It occurs to me that attacking 2600 as the defendant (rather than one of the other myriad of sites distributing DeCSS) was a smart move on the plantiff's part. By associating DeCSS with a magazine devoted to cracking, they help their FUD claim that DeCSS is really about piracy. 2600 has a history of being much in favor of piracy. The "open-source" community, less so.
Notice how the very strong argument that pirating works without needing to decrypt (and therefore DeCSS doesn't help pirating) was never even mentioned in the Judge's report (at least that I saw. Did I miss it?).
My theory is that MPAA dislikes DeCSS not so much because of the piracy or the oft-mentioned country-code thing, but because of the "forced to watch" thing. Notice how a DVD contains sections you *can't* fast-forward through, and are required to watch? I suspect they see a possible advertising stream there. But this only works if
they can retain control over all the playback devices, and force them to honor the "lockout flag", or whatever it is that they call this feature.
Since most technology doesn't have by deafult a gender I wousl think that
would make it at least... err more 'interesting' to translate to/from french...
I wonder if they call serial ports "he" or "she" depending on if they have pins or holes. Sorta brings a whole new meaning to the "gender" of the port.
One of the interesting similar words that keeps coming up is "water". It seems like there's an
awful lot of languages that use a "wah" sound somewhere in their word for water. I'm guessing that it's a word that evolves from a sound-effect.
"wah" is kind of a "watery" sound, like water dripping, or like opening your mouth wide to drink. Also, notice how many languages use a word starting with a harsh "N" sound to mean "no". I'm wondering if there is some sort of reason for this. Perhaps it's just that those types of words are so basic and simple that they date back to way before recoreded history, and as such have common roots. (Kind of like the way all humans make the same facial expressions. Even when they grew up in isolated seperate cultures, a smile and a frown always mean the same thing. Perhaps these simple signals are so old that they date back to before humans started migrating around the world.
I've recently read through that whole series. It was kind of neat because it was from a personal perspective - "I did this", and "I got a letter
from so-and-so". But anyway, I don't remember seeing the part where Churchill said what you say above. I do remember him talking about how difficult it was for the Japneese to use cryptography to make secure transmissions in their language, but that's not quite the same thing.
Then there's the grammer used in the vim editor,
where adjective-verb-object, and verb-adjective-object mean the same thing
( 15dw == d15w ). With the keyboard, it's always
verb-object, but with the mouse in GUI mode, it's always object-verb (Select object, then hit verb key.)
I was agreeing with Miguel up until the point where he said that the interface of MS windows 95 was better than we had in X at the time. I disagreed strongly with that, for one major reason: We had the window manager. That means when a program dies, it doesn't freeze to your screen and eat up real-estate. You can still minimize it or move it out of the way. Windows *STILL* doesn't have this feature today. I get sick and tired of the way in windows a slow app that starts up "hourglasses" the cursor, eats up all the screen real-estate, and can't be dismissed until it wakes up enough to pay attention to my mouseclicks. Plus, the annoying focus policy of "focused windows must be on top" is really annoying to anyone who's experienced the luxury of typing into a shell window that's only partly exposed, while looking at the window on top of it (perhaps as a reference to what you are typing). The MS GUI has some big problems, and it scares me a bit that the maker of GNOME is someone who praises it and (apparently) wants to emulate it.
Yes, the UNIX interface is old and crusty. But imitating Windows is not the way to fix it.
Slashdot doesn't have to be leaking in order for your e-mail address to become known. There's lots of other ways. perhaps hotmail is leaking, perhaps someone is sniffing traffic.
I recieved a reply from the support guy at the site. Apparently they are aware of the discrepency. The form is out of date and was scheduled to be updated, but the whole way they sign people up is about to be re-done anyway, so it will get fixed probably as part of that re-work.
If the 90% CPU usage was a problem, that's because other tasks needed more than the 10% of the CPU time they were getting. In that case, it *was* some problem with SETI@home (or with NT) since it is advertised as only using "unused" CPU cycles.
