And rather interestingly, the American revolutionaries had a lot more success when they used what we now call asymmetric warfare against the British than they did trying to slug it out with them on the battlefield.
This is nothing new. When I was a teenager back in the 1970s, I would pool my meagre resources with those of some friends to buy a vinyl album which the person with access to the best stereo would then record on cassettes for all the others. Note though that we only bought the album if there was nobody around with a decent tape of it that could be traded for a recording of something one of us had, so we'd have quite happily used torrents or whatever if they'd been available to us.
"you realize it is always a net economic gain in the short run to destroy all barriers to entry(you're effective end to copyright on music)."
He was actually proposing an end to restrictions on the _non-commercial_ copying of recorded performances. This is _not_ the same as ending copyrights on music.
"It would be like saying all software should be free."
No, it would not. The act of running a program is _always_ effectively a recorded performance (albeit an interactive one) -- programmers do not have the option of reciting code from a print-out to packed houses (One night only: Linus Torvalds and guests will be reading code from the Linux kernel. Book now!).
"There are artists that only make money performing and there are artists that want to charge people 16 or 20 bucks a CD."
Them wanting to charge a certain price for something is _not_ the same as convincing consumers to pay that price. Technology gave the recording industry a magical century during which they could make large sums of money from distributing a single musical performance over and over again. Now, technology has bypassed that business model, just like radio, records, and movie technology bypassed the previously lucrative music hall / vaudeville business model, and movie sound ruined the careers of many silent stars whose voices weren't "right", and television came along and changed the landscape again, and... Yet every one of these changes (each of which caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth from entrenched interests) ended up generating vast sums of money for the industry as a whole. But the people making fortunes from new, ground-breaking technologies were often not the same people who had made fortunes from whatever got replaced, because far too many of those clung to the deck of a sinking ship until it disappeared below the waves.
New entertainment technologies have always offered huge money making opportunities to those with the vision to see ways to take advantage of them, but they have a notable penchant for laying waste to anyone who tries to cling to old ways of doing things, irrespective of how much money and power they have, and who they can buy.
"of course, the face of music would change completely."
It would indeed. But then it's changed completely many times in the past due to the influences of new and different technologies, and it will do so again many times in the future. And there will be both visionaries who make huge fortunes from embracing those changes, and those who lose what fortunes they had because they thought that laws, publicity campaigns, and daft restrictions on the technology itself would allow them to pretend that nothing had really changed at all.
"Would music still be around, yes. would it be anything like it has been for the last 200 or so years, no."
The first commercial recordings were actually made a little less than 120 years ago, but this is irrelevant to your central point...
Music is already nothing like it has been over the majority of the mainstream recording industry's history due to the fact that video, which started out as a marketing tool for music, has now become the dominant medium, often relegating the music itself to a more or less throwaway backing track for what amounts to soft porn for the recently post-pubescent. It has now reached the stage where a Janis Joplin or Louis Armstrong would not stand a chance in that industry because they aren't "videogenic" enough, while a musically inept Kate Moss type would get a lucrative contract, massive promotion, instant stardom, and an almost equally instant slide into total obscurity after a couple of years.
So while it may change, it is hard to imagine a situation that could be worse than one where the general level of music being offered to consumers is so bad that a stupid frog ring-tone backed by a not-very-wonderful rendition of the theme from an old Eddie Murphy film can reach number one in the charts of several countries.
Where is there anything in the grandparent's post indicating that he's breaking any laws? All he said is that he's not buying music that he otherwise likes on principle -- nothing in his post indicates that he is obtaining said music in any other way (except possibly by listening to the radio etc., which is perfectly legal).
"Sound is the first thing to truely be 3 dimensional"
Strange. I was labouring under the (possibly erroneous) assumption that space has n dimension, the first three of which are rather older than sound which, unlike space, needs a medium to travel through.
A far better analogy would be paying five dollars for an illegal copy of a pair of name-brand trainers knowing that the workers at both factories got paid the same. Downloading songs from the Internet is not free, because Internet links cost money; they are however much cheaper than buying a CD, just like those cheap pirate trainers are much cheaper than the name-brand originals.
