Perhaps if there were free course material from GNU (or maybe LDP?) this could change some minds. I think the best way to get positive attention from the teaching community is to give them something like this. Even a few freely distributed handouts could go a long way. Now if it were published as a book by O'Reilly, that would be cool and would give it some legitimacy (not just downloaded and laser-printed).
It may or may not stay up very long, because it would be against "the rules."
I'm willing to bet that PSU would remove it, or make you remove it before the censorware even found out about it. If the Internet has taught us anything it's that throwing a whole lot of information on a public network doesn't necessarily make it easy to find.
the name itself reduces the interest of possible students by 30% according to the college's market research data.
Probably not good for their finances, but it strikes me that the student who is willing to overlook a possibly funny name in the college is a lot more valuable than the Beavis and Butthead reject who says "Huh huh huh, he said beaver". Also, it seems that there should be several sites that help you screen colleges on different criteria (school size, undergrad only, student/faculty ratio, location, etc).
This all reminds me of the episode of "The Simpsons" I saw last night. Bart was talking with the school superintendant who gave his bio (as I remember it) "I grew up in Queens, attended Ball State before I moved to Intercourse Pensylvania... Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going on vacation to Lake Titicaca". And this man grew up to be the school superintendant!!
Depending on the business, $2.5M might be an underestimate. Like it or not, some companies make quite a bit of maney by not advertising who they sell to. If they did, it would make it that much easier for their competitors to horn in on their market.
I second this recommendation. MuPAD has great symbolic capabilities and can generate graphs, which I don't think Emacs Calc mode can. Perhaps if Emacs had an X11 drawing interface?? Bloat, bloat bloat:)
Can anyone give a rational reason why DVD should be any different to these other media?
Three words: Because They Can. Just like making you watch the FBI warning (OK its a bit annoying), but to make you watch the previews??? I would consider that a defective disk and return it. Oops, off on a rant again.
I think we are just seeing the downside of the new technology. VCRs started out with very little in the way of digital circuitry. Remember the VCRs (or even TVs for that matter) that had tuner knobs? Technology improved and now VCRs and TVs have no moving parts for channel selection apart from up/down buttons. As processing power gets cheaper it allows more things like DIVX, CSS, whatever. VCRs had measures to make copying difficult, but with better technology, these measures have become more sophisticated.
At first I was going to say this is nonsense (and it is because Macs are an alternative), most people buy standalone entertainment DVD players.
I think the confusion there was due to my omission. All my machines are x86 based, hence no macOS. A lot of this is hypothetical since I also don't have a DVD-ROM player, but I don't intend to get one until I can use it.
But it occurs to me that DVD players cost a lot of money, and many people are apt to want to kill two birds with one stone until prices come down (artificially inflated due to encryption costs!). This isn't to watch movies on the computer, but to run the output to your entertainment center and watch it on the TV. I'm sure a fair number of people probably do this. I know several that do, but it's using Windows, of course.
Quite right. Why buy a CDrom drive when the DVD-rom drive works just as well. Why buy a standalone DVD player when you can just run a cable over to the TV. By extension, why reboot to Windows, or even install Windows for that matter, when you can do it under Linux. As for encryption, I have also wondered how much this has increased the engineering cost, parts cost and, in the end, the consumer price. I.E. how much cheaper would DVD players be if there wasn't this silly decryption step involved?
One last query. Do most DVD-rom drives come with software DVD players, or are those purchased seperately? If they were bundled, it would seem that the user has already paid for a Windows-based DVD player software (and associated licensing fees), but is chosing to use his or her own alternate player. Just like when I.E. comes with Windows, the end user is paying for I.E., but can install netscape if he/she wants.
Theaters get a huge percentage of their profits from concessions (I think most popcorn is overpriced and tastes horrible, but that's for another thread). What if theaters started requiring purchase of a popcorn and a large DR Pepper in order to see a movie in its opening week? That doesn't seem fair to me in that I don't usually care for the popcorn and can't stand DR Pepper.
In analogy, I want to go buy/rent some DVD movies and watch them at home on my computer. I don't have a copy of Windows, nor do I want one, but they seem to be requireing me to get one.
True, a copy of windows I only have to buy once (I think) and not everytime like the popcorn, but I think this gets to the heart of the problem. Watching DVD movies is artificially tied to Windows/
northwest may have a court injunction to copy the hdds of employees, but, say one of the employees was using *nix/*bsd machine where obtaining files without password access can be near impossible. does the court order force disclosure of passwords and logins as well? just something i wonder about.
