On the other hand, I wish all the people who take broadcast decoding for granted would go to hell.
You see, I would never go to the trouble of using a device to decode scrambled broadcast signals. It's just not the sort of contraption that interests me. I tend to do without entertainment rather than meet such a barrier to its consumption. It's in the same category of "not going to the theatre because the parking lot is too full."
But this DTV thing goes much further than that.
You see, I know PLENTY of people who use a clandestine tv receiver. I've watched them gloat over their cards as if they had found a Willie Mays rookie card in an attic or something. I've seen them setup all kinds of PC contraptions to fake the receiver. Sure, I run in a circle of nerds, students, blacksmiths, musicians, and accountants, so my experience is somewhat skewed -- but still, I've never met ANYBODY who actually pays retail for DTV, yet I know all kinds of people who do the whole card-hacking trick.
From my limited sample, I've deduced that a large number of people get their signals for free.
Because I know this, I would never, ever, buy the service. Wouldn't even consider it. I don't care what it costs. Knowing that a large number of people get it free, and take getting it free for granted, is enough to stop me from any consideration of buying it. As far as doing the card thing, I could care less. If I were going to put that much effort into anything, it would be toward my music gear, not my TV. I'd do without TV first.
So in a way, part of me hopes the plaintiff prevails. I'd be a lot happier if they could come up with a technical solution that works -- because I know the legal solution never will.
Seriously. If I didn't have knowledge that the service was commonly gotten for free, I might take notice of the product. Might even consider buying it. But not in the current situation. Even if it's worth the price, I'd not voluntarily enter into something that makes me feel like a chump.
"The proper course of action is to let them take you to court, then contest it on the basis that they have to prove that you have used the equipment to 'steal' their service."
If they are asking the State to press a criminal case against you, then yes. They could never reach the standard of proof needed for the case to even see the inside of a court room.
However, if this is being brought as a civil suit, the standards of proof are not so high.
I'd settle for a multi-volume CDR backup system that works (on linux, particularly, but I'm also looking for windows solutions). (Mondo looks promising, but it is entirely too complicated.)
What do you do when you have many gigabytes to backup to a series of 700MB discs? Especially, what do you do when some of your files are larger than the volume size?
I know how to do it the hard way, using multivolume tar and having a script pause, make an iso out of each volume, and cdrecord each one. Restoring from that isn't exactly fun though.
"The reach and aim of the bill will be whittled down over the coming months, even then it has a very slim chance of even making it out of committee in both chambers."
We said that about the DMCA when it was in committee also...
>In the days of vinyl, a record came with all >sorts of stuff
So true.
I know several people whose handwriting changed because they wanted to emulate the lyrics in the liner of Pink Floyd's Animals album. Remember the stickers that came in the Dark Side of the Moon album? If I saw one of those stuck somewhere, I thought of it as someone sacrificing a collectors item for my entertainment. How about actually cutting out and wearing the mask from Gentle Giant "Giant for a Day?"
Never actually smoked a joint that was rolled in the big paper from the Cheech and Chong album, but I know people who did.
On the other hand, that zipper on Sticky Fingers was the worst idea ever -- it would scratch other records even if they were in the sleeve.
>this has nothing to do with copyright >infringement.
Sure it does! Somebody used a key generator, registered an MSDN license, downloaded everything, and put it on kazaa. How is that not copyright infringement?
I'm trying right now to register a *BOUGHT AND PAID FOR* MSDN subscription, thousands of dollars already spent, and I'm quite shocked at how un-helpful MS has been.
The package contains a subscription card with an auth key printed on it, and you're supposed to use an online system to do the registration. Well, apparently, someone else has helped himself to my registration key. So I called Microsoft support. They treated me with a great deal of skepticism, insisting that I snail-mail them my activation card, the BOX TOP with the hologram label, and my invoice from the sale. I realized after mailing that, if it gets lost, intercepted, ignored, or destroyed, then I actually don't have any way to get my money back or to get satisfaction -- since I've already sent all the proof of purchase, together with much more personal information than I would have chosen to provide otherwise.
All this, while someone enjoys *my* subscription without being treated like a thief. I should not be the one suffering consequences.
