"I'm a second year law student, here's my take on this:"
Christ, I think I see why we keep getting laws like this proposed. Not to to be offensive, but what are they teaching you in law school these days?
"First of all, it's a civil registry. I don't see an automatic due process issue because the state isn't meting out any punishment to those who are listed (i.e. there's no state-led deprivation of life, liberty, or property)."
Straight off the top of my head... there are already all sorts of laws controlling where someone on the sex offenders register can live. IANAL, but that looks rather like a deprivation of liberty, right there.
And if it's not state-led, who's maintaining the register, doing the enforcing, and deciding who gets put on there?
"If the accused can attend the hearing and present evidence in his defense before the judge... Tossing around any old accusation won't cut it; a judge will be weighing the evidence and making the decision. Presumably the accused can attend the hearing and present his own evidence... I would fully expect the decision can be appealed... (on many issues the presiding judge has unchallenged discretion; this wouldn't be one of them)."
Get enough assumptions and qualifiers in there, sport?
The fact is, you know pratically nothing about the details of the law, and everything you offer is your own personal opinion. And yet, on the strength of that, you're prepared to stand up and brand other people "knee-jerkers" for daring to suggest that the few details we've heard might just indicate it's a really, really stupid idea?
Your obvious respect and belief in the lawmakers is an admirable thing... but I doubt you'll find many people who'll agree with you. Even if the convictions^H^H^H^H^H sorry, allegations are appealable, you're still arguing that people should be punished who can't be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
"I can see where this law could be useful in cases where we know someone has committed a heinous act but the state can't punish him."
Kindly give an example of such a situation, where we simultaneously know (not "think" or "suspect")the person is guilty, some technicality of the law ensures they can't be convicted, and where disregarding said technicality doesn't do irreparably more harm to our entire society than letting one child molester free.
"Maybe the key evidence linking him is inadmissible in court (but still reliable)."
Right, except that evidence is generally ruled inadmissable in court because rules have been broken to get it. We have rules for admissable evidence to protect people - this is what prevents spying or searching without a warrant, and all the other freedoms we enjoy. The minute evidence obtained like this is made remotely useful we might as well not have the protections at all, as they won't count for shit.
"Maybe the statue of limitations has expired or there are jurisdictional problems."
If you disagree with the fundamental idea then you'd be better off campaigning to have the SoL repealed than passing a stupid law to get around it.
"Maybe the victim is unwilling to press charges or has fled."
If the victim is unwilling to press charges then (from the state's point of view) there isn't really a crime to prosecute, is there? Likewise if the victim flees. I'm sorry, but in a (non-victimless) crime if the victim won't act to ensure prosecution of their supposed wrong-doer then why should the state?
Gutting this exemption allows people to be prosecuted for anything the state likes, even if the "victim" doesn't want the prosecution.
A civilly declared offender, however, could petition the court to have the person's name removed from the new list after six years if there have been no new problems and the judge believes the person is unlikely to abuse again.
Sorry, "again"? I thought we were talking about unproven allegations and an inability to get a conviction. I thought that if you weren't convicted you were deemed to be innocent, at least as far as the law's concerned.
This whole effort smacks of "there's no smoke without fire", and that's a shitty premise to pass a law on. Especially given the number of false allegations of child abuse.
Obviously no-one who abuses children deserves to escape unpunished, but I think that's kind of what we have "due process" for. Assuming the legal system (which has stood us in good stead for the last several hundred years) is still working, no extra loop-holes should be necessary.
For games which "advanced the genre" this is a terrible list.
How can you put System Shock 2 in the top five when SS1 was the game that first introduced role playing/immersive elements into FPSs? Even the review basically admits SS2 just continued the direction SS1 had set and added more polish to the idea!
Now, SS2 might have been a better game, but it didn't "advance the genre" for shit compared to the original.
Likewise Goldeneye - what the fuck? So it was the first FPS on consoles, big whoop - it wasn't exactly groundbreaking at the time compared to what the PC was doing.
Sure it kick-started the market for FPSs on consoles, but "FPS market in consoles" != "FPS genre".
"Games such as Halo could only have been done thanks to Goldeneye" is complete bullshit, too. Halo was originally being developed for the PC before Microsoft bought Bungie, so we clearly would still have seen Halo, just on a different platform.
If, as they claim, we're rating "what pushed the genre forward", the list should have looked more like:
Wolfenstein 3D (invented the genre - try pushing harder than that!)
Doom (first made FPSs widely popular, kicked off the modding scene, invented "Deathmatch" multiplayer)
System Shock One (introduced the idea of "plot", and first to make an effort to immerse the player in a story)
Quake or Descent (first entirely true-3d games. Descent because it was the first, Quake because it was also massively popular and upped the bar for graphics/physics for all games to come)
Half-Life (upped player-immersion to truly cinematic levels, and pioneered playing the story rather than "play a bit/read some story/rinse and repeat")
Don't get me wrong - System Shock 2, Goldeneye and the rest were brilliant games (some better games than those above, but they didn't "push the genre forward" for shit.
Furthermore, imagine that although you legally own the book, you are only allowed to read it by wearing spectacles manufactured by certain companies chosen by the bookshop.
Linux varies between "tricky" and "difficult". Windows makes many things "easy", and everything else "practically fricking impossible".
Linux adepts think Windows is cack because things that are "practically fricking impossible" in Windows are merely "difficult" in Linux. Normal Windows users think Linux sucks, because things which are "easy" in Windows are frequently "tricky" in Linux.
My name is Mtubutu Balawe, and I beg your help. A wealthy government official has recently died, and I require to move large amounts of erectile dysfunction pills from my home to the USA...
