There is exactly nothing illegal about making copies of your own discs for personal use.
In the US, at least, the DMCA would beg to differ with that interpretation, for media protected by an anti-circumvention device. That would be pretty much anything relevant today aside from audio CDs.
That's because ac3 is a subset of AAC; AAC is the new version and includes all its features.
Incorrect. AAC is the successor to the MP3 format, being standardised as a part of the MPEG2 and MPEG4 specifications. AC3, however, is an audio compression format developed by Dolby. They're just about as completely unrelated as you can get while still performing the same function. The only link is that Dolby actually did participate in AAC development at one point.
AAC is technically superior to AC3 at all bitrates, I believe, but AC3 is a much simpler codec: you essentially get more bang for your buck with AC3 where decoding complexity is concerned.
No, he's complaining that apple sells a computer where RAM is not designed to be user-serviceable.
Why? If you don't like it, don't buy it. If other people don't care, they'll buy it, and Apple will make money. If enough people do care, and don't buy it, Apple will lose money, notice, and change their tune. I really don't see why so many people are up in arms about this.
I know my way around computers, so it wasn't exactly a big deal for me to buy another drive and replace it before sending it in but I had to take the whole case apart to do it.
Well, you certainly had the option of buying any number of other laptops where this wouldn't have been the case. But you chose to but a Mac laptop, and, well, that's what you got. Deal with it and quit whining.
The Apple rep stating you violated your warranty by replacing the HD is a separate issue. He's a moron, but that has nothing to do with Apple's design choices.
Well, as they state, and others have noted, the battery is indeed replaceable, just not as easily as you can on current models. I'm sure ifixit (and others) will come up with step-by-step instructions for people who want to do the replacement themselves, and for those who don't, Apple will do it for them.
They didn't invent the name Scaramouche, or Galileo. They didn't invent the fandango. They didn't invent Beelzebub, or the doctrine that he is in charge of allocating devils to sinners...
No, they didn't, but they did configure those words and composed music to go with them that people actually want. If the words themselves were all that mattered, then your post would be destined for greatness, after all, it used the same words, right? As it stands though, your post won't even be read by most (posting AC tends to get you ignored), and those who do read it will forget about it 10 seconds later as it's not particularly profound or interesting.
I disagree; I found it pretty interesting, and would have moderated it as such if I had mod points (and hadn't posted yet).
No one's saying Queen didn't do any work. But they didn't do *all* the work. As the AC says, they didn't invent the concept of Beelzebub, or the name Galileo. While they do deserve recognition and credit for how they arranged the words, our amorphous "culture" deserves credit for some of the names and concepts that Queen drew upon to create their work.
I'm noticing a theme in this thread of people who seem to think that creating a literary or musical work is somehow trivial because all these people do is take words that already exist and talk about things that happened.
Then, sadly, you aren't really reading or comprehending what other people are saying. We're talking about *shared* credit. We could of course argue all day about how much that credit is shared -- 90/10 in favor of Queen? 80/20? 50/50? 30/70? But the fact remains that Queen's creation drew on collective culture and previous creative work. It had to; it'd be mostly meaningless otherwise.
I'm not comfortable telling the people I named above that they have no right to dictate how their work is used, and I certainly wouldn't tell them they are being immoral for not allowing their work to be used in ways that are diametrically opposed to their beliefs and views.
Thinking about this a bit more, I'm not sure I agree with it. Why does a 'creative work' get extra protection than a normal one? If someone creates and builds some sort of device and then sells it, the creator (without some sort of up-front negotiated contract) has no say in how it's used, and I don't think they should.
Sure, it's not 'the same thing,' but, really, nothing is. A creative work is very different from a manufactured object -- the creator often attaches emotional significance to it. Presumably it's this emotional attachment that would lead the creator's decision to allow or deny a particular use of their work. As someone (perhaps you?) said farther up the thread, laws are based on emotion -- we *feel* that murder is wrong, so we have a law against it -- and so we feel that authors of creative works should have certain protections. But we have to balance the emotional and financial needs of the creator against those of society at large. I would lean farther on the side of society than current copyright laws do.
