The difference is, they didn't make a special law of 'failure to open a safe on demand' with up to 5 years in jail if they suspect the safe contains terrorist materials (2 years for everything else). "reasonable suspicion of evidence" is the important point; there's no such requirement under RIPA.
There are already laws against perverting the course of justice and hiding or tampering with evidence. The difference is that they have to show some evidence that there's relevant evidence in the safe. If RIPA applied to safes, they'd just have to show you have a safe and won't open it. They only have to have a 'reasonable belief' that you can open it, and having it on your property, or on property in any way associated with you is enough to meet that criteria. That's sufficient to carry up to 5 years in jail, regardless of what's actually in the safe, or what they can demonstrate might be in the safe.
The law is intended to allow them to put suspected terrorists and pedophiles in jail, even when they have no evidence they did anything illegal, and don't have the capability to brute force their encrypted files, and don't have sufficient grounds to charge them with something else. As we can see, once the british justice system get an 'anti-terrorism' power, it immediately becomes a tool to use against everyone.
The laws for patents, copyright and trademarks are all very, very different. They are also very different from physical property laws. lumping them all together is blantantly misleading. Repeat it as often as you want that it's all sort of the same thing, it's just not. Try *reading* those laws sometime. You might as well call rapists murderers because they're both crimes of violence.
he fact that someone had a false positive and denied you access says nothing about whether the means they used are inherently unjust. That was the point.
The DRM problem people are experiencing is not a 'false positive'. It's working exactly as it's designed to do, deny people access to their own data.
But why stop there? Police pull people over when they haven't done anything wrong. Hell, people are detained and stand trial, when they later turn out to be innocent. I guess to be really consistent, you have to flee those countries.
If I lived in a police state, where I was randomly stopped and imprisoned for life for no reason, with no right of appeal and no humans involved in the process, yes I would indeed flee that country. fortunately, I don't live in the US!
Of course, you're not. That wasn't the point. Your point was that you were trying to use an instance of misuse of DRM to generate the phony indignation to make a case against all of it. Bet you wish you knew what argument you were responding to.
You're being deliberately dense, and you've resulted to insulting me to try and make your case. I'm done with you and your trolling.
Intellectual property is a fiction. It's an attempt to conflate non-physical legal protections with property to make them sound better. You have patents, copyright and trade marks. None of them are property, or have the properties of property. With physical property it is clear who has it, and who owns it, as there's only one physical thing. With patents, copyrights and trademarks, very different rules apply to different uses. Intellectual property conflates many different laws into one handy label, when they shouldn't be. It's sloppy thinking.
DRM is a technical measure over-enforcing copyright. It prevents the exercise of fair use. The DRM on the MLB videos is preventing people watching their purchased copies, and the seller has no intention of fixing it. DRM has nothing to do with protecting patents or trade marks, just copyright. Distribution rights are not property.
But since we're playing this bad analogy between physical property and copyright protection, I again point out that after I buy something from a store, and take it home, it's mine to do with as I please. It's my property. If I break criminal law with it, I get investigated and prosecuted by the police. If I break a civil law with it, I get sued by the other party. At no point after I've left the mall do the guards get involved with this.
With DRM, I buy a copy of copyrighted material infected with DRM. The DRM decides what I get to do with my property, regardless of its legality. It decides what computer I play it on. It decides where I can play it. It decides whether I'm allowed to use extracts for parody or news commentary. It's unthinking rules standing over my shoulder, saying yes or no to what I can do with my purchased property, despite all of them being legal.
DRM is poisonous to fair use and normal use, and removing it or telling others how to remove it is prohibited by law. That is wrong. If mall guards did what DRM does, I'd refuse to shop at that mall too. Bet those people who bought the MLB videos wish they hadn't bought them now.
Yes, but I don't get the mall security guards coming home with me after I've made my purchases, standing in my house, and telling me how I'm allowed to use the things I've bought; then after two years preventing me from using them at all because their office got closed by the mall and they can't radio in to ask for permission any more.
Transmission speeds are done in base 10, Mb/s etc. Screen sizes and resolutions are done in base 10. Physical dimensions are done in base 10. The ONLY thing done in base 2 are computer storage sizes. We have units for those; the kibibyte etc. It's clear that one is base 2, and one is base 10. Using a base 10 unit to designate base 2 numbers just because 'it didn't really matter back at the beginning' is frankly bloody stupid. It matters now, and base 2 units should be described properly. We just need to get it done. Keep storage in base 2, as you say it's the only practical choice. But since you're using a base 2 number, you have to use a base 2 unit not a base 10 unit.
You're setting up a straw man by the way with deciweeks. SI units are not about redefining existing concepts; they're about having a consistent name scheme. kilo is times one thousand; mega is times one million. Everywhere but here. Week is not an SI unit, but if it were it'd be seven days as that's how everyone uses it. The ONLY place K- M- and G- are used incorrectly is computer storage. It's time we got over it, and use the proper prefixes.
