Some months ago-- earlier this year or late last, I forget which-- Oracle announced the official end of support for IRIX. Their 9i series of products will never run on IRIX, at least unless the plan changes. The last version of Oracle to run on IRIX was, and will continue to be, 8i. I believe the specific version is 8.1.7.
This is moderately important. Lots of people still use 8i, so it's not the end of the world yet. What is the end of the world is the fact that Oracle will no longer develop the Oracle client library for IRIX. In theory, the 8i client library will let you talk to a 9i database, but as soon as Oracle breaks that compatibility (with 10i, or whatever) your Oracle client apps will no longer work on IRIX either.
So you're both right. Oracle runs on IRIX, but only in older versions.
In other words, "Girls, girls. You're both pretty."
Anybody who's used the so-called documentation on that and similar sites knows that it consists of exhaustive treatments of such critical topics as how to install Linux on a laptop with less than 4 MB of RAM, making Linux work with the ever-popular "K7S5A," how to run Quake on Linux, and installing the Caudium web server. Documents like the Open Office User's Guide, however, are conspicuously absent. Instead, the developers of Open Office expect their users to make do with a collection of poorly written and woefully incomplete "how to" pamphlets.
For all intents and purposes, Linux and non-commercial Linux applications are effectively undocumented, and that's simply not okay.
Windows crash gallery http://www.scorpioncity.com/mscrash.shtml
That's a collection of screen-shots of error conditions encountered in Winodws. Some of them are quite funny. But I fail to see the relevance of them. Any person so inclined could very easily assemble a comparable "hall of shame" comprised of Linux screen shots. Since practically no one uses Linux as a desktop operating system, however, there would be little point in it.
Hell, from my passing experience with Mozilla alone I feel quite sure I could build a complete "hall of shame" that would compare nicely with the one you linked.
Direction Microsoft is taking: http://www.hevanet.com/peace/microsoft.htm
I fail to see the point of linking to this article. Even a cursory examination of this author's other writings will reveal his history of bias and misrepresentation. This is basically just a somewhat longer version of "M$ sUx0rs, d00d!"
I have yet to be able to find EQUIVALENT information on windows.
Information equivalent to what? I don't understand your comparison. Have you tried the "Help" item under the Start menu? Windows comes with thorough and complete on-line help. This and a great deal more information is also available on the MSDN web site. It's very easy to find.
Where can I find information on making a network boot disk so I can reload windows from another machine that does have a cdrom?
Not being a Windows expert, I'm sure I have no idea, but I would start with bootdisk.com, then Google, then MSDN, then calling Microsoft's technical support hotline.
The wonderful thing about Windows-- and yeah, it's a wonderful thing compared to the anarchy of Linux-- is that there's always somebody you can call. With Linux and related "open source" software, you're limited to trying to track down the author of the original software-- who no longer supports it, naturally-- and hoping that he's nice enough to give you the help you need. In most cases, of course, you are simply ignored, or even verbally abused, rather than receiving any assistance.
With both Microsoft and the Linux whatever-it-is, you get what you pay for. With Microsoft, you pay for and receive help. With the Linux "community," or whatever, you pay for nothing, and you receive nothing in return.
Only problem is, your child stars would age 3-4 years during the making of the movies...
Oh, don't be silly. Even the monster shoot for The Lord of the Rings only lasted 16 months. Remove most of the makeup, post-production, and locations and you could easily shoot two epic-length films in 6-8 months.
I moved to Linux because I was tired of constantly "fiddling" with Windows through the barriers that M$ puts up to "protect" the user from himself.
I often find that the people who hold this opinion are simply people that didn't know how to do it the right way, and so got frustrated with what they perceived as Windows's difficulty and obtuseness.
Macs supposedly work perfectly all the time, but when something does go wrong nobody can fix them.
No, not really. In fact, anybody who knows how to fix a Mac can fix it quite easily; in this way, it's just like Windows. But this takes knowing how to do it, which is another one of those things that frustrates people who lack the knowledge.
Linux, Windows, and the Mac are all quite complex, and difficult to understand at a low level. The difference is that both Windows and the Mac are thoroughly documented, feature-complete, and exhaustively tested. Linux is none of those things.
Linux is best described by that old saying about the singing dog. The remarkable thing is not so much that the dog sings well, but rather that it can sing at all. However, as remarkable as a singing dog is, one would not reasonably expect to replace the lead mezzo soprano with one. Likewise, as much novelty value as Linux carries with it, one would be quite foolish to expect it to do the work of Windows or a Mac.
So, let me get this straight. The fact that you enjoyed LOTR gives you a feeling of superiority for some reason? Is that right?
Hmm.
I could understand feeling that way about Joyce. Anybody who gets through Finnegans Wake in less than a year deserves a medal, in my opinion. I remember thinking I was doing okay until I got to Book III... which is the point where Joyce apparently forgot to have things happen. Hell, even the completion of Delany's Dhalgren is worth a commendation for conspicuous heroism. But LOTR? Not exactly snobbery-inducing material, I'm afraid.
Copyright holders currently have no affirmative requirements to ensure their work enters the public domain.
That's true, but it would be easy to imagine a situation in which that particular aspect of the law is reinterpreted if all publicly available copies of a work are protected by encryption. In that case, the absence of an action on the part of the copyright holder to ensure that their work becomes available in unencrypted form upon the expiration of the copyright would amount to a guarantee that such would not occur. That's a new wrinkle, and it wouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine a court placing a new burden on copyright holders in response to it.