If the server had processes that wanted more than 10% of the time, and SETI@home wasn't giving it to them, then it was not running in "unused" cycles. SETI@home is advertised as not degrading your system's performance. If it doesn't live up to that promise, then it is at fault, not the admins.
I just visted their page after reading this, and tried signing on. I got to the page where it asked for the OS type of your machine at the bottom. It only allowed two answers in the drop-down box: Windows or Mac. It was a required field so I couldn't leave it empty. Rather than lie about what I am using, and contributing to the unfair low usage stats for Linux in the world, I chose not to go any further into the sign-on process. I sent a polite e-mail to their support e-mail mentioning the problem, couching it in terms of "I can't figure out if you only support Windows and Mac, or if you also support Linux. The such-and-such form doesn't agree with what it says on the home page and I'm left a little confused."
Yes, but of all the things that would need to be re-routed, I think that would be the easiest to replace in an emergency situation. Most of the needed info exists in caches at subordinate nameservers, so a new root DNS site could be spawned and populated with data rather quickly, so long as the world agreed to where to do it.
I think you forget what this thread was supposed to be all about - The whole DeCSS thing. This is not about avoiding paying for artist's work. It's about actually being allowed to enjoy it your own way once you have paid for it, instead of having it dictated to you from on-high that there is only one proper way to enjoy the artist's work. Why the fuck should the MPAA give a rat's ass whether I can view DVD's purchased in the "wrong" country, or that I can view them on the "wrong" machine, with the "wrong" software? That's what this is all about. If pirating were the only issue, there'd be no point to DeCSS, since you can copy a DVD verbatim without breaking through the code.
Does it occur to anyone here that anyone, including the very people who would be looking for this sort of thing, can easily read slashdot? The sort of person who would be working for the governments in question, trying to discover the subversive communications, would likely be a techie himself, and therefore might read slashdot on occasion. After this thread he now knows to pay special attention to anyone sending holiday snapshots back and forth in e-mail.
Perhaps a public forum isn't really the best place for these people to be having this discussion.
You're arguing legality. I'm arguing ethics. Ethically there is a huge difference between the napster problem and the dejanews problem. The napster problem is about stealing work from the creator, while the dejanews problem is exactly the opposite. The dejanews problem is a matter of giving credit to people for things they never said, and don't want to have their name attached to. I don't give a rat's ass whether the law treats them as the same problem or not - ethically they are different problems, and therefore someone who supports one and opposes the other is not necessarily being a hyppocrite.
We don't want strong IP laws for Napster or DeCSS, but damn, don't touch my usenet post.
Go ahead and moderate me down for pointing out the hypocrisy,
Nah, ignorance isn't a good enough reason to moderate someone down. You assume the complaint is about wanting to prevent people from using our posts. It Isn't. It's about wanting to not have them use your posts IN A WAY THAT PUTS WORDS IN YOUR MOUTH. Let's say I download the "I Love you, you love me" song from the Barney show, then I edit it for parody by changing "love" to "screw". This is "fair use" only so long as I don't try to pass off my parody as if it were the original. If I were a distributor for a large record company, and I put out my altered version in such a way that it was not obvious that it was a parody, then I've just slandered the Barney show, and the PBS guys would have every right to sue my ass for this.
This is what is happening on Deja.com, when they take our posts and alter them to look as if we put in hyperlinks to sites, when we may never even had heard of those sites. In the example from this article, they made it look as if the person posted a link to a particular modem seller, when that person might not like that modem seller.
How would you like it if you put up a post containing: "So, I opened up three terminal Windows.", and it ended up turning "Windows" into a hyperlink to an MS-Windows site, tricking the newbie public into thinking you actually put that link there?
There is a huge difference between fair use of someone's material and putting words into that person's mouth. When you use someone's material fairly, then you make darn sure you clearly state if the quote is literal or not.
So your allegation of hypocracy is not applicable.