How about if we redefined the week to have 8 days on computer clocks, to make it easier to store and work with on computers? That's what you're saying we should be doing. Hmm, now I think of it, we already had one time where computer guys took a shortcut with dates, which caused a few problems later on...
Comcast et al built their infrastructrure with public money on public land, and now government regulation allows them to not share it with anybody else. There are huge barriers of entry for others to build alternative infrastructure alongside. This means that many of the providers have a natural monopoly in a given area, and a de-facto monopoly down to cost in others.
The free market can only operate in the absence of monopolies, which is why there needs to be regulation. Government created the regional monopolies in the first place, it's government responsibility to fix them so that customers do indeed have a free market choice. The US government should require open-access at cost to wires laid across public land or with public money, allowing a raft of competitors at the 'last-mile' level. That would then allow customers to descriminate between providers. Without open-access and competition, regulation is the only thing preventing customers in a monopoly area from being screwed.
BT, the near monopoly phone company in the UK, has to provide access at fair cost to it's exchange based DSL infrastructure; at the same rate it's own ISP subsidiary pays. Or, companies can put their own equipment into BT's exchanges, and take over the running of BT's 'last mile' copper phone line to the house. There's been a lot on consolidation in the UK ISP market lately, due to race-to-the-bottom service levels; but due to competition, I was able to switch from my previous DSL provider when they started throttling to one that didn't. I believe that many in the US don't have that choice.
If somebody explains "net neutrality" as "reading your email" while transferring it then congress might get the hint. Bittorrent is a bad choice to argue about because it's more like bait to allow filtering than fight it.
AT&T are already giving the NSA full access to all the systems, not just the phone systems, the NSA have full access to AT&Ts customers' web-browsing and email already. Comcast will hand over all data of a user live via wiretap for $1000, no questions asked. Congress, as a whole, don't give a flying monkey or even actively supports this.
The days of privacy in the US are rapidly disappearing; soon it will be corporations watching all of you in detail, not just the secret police. That's assuming you haven't voluntarily already given it up by using services that include snooping provisions like gmail.
1) Orange Box purchased through Steam (online) is NOT REGION LOCKED IN ANY WAY.
Unless you try to buy an out of region version, then it prevents you buying it. Specifically, steam will only allow you to buy games with a card with an address that your IP is in. so, if I'm from the UK, and decide to buy the US version of steam games because it's cheaper, or released earlier, I'm denied for not having a US credit card even if my machine and I are physically in the US at the time. This wasn't needed for the orange box, but did apply to bioshock - sold cheaper and earlier to US IP's, for the exact same bytes.
I was pissed when I bought half-life 2 at retail, and couldn't play it for hours because of the overloaded steam servers wouldn't unlock it, and that because my retail copy was not resellable due to the non-transferable key, and the need - at launch - to have to keep the retail disc in the drive AND sign-on online. I didn't buy another steam game for the years after that; I went out of my way to avoid them. I reluctantly bought the orange box via steam to get into the TF2 open beta, and was pleasantly surprised by portal when it launched. The launch went smoothly, and i was finally starting to accept the advantages of steam for the loss of my right of resale (which is largely disappearing universally with PC games).
Then they pull this shit, and demonstrate that they really do think they still own their games after you've bought them. OK, they're only screwing over some legitimate customers today, such as russians who move out of russia. Who's to say that they're not going to do this later to everybody else for some bullshit reason? Screw Valve, screw steam. They're never seeing another penny of my money again.
You misunderstand me. I am an atheist; I believe it is creationists that exploit scientific sounding arguments to spread lies and misunderstanding, under the guise of legitimate dissent.
Those who believe the earth is 6000 years old are a sub set of creationists; young-earth creationists. They only accept conclusions that match those they've already come to from a very selectively literal interpretation of the bible. If it's not in the bible, or derivable from the bible, it can't be trusted. If it conflicts with the bible, it's wrong. The 6000 years old thing isn't in the bible itself by the way; it's derived by counting up all the generations of people mentioned in the bible, then hand-waving average ages to come up with a total length of time since genesis. These people simply aren't vulnerable to a logical or scientific counter-argument, as they simply ignore both as inconsistent with their existing world-view.
Many creationists - not all, but most - take the bible literally to some extent. The bible says God created the world, and everything on it. Therefore any scientific discovery or theory to the contrary must be wrong, because God did it, because the bible says so. Some of these construct logical sounding arguments, trying to exploit gaps in knowledge or plain contradictory papers to sway the undecided or gullible that God did it. Ths act is a direct attempt to pull away one of their logical-sounding crutches, and is to be both applauded and mourned at the same time.
It's good that scientists continue to expand our knowledge and understanding. It's bad that they have to resort to things like this to prevent non-scientific believers exploiting science's greatest strength - legitimate dissent and questioning of theories - to spread confusion and flat out lies.
