Duh, completely missed your point, I get it now. My guess is that Apple used a "special" version of the DVD player that doesn't have the capture restrictions to create that movie. It's possible that the shipping DVD player app has a secret "fair use" mode that could be enabled via assembly tweaking, but that seems unlikely since I doubt they'd want to do anything that could potentially make themselves a legal target.
That's just the movie running in Apple's DVD player app. As per the edicts of the MPAA, it does not allow you to take screenshots or recordings. Hopefully these guys will come through with a non-crippled player.
Re:My view: against encryption, for saving lives
on
Blaming Encryption
·
· Score: 2
Since you are proposing substantial restrictions on freedom, the burden should be on you to show that it will have any beneficial effect, but I'll indulge you.
What my statement means is whether or not you personally choose to use encryption is completely irrelevant, since there are millions of others who will continue to do so. It only becomes relevant if all (law-abiding) citizens are deprived of the choice to use encryption. So what you are really advocating is the removal of everyone's freedom, whether or not they agree with you that it is warranted.
The second part of my argument is that even if you could magically make non-backdoored (or all) encryption disappear from the face of the earth, it still wouldn't stop criminals and terrorists. It is virtually impossible to stop two people from communicating secret messages to each other, even if they use only cleartext. "I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow" can mean "we bomb the hospital tomorrow", and it's easy to be much more clever than that.
I await your explanation of how restricting or banning encryption will produce any benefits, and why those alleged benefits outweigh the required loss of freedom.
Re:My view: against encryption, for saving lives
on
Blaming Encryption
·
· Score: 2
I'd gladly give up some of my security in encryption, or give up encryption entirely, to save another person's life
That may be very noble, but it's also irrelevant. You sacrificing your own freedom will make no difference whatsoever; what you really advocate is that everyone be forced to sacrifice their freedom. That too will make no difference in terms of security, as criminals will easily defeat whatever restriction you come up with. All you will accomplish is removing the rights of the law-abiding, while increasing the power and intrusiveness of government.
most American would gradly give up a number of perceived "freedoms", so I'm not alone
True, which is why it is fortunate that the US is not a democracy.
Re:He's guilty of foolish technological optimism
on
Blaming Encryption
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· Score: 2
Should he feel guilty for making such a powerful tool available to anyone while naively assuming the use of this technology would be free expression, and ignoring the possiblity that it could be used by terrorists, criminals, and other unsavory people and organizations? You're damn right he should.
How do you know he didn't consider this? You don't. You have no idea of the net benefits of encryption as compared to the costs. Furthermore, you ignore the fact that terrorists will find ways to communicate in secrecy no matter how many freedoms you strip from law-abiding people.
it should have come as no surprise that those people would be significantly strengthened by this.
Here's some other things that probably help terrorists:
Freedom of speech
Freedom of association
Freedom of travel
Protection against arbitrary searches
Pretty much the entire Bill of Rights
Please tell me which of the above you would suppress in the name of security. If you're going to blame Phil for this, you also have to blame George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the rest of the founders of the US who were so naive that they thought this country could handle freedom. As you have aptly demonstrated, some people can't.
And yet only Barbara Lee voted out of concern for that.
Military action against terrorists abroad and suspension of civil liberties in the US are orthoganal; I support the first and oppose the second. Barbara Lee's vote had nothing to do with civil liberties.
You license it. The copy you're running belongs to Microsoft.
That's what Microsoft would have you believe, but as far as I know this has never been tested in court. I fail to see how a non-negotiated EULA can retroactively alter the terms of an already completed sale.
The mindless law-and-order rednecks who hang around at FreeRepublic.com [freerepublic.com] regularily post comments on their forums encouraging their members to "Freep" the poll (using their lingo)
On FreeRepublic there are at least as many civil libertarians as "mindless law-and-order rednecks", and probably more. Most of the "freep" requests I've seen recently have been to vote against additional government power. Two of the primary prinicples of conservatism are limited government and individual rights, which is why there is growing conservative opposition to government excesses such as the War on Drugs.
Of course, you're correct about the unreliability of online polls in general.
First of all, I've been amazed (and disgusted) by the onslaught of whining about our impending loss of privacy ever since this disaster happened.
