Whilest I agree that Photoshop beats The GIMP hands down...
It's used by people that don't take image editing seriously enough to shell out a couple hundred dollars for Photoshop.
GIMP happens to run under my Operating System of choice. Photoshop does not. This means that if I wanted to switch from the GIMP to Photoshop I would need to not only buy Photoshop, but also buy a Mac to go with it.
Why would a professional photographer with thousands of dollars in camera equipment wrestle with a non-standard hackjob
I find it amusing that a single example of a photo editor (Photoshop) can be considered "standard" whilest another single example of a photo editor (The GIMP) is considered "a non-standard hackjob" - yes, the Gimp and Photoshop do things differently. That doesn't mean that one of them is wrong.
A lot of this comes down to what you're used to - for example, a lot of people have told me that "The GIMP's userinterface is completely counterintuitive compared to Paint Shop Pro"... the people who have said this happen to be PSP users - conversely, I find PSP's UI to be totally counterintuitive and the GIMP's to be reasonably good. Of course I happen to use The GIMP and so I'm more used to it's interface than PSP's.
Gimp should just give up on the whole "it can work for professional photographers too" thing.
I don't think GIMP has ever been portrayed as a "professional photographer's" tool by the people responsible for the project.
However, along these lines I think photoshop users should give up on the whole "GIMP won't do what most amateur photographers need" thing, which I hear touted all the time. Whilest it may not be suitable for professional photographers it certainly does what the vast majority of amateurs need, and it doesn't cost a few hundred pounds to do it.
It's exactly like DRM - the shopping malls have to put up with a minority of people shop lifting. So they could force everyone going into the mall to sit through a "do not steal" presentation.
This is pretty much identical to a DVD - the media corporations have to put up with a minority of people infringing their copyright. So they force everyone using the content to sit through a "do not infringe" video.
As with other commercial offerings, the sole measure of success for commercial art is how well it sells, irrespective of the reason for this.
You are talking about commercial success - my original comment was about _quality_, not success. As far as quality goes then yes, from the corporation's point of view the "quality" of the whole product (including marketting, etc) equates to how much it sells. However, from the _consumer's_ point of view the "quality" is very much a question of how much they like the product, irrespecitve of how it was marketted.
If this is true, then why have illegal downloads of the heavily marketed acts / movies always massively outnumbered those of not so heavily marketed ones?
Because they are heavilly marketted. However, I suspect if you compare the number of people listening to the big acts and the small acts proportionally over the years you will find that the _proportion_ of sales going to the small acts has increased.
That's because most such content is either ripped from unprotected CDs, or DVDs whose DRM is so weak that it was broken years ago, and cannot now be replaced with something better.
And I'm sure when bandwidth catches up you will see HD movies ripped from BluRay and posted online. This is already possible since HDCP was cracked before being put into production. Remember that all the DRM cracks in the public domain at the moment have been written by someone like DVD Jon who has got pissed off with the DRM and wants to use the content they paid for in a non-infringing way that the DRM doesn't allow. These cracks were not developed by professional copyright infringers.
The correct action would be to take them back and demand a refund instead of finding ways around what you deem to be unacceptable.
I haven't purposefully "found a way around" the problem - I use an unlicenced DVD player because it better does what I need (integrates with MythTV, runs under the OS I use, etc.). The fact that it allows me to skip stuff I'm not supposed to skip is just a side effect.
The fact that you had to download and install mplayer does however prove rather than refute my point.
No it doesn't - I only "had to download" it because I downloaded my entire Linux distribution - it came as an integral part of the distro. I no more "had to download" mplayer than I "had to download" my text editor.
Just like the copyright holders put locks on their doors to protect them.
Well this was a bad analogy to begin with, but to continue the bad analogy this is closer to preventing people from entering a public building, such as a shopping mall, until they've sat through a 5 minute presentation telling them not to break the law. I think you'd find any shopping malls that tried that would suddenly start losing a whole load of customers who would go elsewhere.
While countless others didn't buy something they might have bought if there wasn't an easily accessible free version.
I recall seeing statistics showing that whilest singles sales have been dropping since MP3 sharing became popular, album sales have increased. It seems to me that many people are just doing the "try before you buy" thing and then buying the albums containing many tracks they like instead of singles containing just one track they like.
There is no objective measure of quality in commercial art beyond what sells, and anyone who suggests otherwise is an elitest snob.
This is untrue. The "quality" of art can be determined by what people _like_, which is not the same as what _sells_ due to marketting - something that people would like will not sell if noone knows about it's existance. The lack of marketting and therefore the lack of sales does not determine a lack of quality of the actual product.
Currently, the media's marketting tactics are to hype up a few acts. The advent of peer-to-peer sharing has meant that the consumers discover acts who haven't been marketted so aggressively but are "better" (i.e. the consumer prefers their music). If people are spending more on the smaller acts then they won't be spending so much on the big acts. This isn't necessarilly a problem for the music industry, but it doesn't fit with their current marketting policies. What _is_ a problem to the industry is that some smaller acts are now able, to some extent, to go it alone without signing to a label.
