I knew exactly what he was referring too and it is still a dumbass point for a variety of reasons:
a) Relies on security through obscurity, so if a dedicated hacker reverse engineers a vulnerability in the nvidia proprietary driver, it will never get fixed unless the vulnerability is used in a virus or something widespread enough to get noticed by nvidia versus getting the many eyeballs effect and possibly nipping it in the bud before an exploit is ever created.
b) As you point out, applicable to, in lesser and greater degrees, ALL programmable i/o devices.
c) Correctly implemented drivers are suppossed to prevent exactly that kind of exploit. 10 to 1, nvidia's linux engineers are nowhere near as akamai as Linus's lieutenants and the chance of an incorrectly implemented driver getting past nvidia QA is higher than getting it past Linus and his chain of command.
If the drivers were free software someone skilled enough would hack the missing features. Isn't about time to nVidia change its mind and release the sources?
Tell that to David Kirk nvidia's chief scientist whose, "sense is that developers on those platforms are quite happy with our efforts" as a justification for not going open source. Plus some totally bizarro bullshit about "hackers tak[ing] bad advantage of raw hardware interfaces."
It is telling that he did not pull out the old, tried and true "competition sensitive" bullshit that so many hardware vendors have been hiding behind since day one.
The point is, you provided no supporting evidence for your statement about the theater's take, you could have just asily been "making up facts to justify your position" just as the poster you were bitching about failed to do so as well. Unlike either of you, I spent the 30 seconds to find and cite a reasonably reliable source for actual numbers. Thus answering the question DEFINITIVELY.
Meanwhile I criticized the rest of your posting because just being right about one, really unrelated fact does not in any way validate the rest of your post which is entirely old hat - a rant that has been made MANY times before here and debunked just as many times. If you can't bring something new to the table, at the very least, bring supporting evidence for what you do have. Unless, of course, you are just another "slashbot" yourself.
I interviewed the FBI at SeattleWireless TV, and the agent I talked to said he hadn't seen any attempted attacks.
I should probably get an update and post it.
Are you nuts? Let sleeping lions lie. Even if the agent you talk to has no 'political' aspirations, even if his boss doesn't either, all it takes is for the right idiot to get the wrong idea and we're off on a new crusade agaisnt freedom.
The wire fraud statute was the Fed's best case against LaMacchia and after losing on it, they did not persue him under any other charges. So, literally, the LaMacchia ruling did not say it is completely legal to share, but IN EFFECT the case and the circumstances around it made that very clear.
If it were not so, there would have been no reason to pass the NET Theft Act which was widely referred to as the "LaMacchia Bill."
Since when has stealing EVER been allowed? Yes, it is stealing if you download a song which you have not paid for. You can whine about information wanting to be free and how you wouldn't have bought the album/song anyway but it's still stealing. You didn't pay for it. Period.
Since just until 1997.
Yeah, go ahead and call it stealing if it makes you feel righteous, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that up until the 'No Electronic Theft (NET) Act' was enacted on December 17th, 1997 it was COMPLETELY LEGAL to download and make available for download, a song, or a movie, or software for which you have not paid for. PERIOD.
Don't believe me and not smart enough to read the bill yourself? Just google for LaMacchia, the guy whose prior case proved that such sharing was NOT ILLEGAL.
did you think that all that scary talk about being arrested and jailed for your opinions (or for even visiting web sites where you can read someone else's opinions) was just Republicans trying to make socialists look bad?
Where have you been? China isn't socialist, it`s fascist, true fascism as envisioned by Benito Mussolini when he said, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
Consquently, the republicans in this country absolutely LUV China today. At least the ones who have abondoned their principles of democracy and freedom in favor of Big Business which seems to be most of the lot.
Cite: CNN circa 2002 During the film's opening week, the studio might take 70 to 80 percent of gross box office sales. By the fifth or sixth week, the percentage the studio takes will likely shrink to about 35 percent.
Unfortunately for you, the rest of your tired rant does not follow.
I beg to differ. I see it as completely greendiculous, also known as gangrene of the penis. Rediculous just means you overdid things a little bit, too much fun is all.
I *always* read Slashdot with Firefox and it always looks fine to me...
What you are saying is that you don't read slashdot over a slow or congested link. Either that, or you use an unofficial build that has the workaround already in it. I suspect that in your case it is the former, you probably read slashdot from the same network as the servers with gigabit link between you and them.