Depends on how they do it. If the hard drives are removed and studied bit by bit, UNIX files should be no harder to read than windows. OTOH, if they just boot up each machine and look for files on it, then they will be in for a bit more trouble.
Northwest sued the union for organizing this event (which was prohibited by the latest union contract), so really this isn't a case corportation playing big brother, its a case of the law proceeding as it should.
So this makes it OK for them to search my computer? It certainly sounds like big brother to me. So many people think that if there is legal utility in the information on someone's personal computer, they are entitled to look at it. What if the emails had already been deleted? What happened to the employees who were sick, but didn't have computers?
Besides which. Text on the side of a box saying "Requires win95" is not a leagally binding requirement to use the device under win95. This is not even a shrink wrap license, its just the manufacturer saying either "We only support this product when used under win95", or "We only provide drivers for win95". Either way, its just saying that you're on your own. And besides which, if you buy a DVD player through mail order, it may just come in a cardboard box full of styrofoam padding and have no statement regarding win95 or Linux at all!
assuming that source code is protected speech when joined with commentary
Yet another reason to heavily comment your code. Throw a few political statements in for good measure, and include an ascii art representation of the american flag (Isn't deleting a flag the same as burning one?).
Seriously, though, this seems strikingly similar to freedom of the press. Think about it. Events happen, speaches are made, etc. This is free speach. There is background information needed to truly understand what is going on. This is also free (possibly copyrighted, but not banned). A journalist takes these several sources of information and condenses and explains the event so that "ordinary" people can understand it without having to spend all their time doing research in the area in question.
This sounds just like binary distribution of free software. The source code is out there, sure, so is the compiler. But binaries are provided for ease of use and saving time. Compiling is certainly more mechanical than newspaper publishing, but if you don't care about speed or quality, I'm sure I could hack gcc to produce editiorials and train New York Times reporters to compile C code.
just as soon as wine reaches v1.0 levels of reliability (meaning: production quality), M$ will go and change things so that their new o/s will have special innards that the new apps are counting on.
That is true, and has certainly restricted previous attempts at window emulation. But there should be a "critical mass" situation, where if a large enough percentage of users are using a windows emulator, it will make it harder for Microsoft to change the API.
I think this is what is so great about UNIX. To a first approximation, code that works under UNIX works under Linux, FreeBSD, etc. The presence of multiple implementations has kept the API stable and the presence of relatively strong third party developers has also helped to keep it stable. Windows doesn't have any major competing implementations or third party developers that can compare to Microsoft itself.
Ah, but during his trial, he was also denied access to these files. Imagine that the prosecution has 100 files that they took from me. 5 files appear to convict me, 5 would appear to exonerate me, and 90 are completely irrelevant. Now, imagine that the juicy bits are 1-2 paragraphs, and that each of these documents is 100 pages long. I don't remember which 5 clear me and which frame me, but I can tell the 10 relevant documents by looking at their title pages.
SO...
Does the prosecution have to let me copy, or provide copies for me of whichever documents I want? If I tell them which of the 10 documents I want, they might be able to find the incriminating evedence against me. OTOH, If my lawyer and I (remember, IANAL) obtain copies of these documents, we can find the 5 documents that might free me.
The prohibitive length of the documents is the encryption, the title pages which identify the documents are the keys, and by turning the keys over, I increminate myself, which I should have a constitutional protection against.
Can't remember what the name of the product was, but CA had some marketoid-type ad in a computer magazene for some product that asked something to the effect of "Imagine if you could fly around the office to fix computer problems". What's wrong with telnet, or some windows equiv? What if the ethernet is unplugged? This looked like a lot of fluff and no substance.
Now Arcserve, when I used it maybe 3-4 years back was horrible. I had to recover 20 some odd files that were spread across several backup tapes. The UI made you click on each cute little backup tape icon and after 45 minutes (no I'm not exagerating), a list of files would come up, and if I wanted one, I had to click on it, then tell the program I wanted to restore from tape, insert that tape, wait for it to finish, then do it all over again. Why no command line? Why no ability to give it a list of files and have it tell me which tapes to put in? Given CLI primitives to list files on a tape and restore, I could have written the whole thing in PERL in an hour.
I find this to be a huge problem, especially with admin tools. If something is sufficiently messed up, you might need to use a command line. If the developer invests all its time in the GUI, then the command line version will be poor, or non exisitant. That's what I like about Linux. Many of the GUIs are just fancy ways of getting at underlying CLI tools. This gives the user True flexibility.
