In order to qualify for protection under the DMCA, aren't you required to use encryption methods to protect copyrighted works?
The terrible idiocy of the law is that the encryption technique *itself* is often a copyrighted work, and so under the DMCA it recursively is illegal to break it for any reason, becasue the act if breaking it already opens up a copyrighted work - the encryption algorithm itself. Consider the DeCSS story for example.
The analogy doesn't hold. Firstly, the act of opening a lock without the proper key isn't technically a crime - it's all the other circumstances that typically surround that act that are crimes - tresspassing, theft, damage to another's property, etc. But with the DMCA the act of bypassing the encryption in and of itself is a crime no matter what you may chose to do before and after it. And even worse, under the DMCA it is also a crime to tell anyone else how it can be done. This allows software companies to make up whatever fradulent claims they like as to the security of their encryption. It is illegal to blow the whistle on how bad their encryption is, because you cannot tell anyone any details of such without violating the DMCA.
In the case in question, Skylarov explained at a conference how bad Adobe's e-book encryption is and how incredebly simple it is to break it, and found himself soon arrested.
It's the equivilent of being thrown in jail because you publicised to consumers how bad Mr Smith's Lock Company is, and proved it by showing how you can break into any of Mr Smith's locks with a simple paperclip.
2) The product is usually 2nd rate. Because there's often no money on the line, my experience has been that the programmers take less accountability for their efforts. Big bug? Guess you have to wait until the programmer (or someone else) gets around to it. Big bug in a program you paid thousands of dollars for? My experience is that enough screaming can get you a patch in very little time.
If you are dealing with a custom-built bit of software, then yes, paying for it gets you a LOT of accountability and attention from the developers, very fast. But that isn't true of shrinkwrap commercial software. If I had to rank them in order of speed of response to bugs, i'd go: 1. (fastest) expensive custom closed source software built on contract. 2. (middle) open source software. 3. (slowest) commercial shrink-wrap software.
Linux will be ready for the desktop when Gnome or KDE drop dead (I can't wait) and some consistency settles in. Until then, I'll run BSD on my servers (the documentation is much better as a result of the consistency) and Windows on the desktop.
Gnome/KDE are irrelevant to the issue of server apps, so your comment that BSD "on my servers" has better documentation because of the consistency of interfaces doesn't make any sense to me. I'm not trying to argue that it does or doesn't have better documentation. I'm trying to argue that the kde/gnome inconsistency can't possibly have anything to do with it.
Apparently the Python developers don't give a rat's ass about backward compatable python source code, if they're willing to change something like that and mess up the existing code (way to go guys).
'/' is NOT more natural for floats than ints. It is not natural for either one in traditional math where you didn't have to use the ascii '/' as the division operator. It *has no* previously understood mathematical meaning that predates using it for programming lanaguages.
If '/' in pascal is only for floating point, and 'div' is only for integers, then you'd still get two different results wouldn't you? Do it one way 'round and it's okay - do it the other and it's a syntax error because you are trying to floating-point-divide two integers (It's been a long time since I did Pascal - I dropped it like the dead rat it is once I learned C.)
Unlike pascal, C is a language where you *want* to be in control of what types are used for things, since unlike pascal, C is supposed to be usable for operating-system things, so insisting that the system do arithmetic by integer when you ask for it is the right answer in C.
It's kind of stupid anyway since a *good* programmer would have just written 0.5*x instead of 1/2 * X to avoid the pointless extra division.
Here's a better analogy - If the smallest unit of change I had was a dollar bill, and I tried to rip it in half to give you half of it, would you expect each piece to be worth 50 cents?
If you were speaking and offered me "one slash two" million dollars that wouldn't mean anything in "traditional math" since it doesn't use "slash" as a divide operator.
Neither floating point nor integer division matches the mathematical meaning of division exactly. After all in math, something like:
1.0 > ( 99999999.0 / 100000000.0 ) would be true, but in floating point computer math it might not, since a 2's compliment number can't hit all the same precise discrete points on the number line as a decimal representation.
What I'm getting at is that it's a mistake to think of floating point interpetation for '/' as being more "traditional" than integer interpetation. Both are a divergance from the traditional. I think C's method of "do it the way that matches the types involved" makes a hell of a lot more sense than Pascal's way of "change all the operators in the code if you decide to change the type of the variable in the future."
The alternative when told to do 1/2 * X to get it to come out the way you want is to say, "Despite the fact that the computer can do integer arithmetic many times faster than floating point, I want to never make use of that and instead do all math as floating point operations anyway just because I'm too lazy to write something like 0.5*X or 1.0/2.0 * X to tell the compiler explicitly what I want."