The problem is related to firefox guessing the layout of the page before all the elements are loaded. With slashdot, there is a race condition causing firefox to guess wrong and thus the end result often looks like crap. Apparently the problem is at least partly due to slashdot's poor W3C standards compliance.
This problem is long running, as in years long, so it is a bit dismaying to hear that you, and apparently the rest of the people at slashdot are not even aware of the issue. God knows it usually gets posted about and rated up to a 3 at least once per day.
If you believe that copyright is a law of property right, like real property rights, then I'm sure you would have no problem accepting the limitations of real property rights too - namely that you can sell said property once and only once.
According to a recent article in the Economist, since joining the WTPO and putting those laws on the books, things got "worse" not better. Primarily because of two factors - huge increases in companies doing business and little funding of the agencies that are suppossed to enforce those laws.
If you know the history of the West trying to do business in China, that result was no surprise. Whether it is a cultural difference or not, Western businesses have often entered into agreements with Chinese businesses only to have the Chinese "end of the bargain" dropped. In essence, in joining the WTPO, China said "yes, we will agree to all of your rules, wink, wink, nudge, nudge."
Thus, it is the actual enforcement of the rules, not the creation of them, that signifies a (possible) sea-change in China's approach towards intellectual property. We'll know in a year or so if this recent activity was just a dog and pony show for the secretary of commerce, or an actual change in chinese market philosophy.
The entertainment elite are constantly given free stuff in the hope that their wearing/using/talking about it will promote the product.
It's a truism in hollywood that nobody will give a dime to struggling actors who could really use a hand, but once they make it big and don't need anything from anyone, they are practically buried in freebies - free clothes, free cars, free tickets, free jewelry, free beer, you name it they get it all for free.
For one - from China's point of view economics and politics are the same thing. That's why it was the secretary of commerce that came a visiting.
For two - They have been selling their patent-scofflaw players in the USA for years already with the 3C (MPEG patent stuff) fees at $20 and the 5C (copy prevention patent stuff) fees at around $10, there is no way places like wal-mart and circuit city could carry players at ~$50 retail that were fully patent-kosher.
In the past, a lot of "no-name" DVD players were manufactured by chinese companies that just flat out ignored the patents held by the DVD consortium.
By going to court over the issue, these companies are tacitly accepting the western-style patent regime that the USA is trying to force on the rest of the world.
Bush is a bad president because this money, which was donated by citizens and corporations explicitly for the inauguration, should go to the Iraq war.
Bush is a bad president because all of this fru-fru pomp and circumstance is inappropriate when the country is at war. Life should not go on like normal for the people responsible for sending the military out to risk life and limb. Celebrate when the killing is over.
If Kerry, or even Dean had won and were doing the same thing I'd say the same thing.
Is there some sort of university program I'm not aware of, pumping out mindless peons by the thousands each year so they can make the same mistake as others did last year?
Yeah, its called the public school system.
How many schools even have a "home ec" course anymore? And of those, how many actually teach useful modern information like how to balance a checkbook, how to read a credit card statement, how to keep a budget, how to compute interest, how to critically read an advertisement, etc? From what I can tell, the answer is almost zero. People need a firm grounding in basic, day-to-day economics and high school is the place it ought to happen - it certainly will be more useful to 90+% of the students than memorizing the dates of the civil war...
Short story we call the Better Business Beurau. NewEgg pulled some shinanigans and got the BBB to close the case as "customer satisfied.
Follow the money - the BBB is 100% funded by "member" businesses. They have a clear conflict of interest when resolving disputes and stores like yours are all too common.
I think the BBB must be a division of DeBeers considering how amazingly good a rep they have and have been able to maintain over the decades of duplicity.
This allows the police to make an arrest whether the victim wants it or not.
Slight correction:
This REQUIRES the police to make an arrest whether the alledged victim wants it or not.
I've seen a brother-in-law hauled off because the two were having a caterwaul of a screaming match and some neighbor called it in. No actual violence, but more importantly no witnessed violence and no evidence of violence, but the cops told her that they were required to make the arrest regardless. Maybe they made it up as cover for "exercising their judgement," but that's what they told her.
I don't think the Iranian people would resent being free... and any way we could assist them in that effort is arguably the right thing to do.
