The most important way to handle this would be for the Artist's to form their own distribution companies and take the Media giants out of the picture. Sell your song, movie or picture. Forget worrying about what its released on, because that just limits your market.
I can think of several very good reasons why you wouldn't want to do this. They all boil down basically to this very simple truth: If I'm an artist (of whatever stripe -- moviemaker, songwriter, painter, whatever), the last thing in the world I would want to do is be forced to be a businessman. Every minute I have to spend dealing with booking agents, gallery owners, theater owners and the like is actually about five minutes I can't spend doing what I enjoy (one minute to psych myself up for something I'd really rather not be doing, one minute to deal with the suits, and three minutes to unpsych myself and get back into a frame of mind where I feel like Creating Art again). --
- The Heinlein juveniles (duh) - Anything in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (I'd start with one of the earlier books, like Mort or Equal Rites). This is fantasy but still funny and accessible - My wife recommends Pratchett's juvenile series (starting with "Only You Can Save Mankind") but I haven't read them yet. You might also check out "Good Omens," which he wrote with Neil Gaiman - Short story anthologies, especially older ones. I would look through them first just in case, so you can recommend some stories she might want to skip for a year or two. - R. A. Lafferty is one of my favorites, even though he's definitely not in the major pantheon of SF gods. This guy thinks different even for a science fiction writer. Try finding an anthology called "Nine Hundred Grandmothers." One of the first stories that got me hooked on science fiction was "Slow Tuesday Night," and if you really want a hoot try reading "Hog Belly Honey" out loud. --
You might be right. Now tell these same people that if they wear this tracking bug around every time they shop at the mall and they'd get a free round-trip plane ticket to the destination of their choice for every $2000 they spent, you'd have about 90 people lining up to get their shoes bugged.
Far fetched? Not at all. Our local mall does this already. Of course they call it "Mallperks" and you have to show a card to get your reward (the free plane ticket was just an example), but people seem to be willing to trade their privacy for a few extra gewgaws. And they do it even though anyone with a room-temperature IQ should know that all that information is going into a big database somewhere that They are going to use to know everything about you, including what games you play, what kind of makeup you buy, what toys your kids play with and probably how often you have sex.
Needless to say I don't have one of these cards. --
Good sentiment, except that most racists are pretty much immune to the truth. Their minds are made up, and you can't convince them with facts. Plus, if you don't believe their particular line of spew, obviously you're an evil person in line with whatever their particular object of hatred is, and you have to be punished.
There are quite a few ways to fight hate and racism. The best is not to be taken in by it. And, you don't have to march in the streets to oppose it. I remember seeing a documentary a year or two ago about hate groups targeting the Jewish community in Billings, Montana. The city's residents responded by putting menorahs in their windows at Chanukah, and the Billings Gazette even printed a picture of a menorah you could put up if you didn't want to light candles. That's just an example; feel free to create your own. --
Well, besides being an interesting read in and of itself, when you read it you'll notice things that sound familiar to you. Dictionary cracking programs, for instance. The only real difference between then and now is that there are new ways to break into a system alongside the old, familiar ones.
I'm willing to bet the government's attitude toward technology hasn't changed much, either. My favorite moment in the book, right up there with using the "Man Who Never Was" technique to expose someone breaking into their system, was the FBI guy who, after being presented with a paper trail of evidence starting with a miniscule accounting error and leading to connections to East Germany, asked incredulously if Stoll expected him to mobilize the FBI because Stoll found a quarter missing. --
but I think the second item down on the Tomorrow's World page has more potential to help quite a few members of the Slashdot community. Take a look and see if you don't agree. --
Actually, the first thing I thought of when I saw this was how cool Star Tours could be if Lucas used this and an Imax film loop to simulate barrel rolls. Sixty feet of space and I'm looping-the-loop in it! YEEHAW!
(Actually I don't think they could do this -- I think too many people would lose their lunches.)
But you have a good point, if home technology keeps getting better and places like Disneyland keep getting more expensive theme parks may someday be looked on as quaint relics of the past, sort of like renaissance festivals or something. --
Differnt strokes for differnt folks. Personally I've never found Perl to be all that difficult, and it does allow for some things that are tough or maybe impossible to do in Python, like:
for ($i = 1; $i < 10; $i++) { $myname = "FD" . $i; $$myname = "This is variable number $i"; } print $FD6; # prints "This is variable number 6"
There's probably a way to do this in Python, but I don't know what it is. I also find Perl's quoting and regular expressions to be more comprehensive than Python's. It's probably just because I've used them more in Perl, and let's face it, Perl was built to muck with text files and it does a great job of that.