Imagine this Microsoft Real World: You use Windows at work, hear about a cool new show, but can't look up anything about it, because your browser been locked down by the domain administrator to stop you visiting personal websites in office hours. You try to schedule the recording via your Windows Mobile smartphone, but there's no cell signal and the battery dies shortly after from the power drain of trying to use it with your work encryption on the wireless.
You come home to your XBox, which has tried to record all of your previous TV shows, but silently stopped working because it couldn't update the guide data, same as MCE. You spend some time trying to force it to download the guide data from your perfectly good home internet connection, but only a reboot fixes it, for no good reason. Except there's now no list of the failed to record shows so no information to try to manually reschedule a repeat broadcast with. You finally manually schedule that cool new show you wanted, and then you find out the broadcaster has flagged it with the do-not-record marker, and your xbox won't even allow you to record it. You decide to try and watch one of your previously recorded shows, only to find the last 5 minutes has been lost because it screwed up the clock. Again.
You finally decide to download that cool new show via bittorrent, made harder by the artificial TCP connections limit imposed by microsoft on windows and your ISPs packet throttling. You'd save it to your Windows Home Server in the closet, but the mofo died from overheating in your poorly ventilated closet, and when you try to reinstall you've hit your activation limit. You'd fire up your Windows Media Center computer and watch it from there, but MCE sucks at sharing media with other MCE boxes, and besides, you don't have the codec installed. You try watching it off the Xbox, but it just red-ringed of death from overheating because you left it running all day.
You give up on TV, and go to check your email, only to find out you've just had your account cancelled by the only ISP in your area for going over your 1GB a day limit on your unlimited super-amazing mega-expensive account, and you've just been sued by viacom for copyright infringement for downloading a show you could have watched on TV if you didn't have to work 14 hours a day to pay for your bandwidth bill and windows licences.
Considering that the vast majority of people with a xbox 360 will also have a TV in the first place to plug it into, which is also covered by the TV license requirement, I don't see it being a huge issue. For those that don't, they just need to demonstrate the lack of an aerial and thus lack the capability to receive broadcast TV, to legitimately not buy one.
I should correct myself there having re-read my original comment. I meant 'far more channels' as compared to analog broadcasting. There will be some more digital channels than now, I just meant that 40-50 odd channels is a lot more than people only receiving analog transmission in the Uk atm!
Yes, I'm commenting on the UK - bad habit to use analog spelling! As I understand it, the existing overly-filled muxes, such as those with channel 4 and itv will get spread out a bit more, and have more bandwidth similar to BBC, thus removing the need for the very aggressive MPEG2 compression on those channels.
HD channels will be broadcast in parallel to the existing channels; current plans will initially involve a mini-HD service from the BBC, with a few hours a night broadcast in MPEG2 HD. Additional channels will come on when the entire analog system is turned off after 2012; I'm told each current analog channel can support 3-4 SD digital channels with reasonable compression, or ~2 HD channels in MPEG4-AVC or the like. Additional HD services will probably have to be in an mpeg4 varient over DVB-T - similar to the australian system I believe. This will require a 'freeview 2' service or somesuch, with new equipment needed for the extra HD channels from 2012. There won't be room to broadcast everything in HD using the available TV bandwidth, even with analog completely off, so it'll probably just be a half-dozen HD channels or so for a while, with all the other fluff in SD.
I doubt there will be far more channels, just some extra HD eventually, with extra bandwidth for the important SD ones. The better coverage will come from massively ramping up the power of the HD channels when they don't have to worry about overriding the analog channels.
Digital signal transmission is currently at 2 to 5% maximum power so that it doesn't cause interference with the analog signal. as the analog transmitters are turned off, they can ramp up the digital transmission power levels to that currently enjoyed by analog transmitters. There will also be much more bandwidth freed up that the analog signals used, allowing more bandwidth (i.e. less compression to start with) for existing channels, and new channels such as broadcasting HD channels in mpeg4 as opposed to the wasteful mpeg2 used for SD broadcasts. The end result will be far more channels, and a far better quality in a given area than analog gave, and even better coverage overall, including areas that can't currently receive digital and only get weak analog signals.
What do you think storm routes over, pink ponies? Storm is a collection of malicious software leeching bandwidth, storage and processing power from poorly maintained PCs connected via the existing internet infrastructure, using existing protocols and providers.
It's a remarkably effective and populated P2P network running on top of the existing one, mainly due to significantly poor maintenance by a *lot* of PC owners. But nothing truly inventive, just big.
Oh, I certainly don't claim it's a cut-and-dried answer one way or the other; files linked on a webpage, and stored on the same host are also generally considered infringing, for the reason you cite - authorization of distribution is a reserved right, as you say.
