I have a friend at a Catholic seminary right now. He's told me that they actually teach some watered-down versions of some really difficult sciences, so priests can avoid a lot of the mistakes that the church has made in the past. He actually had an introductory course in quantum mechanics!
It's partly the Galileo thing. The Church is really determined not to make that mistake again.
Also, considering what the Roman Church is - by far the largest and richest religious organisation there's ever been - it's no surprise they support scientific study. No new Scripture is coming, so how are we to learn more of the mind and the nature of God? Why, by close study and understanding of his masterpiece, creation itself. The Vatican even runs an observatory and sponsors serious research in cosmology. You don't survive as an institution for nearly two thousand years by ignoring reality.
It has to be said, the god revealed by modern science is a whole lot more impressive than the Bible ever made him out to be. Evolution is a magnificent hack that all of us here should appreciate, a blindingly simple system that does all the hard work automatically. Nucleosynthesis in supernovae has incredible artistic audacity, the whole relativity and quantum thing is a mindfuck we still haven't got to the bottom of, and quite what he's up to with inflation and dark energy has us all baffled.
And the fundamentalists would ignore all this in favour of the dumbed-down-to-Bronze-Age version. It's an incredible tragedy.
I bought a copy of the Beatles' Let It Be... Naked, which is one of those weird crippled discs, and I could neither play it nor rip it.
Really? Hmm. Me too. It ripped just fine, I have it in ogg format on my iriver right now (yes, I know, Slashdot stereotype #5776, Linux / ogg / iHP-400, but it's true) and it sounds great. It took a great deal longer to rip than a normal CD would, and cdparanoia reported errors more or less continuously, but every one of them seems to have been corrected.
Perhaps it may depend to some extent on the capabilities of the CD drive being used. Mine is, amusingly, made by Sony...
Nice pull of the 'liberty' strings there, you got your mod points, but you are still incorrect. Ripping this CD is both illegal and wrong; if you bought this CD, you entered into a contract with Sony, and by ripping it, you are breaking your side of the contract, which is wrong in every sense.
No I didn't. I entered into a contract for sale of goods with the record store, the terms of which were that I handed over some cash and they handed over a CD. That contract was fulfilled to the satisfaction of both sides. I have no other contractual obligations of any kind.
If you use the player functionality to make a copy of the CD, doesn't the copy also contain a version of this software just with Copyremaincount=CountRemainCount-1?
I wouldn't call that a virus, as long as it adds the DRM autorun to your burned CDs if and only if you're burning a copy of the DRM'd CD in question. Then it's still a trojan, which happens to spread to your friend because you foolishly copied the trojaned media.
If, OTOH, it hijacks the system to such an extent that it puts its DRM malware on all burned audio CDs, whether they be copies of the original trojaned CD, or party mixes from a variety of sources, or even CDs of your three year old kid reading aloud for the first time and you're SOOOOO proud of him, then that is definitely a virus, of the old-school type; it's basically the same thing as all those infected floppies we remember from high school.
If it installs this rootkit through autorun when you put the CD into your Windows machine, how is this any different from a worm? Just because it isn't spread through the internet doesn't change the fact that it is a virus.
It doesn't automatically self-propagate, so it isn't a worm. Nor does it infect files and piggyback on them to infect other machines; it isn't a virus. This particular piece of malware comes attached to something the user wants (i.e. a music CD) without his knowledge, and proceeds to infect his machine, but makes no attempts to spread itself to other machines. That makes it a trojan.
I've never met anything that cdparanoia couldn't handle, unless it was scratched to death; IIRC, CDex uses cdparanoia as its ripping engine, so it should have the same uber ripping powers.
AFAIK, the rootkit is the only protection on this CD. As they admit, it looks like a normal CD to an Apple computer - and, of course, to a Linux computer. And, for that matter, to a Windows computer with Autorun disabled... I do enjoy a truly pathetic copyrestriction system, don't you?
Playing Soul Calibre could leave you in hospital, and let's not mention Mortal Kombat!
Heh. I've been playing Budokai: Tenkaichi lately. I'm struggling to envisage the kind of peripherals one would need to have a really authentic Dragonball combat experience, but they'd probably fall foul of strategic arms limitation treaties...
I cleaned up my book collection the other day -- nearly all of them I have read about once and then they started gathering dust. Nearly all books out there are read at most once , if they are that lucky.
