Care to back this up? (sound of crickets chirping)
The use of analogy technology to make copies is lawful whether the source material is encrypted or not.
Actually, no. Maybe my copy of the DMCA is outdated, but I see no "analog hole" in section 103. They would have you believe that there is such an exemption, but there isn't. Circumvent Macrovision and you're in violation. There goes your right to fair use.
Why doesn't this run counter to the doctrine of fair use? Because that doctrine does not give you the right to make perfect copies. It merely gives you the right to make copies. Prohibiting the making of perfect copies while allowing the making of imperfect copies is not a problem as far as fair use is concerned.
Since you didn't just pull this out of your a^Hhat, you'll have no problem coming up with references. Btw, great great great grandparent wasn't talking about perfect copies, but recompressed ones. These are lossy anyway.
Sorry, I must have an out-of-date copy of the United States Code here. Because mine doesn't say anything about the doctrine of fair use guaranteeing anybody the right to make perfect digital copies of copyrighted works.
US law 101: That which isn't explicitely forbidden, is allowed. But US (and European) copyright law even explicitely allows making full copies of music recordings for private use, including giving them to friends and family. There's no exemption for digital copies. The DMCA changed that by disallowing circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms, allowing rights holders to make perfectly ok fair use illegal simply by adding even the most ridiculous technical protection.
Nope. By definition, if it's illegal, then it's not legitimate.
I challenge you to quote one relevant philosopher who can back this funny statement up. Btw this defense didn't work too well at the Nuremberg trials.
Rationalize all you want. The point is that the poster was talking about piracy. You might try to throw up a "but what about this? or this? or this?" smokescreen but that isn't going to fool anybody.
For one, you're probably right. Duplicating play-, err, copy-protected DVDs (may I remind the f*@!#/ing MPAA that thanks to the new laws they bought, it is now a crime to watch DVDs under Linux?) using a grid is unlikely to be done for personal use (e.g. geting a backup copy, or a copy without the CSS, Macrovision and region code bullshit). But then, why should I care after all the crap that RIAA and MPAA spew out? What about the corruption, the oligopolist practices and the lies? Why am I to believe them anything any more? Sorry, dude, no pity from me, they can fsck themselves and go to hell.
Actually, I stopped using P2P altogether and don't copy music/films otherwise, and I also quit buying/renting/viewing(in the cinema) anything remotely associated with the Music And Film Industry Association (MAFIA). They are - legally - not going to see a single cent of mine in the next few years, and I wish them a quick and painful death. (ok, that may be an oxymoron)
I propose a compute-intensive stamp for posting to slashdot, instead of the retarded delays we currently have. Why not one of those obfuscated words, like when you sign up for a free email account? That way illiterate asshats like yourself won't clutter up the conversation!
This wouldn't be a problem if moderators actually RTFA'ed and FTFL'ed (followed the f..., err, fine links).
That would be great - people who don't patch their machine will receive lots of spam, while everyone else is unaffected. Finally, a system that punishes the right ones, and that way encourages them to use this funny "Security Update" feature.
In fact, it was a Linux machine at a company called Mainsoft that got hacked which resulted in that Windows source leak.
I've seen no evidence about it being hacked, it's also possible that somebody who had access to the machines copied it deliberately, or that the hard drive was stolen or thrown away without first thoroughly deleting it. There's a lot of disinformation around, including the claim that this was caused by "Linux crashing". First, the core dump that circulated is not from Linux crashing, but from a user land application (more specifically, ViM) crashing on a Linux box, and secondly, you can't hack a crashed box, so this is just complete BS. You would have to hack it after it goes up and online again.
Addendum: It's hard to get first-hand information on the web, but I've just run into a claim that an unpatched wu-ftpd running on Linux was hacked. If that's true, then first of all, it's just damn careless to put critical information like this on an Internet server, and second, it wouldn't be the fault of Linux, but of the notoriously insecure wu-ftpd, which happens to run on Windows as well.
Everyone who's used Windows 95 or Windows 98 knows that TCP/IP is a Microsoft Protocol. They came up with it right after Al Gore invented the Internet and the anti-gravity hovercraft.
if it brags about the strength of their stranglehold on customers? That will just make more people wary of Microsoft's strategy and increase the demand for more interoperable, vendor-independent solutions.
is more insightful than funny. Figuring out code of such a large project could be everything but trivial, especially if they release only the source, but no additional developers' documentation.
Their refusal to work with popular free information formats such as ogg and png also shows their preference for pushing their own junk over the wishes of their users.
