Nope, but like many computer scientists, law was a required portion of my course.
As far as I know, this question has not been definitively settled by any court rulings and there are no specific laws that say "thou shalt not copy a DVD to replace a damaged DVD." So it might be okay and it might not be okay. The MPAA and movie studios seem to think it is not okay. Expect a long, expensive fight that you *might* win if you'd like to assert the right to download DVDs as a means of obtaining a backup copy for a damaged copy.
There is fair use, you cannot be punished for making a single copy. However the DMCA (what a wonderful cockup that was) made it so you are breaking the law if you circumvent copy protection stuff to obtain the copy to which you are entitled. No court would say you can download an illegal copy to make a 'backup'. The thing is, you are downloading from an unauthorised distribution portal, you wouldn't win the argument. If it is a torrent you would have been uploading too, so your council would likely advise you to avoid that argument.
If you have not made a backup of a dvd/other media before it is damaged, then legally you're screwed. You have broken the copy you had a licence for, so you need to buy a new one. Getting a copy from elsewhere once yours is damaged may sound legal/fair, but it is most definitely not legal. Read the DMCA, its a crazy document (I had to, it's boring in places, but mostly an enlightening read)
On an unrelated note, whoeover developed the idea of a media license applying only to the provided medium (i.e. "you have a license for the intellectual property named movie A, but only on the disc you bought") was, I like to think, failed physicist who was always fascinated by wave/particle duality and so they developed their own version called media/medium duality.
Nope, the idea of money being for a single copy is as old as a jolly old thing. After all, buying a car does not give you the right to create new copies of that car, buying a book has not, for centuries, entitled you to make your own copies. Besides, when you buy a movie, you agree to their licence terms, and that clearly indicates that the licence is for the copy your purchased only.
'unlimited' is misused, I agree. So is 'innovation'.
There are often two meanings for words. The 'normal' one, and the business one.
Do you complain about "learn X language in 24 hours" books? It's a bullshit title if taken literally, but its a convention.
I have had a high speed unlimited connection for several years in my lab, Unlimited in almost every way. download speeds of up to 7 to 8 megabytes (yes, actual amount in normal megabytes downloaded) per second, sometimes I get 12 megabytes per second. 3 to four megabytes per second for upload, and no gigabyte cap. That's what unlimited means to me, in terms of the intertubes. Not literally unlimited, but able to handle everything I throw at it.
I also have an 'unlimited' connection at home, and its slow (up to 700kb/sec download, usually 350, and 41kb/sec up), and people on the same service have been shaped if they use it too much. Both services are described as unlimited, but they clearly differ.
I bet if I could afford it I could have a connection as fast as my lab one at home, but It would cost a fortune.
No, when you purchase a dvd you are purchasing a licence for that copy alone, and that with very limited rights (no public performance, no redistribution etc).
If you ruin that dvd, the licence now relates to a destroyed product, it is effectively invalid. You have to buy a new licence to own another copy, which is normally by purchasing a new dvd.
If you have a single backup, then you can legally continue to use that, although media produces don't exactly make this single backup thing easy at the moment.
Nor can you download a ripped 'backup copy', because it is obtained through an unauthorised channel. It would be considered that the download was unrelated to the licence you purchased, and thus a separate infringement.
Your legal options are to:
1: Appeal to the manufacturer for a replacement copy (they just might).
I think you are sort of right. However, lets look at a theoretical example:
You have two customers, one is a light net user. They like to send photo's of their kids around on email to the rest of their family, spread all over the world, and use email as the main means of communicating between their extended family. They shop online, and like to hunt around for cheap flights/holidays. Perhaps they buy the odd small game on-line for the kids.
The other customer is a gamer. They like to play on-line for many hours a day. They download multi gigabyte demos, and have a steam account that they use a lot. They spend a lot of time on Youtube, and use mail and msn constantly.
The first customer can be given a moderatelly capped servive for, say thirty bucks a month (don't know the real US pricing). No problems will arise, they have what they need, you get their money. The second customer can pay fifty bucks and have a much higher limit, say 100Gb. Even the most intense gamer or movie purchaser is unlikely to exceed that. If they do, you charge in blocks of 10gb, and if it happens a lot, suggest they go to 150Gb, and pay more.
By having a sliding scale of charges you avoid the unfairness of having light users paying the same, or close to the same, as heavy users.
I know many heavy users point at the contracts they got that say unlimited, and wave fists about angrily, but, lets be honest here, few people who download hundreds of gigabytes a month are getting all legal stuff at present. To be frank, it isn't fair that I have to pay the same as someone else who rapes the tubes constantly.
