange twist when the pirated versions are better than the originals.
I noticed this absurdity last week when I had to download a pirated version of a CD I had just bought so that I could actually play it in my car.
Utterly absurd and needless to say, the next album I want I will downloading (via illegal sources of course, those legal sources are the worst of all).
Slashdot Mirror
And the government would want to spend millions doing this, why?
Besides, credit-cards can already do the same, with the cost being borne by the various commercial interests rather than the government. Additionally, I would be a lot more worried about what the credit-card companies (and their big corporate friends) are planning to do with such information than the federal government.
Unlike the federal government, they have an obvious reason to care about where you are, what you are doing, etc. (one which doesn't involve aliens and tin-foil hats!).
You can't copyright sounds either, but you can copyright a song. Its the exact same thing, legally, it's all about intended purpose. For the purposes of locking your bike, your lock code is definitely your intellectual property.
The modding is suspicious? how? Are you accusing Slashdot employees of something, someone of hacking the system or what?
Face it, they didn't like the post and it's pretty obvious why.
You really are a bit clueless.
There is no way a US federal court would decide that the publishing of a DRM encryption code is constitutionally protected free speech. There are specific exclusions for "intellectual property rights" which is obviously what the court would rule the code is, I'd like to see you claim you just "happened to come up with that number". Its the exact same reason you can't release a song which is an exact copy of someone else's and claim "free speech" permits you to. This doesn't make the DMCA morally correct, but the law is pretty clear.
I presume moderators voted your post -1 due to it being full of such clueless bits of misinformation.
"Most importantly, the AACS are repeatedly calling the discovery of the key a "leak" - it's not a leak at all, it was discovered, not leaked."
Umm it was leaked, it was leaked by the DVDs themselves.
The only way it could have been "discovered" would have been through a brute force attempt or pure luck, both of which are almost impossible scenarios. The method through which the leak was discovered has also been quite well documented.
""The website said it was responding to legal "cease and desist" notices" Implies that Digg thought those takedown notices were legal. The legality of the takedown notices is actually highly questionable."
Obviously Digg thought cease and desist requests were legal, and I'm pretty sure most legal experts would agree with them (they did after all consult their lawyers beforehand). Whether they're morally correct is the subjective part, but it's pretty undisputed that they are legal.
Should I start calling you a liar then?
It's good to see the pretty even-handed way the BBC have approached this whole issue. I fear most mainstream news agencies would probably side 100% with the AACS and their media buddies, not least due to commercial interests and parent company ownership reasons.
I guess its times like these when it is good that there still are some news organizations independent of the big media conglomerates.
Shhhhhuuuussssshhh, keep quiet!
Don't you know your not allowed to criticize Apple here. Next you'll be claiming you've found a bug in the Linux kernel!
BBC News is a mainstream news organization, they're hardly going to start providing detailed scientific analysis of the comparison methods used and quite frankly, I'm very glad they don't!
Even as an academic, I often don't want to read 20 pages of boring scientific detail and on the frequent occasions that I DO want to research the topic further I go to a suitable website specializing in that field or even try and get a look at the research paper.
The motto of the story is: Pick the right tool for the right job. BBC stories normally give good summaries of scientific stories (far better than our news services do anyway!) but that is all they are, summaries.
I bet he'll reply to every single email with a personal and heartfelt response, because Steve Jobs is actually superman!
Its funny how these days, any "alternative" form of energy is automatically considered by many to be "clean", "green" or "environmentally friendly".
Just for the record: Biofuels are definitely NOT environmentally friendly and Hydro-electric plants are amongst the construction projects most often protested AGAINST on environmental grounds.
Just thought that need to be said.
The USA will never have European style universal free health-care while the large pharmaceutical companies hold so much power. Currently pharmaceutical companies from all over the world love the USA as they can pretty much charge whatever they want.
In European countries, national health systems buy drugs in bulk and so are able to leverage massive price-cuts which the pharmaceutical companies - who know they could risk loosing an entire national market - usually agree to.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the reason for this situation is that here, unlike in the European countries, the pharmaceutical companies here give large campaign donations to both major political parties and consequently successive governments (from both sides) then give pharmaceutical companies a blank cheque to rip everyone off.
"I don't see that at all, neither does any iof my friends, or people I know that work at the Apple store "
I think that says it all.
"The 18-month battery is a myth stemming from one person's bad experience: it is not a function of the design or manufacture of the iPod."
_ durability
What utter bullsh!t.
Do you like work for Apple or something?
It is common knowledge that iPods batteries loose their ability to power the device in an extremely short amount of time if regularly used. Many studies have consistently shown how quick the iPod breaks (some models at almost 30% within 1 year!!!!) and the fact that very few remain of the 1st generation is empirical proof of their numerous design flaws. Recent iPods are definitely better in terms of reliability but still have a comparatively high failure rate.
The Wikipedia article quotes many good sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Reliability_and
"The 10% discount is so you'll bring the iPod in to Apple, who can properly recycle it, instead of tossing it in the trash, where it ends up in a landfill. I'd say that's environmentally friendly."
4 915).