And I've been disgusted by those whose immediate reaction is to turn America into a police state.
Is there something you all are trying to hide from the government?
Yes, of course there is. Private communications to my wife, doctor, accountant, or priest, among many others, should remain private. If the government suspects that I am doing something illegal, they can get a warrant and investigate. Shall I assume that you will be volunteering to have cameras placed in your home and tracking devices on your car?
Do you honestly mean to tell me that you are construing a document written hundreds of years ago as being directly applicable to this situation?
Yes, I am. The Constitution is the supreme law of the United States. If you don't like it there are mechanisms to alter or replace it, but to decide that it no longer means anything is an invitation to both anarchy and totalitarianism.
I believe the Constitution says that our privacy
is guaranteed not to be violated "without reason", or something to that affect.
Here is the 4th Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Note the absence of phrases such as "except during an emergency". No matter what the circumstances, universal monitoring of all citizens' communications is unreasonable.
For those of you claiming that we are "violating" the US Constitution, I propose that it is YOU who wish to violate it.
Total non sequitor, especially since you've already delcared that the Constitution is irrelevant. Tell me, what would you replace it with? A government with unlimited power to take any action it deemed necessary?
I value my right to privacy, but I value my way of life, my security, and that of my country more.
Your proposals are a direct assault on the American way of life, a key component of which is limited government and individual rights.
Congratulations on profoundly missing the point. Nowhere did I claim or imply that non-technical users are a "lower form of life", only that the iMac's lack of PCI slots is not a disadvantage for most of them. iMac sales figures would tend to support this theory.
Most Americans voted for the other guy, and an unelected body declared the winner.
Um, no. First, neither Bush nor Gore received a majority of the popular vote, either nationally or in Florida. Secondly, Bush did win the vote in Florida, confirmed by several official and unofficial recounts. Another "unelected body", i.e. the Florida Supreme Court, attempted to nullify his victory by rewriting election laws after the fact, and the U.S. Supreme Court simply informed them that they couldn't do that.
A more stable president (of either party) might be more cautious, or less desperate to be perceived as taking action.
How has Bush not been cautious? He has not ineffectively fired cruise missiles at empty buildings, nor has he bombed asprin factories based on intelligence known to be unreliable, which were the methods of operation of his predecessor.
This thread is exactly why Stallman's comment was ill-advised. It is a pointless distraction from his valid argument that statist politicians (of both parties) will use this tragedy to remove civil liberties.
Yeah, that doesn't make very much sense. If the G5 information is accurate (big if), I would expect future versions of Mac OS X to either ship with "fat" binaries (like classic Mac OS did during the 68k->PPC transition), or to have separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions. There is no way Apple could get away with abandoning G3 and G4 owners at 10.1.
It's stupid design has an integrated monitor with no PCI slots, making it unusable for much of the computing population.
A large majority of the computing population never uses extra PCI slots, and most probably don't even know what their purpose is.
I can now buy a Pentium IV computer from Dell for under $900, which is faster and MUCH more expandable to boot. How is the iMac "competitive" with that?
Because it's easier for normal people to use. You are not the target audience for the iMac.
Fast. Method invocations take (I think) about 3 times longer than normal C function calls, and if that becomes a problem in a tight loop (which is rare) you can cache the function pointer for a method and use it to bypass the dynamic lookup. Unfortunately Objective-C mostly got overlooked due to the momentum of C++, but hopefully Mac OS X and GNUStep can change that.
Start devoting your time to finding solutions "both" "sides" can be happy with.
The problem is that this isn't possible. It is either legal to use unbreakable encryption, or it's not. There isn't a middle ground.
Three, if you try to fight the concrete consequence of 5000 people dead versus what most will perceive as the largely abstract consequences of the government being able to read your encrypted data, you're going to lose.
Not necessarily, people have become much more aware of privacy issues in recent years. There appears to be much more of a desire to exterminate the terrorists who did this than there is to adopt police state tactics in an attempt to increase security.
Cocoa apps can currently only be written in Objective-C and Java. There is talk about resurrecting Objective-C++, though.
More than talk, Apple has confirmed that the developer tools shipping with Mac OS X 10.1 (due Real Soon Now) will support Objective-C++. This is a big deal because you will be able to write a Cocoa front end to your existing C++ architecture, instead of using Carbon or writing a bunch of ugly ObjC to C++ bridge code.
