However, the word can be removed from use and association with a specific class of goods in the course of trade as a result of gaining the trademark (which has to be distictive in nature or nurture), which seems to be the main point regarding the change in perspective on this case.
Here, the issues are about free-riding and deception: it's unarguable that the competitors are "free-riding" on the legitimate playboy trademark so as to confuse and deceive the user so as to entice them into commerce with the same class of goods. Although playboy has an english meaning, the playboy company has invested considerable time and effort into nuturing the name so that in the minds of users it is linked with the playboy brand. This is entirely against trademark law as trademarks provide you with protection of a mark to be used in the trade of a particular class of goods.
Now, if someone had bought a pop-up advertisement that connected "playboy" to something about men in dinner suites have a good time gambling, then there probably would not be the same case as this is a different class of goods/services to that covered by the playboy trademark.
Other examples: I use the coca-cola trademark to entice a customer into a shop that only sells pepsi. Clearly this is is a deceptive use of the trademark. However, I would be safe in putting up a sign "60% of people find Pepsi(R) better than Coke(R): get your Pepsi here!" so long as the comparison is a fair one; this is a legitimate and factual use of the trademark.
The only new things to come out in the OS world recently are second generation microkernels (L4) and Matt Dillon's BSD fork of Dragon Fly with its IPC and other architectural changes. These are true multi-processor clustering solutions.
As the director of spamhaus said on british television when asked about how the new british anti spam laws would help, he said, "well, actually, it'll stop, let me see... 0 per cent".
His argument was correct: basically spam will stop being sent from within jurisdictions that have anti spam laws, so the spammers will move offshore. Then you then need an international agreement - how the hell are you going to enforce anti-spam against an smtp originator from china that uses a local relay, even the US defence department can't get it right (http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/intere sting-people/200312/msg00070.html).
Have international IPR laws have completely eliminated fake goods ? No. Will international spam laws completely eliminate spam ? No.
There's no silver bullet. Stop your moaning to suggest that anything that's happening isn't a silver bullet.
As the economist pointed out, the real issue is economics. Fundamentally, it costs virtually nothing for a spammer to send so much spam. The only effective way to resolve the problem is to change the economics so that a spammer incurs some cost. When I say cost, I don't actually mean monetary cost. For example, the anti-spam systems that rely upon individual tokens replies institute a resource/time cost on the sender: this kind of works on a small scale.
I don't know what the proper solution is either; but it'll be a mix of (a) law, or psuedo-law (just like the laws we have with anti-invasitory direct marketing phone calls and junk mail), (b) technical measures.
It looks like the ball on (a) is rolling. Sounds like the technical community needs to put some work into (b) - spam catchers / filters / etc don't seem to be the real solution, something has to alter about the way we send and receive email itself.
Garbage, you've never worked on a commercial enterprise scale product. 10% improvement in performance can make a significant difference to performance targets for an average software product, saving reasonable amount of development time, effort and cost.
You don't sell volume mission critical computing to businesses at a good price without getting something right. Dell effectively stole the kind of market that compaq previously enjoyed: the default choice for pretty reliable and pretty well performing workstations.
You're the kind of fool that confuses "cutting edge" with good engineering. Try understanding that engineering is about solving the cost, economic and technical tradeoffs, not just about high performance / etc. Dell doesn't produce high performance sports cars like porsche: but it produces high quality consistently reliable performers with a great flexible manufacturing approach like volkswagen.
This is interesting. Note that restored works are only an issue in the United States, and the original copyright gained in Japan by way of Berne should still be legitimate not only in Japan, but in just about every other Berne signatory (the restored work issue results from US non-compliance with Berne).
This would mean an interesting situation that you could be considered in infringing copyright if you take your work outside the USA, or if anyone downloads your work from outside the USA (many of the similar ITAR issues).
Buy a commodity dell optiplex gx270 in SFF or even USFF (which mounts behind a flatscreen). As you expect with dell: very good engineering, always leading features and options, great support, etc. Buy from dell outlet and you get a reconditioned box (a couple of months old) still with complete warranty and couple of hundred dollar discount to the off-the-floor price. (Kind of equivalent to buying a car that's only 3 months old).
Firstly, disregard all of the useless comments about "it's not fast enough", these come from techie speed freaks who ignore the economics in favour of the sports-car. Most businesses don't want nor need sports-cars.