I know of one case where they had to buy three different tape drives before they found right type that could read the tapes. Keep them all safe and off site.
Better yet, buy one of each type of backup media, unwrap them and write some cryptic lablels on them. That ought to keep them guessing:)
Release DVDs unencrypted so that truly independent artists can create their own movies and burn them and sell them themselves (over the internet if they want).
While the MPAA is not interested in helping independent artists, nor in allowing people to press DVDs, I believe CSS encryption of the media is an optional DVD feature. If a studio wanted to release a DVD movie without encrypting it, they could. But why would they when they have already licensed the encryption technology, and it is just as easy to release an encrypted disk as a non encrypted disk.
Independant artists can also release in VCD format which if memory serves is mpeg-2 rather than 3, and comes on normal CD-rom disks that are easier to press.
So exchange it for an identical item. When that one doesn't work, bring it back to the store along with a portable CD player and show them that it doesn't work. Make this problematic for the stores and they will discontinue selling the CDs.
you don't have to kill yourself to be removed from the gene pool. You just have to loose the ability to reproduce. There were a couple of Darwin awards given in this way to living people over the years.
Democracy of any kind seldom comes easy. Hold fast though. Soon enough these people will realize that their trying to stuff a genie back into a bottle. I don't think the studio's give a rat's ass about this. I mean it is already easy and economically viable to copy music CDs with $1000 of equipment. Do the music labels try to encrypt their content, or stop selling CDs? Of course not. I still don't understand what the point of encrypting the contents was. I mean if any player is to be able to play the movie it has to decrypt the contents. Think of all those transistors/ clock cycles that are being wasted in decrypting DVDs.
I was refering to several of the posts by ACs (hopefully not you) that were basically "GOO-GOO GOO-GOO..." and one that was the text of the lawer's letter passed through a jive filter. And they are there several times each.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps if there were free course material from GNU (or maybe LDP?) this could change some minds. I think the best way to get positive attention from the teaching community is to give them something like this. Even a few freely distributed handouts could go a long way. Now if it were published as a book by O'Reilly, that would be cool and would give it some legitimacy (not just downloaded and laser-printed).
It may or may not stay up very long, because it would be against "the rules."
I'm willing to bet that PSU would remove it, or make you remove it before the censorware even found out about it. If the Internet has taught us anything it's that throwing a whole lot of information on a public network doesn't necessarily make it easy to find.
the name itself reduces the interest of possible students by 30% according to the college's market research data.
Probably not good for their finances, but it strikes me that the student who is willing to overlook a possibly funny name in the college is a lot more valuable than the Beavis and Butthead reject who says "Huh huh huh, he said beaver". Also, it seems that there should be several sites that help you screen colleges on different criteria (school size, undergrad only, student/faculty ratio, location, etc).
This all reminds me of the episode of "The Simpsons" I saw last night. Bart was talking with the school superintendant who gave his bio (as I remember it) "I grew up in Queens, attended Ball State before I moved to Intercourse Pensylvania ... Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going on vacation to Lake Titicaca". And this man grew up to be the school superintendant!!
Depending on the business, $2.5M might be an underestimate. Like it or not, some companies make quite a bit of maney by not advertising who they sell to. If they did, it would make it that much easier for their competitors to horn in on their market.
I second this recommendation. MuPAD has great symbolic capabilities and can generate graphs, which I don't think Emacs Calc mode can. Perhaps if Emacs had an X11 drawing interface?? Bloat, bloat bloat :)
Can anyone give a rational reason why DVD should be any different to these other media?
Three words: Because They Can. Just like making you watch the FBI warning (OK its a bit annoying), but to make you watch the previews??? I would consider that a defective disk and return it. Oops, off on a rant again.
I think we are just seeing the downside of the new technology. VCRs started out with very little in the way of digital circuitry. Remember the VCRs (or even TVs for that matter) that had tuner knobs? Technology improved and now VCRs and TVs have no moving parts for channel selection apart from up/down buttons. As processing power gets cheaper it allows more things like DIVX, CSS, whatever. VCRs had measures to make copying difficult, but with better technology, these measures have become more sophisticated.
At first I was going to say this is nonsense (and it is because Macs are an alternative), most people buy standalone entertainment DVD players.