I am curious though, what about my examples? Are you willing to argue that Elton John, Yoko Ono (as the current copyright holder to Imagine), and Jello Biafra are immoral for not allowing the scenarios I described above?
I'm not the original poster, but...
Elton John: I'm ok with him not allowing use of his works in ways he'd consider objectionable.
Yoko Ono: She didn't write Imagine. Why does she get a say in how it's used? Lennon is dead; his work should go to the public domain.
Jello Biafra: Same as Elton John, assuming Biafra is still alive.
But that's just my personal feel to it. I could easily consider defensible the position that copyright terms should be limited to a fixed time period that ignores the lifespan of the author. Regardless, I don't see why copyright should pass to next of kin just as normal property does. It's all well and good to inherit your parents' house and bank account when they die, but why should you be able to make continuing royalties off their creative works?
But I feel like an author-lifespan copyright term would be too complicated to work out properly. Currently we allow corporations to hold copyright, and I don't think we can abolish that. We also have the concept of copyright assignment, so presumably a copyright holder could assign copyright to someone much younger than them if they feared they were close to death. So, for simplicity's sake, I'd argue for a fixed-length, non-extendable copyright term somewhere on the order of 30-60 years (somewhat arbitrary; that just 'feels' right to me).
You may know this, but for the benefit of those here who don't, ext3 does NOT journal anything but metadata by default (so-called "ordered" mode). If you want full-data journaling (and the corresponding performance penalty), you need to mount ext3 with the data=journal mount option.
In practice, though, you shouldn't end up with corrupt files with ordered mode in the case of a power failure, as the driver will flush changed data to disk before committing the journal for that data. So, you can of course lose data, but your FS will still be consistent.
But even full data journaling isn't going to keep you 100% safe from data loss...
The thing is, this sounds like a bunch of companies are saying "hey, we want to do advanced tech research together, give us some money and then leave us alone." That sounds pretty shady. I think I'd rather see gov't research agencies get funding to do this kind of development. And sure, they'll likely contract out some of the work, but that's just how it's done.
so the government (and US taxpayers, in the longer turn) should be given stocks appropriate to the investment size.
And thus you've completed the transition to socialism.
That's the thing tho -- are really the only three options:
Government gives money to / bails out corporations for free without any expectation of anything in return.
Government gives money to / bails out corporations in return for a stake in the company.
Government loans money to corporations at a favorable (to the gov't) interest rate with reasonable repayment terms.
The first option is just repugnant to me. Why should I help prop up some moron's failing business model?
But you're right, the second one looks quite a lot like socialising corporations. And while I don't see that as inherently bad, there are plenty of ways that can -- and will -- be abused, by both the corps involved and the gov't.
So that leaves us with loans. I can stand behind them to a certain extent, but there needs to be some prudence: the gov't needs to evaluate a potential borrower's likelihood of default just like any respectable lender would do for any borrower (the subprime mess notwithstanding).
Or we can just tell the gov't to shut the hell up and stop giving money to idiots who clearly don't know what to do with it.
Yeah, agreed. My question would be -- if we pony up our tax dollars for this kind of thing, what do we get in return? Partial ownership of the technology? Full specifications for the technology put into the public domain?
Oh, wait, you just wanted free money? Well, fuck right off then.
Heh... while I was at Cornell I worked at CIT as my campus job. Unless they've upgraded it (unlikely, unless the budget fairy has been drastically nicer in recent years), I seem to remember that instruct1.cit.cornell.edu was a single not-really-new Sun box... impressive that it's handing/. traffic as well as it is.
Technically, ECE5760 is a grad-level course, actually. In practice, though, many undergrads end up taking 500- and occasionally 600-level courses (er, I guess they're 5000- and 6000-level courses now... I wonder when/why they renumbered them).
Hear, hear. As a guy with an ECE degree who now writes software for a living, I constantly marvel at how different the two disciplines are, and how most "software engineering" strikes me as... not really engineering.
While it's true that it's possible to mathematically prove many pieces of software to be correct (heh, or to mathematically prove them incorrect, as would be the case with most software out there), it's pretty rarely done. To be fair, it's incredibly difficult with most non-trivial programs, of course.
