This should be called illegal restraint of trade and monopoly abuse.
It should be also dealt with accordingly. HEAR HEAR. This is a product which actually actively seeks out and cripples a competitor's product. How is this legal in any sense whatsoever?
I'm waiting for GM to produce a car that "accidentally" punctures the tires of any other make of car on the road when you take it onto the highway. When you contact them to ask for a fix, they recommend you downgrade to using surface streets only.
This can all be solved by a little device called HDFury. It sits between your display and your DRM enabled device and converts from nasty DRM laden, to beautiful, DRM free signals. Completely digitally. (Unless you get the VGA model) I'm afraid not -- it converts HDMI to an analog RGB signal which is then output to your monitor (or TV/projector with RGB inputs).
In theory, future HDCP content could invalidate whatever key it is using to decrypt the signal; in practice, the makers of the HDFury probably cloned the keys of something extremely popular (for example, a Sony Bravia or Sharp Aquos television), so revoking the key would infuriate thousands of HDTV owners.
The manufacturers of HDFury say that it is a totally legal conversion device, but they're either ignorant, or lying. The specifications for HDCP-protected content state that it is up to the content provider whether analog outputs on the device are enabled. Something tells me they're not exactly honoring what the content provider tells them to do.
(I probably don't have to tell you that even attempting to purchase an HDFury makes you a criminal in the United States thanks to the DMCA, but if you're the sort to buy one I doubt you're very worried about that.)
...because that's the only way I can explain this mirror universe where DRM proponents are arguing that a product barring them from crippling your ability to do what you want with your music is itself "crippleware".
How? Because the MP3s just happen to be located in the folder that Kazaa shares files from, instead of some other folder on his hard drive? You're telling me that the MP3 file is either "authorized" or "unauthorized" based on its logical location on the drive? This is "more reasonable?"
The "OMG THEY CONTAIN MERCURY" scare tactic is the biggest load of anti-CFL bull put forth out there. The average CFL today contains around four milligrams of mercury, and already several companies are making bulbs that contain about two milligrams. Meanwhile, the increased power consumption from billions of incandescent bulbs being burned puts out kilograms of mercury vapors into the atmosphere every year.
As for lead content, you'd better stop using computers of any kind, because all of them use far more lead during their production than any CFLs do.
Who the fuck with a brain buys ringtones? Just drop a needle, take a sample and shuttle it off to your phone via USB... Jesus the RIAA are a bunch of fuckin' morons. Depends on the phone. A lot of newer phones only allow you to choose ringtones from a special section of memory which can't be accessed over USB mass-storage, or require DRM-encrypted files to play. Goddamned phone is designed to work as a music player, and yet you can't use the MP3s stored on it as ringtones, because there's profit to be made, dammit!
It is the kids accepting this shit that are the bunch of fuckin' morons.
I'm probably going to get flamed for this, but Tuvix was a great premise: what happens if you take two people with entirely disparate personalities and combine them into one? What sorts of memories would the new person have? How would he react to his former friends and coworkers? And then, when there's an opportunity to get the original people back, but kill this new person in the process, what do you do?
Janeway's choice to restore the original two crewmembers, effectively killing a living being, was an effective and dramatic (and unusual) way to end a Star Trek episode -- no cheerful resolution here, no "Next Generation"-style magic solution to both save Tuvix and get Tuvok and Neelix back and have a good laugh in Ten Forward afterwards.
Granted, the typical transporter-crutch technobabble used to explain the combination (and the far more unlikely separation of the two) was typical lazy-Trek writing, but the underlying concept was great.
(Just a side-note: in the TNG episode "Second Chances" when Riker's transporter double was found on the surface, the writers briefly toyed with the idea of killing Commander Riker off and replacing him with the "Lieutenant Riker" double -- but since TNG was basically episodic, it would have affected too many future scripts. Imagine what TNG, or even Voyager, might have been like had it used long story arcs like Babylon 5, or late DS9...)
"these 30 sec peview are dumb u cant even steal songs from here how is ti possible to download. plus these are intended to have em in our page we can never put dem in our ipods and such ya know. get rid of da 30 sec limit quick or da 50 cent guy below u will be right about losing alot of members" "Oh no! Oh no! Please don't leave our website because we aren't making it easy for you to do stuff that will piss off our partners!"
I realize this is offtopic, but holy HELL, our society is doomed.