As long as we didn't end up causing the deaths of 100,000 or so of their friends and family in the process, yeah most of them would probably appreciate a little more liberty.
It is most likely one of macrovision's newer versions where they put some info in the same general part of the signal that carries closed captions. I don't know if any current "video clarifier" does strip that out, but it ought to be resonably easy to do so at the expense of losing the closed captioning too.
My Panasonic -R recorder has already refused to record several movies because it detected a copyright flag.
This is a standalone unit and you were trying to record from an analog source right? Sounds like macrovision. You were probably trying to record another DVD or VHS tape by playing it into the panasonic.
This new stupidity from HP is about digital recordings only.
BTW, for about $60 you can buy a "video clarifier" from radio shack which will effectively strip macrovision from the analog video allowing you to record it.
Not only does he use a lot of fancy words, but this guy actually knows what he is talking about, unlike the idiot who thinks that plasma displays have response time issues. Hell, even most TV-grade LCD displays have at least a 16ms response time which is good enough for anything filmed on film (24fps) or video (30fps).
"I can't justify anything other than this mythical $35,000 50inch CRT so my dick must therefore be 50 inches long too" -- what pompous bullshit!
On the flip side, Verizon announced they will start selling unbundled loops in the near future. Go figure.
Also called "naked DSL," Verizon announced it over a year ago. BUT implementation has been next to nothing, the only way SOME people could get it is if they had a POTS phone and DSL and then made use of the new portability rules to move their phone number to a cell phone, Verizon would let some of them keep their DSL after canceling the phone. But there was no way to sign up for naked DSL to start (I tried for 3 months last summer before giving up, since I run two DSL lines and have made zero calls on my ~$50/month dialtone - at least with no actual handsets connected I don't ever get any telemarketing).
Slashdot Mirror
I knew exactly what he was referring too and it is still a dumbass point for a variety of reasons:
a) Relies on security through obscurity, so if a dedicated hacker reverse engineers a vulnerability in the nvidia proprietary driver, it will never get fixed unless the vulnerability is used in a virus or something widespread enough to get noticed by nvidia versus getting the many eyeballs effect and possibly nipping it in the bud before an exploit is ever created.
b) As you point out, applicable to, in lesser and greater degrees, ALL programmable i/o devices.
c) Correctly implemented drivers are suppossed to prevent exactly that kind of exploit. 10 to 1, nvidia's linux engineers are nowhere near as akamai as Linus's lieutenants and the chance of an incorrectly implemented driver getting past nvidia QA is higher than getting it past Linus and his chain of command.
Can we up the bar a LITTLE?
What? You are complaining about truth in advertising? Perhaps you would prefer it if the site called itself, "Sneaky Dog: Fair and Balanced" instead?
If the drivers were free software someone skilled enough would hack the missing features. Isn't about time to nVidia change its mind and release the sources?
Tell that to David Kirk nvidia's chief scientist whose, "sense is that developers on those platforms are quite happy with our efforts" as a justification for not going open source. Plus some totally bizarro bullshit about "hackers tak[ing] bad advantage of raw hardware interfaces."
It is telling that he did not pull out the old, tried and true "competition sensitive" bullshit that so many hardware vendors have been hiding behind since day one.
The point is, you provided no supporting evidence for your statement about the theater's take, you could have just asily been "making up facts to justify your position" just as the poster you were bitching about failed to do so as well. Unlike either of you, I spent the 30 seconds to find and cite a reasonably reliable source for actual numbers. Thus answering the question DEFINITIVELY.
Meanwhile I criticized the rest of your posting because just being right about one, really unrelated fact does not in any way validate the rest of your post which is entirely old hat - a rant that has been made MANY times before here and debunked just as many times. If you can't bring something new to the table, at the very least, bring supporting evidence for what you do have. Unless, of course, you are just another "slashbot" yourself.
I interviewed the FBI at SeattleWireless TV, and the agent I talked to said he hadn't seen any attempted attacks.
I should probably get an update and post it.
Are you nuts? Let sleeping lions lie. Even if the agent you talk to has no 'political' aspirations, even if his boss doesn't either, all it takes is for the right idiot to get the wrong idea and we're off on a new crusade agaisnt freedom.
Don't tempt fate. Really.
