According to Mark Lemley, a professor at the Stanford Law School, the MPAA may have been within its rights to make copies of the film. Given that the MPAA's intent isn't financial gain
[Emphasis added]
It should be legal for me to install and use the libdvd-css software on my PC, so long as my intent is not financial gain. I just want to play the DVDs I've purchased legally, I don't even have foreign region coded DVDs (which is streatching the law in my country anyway).
So come on, U.S. based Linux distro's, put libdvd-css back into your distro!
Adopting Open voting/documententation standards would curtail these sorts of issues, without the FUD of forcing constituents to switch...
However, I think that blaming it on Diabold is only a scape-goat to hide corruption in the voting system, so it's likely to remain...
Re:Pixar != Sequel-makers - Do the math
on
Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 1
I agree. Unfortunately: it's DISNEY.
Disney = STUPID. Everything they produce is stupid, and is more-or-less either a sequel (Lion King ad-nauseum, Mickey/Donald/Goofey forever, etc.) or based on some (previously) public domain concept (Cinderella, Winnie-the-pooh and so on). Disney exec's possess about as much imagination as an iPod.
If Disney understood the finer points of your analysis, then we wouldn't be burdened with the perpetual copyright extension of Mickey Mouse (himself a pilfered idea, if I recall: see the history of "Steamboat Willy"). There have never been new ideas coming from Walt Disney, let alone the company. I doubt Pixar is going to change it, or if it does, I doubt it will be any better than "Robots" by the time it's been through the Disney meat-grinder:-(
At least Google are doing something positive to "grow", as shareholders are so focused upon. I've not seen an instance where Google were the protagonists of a hostile takeover, or anti-competitive market manipulations. They simply have hired smart people and are looking to expand their core competencies the "right" way. Do No Evil is still being observed at the Googleplex.
When I start to see (confirmed) stories that Google is adopting the business practices of Microsoft, then it will be a sad day, but so far, Google have been a magnificent example of the way business should be run. I say: good luck to them.
It would seem to me that Google are currently the target of "doubters" who are in stage 2-3 of the Google-wars, which are following along the OpenSource-wars, and based on the principle of all warfare:
"first, they ignore you; then, they mock you; then, the fight you; and then you win."
in a similar vein, if genes themselves are patented, are mothers and fathers everywhere guilty of patent violations just by pro-creating?
informational patents are just bunkum. No mater how I look at it, I can't justify patents for software "inventions" or science "discoveries". When is the benefit to the inventor supposed to cede to the greater good, as originally intended in patent law?
yeah -- after posting I remembered the quantum entaglement thing and it's applications for cryptology. To implement a DRM solution arround it, would require all DRM devices to be entangled with the master's electrons?!? Not practical for a mass distributed document. In fact, is it even possible for that application?
Agreed. Microsoft has been speeking breathlessly about Longhorn being available for years. It took 2 of them for the media to catch on that it's only vapourwear and get a little miffed.
No. QC leads to the death of DRM, since a QC can theoretically crack a hard problem (finding prime factors) very quickly. Since hard problems with trapdoors are the basis of all encryption algothims today, DRM based on encryption becomes crackable with a QC, unless mathemagicians can find a problem so hard that it can't be cracked by brute force, even given an infinite time to do it in...
QC = the end of encryption as we know it, not the start of amazingly uncrackable codes.
Probably what will happen is that only the spooks can have a QC (like with Cray computers, which must be destroyed when decomissioned, to prevent falling into the "wrong" hands). Unless a way can be found to build a viable QC in the back yard...
8 gallon = 30.28 litres
104 deg F = 40 deg C (a nice shower temperature)
-- courtesy of units(8) program
I wonder if the impurities in cooking oil are better or worse than the dust in air-cooled systems? Also, how would you clean such a system, and what about replacing/upgrading parts? Still it's pretty cool for its hack value.