I have an 'unlimited' service, but my ISP looks at their customers with an eye to finding people who download much more then the others, and shifts them to shaped lines, or kicks them to a higher cost service. I can, and have, transferred tens of gigabytes of data around in recent months, I have to. However I am considerate and do it at night, and I cap my transfers so it doesn't max out my line. Although I definitely will show up with a high usage for a short while, on average I still behave myself, and have not been slapped.
its all down to the definition. A 'normal' user, reading pages, and sending/receiving email, would see 5gb as more then they would use. Someone with greater needs, such as to download large files, would see 5gb as barely adequate. Hell, even re installing a Steam account on your computer could fill that in a day.
That aside, the thing is that companies like Verizon have seen their old pricing model prove inadequate over time, and they want to distance themselves from the previous model. The interweb was such that only people downloading illegally were exceeding their previously undefined upper limit. I would imagine they got the 5gb value by doing some data mining on their customers. I'd bet that most never go near 5gb.
I imagine they know people will soon start buying movies and other large media online as a matter of course, and they want to be able to charge for 'premium' access. The best way to achieve that is show that they are taking action now against heavy downloaders, demonstrating the need for different levels of access, so they cannot be accused of suddenly instituting a new system for the sake of profit only.
I would cope with metered access, if it meant no hassle when I did transfer a lot. I do often have to transfer large amounts of data between home and my lab overnight.
worrying about the amount of ram used is normally a gamers thing. It's a throwback from not too long ago when most systems didn't have much ram, and you had to unload stuff to get games working well, which I am sure you recall.
270Mb being used for fast loading of apps seems reasonable to me, if the system has loads left over for the users important stuff, like games, or can cut the amount down if a user app needs that ram for something.
This is all academic to me, don't own Vista, won't own Vista, I have no use for it
Anyone else around here sick of all the ads we get bombarded with on a nearly constant basis?
Not really.
I use adblock while web browsing, and any site that manages to piss me off with lots of advertising never gets visited twice.
And yet I am still, through my own targeted browsing, led to devices/things I wish to purchase on-line.
I guess this is because, contrary to the statistically defined web browsing individual, I am in fact already aware of the things I want to buy, and quite capable of convincing myself as to their usefulness.
P.K. Dicks books are perhaps among the most significant of recent SF novels, but they aren't exactly easy for the lay reader to grasp. Personally I'm still trying to understand 'Galactic Pot Healer'. I'm on my second attempt now.
Frankly, he was a jerk to think that breaking into US military computers was a wise thing to do.
Ignorance of the law is no defence, he should face the full (custodial) penalty of the US over this offence. Perhaps that isn't the cool thing to say, but it's true.
Back about 10 to 15 years or so ago (can't recall the exact year), there was a 'best single of all time' thing run by the bbc. As it turns out 'I Owe You Nothing' by Bros was voted to number one.
This was patently shit, since it was god awful. Who even remembers it now?
The point was that the people most interested in voting were the young, single obsessed audience, and they were currently having wet dreams about Bros.
This is more of the same. Don't get me wrong, I am a real fan of Firefly. I would never say Serenity was a best film of all time though (I'd go for best SF film of the last decade). If they ran the same poll in ten years, another film would be voted best I'll wager, and it would be just a few years old.
For me there are too many criteria to consider for the best film to be an easy answer. I'd probably say 'Metropolis' (Fritz Lang), although 'The Tramp' (Chaplin) was just as revolutionary, if in a different genre. Those are ancient films, and it's likely many people reading this have never seen them. They will have seen innumerable films inspired by them though. Serenity was inspired by many other films: Blade Runner, Logan's Run (well, I think so), even Star Wars (Malcolm Reynolds bears a striking similarity to Han Solo..). The list likely continues.
And you can't really count all of DirectX - certainly not OpenGL. DirectX is (at least was) very similar to OpenGL except, of course, only working on Windows.
I think I can. DirectX does do some of what opengl does, but it goes a lot further, including allowing the unloading of the windows gui, and bypassing the windows keyboard/mouse access systems(wow, I'm so technical...). Also it handles sound, and access to other area's of hardware, which opengl does not do.
WIndows sucked donkey wang for games before DirectX came out.
Personally I prefer opengl, but that's because I code first for linux, then port to windows. That and I have no need for anything but graphics+mouse+keyboard access in my visualisation software.
Two papers I wrote as a phd student are now behind pay for access portals, where they charge $30 for a single copy, or a subscription.
Do I get a penny of this? Nope, and do I get free access as the Author? Nope.
Did they ask for my permission? Nope.