The point is that continually replacing and recycling (on the other side of the world it should be noted) a product which could quite easily be made to last many times its current average lifespan is not environmentally friendly or ethical in any way, shape or form.
Unlike the electronic products of old (I still have a Sony Walkmam from the 80's which works, unlike my iPod from last year) the iPod is designed to last a pathetically small amount of time, regardless of the inevitable environmental damage caused, because Apple can then get $200 every couple of years (or less) rather than just once. To somehow try and turn that around and pretend the process is environmentally friendly is ridiculous.
Personally, its the fact that if iPods were released 20 years ago they would most probably be deemed "faulty" due to their pathetically short lifespan (particularly of their battery) that annoys me even more than the environmental concerns, but it all adds up to show how unethical a product the iPod really is (and that's not even considering the sweatshops that they are manufactured in with reports of $50 a month wages for daily 15 hr shifts etc http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=1
So even if a company appears to not give a cr@p about their heavy impact on the environment, we should go easy on them, because they might be secretly investing lots of money into reducing their environmental impact?
I don't see how giving a 10% discount for replacing your iPod is environmentally friendly at all. Surely if they made iPods so they didn't have to be either thrown in the bin or replaced every 18 months (or less) then that would be far better, environmentally speaking.
It has been known for years that Apple's environmental record is absolutely terrible. Of course Steve Jobs is going to say otherwise, he's not a complete idiot, but that doesn't mean what he is saying is in anyway true.
license plate recognition systems are in use all over the UK. Several motorways (I think they're called freeways in the USA) have several such cameras on them for calculating average speed and hence detecting if speed limit has been broken (i.e. 2 cameras are placed x miles apart, if a car traversed those x miles in under y minutes then they must have been speeding). Thankfully you apparently have to be averaging 30 miles over the speed limit (so travelling at over 100 mph) to get caught by them.
They are set to be rolled out across the UK soon and tied into the national police databases (as has already been done in the city which the killers got caught). As I say though, the vast, vast majority of people here support their use for hunting criminals. It's only their speed enforcement duties which hopefully will get people worked up.
I think the major difference here as opposed to say the USA, is that vast majority of people in the UK wouldn't consider their license plate being registered on a police database somewhere as an invasion of their privacy. People in the UK are worried about corporations having their personal data, not the government; whereas it seems in the USA, the opposite is the case.
Hmm, not sure why I didn't think of Napster. Your right, it is the obvious choice.
A couple of years ago there was a massive story in the U.K. about a policewoman being shot dead by a group of armed robbers. They would have gotten away with it had it not been for an automatic license plate reading camera picking up the car details a few blocks down the road.
Its instances like that which make such advanced CCTV cameras popular with the mainstream UK public. Polls asking the average person on the street in the UK consistently reveal wide spread support for advanced CCTV cameras.
"Christian values" (as with any "morale values") can be manipulated to supposably justify anything. There are countless examples of this throughout history.
What I find absurd is that despite knowing this, one of the best defences in court is to claim to be "deeply Christian" as if that somehow means they must be innocent.
By the article author's calculations, all paid music services are doomed to failure, not just free ad-supported ones.
From TFA:
"don't waste your time in thinking this is going to do anything positive to the industry"
I've heard that so many times about services which have actually revolutionised industries, many of those services are no longer in business but that didn't stop them being positive influences on the industry.
Case in point: A few years ago in the U.K., Altavista advertised an flat-rate, £10 a year internet service at a time when virtually all domestic ISPs only offered per-minute deals. Several other ISPs then started offering competing flat-rate offers.
The Altavista service never even ended up launching, but it had already caused other ISPs to offer cheap flat-rate deals. As a result, Altavista are often credited with helping to give the U.K. some of the cheapest internet deals in the world.
Maybe this service won't be a massive hit, but to instantly dismiss an innovative idea is extremely stupid!
"If the company kills someone, then you could only sue the company, and not the person behind it"
It depends entirely on the jurisdiction.
Most countries do have laws which allow employees/managers/bosses/executives etc. to be criminally tried for negligent actions carried out by their company.
Of course the USA doesn't (although a couple of individual states do to some extent) because as everyone knows, Capitol Hill works for - and is funded by - big business. Big business is hardly going to allow them (read: give campaign money) to introduce a law which would see their bosses get prosecuted.
It's a blue sky today here on Earth. What about your planet?
I think the fact that it was a multiplayer gaming story covered by the most watched daily news program in the U.K. is also what sets the story apart. Can you imagine ABC World News reporting on gold farming?
Its certainly one of the biggest incidences of mainstream press coverage given to a purely on-line gaming story yet. Yet more evidence of societies changing attitudes towards on-line gaming.
Visa are of course an extremely qualified company to look after the IT security of the games however. Regardless of anything else they would be amongst the top couple of contenders anyway.
"Utterly absurd and needless to say, the next album I want I will be downloading."
Oops, it seems even previewing a comment doesn't always stop typos.
It is indeed a strange twist when the pirated versions are better than the originals.
I noticed this absurdity last week when I had to download a pirated version of a CD I had just bought so that I could actually play it in my car.
Utterly absurd and needless to say, the next album I want I will downloading (via illegal sources of course, those legal sources are the worst of all).