"A USB key could be a feasable commercial solution; if distributors took responsibility for PKI infrastructure after the point of sale."
But the scale of the problem must prevent that.
One of my MSDN subscriptions failed to activate, because the activation key was already taken. My guess is that someone registered it along with a wide swath of other keys, perhaps using a generator or just guessing. They aren't afraid of any consequences -- why should they? They are less than a needle in a haystack.
Meanwhile, I, the paying customer (or the customer's agent/admin/manager/whateverIam), am shut out of the product I purchased.
The whole thing would be better without the copy protection in the first place -- the "protection" didn't protect either the customer or the vendor, nor did it prevent the unauthorized use. On the other hand, it did create an inconvenience and an expense for everyone involved: the customer, the vendor, and the unauthorized user.
"if you count each top bead as 5 and each bottom bead as 1, they add up to 15"
What's interesting about that to me is, that's the way I learned abacus, and I've never considered any other representation of the beads... but until I read your post, I never made the connection between hexidecimal and the abacus.
Once upon a time, I knew division and multiplication algorithms for abacus. Now I'm going to have to dust off those memories and see if I can figure out rotate, shift, xor...
Does it harm the ketchup industry if I put mayonaise on my burger? Should I support the ketchup people if they try to put the mayonaise people out of business?
>But isn't the whole philosophy behind linux to >be open and clear?
You are not allowed to be "open and clear" when you reside in a Federal prison. And it's really hard to be of any use to the community when you are locked up in a Federal prison which happens to be on the communist island nation of Cuba.
[I'm still appalled, that I have never heard anyone question the existence of a US prison in Cuba.]
Well, you're right of course, but the real problem with audio/video is with I/O, not with computational power. So it could be a decent system for video without having much of a cpu. (I doubt this board qualifies though).
Re:Damn, I thought this was mini-itx NOT FROM VIA
on
Small Footprint Computers
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Shuttle will run you $300 for a bare system, $700 with RAM, an Athlon XP CPU, a disk drive, and a DVD/CDRW combo, maybe you can get by for a little less. Now, the Shuttle is a hell of a good system, but that's not the point.
An EPIA-800 and a case should be closer to $125. Big difference. But it will also run about as fast as a K6-300. Might not even be worthwhile.
I'm sure there are MiniITX systems that bridge the gap between epia-800's and Shuttle XPC's, and others that go way beyond, but I don't know about them. I do have both a Shuttle SN41G2 and an EPIA-800 box. There's really no comparison between these two, but I bought one for a toy because it was cheap, and the other for a workstation for my music studio.
"And why would you go out of your way to ignore windows and mac users when they need help?"
You totally missed his point.
I'm good with cars. I will help people with their cars when they have problems that fit my tools and my skills. When they have cars that need special (or just not metric!) tools, or when they have problems hat don't fit my skills.
It doesn't mean I'm "ignoring" Dodges and Fords to work on VW's and MG's.
"I think 1GHz is MORE than good enough for word processing and internet browsing. I was doing the said activities on a 100 MHz machine back in the old days"
The OLD DAYS? I was doing professional wordprocessing and 2-d graphic design on a 33 MHZ IBM PS/2. Internet usage was limited to a 3270 emulator, but that ran fine. That was fairly recent, to my thinking.
In the old days I did my wordprocessing on a 4 MHZ Kaypro running CP/M. I've never seen the same productivity that I had back then -- not that I'd like to go back to it.
Before that, I had to write my own editor, and before that, I used the EDTASM editor on my TRS-80. And before that, an ASR-33 teletype and paper tape. Now, I'll start to concede that THOSE were the old days, but the days of 100MHZ PC's were *YESTERDAY*.
>Why is everyone so afraid of a little bit of >radioactivity?
Well, it seems only a very small fraction study Physics, but aside from plain ignorance, the reason that there is rampant hysteria about anything "nuclear" and/or radioactive is simply that the government instilled the fear during the 1950's and on through the 1980's. People do not know how to differentiate between "a little bit" of radioactivity and a strategic nuke or a plant core breach.