But there's something incredibly satisfying and elegant about having a hardware design that you can prove is correct.
Now, of course, many other things can horribly break that design (yay for analog effects, process deficiencies and defects, etc.), but that's a far cry from "well, it compiles, so it'll probably work." But that's reality for ya.
Well, that's certainly your choice (in this hypothetical copyright-free world we've made up). Personally I hope that more OSS developers share my point of view, but I haven't seen any data either way.
When talking about video streams, both bps and Bps refer to the same thing -- the amount of payload data taken up by a second of video (or audio, or both, depending on what you're measuring).
At least that's how I always understood it.
I don't see how network layer (for example) is any different. A 10Mbps ethernet switch is able to transmit 1.25MB of data per second (theoretical max, of course). In either case (referring to it as 10Mbps or 1.25MBps), you're still talking about physical layer data rate. In fact, when talking about that link, it's pretty much impossible to give an absolute max data rate that only includes payload without defining a bit more. Do you want to consider the payload of the ethernet frame as what you care about? Or how about just the payload of the TCP packet that's in an IP packet that's in the ethernet frame? (And if you're talking about TCP, what's your MTU?)
So I don't see how your Bps/bps distinction matters. With either measure, you're still talking about the same amount of data (multiplied by or divided by 8). Without defining more about the rate, it's irrelevant what kind of overhead/payload distinction is in effect.
Yes, I do release software under the terms of the GPL. If copyright law did not exist, or if my only options were proprietary or public domain, I'd still choose public domain.
My "political" goals involve the proliferation of OSS, which is why I use the GPL instead of something BSD-like or placing my work in the public domain. I consider that a separate issue than the one we're discussing.
You can make seven different copies, one for each day of the week. You can shift it to a different format so you can watch it elsewhere.
This may have been true before the DMCA, but it's not anymore. If the manufacturer "protects" the content with a "device" (in this case, DRM) used to restrict or disallow copying, it is illegal to defeat that protection, even just for personal use.
I think it's retarded too, but, unless I'm mistaken (corrections welcome, please!), that's the law (in the US, at least).
A "byte" is defined as a collection of 8 bits. Full stop. Any obsolete hardware that doesn't follow that definition can safely be ignored for the purposes of a discussion about the current state-of-the-art video disc format.
Pre-university education is filled with things the students don't care about. This would just be another entry in the long list. At least in this case, it would be something likely useful as well.
it's almost literally impossible to get them to do something that they don't care about
That's somewhat tautologically useless. I mean: duh? That's just a restatement of "people tend not to do things in which they are not interested and for which they have no incentive."
Very few free software programmers would put out anything if they knew up front that no one would contribute code back, or ideas, or any sign of appreciation.
I don't think I buy that. Have any stats or polls to back it up? I know at least I, for one, *do* release code for some things without expectation of any return.
For some code that I release, yes, I do expect that others will contribute in some shape or form, but that really has no bearing on whether I release it or not. The litmus test for me as to whether or not to release source (barring any concrete reason I might have to *not* release it) is simply, "might other people find this useful?"
Further, if you shoot someone who is deleting your email you will go to jail for murder or manslaughter. If there is no perceived threat to your person you can not shoot trespassers(your mileage may vary by state).
Mileage *does* vary by state in the US, and by a lot. While many states don't give carte-blanche to kill anyone who enters your home, many also more or less do. See Wikipedia's article on the Castle Doctrine.
Yeah, sorry -- that was a bit unfair of me. If you're still trying to figure out a way to use FF3 on SLED 10, check this out. It's a little bit of a pain, but if you're comfortable enough with the command line to attempt to upgrade your system gtk, I think you'll be ok with this, too.
Firefox 3 requires gtk 2.10.0, which was released in July of 2006. If you're running an OS that is incapable of keeping you up-to-date enough to run software that's 2.5 years old, then you picked your OS poorly. Plain and simple.
Mozilla could have bundled gtk 2.10 with Firefox 3, like they do for many other libraries they depend on, but they chose not to, probably for good reasons.
Besides, after 25 seconds with Google, I found this, which, while not particularly fun, is entirely doable for someone who has the balls to try to update their system bypassing their OS's package management.
