Although, only the BBC channels are advert-free. And you have to pay for the BBC channels, even if you only want the non-BBC channels. (They could have fixed this by broadcasting BBC programmes scrambled and requiring a viewing card; the transition to digital television would have been the perfect opportunity to introduce this. I am currently awaiting a response from my MP as to why this was not done.)
Actually, nobody does click on the links and buy the stuff being advertised. They don't have to.
The spam advertisements are part of a get-rich-quick scheme (also known as Network Marketing -- as in the great Networks of Ancient Egypt). The advertisements are the product. The spammers are making money right, left and centre from idiots who are paying for an unsaleable product, and then paying more to have their product advertised widely. The advertising doesn't help them sell a single product, of course; but by that time, it's already too late. Some prat who thought he could become a dot-com millionaire ends up with naught but a stockpile of fake pills and a bill for services rendered -- and not a single order. He's not even going to report it because (1) it'll make him look daft for falling for it, and (2) it probably was illegal anyway. Unfortunately for the rest of us, there is an inexhaustible supply of prats who want to get rich quick.
Why need they support two platforms? If they would just release the Source Code for their applications, then the GNU/Linux and BSD communities would be able to make use of it. Hell, if they'd release some specs, then the community would write their own development tools.
I've said this before somewhere. The value of a computer lies not in the hardware, nor in the software, but in the users' data which passes through it. Those £20 Taiwanese Motherboards are proof that hardware manufacturers have the message; it seems that the closed-source software vendors are still struggling to take it on board. (How do you make Windows give non-admin users read-only access to USB mass storage devices? So your staff can show off their photos from their digital cameras, but not snarf company secrets onto thumb drives. In Linux, you have to add
/dev/sda1/camera auto user,ro,noexec,noauto 0 0
to your/etc/fstab or apply a kernel patch. Must be just one mouse click in Windows then.....)
There's no way for a saucepan manufacturer to prevent food cut up with other manufacturers' knives from being cooked in their pans, and nor should there be. The artificial restrictions imposed by software vendors exist primarily or solely to inflate the value of their warez (witness especially the blatant anticompetitive behaviour of the games console manufacturers, which already is technically in breach of EU law; allow time for the gaming kids of today to reach positions of power and stand well back). I think the Powers That Be are slowly twigging to this, which is why the whole ODF controversy started -- someone got wise to Microsoft's lock-in attempts.
WINE isn't always easy to configure. I tried it once, didn't get very far, thought "sod it" and looked to native Linux applications instead. And I have to say, they've improved with every version I've tried. (In all probability, so has WINE, so you may have a better experience than I did).
The thing is..... teaching a cat to bark will ultimately be a disappointing exercise. If your heart is dead set on something that barks, go and buy a dog. If you go for a cat, appreciate it for its felinity. Embrace the fact that it's not a dog, and enjoy how it can do things dogs can't do. It's really quite rare for anyone actually to need a cat with the ability to bark; most of the time you could get by with not barking, or borrow a real dog.
Also, what we tend to think of as "native Linux applications" can usually be persuaded to compile and run under Windows precisely because they are Open Source. (Windows applications probably could be got to compile and run under Linux -- if we only had the Source Code. But you don't very often see an Open Source project that started development on Windows and got ported to Mac and Linux -- usually, they start out being developed on Linux or BSD and get ported to Windows. I think that speaks volumes about the mentality of Windows developers.) Firefox/Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Gaim and Audacity probably would meet the requirements of 90% of Dell's customers, and of course are potentially available on both platforms. But Microsoft won't be happy at the thought of something taking marketshare from Outlook and Office; and I'm not sure the various advert-pushing IM networks are entirely thrilled about Gaim.
And so, the wheel turns full circle. As summer fades into autumn, then winter gives way to spring and summer returns again; so doth GNU depart from Unix, only to return again to Unix.
The GNU project was originally meant to be an alternative to the closed-source Unix implementations of the day. Like a heroin dealer relying on the twin pillars of illegality and addictive potential, closed-source Unix vendors had little incentive to improve their products; they just had to be different enough from the competition that you couldn't switch easily.
