How is a 1 in 100 chance of having a few questions asked and your bags searched because of a false positive "completely destroying" any of your rights?
The right to travel freely means exactly that. The right NOT to have to prove who you are just to get from point A to point B. Think about it. The odds of any particular person flying on a place being a terrorist are SO low that it makes these security precautions completely ludicrous based on the level of risk.
The 9/11 hijackers managed what they managed because:
1) There were no sky marshals 2) Everyone had been taught to give in to hijackers
Both of these are no longer true. Anyone who tries to hijack a US aircraft will be jumped by the every passenger on the plane.
Creating no fly lists that demonstrably don't work , but create big headaches for innocent people are NOT the American way... or at least not the America that I USED to live in.
Whatever happened to presumed innocent until proven guilty? These security checks assume everyone is guilty and these no-fly lists are even worse. There are literally people who have shown up at the airport, got flagged, had to talk to the FBI and then had to go back home because the FBI wouldn't let them fly since they had no way of knowing they were not the J. Adams that was a terrorist!!
That sure as hell sounds like interfering with our right to travel freely! You just better hope that doesn't happen to you, because those people had NO RECOURSE. They tried to contact the TSA to get it fixed and were told to piss off. They only way ANY of them ever got to fly again was to sue or fight it through their congressman.
Why the hell should you have to do that just to fly?
Finally, ask yourself this. If you accept (which apparently a lot of you sheep do) on faith that the incredibly unlikely event of a terrorist hijacking is enough to allow the government to prevent innocent people from flying, strip searching grandmothers, have security personnel paw through your wife or daughters unmentionables, then what powers will you allow the government for risks that are FAR greater than a 300million to 1 chance of a terrorist hijacking?!
Drunk driving kills tens of thousands each year. Will you allow the government to force each of us to submit to a computerized sobriety test each time we get behind the wheel?
If the answer is no, then ask yourself why you should allow the same for air travel.
[i] False positives are *not* a violation of civil liberties. You do not have a right to convenience.[/i]
I'm as conservative as they come in most ways and you are crazy as a $hit house rat if you think that interfering with your right to travel isn't a violation of your constitutional rights. There are MASSIVE amounts of caselaw that state that dragnets and such (which is what this amounts to) are unconstitutional.
Since the people who were false positive were delayed in their travels by the US government, probably costing them money and certainly costing them their time, do you agree that they have the right to petition the government for redress of greivances? If my name ever comes up on that list and I am harrassed for no reason, I will certainly sue the US government.
When the government stops treating us all as citizens and starts treating us all as CRIMINALS, the government has outlived it's usefulness. The US government needs a serious reality check when it comes to our civil liberties and airplanes.
The 1 in 300 MILLION chance that someone is a terrorist on a domestic airline is NOT enough to completely destroy our rights to travel freely.
Put air marshalls on planes, x-ray baggage, fine. That is enough. That's all El Al does and they NEVER have hijackings. Armed air marshalls on EVERY plane will stop the threat of hijacking forever. All the rest of this $hit is just that. $hit. Designed to make the government even MORE powerful.
If you take the contract, you shouldn't complain about the conditions later. I don't mean just you, Xerithane, personally, but anyone in general, and him especially. If he really agreed to this kind of contract, he's given AOL the high road in this matter.
That's crap. The company has all the power and you have none. If you say no, I don't agree to that clause, then the company (and all companies over a certain size have this clause) will say, "Sorry, we won't hire you."
If you want to work, you don't have a choice. They could say "We demand your firstborn.", and you'd have to sign cheerfully or you're screwed. Does that mean they can make it stick later in court? Almost certainly not... but never fool yourself into thinking you can negotiate as an individual with a multi-national corporation. They will just drop you and grab another disposable employee from the world pool.
I've had a Palm and a Handspring and they both died within a year and half (just after the warranty). Neither was subjected to tough use and neither was ever dropped (as if that would matter anyway, since they should do shock and vibe testing on their products).
Every person I know who's had a Palm has had it die or stop working the way it is supposed to within a year or two. N ~ 5 here. Combined with my experience, this tells me that there is something very unreliable about the whole Palm architecture.
Frankly, I've come to the conclusion that Palm and Handspring's quality and reliability SUCK and I won't buy a Palm PDA ever again, which is too bad, as I actually liked the interface.