The key word in my sentence, of course, was "might."
In a previous post I've already mentioned the example that anything that was only released on DIVX is essentially lost to the public domain.
I am unaware of any such work that was only released in that format and that does not exist in an unprotected form.
About the only fix I can think of, is to go back to an archival registration requirement when the copyrighted item will be protected by DRM.
Which is why I said I can imagine the court deciding to require copyright holders to ensure that an unencrypted version of their works becomes available upon expiration of the copyright. Doing so by placing a physical copy with the Library of Congress places a heavy burden, while requiring a expiration date in DRM rights packages does not.
Lawrence Lessig has proposed...
Lessig's liberal ideas (and I mean that term literally, not pejoratively) on copyright and other intellectual property matters are well known. I would recommend taking his opinions with a grain of salt; they certainly have value, but they would be well-served by a more balanced and conservative approach.
In my opinion, Lessig's biggest shortcoming is that he ignores, or at best trivializes, the fact that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works via Napster and its successors has reached levels undreamt of as few as five years ago. A world with no technology for copy prevention is a world that must work on the honor system. As long as otherwise law-abiding adults are willing to ignore the expressly granted rights of copyright holders and distribute works without permission, DRM is inevitable.
If you can figure out how to get us back to an honor-system world, I'd love to hear about it. Until then, though, the question won't be whether we have DRM or not, but rather which system or systems.
I'm used to DRM systems that contact the host on a regular basis to see if the details have changed.
That's what makes Intertrust different from lots of other DRM systems. It doesn't include any such requirement. It's optional, of course; for example, a system built on Intertrust might allow you to buy individual viewings of a movie, but that system would really just be putting a pretty user interface on what is essentially the same set of transactions: you buy an authorization, use the authorization to retrieve the rights package, and then execute the rights package on the media.
So from the sounds of it InterTrust has some type of push mechanism where you have to update the rights package during a customer driven transaction, but the client does not have to actually access the server.
Nope. Downloading a rights package is a one-time deal. There's no mechanism for the licensing authority to contact the client, only for the client to contact the licensing authority to download new rights packages. There's no "push" involved.
Maybe an analogy will make this more clear. Let's say you go to the record store, and are given the option of buying various rights packages for a given CD. You can buy the unlimited rights package for the CD ($19.99), which lets you listen all you want, forever. Or you can buy a package that lets you listen all you want for a month ($4.99), or you can buy a package that lets you listen only once ($0.25). In any case, you go home with the CD and an index card with instructions on it. The card may say, "You can listen to this CD all you want," or it may say, "You can only listen to this CD one time."
Whichever rights package you bought, you follow the instructions to the letter. Let's say you bought the one-time rights package. After listening to the CD, you decide it's pretty okay, so you go back to the store and buy the one-month rights package. Instead of carrying a new copy of the CD home, you just pay your $5 and bring home a new index card. You follow those instructions to the letter again, and listen to the CD all you want for the next month. You can then choose to keep buying limited rights packages for as long as you like, or you can just buy the unlimited rights package. If you think you'll be sick of the CD after two months and will never listen to it again, you can just buy two one-month packages and save some money.
That's exactly how Intertrust's system works, except it's all data. The client (which is embedded hardware or software) follows the instructions on the rights package. Once you've downloaded the rights package (or bought the index card), you've got everything you need to use the media.
The fact that InterTrust does not currently "automatically" update the rights package is probably a good thing (from the user rights standpoint), but I would not count upon it remaining that way.
You can count on it until they fundamentally reengineer the Intertrust system design. It's just not built that way.
But if you want to hold up the possibility that they might do it as a reason why Intertrust should not be adopted, go ahead. Meanwhile, I'll argue that you might call somebody a dirty name in a Slashdot post, and get your posting privileges revoked.;-) (Of course, I'm just kidding. I just wanted to point out that it's kind of silly to talk about how things might be, when that might is so far removed from the present reality.)
I find it inconceivable that you persist in claiming that the law you just quoted "expressly permits" criticism...
Are you not reading? The law, as quoted, says that the limited use of a work for the purpose of criticism is non-infringing. This is not complex, or ambiguous, or difficult to understand. It goes on to say that a few key factors should be taken into consideration when determining whether a particular use is fair or not, but that doesn't change the fact that the law says that limited use for criticism is explicitly non-infringing.
I don't recall any suits being brought for this reason against Digital Video Espress, LP back when it still existed, and tellingly, now that it does exist, who do I sue when my copy of "Flashdance, the Exclusive DIVX edition" falls out of copyright?
You sue the same entity you would have sued before: the copyright holder. Go right ahead.
The court, however, will almost certainly find no justification for your suit because numerous unprotected analog copies of that movie exist, both in public and in the archives of the copyright holder. The public domain, therefore, on whose behalf you would be filing suit, suffers no harm from the inaccessibility of the data on the discs issued by the now-defunct company.
Which kind of puts the whole "what happens when the copyright expires?" objection to bed, in my book.
But I suppose we ought to believe that this time it will be different, based upon the unsupported opinions of a self-described non-employee of Intertrust who has no vested interest in seeing the technology succeed or fail. Wink, wink.