So maybe the original poster isn't troll, but (s)he's certainly foolish.
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There is exactly nothing illegal about making copies of your own discs for personal use.
In the US, at least, the DMCA would beg to differ with that interpretation, for media protected by an anti-circumvention device. That would be pretty much anything relevant today aside from audio CDs.
That's because ac3 is a subset of AAC; AAC is the new version and includes all its features.
Incorrect. AAC is the successor to the MP3 format, being standardised as a part of the MPEG2 and MPEG4 specifications. AC3, however, is an audio compression format developed by Dolby. They're just about as completely unrelated as you can get while still performing the same function. The only link is that Dolby actually did participate in AAC development at one point.
AAC is technically superior to AC3 at all bitrates, I believe, but AC3 is a much simpler codec: you essentially get more bang for your buck with AC3 where decoding complexity is concerned.
No, he's complaining that apple sells a computer where RAM is not designed to be user-serviceable.
Why? If you don't like it, don't buy it. If other people don't care, they'll buy it, and Apple will make money. If enough people do care, and don't buy it, Apple will lose money, notice, and change their tune. I really don't see why so many people are up in arms about this.
I know my way around computers, so it wasn't exactly a big deal for me to buy another drive and replace it before sending it in but I had to take the whole case apart to do it.
Well, you certainly had the option of buying any number of other laptops where this wouldn't have been the case. But you chose to but a Mac laptop, and, well, that's what you got. Deal with it and quit whining.
The Apple rep stating you violated your warranty by replacing the HD is a separate issue. He's a moron, but that has nothing to do with Apple's design choices.
Well, as they state, and others have noted, the battery is indeed replaceable, just not as easily as you can on current models. I'm sure ifixit (and others) will come up with step-by-step instructions for people who want to do the replacement themselves, and for those who don't, Apple will do it for them.
They didn't invent the name Scaramouche, or Galileo. They didn't invent the fandango. They didn't invent Beelzebub, or the doctrine that he is in charge of allocating devils to sinners...
No, they didn't, but they did configure those words and composed music to go with them that people actually want. If the words themselves were all that mattered, then your post would be destined for greatness, after all, it used the same words, right? As it stands though, your post won't even be read by most (posting AC tends to get you ignored), and those who do read it will forget about it 10 seconds later as it's not particularly profound or interesting.
I disagree; I found it pretty interesting, and would have moderated it as such if I had mod points (and hadn't posted yet).
No one's saying Queen didn't do any work. But they didn't do *all* the work. As the AC says, they didn't invent the concept of Beelzebub, or the name Galileo. While they do deserve recognition and credit for how they arranged the words, our amorphous "culture" deserves credit for some of the names and concepts that Queen drew upon to create their work.
I'm noticing a theme in this thread of people who seem to think that creating a literary or musical work is somehow trivial because all these people do is take words that already exist and talk about things that happened.
Then, sadly, you aren't really reading or comprehending what other people are saying. We're talking about *shared* credit. We could of course argue all day about how much that credit is shared -- 90/10 in favor of Queen? 80/20? 50/50? 30/70? But the fact remains that Queen's creation drew on collective culture and previous creative work. It had to; it'd be mostly meaningless otherwise.
I'm not comfortable telling the people I named above that they have no right to dictate how their work is used, and I certainly wouldn't tell them they are being immoral for not allowing their work to be used in ways that are diametrically opposed to their beliefs and views.
Thinking about this a bit more, I'm not sure I agree with it. Why does a 'creative work' get extra protection than a normal one? If someone creates and builds some sort of device and then sells it, the creator (without some sort of up-front negotiated contract) has no say in how it's used, and I don't think they should.
Sure, it's not 'the same thing,' but, really, nothing is. A creative work is very different from a manufactured object -- the creator often attaches emotional significance to it. Presumably it's this emotional attachment that would lead the creator's decision to allow or deny a particular use of their work. As someone (perhaps you?) said farther up the thread, laws are based on emotion -- we *feel* that murder is wrong, so we have a law against it -- and so we feel that authors of creative works should have certain protections. But we have to balance the emotional and financial needs of the creator against those of society at large. I would lean farther on the side of society than current copyright laws do.