"They simply take the magic "projected sales if internet didn't exist and we were still in the 80's""
And cassette tapes hadn't been invented, and home taping was not therefore killing music by taking food from the mouths of poor, starving musicians and the poor, starving executives of record companies who were trying to live off of them.
I think that the grandparent is trying to point out the fact that most of artists who are signed to major labels either earn nothing from what can be quite a substantial number of CD sales, or actually end up owing money to the label. So while agreeing that paying somebody for creating something one wants is indeed fair, the grandparent is stating that this rarely happens for all but the top acts who are signed to major labels, so more and more artists are choosing to either independently market their works via services such as CD Baby (who can get you on iTunes), or go with one of the growing number of independent labels who give artists a much better deal than the bigger, more established companies.
In any case, I wouldn't want Intel to die, because that would leave AMD with a monopoly, so they could get away with churning out crap just like Intel used to. IMO the ideal situation would be one where both companies were more or less the same size with similar market shares, thereby giving AMD more to spend on R&D, fabs, etc, while Intel would have to be both more agile in a development sense, and less able to foist crap on the market just because they dominate it. Consumers would benefit from this sort of situation far more than would be the case if we simply exchanged one chip-making monolith for another with a different name.
For the same reasons, I would very much like to see both Apple and desktop Linux with bigger market shares than they have now. This doesn't mean I want to see MS die, but rather that I would welcome an MS which is forced to produce new, better products on a regular basis instead of papering over the cracks in old and deficient offerings while their successors languish in a limbo of slipped shipping dates and feature trimmings.
"Windows users learned the hard way that they have to be careful"
The number of viruses, worms, and trojans that are still spreading widely via security holes which MS have already fixed with patches months or even years ago would seem to indicate that large numbers of Windows users are being anything but careful.
"Customers wouldn't (or couldn't) migrate away from DOS-based Windows, ergo Microsoft had to update the product for them."
I would be more inclined to believe this if they hadn't launched Windows-95 with so much fanfare. That and the fact that Windows-95 had a new UI and control set, and whole slew of new APIs and capabilities which NT, still in its 3.51 incarnation, lacked (built in networking, TAPI, multimedia, DirectX, system policies, plug-and-play, FAX capabilities, etc.).
"If you really think Microsoft _wanted_ the hassle and expense of maintaining, supporting, and marketing two different codebases while trying to keep binary compatibility between them (and their previous releases), you've got a pretty weird idea about a preferable way to run a software business."
What you claim they wanted is neither here or there: as with people, companies are judged by what they do, not what somebody claims they meant to do. If they were so reluctant to maintain two code bases, then why did they continue to push Win9X hard long after most domestic users had hardware that easily exceeded the requirements for NT, while making no effort whatsoever to market NT to those same domestic users? Why did they launch and push the horrid Windows-ME in the same year as the excellent Windows-2000, when ME was so broken that its compatibility with old applications was actually worse than that of Windows-2000?
"That's a rather extraordinary claim. Evidence ?"
Unfortunately, the Microsoft page for the old "Designed For Windows-95" logo requirements is no longer there, and much Googling reveals many busted links and not a lot else. The oldest on-line version I can find is one for the "Designed for Windows NT and 95" logo, which obviously contains a lot of NT-aware stuff that wasn't in the older Win95-specific one. I still have the MS handbook, but neither the time nor the inclination to scan the whole thing in just for one passage, which basically states that software should store its configuration information in the registry, under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Company/Program name/Version/. You've possibly noticed that a lot of older software does this, thereby rendering it unsuitable for a multi-user system (whose users may not have write access to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or any other global registry keys), and perhaps wondered why. Now you know.
You soften them by chewing them, however. The sort of tents I was talking about are made from rawhide, not tanned leather, which is a technology.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
I am not justifying anything. The entirety of my post was concerned with the _why_ of a particular situation, and made no references whatsoever to its desirability or otherwise.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
"The problem is if this were a program from Windows we would be flying ape shit."
