I was making a joke. Since this new company seems to have a monopoly on satellite radio, they could use this to crush all other broadcasters by jamming cellphones and thus have a monopoly on all broadcasting to cars.
Now I look towards ReactOS replacing Windows XP I don't think anyone could sell ReactOS. The consensus here was that it was too contaminated with code cut and pasted from code copyright Microsoft
Many of those address types have never been used by any third party code. So it's highly suspicious that they appear in the ReactOS version of tdi.h with the exact same names. It looks like someone took the Microsoft file, stripped the comments and changed the license.
The problem is that since there is no "GPL Corporation" there is no way to sue open source, except go after individuals which is a losing game. This is why Bo Branten is still out there since the cost of the legal action would be orders of magnitude more than the payback. Someone asked why if this is true Microsoft haven't sued. Don Burn again
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.development.device.drivers/msg/14b6c360e6dc2c1d
Because it would cost many times more than it would payback. I have had this discussion with management of a number of firms ripped off by open source they all say it is not worth it. It may be worth it if a firm tries to release a ReactOS PC, or if you have a firm commercialize ReactOS, but sue lots of little hackers who don't make enough combined to pay for the first suit? So Open Source project=no lawsuit. Someone company to make money by selling it=instant lawsuit. The code is probably a derived work in copyright terms and no one has a right to distribute it. But so long as the people distributing it illegally have no assets they are safe because there is no point suing them. But if a company started to make money out of it, they would have assets and thus not be safe from a lawsuit.
Note this isn't Microsoft saying this, it's a bunch of MS MVPs diffing the ReactOS source against the Microsoft source they have. You can check yourself if you want. Download the Windows DDK and ReactOS and diff files with similar names. And ask how you'd feel if someone did this to GPL code and changed the license to proprietary. The DDK EULA certainly doesn't allow you to make a GPL fork of the Microsoft source code you get.
But I've had Apple as a girlfriend for several decades. You're only getting laid right now. Once that lust and sex-haze evaporates, perhaps you'll see what's underneath. Good God man, I think that's the most depressing thing I've ever read on the Internet. It's actually sad on multiple levels.
Abstract it. Write a version of the library that uses an semaphore to protect access to variables on most systems. On the ones you can test on use lock cmpxchg or the local equivalent instead. So the code will still be portable, just faster on the ones with the assembler. Hopefully you can test on x86 and x64 so your code will be fast on those. Other peoplem can contribute assembler on other architectures if they use them.
Actually some OSs do provide a portable version of lock cmpxchg
Look at what people learn at University though. Lots of Java and Posix. Posix has pthreads that I've never used but the consensus from Unix people seems to be that multi threading is too hard to bother with. They also are told that the Windows API is a hack (true) and too hard to bother with (not true). Unix kernels traditionally have been preemptive. Java takes away all the details of locking from the programmer. If all you're exposed to is Posix and Java, I can see that multi threading seems like black magic because you don't really have any feel for how processors actually execute code.
Microsoft technologies are unfashionable and taught as a "how not to do things" way at University. Someone from a major Asian electronics manufacturer told me that they would do Windows Mobile smartphones for Asia and a Symbian based smartphone for Europe, because "Europeans don't like Microsoft for emotional reasons". Now in Asia and Russia quite a lot of people learn Win32 because it is so common and they see it as a useful skill to have.
Now Windows NT may have had its flaws but it was designed from the start to be SMP friendly. Everything in the kernel is preemptive and locking is extremely fine grained - any object in the driver needs to be locked since the IO model is designed to pipeline across processors under heavy load. And usermode Win32 has excellent support for threading. It even has a C version of x86's lock cmpxchg, InterlockedCompareAndExchange. Windows historically has tended to be a mass of subtle hacks that require an assembly background to appreciate. My guess is CS teachers think that this will damage young programmers, but I think that is completely wrong. If you understand why they worked, you know a lot more about how processors really operate than someone who's only ever written high level C. And that is helpful if you want to write multithreaded code. Or for that matter code on some idiosyncratic or just plain limited embedded system.
Actually, that's not really true. WDM on Win98 is only supported for a few device classes. It doesn't support video cards, printers, scsi adapter, network cards or filesystems, or anything on a non plug and play bus. Video devices are completely different between Win98 and NT based OSs. Scsi and Network cards each have a minport architecture that was portable across 16 and 32 bit OSs backi in the Win98 days but Vista and XP have a very different version of NDIS than Win98. Mostly WDM was a way for people to write USB drivers that worked on Win98 and Win2K. But USB has changed a lot since then, and so has WDM. Finally, lots of modern USB drivers will use WDF in kernel mode or are user mode code that uses WinUSB.sys, and neither of those will work on Win98. In fact neither of them will work on Win2k either.