Seriously speaking, I'm betting Drew just wanted to see how many news outfits he could get to carry such a ridiculous story, and how much of an overreaction and outrage said coverage would generate in the blogosphere. An effective publicity stunt, really, considering the recent publication of his book [amazon.com] and its subject matter. Wait a minute... whenever other companies attempt to patent/trademark/copyright something stupid, Slashdot jumps right on it, and rightly so because it's a stupid move. We freak out about patent trolls and people trying to copyright emoticons. If Fark really were honestly trying to trademark "NSFW," why would it be ridiculous or overreacting for everybody to point out how broken the system is, and how much respect Fark has lost for pulling such an ass move?
Are we saying that abuses of the copyright, trademark, and patent systems are not newsworthy now? If this is a joke, then more power to them, but I see no reason why those sorts of things shouldn't evoke outrage.
I've really ENJOYED THE SAFETY I GET with web filtering. This sort of stuff has simply gone too NOT FAR ENOUGH. I'm so ABSOLUTELY CONTENT with Comcast, I'm going to go call them right now and VOLUNTARILY INCREASE THE AMOUNT I AM PAYING THEM, and I suggest that everybody else yell about HOW COMCASTIC THEIR SERVICE IS.
If all businesses followed the "No Asshole Rule" there would be nobody left to run Comcast, AT&T, Vivendi, News Corporation, Universal, BMG, Time-Warner, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, Microsoft, Paramount, Exelon... I could go on but I'm sure you get the idea.
I have to ask, though... isn't it possible that his senility caused him to believe he had been a spy during WWII? Or was he nowhere near far gone enough for that? I'm not trying to troll here, just seriously wondering...
Talk about copyrights when your copyrights are violated and copyright law is the only protection that your work has. The fact that copyright law can be used for good does not negate the fact that it is often sorely abused, over and over and over.
Yes, because if there's anything I hear the typical consumer demanding, it's that we should have more mandatory advertising.
What's that, you say? It's the advertisers who are demanding it? It just proves, once again, who the actual customer is for any and all media produced: advertisers. Viewers are just the product being delivered to them.
I'm not trying to debate politics, just to get the facts straight. I realize Geneva is a wonderful and egalitarian city, and that HTML was born there, and that the WWW is essentially the backbone of today's web. I'm just pointing out that you can't say the Internet was "invented" in Geneva. (And it's interesting that you mentioned Gopher, since HTTP owed a lot to the original network of Gopher servers.)
Also, although I may be a bit biased since I graduated from there, universities such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are also very liberal, egalitarian, and progressive -- which is why it's no wonder so much early Internet development occurred there.
From the article:
#7 - Lieutenant Commander Data's leg Yes, you read that right, one of the best off switches ever is fitted to the android from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Data, as he's known to his friends -- seen here snogging the face off the Borg Queen -- had one secret he only told a select few people. He could be deactivated with a power button on his leg. Yeah... but it was on his hip, not his leg. Which, I suppose, could make sex with the Borg Queen a bit of a pain...
"Oh yeah, yeah, wait, no, don't touch me th*thunk*"
Are you from Switzerland? The Internet was invented at the international scientific center CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. This is incorrect.
The World Wide Web (that is, HTML and HTTP) was first invented at CERN near Geneva, but the Internet's backbone, TCP/IP, was based off of the U.S. Department of Defense's ARPANET, and generally evolved into what we recognize as the Internet with the help of the U.S. National Science Foundation and Stanford University.
And while the Web may have first started at CERN, the first widely available graphical web browser -- Mosaic -- was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois.
You do *not* have to be intimately familiar with the low-level details of all the hardware in order to combine it together in a useful way."
OK, I agree, but simply mashing together some technologies does not an engineer make. Perhaps not, but it's a damned good start. I was just thinking about the world my seven-month-old daughter will be growing up in. Computers are ubiquitous, nearly throwaway, and run extremely complex operating systems that abstract out the hardware as much as possible. Electronics of any complexity require you to use surface-mount components on two or four-layer PCBs, well beyond the breadboard-and-solder level. There's no real analogue to the DOS command line and GW-BASIC I grew up learning to program on. Assuming she grows up being a computer geek like her father (a huge assumption, but still something to consider), what's out there to honestly get her interested in electronics or computing?
I came up with a concept about a year back that was similar to this, although cheaper and cruder in concept: modules a bit more complicated than Mindstorms, all cubes in shape, communicating and getting power along a sort of wire mesh using a serial protocol favoring fault tolerance over speed. A CPU module could query everything on the bus to see what is connected, get responses back, and interface with a PC, which would present a list of the modules and the functions each of them can provide. (You know, like object-oriented programming, but with physical objects.)
