> http://video.rotten.com/elron/. Not for the faint of heart...
Unless rotten.com isn't using the actual autopsy pics, that link is entirely on-topic for this thread.
This is what happens to you when your cult decides that you need to be strapped to a bed and left in isolation to die of dehydration.
The day you die, your corpse is taken, not to the nearest hospital, not to the next-nearest hospital, but five hospitals away, where (what a coincidence!) the doctor (who pronounces you dead on arrival) is a $cientologist.
He then concludes that you were alive when your cult realized you were feeling really bad that day, but that (aaw, shucks!) you tragically died on the way to the hospital.
> As on any activist site(this one is far from the most active), strong ideas about really bad things are
discussed. Sometimes the activist group wins, and sometimes they don't.
With another 100,000 pissed-off geeks learning about the Co$ today, I'd lay good odds the geeks won this round bigtime.
If you know people who don't read Slashdot, tell them about the cult today.
This is memetic warfare - and we outnumber and outclue the cult by a million-to-one margin.
> To be fair, I think this article being posted is doing more damage to the Travolta-ologists than the original
removed post. Look at all the great links to anti-Scientology(tm) stuff!
I'm glad I'm not the only person who's realized this.
I watched the reaction when Co$ issued the forged rmgroup alt.religion.scientology that started this whole mess years ago.
The reaction was the same as today's - another half-million very pissed-off geeks ended up a new chew toy.
If I want to read about Xenu and the volcanoes, I can get it anywhere on the 'net today. Just like MP3s and DeCSS, it's everywhere, and they can't put the genie back in the bottle again.
Unlike RIAA and MPAA, however, the Co$ is constrained by its own doctrine not to adapt to changing times.
Thus, we see MPAA making the first moves towards friendly relations with the DivX;-) But Co$ is constrained by its own rules to "always attack, never defend". Its members are punished for trying to apply "the tech" (the words of Hubbard) in innovative ways - even talking about the idea of adapting - is considered "out-tech" and is a punishable offence in the cult.
In the '50s, when the cult was designed, this was a pretty good memeset - highly self-reinforcing, and the "always attack" spin-doctoring (e.g. "when attacked, turn the attack around and say that you welcome investigations of your critics") worked great in the media regime back then.
In the age of the 'net, it's not just useless to try to shut down criticism, it's counterproductive, in that every attempt to do so will result in wider dissemination of the verboten information.
This is a classic "Operation foot-bullet" for the cult. They aimed at Slashdot, fired with both barrels, and now every Slashdot reader knows (a) how low the cult is willing to stoop, (b) everything they could possibly want to know about OT III via search engines and several years' worth of mirrors already set up, and (c) all the other juicy information in the URLs in the article with which Slashdot's editors replaced the OT III posting.
Before Today: "Yet another copy of that Xenu story".
After Today: Ten links detailing OT III, OT III written in English, as opposed to $cienospeak, Jon Atack's book, Operation Clambake, the eBay story about the galvanometers, the needless death of Lisa McPherson, and another huge page of links.
OK, maybe the clams have gotten a clue and realized that the only way to shut down sites that expose $cientology is through the Slashdot effect.
> The story was edited and resubmitted, after the Slashdot link was posted. The original is down
the memory hole.
Apologies to/. for posting twice in response to the same post. But if you visited the site early in the day, check your browser's cache. If you have a copy for the original article (this morning's version with the stronger by-line), you may wish to save it somewhere on your hard drive.
IMNSHO, Electronic News should do the right thing and print a retraction of the original article.
> As [the AC to whom I'm replying] was typing this, [Electronic News] changed the byline to 3/15. They are covering their
ass quite carefully.
I can't vouch for whether or not they changed the byline while you were typing it, but the byline at "http://www.electronicnews.com/enews/news/NewsInde x.asp" for March 14 now says "Expected Rambus Ruling Could Limit Scope Of Patents"...
It sure as hell didn't say that this morning, when I read the article and submitted the link to Slashdot.
> but "Good Guys" ? ??
Don't get me wrong. From what I can tell, RAMBUS are a bunch of jerks.
As you point out - it's/. The side with the most IP lawyers is automatically not the "good guys":-)
> Why are they doing this? Are they truly just a bunch of jerks?
Why do they feel that they have rights to some of this technology?
1) To make money because they ain't gettin' enough from RDRAM sales to keep their investors happy.