Other Win98 'drivers' are actually just hacks - code that must run in Ring 0. They are VxDs, a system that was originally designed to virtualise devices underneath multiple Dos boxes. Antivirus software and the like used this environment to hook filesystem access for example. Obviously this can't work on NT since there are no VxDs and the filesystem layer is completely different.
Even between successive releases of NT based OSs, there isn't any guarantee that drivers will work. Most people know this and write their inf files so the device will only install on one of the OS versions they tested.
Yeah, but your office friends will keep a look out for lurkers. Plus they can hold the ammo belt on your M60 if it comes to a last stand with the zombie like lurker hoards.
There will be legal problems if you trap a human thief though. Even if you file down the sides of the bear trap and a leave a stash of twinkies nearby so they don't starve over a long weekend. And land mines are right out. Trust me, I speak from experience.
Paleoconservatives don't believe in pre-emptive wars. I'm not sure she does anymore.
that would be Kissinger The Chinese got much more from Kissinger than he did from them. He also failed completely in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos allowing the Communists to take over, backed Pakistan over India, and Indonesia over East Timor. Pakistan ended up being a very poor ally as did most of the anticommunist dictators he allied with. I don't think he was anywhere near as smart as he thought he was. And even though I can sort of accept what he tried to do, he didn't actually achieve what he set out to do. And in the long run, the Chinese, Pakistanis and others he backed are actually a much more serious threat to US interests than some of the people he tried to destroy.
James Baker Ok, he was good in the first Gulf War.
I think Rice's problem is that she never was that high up in the Bush II administrations pecking order as Baker was in Bush I's.
The Briscoe proposal reminds me a bit of USB actually. USB allocates bandwith for control transfers (analogous to downloading a web page) and isonchonous transfers (analogous to Skype, VOIP and streaming video) first. Anything left goes for bulk transfers (analogous to P2P). So if you're loading CNN or watching a video you get prioritised and things get better. But P2P isn't hurt by much, since web pages and streaming actually only use a small percentage of total bandwidth, especially at peak times compared to P2P. Outside peak times, P2P could actually be allowed to use more bandwidth.
Condie should have run. A black, female lesbian* who's a firebreathing paleoconservative* would really stir things up. Plus she has mad foreign policy skills, and I like that***
I could have accused people who disagreed with her of being racist, sexist, homophobic or misogynist**.
* allegedly. ** Some of these would not apply depending on her opponent. But shit, against either Obama or Clinton she still wins on diversity points, even she's actually heterosexual. That's reason enough to pick her. *** She should blame all the Bush admin fuckups on other people, not Bush himself because that comes across as disloyal. But I think we can all think of a few people who've left the administration in disgrace who fit the scapegoat profile pretty well.
Eventually it was overturned because the Supreme Court thought that even though he had broken swedish law a conviction would be likely overturned by the European Court of Human Rights.
The Swedish law is problematic to me. He didn't cross the line into incitement, i.e. he didn't tell people to attack homosexuals in fact he said "We cannot condemn these people - Jesus never did that either. He showed everyone He met deep respect for the person they were (...) Jesus never belittled anyone". Which is a bit hypocritical in context but it definitely means he wasn't inciting violence.
So much as I despise what he said I'd defend to the death his right to say it. Well, argue he has a right to say anonymously on the internet anyway.
Though I think if someone did actually encourage people to attack some group, they should be prosecuted for incitement. The UK government strategically prosecuted both Abu Hamza for inciting violence against non Muslims and Nick Griffin, leader of the far right British National Party for inciting violence against non whites. It reminds me of a museum I went to in Germany which showed how both the Communists and Fascists gradually ended up dominating the political spectrum. Whilst I don't think the UK is in danger of that, there is something to be said for prosecuting politicians for incitement since it cripples extremist parties. And both the BNP and the muslim nutters are capable of starting riots, even if they can't achieve much politically.
Having said that, I think criticising an ideology without inciting violence against its adherents should be protected speech.
Apple are clearly the Israelis. A smaller group, but richer and much more civilised. Users of other OSs need to hate them to take their mind off the endless fail they experience on a daily basis.