Like DRM on computer software or satellite / cable TV systems, it prevents casual copying, and that's the best that can be expected from a purely technological system.
No... no it doesn't. If I want to casually copy some DRM'd content I only have to fire up my Gnutella or Bittorrent client - it only takes one person to rip the content and put it online, and when you're distributing your content to millions of people you can pretty much guarantee that _someone_ will do it.
because these warnings are aimed at potential uploaders rather than downloaders
This may or may not be true - certainly the wording on some warnings on DVDs I have looks very much directed toward the downloader/buyer.
unless you are seriously going to suggest that the average media consumer finds sitting through a one minute unskippable ad
Some of my DVDs have *5 minute* unskippable videos at the start telling me that "copying is stealing" (which it isn't). Add to this that some DVDs have unskippable trailors for other movies and you've got a lot more than "a one minute unskippable ad". If I were using a licenced DVD player instead of Xine (and thus were affected by unskippable content) then these discs would go straight back to the shop - I didn't pay to have to put up with that kind of crap.
and then downloading and installing the relevant codecs to play it.
I've never had to install extra codecs to play any videos - mplayer handles most stuff out of the box.
than whether they'll be able to play a $1 song from iTunes on whatever music player they might end up with in 5 years.
You're right that most people won't care too much about a $1 song not playing... However, if your library of 1000 $1 tracks suddenly stopped working you'd probably be pretty pissed off, right? I dunno about you but I still regularly play a lot of my music collection that's well over 5 years old.
people don't care whether their code or their CSS is kosher, they just care that it looks the way they want it to.
Also, the way they want it to look is often terrible - most of the MySpace sites are either completely unreadable because of some background the site owner has decided to apply, or just plain annoying because they've decided that absolutely everyone must hear their favorite piece of music so they push it upon you as soon as you open the page.
From what I can see, the one good thing MySpace has done is group a large amount of crap in one place so it's easier to avoid.
(And I'm not even going to get started on the number of MySpace people who have taken to whoring my bandwidth by linking full size 6MP photos off my web server as their background images without permission).
Source? I'm curious how you'd go about doing such a thing...
The CLID is passed across the SS7 network as informational metadata (it's not used for actually routing the traffic so it doesn't need to be accurate). If you are a node in the SS7 network then you can place a call with whatever CLID you like. If you're using ISDN instead, you *may* be able to do the same thing, although in that case your telco would usually filter on the CLID you've set and refuse the call if it doesn't fall within the DDIs allocated to you.
Basically the problem is that the SS7 network assumes none of the nodes are hostile, which may not necessarilly be the case these days.
Phishing in my mind is a grey area and the responsiblity should be shared.
If I leave the keys in my house door and someone walks in and empties my house then I'm the one who will be paying.
Actually, my insurance company might be paying. Which brings me to my point - why not let people optionally get insurance, then those of us who don't get taken in by phishing and 419s, and don't run insecure software, can continue as we are and everyone else can go pay high insurance premiums to cover their incompetence.
it was not much work to email abuse@... and postmaster@
There also seems to be a move away from people even having standard abuse, postmaster and webmaster addresses - many businesses now expect you to post such things through their website, and honestly - who has time to trawl through a website to find a contact page rather than just using the standard addresses?
Traditionally all of their mission software was 100% home-rolled.
This is untrue - Spirit and Opportunity run VxWorks.
It would be interested to see any modifications NASA come out with for Linux (although since they aren't distributing the software they don't technically need to release the source). I understand they use a modified IP stack for communicating with recent probes, etc. so that's all stuff that could be published.
I suspect the reduced manpower to build the software is where the savings come in.
There could be stability bonuses too - even though noone else is using Linux for this job, the fact that large chunks of the code have been in use by a large number of people for years may be a big benefit - there's only so far that testing in the lab will go. (That is not to say they will reduce the testing they do, but starting with a code base that's well proved already is always a good thing on top of your normal test procedures)
Spamhaus are not liable if the information they published is used by a third party to decide not to accept your mail.
I guess it could be considered libel since by listing your address they are effectively making a claim that you are a spammer (assuming the claim is untrue of course). (IANAL)
No, it does not, any more than having a lock on your door "pushes" people into breaking into your house
This is a bad analogy:
- People who would break into my house are never "legitimate users". - I chose to put the lock on my door to protect *me* - it wasn't imposed on me by some third party in order to protect *them*.
If the lock on my door was placed there by some other authority and did nothing to protect me then yes, I would be pushed into bypassing it if it causes me an inconvenience.
Like many who do illegal things, you are attempting to justify your own actions by pretending that you were somehow forced into them instead of merely having _chosen to act illegally_.
Errm, *I* haven't chosen to act illegally - I am simply saying that if you make it way more inconvenient for people to take the legitimate route than the illegal route then you will push more people towards the illegal side. Whether these people are "right" or "wrong" is a completely moot point - the fact that otherwise legitimate users have decided they're going to take the illegal route because of the publishers actions certainly can't be considered good for the publisher's business. And yet, the people who were going to act illegally anyway are still going to act illegally - who benefits?
Stealing CDs is also a lot easier than earning money to buy them.