However, my main point was it's a contentious point which has been judged both ways in court, and often is accompanied by what looks like outright lies from the plaintiffs to sell their interpretation of the law to the judge. It was worth fighting the case, given the ambiguity. She didn't help herself though, and she did rather encounter a jury of idiots.
I don't agree that it wasn't a case worth fighting. They had no evidence that she committed any copyright infringement. Only that her computer, probably at her direction 'made files available' for copyright infringement. The judge changed his mind on the basis of an argument misrepresenting another court case, to allow making available to also be classified as copyright infringement in the jury instructions. Without that jury instruction, it's entirely possible she would have been found not liable, as the music company didn't even look for infringement, just for the possibility of it.
In that light, I expect all photocopiers to now be removed from US libraries, as they are also making available books and a means to copy them.
However, I do agree that if someone were to be found liable for copyright infringement for non-profit and personal use, the fine should represent actual losses plus a bit, rather than a hundred times them as a deterrence. The scale should distinguish between commercial large scale infringement for profit, and small scale personal infringement.
To draw a a parallel with the drug laws in my country, small possession for personal use of illegal drugs is treated a lot less harshly than running a drug distribution business. A punishment, increasing for repeat offenders; but not a life-destroying punishment for a first, small personal offence.
Too right. I used thunderbird for years for my email, but I've finally given up and gone back to the beast at work. I use outlook 2007 to combine my emails, calendar and task list.
1) I can flag IMAP emails for follow up, and they show up in my task list (I'd like to be able to actually drag-and-copy an email into my task list, rather than just link em, but nothing's perfect)
2) I can list tasks by due date under calendar days. This is a killer feature for me.
3) I can drag and drop tasks into appointments on the calendar, and vice versa, as well as dragging tasks to later days and appointments around. This seemless mixing of appointments and tasks and days, and linking to emails, which are then synced with my PDA makes scheduling my days and weeks so much easier it's not funny.
We're in the process of moving from a linux based IMAP email server to an exchange system, so we can implement shared calendars and address books through outlook. 70% of my servers are linux based. If there was truly a viable alternative to exchange+outlook+outlook web access (and I've tried out over a dozen, including zimbra and scalix), I'd be taking it.
Fair enough, though RSS is not always the appropriate solution, especially for non-tech savvy people. However I'm NOT the man running the mailing list, it's someone else on my ISP. Because some numpty who deliberately subscribed to one couldn't be arsed to unsubscribe but just hit the 'this is spam' handy button to make it go away, I, and literally thousands of other companies were blocked by hotmail for days. Doesn't bother me - but it bothers the parents of the children at my boarding school who now can't get mail from their little'uns - and they expect ME to fix it with a magic wand.
how many of you so called sysadmins would be out of a job if there would be no spam?
Not me, I've plenty of other work to be doing. A reliable and spam-free email service, where I don't have to rely on legitimate senders adhering to RFC's quite so strictly would mean I'd have more time to spend doing *productive* work adding new services instead of bugfixing weird compatibility problems and playing who's-got-the-broken-firewall-in-the-middle.
I'd never advocate killing a spammer. But I too, am finding it hard to be sad he's dead. as a sysadmin, I spend anything up to a days-worth of my time a week dealing with the fallout from spam. The users that complain about legitimate email that's flagged as possibly spam, even though it IS really spam from someone they know. The users that complain about spam that isn't caught by the filters, a much larger group. The overseas user from hong kong who I've just spent a month working with, working with 3 different ISPs to try and track down his particular oddball problem negotiating our anti-spam defences. Hotmail, blocking my entirely legitimate leased line ISP's mail server for 3 days because some luser reported someone else's legit mailing list as spam. Again.
I think about the millions of hours wasted every year in my country by mail admins on dealing with this crap, the huge amount of money spent on unnecessary bandwidth and mail server capacity, the unimaginable amount of time spent trying to block owned pcs, or clean them of their spam-spewing infections.
Yes, he was no eponymous third world dictator torturing and murdering his citizens. And yet, given the millions of lives he's stolen so much time from, the massive waste of billions of pounds to support his millions in profit extracted from a handful of idiots. I'm not sorry he's dead.
The patents are a meaningless threat in the EU at this time, as software patents are currently not legal or enforceable across the EU. Given that, the EU antitrust court is unlikely to do anything with regards such threats that are pretty much only relevent within the US. Fraid you're stuck with needing the DOJ to instigate antitrust proceedings. I share your lack of belief that the DOJ will actually do anything.
Because it entrenches existing priviledge and prevents people of the 'wrong sort' being able to work their way up to better things. It permanently disenfranchises the old, female and minority workers from getting a fair chance at a job they have the skills to do, in a country which prides itself on supposedly being fair, just, and given all an equal chance to rise on merit.
As a question, it's right up there with 'why should I be forced to let blacks into my restaurant?'