If you want to run a 2D GUI then any graphics card with accelerated BitBlt, line drawing and a hardware cursor is OK, including an Intel GMA. Assuming the driver is stable of course. This is the Linux user's experience of Intel GFX, or for that matter a Windows user who never plays any games.
If you want accelerated 3D then you need much, much more video hardware. Intel Integrated Graphics are completely horrible for that. Far worse in fact than a low end GPU from ATI or NVidia. What the GGP was complaining about is that if you write games then Intel are a pain because Intel claim that they are sufficient when they in fact aren't. And their drivers are hopelessly buggy. So from a game developer's point of view they are a pain because you spend a load of time handling bug reports only to find that actually the chip is essentially unusable. That is the great grand parents experience of Intel GFX.
Maybe, like me, he chooses to use a classic Stalin 9 inch TV from Albania. It has much, much more saturated colours than a capitalist TV and still uses valves to improve audio quality. It got 105% in Albania Multimedia Magazines 1958 Colour TV grouptest. However because of a conspiracy Western made video consoles don't support the Hoxha2 colour standard, only the far inferior NTSC or PAL. So all my games are in black and white.
Stargate SG1 used to do that, back in the first few series. Whenever they used a TV sci fi cliche - evil twins, montrous voices from the sky, technobabble as a deus ex machina, reusing the same filming locations in multiple episodes and so one of the characters would make a joke about it, which was kind of likeable.
Very true. Most people aren't interested in cracking and would rather buy originals than futz around ripping or downloading. In this model DVD protection still does the job fine. If you want to rip it you need to download some user unfriendly tool which may or may not work - I remember when structure protection came out it stopped people ripping for a week or so. Anyone that tried it then had a high chance of giving up due to frustration. Downloaded movies tend to be a bit fuzzier than the original due to the extra compression and most people perceive it to be legally risky to download. And there's a meanness issue too. If you watching a movie with non technical people, watching a pirate version comes across as cheap, especially if the quality is worse.
I think this explains the move to HD by studios. Most likely any DRM scheme will be broken and a small minority wil rip, pack and upload movies. But HD is sold as being sharper than DVD. The quality difference between legal versions (30GB) and packed versions which need to be compressed more is likely to be more noticable. On most internet connections, downloading rips is also rather slow.
Ripping tools are illegal too, and that helps enormously. They will always be available of course, and someone determined can always find a version that works in a few days. But because they are non commercial and free there is no incentive to make them user friendly. Most people will therefore not bother. If they were legal people might sell 1 click DVD rippers, and that would enormously increase the number of people who use them. With unencrypted CDs, Apple can sell iTunes which rips to mp3. Other companies sell commercial software which lets people make copies of CDs for their friends. Legally, that's not possible for DVD and BlueRay.
I think slashdot users don't understand this. If everyone was like a typical slashdot user then breaking encryption would be a serious problem for the movie studios. But they aren't and so DRM only needs to make copying fiddly, not impossible. If you really want to rip digital media and are prepared to spend time researching and downloading tools to do it, it will always be possible. But that doesn't really matter, because people that are willing to do that are a small minority.
If the US was as bad as Americans complain it is then there wouldn't be so many people complaining because they'd all have either been sent to Gitmo (for complaining) or stopped complaining to avoid getting sent to Gitmo.
Actually even that isn't completely unreasonable.
On the copyright claim, the court found that the use of the Toner Loading Program was indeed a likely copyright violation,[6] because the Toner Loading Program was not a "lock-out code" that SCC was entitled to copy under the DMCA,[7][8] and because the Toner Loading Program could be rewritten in different ways (and therefore had enough creativity to qualify for copyright protection).[9][6] The court also found that the Copyright Office's decision to grant copyright registration to the two programs showed that the programs were probably copyright-able.[10][8] The court found that because of the complexity of the authentication system, SCC could not have known that it could bypass the authentication without using Lexmark's copyrighted program; but it held that this did not matter because "Innocent infringement, however, is still infringement."[11] The court also held that fair use did not apply.[12]
On the DMCA claims, the court found that the SCC microchip circumvented Lexmark's authentication sequence,[13][14] and that the reverse engineering exception to the DMCA did not apply, because it only covers the independent creation of new programs that must interoperate with existing ones, and SCC did not create any new program.[15] I think it's more of a political decision than a technical one really. SCC did violate copyright, but it was in the public interest that they be allowed to, because otherwise LexMark could stop them competing.