It really took for Linux to come on the scene to get GNU into a usable state; the BSD kernel (which had been favoured by the GNU developers prior to the advent Linux) already came with well-matched userland tools. And you've got to be serious about something to buy a whole car that already works just to rip out the engine and use it in a different chassis that looks identical to the first one from a distance. The GNU/Linux combination sparked interest in GNU. In turn, the BSDs diversified; today FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD all have their own respective market niches.
Closed-source Unix continues to stagnate and ultimately will grow irrelevant. The elephant in the room is that neither hardware nor software make up the bulk of the intrinsic value of a computer system; that value comes mainly from users' saved data.
Open Source pretty much forces you to implement Open Standards for saved files, which leads to transparent interoperability between programs that do the same sort of thing. In the end, AbiWord on GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org on Solaris and KWord on FreeBSD will all be able to open the same documents. The brand of tools used to shape the data is becoming less important than the result of using them. That's already how it is in other industries. After all, who ever asked what brand of cooking equipment a restaurant uses, or what make of tools a cabinet maker uses? The important thing is that chopping food with one make of knife doesn't block you from cooking it in a different manufacturer's pans, and rough-cutting a piece of wood with one make of power saw doesn't prevent you finishing it with a different manufacturer's chisel. Using one OS and application stack on your computer shouldn't preclude you from working with data manipulated using a different OS and stack. That's already the way it's heading, slowly but surely.
It won't work because it's attempting -- badly -- to solve the wrong problem.
The thing is, nobody actually shoplifts DVDs anyway! In record stores like HMV, there are already security tags on the DVD boxes on the shelves. In supermarkets like Sainsburys, which carry a smaller range of titles, the boxes on the shelves are empty; scanning the boxes alerts an assistant to bring the actual discs to the till.
What it might deter people from doing is taking a portable computer into a record store, opening a security-tagged DVD box, slotting the disc into their PC, ripping the movie to HDD and leaving the disc and its box in the store; thus not setting off the alarm. But if that sort of attack is happening for real, then maybe your in-store security personnel could do with taking their guide dogs to the vet for a check-up. (And then it's a matter of criminal damage, not theft; you gave their property back to them, although not in the condition in which you found it.) It probably won't deter store staff from ripping off DVDs, since they have access to the machine for activating the disc anyway -- and how's a customer going to tell that the disc went from unplayable to playable as opposed to having been playable all along?
If you want to get a movie to rip off and post all around the internet, it's least embarrassing all round just to pay for it. You can always try for a refund using the line about how it was a present for someone who you didn't know already had it; most places will offer you at least an exchange or credit note (which they aren't obliged to do, if the goods were actually fit for purpose, but there's nothing like tight margins to remind them who pays their wages).
Once the scheme fails -- and it won't succeed, because it cannot succeed; there is no way for it to succeed -- then expect further attacks on the consumer. Even if that just means price rises.
What's the problem? You may have been brainwashed by all the "requires Adobe reader" icons, but I can assure you that is a filthy great lie. There are "i-tal" tools for reading and writing PDF files. Try xpdf, kpdf, gpdf or evince for reading, and don't forget ps2pdf (which is part of ghostscript) for writing. I recently wrote a nice little web app that works by modifying an existing PostScript file with some user-supplied data, then piping it through ps2pdf to STDOUT.
A pound of my money is worth a pound whether it's a pound coin, five twenties, a hundred pennies or any of the other combinations of coins; and it's worth a pound whether it comes by cheque, cash or credit card, and whether I bring it to you in person or down a wire. If your bank is charging you different amounts to deal with it depending how it comes in, they're being shonky.
Coca Cola branded soda costs more than unbranded stuff at the supermarket because they cost the supermarket different amounts in to buy themselves. Is that shonky?
As long as they aren't trying to pass off the unbranded stuff as Coke, no: it's not the same stuff.
What I object to is being charged different prices for the same goods.
I'd be in favour of banning advertising altogether..... along with other shonky practises such as charging different amounts depending on method of payment and/or charging different amounts for online and in-person purchases.
Advertising increases the cost of the products that are advertised. It may or may not result in more purchases. If it does not result in more purchases, or the increased revenue from purchases fails to offset the advertising costs (and it's a very fine line between economy of scale and the law of diminishing returns) then consumers suffer.
'Our measurement systems are inaccurate for the amount of trust we'd like to put into them,' Edelman said. 'So that's the puzzle: How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?'