I have a mini-itx at 500mhz running BSD: it handles 512K dsl + bluetooth + 802.11b+ + samba + nat + firewall + print server + http + everything else quite well - most of the time it idles at 10% CPU. Sure I could use an overblown 576ghz-latest-pentium, but it's just simply not necessary. Power consumption is also low. It's a perfect home server. Kernel build times are pretty good as well. It also hosts development environments for 4 web sites.
I could have have purchased a fast machine, but what's the point ? I have a 2ghz desktop for power-use. In fact, I now wish that I'd gone for a smaller form factor. Even the mini-itx is too big: looks like a DVD player. PC/104 or smaller form factor would be perfect.
Also, ignore the comments about "price": sure you could get a cheaper and faster commodity pc: but then you have to pay for the techie to install and configure the OS and enable everything else. What this appliance is offering is an out-of-the box solution, and you definitely pay for the added value. They're not in business to give things away:-). Most of the people hanging out in slashdot are competent (like me) to build platforms from scratch: but a vast majority of businesses don't have nor can afford nor even need to pay for that kind of approach.
This debate seems to have become too nastily focused directly on the UN.
If you forget about the UN, the point is that the internet has become one global infrastructure, and although everyone acknowledges and thanks ARPA, Licklider, IETF and ICANN and all the others that built into what it is, the point is that many aspects of it are international, and the various aspects of its management (I say that rather than use the loaded word 'governance') need to be looked at and kept in check. Basically it looks like the UN is facilitating this: and although the outcomes of the UN could be criticised the actual outcomes of the UN, but it's widely acknowledged that the UN is _at least_ a forum and meeting place for discussion between nations. Also, places like the UN council aren't some entity by self: they're basically just a representation of nations: to say that the UN has failed - e.g. in the case of iraq - is not quite correct: what failed was nations to come to an agreement. And it's okay for nations to fail to come to an agreement because this is a good sign of dissent.
Look, I agree with you - but you're being a little too idealistic, that was my point. Work in a software development organisation for a while and you'll understand why. If you haven't had this experience, I'm sorry for you. All the engineering ideals you can throw a textbook at are subject to the reality of commercial and technical pressures of the real world.
I want software to be better too. I've been wanting that for 15 years. So have many of us. But it's just not like that. I mean, software is somewhere like where car production was 30 years ago or whatever: rust and other assembly problems made it out into the field. This is not just a problem that Microsoft is having: everyone has it. Show me a Linux kernel release where bugs haven't been found. Show many any software product where bugs haven't been found. Say "they should be doing better" is kind of nice, but you can say that about all of 11sec 100m runners out there as well: unfortunately not everyone is at the head of the pack.
I agree that it's outrageous that software is largely so poorly constructed. But, from a pragmatic perspective: these things happen. If you work in Engineering support, you see software dump core in a production system, you get the trace outputs, the pstacks and the core files: and even with all of this you sometimes can't find the problem. Sometimes it can take days to find the root cause of a defect. Sometimes it can take a few minutes. Sometimes it just can't be found and you close off the defect as non-reproducable. As an idealistic engineer: that's so demoralising.
Microsoft products have such a high profile. Something goes wrong, the impact are millions of computers. I'm sure that they would like to ship bug free software as well concentrate on the sexy technical work. I know I do, but if I spend all of my time fixing defects, and not working on new functionality, our product will lose it's competitive edge and I'll soon be out of a job: there's a tightrope to walk!
(a) an above average quota for dyslexic spelling mistakes and grammatical errors; (b) the experience of strange and non-deterministic software that doesn't always perform as well as itself.
(in fact, I did mean to say "as well as zmodem")
Next time I'll ask my imaginary friend to proof read my work. Honestly, my code is less buggy than my writing.
> If that doesn't give you cause for concern, you're not a computing professional.
You don't understand: it doesn't give me cause for concern because I _am_ a computing professional. I see software that affects thousands of computers belonging to other people where the manufacturers have no idea why. In fact, I usually have no idea why something goes wrong with my own software until I've spent a couple of hours looking at it. In fact, sometimes I never do find out what went wrong with my software.
I think you're the one that's not a computing professional:-).
So what - they had a bug. Name a software product or company that doesn't experience a bug at some time or another. Just happens this was a bit too obvious. As long as the bug rate is low, I'll be happy.
zmodem is high performance single streaming large packet size negative-acknowledgement only protocol - it fails badly in noisy or lossy style of environments.
kermit is far more robust, can interoperate with various different systems of different character encoding, had adaptive retransmission, and can perform just as well as kermit under the right circumstances.
