This was already mentioned in a story yesterday. Or maybe it was in a comment. But anyway, it almost beggars belief that MS could seriously recommend that you type URLs yourself. The web's whole purpose is for hyperlinks. The internet, for most people, is all about interactive hyperlinking. That's the crux of the whole WWW !
Not only should they fix this immediately, but they have a responsibility to the community that they force their browser on to at least provide them with a browser that is not open to such a simple hack
The only counter argument I can think of for hiding the user/pass syntax before the @ in the first place is to "stop the password being in cleartext on the screen when viewing" and I think we can all see through the pointlessness of that argument.
O Firebird, Firebird, wherefore art thou Firebird?
(Who can) deny thy greatness and refuse thy name;
Or, if they wilt not, be sworn to hell,
As soon there'll no longer be an Internet...
Nobody has anything to say, and yet good articles get rejected all the time.
Just proves that really, people are trying to be funny all the time rather than actually submitting elightened comment on the subject at hand. You can't be funny about an Apache developer, so other than bowing down and saying you're not worthy... nothing much to post is there?
WTF? For free? You are joking. Lawyers do not work for free. They will make money, for sure for sure. Provide links that suggest otherwise for this case.
It's a shame we live in such a litigious global society these days. Back in the day, rescuing your honour was all that you wanted. But then, back in the day, you didn't get sued for stupid shit all the time. Isn't it a bit obvious that people who copy DVDs are breaking the law, not the people who supply the means to do it?
Anyway he might make more money writing a few exclusives in the press than going through more legal procedure. People must understand : the lawyers make the real money, not the plaintiffs. Stop making those snakes rich with at no risk to themselves. You take the risk, DVD Jon. The lawyer gets paid whatever.
I don't know that you need to go full res for acceptable results. If you reduce a little bit then you'll still have better than SVHS quality and will be able to encode more quickly. This will most certainly help out for noise, which will benefit from a noise filter + resampling rather than the other way around.
However if you're a bit of a perfectionist then by all mains re-encode at full res less any black bars, and pay the time penalty for that of course. The extra noise won't make encoding any slower as such, it will just effect the general output quality. Resizing (small reduction, say to 560 wide) + filtering noise just may give you more aesthetically pleasing results. Still I guess you've already experimented and you just want top quality backups so... take my rambling with a pinch of salt.
Other than in video games, I am currently transcoding a Babylon 5 video from MPEG-2 to DivX (using Xvid) on my laptop. It is an Athlon64 3200+--the fastest laptop processor money can buy (well, strictly for video transcoding, the highest end Pentium IVs are actually slightly faster) and it takes about 6 hours for a 2hr movie, 3 hours for an episode.
What resolution are you transcoding to? The same as the original DVD? I can't believe it's that slow. What are you using to do it? How much RAM do you have?
I have an Athlon 2400+ and two pass XviD wouldn't take that long, and I only have 128MB of RAM. Unless, of course, you're leaving it at the full original DVD resolution and not chopping out any of the black bars.
Having said that, I reckon my PC could transcode at full resolution faster than in 6 hours. Heck, I less than halve the resolution and I get a full 2 hours transcoded (including audio) in 3 hours or so.
A lot of countries installed VSATs into a few key towns and then paying massive amounts for hardly any bandwidth at all and no national backbone at all.
Using a decent wireless solution is the only IP backbone most places I have been have had. Microwave mostly, some spread spectrum stuff. 100mbit backbone would be amazing in a lot of poorer places. Sure, cable would be better, but significantly more expensive. A lot of governments don't care about mid to long term, because nobody plans that way when they themselves don't intend to be there too much longer. They might lay cables in road development works and when distributing electricity, but to cover massive distances cheaply, wireless is the way to go.
Oh, and I've lived and worked in Africa. Tunisia, Morocco, Malawi, Niger... and in the Caribbean in Haiti too. I made the mistake of making a short post earlier, perhaps, but you are so wrong here. Have YOU been to Africa? Have YOU worked in telecoms in Africa? I have.