Short answer: You don't.
Advertisers are parasites that manage to hook into both ends of the food chain. They suck producers dry under the false pretence of bringing consumers to them; and they suck consumers dry by inflating the prices of goods (to pay for the adverts that they are ignoring).
We have now reached a saturation point: there is literally nowhere left for the advertising industry to plaster their garish advertisements. Everywhere you look, there's a f***ing advertising hoarding. Then they got clever and used "time-domain multiplexing" -- revolving hoardings that can fit three posters into the space of one! People wander round in clothes made in third-world sweatshops, that boldly display the manufacturer's name; yet they actually paid good money to do that. (Unless they bought the better-quality counterfeits, and the real manufacturer still gets the benefit of advertising either way.) The only watchable TV channels -- unless you've got Sky Plus -- are from the BBC. And don't think you can get away from it in the cinema. First they advertised before the movie. Then they advertised the tie-in merchandise for weeks after the movie. Nowadays the whole movie is one long advert!
When the advertising industry is dead, there'll be one MOTHER of a queue to dance on its grave.
If Ubuntu make good and include a GPL Java interpreter as standard, then that's not at all unlikely. It would take some special classes for implementing playback, is all. You could embed a movie, as a literal, right into a Java player-applet.....
It's important because when you call a non-GPL library from a GPL program, or a GPL library from a non-GPL program, the combination (program + library) in the memory of the computer could be considered a derived work of both components.
It's also irrelevant, because making a copy of a computer program in memory, from a source which does not infringe copyright in and of itself (e.g. an original CD that you rightfully own) and for the purpose of running the program, is explicitly permitted by copyright law -- it falls within the scope of Fair Dealing. Otherwise you might be denied the use of something that you had bought and paid for; which would certainly run afoul of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 as amended and/or the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 as amended.
BT most definitely check what number you're identing as. If they didn't, anyone would be able to pretend to be anyone else. The whole point of caller ID is to let you see who is calling before you pick up the phone, so it absolutely has to be correct.
We have two primary rate ISDN connections, i.e. 60 conversations plus two D-channels, and a few ranges of numbers (including some 0800 [free] and 0845 [old local rate, but you can't use any inclusive minutes on your tariff]) to go with them. These are plugged into an Asterisk PABX using a four-channel card (a third port is used "in reverse" for the Eicon Diva card in our Hylafax server..... looks just like 30 serial ports with modems on them. But what's coming out of them is already just a bunch of zeros and ones, all time-domain multiplexed and ready to stuff into a primary rate ISDN line). However, due to a change of address, there were subtly different particulars on the order for the second E1 line and associated numbers (subtle enough not to prevent bills getting through; if only telephone companies devoted as much attention to keeping the network going as they do to getting their money in). As a result, we couldn't ident any calls going down the first group of 30 lines as originating from any number associated with the second group, and vice versa.
Needless to say, this took some tracking down! At our end, we had to disconnect each ISDN line in turn to verify that the problem was with each line not being allowed to use certain numbers; and at BT's end, they had to check the full billing information, right down to the last punctuation mark, and realise that we were the same customer.
If you have a primary rate ISDN line, you can send a message over the D-channel to set your ident. However, the telephone company will check that the number you are requesting is actually assigned to you. If the number is not one of yours, then the ident will not be changed.
Faxes do have one advantage: you can use a pencil. Sometimes it's still the quickest way of getting a drawing together. If you're ordering some timber and you want to include a sketch with a cutting list, for instance, a fax is definitely the way to do it.
No it isn't, at least not by an ordinary person. On a land line, the caller ID is sent -- from the called party's local telephone exchange -- after the line polarity reversal and before the first burst of ringing voltage. No circuit is established between caller and called party. The only way to spoof caller ID is from the called party's local exchange. If you're on ISDN and have multiple numbers, there's a message you can send down the D-channel to select one of them; but the remote exchange will actually check that the number really is assigned to you. Spoofing caller ID requires fairly high-level access, and the phone company know exactly who can do it.
However, there may be a way you can apparently spoof it, if the far-end user is sufficiently dim-witted. But it will probably only work for phones, not faxes. Like any phorm of phreaking, this one relies on telephone company greed to succeed.