The BBS implementations of kermit were not as sophisticated as the protocol could be, and most BBS environments didn't need the kind of features that kermit had. kermit is also of the emacs style: it's not just a protocol by an entire interactive terminal in itself: scripts, command line, etc.
The funny thing is that it's nice of everyone to criticise, and for sure we know that Microsoft has all of its vulnerabilities, but don't underestimate one thing: the microsoft patch/update system is very well done - name another software product/operating system that has a similar patch system that's easy to use and works for "average joe" ? For all you can say about Linux, it doesn't offer this on the desktop yet! Now this framework means that Microsoft can incrementally patch and make up for a lot of lost ground.
How about this: the LSB is about to formalise its own unix standard based upon Linux at ISO, despite the 90% similarity between LSB and POSIX. Apparently, the LSB folks claim Linux is sufficiently different and many other bogus Microsoft like arguments.
My memory is better now, plus I read the document. There are 4096 possible combinations of password. I still forget the other details. I know that/. is not forgiving either...
Not a new concept, but novel given the use of modern computing resources.
I (and probably others, I claim no novelty, only an inventive step:-) wrote software in 1991/1992 to do this: unfortunately sun4 MP's and about a gigabyte of disk were the best we had.
Rather than precompute the entire crypt() space, we precomputed the space for well known words (and combinations of those words with different prefix and suffix), because for any individual word, there are only 32 [I think from memory - 5 bits?] combinations that it can crypt to given the random salt that was possible.
Because of available disk space, we couldn't store the entire precomputed output: so we chose to only store the first N bits of it. This was configurable. I cannot remember the exact figure - sure I could dig the code up out of an old CDROM archive:-). The output was also stored in bitwise numerical order - matching divide/2 matching very fast.
So the password cracker would then mmap() the couple of gigabyte file, then easily find (or not find) a candidate prefix. If it found the prefix, it ran a few trial crypt()'s to ensure an exact match. In practice, because of the lack of diversity in passwords, there were few false candidate matches: so the password cracker had some extremely large hundreds/millions of equivalent cracks per second as a result of mostly just not finding comparisons, and a few trial runs for succesful targets (I think the running rate of the other two popular crackers at that time was about 100K cracks/second).
Anyway - that was a long time ago - fun and games as a student. I still have the source code:-).
To suggest that "I'll operate a jammer to disrupt the signal of phones around me because of what they could do" is to say that the person/phones are guilty, without any proof that they are guilty: in using a jammer you're stopping/interferring with the rights of the other person to use their equipment. I don't like invasion of privacy as much as the other guy, but in a public place, I there is no privacy (by definition). On the other hand: preventing/jamming phones in situations such as manufacturing areas, confidential meetings, and so on seems entirely appropriate. In this case, it's not a public area, and you have some rights to control access of people / material. If I were on a bus and couldn't use my phone because the guy next to me was using a jammer, I'd expect any nearby police to confiscate the equipment.
security is about economics
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Security is nothing special in itself, it's just another aspect of a problem: all problems have many aspects and as you suggest, usability is another aspect of a problem. Turn the technical aspects of the security lever the wrong way (e.g. too frequent password changes), and you lose on usability, and this potentially has a negative impact on the social aspects of the security level (e.g. the passwords are written on a post it note).
Really, it is about economics and engineering: using the measured amount of resources to solve the problem holistically: technically and socially - understand where all the impacts and flexibile point are. This is no easy task though. Peter Neumann and RISKS have been teaching us these lessons for many years - so there's nothing new here, but it is important to continually reevaluate.
You don't buy Solaris for the low end. Just like you don't buy a station wagon to make courier deliveries. Trying to criticise their low end abilities is a poor argument: that's not really a space they want to be in.
Why do you blame this on the copyright legislation ? The blame lies with the standards and manufacturers who introduced region encoding in the first place. These are the same manufacturers who can't get their act together to device on a standard writable DVD format.
You were already a criminal, it hasn't changed. Ripping your CD's was already an infringement: the UK has no allowance for private use. Move to Spain or another country that has have such an allowance, or lobby to have the legislation changed.
Does it occur to people that this is actually also beneficial for copyleft and open source software ?
Preventing alteration of rights management information and anti-circumvention also works to protect a ripp off of GNU / copyleft / open source software licenses.
These mechanisms are for the benefit of all copyright owners, irrespective of what political stance they take. Effectively they just strengthen the use of rights management information, and are agnostic about the specific favour of that rights management information.
