So what you are saying that these are not ordinary captives, they are Prisoners Of War, POWs?
Last I checked even POWs had rights? According to the Geneva convention and such, which btw the US is obligated to conform to.
The funny part of this, apart from the fact that US haven't declared war in a long time, is ofcourse that quite a few of these people have been requested by the US-goverment from numerous other countries, which the US is not at all in war with, and been extradicted as ordinary criminals.
So POWs, criminals or your "illegal combatants", these people do have rights, weather you'd like to acknowledge it or not. The US signed the conventions, now it's time to live up to them.
And no, far from all of them were caught during fights or combats. A lot of them were actually "arrested" in the same sense you'd expect the police to arrest criminals.
As long as you don't know everything surrounding their capture, I would really think it's a smart thing not to disregard reason, (signed) conventions and consitent thinking.
My question was how would you determine with absolute certainty that someone is guilty of a crime, being it under costitutional protection or not, if there is no due process?
Would you except being stuck at Guantanamo for years without an attorney, simply because someone named you as a "illegal combatant"? May I ask you, as you may clarify this, illegal according to whom?
I'll claim with great prejudice, "illegal combatant" is simply a political rethoric, a rethorical rewrite to avoid difficult questions. Obviously works on Americans though.
You obviously take it for granted that these people are, oh whatever, say "illegal combatants" or terrorists, name your favorite. How can you know this with certainty? So far there has been only claims, captures, and complete ignorance of basic human-rights.
Which really is no good method of determining guilt. And is this kind of treatment really worthy of a modern democracy?
As someone else pointed out in some other slashdot/k5-discussion (I've googled and looked, but I can't find a link), the people who are really in power are not elected at all.
The president may be the one who "makes" the decissions, but he has advisors and generally a big staff. There are also those who are head of variuos goverment agencies, who are largely influencial.
When you look upon us politics in general, you will find that alot of what the president is apparently doing, really is the work of someone who has been sitting in the administration for 10, 20, maybe 30 years.
The people with real power are not elected. That's why these things seem to happen regardless.
At least that's what I claim, for what that's worth.
Sorry for this offtopic rant, but statements like these really piss me off:
Regarding Guantanamo, I have no problem with the US holding combatant terrorists for as long as they deem necessary. These terrorists were not fighting under the accord of any acknowledged UN/Geneva conventions of war, thus they are not privy to the protections of said conventions.
Jeez. Do you know how ignorant that paragraph makes you seem? You need the basic rights like due process and a fair trial to actually establish for a fact that these people are "combatant terrorists".
They may be, but there is no fscking way of knowing, unless they are given the rights, which has been explicitly been taken away from them. How complicated is that to understand?!?
Ofcourse, G. W. Bush haven't understood this at all, but this should be no surprise. I quote: "the only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people". How does he know?
But let's be consistent in our reasoning at least. Since murder is also a sever crime, I suggest we remove all security that the law provides for fair trials, if the poeple are accused for murder. After all they are murderers and don't deserve any legal protection, now do they?
Last I checked, some of these "combatant terrorists" held which were release after only 18 months, was found to be a taxi-driver and his ride. I think you should consider the possibility that the people giving out "terrorists", has aproximately the same credability as those informing the US about Iraqi WMD.
Using lame with Easy CD-DA extractor on my 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4 processor, and a 40x CD-rom I still can't encode faster than 5x.
Sure, if I encoded using Xing, I could encode 32x realtime from cd on my old 800 Mhz, but you get what you pay for. That goes for time as well.
The MP3's I get from lame (usally preset: extreme) beats the hell out of the ones I gett from Xing at any bitrate. You know... Like multipass videoencoding takes alot more time, but results in a better quality/bit-rate.
And... yes. With a good broadband-connection it's faster to download than encoding yourself, but then you'll have to take whatever you get. No quality-control whatsoever.
And then there's meta-data consistency in your MP3-collection. If you got a large hard-drive MP3-player, you really want that meta-data to be correct and consistent.
