Yes; but once one DRM-free copy exists in the world, then an infinite number more DRM-free copies can be generated from that one. Anyway, consumers won't stand for that scam forever. Once the novelty wears off, if the choice is "pay up or do without", then they will do without.
Before 1994, South Africa held the title of "most hated nation". Nations who persisted in trading with South Africa said that not to do so would disadvantage the poorest, mainly black, South Africans. Other nations ranted against South Africa whilst perpetrating their own heinous abuses of human rights.
Anyway, Google run their server farms on cheap motherboards..... where do they think the components for those boards are made?
The unpleasant truth is that it's damned nigh impossible to avoid doing business with China one way or another. And if you do manage to avoid China, then you will end up paying over the odds for everything you buy, and be unable to compete in the marketplace.
Write to your Elected Representatives and ask them why we are allowed to import goods which have been manufactured under conditions which would not be acceptable in the destination country? It's all very well for countries such as Britain and the USA to have environmental, consumer protection and workers' rights laws; but when imported goods sidestep those laws, locally-produced goods become uncompetitive and the benefits that should have brought by those laws are lost. Something's got to be wrong when it's cheaper to fly a plane halfway round the world and back than to treat your workers like human beings.
Just because it's a three-conductor plug doesn't make it stereo. The end connection is the signal, and the middle one is +5V through a resistor for powering up electret condenser mics. If you use a dynamic mic with a mono plug, the resistor will protect the power supply.
Abuse of liberty is abuse of liberty whatever form it takes. Before white and black people ever walked on the same land, there was no such thing as race discrimination: every one of your neighbours had the same colour skin as you. We think now that people have the right to be treated the same whatever the colour of their skin.
By the same token, before computers existed, Software Users' Rights weren't an issue. Today, we should be able to count among our basic rights the right to enjoy the use of software without interference, the right to study the source code of the software we use, the right to share the code with our neighbours and the right to adapt the software we use to our individual needs. Those rights exist because software exists, and only because software exists.
Telling people what they can and cannot do with what they own violates the right to enjoy. Telling people that they cannot inspect the software they use violates the right to study. Telling people that they cannot give a copy of the software that they use to their neighbour violates the right to share and telling people that they cannot modify the software, but must modify their workflow to match the software, violates the right to adapt. All these things constitute the unfair imposition of one person's will upon another, and as such should be condemned as acts of violence.
It is precisely because people like you go around thinking that one violation of fundamental human rights is any less deplorable than another, that people's rights continue to be violated.
As long as it works with even one sound card for which Open Source drivers exist, this DRM scheme is defeatable, just the same as any other DRM scheme that has ever existed or will ever exist. Every penny spent pursuing what is demonstrably a mathematical impossibility is a penny wasted.
You can publish patches to the source code for Pine. You can publish modified binaries for Pine as long as you take them outside the UW versioning scheme so they don't get mistaken for actual UW products.
Gentoo and the BSDs, with their source-based ports systems, can all include Pine natively; since patching and compilation are done on the end user's computer. Debian could {by adding depends: for the complete development toolchain, and patching and compiling the source during preinstall}, but won't because it would seriously break the way their packaging system works {depends: is meant to be about running the package, not the preinstall phase, and mucking about with the toolchain shouldn't affect what's already been compiled}.
I personally don't have a problem with the Pine licence. And UW are currently happy about people downloading, compiling and using Pine; they're just too damn stubborn to solve everybody's problems in one fell swoop by switching to the GPL for PINE v5. But I can see why Debian are erring on the side of caution -- what will happen if some new top brass take over at UW, decide to make Pine a closed-source, commercial project, and begin vigorously pursuing past excesses of authority by software distributors?
I am sure that racial equality is an ideal to you, but to most people it is not. It is people, and it is a business model to me and many others. It isn't inherently political to use it, and it's annoying when people try to drag the rest of us into their political battles.