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However, the word can be removed from use and association with a specific class of goods in the course of trade as a result of gaining the trademark (which has to be distictive in nature or nurture), which seems to be the main point regarding the change in perspective on this case.
Here, the issues are about free-riding and deception: it's unarguable that the competitors are "free-riding" on the legitimate playboy trademark so as to confuse and deceive the user so as to entice them into commerce with the same class of goods. Although playboy has an english meaning, the playboy company has invested considerable time and effort into nuturing the name so that in the minds of users it is linked with the playboy brand. This is entirely against trademark law as trademarks provide you with protection of a mark to be used in the trade of a particular class of goods.
Now, if someone had bought a pop-up advertisement that connected "playboy" to something about men in dinner suites have a good time gambling, then there probably would not be the same case as this is a different class of goods/services to that covered by the playboy trademark.
Other examples:
I use the coca-cola trademark to entice a customer into a shop that only sells pepsi. Clearly this is is a deceptive use of the trademark.
However, I would be safe in putting up a sign "60% of people find Pepsi(R) better than Coke(R): get your Pepsi here!" so long as the comparison is a fair one; this is a legitimate and factual use of the trademark.
The only new things to come out in the OS world recently are second generation microkernels (L4) and Matt Dillon's BSD fork of Dragon Fly with its IPC and other architectural changes. These are true multi-processor clustering solutions.
As the director of spamhaus said on british television when asked about how the new british anti spam laws would help, he said, "well, actually, it'll stop, let me see
His argument was correct: basically spam will stop being sent from within jurisdictions that have anti spam laws, so the spammers will move offshore. Then you then need an international agreement - how the hell are you going to enforce anti-spam against an smtp originator from china that uses a local relay, even the US defence department can't get it right (http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/inter
Have international IPR laws have completely eliminated fake goods ? No. Will international spam laws completely eliminate spam ? No.
There's no silver bullet. Stop your moaning to suggest that anything that's happening isn't a silver bullet.
As the economist pointed out, the real issue is economics. Fundamentally, it costs virtually nothing for a spammer to send so much spam. The only effective way to resolve the problem is to change the economics so that a spammer incurs some cost. When I say cost, I don't actually mean monetary cost. For example, the anti-spam systems that rely upon individual tokens replies institute a resource/time cost on the sender: this kind of works on a small scale.
I don't know what the proper solution is either; but it'll be a mix of (a) law, or psuedo-law (just like the laws we have with anti-invasitory direct marketing phone calls and junk mail), (b) technical measures.
It looks like the ball on (a) is rolling. Sounds like the technical community needs to put some work into (b) - spam catchers / filters / etc don't seem to be the real solution, something has to alter about the way we send and receive email itself.
Garbage, you've never worked on a commercial enterprise scale product. 10% improvement in performance can make a significant difference to performance targets for an average software product, saving reasonable amount of development time, effort and cost.
You don't sell volume mission critical computing to businesses at a good price without getting something right. Dell effectively stole the kind of market that compaq previously enjoyed: the default choice for pretty reliable and pretty well performing workstations.
You're the kind of fool that confuses "cutting edge" with good engineering. Try understanding that engineering is about solving the cost, economic and technical tradeoffs, not just about high performance / etc. Dell doesn't produce high performance sports cars like porsche: but it produces high quality consistently reliable performers with a great flexible manufacturing approach like volkswagen.
This is interesting. Note that restored works are only an issue in the United States, and the original copyright gained in Japan by way of Berne should still be legitimate not only in Japan, but in just about every other Berne signatory (the restored work issue results from US non-compliance with Berne).
This would mean an interesting situation that you could be considered in infringing copyright if you take your work outside the USA, or if anyone downloads your work from outside the USA (many of the similar ITAR issues).
Buy a commodity dell optiplex gx270 in SFF or even USFF (which mounts behind a flatscreen). As you expect with dell: very good engineering, always leading features and options, great support, etc. Buy from dell outlet and you get a reconditioned box (a couple of months old) still with complete warranty and couple of hundred dollar discount to the off-the-floor price. (Kind of equivalent to buying a car that's only 3 months old).
Firstly, disregard all of the useless comments about "it's not fast enough", these come from techie speed freaks who ignore the economics in favour of the sports-car. Most businesses don't want nor need sports-cars.
