This would be shot down before it got past #1. You would have to prove that your knowledge of CSS is not through illegal means. As your knowledge of CSS is likely derived from someone else's disassembly and/or reverse engineering of commercial, copyrighted programs, I doubt you'd last more than five minutes before a judge. Sorry.
This is a very ugly and complex issue. Your knowledge of the trade secret must be untainted. If you have a copy of the DVD books as a result of theft, you have no legal footing to use that knowledge. Sure, it's no longer a secret. But you cannot use what you know without risk of prosecution. Now if the DVD books were lost in a hideous chain of events during an office move -- packed in a moving box that falls out of the moving van on the freeway into the oncoming path of a semi which smashes the box knocking (at least part of) the DVD books over the railing landing in the bed of your Ford Ranger -- your knowledge of the trade secret(s) would be 100% legal. "They just fell out of the sky."
(I had a similar discussion with my granddad's lawyer years ago when the I2O v1.5? specs were leaked. They were 5000$US per copy at the time.)
You missed the point. To those highly skilled and highly paid software gurus for whom 50k is "nothing", it would be trivial. The fact of the matter is, those people don't do anything for free -- even though there's a 50k$ payoff, it'd still be "free software".
And yes, I do think it would be trivial. There isn't more support for these things under linux because those with the abilities don't care. In fact, alot of programmers get rather pissed every time they get close to linux with anything remotely complicated. Gfx work under *NIX has always been a pain in the ass.
If by "well over 50k/year" you mean 2x or 3x, then you're on target. Skilled programmers can make anywhere from 50k to 250k per year depending on who they work for, what they write, and where they are. I would submit that even if you made 250k, making 50k for a "trivial" bit of code would be worth the time. (If you're that skilled, it's not a hassle; it's a few "bored" weekends.)
The likely "winner" will be a team of people, not a single god-like programmer.
Well, sort of... MP3 files do have a header. It's not the same thing as a wav file, however. There's nothing in a wav data segment to tell you anything about it's format. However, if you know the data is 44.1/16bit/stereo, you can play it back from any byte (+/-).
You certainly cannot playback an mp3 from any random byte. It has to be started from the begining of a block. There's a header for each block with the playback information.
FYI, you can put mp3 audio data in a wav file. "WAV" is only a file structure.
Well, that's a point of debate in certain circles... will the Earth be inside, on the surface, or outside the corrona? The debate is entirely moot as the Earth will be vaporized long before the sun expands that far. And on this, everyone seems to agree: The Earth is toast.
(Oh, and as I recall, Sol's Red Giant stage is on the order of 100 billion years away. Maybe we'll have technology similar to that on Bruneis to stablize our Sun.)
Well, it has to be displayable on your TV. So, therefore, it is copiable. Unless your entire home theater system is all digital where the "firewire" data is encrypted between devices, it's always gonna be recordable.
Personally, I think MPAA is a lost cause. In the digital world, there is no way to prevent criminals from being criminals. You can, however, render everyone a criminal and be done with it. This seems to be MPAA's ploy.
What's next? C&D orders to people looking at billboards on the side of interstate highways?
Well, seeing as there's currently no way to get the digital content out of a TiVo, I don't see that as an issue. (well, you can but it's very cumbersome and no one has yet determined how to undo what the TiVo does to it's mpeg data "streams" -- it's packetized.)
At least in the US, you cannot "back date" laws. (ex post facto, or whatever.) I doubt the existing hardware would be rendered illegal; it would be come obsolite over time. (Remeber 8-track?)
As many have said, it better not have taken five years to design a bar code reader. I built one in a week _15_ years ago using common parts from HP and National Semiconductor (still have it too.) Reading a barcode isn't magic -- people can be taught to read them as well.
Speaking of which, has anyone actually cracked one of them kitties open?
Why not gather up all the:Cue:Cat's from every RadioShack and where ever and microwave them... in the bag. And then mail the glowing, chared remains back to Cue (or whom ever) -- postage due of course.
I don't know how much damage that would do to the electronics, but the CD would certainly be a gonner.
Some days I wonder if we're headed toward a society where you can't even wipe your own butt for yourself, instead of having some corporation do it for you (for a nominal fee).
That's already sorta true... you buy toilet paper, right? Ok, so we don't have a little midget in the bathroom to scrub our ass after we do our business -- well, not until you get "really old".