Dude, I work at a restaurant. I've been a professional chef since I was laid off by my former employer earlier this year. If you think I've got a vested interest in any of this stuff, you've got another thing coming. I just get sick of people who set up straw-man arguments and who-- deliberately or innocently-- misinterpret the law to try to argue that DRM is somehow unjust, unfair, or unlawful.
It's a free country, man. Anything that is not prohibited by the law is allowed. The use of technology to prevent the unlawful copying of copyrighted materials is not prohibited; it's totally legal. But the unauthorized copying of copyrighted works, with the narrow and specifically defined exceptions codified by law, is prohibited. Trying to bend the idea of fair use to fit anything that you might feel an urge to do is just a mockery.
But think of your karma Twirlip, think of your karma... it will progerssively get lower and lower with the more troll mods you get and you can't do anything about that!
Except for the fact that I get many, many more up-mods than down-mods. Spend every one of your five mod points on me every time you get them. I'll still be capped.
You are quite irrelevant to me. You're not even an annoyance. In fact, you're kind of entertaining, in a small way. Keep up the good work.
Title 17 Sec 107 basically states that if an act is deemed as fair use, it is not an infringement of copyright. It doesn't "expressly allow" any particular usage but sets guidelines to determine whether that use is fair use or not.
Wrong. Section 107 reads, in relevant part,
"[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism [...] is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include [...] the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole."
So the limited use of a work for purposes of criticism is, as I said, expressly permitted by law.
Doesn't qualify under Sec. 107, although whether it qualifies under 1008 is an open question at this point.
Of course it isn't. Section 1008 refers to "the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings." If you're trading music with friends, you cannot call that use "noncommercial," because the word "commerce" refers to the exchange of goods or commodities, whether money is involved or not. If you make a recording of a copyrighted work that you own, say so you can carry it around in your car, that use is protected under section 1008 because it's noncommercial. If you give that copy to somebody else, though, that's an exchange of goods-- you exchanged the recording for nothing-- and as such as a commercial transaction. Sharing and trading of copyrighted music is not protected under 1008.
The other thing you're failing to notice is what happens if someone wants to make a perfectly legal "fair use" of a digital recording?
The law provides you with no such right. You can exercise every nonexclusive right under Title 17 using analog technology only, so DRM systems such as Intertrust that prevent the licensee from making bit-for-bit copies of media for fair use purposes are not in violation of the law.
Let's say I want to send a 20 second snippet of a song to a buddy to explain to him why he should or shouldn't buy it. (Criticism) That ought to be permissible under sec.107. How does the rights package allow me to assert my privilege to do this?
Hold a microphone up to the speaker and press "play." Or use analog audio jacks to make a recording. The system will prevent you from using the original digital media for this purpose, but because it doesn't prevent you from using analog copies of the media, it doesn't infringe.
So, we should be expecting those old DIVX disks to unlock after their copyright expires, too?
WTF does that have to do with Intertrust? I think you're confused.
Furthermore, I don't think it's even a given that Intertrust will be around in 95 years or more to unlock all these packages.
Sounds like you're not listening to what I'm saying. This issue has been beaten to death here. I've already responded to all of your questions and objections in this and other postings. If you have new questions, I'll be happy to respond to them, but I'm not interested in simply answering the same three questions over and over for people who aren't reading.
They're kind of a red herring. Seeing spiders fleeing the scenes of the attacks naturally raises the suspicion that they have something to do with what's going on. But as it turns out, the giant spider in the forest, Agragog, has nothing to do with anything. Spiders are deathly afraid of basilisks, and that's why they're seen running away whenever the basilisk struck.
What was up with the car? It was never cleared up. No motive, etc.
The car was enchanted. Enchanted things tend to have minds of their own at times. There's really not much more to it than that.
How about the water? Why does it keep showing up?
The basilisk travels through the water pipes. When it comes out, water gets all over everything.
The attacks seem a bit contrived. Contrived in the lethality.
The basilisk legend is actually real. A real legend, I mean. According to legend, a basilisk was a serpent whose gaze was lethal. The reflected gaze of the basilisk, though, paralyzes rather than killing.
Why? To keep the body count down, of course. In a book written primarily for 12-year-olds, it doesn't do to have characters dropping dead every few chapters.
Mee'sa Dobby? I guess he will be explained in the sequel, which I will probably need to see to resolve a few loose ends.
What loose ends are those? Dobby's a house-elf, and he knows that the Malfoy's have it in for Harry Potter. He tries to warn Harry, but in perversely roundabout ways. At the end of the story, Harry tricks Dobby's owner into giving Dobby a sock, which sets him free-- house-elves are enslaved (quite willingly) until their owners present them with clothes. Your average house-elf takes pride is his work, and would consider being given clothes a shameful failure. But Dobby, because he worked for the slimy and horrible Malfoy family, was happy to be dismissed.
Moreover, I think it was poorly edited and could be vastly improved with a directors cut edition.
This is the director's cut. Chris Columbus, being executive producer, gets the absolutely final say in the cut of the film. There are scenes that were shot but ultimately cut-- which have been saved for the DVD, by the way-- but it was Columbus himself who made those calls.
This is the one-and-only "director's cut" of this film.
No, no. First of all, Chris Columbus isn't being replaced. He's the executive producer, so he gets to choose who directs the films. He's stepping down from directing the third film because he wants to movie his family back to the States for a while. They've been living in London for the past three years working on the first two films, and he needs a break.
He has said, though, that he hopes to come back and direct the fourth film/films.