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The difference is, they didn't make a special law of 'failure to open a safe on demand' with up to 5 years in jail if they suspect the safe contains terrorist materials (2 years for everything else). "reasonable suspicion of evidence" is the important point; there's no such requirement under RIPA.
There are already laws against perverting the course of justice and hiding or tampering with evidence. The difference is that they have to show some evidence that there's relevant evidence in the safe. If RIPA applied to safes, they'd just have to show you have a safe and won't open it. They only have to have a 'reasonable belief' that you can open it, and having it on your property, or on property in any way associated with you is enough to meet that criteria. That's sufficient to carry up to 5 years in jail, regardless of what's actually in the safe, or what they can demonstrate might be in the safe.
The law is intended to allow them to put suspected terrorists and pedophiles in jail, even when they have no evidence they did anything illegal, and don't have the capability to brute force their encrypted files, and don't have sufficient grounds to charge them with something else. As we can see, once the british justice system get an 'anti-terrorism' power, it immediately becomes a tool to use against everyone.
The laws for patents, copyright and trademarks are all very, very different. They are also very different from physical property laws. lumping them all together is blantantly misleading. Repeat it as often as you want that it's all sort of the same thing, it's just not. Try *reading* those laws sometime. You might as well call rapists murderers because they're both crimes of violence.
he fact that someone had a false positive and denied you access says nothing about whether the means they used are inherently unjust. That was the point.
The DRM problem people are experiencing is not a 'false positive'. It's working exactly as it's designed to do, deny people access to their own data.
But why stop there? Police pull people over when they haven't done anything wrong. Hell, people are detained and stand trial, when they later turn out to be innocent. I guess to be really consistent, you have to flee those countries.
If I lived in a police state, where I was randomly stopped and imprisoned for life for no reason, with no right of appeal and no humans involved in the process, yes I would indeed flee that country. fortunately, I don't live in the US!
Of course, you're not. That wasn't the point. Your point was that you were trying to use an instance of misuse of DRM to generate the phony indignation to make a case against all of it. Bet you wish you knew what argument you were responding to.
You're being deliberately dense, and you've resulted to insulting me to try and make your case. I'm done with you and your trolling.
Intellectual property is a fiction. It's an attempt to conflate non-physical legal protections with property to make them sound better. You have patents, copyright and trade marks. None of them are property, or have the properties of property. With physical property it is clear who has it, and who owns it, as there's only one physical thing. With patents, copyrights and trademarks, very different rules apply to different uses. Intellectual property conflates many different laws into one handy label, when they shouldn't be. It's sloppy thinking.
DRM is a technical measure over-enforcing copyright. It prevents the exercise of fair use. The DRM on the MLB videos is preventing people watching their purchased copies, and the seller has no intention of fixing it. DRM has nothing to do with protecting patents or trade marks, just copyright. Distribution rights are not property.
But since we're playing this bad analogy between physical property and copyright protection, I again point out that after I buy something from a store, and take it home, it's mine to do with as I please. It's my property. If I break criminal law with it, I get investigated and prosecuted by the police. If I break a civil law with it, I get sued by the other party. At no point after I've left the mall do the guards get involved with this.
With DRM, I buy a copy of copyrighted material infected with DRM. The DRM decides what I get to do with my property, regardless of its legality. It decides what computer I play it on. It decides where I can play it. It decides whether I'm allowed to use extracts for parody or news commentary. It's unthinking rules standing over my shoulder, saying yes or no to what I can do with my purchased property, despite all of them being legal.
DRM is poisonous to fair use and normal use, and removing it or telling others how to remove it is prohibited by law. That is wrong. If mall guards did what DRM does, I'd refuse to shop at that mall too. Bet those people who bought the MLB videos wish they hadn't bought them now.
Yes, but I don't get the mall security guards coming home with me after I've made my purchases, standing in my house, and telling me how I'm allowed to use the things I've bought; then after two years preventing me from using them at all because their office got closed by the mall and they can't radio in to ask for permission any more.
Transmission speeds are done in base 10, Mb/s etc. Screen sizes and resolutions are done in base 10. Physical dimensions are done in base 10. The ONLY thing done in base 2 are computer storage sizes. We have units for those; the kibibyte etc. It's clear that one is base 2, and one is base 10. Using a base 10 unit to designate base 2 numbers just because 'it didn't really matter back at the beginning' is frankly bloody stupid. It matters now, and base 2 units should be described properly. We just need to get it done. Keep storage in base 2, as you say it's the only practical choice. But since you're using a base 2 number, you have to use a base 2 unit not a base 10 unit.
You're setting up a straw man by the way with deciweeks. SI units are not about redefining existing concepts; they're about having a consistent name scheme. kilo is times one thousand; mega is times one million. Everywhere but here. Week is not an SI unit, but if it were it'd be seven days as that's how everyone uses it. The ONLY place K- M- and G- are used incorrectly is computer storage. It's time we got over it, and use the proper prefixes.