As for wise-cracks about communism (or is that Communism), in case you've not noticed with all the C&D letters and DMCA lawsuits, democracy doesn't work exactly right either. The problem is that all forms of government depend, nay rely, on people. The net result is that the inscrupulous people (no offense) tend to bubble to the top. Politicians don't do what's in the best interest of their constituients; they do what's best for them -- their bank accounts and whatever keeps them in office.
Corruption is a fact of life. When given power, people will eventually abuse it. I'm not saying everyone with administrative access to the mail server is, as matter of daily operations, reading everyone's email. People don't have to answer, but just think to yourself: How many times have you used the privledges granted to you to do something for your own gains or amusement? (i.e. read someone's email, go look through someone's files, snoop through a netscape cache or history file, etc.) [I'll admit to having done all of these things over the years. Hell, I've done far worse than those things. Actually, I've done worse without exercising privs. -- some of you will know what I'm alluding to *grin*]
Dude, do you even know how SMTP works? The full address of the receiver is sent to the SMTP daemon... "RCPT TO: "
POP and IMAP can trivially deal with this as well by having the user login with a full email address instead of a username, i.e. "user@sub.domain.com" or just "user@sub".
Having done both (one mega server and one server per client) I can say both has it's merits and problems.
The mega-server is administratively simplistic as everything is in one file. Having only one main process, it tends to use system resources more efficiently reducing the constraints on server hardware. And it only needs one IP address. However, it's hard to police what any individual vhost can do -- including server capability, bandwidth, connections, and system resources. And, the larger the configuration, the longer it takes to startup making altering the configuration (add or delete a vhost) more costly and dangerous.
The one-off model is rather administratively costly. Each site is run by it's own apache server complete and standalone. This gives the admin complete control over what that client is allowed to do -- system resources, bandwidth, and even individualized server functionality. Alterations to the client's setup only effects that one site. Moving a client to a different physical server is quite simple and again, only effects that customer. However, this mode is much more demanding on server hardware as you've got far more processes running. And it needs IP-based hosting.
HTTP is good for moving visually rendered media -- "magazine pages". FTP is designed for moving files -- any file of any size to anywhere. More and more people are using HTTP to do what FTP used to do. I hate that. No web browser on the face of the planet has the file transfer smarts that even the stupidest ftp program has.
It wasn't Greek, it was German. Exactly how many of the colonists spoke greek? (Very few.)
North America was colonized by England, Spain, and France. The English "took root" and expanded. The French never had much of a foothold. The Spanish expanded into South America. Granted, that's a huge over simplification, but there's no doubt why the US speaks english, most of South America speaks spanish, and a fair amount of Canada speaks french.
If I were to create my own country, do you honestly expect me to declare the national language to be something I don't understand or wouldn't even recognize? Or choose a language no one in my country understands?
Not at all. They are teaching you the concept of debugging a running program. They cannot teach you to use every damned debugger on the planet. Once you've learned the concept of break points and such, it's easy to figure out how this works with other environments. As for people working in multiple environments, over time, yes, you'll be exposed to multiple environments, but you generally will not be working with three different IDEs on windows at the same time.
They are teaching you those things. However, they have to do it with a specific tool. There's no way a university can teach dozens of students to use every compiler environment on the planet -- nor do they have the budget to go buy every one of those compilers. In the real world, you have to learn to adapt to the compiler you're forced to use -- and with C++, this is a big issue as they all do things differently.
In order to learn to program, you have to compile your code. The instant you compile your code, you've locked yourself into dealing with that compiler. Trust me on this; I know far too well how non-portable C++ code and compilers are. (Several problems with the DCTI clients were attributed to various C++ compilers -- a few years ago. I've spent several months converting C++ code designed for Sun Workshop 4 to work with MSVC++ -- no template repositories and draconian type casting rules... The Cosm code base is 110% C to avoid all the C++ compiler bullshit.)
non-standard implementations of c++ Read: ALL OF THEM. I have never seen two C++ compilers treat the same code in the same manner. Straight C compilers all work the same, within a std. dev. or two.
If you want a better example, think about JAVA compilers and VMs... sure, JAVA is supposed to uniform and platform independant. But, it is none of those things -- things depend heavily on who's compiler is being used and who's VM is being forced to run it on which platform.
That and the collider wasn't expected to do much more than confirm existing theory. It's not like the thing was likely to bring about world peace, solve world hunger, or dispose of tons of nuclear waste.