I like the oddly philosophical idea that only code that could be written in several ways is creative enough to deserve copyright protection. Something that must be a particular way in order to work is not copyright-able. This is a profound point, not only does it not require any creativity, allowing it to be copyrighted would allow the person with the copyright to act contrary to the public interest.
Slashdot Mirror
I was making a joke. Since this new company seems to have a monopoly on satellite radio, they could use this to crush all other broadcasters by jamming cellphones and thus have a monopoly on all broadcasting to cars.
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.development.device.drivers/browse_thread/thread/2bf43e5dd0f858d0/dc8d5e6faa6e2fff?hl=en&lnk=gst
Later on in the thread people quote a header file
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.development.device.drivers/msg/d1f7de5b42bdd68c
Many of those address types have never been used by any third party code. So it's highly suspicious that they appear in the ReactOS version of tdi.h with the exact same names. It looks like someone took the Microsoft file, stripped the comments and changed the license.
As Don Burn put it
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.development.device.drivers/msg/163eaa7ddca8dffc Enough [code is identical] that if this was stolen open source code, the open source community
would be suing the heck out of the project. My guess from what I have
looked at is that at least 30% is stolen or derived from stolen code.
The problem is that since there is no "GPL Corporation" there is no way to
sue open source, except go after individuals which is a losing game. This
is why Bo Branten is still out there since the cost of the legal action
would be orders of magnitude more than the payback. Someone asked why if this is true Microsoft haven't sued. Don Burn again
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.development.device.drivers/msg/14b6c360e6dc2c1d Because it would cost many times more than it would payback. I have had
this discussion with management of a number of firms ripped off by open
source they all say it is not worth it. It may be worth it if a firm tries
to release a ReactOS PC, or if you have a firm commercialize ReactOS, but
sue lots of little hackers who don't make enough combined to pay for the
first suit? So Open Source project=no lawsuit. Someone company to make money by selling it=instant lawsuit. The code is probably a derived work in copyright terms and no one has a right to distribute it. But so long as the people distributing it illegally have no assets they are safe because there is no point suing them. But if a company started to make money out of it, they would have assets and thus not be safe from a lawsuit.
Note this isn't Microsoft saying this, it's a bunch of MS MVPs diffing the ReactOS source against the Microsoft source they have. You can check yourself if you want. Download the Windows DDK and ReactOS and diff files with similar names. And ask how you'd feel if someone did this to GPL code and changed the license to proprietary. The DDK EULA certainly doesn't allow you to make a GPL fork of the Microsoft source code you get.
Cell phones can be jammed using satellites though.
Abstract it. Write a version of the library that uses an semaphore to protect access to variables on most systems. On the ones you can test on use lock cmpxchg or the local equivalent instead. So the code will still be portable, just faster on the ones with the assembler. Hopefully you can test on x86 and x64 so your code will be fast on those. Other peoplem can contribute assembler on other architectures if they use them.
Actually some OSs do provide a portable version of lock cmpxchg
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms683590(VS.85).aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc302329.aspx
The problem is it's not part of Posix.
If you want a compare and exchange, just use inline assembler.
Look at what people learn at University though. Lots of Java and Posix. Posix has pthreads that I've never used but the consensus from Unix people seems to be that multi threading is too hard to bother with. They also are told that the Windows API is a hack (true) and too hard to bother with (not true). Unix kernels traditionally have been preemptive. Java takes away all the details of locking from the programmer. If all you're exposed to is Posix and Java, I can see that multi threading seems like black magic because you don't really have any feel for how processors actually execute code.
Microsoft technologies are unfashionable and taught as a "how not to do things" way at University. Someone from a major Asian electronics manufacturer told me that they would do Windows Mobile smartphones for Asia and a Symbian based smartphone for Europe, because "Europeans don't like Microsoft for emotional reasons". Now in Asia and Russia quite a lot of people learn Win32 because it is so common and they see it as a useful skill to have.
Now Windows NT may have had its flaws but it was designed from the start to be SMP friendly. Everything in the kernel is preemptive and locking is extremely fine grained - any object in the driver needs to be locked since the IO model is designed to pipeline across processors under heavy load. And usermode Win32 has excellent support for threading. It even has a C version of x86's lock cmpxchg, InterlockedCompareAndExchange. Windows historically has tended to be a mass of subtle hacks that require an assembly background to appreciate. My guess is CS teachers think that this will damage young programmers, but I think that is completely wrong. If you understand why they worked, you know a lot more about how processors really operate than someone who's only ever written high level C. And that is helpful if you want to write multithreaded code. Or for that matter code on some idiosyncratic or just plain limited embedded system.