On the other hand you're right in that Python is a lot easier to read once it's written. Plus, its OO foundation makes writing things like GUIs much easier. OO in Perl always struck me as something of an afterthought, probably because it didn't come in until version 5.
At any rate both languages have quite a bit to recommend them. I'm glad I learned both, although I will admit not every language is suited for not every coder. I for instance have had a terrible time trying to grok C and C++, though I find them easier to deal with since I started using Perl. --
Take a look at the Linux Tips page on Portico. They recently posted a list of servers you can alias to 127.0.0.1 in your/etc/hosts file. I haven't tried it yet but I'm going to.
Any chance someone could create a cookie we could all paste into our caches that indicates that every single one of us is the MPAA Executive Offices? Let Doubleclick track them. Somehow I think they might deserve each other. --
Don't let them touch a thing until you've spoken to a lawyer. I have a feeling it's very illegal for them to remove things from your home until you've had a lawyer look over the warrant.
You may not have a choice. If whoever has the search warrant is sufficiently interested in you, they will show up with official-looking policement with official-looking guns, and if you try to interfere with the service of a search warrant they will slap you in jail for obstruction of process or something. And think about it, if they think you're enough of a threat that they want to steal your computer, they think you're enough of a threat that they'll throw your butt in jail if you give them half an excuse. Sometimes just being present at the time counts as an excuse.
So yes, have a lawyer present if circumstances permit, but don't try to interfere with the seizure. On the other hand, record everything that happens, and insist on an inventory of items taken. Make your own if you have to (and can). Get whoever's in charge to sign the inventory, or note that s/he refused to do so.
One tip from the sixties: If you find yourself in a situation like this, try to get someone to serve as a witness. Not everyone is going to want to be involved, but if you can find someone who is willing to just stand and observe, then be deposed later (they don't even necessarily have to go to court), you can have someone back up your statement that they took your stereo and CD collection on the ground that one of your music CDs might have data hidden on it.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I speak as a resident of the US, based on my experiences and limited understanding of the laws here. Norwegian law (or other countries' laws, if it comes down to it) may necessitate a different course of action. And especially in cases like this, consult an attorney. --
Gee, I could be a criminal already without having done anything I wouldn't normally be doing. (That was probably true before all this started, but we'll bypass that for now.) See, my web page has links to about half-a-dozen search engines. That means I'm at most two clicks away from the DeCSS code -- put "DeCSS code" in the text entry box I set up to do direct Google searches, click the Search button, and one of the 100 links that shows up will probably take me straight to the code.
Even if you never used a search engine at all, how many degrees of separation do you think there are between some random home page, the pages it links to, the pages THEY link to and so until you finally hit what is probably now one of the 5,552,463 pages on the Web hosting DeCSS? I'll bet there aren't that many. And I have links to a bunch of pages.
But wait a minute! This discussion thread has links to the DSS source code in it -- in fact, it has portions of the code itself -- and it's stored in my cache! In fact it's probably in the cache of everyone who uses any kind of browser and didn't specifically disable the cache. That means, my friends, that every single one of us is now in direct violation of the law.
So now I might as well put the code right on my home page on the theory that if you're going to be hung for a lamb, you might as well be hung for a sheep. --
Most of the people here are probably too young to remember Kentucky Fried Computers, an upstart company back in the late 70s that made CP/M boxes. They were visited by the Colonel's lawyers, who made their displeasure known. The company was renamed soon after, to Northstar if memory serves. --
Sorry, you're wrong. Legal teams do indeed occasionally find things funny. You, however, don't want to know what they would find funny, for the same reason you wouldn't want to know what a particularly malevolent Elder God might find funny. For one thing, it might involve you. --
Under US trademark and copyright laws, if you own a trademark you have to defend every misuse of your product you find. Otherwise, your trademark can become genericized. Here's a glaringly simplified example:
Say I make a product called OMIR's Covert Coke, "the drink for infiltrating and subverting large software companies." It becomes a modest success on campus. Microsoft's legal team thinks it's funny so they don't do anything about it. Coca-Cola's lawyers say we're too small to worry about so they don't bother us either.
