k3b also has good _duplication_ capabilities. But what the original poster has neglected to mention is that he wants to strip off the encryption and region encoding so that he can play it anywhere or share with friends and leave off the troublesome bits. I've actually wanted to to do that when traveling, with my own DVD's so I could watch them with friends in another country, or when the 10 mninutes of enforced copyright notification and age-inappropriate previews would interfere with viewing of my purchased material.
That requires some dynamic editing of the original content, not merely a byte-for-byte duplication of the material, and a good DVD editing and ripping program can be very useful for that.
You were the only customer in the building. What would you care to bet that there were other "customers" nearby with Bittorrent running, maybe with a Pringles can antenna pointed at the McDonald's? I see a lot of that at Starbucks when I meet people shopping: people complaining about slow connections, and one idiot in the corner serving up his torrents with one latte he purchased 4 hours ago.
The UK, fortunately or unfortunately, has that bandwidth disaster known as "Iplayer" from the BBC. They provide a lot of their primary, taxpayer funded television via streaming media, and because they were propriatary Windows supporting idiots in its original Bittorrent-like design, they got slapped by the courts and now have to provide everything in Flash. Their interface is also pure dancing monkey, spray you with advertising and scheduling nonsense. The results are predictably bad, and they're probably going to get worse: massive bandwidth consumption with degrading performance.
Sure it is! Running coal-fired and oil-fired electrical power plants, gasoline engines, etc. literally created the industrial revolution and now fuels the information age, and made our world population of over 6 billion people possible.
That's odd. We had the jurisdiction to run the coal plants and burn the oil that helped create this climate change? In the past, we've sprayed the flourocarbons, spewed the DDT, dumped the mercury and lead and dioxin in factories we ran overseas. And somehow, we don't have the jurisdiction to try to reverse some of the damage?
I'm not suggesting that this particular crackpot scheme is a good idea, but "jurisdiction" wouldn't seem to be the problem here.
I'm afraid not, that was 20 years ago: I no longer have the originals. There were a set of published security updates for telnet and sendmail at the time, which the Morris Worm probably exploited on my systems: the vendors had not revealed all the exploit details. (Few vendors do.) We frankly didn't bother to do extensive analysis at the time, we had critical work to do and a lot of systems to rebuild, very painfully, from bootstrap systems that hadn't been tested in years and backup policies that I'd also written about as being badly scheduled and incomplete.
Having the "I told you so" documents on paper can be critical: they have much more power than mere verbal testimony. The fact that I'd kept them under lock and key and wouldn't let the originals out of my hands were an interesting source of internal strife, and revealed some other bureaucratic issues when other documents were somehow "lost" by the people assessing the situation.
Not necessarily. I've been in the situation where security issues that I warned about, documented, and was refused resources or permission to secure were in fact used against my employer. The Morris Worm in 1988 was a particularly bad example: I had printouts of the management refusals to permit security updates in a locked cabinet to prevent tampering, and my goodness, was I glad I had those. I keep similar files to this day, as a matter of basic self-defense when layoffs are pending and managers are looking for things to blame on our technical people in order to fire them and avoid paying severance bundles.
And don't forget fools with laptops who leave their wi-fi on when they are connected to the internal network, and fools who install 'PCAnywhere' on their desktop hooked to their desktop, and the spread of the littls 3G modems and VPN's so people can work on the train. Couple this with really, really stupid behavior like unlocked SSH keys in NFS shared home directories, or Subversion and CVS storing passwords in clear text in people's home directories on NFS servers, and you have a disaster begging to happen.
And luring you into accepting a man-in-the-middle SSL key is.... how difficult? Or stealing your target website's keys, aor getting them with a warrant-free patriot act request?
It will also continue to run well in virtualization, on almost any OS capable of supporting VMware (for Windows) or Xen, KVM, or others for Linux and UNIX. It won't work well for games due to video performance limitations, but it will provide continuing support for critical systems that Microsoft will be very sad about users not buying Vista or Win7 for.
Yeah, standards change. I certainly knew households where 14 year olds weren't allowed to date. I also know families where 14 year olds could marry (and one where a 14 year old girl did, with her parents blessing). And my grandpa remembered when women weren't allowed to show their ankles. And we both certainly know countries where women are not allowed to show their face in public, and cultures where their clitoris is removed to prevent sexual misbehavior. I _worry_ about trying to protect the children so much that we imprison them, frighten them, and keep them so ignorant they get badly hurt when they encounter the world outside their home, or even get hurt inside their home.