Regardless of the source of energy, electricity or cumbustion, one of the major causes of inefficiency is the fact that cars can hold 4-5 people, but typically only carry one person. Since the car itself weighs something on the order of a ton, adding a few passengers (even overweight ones) doesn't increase the weight by a large percentage. As long as public transport continues to suck, transit will continue to be inefficient in this way. People tend to drive one-to-a-car because its so much faster than public transport, to just go right where you want to. As long as the public transport system is inconvienient, this will continue to be the case.
People don't like public transit because:
It's often slower than the freeway speed limit. (At least in the US.)
It doesn't run 24 hours a day, so you have the fear of being stranded if you miss the last route (bus or train).
You have to slave your schedule to the sparse transit schedule. Let's say you want to see a movie that starts at 9:55, and the busses arive there on the hour - you have two choices, get there 55 minutes early, or 5 minutes late.
So long as combined transit is a PITA, people will want their own personal car. But since they know that they will *sometimes* want to carry more people in their car, they don't want to buy a tiny car that only holds one person. So they get a big car, and use it inefficiently most of the time (I'm guilty of this).
I think one thing that would greatly improve efficiency would be a tiny car that is designed to only hold one person, without much cargo, BUT can still go at freeway speeds, and be street-legal. If such an animal existed, and (this is the important point) was cheap enough, then people could easily get such a car *and* a second car for trips with more people. Then for trips where they know they are going alone, they can take the efficient one-seater vehicle.
1 - The "eye" of most tornadoes is too small to fit a helicopter - tornadoes don't often get very big in diameter. 2 - The tornado twists around chaoticly. You can't predict which way to move to stay within the eye. 3 - The eye is very low-pressure, with the air being 'sucked out' into the ring-shaped vortex. A wing or helicopter blade won't have enough air to hold it up in the eye. 4 - The wind surrounding the eye is immeasurably high. The highest confirmed speeds are around 300 Mph. Good luck pushing a helicopter through that.
Unix just happened to have been written by an employee at Bell Labs who liked C enough to recode it in the language...
..Yeah, the same someone. The K&R of C fame are also the K&R of UNIX fame. C was designed specifically for the needs of systems development, where they wanted a language with some of the high-level syntax, but without the high-level masking of what's really happening. (the "icky" features of C that let you make all the same mistakes as in assembly language are actually intentional - It was meant to let people develop something as low-level as an OS in it.)
You are right that the first experimental versions of UNIX predate C, but those versions were not the versions the public saw later when UNIX finally escaped from Bell Labs and saw the light of day. The switch to C happened very early in the development of UNIX, and C was designed explicitly with the needs of the UNIX developers in mind, so it meshed very well.
What you say makes sense up to a point, but you ignore the fact that "What kinds of problems is OS foo better at?" includes the question, "What is it like to program for such-and-such a task on OS foo."
You're acting like they were seperate issues. They aren't. One is a subset of the other.
Have things really changed that much since I started college ('89)? Where I went was a very small sattelite college of the state system, in a small city, where most attendees were planning on taking the 4-years and out into a job path, rather than the acedemic grad-student path. Even at a place like that, the CS department was filled with UNIX people, teaching concepts on UNIX machines, with other systems taught only as a sidebar to broaden the student's base, and make sure they don't leave with an "all the world's a UNIX box" mentality.
As PC's grew in power, they started using Windows stuff more, but I could tell they didn't like it and were only doing it for the cheap price and expediency (students could work on their own hardware at home if they liked). But once Linux became a big thing (as I was leaving), they went right back to being mostly UNIX again. They were only using PCs for the cheap hardware, not because they actually liked Windows. Once the chance came up to have the cheap hardware but also have UNIX on it, they went for it. (This is what I have learned from others at the school after I left. I have not witnessed it personally).
I was under the impression that UNIX was still stronger in acedemic circles than in commercial ones. Has this changed?