There isn't a lot of demand for PNG and OGG outside the OSS world, period. PNG is somewhat popular among web designers because of its versatility, but that's all, and no one apart from open source fans and a handful of entertainment electronics vendors gives a flying fuck about OGG Vorbis.
Like all FUD, it relies on most people's ignorance of the details and gullibility (hey, it's a large American organization, they can't be wrong, can they?):
The offered downloads are without the authorisation of the respective rights holders and therefore infringe copyright,
No one ever claimed that they have the authorisation of the "rights holders" (the people who hold the rights in the USA, not in Russia). But allofmp3.com doesn't need it. More specifically, the Russian acceptance of US copyrights is based on the Berne Convention, which Russia didn't ratify until May 1995. US works that precede this date were - in Russia - placed in the public domain, which means: bad luck for IFPI/MIPI. allofmp3.com may offer these without even paying royalties (I'm not sure whether they do anyway). For more recent music pieces, allofmp3.com does not require a permission by the copyright holder (e.g. the US label) either. but they have to pay royalties to the russian collection society, ROMS, which in turn pays most of the royalties to the labels. They do, so no problem here either.
So it looks like allofmp3 is not infringing on any rights that US labels actually have, but only on rights that they would like to have. It's up to the MIPI, IFPI, RIAA and how they're all called to put their money where their mouth is and actually sue allofmp3.com. After all, if they are right, it should be easy to stop their business, shouldn't it?
The fact remains that none of your "few cents per song" is making it to the artists or record companies.
Wrong, allofmp3.com pays ROMS (the Russian collection society) royalties, which in turn makes it to the labels, and sometimes even the artists. MIPI is not upset about getting no royalties, they're upset about getting - in their eyes - too little. I mean, think about it, they even want iTMS to sell songs at $1.49 instead of the already expensive $0.99. In Europe, they want to charge 1.49 Euro, or another 20% more.
Re:Is a GNU/Linux biz feasible?
on
Linux in Iraq
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· Score: 1
A business based on hate and fear is not going to work out. If it would, people could get rich by selling, like, guns.
Re:Is a GNU/Linux biz feasible?
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 1
white people are not the devils, savages that fire weapons in the air at weddings... are.
Ah, ok, please put us Germans on the list of savage devils for our kids (esp. the boys) love to fire toy guns on carnival. Btw, what about (mostly white, I guess?) pilots who drop bombs and missiles on those wedding guests, killing dozens of them? Are they heroes? D'oh, I think I'll stop getting vexed about your post and just add you to the long list of stupid Americans. Ever wondered why the world hates the US? Reading your post, I certainly don't.
Since key frames are usually a fixed number of frames apart
Not quite. The key frame interval tends to be a maximum. E.g. you tell the codec "insert a key frame at least every 50th frame". The codec however is free to insert more key frames if it feels like it. Of course, it doesn't do this just for fun, but because the delta frame compresses too badly, so it could just as well (or better) compress the entire frame. This is typically the case between different shots, so the first frame of each shot will be a key frame.
On the one hand, this means that your keyframe locations will - at first - be unpredictable. On the other, you can perform a quick check for suitable keyframe positions before handing the subtasks out to different machines, plus, you can also split the work up into blocks of x frames and render each block seperately, and then append them. This works fine since that way, each block will start with a key frame. The only disadvantage is that key frame placement may be suboptimal, causing a slight increase in movie size. The most extreme case would be single-frame blocks, which would mean that every frame is a key frame, and thus your compression is no better than MJPEG.;)
I'd rather develop software for a specific platform, and then let the various OS's figure out how to run it.
For one, you are right. It's so much simpler and more cost-efficient to target a single platform. But then, you miss a very crucial point: Platforms and operating systems are not the same! Let me give you a few examples:
Microsoft Windows 98 is an operating system. So is MS Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server.
Win32 is a platform (an API) that runs on (among others) Win98, WinME, W2K, WinXP, W2K3 etc., and, to a degree, WINE and relatives. The Windows NT API is a platform that only runs on the NT line of OSes.
MFC is a platform. mostly Windows-specific, too.
GNU/Linux is an OS.
ISO C is a platform supported by a myriad of OSes.
Java is a platform that runs on modern MS Windows OSes, GNU/Linux, MacOS X, FreeBSD, Solaris (of course) etc.
Actually, it's a little more complicated than that still. A platform is an interface as well as an implementation. The interface may be free (as in speech) or proprietary. There may be one or several implementations which are free (GPL may not be free enough for your purposes) or proprietary, and there may be monopolies. And interfaces may be binary compatible (ABI) or only source code compatible (API). So Java is a free platform ABI, while Sun JRE is a proprietary implementation of it.