You don't know a lot of 14 year olds, do you? Or haven't you looked at the teen pregnancy rates, or noticed that puberty happens about then? The girls were out of line, but child pornography felony charges are insane for that.
And the little boy happened to have no pants and was smiling at his mommy. (If I remember right, he'd been in a kiddie pool in the backyard.) He was a toddler, and hadn't even noticed where he was standing, so it was a bit weird but funny. You mean to tell me your parents didn't save any weird moments on film you'd rather they hadn't? I thought the picture was funny.
Much, much, faster booting, much better reporting of your system's temperature and voltages to report overheating or power supply issues, and the ability to change your BIOS password or boot order (to boot from a USB or CD, or from the hard drive) from the operating system itself so that you don't have to sit there figuring out "which key do I hit, which key do I hit, dang!" while the BIOS displays an entirely useless big picture of a motherboard for 30 seconds at boot time and fails to tell you how to actually select the BIOS. Also, getting away from the "I reset to factory defaults if I fail reboot 3 times" that completely screws up settings for that hot gaming machine your friend, the overclocker, built for you.
No, it's 14 year olds sending cellphone pictures unclothed to each other. It's Lolita, and it's a little boy whose mother took a picture of him when he happened to put his penis though a chain link fence and winds up arrested because the photo developer became freaked out. It's Traci Lords, doing adult films when she was 16 and making a bundle at it.
Is there absolutely disgusting porn involving abused children? Absolutely. Is anything classified legally as child porn automatically worth the furor and bother and anathema which the phrase automatically carries? No, not when a postal inspector can send unordered child porn to a porn house, get a warrant for it, and manage to convict them even though they never opened the box. (The charges they got convicted on weren't child porn, but the child porn raid from the entrapping postal inspector was how they gathered evidence.)
Oh, please. Land sales fraud goes right back at least as far as the first American colonies, with some colonists paying excessive fees to go to a new land of milk and honey. The Israelites probably spent that 40 years in the desert looking for the land of milk and honey because that's what the real estate agent promised them, and it took them 40 years to find a place nice enough to be worth invading instead. (The Bible and Talmud are pretty clear, they were "given" the promised land the same way the colonists were "given" America" by taking it away from the people living there.)
Depends. Many distributions, such Ubuntu and RHEL and Mandriva, are very careful not to include software that isn't legally licensed for easy distribution, in order to avoid the licensing and fees craziness for MPEG and especially for DVD encoding. There is _no_ legal DVD decoder for Linux for the US. There are plenty of easily installable ones, such as those at the Free Penguin projects software bundles, but the major Linux vendors don't dare include them.
It's OK: Intel stole a lot of their technologies for Pentiums. (http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/business/suit-by-digital-says-intel-stole-pentium-design.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all, and lots of other references describe this.)
Especially the newer LinuxBIOS, which kicks the tar out of that piece of proprietary and undocumented debris that AMI has been foisting on suckers for the past decade or so. Being forced to cooperate with a superior, open source BIOS such as that on the OLPC project. I'm looking forward to massive delight to Microsoft having to hold its news and get comfortable with the superior, much faster booting system to make Microsoft's painfully slow boot processes look bad.
Oh, my. I'd hate to handle the checkbook for _your_ family. Having 1000 scientists is great: but spending all that food and energy and steel and energy to make rocket fuel and iron ore and copper ore and high purity silicon for electronics costs a huge capital investment. The Soviets had the largest continent in the world, and at the end of their regime a world-wide empire, to draw resources from for their space program. And they got things out of that program: communications and accurate weather reports are useful.
The "don't have the money" in the same way that a family living out of a car "doesn't have the money" to buy a pony. It's a ludicrous extravagance.
Nuclear warheads aren't that hard anymore, with the published details available from Pakistani's nuclear weapons programs on the black market for the last decade or two. And once you have the fissionable material, the theory is trivial: enough explosive, closely timed to drive enough high energy fissile material (plutonium, u-238 or the like) into a single small space is quite enough. All the rest is optimization, and if you're rushed and sloppy, you don't care if it's optimized.