2) Yes they are, but that's not important;-)
3) IMHO, they're grasping at straws (e.g. programmable latency) to support their case because they see RDRAM going away in favor of DDR. If they can get their hands on royalties from DDR and SDRAM, they make big bucks for their shareholders.
I see "making big bucks for their shareholders" as a legitimate business activity of any company. It just so happens that the way in which this company is going about it (i.e. trying to extend a patent intended to cover RDRAM into SDRAM and DDR after you've realized that your RDRAM tech isn't gonna take over the world the way you thought it was) happens to make them look like a bunch of jerks.
> Am I missing something here? Why did Hitachi sign licensing agreements with RAMBUS?
Hyundai is presently in rather dire financial straits due to a high debt load. Hyundai may just have been hedging their bets, as they may not be in a position to afford the cost of losing the case against Rambus.
It's also possible that since RDRAM is more expensive than SDRAM or DDR, and we all know how low RAM prices have gotten lately, Hyundai may have decided there's no money to be made in anything other than RDRAM. (And that there's therefore no money to be saved by trying to cut Rambus out of their SDRAM and DDR sales, since they may not be making money on these types of RAM anyways)
> No "limiting of scope" and no invalidation of any
part of the patent, just a Judge being safe and agreeing with an "expert" that RAMBUS has no patent on SDRAM.
FWIW, I leeched the headline pretty much verbatim from the Electronic News article. (IANAL, and the Electronic News article may have overstated the case, and I may have propagated the overstatement)
Your phrasing - "most likely" their DDR/SDRAM claims will not apply - is probably the more fair take on the story.
> Rambus patent hasn't been touched, the Judge has merely sided with an
"expert witness" in saying that Rambus's patent doesn't even apply to SDRAM, since SDRAM doesn't use the
technology in the patent.
Yeah, the headline (which I wrote) is a bit misleading. I'd hoped I'd cleared it up in the "article text" by mentioning that (a) it's a preliminary ruling, and (b) the judge hasn't concluded that DDR and SDRAM don't use a multiplex bus -- only a source in the article.
So two things have to happen: (1) The judge has to agree that neither DDR nor SDRAM use a multiplex bus, and (2) The judge has to remain convinced that Rambus' patent does not extend beyond the multiplex bus.
Although this ruling is a blow for Rambus, it's not the end. If the Rambus landsharks can sway the judge on either of these two points, they can still win.
> So, does this mean that Hitachi, Micron, and everyone else that perviously had to pay Rambus royalties will get their
money back? It's about time this bully got its ass beat.
Probably not. Micron, for instance, never paid Rambus a cent - that's why they're part of another lawsuit;-)
If you signed a contract with Rambus that said "we'll pay you a royalty on our SDRAM sales between $NOW and $LATER", well, uh, you signed the contract. Tough.
Of course, if you signed such a contract, and Rambus' patents turn out to be invalid, odds are you're gonna drive a harder bargain when the contract expires.
(I suppose that if a judge rules that Rambus knew its patents were invalid at the time it wrote the contract, it may invalidate the contract altogether - but that would require proof of fraudulent intent, which is a much harder thing to prove than anything that's been seen up to this point. Personally, I think there'd be reasonable doubt - Rambus' goons wouldn't have gone on the path of attempting to license DDR and SDRAM unless they had reason to believe they could get away with it. Even if the patents are invalidated, given what's been made public so far, I think Rambus can still credibly claim that they thought their DDR/SDRAM land grab would stand up in court.)
> Well, even if RAMBUS loses this case altogether, there is still the competition between DDR and RDRAM. Who will
win this battle is completely unknown.
Yup. RDRAM is pretty clearly a Rambus innovation, and I don't begrudge them their royalties on RDRAM sales.
There's nothing intrinsically evil about saying "we invent things and license the tech to people who want to build them". It's only when Rambus said "Oh yeah, all your RAM are belong to us!" that I think they crossed the line from being innovators into being litigators.
If you invent something, you can license it. My beef with Rambus is that I don't believe they had anything to do with the "invention" of SDRAM or DDR, and that they therefore have no legitimate claim to royalties on those products.
If Rambus makes a fortune because Intel ships a CPU/chipset combo that turns the performance potential of RDRAM into real-world advantages, and their technology gains marketshare from DDR, more power to 'em.