It suited the agenda of government very well to have people be afraid of nuclear anything. The energy companies benefit because we didn't make a large scale move away from coal, oil, and gas for electricity, and also, didn't move our reliance from those fuels onto the cheap electricity that would have come from nuclear power.
More importantly, the fear was a fine tool to use when we needed to be convinced of the dangers of communism. The only thing we needed to know about communism was that the communists could and would end our way of life, and that they would start by using atomic bombs.
A whole generation grew up under those parameters. People still carry the ignorance that comes with the brainwashing, and an awful lot of those people are in positions of power and authority.
In keeping with their view that the courts are more qualified to deal with the problem than the patent system, that sounds about right! The problem here is that they want to have their cake and eat it too. That is, they want to offload their responsibility to the courts, but they also do not want to be subject to the natural and logical consequences -- the courts ought to have recourse against the patent office.
"isn't it the seller's reponsibility to sell the products according to Microsoft's wishes?"
Once you accept that Microsoft has the authority to HAVE WISHES, then I suppose it is. However, I wonder why the whole notion of selling a serial gender changer or a disk drive bracket with a piece of software still passes the reasonability test. Why bother with the loophole if it's obviously pointless and unenforceable?
> I get absolutely NO mortgage, porn, penis >enlargement, or viagra spams at all.
Yes you do. But you do the ostrich thing to keep from looking. I'd much prefer not to receive them at all. I want my ISP to let me run my own SMTP, so that I can whitelist at the TRANSPORT layer. Not from a source I care to receive mail from? Socket closed.
No. "Begging the question" would be more like a statement that "We must not expose children to pornography because children might be exposed to pornographic images!"
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On one hand, I despise litigation like this.
On the other hand, I wish all the people who take broadcast decoding for granted would go to hell.
You see, I would never go to the trouble of using a device to decode scrambled broadcast signals. It's just not the sort of contraption that interests me. I tend to do without entertainment rather than meet such a barrier to its consumption. It's in the same category of "not going to the theatre because the parking lot is too full."
But this DTV thing goes much further than that.
You see, I know PLENTY of people who use a clandestine tv receiver. I've watched them gloat over their cards as if they had found a Willie Mays rookie card in an attic or something. I've seen them setup all kinds of PC contraptions to fake the receiver. Sure, I run in a circle of nerds, students, blacksmiths, musicians, and accountants, so my experience is somewhat skewed -- but still, I've never met ANYBODY who actually pays retail for DTV, yet I know all kinds of people who do the whole card-hacking trick.
From my limited sample, I've deduced that a large number of people get their signals for free.
Because I know this, I would never, ever, buy the service. Wouldn't even consider it. I don't care what it costs. Knowing that a large number of people get it free, and take getting it free for granted, is enough to stop me from any consideration of buying it. As far as doing the card thing, I could care less. If I were going to put that much effort into anything, it would be toward my music gear, not my TV. I'd do without TV first.
So in a way, part of me hopes the plaintiff prevails. I'd be a lot happier if they could come up with a technical solution that works -- because I know the legal solution never will.
Seriously. If I didn't have knowledge that the service was commonly gotten for free, I might take notice of the product. Might even consider buying it. But not in the current situation.
Even if it's worth the price, I'd not voluntarily enter into something that makes me feel like a chump.
"The proper course of action is to let them take you to court, then contest it on the basis that they have to prove that you have used the equipment to 'steal' their service."
If they are asking the State to press a criminal case against you, then yes. They could never reach the standard of proof needed for the case to even see the inside of a court room.
However, if this is being brought as a civil suit, the standards of proof are not so high.
I'd settle for a multi-volume CDR backup system that works (on linux, particularly, but I'm also looking for windows solutions). (Mondo looks promising, but it is entirely too complicated.)
What do you do when you have many gigabytes to backup to a series of 700MB discs? Especially, what do you do when some of your files are larger than the volume size?
I know how to do it the hard way, using multivolume tar and having a script pause, make an iso out of each volume, and cdrecord each one. Restoring from that isn't exactly fun though.
"If you have a music (or other copyrighted work) file, and you didn't buy it, technically you stole it."