Unfortunately, I don't have the time, money, or mechanical/electrical skills for such an endeavor, but that's the sort of electronics and programming lab I would have killed for as a kid. You get the cost of each module down to around one to five bucks (depending on the module's capabilities) and you have a totally expandable, programmable building system.
That does it. Let's outlaw conversation. Seriously. It's basically the original "peer to peer" method of communication, right?
From now on, nobody is allowed to communicate with anybody except for specially designated "servers". These "servers" must relay all messages from one person to another, vetting the communication to make sure there is nothing illegal, immoral, obscene, libelous, traitorous, unpatriotic, or just plain questionable about it.
Slashdot Mirror
This should be called illegal restraint of trade and monopoly abuse.
It should be also dealt with accordingly. HEAR HEAR. This is a product which actually actively seeks out and cripples a competitor's product. How is this legal in any sense whatsoever?
I'm waiting for GM to produce a car that "accidentally" punctures the tires of any other make of car on the road when you take it onto the highway. When you contact them to ask for a fix, they recommend you downgrade to using surface streets only.
In theory, future HDCP content could invalidate whatever key it is using to decrypt the signal; in practice, the makers of the HDFury probably cloned the keys of something extremely popular (for example, a Sony Bravia or Sharp Aquos television), so revoking the key would infuriate thousands of HDTV owners.
The manufacturers of HDFury say that it is a totally legal conversion device, but they're either ignorant, or lying. The specifications for HDCP-protected content state that it is up to the content provider whether analog outputs on the device are enabled. Something tells me they're not exactly honoring what the content provider tells them to do.
(I probably don't have to tell you that even attempting to purchase an HDFury makes you a criminal in the United States thanks to the DMCA, but if you're the sort to buy one I doubt you're very worried about that.)
...because that's the only way I can explain this mirror universe where DRM proponents are arguing that a product barring them from crippling your ability to do what you want with your music is itself "crippleware".
Scotty, for the love of God, get me out of here.
How? Because the MP3s just happen to be located in the folder that Kazaa shares files from, instead of some other folder on his hard drive? You're telling me that the MP3 file is either "authorized" or "unauthorized" based on its logical location on the drive? This is "more reasonable?"
How long before Jack Thompson is sharing a cell with Jonathan Lee Riches?
Maybe Riches can sue him for trademark infringement.
The "OMG THEY CONTAIN MERCURY" scare tactic is the biggest load of anti-CFL bull put forth out there. The average CFL today contains around four milligrams of mercury, and already several companies are making bulbs that contain about two milligrams. Meanwhile, the increased power consumption from billions of incandescent bulbs being burned puts out kilograms of mercury vapors into the atmosphere every year.
As for lead content, you'd better stop using computers of any kind, because all of them use far more lead during their production than any CFLs do.
It is the kids accepting this shit that are the bunch of fuckin' morons.
I'm probably going to get flamed for this, but Tuvix was a great premise: what happens if you take two people with entirely disparate personalities and combine them into one? What sorts of memories would the new person have? How would he react to his former friends and coworkers? And then, when there's an opportunity to get the original people back, but kill this new person in the process, what do you do?
Janeway's choice to restore the original two crewmembers, effectively killing a living being, was an effective and dramatic (and unusual) way to end a Star Trek episode -- no cheerful resolution here, no "Next Generation"-style magic solution to both save Tuvix and get Tuvok and Neelix back and have a good laugh in Ten Forward afterwards.
Granted, the typical transporter-crutch technobabble used to explain the combination (and the far more unlikely separation of the two) was typical lazy-Trek writing, but the underlying concept was great.
(Just a side-note: in the TNG episode "Second Chances" when Riker's transporter double was found on the surface, the writers briefly toyed with the idea of killing Commander Riker off and replacing him with the "Lieutenant Riker" double -- but since TNG was basically episodic, it would have affected too many future scripts. Imagine what TNG, or even Voyager, might have been like had it used long story arcs like Babylon 5, or late DS9...)
I realize this is offtopic, but holy HELL, our society is doomed.
Yeah, I know, get off my lawn, et cetera.
Are we saying that abuses of the copyright, trademark, and patent systems are not newsworthy now? If this is a joke, then more power to them, but I see no reason why those sorts of things shouldn't evoke outrage.