Hmm, Bush ~= Stalin? Maybe. It concerns me that your comment could be construed as breaking the law because it disagrees with jamie's post... very scary.
When do the Bush gulags start?
I think this new law, by constraining activity on an (esentially) non-invasive, non-real-time medium, is close to violating the 1st Amendment. But I'm not a US citizen, nor a law student, so I'm probably wrong.
Where is the line drawn between a comment like yours (reasonable) and someone spouting anti-american terrorism threats on a polititians personal blog (probably what the law is targetted to)? Can't the poly just delete the comment? Or even leave it there, if he's truely interested in what his constituents have to say? Like you say, it's not like commenters are calling in the middle of the night.
This latest move does demonstrate even more how (as I've said before) America is no longer "the land of the free". Maybe someone should write a new national anthem?
Actually, for those of us still stuck on narrow-band internet, it doesn't even have that as a benefit.
The real benefit of internet delivery is really for the (unsigned) artists: they can get their music out there to be heard, without signing their souls to the RIAA devils. Though, they should probably use Ogg Vorbis and avoid MP3 unless they pay the patent royalty. But even then, the patent royalty is better than being stuck with the likes of EMI.
Yes, I found the same issue with dual screen -- until I turned on the automatic mouse pointer movement options (I found them under the Accesibility stuff in Winblows, for Linux, it depends on your window manager).
One of the advantages I hope to see from a single, large display, is that Window's habit of poping up new windows on the wrong screen will be solved.
I'd also love to have a touch-screen option, reverting to a mouse or trackpad/ball/sketchpad for precision pointing only. But all the touch-screens I've seen end up with paw prints all over them, unless you wear kidgloves or something...:-)
i always thought we live in "Netscape" time (it's all over the place). especially when I was doing exams, time moves faster then... probably proof that Information has mass, and can affect time progression if there's enough of it.;-)
extremely small printing systems are one component. And OCR to read the bits off the photo when it exits the photo-bus. Maybe that's why IBM needs to slow things down...?
It's not a silly question. I've had a problem with the "speed of light is a constant" assumption for years, and since it is the basis of Relativity, I was wondering similar to you. Particularly when it can be easily demonstraited that light's speed is not a constant (e.g. refraction in a prism can act to slow light down a bit, causing different colours to bend by different angles accourding to thier "wave length", producing a spectrum).
Unfortunately I found out that the rule is "the maximum speed of light through a medium [e.g. vacuum] is contstant". And the maximum speed of light, c=2.99792458e8 m/s, is of course the fastest that light can go. Nothing says it can't go slower.
This explains the article a bit better. IBM have found a way to "slow light" down a lot more than what happens when light passes through a transparent solid, or is bent by gravitation. Although whether IBM have slowed the linear speed of photons, or just found a way to modulate the light "waves" from a laser to a much lower frequency is something I can't grasp from the article's over-simplification (it is only a ZDnet article, so my expections are probably too high)....
Much as we would love to be able to use this as a basis for non-Relativistic physics and superluminal space travel or time travel, there is nothing going on in IBM's invention that breaks the laws we have today.
Of course, this is an observation that is new to the "mainstream" of our generation. Many people in my parent's generation would only "trust" one source. Indeed, most television news programs and newspapers still advertise themselves today as "your most trusted news source" as if it is a good thing to only focus on one!
I feel this is a reflection on our increased education, more than it is about the internet, or even the quality of newspapers (which has declined markedly in the last 10 years). More people with university education (completed or not) means that more people understand your observation of the importance of a varied news source.
It means more people recognise that present-day journalist are either hacks, or payed-for schills of whichever "cause" the story is supporting (it used to be that papers reported facts, not "stories").
This is compounded by the Internet, because people are finding it easier to get alternate views from sources besides their "trusted" newspapers. And as they learn that, in fact, you can't trust your newspapers, they turn to whatever source that they feel they can trust.