In my case, I wrote, performed, and recorded it.
I'm not the only musician.
These laws suppress my right to distribute my music.
"The reach and aim of the bill will be whittled down over the coming months, even then it has a very slim chance of even making it out of committee in both chambers."
We said that about the DMCA when it was in committee also...
>In the days of vinyl, a record came with all
>sorts of stuff
So true.
I know several people whose handwriting changed because they wanted to emulate the lyrics in the liner of Pink Floyd's Animals album. Remember the stickers that came in the Dark Side of the Moon album? If I saw one of those stuck somewhere, I thought of it as someone sacrificing a collectors item for my entertainment. How about actually cutting out and wearing the mask from Gentle Giant "Giant for a Day?"
Never actually smoked a joint that was rolled in the big paper from the Cheech and Chong album, but I know people who did.
On the other hand, that zipper on Sticky Fingers was the worst idea ever -- it would scratch other records even if they were in the sleeve.
>this has nothing to do with copyright
>infringement.
Sure it does! Somebody used a key generator, registered an MSDN license, downloaded everything, and put it on kazaa. How is that
not copyright infringement?
I'm trying right now to register a *BOUGHT AND PAID FOR* MSDN subscription, thousands of dollars already spent, and I'm quite shocked at how un-helpful MS has been.
The package contains a subscription card with an auth key printed on it, and you're supposed to use an online system to do the registration. Well, apparently, someone else has helped himself to my registration key. So I called Microsoft support. They treated me with a great deal of skepticism, insisting that I snail-mail them my activation card, the BOX TOP with the hologram label, and my invoice from the sale. I realized after mailing that, if it gets lost, intercepted, ignored, or destroyed, then I actually don't have any way to get my money back or to get satisfaction -- since I've already sent all the proof of purchase, together with much more personal information than I would have chosen to provide otherwise.
All this, while someone enjoys *my* subscription without being treated like a thief. I should not be the one suffering consequences.
"A USB key could be a feasable commercial solution; if distributors took responsibility for PKI infrastructure after the point of sale."
But the scale of the problem must prevent that.
One of my MSDN subscriptions failed to activate, because the activation key was already taken. My guess is that someone registered it along with a wide swath of other keys, perhaps using a generator or just guessing. They aren't afraid of any consequences -- why should they? They are less than a needle in a haystack.
Meanwhile, I, the paying customer (or the customer's agent/admin/manager/whateverIam), am shut out of the product I purchased.
The whole thing would be better without the copy protection in the first place -- the "protection" didn't protect either the customer or the vendor, nor did it prevent the unauthorized use. On the other hand, it did create an inconvenience and an expense for everyone involved: the customer, the vendor, and the unauthorized user.
"if you count each top bead as 5 and each bottom bead as 1, they add up to 15"
What's interesting about that to me is, that's the way I learned abacus, and I've never considered any other representation of the beads... but until I read your post, I never made the connection between hexidecimal and the abacus.
Once upon a time, I knew division and multiplication algorithms for abacus. Now I'm going to have to dust off those memories and see if I can figure out rotate, shift, xor...
Come on, indeed.
Does it harm the ketchup industry if I put mayonaise on my burger? Should I support the ketchup people if they try to put the mayonaise people out of business?
>But isn't the whole philosophy behind linux to
>be open and clear?
You are not allowed to be "open and clear" when you reside in a Federal prison. And it's really hard to be of any use to the community when you are locked up in a Federal prison which happens to be on the communist island nation of Cuba.
[I'm still appalled, that I have never heard anyone question the existence of a US prison in Cuba.]
"Win9x, WinME, Windows 2000 are pretty much
available for the asking on a trial basis."
Come again?
No happy mediums here -- I hope they set a legal precedent that makes it illegal to attend a concert or listen to the radio.
Well, you're right of course, but the real problem with audio/video is with I/O, not with computational power. So it could be a decent system for video without having much of a cpu. (I doubt this board qualifies though).
Shuttle will run you $300 for a bare system, $700 with RAM, an Athlon XP CPU, a disk drive, and a DVD/CDRW combo, maybe you can get by for a little less. Now, the Shuttle is a hell of a good system, but that's not the point.