The wire fraud statute was the Fed's best case against LaMacchia and after losing on it, they did not persue him under any other charges. So, literally, the LaMacchia ruling did not say it is completely legal to share, but IN EFFECT the case and the circumstances around it made that very clear.
If it were not so, there would have been no reason to pass the NET Theft Act which was widely referred to as the "LaMacchia Bill."
Since when has stealing EVER been allowed? Yes, it is stealing if you download a song which you have not paid for. You can whine about information wanting to be free and how you wouldn't have bought the album/song anyway but it's still stealing. You didn't pay for it. Period.
Since just until 1997.
Yeah, go ahead and call it stealing if it makes you feel righteous, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that up until the 'No Electronic Theft (NET) Act' was enacted on December 17th, 1997 it was COMPLETELY LEGAL to download and make available for download, a song, or a movie, or software for which you have not paid for. PERIOD.
Don't believe me and not smart enough to read the bill yourself? Just google for LaMacchia, the guy whose prior case proved that such sharing was NOT ILLEGAL.
did you think that all that scary talk about being arrested and jailed for your opinions (or for even visiting web sites where you can read someone else's opinions) was just Republicans trying to make socialists look bad?
Where have you been? China isn't socialist, it`s fascist, true fascism as envisioned by Benito Mussolini when he said, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
Consquently, the republicans in this country absolutely LUV China today. At least the ones who have abondoned their principles of democracy and freedom in favor of Big Business which seems to be most of the lot.
Cite: CNN circa 2002
During the film's opening week, the studio might take 70 to 80 percent of gross box office sales.
By the fifth or sixth week, the percentage the studio takes will likely shrink to about 35 percent.
Unfortunately for you, the rest of your tired rant does not follow.
I see this as completely rediculous.
I beg to differ. I see it as completely greendiculous, also known as gangrene of the penis. Rediculous just means you overdid things a little bit, too much fun is all.
I *always* read Slashdot with Firefox and it always looks fine to me...
What you are saying is that you don't read slashdot over a slow or congested link. Either that, or you use an unofficial build that has the workaround already in it. I suspect that in your case it is the former, you probably read slashdot from the same network as the servers with gigabit link between you and them.
The problem is related to firefox guessing the layout of the page before all the elements are loaded. With slashdot, there is a race condition causing firefox to guess wrong and thus the end result often looks like crap. Apparently the problem is at least partly due to slashdot's poor W3C standards compliance.
This problem is long running, as in years long, so it is a bit dismaying to hear that you, and apparently the rest of the people at slashdot are not even aware of the issue. God knows it usually gets posted about and rated up to a 3 at least once per day.
If you believe that copyright is a law of property right, like real property rights, then I'm sure you would have no problem accepting the limitations of real property rights too - namely that you can sell said property once and only once.
According to a recent article in the Economist, since joining the WTPO and putting those laws on the books, things got "worse" not better. Primarily because of two factors - huge increases in companies doing business and little funding of the agencies that are suppossed to enforce those laws.
If you know the history of the West trying to do business in China, that result was no surprise. Whether it is a cultural difference or not, Western businesses have often entered into agreements with Chinese businesses only to have the Chinese "end of the bargain" dropped. In essence, in joining the WTPO, China said "yes, we will agree to all of your rules, wink, wink, nudge, nudge."
Thus, it is the actual enforcement of the rules, not the creation of them, that signifies a (possible) sea-change in China's approach towards intellectual property. We'll know in a year or so if this recent activity was just a dog and pony show for the secretary of commerce, or an actual change in chinese market philosophy.
The entertainment elite are constantly given free stuff in the hope that their wearing/using/talking about it will promote the product.
It's a truism in hollywood that nobody will give a dime to struggling actors who could really use a hand, but once they make it big and don't need anything from anyone, they are practically buried in freebies - free clothes, free cars, free tickets, free jewelry, free beer, you name it they get it all for free.
For one - from China's point of view economics and politics are the same thing. That's why it was the secretary of commerce that came a visiting.
For two - They have been selling their patent-scofflaw players in the USA for years already with the 3C (MPEG patent stuff) fees at $20 and the 5C (copy prevention patent stuff) fees at around $10, there is no way places like wal-mart and circuit city could carry players at ~$50 retail that were fully patent-kosher.