I shouldn't even reply to anonymous cowards, but your premise is idiotic.
So what if a beta improves product quality. That should not give the software industry the right to kill reverse engineering, nor should it excuse Blizzard's attempts to SLAPP BnetD with the DMCA.
Following your logic, it is ok if IBM sues American Megatrends since IBM will give us better quality. Who cares that IBM was closed and opposed to change and clone PCs because that was against their product plans.
This is the whole damn point of reverse engineering! If someone can keep their invention closed for FOREVER, society does NOT benefit. That is why patents expire! It's why copyright SHOULD expire.
And Blizzard was bad, and everyone on here KNOWS they were bad, but because you like their product, you will bend over and take it. Fool. In the end, you can blame yourself for the corporate chains that bind you.
And yeah, Moderator, go ahead and mod this as a troll like you did the other one, even though I have said nothing but the TRUTH!
Reverse engineering is and always has been legal. The IBM compatible PC you are using would not exist without reverse engineering (assuming you aren't using an IBM).
Reverse engineering is a key part of the world economy. Anyone who doesn't know that is woefully ignorant.
In every other industry reverse engineering is legal, it is only the DMCA that makes it illegal in this case, which is probably unconstitutional.
And Blizzard used this heinous, evil law against their customers, hence they are evil and YOU are an idiot for supporting them.
These are the same scumbags who went after Open Source guys for reverse engineering their server TCP/IP calls and making an Open Source server, which should NOT be illegal. They didn't steal any code, they reverse engineered fair and square.
But that wasn't good enough for Blizzard.
They invoked the evil DMCA and went after the poor OS guys.
The penalty to Blizzard should be severe. So boycott them! They obviously think all their customers are criminals who can't be trusted, so don't give them more money to sue more of us.
I know I won't buy ANY game from those scumbags, nor will I play any game from them.
There are plenty of other games from decent, hardworking people who don't go after innocent folks with evil corporate bought laws.
Sure buying votes is in the best interest of the companies. Just like buying judges is in the best interest of the mafia. We despise and revile the latter as a complete perversion of the Justice system. Should we not despise and revile the former as a complete perversion of the Legislative system?
Of course we should. Bribing officials who make policy for all of us so that SOME of us get a better deal is just WRONG.
That you could possibly think it is acceptable says a lot about how completely fscked up America and our system of government is.
Everything a normal workstation/desktop system does, the 3GHz Xeon does better than Opteron.
Think that is going to change by Sept...? I seriously doubt it. Especially since by then Intel CPUs will be even faster than they are now.
If this is supposed to be server vs. server, anyone wonder why they didn't throw an Itanium2 in the mix? Sure it is more expensive, but with servers, it is generally cheaper to buy something faster and more expensive than to sit around waiting on the server all day.
Not only that, but then Intel is expected by the end user to warranty the part as if it were actually a Pentium 4 2.8GHz instead of the 2.0 it actually is.
Yeah, well I've got 2 whole shares of SCOX because I bought 10 Caldera shares right after the IPO (yeah, I was dumb). Given that I've lost all that money, I would sell the 2 shares I have left, but it would cost me more money to sell them than I'd make selling them, so I'm hanging on to them until they are either: A) worth the Etrade cost of selling them (i.e. at least 19.99) B) completely worthless
I think their business stand is totally reprehensible, but with my minority stake (2 whole shares) I have no effective say in the matter...
>That's because most of these tests are things that >the p4 were made to do, and are almost always >dominating in (uh, things like content creation, 3d >and video rendering)
So what was the Barton made to do? Office apps and 3 year old games?
>Both you and tom don't realized that this PR >number was based on the Athlon T-bird.. ignorance >!= good.
That may be what AMD says it is for, but Tom knows , as I do as well that AMD wants and hopes that people will compare the Barton 3000+ chip to the equivalent Pentium4. To think otherwise is just kidding yourself. This whole PR thing is nothing but marketing and when you are the second tier guy marketing is all about making yourself look better than the number one.
Neither Tom nor I are ignorant on this one. We just aren't as naive as you.
Pretty much unbiased? Certainly in their summary verbiage, but THEIR testing shows just how much of an a$$kicking the AMD part took. The P4 3.06GHz was faster than the AMD part in 77% of the tests Anandtech did, and in many of those tests (especially the lightwave, media content generation,etc.), the Barton chip isn't even CLOSE! Heck, the 2800+ beats it in a lot of those cases.