An EPIA-800 and a case should be closer to $125.
Big difference. But it will also run about as fast as a K6-300. Might not even be worthwhile.
I'm sure there are MiniITX systems that bridge the gap between epia-800's and Shuttle XPC's, and others that go way beyond, but I don't know about them. I do have both a Shuttle SN41G2 and an EPIA-800 box. There's really no comparison between these two, but I bought one for a toy because it was cheap, and the other for a workstation for my music studio.
"And why would you go out of your way to ignore windows and mac users when they need help?"
You totally missed his point.
I'm good with cars. I will help people with their cars when they have problems that fit my tools and my skills. When they have cars that need special (or just not metric!) tools, or when they have problems hat don't fit my skills.
It doesn't mean I'm "ignoring" Dodges and Fords to work on VW's and MG's.
"Answer to #1: Bob knew that this was a risk, and deliberately put the patients at risk. Therefore Bob is a terrorist, as we all know IP pirates are."
The patients, families, doctors, etc. are not going to be satisfied with "Bob in Jail"
They are going to go for billions from the folks who were directly responsible for the destruction.
"I think 1GHz is MORE than good enough for word processing and internet browsing. I was doing the said activities on a 100 MHz machine back in the old days"
The OLD DAYS? I was doing professional wordprocessing and 2-d graphic design on a 33 MHZ IBM PS/2. Internet usage was limited to a 3270 emulator, but that ran fine. That was fairly recent, to my thinking.
In the old days I did my wordprocessing on a 4 MHZ Kaypro running CP/M. I've never seen the same productivity that I had back then -- not that I'd like to go back to it.
Before that, I had to write my own editor, and before that, I used the EDTASM editor on my TRS-80. And before that, an ASR-33 teletype and paper tape. Now, I'll start to concede that THOSE were the old days, but the days of 100MHZ PC's were *YESTERDAY*.
>The dollar is going to crash sooner or later
You don't think the world economy will follow? *Starting* with the Euro?
>Why is everyone so afraid of a little bit of
>radioactivity?
Well, it seems only a very small fraction study Physics, but aside from plain ignorance, the reason that there is rampant hysteria about anything "nuclear" and/or radioactive is simply that the government instilled the fear during the 1950's and on through the 1980's. People do not know how to differentiate between "a little bit" of radioactivity and a strategic nuke or a plant core breach.
It suited the agenda of government very well to have people be afraid of nuclear anything. The energy companies benefit because we didn't make a large scale move away from coal, oil, and gas for electricity, and also, didn't move our reliance from those fuels onto the cheap electricity that would have come from nuclear power.
More importantly, the fear was a fine tool to use when we needed to be convinced of the dangers of communism. The only thing we needed to know about communism was that the communists could and would end our way of life, and that they would start by using atomic bombs.
A whole generation grew up under those parameters. People still carry the ignorance that comes with the brainwashing, and an awful lot of those people are in positions of power and authority.
We reap what we sow, I reckon.
>read: people can sue the patent office
In keeping with their view that the courts are more qualified to deal with the problem than the patent system, that sounds about right! The problem here is that they want to have their cake and eat it too. That is, they want to offload their responsibility to the courts, but they also do not want to be subject to the natural and logical consequences -- the courts ought to have recourse against the patent office.
"isn't it the seller's reponsibility to sell the products according to Microsoft's wishes?"
Once you accept that Microsoft has the authority to HAVE WISHES, then I suppose it is. However, I wonder why the whole notion of selling a serial gender changer or a disk drive bracket with a piece of software still passes the reasonability test. Why bother with the loophole if it's obviously pointless and unenforceable?
> I get absolutely NO mortgage, porn, penis
>enlargement, or viagra spams at all.
Yes you do. But you do the ostrich thing to keep from looking. I'd much prefer not to receive them at all. I want my ISP to let me run my own SMTP, so that I can whitelist at the TRANSPORT layer. Not from a source I care to receive mail from? Socket closed.
>Begs the question
No. "Begging the question" would be more like a statement that "We must not expose children to pornography because children might be exposed to pornographic images!"