I've heard from muliple news reports that officials had credible evidence that Air Force One was a target. I don't know how such an attack could have taken place, but the Secret Service took it seriously enough to have it fly via undisclosed routes with fighter escorts at an unusally high altitude. There has also been speculation that the terrorists had trouble locating the White House from the air, so they instead went for the Pentagon which was a much easier target to hit.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
If these suggestions are implemented (particularly 1 and 2), a large number of people will choose to drive instead of fly. Because driving is much more dangerous than flying, this could very well increase the total number of deaths.
Neither you nor I have any idea if increased ssecurity measures would have made any difference. What happened today was a tragedy and an assault on American freedom. If as a result we sacrifice our liberty in what is likely to be a futile attempt to future occurrences, then the terrorists have truly won.
"Good for the people" means "Taking from the Rich" in America, where "sharing" is unknown.
There are other, more effective, forms of "sharing" than massive government programs funded by forcible confiscation of wealth. You might want to examine this report, which states that Americans donate to charity much more generously than do Canadians. Note particularly the conclusion that "those who have more, give more".
The 'good of all' does always outweigh the 'good of the few'. That is the definition of community and democracy.
No, that is the definition of tyranny. When 51% of the voters can deprive the other 49% of their life, liberty, or property, you do not have a free country.
Objective-C was a great language compared to Java.
No need for the "was". Objective C is the primary development language for Mac OS X, which probably already has a larger installed base than NextStep/OpenStep ever did. And GNUStep is steadily coming along.
Rather, it would now fall strait into the laps of the corporations.
How? Without the DMCA passed and enforced by the government, Adobe could not abduct and imprison Sklyarov. Nor could the MPAA prevent you from watching your own DVDs on your own computer, nor could the media cartels dictate how computer systems are designed. All these violations happened (or may happen) because government abused its power, and you want to give it more? I really don't understand this.
Republicans, in general, are greedy, self-centered, give-me-a-tax-cut-and-to-hell-with-everyone-else types.
So a worker wanting to keep what he has earned is "greedy", while you wanting to forcibly take his earnings is not. Thanks for the clarification.
Just look at the efforts to drill for oil in Alaskan wilderness areas and the decision to let mega-monopoly Microsoft remain intact.
Using 2000 acres out of 15 million in ANWR for access to potentially huge oil reserves sounds good to me, especially since previous drilling in Alaska has shown it can be done with minimal environmental impact. And the DOJ did not drop the Microsoft case, they are attempting to have remedies applied more quickly than would be possible if they continued to pursue a breakup. You should try incorporating facts and logic into your arguments sometime, although I realize this can be difficult if you're a liberal.
Moreover there is likely no representation that the CD will play on a computer 'anonymously'.
If it's sold as a standard CD, then that is a representation that it will play on her computer CD player without any additional requirements. Unless the limitations are clearly disclosed on the package, the manufacturer is knowingly making false claims about their product.
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Duh, completely missed your point, I get it now. My guess is that Apple used a "special" version of the DVD player that doesn't have the capture restrictions to create that movie. It's possible that the shipping DVD player app has a secret "fair use" mode that could be enabled via assembly tweaking, but that seems unlikely since I doubt they'd want to do anything that could potentially make themselves a legal target.
That's just the movie running in Apple's DVD player app. As per the edicts of the MPAA, it does not allow you to take screenshots or recordings. Hopefully these guys will come through with a non-crippled player.
What my statement means is whether or not you personally choose to use encryption is completely irrelevant, since there are millions of others who will continue to do so. It only becomes relevant if all (law-abiding) citizens are deprived of the choice to use encryption. So what you are really advocating is the removal of everyone's freedom, whether or not they agree with you that it is warranted.
The second part of my argument is that even if you could magically make non-backdoored (or all) encryption disappear from the face of the earth, it still wouldn't stop criminals and terrorists. It is virtually impossible to stop two people from communicating secret messages to each other, even if they use only cleartext. "I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow" can mean "we bomb the hospital tomorrow", and it's easy to be much more clever than that.