Well as we said, bully for you - you're fine. So don't get worried about TCP or DRM, because it may well never significantly affect you.
However, it's then completely incorrect to tell other people, who will be affected that "there's no problem".
You won't have a problem, but they will. Ergo, there is a problem, just not one which affects you personally. Hence posting "there's no problem" is flat-out wrong.
Sit there and be smug that you'll be fine, as is your right. However, recognise that you have nothing useful or informative to say to people from other countries in a DRM/TCP debate.
It's like if the government decided to put to death all the people who had brown hair. If I happen to be invisible I'm laughing, but I have absolutely nothing of value to say to a forum full of people who aren't. And going on said forum and posting that "it's not a problem" is simply bullshit.
I'm as hot as you on the media sensationalising trivial occurrances, and the damage the inevitable knee-jerk reactions by short-sighted citizens and bandwagon-jumping representatives. I think this is one of the major problems with modern society in the West - we're hearing news from all four corners of the earth, but we've got brains evolved for living in small groups of 100-150 people, so at a subsconscious level we assume anything we hear happening to anyone must be happening to people in a group that size.
We hear about a child getting abducted and murdered, and instead of going "well, that's a 1 in 10,000,000 chance, nothing to worry about" we go "Shit! My kids are playing inside now for the rest of their lives!!!111!!11eleventy!!!1".
Nevertheless, when you have clear and incontrovertible proof that your own government is eavesdropping on the population (and, like it or not, Echelon is listening to your calls and eavesdropping on your e-mail, and traffic analysis is being done on your phone), in defiance of the laws of the land, that's neither "media manipulation" nor "isolated".
When you look at the statistics and see the economy tanking, you see Creationism/ID being given the status of a "science", you see the "before" and "after" versions of a scientific report that's been vetted by the Whitehouse, it's hard to write those off as media manipulation.
When you read amateur blog postings of people who have been arrested and detained for days for taking part in a peaceful (pre-arranged!) protest, or when you read self-published accounts of people being denied visas or flights because their name sounds a bit like a suspected terrorist, that's not media manipulation.
When you see time and again the law enforcement admitting the use of PATRIOT Act powers in situations completely unrelated to terrorism, that's neither media manipulation, nor something that's "always happened".
"There are almost no stories of abuses by normal citizens in the news media. It just doesn't happen."
Maybe not in Fox news, mate, but try raising your head occasionally (fuck it: just do a Google search) and you'dbeamazedwhatyousee.
And that only took a couple of minutes and a quick search.
Geeks are successful precisely because they reject convention, so get used to it if you aren't already. No cow is sacred, no thought is verboten, and this can be hard to adjust to sometimes, especially if you tend to have delicate sensibilities.
A woman in an IT department full of geeks is going to be thought of as the odd one out, simply because IT is so male-dominated. As a minority (especially with socially-inept people like geeks), you have to prove you're "one of the lads" - this might mean inviting them all down the pub one night, not being afraid to fart in front of them, or responding to a risque joke with a downright rude one (basically, match their behaviour, at least a bit).
Grow a thick skin, and whatever you do don't get sniffy or go running to management when a problem arises - nothing marks you out as different more than demanding special consideration. There are already several geeks in the department with their own little microculture - if you want to fit into it you'll be fine, but if you start demanding they change to suit you, you'll only ostracise yourself.
Sure, if someone makes a blatantly misogynist comment by all means defend your gender, but do it by good-humouredly responding in kind, not by getting uptight or offendedly asking them to stop.
Guys like all-guy groups because they can relax and let it all hang out. Women tend to demand higher standards of behaviour, which prevents many guys from relaxing fully.
If you want to get on comfortably what you're aiming for is to be "one of the lads" who just happens to have ovaries, not a girly-girl they have to watch themselves around.
If you do this right they're highly unlikely to ask you out on a date - women are mysterious magical creatures who smell nice and have almost no body-hair. Mates who burp in front of you, tell dirtier jokes than you and aren't afraid to scratch themselves in public and just happen to posess ovaries don't get a look-in.
Oh noes! Two people posted the same link close together in time!
One must have copied the other, as there's no way at all they could both have already known about the video. You know, the one on the world's most well-known public video-sharing website... <:-/
"The problem I pointed out is that DRM doesn't stop commercial "pirates"... All DRM does make it hard or impossible for a legal user to use the contents they have bought in any other previously undreamed of ways."
Exactly. The talented hardware-hackers and organised criminals will be able to crack media, but normal users home are stuffed. Ripping gangs are very good on new releases, but the overwhelming majority of pirate content on bittorent isn't the latest stuff - it's largely hosted by amateurs.
"Every bit of content that was ever expressed by all humans on the planet since history began can then be carried in a device much smaller than any iPod today. DRM for any particular microscopic fragment of data would no longer make sense."
Sorrry, what?. We've already got entire libraries in the palms of our hands, and all that's happened is that content producers have got more uptight about copyright.
We're moving to an information economy rather than an industrial one. That means information (and access to it) becomes more valuable, not less.
What was your reasoning otherwise?
"DRM will be a distant memory in 10-20 years. Copyright itself, an artificial monopoly, will die before the presently granted copyrights expire."
Hopefully so - the world would be a much better place. Unfortunately, I don't trust large corporations and the governments i ntheir pockets to act in the best interests of a society 20 years later. I trust them to clamp down and screw the normal user for every penny they've got, and fuck the future.
Nice plan, and one whihc I generally try to help along.
However, at the moment the movie industry's tanking, and instead of re-examining their approach they're just blaming the whole thing on piracy and clamping down harder.