The ONLY cases that the Barton wins in are office apps (whoo hoo!) and it has a couple of frames per second faster in UT2003. But, I guess if you are AMD, winning in even a couple of bench marks means your part is 3000 PLUS....
What a load of horseshit. This performance number is already laughable and it will get even worse with the next generation parts.
AMD is running scared as indicated by this Tom's Hardware quote: "In its testing information, AMD recommends running old DirectX 7 games. Some have been around for two years or more and are really over the hill. Anyone for a benchmark under MS DOS 3.1?" Pathetic.
To quote Tom "On the negative side, the model numbering of AMD's new top-shelf model seems pretty aggressive for the Athlon XP 3000+. Even in comparison to the "old" Athlon XP 2800+, based on the T-Bred core, the new high-end processor is often left in the dust (10 out of 18 tests). "
Entirely fair? This chip gets BITCHSLAPPED by the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz chip.
When AMD started off this stupid arse made up numbers, they were slightly better than a similar P4, but now they are way worse, so they are starting to look stupid.
Here's to hoping AMD drops this false advertising and goes back to clock speed. At least then they aren't pretending the chip is something it's not.
TNN.com has been told that they are far too close phonetically to CNN.com. Said Judge Robert Rheinhold "All those N's... way too confusing." TNN was ordered to avoid using N's in the future.
The way I see the "radical change" in the direction of the RIAA is as follows. It is not so radical. The RIAA has gotten absolutely everything it wants.
Every large CPU chip maker (Intel, AMD, & Transmeta) have recently (in the last quarter) unveiled DRM enabling technologies. Inevitably touted as "security" or "trustworthy computing" features, they generally support the TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Alliance), which in turn can be used to prevent users' access to portions of their computer and to the files on their computer (i.e. DRM).
With the CPU & chipset taken care of via these companies, all that is left to get on board are the BIOS makers, since any DRM technology is dead in the water if the BIOS doesn't enforce certain rules about what can run at boottime (not to mention run HASH checks, key checks, etc). The support that BIOS makers such as American Megatrends, Inc., have recently annouced for TCPA puts all the pieces for effective hardware DRM in place. Of course, the other portion of the pie that is necessary for DRM is a DRM enforcing OS, but Microsoft is working on that with Palladium.
With all the above, the Hollings bill becomes irrelevant. No GOVERNMENT mandated DRM technologies are needed, because the chip makers are implementing the exact DRM "features" the RIAA has always wanted. Control of individual PC users data will now be wrested away from them and given to the content owners. The RIAA has been given exactly what they wanted and they didn't have to go to the government to get it; in effect, the computer industry caved.
From what I know firsthand, it is clear that a trade has been made. The computer industry will supply the DRM framework if the RIAA (and eventually the MPAA) will provide the content that keeps the PC platform as a viable alternative to set top boxes (i.e. get people using "media PCs").
The other thing that makes this an absolute coup for the RIAA is the announcement that the computer industry will no longer fight the DMCA or support users fair use rights. This may effectively kill Rep. Boucher's attempt to reform the DMCA through the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (the "DMCRA"). DRM with the DMCA still in effect is almost too horrible for me to contemplate.
There is room for disagreement perhaps, but it seems that the computer companies have sold out the American consumer for a cut of the "content" pie.
Nope. I noticed it too. But it is pretty obvious now that the US Constitution and Bill of Rights can be ignored with impunity by everyone. They were so generally written as to be effectively useless. At least when the authority who is supposed to enforce them refuses to read or accept the reasoning behind them.
Face it, the DMCA killed the first Amendment. Now you CAN go to jail for what you say on a tee shirt or post on a website.
Gun control has killed the 2nd Amendment. You can't get much more direct and concise than "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", and don't give me that bullshit about militia being the National Guard either.
The third amendment doesn't really apply right now.
The 4th amendment has been shredded by the Patriot Act (among others) and is heinously violated everytime we have to give ID and submit to physical search before we are allowed to travel.
The 5th amendment has been shredded by all the EPA regulations that allow the government to steal your land.
The 6th amendment was shown by Kevin Mitnick to be a complete bogus lie. So much for a speedy trial.