This is also a bogus argument - most people *have* the money to buy CDs - if you already had the money anyway then it doesn't feature in the "effort to get the CD" calculation.
Also, you seem to be using theft analogies a lot - copyright infringement is _not_ theft, despite what certain people want to to believe. If you infringe copyright you haven't relieved anyone of anything they already had.
The problem is that people were already doing precisely that before music DRM was widespread, hence the insistence on its use.
I won't argue with that point (although I will suggest the problem isn't anywhere near as big as the music industry maintain - in many cases music piracy seems to cause people to *buy* music they otherwise wouldn't have bought. Maybe the industry's problem is that more people are buying higher quality music rather than the music the industry is trying to promote)
However, it brings me back to my original point - DRM won't prevent copying so it doesn't solve the problem, and in the process it has also annoyed legitimate consumers who, as a result, are pushed more towards the easy (illegal) route rather than the difficult (legal, DRM encumbered) route.
all were to the overall detriment of customers
You're not making a very good arguement for DRM...
Again,it is a response to _a perceived problem_
I'm afraid I just can't see how this response makes any sense at all, whether there is a perceived problem or an actual problem. It doesn't impact the people who are causing the problem, whilest it impacts the legitimate customers.
You wouldn't have to put up with it if there weren't any pirated copies or unlicensed players either
I'm not sure what your point is - yes, people break the law. What I have been saying is that DRM doesn't impact the people who are breaking the law, whilest it encourages the otherwise legitimate consumers to break the law as well. How does that help?
this is the only way to make people understand that _unauthorised_ downloading is illegal
How will it do that? The people who do unauthorised downloading won't ever see the copyright warnings since they'll already have been stripped. Meanwhile, the people who bought it legitimately have to put up with a warning that doesn't apply to them.
And seriously - how many people really don't know that copyright infringement is illegal? People who infringe copyright do it with the full knowledge that it's illegal - reminding them of this fact does nothing.
Yet the fact of the matter is that being entertained by someb
This seems to be a running theme with systems aiming to "protect" content - they're not making things impossible, just more effort, and that simply means it hits the legitimate users and pushes them more towards the non-legitimate side. I'm sure this will come back to bite the media companies in the arse at some point.
So at the moment, I buy all my music on CD and immediately rip it into Ogg format. I can play the resulting Oggs on my computer at home or work, on my MythTV system and on my in-car stereo. And I've still got the CD if I want to use it on my CD player.
If I were to buy my music from Apple then in order to convert it to Ogg format I need to burn it to CD and then rip the CD - that's a lot of effort... Just firing up gnutella and downloading it is far easier. (The same goes for the corrupt optical discs that are being sold instead of CDs by a number of companies). Now personally, I do pay for my music (remember: I buy it on CD), but as it gets harder and harder to use the legally purchased content then people will be pushed towards downloading it illegally instead. And once they're having to download it to make use of it I'd bet a large chunk of people will just plain stop paying for it in the first place.
Essentially the media companies have completely lost their customer focus - they're adding annoyances that only affect their legitimate customers. Take DVDs for example - if I legitimately buy a DVD and play it on a licenced DVD player I have to put up with a long "piracy is stealing" video which I can't skip (ignoring, for a minute, the fact that piracy isn't stealing). If I were to get a pirated copy of the movie, or use it on an unlicenced player, I wouldn't have to put up with that. Why do they make bits of a DVD unskippable? Because they know noone wants to watch those bits - so do they somehow think that forcing people to watch it every time they put the DVD in the player *won't* piss off the legitimate customers?
So now if any customer wants a good quality of service, they have no choice but to infringe the copyright - Maybe I'm completely missing something, but I can't see how forcing your legitimate customers into piracy is supposed to reduce the number of people infringing your copyright...
However, the US is powerless against some calling agency operating out of Costa Rica, who doesn't give a rip about telecommunication laws. These people will war-dial phone numbers at unscrupulous hours of the evening, varying their tactics anywhere from constant nagging to actually demanding that you buy from them, even sometimes claiming that you've already established an "oral agreement" to make a purchase that you cannot back down from without penalty.
For what it's worth, it isn't just Costa Rica phoning the US - I'm in the UK and registered on the telephone preference service (the UK version of the "do not call list"). The only telesales calls I receive on my POTS line are international calls made from the US - and they are usually *very* abusive if I ask them not to call me again (quote from the last telesales call I got "I don't give a fucking shit about your telephone preference service - I'm not in your country so fuck you" - yup, I'd call that pretty abusive).
The moral of the story - it doesn't matter where the telemarketter is located, if they're calling across international boarders there are no laws and they are free to do whatever they like (and they do).
1) if an artificial black hole instantly swallows Earth, what about the moon?
There would be nothing instant about it - it would slowly munch through the Earth's core... the moon would continue to orbit (since the black hole would have the same mass as the Earth once it has finished eating).
2) if an artificial black hole grows slowly, then wouldn't it be possible to encapsulate it in a space capsule and throw it to the sun?
Great idea - now instead of just munching up the Earth you've thrown it at an all-you-can-eat buffet... which also happens to be the source of all out energy.