Actually, that's not really true. WDM on Win98 is only supported for a few device classes. It doesn't support video cards, printers, scsi adapter, network cards or filesystems, or anything on a non plug and play bus. Video devices are completely different between Win98 and NT based OSs. Scsi and Network cards each have a minport architecture that was portable across 16 and 32 bit OSs backi in the Win98 days but Vista and XP have a very different version of NDIS than Win98. Mostly WDM was a way for people to write USB drivers that worked on Win98 and Win2K. But USB has changed a lot since then, and so has WDM. Finally, lots of modern USB drivers will use WDF in kernel mode or are user mode code that uses WinUSB.sys, and neither of those will work on Win98. In fact neither of them will work on Win2k either.
Other Win98 'drivers' are actually just hacks - code that must run in Ring 0. They are VxDs, a system that was originally designed to virtualise devices underneath multiple Dos boxes. Antivirus software and the like used this environment to hook filesystem access for example. Obviously this can't work on NT since there are no VxDs and the filesystem layer is completely different.
Even between successive releases of NT based OSs, there isn't any guarantee that drivers will work. Most people know this and write their inf files so the device will only install on one of the OS versions they tested.
Q1) Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road?
A1) to To other side. get the
Q2) Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road?
A4) other to side. To the get
It is funnier in the original Russian.
Yeah, but your office friends will keep a look out for lurkers. Plus they can hold the ammo belt on your M60 if it comes to a last stand with the zombie like lurker hoards.
There will be legal problems if you trap a human thief though. Even if you file down the sides of the bear trap and a leave a stash of twinkies nearby so they don't starve over a long weekend. And land mines are right out. Trust me, I speak from experience.
I think Rice's problem is that she never was that high up in the Bush II administrations pecking order as Baker was in Bush I's.
The Briscoe proposal reminds me a bit of USB actually. USB allocates bandwith for control transfers (analogous to downloading a web page) and isonchonous transfers (analogous to Skype, VOIP and streaming video) first. Anything left goes for bulk transfers (analogous to P2P). So if you're loading CNN or watching a video you get prioritised and things get better. But P2P isn't hurt by much, since web pages and streaming actually only use a small percentage of total bandwidth, especially at peak times compared to P2P. Outside peak times, P2P could actually be allowed to use more bandwidth.
Condie should have run. A black, female lesbian* who's a firebreathing paleoconservative* would really stir things up. Plus she has mad foreign policy skills, and I like that***
I could have accused people who disagreed with her of being racist, sexist, homophobic or misogynist**.
* allegedly.
** Some of these would not apply depending on her opponent. But shit, against either Obama or Clinton she still wins on diversity points, even she's actually heterosexual. That's reason enough to pick her.
*** She should blame all the Bush admin fuckups on other people, not Bush himself because that comes across as disloyal. But I think we can all think of a few people who've left the administration in disgrace who fit the scapegoat profile pretty well.
Actually in Sweden some pastor was prosecuted for hate speech for quoting those passages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ake_Green
Eventually it was overturned because the Supreme Court thought that even though he had broken swedish law a conviction would be likely overturned by the European Court of Human Rights.
The Swedish law is problematic to me. He didn't cross the line into incitement, i.e. he didn't tell people to attack homosexuals in fact he said "We cannot condemn these people - Jesus never did that either. He showed everyone He met deep respect for the person they were (...) Jesus never belittled anyone". Which is a bit hypocritical in context but it definitely means he wasn't inciting violence.
So much as I despise what he said I'd defend to the death his right to say it. Well, argue he has a right to say anonymously on the internet anyway.
Though I think if someone did actually encourage people to attack some group, they should be prosecuted for incitement. The UK government strategically prosecuted both Abu Hamza for inciting violence against non Muslims and Nick Griffin, leader of the far right British National Party for inciting violence against non whites. It reminds me of a museum I went to in Germany which showed how both the Communists and Fascists gradually ended up dominating the political spectrum. Whilst I don't think the UK is in danger of that, there is something to be said for prosecuting politicians for incitement since it cripples extremist parties. And both the BNP and the muslim nutters are capable of starting riots, even if they can't achieve much politically.