I really hope it works, but I fear a future of having to avoid all mainstream media is coming...
You're right, apart from the fact that (as I understand it) TCP relies on the audio/video being encrypted with the DRM key right up until it hits the display device.
And yes, every link in the chain has to be TCP-compliant, or the system isn't "Trusted". For example, have you seen the recent news stories announcing Vista will downsample all HD content played on the computer if you don't have a TCP monitor? Ditto for sound cards and other output devices.
The whole point of TCP is that the entire architecture of the computer is locked down by it. Otherwise the entirety of TCP is a white elephant, not much scarier than the current crop of (crackable) DRM offerings.
Not to be rude, but I think you need to read up a bit on the specifics of the TC platform.
Heh, I see what you mean now, but this is a very parochial attitude.
Most western countries are very hot on IP protection, and with the pressure from the US this is only getting worse. The US is also putting pressure on the far east (SE Asia), Russia and others right now to clamp down on it.
Relying on your government to be half-arsed on IP law doesn't strike me as a particularly good solution when the USA is on the warpath, just like relying on the government to be half-arsed on terrorism didn't work in Afghanistan.
1. Great, we've just established you mostly like the very media that bittorrent is good for. So it's no surprise that you don't see the problem for everyone else.
2. In this case you're definitely only looking for the most mainstream stuff out there. Again, you're fine but many other people won't be.
3. When you know what your'e doing ripping a DVD can be automated to a one- or two-click process (as it is on my machine). This makes ripping DVDs a lot more "usable" than hunting mininova or isohunt for variable-quality reliant-on-other-people torrents.
4. To my certain knowledge this is going on in the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and several other european countries. And the USA is famous for nothing if not putting pressure on other countries to adopt its economic and legal policies.
"Ok, so we can reach the conclusion that you certainly like more obscure titles than I do. Which is impressive in and on itself."
Less the sarcasm, correct. You don't seem to spend much time on the fringes of bittorrent, but are safely ensconced in the middle of the most popular torrents. And you seem to have little care for either the future or the idea that what happens in other countries affects your life too. Where are you from, exactly (if you don't mind me asking)?
"We have a consumer protection legislation -- and popular movements -- that make the passing of DMCA-like legislation practically impossible, which is GOOD."
That is good. However, given the USA is putting serious amounts of pressure on various governments to fall into line and adopt its IP policies, how long do you think you'll stand against the world, if the USA continues unchecked?
"TCP-less hardware abound here and will continue to abound for a long time... even after every single piece of hardware in the USofA is TCP-enabled."
Who designs and manufactures most of the hardware and software in the world? What country still dominates the web (even though it didn't even invent it)? What countries' corporations determine the de-facto standards that everyone else has to be compatible with? What country consitutes the single largest market in the world for hardware, and where's the equivalent of Microsoft or Dell pushing for non-TCP hardware?
And who produces a massively disproportionate quantity of the world's mass-media?
"This is a 180-million people country, and others (China and India) will follow suit."
Says who? One small region's administration in India says it's adopting open source (important: it hasn't done it yet - there's still plenty of time for it to pull a Massachusetts), and China's making vague moves in the direction of Red Flag Linux, that's all.
"About hardware hacks: if you stop to remember, before the 1960's there were no software hacks..."
Indeed, and there was a miniscule fraction of the number of people who could use them, compared to now, when even my grandmother can rip MP3s off a CD.
"but plenty of hardware hacks, with secret recipies being exchanged in the underground (do you know what is a 999 key?) The internet will continue to make those hardware hacks available to anyone anonymously, even in a TCP-dominated USofA. And it's just slightly more expensive to implement, but plenty of people will do so. And plenty of unDRMed media will be available, even if more obscure titles don't."
All correct. But the number of people with the skills, time and patience for hardware hacking is pathetically small compared to the number of people who'll download a ripping app and use it to rip CDs/DVDs.
All DRM is theoretically possible to break. It's the difficulty of implementing the solution that matters. You can't argue that hardware hacking is more specialised and expensive than writing code. You can't reasonably argue that making a complex hardware device is as eas
Your international calls are eavesdropped on by the NSA, an agency specifically not permitted to conduct surveillance on US citizens. Your domestic calls are traffic-analysed for "patterns indicating terrorism". Your ISP, telephone and library records are browsed by law enforcement not only without a warrant, but with punishments for the librarians/engineers/companies responsible if they tip you off.
You're holding hundreds of foreign nationals in legal limbo in a concentration camp, where they're regularly humiliated and tortured with complete administration approval. They're subject to secret trials without legal protection, and "due process" isn't even paid lip-service. The CIA has been caught illegally flying suspects to authoritarian regimes through your allies airports without permission so they can be "properly" tortured without US personnel being directly held responsible.
The PATRIOT act powers, far from only being used to catch terrorists (as promised) have been used to harrass holidaymakers, arrest peaceful demonstrators and deny innocent people flights and passports. In addition, said powers were recently renewed and made permanent, even though they were firmly promised to be "only temporary" when introduced after 9/11.
Your democratic system is hopelessly corrupt - one party controls (and is consolidating its hold) on all three branches of your government, your representatives are either corrupt or powerless in the face of the Whitehouse, judicial oversight of the executive branch has been gutted, your leaders are known to have broken the law multiple times and that's not even counting the constant background noise of corrupt representatives (to be fair, more Republicans than Democrats, but still both) being outed in dodgy financial deals and abuses of power. Your elections would embarrass a south american banana republic, with Diebold and ES&S machines showing all kinds of voting irregularities (when people haven't been erroneously thrown off the voting rolls for daring to have a similar name to a convicted felon), machines so easy to hack a chimpanzee has been videoed doing it and programmers testifying the systems are insecure by design, and that they were paid to produce election-subverting tools for Republican party members.
