I second that.
My machine also has 4 Gigs of RAM, and since it's XP x64, all 4 are fully recognized. With no memory hogs running and but a couple of dozen windows open, after creating 2 desktops it claimed that "not enough storage" was available (sic, whatever that means).
So I logged out and back in, and behold, I was able to create 3 desktops now before the resources ran out. Sorry, I prefer VirtuaWin anytime. One has to wonder, though, why the API functions used in Desktops (CreateDesktop(), SwitchDesktop(), ect) haven't been used by any Windows Multiple Desktops Tool so far.
The US is still playing junior varsity "nation building" by comparison.
Ok, so today it's ok to draw maps that are conventient to you because in a distant past, an empire did it as well? Your're entitled to your share of imperialism?
Truth be told, that if this was ANY country, the same thing would have happened.
In fact, that's plain wrong. Most countries would not generally extradite a person like that. That said, when the US throws its weight around, the rules are easily bent. Still, a german citizen, for example, could not legally extradited to any country outside the EU in such a case as this.
What did he expect? We are talking about highly classified stuff. He may have not caused as much as the claimed damage, but he DID access them. In some countries, he would be executed...
And some countries, like his native country where he committed the crime, would give him a few months instead of the couple of years -at the very least-, that he is facing now.
Michael Benson is proposing that NASA send the ISS to the moon instead of leaving it low earth orbit
Apart from being ridiculous nonsense by all practial standards, this preposterous suggestion conveniently ignores the fact that the ISS isn't just NASA's property, toy and command target. The other participants of the international space station would hopefully refuse to tolerate such follies.
That's a very misleading statement. We'll have no human orbital capacity, but plenty of expendable rockets for lobbing satellites and probes into space
You're undoubtedly right about satellites and probes. However, I think there's also no independent access to the ISS, neither manned nor unmanned.
Another useful combination is Win + Break, which will pop up the system properties. Good for quickly finding out the machine name, hardware configuration, changing environment variables, etc, etc.
The situation on the german motorway is technically as you describe it, though I'd say the danger of actually being pulled over by the police for either misbehaviour is not grave. You are far more likely to be "punished" for staying in the fast lane by some asshole approaching from behind at 125 Mph, then being forced to slow down to your speed, say, 85, sitting at your back almost touching your bumper, flashing and gesturing until you finally move over.
It's interesting that people are splitting "markets" into US vs Europe. Last I checked, those were still two different levels of analysis - the US being a country and Europe being a whole bunch of countries. Shouldn't it be Europe vs North America? At least, for the moment, until the EU finally realizes its dream of becoming one shiny happy country that doesn't know the difference between a constitution and a complete code of law...
You freely substitute "EU" for "Europe". This is also an inappropriate change in "level of anaysis" and nullifies your argument: while the EU is certainly not "a country", it is definitely more than a bunch of countries, the most important difference being that the EU is a single market with capital and labour mobility*, a common trade policy and, in large parts, a single currency and fiscal policy. This market is *roughly* comparable to the US market in structure, size and performance.
In short, for comparing US-EU in terms of economy it is irrelevant whether or not the EU has a single language, an army, a constitution or whatever else you consider an attribute of a country. Nation != Market.
*Yes, these parameters differ significantly between US and EU, but not by orders of magnitude.
Is there something in Galileo that won't fit their communist dictatorship agenda?
First and foremost, they want an independent system exclusively under their own control. They know that the EU will surrender the Galileo controls to the US whenever they demand it - there goes Galileo's sole big advantage. The sad story of how the EU bent US demands and crippled its system made that clear to the Chinese.
A new "feature" of their expanded GPS network will probably be to tell the police exactly where the user is
You wouldn't really need any changes to the GPS for that- the satellite has no knowledge about the position of anyone receiving its signal anyway; the positioning signal is one way. In theory, a receiver could of course send an ID and the location it computed from multiple satellites back to one of them- but you'd hardly use the GPS satellites for tracking millions of individual devices. Much more likely, it would work somewhat like the EU's Galileo extension to the COSPAS-SARSAT system.