As far as I know the 7th is still ok. Whoo hoo!!
The 8th has been clobbered by the Patriot Act. Hack a computer, go to jail for life. So much for cruel and unusual punishment.
The 9th states that the bill of rights is not ALL the rights of the people. There are others not listed. Of course, given that the feds can't even keep their hands off of THESE, I'm not sure how well these other unlisted rights have faired.
The 10th says that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Which the US government routinely ignores.
So... so much for the US bill of rights. It was a nice concept while it lasted. Too bad the people made the choice to be ruled by greed rather than by wisdom.
Why did no one notice? If the PS doesn't provide a way to tell the fan stopped working, then it SUCKS!!
It needs some sort of user indicator! In our systems, if the fan stopped, a system light indicated it.
Or you could use an auditory tone or something. And unfortunately most PS suck and don't have anything. And if the PS itself doesn't fail, a bearing in the PS fan does and the thing winds up sounding like a LAWNMOWER!!!
I've had more PS failures on my PCs than any other single component. They are cheap pieces of crap in most cases.
The PS MTBF is ALMOST ALWAYS THE LOWEST IN ANY COMPUTER SYSTEM. It makes building a reliable system very difficult when one can't find a fairly cheap PS that has an MTBF much more than 50,000hrs.
From the summary notes, it sounds as if he made a complete hash of it. I mean, his argument should be that the founders stated for "limited times" and that "limited times" there did not mean mathematically limited, otherwise as long as the congress didn't make copyright eternal, they can make it 1000 years long. "Limited times" certainly means less than the average human life. There is no way the framers could have meant or expected 90 years! Screw this whole Internet changes everything crap! That is neither here nor there! A 90 year copyright is wrong for EVERY kind of media! It robs the public domain! THAT should be the argument!
Slashdot Mirror
How is a 1 in 100 chance of having a few questions asked and your bags searched because of a false positive "completely destroying" any of your rights?
The right to travel freely means exactly that. The right NOT to have to prove who you are just to get from point A to point B. Think about it. The odds of any particular person flying on a place being a terrorist are SO low that it makes these security precautions completely ludicrous based on the level of risk.
The 9/11 hijackers managed what they managed because:
1) There were no sky marshals
2) Everyone had been taught to give in to hijackers
Both of these are no longer true. Anyone who tries to hijack a US aircraft will be jumped by the every passenger on the plane.
Creating no fly lists that demonstrably don't work , but create big headaches for innocent people are NOT the American way... or at least not the America that I USED to live in.
Whatever happened to presumed innocent until proven guilty? These security checks assume everyone is guilty and these no-fly lists are even worse. There are literally people who have shown up at the airport, got flagged, had to talk to the FBI and then had to go back home because the FBI wouldn't let them fly since they had no way of knowing they were not the J. Adams that was a terrorist!!
That sure as hell sounds like interfering with our right to travel freely! You just better hope that doesn't happen to you, because those people had NO RECOURSE. They tried to contact the TSA to get it fixed and were told to piss off. They only way ANY of them ever got to fly again was to sue or fight it through their congressman.
Why the hell should you have to do that just to fly?
Finally, ask yourself this. If you accept (which apparently a lot of you sheep do) on faith that the incredibly unlikely event of a terrorist hijacking is enough to allow the government to prevent innocent people from flying, strip searching grandmothers, have security personnel paw through your wife or daughters unmentionables, then what powers will you allow the government for risks that are FAR greater than a 300million to 1 chance of a terrorist hijacking?!
Drunk driving kills tens of thousands each year. Will you allow the government to force each of us to submit to a computerized sobriety test each time we get behind the wheel?
If the answer is no, then ask yourself why you should allow the same for air travel.
[i] False positives are *not* a violation of civil liberties. You do not have a right to convenience.[/i]
I'm as conservative as they come in most ways and you are crazy as a $hit house rat if you think that interfering with your right to travel isn't a violation of your constitutional rights. There are MASSIVE amounts of caselaw that state that dragnets and such (which is what this amounts to) are unconstitutional.
Since the people who were false positive were delayed in their travels by the US government, probably costing them money and certainly costing them their time, do you agree that they have the right to petition the government for redress of greivances? If my name ever comes up on that list and I am harrassed for no reason, I will certainly sue the US government.