I think they just want to have paying-only customers, and having an AOL account is ONE WAY that counts as being a paying customer by default, so anyone coming through AOL gets in without paying extra, because they're already paying money to the AOL/TIME/WARNER company. The headline is misleading. They aren't allowing content ONLY to AOL. They are allowing it to others who pay also. It's just that for AOL the entire set of subscribers is assumed to have "paid".
Do they have a right to do this? Of course. And I have the right to tell them goodbye because their site was only worth the price when it was free. It's not good enough to be worth the charge, so let them be dumb enough to throw the fee on it and watch it wither away.
I wasn't saying the pump attendants salary was magical and just appeared, only that I had heard that it wasn't allowed to be itemized into the price of the gas.
First lie. You said they can't charge more for it. Whether or not they can itemize it on the bill is a second issue you only took up after someone else pointed out that that's all the law really entails.
All you have said is I don't have a clue about economics
Second lie. That was someone else, not me.
You also seem to be completely bent on not reading what I'm writing
You apparently attribute other people's posts to me, so speak for yourself.
So how does this apply the willful and knowing acquisition of copyrighted material without the owners' permission?
That's already been explained in previous posts. I ahve no reason to belive saying the same thing twice4 would convince you more than saying it once, so I'm done.
So as long as 1% of the money spent on a product goes to something you don't like, you shouldn't spend the other 99% on the product either, even though it goes to the things you *do* like and want to support? The frustration with using the free market power to vote with your wallet is that most purchase prices include a heck of a lot of "riders" you are also voting for, just like a bill before Congress. And, just like a congressman you are stuck where the only way to vote against those riders you don't like is to simultaneously vote against the rest of the bill that you would otherwise have supported. When you support the making of good high fantasy movies, like LOTR and want to see hollywood make more, the only way to "vote for" that is to also "vote for" the DMCA as a small rider tacked on to your ticket price.
Asking people to never support these riders EVER isn't a practical solution unless you plan to move up into the mountains and live as a hermit. The solution of making sure you give more money (votes) to the opposition than you do via incedental riders on your ticket prices, CD-R prices, and so on, is certainly sub-optimal. But it's the only practical way short of not being a participant in the modern marketplace at all.
Because we aren't privy to the internal accounting data of a movie studio, and we probably wouldn't have the time to wade through it if we were, we can't accurately answer the following very important question:
When I pay $7.50 to watch Lord of the Rings, how much of that is funding the MPAA's legal efforts?
I might enjoy the movie enough to see it several times. While I might be fully in favor of rewarding New Line Cinema for bankrolling this risky project, and I might be fully in favor of Peter Jackson raking in the royalties on his excellent work, I can't tell whether or not I'm *matching* funding to the EFF unless I know how much of that ticket price went to "the enemy" the EFF fights. I could just do matching funds and say for each $7.50 I spend on any movie I'll donate $7.50 to the EFF, but that gets a bit excessive very fast.
I'd have thought that even you could grasp the notion that one hour is not equal to five minutes. Your post to which I replied did not make the claim that someone could drive ONE HOUR to Washington to get cheaper gas if there was a price difference. It made the claim that one could drive FIVE MINUTES to Washington to do so. Even for most people living in Portland that wouldn't be true.
Nice try.
If you don't have anything intelligent, or informed (as you don't seem to have a clue about Oregon), don't contribute. It's ok to just let a thread go by without adding your (irrelevant and uniformed) opinion.
And you can't seem to remember from one post to the next what your argument actually was.
Your post operates under the false premise that the word "liberal" is synonymous with "Democratic Party". I wasn't using it that way. If you *do* use it that way, you are playing right into the Republicans' hands and not at all thinking like a libertarian. (Consider where the "liber" part of "libertarian" comes from for a second.) It's the Republican Party's tactic to tie together liberalism with the Democratic Party's practice of overspending, as if the two were cosmically tied together, thereby tricking people into thinking that to oppose excessive spending they must oppose liberal *moral* policies as well, and be a good little Fascist.
And, incedentally, George Bush has zero record on Gay rights, and neither does Clinton. Those sorts of things aren't decided at the presidential level.