Personally, as much as I use and love some black people, I think that it is a good thing that developers have the freedom to employ people on whatever terms they want, including a whites-only one. I don't even think it would be a good idea if all workplaces were mixed-race. I think that a single-race work environment is an important business model for many people.
The only thing that will move Java from "non-free" to "free" is the release of Java source code under a DFSG-compliant licence. Although that is slated to happen sometime in the future, I'm not holding my breath.
Re:Kaspersky Anti-Virus is revolutionary
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Predicting Malware
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Let's have the canonical answer to this question so we can settle it once and for all.
Any piece of software will work on Linux, if you build it on Linux from source. If they won't show you the source code, they most probably are trying to hide something from you and you should seek an alternative.
Software for minis and mainframes often used to be shipped as source code without a distribution licence, effectively still granting its user freedoms 0, 1 and 3. Absence of source code does not make copying harder, as is evidenced by the ubiquity of pirated Office and Windows; but the existence of many machines which are electronically identical and many new sysadmins makes it easier to get away with not supplying source code.
No it's not, because it's covered under the "fair dealing" exemption.
Nobody has ever been successfully prosecuted in the UK for home taping or any other kind of format-shifting. Nobody ever will be. If it ever gets to Crown Court it will most probably be found legal {where are they going to get a jury of 12 people, none of whom have ever taped an album to listen in the car?} which the music industry really don't want. And also, a bent copper can obtain a search warrant on the basis of seeing a home-copied cassette in a suspect's car and use this for a more involved fishing mission, which will produce some charges more likely to stick. What will most probably happen if you ever get nicked for format-shifting, is that the charges will get dropped for want of evidence and you'll find yourself free to go.
At least PHP and Perl have the decency to use separate operators for adding numbers and concatenating strings. When one evaluates "2" + 2, 2 + "2" or even "2" + "2" in one of these languages, the answer invariably comes out as 4. Should one wish to concatenate them together as strings, one would write "2" . "2" which would give "22".
In a language where numbers and strings are distinguished to the extent that you must call a function to convert one to the other, it's less unacceptable to recycle operators in this fashion.
Anyway, the programming language is a generality-of-purpose abstraction layer in its own right. You should always begin by writing a program to do one thing well. If you need to do something similar but subtly different at a later date, you can modify it then. As long as you commented it properly then you won't have any problems, and if you do have any problems then think of them as a lesson in commenting. It's usually better to write a program that is not general-purpose enough {but can be improved on} than a program that is too general-purpose.
What autoplay? I've been running 100% GNU/Linux since 2002.
I've also worked out how you could get away with a smaller memory device -- it only needs to be big enough to hold all the MP3s and one of the uncompressed wave files. Or if you had a FAT32 partition, Linux could mount that.
Also, turning off autoplay won't work if your machine is already infected. Linux will. I wrote some instructions for doing it using a commonly-available live CD distro just to prove the point; but I just really like the idea of a set consisting of an 8cm. CD and a 1GB SD card with integral USB connector in a fancy box. So file me under hopeless romantic.....
Cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli, swede, oil-seed rape and Brussels sprouts are all genetically-modified variants of a now extinct plant, Brassica sativa. Admittedly they were modified by waiting for a freak variant to crop up naturally for whatever reason, and breeding from that. But genetic modification is not changing the rules, just selecting the cards in an organism's hand and shoving it into the game.
As for the use of DNA taken from other organisms, that's just the way it works. Like the way the Swedish word for "fast" means something mildly rude in English. Some particular sequence that causes cats to have yellow eyes might well cause cherry trees -- which don't have eyes -- to have smoother bark. The same letters make up the word, but a different language assigns it a meaning.
And present-day genetic manipulation techniques are still a bit like building matchstick sculptures whilst wearing boxing gloves.