While capacity would eventually become a problem, "dialtone" is easy to add. In some cases, the provider only changes for active minutes -- i.e. no charge for the T1, local loop, etc. So, aside from the cost of the equipment to terminate the calls, 800 service is "cheap". Farming it out to SpewSpewNet is, of course, far simpler.
As a data point, there are people currently doing daily updates via their own network -- ppp on the DSS port. TiVo hasn't said anything about it. (Well, other than the standard "we make no promise to keep user hacks functional" statement.)
It used to dial into TiVo directly, however, 800# charges add up fast... Starting with version 1.3 of the TiVo software, it dials a local (UUNet) ISP number just like any other dialup PPP system and proceeds to send and recv data via http and ftp.
The TiVo guide data IS available from the TiVo servers over the public internet. That information is (and always has been) encrypted and therefore useless to everything but the TiVo. (While it is theoretically possible to feed none Service program data into the TiVo, none of the TiVo Hacker community will spend any time at all telling you how -- it's not worth our time and we don't want to piss off TiVo.)
(You can get the TiVo to fetch it's updates via your existing network connection, but there's a bit of setup to be done on the TiVo to do it. TiVo has given no official statement for or against this practice.)
"legal implications"??? the TiVo is the same class of device as a VCR. Are you trying to tell me I can be arested for using my computer to record broadcast TV? (Cable is another matter, but they broadcast MacroVision over cable.)
As for TiVo, I don't think they mind us playing around in there. They are selling us the service; as long as we continue to buy their service, what do they care if we tweak our TiVo? Granted, they have issues with people trying to change their serial number or otherwise side-step the service. They haven't said anything (that I know of) about our efforts to figure out how the thing (read: MFS) ticks. [I'm actually impressed by the whole thing!]
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This would be shot down before it got past #1. You would have to prove that your knowledge of CSS is not through illegal means. As your knowledge of CSS is likely derived from someone else's disassembly and/or reverse engineering of commercial, copyrighted programs, I doubt you'd last more than five minutes before a judge. Sorry.
This is a very ugly and complex issue. Your knowledge of the trade secret must be untainted. If you have a copy of the DVD books as a result of theft, you have no legal footing to use that knowledge. Sure, it's no longer a secret. But you cannot use what you know without risk of prosecution. Now if the DVD books were lost in a hideous chain of events during an office move -- packed in a moving box that falls out of the moving van on the freeway into the oncoming path of a semi which smashes the box knocking (at least part of) the DVD books over the railing landing in the bed of your Ford Ranger -- your knowledge of the trade secret(s) would be 100% legal. "They just fell out of the sky."
(I had a similar discussion with my granddad's lawyer years ago when the I2O v1.5? specs were leaked. They were 5000$US per copy at the time.)
You missed the point. To those highly skilled and highly paid software gurus for whom 50k is "nothing", it would be trivial. The fact of the matter is, those people don't do anything for free -- even though there's a 50k$ payoff, it'd still be "free software".
And yes, I do think it would be trivial. There isn't more support for these things under linux because those with the abilities don't care. In fact, alot of programmers get rather pissed every time they get close to linux with anything remotely complicated. Gfx work under *NIX has always been a pain in the ass.
If by "well over 50k/year" you mean 2x or 3x, then you're on target. Skilled programmers can make anywhere from 50k to 250k per year depending on who they work for, what they write, and where they are. I would submit that even if you made 250k, making 50k for a "trivial" bit of code would be worth the time. (If you're that skilled, it's not a hassle; it's a few "bored" weekends.)
The likely "winner" will be a team of people, not a single god-like programmer.
Well, sort of... MP3 files do have a header. It's not the same thing as a wav file, however. There's nothing in a wav data segment to tell you anything about it's format. However, if you know the data is 44.1/16bit/stereo, you can play it back from any byte (+/-).
You certainly cannot playback an mp3 from any random byte. It has to be started from the begining of a block. There's a header for each block with the playback information.
FYI, you can put mp3 audio data in a wav file. "WAV" is only a file structure.
Well, that's a point of debate in certain circles... will the Earth be inside, on the surface, or outside the corrona? The debate is entirely moot as the Earth will be vaporized long before the sun expands that far. And on this, everyone seems to agree: The Earth is toast.
(Oh, and as I recall, Sol's Red Giant stage is on the order of 100 billion years away. Maybe we'll have technology similar to that on Bruneis to stablize our Sun.)