And, yes, you guessed correct. I make my own MP3s. Downloading is just too much work.
I am not sure that MPEG-4 encoding is even capable of reaching 7.5 Mbps - the maximum I have seen for DivX movies is around 2 Mbps with the minimum quantiser used for all frames.
DivX: One MPEG4-implementation
MPEG4: A video-compression spesification
Just because DivX doesn't provide higher rates than 2Mbps, doesn't mean MPEG4 doesn't. And to be honest, I think this restriction only applies to DivX3.11 and older versions.
If you check out XviD, I'm pretty sure you can specify any bitrate, even if it doesn't make sense.
And remember that most DivX/XviD/MPEG4-content you see these days are DVD-rips, and thus doesn't need any higher bitrate, because the resolution is so low.
If you jack up the resolution, say 16 times (4x4 increase), I'll bet you can use the higher bitrates you'll all of a sudden need.
And if you wonder: They have chosen MPEG4 because MPEG4 provides better compression than MPEG2. I thought that was kinda obvious, in "go figure"-bigtime-style. No need to waste bandwidth, really.
Maybe an easier solution would be a device that captures the (VGA | DVI) output.
I really have to disagree on this one.
It believe it's easier to decrypt an allready compressed stream, than to capture, recompress and write to disk cinema-class high-definition video-content.
If the this is anything like say HDTV (to be modest) real-time compression will be pretty impossible in any reasonable format with any available standard-hardware. Even the less the ability to write the data to disk at the speeds this would require.
I believe that decryption is the only viable option. But that will, on the other side (as allready mentioned) provide killer screeners for our p2p-networks!
Well... How many Europeans died in WW1/2, how many Russians? I'm not sure. I'm not even going to go for a full bodycount here, because that's really not the real issue here at all.
In my fsck-that statement, I was reffering to that printed words mean nothing. It's the actual freedom that counts.
The "War on terror" is nothing more then a political football, used to keep people afraid and in line.
Thats why I used quotes when I referred to the "War on terror". I also believe it's balgoney, but alot of nasty things are justified by it. Thus, worthy a writeup in my last comment.
Even if it was a real war on terror, it still be as doomed as the war on drugs. It's kinda like trying to cure the syndromes, and not going for the underlying decease.
Fsck your holy constitution, we used to have freedom in Europa.
Now that golden era seems to be fading.
Strange thing... No really! "Suffering" artists forced to live lifes of "only semi-luxery" *pun intended* seem to take away more freedom and legal protection from people worldwide these days, than anything else. "War on terror" included.
I'm afraid of a corporative appocalyptic future these days...............
I'm sorry, but you forgot to think the simple fact of economics that choices are made by supply and demand.
Should it be? Or should it be determined by need?
Supply of HIV-infected people will create demand for HIV pills.
There is no place in the world more AIDS-ridden than Africa. However, Africa is a poor continent, and can't pay up full price. Nevermind it has the world biggest market for these drugs.
Admit it. Drugs is a bad example to prove your point.
In fact, I think the drugs angle on patenting shows that patent-law now is as equally corrupted as copyright-law, when compared to the original intents of these laws.
We'll just have to bow down and kiss boot for our corporate-overlords one day or another anytime soon now. What? That's a problem?
What I ment, but which might not have been too clear, was that the mere concept of a bootable windows-cd with full repair-kit functionality is actually nothing new.
I'm all for free software, but this was being hailed as something conceptionaly new and groundbreaking. Which it is not, it's just free.
As for sysadmins working professionaly for large user-groups, the benefits of having this kind of software by far outweights the expenses.
Well... I'm kinda not in a position to argue this, as I haven't booted up my MP3-player as of yet, but... There's usually this thing called personal taste that comes around, when stuff like music is being discussed.
And I really thought that we were past those discussions about DJing being artistic or not. A DJ may do something creative with something old, even though he may not have actually made the original creative work.