But if the world goes with DDR instead of RDRAM, then Rambus (IMHO) should either come up with something better than DDR and patent it, or stick a fork in itself, 'cuz it's done.
>Having said all that, I've noticed that the amount of spam I get from uunet is greatly reduced lately.
I've seen a slight uptick in the amount of spam from uu.net dialups leased to msn.com (i.e. msn.com customers) coming through msn.com's mailservers.
Theory: When msn.com didn't have port-25 blocking, msn.com customers using spewnet dialups got reported to abuse@uunet.net. By the time Spewnet forwarded the complaint to the "unnamed reseller" (msn.com), the spammer had gotten a day or two of spam out of the account before MSN shut it down.
Now that msn.com appears to have (at least partially) implemented such blocking, the only way an MSN spammer can spew from a spewnet dialup is to do it through his own account. Accounts don't live nearly as long, and thus Spewnet looks like a bit less of a spamhaven.
My "legal deadpool" (my list of spammers whom I believe are next in line criminal charges) still has Alan Ralsky (of Telodgim fame, IIRC now hosting out of Russia after a brief stint in Hong Kong after months of uninterrupted Qwest service) and Ron Millette (the guy most likely behind the "joe-jobs" of the anti-Global Prosperity scam) at the top of the list.
There's a reason he's going to Disney and AOL, and it ain't
just because they pay better.
Note the only "military" application: Preventing casual users
of turnkey systems ("Here, Sargeant. Use this machine.") from
inadvertently emailing sensitive documents home.
Note what isn't in his DOD application: Preventing
highly-trained adversaries (spies) from gaining access to
the data.
Finally - the FUD factor: Multiple "snake-oil crypto" signs
are here... "11 different layers", as though
that makes it more secure than, say, 10 different layers?
More layers mean more security, right? I mean, there are
more of them! Or phrases like "white screen of death", as
opposed to "if the software detects tampering, it deletes itself".
It's a cute hack to wrap DRM in an executable and bundle it
with a file for 'doze, but it's hardly worthy of the "military
grade document-destroying copy protection system" kind of hype
it got in the puff piece at inside.com.
> "We are in need of a new format," says BMG's Sami Valkonen
Well, Sami, enjoy your new format.
I'm not in need of a new format.
Actually, I kinda like the idea of 500M of rewritable storage in the palm of my hand, but not at the cost of the DRM garbage you wanna cripple it with.
> i can definetly hear the difference. it's most noticable in the higher freqs, in my experience.
i've only heard one encoder, so others may do a better job.
Correct. In my experience, there's no "best encoder" for all types of music.
There may be "best encoders" for some types of music, but no one encoder produces "best" results on all types of music.
I'll take Blade at 128 or 160 as an example - I've heard it's reasonably good on classical, but I know from experience it's abysmal on electric guitars and certain synthesized drum beats. (For sheer torture, try Ozzy or Def Leppard - lots of cymbals and guitar, or the thump-thump-thump of New Order's "Blue Monday" on Blade/128. I can even hear the difference at 192.)
On the same pieces of music encoded with Fraun or LAME, I have a hard time telling the difference from CD at 160, and can't tell the difference at all at 192.
I suspect if you're into acoustic guitar or jazz, your mileage would vary considerably - for all I know, you'd be writing exactly the same post as I am, but wondering why you hear all kinds of artifacts with LAME, but Blade sounds fine.
(Yeah, I know you're "not supposed to" use Blade at 128 - I'm using it as an example because I can hear the same artifacts at 160, just not as bad, as 128. Again, what matters is that there's no "best encoder" for all types of music. But there probably are "best encoders" any given type of music.)
> And the reason given by Scientology why they don't tell you this for ages, is that your mind would
explode and you'd go mad, if you heard about this before you were ready.
Actually, wasn't it that you'd die of pneumonia?
(Hmm, it's been out for a few years now, where's the epidemic?)
>Christianity has a lot more power to do a little harm to billions of people, and it often does so.
Scientology has power to do vast amounts of harm to fewer people. It's hard to compare the two.
Agreed. And your point on Mother Teresa (i.e. as a representative of Catholicism) and birth control causing misery in India is well-taken.
On the other hand, ever since the Inquisition, the Catholic Church doesn't have "clear the planet" as a mandate, and a doctrine that those who don't sign up will be "disposed of quietly and without sorrow".