In the past, a lot of "no-name" DVD players were manufactured by chinese companies that just flat out ignored the patents held by the DVD consortium.
By going to court over the issue, these companies are tacitly accepting the western-style patent regime that the USA is trying to force on the rest of the world.
This new acceptance is probably part of the fallout of the Secretary of Commerce, Donald Evans's recent trip to Beijing. As was the recent arrest of bittorrent user in HK.
Well, with your logic then we should just shut down the Oscars and the Grammys as well. After all, we're at WAR!
You will actually have a point just as soon as hollywood declares war and sends a thousand American troops to their deaths.
And no, I don't expect the MPAA to get American troops sent in to "liberate" Hong Kong from DVD pirates.
Bush is a bad president because this money, which was donated by citizens and corporations explicitly for the inauguration, should go to the Iraq war.
Bush is a bad president because all of this fru-fru pomp and circumstance is inappropriate when the country is at war. Life should not go on like normal for the people responsible for sending the military out to risk life and limb. Celebrate when the killing is over.
If Kerry, or even Dean had won and were doing the same thing I'd say the same thing.
Is there some sort of university program I'm not aware of, pumping out mindless peons by the thousands each year so they can make the same mistake as others did last year?
Yeah, its called the public school system.
How many schools even have a "home ec" course anymore? And of those, how many actually teach useful modern information like how to balance a checkbook, how to read a credit card statement, how to keep a budget, how to compute interest, how to critically read an advertisement, etc? From what I can tell, the answer is almost zero. People need a firm grounding in basic, day-to-day economics and high school is the place it ought to happen - it certainly will be more useful to 90+% of the students than memorizing the dates of the civil war...
Short story we call the Better Business Beurau. NewEgg pulled some shinanigans and got the BBB to close the case as "customer satisfied.
Follow the money - the BBB is 100% funded by "member" businesses. They have a clear conflict of interest when resolving disputes and stores like yours are all too common.
I think the BBB must be a division of DeBeers considering how amazingly good a rep they have and have been able to maintain over the decades of duplicity.
This allows the police to make an arrest whether the victim wants it or not.
Slight correction:
This REQUIRES the police to make an arrest whether the alledged victim wants it or not.
I've seen a brother-in-law hauled off because the two were having a caterwaul of a screaming match and some neighbor called it in. No actual violence, but more importantly no witnessed violence and no evidence of violence, but the cops told her that they were required to make the arrest regardless. Maybe they made it up as cover for "exercising their judgement," but that's what they told her.
I don't think the Iranian people would resent being free... and any way we could assist them in that effort is arguably the right thing to do.
As long as we didn't end up causing the deaths of 100,000 or so of their friends and family in the process, yeah most of them would probably appreciate a little more liberty.
It is most likely one of macrovision's newer versions where they put some info in the same general part of the signal that carries closed captions. I don't know if any current "video clarifier" does strip that out, but it ought to be resonably easy to do so at the expense of losing the closed captioning too.
My Panasonic -R recorder has already refused to record several movies because it detected a copyright flag.
This is a standalone unit and you were trying to record from an analog source right? Sounds like macrovision.
You were probably trying to record another DVD or VHS tape by playing it into the panasonic.
This new stupidity from HP is about digital recordings only.
BTW, for about $60 you can buy a "video clarifier" from radio shack which will effectively strip macrovision from the analog video allowing you to record it.
Bingo!
Not only does he use a lot of fancy words, but this guy actually knows what he is talking about, unlike the idiot who thinks that plasma displays have response time issues. Hell, even most TV-grade LCD displays have at least a 16ms response time which is good enough for anything filmed on film (24fps) or video (30fps).
"I can't justify anything other than this mythical $35,000 50inch CRT so my dick must therefore be 50 inches long too" -- what pompous bullshit!
On the flip side, Verizon announced they will start selling unbundled loops in the near future. Go figure.
Also called "naked DSL," Verizon announced it over a year ago. BUT implementation has been next to nothing, the only way SOME people could get it is if they had a POTS phone and DSL and then made use of the new portability rules to move their phone number to a cell phone, Verizon would let some of them keep their DSL after canceling the phone. But there was no way to sign up for naked DSL to start (I tried for 3 months last summer before giving up, since I run two DSL lines and have made zero calls on my ~$50/month dialtone - at least with no actual handsets connected I don't ever get any telemarketing).