What I want now is a note detector. It needs a range of about 10 feet, and a little screen that says how much money it is detecting, and shows a little arrow pointing in the right direction.
This will be extremely useful for my new career as a pick-pocket.
From TFA:
His organization has a code of ethics... So how about putting these principles into law?... any regulation "would have a chilling effect that would put us back years"
In other words, the RFID maker claims to have a code of ethics, but doesn't want to be held to that code.
That smells to me like his code of ethics is going straight out of the window the instant it suits him.
The linux players work fine. I use
MPlayer
which will let me just watch one track of the DVD,
without having to mess about with menus at all. I've
never watched the FBI warning crap since I started
to use it.
The firmware in my DVDROM driver is supposed to be
region-locked, but I've never found a DVD that won't play.
Why didn't you just buy a DVD player at the same time? A cheap one only costs as much as 2 or 3 DVDs, and more or less every DVD player for sale in the UK is either region-free, or can be made so after a couple of minutes search on google.
As far as I can tell from this discussion, this region coding crap is still enforced in the US. But it is certainly not enforced over here.
Yes, breaking the law is often a prerequisite for being arrested.
As I'm not familiar with this law: can you tell me if it was the "being in front of the White House" bit that is illegal? Does everyone who goes there get arrested? Or was her crime the fact that she sat down? Or just the protesting?
If this is really a bad crime, how can it be a waste of money for the cops to be dealing with it? Surely it's just as important for them to be arresting these protestors as it is for them to be catching burglars?
Or perhaps you think that this isn't really bad behaviour at all, and that the time and money the cops spend dealing with it is wasted? In that case, why is it a crime?
Yes, I agree. If Cindy Sheehan had protested somewhere appropriate, like locked in her own house, no-one would have bothered her because no-one would have known she was protesting.
Her crime was to protest in an unreasonable place, i.e. where the press and public could see her. Of course anyone protesting in such a place should be arrested.
And all solders have joined the army of their own free will, so they must all want to die. So how stupid to complain about a war that is only killing soldiers and foreigners.
I bet you can't get anything sent to the ISS without paying some vast amount of money. Soaking up money seems to be the main reason that it's there.
If someone just had a satellite and wanted it launched, they would go to the cheapest vendor. I bet the Russian launchers will quote a price that undercuts anyone else by a substantial margin.
If I were a terrorist I wouldn't hijack a plane. That's been done, and a huge amount of effort has been put into stopping it from happening again.
I would blow up a boat, or a train, or something else. There must be lots of other potential targets. All the effort has been put into protecting the target that was chosen last time. That diverts resources from protecting the targets that haven't been tried yet.
And no effort at all has gone into the sort of political process that would make these precautions unneccessary. Exactly the opposite, in fact: the attacks on innocent coutries have strengthened popular support there for this kind of action.
It is usually a requirement of extradition that the offence be illegal in the country being extradited from, as well as the country being extradited to. Otherwise, everyone would get sent to Saudi Arabia for flogging every time they took a drink.
The tendency of powerful countries like the US to believe that their law should apply everywhere is more troubling. This not only leads to cases like Sklyarov's, but also to pressure on other countries to make them change their own laws to fall into line: the various European versions of the DMCA come to mind here.
The logical end of this process would be for all laws to be the same everywhere (and to be the worst common denominator of all the current laws). The present diversity of laws between different countries is an important source of our current freedoms.
Well, Farewell, NXDOMAIN ! I'm afraid I will not see you for a long time (since I have no other choice for a broadband ISP...)
But you've got plenty of choice for DNS servers. If the ones you are using are broken, try some others.
Well, I'm posting this from a machine using an A7S333 that works just fine. Yes, the onboard sound is crap, but what do you expect? It's a cheap generic machine.
No it doesn't. They're not charging anyone to use Linux.
In the US, at least, the word BSD is a trademark (look at bsd.org) so Berkeley Software Design, Inc would be equally entitled to ask for money like this.