When I eventually get my shit together, I will build a little Linux distro with cdparanoia and lame, specifically for ripping "copy protected" "CD"s. The basic idea of most of these discs, is that the data track contains some software that hooks into the SCSI emulation layer of the CD-ROM drivers under Windows and deliberately, in contravention of the Misuse of Computers Act 1990, fucks up any attempt to read them as CD-DA. Since this thing will be running its own OS from its own read-only medium, and won't read the data track, it will be immune to such shenanigans. Downside is you're probably gonna need a geet huge USB stick for temporary storage, since it'll take the best part of 700MB for the wave files and about another tenth of that for the MP3 {or ogg vorbis?} files. But then, being ordinary MP3 files, they will play just fine on an Apple iPod. Or, if you burn enough of them to a DVD+R, one of those cheap portable DVD players!
I don't think people did buy cassette copies of vinyl LPs they already owned. When cassette was king, everybody I knew bought vinyl LPs, taped them at home on their music centres [1970s] or midi systems [1980s], and listened mostly to the cassettes. And then re-recorded them onto a new cassette when the old one got chewed up.
I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure books, and some of the knockoffs weren't bad either. Had a go at writing one once. Of course, now there's MediaWiki which makes it easy to create a computer-based one.
I was writing "VERB NOUN" text adventures in BBC BASIC since long ago. I had another go recently; this time in perl and using a database for the room and object descriptions. Then I got distracted and tried to make it multi-player. Ended up learning more about select(2) than it's good for a mere mortal to know.
That's not actually a problem. Public keys have to be revocable, just in case they are ever compromised. In the worst case scenario, with the key in the receiver, you would just need to reflash the receiver to insert your own key. And they probably are using flash chips for the ROM. Otherwise, a key leak would mean disaster -- it'd probably work out cheaper for Moviebeam just to buy their way out of any existing contracts and shut up shop for good, than replace or rechip a load of receivers.
If the system then sends the balance adjustment over the air, there is no way for a hacker to spoof that transmitted packet into the encrypted over the air stream.
First: that idea would only work if it was a pay-in-advance system; you request x amount of credit via the phone and the box is charged up with x amount of credit. But it seems to me that you have to pay for what you have watched rather than what you're going to watch.
SSL doesn't necessarily prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. If the man in the middle has always been there, ever since day one, then it's vulnerable. Consider this scenario:
Client generates a random session key.
Client encrypts the session key with the MITM's public key (which it thinks is the server's public key) and transmits the encrypted key to the MITM.
MITM decrypts the received session key using its own private key.
MITM re-encrypts the received session key with the server's real public key and sends it to the server.
Server decrypts the received session key using its own private key.
Client and server send data back and forth, encrypting using the session key.
MITM decrypts anything it likes, since it has the session key.
After this has been done once, the client knows the server's public key and can compare against it in future. And if the server ever changes its public key, the client can display a warning message and refuse to connect. But that first-ever connection to a new server is always potentially iffy. And public keys do sometimes need to be revoked; so it's my guess that the key won't be hardcoded into the Moviebeam box.
Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this pans out. I expect much effort will be put into hacking it.
Well, maybe off a Windows system it would be based on a bitmap. But all unix systems {including BSD, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X} use PostScript as a kind of meta-language for printing. All applications generate PS output, and all printer drivers expect PS input. And PostScript works by never converting text to bitmaps if it can help it.
Poor you..... When Java goes Open Source, my company will be fully OSI-accredited. We got a "friendly visit" from FAST once. We shew them our policy to prevent illegal copying of software, which boils down to "Only use software that it is legal for anyone to copy". But I'm digressing.
Frankly I think putting PDF generation in as a printer driver, a la Mac OS X, is more powerful than putting it into the application itself. Anything that's on your screen can be made into a PDF that way.
KDE does it that way, too..... like everything else in unix, it wants to pretend all printers understand PostScript, so it has all the tools. It offers for you to print to PostScript or PDF files, and send faxes if you have the right hardware {external modem or ISDNTA} and software {HylaFAX} installed.
Otherwise, more people producing PDFs means more demand for Acrobat, because you need it to do all the things you'd expect to do with paper besides print and file.