I've really ENJOYED THE SAFETY I GET with web filtering. This sort of stuff has simply gone too NOT FAR ENOUGH. I'm so ABSOLUTELY CONTENT with Comcast, I'm going to go call them right now and VOLUNTARILY INCREASE THE AMOUNT I AM PAYING THEM, and I suggest that everybody else yell about HOW COMCASTIC THEIR SERVICE IS.
Sincerely,
SATISFIED CUSTOMER
"The House will now consider the Flags for Orphans... and Springfield Airport Re-Routing Bill!? Oh well, it's been paperclipped..."
I know; isn't it odd? Somehow they managed to create an absolutely awful website before HTML was even invented! It's a fascinating mystery.
If all businesses followed the "No Asshole Rule" there would be nobody left to run Comcast, AT&T, Vivendi, News Corporation, Universal, BMG, Time-Warner, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, Microsoft, Paramount, Exelon... I could go on but I'm sure you get the idea.
I have to ask, though... isn't it possible that his senility caused him to believe he had been a spy during WWII? Or was he nowhere near far gone enough for that? I'm not trying to troll here, just seriously wondering...
I believe that website was made in 1985, and hasn't been updated since.
Yes, because if there's anything I hear the typical consumer demanding, it's that we should have more mandatory advertising.
What's that, you say? It's the advertisers who are demanding it? It just proves, once again, who the actual customer is for any and all media produced: advertisers. Viewers are just the product being delivered to them.
I'd love to mod this Insightful.
I'm not trying to debate politics, just to get the facts straight. I realize Geneva is a wonderful and egalitarian city, and that HTML was born there, and that the WWW is essentially the backbone of today's web. I'm just pointing out that you can't say the Internet was "invented" in Geneva. (And it's interesting that you mentioned Gopher, since HTTP owed a lot to the original network of Gopher servers.)
Also, although I may be a bit biased since I graduated from there, universities such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are also very liberal, egalitarian, and progressive -- which is why it's no wonder so much early Internet development occurred there.
Yes, you read that right, one of the best off switches ever is fitted to the android from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Data, as he's known to his friends -- seen here snogging the face off the Borg Queen -- had one secret he only told a select few people. He could be deactivated with a power button on his leg. Yeah... but it was on his hip, not his leg. Which, I suppose, could make sex with the Borg Queen a bit of a pain...
"Oh yeah, yeah, wait, no, don't touch me th*thunk*"
The World Wide Web (that is, HTML and HTTP) was first invented at CERN near Geneva, but the Internet's backbone, TCP/IP, was based off of the U.S. Department of Defense's ARPANET, and generally evolved into what we recognize as the Internet with the help of the U.S. National Science Foundation and Stanford University.
And while the Web may have first started at CERN, the first widely available graphical web browser -- Mosaic -- was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois.
OK, I agree, but simply mashing together some technologies does not an engineer make. Perhaps not, but it's a damned good start. I was just thinking about the world my seven-month-old daughter will be growing up in. Computers are ubiquitous, nearly throwaway, and run extremely complex operating systems that abstract out the hardware as much as possible. Electronics of any complexity require you to use surface-mount components on two or four-layer PCBs, well beyond the breadboard-and-solder level. There's no real analogue to the DOS command line and GW-BASIC I grew up learning to program on. Assuming she grows up being a computer geek like her father (a huge assumption, but still something to consider), what's out there to honestly get her interested in electronics or computing?
I came up with a concept about a year back that was similar to this, although cheaper and cruder in concept: modules a bit more complicated than Mindstorms, all cubes in shape, communicating and getting power along a sort of wire mesh using a serial protocol favoring fault tolerance over speed. A CPU module could query everything on the bus to see what is connected, get responses back, and interface with a PC, which would present a list of the modules and the functions each of them can provide. (You know, like object-oriented programming, but with physical objects.)
Unfortunately, I don't have the time, money, or mechanical/electrical skills for such an endeavor, but that's the sort of electronics and programming lab I would have killed for as a kid. You get the cost of each module down to around one to five bucks (depending on the module's capabilities) and you have a totally expandable, programmable building system.
1) Incompetence, or
2) Malice.
We're screwed. I really wish I could mod this (+1, Amusing At First But Gradually Becoming Horribly Depressing As You Realize The Implications).
That does it. Let's outlaw conversation. Seriously. It's basically the original "peer to peer" method of communication, right?
From now on, nobody is allowed to communicate with anybody except for specially designated "servers". These "servers" must relay all messages from one person to another, vetting the communication to make sure there is nothing illegal, immoral, obscene, libelous, traitorous, unpatriotic, or just plain questionable about it.
It's for our own safety, dammit.