Now somebody like R. J. Reynolds makes a cola they call "Coke-A-Rama." Coca-Cola doesn't like their name being associated with a cigarette company, so they try to issue an injunction against RJR making and selling the product under that name. RJR's lawyers can argue to invalidate the trademark on the grounds that, since Coca-Cola knew about OMIR's Covert Coke and didn't do anything about it, they relinquished the rights to the "Coke" trademark. And they would have a very good chance of winning.
Considering how much money Coca-Cola makes off of selling T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, windbreakers and the like with their "Coke" trademark on them, they aren't going to let this happen. It means a lot of money to them.
This leads to things like companies writing in to magazines to inform them that "we enjoyed your article on why photocopiers should be banned, but we wanted to remind you that the word 'Xerox' is a trademark for our particular brand of photocopier and should not be used as a generic synonym for the verb 'to photocopy.'"
Linus is in the same position. In order to defend the Linux trademark, he has to "crack the whip," so to speak. My wife used to have to do this for a company she worked for. It's annoying and time-consuming, but if Linus ever lost the trademark and with it his ability to veto uses of it, he would be sorry he hadn't (probably every time he heard it used for something he wished it wasn't). --
According to this Yahoo/CNet link, Streambox can't distribute or market two of their three products for the duration of the trial. By looking at both press releases I managed to figure out that it's now OK for Streambox to distribute the Ripper, but not Ferret or VCR. It says as much in the Real press release, but it's buried way toward the bottom of the release and spun so it sounds like an OK thing.
So it's not the exact opposite, exactly. Both sides are claiming victory in a big way, but you have to dig to find that out. So remember, kiddies, never get all of your news from one source! --
I'm somewhat surprised that you couldn't tell just by listening to him that the original poster had his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. I mean, come on. Simpsons and Christian values? You only ever hear those words together in sentences containing the words "destroying" or with references to Ned Flanders (who I'm sure we can all agree would make most real-life annoyingly pleasant Christians suddenly remember urgent dental appointments). --
B-O-L-O-G-N-A is what an unenlightened person puts on his sandwich when there are better alternatives. Examples of better alternatives are roast beef, turkey and maple-cured ham.
B-A-L-O-N-E-Y is what an unenlightened person spouts forth when there are better alternatives. Examples of better alternatives are not claiming that DVD decryption is being used for purposes of piracy, and not trying to correct someone who does in fact know the difference between bologna of the awful-excuse-for-lunchmeat variety and baloney of the you-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about variety. --
There's absolutely nothing to stop you from doing that, and that's part of the point of the case. They're making out like the community is aiding and abetting a bunch of pirates who are going to crank out $3 low-quality knockoffs of Jim Varney movies or something (or worse, that we're the pirates). Part of our point is that if we wanted to, we could easily do that without breaking the encryption, just as you described. (Never mind that it would cost a lot more than just going out and buying the DVDs already made. Never let logic get in the way of FUD, that's their motto.)
This is really about freedom and control. They're basically using a crappy, easily-broken encryption scheme to try to control a proprietary format, and then bleating because somebody broke their crappy encryption and now a bunch of us might be able to watch DVDs on our Linux players without waiting for someone to pay them a bucketful of money for the specs on how to decode the DVDs. I say, "No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney."
Argh, I can feel myself going into full rant mode. Time for my medication. I'll leave it to others to rehash the reasons why this lawsuit should not only be thrown out of court, but taught in first-year law school as a prime bad example. --
One thing I have noticed while working with the modems on Rogers@Home, is that the modem itself has an IP address in the 10.x.x.x block. Anyone else seen this?
One of @home's techs told me the same thing. Yes, their modems have 10.x.x.x addresses. Presumably it's so the script kiddies have to work a little harder to control them (e.g. they have to do it from a machine on the @home network). --
I find it highly unlikely that, given the rising costs of sports these days, any sporting venue would decide not to sell any advertising space it possibly could. In fact it's a lot more likely that the same space will be sold several times over. Take the prime ad space behind home plate, for instance (I'll use Safeco Field as an example, a Mariners vs. Yankees game). The stadium would sell that space to local merchants like Starbucks, Eagle Hardware and Eddie Bauer (as it is now). The Mariners broadcast team would rent the rights to digitally alter the same area for their sponsors, like State Farm, Fletchers and Pepsi. The Yankees would likewise rent the space to advertise Mobach's and The Wiz (or whoever sponsors the Yankees games). And, if the game is picked up nationally by ESPN they could use the same space for national sponsors like Chevrolet, The Gap and Budweiser.