And that anti-missile technology is far better in theory than in practice. Literature on the failures of anti-missile systems abound, from credible scientists, such as http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0102-02.htm. Much like North Korean missiles, US anti-missile technology is far better in theory than in practice and should not be relied on for actually stopping missiles. The major use of the 1980's "Star Wars" effort was to drive the Soviet Union to military bankruptcy, trying to keep up with crackpot schemes they didn't have the money or technical manpower to develop or even properly refute.
North Korea's potential nuclear arsenal, and the ability to deliver warheads, is extremely effective as a deterrent against the kind of "regime change" that was tried in Iraq and Afghanistan. And North Korea can sell the technologies to keep the US off-balance, especially since the sale of Pakistani nuclear technologies is being monitored much more closely now with so many US troops nearby and their previous nuclear secret sales revealed (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece).
You know, it _doesn't matter_ if this launch was for a communications satellite. Just because this rocket contained a benign payload, doesn't mean the next one will. North Korea doesn't have the spare money to spend on building their own satellite launching systems when it's so much cheaper to buy a satellite launch from someone else. The next payload will be whatever North Korea decides to put in the rocket, and the expertise from peaceful rockets is amazingly useful for building missiles.
I have to say "no" on your categories. I cannot be explicit enough about this. The definitions of "depraved" and "illegal" and "dangerous" vary so widely that permission to filter without explicit consent or the ability to voluntarily disable the filter is completely out of line for almost all users. Children's and prisoners rights are so limited that it seems reasonable to filter them involuntarily. But the enforced censorship that Google has performed in China against human rights websites, and particularly against Tibet liberation sites, is plain old political censorship and is considered legal anathema in the US and in the UN.
Remember, export of encryption technologies from the US remain restricted by regulatory fiat, even though they've previously been found unconstitutional under a different federal department. Drawings of human beings are considered depraved in some cultures, and insulting the president of Abidjan has a reporter facing a 2-year sentence right now (http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,,,CIV,,49cb32b5c,0.html). And let's not get started on the restriction of the information over at www.wikileaks.org, a site I find wonderful for their willingness to break _everybody's_ political restrictions.
No, I assume it's for content filtering, pure and simple, as Google has cooperated with China in the past on this matter (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Business/story?id=1540568).
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k3b also has good _duplication_ capabilities. But what the original poster has neglected to mention is that he wants to strip off the encryption and region encoding so that he can play it anywhere or share with friends and leave off the troublesome bits. I've actually wanted to to do that when traveling, with my own DVD's so I could watch them with friends in another country, or when the 10 mninutes of enforced copyright notification and age-inappropriate previews would interfere with viewing of my purchased material.
That requires some dynamic editing of the original content, not merely a byte-for-byte duplication of the material, and a good DVD editing and ripping program can be very useful for that.
You were the only customer in the building. What would you care to bet that there were other "customers" nearby with Bittorrent running, maybe with a Pringles can antenna pointed at the McDonald's? I see a lot of that at Starbucks when I meet people shopping: people complaining about slow connections, and one idiot in the corner serving up his torrents with one latte he purchased 4 hours ago.
The UK, fortunately or unfortunately, has that bandwidth disaster known as "Iplayer" from the BBC. They provide a lot of their primary, taxpayer funded television via streaming media, and because they were propriatary Windows supporting idiots in its original Bittorrent-like design, they got slapped by the courts and now have to provide everything in Flash. Their interface is also pure dancing monkey, spray you with advertising and scheduling nonsense. The results are predictably bad, and they're probably going to get worse: massive bandwidth consumption with degrading performance.
Sure it is! Running coal-fired and oil-fired electrical power plants, gasoline engines, etc. literally created the industrial revolution and now fuels the information age, and made our world population of over 6 billion people possible.
That's odd. We had the jurisdiction to run the coal plants and burn the oil that helped create this climate change? In the past, we've sprayed the flourocarbons, spewed the DDT, dumped the mercury and lead and dioxin in factories we ran overseas. And somehow, we don't have the jurisdiction to try to reverse some of the damage?
I'm not suggesting that this particular crackpot scheme is a good idea, but "jurisdiction" wouldn't seem to be the problem here.
Chimps are quite close. Frankly, humans should be called "pans" rather than "homo" due to the similarity.