That explanation would only make sense if they were *swapping* names with each other. As it is, the orginization called PETA now has two names, one under peta.com and one under peta.org. The same argument for taking the.org address away from the parody site can be used to take the.com address away from the non-profit organization site. (Or at least it could if the law was being fair, logical, and consistent.)
The best thing about the movie is that Scientology probably lost money making it. (They didn't get my money either - I paid for a ticket to the wrong movie.) The second best thing about the movie is that after seeing it you can withstand most anything. From now on, every time I see a terrible movie I'll be able to say, "Well, at least it's not Battlefield Earth." "Manos: The Hands of Fate" Is a thrill-a-minute masterpeice by comparasin. MST3K will never do this movie. They decided not to do Plan 9 From Outer Space because it was "too easy". BF:Earth is even easier.
The MS APIs are probably the best-documented in the industry.
Please tell me - what color is the sky on your planet? I don't suppose you've ever looked at a manpage before have you? They're so fully documented that the problem is typically sifting out the bit you need from the rest of it. The problem with MS API docs is the opposite - you spend forever reading only to find that they didn't feel like telling you anything precise enough for the technical work you are doing.
The problem is that "server", in its technical definition also includes things like telnetd, nfsd, rpc, ftpd, and so on, that us in the UNIX world have come to expect as part of the core OS. I don't like the precedent being set here - the terms the judge is using are being used incorrectly and he doesn't know it. Once the rulnig is down on paper it can easily be interpeted differently to include things like telnetd.
Conceptually, there is no difference between something like telnetd and a web server. They are both applications. They both make use of stream TCP/IP sockets. They both provide remote access to features for outside users. The only tangible difference that would put telnetd into the 'os' category and IIS into the "application" category is 1 - telnetd has traditionally always been there, and 2 - telnetd is smaller and simpler.
Slashdot Mirror
Notice how the very strong argument that pirating works without needing to decrypt (and therefore DeCSS doesn't help pirating) was never even mentioned in the Judge's report (at least that I saw. Did I miss it?).
My theory is that MPAA dislikes DeCSS not so much because of the piracy or the oft-mentioned country-code thing, but because of the "forced to watch" thing. Notice how a DVD contains sections you *can't* fast-forward through, and are required to watch? I suspect they see a possible advertising stream there. But this only works if they can retain control over all the playback devices, and force them to honor the "lockout flag", or whatever it is that they call this feature.
I wonder if they call serial ports "he" or "she" depending on if they have pins or holes. Sorta brings a whole new meaning to the "gender" of the port.
One of the interesting similar words that keeps coming up is "water". It seems like there's an awful lot of languages that use a "wah" sound somewhere in their word for water. I'm guessing that it's a word that evolves from a sound-effect. "wah" is kind of a "watery" sound, like water dripping, or like opening your mouth wide to drink. Also, notice how many languages use a word starting with a harsh "N" sound to mean "no". I'm wondering if there is some sort of reason for this. Perhaps it's just that those types of words are so basic and simple that they date back to way before recoreded history, and as such have common roots. (Kind of like the way all humans make the same facial expressions. Even when they grew up in isolated seperate cultures, a smile and a frown always mean the same thing. Perhaps these simple signals are so old that they date back to before humans started migrating around the world.
I've recently read through that whole series. It was kind of neat because it was from a personal perspective - "I did this", and "I got a letter from so-and-so". But anyway, I don't remember seeing the part where Churchill said what you say above. I do remember him talking about how difficult it was for the Japneese to use cryptography to make secure transmissions in their language, but that's not quite the same thing.
Then there's the grammer used in the vim editor, where adjective-verb-object, and verb-adjective-object mean the same thing ( 15dw == d15w ). With the keyboard, it's always verb-object, but with the mouse in GUI mode, it's always object-verb (Select object, then hit verb key.)