These are going to be 10 miles up, it's only the experiments that are with tethered airships. The tests will be followed by slightly different style aircraft which will be less affected by weather systems significantly below them. Birds don't fly to those sorts of altitudes either.
Serviceable area will be less than for geostationary orbit satellites, but lower power and higher speeds are possible. The telecoms requirements of this century will probably require a lot of deployment of new stuff, because there's only so much sense in deploying fibre optics all over the place, because the remote areas will get left out.
Do you turn off your phone at home? Do you value your family and friends enough to not answer the phone when they are present as guests in your house? Do you fight the social pressures to answer the phone? I do not worry about missing calls, and I deal with the social ridicule that results from my decision. I know that not everyone has the freedom to miss calls, and some just want to take the path of least resistance.
You are so right. This is one of the most insightful things I've read on Slashdot in a while. Particularly the question : Do you value your family and friends enough to not answer the phone when they are present as guests in your house? There is nothing more annoying than actually going across town to see someone, and spending half your time just sitting there while they talk on the phone. Without adding in that a lot of people now think it's acceptable to just call without ever seeing you any more... and that very few people just 'drop in' on me any more. In fact, none. They all call first. They assume this is a courtesy, which sometimes it is. But then, I have enough about me to be able to tell people that the time they have chosen to call/visit is inconvenient, in a polite way.
This company is saying their encryption can't reasonably be brute forced with current computing, even if you got pretty much everyone on the internet (more than are currently running SETI) to start brute forcing the keys. It's harder than RSA encryption mathematics theory, on a key which is like 163 bits for the $20,000 prize, and to get a million you'd have to break the scheme for any bit length I imagine, not just the 224 bit key they mention earlier in the article.
So, unless there is a quantum leap (how ironic that quantum computing would indeed be a quantum leap) this is not some kind of Distributed project. RC5 was fairly simple bruteforcing at the end of the day.
The summary of the article is like so dumb I cannot believe it passes muster. And the million bucks are as likely to be awarded as a release of Duke Nukem Forever and Ever Amen. Nothing to see here, move along.
I am surprised, because most of the other countries in the world do end up watching a lot of american shows
Most of the shows are made just for the American market, perhaps you can make an exception for Friends, but it's still got a lot of in US jokes which we don't get until we hear the audience laugh.
The sad fact is that it's cheaper to buy US rejects or old US shows (you'd be surprised at what's still running on African TV stations) so they get shown instead of locally produced content, or newer European content...
Please see this post which I spent some time writing in this disjointed thread it comes closest to where I meant to go with my remarks.
Someone else has rightly pointed out that "piracy" was in the original article so that point is moot. On theft, you say If a copyright owner says 'you can have a copy of this if you pay me $10'. I'm more worried about how the copyright owner can claim that $10, and I'm also still not sure that it is theft. Because getting a copy, in itself, doesn't cost $10. The copyright principle is rather more like this: 'if you obtain a copy of this work, then you owe me $10 for the privilege of reading or listening to it'. The obtention of the copy itself is a very big part of my feelings around copyright, and I'm with you on your analogy about the GPL. I'm just not happy about the word theft, I prefer infringement.
OK you've backtracked to your original post and I'm going to dedicate a bit more time to this. I just clicked through to your website, looked at Andromeda and some of the other stuff and I'm seeing where you're coming from.
I'm not saying that filesharing should be made legal. I think, however, that people would pay for music if the distribution could be managed fairly. Most people who think they are doing nothing wrong are vindicated because buying individual songs is nigh impossible, even with iTunes and all the rest. Record distribution wasn't fair in the days of vinyl; tapes and CDs just made the whole process even less balanced towards the artists and consumers are starting to vote with their wallets and flippantly copy "multimedia content".
I think high percentages of people would really pay for stuff online in convenient delivery mechanisms. I don't think tax is the answer like the blank CDR levy in Canada. I don't think leglislation is the answer. I think the answer is the very technology everyone is so afraid of. Make the music available online with an easy way to pay. Those who want to copy for free, will anyway. That's what freedom is all about.