But, constantly and silently tracking the location of millions of GPS receivers is - luckily - science fiction as of today.
Plus, there would be no way of enforcing this - anyone building a Compass receiver could simply ignore the demand for a transmitter/tracker, unless the Chinese released no specs and managed to keep their system completely secret, but this would of course conflict with the availability of a 'public' signal.
A much more unpleasant thought is that, even today, your current position can be determined at any given time, albeit with low accuracy (couple of 100m in cities), if you walk around with a connected cellphone in your pocket.
To be even more pedantic: In terms of raw CCD sensor data, the number of bits per pixel is actually likely to be 12 indeed. With the exception of devices like the Foveon CCDs, most have some kind of colour filter mask placed over the individual pixels, either the well-known bayer pattern or a variant such as the CYMK grids used in some Sony CCDs (probably others too, can't be asked to dig it up). Each output colour pixel is interpolated from 4 adjacent, but spatially distinct physical pixels. Simply assuming the bits per colour pixel to be 3*12 is therefore not entirely correct.
Kindly separate what some inaccurate media summary says and what the ESA itself states. Where exactly does ESA claim to have "the first automated transport spacecraft?". They say it is the first of its kind, i.e. one that navigates and docks fully automatically, which is neither a lie nor an overstatement. And quoting from the Smart-1 (probe with ion drive) site:
This was only the second time that ion propulsion has been used as a mission's primary propulsion system...
I haven't bothered checking your "first 3-axis stabilized spacecraft to be operated without any gyro" example but frankly I'm sure I'd not find an "outright lie" here or even a overstatement either.
Ah yes. The question why a highly superior, more sophisticated, more secure, freely available OS that can do everything that Windows does, and better, hasn't managed to gain a desktop market share beyond 1% in the last 10 years even with ungodly amounts of free "Live CDs" in every goddamn "PC" tabloid.
Users must be incredibly dumb, too breathtakingly stupid notice the the good stuff when it bites their lower backs. Only a few enlightened prophets hold the true vision. Test case: offer a piece of fresh Black forest gateau for free, next to a snickers (out of date by a week) for $10. All those lusers will go for the snickers, won't they.
Stop the semantic bullshitting. We are talking about whether you can go to the store, buy a DVD, and then legally make a useful, working copy of it for personal use. You cannot, and you know full well that you cannot.
We've now apparently left the path of politeness, so: bullshit. You can make a backup copy of a normal, encrypted video DVD, unless it is additionaly protected by some proprietary 3rd-party protection mechanism like those used for games. Again: the important point here is that you're not breaking the encryption while dumping the disc image, and that your copy is still encrypted. You can't legally rip the DVD using the standard ripper tools (->circumvention), ending up with a unencrypted/reencoded version of the contents. You can't legally play back either your original or backup with anything but licenced devices/software. This has been the state of things in Germany since about 2003.
The current modification of the law, which was the topic of this SD story, is chiefly about personal use of material obtained from "illegal" sources such as torrents or private DVD rips. Having been legal so far for personal use, it has now been made illegal. This has little to do with making backups of your own DVDs for your own personal use.
The very point was that the story turned the copyright law revision in germany into "copying DVDs now illegal in Germany", which is utter nonsense. Look here or here if you read German.
I'm not wasting any more time here, this is my last post on the topic.
You're also not copying "the DVD", since you're not copying the key, which is an essential part of the DVD. Copying the entire DVD is illegal because it involves copying the key.
No. Creating a bit-identical copy of a DVD is not in itself illegal, even if there is a (encrypted) disc key somewhere in the bitstream. The official DVD copy protection mechanism doesn't even try to stop bitwise copies from being made; it stops DVDs from being played in non-licenced devices/software players. The practical problem with making a bit-identical copy is that current DVD hardware doesn't permit reading the entire raw bitstream.