Multiply this by the scoreboard, outfield fence, facades and other vertical surfaces and you can begin to see that there's too much potential money to be made for anyone to leave this alone. Not that I think it's a good thing, but I think it's the way things are. --
Usually broadcasters shoveling out anti-government propaganda are referred to as "clandestines," especially if they operate on irregular schedules from uncertain locations and appear to be allied with particular political movements. A few stations could fall into either category; certainly many US pirates are subversive in their point of view, even though they aren't backed by a political organization.
Pirates can be subversive in their own right as well. I seem to remember visiting an HMV shop in London over Christmas in 1977, and The Sex Pistols were at the top of their charts, even though their music was banned in the UK. I'm not sure exactly how this worked, but I seem to remember pirates had something to do with it. --
Simplified Chinese is used on the mainland, Traditional in Taiwan. So it would be safe to guess that Red Flag would default to Simplified. Linux being what it is, though, it would probably not be that difficult to switch it from one to the other, or at least no more difficult than switching from Roman to Cyrillic characters.
Someone more qualified than I would have to give an assessment of where Unicode support currently stands in the various distributions. --
Here's a thought: It's just barely possible that LinuxOne may someday make money. In an age of $7.5M+ domian names, how much would some other company pay to get LinuxOne's most valuable asset -- the ticker symbol LINX? --
You're not paying $100 (or $200 or whatever) for the Legos. You're paying for a really cool, really small computer that happens to come with a bunch of Lego bricks and other accessories (sensors, motors, and the like).
I don't know just how cool it is yet, though. I got a set for my son for Christmas and he hasn't yet let me near it. --
You might be wrong too. Check out this link, which documents experiments by Heinrich Hertz and Nathan Stubblefield, among others. Bottom line is, there's still a great deal of controversy on this issue, but even if he didn't exactly invent radio, Tesla was still one smart guy. --
Slashdot Mirror
The most important way to handle this would be for the Artist's to form their own distribution companies and take the Media giants out of the picture. Sell your song, movie or picture. Forget
worrying about what its released on, because that just limits your market.
I can think of several very good reasons why you wouldn't want to do this. They all boil down basically to this very simple truth: If I'm an artist (of whatever stripe -- moviemaker, songwriter, painter, whatever), the last thing in the world I would want to do is be forced to be a businessman. Every minute I have to spend dealing with booking agents, gallery owners, theater owners and the like is actually about five minutes I can't spend doing what I enjoy (one minute to psych myself up for something I'd really rather not be doing, one minute to deal with the suits, and three minutes to unpsych myself and get back into a frame of mind where I feel like Creating Art again).
--
- The Heinlein juveniles (duh)
- Anything in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (I'd start with one of the earlier books, like Mort or Equal Rites). This is fantasy but still funny and accessible
- My wife recommends Pratchett's juvenile series (starting with "Only You Can Save Mankind") but I haven't read them yet. You might also check out "Good Omens," which he wrote with Neil Gaiman
- Short story anthologies, especially older ones. I would look through them first just in case, so you can recommend some stories she might want to skip for a year or two.
- R. A. Lafferty is one of my favorites, even though he's definitely not in the major pantheon of SF gods. This guy thinks different even for a science fiction writer. Try finding an anthology called "Nine Hundred Grandmothers." One of the first stories that got me hooked on science fiction was "Slow Tuesday Night," and if you really want a hoot try reading "Hog Belly Honey" out loud.
--
You might be right. Now tell these same people that if they wear this tracking bug around every time they shop at the mall and they'd get a free round-trip plane ticket to the destination of their choice for every $2000 they spent, you'd have about 90 people lining up to get their shoes bugged.
Far fetched? Not at all. Our local mall does this already. Of course they call it "Mallperks" and you have to show a card to get your reward (the free plane ticket was just an example), but people seem to be willing to trade their privacy for a few extra gewgaws. And they do it even though anyone with a room-temperature IQ should know that all that information is going into a big database somewhere that They are going to use to know everything about you, including what games you play, what kind of makeup you buy, what toys your kids play with and probably how often you have sex.