If they'd cancelled Babylon 5 after season 3 or so, you bet there'd have been a very active fanbase pleading for it to continue. Much more so than Farscape, I'd imagine, becasue Babylon5 is all one long continuous story. (Except for when JMS was told he'd have to hurry up and finish by season 4 because he wasn't going to get 5 seasons like he thought, and so he did speed up the plot to finish it, and then got season 5 awarded to him after all, which then ended up feeling like a drawn-out epilogue instead of an integral part of the story, because he'd hurried up an finished the interesting stuff in season 4.)
The big difference between B5 and Farscape here isn't fan loyalty, its that one was in a situation of having the show cancelled, and the other was in a situation of having the show end its run in the way the scriptwriter wanted it to, so it felt "done".
I think the only major reason small devices like mobile phones are using opera a lot is that opera is very small. It doesn't use a lot of memory or a lot of secondary storage. When trying to fit a browser into a crowded machine, that probably matters much more than any of the other considerations. I don't much like the look and feel of opera, but I'd still make it my first choice if I was trying to stick a browser into something with only a few megs of memory.
If you had one iota of a clue of how it worked over here you would know it isn't even a choice for them to raise the price of gas to take care of the increased salaries from the attendants. People would go 5 minutes to Washington.
If you had one iota of a clue you'd realize that an Oregon state law actually applies to all of Oregon, much of which is more than 5 minutes away from the border with Washington.
What a startling and fundamental ignorance of economics this post represents.
Fucking liberals.
Fucking knee-jerk idiots assuming knowlege of economics automatically makes one not a liberal, assuming by implication that anyone agreeing with the conservative agenda in terms of budgets must necessarily also agree with it in terms of the stuffy religious bullcrap that comes with it.
You're suggesting that you can only "take" something that manifests itself in a physical sense
No I'm not. I'm suggesting you can only "take" something if you don't create any new instances of it and instead you remove an existing instance from someone and keep it for yourself. That is also true for services. If you're an automobile expert and I pay you to tell me how to fix a problem in my car, and it takes you an hour to explain it, I have "taken" an hour of your time, and you no longer have it for yourself, so that still counts as "taking" your service, thus the pay your arranged for ahead of time. If I fail to give you the pay, then I've stolen the service from you, yes. What doesn't count as taking is if you were explaining it to someone else who was paying you for it and I just happened to be listening in on the conversation at the door without your knowlege. I didn't take your service, in that case, in a way it's like I copied it. Is that still ethically wrong? Yes. Is it *equally wrong* to taking the service? No.
they cannot charge extra for having to pump the gas. It cannot be included in the price of the gas.
So are the pump attendants unpaid then?
No?
Then you ARE paying for them at the pump. They just aren't allowed to itemize it explicitly as a seperate thing on the receipt. Unless the gas station is operating in the red, you betcha some of that money eventually ends up paying the pump attendants. That's the only possible way to do it unless their pay is part of some state welfare program.
The whole mandatory gas attendant thing seems silly to me. And Oregon's not the only place. The first time I saw it was when visiting New Jersey, and I thought it was just part of the oddity of New Jersey. I didn't know it was a common phenomenon.
Slashdot Mirror
The terrible idiocy of the law is that the encryption technique *itself* is often a copyrighted work, and so under the DMCA it recursively is illegal to break it for any reason, becasue the act if breaking it already opens up a copyrighted work - the encryption algorithm itself. Consider the DeCSS story for example.
The analogy doesn't hold. Firstly, the act of opening a lock without the proper key isn't technically a crime - it's all the other circumstances that typically surround that act that are crimes - tresspassing, theft, damage to another's property, etc. But with the DMCA the act of bypassing the encryption in and of itself is a crime no matter what you may chose to do before and after it. And even worse, under the DMCA it is also a crime to tell anyone else how it can be done. This allows software companies to make up whatever fradulent claims they like as to the security of their encryption. It is illegal to blow the whistle on how bad their encryption is, because you cannot tell anyone any details of such without violating the DMCA.
In the case in question, Skylarov explained at a conference how bad Adobe's e-book encryption is and how incredebly simple it is to break it, and found himself soon arrested.
It's the equivilent of being thrown in jail because you publicised to consumers how bad Mr Smith's Lock Company is, and proved it by showing how you can break into any of Mr Smith's locks with a simple paperclip.
If you are dealing with a custom-built bit of software, then yes, paying for it gets you a LOT of accountability and attention from the developers, very fast. But that isn't true of shrinkwrap commercial software. If I had to rank them in order of speed of response to bugs, i'd go:
1. (fastest) expensive custom closed source software built on contract.
2. (middle) open source software.
3. (slowest) commercial shrink-wrap software.