What this boils down to is: If you (e.g.) switch from MFC to wxWidgets, you are not switching from "one platform" to "many platforms", with all the code development and maintenance horrors involved in such a transition. You are switching from one platform to another platform, nothing more, nothing less! If you find wxWidgets easier to develop for, you may even save time and money in developing your product.
What do you gain apart from that? Simple. MFC is a proprietary platform that runs (fully) only on Microsoft Windows operating systems. wxWidgets is a free (LGPL) platform that runs on all relevant desktop operating systems. It's not ABI-compatible, but API-compatible, so all you need to do to support a different OS, barring other subleties that unfortunately do occur from time to time, is to recompile it for that other OS. ABI platforms such as Java make porting even easier.
You are entirely correct that it's better to target a single platform. But you are not correct in your conclusion that this platform ought to be the Microsoft Windows for x86 processors ABI. If you target this platform, you will sacrifice portability to a wide range of other operating systems and processor architectures. Plus, the only full implementation is proprietary, and worse, the interface itself may soon be patent-protected, thus barring competing implementations. This means you make yourself dependent on a single platform vendor, and that is, IMO, a mistake.
Come on... it's probably only soaked with the preservative surrounding it. And the glass makes it look bigger than it actually is. Also, the lady in the photo is probably just 4'8" so that gives the viewer a false sense of proportions.
I already loved their open source versions of Windows NT and Windows 2000. Can't wait to see more of this stuff, though it would be even nicer if they set up some kind of official download server, and maybe a VCS repository.
Yes the adds can be be a tad annoying but I get a very good email and IM service for free so I am not going to complain.
And I will use Jabber for free, without the ads, and without the lock-outs, and I am not going to complain. Sheesh. It's not like their servers would cost them billions. I'd be ready to pay let's say 5 dollars per year (way more than their servers cost them per user) for a reliable, 100% interoperable IM service, so don't make it look like Trillian/GAIM users were ripoffs (yes, I've seen this kind of argument). However, for sad business-political reasons, that's not going to happen, Jabber gateways will have to deal with the same protocol problems as third-party IM clients. Yahoo! wants to use extortion to maximize their profit. This behavior is legitimate, but I don't need to support it.
Slashdot Mirror
Copies, yes. Perfect digital reproductions, no.
Care to back this up? (sound of crickets chirping)
The use of analogy technology to make copies is lawful whether the source material is encrypted or not.
Actually, no. Maybe my copy of the DMCA is outdated, but I see no "analog hole" in section 103. They would have you believe that there is such an exemption, but there isn't. Circumvent Macrovision and you're in violation. There goes your right to fair use.
Why doesn't this run counter to the doctrine of fair use? Because that doctrine does not give you the right to make perfect copies. It merely gives you the right to make copies. Prohibiting the making of perfect copies while allowing the making of imperfect copies is not a problem as far as fair use is concerned.
Since you didn't just pull this out of your a^Hhat, you'll have no problem coming up with references. Btw, great great great grandparent wasn't talking about perfect copies, but recompressed ones. These are lossy anyway.
Sorry, I must have an out-of-date copy of the United States Code here. Because mine doesn't say anything about the doctrine of fair use guaranteeing anybody the right to make perfect digital copies of copyrighted works.
US law 101: That which isn't explicitely forbidden, is allowed. But US (and European) copyright law even explicitely allows making full copies of music recordings for private use, including giving them to friends and family. There's no exemption for digital copies. The DMCA changed that by disallowing circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms, allowing rights holders to make perfectly ok fair use illegal simply by adding even the most ridiculous technical protection.
Nope. By definition, if it's illegal, then it's not legitimate.
I challenge you to quote one relevant philosopher who can back this funny statement up. Btw this defense didn't work too well at the Nuremberg trials.
Rationalize all you want. The point is that the poster was talking about piracy. You might try to throw up a "but what about this? or this? or this?" smokescreen but that isn't going to fool anybody.
For one, you're probably right. Duplicating play-, err, copy-protected DVDs (may I remind the f*@!#/ing MPAA that thanks to the new laws they bought, it is now a crime to watch DVDs under Linux?) using a grid is unlikely to be done for personal use (e.g. geting a backup copy, or a copy without the CSS, Macrovision and region code bullshit). But then, why should I care after all the crap that RIAA and MPAA spew out? What about the corruption, the oligopolist practices and the lies? Why am I to believe them anything any more? Sorry, dude, no pity from me, they can fsck themselves and go to hell.