I am curious though, what about my examples? Are you willing to argue that Elton John, Yoko Ono (as the current copyright holder to Imagine), and Jello Biafra are immoral for not allowing the scenarios I described above?
I'm not the original poster, but...
Elton John: I'm ok with him not allowing use of his works in ways he'd consider objectionable.
Yoko Ono: She didn't write Imagine. Why does she get a say in how it's used? Lennon is dead; his work should go to the public domain.
Jello Biafra: Same as Elton John, assuming Biafra is still alive.
But that's just my personal feel to it. I could easily consider defensible the position that copyright terms should be limited to a fixed time period that ignores the lifespan of the author. Regardless, I don't see why copyright should pass to next of kin just as normal property does. It's all well and good to inherit your parents' house and bank account when they die, but why should you be able to make continuing royalties off their creative works?
But I feel like an author-lifespan copyright term would be too complicated to work out properly. Currently we allow corporations to hold copyright, and I don't think we can abolish that. We also have the concept of copyright assignment, so presumably a copyright holder could assign copyright to someone much younger than them if they feared they were close to death. So, for simplicity's sake, I'd argue for a fixed-length, non-extendable copyright term somewhere on the order of 30-60 years (somewhat arbitrary; that just 'feels' right to me).
You'll still have a failsafe command line on your VC when X fails. That hasn't changed, and won't. Quit whining about something you don't understand.
You may know this, but for the benefit of those here who don't, ext3 does NOT journal anything but metadata by default (so-called "ordered" mode). If you want full-data journaling (and the corresponding performance penalty), you need to mount ext3 with the data=journal mount option.
In practice, though, you shouldn't end up with corrupt files with ordered mode in the case of a power failure, as the driver will flush changed data to disk before committing the journal for that data. So, you can of course lose data, but your FS will still be consistent.
But even full data journaling isn't going to keep you 100% safe from data loss...
The thing is, this sounds like a bunch of companies are saying "hey, we want to do advanced tech research together, give us some money and then leave us alone." That sounds pretty shady. I think I'd rather see gov't research agencies get funding to do this kind of development. And sure, they'll likely contract out some of the work, but that's just how it's done.
so the government (and US taxpayers, in the longer turn) should be given stocks appropriate to the investment size.
And thus you've completed the transition to socialism.
That's the thing tho -- are really the only three options:
The first option is just repugnant to me. Why should I help prop up some moron's failing business model?
But you're right, the second one looks quite a lot like socialising corporations. And while I don't see that as inherently bad, there are plenty of ways that can -- and will -- be abused, by both the corps involved and the gov't.
So that leaves us with loans. I can stand behind them to a certain extent, but there needs to be some prudence: the gov't needs to evaluate a potential borrower's likelihood of default just like any respectable lender would do for any borrower (the subprime mess notwithstanding).
Or we can just tell the gov't to shut the hell up and stop giving money to idiots who clearly don't know what to do with it.
Yeah, agreed. My question would be -- if we pony up our tax dollars for this kind of thing, what do we get in return? Partial ownership of the technology? Full specifications for the technology put into the public domain?
Oh, wait, you just wanted free money? Well, fuck right off then.
Heh... while I was at Cornell I worked at CIT as my campus job. Unless they've upgraded it (unlikely, unless the budget fairy has been drastically nicer in recent years), I seem to remember that instruct1.cit.cornell.edu was a single not-really-new Sun box... impressive that it's handing /. traffic as well as it is.
Technically, ECE5760 is a grad-level course, actually. In practice, though, many undergrads end up taking 500- and occasionally 600-level courses (er, I guess they're 5000- and 6000-level courses now... I wonder when/why they renumbered them).
Hear, hear. As a guy with an ECE degree who now writes software for a living, I constantly marvel at how different the two disciplines are, and how most "software engineering" strikes me as... not really engineering.
While it's true that it's possible to mathematically prove many pieces of software to be correct (heh, or to mathematically prove them incorrect, as would be the case with most software out there), it's pretty rarely done. To be fair, it's incredibly difficult with most non-trivial programs, of course.