You've lost the rights to: not be searched without due cause, not permit law enforcement entry into your home without "good reason" to believe a crime is being committed, the right to free speech and the majority of rights ensuring your privacy.
And that's without even touching on the deliberate treason by the current administration outing an undercover CIA operative for political gains, "clamping down on terrorism" by selling off your ports to a middle-eastern company with decidedly dodgy connections, an illegal war in Iraq, thousands of US soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent foreign nationals dead, an army so unpopular it can't recruit enough people to mintain parity and so financially fucked it can't afford proper equipment for the people they already have.
Plus, y'know, Creationism/ID being taught as "science", the environment, your entire foreign policy making you a pariah in the international scene and all the other fun things that haven't changed a bit since 9/11.
Fair point, but from little Susan's (or more likely, little Sandeep's;-) position, how different it OO.org Writer to MS Word to AbiWord? How different in basic functionality is OO.org Calc to MS Excel?
How different are the concepts of desktop/folders/files/searches/windows between Linux and Windows?
It'll look a bit different and a few options will have moved, but unless you're a Word power-user you really won't notice the difference between (say) OO.org and MS Office.
Little Johnny would likewise be fine - if he wants to run a small business he'll already know Linux/OO.org/whatever, allowing him to set up the software infrastructure of his business essentially for free, instead of having to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars up-front in licence fees.
You're basically arguing that the difference between Word and OO.org is enough that they should perpetuate vendor lockin for another whole generation. Their whole position is to avoid vendor lockin, so your argument doesn't really make sense in the context of their stated aims.
The trouble is, with hardware TCP support you may well be "uniquely identified" in order to complete the DRM licence acquisition, and you might well never even know it.
And TBH, I don't think your last paragraph is a stretch at all. People become what they're treated like. Treat people like idiots and they'll take great pleasure in acting dumb. Treat people like criminals and the implicit insult will make them more likely to break the law.
"I'm being treated like this anyway, so I might as well reap the benefits" is a powerful and common impulse.
I'm not sure what argument you're responding to, but it's not the one we were discussing.
We were talking about downloading TCP DRMed files, or ripping TCP DRMed media. We weren't talking about buying DVDs from Wal-mart - we can rip those already.
Your universal backup device is lovely, but it doesn't do squat about circumventing the DRM, which is what we were talking about. Sure, I could back up my DVD movies to other bits of obsolete plastic, and in the coming years I could also pull out my antique DVD player to watch them on. Assuming the player is still working, I can get spares for it, and the DVDs don't degrade after... oh... 10-15 years?
Alternatively, I could back them up to my machine, stick the lot in a database and view them whenever I want, however I want.
I mean, I could back up DRMed files now, but as soon as I change my machine or lose the DRM licence all those backed up files are useless.
But -thats what I said not in 5 years, Vista is not even here yet, not to mention most of the hardware for it , DVI/VGA are still standard video interfaces and none of DRM ridden interfaces are in main stream use (despite them being present on the market for last 5 years).
Vista is slated to be released in January next year. As with all Windows releases, it'll prompt a new generation of "designed for Windows Vista" hardware, and will prompt a new round of hardware upgrades/purchases across the PC world.
According to this there are already in excess of 25 million PCs out there with the trusted computing chip in them (link was written a year ago), and by 2010 most devices will have some form of hardware TCP support.
Now, while I'm not arguing there might be a few machines knocking around in five years time without a complete end-to-end hardware TCP implementation, it's clearly going to be the de-facto standard, and that's only going to get worse with time.
You're right, in principle speaker or monitor hacking isn't impossible. However it's not easy, the skills required are much less common that software programming, and once one person does it they can't package the solution up like an application and simply copy it to anyone who wants to use it. Hardware is hard.
Also see what I posted earlier about the hassle of it. If I've got to rip apart my monitor (or even download schematics, buy components and build my own device) just to rip a movie I own, chances are I'll just suck it up and buy the damn thing.
And then guess what? - non DRM ridden platform will still be here,as there is still consumer demand for them.DRM ridden boxes will be just another appliance of limited use.
Sorry? Did you miss something? The whole point of hardware DRM is that machines which don't support it won't play the media. They won't have the hardware, and they won't have a licence to decrypt the file.
DVDs/DeCSS is a relatively pathetic encryption attempt, and look at the legal trouble it caused, and how long it took for legit, reliable DVD players to be made available on Linux.
If an OS wants to play TCP DRMed media it'll have to have support right down to the hardware and buy a licence to join the club. OSes which don't follow the rules will get sued, and the next generation of DRMed content will simply ignore them.
Remember you only need one hacked monitor and one hacked sound card in the whole world to get the content on the loose. -All regular users get it same no hassle way (bittorent,p2p).
Oh jesus, I thought we covered this. Downloading off bittorrent is fine for teenage pirates to leech the latest episodes of Stargate SG-i or Desperate Housewives. It's no solution at all for those who like obscure media, who have a large collection of movies they'd like to back up, or who don't want to be exposed to prosecution and bankruptcy simply for exercising their Fair Use rights.
Where did this "OMFG! Teh intarwebs wi1l s4ve uS from DRM witH biTtorr3ntz!" meme come from anyway? It's not a solution - it's just a workaround for one small (ethically indefensible) section of the ripping community. Normal users are still fucked, and it's only really the normal users who have a right to complain in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny thing - I remember everything you're reminiscing about, but for me it was a teeth-grinding irritation. ;-)
I assume many other people did too, which is why Descent and its sequals seems to be the neanderthals of FPS evolution.