I await your explanation of how restricting or banning encryption will produce any benefits, and why those alleged benefits outweigh the required loss of freedom.
That may be very noble, but it's also irrelevant. You sacrificing your own freedom will make no difference whatsoever; what you really advocate is that everyone be forced to sacrifice their freedom. That too will make no difference in terms of security, as criminals will easily defeat whatever restriction you come up with. All you will accomplish is removing the rights of the law-abiding, while increasing the power and intrusiveness of government.
most American would gradly give up a number of perceived "freedoms", so I'm not alone
True, which is why it is fortunate that the US is not a democracy.
How do you know he didn't consider this? You don't. You have no idea of the net benefits of encryption as compared to the costs. Furthermore, you ignore the fact that terrorists will find ways to communicate in secrecy no matter how many freedoms you strip from law-abiding people.
it should have come as no surprise that those people would be significantly strengthened by this.
Here's some other things that probably help terrorists:
Please tell me which of the above you would suppress in the name of security. If you're going to blame Phil for this, you also have to blame George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the rest of the founders of the US who were so naive that they thought this country could handle freedom. As you have aptly demonstrated, some people can't.
Military action against terrorists abroad and suspension of civil liberties in the US are orthoganal; I support the first and oppose the second. Barbara Lee's vote had nothing to do with civil liberties.
That's what Microsoft would have you believe, but as far as I know this has never been tested in court. I fail to see how a non-negotiated EULA can retroactively alter the terms of an already completed sale.
On FreeRepublic there are at least as many civil libertarians as "mindless law-and-order rednecks", and probably more. Most of the "freep" requests I've seen recently have been to vote against additional government power. Two of the primary prinicples of conservatism are limited government and individual rights, which is why there is growing conservative opposition to government excesses such as the War on Drugs.
Of course, you're correct about the unreliability of online polls in general.
And I've been disgusted by those whose immediate reaction is to turn America into a police state.
Is there something you all are trying to hide from the government?
Yes, of course there is. Private communications to my wife, doctor, accountant, or priest, among many others, should remain private. If the government suspects that I am doing something illegal, they can get a warrant and investigate. Shall I assume that you will be volunteering to have cameras placed in your home and tracking devices on your car?
Do you honestly mean to tell me that you are construing a document written hundreds of years ago as being directly applicable to this situation?
Yes, I am. The Constitution is the supreme law of the United States. If you don't like it there are mechanisms to alter or replace it, but to decide that it no longer means anything is an invitation to both anarchy and totalitarianism.
I believe the Constitution says that our privacy
is guaranteed not to be violated "without reason", or something to that affect.
Here is the 4th Amendment:
Note the absence of phrases such as "except during an emergency". No matter what the circumstances, universal monitoring of all citizens' communications is unreasonable.
For those of you claiming that we are "violating" the US Constitution, I propose that it is YOU who wish to violate it.
Total non sequitor, especially since you've already delcared that the Constitution is irrelevant. Tell me, what would you replace it with? A government with unlimited power to take any action it deemed necessary?
I value my right to privacy, but I value my way of life, my security, and that of my country more.
Your proposals are a direct assault on the American way of life, a key component of which is limited government and individual rights.
Apology accepted, and point taken; I could have worded that differently.
Congratulations on profoundly missing the point. Nowhere did I claim or imply that non-technical users are a "lower form of life", only that the iMac's lack of PCI slots is not a disadvantage for most of them. iMac sales figures would tend to support this theory.
Um, no. First, neither Bush nor Gore received a majority of the popular vote, either nationally or in Florida. Secondly, Bush did win the vote in Florida, confirmed by several official and unofficial recounts. Another "unelected body", i.e. the Florida Supreme Court, attempted to nullify his victory by rewriting election laws after the fact, and the U.S. Supreme Court simply informed them that they couldn't do that.
A more stable president (of either party) might be more cautious, or less desperate to be perceived as taking action.
How has Bush not been cautious? He has not ineffectively fired cruise missiles at empty buildings, nor has he bombed asprin factories based on intelligence known to be unreliable, which were the methods of operation of his predecessor.
This thread is exactly why Stallman's comment was ill-advised. It is a pointless distraction from his valid argument that statist politicians (of both parties) will use this tragedy to remove civil liberties.