The old Nynex / Cable and Wireless phone lines avoided patent issues (and coincidentally made sure their equipment would be incompatible with BT's; though manufacturers would soon see a gap for a phone with built-in caller ID display and include both systems in their phones) by using a different method of sending caller ID, which was a burst of DTMF tones between ringing voltage bursts. If someone's telephone supports such dual-mode caller ID (it'd've been labelled "BT and cable compatible"), then you can send DTMF digits from the calling end immediately after the line has been picked up and they will show on the screen.
Obviously that won't work for most people, since it's usual to look at the caller ID on the phone first, then pick it up (or let it ring, as the case may be). The called party would have to be in a hurry, or expecting a call from a known person, to pick up the phone without checking. Furthermore, you can only spoof the number that appears on the screen of the telephone, not the number you hear when you dial 1471.
But it wasn't their $999 999 980. That money belonged to the people who ended up spending it on other things.
Suppose someone made a different movie that was not popular at all; you were the only person who bought it. Everybody's talking about it, but it's not nice things they're saying! Having paid $20 just to see what all the fuss was about, you decrypted it and posted it on the Internet anyway; but the movie was so utterly dire that nobody else even downloaded a copy without paying for it, let alone bought it.
This movie also made $20 in total, as opposed to the $1 000 000 000 that other movies made. Is anybody guilty of stealing $999 999 980 this time?
The fact is, you don't have an automatic right to make money just because you do things that you think people might pay you for.
It's called the Economics of Plenty -- you can't apply the old Economics of Scarcity to goods that are by nature not scarce. If you want to be able to sell things that other people can make for themselves, you have to offer better value than anyone else. Downloading a movie ties up your PC for days on end, and the use of a PC has Value. If you want people to buy movies from you rather than downloading them for themselves, you have to sell them at a price lower than their assessment of the Value of the Labour and Materials involved in downloading.
That's why people don't "pirate" newspapers, magazines and the latest Harry Potter novel, despite the total absence of copy-prevention technology in most printed material (though I believe some sheet music was printed in UV-reflective ink, which messed up any attempt to photocopy it on some older machines) and the presence of a photocopier in nearly every newsagent, bookshop and library: making a copy requires a greater outlay than just buying the item.
I keep hearing that copyright infringement is theft, and I am not convinced.
Theft means depriving someone of something.
What exactly is it that you used to have before someone decrypted a movie from a disc they bought and paid for with their own money, earned through their own efforts by hand or by brain, and you don't have after someone decrypted the movie?
The legitimate software player application that has had its key revoked needs to have its key updated. Fair enough. What's to stop someone from doing a bit-by-bit comparison between the "old" and "new" files, and determining the new key from there?
This whole system was never, ever going to work. It matters not one iota how many bits be in the key, the fact is that the key is on the disc and in the player -- both of which the "attacker" has access to. Even worse, the unencrypted RGB signal is available at the grids of the cathode ray tube (you'll have to recover the timing information from the scan coils, but it's eminently doable). I reckon, two 2902 quad op-amps and a bunch of resistors at most. Unless you send a policeman round to check up on everyone watching a HD-DVD, people are going to find a way to make copies. Come to think of it, even that won't necessarily work -- you can bribe a cop.
What'll be pants-pissingly funny is if they ever try to revoke a key on a standalone, TV-connected player. In the UK, that sort of thing is called "criminal damage" and can get you arrested. It's also a good way to get your products banned from sale.
There's no pirated software where I work. I can be sure of that because we're a 100% Open Source / Manual Methods shop.
We got a "friendly visit" from FAST once. They seemed concerned mainly with how we prevented employees from copying the software that was on their workstations (more particularly with trying to sell us a Windows-only, closed-source payware program that would have made a christian attempt to prevent this sort of thing). I pointed out that we had no procedure in place to prevent this and were unlikely ever to institute one. I thought the poor guy's arsehole was going to cave in until I pointed out that every piece of software on their machines was either truly Open Source or otherwise redistributable, so there would be no reason for us to prevent this.
I hardly think GCC is "contamination". You're free to do most things with it, apart from rape it by turning it into a closed-source proprietary product.
Debian have created GNU/FreeBSD, GNU/Hurd and GNU/OpenSolaris operating systems. Same userland programs, different kernel.