That way they get to be read more than once, by many different people, and fulfill their purpose in life. Release your dusty books into the world and let them live again!
To most people who only have a passing idea what a virus or spyware/addware is, most really won't know much how to fix it if it doesn't require clicking one button and then selecting the default for all questions. So if it is anything of a difficult fix, or requires hireing expensive techs to fix it they will toss their computer saying it is broken
This is, of course, greatly to be encouraged. The more lusers decide their computers are irreparably broken just because of some worm, the more perfectly good machines are available for, er, refurbishment and recycling. Nuke the hard disk, install Linux, imagine a Beowulf cluster of those things. Should we geeks not be looking out for our own interests in this matter?
How can Linux compete with the current desktop market leader, which surely must be either chipboard or pine?
Well, I've been using pine on Linux for years, from back when I used to telnet into my shell account just because I didn't have the disk space on my machine for a mail client, but I haven't heard of chipboard. New project? Is it on freshmeat yet?
Three weeks?... Well, I finally watched Gokuu and Uubu fly off into the sunset last night, so I'm kind of in the market for another ridiculously long bit of geek viewing. This is alarmingly tempting, though monstrously overpriced.
The sad thing, though, is:
TOS: 47 min
TNG, DS9, Voy: 45 min
Enterprise: 42 min
... those ad breaks just get longer and longer, huh?
No, actually, that's only four. There were only four Star Trek TV series ever made. I don't see where you people are getting five, let alone six.
Clearly the confusion comes from the fact that there were a total of five Star Wars movies. It's an easy mental slip to make, though I'd expect better from a geek-heavy crowd like this one.
Is what's encrypted illegal enough to get me more than 2 years? And is it well enough encrypted that they won't be able to break it anyway?
Precisely. If you are, say, Gary Glitter, you keep schtum. Suspicion will fall on you but nothing will ever be proved. If you're Ali al-Jihad or Seamus O'Carbomb, you keep quiet, do your time and get massive respect and status within your organisation.
If, OTOH, you're Random Q. Hacker protecting your collection of downloaded Naruto fansubs and Weird Al mp3s, you might as well hand 'em over. If the police have seized your computer and waved the RIP Act at you they're probably after you for something bigger than you've actually done, and will promptly lose all interest.
90 days sounds more like arrest now, look for a justification later.
Now, that's the sort of subversive talk that we need to be cracking down on. You aren't by any chance associated with any known terrorist organisations, are you, citizen?
What's going on here is that we have a fair few people in prisons in the UK and in allied countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Uzbekistan and Cuba undergoing robust interrogation. Every so often one of them will denounce a variety of people, all of whom must then be considered potential terrorists.
Now, clearly they must be rounded up immediately; we cannot allow potential witc^H^H^H^Hcomm^H^H^H^Hterrorists to walk the streets. We then need the full 90 day period to conduct our investigation and corroborate the freely given testimony of the prisoners who denounced them.
Meanwhile, we can begin to interrogate the new suspects. With luck, they'll denounce more of their evil jihadist comrades. Don't worry, citizen; we'll catch the lot of them eventually.
So, do you think a terrorist is going to comply with the RIP Act?
No, not for a moment. But if he doesn't, then he's committed an offence and can be formally charged, tried and locked up.
The 'encryption' thing is a smokescreen. We already have the RIP Act to deal with encryption users. But this government has never been particularly logical when it comes to extending police powers and cracking down on subversive civil liberties.
Interesting that those that use encryption are automatically considered criminals.
That's because they are criminals. Failure to turn over your encryption key is an offence under the RIP Act, punishable IIRC by up to two years imprisonment.
Glad to know they think they can crack it in only 90 days with a mere "super-computer".
They can't and don't, but what the hell, it's a pretext. The police have never liked this whole deal of having to let people go if you don't have enough evidence to charge them with anything. The longer they can get to find something that will stick, the more criminals they successfully prosecute and the safer we all are.
Now, if you'll excuse me I have to open my new estate agency, pontine transit solutions a speciality...
If a troll is genuinly funny, should it be modded troll or funny?
If the troll is original, Funny. If it's the same damn Christian Record Store troll that gets pasted into every single thread mentioning the RIAA, Troll.
In this case, definitely Troll. With lashings of Redundant.
The general case is quite interesting, though. From what I see with my own posts, the difference between +5 Insightful and -1 Flamebait is all in the opinion of the first moderator.