I was in a Virgin CD outlet the other day, looking for a recording, made by someone from Primal Scream featuring Kate Moss, for a colleague. It hasn't been released (yet). I was told maybe I could find it online. I would have paid for it in Virgin, had it been available. Similar analogies could be made for buying other music online. Most artists I like do not have their catalogue available online.
I am a musician, I have made money performing, but not from recorded work. I'd just be happy for people to hear my music, and some has (at some times) been available for download, completely free. I just do it for the pleasure, I earn my living elsewhere. That's how I feel about my music but I am blessed in having a talent to make money in the professional world and free time to make music which I can give away for free, with an open heart.
We're all asking more questions (about the filesharing and media distribution situation) than we're answering, but the key is that the technology that is available today is not changing anything fundamental compared to the copyright violations of photocopying, VCRs and home taping to compact cassette. But the quality of copies and speed at which they can be distributed means, of course, the problem is intensified; still, that also means duplication costs are virtually nil and the marketplace is immediately international.
Perhaps, ultimately, the only way that things are going to work is by honesty. Get full quality (320kbps) MP3/OGG encodings direct from studio masters if you pay. If you want crappy quality or second generation, and to do the band out of the money, well then that sucks but the harder you fight, the more freedoms you take away. A lot more people have gotten rich by ostensibly "protecting artists and works" than by actually creating them.
Music distribution is changing. Movie distribution is too. This is the great problem for the "industries" but I personally see it as a great levelling. I'm still not sure just how things will pan out, but I follow the whole thing with a lot of interest. And I get a bit pedantic about linguistics, rightly or wrongly, because I'd like to see more intelligent argument and vocabulary in the whole debate. I should try to spend more time better expressing the points I hold close to my heart. If you now disagree with me now, at least I have more or less exposed my true opinion in a more or less coherent manner.
3. One who infringes the law of copyright, or publishes the work of an author without permission.
It's an accepted dictionary definition and one that I am happy with. Theft is the word I'm really against, but pirate I can sort of let it get by. However the article wasn't about that anyway and I'm glad it wasn't mentioned, for reasons other than those for which I'm glad that theft was not mentioned. I hope this is clear now.
As far as I am concerned, theft is taking property from someone and depriving them of it. Copyright violation is not theft. Theft involves loss
To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief
I'm with you on the point you're trying to make though. But you cannot say 'all copyright violation is theft' because none of it is.
In any case, the fact reamains (sic) that "the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material" remains illegal.
Of course. I'm not talking about it being illegal or not. I'm talking about the fact that "theft" is what it most certainly is not. In law this is very important. That's why we have different degrees of murder, manslaughter, involuntary homicide, etc etc. The punishment should fit the crime, but so should the vocabulary.
Piracy - whilst part of the problem - is a word I'd prefer not to see, since the real pirates do not use P2P. The top end of the food chain is not on Kazaa or even in IRC, but involved in all sorts of punting of copies of stuff in hidden away markets and often linked to other nefarious activities. By the time stuff gets to most P2P networks it's second or third hand couriers...
Shame you're so pessimistic about it, but I think you're right to be. The "industries" involved have their own vested interests, although most popular P2P applications could not be considered an "industry" except for those like Kazaa or Napster 2 which always intended to make money out of their tools.
The most positive point of the whole article is that the word piracy
is not mentioned. Not once. That's a good start. It doesn't mention theft or stealing either. So there is a lot to be happy about!
When my knowledge of Spanish expanded, my grammar and spelling skills suffered. I figure one of two things happened:
Memory was overwritten.
In order to easily switch between the two languages, my use of English was simplified.
I'm sure that things get selectively forgotten over time, as mid term memory has less capacity for detail. However, what you are saying (Spanish somehow replaced English) is not strictly true. It is fairer to say that you are concentrating on Spanish whilst neglecting your English. Language skills require regular maintenance.