Why does "mainstream media" think blogging is such a huge hit? It's not that Internet is immediate, or that anyone can do it (which has big down-sides as well as it's egalitarian advantages). It is simply that people everywhere are fed-up with WWII-era propagandists telling us what to believe and have started researching it for themselves.
This is the Information Revolution: the Revolution is greatly improved access to the information. People are more educated now than they were 50 or even 20 years ago and can make informed judgements. They don't need some "journalist" to do it for them. This is quite appart form the fact that today's journalism is extremely poor compared to yester-year's.
I don't buy papers because I know that I can't trust them to bring me news in an unbiased, non-politically or commercially influenced fashion, or full of Tabloid rubbish like British newspapers. I accept the risk that the news I learn via the Net can be from the "uninformed" masses and mitigate this by using many sources so I can judge for myself where the "truth" may lay.
I won't even read over people's shoulders anymore.
For at least the last 10 years, newspapers have been good for only one thing: the ink used in newspaper presses is fantastic for removing streaks and smudges from my computer monitor!
While we are on the subject of Linux being so hard to learn and use (and the only convinsing argument I've heard is simply that it's different): who says Windows is easy?
Every time I've upgraded Windows (or moved to a machine running a different version) I've had to play the "where the heck have they moved option X to now?" game. ODBC driver locations in the Control Pannel between Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2003 Server and Windows XP are a pet peive of mine, but also "simple" things like keyboard layout (under International Settings in XP now. Why not in the Keyboard settings where it made sense?)
And don't get me started on the issues of doing things in Windows that the GUI designers or driver manufacturers didn't anticipate. Case in point: can't change the monitor refresh rate on my work's laptop when in dual-screen mode, but can in single-screen mode, and can when when I run a Linux LiveCD, so it's not a hardware limitation, it's a Windows driver limitation, and since there's no "confusing text file" I can't go digging to fix this. Instead I'm stuck with a flickery 60Hz display.
Office is another major offender in the shifting options problem.
Plus, why, after painstakingly arranging my desktop icons in Windows, does it insist on moving them all to the left of the screen whenever it feels like it (yes, the Auto Arrange option is turned off, thanks)?
This "linux is hard" FUD is especially anoying because it's a classic case of "pot calling kettle black". Anyway, if you are so worried about how hard a Unix can be, take a look at Apple MacOS X. It's not hard, even the "confusing" text files can be pretty easy to reach and they work too.
Cut and paste, swap "Windows" for "Linux" and the arguments are the same...
Many Linux distro's (e.g. SuSE, Mandriva, Ubuntu) install and "just work", many cases easier and more reliably than Windows, but always at least as "easy" and as "reliably".
Also, besides the price (and you can always pirate and crack windows if you are concerned only about price...):
If the GUI "protects" me from "confusing configurations files" at the expense of actually letting me configure my monitor's refresh rate, I can resort to the text file if I want.
If I write a document, I own it, because it's in a format that is free and open, not controlled by a monopolist. My 1997 Honours Thesis is in MS-Word 6.0 format, and does not open properly, even in Microsoft Word these days...
I can record my own home movies into a format that can be played on my DVD player at home (Windows Media Centre does not allow this, something weired about "copyright violations", but it's my home movie, staring me and my family!)
I have no reason to stay with Windows, except:
My employer insists on it. Fortunately, my employer supplies me with a computer with Windows on. It is 12 months old now and it has been in for repair three times this year already and is currently in for a fourth time. I should get it back tomorrow...
Many Pr0n sites insist on using movie media formats in strange codecs. Come to think of it, this is not really a major concern.
I have a Sony Playstation if I want to play. The TV screen is much bigger than I could afford for a computer monitor, and my couch is much more comfortable than sitting on an office chair to play games...
The great thing about Linux is that all the definitive documentation (including the source code) comes with the OS.
You know, I'm finding that for a lot of the "beginner" linux distro's, this is not true. Yes, the source is available but it doesn't come with the OS.