While Christianity does harm, it does so by at least intending to do well. (The road to hell is paved with good intentions:)
My concern with $cientology is that they appear - by their own actions, as well as their "church" policy memos - to intend grave harm. Thankfully, no court can put an information genie (be it DeCSS or OT3) back in the bottle, and as a result, the cult is now certain to fail in its goal of clearing the planet and disposing of the rest of us quietly and without sorrow.
>Now I will ask the question again: how can a religion have trade secrets?
You've gotten a lot of skeptical replies - but I think it's because you're asking the wrong question.
The question I think you're really asking is not "how can" a religion "have" trade secrets, but why does a religion need trade secrets?
How can a religion have trade secrets? The same way anything has trade secrets.
Why does a "religion" believe it needs trade secrets? Because - unlike Sun worship, Pharaonic Egypt, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and most of the other faiths, I believe that Scientology was designed from the outset as a means for separating fools from their money.
Anything that exposes a potential sucker to the fact that he or she will pay about $300K to learn the story about "Xenu and the volcanoes in Hawaii" is a serious risk to the $cieno business plan.
To those who bash religion in response to the poster's original question - I'm not talking about whether or not other religions may have degenerated into means of separating fools from their money. I'm merely saying that they weren't intended as such when they started.
>watch lil' Johnny create an 'A' report with it, and next thing you
know, Joe-Six-Pack is at the water cooler telling his buddies how "this OSS shit ain't all that
bad.. and it's FREE!"
Unfortunately, until Joe Sixpack can install Linux and the OSS application without having to grok "partition", "glibc", and what-not, he's gonna say "fuck this, next time I'm buying a Dell(tm) because it's got Intel Inside(tm) and comes with WindowsXP(tm) and WindowsXP(tm) comes with a word processor built-in!"
Don't forget - Joe Sixpack doesn't buy an OS and applications - he doesn't even buy an Athlon/Duron/PIII. He buys a "Dell" or a "Compaq", and has no idea that he's even paying $100ish for the 'doze license and other "bundled" software on it.
>The real assumption is that the person downloading the IP would actually have gone
out and plunked hard-earned money down for it.
Yup. Regrettably, Ellison, just like RIAA, Doesn't Get It.
I'd like to thank him for pointing out that books are now becoming widely-available online, though. I've got some downloading to do. I love my dead-tree editions of the SF classics, but I wish I could search 'em - electronic versions of the texts sounds like a great value-add for me.
My call: Legal or not, it's not wrong to download an electronic version of a dead-tree edition you've already paid for.
Of course, Ellison is objecting to much more than this - people downloading electronic versions of books for which they haven't purchased dead-tree editions. He's got a point -- artists get screwed by publishers in much the same way as musicians get screwed by RIAA.
> A Dr. Hanfkopf was interview today. He say "Television has probably contribute more to this
than anything else. The TV people have let these people be hear without ever having correct
them. My God, now it has happen to me!!!
Somebody set up us the language!
All your tense belong to us!
(Oh hell, somebody have to say it. 'Cuz we were all thinking it... for great justice 'n' all that...;)
>I believe that in a representative government based on democratic principles that there is both a
moral authority for the government to tax and a moral authority for a person to own property. I
would propose that these two beliefs are not mutually exclusive.
In that case - although I happen disagree with your premises (as for me, I wouldn't go so far as to say the two are "mutually exclusive", but I would say "very strongly in conflict with each other"), if I accept them for the purposes of argument, your argument becomes valid, and your call of "straw man" is entirely correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless rotten.com isn't using the actual autopsy pics, that link is entirely on-topic for this thread.
This is what happens to you when your cult decides that you need to be strapped to a bed and left in isolation to die of dehydration.
The day you die, your corpse is taken, not to the nearest hospital, not to the next-nearest hospital, but five hospitals away, where (what a coincidence!) the doctor (who pronounces you dead on arrival) is a $cientologist.
He then concludes that you were alive when your cult realized you were feeling really bad that day, but that (aaw, shucks!) you tragically died on the way to the hospital.
With another 100,000 pissed-off geeks learning about the Co$ today, I'd lay good odds the geeks won this round bigtime.
If you know people who don't read Slashdot, tell them about the cult today.
This is memetic warfare - and we outnumber and outclue the cult by a million-to-one margin.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who's realized this.
I watched the reaction when Co$ issued the forged rmgroup alt.religion.scientology that started this whole mess years ago.