As a bilingual person myself, I am very aware of the need to alternate between reading novels in my native English and in French, to write in English and in French as often as possible, and to generally experience the languages as much as possible; if I neglect one for too long, the other one quickly takes precedence. But I wouldn't say any erasing of stuff is happening, it just goes a little out of focus until you adjust the lens;-)
They don't have to spend serious CGI. He just has to play the part twice, and then stitch them together, rather like in "Death Becomes Her" where the body and head parts were filmed separately, and the results were far more realistic than a completely CGI head like TPM or AotC. The plot of the film wasn't great, but it won the 1993 Oscar, BAFTA and Saturn awards for special effects.
The key part is how to get a decent neck on him so that the two heads work. You could get twins or a pair of similar looking actors to play each part separately, then CGI them into one. Kinda like by tying them together before shooting and stuff. Way too many cool ways to do it, but don't make him 100% CGI!
Slashdot Mirror
Not only should they fix this immediately, but they have a responsibility to the community that they force their browser on to at least provide them with a browser that is not open to such a simple hack
The only counter argument I can think of for hiding the user/pass syntax before the @ in the first place is to "stop the password being in cleartext on the screen when viewing" and I think we can all see through the pointlessness of that argument.
O Firebird, Firebird, wherefore art thou Firebird?
(Who can) deny thy greatness and refuse thy name;
Or, if they wilt not, be sworn to hell,
As soon there'll no longer be an Internet...
With apologies to the great bard.
Just proves that really, people are trying to be funny all the time rather than actually submitting elightened comment on the subject at hand. You can't be funny about an Apache developer, so other than bowing down and saying you're not worthy... nothing much to post is there?
Old English, for sure, but English. It's "Chaucer" too, not Chauncer, and I presume this is the same guy who wrote the Canterbury Tales including Thomas farts thunderously in the friar's hand
WTF? For free? You are joking. Lawyers do not work for free. They will make money, for sure for sure. Provide links that suggest otherwise for this case.
Anyway he might make more money writing a few exclusives in the press than going through more legal procedure. People must understand : the lawyers make the real money, not the plaintiffs. Stop making those snakes rich with at no risk to themselves. You take the risk, DVD Jon. The lawyer gets paid whatever.
However if you're a bit of a perfectionist then by all mains re-encode at full res less any black bars, and pay the time penalty for that of course. The extra noise won't make encoding any slower as such, it will just effect the general output quality. Resizing (small reduction, say to 560 wide) + filtering noise just may give you more aesthetically pleasing results. Still I guess you've already experimented and you just want top quality backups so ... take my rambling with a pinch of salt.
What resolution are you transcoding to? The same as the original DVD? I can't believe it's that slow. What are you using to do it? How much RAM do you have?
I have an Athlon 2400+ and two pass XviD wouldn't take that long, and I only have 128MB of RAM. Unless, of course, you're leaving it at the full original DVD resolution and not chopping out any of the black bars.
Having said that, I reckon my PC could transcode at full resolution faster than in 6 hours. Heck, I less than halve the resolution and I get a full 2 hours transcoded (including audio) in 3 hours or so.
Using a decent wireless solution is the only IP backbone most places I have been have had. Microwave mostly, some spread spectrum stuff. 100mbit backbone would be amazing in a lot of poorer places. Sure, cable would be better, but significantly more expensive. A lot of governments don't care about mid to long term, because nobody plans that way when they themselves don't intend to be there too much longer. They might lay cables in road development works and when distributing electricity, but to cover massive distances cheaply, wireless is the way to go.
Oh, and I've lived and worked in Africa. Tunisia, Morocco, Malawi, Niger... and in the Caribbean in Haiti too. I made the mistake of making a short post earlier, perhaps, but you are so wrong here. Have YOU been to Africa? Have YOU worked in telecoms in Africa? I have.