Why would it stimulate demand for Acrobat? It's entirely possible to generate, view and edit PDF documents using only i-tal software. The "requires Acrobat reader" logo often seen next to downloadable PDFs is in fact a big fat lie - there has been xpdf for a long time, and it in turn begat gpdf and kpdf which are the GNOMEified and KDEified versions {currently having a bit of a feature war, from which those of us who installed both Qt and GTK are in the best position to benefit}. Actually, I think I'll put up a "requires kpdf or gpdf" graphic next to any PDF I ever offer on my website, and link it to "boycott Adobe".
A Unix command-line utility is as powerful as it gets.
What about if someone set up a box to listen on port 9100, like it was a JetDirect-compatible printer, so you "print" documents to it; and convert the received documents to PDF and serve them out via an Apache server, so you can later download PDFs of what you "printed" from a web-based interface ?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes; but once one DRM-free copy exists in the world, then an infinite number more DRM-free copies can be generated from that one. Anyway, consumers won't stand for that scam forever. Once the novelty wears off, if the choice is "pay up or do without", then they will do without.
Before 1994, South Africa held the title of "most hated nation". Nations who persisted in trading with South Africa said that not to do so would disadvantage the poorest, mainly black, South Africans. Other nations ranted against South Africa whilst perpetrating their own heinous abuses of human rights.
..... where do they think the components for those boards are made?
Anyway, Google run their server farms on cheap motherboards
The unpleasant truth is that it's damned nigh impossible to avoid doing business with China one way or another. And if you do manage to avoid China, then you will end up paying over the odds for everything you buy, and be unable to compete in the marketplace.
Write to your Elected Representatives and ask them why we are allowed to import goods which have been manufactured under conditions which would not be acceptable in the destination country? It's all very well for countries such as Britain and the USA to have environmental, consumer protection and workers' rights laws; but when imported goods sidestep those laws, locally-produced goods become uncompetitive and the benefits that should have brought by those laws are lost. Something's got to be wrong when it's cheaper to fly a plane halfway round the world and back than to treat your workers like human beings.
Just because it's a three-conductor plug doesn't make it stereo. The end connection is the signal, and the middle one is +5V through a resistor for powering up electret condenser mics. If you use a dynamic mic with a mono plug, the resistor will protect the power supply.
/dev/dsp?
Does windows have anything like
Have you noticed how few motherboards actually have a line-in port these days?
Mic inputs are mono, and have preamplification and bandpass filtering which make them unsuitable for anything but recording speech.
Yes, I am.
Abuse of liberty is abuse of liberty whatever form it takes. Before white and black people ever walked on the same land, there was no such thing as race discrimination: every one of your neighbours had the same colour skin as you. We think now that people have the right to be treated the same whatever the colour of their skin.
By the same token, before computers existed, Software Users' Rights weren't an issue. Today, we should be able to count among our basic rights the right to enjoy the use of software without interference, the right to study the source code of the software we use, the right to share the code with our neighbours and the right to adapt the software we use to our individual needs. Those rights exist because software exists, and only because software exists.
Telling people what they can and cannot do with what they own violates the right to enjoy. Telling people that they cannot inspect the software they use violates the right to study. Telling people that they cannot give a copy of the software that they use to their neighbour violates the right to share and telling people that they cannot modify the software, but must modify their workflow to match the software, violates the right to adapt. All these things constitute the unfair imposition of one person's will upon another, and as such should be condemned as acts of violence.
It is precisely because people like you go around thinking that one violation of fundamental human rights is any less deplorable than another, that people's rights continue to be violated.
As long as it works with even one sound card for which Open Source drivers exist, this DRM scheme is defeatable, just the same as any other DRM scheme that has ever existed or will ever exist. Every penny spent pursuing what is demonstrably a mathematical impossibility is a penny wasted.
You can publish patches to the source code for Pine. You can publish modified binaries for Pine as long as you take them outside the UW versioning scheme so they don't get mistaken for actual UW products.