The reaction was the same as today's - another half-million very pissed-off geeks ended up a new chew toy.
If I want to read about Xenu and the volcanoes, I can get it anywhere on the 'net today. Just like MP3s and DeCSS, it's everywhere, and they can't put the genie back in the bottle again.
Unlike RIAA and MPAA, however, the Co$ is constrained by its own doctrine not to adapt to changing times.
Thus, we see MPAA making the first moves towards friendly relations with the DivX ;-) But Co$ is constrained by its own rules to "always attack, never defend". Its members are punished for trying to apply "the tech" (the words of Hubbard) in innovative ways - even talking about the idea of adapting - is considered "out-tech" and is a punishable offence in the cult.
In the '50s, when the cult was designed, this was a pretty good memeset - highly self-reinforcing, and the "always attack" spin-doctoring (e.g. "when attacked, turn the attack around and say that you welcome investigations of your critics") worked great in the media regime back then.
In the age of the 'net, it's not just useless to try to shut down criticism, it's counterproductive, in that every attempt to do so will result in wider dissemination of the verboten information.
This is a classic "Operation foot-bullet" for the cult. They aimed at Slashdot, fired with both barrels, and now every Slashdot reader knows (a) how low the cult is willing to stoop, (b) everything they could possibly want to know about OT III via search engines and several years' worth of mirrors already set up, and (c) all the other juicy information in the URLs in the article with which Slashdot's editors replaced the OT III posting.
Before Today: "Yet another copy of that Xenu story".
After Today: Ten links detailing OT III, OT III written in English, as opposed to $cienospeak, Jon Atack's book, Operation Clambake, the eBay story about the galvanometers, the needless death of Lisa McPherson, and another huge page of links.
OK, maybe the clams have gotten a clue and realized that the only way to shut down sites that expose $cientology is through the Slashdot effect.
But I doubt it.
Apologies to /. for posting twice in response to the same post. But if you visited the site early in the day, check your browser's cache. If you have a copy for the original article (this morning's version with the stronger by-line), you may wish to save it somewhere on your hard drive.
IMNSHO, Electronic News should do the right thing and print a retraction of the original article.
I can't vouch for whether or not they changed the byline while you were typing it, but the byline at "http://www.electronicnews.com/enews/news/NewsInde x.asp" for March 14 now says "Expected Rambus Ruling Could Limit Scope Of Patents"...
It sure as hell didn't say that this morning, when I read the article and submitted the link to Slashdot.
As you point out - it's /. The side with the most IP lawyers is automatically not the "good guys" :-)
> Why are they doing this? Are they truly just a bunch of jerks? Why do they feel that they have rights to some of this technology?
1) To make money because they ain't gettin' enough from RDRAM sales to keep their investors happy.
2) Yes they are, but that's not important ;-)
3) IMHO, they're grasping at straws (e.g. programmable latency) to support their case because they see RDRAM going away in favor of DDR. If they can get their hands on royalties from DDR and SDRAM, they make big bucks for their shareholders.
I see "making big bucks for their shareholders" as a legitimate business activity of any company. It just so happens that the way in which this company is going about it (i.e. trying to extend a patent intended to cover RDRAM into SDRAM and DDR after you've realized that your RDRAM tech isn't gonna take over the world the way you thought it was) happens to make them look like a bunch of jerks.
Hyundai is presently in rather dire financial straits due to a high debt load. Hyundai may just have been hedging their bets, as they may not be in a position to afford the cost of losing the case against Rambus.
It's also possible that since RDRAM is more expensive than SDRAM or DDR, and we all know how low RAM prices have gotten lately, Hyundai may have decided there's no money to be made in anything other than RDRAM. (And that there's therefore no money to be saved by trying to cut Rambus out of their SDRAM and DDR sales, since they may not be making money on these types of RAM anyways)
FWIW, I leeched the headline pretty much verbatim from the Electronic News article. (IANAL, and the Electronic News article may have overstated the case, and I may have propagated the overstatement)
Your phrasing - "most likely" their DDR/SDRAM claims will not apply - is probably the more fair take on the story.
Yeah, the headline (which I wrote) is a bit misleading. I'd hoped I'd cleared it up in the "article text" by mentioning that (a) it's a preliminary ruling, and (b) the judge hasn't concluded that DDR and SDRAM don't use a multiplex bus -- only a source in the article.