I think the confusion there was due to my omission. All my machines are x86 based, hence no macOS. A lot of this is hypothetical since I also don't have a DVD-ROM player, but I don't intend to get one until I can use it.
But it occurs to me that DVD players cost a lot of money, and many people are apt to want to kill two birds with one stone until prices come down (artificially inflated due to encryption costs!). This isn't to watch movies on the computer, but to run the output to your entertainment center and watch it on the TV. I'm sure a fair number of people probably do this. I know several that do, but it's using Windows, of course.
Quite right. Why buy a CDrom drive when the DVD-rom drive works just as well. Why buy a standalone DVD player when you can just run a cable over to the TV. By extension, why reboot to Windows, or even install Windows for that matter, when you can do it under Linux. As for encryption, I have also wondered how much this has increased the engineering cost, parts cost and, in the end, the consumer price. I.E. how much cheaper would DVD players be if there wasn't this silly decryption step involved?
One last query. Do most DVD-rom drives come with software DVD players, or are those purchased seperately? If they were bundled, it would seem that the user has already paid for a Windows-based DVD player software (and associated licensing fees), but is chosing to use his or her own alternate player. Just like when I.E. comes with Windows, the end user is paying for I.E., but can install netscape if he/she wants.
Well, just to throw another analogy on the fire :)
Theaters get a huge percentage of their profits from concessions (I think most popcorn is overpriced and tastes horrible, but that's for another thread). What if theaters started requiring purchase of a popcorn and a large DR Pepper in order to see a movie in its opening week? That doesn't seem fair to me in that I don't usually care for the popcorn and can't stand DR Pepper.
In analogy, I want to go buy/rent some DVD movies and watch them at home on my computer. I don't have a copy of Windows, nor do I want one, but they seem to be requireing me to get one.
True, a copy of windows I only have to buy once (I think) and not everytime like the popcorn, but I think this gets to the heart of the problem. Watching DVD movies is artificially tied to Windows/
northwest may have a court injunction to copy the hdds of employees, but, say one of the employees was using *nix/*bsd machine where obtaining files without password access can be near impossible. does the court order force disclosure of passwords and logins as well? just something i wonder about.
Depends on how they do it. If the hard drives are removed and studied bit by bit, UNIX files should be no harder to read than windows. OTOH, if they just boot up each machine and look for files on it, then they will be in for a bit more trouble.
Northwest sued the union for organizing this event (which was prohibited by the latest union contract), so really this isn't a case corportation playing big brother, its a case of the law proceeding as it should.
So this makes it OK for them to search my computer? It certainly sounds like big brother to me. So many people think that if there is legal utility in the information on someone's personal computer, they are entitled to look at it. What if the emails had already been deleted? What happened to the employees who were sick, but didn't have computers?
Besides which. Text on the side of a box saying "Requires win95" is not a leagally binding requirement to use the device under win95. This is not even a shrink wrap license, its just the manufacturer saying either "We only support this product when used under win95", or "We only provide drivers for win95". Either way, its just saying that you're on your own. And besides which, if you buy a DVD player through mail order, it may just come in a cardboard box full of styrofoam padding and have no statement regarding win95 or Linux at all!
assuming that source code is protected speech when joined with commentary
Yet another reason to heavily comment your code. Throw a few political statements in for good measure, and include an ascii art representation of the american flag (Isn't deleting a flag the same as burning one?).
Seriously, though, this seems strikingly similar to freedom of the press. Think about it. Events happen, speaches are made, etc. This is free speach. There is background information needed to truly understand what is going on. This is also free (possibly copyrighted, but not banned). A journalist takes these several sources of information and condenses and explains the event so that "ordinary" people can understand it without having to spend all their time doing research in the area in question.
This sounds just like binary distribution of free software. The source code is out there, sure, so is the compiler. But binaries are provided for ease of use and saving time. Compiling is certainly more mechanical than newspaper publishing, but if you don't care about speed or quality, I'm sure I could hack gcc to produce editiorials and train New York Times reporters to compile C code.
just as soon as wine reaches v1.0 levels of reliability (meaning: production quality), M$ will go and change things so that their new o/s will have special innards that the new apps are counting on.
That is true, and has certainly restricted previous attempts at window emulation. But there should be a "critical mass" situation, where if a large enough percentage of users are using a windows emulator, it will make it harder for Microsoft to change the API.
I think this is what is so great about UNIX. To a first approximation, code that works under UNIX works under Linux, FreeBSD, etc. The presence of multiple implementations has kept the API stable and the presence of relatively strong third party developers has also helped to keep it stable. Windows doesn't have any major competing implementations or third party developers that can compare to Microsoft itself.