I was agreeing with Miguel up until the point where he said that the interface of MS windows 95 was better than we had in X at the time. I disagreed strongly with that, for one major reason: We had the window manager. That means when a program dies, it doesn't freeze to your screen and eat up real-estate. You can still minimize it or move it out of the way. Windows *STILL* doesn't have this feature today. I get sick and tired of the way in windows a slow app that starts up "hourglasses" the cursor, eats up all the screen real-estate, and can't be dismissed until it wakes up enough to pay attention to my mouseclicks. Plus, the annoying focus policy of "focused windows must be on top" is really annoying to anyone who's experienced the luxury of typing into a shell window that's only partly exposed, while looking at the window on top of it (perhaps as a reference to what you are typing). The MS GUI has some big problems, and it scares me a bit that the maker of GNOME is someone who praises it and (apparently) wants to emulate it. Yes, the UNIX interface is old and crusty. But imitating Windows is not the way to fix it.
Slashdot doesn't have to be leaking in order for your e-mail address to become known. There's lots of other ways. perhaps hotmail is leaking, perhaps someone is sniffing traffic.
I recieved a reply from the support guy at the site. Apparently they are aware of the discrepency. The form is out of date and was scheduled to be updated, but the whole way they sign people up is about to be re-done anyway, so it will get fixed probably as part of that re-work.
If the server had processes that wanted more than 10% of the time, and SETI@home wasn't giving it to them, then it was not running in "unused" cycles. SETI@home is advertised as not degrading your system's performance. If it doesn't live up to that promise, then it is at fault, not the admins.
I just visted their page after reading this, and tried signing on. I got to the page where it asked for the OS type of your machine at the bottom. It only allowed two answers in the drop-down box: Windows or Mac. It was a required field so I couldn't leave it empty. Rather than lie about what I am using, and contributing to the unfair low usage stats for Linux in the world, I chose not to go any further into the sign-on process. I sent a polite e-mail to their support e-mail mentioning the problem, couching it in terms of "I can't figure out if you only support Windows and Mac, or if you also support Linux. The such-and-such form doesn't agree with what it says on the home page and I'm left a little confused."
Yes, but of all the things that would need to be re-routed, I think that would be the easiest to replace in an emergency situation. Most of the needed info exists in caches at subordinate nameservers, so a new root DNS site could be spawned and populated with data rather quickly, so long as the world agreed to where to do it.
I think you forget what this thread was supposed to be all about - The whole DeCSS thing. This is not about avoiding paying for artist's work. It's about actually being allowed to enjoy it your own way once you have paid for it, instead of having it dictated to you from on-high that there is only one proper way to enjoy the artist's work. Why the fuck should the MPAA give a rat's ass whether I can view DVD's purchased in the "wrong" country, or that I can view them on the "wrong" machine, with the "wrong" software? That's what this is all about. If pirating were the only issue, there'd be no point to DeCSS, since you can copy a DVD verbatim without breaking through the code.
Perhaps a public forum isn't really the best place for these people to be having this discussion.
You're arguing legality. I'm arguing ethics. Ethically there is a huge difference between the napster problem and the dejanews problem. The napster problem is about stealing work from the creator, while the dejanews problem is exactly the opposite. The dejanews problem is a matter of giving credit to people for things they never said, and don't want to have their name attached to. I don't give a rat's ass whether the law treats them as the same problem or not - ethically they are different problems, and therefore someone who supports one and opposes the other is not necessarily being a hyppocrite.
Nah, ignorance isn't a good enough reason to moderate someone down. You assume the complaint is about wanting to prevent people from using our posts. It Isn't. It's about wanting to not have them use your posts IN A WAY THAT PUTS WORDS IN YOUR MOUTH. Let's say I download the "I Love you, you love me" song from the Barney show, then I edit it for parody by changing "love" to "screw". This is "fair use" only so long as I don't try to pass off my parody as if it were the original. If I were a distributor for a large record company, and I put out my altered version in such a way that it was not obvious that it was a parody, then I've just slandered the Barney show, and the PBS guys would have every right to sue my ass for this.