Denying that DJs can do creative work, is just plain stupid. But that doesn't mean that what a DJ does, have to be, though:)
This probably doesn't go for all disciplines, but it's usualy true, and hey, I just happen to feel like getting mod'ed Insightful today. Or just lucky:)
And now, for my killer claim: *tada*
If a performance by a performer is made to seem easy, it's probably a hellova lot of work/skill behind it.
Same here. Read the headline. Downloaded the album, and now I'll listen to it.
If I didn't know for a fact that the boneheads at EMI are in fact boneheads, I'd supspect this was some kind of new marketing scheme.
Oh, and the fact that it's impossible to buy, and that people are willing to fork out over $80 for it on eBay, kinda gives it away. No scam here. Just downloads:)
And do you really think that it's perfectly OK for a DJ to just take other musicians' work, and press and sell a commercial CD, and give them nothing in return?
Let's get the facts straight here. Jay-Z made a vocal only edition, so people could mess around with it! Aka, it was intended to be messed around with. Jay-Z wanted people to remix his album.
Now, with that clear let's move on to the Beatles.
And, yes, for the Beatles... Shouldn't their material be public domain allready? Or do you think that selling 10s of millions of album doesn't establish the incentive to create, or promote creativy sufficiently?
No really. Im all for Betales being good music, but yeez, they've made enough money long time ago.
As far as I am conserned... ERD Commander from Winternals has allways been my tool of choice.
You can boot up a stripped version of Windows. Unlock admin-accounts. Access local-net, make backups of documents on an otherwise f**ked up harddrive... And yes, there is a command prompt.
And no, I am not affiliated with Winternals, but ERD Commander has been around since NT4.0-days, if I remember correctly.
Maybe this is some kind of free tool, unlike ERD Commander, but it isn't news.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you are saying that these are not ordinary captives, they are Prisoners Of War, POWs?
Last I checked even POWs had rights? According to the Geneva convention and such, which btw the US is obligated to conform to.
The funny part of this, apart from the fact that US haven't declared war in a long time, is ofcourse that quite a few of these people have been requested by the US-goverment from numerous other countries, which the US is not at all in war with, and been extradicted as ordinary criminals.
So POWs, criminals or your "illegal combatants", these people do have rights, weather you'd like to acknowledge it or not. The US signed the conventions, now it's time to live up to them.
And no, far from all of them were caught during fights or combats. A lot of them were actually "arrested" in the same sense you'd expect the police to arrest criminals.
As long as you don't know everything surrounding their capture, I would really think it's a smart thing not to disregard reason, (signed) conventions and consitent thinking.
You obviously missed my point entirely.
My question was how would you determine with absolute certainty that someone is guilty of a crime, being it under costitutional protection or not, if there is no due process?
Would you except being stuck at Guantanamo for years without an attorney, simply because someone named you as a "illegal combatant"? May I ask you, as you may clarify this, illegal according to whom?
I'll claim with great prejudice, "illegal combatant" is simply a political rethoric, a rethorical rewrite to avoid difficult questions. Obviously works on Americans though.
You obviously take it for granted that these people are, oh whatever, say "illegal combatants" or terrorists, name your favorite. How can you know this with certainty? So far there has been only claims, captures, and complete ignorance of basic human-rights.
Which really is no good method of determining guilt. And is this kind of treatment really worthy of a modern democracy?
As someone else pointed out in some other slashdot/k5-discussion (I've googled and looked, but I can't find a link), the people who are really in power are not elected at all.
The president may be the one who "makes" the decissions, but he has advisors and generally a big staff. There are also those who are head of variuos goverment agencies, who are largely influencial.
When you look upon us politics in general, you will find that alot of what the president is apparently doing, really is the work of someone who has been sitting in the administration for 10, 20, maybe 30 years.
The people with real power are not elected. That's why these things seem to happen regardless.
At least that's what I claim, for what that's worth.
Sorry for this offtopic rant, but statements like these really piss me off:
Jeez. Do you know how ignorant that paragraph makes you seem? You need the basic rights like due process and a fair trial to actually establish for a fact that these people are "combatant terrorists".
They may be, but there is no fscking way of knowing, unless they are given the rights, which has been explicitly been taken away from them. How complicated is that to understand?!?