Actually, I stopped using P2P altogether and don't copy music/films otherwise, and I also quit buying/renting/viewing(in the cinema) anything remotely associated with the Music And Film Industry Association (MAFIA). They are - legally - not going to see a single cent of mine in the next few years, and I wish them a quick and painful death. (ok, that may be an oxymoron)
I propose a compute-intensive stamp for posting to slashdot, instead of the retarded delays we currently have. Why not one of those obfuscated words, like when you sign up for a free email account? That way illiterate asshats like yourself won't clutter up the conversation!
This wouldn't be a problem if moderators actually RTFA'ed and FTFL'ed (followed the f..., err, fine links).
Long live spimming...
That would be great - people who don't patch their machine will receive lots of spam, while everyone else is unaffected. Finally, a system that punishes the right ones, and that way encourages them to use this funny "Security Update" feature.
I'm all for fining the company who's product is advertised. $100 per reported spam.
Yes, this would make Joe jobbing so much more fun.
In fact, it was a Linux machine at a company called Mainsoft that got hacked which resulted in that Windows source leak.
I've seen no evidence about it being hacked, it's also possible that somebody who had access to the machines copied it deliberately, or that the hard drive was stolen or thrown away without first thoroughly deleting it. There's a lot of disinformation around, including the claim that this was caused by "Linux crashing". First, the core dump that circulated is not from Linux crashing, but from a user land application (more specifically, ViM) crashing on a Linux box, and secondly, you can't hack a crashed box, so this is just complete BS. You would have to hack it after it goes up and online again.
Addendum: It's hard to get first-hand information on the web, but I've just run into a claim that an unpatched wu-ftpd running on Linux was hacked. If that's true, then first of all, it's just damn careless to put critical information like this on an Internet server, and second, it wouldn't be the fault of Linux, but of the notoriously insecure wu-ftpd, which happens to run on Windows as well.
Everyone who's used Windows 95 or Windows 98 knows that TCP/IP is a Microsoft Protocol. They came up with it right after Al Gore invented the Internet and the anti-gravity hovercraft.
if it brags about the strength of their stranglehold on customers? That will just make more people wary of Microsoft's strategy and increase the demand for more interoperable, vendor-independent solutions.
is more insightful than funny. Figuring out code of such a large project could be everything but trivial, especially if they release only the source, but no additional developers' documentation.
my screen can show me bigger boobies than your girlfriend ever will. ;)
Their refusal to work with popular free information formats such as ogg and png also shows their preference for pushing their own junk over the wishes of their users.
There isn't a lot of demand for PNG and OGG outside the OSS world, period. PNG is somewhat popular among web designers because of its versatility, but that's all, and no one apart from open source fans and a handful of entertainment electronics vendors gives a flying fuck about OGG Vorbis.
Like all FUD, it relies on most people's ignorance of the details and gullibility (hey, it's a large American organization, they can't be wrong, can they?):
The offered downloads are without the authorisation of the respective rights holders and therefore infringe copyright,
No one ever claimed that they have the authorisation of the "rights holders" (the people who hold the rights in the USA, not in Russia). But allofmp3.com doesn't need it. More specifically, the Russian acceptance of US copyrights is based on the Berne Convention, which Russia didn't ratify until May 1995. US works that precede this date were - in Russia - placed in the public domain, which means: bad luck for IFPI/MIPI. allofmp3.com may offer these without even paying royalties (I'm not sure whether they do anyway). For more recent music pieces, allofmp3.com does not require a permission by the copyright holder (e.g. the US label) either. but they have to pay royalties to the russian collection society, ROMS, which in turn pays most of the royalties to the labels. They do, so no problem here either.
So it looks like allofmp3 is not infringing on any rights that US labels actually have, but only on rights that they would like to have. It's up to the MIPI, IFPI, RIAA and how they're all called to put their money where their mouth is and actually sue allofmp3.com. After all, if they are right, it should be easy to stop their business, shouldn't it?
The fact remains that none of your "few cents per song" is making it to the artists or record companies.
Wrong, allofmp3.com pays ROMS (the Russian collection society) royalties, which in turn makes it to the labels, and sometimes even the artists. MIPI is not upset about getting no royalties, they're upset about getting - in their eyes - too little. I mean, think about it, they even want iTMS to sell songs at $1.49 instead of the already expensive $0.99. In Europe, they want to charge 1.49 Euro, or another 20% more.
A business based on hate and fear is not going to work out. If it would, people could get rich by selling, like, guns.
white people are not the devils, savages that fire weapons in the air at weddings ... are.