4) if an artificial black hole can be totally controlled (i.e. created and destroyed at will), could it be used to swallow all our garbage?
You can't destroy mass - you redistribute it or convert it to energy. So yes, it can swallow all our garbage, but the mass remains the same so you still have to do *something* with it... I guess you could convert some of the mass into energy and use it to radiate the rest of the mass into space...
* Added MHEG content implementation (Interactive TV in UK)
It should be noted that MHEG-5 is currently only used in the UK on DVB-T, not DVB-S (hopefully this will change when FreeSat gets off the ground next year). ATM all the interactive content on DVB-S is propriatory (not-so-)OpenTV stuff.:(
How does more choice equal less choice in your world?
In the short term there is more choice, but in the long term the publishers want to phase out non-DRM'd formats.
By the way, it is not illegal in most of the world to create DRM removal tools. Not all the world is the USA.
It's illegal in the US and it's also illegal here in the EU - that constitutes a large chunk of the world.
So, you refuse to buy or rent DVDs because they have DRM?
DVDs are slightly different in that they don't tie the content to a specific device - I can put my DVDs into any region 2 DVD player and they will work (but don't get me started on the whole region coding thing).
That said, I wouldn't ever buy a licenced DVD player for myself - I'm much happier playing my DVDs illegally using MythTV or Xine so I can skip the annoying unskippable parts which accuse me of piracy when I play contend *I paid for*. I suspect that if I couldn't skip the sections that are flagged as unskippable then I'd still be using VHS.
Then don't buy it. Pretty simple, really. What's your problem? You can buy music or movies elsewhere.
I don't buy it, and yes, I can (and do) buy my music and movies elsewhere *at the moment*. But the way things are going, the non-DRM'd sources are going to be gone eventually and then there will be no choice.
Well, there are already tools for removing the DRM from iTunes files, so if Apple goes out of business, you could legally use those.
The people who developed those tools are breaking the law and therefore risking their own freedom. So you seem to be saying that DRM is ok, because people (not you) are risking their freedom to develop tools you can use.
IMHO, anyone who actively supports DRM by buying DRM'd content is either crazy or has absolutely no understanding of the implications.
No, which is why I used the qualifier "likely." Where did I give a guarantee?
I would be unwilling to pay money for content that I *might* be able to use in the future - when I buy a CD I'm guaranteed that it will continue to work for as long as the medium itself lasts, nomatter what happens to the reseller (which is what iTMS is), the publisher or the artist.
So then they will get sued, probably by both (ex)-Apple and consumers.
If they give away the keys they're likley going to get sued by the content providers - so on the one hand we have a bunch of outraged customers with whome Apple (or it's liquidators) haven't violated any contract, and on the other hand, if they release the keys, they have almost certainly willingly borken a contract with the content providers.
It seems the only way Apple (or the liquidators) can abide by all of the contracts is to withhold or destroy the keys. Yes, that'll piss a helluva lot of people off, big deal.
The DMCA allows you to remove the DRM if the service you were using goes bankrupt or becomes obsolete.
Ah, great, so you have to put a helluva lot of effort into cracking an encryption that is designed to be very difficult to crack, yes, that makes it allright then...
If Apple went out of business, they would likely provide you with the keys to keep using your songs.
Have you got a contract with them guaranteeing that they'll do that? (Bear in mind that when apple go out of business it'll be the liquidators deciding what to do with DRM keys, not apple themselves. And the fact that they probably have a contract with the copyright holders guaranteeing they will never release the DRM keys).
Well then its on you to have a backup. You cannot expect everyone to wait on you hand and foot right?
This is the whole problem with DRM though - if it has to contact a server to authorize a machine to play it and that server nolonger exists then all the backups in the world won't help you - you just lost access to all the content you paid for.
But are they going to release linux drivers with support for accellerated H.264 decoding any time soon? I don't care how many polygons per second these cards can shift, but accelleration of stuff I actually do, such as playing video, would be very worthwhile.
What's less obvious is that being too far east or west creates the same problem.
Not really - there are several SBAS satellites at different longitudes with overlapping footprints. If you can't see one then you are likely too far from the equator or so far out to east/west that you wouldn't get any useful DGPS data anyway.
Have no doubt whatsoever that the moment a "terrorist" uses (or comes close to using) a GPS-enabled attack, SA will go back on.
And this is why the EU is constructing Gallileo (and also why the US has been so adamantly opposed to it).
if Bush decided to turn SA on tomorrow, he could also turn WAAS off.
And doing so would be proof that the US government is criminally insane - turning SA on and SBAS off at the same time would certainly endanger a lot more lives than most terrorist attacks. It would also be interesting to see the legal ramifications of such a decision when the families of the thousands of innocent people who would be killed/maimed by this action sue the US government. (Yes, GPS/SBAS is used in safety-of-life applications).
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Whilest I agree that Photoshop beats The GIMP hands down...
It's used by people that don't take image editing seriously enough to shell out a couple hundred dollars for Photoshop.