Ofcourse, G. W. Bush haven't understood this at all, but this should be no surprise. I quote: "the only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people". How does he know?
But let's be consistent in our reasoning at least. Since murder is also a sever crime, I suggest we remove all security that the law provides for fair trials, if the poeple are accused for murder. After all they are murderers and don't deserve any legal protection, now do they?
Last I checked, some of these "combatant terrorists" held which were release after only 18 months, was found to be a taxi-driver and his ride. I think you should consider the possibility that the people giving out "terrorists", has aproximately the same credability as those informing the US about Iraqi WMD.
Using lame with Easy CD-DA extractor on my 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4 processor, and a 40x CD-rom I still can't encode faster than 5x.
Sure, if I encoded using Xing, I could encode 32x realtime from cd on my old 800 Mhz, but you get what you pay for. That goes for time as well.
The MP3's I get from lame (usally preset: extreme) beats the hell out of the ones I gett from Xing at any bitrate. You know... Like multipass videoencoding takes alot more time, but results in a better quality/bit-rate.
And... yes. With a good broadband-connection it's faster to download than encoding yourself, but then you'll have to take whatever you get. No quality-control whatsoever.
And then there's meta-data consistency in your MP3-collection. If you got a large hard-drive MP3-player, you really want that meta-data to be correct and consistent.
And, yes, you guessed correct. I make my own MP3s. Downloading is just too much work.
Err... My bad. It's written Europa in Norwegian :) Must have slipped by my sight.
DivX: One MPEG4-implementation
MPEG4: A video-compression spesification
Just because DivX doesn't provide higher rates than 2Mbps, doesn't mean MPEG4 doesn't. And to be honest, I think this restriction only applies to DivX3.11 and older versions.
If you check out XviD, I'm pretty sure you can specify any bitrate, even if it doesn't make sense.
And remember that most DivX/XviD/MPEG4-content you see these days are DVD-rips, and thus doesn't need any higher bitrate, because the resolution is so low.
If you jack up the resolution, say 16 times (4x4 increase), I'll bet you can use the higher bitrates you'll all of a sudden need.
And if you wonder: They have chosen MPEG4 because MPEG4 provides better compression than MPEG2. I thought that was kinda obvious, in "go figure"-bigtime-style. No need to waste bandwidth, really.
I really have to disagree on this one.
It believe it's easier to decrypt an allready compressed stream, than to capture, recompress and write to disk cinema-class high-definition video-content.
If the this is anything like say HDTV (to be modest) real-time compression will be pretty impossible in any reasonable format with any available standard-hardware. Even the less the ability to write the data to disk at the speeds this would require.
I believe that decryption is the only viable option. But that will, on the other side (as allready mentioned) provide killer screeners for our p2p-networks!
Yeah, especially with the DRM and all. Now who wants to work at the cinema?
Well... How many Europeans died in WW1/2, how many Russians? I'm not sure. I'm not even going to go for a full bodycount here, because that's really not the real issue here at all.
In my fsck-that statement, I was reffering to that printed words mean nothing. It's the actual freedom that counts.
Thats why I used quotes when I referred to the "War on terror". I also believe it's balgoney, but alot of nasty things are justified by it. Thus, worthy a writeup in my last comment.
Even if it was a real war on terror, it still be as doomed as the war on drugs. It's kinda like trying to cure the syndromes, and not going for the underlying decease.
Fsck your holy constitution, we used to have freedom in Europa.
Now that golden era seems to be fading.Strange thing... No really! "Suffering" artists forced to live lifes of "only semi-luxery" *pun intended* seem to take away more freedom and legal protection from people worldwide these days, than anything else. "War on terror" included.
I'm afraid of a corporative appocalyptic future these days...............
Oh.. In case you missed it, that is totally irellevant. You see, you are facing the recording industry here, not any agancy of legal investigation.
That they now seem to be given even more powers than these agencies, is however quite disturbing.
Now, I'll have to flee Europa as well.