You probably could get the FreeBSD userland to work with a Linux kernel, too. For that matter, some parts of Slackware and Debian did originally come from one or other of the BSDs, and in fact Debian have started looking to OpenBSD for certain security-related packages.
most people don't give a fuck about the "internals" of the operating system.
But a few people do, and they care a lot. It's important for their sakes that the internals be exposed.
windows just works.
You have seriously low expectations if you think Windows "works". Go and look at a proper unix system sometime -- preferably the sort whose reliability record GNU/Linux would be jealous of.
Slashdot Mirror
Sixty million Britons do exactly that.
Although, only the BBC channels are advert-free. And you have to pay for the BBC channels, even if you only want the non-BBC channels. (They could have fixed this by broadcasting BBC programmes scrambled and requiring a viewing card; the transition to digital television would have been the perfect opportunity to introduce this. I am currently awaiting a response from my MP as to why this was not done.)
Actually, nobody does click on the links and buy the stuff being advertised. They don't have to.
The spam advertisements are part of a get-rich-quick scheme (also known as Network Marketing -- as in the great Networks of Ancient Egypt). The advertisements are the product. The spammers are making money right, left and centre from idiots who are paying for an unsaleable product, and then paying more to have their product advertised widely. The advertising doesn't help them sell a single product, of course; but by that time, it's already too late. Some prat who thought he could become a dot-com millionaire ends up with naught but a stockpile of fake pills and a bill for services rendered -- and not a single order. He's not even going to report it because (1) it'll make him look daft for falling for it, and (2) it probably was illegal anyway. Unfortunately for the rest of us, there is an inexhaustible supply of prats who want to get rich quick.
I'm afraid I can't think of Sandra Bullock the same way anymore since that song by The Beautiful South.
I've said this before somewhere. The value of a computer lies not in the hardware, nor in the software, but in the users' data which passes through it. Those £20 Taiwanese Motherboards are proof that hardware manufacturers have the message; it seems that the closed-source software vendors are still struggling to take it on board. (How do you make Windows give non-admin users read-only access to USB mass storage devices? So your staff can show off their photos from their digital cameras, but not snarf company secrets onto thumb drives. In Linux, you have to add to your
There's no way for a saucepan manufacturer to prevent food cut up with other manufacturers' knives from being cooked in their pans, and nor should there be. The artificial restrictions imposed by software vendors exist primarily or solely to inflate the value of their warez (witness especially the blatant anticompetitive behaviour of the games console manufacturers, which already is technically in breach of EU law; allow time for the gaming kids of today to reach positions of power and stand well back). I think the Powers That Be are slowly twigging to this, which is why the whole ODF controversy started -- someone got wise to Microsoft's lock-in attempts.
I have to agree with Mark on this one.
..... teaching a cat to bark will ultimately be a disappointing exercise. If your heart is dead set on something that barks, go and buy a dog. If you go for a cat, appreciate it for its felinity. Embrace the fact that it's not a dog, and enjoy how it can do things dogs can't do. It's really quite rare for anyone actually to need a cat with the ability to bark; most of the time you could get by with not barking, or borrow a real dog.
WINE isn't always easy to configure. I tried it once, didn't get very far, thought "sod it" and looked to native Linux applications instead. And I have to say, they've improved with every version I've tried. (In all probability, so has WINE, so you may have a better experience than I did).
The thing is
Also, what we tend to think of as "native Linux applications" can usually be persuaded to compile and run under Windows precisely because they are Open Source. (Windows applications probably could be got to compile and run under Linux -- if we only had the Source Code. But you don't very often see an Open Source project that started development on Windows and got ported to Mac and Linux -- usually, they start out being developed on Linux or BSD and get ported to Windows. I think that speaks volumes about the mentality of Windows developers.) Firefox/Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Gaim and Audacity probably would meet the requirements of 90% of Dell's customers, and of course are potentially available on both platforms. But Microsoft won't be happy at the thought of something taking marketshare from Outlook and Office; and I'm not sure the various advert-pushing IM networks are entirely thrilled about Gaim.
And so, the wheel turns full circle. As summer fades into autumn, then winter gives way to spring and summer returns again; so doth GNU depart from Unix, only to return again to Unix.