When the government stops treating us all as citizens and starts treating us all as CRIMINALS, the government has outlived it's usefulness. The US government needs a serious reality check when it comes to our civil liberties and airplanes.
The 1 in 300 MILLION chance that someone is a terrorist on a domestic airline is NOT enough to completely destroy our rights to travel freely.
Put air marshalls on planes, x-ray baggage, fine. That is enough. That's all El Al does and they NEVER have hijackings. Armed air marshalls on EVERY plane will stop the threat of hijacking forever. All the rest of this $hit is just that. $hit. Designed to make the government even MORE powerful.
If you take the contract, you shouldn't complain about the conditions later. I don't mean just you, Xerithane, personally, but anyone in general, and him especially. If he really agreed to this kind of contract, he's given AOL the high road in this matter.
That's crap. The company has all the power and you have none. If you say no, I don't agree to that clause, then the company (and all companies over a certain size have this clause) will say, "Sorry, we won't hire you."
If you want to work, you don't have a choice. They could say "We demand your firstborn.", and you'd have to sign cheerfully or you're screwed. Does that mean they can make it stick later in court? Almost certainly not... but never fool yourself into thinking you can negotiate as an individual with a multi-national corporation. They will just drop you and grab another disposable employee from the world pool.
This is not a troll.
I've had a Palm and a Handspring and they both died within a year and half (just after the warranty). Neither was subjected to tough use and neither was ever dropped (as if that would matter anyway, since they should do shock and vibe testing on their products).
Every person I know who's had a Palm has had it die or stop working the way it is supposed to within a year or two. N ~ 5 here. Combined with my experience, this tells me that there is something very unreliable about the whole Palm architecture.
Frankly, I've come to the conclusion that Palm and Handspring's quality and reliability SUCK and I won't buy a Palm PDA ever again, which is too bad, as I actually liked the interface.
My two cents....
I shouldn't even reply to anonymous cowards, but your premise is idiotic.
So what if a beta improves product quality. That should not give the software industry the right to kill reverse engineering, nor should it excuse Blizzard's attempts to SLAPP BnetD with the DMCA.
Following your logic, it is ok if IBM sues American Megatrends since IBM will give us better quality. Who cares that IBM was closed and opposed to change and clone PCs because that was against their product plans.
This is the whole damn point of reverse engineering! If someone can keep their invention closed for FOREVER, society does NOT benefit. That is why patents expire! It's why copyright SHOULD expire.
And Blizzard was bad, and everyone on here KNOWS they were bad, but because you like their product, you will bend over and take it. Fool. In the end, you can blame yourself for the corporate chains that bind you.
And yeah, Moderator, go ahead and mod this as a troll like you did the other one, even though I have said nothing but the TRUTH!
Reverse engineering is and always has been legal.
The IBM compatible PC you are using would not exist without reverse engineering (assuming you aren't using an IBM).
Reverse engineering is a key part of the world economy. Anyone who doesn't know that is woefully ignorant.
In every other industry reverse engineering is legal, it is only the DMCA that makes it illegal in this case, which is probably unconstitutional.
And Blizzard used this heinous, evil law against their customers, hence they are evil and YOU are an idiot for supporting them.
These are the same scumbags who went after Open Source guys for reverse engineering their server TCP/IP calls and making an Open Source server, which should NOT be illegal. They didn't steal any code, they reverse engineered fair and square.
But that wasn't good enough for Blizzard.
They invoked the evil DMCA and went after the poor OS guys.
The penalty to Blizzard should be severe. So boycott them! They obviously think all their customers are criminals who can't be trusted, so don't give them more money to sue more of us.
I know I won't buy ANY game from those scumbags, nor will I play any game from them.
There are plenty of other games from decent, hardworking people who don't go after innocent folks with evil corporate bought laws.
Blizzard = evil incarnate in my book.
So? Is it wrong to go looking for trouble?
Europe created Hitler, let Europe deal with him.
Too bad Europe fucked that up just like they do everything else...
Yeah, so are us poor corporate indentured servants here in the land of the free..,
The only freedom we have is to pay corporations which own us.
Sure buying votes is in the best interest of the companies. Just like buying judges is in the best interest of the mafia. We despise and revile the latter as a complete perversion of the Justice system. Should we not despise and revile the former as a complete perversion of the Legislative system?