Ah, ok, please put us Germans on the list of savage devils for our kids (esp. the boys) love to fire toy guns on carnival. Btw, what about (mostly white, I guess?) pilots who drop bombs and missiles on those wedding guests, killing dozens of them? Are they heroes? D'oh, I think I'll stop getting vexed about your post and just add you to the long list of stupid Americans. Ever wondered why the world hates the US? Reading your post, I certainly don't.
Since key frames are usually a fixed number of frames apart
Not quite. The key frame interval tends to be a maximum. E.g. you tell the codec "insert a key frame at least every 50th frame". The codec however is free to insert more key frames if it feels like it. Of course, it doesn't do this just for fun, but because the delta frame compresses too badly, so it could just as well (or better) compress the entire frame. This is typically the case between different shots, so the first frame of each shot will be a key frame.
On the one hand, this means that your keyframe locations will - at first - be unpredictable. On the other, you can perform a quick check for suitable keyframe positions before handing the subtasks out to different machines, plus, you can also split the work up into blocks of x frames and render each block seperately, and then append them. This works fine since that way, each block will start with a key frame. The only disadvantage is that key frame placement may be suboptimal, causing a slight increase in movie size. The most extreme case would be single-frame blocks, which would mean that every frame is a key frame, and thus your compression is no better than MJPEG. ;)
I agree with the quote.
I'd rather develop software for a specific platform, and then let the various OS's figure out how to run it.
For one, you are right. It's so much simpler and more cost-efficient to target a single platform. But then, you miss a very crucial point: Platforms and operating systems are not the same! Let me give you a few examples:
Actually, it's a little more complicated than that still. A platform is an interface as well as an implementation. The interface may be free (as in speech) or proprietary. There may be one or several implementations which are free (GPL may not be free enough for your purposes) or proprietary, and there may be monopolies. And interfaces may be binary compatible (ABI) or only source code compatible (API). So Java is a free platform ABI, while Sun JRE is a proprietary implementation of it.
What this boils down to is: If you (e.g.) switch from MFC to wxWidgets, you are not switching from "one platform" to "many platforms", with all the code development and maintenance horrors involved in such a transition. You are switching from one platform to another platform, nothing more, nothing less! If you find wxWidgets easier to develop for, you may even save time and money in developing your product.
What do you gain apart from that? Simple. MFC is a proprietary platform that runs (fully) only on Microsoft Windows operating systems. wxWidgets is a free (LGPL) platform that runs on all relevant desktop operating systems. It's not ABI-compatible, but API-compatible, so all you need to do to support a different OS, barring other subleties that unfortunately do occur from time to time, is to recompile it for that other OS. ABI platforms such as Java make porting even easier.
You are entirely correct that it's better to target a single platform. But you are not correct in your conclusion that this platform ought to be the Microsoft Windows for x86 processors ABI. If you target this platform, you will sacrifice portability to a wide range of other operating systems and processor architectures. Plus, the only full implementation is proprietary, and worse, the interface itself may soon be patent-protected, thus barring competing implementations. This means you make yourself dependent on a single platform vendor, and that is, IMO, a mistake.
Are you sure that your penis contains muscles?
why hasn't my boyfriend got one that big?
Come on... it's probably only soaked with the preservative surrounding it. And the glass makes it look bigger than it actually is. Also, the lady in the photo is probably just 4'8" so that gives the viewer a false sense of proportions.
the Ken Brown abombination
Please... you can blame lots of things on Kenneth Brown, but he did not bomb the nation.
I already loved their open source versions of Windows NT and Windows 2000. Can't wait to see more of this stuff, though it would be even nicer if they set up some kind of official download server, and maybe a VCS repository.
Yes the adds can be be a tad annoying but I get a very good email and IM service for free so I am not going to complain.
And I will use Jabber for free, without the ads, and without the lock-outs, and I am not going to complain. Sheesh. It's not like their servers would cost them billions. I'd be ready to pay let's say 5 dollars per year (way more than their servers cost them per user) for a reliable, 100% interoperable IM service, so don't make it look like Trillian/GAIM users were ripoffs (yes, I've seen this kind of argument). However, for sad business-political reasons, that's not going to happen, Jabber gateways will have to deal with the same protocol problems as third-party IM clients. Yahoo! wants to use extortion to maximize their profit. This behavior is legitimate, but I don't need to support it.
i know there are ways around it, but it's just easier to use screen and put all our effort into the chemistry part of the programming.
Actually, in a *nix C program, all you need to do is ignore SIGHUP.
#include <signal.h>
...
int main() {
signal(SIGHUP, SIG_IGN);
}
Well, it can't be an organized thing, since Microsoft is very rigorous about its business ethics.