If they don't intend to collect the money, why not set the price at $0.01? Then people who were scared into paying wouldn't feel so bad about it.
If the price list says $5000, it looks as though they actually expect to collect thousands of dollars, even if they give everyone a discount. And if there are lawers involved, they would have to collect a good bit of money to pay their fees. Even geeky lawyers expect to be paid. Or is Jeremy doing this for free too?
If you've got something big to plan, you plainly *do* use an unsecured public medium. You admit yourself that a Chechen leader was assassinated this way, and it's how the Madrid bombers were traced.
Most criminals aren't IT experts. If they were all that clever, they would have regular well-paid jobs and wouldn't need to turn to a life of crime.
No, I don't think it would be wrong to solve world hunger. I'm just pointing out that the logical extension of our present approach to DRM would make solving world hunger with matter duplicators illegal.
Re:Students better watch out!!
on
Textbooks With EULAs
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, the text of Dante's Inferno is likely to be a recent translation, and hence copyrighted.
But (at least in my country, so I would guess in the US too) the law is more retarded than you think. Even if the copyright of the text has expired, the publisher can still claim copyright on the specific arrangement of the words on the page. So if you want to make your own copy, you have to find an old edition to make it from.
No, the difference is that copying digital media can be done for free once you've paid the one-off cost of a computer, whereas copying a paper book requires feeding a photocopier with paper and toner, which costs money.
When you buy something like a book, some of the price you pay goes towards the cost of duplicating the item, and some of it goes to paying off the fixed costs of the manufacturer (such as buying the printing press). Actually you would have been happy with a duplicate of the book, but so long as you cannot make that yourself for less than the retail price, you will happily pay an amount that covers both elements of the cost.
But digital is different: you can duplicate it yourself for free. So the incentive to buy it at retail prices must be something other that a financial one.
The same problem would arise with other things if we had matter duplicators like we see in sci-fi, no-one would want to pay for their food, and we would have to have DRMed meals.
I found a bug in the free-download version of Suse last year, and tried to send them a patch. All I ever got was emails from marketing droids saying "you must purchase a copy of Suse and register it before you can receive technical support".
I didn't want technical support. I was giving them support, for fscks sake. I was sending them a patch. Yet they refused to accept it.
I've used Debian since then. They are even happy to receive fault reports without a patch.
No, no, the reason they want you to make 5 copies of the letter is because they want to distribute it to 5 different people and they don't want to get caught copying it themselves in case you have copyrighted it.
Slashdot Mirror
This will be extremely useful for my new career as a pick-pocket.
His organization has a code of ethics
In other words, the RFID maker claims to have a code of ethics, but doesn't want to be held to that code.
That smells to me like his code of ethics is going straight out of the window the instant it suits him.
If you're going to use cash, beware of this
The linux players work fine. I use MPlayer which will let me just watch one track of the DVD, without having to mess about with menus at all. I've never watched the FBI warning crap since I started to use it.
The firmware in my DVDROM driver is supposed to be region-locked, but I've never found a DVD that won't play.
Why didn't you just buy a DVD player at the same time? A cheap one only costs as much as 2 or 3 DVDs, and more or less every DVD player for sale in the UK is either region-free, or can be made so after a couple of minutes search on google.
As far as I can tell from this discussion, this region coding crap is still enforced in the US. But it is certainly not enforced over here.
This is so true. The money should have been spent on bombing North Korea.
Yes, breaking the law is often a prerequisite for being arrested.
As I'm not familiar with this law: can you tell me if it was the "being in front of the White House" bit that is illegal? Does everyone who goes there get arrested? Or was her crime the fact that she sat down? Or just the protesting?
If this is really a bad crime, how can it be a waste of money for the cops to be dealing with it? Surely it's just as important for them to be arresting these protestors as it is for them to be catching burglars?
Or perhaps you think that this isn't really bad behaviour at all, and that the time and money the cops spend dealing with it is wasted? In that case, why is it a crime?