Decoding the data on a protected disc (to view the video) involves decryption. The keys required to decrypt the disc key must be stolen or determined by a crypto-attack, both of which counts as circumvention and is hence illegal.
No, you cannot, because computer manufacturers have to disable screen capture during DVD playback, and both Microsoft and Apple do. If you try to work around that, it's circumvention, no matter how easy it may be.
"Computer manufacturers", to begin with, can't "disable" anything related to screen-capture functionality. The party required to take protective measures is the maker of the player software, who, in order to be able to play DVDs legally, has to honour his agreements with the CCA.
"Screen capture" is not some sort of system function that you have to use in order to make a copy of what is displayed on your screen. In the end, it ist just the process of reading out video memory. This is nothing that requires "circumvention". At least in Germany circumvention means to work around "effective technical measures" (wirksame technische Maßnahmen). There are no such measures that would protect the bytes representing an image displayed on screen from being copied, hence doing so is not circumvention, just as re-recording the film off the screen with a camcorder isn't circumvention. This situation has often been debated in the case of re-recording protected audio.
Yes, copying some DVDs is legal. However, copying DVDs (in general) is not, because almost all DVDs cannot legally be copied by any means. Saying that people can legally copy DVDs is therefore a lie because they can't in general.
Saying that people can't legally copy DVDs is just as much of a lie by that standard, because they can copy some DVDs. You're considering "DVD" and "encrypted video DVD" to be synonymous, which wrong. There are DVD-Roms and unencrypted video discs. How many of them and how relevant you consider them to be is not the point here.
In what sense is it not "illegal" to copy DVDs in Germany? In what sense can I copy them?
In the sense that "copying" and "circumventing copy protection" are not synonymous. If you were able to make a bit-wise copy of an encrypted DVD (thus ending up with another encrypted DVD) you're not breaking the law. This sort of copy may not be currently possible due to technical limitations, but that doesn't mean it's inherently impossible.
Then, unencrypted DVDs may be as rare as you say (I doubt that somehow, but never mind), but they do exist, they are DVDs and copying them in whatever way is definitely not illegal.
Moreover, you could even copy a normal, encrypted DVD in a way similar to some HD-DVD ripping methods: by controlling a software player to display the DVD frame by frame, capturing and re-encoding every frame, then playing the audio tracks you want, capturing PCM from the soundcard etc. etc. Such a procedure would definitely be a pita compared to normal DVD-ripping, but at least it's not illegal.
All this is just theory. In practice, no one will give a damn.
And if someone were to hold a plastic bag over your head, it is not killing you, it disallows fresh air from reaching your lungs.
If you make all possible ways of achieving a task illegal, then it is illegal to achieve that task, no matter how you wish to play with your words.
How can this be rated insightful? The comparison is totally invalid. It is NOT illegal to copy CDs/DVDs in Germany. You can still copy your own DVDs or unencrypted discs as much as you like. Technically it isn't even illegal to copy protected discs as long as you don't circumvent the protection mechanism in the process (sounds absurd, but what if a simple bit-by-bit copy were possible, where the content isn't actually decrypted?)
The majority of the planet is weaker than the US, dependent on the US, or desperately in need of the US for protection or stability.
'Majority' is grotesquely wrong.
Weaker, as in having less weapons, certainly. Dependent on the US: Not anymore. In fact, the US depends far more on the rest of the planet than it is the case vice versa.
Desperately in need of US 'protection' are a couple of areas with minor geostrategic relevance. A great part of the world would be perfectly fine without US 'protection', aka hegemony.
I understand you're venting some frustration - are you sure tourism is the right business for a primitive, hatred-loaden pathetic person like yourself?
Canada is a beautiful country, btw! Loads of cool people very much unlike yourself, I never had the least trouble there. Obviously, neither me nor any German I know would behave as described in you rant.