And sure enough, just as none of us do anything special by slogging through yet another day, the infant Harry didn't do anything special by living. It was his mother who saved him, sacrificing her life for his.
Anybody who's read the first book-- or, hell, even seen the first movie-- knows that the story is actually quite a bit more complicated than that. I'm not interested in reading an article that fundamentally misinterprets the premise of the books.
The rumour was that they weren't happy with the non-ILM effects, which more-or-less has been confirmed.
That's really not the way things happened.
See, the first movie was filmed in order; the first scene was shot first, and the last scene last. This is not a terribly uncommon thing to do on a long shoot with kids of that age-- 10-12 or so. In fact, if you watch the first movie kinda carefully you can see that the kids grow up just a little through the film. In particular, Rupert Grint's voice starts to change slightly in the middle.
A consequence of this is the fact that some special effects sequences couldn't be started until close to the end of principle photography. Some of the biggest sequences in the movie-- like the Quiddich match, in particular-- were done in about three months. That's just not enough time.
This time around, they did things differently. They shot the most effects-laden scenes first-- everything with Dobby, the Quiddich scenes, the stuff with the basilisk-- first, and shipped them off to the FX houses. They had nine months to do those sequences this time around instead of three. The difference is clear.
So it's not so much that they weren't happy with the FX on the first film because the work was shoddy; it's just that they didn't have enough time in the schedule to do it any better.
The source on this, by the way, is Chris Columbus, in a recent interview with Charlie Rose.
Not only did that scene make it, it was practically the "money shot" of the film. The action sequence in the Chamber is the literal climax of the movie, but the quiet little exchange between Dumbledore and Harry at the end is the emotional resolution. All the moreso when you realize that this was Richard Harris's last performance as Dumbledore. Pretty darned good ending, all around.
Goblet of Fire is easily three times the size of Secrets
That's true, but GOF is kind of modular. For instance, the whole "Quiddich World Cup" section at the beginning of the book could probably be omitted without damaging the story too much, or at least reduced to a couple of lines of exposition later. I love that section and I wouldn't want it cut, but it could be if it were necessary. Some of the Triwizard challenges are the same way. They're really cool, and I'd love to see 'em on the big screen, but they're not completely integral to the plot.
Of course, the right way to do GOF is to film two three-hours movies simultaneously and release one in October (ending with a cliffhanger) and the other in December. If the next two Matrix flicks do well, there's a chance Columbus might choose to do just that, rather than cutting too much of the novel for time.
Since Devon absolutely owns the copyright to his own statements, by your own admission he has absolute right to command you not to quote him out of context, or for that matter not to quote him at all.
Nope. Limited quoting for the purpose of criticism is expressly allowed under Title 17. Read the law.
Or do you think your grandiose pronouncement that "only the copyright holder of a work has the right to determine how that work is distributed" only applies to big corporations and not to ordinary blokes like Devon Bowen?
I think that particular grandiose statement is absolutely correct, according to Title 17. The only exceptions are those listed under the article describing fair use, and trading music with friends doesn't qualify.
Or maybe you'll concede that there are exceptions to your apparent belief that copyright is paramount over user rights?
Nope. The law says that a copyright holder has absolute rights over his work, with only the narrow and strictly defined exceptions listed under fair use. How can they get away with this? Copyright is limited in duration.
And BTW, what happens when the copyright runs out on those Intertrust encrypted tunes? Will they automatically unlock into the public domain?
Yes. This will be programmed into the rights package that governs the media's use. This provision is already mandated by law.
Do you still persist in this belief that it's impossible for Intertrust technology to possibly infringe upon a person's existing rights?
Possibly? Sure. Anything's possible. The absence of an Intertrust-like system means it's possible for users to infringe on copyright holders' rights. A gun makes it possible for one person to shoot another. The fact that a thing makes something bad possible doesn't mean that the thing itself is bad, or that it's not better than the absence of that thing.
DRM is justified, both ethically and under law, and it's inevitable. The only question is whether we'll get a good system or a bad one. Intertrust appears, to me, to be a good one.
Okay, we've got idiots coming out of the walls tonight. I know you kids were raised on the computer-generated whatsit, but back in the day we used to do whatcha call "optical compositing." No computers, no digital anything, just a dark room and some film.
Hence the phrase, "more motion-controlled model shots optically composited together than ever before."
All of Babylon 5's special effects were computer-generated and digitally composited. Apart from looking like hammered shit most of the time, they do not even remotely qualify for the title of most complex optical shot ever.
They also beat the last battle of Return of the Jedi, claiming for a short while, 'most ships on screen in a battle'.
Idiot. The noteworthy fact about ROTJ is that one shot included more motion-controlled model shots optically composited together than ever before. As far as I know, that record still stands.
"Most ships on the screen" doesn't mean a damn thing. But the challenge of optically compositing umpty-bump layers together without having the result look like one big blur is... well, it's more well than you can imagine.
Slashdot Mirror
Some months ago-- earlier this year or late last, I forget which-- Oracle announced the official end of support for IRIX. Their 9i series of products will never run on IRIX, at least unless the plan changes. The last version of Oracle to run on IRIX was, and will continue to be, 8i. I believe the specific version is 8.1.7.