GIMP happens to run under my Operating System of choice. Photoshop does not. This means that if I wanted to switch from the GIMP to Photoshop I would need to not only buy Photoshop, but also buy a Mac to go with it.
Why would a professional photographer with thousands of dollars in camera equipment wrestle with a non-standard hackjob
I find it amusing that a single example of a photo editor (Photoshop) can be considered "standard" whilest another single example of a photo editor (The GIMP) is considered "a non-standard hackjob" - yes, the Gimp and Photoshop do things differently. That doesn't mean that one of them is wrong.
A lot of this comes down to what you're used to - for example, a lot of people have told me that "The GIMP's userinterface is completely counterintuitive compared to Paint Shop Pro"... the people who have said this happen to be PSP users - conversely, I find PSP's UI to be totally counterintuitive and the GIMP's to be reasonably good. Of course I happen to use The GIMP and so I'm more used to it's interface than PSP's.
Gimp should just give up on the whole "it can work for professional photographers too" thing.
I don't think GIMP has ever been portrayed as a "professional photographer's" tool by the people responsible for the project.
However, along these lines I think photoshop users should give up on the whole "GIMP won't do what most amateur photographers need" thing, which I hear touted all the time. Whilest it may not be suitable for professional photographers it certainly does what the vast majority of amateurs need, and it doesn't cost a few hundred pounds to do it.
How is this like DRM?
It's exactly like DRM - the shopping malls have to put up with a minority of people shop lifting. So they could force everyone going into the mall to sit through a "do not steal" presentation.
This is pretty much identical to a DVD - the media corporations have to put up with a minority of people infringing their copyright. So they force everyone using the content to sit through a "do not infringe" video.
As with other commercial offerings, the sole measure of success for commercial art is how well it sells, irrespective of the reason for this.
You are talking about commercial success - my original comment was about _quality_, not success. As far as quality goes then yes, from the corporation's point of view the "quality" of the whole product (including marketting, etc) equates to how much it sells. However, from the _consumer's_ point of view the "quality" is very much a question of how much they like the product, irrespecitve of how it was marketted.
If this is true, then why have illegal downloads of the heavily marketed acts / movies always massively outnumbered those of not so heavily marketed ones?
Because they are heavilly marketted. However, I suspect if you compare the number of people listening to the big acts and the small acts proportionally over the years you will find that the _proportion_ of sales going to the small acts has increased.
That's because most such content is either ripped from unprotected CDs, or DVDs whose DRM is so weak that it was broken years ago, and cannot now be replaced with something better.
And I'm sure when bandwidth catches up you will see HD movies ripped from BluRay and posted online. This is already possible since HDCP was cracked before being put into production. Remember that all the DRM cracks in the public domain at the moment have been written by someone like DVD Jon who has got pissed off with the DRM and wants to use the content they paid for in a non-infringing way that the DRM doesn't allow. These cracks were not developed by professional copyright infringers.
The correct action would be to take them back and demand a refund instead of finding ways around what you deem to be unacceptable.
I haven't purposefully "found a way around" the problem - I use an unlicenced DVD player because it better does what I need (integrates with MythTV, runs under the OS I use, etc.). The fact that it allows me to skip stuff I'm not supposed to skip is just a side effect.
The fact that you had to download and install mplayer does however prove rather than refute my point.
No it doesn't - I only "had to download" it because I downloaded my entire Linux distribution - it came as an integral part of the distro. I no more "had to download" mplayer than I "had to download" my text editor.
Just like the copyright holders put locks on their doors to protect them.
Well this was a bad analogy to begin with, but to continue the bad analogy this is closer to preventing people from entering a public building, such as a shopping mall, until they've sat through a 5 minute presentation telling them not to break the law. I think you'd find any shopping malls that tried that would suddenly start losing a whole load of customers who would go elsewhere.
While countless others didn't buy something they might have bought if there wasn't an easily accessible free version.
I recall seeing statistics showing that whilest singles sales have been dropping since MP3 sharing became popular, album sales have increased. It seems to me that many people are just doing the "try before you buy" thing and then buying the albums containing many tracks they like instead of singles containing just one track they like.
There is no objective measure of quality in commercial art beyond what sells, and anyone who suggests otherwise is an elitest snob.
This is untrue. The "quality" of art can be determined by what people _like_, which is not the same as what _sells_ due to marketting - something that people would like will not sell if noone knows about it's existance. The lack of marketting and therefore the lack of sales does not determine a lack of quality of the actual product.
Currently, the media's marketting tactics are to hype up a few acts. The advent of peer-to-peer sharing has meant that the consumers discover acts who haven't been marketted so aggressively but are "better" (i.e. the consumer prefers their music). If people are spending more on the smaller acts then they won't be spending so much on the big acts. This isn't necessarilly a problem for the music industry, but it doesn't fit with their current marketting policies. What _is_ a problem to the industry is that some smaller acts are now able, to some extent, to go it alone without signing to a label.
Like DRM on computer software or satellite / cable TV systems, it prevents casual copying, and that's the best that can be expected from a purely technological system.