Yeah, that doesn't make very much sense. If the G5 information is accurate (big if), I would expect future versions of Mac OS X to either ship with "fat" binaries (like classic Mac OS did during the 68k->PPC transition), or to have separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions. There is no way Apple could get away with abandoning G3 and G4 owners at 10.1.
A large majority of the computing population never uses extra PCI slots, and most probably don't even know what their purpose is.
I can now buy a Pentium IV computer from Dell for under $900, which is faster and MUCH more expandable to boot. How is the iMac "competitive" with that?
Because it's easier for normal people to use. You are not the target audience for the iMac.
Fast. Method invocations take (I think) about 3 times longer than normal C function calls, and if that becomes a problem in a tight loop (which is rare) you can cache the function pointer for a method and use it to bypass the dynamic lookup. Unfortunately Objective-C mostly got overlooked due to the momentum of C++, but hopefully Mac OS X and GNUStep can change that.
The problem is that this isn't possible. It is either legal to use unbreakable encryption, or it's not. There isn't a middle ground.
Three, if you try to fight the concrete consequence of 5000 people dead versus what most will perceive as the largely abstract consequences of the government being able to read your encrypted data, you're going to lose.
Not necessarily, people have become much more aware of privacy issues in recent years. There appears to be much more of a desire to exterminate the terrorists who did this than there is to adopt police state tactics in an attempt to increase security.
More than talk, Apple has confirmed that the developer tools shipping with Mac OS X 10.1 (due Real Soon Now) will support Objective-C++. This is a big deal because you will be able to write a Cocoa front end to your existing C++ architecture, instead of using Carbon or writing a bunch of ugly ObjC to C++ bridge code.
I've heard from muliple news reports that officials had credible evidence that Air Force One was a target. I don't know how such an attack could have taken place, but the Secret Service took it seriously enough to have it fly via undisclosed routes with fighter escorts at an unusally high altitude. There has also been speculation that the terrorists had trouble locating the White House from the air, so they instead went for the Pentagon which was a much easier target to hit.
If these suggestions are implemented (particularly 1 and 2), a large number of people will choose to drive instead of fly. Because driving is much more dangerous than flying, this could very well increase the total number of deaths.
Neither you nor I have any idea if increased ssecurity measures would have made any difference. What happened today was a tragedy and an assault on American freedom. If as a result we sacrifice our liberty in what is likely to be a futile attempt to future occurrences, then the terrorists have truly won.
There are other, more effective, forms of "sharing" than massive government programs funded by forcible confiscation of wealth. You might want to examine this report, which states that Americans donate to charity much more generously than do Canadians. Note particularly the conclusion that "those who have more, give more".
The 'good of all' does always outweigh the 'good of the few'. That is the definition of community and democracy.
No, that is the definition of tyranny. When 51% of the voters can deprive the other 49% of their life, liberty, or property, you do not have a free country.
No need for the "was". Objective C is the primary development language for Mac OS X, which probably already has a larger installed base than NextStep/OpenStep ever did. And GNUStep is steadily coming along.
How? Without the DMCA passed and enforced by the government, Adobe could not abduct and imprison Sklyarov. Nor could the MPAA prevent you from watching your own DVDs on your own computer, nor could the media cartels dictate how computer systems are designed. All these violations happened (or may happen) because government abused its power, and you want to give it more? I really don't understand this.
So a worker wanting to keep what he has earned is "greedy", while you wanting to forcibly take his earnings is not. Thanks for the clarification.
Just look at the efforts to drill for oil in Alaskan wilderness areas and the decision to let mega-monopoly Microsoft remain intact.
Using 2000 acres out of 15 million in ANWR for access to potentially huge oil reserves sounds good to me, especially since previous drilling in Alaska has shown it can be done with minimal environmental impact. And the DOJ did not drop the Microsoft case, they are attempting to have remedies applied more quickly than would be possible if they continued to pursue a breakup. You should try incorporating facts and logic into your arguments sometime, although I realize this can be difficult if you're a liberal.
If it's sold as a standard CD, then that is a representation that it will play on her computer CD player without any additional requirements. Unless the limitations are clearly disclosed on the package, the manufacturer is knowingly making false claims about their product.