Of course we should. Bribing officials who make policy for all of us so that SOME of us get a better deal is just WRONG.
That you could possibly think it is acceptable says a lot about how completely fscked up America and our system of government is.
This article implies you are out of luck.
Everything a normal workstation/desktop system does, the 3GHz Xeon does better than Opteron.
Think that is going to change by Sept...? I seriously doubt it. Especially since by then Intel CPUs will be even faster than they are now.
If this is supposed to be server vs. server, anyone wonder why they didn't throw an Itanium2 in the mix? Sure it is more expensive, but with servers, it is generally cheaper to buy something faster and more expensive than to sit around waiting on the server all day.
Not only that, but then Intel is expected by the end user to warranty the part as if it were actually a Pentium 4 2.8GHz instead of the 2.0 it actually is.
That gets expensive fast.
"...the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
- 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
Yeah, well I've got 2 whole shares of SCOX because I bought 10 Caldera shares right after the IPO (yeah, I was dumb). Given that I've lost all that money, I would sell the 2 shares I have left, but it would cost me more money to sell them than I'd make selling them, so I'm hanging on to them until they are either:
A) worth the Etrade cost of selling them (i.e. at least 19.99)
B) completely worthless
I think their business stand is totally reprehensible, but with my minority stake (2 whole shares) I have no effective say in the matter...
And which department of Rambus do YOU work in?
"We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." - George Orwell
Think on this.... it only takes one to make a war and violence, despite other's wishful thinking, solves things very finally.
How come everyone keeps writing like Itanium hasn't been released? Not only has it been out for more than a year, Itanium2 is OUT!!!!
Bloody hell!
>That's because most of these tests are things that >the p4 were made to do, and are almost always >dominating in (uh, things like content creation, 3d >and video rendering)
So what was the Barton made to do? Office apps and 3 year old games?
>Both you and tom don't realized that this PR >number was based on the Athlon T-bird.. ignorance >!= good.
That may be what AMD says it is for, but Tom knows , as I do as well that AMD wants and hopes that people will compare the Barton 3000+ chip to the equivalent Pentium4. To think otherwise is just kidding yourself. This whole PR thing is nothing but marketing and when you are the second tier guy marketing is all about making yourself look better than the number one.
Neither Tom nor I are ignorant on this one. We just aren't as naive as you.
Pretty much unbiased? Certainly in their summary verbiage, but THEIR testing shows just how much of an a$$kicking the AMD part took. The P4 3.06GHz was faster than the AMD part in 77% of the tests Anandtech did, and in many of those tests (especially the lightwave, media content generation,etc.), the Barton chip isn't even CLOSE! Heck, the 2800+ beats it in a lot of those cases.
The ONLY cases that the Barton wins in are office apps (whoo hoo!) and it has a couple of frames per second faster in UT2003. But, I guess if you are AMD, winning in even a couple of bench marks means your part is 3000 PLUS....
What a load of horseshit. This performance number is already laughable and it will get even worse with the next generation parts.
AMD is running scared as indicated by this Tom's Hardware quote: "In its testing information, AMD recommends running old DirectX 7 games. Some have been around for two years or more and are really over the hill. Anyone for a benchmark under MS DOS 3.1?" Pathetic.
To quote Tom "On the negative side, the model numbering of AMD's new top-shelf model seems pretty aggressive for the Athlon XP 3000+. Even in comparison to the "old" Athlon XP 2800+, based on the T-Bred core, the new high-end processor is often left in the dust (10 out of 18 tests). "
Entirely fair? This chip gets BITCHSLAPPED by the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz chip.
When AMD started off this stupid arse made up numbers, they were slightly better than a similar P4, but now they are way worse, so they are starting to look stupid.
Here's to hoping AMD drops this false advertising and goes back to clock speed. At least then they aren't pretending the chip is something it's not.
TNN.com has been told that they are far too close phonetically to CNN.com. Said Judge Robert Rheinhold "All those N's... way too confusing." TNN was ordered to avoid using N's in the future.
She's WON!
The way I see the "radical change" in the direction of the RIAA is as follows.
It is not so radical. The RIAA has gotten absolutely everything it wants.