Gentoo and the BSDs, with their source-based ports systems, can all include Pine natively; since patching and compilation are done on the end user's computer. Debian could {by adding depends: for the complete development toolchain, and patching and compiling the source during preinstall}, but won't because it would seriously break the way their packaging system works {depends: is meant to be about running the package, not the preinstall phase, and mucking about with the toolchain shouldn't affect what's already been compiled}.
I personally don't have a problem with the Pine licence. And UW are currently happy about people downloading, compiling and using Pine; they're just too damn stubborn to solve everybody's problems in one fell swoop by switching to the GPL for PINE v5. But I can see why Debian are erring on the side of caution -- what will happen if some new top brass take over at UW, decide to make Pine a closed-source, commercial project, and begin vigorously pursuing past excesses of authority by software distributors?
I am sure that racial equality is an ideal to you, but to most people it is not. It is people, and it is a business model to me and many others. It isn't inherently political to use it, and it's annoying when people try to drag the rest of us into their political battles.
Personally, as much as I use and love some black people, I think that it is a good thing that developers have the freedom to employ people on whatever terms they want, including a whites-only one. I don't even think it would be a good idea if all workplaces were mixed-race. I think that a single-race work environment is an important business model for many people.
The only thing that will move Java from "non-free" to "free" is the release of Java source code under a DFSG-compliant licence. Although that is slated to happen sometime in the future, I'm not holding my breath.
Let's have the canonical answer to this question so we can settle it once and for all.
Any piece of software will work on Linux, if you build it on Linux from source. If they won't show you the source code, they most probably are trying to hide something from you and you should seek an alternative.
Software for minis and mainframes often used to be shipped as source code without a distribution licence, effectively still granting its user freedoms 0, 1 and 3. Absence of source code does not make copying harder, as is evidenced by the ubiquity of pirated Office and Windows; but the existence of many machines which are electronically identical and many new sysadmins makes it easier to get away with not supplying source code.
No it's not, because it's covered under the "fair dealing" exemption.
Nobody has ever been successfully prosecuted in the UK for home taping or any other kind of format-shifting. Nobody ever will be. If it ever gets to Crown Court it will most probably be found legal {where are they going to get a jury of 12 people, none of whom have ever taped an album to listen in the car?} which the music industry really don't want. And also, a bent copper can obtain a search warrant on the basis of seeing a home-copied cassette in a suspect's car and use this for a more involved fishing mission, which will produce some charges more likely to stick. What will most probably happen if you ever get nicked for format-shifting, is that the charges will get dropped for want of evidence and you'll find yourself free to go.
At least PHP and Perl have the decency to use separate operators for adding numbers and concatenating strings. When one evaluates "2" + 2, 2 + "2" or even "2" + "2" in one of these languages, the answer invariably comes out as 4. Should one wish to concatenate them together as strings, one would write "2" . "2" which would give "22".
In a language where numbers and strings are distinguished to the extent that you must call a function to convert one to the other, it's less unacceptable to recycle operators in this fashion.
Anyway, the programming language is a generality-of-purpose abstraction layer in its own right. You should always begin by writing a program to do one thing well. If you need to do something similar but subtly different at a later date, you can modify it then. As long as you commented it properly then you won't have any problems, and if you do have any problems then think of them as a lesson in commenting. It's usually better to write a program that is not general-purpose enough {but can be improved on} than a program that is too general-purpose.
If they own it, then by definition it can't be illegal to modify it or sell it.
Look up "exhaustion of rights" sometime.
What autoplay? I've been running 100% GNU/Linux since 2002.
.....
I've also worked out how you could get away with a smaller memory device -- it only needs to be big enough to hold all the MP3s and one of the uncompressed wave files. Or if you had a FAT32 partition, Linux could mount that.
Also, turning off autoplay won't work if your machine is already infected. Linux will. I wrote some instructions for doing it using a commonly-available live CD distro just to prove the point; but I just really like the idea of a set consisting of an 8cm. CD and a 1GB SD card with integral USB connector in a fancy box. So file me under hopeless romantic
Cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli, swede, oil-seed rape and Brussels sprouts are all genetically-modified variants of a now extinct plant, Brassica sativa. Admittedly they were modified by waiting for a freak variant to crop up naturally for whatever reason, and breeding from that. But genetic modification is not changing the rules, just selecting the cards in an organism's hand and shoving it into the game.