How about if we redefined the week to have 8 days on computer clocks, to make it easier to store and work with on computers? That's what you're saying we should be doing. Hmm, now I think of it, we already had one time where computer guys took a shortcut with dates, which caused a few problems later on...
Comcast et al built their infrastructrure with public money on public land, and now government regulation allows them to not share it with anybody else. There are huge barriers of entry for others to build alternative infrastructure alongside. This means that many of the providers have a natural monopoly in a given area, and a de-facto monopoly down to cost in others.
The free market can only operate in the absence of monopolies, which is why there needs to be regulation. Government created the regional monopolies in the first place, it's government responsibility to fix them so that customers do indeed have a free market choice. The US government should require open-access at cost to wires laid across public land or with public money, allowing a raft of competitors at the 'last-mile' level. That would then allow customers to descriminate between providers. Without open-access and competition, regulation is the only thing preventing customers in a monopoly area from being screwed.
BT, the near monopoly phone company in the UK, has to provide access at fair cost to it's exchange based DSL infrastructure; at the same rate it's own ISP subsidiary pays. Or, companies can put their own equipment into BT's exchanges, and take over the running of BT's 'last mile' copper phone line to the house. There's been a lot on consolidation in the UK ISP market lately, due to race-to-the-bottom service levels; but due to competition, I was able to switch from my previous DSL provider when they started throttling to one that didn't. I believe that many in the US don't have that choice.
If somebody explains "net neutrality" as "reading your email" while transferring it then congress might get the hint. Bittorrent is a bad choice to argue about because it's more like bait to allow filtering than fight it.
AT&T are already giving the NSA full access to all the systems, not just the phone systems, the NSA have full access to AT&Ts customers' web-browsing and email already. Comcast will hand over all data of a user live via wiretap for $1000, no questions asked. Congress, as a whole, don't give a flying monkey or even actively supports this.
The days of privacy in the US are rapidly disappearing; soon it will be corporations watching all of you in detail, not just the secret police. That's assuming you haven't voluntarily already given it up by using services that include snooping provisions like gmail.
1) Orange Box purchased through Steam (online) is NOT REGION LOCKED IN ANY WAY.
Unless you try to buy an out of region version, then it prevents you buying it. Specifically, steam will only allow you to buy games with a card with an address that your IP is in. so, if I'm from the UK, and decide to buy the US version of steam games because it's cheaper, or released earlier, I'm denied for not having a US credit card even if my machine and I are physically in the US at the time. This wasn't needed for the orange box, but did apply to bioshock - sold cheaper and earlier to US IP's, for the exact same bytes.
I was pissed when I bought half-life 2 at retail, and couldn't play it for hours because of the overloaded steam servers wouldn't unlock it, and that because my retail copy was not resellable due to the non-transferable key, and the need - at launch - to have to keep the retail disc in the drive AND sign-on online. I didn't buy another steam game for the years after that; I went out of my way to avoid them. I reluctantly bought the orange box via steam to get into the TF2 open beta, and was pleasantly surprised by portal when it launched. The launch went smoothly, and i was finally starting to accept the advantages of steam for the loss of my right of resale (which is largely disappearing universally with PC games).
Then they pull this shit, and demonstrate that they really do think they still own their games after you've bought them. OK, they're only screwing over some legitimate customers today, such as russians who move out of russia. Who's to say that they're not going to do this later to everybody else for some bullshit reason? Screw Valve, screw steam. They're never seeing another penny of my money again.
Well, since all software patents are currently non-enforceable in the EU anyway, does it matter?
You misunderstand me. I am an atheist; I believe it is creationists that exploit scientific sounding arguments to spread lies and misunderstanding, under the guise of legitimate dissent.
Those who believe the earth is 6000 years old are a sub set of creationists; young-earth creationists. They only accept conclusions that match those they've already come to from a very selectively literal interpretation of the bible. If it's not in the bible, or derivable from the bible, it can't be trusted. If it conflicts with the bible, it's wrong. The 6000 years old thing isn't in the bible itself by the way; it's derived by counting up all the generations of people mentioned in the bible, then hand-waving average ages to come up with a total length of time since genesis. These people simply aren't vulnerable to a logical or scientific counter-argument, as they simply ignore both as inconsistent with their existing world-view.
Many creationists - not all, but most - take the bible literally to some extent. The bible says God created the world, and everything on it. Therefore any scientific discovery or theory to the contrary must be wrong, because God did it, because the bible says so. Some of these construct logical sounding arguments, trying to exploit gaps in knowledge or plain contradictory papers to sway the undecided or gullible that God did it. Ths act is a direct attempt to pull away one of their logical-sounding crutches, and is to be both applauded and mourned at the same time.
It's good that scientists continue to expand our knowledge and understanding. It's bad that they have to resort to things like this to prevent non-scientific believers exploiting science's greatest strength - legitimate dissent and questioning of theories - to spread confusion and flat out lies.