The GNU project was originally meant to be an alternative to the closed-source Unix implementations of the day. Like a heroin dealer relying on the twin pillars of illegality and addictive potential, closed-source Unix vendors had little incentive to improve their products; they just had to be different enough from the competition that you couldn't switch easily.
It really took for Linux to come on the scene to get GNU into a usable state; the BSD kernel (which had been favoured by the GNU developers prior to the advent Linux) already came with well-matched userland tools. And you've got to be serious about something to buy a whole car that already works just to rip out the engine and use it in a different chassis that looks identical to the first one from a distance. The GNU/Linux combination sparked interest in GNU. In turn, the BSDs diversified; today FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD all have their own respective market niches.
Closed-source Unix continues to stagnate and ultimately will grow irrelevant. The elephant in the room is that neither hardware nor software make up the bulk of the intrinsic value of a computer system; that value comes mainly from users' saved data.
Open Source pretty much forces you to implement Open Standards for saved files, which leads to transparent interoperability between programs that do the same sort of thing. In the end, AbiWord on GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org on Solaris and KWord on FreeBSD will all be able to open the same documents. The brand of tools used to shape the data is becoming less important than the result of using them. That's already how it is in other industries. After all, who ever asked what brand of cooking equipment a restaurant uses, or what make of tools a cabinet maker uses? The important thing is that chopping food with one make of knife doesn't block you from cooking it in a different manufacturer's pans, and rough-cutting a piece of wood with one make of power saw doesn't prevent you finishing it with a different manufacturer's chisel. Using one OS and application stack on your computer shouldn't preclude you from working with data manipulated using a different OS and stack. That's already the way it's heading, slowly but surely.
It won't work because it's attempting -- badly -- to solve the wrong problem.
The thing is, nobody actually shoplifts DVDs anyway! In record stores like HMV, there are already security tags on the DVD boxes on the shelves. In supermarkets like Sainsburys, which carry a smaller range of titles, the boxes on the shelves are empty; scanning the boxes alerts an assistant to bring the actual discs to the till.
What it might deter people from doing is taking a portable computer into a record store, opening a security-tagged DVD box, slotting the disc into their PC, ripping the movie to HDD and leaving the disc and its box in the store; thus not setting off the alarm. But if that sort of attack is happening for real, then maybe your in-store security personnel could do with taking their guide dogs to the vet for a check-up. (And then it's a matter of criminal damage, not theft; you gave their property back to them, although not in the condition in which you found it.) It probably won't deter store staff from ripping off DVDs, since they have access to the machine for activating the disc anyway -- and how's a customer going to tell that the disc went from unplayable to playable as opposed to having been playable all along?
If you want to get a movie to rip off and post all around the internet, it's least embarrassing all round just to pay for it. You can always try for a refund using the line about how it was a present for someone who you didn't know already had it; most places will offer you at least an exchange or credit note (which they aren't obliged to do, if the goods were actually fit for purpose, but there's nothing like tight margins to remind them who pays their wages).
Once the scheme fails -- and it won't succeed, because it cannot succeed; there is no way for it to succeed -- then expect further attacks on the consumer. Even if that just means price rises.
We have had Stasi@home in Britain for years, except we call it "Neighbourhood Watch".
What's the problem? You may have been brainwashed by all the "requires Adobe reader" icons, but I can assure you that is a filthy great lie. There are "i-tal" tools for reading and writing PDF files. Try xpdf, kpdf, gpdf or evince for reading, and don't forget ps2pdf (which is part of ghostscript) for writing. I recently wrote a nice little web app that works by modifying an existing PostScript file with some user-supplied data, then piping it through ps2pdf to STDOUT.
What I object to is being charged different prices for the same goods.
I'd be in favour of banning advertising altogether ..... along with other shonky practises such as charging different amounts depending on method of payment and/or charging different amounts for online and in-person purchases.
Advertising increases the cost of the products that are advertised. It may or may not result in more purchases. If it does not result in more purchases, or the increased revenue from purchases fails to offset the advertising costs (and it's a very fine line between economy of scale and the law of diminishing returns) then consumers suffer.
Advertisers are parasites that manage to hook into both ends of the food chain. They suck producers dry under the false pretence of bringing consumers to them; and they suck consumers dry by inflating the prices of goods (to pay for the adverts that they are ignoring).