Every large CPU chip maker (Intel, AMD, & Transmeta) have recently (in the last quarter) unveiled DRM enabling technologies. Inevitably touted as "security" or "trustworthy computing" features, they generally support the TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Alliance), which in turn can be used to prevent users' access to portions of their computer and to the files on their computer (i.e. DRM).
With the CPU & chipset taken care of via these companies, all that is left to get on board are the BIOS makers, since any DRM technology is dead in the water if the BIOS doesn't enforce certain rules about what can run at boottime (not to mention run HASH checks, key checks, etc). The support that BIOS makers such as American Megatrends, Inc., have recently annouced for TCPA puts all the pieces for effective hardware DRM in place. Of course, the other portion of the pie that is necessary for DRM is a DRM enforcing OS, but Microsoft is working on that with Palladium.
With all the above, the Hollings bill becomes irrelevant. No GOVERNMENT mandated DRM technologies are needed, because the chip makers are implementing the exact DRM "features" the RIAA has always wanted. Control of individual PC users data will now be wrested away from them and given to the content owners. The RIAA has been given exactly what they wanted and they didn't have to go to the government to get it; in effect, the computer industry caved.
From what I know firsthand, it is clear that a trade has been made. The computer industry will supply the DRM framework if the RIAA (and eventually the MPAA) will provide the content that keeps the PC platform as a viable alternative to set top boxes (i.e. get people using "media PCs").
The other thing that makes this an absolute coup for the RIAA is the announcement that the computer industry will no longer fight the DMCA or support users fair use rights. This may effectively kill Rep. Boucher's attempt to reform the DMCA through the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (the "DMCRA"). DRM with the DMCA still in effect is almost too horrible for me to contemplate.
There is room for disagreement perhaps, but it seems that the computer companies have sold out the American consumer for a cut of the "content" pie.
Nope. I noticed it too. But it is pretty obvious now that the US Constitution and Bill of Rights can be ignored with impunity by everyone. They were so generally written as to be effectively useless. At least when the authority who is supposed to enforce them refuses to read or accept the reasoning behind them.
Face it, the DMCA killed the first Amendment. Now you CAN go to jail for what you say on a tee shirt or post on a website.
Gun control has killed the 2nd Amendment. You can't get much more direct and concise than "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", and don't give me that bullshit about militia being the National Guard either.
The third amendment doesn't really apply right now.
The 4th amendment has been shredded by the Patriot Act (among others) and is heinously violated everytime we have to give ID and submit to physical search before we are allowed to travel.
The 5th amendment has been shredded by all the EPA regulations that allow the government to steal your land.
The 6th amendment was shown by Kevin Mitnick to be a complete bogus lie. So much for a speedy trial.
As far as I know the 7th is still ok. Whoo hoo!!
The 8th has been clobbered by the Patriot Act. Hack a computer, go to jail for life. So much for cruel and unusual punishment.
The 9th states that the bill of rights is not ALL the rights of the people. There are others not listed. Of course, given that the feds can't even keep their hands off of THESE, I'm not sure how well these other unlisted rights have faired.
The 10th says that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Which the US government routinely ignores.
So... so much for the US bill of rights. It was a nice concept while it lasted. Too bad the people made the choice to be ruled by greed rather than by wisdom.
It needs some sort of user indicator! In our systems, if the fan stopped, a system light indicated it.
Or you could use an auditory tone or something. And unfortunately most PS suck and don't have anything. And if the PS itself doesn't fail, a bearing in the PS fan does and the thing winds up sounding like a LAWNMOWER!!!
I've had more PS failures on my PCs than any other single component. They are cheap pieces of crap in most cases.
The PS MTBF is ALMOST ALWAYS THE LOWEST IN ANY COMPUTER SYSTEM. It makes building a reliable system very difficult when one can't find a fairly cheap PS that has an MTBF much more than 50,000hrs.
From the summary notes, it sounds as if he made a complete hash of it. I mean, his argument should be that the founders stated for "limited times" and that "limited times" there did not mean mathematically limited, otherwise as long as the congress didn't make copyright eternal, they can make it 1000 years long. "Limited times" certainly means less than the average human life. There is no way the framers could have meant or expected 90 years! Screw this whole Internet changes everything crap! That is neither here nor there! A 90 year copyright is wrong for EVERY kind of media! It robs the public domain! THAT should be the argument!