Should it be? Or should it be determined by need?
There is no place in the world more AIDS-ridden than Africa. However, Africa is a poor continent, and can't pay up full price. Nevermind it has the world biggest market for these drugs.
Guess what, patents are being used to make sure they don't get any medicine at all.
Admit it. Drugs is a bad example to prove your point.
In fact, I think the drugs angle on patenting shows that patent-law now is as equally corrupted as copyright-law, when compared to the original intents of these laws.
We'll just have to bow down and kiss boot for our corporate-overlords one day or another anytime soon now. What? That's a problem?
If this catches on as much as RealNames did, you'll all of a sudden need to be a millionaire to get a cellphone.
And then your cellphone will die.
We've had this for a long time in Norway, and yes, give it a year or two and this will all die. Hopefully, at least it did over here.
I don't know if this is a valid number at all (me being Norwegian, and we employ 8-digit numbers...)
Anyway, my favorite would be 666-1337. What? You figured? Never!
What I ment, but which might not have been too clear, was that the mere concept of a bootable windows-cd with full repair-kit functionality is actually nothing new.
I'm all for free software, but this was being hailed as something conceptionaly new and groundbreaking. Which it is not, it's just free.
As for sysadmins working professionaly for large user-groups, the benefits of having this kind of software by far outweights the expenses.
So you seriously believe that the DVDCCA would license CSS to 321 studios?
After all they tried to suit 'em hard (as usual) for making it software which made it possible to backup your DVDs.
After they lost that case, yeah, they're probably eager to license them the technology.
I salute 321 studios for what their doing, and I despice DVDCCA and the likes of them, for trying to make it unlawful to backup your own media.
I say fuck the DVDCCA, and that's not just a gut reaction.
Err... Does this go for DVD-to-DVDr copies as well? Just asking...
Yeah. I know you get DVD-players with DivX/XviD-support these days, but nevertheless!
"annoydvdcca_utils". Now there's a package I can respect!
If I had modpoints, I wouldn't know if I should mod you informative or funny :)
Well... I'm kinda not in a position to argue this, as I haven't booted up my MP3-player as of yet, but... There's usually this thing called personal taste that comes around, when stuff like music is being discussed.
And I really thought that we were past those discussions about DJing being artistic or not. A DJ may do something creative with something old, even though he may not have actually made the original creative work.
Denying that DJs can do creative work, is just plain stupid. But that doesn't mean that what a DJ does, have to be, though :)
This probably doesn't go for all disciplines, but it's usualy true, and hey, I just happen to feel like getting mod'ed Insightful today. Or just lucky :)
And now, for my killer claim: *tada*
If a performance by a performer is made to seem easy, it's probably a hellova lot of work/skill behind it.
Same here. Read the headline. Downloaded the album, and now I'll listen to it.
If I didn't know for a fact that the boneheads at EMI are in fact boneheads, I'd supspect this was some kind of new marketing scheme.
Oh, and the fact that it's impossible to buy, and that people are willing to fork out over $80 for it on eBay, kinda gives it away. No scam here. Just downloads :)
Let's get the facts straight here. Jay-Z made a vocal only edition, so people could mess around with it! Aka, it was intended to be messed around with. Jay-Z wanted people to remix his album.
Now, with that clear let's move on to the Beatles.
And, yes, for the Beatles... Shouldn't their material be public domain allready? Or do you think that selling 10s of millions of album doesn't establish the incentive to create, or promote creativy sufficiently?
No really. Im all for Betales being good music, but yeez, they've made enough money long time ago.
Death to all who insist on prolonged copyright!
As far as I am conserned... ERD Commander from Winternals has allways been my tool of choice.
You can boot up a stripped version of Windows. Unlock admin-accounts. Access local-net, make backups of documents on an otherwise f**ked up harddrive... And yes, there is a command prompt.
And no, I am not affiliated with Winternals, but ERD Commander has been around since NT4.0-days, if I remember correctly.
Maybe this is some kind of free tool, unlike ERD Commander, but it isn't news.