Granted, not everyone wants to fill their harddrives with source tarballs or SRPMs on the off chance they might want to read them, but only a few distro's I know come with source, and those are not necessarily for noob's. the main example that comes to mind is Gentoo (since it's a "ports"-like distribution). This is not to wax lyrical on the benefits of Gentoo for learning Linux (Gentoo has many weaknesses in that regard too, among its inappropriateness as a general OS for noob's), just that it's the only one I've found where the source comes with the OS.
Other distro's with source "available" are Debian and Fedora (on extra CDs you have to download, and Fedora locks the source into SRPMs which is another learning hurdle to leap over, especially bad if all you want to do is read the source comments, or documentation not included in the binary RPM). It makes me feel like a 2nd-class citizen, that the source is somehow "open" but you have to know the secret handshake to get at it.
All of this, just to say: while reading source docs is a laudable habbit and I share your wish to encourage it, I can also see how it is difficult for most Linux noob's to form this habbit so long as the source doesn't actually come with the OS, which for a great many distro's it does not. The extra steps to download (and in many cases extract from SRPMs) the source are probably enough of a deterrent to forming this habbit.
yeah, I've been wanting the Cybersphere Snow Crash / Neuromancer / Lawnmower Man experience too. Or even something more along the Japanese style interfaces you see in Final Fantasy or Ghost in the Shell. But I feel that so long as we have to interract with a mouse + physical keyboard and navigate through a 2D pannel, it's never going to work quite as well as we dream. Maybe one day we'll have cheep VR headsets and data gloves, enabling this kind of interface in a more natural way.
I'd love to be able to litterally fly through my filesystem or the Web, for instance, but programs like fs3d don't really work on a 2D screen the way SciFi promisses.
But I've still downloaded this ISO to play with. I hope one day I can contribute to this thing. So far it's the best chance I've seen of getting somewhere close to that Cyberspace dream.
Slashdot Mirror
It should be legal for me to install and use the libdvd-css software on my PC, so long as my intent is not financial gain. I just want to play the DVDs I've purchased legally, I don't even have foreign region coded DVDs (which is streatching the law in my country anyway).
So come on, U.S. based Linux distro's, put libdvd-css back into your distro!
Adopting Open voting/documententation standards would curtail these sorts of issues, without the FUD of forcing constituents to switch... However, I think that blaming it on Diabold is only a scape-goat to hide corruption in the voting system, so it's likely to remain...
Disney = STUPID. Everything they produce is stupid, and is more-or-less either a sequel (Lion King ad-nauseum, Mickey/Donald/Goofey forever, etc.) or based on some (previously) public domain concept (Cinderella, Winnie-the-pooh and so on). Disney exec's possess about as much imagination as an iPod.
If Disney understood the finer points of your analysis, then we wouldn't be burdened with the perpetual copyright extension of Mickey Mouse (himself a pilfered idea, if I recall: see the history of "Steamboat Willy"). There have never been new ideas coming from Walt Disney, let alone the company. I doubt Pixar is going to change it, or if it does, I doubt it will be any better than "Robots" by the time it's been through the Disney meat-grinder :-(
When I start to see (confirmed) stories that Google is adopting the business practices of Microsoft, then it will be a sad day, but so far, Google have been a magnificent example of the way business should be run. I say: good luck to them.
It would seem to me that Google are currently the target of "doubters" who are in stage 2-3 of the Google-wars, which are following along the OpenSource-wars, and based on the principle of all warfare:
informational patents are just bunkum. No mater how I look at it, I can't justify patents for software "inventions" or science "discoveries". When is the benefit to the inventor supposed to cede to the greater good, as originally intended in patent law?
yeah -- after posting I remembered the quantum entaglement thing and it's applications for cryptology. To implement a DRM solution arround it, would require all DRM devices to be entangled with the master's electrons?!? Not practical for a mass distributed document. In fact, is it even possible for that application?
Mass Media are just lemmings.
QC = the end of encryption as we know it, not the start of amazingly uncrackable codes.