We have now reached a saturation point: there is literally nowhere left for the advertising industry to plaster their garish advertisements. Everywhere you look, there's a f***ing advertising hoarding. Then they got clever and used "time-domain multiplexing" -- revolving hoardings that can fit three posters into the space of one! People wander round in clothes made in third-world sweatshops, that boldly display the manufacturer's name; yet they actually paid good money to do that. (Unless they bought the better-quality counterfeits, and the real manufacturer still gets the benefit of advertising either way.) The only watchable TV channels -- unless you've got Sky Plus -- are from the BBC. And don't think you can get away from it in the cinema. First they advertised before the movie. Then they advertised the tie-in merchandise for weeks after the movie. Nowadays the whole movie is one long advert!
When the advertising industry is dead, there'll be one MOTHER of a queue to dance on its grave.
If Ubuntu make good and include a GPL Java interpreter as standard, then that's not at all unlikely. It would take some special classes for implementing playback, is all. You could embed a movie, as a literal, right into a Java player-applet .....
It's important because when you call a non-GPL library from a GPL program, or a GPL library from a non-GPL program, the combination (program + library) in the memory of the computer could be considered a derived work of both components.
It's also irrelevant, because making a copy of a computer program in memory, from a source which does not infringe copyright in and of itself (e.g. an original CD that you rightfully own) and for the purpose of running the program, is explicitly permitted by copyright law -- it falls within the scope of Fair Dealing. Otherwise you might be denied the use of something that you had bought and paid for; which would certainly run afoul of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 as amended and/or the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 as amended.
BT most definitely check what number you're identing as. If they didn't, anyone would be able to pretend to be anyone else. The whole point of caller ID is to let you see who is calling before you pick up the phone, so it absolutely has to be correct.
..... looks just like 30 serial ports with modems on them. But what's coming out of them is already just a bunch of zeros and ones, all time-domain multiplexed and ready to stuff into a primary rate ISDN line). However, due to a change of address, there were subtly different particulars on the order for the second E1 line and associated numbers (subtle enough not to prevent bills getting through; if only telephone companies devoted as much attention to keeping the network going as they do to getting their money in). As a result, we couldn't ident any calls going down the first group of 30 lines as originating from any number associated with the second group, and vice versa.
We have two primary rate ISDN connections, i.e. 60 conversations plus two D-channels, and a few ranges of numbers (including some 0800 [free] and 0845 [old local rate, but you can't use any inclusive minutes on your tariff]) to go with them. These are plugged into an Asterisk PABX using a four-channel card (a third port is used "in reverse" for the Eicon Diva card in our Hylafax server
Needless to say, this took some tracking down! At our end, we had to disconnect each ISDN line in turn to verify that the problem was with each line not being allowed to use certain numbers; and at BT's end, they had to check the full billing information, right down to the last punctuation mark, and realise that we were the same customer.
If you have a primary rate ISDN line, you can send a message over the D-channel to set your ident. However, the telephone company will check that the number you are requesting is actually assigned to you. If the number is not one of yours, then the ident will not be changed.
Faxes do have one advantage: you can use a pencil. Sometimes it's still the quickest way of getting a drawing together. If you're ordering some timber and you want to include a sketch with a cutting list, for instance, a fax is definitely the way to do it.
No it isn't, at least not by an ordinary person. On a land line, the caller ID is sent -- from the called party's local telephone exchange -- after the line polarity reversal and before the first burst of ringing voltage. No circuit is established between caller and called party. The only way to spoof caller ID is from the called party's local exchange. If you're on ISDN and have multiple numbers, there's a message you can send down the D-channel to select one of them; but the remote exchange will actually check that the number really is assigned to you. Spoofing caller ID requires fairly high-level access, and the phone company know exactly who can do it.
However, there may be a way you can apparently spoof it, if the far-end user is sufficiently dim-witted. But it will probably only work for phones, not faxes. Like any phorm of phreaking, this one relies on telephone company greed to succeed.