So two things have to happen: (1) The judge has to agree that neither DDR nor SDRAM use a multiplex bus, and (2) The judge has to remain convinced that Rambus' patent does not extend beyond the multiplex bus.
Although this ruling is a blow for Rambus, it's not the end. If the Rambus landsharks can sway the judge on either of these two points, they can still win.
Probably not. Micron, for instance, never paid Rambus a cent - that's why they're part of another lawsuit ;-)
If you signed a contract with Rambus that said "we'll pay you a royalty on our SDRAM sales between $NOW and $LATER", well, uh, you signed the contract. Tough.
Of course, if you signed such a contract, and Rambus' patents turn out to be invalid, odds are you're gonna drive a harder bargain when the contract expires.
(I suppose that if a judge rules that Rambus knew its patents were invalid at the time it wrote the contract, it may invalidate the contract altogether - but that would require proof of fraudulent intent, which is a much harder thing to prove than anything that's been seen up to this point. Personally, I think there'd be reasonable doubt - Rambus' goons wouldn't have gone on the path of attempting to license DDR and SDRAM unless they had reason to believe they could get away with it. Even if the patents are invalidated, given what's been made public so far, I think Rambus can still credibly claim that they thought their DDR/SDRAM land grab would stand up in court.)
Yup. RDRAM is pretty clearly a Rambus innovation, and I don't begrudge them their royalties on RDRAM sales.
There's nothing intrinsically evil about saying "we invent things and license the tech to people who want to build them". It's only when Rambus said "Oh yeah, all your RAM are belong to us!" that I think they crossed the line from being innovators into being litigators.
If you invent something, you can license it. My beef with Rambus is that I don't believe they had anything to do with the "invention" of SDRAM or DDR, and that they therefore have no legitimate claim to royalties on those products.
If Rambus makes a fortune because Intel ships a CPU/chipset combo that turns the performance potential of RDRAM into real-world advantages, and their technology gains marketshare from DDR, more power to 'em.
But if the world goes with DDR instead of RDRAM, then Rambus (IMHO) should either come up with something better than DDR and patent it, or stick a fork in itself, 'cuz it's done.
I've seen a slight uptick in the amount of spam from uu.net dialups leased to msn.com (i.e. msn.com customers) coming through msn.com's mailservers.
Theory: When msn.com didn't have port-25 blocking, msn.com customers using spewnet dialups got reported to abuse@uunet.net. By the time Spewnet forwarded the complaint to the "unnamed reseller" (msn.com), the spammer had gotten a day or two of spam out of the account before MSN shut it down.
Now that msn.com appears to have (at least partially) implemented such blocking, the only way an MSN spammer can spew from a spewnet dialup is to do it through his own account. Accounts don't live nearly as long, and thus Spewnet looks like a bit less of a spamhaven.
My "legal deadpool" (my list of spammers whom I believe are next in line criminal charges) still has Alan Ralsky (of Telodgim fame, IIRC now hosting out of Russia after a brief stint in Hong Kong after months of uninterrupted Qwest service) and Ron Millette (the guy most likely behind the "joe-jobs" of the anti-Global Prosperity scam) at the top of the list.
Roastbeef. Yep, that's me :) I still read the IO board every week or so... just not too many threads where I can contribute useful info anymore.
Note the only "military" application: Preventing casual users of turnkey systems ("Here, Sargeant. Use this machine.") from inadvertently emailing sensitive documents home.
Note what isn't in his DOD application: Preventing highly-trained adversaries (spies) from gaining access to the data.
Finally - the FUD factor: Multiple "snake-oil crypto" signs are here... "11 different layers", as though that makes it more secure than, say, 10 different layers? More layers mean more security, right? I mean, there are more of them! Or phrases like "white screen of death", as opposed to "if the software detects tampering, it deletes itself".
It's a cute hack to wrap DRM in an executable and bundle it with a file for 'doze, but it's hardly worthy of the "military grade document-destroying copy protection system" kind of hype it got in the puff piece at inside.com.
Go, Schneier, go.
Well, Sami, enjoy your new format.
I'm not in need of a new format.
Actually, I kinda like the idea of 500M of rewritable storage in the palm of my hand, but not at the cost of the DRM garbage you wanna cripple it with.
Correct. In my experience, there's no "best encoder" for all types of music.