The problem with Germans is that they think they are the best even though they have no clue about what they are doing and they direct all their blames to someone else. The attitude of the germans needs some serious ammends to gel with the rest of the world and catch up.
Sheesh, thank god we evil clueless germans aren't the only ones who profess in stupid broad generalizations.
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I second that. My machine also has 4 Gigs of RAM, and since it's XP x64, all 4 are fully recognized. With no memory hogs running and but a couple of dozen windows open, after creating 2 desktops it claimed that "not enough storage" was available (sic, whatever that means). So I logged out and back in, and behold, I was able to create 3 desktops now before the resources ran out. Sorry, I prefer VirtuaWin anytime. One has to wonder, though, why the API functions used in Desktops (CreateDesktop(), SwitchDesktop(), ect) haven't been used by any Windows Multiple Desktops Tool so far.
The US is still playing junior varsity "nation building" by comparison.
Ok, so today it's ok to draw maps that are conventient to you because in a distant past, an empire did it as well? Your're entitled to your share of imperialism?
Yup, so the Wikipedia link says as well, including the VAX pun. I still think it's hilarious, though.
Hard to beat Electrolux and its vacuum cleaners: Nothings sucks like Electrolux:
Wiki ref
Truth be told, that if this was ANY country, the same thing would have happened.
In fact, that's plain wrong. Most countries would not generally extradite a person like that. That said, when the US throws its weight around, the rules are easily bent. Still, a german citizen, for example, could not legally extradited to any country outside the EU in such a case as this.
What did he expect? We are talking about highly classified stuff. He may have not caused as much as the claimed damage, but he DID access them. In some countries, he would be executed...
And some countries, like his native country where he committed the crime, would give him a few months instead of the couple of years -at the very least-, that he is facing now.
Michael Benson is proposing that NASA send the ISS to the moon instead of leaving it low earth orbit
Apart from being ridiculous nonsense by all practial standards, this preposterous suggestion conveniently ignores the fact that the ISS isn't just NASA's property, toy and command target. The other participants of the international space station would hopefully refuse to tolerate such follies.
You're undoubtedly right about satellites and probes. However, I think there's also no independent access to the ISS, neither manned nor unmanned.
Another useful combination is Win + Break, which will pop up the system properties. Good for quickly finding out the machine name, hardware configuration, changing environment variables, etc, etc.
The situation on the german motorway is technically as you describe it, though I'd say the danger of actually being pulled over by the police for either misbehaviour is not grave. You are far more likely to be "punished" for staying in the fast lane by some asshole approaching from behind at 125 Mph, then being forced to slow down to your speed, say, 85, sitting at your back almost touching your bumper, flashing and gesturing until you finally move over.
It's interesting that people are splitting "markets" into US vs Europe. Last I checked, those were still two different levels of analysis - the US being a country and Europe being a whole bunch of countries. Shouldn't it be Europe vs North America? At least, for the moment, until the EU finally realizes its dream of becoming one shiny happy country that doesn't know the difference between a constitution and a complete code of law...
You freely substitute "EU" for "Europe". This is also an inappropriate change in "level of anaysis" and nullifies your argument: while the EU is certainly not "a country", it is definitely more than a bunch of countries, the most important difference being that the EU is a single market with capital and labour mobility*, a common trade policy and, in large parts, a single currency and fiscal policy. This market is *roughly* comparable to the US market in structure, size and performance.
In short, for comparing US-EU in terms of economy it is irrelevant whether or not the EU has a single language, an army, a constitution or whatever else you consider an attribute of a country. Nation != Market.
*Yes, these parameters differ significantly between US and EU, but not by orders of magnitude.
First and foremost, they want an independent system exclusively under their own control. They know that the EU will surrender the Galileo controls to the US whenever they demand it - there goes Galileo's sole big advantage. The sad story of how the EU bent US demands and crippled its system made that clear to the Chinese.