No... no it doesn't. If I want to casually copy some DRM'd content I only have to fire up my Gnutella or Bittorrent client - it only takes one person to rip the content and put it online, and when you're distributing your content to millions of people you can pretty much guarantee that _someone_ will do it.
because these warnings are aimed at potential uploaders rather than downloaders
This may or may not be true - certainly the wording on some warnings on DVDs I have looks very much directed toward the downloader/buyer.
unless you are seriously going to suggest that the average media consumer finds sitting through a one minute unskippable ad
Some of my DVDs have *5 minute* unskippable videos at the start telling me that "copying is stealing" (which it isn't). Add to this that some DVDs have unskippable trailors for other movies and you've got a lot more than "a one minute unskippable ad". If I were using a licenced DVD player instead of Xine (and thus were affected by unskippable content) then these discs would go straight back to the shop - I didn't pay to have to put up with that kind of crap.
and then downloading and installing the relevant codecs to play it.
I've never had to install extra codecs to play any videos - mplayer handles most stuff out of the box.
than whether they'll be able to play a $1 song from iTunes on whatever music player they might end up with in 5 years.
You're right that most people won't care too much about a $1 song not playing... However, if your library of 1000 $1 tracks suddenly stopped working you'd probably be pretty pissed off, right? I dunno about you but I still regularly play a lot of my music collection that's well over 5 years old.
people don't care whether their code or their CSS is kosher, they just care that it looks the way they want it to.
Also, the way they want it to look is often terrible - most of the MySpace sites are either completely unreadable because of some background the site owner has decided to apply, or just plain annoying because they've decided that absolutely everyone must hear their favorite piece of music so they push it upon you as soon as you open the page.
From what I can see, the one good thing MySpace has done is group a large amount of crap in one place so it's easier to avoid.
(And I'm not even going to get started on the number of MySpace people who have taken to whoring my bandwidth by linking full size 6MP photos off my web server as their background images without permission).
Source? I'm curious how you'd go about doing such a thing...
The CLID is passed across the SS7 network as informational metadata (it's not used for actually routing the traffic so it doesn't need to be accurate). If you are a node in the SS7 network then you can place a call with whatever CLID you like. If you're using ISDN instead, you *may* be able to do the same thing, although in that case your telco would usually filter on the CLID you've set and refuse the call if it doesn't fall within the DDIs allocated to you.
Basically the problem is that the SS7 network assumes none of the nodes are hostile, which may not necessarilly be the case these days.
Phishing in my mind is a grey area and the responsiblity should be shared.
If I leave the keys in my house door and someone walks in and empties my house then I'm the one who will be paying.
Actually, my insurance company might be paying. Which brings me to my point - why not let people optionally get insurance, then those of us who don't get taken in by phishing and 419s, and don't run insecure software, can continue as we are and everyone else can go pay high insurance premiums to cover their incompetence.
it was not much work to email abuse@... and postmaster@
There also seems to be a move away from people even having standard abuse, postmaster and webmaster addresses - many businesses now expect you to post such things through their website, and honestly - who has time to trawl through a website to find a contact page rather than just using the standard addresses?
Traditionally all of their mission software was 100% home-rolled.
This is untrue - Spirit and Opportunity run VxWorks.
It would be interested to see any modifications NASA come out with for Linux (although since they aren't distributing the software they don't technically need to release the source). I understand they use a modified IP stack for communicating with recent probes, etc. so that's all stuff that could be published.
I suspect the reduced manpower to build the software is where the savings come in.
There could be stability bonuses too - even though noone else is using Linux for this job, the fact that large chunks of the code have been in use by a large number of people for years may be a big benefit - there's only so far that testing in the lab will go. (That is not to say they will reduce the testing they do, but starting with a code base that's well proved already is always a good thing on top of your normal test procedures)
Spamhaus are not liable if the information they published is used by a third party to decide not to accept your mail.
I guess it could be considered libel since by listing your address they are effectively making a claim that you are a spammer (assuming the claim is untrue of course). (IANAL)
No, it does not, any more than having a lock on your door "pushes" people into breaking into your house
This is a bad analogy:
- People who would break into my house are never "legitimate users".
- I chose to put the lock on my door to protect *me* - it wasn't imposed on me by some third party in order to protect *them*.
If the lock on my door was placed there by some other authority and did nothing to protect me then yes, I would be pushed into bypassing it if it causes me an inconvenience.
Like many who do illegal things, you are attempting to justify your own actions by pretending that you were somehow forced into them instead of merely having _chosen to act illegally_.
Errm, *I* haven't chosen to act illegally - I am simply saying that if you make it way more inconvenient for people to take the legitimate route than the illegal route then you will push more people towards the illegal side. Whether these people are "right" or "wrong" is a completely moot point - the fact that otherwise legitimate users have decided they're going to take the illegal route because of the publishers actions certainly can't be considered good for the publisher's business. And yet, the people who were going to act illegally anyway are still going to act illegally - who benefits?
Stealing CDs is also a lot easier than earning money to buy them.
This is also a bogus argument - most people *have* the money to buy CDs - if you already had the money anyway then it doesn't feature in the "effort to get the CD" calculation.