Needless to say I don't have one of these cards.
--
Good sentiment, except that most racists are pretty much immune to the truth. Their minds are made up, and you can't convince them with facts. Plus, if you don't believe their particular line of spew, obviously you're an evil person in line with whatever their particular object of hatred is, and you have to be punished.
There are quite a few ways to fight hate and racism. The best is not to be taken in by it. And, you don't have to march in the streets to oppose it. I remember seeing a documentary a year or two ago about hate groups targeting the Jewish community in Billings, Montana. The city's residents responded by putting menorahs in their windows at Chanukah, and the Billings Gazette even printed a picture of a menorah you could put up if you didn't want to light candles. That's just an example; feel free to create your own.
--
Well, besides being an interesting read in and of itself, when you read it you'll notice things that sound familiar to you. Dictionary cracking programs, for instance. The only real difference between then and now is that there are new ways to break into a system alongside the old, familiar ones.
I'm willing to bet the government's attitude toward technology hasn't changed much, either. My favorite moment in the book, right up there with using the "Man Who Never Was" technique to expose someone breaking into their system, was the FBI guy who, after being presented with a paper trail of evidence starting with a miniscule accounting error and leading to connections to East Germany, asked incredulously if Stoll expected him to mobilize the FBI because Stoll found a quarter missing.
--
but I think the second item down on the Tomorrow's World page has more potential to help quite a few members of the Slashdot community. Take a look and see if you don't agree.
--
Actually, the first thing I thought of when I saw this was how cool Star Tours could be if Lucas used this and an Imax film loop to simulate barrel rolls. Sixty feet of space and I'm looping-the-loop in it! YEEHAW!
(Actually I don't think they could do this -- I think too many people would lose their lunches.)
But you have a good point, if home technology keeps getting better and places like Disneyland keep getting more expensive theme parks may someday be looked on as quaint relics of the past, sort of like renaissance festivals or something.
--
Differnt strokes for differnt folks. Personally I've never found Perl to be all that difficult, and it does allow for some things that are tough or maybe impossible to do in Python, like:
for ($i = 1; $i < 10; $i++)
{
$myname = "FD" . $i;
$$myname = "This is variable number $i";
}
print $FD6; # prints "This is variable number 6"
There's probably a way to do this in Python, but I don't know what it is. I also find Perl's quoting and regular expressions to be more comprehensive than Python's. It's probably just because I've used them more in Perl, and let's face it, Perl was built to muck with text files and it does a great job of that.
On the other hand you're right in that Python is a lot easier to read once it's written. Plus, its OO foundation makes writing things like GUIs much easier. OO in Perl always struck me as something of an afterthought, probably because it didn't come in until version 5.
At any rate both languages have quite a bit to recommend them. I'm glad I learned both, although I will admit not every language is suited for not every coder. I for instance have had a terrible time trying to grok C and C++, though I find them easier to deal with since I started using Perl.
--
Take a look at the Linux Tips page on Portico. They recently posted a list of servers you can alias to 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/hosts file. I haven't tried it yet but I'm going to.
Any chance someone could create a cookie we could all paste into our caches that indicates that every single one of us is the MPAA Executive Offices? Let Doubleclick track them. Somehow I think they might deserve each other.
--
Don't let them touch a thing until you've spoken to a lawyer. I have a feeling it's very illegal for them to remove things from your home until you've had a lawyer look over the warrant.
You may not have a choice. If whoever has the search warrant is sufficiently interested in you, they will show up with official-looking policement with official-looking guns, and if you try to interfere with the service of a search warrant they will slap you in jail for obstruction of process or something. And think about it, if they think you're enough of a threat that they want to steal your computer, they think you're enough of a threat that they'll throw your butt in jail if you give them half an excuse. Sometimes just being present at the time counts as an excuse.
So yes, have a lawyer present if circumstances permit, but don't try to interfere with the seizure. On the other hand, record everything that happens, and insist on an inventory of items taken. Make your own if you have to (and can). Get whoever's in charge to sign the inventory, or note that s/he refused to do so.
One tip from the sixties: If you find yourself in a situation like this, try to get someone to serve as a witness. Not everyone is going to want to be involved, but if you can find someone who is willing to just stand and observe, then be deposed later (they don't even necessarily have to go to court), you can have someone back up your statement that they took your stereo and CD collection on the ground that one of your music CDs might have data hidden on it.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I speak as a resident of the US, based on my experiences and limited understanding of the laws here. Norwegian law (or other countries' laws, if it comes down to it) may necessitate a different course of action. And especially in cases like this, consult an attorney.