You wouldn't really need any changes to the GPS for that- the satellite has no knowledge about the position of anyone receiving its signal anyway; the positioning signal is one way. In theory, a receiver could of course send an ID and the location it computed from multiple satellites back to one of them- but you'd hardly use the GPS satellites for tracking millions of individual devices. Much more likely, it would work somewhat like the EU's Galileo extension to the COSPAS-SARSAT system.
But, constantly and silently tracking the location of millions of GPS receivers is - luckily - science fiction as of today.
Plus, there would be no way of enforcing this - anyone building a Compass receiver could simply ignore the demand for a transmitter/tracker, unless the Chinese released no specs and managed to keep their system completely secret, but this would of course conflict with the availability of a 'public' signal.
A much more unpleasant thought is that, even today, your current position can be determined at any given time, albeit with low accuracy (couple of 100m in cities), if you walk around with a connected cellphone in your pocket.
To be even more pedantic: In terms of raw CCD sensor data, the number of bits per pixel is actually likely to be 12 indeed. With the exception of devices like the Foveon CCDs, most have some kind of colour filter mask placed over the individual pixels, either the well-known bayer pattern or a variant such as the CYMK grids used in some Sony CCDs (probably others too, can't be asked to dig it up). Each output colour pixel is interpolated from 4 adjacent, but spatially distinct physical pixels. Simply assuming the bits per colour pixel to be 3*12 is therefore not entirely correct.
Kindly separate what some inaccurate media summary says and what the ESA itself states. Where exactly does ESA claim to have "the first automated transport spacecraft?". They say it is the first of its kind, i.e. one that navigates and docks fully automatically, which is neither a lie nor an overstatement. And quoting from the Smart-1 (probe with ion drive) site:
This was only the second time that ion propulsion has been used as a mission's primary propulsion systemI haven't bothered checking your "first 3-axis stabilized spacecraft to be operated without any gyro" example but frankly I'm sure I'd not find an "outright lie" here or even a overstatement either.
Ah yes. The question why a highly superior, more sophisticated, more secure, freely available OS that can do everything that Windows does, and better, hasn't managed to gain a desktop market share beyond 1% in the last 10 years even with ungodly amounts of free "Live CDs" in every goddamn "PC" tabloid.
Users must be incredibly dumb, too breathtakingly stupid notice the the good stuff when it bites their lower backs. Only a few enlightened prophets hold the true vision. Test case: offer a piece of fresh Black forest gateau for free, next to a snickers (out of date by a week) for $10. All those lusers will go for the snickers, won't they.
We've now apparently left the path of politeness, so: bullshit. You can make a backup copy of a normal, encrypted video DVD, unless it is additionaly protected by some proprietary 3rd-party protection mechanism like those used for games. Again: the important point here is that you're not breaking the encryption while dumping the disc image, and that your copy is still encrypted. You can't legally rip the DVD using the standard ripper tools (->circumvention), ending up with a unencrypted/reencoded version of the contents. You can't legally play back either your original or backup with anything but licenced devices/software. This has been the state of things in Germany since about 2003.
The current modification of the law, which was the topic of this SD story, is chiefly about personal use of material obtained from "illegal" sources such as torrents or private DVD rips. Having been legal so far for personal use, it has now been made illegal. This has little to do with making backups of your own DVDs for your own personal use.
The very point was that the story turned the copyright law revision in germany into "copying DVDs now illegal in Germany", which is utter nonsense. Look here or here if you read German.
I'm not wasting any more time here, this is my last post on the topic.
No. Creating a bit-identical copy of a DVD is not in itself illegal, even if there is a (encrypted) disc key somewhere in the bitstream. The official DVD copy protection mechanism doesn't even try to stop bitwise copies from being made; it stops DVDs from being played in non-licenced devices/software players. The practical problem with making a bit-identical copy is that current DVD hardware doesn't permit reading the entire raw bitstream.