Perhaps they did not know and were just inept , I very much doubt it though.
They probably did not know, because they did not want to know. Their policy was probably 'ask no questions, get no lies': you don't investigate at all into your affiliates' businesses, and then when the faeces strike the ventilator you can honestly claim ignorance...
I pay something like £1/MB. If I go to a site and it doesn't display on my device, then it may have cost 10p or so for nothing.
Try browsing via wap.google.com. It converts webpages to mobile-friendly format on the fly, does a pretty decent job of it, and breaks them down into short chunks so that if, on reading the first one, you realise the page won't be useful, then you haven't wasted your money downloading all 200k of it...
The SOFTWARE is intended to protect the audio files embodied on the CD, and it may also facilitate your use of the DIGITAL CONTENT.
Lying about the purpose of the SOFTWARE, are we?
As I understand the word, facilitate comes from facile meaning 'easy'. If you facilitate something, you make it easy or easier. The SOFTWARE, however, is designed to make my (fair) use of the DIGITAL CONTENT more difficult. Sony is misrepresenting the nature of the SOFTWARE here.
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It's partly the Galileo thing. The Church is really determined not to make that mistake again.
Also, considering what the Roman Church is - by far the largest and richest religious organisation there's ever been - it's no surprise they support scientific study. No new Scripture is coming, so how are we to learn more of the mind and the nature of God? Why, by close study and understanding of his masterpiece, creation itself. The Vatican even runs an observatory and sponsors serious research in cosmology. You don't survive as an institution for nearly two thousand years by ignoring reality.
It has to be said, the god revealed by modern science is a whole lot more impressive than the Bible ever made him out to be. Evolution is a magnificent hack that all of us here should appreciate, a blindingly simple system that does all the hard work automatically. Nucleosynthesis in supernovae has incredible artistic audacity, the whole relativity and quantum thing is a mindfuck we still haven't got to the bottom of, and quite what he's up to with inflation and dark energy has us all baffled.
And the fundamentalists would ignore all this in favour of the dumbed-down-to-Bronze-Age version. It's an incredible tragedy.
Too bad; you live in one. Or possibly you don't. With a probability of a|live_in_one> + b|dont_live_in_one> where a^2 + b^2 = 1.
Really? Hmm. Me too. It ripped just fine, I have it in ogg format on my iriver right now (yes, I know, Slashdot stereotype #5776, Linux / ogg / iHP-400, but it's true) and it sounds great. It took a great deal longer to rip than a normal CD would, and cdparanoia reported errors more or less continuously, but every one of them seems to have been corrected.
Perhaps it may depend to some extent on the capabilities of the CD drive being used. Mine is, amusingly, made by Sony...
No I didn't. I entered into a contract for sale of goods with the record store, the terms of which were that I handed over some cash and they handed over a CD. That contract was fulfilled to the satisfaction of both sides. I have no other contractual obligations of any kind.
I wouldn't call that a virus, as long as it adds the DRM autorun to your burned CDs if and only if you're burning a copy of the DRM'd CD in question. Then it's still a trojan, which happens to spread to your friend because you foolishly copied the trojaned media.
If, OTOH, it hijacks the system to such an extent that it puts its DRM malware on all burned audio CDs, whether they be copies of the original trojaned CD, or party mixes from a variety of sources, or even CDs of your three year old kid reading aloud for the first time and you're SOOOOO proud of him, then that is definitely a virus, of the old-school type; it's basically the same thing as all those infected floppies we remember from high school.
Ah, but you didn't say illegal, you said wrong. The equation of the two is perhaps the greatest threat to liberty in the modern world.
It doesn't automatically self-propagate, so it isn't a worm. Nor does it infect files and piggyback on them to infect other machines; it isn't a virus. This particular piece of malware comes attached to something the user wants (i.e. a music CD) without his knowledge, and proceeds to infect his machine, but makes no attempts to spread itself to other machines. That makes it a trojan.
AFAIK, the rootkit is the only protection on this CD. As they admit, it looks like a normal CD to an Apple computer - and, of course, to a Linux computer. And, for that matter, to a Windows computer with Autorun disabled... I do enjoy a truly pathetic copyrestriction system, don't you?
Heh. I've been playing Budokai: Tenkaichi lately. I'm struggling to envisage the kind of peripherals one would need to have a really authentic Dragonball combat experience, but they'd probably fall foul of strategic arms limitation treaties...