--
Gee, I could be a criminal already without having done anything I wouldn't normally be doing. (That was probably true before all this started, but we'll bypass that for now.) See, my web page has links to about half-a-dozen search engines. That means I'm at most two clicks away from the DeCSS code -- put "DeCSS code" in the text entry box I set up to do direct Google searches, click the Search button, and one of the 100 links that shows up will probably take me straight to the code.
Even if you never used a search engine at all, how many degrees of separation do you think there are between some random home page, the pages it links to, the pages THEY link to and so until you finally hit what is probably now one of the 5,552,463 pages on the Web hosting DeCSS? I'll bet there aren't that many. And I have links to a bunch of pages.
But wait a minute! This discussion thread has links to the DSS source code in it -- in fact, it has portions of the code itself -- and it's stored in my cache! In fact it's probably in the cache of everyone who uses any kind of browser and didn't specifically disable the cache. That means, my friends, that every single one of us is now in direct violation of the law.
So now I might as well put the code right on my home page on the theory that if you're going to be hung for a lamb, you might as well be hung for a sheep.
--
Most of the people here are probably too young to remember Kentucky Fried Computers, an upstart company back in the late 70s that made CP/M boxes. They were visited by the Colonel's lawyers, who made their displeasure known. The company was renamed soon after, to Northstar if memory serves.
--
Sorry, you're wrong. Legal teams do indeed occasionally find things funny. You, however, don't want to know what they would find funny, for the same reason you wouldn't want to know what a particularly malevolent Elder God might find funny. For one thing, it might involve you.
--
Under US trademark and copyright laws, if you own a trademark you have to defend every misuse of your product you find. Otherwise, your trademark can become genericized. Here's a glaringly simplified example:
Say I make a product called OMIR's Covert Coke, "the drink for infiltrating and subverting large software companies." It becomes a modest success on campus. Microsoft's legal team thinks it's funny so they don't do anything about it. Coca-Cola's lawyers say we're too small to worry about so they don't bother us either.
Now somebody like R. J. Reynolds makes a cola they call "Coke-A-Rama." Coca-Cola doesn't like their name being associated with a cigarette company, so they try to issue an injunction against RJR making and selling the product under that name. RJR's lawyers can argue to invalidate the trademark on the grounds that, since Coca-Cola knew about OMIR's Covert Coke and didn't do anything about it, they relinquished the rights to the "Coke" trademark. And they would have a very good chance of winning.
Considering how much money Coca-Cola makes off of selling T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, windbreakers and the like with their "Coke" trademark on them, they aren't going to let this happen. It means a lot of money to them.
This leads to things like companies writing in to magazines to inform them that "we enjoyed your article on why photocopiers should be banned, but we wanted to remind you that the word 'Xerox' is a trademark for our particular brand of photocopier and should not be used as a generic synonym for the verb 'to photocopy.'"
Linus is in the same position. In order to defend the Linux trademark, he has to "crack the whip," so to speak. My wife used to have to do this for a company she worked for. It's annoying and time-consuming, but if Linus ever lost the trademark and with it his ability to veto uses of it, he would be sorry he hadn't (probably every time he heard it used for something he wished it wasn't).
--
According to this Yahoo/CNet link, Streambox can't distribute or market two of their three products for the duration of the trial. By looking at both press releases I managed to figure out that it's now OK for Streambox to distribute the Ripper, but not Ferret or VCR. It says as much in the Real press release, but it's buried way toward the bottom of the release and spun so it sounds like an OK thing.
So it's not the exact opposite, exactly. Both sides are claiming victory in a big way, but you have to dig to find that out. So remember, kiddies, never get all of your news from one source!
--
I'm somewhat surprised that you couldn't tell just by listening to him that the original poster had his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. I mean, come on. Simpsons and Christian values? You only ever hear those words together in sentences containing the words "destroying" or with references to Ned Flanders (who I'm sure we can all agree would make most real-life annoyingly pleasant Christians suddenly remember urgent dental appointments).
--
B-O-L-O-G-N-A is what an unenlightened person puts on his sandwich when there are better alternatives. Examples of better alternatives are roast beef, turkey and maple-cured ham.