The old Nynex / Cable and Wireless phone lines avoided patent issues (and coincidentally made sure their equipment would be incompatible with BT's; though manufacturers would soon see a gap for a phone with built-in caller ID display and include both systems in their phones) by using a different method of sending caller ID, which was a burst of DTMF tones between ringing voltage bursts. If someone's telephone supports such dual-mode caller ID (it'd've been labelled "BT and cable compatible"), then you can send DTMF digits from the calling end immediately after the line has been picked up and they will show on the screen.
Obviously that won't work for most people, since it's usual to look at the caller ID on the phone first, then pick it up (or let it ring, as the case may be). The called party would have to be in a hurry, or expecting a call from a known person, to pick up the phone without checking. Furthermore, you can only spoof the number that appears on the screen of the telephone, not the number you hear when you dial 1471.
But it wasn't their $999 999 980. That money belonged to the people who ended up spending it on other things.
Suppose someone made a different movie that was not popular at all; you were the only person who bought it. Everybody's talking about it, but it's not nice things they're saying! Having paid $20 just to see what all the fuss was about, you decrypted it and posted it on the Internet anyway; but the movie was so utterly dire that nobody else even downloaded a copy without paying for it, let alone bought it.
This movie also made $20 in total, as opposed to the $1 000 000 000 that other movies made. Is anybody guilty of stealing $999 999 980 this time?
The fact is, you don't have an automatic right to make money just because you do things that you think people might pay you for.
It's called the Economics of Plenty -- you can't apply the old Economics of Scarcity to goods that are by nature not scarce. If you want to be able to sell things that other people can make for themselves, you have to offer better value than anyone else. Downloading a movie ties up your PC for days on end, and the use of a PC has Value. If you want people to buy movies from you rather than downloading them for themselves, you have to sell them at a price lower than their assessment of the Value of the Labour and Materials involved in downloading.
That's why people don't "pirate" newspapers, magazines and the latest Harry Potter novel, despite the total absence of copy-prevention technology in most printed material (though I believe some sheet music was printed in UV-reflective ink, which messed up any attempt to photocopy it on some older machines) and the presence of a photocopier in nearly every newsagent, bookshop and library: making a copy requires a greater outlay than just buying the item.
I keep hearing that copyright infringement is theft, and I am not convinced.
Theft means depriving someone of something.
What exactly is it that you used to have before someone decrypted a movie from a disc they bought and paid for with their own money, earned through their own efforts by hand or by brain, and you don't have after someone decrypted the movie?
The legitimate software player application that has had its key revoked needs to have its key updated. Fair enough. What's to stop someone from doing a bit-by-bit comparison between the "old" and "new" files, and determining the new key from there?
This whole system was never, ever going to work. It matters not one iota how many bits be in the key, the fact is that the key is on the disc and in the player -- both of which the "attacker" has access to. Even worse, the unencrypted RGB signal is available at the grids of the cathode ray tube (you'll have to recover the timing information from the scan coils, but it's eminently doable). I reckon, two 2902 quad op-amps and a bunch of resistors at most. Unless you send a policeman round to check up on everyone watching a HD-DVD, people are going to find a way to make copies. Come to think of it, even that won't necessarily work -- you can bribe a cop.
What'll be pants-pissingly funny is if they ever try to revoke a key on a standalone, TV-connected player. In the UK, that sort of thing is called "criminal damage" and can get you arrested. It's also a good way to get your products banned from sale.
There's no pirated software where I work. I can be sure of that because we're a 100% Open Source / Manual Methods shop.
We got a "friendly visit" from FAST once. They seemed concerned mainly with how we prevented employees from copying the software that was on their workstations (more particularly with trying to sell us a Windows-only, closed-source payware program that would have made a christian attempt to prevent this sort of thing). I pointed out that we had no procedure in place to prevent this and were unlikely ever to institute one. I thought the poor guy's arsehole was going to cave in until I pointed out that every piece of software on their machines was either truly Open Source or otherwise redistributable, so there would be no reason for us to prevent this.
I hardly think GCC is "contamination". You're free to do most things with it, apart from rape it by turning it into a closed-source proprietary product.
Debian have created GNU/FreeBSD, GNU/Hurd and GNU/OpenSolaris operating systems. Same userland programs, different kernel.
You probably could get the FreeBSD userland to work with a Linux kernel, too. For that matter, some parts of Slackware and Debian did originally come from one or other of the BSDs, and in fact Debian have started looking to OpenBSD for certain security-related packages.