"I'm a second year law student, here's my take on this:"
Christ, I think I see why we keep getting laws like this proposed. Not to to be offensive, but what are they teaching you in law school these days?
"First of all, it's a civil registry. I don't see an automatic due process issue because the state isn't meting out any punishment to those who are listed (i.e. there's no state-led deprivation of life, liberty, or property)."
Straight off the top of my head... there are already all sorts of laws controlling where someone on the sex offenders register can live. IANAL, but that looks rather like a deprivation of liberty, right there.
And if it's not state-led, who's maintaining the register, doing the enforcing, and deciding who gets put on there?
"If the accused can attend the hearing and present evidence in his defense before the judge... Tossing around any old accusation won't cut it; a judge will be weighing the evidence and making the decision. Presumably the accused can attend the hearing and present his own evidence... I would fully expect the decision can be appealed... (on many issues the presiding judge has unchallenged discretion; this wouldn't be one of them)."
Get enough assumptions and qualifiers in there, sport?
The fact is, you know pratically nothing about the details of the law, and everything you offer is your own personal opinion. And yet, on the strength of that, you're prepared to stand up and brand other people "knee-jerkers" for daring to suggest that the few details we've heard might just indicate it's a really, really stupid idea?
Your obvious respect and belief in the lawmakers is an admirable thing... but I doubt you'll find many people who'll agree with you. Even if the convictions^H^H^H^H^H sorry, allegations are appealable, you're still arguing that people should be punished who can't be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
"I can see where this law could be useful in cases where we know someone has committed a heinous act but the state can't punish him."
Kindly give an example of such a situation, where we simultaneously know (not "think" or "suspect")the person is guilty, some technicality of the law ensures they can't be convicted, and where disregarding said technicality doesn't do irreparably more harm to our entire society than letting one child molester free.
"Maybe the key evidence linking him is inadmissible in court (but still reliable)."
Right, except that evidence is generally ruled inadmissable in court because rules have been broken to get it. We have rules for admissable evidence to protect people - this is what prevents spying or searching without a warrant, and all the other freedoms we enjoy. The minute evidence obtained like this is made remotely useful we might as well not have the protections at all, as they won't count for shit.
"Maybe the statue of limitations has expired or there are jurisdictional problems."
Erm, maybe you aren't aware of why we have a statute of limitations.
If you disagree with the fundamental idea then you'd be better off campaigning to have the SoL repealed than passing a stupid law to get around it.
"Maybe the victim is unwilling to press charges or has fled."
If the victim is unwilling to press charges then (from the state's point of view) there isn't really a crime to prosecute, is there? Likewise if the victim flees. I'm sorry, but in a (non-victimless) crime if the victim won't act to ensure prosecution of their supposed wrong-doer then why should the state?
Gutting this exemption allows people to be prosecuted for anything the state likes, even if the "victim" doesn't want the prosecution.
Damn straight - I've got scars all over my hands.
Used to be employed to put the damn things together, one after another. I swear in those days they used to sharpen the fuckers...
Well, he's jamming his thumb right in God's butt-hole now...
</southpark>
Sorry, "again"? I thought we were talking about unproven allegations and an inability to get a conviction. I thought that if you weren't convicted you were deemed to be innocent, at least as far as the law's concerned.
This whole effort smacks of "there's no smoke without fire", and that's a shitty premise to pass a law on. Especially given the number of false allegations of child abuse.
Obviously no-one who abuses children deserves to escape unpunished, but I think that's kind of what we have "due process" for. Assuming the legal system (which has stood us in good stead for the last several hundred years) is still working, no extra loop-holes should be necessary.
For games which "advanced the genre" this is a terrible list.
How can you put System Shock 2 in the top five when SS1 was the game that first introduced role playing/immersive elements into FPSs? Even the review basically admits SS2 just continued the direction SS1 had set and added more polish to the idea!
Now, SS2 might have been a better game, but it didn't "advance the genre" for shit compared to the original.
Likewise Goldeneye - what the fuck? So it was the first FPS on consoles, big whoop - it wasn't exactly groundbreaking at the time compared to what the PC was doing.
Sure it kick-started the market for FPSs on consoles, but "FPS market in consoles" != "FPS genre".
"Games such as Halo could only have been done thanks to Goldeneye" is complete bullshit, too. Halo was originally being developed for the PC before Microsoft bought Bungie, so we clearly would still have seen Halo, just on a different platform.
If, as they claim, we're rating "what pushed the genre forward", the list should have looked more like:
Wolfenstein 3D (invented the genre - try pushing harder than that!)
Doom (first made FPSs widely popular, kicked off the modding scene, invented "Deathmatch" multiplayer)
System Shock One (introduced the idea of "plot", and first to make an effort to immerse the player in a story)
Quake or Descent (first entirely true-3d games. Descent because it was the first, Quake because it was also massively popular and upped the bar for graphics/physics for all games to come)
Half-Life (upped player-immersion to truly cinematic levels, and pioneered playing the story rather than "play a bit/read some story/rinse and repeat")
Don't get me wrong - System Shock 2, Goldeneye and the rest were brilliant games (some better games than those above, but they didn't "push the genre forward" for shit.
That's because he's a registered member (+1) in good standing (+1).
You're an AC, who are frequently annoyances, trolls or idiots.
Anyone can register, for free, if they aren't afraid of the reputation-tracking aspects.
You do the math.
Furthermore, imagine that although you legally own the book, you are only allowed to read it by wearing spectacles manufactured by certain companies chosen by the bookshop.