While you could build a wireless backbone using this technology, the bandwidth would suck
Have you any idea what sort of bandwidth requirements whole countries in Africa have, compared to the average US neighbourhood of a few thousand?
Oh well, can anyone find a mirror of the mirror? The RearView version?
These are going to be 10 miles up, it's only the experiments that are with tethered airships. The tests will be followed by slightly different style aircraft which will be less affected by weather systems significantly below them. Birds don't fly to those sorts of altitudes either.
Serviceable area will be less than for geostationary orbit satellites, but lower power and higher speeds are possible. The telecoms requirements of this century will probably require a lot of deployment of new stuff, because there's only so much sense in deploying fibre optics all over the place, because the remote areas will get left out.
You are so right. This is one of the most insightful things I've read on Slashdot in a while. Particularly the question : Do you value your family and friends enough to not answer the phone when they are present as guests in your house? There is nothing more annoying than actually going across town to see someone, and spending half your time just sitting there while they talk on the phone. Without adding in that a lot of people now think it's acceptable to just call without ever seeing you any more... and that very few people just 'drop in' on me any more. In fact, none. They all call first. They assume this is a courtesy, which sometimes it is. But then, I have enough about me to be able to tell people that the time they have chosen to call/visit is inconvenient, in a polite way.
This company is saying their encryption can't reasonably be brute forced with current computing, even if you got pretty much everyone on the internet (more than are currently running SETI) to start brute forcing the keys. It's harder than RSA encryption mathematics theory, on a key which is like 163 bits for the $20,000 prize, and to get a million you'd have to break the scheme for any bit length I imagine, not just the 224 bit key they mention earlier in the article.
So, unless there is a quantum leap (how ironic that quantum computing would indeed be a quantum leap) this is not some kind of Distributed project. RC5 was fairly simple bruteforcing at the end of the day.
The summary of the article is like so dumb I cannot believe it passes muster. And the million bucks are as likely to be awarded as a release of Duke Nukem Forever and Ever Amen. Nothing to see here, move along.
I am surprised, because most of the other countries in the world do end up watching a lot of american shows
Most of the shows are made just for the American market, perhaps you can make an exception for Friends, but it's still got a lot of in US jokes which we don't get until we hear the audience laugh.
The sad fact is that it's cheaper to buy US rejects or old US shows (you'd be surprised at what's still running on African TV stations) so they get shown instead of locally produced content, or newer European content...
Someone else has rightly pointed out that "piracy" was in the original article so that point is moot. On theft, you say If a copyright owner says 'you can have a copy of this if you pay me $10'. I'm more worried about how the copyright owner can claim that $10, and I'm also still not sure that it is theft. Because getting a copy, in itself, doesn't cost $10. The copyright principle is rather more like this: 'if you obtain a copy of this work, then you owe me $10 for the privilege of reading or listening to it'. The obtention of the copy itself is a very big part of my feelings around copyright, and I'm with you on your analogy about the GPL. I'm just not happy about the word theft, I prefer infringement.
I'm not saying that filesharing should be made legal. I think, however, that people would pay for music if the distribution could be managed fairly. Most people who think they are doing nothing wrong are vindicated because buying individual songs is nigh impossible, even with iTunes and all the rest. Record distribution wasn't fair in the days of vinyl; tapes and CDs just made the whole process even less balanced towards the artists and consumers are starting to vote with their wallets and flippantly copy "multimedia content".
I think high percentages of people would really pay for stuff online in convenient delivery mechanisms. I don't think tax is the answer like the blank CDR levy in Canada. I don't think leglislation is the answer. I think the answer is the very technology everyone is so afraid of. Make the music available online with an easy way to pay. Those who want to copy for free, will anyway. That's what freedom is all about.
I was in a Virgin CD outlet the other day, looking for a recording, made by someone from Primal Scream featuring Kate Moss, for a colleague. It hasn't been released (yet). I was told maybe I could find it online. I would have paid for it in Virgin, had it been available. Similar analogies could be made for buying other music online. Most artists I like do not have their catalogue available online.