Imagine this Microsoft Real World: You use Windows at work, hear about a cool new show, but can't look up anything about it, because your browser been locked down by the domain administrator to stop you visiting personal websites in office hours. You try to schedule the recording via your Windows Mobile smartphone, but there's no cell signal and the battery dies shortly after from the power drain of trying to use it with your work encryption on the wireless.
You come home to your XBox, which has tried to record all of your previous TV shows, but silently stopped working because it couldn't update the guide data, same as MCE. You spend some time trying to force it to download the guide data from your perfectly good home internet connection, but only a reboot fixes it, for no good reason. Except there's now no list of the failed to record shows so no information to try to manually reschedule a repeat broadcast with. You finally manually schedule that cool new show you wanted, and then you find out the broadcaster has flagged it with the do-not-record marker, and your xbox won't even allow you to record it. You decide to try and watch one of your previously recorded shows, only to find the last 5 minutes has been lost because it screwed up the clock. Again.
You finally decide to download that cool new show via bittorrent, made harder by the artificial TCP connections limit imposed by microsoft on windows and your ISPs packet throttling. You'd save it to your Windows Home Server in the closet, but the mofo died from overheating in your poorly ventilated closet, and when you try to reinstall you've hit your activation limit. You'd fire up your Windows Media Center computer and watch it from there, but MCE sucks at sharing media with other MCE boxes, and besides, you don't have the codec installed. You try watching it off the Xbox, but it just red-ringed of death from overheating because you left it running all day.
You give up on TV, and go to check your email, only to find out you've just had your account cancelled by the only ISP in your area for going over your 1GB a day limit on your unlimited super-amazing mega-expensive account, and you've just been sued by viacom for copyright infringement for downloading a show you could have watched on TV if you didn't have to work 14 hours a day to pay for your bandwidth bill and windows licences.
Welcome to the modern world of digital media.
Considering that the vast majority of people with a xbox 360 will also have a TV in the first place to plug it into, which is also covered by the TV license requirement, I don't see it being a huge issue. For those that don't, they just need to demonstrate the lack of an aerial and thus lack the capability to receive broadcast TV, to legitimately not buy one.
I should correct myself there having re-read my original comment. I meant 'far more channels' as compared to analog broadcasting. There will be some more digital channels than now, I just meant that 40-50 odd channels is a lot more than people only receiving analog transmission in the Uk atm!
Yes, I'm commenting on the UK - bad habit to use analog spelling! As I understand it, the existing overly-filled muxes, such as those with channel 4 and itv will get spread out a bit more, and have more bandwidth similar to BBC, thus removing the need for the very aggressive MPEG2 compression on those channels.
HD channels will be broadcast in parallel to the existing channels; current plans will initially involve a mini-HD service from the BBC, with a few hours a night broadcast in MPEG2 HD. Additional channels will come on when the entire analog system is turned off after 2012; I'm told each current analog channel can support 3-4 SD digital channels with reasonable compression, or ~2 HD channels in MPEG4-AVC or the like. Additional HD services will probably have to be in an mpeg4 varient over DVB-T - similar to the australian system I believe. This will require a 'freeview 2' service or somesuch, with new equipment needed for the extra HD channels from 2012. There won't be room to broadcast everything in HD using the available TV bandwidth, even with analog completely off, so it'll probably just be a half-dozen HD channels or so for a while, with all the other fluff in SD.
I doubt there will be far more channels, just some extra HD eventually, with extra bandwidth for the important SD ones. The better coverage will come from massively ramping up the power of the HD channels when they don't have to worry about overriding the analog channels.
Digital signal transmission is currently at 2 to 5% maximum power so that it doesn't cause interference with the analog signal. as the analog transmitters are turned off, they can ramp up the digital transmission power levels to that currently enjoyed by analog transmitters. There will also be much more bandwidth freed up that the analog signals used, allowing more bandwidth (i.e. less compression to start with) for existing channels, and new channels such as broadcasting HD channels in mpeg4 as opposed to the wasteful mpeg2 used for SD broadcasts. The end result will be far more channels, and a far better quality in a given area than analog gave, and even better coverage overall, including areas that can't currently receive digital and only get weak analog signals.
i can't WAIT until analog is fully turned off.
What do you think storm routes over, pink ponies? Storm is a collection of malicious software leeching bandwidth, storage and processing power from poorly maintained PCs connected via the existing internet infrastructure, using existing protocols and providers.
It's a remarkably effective and populated P2P network running on top of the existing one, mainly due to significantly poor maintenance by a *lot* of PC owners. But nothing truly inventive, just big.
Oh, I certainly don't claim it's a cut-and-dried answer one way or the other; files linked on a webpage, and stored on the same host are also generally considered infringing, for the reason you cite - authorization of distribution is a reserved right, as you say.