I'm afraid not, that was 20 years ago: I no longer have the originals. There were a set of published security updates for telnet and sendmail at the time, which the Morris Worm probably exploited on my systems: the vendors had not revealed all the exploit details. (Few vendors do.) We frankly didn't bother to do extensive analysis at the time, we had critical work to do and a lot of systems to rebuild, very painfully, from bootstrap systems that hadn't been tested in years and backup policies that I'd also written about as being badly scheduled and incomplete.
Having the "I told you so" documents on paper can be critical: they have much more power than mere verbal testimony. The fact that I'd kept them under lock and key and wouldn't let the originals out of my hands were an interesting source of internal strife, and revealed some other bureaucratic issues when other documents were somehow "lost" by the people assessing the situation.
Not necessarily. I've been in the situation where security issues that I warned about, documented, and was refused resources or permission to secure were in fact used against my employer. The Morris Worm in 1988 was a particularly bad example: I had printouts of the management refusals to permit security updates in a locked cabinet to prevent tampering, and my goodness, was I glad I had those. I keep similar files to this day, as a matter of basic self-defense when layoffs are pending and managers are looking for things to blame on our technical people in order to fire them and avoid paying severance bundles.
And don't forget fools with laptops who leave their wi-fi on when they are connected to the internal network, and fools who install 'PCAnywhere' on their desktop hooked to their desktop, and the spread of the littls 3G modems and VPN's so people can work on the train. Couple this with really, really stupid behavior like unlocked SSH keys in NFS shared home directories, or Subversion and CVS storing passwords in clear text in people's home directories on NFS servers, and you have a disaster begging to happen.
And luring you into accepting a man-in-the-middle SSL key is.... how difficult? Or stealing your target website's keys, aor getting them with a warrant-free patriot act request?
It will also continue to run well in virtualization, on almost any OS capable of supporting VMware (for Windows) or Xen, KVM, or others for Linux and UNIX. It won't work well for games due to video performance limitations, but it will provide continuing support for critical systems that Microsoft will be very sad about users not buying Vista or Win7 for.
Yeah, standards change. I certainly knew households where 14 year olds weren't allowed to date. I also know families where 14 year olds could marry (and one where a 14 year old girl did, with her parents blessing). And my grandpa remembered when women weren't allowed to show their ankles. And we both certainly know countries where women are not allowed to show their face in public, and cultures where their clitoris is removed to prevent sexual misbehavior. I _worry_ about trying to protect the children so much that we imprison them, frighten them, and keep them so ignorant they get badly hurt when they encounter the world outside their home, or even get hurt inside their home.
You don't know a lot of 14 year olds, do you? Or haven't you looked at the teen pregnancy rates, or noticed that puberty happens about then? The girls were out of line, but child pornography felony charges are insane for that.
And the little boy happened to have no pants and was smiling at his mommy. (If I remember right, he'd been in a kiddie pool in the backyard.) He was a toddler, and hadn't even noticed where he was standing, so it was a bit weird but funny. You mean to tell me your parents didn't save any weird moments on film you'd rather they hadn't? I thought the picture was funny.
Much, much, faster booting, much better reporting of your system's temperature and voltages to report overheating or power supply issues, and the ability to change your BIOS password or boot order (to boot from a USB or CD, or from the hard drive) from the operating system itself so that you don't have to sit there figuring out "which key do I hit, which key do I hit, dang!" while the BIOS displays an entirely useless big picture of a motherboard for 30 seconds at boot time and fails to tell you how to actually select the BIOS. Also, getting away from the "I reset to factory defaults if I fail reboot 3 times" that completely screws up settings for that hot gaming machine your friend, the overclocker, built for you.
No, it's 14 year olds sending cellphone pictures unclothed to each other. It's Lolita, and it's a little boy whose mother took a picture of him when he happened to put his penis though a chain link fence and winds up arrested because the photo developer became freaked out. It's Traci Lords, doing adult films when she was 16 and making a bundle at it.
Is there absolutely disgusting porn involving abused children? Absolutely. Is anything classified legally as child porn automatically worth the furor and bother and anathema which the phrase automatically carries? No, not when a postal inspector can send unordered child porn to a porn house, get a warrant for it, and manage to convict them even though they never opened the box. (The charges they got convicted on weren't child porn, but the child porn raid from the entrapping postal inspector was how they gathered evidence.)