Then set them free.
That way they get to be read more than once, by many different people, and fulfill their purpose in life. Release your dusty books into the world and let them live again!
This is, of course, greatly to be encouraged. The more lusers decide their computers are irreparably broken just because of some worm, the more perfectly good machines are available for, er, refurbishment and recycling. Nuke the hard disk, install Linux, imagine a Beowulf cluster of those things. Should we geeks not be looking out for our own interests in this matter?
Well, I've been using pine on Linux for years, from back when I used to telnet into my shell account just because I didn't have the disk space on my machine for a mail client, but I haven't heard of chipboard. New project? Is it on freshmeat yet?
The sad thing, though, is:
TOS: 47 min
TNG, DS9, Voy: 45 min
Enterprise: 42 min
... those ad breaks just get longer and longer, huh?
Clearly the confusion comes from the fact that there were a total of five Star Wars movies. It's an easy mental slip to make, though I'd expect better from a geek-heavy crowd like this one.
Precisely. If you are, say, Gary Glitter, you keep schtum. Suspicion will fall on you but nothing will ever be proved. If you're Ali al-Jihad or Seamus O'Carbomb, you keep quiet, do your time and get massive respect and status within your organisation.
If, OTOH, you're Random Q. Hacker protecting your collection of downloaded Naruto fansubs and Weird Al mp3s, you might as well hand 'em over. If the police have seized your computer and waved the RIP Act at you they're probably after you for something bigger than you've actually done, and will promptly lose all interest.
Now, that's the sort of subversive talk that we need to be cracking down on. You aren't by any chance associated with any known terrorist organisations, are you, citizen?
What's going on here is that we have a fair few people in prisons in the UK and in allied countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Uzbekistan and Cuba undergoing robust interrogation. Every so often one of them will denounce a variety of people, all of whom must then be considered potential terrorists.
Now, clearly they must be rounded up immediately; we cannot allow potential witc^H^H^H^Hcomm^H^H^H^Hterrorists to walk the streets. We then need the full 90 day period to conduct our investigation and corroborate the freely given testimony of the prisoners who denounced them.
Meanwhile, we can begin to interrogate the new suspects. With luck, they'll denounce more of their evil jihadist comrades. Don't worry, citizen; we'll catch the lot of them eventually.
No, not for a moment. But if he doesn't, then he's committed an offence and can be formally charged, tried and locked up.
The 'encryption' thing is a smokescreen. We already have the RIP Act to deal with encryption users. But this government has never been particularly logical when it comes to extending police powers and cracking down on subversive civil liberties.
That's because they are criminals. Failure to turn over your encryption key is an offence under the RIP Act, punishable IIRC by up to two years imprisonment.
The innocent, of course, have nothing to hide.
They can't and don't, but what the hell, it's a pretext. The police have never liked this whole deal of having to let people go if you don't have enough evidence to charge them with anything. The longer they can get to find something that will stick, the more criminals they successfully prosecute and the safer we all are.
Now, if you'll excuse me I have to open my new estate agency, pontine transit solutions a speciality...
If the troll is original, Funny. If it's the same damn Christian Record Store troll that gets pasted into every single thread mentioning the RIAA, Troll.
In this case, definitely Troll. With lashings of Redundant.
The general case is quite interesting, though. From what I see with my own posts, the difference between +5 Insightful and -1 Flamebait is all in the opinion of the first moderator.
They probably did not know, because they did not want to know. Their policy was probably 'ask no questions, get no lies': you don't investigate at all into your affiliates' businesses, and then when the faeces strike the ventilator you can honestly claim ignorance...
Try browsing via wap.google.com. It converts webpages to mobile-friendly format on the fly, does a pretty decent job of it, and breaks them down into short chunks so that if, on reading the first one, you realise the page won't be useful, then you haven't wasted your money downloading all 200k of it...
Don't be silly. Sony is a corporation. When it's a corporation doing it, it's not a trojan, it's a feature!
Lying about the purpose of the SOFTWARE, are we?
As I understand the word, facilitate comes from facile meaning 'easy'. If you facilitate something, you make it easy or easier. The SOFTWARE, however, is designed to make my (fair) use of the DIGITAL CONTENT more difficult. Sony is misrepresenting the nature of the SOFTWARE here.
Nothing like a little optimism, eh? Quick question, what are you smoking and who's your dealer? I gotta get some of that stuff...