Come on, now. Everyone knows that MIGHT makes right :)
:)
Please moderators have pitty on my poor punning soul
Ah, but during his trial, he was also denied access to these files. Imagine that the prosecution has 100 files that they took from me. 5 files appear to convict me, 5 would appear to exonerate me, and 90 are completely irrelevant. Now, imagine that the juicy bits are 1-2 paragraphs, and that each of these documents is 100 pages long. I don't remember which 5 clear me and which frame me, but I can tell the 10 relevant documents by looking at their title pages.
SO...
Does the prosecution have to let me copy, or provide copies for me of whichever documents I want? If I tell them which of the 10 documents I want, they might be able to find the incriminating evedence against me. OTOH, If my lawyer and I (remember, IANAL) obtain copies of these documents, we can find the 5 documents that might free me.
The prohibitive length of the documents is the encryption, the title pages which identify the documents are the keys, and by turning the keys over, I increminate myself, which I should have a constitutional protection against.
Can't remember what the name of the product was, but CA had some marketoid-type ad in a computer magazene for some product that asked something to the effect of "Imagine if you could fly around the office to fix computer problems". What's wrong with telnet, or some windows equiv? What if the ethernet is unplugged? This looked like a lot of fluff and no substance.
Now Arcserve, when I used it maybe 3-4 years back was horrible. I had to recover 20 some odd files that were spread across several backup tapes. The UI made you click on each cute little backup tape icon and after 45 minutes (no I'm not exagerating), a list of files would come up, and if I wanted one, I had to click on it, then tell the program I wanted to restore from tape, insert that tape, wait for it to finish, then do it all over again. Why no command line? Why no ability to give it a list of files and have it tell me which tapes to put in? Given CLI primitives to list files on a tape and restore, I could have written the whole thing in PERL in an hour.
I find this to be a huge problem, especially with admin tools. If something is sufficiently messed up, you might need to use a command line. If the developer invests all its time in the GUI, then the command line version will be poor, or non exisitant. That's what I like about Linux. Many of the GUIs are just fancy ways of getting at underlying CLI tools. This gives the user True flexibility.
I know of one case where they had to buy three different tape drives before they found right type that could read the tapes. Keep them all safe and off site.
Better yet, buy one of each type of backup media, unwrap them and write some cryptic lablels on them. That ought to keep them guessing :)
Release DVDs unencrypted so that truly independent artists can create their own movies and burn them and sell them themselves (over the internet if they want).
While the MPAA is not interested in helping independent artists, nor in allowing people to press DVDs, I believe CSS encryption of the media is an optional DVD feature. If a studio wanted to release a DVD movie without encrypting it, they could. But why would they when they have already licensed the encryption technology, and it is just as easy to release an encrypted disk as a non encrypted disk.
Independant artists can also release in VCD format which if memory serves is mpeg-2 rather than 3, and comes on normal CD-rom disks that are easier to press.
On that note, drag the bastard to their top of the line cpu's on display and pop it in, and glare at him in retaliation.
Or just grab a handfull of your own CDs from home to show that it is the media and not the player that's defective.
So exchange it for an identical item. When that one doesn't work, bring it back to the store along with a portable CD player and show them that it doesn't work. Make this problematic for the stores and they will discontinue selling the CDs.
boycottdvd.org doesn't seem to be taken.
you don't have to kill yourself to be removed from the gene pool. You just have to loose the ability to reproduce. There were a couple of Darwin awards given in this way to living people over the years.
Uses i-smell to replicate the acrid stench of burning CPUs and optional burning flesh (if your hands get too close :)
Democracy of any kind seldom comes easy. Hold fast though. Soon enough these people will realize that their trying to stuff a genie back into a bottle. I don't think the studio's give a rat's ass about this. I mean it is already easy and economically viable to copy music CDs with $1000 of equipment. Do the music labels try to encrypt their content, or stop selling CDs? Of course not. I still don't understand what the point of encrypting the contents was. I mean if any player is to be able to play the movie it has to decrypt the contents. Think of all those transistors/ clock cycles that are being wasted in decrypting DVDs.
Rant done, back to you on slashdot.
I was refering to several of the posts by ACs (hopefully not you) that were basically "GOO-GOO GOO-GOO ..." and one that was the text of the lawer's letter passed through a jive filter. And they are there several times each.