Linux varies between "tricky" and "difficult". Windows makes many things "easy", and everything else "practically fricking impossible".
Linux adepts think Windows is cack because things that are "practically fricking impossible" in Windows are merely "difficult" in Linux. Normal Windows users think Linux sucks, because things which are "easy" in Windows are frequently "tricky" in Linux.
Dear sir,
My name is Mtubutu Balawe, and I beg your help. A wealthy government official has recently died, and I require to move large amounts of erectile dysfunction pills from my home to the USA...
Well as we said, bully for you - you're fine. So don't get worried about TCP or DRM, because it may well never significantly affect you.
However, it's then completely incorrect to tell other people, who will be affected that "there's no problem".
You won't have a problem, but they will. Ergo, there is a problem, just not one which affects you personally. Hence posting "there's no problem" is flat-out wrong.
Sit there and be smug that you'll be fine, as is your right. However, recognise that you have nothing useful or informative to say to people from other countries in a DRM/TCP debate.
It's like if the government decided to put to death all the people who had brown hair. If I happen to be invisible I'm laughing, but I have absolutely nothing of value to say to a forum full of people who aren't. And going on said forum and posting that "it's not a problem" is simply bullshit.
Fnar, again: good one.
I'm as hot as you on the media sensationalising trivial occurrances, and the damage the inevitable knee-jerk reactions by short-sighted citizens and bandwagon-jumping representatives. I think this is one of the major problems with modern society in the West - we're hearing news from all four corners of the earth, but we've got brains evolved for living in small groups of 100-150 people, so at a subsconscious level we assume anything we hear happening to anyone must be happening to people in a group that size.
We hear about a child getting abducted and murdered, and instead of going "well, that's a 1 in 10,000,000 chance, nothing to worry about" we go "Shit! My kids are playing inside now for the rest of their lives!!!111!!11eleventy!!!1".
Nevertheless, when you have clear and incontrovertible proof that your own government is eavesdropping on the population (and, like it or not, Echelon is listening to your calls and eavesdropping on your e-mail, and traffic analysis is being done on your phone), in defiance of the laws of the land, that's neither "media manipulation" nor "isolated".
When you look at the statistics and see the economy tanking, you see Creationism/ID being given the status of a "science", you see the "before" and "after" versions of a scientific report that's been vetted by the Whitehouse, it's hard to write those off as media manipulation.
When you read amateur blog postings of people who have been arrested and detained for days for taking part in a peaceful (pre-arranged!) protest, or when you read self-published accounts of people being denied visas or flights because their name sounds a bit like a suspected terrorist, that's not media manipulation.
When you see time and again the law enforcement admitting the use of PATRIOT Act powers in situations completely unrelated to terrorism, that's neither media manipulation, nor something that's "always happened".
"There are almost no stories of abuses by normal citizens in the news media. It just doesn't happen."
Maybe not in Fox news, mate, but try raising your head occasionally (fuck it: just do a Google search) and you'd be amazed what you see.
And that only took a couple of minutes and a quick search.
Amen to that.
Geeks are successful precisely because they reject convention, so get used to it if you aren't already. No cow is sacred, no thought is verboten, and this can be hard to adjust to sometimes, especially if you tend to have delicate sensibilities.
A woman in an IT department full of geeks is going to be thought of as the odd one out, simply because IT is so male-dominated. As a minority (especially with socially-inept people like geeks), you have to prove you're "one of the lads" - this might mean inviting them all down the pub one night, not being afraid to fart in front of them, or responding to a risque joke with a downright rude one (basically, match their behaviour, at least a bit).
Grow a thick skin, and whatever you do don't get sniffy or go running to management when a problem arises - nothing marks you out as different more than demanding special consideration. There are already several geeks in the department with their own little microculture - if you want to fit into it you'll be fine, but if you start demanding they change to suit you, you'll only ostracise yourself.
Sure, if someone makes a blatantly misogynist comment by all means defend your gender, but do it by good-humouredly responding in kind, not by getting uptight or offendedly asking them to stop.
Guys like all-guy groups because they can relax and let it all hang out. Women tend to demand higher standards of behaviour, which prevents many guys from relaxing fully.
If you want to get on comfortably what you're aiming for is to be "one of the lads" who just happens to have ovaries, not a girly-girl they have to watch themselves around.
If you do this right they're highly unlikely to ask you out on a date - women are mysterious magical creatures who smell nice and have almost no body-hair. Mates who burp in front of you, tell dirtier jokes than you and aren't afraid to scratch themselves in public and just happen to posess ovaries don't get a look-in.
Oh noes! Two people posted the same link close together in time!
One must have copied the other, as there's no way at all they could both have already known about the video. You know, the one on the world's most well-known public video-sharing website... <:-/
"The problem I pointed out is that DRM doesn't stop commercial "pirates"... All DRM does make it hard or impossible for a legal user to use the contents they have bought in any other previously undreamed of ways."
Exactly. The talented hardware-hackers and organised criminals will be able to crack media, but normal users home are stuffed. Ripping gangs are very good on new releases, but the overwhelming majority of pirate content on bittorent isn't the latest stuff - it's largely hosted by amateurs.
"Every bit of content that was ever expressed by all humans on the planet since history began can then be carried in a device much smaller than any iPod today. DRM for any particular microscopic fragment of data would no longer make sense."
Sorrry, what?. We've already got entire libraries in the palms of our hands, and all that's happened is that content producers have got more uptight about copyright.
We're moving to an information economy rather than an industrial one. That means information (and access to it) becomes more valuable, not less.
What was your reasoning otherwise?
"DRM will be a distant memory in 10-20 years. Copyright itself, an artificial monopoly, will die before the presently granted copyrights expire."