Its the standard way papers are distributed in the academic world. I think it's unfair as it stands, although I recognise they have some need to recoup their storage/indexing costs.
Incidentally, I started my phd with the explicit requirement that all software instantiations of my research that I created were to be released under the GPL, and that no-one else had control over my findings. I had an understanding supervisor, and the prerequisites were accepted.
1: directX - first ever tool of its kind 2: microsoft office - not the first, but still good in itself (ignoring the shit they pulled). 3: the Xbox - much maligned, but still rather good. 4: the microsoft ergonomic keyboard - well, I liked it.
um, crap, I'm out.
Scraping the barrel here, not even sure if the keyboard counts.
simulations of the solar system using a Newtonian gravitational model of my own devising, currently just trying to get a stable representation of the Asteroid belt.
Working towards a model where I can establish the modelling mass (especially in cases where no mass is currently known) and velocity required for accurate representations of all the moons in the solar system, and accurately predict the future behaviour of Earth Crossing Asteroids.
and, for work:
Using evolutionary algorithms to evolve models that replicate the interactions between genes in Yeast (at least aproximatelly).
Discovery of significant motifs in Eukaryote DNA
I did try to write some software that would get me either
It does have a Posix layer, but IIRC they haven't implemented Pipes properly.
That's what I was told a few years ago anyway. Not that I've ever (I am ashamed to say) used pipes.
Those posix compliant apps I do write (as in all of them) recompile in windows for the windows builds I have to have without any re-editing of code. It's all low level C stuff though, nothing fancy.
It's not that they reject science. It's that it's hard, if not impossible, to advance into a career in science without being able to accept things on proof.
If you go into a science career with the idea that faith can be used as an explanation for anything you don't understand, then you're onto a loser. That wasn't the case in the past, as in for a couple of thousand years, but it is now.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking for myself, galaxy simulations. Especially galaxy collision.
[pardon me while I groove to this thought for a moment, Aaaahhh yeaaahh]
I would *love* to have this machine, oh god yes. As it is I have to wait several days for even small galaxy models to complete.
Oops, starting to drool....
YANALAY - You are not a lawyer, are you?
Nope, but like many computer scientists, law was a required portion of my course.
As far as I know, this question has not been definitively settled by any court rulings and there are no specific laws that say "thou shalt not copy a DVD to replace a damaged DVD." So it might be okay and it might not be okay. The MPAA and movie studios seem to think it is not okay. Expect a long, expensive fight that you *might* win if you'd like to assert the right to download DVDs as a means of obtaining a backup copy for a damaged copy.
There is fair use, you cannot be punished for making a single copy. However the DMCA (what a wonderful cockup that was) made it so you are breaking the law if you circumvent copy protection stuff to obtain the copy to which you are entitled. No court would say you can download an illegal copy to make a 'backup'. The thing is, you are downloading from an unauthorised distribution portal, you wouldn't win the argument. If it is a torrent you would have been uploading too, so your council would likely advise you to avoid that argument.
If you have not made a backup of a dvd/other media before it is damaged, then legally you're screwed. You have broken the copy you had a licence for, so you need to buy a new one. Getting a copy from elsewhere once yours is damaged may sound legal/fair, but it is most definitely not legal. Read the DMCA, its a crazy document (I had to, it's boring in places, but mostly an enlightening read)
On an unrelated note, whoeover developed the idea of a media license applying only to the provided medium (i.e. "you have a license for the intellectual property named movie A, but only on the disc you bought") was, I like to think, failed physicist who was always fascinated by wave/particle duality and so they developed their own version called media/medium duality.
Nope, the idea of money being for a single copy is as old as a jolly old thing. After all, buying a car does not give you the right to create new copies of that car, buying a book has not, for centuries, entitled you to make your own copies. Besides, when you buy a movie, you agree to their licence terms, and that clearly indicates that the licence is for the copy your purchased only.
'unlimited' is misused, I agree. So is 'innovation'.
There are often two meanings for words. The 'normal' one, and the business one.
Do you complain about "learn X language in 24 hours" books? It's a bullshit title if taken literally, but its a convention.
I have had a high speed unlimited connection for several years in my lab, Unlimited in almost every way. download speeds of up to 7 to 8 megabytes (yes, actual amount in normal megabytes downloaded) per second, sometimes I get 12 megabytes per second. 3 to four megabytes per second for upload, and no gigabyte cap.
That's what unlimited means to me, in terms of the intertubes. Not literally unlimited, but able to handle everything I throw at it.