B-A-L-O-N-E-Y is what an unenlightened person spouts forth when there are better alternatives. Examples of better alternatives are not claiming that DVD decryption is being used for purposes of piracy, and not trying to correct someone who does in fact know the difference between bologna of the awful-excuse-for-lunchmeat variety and baloney of the you-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about variety.
--
There's absolutely nothing to stop you from doing that, and that's part of the point of the case. They're making out like the community is aiding and abetting a bunch of pirates who are going to crank out $3 low-quality knockoffs of Jim Varney movies or something (or worse, that we're the pirates). Part of our point is that if we wanted to, we could easily do that without breaking the encryption, just as you described. (Never mind that it would cost a lot more than just going out and buying the DVDs already made. Never let logic get in the way of FUD, that's their motto.)
This is really about freedom and control. They're basically using a crappy, easily-broken encryption scheme to try to control a proprietary format, and then bleating because somebody broke their crappy encryption and now a bunch of us might be able to watch DVDs on our Linux players without waiting for someone to pay them a bucketful of money for the specs on how to decode the DVDs. I say, "No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney."
Argh, I can feel myself going into full rant mode. Time for my medication. I'll leave it to others to rehash the reasons why this lawsuit should not only be thrown out of court, but taught in first-year law school as a prime bad example.
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One thing I have noticed while working with the modems on Rogers@Home, is that the modem itself has an IP address in the 10.x.x.x block. Anyone else seen this?
One of @home's techs told me the same thing. Yes, their modems have 10.x.x.x addresses. Presumably it's so the script kiddies have to work a little harder to control them (e.g. they have to do it from a machine on the @home network).
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I find it highly unlikely that, given the rising costs of sports these days, any sporting venue would decide not to sell any advertising space it possibly could. In fact it's a lot more likely that the same space will be sold several times over. Take the prime ad space behind home plate, for instance (I'll use Safeco Field as an example, a Mariners vs. Yankees game). The stadium would sell that space to local merchants like Starbucks, Eagle Hardware and Eddie Bauer (as it is now). The Mariners broadcast team would rent the rights to digitally alter the same area for their sponsors, like State Farm, Fletchers and Pepsi. The Yankees would likewise rent the space to advertise Mobach's and The Wiz (or whoever sponsors the Yankees games). And, if the game is picked up nationally by ESPN they could use the same space for national sponsors like Chevrolet, The Gap and Budweiser.
Multiply this by the scoreboard, outfield fence, facades and other vertical surfaces and you can begin to see that there's too much potential money to be made for anyone to leave this alone. Not that I think it's a good thing, but I think it's the way things are.
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Usually broadcasters shoveling out anti-government propaganda are referred to as "clandestines," especially if they operate on irregular schedules from uncertain locations and appear to be allied with particular political movements. A few stations could fall into either category; certainly many US pirates are subversive in their point of view, even though they aren't backed by a political organization.
Pirates can be subversive in their own right as well. I seem to remember visiting an HMV shop in London over Christmas in 1977, and The Sex Pistols were at the top of their charts, even though their music was banned in the UK. I'm not sure exactly how this worked, but I seem to remember pirates had something to do with it.
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Simplified Chinese is used on the mainland, Traditional in Taiwan. So it would be safe to guess that Red Flag would default to Simplified. Linux being what it is, though, it would probably not be that difficult to switch it from one to the other, or at least no more difficult than switching from Roman to Cyrillic characters.
Someone more qualified than I would have to give an assessment of where Unicode support currently stands in the various distributions.
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Here's a thought: It's just barely possible that LinuxOne may someday make money. In an age of $7.5M+ domian names, how much would some other company pay to get LinuxOne's most valuable asset -- the ticker symbol LINX?
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You're not paying $100 (or $200 or whatever) for the Legos. You're paying for a really cool, really small computer that happens to come with a bunch of Lego bricks and other accessories (sensors, motors, and the like).
I don't know just how cool it is yet, though. I got a set for my son for Christmas and he hasn't yet let me near it.
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You might be wrong too. Check out this link, which documents experiments by Heinrich Hertz and Nathan Stubblefield, among others. Bottom line is, there's still a great deal of controversy on this issue, but even if he didn't exactly invent radio, Tesla was still one smart guy.
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