As for the use of DNA taken from other organisms, that's just the way it works. Like the way the Swedish word for "fast" means something mildly rude in English. Some particular sequence that causes cats to have yellow eyes might well cause cherry trees -- which don't have eyes -- to have smoother bark. The same letters make up the word, but a different language assigns it a meaning.
And present-day genetic manipulation techniques are still a bit like building matchstick sculptures whilst wearing boxing gloves.
When I eventually get my shit together, I will build a little Linux distro with cdparanoia and lame, specifically for ripping "copy protected" "CD"s. The basic idea of most of these discs, is that the data track contains some software that hooks into the SCSI emulation layer of the CD-ROM drivers under Windows and deliberately, in contravention of the Misuse of Computers Act 1990, fucks up any attempt to read them as CD-DA. Since this thing will be running its own OS from its own read-only medium, and won't read the data track, it will be immune to such shenanigans. Downside is you're probably gonna need a geet huge USB stick for temporary storage, since it'll take the best part of 700MB for the wave files and about another tenth of that for the MP3 {or ogg vorbis?} files. But then, being ordinary MP3 files, they will play just fine on an Apple iPod. Or, if you burn enough of them to a DVD+R, one of those cheap portable DVD players!
I don't think people did buy cassette copies of vinyl LPs they already owned. When cassette was king, everybody I knew bought vinyl LPs, taped them at home on their music centres [1970s] or midi systems [1980s], and listened mostly to the cassettes. And then re-recorded them onto a new cassette when the old one got chewed up.
I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure books, and some of the knockoffs weren't bad either. Had a go at writing one once. Of course, now there's MediaWiki which makes it easy to create a computer-based one.
I was writing "VERB NOUN" text adventures in BBC BASIC since long ago. I had another go recently; this time in perl and using a database for the room and object descriptions. Then I got distracted and tried to make it multi-player. Ended up learning more about select(2) than it's good for a mere mortal to know.
Multi-tasking is soooo last century. Try inter-tasking instead!
That's not actually a problem. Public keys have to be revocable, just in case they are ever compromised. In the worst case scenario, with the key in the receiver, you would just need to reflash the receiver to insert your own key. And they probably are using flash chips for the ROM. Otherwise, a key leak would mean disaster -- it'd probably work out cheaper for Moviebeam just to buy their way out of any existing contracts and shut up shop for good, than replace or rechip a load of receivers.
And second: oh yes, for sure there is a way.
- Client generates a random session key.
- Client encrypts the session key with the MITM's public key (which it thinks is the server's public key) and transmits the encrypted key to the MITM.
- MITM decrypts the received session key using its own private key.
- MITM re-encrypts the received session key with the server's real public key and sends it to the server.
- Server decrypts the received session key using its own private key.
- Client and server send data back and forth, encrypting using the session key.
- MITM decrypts anything it likes, since it has the session key.
After this has been done once, the client knows the server's public key and can compare against it in future. And if the server ever changes its public key, the client can display a warning message and refuse to connect. But that first-ever connection to a new server is always potentially iffy. And public keys do sometimes need to be revoked; so it's my guess that the key won't be hardcoded into the Moviebeam box.Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this pans out. I expect much effort will be put into hacking it.
Well, maybe off a Windows system it would be based on a bitmap. But all unix systems {including BSD, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X} use PostScript as a kind of meta-language for printing. All applications generate PS output, and all printer drivers expect PS input. And PostScript works by never converting text to bitmaps if it can help it.
A Unix command-line utility is as powerful as it gets.
What about if someone set up a box to listen on port 9100, like it was a JetDirect-compatible printer, so you "print" documents to it; and convert the received documents to PDF and serve them out via an Apache server, so you can later download PDFs of what you "printed" from a web-based interface ?