I have a mini-itx at 500mhz running BSD: it handles 512K dsl + bluetooth + 802.11b+ + samba + nat + firewall + print server + http + everything else quite well - most of the time it idles at 10% CPU. Sure I could use an overblown 576ghz-latest-pentium, but it's just simply not necessary. Power consumption is also low. It's a perfect home server. Kernel build times are pretty good as well. It also hosts development environments for 4 web sites.
I could have have purchased a fast machine, but what's the point ? I have a 2ghz desktop for power-use. In fact, I now wish that I'd gone for a smaller form factor. Even the mini-itx is too big: looks like a DVD player. PC/104 or smaller form factor would be perfect.
Also, ignore the comments about "price": sure you could get a cheaper and faster commodity pc: but then you have to pay for the techie to install and configure the OS and enable everything else. What this appliance is offering is an out-of-the box solution, and you definitely pay for the added value. They're not in business to give things away
This debate seems to have become too nastily focused directly on the UN.
If you forget about the UN, the point is that the internet has become one global infrastructure, and although everyone acknowledges and thanks ARPA, Licklider, IETF and ICANN and all the others that built into what it is, the point is that many aspects of it are international, and the various aspects of its management (I say that rather than use the loaded word 'governance') need to be looked at and kept in check. Basically it looks like the UN is facilitating this: and although the outcomes of the UN could be criticised the actual outcomes of the UN, but it's widely acknowledged that the UN is _at least_ a forum and meeting place for discussion between nations. Also, places like the UN council aren't some entity by self: they're basically just a representation of nations: to say that the UN has failed - e.g. in the case of iraq - is not quite correct: what failed was nations to come to an agreement. And it's okay for nations to fail to come to an agreement because this is a good sign of dissent.
Look, I agree with you - but you're being a little too idealistic, that was my point. Work in a software development organisation for a while and you'll understand why. If you haven't had this experience, I'm sorry for you. All the engineering ideals you can throw a textbook at are subject to the reality of commercial and technical pressures of the real world.
I want software to be better too. I've been wanting that for 15 years. So have many of us. But it's just not like that. I mean, software is somewhere like where car production was 30 years ago or whatever: rust and other assembly problems made it out into the field. This is not just a problem that Microsoft is having: everyone has it. Show me a Linux kernel release where bugs haven't been found. Show many any software product where bugs haven't been found. Say "they should be doing better" is kind of nice, but you can say that about all of 11sec 100m runners out there as well: unfortunately not everyone is at the head of the pack.
I agree that it's outrageous that software is largely so poorly constructed. But, from a pragmatic perspective: these things happen. If you work in Engineering support, you see software dump core in a production system, you get the trace outputs, the pstacks and the core files: and even with all of this you sometimes can't find the problem. Sometimes it can take days to find the root cause of a defect. Sometimes it can take a few minutes. Sometimes it just can't be found and you close off the defect as non-reproducable. As an idealistic engineer: that's so demoralising.
Microsoft products have such a high profile. Something goes wrong, the impact are millions of computers. I'm sure that they would like to ship bug free software as well concentrate on the sexy technical work. I know I do, but if I spend all of my time fixing defects, and not working on new functionality, our product will lose it's competitive edge and I'll soon be out of a job: there's a tightrope to walk!
I'm an engineer and that's gives me two things:
(a) an above average quota for dyslexic spelling mistakes and grammatical errors;
(b) the experience of strange and non-deterministic software that doesn't always perform as well as itself.
(in fact, I did mean to say "as well as zmodem")
Next time I'll ask my imaginary friend to proof read my work. Honestly, my code is less buggy than my writing.
> If that doesn't give you cause for concern, you're not a computing professional.
:-).
You don't understand: it doesn't give me cause for concern because I _am_ a computing professional. I see software that affects thousands of computers belonging to other people where the manufacturers have no idea why. In fact, I usually have no idea why something goes wrong with my own software until I've spent a couple of hours looking at it. In fact, sometimes I never do find out what went wrong with my software.
I think you're the one that's not a computing professional
The best game is always trying to flirt with someone else; even if it's just innocent, which it doesn't always turn out to be.
So what - they had a bug. Name a software product or company that doesn't experience a bug at some time or another. Just happens this was a bit too obvious. As long as the bug rate is low, I'll be happy.
You need to understand the differences.
zmodem is high performance single streaming large packet size negative-acknowledgement only protocol - it fails badly in noisy or lossy style of environments.
kermit is far more robust, can interoperate with various different systems of different character encoding, had adaptive retransmission, and can perform just as well as kermit under the right circumstances.