How many open source success stories are there, where the open-source solution is so clearly superior that it's used by everyone? Uh, zero.
Tivo. Various POS cash registers. Every time a web browser hits an apache web site.
You don't have to install it on your own local machine to be using linux.
Gnome/KDE are irrelevant to the issue of server apps, so your comment that BSD "on my servers" has better documentation because of the consistency of interfaces doesn't make any sense to me. I'm not trying to argue that it does or doesn't have better documentation. I'm trying to argue that the kde/gnome inconsistency can't possibly have anything to do with it.
Apparently the Python developers don't give a rat's ass about backward compatable python source code, if they're willing to change something like that and mess up the existing code (way to go guys).
'/' is NOT more natural for floats than ints. It is not natural for either one in traditional math where you didn't have to use the ascii '/' as the division operator. It *has no* previously understood mathematical meaning that predates using it for programming lanaguages.
If '/' in pascal is only for floating point, and 'div' is only for integers, then you'd still get two different results wouldn't you? Do it one way 'round and it's okay - do it the other and it's a syntax error because you are trying to floating-point-divide two integers (It's been a long time since I did Pascal - I dropped it like the dead rat it is once I learned C.)
Unlike pascal, C is a language where you *want* to be in control of what types are used for things, since unlike pascal, C is supposed to be usable for operating-system things, so insisting that the system do arithmetic by integer when you ask for it is the right answer in C.
It's kind of stupid anyway since a *good* programmer would have just written 0.5*x instead of 1/2 * X to avoid the pointless extra division.
Here's a better analogy - If the smallest unit of change I had was a dollar bill, and I tried to rip it in half to give you half of it, would you expect each piece to be worth 50 cents?
If you were speaking and offered me "one slash two" million dollars that wouldn't mean anything in "traditional math" since it doesn't use "slash" as a divide operator.
Neither floating point nor integer division matches the mathematical meaning of division exactly. After all in math, something like:
1.0 > ( 99999999.0 / 100000000.0 )
would be true, but in floating point computer math it might not, since a 2's compliment number can't hit all the same precise discrete points on the number line as a decimal representation.
What I'm getting at is that it's a mistake to think of floating point interpetation for '/' as being more "traditional" than integer interpetation. Both are a divergance from the traditional. I think C's method of "do it the way that matches the types involved" makes a hell of a lot more sense than Pascal's way of "change all the operators in the code if you decide to change the type of the variable in the future."
The alternative when told to do 1/2 * X to get it to come out the way you want is to say, "Despite the fact that the computer can do integer arithmetic many times faster than floating point, I want to never make use of that and instead do all math as floating point operations anyway just because I'm too lazy to write something like 0.5*X or 1.0/2.0 * X to tell the compiler explicitly what I want."
DWIM is a stoopid way to write a compiler.
I think they just want to have paying-only customers, and having an AOL account is ONE WAY that counts as being a paying customer by default, so anyone coming through AOL gets in without paying extra, because they're already paying money to the AOL/TIME/WARNER company. The headline is misleading. They aren't allowing content ONLY to AOL. They are allowing it to others who pay also. It's just that for AOL the entire set of subscribers is assumed to have "paid".
Do they have a right to do this? Of course. And I have the right to tell them goodbye because their site was only worth the price when it was free. It's not good enough to be worth the charge, so let them be dumb enough to throw the fee on it and watch it wither away.
First lie. You said they can't charge more for it. Whether or not they can itemize it on the bill is a second issue you only took up after someone else pointed out that that's all the law really entails.
Second lie. That was someone else, not me.
You apparently attribute other people's posts to me, so speak for yourself.
That's already been explained in previous posts. I ahve no reason to belive saying the same thing twice4 would convince you more than saying it once, so I'm done.
Yout think you're winning the argument?
What color is the sky on your planet?
So as long as 1% of the money spent on a product goes to something you don't like, you shouldn't spend the other 99% on the product either, even though it goes to the things you *do* like and want to support? The frustration with using the free market power to vote with your wallet is that most purchase prices include a heck of a lot of "riders" you are also voting for, just like a bill before Congress. And, just like a congressman you are stuck where the only way to vote against those riders you don't like is to simultaneously vote against the rest of the bill that you would otherwise have supported. When you support the making of good high fantasy movies, like LOTR and want to see hollywood make more, the only way to "vote for" that is to also "vote for" the DMCA as a small rider tacked on to your ticket price.