Also, you seem to be using theft analogies a lot - copyright infringement is _not_ theft, despite what certain people want to to believe. If you infringe copyright you haven't relieved anyone of anything they already had.
The problem is that people were already doing precisely that before music DRM was widespread, hence the insistence on its use.
I won't argue with that point (although I will suggest the problem isn't anywhere near as big as the music industry maintain - in many cases music piracy seems to cause people to *buy* music they otherwise wouldn't have bought. Maybe the industry's problem is that more people are buying higher quality music rather than the music the industry is trying to promote)
However, it brings me back to my original point - DRM won't prevent copying so it doesn't solve the problem, and in the process it has also annoyed legitimate consumers who, as a result, are pushed more towards the easy (illegal) route rather than the difficult (legal, DRM encumbered) route.
all were to the overall detriment of customers
You're not making a very good arguement for DRM...
Again,it is a response to _a perceived problem_
I'm afraid I just can't see how this response makes any sense at all, whether there is a perceived problem or an actual problem. It doesn't impact the people who are causing the problem, whilest it impacts the legitimate customers.
You wouldn't have to put up with it if there weren't any pirated copies or unlicensed players either
I'm not sure what your point is - yes, people break the law. What I have been saying is that DRM doesn't impact the people who are breaking the law, whilest it encourages the otherwise legitimate consumers to break the law as well. How does that help?
this is the only way to make people understand that _unauthorised_ downloading is illegal
How will it do that? The people who do unauthorised downloading won't ever see the copyright warnings since they'll already have been stripped. Meanwhile, the people who bought it legitimately have to put up with a warning that doesn't apply to them.
And seriously - how many people really don't know that copyright infringement is illegal? People who infringe copyright do it with the full knowledge that it's illegal - reminding them of this fact does nothing.
Yet the fact of the matter is that being entertained by someb
It's inconvenient, but not illegal.
This seems to be a running theme with systems aiming to "protect" content - they're not making things impossible, just more effort, and that simply means it hits the legitimate users and pushes them more towards the non-legitimate side. I'm sure this will come back to bite the media companies in the arse at some point.
So at the moment, I buy all my music on CD and immediately rip it into Ogg format. I can play the resulting Oggs on my computer at home or work, on my MythTV system and on my in-car stereo. And I've still got the CD if I want to use it on my CD player.
If I were to buy my music from Apple then in order to convert it to Ogg format I need to burn it to CD and then rip the CD - that's a lot of effort... Just firing up gnutella and downloading it is far easier. (The same goes for the corrupt optical discs that are being sold instead of CDs by a number of companies). Now personally, I do pay for my music (remember: I buy it on CD), but as it gets harder and harder to use the legally purchased content then people will be pushed towards downloading it illegally instead. And once they're having to download it to make use of it I'd bet a large chunk of people will just plain stop paying for it in the first place.
Essentially the media companies have completely lost their customer focus - they're adding annoyances that only affect their legitimate customers. Take DVDs for example - if I legitimately buy a DVD and play it on a licenced DVD player I have to put up with a long "piracy is stealing" video which I can't skip (ignoring, for a minute, the fact that piracy isn't stealing). If I were to get a pirated copy of the movie, or use it on an unlicenced player, I wouldn't have to put up with that. Why do they make bits of a DVD unskippable? Because they know noone wants to watch those bits - so do they somehow think that forcing people to watch it every time they put the DVD in the player *won't* piss off the legitimate customers?
So now if any customer wants a good quality of service, they have no choice but to infringe the copyright - Maybe I'm completely missing something, but I can't see how forcing your legitimate customers into piracy is supposed to reduce the number of people infringing your copyright...
However, the US is powerless against some calling agency operating out of Costa Rica, who doesn't give a rip about telecommunication laws. These people will war-dial phone numbers at unscrupulous hours of the evening, varying their tactics anywhere from constant nagging to actually demanding that you buy from them, even sometimes claiming that you've already established an "oral agreement" to make a purchase that you cannot back down from without penalty.
For what it's worth, it isn't just Costa Rica phoning the US - I'm in the UK and registered on the telephone preference service (the UK version of the "do not call list"). The only telesales calls I receive on my POTS line are international calls made from the US - and they are usually *very* abusive if I ask them not to call me again (quote from the last telesales call I got "I don't give a fucking shit about your telephone preference service - I'm not in your country so fuck you" - yup, I'd call that pretty abusive).
The moral of the story - it doesn't matter where the telemarketter is located, if they're calling across international boarders there are no laws and they are free to do whatever they like (and they do).
1) if an artificial black hole instantly swallows Earth, what about the moon?
There would be nothing instant about it - it would slowly munch through the Earth's core... the moon would continue to orbit (since the black hole would have the same mass as the Earth once it has finished eating).
2) if an artificial black hole grows slowly, then wouldn't it be possible to encapsulate it in a space capsule and throw it to the sun?
Great idea - now instead of just munching up the Earth you've thrown it at an all-you-can-eat buffet... which also happens to be the source of all out energy.
4) if an artificial black hole can be totally controlled (i.e. created and destroyed at will), could it be used to swallow all our garbage?