The BBS implementations of kermit were not as sophisticated as the protocol could be, and most BBS environments didn't need the kind of features that kermit had. kermit is also of the emacs style: it's not just a protocol by an entire interactive terminal in itself: scripts, command line, etc.
The funny thing is that it's nice of everyone to criticise, and for sure we know that Microsoft has all of its vulnerabilities, but don't underestimate one thing: the microsoft patch/update system is very well done - name another software product/operating system that has a similar patch system that's easy to use and works for "average joe" ? For all you can say about Linux, it doesn't offer this on the desktop yet! Now this framework means that Microsoft can incrementally patch and make up for a lot of lost ground.
How about this: the LSB is about to formalise its own unix standard based upon Linux at ISO, despite the 90% similarity between LSB and POSIX. Apparently, the LSB folks claim Linux is sufficiently different and many other bogus Microsoft like arguments.
You think that I am joking ?
My memory is better now, plus I read the document. There are 4096 possible combinations of password. I still forget the other details. I know that
Not a new concept, but novel given the use of modern computing resources.
:-) wrote software in 1991/1992 to do this: unfortunately sun4 MP's and about a gigabyte of disk were the best we had.
:-). The output was also stored in bitwise numerical order - matching divide/2 matching very fast.
:-).
I (and probably others, I claim no novelty, only an inventive step
Rather than precompute the entire crypt() space, we precomputed the space for well known words (and combinations of those words with different prefix and suffix), because for any individual word, there are only 32 [I think from memory - 5 bits?] combinations that it can crypt to given the random salt that was possible.
Because of available disk space, we couldn't store the entire precomputed output: so we chose to only store the first N bits of it. This was configurable. I cannot remember the exact figure - sure I could dig the code up out of an old CDROM archive
So the password cracker would then mmap() the couple of gigabyte file, then easily find (or not find) a candidate prefix. If it found the prefix, it ran a few trial crypt()'s to ensure an exact match. In practice, because of the lack of diversity in passwords, there were few false candidate matches: so the password cracker had some extremely large hundreds/millions of equivalent cracks per second as a result of mostly just not finding comparisons, and a few trial runs for succesful targets (I think the running rate of the other two popular crackers at that time was about 100K cracks/second).
Anyway - that was a long time ago - fun and games as a student. I still have the source code
To suggest that "I'll operate a jammer to disrupt the signal of phones around me because of what they could do" is to say that the person/phones are guilty, without any proof that they are guilty: in using a jammer you're stopping/interferring with the rights of the other person to use their equipment. I don't like invasion of privacy as much as the other guy, but in a public place, I there is no privacy (by definition). On the other hand: preventing/jamming phones in situations such as manufacturing areas, confidential meetings, and so on seems entirely appropriate. In this case, it's not a public area, and you have some rights to control access of people / material. If I were on a bus and couldn't use my phone because the guy next to me was using a jammer, I'd expect any nearby police to confiscate the equipment.
Security is nothing special in itself, it's just another aspect of a problem: all problems have many aspects and as you suggest, usability is another aspect of a problem. Turn the technical aspects of the security lever the wrong way (e.g. too frequent password changes), and you lose on usability, and this potentially has a negative impact on the social aspects of the security level (e.g. the passwords are written on a post it note).
Really, it is about economics and engineering: using the measured amount of resources to solve the problem holistically: technically and socially - understand where all the impacts and flexibile point are. This is no easy task though. Peter Neumann and RISKS have been teaching us these lessons for many years - so there's nothing new here, but it is important to continually reevaluate.
You don't buy Solaris for the low end. Just like you don't buy a station wagon to make courier deliveries. Trying to criticise their low end abilities is a poor argument: that's not really a space they want to be in.
Why do you blame this on the copyright legislation ? The blame lies with the standards and manufacturers who introduced region encoding in the first place. These are the same manufacturers who can't get their act together to device on a standard writable DVD format.
You were already a criminal, it hasn't changed. Ripping your CD's was already an infringement: the UK has no allowance for private use. Move to Spain or another country that has have such an allowance, or lobby to have the legislation changed.
Does it occur to people that this is actually also beneficial for copyleft and open source software ?
Preventing alteration of rights management information and anti-circumvention also works to protect a ripp off of GNU / copyleft / open source software licenses.
These mechanisms are for the benefit of all copyright owners, irrespective of what political stance they take. Effectively they just strengthen the use of rights management information, and are agnostic about the specific favour of that rights management information.