This is what is happening on Deja.com, when they take our posts and alter them to look as if we put in hyperlinks to sites, when we may never even had heard of those sites. In the example from this article, they made it look as if the person posted a link to a particular modem seller, when that person might not like that modem seller.
How would you like it if you put up a post containing: "So, I opened up three terminal Windows.", and it ended up turning "Windows" into a hyperlink to an MS-Windows site, tricking the newbie public into thinking you actually put that link there?
There is a huge difference between fair use of someone's material and putting words into that person's mouth. When you use someone's material fairly, then you make darn sure you clearly state if the quote is literal or not.
So your allegation of hypocracy is not applicable.
People don't like public transit because:
So long as combined transit is a PITA, people will want their own personal car. But since they know that they will *sometimes* want to carry more people in their car, they don't want to buy a tiny car that only holds one person. So they get a big car, and use it inefficiently most of the time (I'm guilty of this).
I think one thing that would greatly improve efficiency would be a tiny car that is designed to only hold one person, without much cargo, BUT can still go at freeway speeds, and be street-legal. If such an animal existed, and (this is the important point) was cheap enough, then people could easily get such a car *and* a second car for trips with more people. Then for trips where they know they are going alone, they can take the efficient one-seater vehicle.
1 - The "eye" of most tornadoes is too small to fit a helicopter - tornadoes don't often get very big in diameter.
2 - The tornado twists around chaoticly. You can't predict which way to move to stay within the eye.
3 - The eye is very low-pressure, with the air being 'sucked out' into the ring-shaped vortex. A wing or helicopter blade won't have enough air to hold it up in the eye.
4 - The wind surrounding the eye is immeasurably high. The highest confirmed speeds are around 300 Mph. Good luck pushing a helicopter through that.
This is off-topic. You are replying to my .sig. I would have been willing to go into that via e-mail, but you posted anonymously, so I can't.
You are right that the first experimental versions of UNIX predate C, but those versions were not the versions the public saw later when UNIX finally escaped from Bell Labs and saw the light of day. The switch to C happened very early in the development of UNIX, and C was designed explicitly with the needs of the UNIX developers in mind, so it meshed very well.
You're acting like they were seperate issues. They aren't. One is a subset of the other.
As PC's grew in power, they started using Windows stuff more, but I could tell they didn't like it and were only doing it for the cheap price and expediency (students could work on their own hardware at home if they liked). But once Linux became a big thing (as I was leaving), they went right back to being mostly UNIX again. They were only using PCs for the cheap hardware, not because they actually liked Windows. Once the chance came up to have the cheap hardware but also have UNIX on it, they went for it. (This is what I have learned from others at the school after I left. I have not witnessed it personally).
I was under the impression that UNIX was still stronger in acedemic circles than in commercial ones. Has this changed?
That explanation would only make sense if they were *swapping* names with each other. As it is, the orginization called PETA now has two names, one under peta.com and one under peta.org. The same argument for taking the .org address away from the parody site can be used to take the .com address away from the non-profit organization site. (Or at least it could if the law was being fair, logical, and consistent.)
The best thing about the movie is that Scientology probably lost money making it. (They didn't get my money either - I paid for a ticket to the wrong movie.) The second best thing about the movie is that after seeing it you can withstand most anything. From now on, every time I see a terrible movie I'll be able to say, "Well, at least it's not Battlefield Earth." "Manos: The Hands of Fate" Is a thrill-a-minute masterpeice by comparasin. MST3K will never do this movie. They decided not to do Plan 9 From Outer Space because it was "too easy". BF:Earth is even easier.
Conceptually, there is no difference between something like telnetd and a web server. They are both applications. They both make use of stream TCP/IP sockets. They both provide remote access to features for outside users. The only tangible difference that would put telnetd into the 'os' category and IIS into the "application" category is 1 - telnetd has traditionally always been there, and 2 - telnetd is smaller and simpler.