Oh, please. Land sales fraud goes right back at least as far as the first American colonies, with some colonists paying excessive fees to go to a new land of milk and honey. The Israelites probably spent that 40 years in the desert looking for the land of milk and honey because that's what the real estate agent promised them, and it took them 40 years to find a place nice enough to be worth invading instead. (The Bible and Talmud are pretty clear, they were "given" the promised land the same way the colonists were "given" America" by taking it away from the people living there.)
Depends. Many distributions, such Ubuntu and RHEL and Mandriva, are very careful not to include software that isn't legally licensed for easy distribution, in order to avoid the licensing and fees craziness for MPEG and especially for DVD encoding. There is _no_ legal DVD decoder for Linux for the US. There are plenty of easily installable ones, such as those at the Free Penguin projects software bundles, but the major Linux vendors don't dare include them.
It's OK: Intel stole a lot of their technologies for Pentiums. (http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/business/suit-by-digital-says-intel-stole-pentium-design.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all, and lots of other references describe this.)
Especially the newer LinuxBIOS, which kicks the tar out of that piece of proprietary and undocumented debris that AMI has been foisting on suckers for the past decade or so. Being forced to cooperate with a superior, open source BIOS such as that on the OLPC project. I'm looking forward to massive delight to Microsoft having to hold its news and get comfortable with the superior, much faster booting system to make Microsoft's painfully slow boot processes look bad.
Oh, my. I'd hate to handle the checkbook for _your_ family. Having 1000 scientists is great: but spending all that food and energy and steel and energy to make rocket fuel and iron ore and copper ore and high purity silicon for electronics costs a huge capital investment. The Soviets had the largest continent in the world, and at the end of their regime a world-wide empire, to draw resources from for their space program. And they got things out of that program: communications and accurate weather reports are useful.
The "don't have the money" in the same way that a family living out of a car "doesn't have the money" to buy a pony. It's a ludicrous extravagance.
Nuclear warheads aren't that hard anymore, with the published details available from Pakistani's nuclear weapons programs on the black market for the last decade or two. And once you have the fissionable material, the theory is trivial: enough explosive, closely timed to drive enough high energy fissile material (plutonium, u-238 or the like) into a single small space is quite enough. All the rest is optimization, and if you're rushed and sloppy, you don't care if it's optimized.
And that anti-missile technology is far better in theory than in practice. Literature on the failures of anti-missile systems abound, from credible scientists, such as http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0102-02.htm. Much like North Korean missiles, US anti-missile technology is far better in theory than in practice and should not be relied on for actually stopping missiles. The major use of the 1980's "Star Wars" effort was to drive the Soviet Union to military bankruptcy, trying to keep up with crackpot schemes they didn't have the money or technical manpower to develop or even properly refute.
North Korea's potential nuclear arsenal, and the ability to deliver warheads, is extremely effective as a deterrent against the kind of "regime change" that was tried in Iraq and Afghanistan. And North Korea can sell the technologies to keep the US off-balance, especially since the sale of Pakistani nuclear technologies is being monitored much more closely now with so many US troops nearby and their previous nuclear secret sales revealed (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece).
You know, it _doesn't matter_ if this launch was for a communications satellite. Just because this rocket contained a benign payload, doesn't mean the next one will. North Korea doesn't have the spare money to spend on building their own satellite launching systems when it's so much cheaper to buy a satellite launch from someone else. The next payload will be whatever North Korea decides to put in the rocket, and the expertise from peaceful rockets is amazingly useful for building missiles.
I have to say "no" on your categories. I cannot be explicit enough about this. The definitions of "depraved" and "illegal" and "dangerous" vary so widely that permission to filter without explicit consent or the ability to voluntarily disable the filter is completely out of line for almost all users. Children's and prisoners rights are so limited that it seems reasonable to filter them involuntarily. But the enforced censorship that Google has performed in China against human rights websites, and particularly against Tibet liberation sites, is plain old political censorship and is considered legal anathema in the US and in the UN.
Remember, export of encryption technologies from the US remain restricted by regulatory fiat, even though they've previously been found unconstitutional under a different federal department. Drawings of human beings are considered depraved in some cultures, and insulting the president of Abidjan has a reporter facing a 2-year sentence right now (http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,,,CIV,,49cb32b5c,0.html). And let's not get started on the restriction of the information over at www.wikileaks.org, a site I find wonderful for their willingness to break _everybody's_ political restrictions.
No, I assume it's for content filtering, pure and simple, as Google has cooperated with China in the past on this matter (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Business/story?id=1540568).