1 - I don't trust it deleting parts of my TV shows. It's good, but not perfect.
2 - It would if you're infringing on anyone's patents. And they found out about it.
Coo, revolt, insurrection, maybe even uprising... but not a riot. Riots are too random and inefficient.
I prefer the efficient, if indescriminant, weapons of mass destruction. *evil grin*
Warning: "Commercial Advance" is patented.
But, yes, I'd like my TiVo to have that capability. My RCA VCR has it and it kicks ass.
Petition?! Bah! Bullets are cheaper and far more effective.
[Disclaimer: I am not insighting a riot.]
Well, it has to be displayable on your TV. So, therefore, it is copiable. Unless your entire home theater system is all digital where the "firewire" data is encrypted between devices, it's always gonna be recordable.
Personally, I think MPAA is a lost cause. In the digital world, there is no way to prevent criminals from being criminals. You can, however, render everyone a criminal and be done with it. This seems to be MPAA's ploy.
What's next? C&D orders to people looking at billboards on the side of interstate highways?
Well, seeing as there's currently no way to get the digital content out of a TiVo, I don't see that as an issue. (well, you can but it's very cumbersome and no one has yet determined how to undo what the TiVo does to it's mpeg data "streams" -- it's packetized.)
At least in the US, you cannot "back date" laws. (ex post facto, or whatever.) I doubt the existing hardware would be rendered illegal; it would be come obsolite over time. (Remeber 8-track?)
As many have said, it better not have taken five years to design a bar code reader. I built one in a week _15_ years ago using common parts from HP and National Semiconductor (still have it too.) Reading a barcode isn't magic -- people can be taught to read them as well.
Speaking of which, has anyone actually cracked one of them kitties open?
Ya know, I've got an idea...
:Cue:Cat's from every RadioShack and where ever and microwave them... in the bag. And then mail the glowing, chared remains back to Cue (or whom ever) -- postage due of course.
Why not gather up all the
I don't know how much damage that would do to the electronics, but the CD would certainly be a gonner.
- Some days I wonder if we're headed toward a society where you can't even wipe your own butt for yourself, instead of having some corporation do it for you (for a nominal fee).
That's already sorta true... you buy toilet paper, right? Ok, so we don't have a little midget in the bathroom to scrub our ass after we do our business -- well, not until you get "really old".As for wise-cracks about communism (or is that Communism), in case you've not noticed with all the C&D letters and DMCA lawsuits, democracy doesn't work exactly right either. The problem is that all forms of government depend, nay rely, on people. The net result is that the inscrupulous people (no offense) tend to bubble to the top. Politicians don't do what's in the best interest of their constituients; they do what's best for them -- their bank accounts and whatever keeps them in office.
Corruption is a fact of life. When given power, people will eventually abuse it. I'm not saying everyone with administrative access to the mail server is, as matter of daily operations, reading everyone's email. People don't have to answer, but just think to yourself: How many times have you used the privledges granted to you to do something for your own gains or amusement? (i.e. read someone's email, go look through someone's files, snoop through a netscape cache or history file, etc.) [I'll admit to having done all of these things over the years. Hell, I've done far worse than those things. Actually, I've done worse without exercising privs. -- some of you will know what I'm alluding to *grin*]
Dude, do you even know how SMTP works? The full address of the receiver is sent to the SMTP daemon... "RCPT TO: "
POP and IMAP can trivially deal with this as well by having the user login with a full email address instead of a username, i.e. "user@sub.domain.com" or just "user@sub".
Having done both (one mega server and one server per client) I can say both has it's merits and problems.
The mega-server is administratively simplistic as everything is in one file. Having only one main process, it tends to use system resources more efficiently reducing the constraints on server hardware. And it only needs one IP address. However, it's hard to police what any individual vhost can do -- including server capability, bandwidth, connections, and system resources. And, the larger the configuration, the longer it takes to startup making altering the configuration (add or delete a vhost) more costly and dangerous.
The one-off model is rather administratively costly. Each site is run by it's own apache server complete and standalone. This gives the admin complete control over what that client is allowed to do -- system resources, bandwidth, and even individualized server functionality. Alterations to the client's setup only effects that one site. Moving a client to a different physical server is quite simple and again, only effects that customer. However, this mode is much more demanding on server hardware as you've got far more processes running. And it needs IP-based hosting.