I am a musician, I have made money performing, but not from recorded work. I'd just be happy for people to hear my music, and some has (at some times) been available for download, completely free. I just do it for the pleasure, I earn my living elsewhere. That's how I feel about my music but I am blessed in having a talent to make money in the professional world and free time to make music which I can give away for free, with an open heart.
We're all asking more questions (about the filesharing and media distribution situation) than we're answering, but the key is that the technology that is available today is not changing anything fundamental compared to the copyright violations of photocopying, VCRs and home taping to compact cassette. But the quality of copies and speed at which they can be distributed means, of course, the problem is intensified; still, that also means duplication costs are virtually nil and the marketplace is immediately international.
Perhaps, ultimately, the only way that things are going to work is by honesty. Get full quality (320kbps) MP3/OGG encodings direct from studio masters if you pay. If you want crappy quality or second generation, and to do the band out of the money, well then that sucks but the harder you fight, the more freedoms you take away. A lot more people have gotten rich by ostensibly "protecting artists and works" than by actually creating them.
Music distribution is changing. Movie distribution is too. This is the great problem for the "industries" but I personally see it as a great levelling. I'm still not sure just how things will pan out, but I follow the whole thing with a lot of interest. And I get a bit pedantic about linguistics, rightly or wrongly, because I'd like to see more intelligent argument and vocabulary in the whole debate. I should try to spend more time better expressing the points I hold close to my heart. If you now disagree with me now, at least I have more or less exposed my true opinion in a more or less coherent manner.
It's an accepted dictionary definition and one that I am happy with. Theft is the word I'm really against, but pirate I can sort of let it get by. However the article wasn't about that anyway and I'm glad it wasn't mentioned, for reasons other than those for which I'm glad that theft was not mentioned. I hope this is clear now.
To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief
I'm with you on the point you're trying to make though. But you cannot say 'all copyright violation is theft' because none of it is.
Of course. I'm not talking about it being illegal or not. I'm talking about the fact that "theft" is what it most certainly is not. In law this is very important. That's why we have different degrees of murder, manslaughter, involuntary homicide, etc etc. The punishment should fit the crime, but so should the vocabulary.
Piracy - whilst part of the problem - is a word I'd prefer not to see, since the real pirates do not use P2P. The top end of the food chain is not on Kazaa or even in IRC, but involved in all sorts of punting of copies of stuff in hidden away markets and often linked to other nefarious activities. By the time stuff gets to most P2P networks it's second or third hand couriers...
I'm talking about the difference between "copyright violation" and "theft" which, legally, are two entirely different crimes.
Shame you're so pessimistic about it, but I think you're right to be. The "industries" involved have their own vested interests, although most popular P2P applications could not be considered an "industry" except for those like Kazaa or Napster 2 which always intended to make money out of their tools.
The most positive point of the whole article is that the word piracy
is not mentioned. Not once. That's a good start. It doesn't mention theft or stealing either. So there is a lot to be happy about!I'm sure that things get selectively forgotten over time, as mid term memory has less capacity for detail. However, what you are saying (Spanish somehow replaced English) is not strictly true. It is fairer to say that you are concentrating on Spanish whilst neglecting your English. Language skills require regular maintenance.
As a bilingual person myself, I am very aware of the need to alternate between reading novels in my native English and in French, to write in English and in French as often as possible, and to generally experience the languages as much as possible; if I neglect one for too long, the other one quickly takes precedence. But I wouldn't say any erasing of stuff is happening, it just goes a little out of focus until you adjust the lens ;-)
The key part is how to get a decent neck on him so that the two heads work. You could get twins or a pair of similar looking actors to play each part separately, then CGI them into one. Kinda like by tying them together before shooting and stuff. Way too many cool ways to do it, but don't make him 100% CGI!
I didn't RTFA though because no free link was given, but there's one in this sentence.
They just touched the screen with their whole palm, and expected it to sense who they wanted to vote for :)