This is moderately important. Lots of people still use 8i, so it's not the end of the world yet. What is the end of the world is the fact that Oracle will no longer develop the Oracle client library for IRIX. In theory, the 8i client library will let you talk to a 9i database, but as soon as Oracle breaks that compatibility (with 10i, or whatever) your Oracle client apps will no longer work on IRIX either.
So you're both right. Oracle runs on IRIX, but only in older versions.
In other words, "Girls, girls. You're both pretty."
Linux documentation at http://www.tldp.org
Anybody who's used the so-called documentation on that and similar sites knows that it consists of exhaustive treatments of such critical topics as how to install Linux on a laptop with less than 4 MB of RAM, making Linux work with the ever-popular "K7S5A," how to run Quake on Linux, and installing the Caudium web server. Documents like the Open Office User's Guide, however, are conspicuously absent. Instead, the developers of Open Office expect their users to make do with a collection of poorly written and woefully incomplete "how to" pamphlets.
For all intents and purposes, Linux and non-commercial Linux applications are effectively undocumented, and that's simply not okay.
Windows crash gallery http://www.scorpioncity.com/mscrash.shtml
That's a collection of screen-shots of error conditions encountered in Winodws. Some of them are quite funny. But I fail to see the relevance of them. Any person so inclined could very easily assemble a comparable "hall of shame" comprised of Linux screen shots. Since practically no one uses Linux as a desktop operating system, however, there would be little point in it.
Hell, from my passing experience with Mozilla alone I feel quite sure I could build a complete "hall of shame" that would compare nicely with the one you linked.
Direction Microsoft is taking: http://www.hevanet.com/peace/microsoft.htm
I fail to see the point of linking to this article. Even a cursory examination of this author's other writings will reveal his history of bias and misrepresentation. This is basically just a somewhat longer version of "M$ sUx0rs, d00d!"
I have yet to be able to find EQUIVALENT information on windows.
Information equivalent to what? I don't understand your comparison. Have you tried the "Help" item under the Start menu? Windows comes with thorough and complete on-line help. This and a great deal more information is also available on the MSDN web site. It's very easy to find.
Where can I find information on making a network boot disk so I can reload windows from another machine that does have a cdrom?
Not being a Windows expert, I'm sure I have no idea, but I would start with bootdisk.com, then Google, then MSDN, then calling Microsoft's technical support hotline.
The wonderful thing about Windows-- and yeah, it's a wonderful thing compared to the anarchy of Linux-- is that there's always somebody you can call. With Linux and related "open source" software, you're limited to trying to track down the author of the original software-- who no longer supports it, naturally-- and hoping that he's nice enough to give you the help you need. In most cases, of course, you are simply ignored, or even verbally abused, rather than receiving any assistance.
With both Microsoft and the Linux whatever-it-is, you get what you pay for. With Microsoft, you pay for and receive help. With the Linux "community," or whatever, you pay for nothing, and you receive nothing in return.
Only problem is, your child stars would age 3-4 years during the making of the movies...
Oh, don't be silly. Even the monster shoot for The Lord of the Rings only lasted 16 months. Remove most of the makeup, post-production, and locations and you could easily shoot two epic-length films in 6-8 months.
I moved to Linux because I was tired of constantly "fiddling" with Windows through the barriers that M$ puts up to "protect" the user from himself.
I often find that the people who hold this opinion are simply people that didn't know how to do it the right way, and so got frustrated with what they perceived as Windows's difficulty and obtuseness.
Macs supposedly work perfectly all the time, but when something does go wrong nobody can fix them.
No, not really. In fact, anybody who knows how to fix a Mac can fix it quite easily; in this way, it's just like Windows. But this takes knowing how to do it, which is another one of those things that frustrates people who lack the knowledge.
Linux, Windows, and the Mac are all quite complex, and difficult to understand at a low level. The difference is that both Windows and the Mac are thoroughly documented, feature-complete, and exhaustively tested. Linux is none of those things.
Linux is best described by that old saying about the singing dog. The remarkable thing is not so much that the dog sings well, but rather that it can sing at all. However, as remarkable as a singing dog is, one would not reasonably expect to replace the lead mezzo soprano with one. Likewise, as much novelty value as Linux carries with it, one would be quite foolish to expect it to do the work of Windows or a Mac.
So, let me get this straight. The fact that you enjoyed LOTR gives you a feeling of superiority for some reason? Is that right?
Hmm.
I could understand feeling that way about Joyce. Anybody who gets through Finnegans Wake in less than a year deserves a medal, in my opinion. I remember thinking I was doing okay until I got to Book III... which is the point where Joyce apparently forgot to have things happen. Hell, even the completion of Delany's Dhalgren is worth a commendation for conspicuous heroism. But LOTR? Not exactly snobbery-inducing material, I'm afraid.
Copyright holders currently have no affirmative requirements to ensure their work enters the public domain.
That's true, but it would be easy to imagine a situation in which that particular aspect of the law is reinterpreted if all publicly available copies of a work are protected by encryption. In that case, the absence of an action on the part of the copyright holder to ensure that their work becomes available in unencrypted form upon the expiration of the copyright would amount to a guarantee that such would not occur. That's a new wrinkle, and it wouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine a court placing a new burden on copyright holders in response to it.
The key word in my sentence, of course, was "might."
In a previous post I've already mentioned the example that anything that was only released on DIVX is essentially lost to the public domain.
I am unaware of any such work that was only released in that format and that does not exist in an unprotected form.