Probably what will happen is that only the spooks can have a QC (like with Cray computers, which must be destroyed when decomissioned, to prevent falling into the "wrong" hands). Unless a way can be found to build a viable QC in the back yard...
When do the Bush gulags start?
I think this new law, by constraining activity on an (esentially) non-invasive, non-real-time medium, is close to violating the 1st Amendment. But I'm not a US citizen, nor a law student, so I'm probably wrong.
Where is the line drawn between a comment like yours (reasonable) and someone spouting anti-american terrorism threats on a polititians personal blog (probably what the law is targetted to)? Can't the poly just delete the comment? Or even leave it there, if he's truely interested in what his constituents have to say? Like you say, it's not like commenters are calling in the middle of the night.
This latest move does demonstrate even more how (as I've said before) America is no longer "the land of the free". Maybe someone should write a new national anthem?hey, I hadn't heard this news. Thanks!
Yes, I found the same issue with dual screen -- until I turned on the automatic mouse pointer movement options (I found them under the Accesibility stuff in Winblows, for Linux, it depends on your window manager). One of the advantages I hope to see from a single, large display, is that Window's habit of poping up new windows on the wrong screen will be solved. I'd also love to have a touch-screen option, reverting to a mouse or trackpad/ball/sketchpad for precision pointing only. But all the touch-screens I've seen end up with paw prints all over them, unless you wear kidgloves or something... :-)
i always thought we live in "Netscape" time (it's all over the place). especially when I was doing exams, time moves faster then... probably proof that Information has mass, and can affect time progression if there's enough of it. ;-)
Ouch, now my head is hurting too!
Quick: how fast can we start running, before the Singularity is built an we simply cannot ever escape from Microsoft? That must be the evil plan...
extremely small printing systems are one component. And OCR to read the bits off the photo when it exits the photo-bus. Maybe that's why IBM needs to slow things down...?
Unfortunately I found out that the rule is "the maximum speed of light through a medium [e.g. vacuum] is contstant". And the maximum speed of light, c=2.99792458e8 m/s, is of course the fastest that light can go. Nothing says it can't go slower.
This explains the article a bit better. IBM have found a way to "slow light" down a lot more than what happens when light passes through a transparent solid, or is bent by gravitation. Although whether IBM have slowed the linear speed of photons, or just found a way to modulate the light "waves" from a laser to a much lower frequency is something I can't grasp from the article's over-simplification (it is only a ZDnet article, so my expections are probably too high)....
Much as we would love to be able to use this as a basis for non-Relativistic physics and superluminal space travel or time travel, there is nothing going on in IBM's invention that breaks the laws we have today.
Of course, this is an observation that is new to the "mainstream" of our generation. Many people in my parent's generation would only "trust" one source. Indeed, most television news programs and newspapers still advertise themselves today as "your most trusted news source" as if it is a good thing to only focus on one!
I feel this is a reflection on our increased education, more than it is about the internet, or even the quality of newspapers (which has declined markedly in the last 10 years). More people with university education (completed or not) means that more people understand your observation of the importance of a varied news source.
It means more people recognise that present-day journalist are either hacks, or payed-for schills of whichever "cause" the story is supporting (it used to be that papers reported facts, not "stories").
This is compounded by the Internet, because people are finding it easier to get alternate views from sources besides their "trusted" newspapers. And as they learn that, in fact, you can't trust your newspapers, they turn to whatever source that they feel they can trust.
Why does "mainstream media" think blogging is such a huge hit? It's not that Internet is immediate, or that anyone can do it (which has big down-sides as well as it's egalitarian advantages). It is simply that people everywhere are fed-up with WWII-era propagandists telling us what to believe and have started researching it for themselves.
This is the Information Revolution: the Revolution is greatly improved access to the information. People are more educated now than they were 50 or even 20 years ago and can make informed judgements. They don't need some "journalist" to do it for them. This is quite appart form the fact that today's journalism is extremely poor compared to yester-year's.