You can't destroy mass - you redistribute it or convert it to energy. So yes, it can swallow all our garbage, but the mass remains the same so you still have to do *something* with it... I guess you could convert some of the mass into energy and use it to radiate the rest of the mass into space...
Can MythTV control my existing cablebox (Scientific Atlanta Explorer 3250)?
You can tell Myth to fire up an external program to change channel - I have a shell script to send IR commands to my Sky box.
* Added MHEG content implementation (Interactive TV in UK)
:(
It should be noted that MHEG-5 is currently only used in the UK on DVB- T , not DVB-S (hopefully this will change when FreeSat gets off the ground next year). ATM all the interactive content on DVB-S is propriatory (not-so-)OpenTV stuff.
How does more choice equal less choice in your world?
In the short term there is more choice, but in the long term the publishers want to phase out non-DRM'd formats.
By the way, it is not illegal in most of the world to create DRM removal tools. Not all the world is the USA.
It's illegal in the US and it's also illegal here in the EU - that constitutes a large chunk of the world.
So, you refuse to buy or rent DVDs because they have DRM?
DVDs are slightly different in that they don't tie the content to a specific device - I can put my DVDs into any region 2 DVD player and they will work (but don't get me started on the whole region coding thing).
That said, I wouldn't ever buy a licenced DVD player for myself - I'm much happier playing my DVDs illegally using MythTV or Xine so I can skip the annoying unskippable parts which accuse me of piracy when I play contend *I paid for*. I suspect that if I couldn't skip the sections that are flagged as unskippable then I'd still be using VHS.
Then don't buy it. Pretty simple, really. What's your problem? You can buy music or movies elsewhere.
I don't buy it, and yes, I can (and do) buy my music and movies elsewhere *at the moment*. But the way things are going, the non-DRM'd sources are going to be gone eventually and then there will be no choice.
Well, there are already tools for removing the DRM from iTunes files, so if Apple goes out of business, you could legally use those.
The people who developed those tools are breaking the law and therefore risking their own freedom. So you seem to be saying that DRM is ok, because people (not you) are risking their freedom to develop tools you can use.
IMHO, anyone who actively supports DRM by buying DRM'd content is either crazy or has absolutely no understanding of the implications.
No, which is why I used the qualifier "likely." Where did I give a guarantee?
I would be unwilling to pay money for content that I *might* be able to use in the future - when I buy a CD I'm guaranteed that it will continue to work for as long as the medium itself lasts, nomatter what happens to the reseller (which is what iTMS is), the publisher or the artist.
So then they will get sued, probably by both (ex)-Apple and consumers.
If they give away the keys they're likley going to get sued by the content providers - so on the one hand we have a bunch of outraged customers with whome Apple (or it's liquidators) haven't violated any contract, and on the other hand, if they release the keys, they have almost certainly willingly borken a contract with the content providers.
It seems the only way Apple (or the liquidators) can abide by all of the contracts is to withhold or destroy the keys. Yes, that'll piss a helluva lot of people off, big deal.
The DMCA allows you to remove the DRM if the service you were using goes bankrupt or becomes obsolete.
Ah, great, so you have to put a helluva lot of effort into cracking an encryption that is designed to be very difficult to crack, yes, that makes it allright then...
If Apple went out of business, they would likely provide you with the keys to keep using your songs.
Have you got a contract with them guaranteeing that they'll do that? (Bear in mind that when apple go out of business it'll be the liquidators deciding what to do with DRM keys, not apple themselves. And the fact that they probably have a contract with the copyright holders guaranteeing they will never release the DRM keys).
Well then its on you to have a backup. You cannot expect everyone to wait on you hand and foot right?
This is the whole problem with DRM though - if it has to contact a server to authorize a machine to play it and that server nolonger exists then all the backups in the world won't help you - you just lost access to all the content you paid for.
2) an itunes account can be migrated from one computer to another (so if your computer dies your music does not)
What happens if the iTunes servers die (for example, if Apple go bankrupt)?
But are they going to release linux drivers with support for accellerated H.264 decoding any time soon? I don't care how many polygons per second these cards can shift, but accelleration of stuff I actually do, such as playing video, would be very worthwhile.
What's less obvious is that being too far east or west creates the same problem.
Not really - there are several SBAS satellites at different longitudes with overlapping footprints. If you can't see one then you are likely too far from the equator or so far out to east/west that you wouldn't get any useful DGPS data anyway.
Have no doubt whatsoever that the moment a "terrorist" uses (or comes close to using) a GPS-enabled attack, SA will go back on.
And this is why the EU is constructing Gallileo (and also why the US has been so adamantly opposed to it).
if Bush decided to turn SA on tomorrow, he could also turn WAAS off.
And doing so would be proof that the US government is criminally insane - turning SA on and SBAS off at the same time would certainly endanger a lot more lives than most terrorist attacks. It would also be interesting to see the legal ramifications of such a decision when the families of the thousands of innocent people who would be killed/maimed by this action sue the US government. (Yes, GPS/SBAS is used in safety-of-life applications).
At this point, I could care less about DGPS.
Really? Personally I couldn't care less about it - do you want to elaborate why you care?