However, my main point was it's a contentious point which has been judged both ways in court, and often is accompanied by what looks like outright lies from the plaintiffs to sell their interpretation of the law to the judge. It was worth fighting the case, given the ambiguity. She didn't help herself though, and she did rather encounter a jury of idiots.
I don't agree that it wasn't a case worth fighting. They had no evidence that she committed any copyright infringement. Only that her computer, probably at her direction 'made files available' for copyright infringement. The judge changed his mind on the basis of an argument misrepresenting another court case, to allow making available to also be classified as copyright infringement in the jury instructions. Without that jury instruction, it's entirely possible she would have been found not liable, as the music company didn't even look for infringement, just for the possibility of it.
In that light, I expect all photocopiers to now be removed from US libraries, as they are also making available books and a means to copy them.
However, I do agree that if someone were to be found liable for copyright infringement for non-profit and personal use, the fine should represent actual losses plus a bit, rather than a hundred times them as a deterrence. The scale should distinguish between commercial large scale infringement for profit, and small scale personal infringement.
To draw a a parallel with the drug laws in my country, small possession for personal use of illegal drugs is treated a lot less harshly than running a drug distribution business. A punishment, increasing for repeat offenders; but not a life-destroying punishment for a first, small personal offence.
Too right. I used thunderbird for years for my email, but I've finally given up and gone back to the beast at work. I use outlook 2007 to combine my emails, calendar and task list.
1) I can flag IMAP emails for follow up, and they show up in my task list (I'd like to be able to actually drag-and-copy an email into my task list, rather than just link em, but nothing's perfect)
2) I can list tasks by due date under calendar days. This is a killer feature for me.
3) I can drag and drop tasks into appointments on the calendar, and vice versa, as well as dragging tasks to later days and appointments around. This seemless mixing of appointments and tasks and days, and linking to emails, which are then synced with my PDA makes scheduling my days and weeks so much easier it's not funny.
We're in the process of moving from a linux based IMAP email server to an exchange system, so we can implement shared calendars and address books through outlook. 70% of my servers are linux based. If there was truly a viable alternative to exchange+outlook+outlook web access (and I've tried out over a dozen, including zimbra and scalix), I'd be taking it.
Fair enough, though RSS is not always the appropriate solution, especially for non-tech savvy people. However I'm NOT the man running the mailing list, it's someone else on my ISP. Because some numpty who deliberately subscribed to one couldn't be arsed to unsubscribe but just hit the 'this is spam' handy button to make it go away, I, and literally thousands of other companies were blocked by hotmail for days. Doesn't bother me - but it bothers the parents of the children at my boarding school who now can't get mail from their little'uns - and they expect ME to fix it with a magic wand.
how many of you so called sysadmins would be out of a job if there would be no spam?
Not me, I've plenty of other work to be doing. A reliable and spam-free email service, where I don't have to rely on legitimate senders adhering to RFC's quite so strictly would mean I'd have more time to spend doing *productive* work adding new services instead of bugfixing weird compatibility problems and playing who's-got-the-broken-firewall-in-the-middle.
I'd never advocate killing a spammer. But I too, am finding it hard to be sad he's dead. as a sysadmin, I spend anything up to a days-worth of my time a week dealing with the fallout from spam. The users that complain about legitimate email that's flagged as possibly spam, even though it IS really spam from someone they know. The users that complain about spam that isn't caught by the filters, a much larger group. The overseas user from hong kong who I've just spent a month working with, working with 3 different ISPs to try and track down his particular oddball problem negotiating our anti-spam defences. Hotmail, blocking my entirely legitimate leased line ISP's mail server for 3 days because some luser reported someone else's legit mailing list as spam. Again.
I think about the millions of hours wasted every year in my country by mail admins on dealing with this crap, the huge amount of money spent on unnecessary bandwidth and mail server capacity, the unimaginable amount of time spent trying to block owned pcs, or clean them of their spam-spewing infections.
Yes, he was no eponymous third world dictator torturing and murdering his citizens. And yet, given the millions of lives he's stolen so much time from, the massive waste of billions of pounds to support his millions in profit extracted from a handful of idiots. I'm not sorry he's dead.
The patents are a meaningless threat in the EU at this time, as software patents are currently not legal or enforceable across the EU. Given that, the EU antitrust court is unlikely to do anything with regards such threats that are pretty much only relevent within the US. Fraid you're stuck with needing the DOJ to instigate antitrust proceedings. I share your lack of belief that the DOJ will actually do anything.
Because it entrenches existing priviledge and prevents people of the 'wrong sort' being able to work their way up to better things. It permanently disenfranchises the old, female and minority workers from getting a fair chance at a job they have the skills to do, in a country which prides itself on supposedly being fair, just, and given all an equal chance to rise on merit.
As a question, it's right up there with 'why should I be forced to let blacks into my restaurant?'