Hopefully so - the world would be a much better place. Unfortunately, I don't trust large corporations and the governments i ntheir pockets to act in the best interests of a society 20 years later. I trust them to clamp down and screw the normal user for every penny they've got, and fuck the future.
That's why I'm fighting against them.
Nice plan, and one whihc I generally try to help along.
However, at the moment the movie industry's tanking, and instead of re-examining their approach they're just blaming the whole thing on piracy and clamping down harder.
I really hope it works, but I fear a future of having to avoid all mainstream media is coming...
You're right, apart from the fact that (as I understand it) TCP relies on the audio/video being encrypted with the DRM key right up until it hits the display device.
And yes, every link in the chain has to be TCP-compliant, or the system isn't "Trusted". For example, have you seen the recent news stories announcing Vista will downsample all HD content played on the computer if you don't have a TCP monitor? Ditto for sound cards and other output devices.
The whole point of TCP is that the entire architecture of the computer is locked down by it. Otherwise the entirety of TCP is a white elephant, not much scarier than the current crop of (crackable) DRM offerings.
Not to be rude, but I think you need to read up a bit on the specifics of the TC platform.
Heh, I see what you mean now, but this is a very parochial attitude.
Most western countries are very hot on IP protection, and with the pressure from the US this is only getting worse. The US is also putting pressure on the far east (SE Asia), Russia and others right now to clamp down on it.
Relying on your government to be half-arsed on IP law doesn't strike me as a particularly good solution when the USA is on the warpath, just like relying on the government to be half-arsed on terrorism didn't work in Afghanistan.
1. Great, we've just established you mostly like the very media that bittorrent is good for. So it's no surprise that you don't see the problem for everyone else.
2. In this case you're definitely only looking for the most mainstream stuff out there. Again, you're fine but many other people won't be.
3. When you know what your'e doing ripping a DVD can be automated to a one- or two-click process (as it is on my machine). This makes ripping DVDs a lot more "usable" than hunting mininova or isohunt for variable-quality reliant-on-other-people torrents.
4. To my certain knowledge this is going on in the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and several other european countries. And the USA is famous for nothing if not putting pressure on other countries to adopt its economic and legal policies.
"Ok, so we can reach the conclusion that you certainly like more obscure titles than I do. Which is impressive in and on itself."
Less the sarcasm, correct. You don't seem to spend much time on the fringes of bittorrent, but are safely ensconced in the middle of the most popular torrents. And you seem to have little care for either the future or the idea that what happens in other countries affects your life too. Where are you from, exactly (if you don't mind me asking)?
"We have a consumer protection legislation -- and popular movements -- that make the passing of DMCA-like legislation practically impossible, which is GOOD."
That is good. However, given the USA is putting serious amounts of pressure on various governments to fall into line and adopt its IP policies, how long do you think you'll stand against the world, if the USA continues unchecked?
"TCP-less hardware abound here and will continue to abound for a long time... even after every single piece of hardware in the USofA is TCP-enabled."
Who designs and manufactures most of the hardware and software in the world? What country still dominates the web (even though it didn't even invent it)? What countries' corporations determine the de-facto standards that everyone else has to be compatible with? What country consitutes the single largest market in the world for hardware, and where's the equivalent of Microsoft or Dell pushing for non-TCP hardware?
And who produces a massively disproportionate quantity of the world's mass-media?
"This is a 180-million people country, and others (China and India) will follow suit."
Says who? One small region's administration in India says it's adopting open source (important: it hasn't done it yet - there's still plenty of time for it to pull a Massachusetts), and China's making vague moves in the direction of Red Flag Linux, that's all.
"About hardware hacks: if you stop to remember, before the 1960's there were no software hacks..."
Indeed, and there was a miniscule fraction of the number of people who could use them, compared to now, when even my grandmother can rip MP3s off a CD.
"but plenty of hardware hacks, with secret recipies being exchanged in the underground (do you know what is a 999 key?) The internet will continue to make those hardware hacks available to anyone anonymously, even in a TCP-dominated USofA. And it's just slightly more expensive to implement, but plenty of people will do so. And plenty of unDRMed media will be available, even if more obscure titles don't."
All correct. But the number of people with the skills, time and patience for hardware hacking is pathetically small compared to the number of people who'll download a ripping app and use it to rip CDs/DVDs.
All DRM is theoretically possible to break. It's the difficulty of implementing the solution that matters. You can't argue that hardware hacking is more specialised and expensive than writing code. You can't reasonably argue that making a complex hardware device is as eas
Hahahahahaha, good one.
Your international calls are eavesdropped on by the NSA, an agency specifically not permitted to conduct surveillance on US citizens. Your domestic calls are traffic-analysed for "patterns indicating terrorism". Your ISP, telephone and library records are browsed by law enforcement not only without a warrant, but with punishments for the librarians/engineers/companies responsible if they tip you off.
You're holding hundreds of foreign nationals in legal limbo in a concentration camp, where they're regularly humiliated and tortured with complete administration approval. They're subject to secret trials without legal protection, and "due process" isn't even paid lip-service. The CIA has been caught illegally flying suspects to authoritarian regimes through your allies airports without permission so they can be "properly" tortured without US personnel being directly held responsible.
The PATRIOT act powers, far from only being used to catch terrorists (as promised) have been used to harrass holidaymakers, arrest peaceful demonstrators and deny innocent people flights and passports. In addition, said powers were recently renewed and made permanent, even though they were firmly promised to be "only temporary" when introduced after 9/11.