There may be "best encoders" for some types of music, but no one encoder produces "best" results on all types of music.
I'll take Blade at 128 or 160 as an example - I've heard it's reasonably good on classical, but I know from experience it's abysmal on electric guitars and certain synthesized drum beats. (For sheer torture, try Ozzy or Def Leppard - lots of cymbals and guitar, or the thump-thump-thump of New Order's "Blue Monday" on Blade/128. I can even hear the difference at 192.)
On the same pieces of music encoded with Fraun or LAME, I have a hard time telling the difference from CD at 160, and can't tell the difference at all at 192.
I suspect if you're into acoustic guitar or jazz, your mileage would vary considerably - for all I know, you'd be writing exactly the same post as I am, but wondering why you hear all kinds of artifacts with LAME, but Blade sounds fine.
(Yeah, I know you're "not supposed to" use Blade at 128 - I'm using it as an example because I can hear the same artifacts at 160, just not as bad, as 128. Again, what matters is that there's no "best encoder" for all types of music. But there probably are "best encoders" any given type of music.)
Actually, wasn't it that you'd die of pneumonia?
(Hmm, it's been out for a few years now, where's the epidemic?)
Agreed. And your point on Mother Teresa (i.e. as a representative of Catholicism) and birth control causing misery in India is well-taken.
On the other hand, ever since the Inquisition, the Catholic Church doesn't have "clear the planet" as a mandate, and a doctrine that those who don't sign up will be "disposed of quietly and without sorrow".
While Christianity does harm, it does so by at least intending to do well. (The road to hell is paved with good intentions :)
My concern with $cientology is that they appear - by their own actions, as well as their "church" policy memos - to intend grave harm. Thankfully, no court can put an information genie (be it DeCSS or OT3) back in the bottle, and as a result, the cult is now certain to fail in its goal of clearing the planet and disposing of the rest of us quietly and without sorrow.
You've gotten a lot of skeptical replies - but I think it's because you're asking the wrong question.
The question I think you're really asking is not "how can" a religion "have" trade secrets, but why does a religion need trade secrets?
How can a religion have trade secrets? The same way anything has trade secrets.
Why does a "religion" believe it needs trade secrets? Because - unlike Sun worship, Pharaonic Egypt, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and most of the other faiths, I believe that Scientology was designed from the outset as a means for separating fools from their money.
Anything that exposes a potential sucker to the fact that he or she will pay about $300K to learn the story about "Xenu and the volcanoes in Hawaii" is a serious risk to the $cieno business plan.
To those who bash religion in response to the poster's original question - I'm not talking about whether or not other religions may have degenerated into means of separating fools from their money. I'm merely saying that they weren't intended as such when they started.
Nope, that was Cantor and Siegel. They were lawyers.
Unfortunately, until Joe Sixpack can install Linux and the OSS application without having to grok "partition", "glibc", and what-not, he's gonna say "fuck this, next time I'm buying a Dell(tm) because it's got Intel Inside(tm) and comes with WindowsXP(tm) and WindowsXP(tm) comes with a word processor built-in!"
Don't forget - Joe Sixpack doesn't buy an OS and applications - he doesn't even buy an Athlon/Duron/PIII. He buys a "Dell" or a "Compaq", and has no idea that he's even paying $100ish for the 'doze license and other "bundled" software on it.
"Voice"? Is that how they spell "tits" these days? :)
Yup. Regrettably, Ellison, just like RIAA, Doesn't Get It.
I'd like to thank him for pointing out that books are now becoming widely-available online, though. I've got some downloading to do. I love my dead-tree editions of the SF classics, but I wish I could search 'em - electronic versions of the texts sounds like a great value-add for me.
My call: Legal or not, it's not wrong to download an electronic version of a dead-tree edition you've already paid for.
Of course, Ellison is objecting to much more than this - people downloading electronic versions of books for which they haven't purchased dead-tree editions. He's got a point -- artists get screwed by publishers in much the same way as musicians get screwed by RIAA.
Somebody set up us the language!
All your tense belong to us!
(Oh hell, somebody have to say it. 'Cuz we were all thinking it... for great justice 'n' all that... ;)
In that case - although I happen disagree with your premises (as for me, I wouldn't go so far as to say the two are "mutually exclusive", but I would say "very strongly in conflict with each other"), if I accept them for the purposes of argument, your argument becomes valid, and your call of "straw man" is entirely correct.