Decoding the data on a protected disc (to view the video) involves decryption. The keys required to decrypt the disc key must be stolen or determined by a crypto-attack, both of which counts as circumvention and is hence illegal.
No, you cannot, because computer manufacturers have to disable screen capture during DVD playback, and both Microsoft and Apple do. If you try to work around that, it's circumvention, no matter how easy it may be."Computer manufacturers", to begin with, can't "disable" anything related to screen-capture functionality. The party required to take protective measures is the maker of the player software, who, in order to be able to play DVDs legally, has to honour his agreements with the CCA.
"Screen capture" is not some sort of system function that you have to use in order to make a copy of what is displayed on your screen. In the end, it ist just the process of reading out video memory. This is nothing that requires "circumvention". At least in Germany circumvention means to work around "effective technical measures" (wirksame technische Maßnahmen). There are no such measures that would protect the bytes representing an image displayed on screen from being copied, hence doing so is not circumvention, just as re-recording the film off the screen with a camcorder isn't circumvention. This situation has often been debated in the case of re-recording protected audio.
Yes, copying some DVDs is legal. However, copying DVDs (in general) is not, because almost all DVDs cannot legally be copied by any means. Saying that people can legally copy DVDs is therefore a lie because they can't in general.Saying that people can't legally copy DVDs is just as much of a lie by that standard, because they can copy some DVDs. You're considering "DVD" and "encrypted video DVD" to be synonymous, which wrong. There are DVD-Roms and unencrypted video discs. How many of them and how relevant you consider them to be is not the point here.
In the sense that "copying" and "circumventing copy protection" are not synonymous. If you were able to make a bit-wise copy of an encrypted DVD (thus ending up with another encrypted DVD) you're not breaking the law. This sort of copy may not be currently possible due to technical limitations, but that doesn't mean it's inherently impossible.
Then, unencrypted DVDs may be as rare as you say (I doubt that somehow, but never mind), but they do exist, they are DVDs and copying them in whatever way is definitely not illegal.
Moreover, you could even copy a normal, encrypted DVD in a way similar to some HD-DVD ripping methods: by controlling a software player to display the DVD frame by frame, capturing and re-encoding every frame, then playing the audio tracks you want, capturing PCM from the soundcard etc. etc. Such a procedure would definitely be a pita compared to normal DVD-ripping, but at least it's not illegal.
All this is just theory. In practice, no one will give a damn.
If you make all possible ways of achieving a task illegal, then it is illegal to achieve that task, no matter how you wish to play with your words.
How can this be rated insightful? The comparison is totally invalid. It is NOT illegal to copy CDs/DVDs in Germany. You can still copy your own DVDs or unencrypted discs as much as you like. Technically it isn't even illegal to copy protected discs as long as you don't circumvent the protection mechanism in the process (sounds absurd, but what if a simple bit-by-bit copy were possible, where the content isn't actually decrypted?)
You bet, they're going to be spy-sats.
Who has the power to, spies. US does it on a large scale, so does Russia, why wouldn't China.
'Majority' is grotesquely wrong.
Weaker, as in having less weapons, certainly. Dependent on the US: Not anymore. In fact, the US depends far more on the rest of the planet than it is the case vice versa.
Desperately in need of US 'protection' are a couple of areas with minor geostrategic relevance. A great part of the world would be perfectly fine without US 'protection', aka hegemony.
Seems good enough for me.
Risk, adventure, curiosity and the will to expand is the essence of human kind. We'd still climb trees in fur if it was otherwise.
We speak English instead. Seemed a good idea at first, but less and less so lately.
I understand you're venting some frustration - are you sure tourism is the right business for a primitive, hatred-loaden pathetic person like yourself?
Canada is a beautiful country, btw! Loads of cool people very much unlike yourself, I never had the least trouble there. Obviously, neither me nor any German I know would behave as described in you rant.
Sheesh, thank god we evil clueless germans aren't the only ones who profess in stupid broad generalizations.