I don't buy papers because I know that I can't trust them to bring me news in an unbiased, non-politically or commercially influenced fashion, or full of Tabloid rubbish like British newspapers. I accept the risk that the news I learn via the Net can be from the "uninformed" masses and mitigate this by using many sources so I can judge for myself where the "truth" may lay.
I won't even read over people's shoulders anymore.
For at least the last 10 years, newspapers have been good for only one thing: the ink used in newspaper presses is fantastic for removing streaks and smudges from my computer monitor!
Hmm, it looks to me like it's built to defend us against the Deceptocons. I think the Autobots are the good guys...
I wonder if this thing folds up into a Citroen?
thankyou :-)
While we are on the subject of Linux being so hard to learn and use (and the only convinsing argument I've heard is simply that it's different): who says Windows is easy?
Every time I've upgraded Windows (or moved to a machine running a different version) I've had to play the "where the heck have they moved option X to now?" game. ODBC driver locations in the Control Pannel between Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2003 Server and Windows XP are a pet peive of mine, but also "simple" things like keyboard layout (under International Settings in XP now. Why not in the Keyboard settings where it made sense?)
And don't get me started on the issues of doing things in Windows that the GUI designers or driver manufacturers didn't anticipate. Case in point: can't change the monitor refresh rate on my work's laptop when in dual-screen mode, but can in single-screen mode, and can when when I run a Linux LiveCD, so it's not a hardware limitation, it's a Windows driver limitation, and since there's no "confusing text file" I can't go digging to fix this. Instead I'm stuck with a flickery 60Hz display.
Office is another major offender in the shifting options problem.
Plus, why, after painstakingly arranging my desktop icons in Windows, does it insist on moving them all to the left of the screen whenever it feels like it (yes, the Auto Arrange option is turned off, thanks)?
This "linux is hard" FUD is especially anoying because it's a classic case of "pot calling kettle black". Anyway, if you are so worried about how hard a Unix can be, take a look at Apple MacOS X. It's not hard, even the "confusing" text files can be pretty easy to reach and they work too.
Many Linux distro's (e.g. SuSE, Mandriva, Ubuntu) install and "just work", many cases easier and more reliably than Windows, but always at least as "easy" and as "reliably".
Also, besides the price (and you can always pirate and crack windows if you are concerned only about price...):
I have no reason to stay with Windows, except:
Granted, not everyone wants to fill their harddrives with source tarballs or SRPMs on the off chance they might want to read them, but only a few distro's I know come with source, and those are not necessarily for noob's. the main example that comes to mind is Gentoo (since it's a "ports"-like distribution). This is not to wax lyrical on the benefits of Gentoo for learning Linux (Gentoo has many weaknesses in that regard too, among its inappropriateness as a general OS for noob's), just that it's the only one I've found where the source comes with the OS.
Other distro's with source "available" are Debian and Fedora (on extra CDs you have to download, and Fedora locks the source into SRPMs which is another learning hurdle to leap over, especially bad if all you want to do is read the source comments, or documentation not included in the binary RPM). It makes me feel like a 2nd-class citizen, that the source is somehow "open" but you have to know the secret handshake to get at it.
All of this, just to say: while reading source docs is a laudable habbit and I share your wish to encourage it, I can also see how it is difficult for most Linux noob's to form this habbit so long as the source doesn't actually come with the OS, which for a great many distro's it does not. The extra steps to download (and in many cases extract from SRPMs) the source are probably enough of a deterrent to forming this habbit.
unfortunately, hacker habbits require hacker motivation :-(
I'd love to be able to litterally fly through my filesystem or the Web, for instance, but programs like fs3d don't really work on a 2D screen the way SciFi promisses.
But I've still downloaded this ISO to play with. I hope one day I can contribute to this thing. So far it's the best chance I've seen of getting somewhere close to that Cyberspace dream.