Your democratic system is hopelessly corrupt - one party controls (and is consolidating its hold) on all three branches of your government, your representatives are either corrupt or powerless in the face of the Whitehouse, judicial oversight of the executive branch has been gutted, your leaders are known to have broken the law multiple times and that's not even counting the constant background noise of corrupt representatives (to be fair, more Republicans than Democrats, but still both) being outed in dodgy financial deals and abuses of power. Your elections would embarrass a south american banana republic, with Diebold and ES&S machines showing all kinds of voting irregularities (when people haven't been erroneously thrown off the voting rolls for daring to have a similar name to a convicted felon), machines so easy to hack a chimpanzee has been videoed doing it and programmers testifying the systems are insecure by design, and that they were paid to produce election-subverting tools for Republican party members.
You've lost the rights to: not be searched without due cause, not permit law enforcement entry into your home without "good reason" to believe a crime is being committed, the right to free speech and the majority of rights ensuring your privacy.
And that's without even touching on the deliberate treason by the current administration outing an undercover CIA operative for political gains, "clamping down on terrorism" by selling off your ports to a middle-eastern company with decidedly dodgy connections, an illegal war in Iraq, thousands of US soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent foreign nationals dead, an army so unpopular it can't recruit enough people to mintain parity and so financially fucked it can't afford proper equipment for the people they already have.
Plus, y'know, Creationism/ID being taught as "science", the environment, your entire foreign policy making you a pariah in the international scene and all the other fun things that haven't changed a bit since 9/11.
Need I go on?
Fair point, but from little Susan's (or more likely, little Sandeep's ;-) position, how different it OO.org Writer to MS Word to AbiWord? How different in basic functionality is OO.org Calc to MS Excel?
How different are the concepts of desktop/folders/files/searches/windows between Linux and Windows?
It'll look a bit different and a few options will have moved, but unless you're a Word power-user you really won't notice the difference between (say) OO.org and MS Office.
Little Johnny would likewise be fine - if he wants to run a small business he'll already know Linux/OO.org/whatever, allowing him to set up the software infrastructure of his business essentially for free, instead of having to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars up-front in licence fees.
You're basically arguing that the difference between Word and OO.org is enough that they should perpetuate vendor lockin for another whole generation. Their whole position is to avoid vendor lockin, so your argument doesn't really make sense in the context of their stated aims.
Amen to that.
The trouble is, with hardware TCP support you may well be "uniquely identified" in order to complete the DRM licence acquisition, and you might well never even know it.
And TBH, I don't think your last paragraph is a stretch at all. People become what they're treated like. Treat people like idiots and they'll take great pleasure in acting dumb. Treat people like criminals and the implicit insult will make them more likely to break the law.
"I'm being treated like this anyway, so I might as well reap the benefits" is a powerful and common impulse.
I'm not sure what argument you're responding to, but it's not the one we were discussing.
We were talking about downloading TCP DRMed files, or ripping TCP DRMed media. We weren't talking about buying DVDs from Wal-mart - we can rip those already.
Your universal backup device is lovely, but it doesn't do squat about circumventing the DRM, which is what we were talking about. Sure, I could back up my DVD movies to other bits of obsolete plastic, and in the coming years I could also pull out my antique DVD player to watch them on. Assuming the player is still working, I can get spares for it, and the DVDs don't degrade after... oh... 10-15 years?
Alternatively, I could back them up to my machine, stick the lot in a database and view them whenever I want, however I want.
I mean, I could back up DRMed files now, but as soon as I change my machine or lose the DRM licence all those backed up files are useless.
That's a great hope for the future. Nevertheless, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be fighting against DRM as well.
Vista is slated to be released in January next year. As with all Windows releases, it'll prompt a new generation of "designed for Windows Vista" hardware, and will prompt a new round of hardware upgrades/purchases across the PC world.
According to this there are already in excess of 25 million PCs out there with the trusted computing chip in them (link was written a year ago), and by 2010 most devices will have some form of hardware TCP support.
Now, while I'm not arguing there might be a few machines knocking around in five years time without a complete end-to-end hardware TCP implementation, it's clearly going to be the de-facto standard, and that's only going to get worse with time.
You're right, in principle speaker or monitor hacking isn't impossible. However it's not easy, the skills required are much less common that software programming, and once one person does it they can't package the solution up like an application and simply copy it to anyone who wants to use it. Hardware is hard.
Also see what I posted earlier about the hassle of it. If I've got to rip apart my monitor (or even download schematics, buy components and build my own device) just to rip a movie I own, chances are I'll just suck it up and buy the damn thing.
Sorry? Did you miss something? The whole point of hardware DRM is that machines which don't support it won't play the media. They won't have the hardware, and they won't have a licence to decrypt the file.
DVDs/DeCSS is a relatively pathetic encryption attempt, and look at the legal trouble it caused, and how long it took for legit, reliable DVD players to be made available on Linux.
If an OS wants to play TCP DRMed media it'll have to have support right down to the hardware and buy a licence to join the club. OSes which don't follow the rules will get sued, and the next generation of DRMed content will simply ignore them.
Oh jesus, I thought we covered this. Downloading off bittorrent is fine for teenage pirates to leech the latest episodes of Stargate SG-i or Desperate Housewives. It's no solution at all for those who like obscure media, who have a large collection of movies they'd like to back up, or who don't want to be exposed to prosecution and bankruptcy simply for exercising their Fair Use rights.
Where did this "OMFG! Teh intarwebs wi1l s4ve uS from DRM witH biTtorr3ntz!" meme come from anyway? It's not a solution - it's just a workaround for one small (ethically indefensible) section of the ripping community. Normal users are still fucked, and it's only really the normal users who have a right to complain in the first place.