Asking people to never support these riders EVER isn't a practical solution unless you plan to move up into the mountains and live as a hermit. The solution of making sure you give more money (votes) to the opposition than you do via incedental riders on your ticket prices, CD-R prices, and so on, is certainly sub-optimal. But it's the only practical way short of not being a participant in the modern marketplace at all.
Because we aren't privy to the internal accounting data of a movie studio, and we probably wouldn't have the time to wade through it if we were, we can't accurately answer the following very important question:
When I pay $7.50 to watch Lord of the Rings, how much of that is funding the MPAA's legal efforts?
I might enjoy the movie enough to see it several times. While I might be fully in favor of rewarding New Line Cinema for bankrolling this risky project, and I might be fully in favor of Peter Jackson raking in the royalties on his excellent work, I can't tell whether or not I'm *matching* funding to the EFF unless I know how much of that ticket price went to "the enemy" the EFF fights. I could just do matching funds and say for each $7.50 I spend on any movie I'll donate $7.50 to the EFF, but that gets a bit excessive very fast.
Nice try.
And you can't seem to remember from one post to the next what your argument actually was.
Nice try.
Your post operates under the false premise that the word "liberal" is synonymous with "Democratic Party". I wasn't using it that way. If you *do* use it that way, you are playing right into the Republicans' hands and not at all thinking like a libertarian. (Consider where the "liber" part of "libertarian" comes from for a second.) It's the Republican Party's tactic to tie together liberalism with the Democratic Party's practice of overspending, as if the two were cosmically tied together, thereby tricking people into thinking that to oppose excessive spending they must oppose liberal *moral* policies as well, and be a good little Fascist.
And, incedentally, George Bush has zero record on Gay rights, and neither does Clinton. Those sorts of things aren't decided at the presidential level.
He came down in a mesquite wooded area. Those small gnarly trees would not have made a good landing strip.
If they'd cancelled Babylon 5 after season 3 or so, you bet there'd have been a very active fanbase pleading for it to continue. Much more so than Farscape, I'd imagine, becasue Babylon5 is all one long continuous story. (Except for when JMS was told he'd have to hurry up and finish by season 4 because he wasn't going to get 5 seasons like he thought, and so he did speed up the plot to finish it, and then got season 5 awarded to him after all, which then ended up feeling like a drawn-out epilogue instead of an integral part of the story, because he'd hurried up an finished the interesting stuff in season 4.)
The big difference between B5 and Farscape here isn't fan loyalty, its that one was in a situation of having the show cancelled, and the other was in a situation of having the show end its run in the way the scriptwriter wanted it to, so it felt "done".
I think the only major reason small devices like mobile phones are using opera a lot is that opera is very small. It doesn't use a lot of memory or a lot of secondary storage. When trying to fit a browser into a crowded machine, that probably matters much more than any of the other considerations. I don't much like the look and feel of opera, but I'd still make it my first choice if I was trying to stick a browser into something with only a few megs of memory.
If you had one iota of a clue you'd realize that an Oregon state law actually applies to all of Oregon, much of which is more than 5 minutes away from the border with Washington.
Fucking knee-jerk idiots assuming knowlege of economics automatically makes one not a liberal, assuming by implication that anyone agreeing with the conservative agenda in terms of budgets must necessarily also agree with it in terms of the stuffy religious bullcrap that comes with it.
No I'm not. I'm suggesting you can only "take" something if you don't create any new instances of it and instead you remove an existing instance from someone and keep it for yourself. That is also true for services. If you're an automobile expert and I pay you to tell me how to fix a problem in my car, and it takes you an hour to explain it, I have "taken" an hour of your time, and you no longer have it for yourself, so that still counts as "taking" your service, thus the pay your arranged for ahead of time. If I fail to give you the pay, then I've stolen the service from you, yes. What doesn't count as taking is if you were explaining it to someone else who was paying you for it and I just happened to be listening in on the conversation at the door without your knowlege. I didn't take your service, in that case, in a way it's like I copied it. Is that still ethically wrong? Yes. Is it *equally wrong* to taking the service? No.
So are the pump attendants unpaid then?
No?
Then you ARE paying for them at the pump. They just aren't allowed to itemize it explicitly as a seperate thing on the receipt. Unless the gas station is operating in the red, you betcha some of that money eventually ends up paying the pump attendants. That's the only possible way to do it unless their pay is part of some state welfare program.
The whole mandatory gas attendant thing seems silly to me. And Oregon's not the only place. The first time I saw it was when visiting New Jersey, and I thought it was just part of the oddity of New Jersey. I didn't know it was a common phenomenon.