Umm, in a word, NO .
((HTTP != FTP) && (HTTP !~ FTP))
HTTP is good for moving visually rendered media -- "magazine pages". FTP is designed for moving files -- any file of any size to anywhere. More and more people are using HTTP to do what FTP used to do. I hate that. No web browser on the face of the planet has the file transfer smarts that even the stupidest ftp program has.
It wasn't Greek, it was German. Exactly how many of the colonists spoke greek? (Very few.)
North America was colonized by England, Spain, and France. The English "took root" and expanded. The French never had much of a foothold. The Spanish expanded into South America. Granted, that's a huge over simplification, but there's no doubt why the US speaks english, most of South America speaks spanish, and a fair amount of Canada speaks french.
If I were to create my own country, do you honestly expect me to declare the national language to be something I don't understand or wouldn't even recognize? Or choose a language no one in my country understands?
Not at all. They are teaching you the concept of debugging a running program. They cannot teach you to use every damned debugger on the planet. Once you've learned the concept of break points and such, it's easy to figure out how this works with other environments. As for people working in multiple environments, over time, yes, you'll be exposed to multiple environments, but you generally will not be working with three different IDEs on windows at the same time.
They are teaching you those things. However, they have to do it with a specific tool. There's no way a university can teach dozens of students to use every compiler environment on the planet -- nor do they have the budget to go buy every one of those compilers. In the real world, you have to learn to adapt to the compiler you're forced to use -- and with C++, this is a big issue as they all do things differently.
In order to learn to program, you have to compile your code. The instant you compile your code, you've locked yourself into dealing with that compiler. Trust me on this; I know far too well how non-portable C++ code and compilers are. (Several problems with the DCTI clients were attributed to various C++ compilers -- a few years ago. I've spent several months converting C++ code designed for Sun Workshop 4 to work with MSVC++ -- no template repositories and draconian type casting rules... The Cosm code base is 110% C to avoid all the C++ compiler bullshit.)
non-standard implementations of c++
Read: ALL OF THEM. I have never seen two C++ compilers treat the same code in the same manner. Straight C compilers all work the same, within a std. dev. or two.
If you want a better example, think about JAVA compilers and VMs... sure, JAVA is supposed to uniform and platform independant. But, it is none of those things -- things depend heavily on who's compiler is being used and who's VM is being forced to run it on which platform.
That and the collider wasn't expected to do much more than confirm existing theory. It's not like the thing was likely to bring about world peace, solve world hunger, or dispose of tons of nuclear waste.
While capacity would eventually become a problem, "dialtone" is easy to add. In some cases, the provider only changes for active minutes -- i.e. no charge for the T1, local loop, etc. So, aside from the cost of the equipment to terminate the calls, 800 service is "cheap". Farming it out to SpewSpewNet is, of course, far simpler.
As a data point, there are people currently doing daily updates via their own network -- ppp on the DSS port. TiVo hasn't said anything about it. (Well, other than the standard "we make no promise to keep user hacks functional" statement.)
It used to dial into TiVo directly, however, 800# charges add up fast... Starting with version 1.3 of the TiVo software, it dials a local (UUNet) ISP number just like any other dialup PPP system and proceeds to send and recv data via http and ftp.
The TiVo guide data IS available from the TiVo servers over the public internet. That information is (and always has been) encrypted and therefore useless to everything but the TiVo. (While it is theoretically possible to feed none Service program data into the TiVo, none of the TiVo Hacker community will spend any time at all telling you how -- it's not worth our time and we don't want to piss off TiVo.)
(You can get the TiVo to fetch it's updates via your existing network connection, but there's a bit of setup to be done on the TiVo to do it. TiVo has given no official statement for or against this practice.)
Dude, it has the hardware for MPEG encoding. That's all. Quicktime and realmedia would have to be done in software (on a 54MHz PPC at that.)
"legal implications"??? the TiVo is the same class of device as a VCR. Are you trying to tell me I can be arested for using my computer to record broadcast TV? (Cable is another matter, but they broadcast MacroVision over cable.)
As for TiVo, I don't think they mind us playing around in there. They are selling us the service; as long as we continue to buy their service, what do they care if we tweak our TiVo? Granted, they have issues with people trying to change their serial number or otherwise side-step the service. They haven't said anything (that I know of) about our efforts to figure out how the thing (read: MFS) ticks. [I'm actually impressed by the whole thing!]