About the only fix I can think of, is to go back to an archival registration requirement when the copyrighted item will be protected by DRM.
Which is why I said I can imagine the court deciding to require copyright holders to ensure that an unencrypted version of their works becomes available upon expiration of the copyright. Doing so by placing a physical copy with the Library of Congress places a heavy burden, while requiring a expiration date in DRM rights packages does not.
Lawrence Lessig has proposed...
Lessig's liberal ideas (and I mean that term literally, not pejoratively) on copyright and other intellectual property matters are well known. I would recommend taking his opinions with a grain of salt; they certainly have value, but they would be well-served by a more balanced and conservative approach.
In my opinion, Lessig's biggest shortcoming is that he ignores, or at best trivializes, the fact that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works via Napster and its successors has reached levels undreamt of as few as five years ago. A world with no technology for copy prevention is a world that must work on the honor system. As long as otherwise law-abiding adults are willing to ignore the expressly granted rights of copyright holders and distribute works without permission, DRM is inevitable.
If you can figure out how to get us back to an honor-system world, I'd love to hear about it. Until then, though, the question won't be whether we have DRM or not, but rather which system or systems.
I'm used to DRM systems that contact the host on a regular basis to see if the details have changed.
;-) (Of course, I'm just kidding. I just wanted to point out that it's kind of silly to talk about how things might be, when that might is so far removed from the present reality.)
That's what makes Intertrust different from lots of other DRM systems. It doesn't include any such requirement. It's optional, of course; for example, a system built on Intertrust might allow you to buy individual viewings of a movie, but that system would really just be putting a pretty user interface on what is essentially the same set of transactions: you buy an authorization, use the authorization to retrieve the rights package, and then execute the rights package on the media.
So from the sounds of it InterTrust has some type of push mechanism where you have to update the rights package during a customer driven transaction, but the client does not have to actually access the server.
Nope. Downloading a rights package is a one-time deal. There's no mechanism for the licensing authority to contact the client, only for the client to contact the licensing authority to download new rights packages. There's no "push" involved.
Maybe an analogy will make this more clear. Let's say you go to the record store, and are given the option of buying various rights packages for a given CD. You can buy the unlimited rights package for the CD ($19.99), which lets you listen all you want, forever. Or you can buy a package that lets you listen all you want for a month ($4.99), or you can buy a package that lets you listen only once ($0.25). In any case, you go home with the CD and an index card with instructions on it. The card may say, "You can listen to this CD all you want," or it may say, "You can only listen to this CD one time."
Whichever rights package you bought, you follow the instructions to the letter. Let's say you bought the one-time rights package. After listening to the CD, you decide it's pretty okay, so you go back to the store and buy the one-month rights package. Instead of carrying a new copy of the CD home, you just pay your $5 and bring home a new index card. You follow those instructions to the letter again, and listen to the CD all you want for the next month. You can then choose to keep buying limited rights packages for as long as you like, or you can just buy the unlimited rights package. If you think you'll be sick of the CD after two months and will never listen to it again, you can just buy two one-month packages and save some money.
That's exactly how Intertrust's system works, except it's all data. The client (which is embedded hardware or software) follows the instructions on the rights package. Once you've downloaded the rights package (or bought the index card), you've got everything you need to use the media.
The fact that InterTrust does not currently "automatically" update the rights package is probably a good thing (from the user rights standpoint), but I would not count upon it remaining that way.
You can count on it until they fundamentally reengineer the Intertrust system design. It's just not built that way.
But if you want to hold up the possibility that they might do it as a reason why Intertrust should not be adopted, go ahead. Meanwhile, I'll argue that you might call somebody a dirty name in a Slashdot post, and get your posting privileges revoked.
I find it inconceivable that you persist in claiming that the law you just quoted "expressly permits" criticism...
Are you not reading? The law, as quoted, says that the limited use of a work for the purpose of criticism is non-infringing. This is not complex, or ambiguous, or difficult to understand. It goes on to say that a few key factors should be taken into consideration when determining whether a particular use is fair or not, but that doesn't change the fact that the law says that limited use for criticism is explicitly non-infringing.
I don't recall any suits being brought for this reason against Digital Video Espress, LP back when it still existed, and tellingly, now that it does exist, who do I sue when my copy of "Flashdance, the Exclusive DIVX edition" falls out of copyright?
You sue the same entity you would have sued before: the copyright holder. Go right ahead.
The court, however, will almost certainly find no justification for your suit because numerous unprotected analog copies of that movie exist, both in public and in the archives of the copyright holder. The public domain, therefore, on whose behalf you would be filing suit, suffers no harm from the inaccessibility of the data on the discs issued by the now-defunct company.
Which kind of puts the whole "what happens when the copyright expires?" objection to bed, in my book.
But I suppose we ought to believe that this time it will be different, based upon the unsupported opinions of a self-described non-employee of Intertrust who has no vested interest in seeing the technology succeed or fail. Wink, wink.
Dude, I work at a restaurant. I've been a professional chef since I was laid off by my former employer earlier this year. If you think I've got a vested interest in any of this stuff, you've got another thing coming. I just get sick of people who set up straw-man arguments and who-- deliberately or innocently-- misinterpret the law to try to argue that DRM is somehow unjust, unfair, or unlawful.