I also have an 'unlimited' connection at home, and its slow (up to 700kb/sec download, usually 350, and 41kb/sec up), and people on the same service have been shaped if they use it too much. Both services are described as unlimited, but they clearly differ.
I bet if I could afford it I could have a connection as fast as my lab one at home, but It would cost a fortune.
No, when you purchase a dvd you are purchasing a licence for that copy alone, and that with very limited rights (no public performance, no redistribution etc).
If you ruin that dvd, the licence now relates to a destroyed product, it is effectively invalid. You have to buy a new licence to own another copy, which is normally by purchasing a new dvd.
If you have a single backup, then you can legally continue to use that, although media produces don't exactly make this single backup thing easy at the moment.
Nor can you download a ripped 'backup copy', because it is obtained through an unauthorised channel. It would be considered that the download was unrelated to the licence you purchased, and thus a separate infringement.
Your legal options are to:
1: Appeal to the manufacturer for a replacement copy (they just might).
2: Buy a new copy.
I think you are sort of right. However, lets look at a theoretical example:
You have two customers, one is a light net user. They like to send photo's of their kids around on email to the rest of their family, spread all over the world, and use email as the main means of communicating between their extended family. They shop online, and like to hunt around for cheap flights/holidays. Perhaps they buy the odd small game on-line for the kids.
The other customer is a gamer. They like to play on-line for many hours a day. They download multi gigabyte demos, and have a steam account that they use a lot. They spend a lot of time on Youtube, and use mail and msn constantly.
The first customer can be given a moderatelly capped servive for, say thirty bucks a month (don't know the real US pricing). No problems will arise, they have what they need, you get their money.
The second customer can pay fifty bucks and have a much higher limit, say 100Gb. Even the most intense gamer or movie purchaser is unlikely to exceed that. If they do, you charge in blocks of 10gb, and if it happens a lot, suggest they go to 150Gb, and pay more.
By having a sliding scale of charges you avoid the unfairness of having light users paying the same, or close to the same, as heavy users.
I know many heavy users point at the contracts they got that say unlimited, and wave fists about angrily, but, lets be honest here, few people who download hundreds of gigabytes a month are getting all legal stuff at present. To be frank, it isn't fair that I have to pay the same as someone else who rapes the tubes constantly.
I have an 'unlimited' service, but my ISP looks at their customers with an eye to finding people who download much more then the others, and shifts them to shaped lines, or kicks them to a higher cost service. I can, and have, transferred tens of gigabytes of data around in recent months, I have to. However I am considerate and do it at night, and I cap my transfers so it doesn't max out my line. Although I definitely will show up with a high usage for a short while, on average I still behave myself, and have not been slapped.
its all down to the definition. A 'normal' user, reading pages, and sending/receiving email, would see 5gb as more then they would use. Someone with greater needs, such as to download large files, would see 5gb as barely adequate. Hell, even re installing a Steam account on your computer could fill that in a day.
That aside, the thing is that companies like Verizon have seen their old pricing model prove inadequate over time, and they want to distance themselves from the previous model. The interweb was such that only people downloading illegally were exceeding their previously undefined upper limit. I would imagine they got the 5gb value by doing some data mining on their customers. I'd bet that most never go near 5gb.
I imagine they know people will soon start buying movies and other large media online as a matter of course, and they want to be able to charge for 'premium' access. The best way to achieve that is show that they are taking action now against heavy downloaders, demonstrating the need for different levels of access, so they cannot be accused of suddenly instituting a new system for the sake of profit only.
I would cope with metered access, if it meant no hassle when I did transfer a lot. I do often have to transfer large amounts of data between home and my lab overnight.
Hows about a little bit more detail on point 2 there? I'm immensely curious.
I always thought it was just that the Iranians themselves had decided to wait until the next president was in before releasing the hostages.
worrying about the amount of ram used is normally a gamers thing.
It's a throwback from not too long ago when most systems didn't have much ram, and you had to unload stuff to get games working well, which I am sure you recall.
270Mb being used for fast loading of apps seems reasonable to me, if the system has loads left over for the users important stuff, like games, or can cut the amount down if a user app needs that ram for something.
This is all academic to me, don't own Vista, won't own Vista, I have no use for it
It's not an opinion, in almost all countries, it is a fact that ignorance of the law cannot be used as a defence in court.
one slight problem with your analysis. I don't own a television.
Why? Because I was married to a lazy biatch who sat in front of it and neglected our child for years before I finally divorced her and got my kid.
Since then I haven't been able to stand television. For my SF video needs I rely on getting dvds of series I particularly want.
You will note that I specified 'custodial'
If the US executed him for this, well then they would be damning themselves, to be frank.
not really, I don't drive.