Her crime was to protest in an unreasonable place, i.e. where the press and public could see her. Of course anyone protesting in such a place should be arrested.
And all solders have joined the army of their own free will, so they must all want to die. So how stupid to complain about a war that is only killing soldiers and foreigners.
So they blow up some troops in Iraq instead. That's become the easy option for terrorists now.
If someone just had a satellite and wanted it launched, they would go to the cheapest vendor. I bet the Russian launchers will quote a price that undercuts anyone else by a substantial margin.
I would blow up a boat, or a train, or something else. There must be lots of other potential targets. All the effort has been put into protecting the target that was chosen last time. That diverts resources from protecting the targets that haven't been tried yet.
And no effort at all has gone into the sort of political process that would make these precautions unneccessary. Exactly the opposite, in fact: the attacks on innocent coutries have strengthened popular support there for this kind of action.
The tendency of powerful countries like the US to believe that their law should apply everywhere is more troubling. This not only leads to cases like Sklyarov's, but also to pressure on other countries to make them change their own laws to fall into line: the various European versions of the DMCA come to mind here.
The logical end of this process would be for all laws to be the same everywhere (and to be the worst common denominator of all the current laws). The present diversity of laws between different countries is an important source of our current freedoms.
Well, Farewell, NXDOMAIN ! I'm afraid I will not see you for a long time (since I have no other choice for a broadband ISP...)
But you've got plenty of choice for DNS servers. If the ones you are using are broken, try some others.
Well, I'm posting this from a machine using an A7S333 that works just fine. Yes, the onboard sound is crap, but what do you expect? It's a cheap generic machine.
No it doesn't. They're not charging anyone to use Linux.
In the US, at least, the word BSD is a trademark (look at bsd.org) so Berkeley Software Design, Inc would be equally entitled to ask for money like this.
If they don't intend to collect the money, why not set the price at $0.01? Then people who were scared into paying wouldn't feel so bad about it.
If the price list says $5000, it looks as though they actually expect to collect thousands of dollars, even if they give everyone a discount. And if there are lawers involved, they would have to collect a good bit of money to pay their fees. Even geeky lawyers expect to be paid. Or is Jeremy doing this for free too?
Suicide bombers usually perpetrate their crime just once. The ones on July 21st were just incompetent.
The directors of Enron? They were management. There's no way they would have known how to use secure encryption.
If you've got something big to plan, you plainly *do* use an unsecured public medium. You admit yourself that a Chechen leader was assassinated this way, and it's how the Madrid bombers were traced.
Most criminals aren't IT experts. If they were all that clever, they would have regular well-paid jobs and wouldn't need to turn to a life of crime.
No, I don't think it would be wrong to solve world hunger. I'm just pointing out that the logical extension of our present approach to DRM would make solving world hunger with matter duplicators illegal.
But (at least in my country, so I would guess in the US too) the law is more retarded than you think. Even if the copyright of the text has expired, the publisher can still claim copyright on the specific arrangement of the words on the page. So if you want to make your own copy, you have to find an old edition to make it from.
When you buy something like a book, some of the price you pay goes towards the cost of duplicating the item, and some of it goes to paying off the fixed costs of the manufacturer (such as buying the printing press). Actually you would have been happy with a duplicate of the book, but so long as you cannot make that yourself for less than the retail price, you will happily pay an amount that covers both elements of the cost.
But digital is different: you can duplicate it yourself for free. So the incentive to buy it at retail prices must be something other that a financial one. The same problem would arise with other things if we had matter duplicators like we see in sci-fi, no-one would want to pay for their food, and we would have to have DRMed meals.
I didn't want technical support. I was giving them support, for fscks sake. I was sending them a patch. Yet they refused to accept it.
I've used Debian since then. They are even happy to receive fault reports without a patch.
No, no, the reason they want you to make 5 copies of the letter is because they want to distribute it to 5 different people and they don't want to get caught copying it themselves in case you have copyrighted it.