It's a free country, man. Anything that is not prohibited by the law is allowed. The use of technology to prevent the unlawful copying of copyrighted materials is not prohibited; it's totally legal. But the unauthorized copying of copyrighted works, with the narrow and specifically defined exceptions codified by law, is prohibited. Trying to bend the idea of fair use to fit anything that you might feel an urge to do is just a mockery.
But think of your karma Twirlip, think of your karma... it will progerssively get lower and lower with the more troll mods you get and you can't do anything about that!
Except for the fact that I get many, many more up-mods than down-mods. Spend every one of your five mod points on me every time you get them. I'll still be capped.
You are quite irrelevant to me. You're not even an annoyance. In fact, you're kind of entertaining, in a small way. Keep up the good work.
Title 17 Sec 107 basically states that if an act is deemed as fair use, it is not an infringement of copyright. It doesn't "expressly allow" any particular usage but sets guidelines to determine whether that use is fair use or not.
Wrong. Section 107 reads, in relevant part,
"[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism [...] is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include [...] the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole."
So the limited use of a work for purposes of criticism is, as I said, expressly permitted by law.
Doesn't qualify under Sec. 107, although whether it qualifies under 1008 is an open question at this point.
Of course it isn't. Section 1008 refers to "the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings." If you're trading music with friends, you cannot call that use "noncommercial," because the word "commerce" refers to the exchange of goods or commodities, whether money is involved or not. If you make a recording of a copyrighted work that you own, say so you can carry it around in your car, that use is protected under section 1008 because it's noncommercial. If you give that copy to somebody else, though, that's an exchange of goods-- you exchanged the recording for nothing-- and as such as a commercial transaction. Sharing and trading of copyrighted music is not protected under 1008.
The other thing you're failing to notice is what happens if someone wants to make a perfectly legal "fair use" of a digital recording?
The law provides you with no such right. You can exercise every nonexclusive right under Title 17 using analog technology only, so DRM systems such as Intertrust that prevent the licensee from making bit-for-bit copies of media for fair use purposes are not in violation of the law.
Let's say I want to send a 20 second snippet of a song to a buddy to explain to him why he should or shouldn't buy it. (Criticism) That ought to be permissible under sec.107. How does the rights package allow me to assert my privilege to do this?
Hold a microphone up to the speaker and press "play." Or use analog audio jacks to make a recording. The system will prevent you from using the original digital media for this purpose, but because it doesn't prevent you from using analog copies of the media, it doesn't infringe.
So, we should be expecting those old DIVX disks to unlock after their copyright expires, too?
WTF does that have to do with Intertrust? I think you're confused.
Furthermore, I don't think it's even a given that Intertrust will be around in 95 years or more to unlock all these packages.
Sounds like you're not listening to what I'm saying. This issue has been beaten to death here. I've already responded to all of your questions and objections in this and other postings. If you have new questions, I'll be happy to respond to them, but I'm not interested in simply answering the same three questions over and over for people who aren't reading.
Yes, I certainly do. Oops.
What do the spiders have to do with the movie?
They're kind of a red herring. Seeing spiders fleeing the scenes of the attacks naturally raises the suspicion that they have something to do with what's going on. But as it turns out, the giant spider in the forest, Agragog, has nothing to do with anything. Spiders are deathly afraid of basilisks, and that's why they're seen running away whenever the basilisk struck.
What was up with the car? It was never cleared up. No motive, etc.
The car was enchanted. Enchanted things tend to have minds of their own at times. There's really not much more to it than that.
How about the water? Why does it keep showing up?
The basilisk travels through the water pipes. When it comes out, water gets all over everything.
The attacks seem a bit contrived. Contrived in the lethality.
The basilisk legend is actually real. A real legend, I mean. According to legend, a basilisk was a serpent whose gaze was lethal. The reflected gaze of the basilisk, though, paralyzes rather than killing.
Why? To keep the body count down, of course. In a book written primarily for 12-year-olds, it doesn't do to have characters dropping dead every few chapters.
Mee'sa Dobby? I guess he will be explained in the sequel, which I will probably need to see to resolve a few loose ends.
What loose ends are those? Dobby's a house-elf, and he knows that the Malfoy's have it in for Harry Potter. He tries to warn Harry, but in perversely roundabout ways. At the end of the story, Harry tricks Dobby's owner into giving Dobby a sock, which sets him free-- house-elves are enslaved (quite willingly) until their owners present them with clothes. Your average house-elf takes pride is his work, and would consider being given clothes a shameful failure. But Dobby, because he worked for the slimy and horrible Malfoy family, was happy to be dismissed.
Moreover, I think it was poorly edited and could be vastly improved with a directors cut edition.
This is the director's cut. Chris Columbus, being executive producer, gets the absolutely final say in the cut of the film. There are scenes that were shot but ultimately cut-- which have been saved for the DVD, by the way-- but it was Columbus himself who made those calls.
This is the one-and-only "director's cut" of this film.
No, no. First of all, Chris Columbus isn't being replaced. He's the executive producer, so he gets to choose who directs the films. He's stepping down from directing the third film because he wants to movie his family back to the States for a while. They've been living in London for the past three years working on the first two films, and he needs a break.
He has said, though, that he hopes to come back and direct the fourth film/films.
I quit reading at this point:
And sure enough, just as none of us do anything special by slogging through yet another day, the infant Harry didn't do anything special by living. It was his mother who saved him, sacrificing her life for his.