However, I make a point of not buying anything that pisses me off through obtrusive advertising.
Anyone else around here sick of all the ads we get bombarded with on a nearly constant basis?
Not really.
I use adblock while web browsing, and any site that manages to piss me off with lots of advertising never gets visited twice.
And yet I am still, through my own targeted browsing, led to devices/things I wish to purchase on-line.
I guess this is because, contrary to the statistically defined web browsing individual, I am in fact already aware of the things I want to buy, and quite capable of convincing myself as to their usefulness.
P.K. Dicks books are perhaps among the most significant of recent SF novels, but they aren't exactly easy for the lay reader to grasp. Personally I'm still trying to understand 'Galactic Pot Healer'. I'm on my second attempt now.
I'm from the UK.
Frankly, he was a jerk to think that breaking into US military computers was a wise thing to do.
Ignorance of the law is no defence, he should face the full (custodial) penalty of the US over this offence. Perhaps that isn't the cool thing to say, but it's true.
Back about 10 to 15 years or so ago (can't recall the exact year), there was a 'best single of all time' thing run by the bbc. As it turns out 'I Owe You Nothing' by Bros was voted to number one.
This was patently shit, since it was god awful. Who even remembers it now?
The point was that the people most interested in voting were the young, single obsessed audience, and they were currently having wet dreams about Bros.
This is more of the same. Don't get me wrong, I am a real fan of Firefly. I would never say Serenity was a best film of all time though (I'd go for best SF film of the last decade). If they ran the same poll in ten years, another film would be voted best I'll wager, and it would be just a few years old.
For me there are too many criteria to consider for the best film to be an easy answer. I'd probably say 'Metropolis' (Fritz Lang), although 'The Tramp' (Chaplin) was just as revolutionary, if in a different genre. Those are ancient films, and it's likely many people reading this have never seen them. They will have seen innumerable films inspired by them though. Serenity was inspired by many other films: Blade Runner, Logan's Run (well, I think so), even Star Wars (Malcolm Reynolds bears a striking similarity to Han Solo..). The list likely continues.
Darn you and your calm and correct answers.
Foiled again..
And you can't really count all of DirectX - certainly not OpenGL. DirectX is (at least was) very similar to OpenGL except, of course, only working on Windows.
I think I can. DirectX does do some of what opengl does, but it goes a lot further, including allowing the unloading of the windows gui, and bypassing the windows keyboard/mouse access systems(wow, I'm so technical...). Also it handles sound, and access to other area's of hardware, which opengl does not do.
WIndows sucked donkey wang for games before DirectX came out.
Personally I prefer opengl, but that's because I code first for linux, then port to windows. That and I have no need for anything but graphics+mouse+keyboard access in my visualisation software.
Two papers I wrote as a phd student are now behind pay for access portals, where they charge $30 for a single copy, or a subscription.
Do I get a penny of this? Nope, and do I get free access as the Author? Nope.
Did they ask for my permission? Nope.
Its the standard way papers are distributed in the academic world. I think it's unfair as it stands, although I recognise they have some need to recoup their storage/indexing costs.
Incidentally, I started my phd with the explicit requirement that all software instantiations of my research that I created were to be released under the GPL, and that no-one else had control over my findings. I had an understanding supervisor, and the prerequisites were accepted.
I'll take that dare..
1: directX - first ever tool of its kind
2: microsoft office - not the first, but still good in itself (ignoring the shit they pulled).
3: the Xbox - much maligned, but still rather good.
4: the microsoft ergonomic keyboard - well, I liked it.
um, crap, I'm out.
Scraping the barrel here, not even sure if the keyboard counts.
For fun:
http://code.google.com/p/nmod/
and, for work:
I did try to write some software that would get me either
or
No luck there as yet...
even trivial java apps aren't necessarily "easy" to get running on more than on OS
Especially not in windows when the bleedin' classpath hasn't been set up correctly..
I have too, but isn't that using the cygwinX libs? That's not really porting
It does have a Posix layer, but IIRC they haven't implemented Pipes properly.
That's what I was told a few years ago anyway. Not that I've ever (I am ashamed to say) used pipes.
Those posix compliant apps I do write (as in all of them) recompile in windows for the windows builds I have to have without any re-editing of code. It's all low level C stuff though, nothing fancy.
It's not that they reject science. It's that it's hard, if not impossible, to advance into a career in science without being able to accept things on proof.
If you go into a science career with the idea that faith can be used as an explanation for anything you don't understand, then you're onto a loser. That wasn't the case in the past, as in for a couple of thousand years, but it is now.