Having said that, I think criticising an ideology without inciting violence against its adherents should be protected speech.
No.
Apple are clearly the Israelis. A smaller group, but richer and much more civilised. Users of other OSs need to hate them to take their mind off the endless fail they experience on a daily basis.
Shouldn't you be using multiple inheritance, operator overloading, enclosures and so on? Outsourcing is a serious threat.
If you want to run a 2D GUI then any graphics card with accelerated BitBlt, line drawing and a hardware cursor is OK, including an Intel GMA. Assuming the driver is stable of course. This is the Linux user's experience of Intel GFX, or for that matter a Windows user who never plays any games.
If you want accelerated 3D then you need much, much more video hardware. Intel Integrated Graphics are completely horrible for that. Far worse in fact than a low end GPU from ATI or NVidia. What the GGP was complaining about is that if you write games then Intel are a pain because Intel claim that they are sufficient when they in fact aren't. And their drivers are hopelessly buggy. So from a game developer's point of view they are a pain because you spend a load of time handling bug reports only to find that actually the chip is essentially unusable. That is the great grand parents experience of Intel GFX.
Maybe, like me, he chooses to use a classic Stalin 9 inch TV from Albania. It has much, much more saturated colours than a capitalist TV and still uses valves to improve audio quality. It got 105% in Albania Multimedia Magazines 1958 Colour TV grouptest. However because of a conspiracy Western made video consoles don't support the Hoxha2 colour standard, only the far inferior NTSC or PAL. So all my games are in black and white.
Stargate SG1 used to do that, back in the first few series. Whenever they used a TV sci fi cliche - evil twins, montrous voices from the sky, technobabble as a deus ex machina, reusing the same filming locations in multiple episodes and so one of the characters would make a joke about it, which was kind of likeable.
You're right though, the X files did know how to laugh at itself sometimes. This episode was great -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post-Modern_Prometheus
Very true. Most people aren't interested in cracking and would rather buy originals than futz around ripping or downloading. In this model DVD protection still does the job fine. If you want to rip it you need to download some user unfriendly tool which may or may not work - I remember when structure protection came out it stopped people ripping for a week or so. Anyone that tried it then had a high chance of giving up due to frustration. Downloaded movies tend to be a bit fuzzier than the original due to the extra compression and most people perceive it to be legally risky to download. And there's a meanness issue too. If you watching a movie with non technical people, watching a pirate version comes across as cheap, especially if the quality is worse.
I think this explains the move to HD by studios. Most likely any DRM scheme will be broken and a small minority wil rip, pack and upload movies. But HD is sold as being sharper than DVD. The quality difference between legal versions (30GB) and packed versions which need to be compressed more is likely to be more noticable. On most internet connections, downloading rips is also rather slow.
Ripping tools are illegal too, and that helps enormously. They will always be available of course, and someone determined can always find a version that works in a few days. But because they are non commercial and free there is no incentive to make them user friendly. Most people will therefore not bother. If they were legal people might sell 1 click DVD rippers, and that would enormously increase the number of people who use them. With unencrypted CDs, Apple can sell iTunes which rips to mp3. Other companies sell commercial software which lets people make copies of CDs for their friends. Legally, that's not possible for DVD and BlueRay.
I think slashdot users don't understand this. If everyone was like a typical slashdot user then breaking encryption would be a serious problem for the movie studios. But they aren't and so DRM only needs to make copying fiddly, not impossible. If you really want to rip digital media and are prepared to spend time researching and downloading tools to do it, it will always be possible. But that doesn't really matter, because people that are willing to do that are a small minority.
If the US was as bad as Americans complain it is then there wouldn't be so many people complaining because they'd all have either been sent to Gitmo (for complaining) or stopped complaining to avoid getting sent to Gitmo.
On the DMCA claims, the court found that the SCC microchip circumvented Lexmark's authentication sequence,[13][14] and that the reverse engineering exception to the DMCA did not apply, because it only covers the independent creation of new programs that must interoperate with existing ones, and SCC did not create any new program.[15] I think it's more of a political decision than a technical one really. SCC did violate copyright, but it was in the public interest that they be allowed to, because otherwise LexMark could stop them competing.
I like the oddly philosophical idea that only code that could be written in several ways is creative enough to deserve copyright protection. Something that must be a particular way in order to work is not copyright-able. This is a profound point, not only does it not require any creativity, allowing it to be copyrighted would allow the person with the copyright to act contrary to the public interest.