But there's something incredibly satisfying and elegant about having a hardware design that you can prove is correct.
Now, of course, many other things can horribly break that design (yay for analog effects, process deficiencies and defects, etc.), but that's a far cry from "well, it compiles, so it'll probably work." But that's reality for ya.
Well, that's certainly your choice (in this hypothetical copyright-free world we've made up). Personally I hope that more OSS developers share my point of view, but I haven't seen any data either way.
When talking about video streams, both bps and Bps refer to the same thing -- the amount of payload data taken up by a second of video (or audio, or both, depending on what you're measuring).
At least that's how I always understood it.
I don't see how network layer (for example) is any different. A 10Mbps ethernet switch is able to transmit 1.25MB of data per second (theoretical max, of course). In either case (referring to it as 10Mbps or 1.25MBps), you're still talking about physical layer data rate. In fact, when talking about that link, it's pretty much impossible to give an absolute max data rate that only includes payload without defining a bit more. Do you want to consider the payload of the ethernet frame as what you care about? Or how about just the payload of the TCP packet that's in an IP packet that's in the ethernet frame? (And if you're talking about TCP, what's your MTU?)
So I don't see how your Bps/bps distinction matters. With either measure, you're still talking about the same amount of data (multiplied by or divided by 8). Without defining more about the rate, it's irrelevant what kind of overhead/payload distinction is in effect.
Yes, I do release software under the terms of the GPL. If copyright law did not exist, or if my only options were proprietary or public domain, I'd still choose public domain.
My "political" goals involve the proliferation of OSS, which is why I use the GPL instead of something BSD-like or placing my work in the public domain. I consider that a separate issue than the one we're discussing.
You can make seven different copies, one for each day of the week. You can shift it to a different format so you can watch it elsewhere.
This may have been true before the DMCA, but it's not anymore. If the manufacturer "protects" the content with a "device" (in this case, DRM) used to restrict or disallow copying, it is illegal to defeat that protection, even just for personal use.
I think it's retarded too, but, unless I'm mistaken (corrections welcome, please!), that's the law (in the US, at least).
A "byte" is defined as a collection of 8 bits. Full stop. Any obsolete hardware that doesn't follow that definition can safely be ignored for the purposes of a discussion about the current state-of-the-art video disc format.
it's almost literally impossible to get them to do something that they don't care about
That's somewhat tautologically useless. I mean: duh? That's just a restatement of "people tend not to do things in which they are not interested and for which they have no incentive."
Very few free software programmers would put out anything if they knew up front that no one would contribute code back, or ideas, or any sign of appreciation.
I don't think I buy that. Have any stats or polls to back it up? I know at least I, for one, *do* release code for some things without expectation of any return.
For some code that I release, yes, I do expect that others will contribute in some shape or form, but that really has no bearing on whether I release it or not. The litmus test for me as to whether or not to release source (barring any concrete reason I might have to *not* release it) is simply, "might other people find this useful?"
Further, if you shoot someone who is deleting your email you will go to jail for murder or manslaughter. If there is no perceived threat to your person you can not shoot trespassers(your mileage may vary by state).
Mileage *does* vary by state in the US, and by a lot. While many states don't give carte-blanche to kill anyone who enters your home, many also more or less do. See Wikipedia's article on the Castle Doctrine.
Yeah, sorry -- that was a bit unfair of me. If you're still trying to figure out a way to use FF3 on SLED 10, check this out. It's a little bit of a pain, but if you're comfortable enough with the command line to attempt to upgrade your system gtk, I think you'll be ok with this, too.
Firefox 3 requires gtk 2.10.0, which was released in July of 2006. If you're running an OS that is incapable of keeping you up-to-date enough to run software that's 2.5 years old, then you picked your OS poorly. Plain and simple.
Mozilla could have bundled gtk 2.10 with Firefox 3, like they do for many other libraries they depend on, but they chose not to, probably for good reasons.
Besides, after 25 seconds with Google, I found this, which, while not particularly fun, is entirely doable for someone who has the balls to try to update their system bypassing their OS's package management.
So maybe the original poster isn't troll, but (s)he's certainly foolish.