Anybody who's read the first book-- or, hell, even seen the first movie-- knows that the story is actually quite a bit more complicated than that. I'm not interested in reading an article that fundamentally misinterprets the premise of the books.
The rumour was that they weren't happy with the non-ILM effects, which more-or-less has been confirmed.
That's really not the way things happened.
See, the first movie was filmed in order; the first scene was shot first, and the last scene last. This is not a terribly uncommon thing to do on a long shoot with kids of that age-- 10-12 or so. In fact, if you watch the first movie kinda carefully you can see that the kids grow up just a little through the film. In particular, Rupert Grint's voice starts to change slightly in the middle.
A consequence of this is the fact that some special effects sequences couldn't be started until close to the end of principle photography. Some of the biggest sequences in the movie-- like the Quiddich match, in particular-- were done in about three months. That's just not enough time.
This time around, they did things differently. They shot the most effects-laden scenes first-- everything with Dobby, the Quiddich scenes, the stuff with the basilisk-- first, and shipped them off to the FX houses. They had nine months to do those sequences this time around instead of three. The difference is clear.
So it's not so much that they weren't happy with the FX on the first film because the work was shoddy; it's just that they didn't have enough time in the schedule to do it any better.
The source on this, by the way, is Chris Columbus, in a recent interview with Charlie Rose.
The fact that your wife has any kind of Homer Simpson voice at all, much less a "best" one, really gives me the creeps, dude.
:shudder:
Not only did that scene make it, it was practically the "money shot" of the film. The action sequence in the Chamber is the literal climax of the movie, but the quiet little exchange between Dumbledore and Harry at the end is the emotional resolution. All the moreso when you realize that this was Richard Harris's last performance as Dumbledore. Pretty darned good ending, all around.
Goblet of Fire is easily three times the size of Secrets
That's true, but GOF is kind of modular. For instance, the whole "Quiddich World Cup" section at the beginning of the book could probably be omitted without damaging the story too much, or at least reduced to a couple of lines of exposition later. I love that section and I wouldn't want it cut, but it could be if it were necessary. Some of the Triwizard challenges are the same way. They're really cool, and I'd love to see 'em on the big screen, but they're not completely integral to the plot.
Of course, the right way to do GOF is to film two three-hours movies simultaneously and release one in October (ending with a cliffhanger) and the other in December. If the next two Matrix flicks do well, there's a chance Columbus might choose to do just that, rather than cutting too much of the novel for time.
Is "is fundamentally preoccupied with heavy theological issues" some kind of code for "is boring as all get-out?"
Because if it's not, I don't think I read the same books as you.
No one fucks with me and gets away with it.
So... your bad-ass retaliation is to mod me -1, Troll once every couple of months? Man, do you ever have me shaking in my boots.
Yawn.
One of the big draws (for some people) is the number of choices that they have.
Choice, schmoice. If none of the options work completely or correctly, then your choices are reduced to zero awfully quickly.
It'd be better to have one desktop environment that works than sixty-four that are almost there.
Since Devon absolutely owns the copyright to his own statements, by your own admission he has absolute right to command you not to quote him out of context, or for that matter not to quote him at all.
Nope. Limited quoting for the purpose of criticism is expressly allowed under Title 17. Read the law.
Or do you think your grandiose pronouncement that "only the copyright holder of a work has the right to determine how that work is distributed" only applies to big corporations and not to ordinary blokes like Devon Bowen?
I think that particular grandiose statement is absolutely correct, according to Title 17. The only exceptions are those listed under the article describing fair use, and trading music with friends doesn't qualify.
Or maybe you'll concede that there are exceptions to your apparent belief that copyright is paramount over user rights?
Nope. The law says that a copyright holder has absolute rights over his work, with only the narrow and strictly defined exceptions listed under fair use. How can they get away with this? Copyright is limited in duration.
And BTW, what happens when the copyright runs out on those Intertrust encrypted tunes? Will they automatically unlock into the public domain?
Yes. This will be programmed into the rights package that governs the media's use. This provision is already mandated by law.
Do you still persist in this belief that it's impossible for Intertrust technology to possibly infringe upon a person's existing rights?
Possibly? Sure. Anything's possible. The absence of an Intertrust-like system means it's possible for users to infringe on copyright holders' rights. A gun makes it possible for one person to shoot another. The fact that a thing makes something bad possible doesn't mean that the thing itself is bad, or that it's not better than the absence of that thing.
DRM is justified, both ethically and under law, and it's inevitable. The only question is whether we'll get a good system or a bad one. Intertrust appears, to me, to be a good one.
Okay, we've got idiots coming out of the walls tonight. I know you kids were raised on the computer-generated whatsit, but back in the day we used to do whatcha call "optical compositing." No computers, no digital anything, just a dark room and some film.
Hence the phrase, "more motion-controlled model shots optically composited together than ever before."
All of Babylon 5's special effects were computer-generated and digitally composited. Apart from looking like hammered shit most of the time, they do not even remotely qualify for the title of most complex optical shot ever.
Sheesh. Kids these days.
They also beat the last battle of Return of the Jedi, claiming for a short while, 'most ships on screen in a battle'.
Idiot. The noteworthy fact about ROTJ is that one shot included more motion-controlled model shots optically composited together than ever before. As far as I know, that record still stands.
"Most ships on the screen" doesn't mean a damn thing. But the challenge of optically compositing umpty-bump layers together without having the result look like one big blur is... well, it's more well than you can imagine.