Because many, many more people would be affected. Apple have sold around 45 million iPods since 2001, while Dell shipped 188 million PCs in 2004 alone. Dell have approximately 30% of the PC market, so we can assume for the sake of this argument that something like 600 million PCs were sold in 2004, with 90% or so of those either having Windows on them, or being an eventual Windows recipient. That's 540 million people who would potentially be affected through one years' PC sales alone, versus maybe 45 million iPod users _in total_ (assuming that all iPods ever bought are still in active use, which is extremely unlikely). Thus, the potential for damage from something MS does is at least an order of magnitude greater than a similar act by Apple, and would consequently elicit a much higher level of general condemnation.
Which would be excellent names when one considers the fact that most working horses were usually mares (stallions are too aggressive when confronted by other stallions, and likely to try and mount any mares they come across).
Indeed. In other news, those who are used to modern radios had trouble building and using crystal sets, women that grew up with gas and electric stoves didn't get the same cooking results from a wood-fired ranges, and people used to buying ready-made houses weren't very good at killing animals and chewing their skins to make tents.
It's not the fantasising that surprises me so much as the fact that so many people believe it, and then get disappointed when it turns out to be wrong. Those who believe horoscopes in newspapers are much more sophisticated: they are satisfied when some vague piece of pap can be levered into a slight conformance with reality, and simply ignore the much larger number of cases where it bears no relation to anything in their lives whatsoever.
"It is important to note that this Directive focuses on copyrighted material such as texts, music and films. Software is explicitly excluded from its scope. The protection of technological measures applied to software products is governed by a different regime".
Not applicable to software, and by extension, firmware.
"The definition does, however, contain a limitation to the protection of technological measures. Technological measures need only be protected if they hinder to perform an act with copyrightable material. Technological measures, which are applied to material not protected by copyright - or by the neighboring or database rights - may lawfully be circumvented."
It is perfectly legal to circumvent technological protection measures for works which have passed into the public domain after copyrights have expired. One of the notable concerns for those living under the DMCA is not therefore in any way applicable to this directive.
"Not under all circumstances must circumvention be made illegal in national law. Only if a person knows or has reasonable grounds to know that an act leads to the circumvention of a technological measure, do the Member States have to declare that act unlawful. Thus, if, for example, person A sends a file to person B, who, not knowing it to be a crack and having no reason to assume it is one, runs the file which then turns out to crack a technological measure, then the Directive does not require the Member-States to target this act."
In other words, they have to show that one knowingly and with forethought bypassed a protection system.
"Probably, if a technological measure does not really and reliably restrict (unauthorized) acts, it is considered to be ineffective and thus not protected. However, it is up to the European Court of Justice to ultimately decide what the requirement means."
The fact that somebody puts a protection mechanism on something doesn't automatically mean that bypassing it is illegal. It is thus likely that copy protection systems that can be bypassed by simple measures such as holding down the shift key when inserting a CD would be ruled ineffective, and therefore exempt.
"Article 6(2) instructs them to prohibit the manufacture, distribution and sale of devices or services which:
are advertised, promoted or marketed for the purpose of circumvention, or
have only a limited commercially different use or purpose other than to circumvent, or
are primarily designed to enable circumvention.
The main purpose of these criteria is to distinguish equipment or software which can be used for circumvention, but which is also capable of other uses which are not related to circumvention. For instance, a regular PC of which the number crushing power can be used to decrypt a file, but which can also be used as a word processor, will not fall under the criteria."
I.e. precisely as I stated in my prior post. A digital music player that contained (for example) a mechanism for bypassing Apple's FairPlay system so that it could play songs bought from the iTunes store would not be illegal under this directive, whereas a device whose main purpose was circumventing Apple's DRM would (with the notable exemption of devices that bypass access protection mechanisms to allow activities which are protected by a member nation's existing "fair use" provisions -- more on this below).
"The Directive requires the EU Member States to provide 'adequate legal protection' against circumvention and against the provision of circumvention devices or services. This means that it is up to the Member States to decide
"That's because it was only ever meant to be a temporary, throw-away piece of software meant for transitioning away from DOS and DOS-based Windows. The original plan was for Windows 98 (and later) to never even exist, but people just wouldn't stop writing software that broke under NT. "
So the fact that Microsoft released _and sold_ no less than two versions of 98, and then WinME can be blamed on third party developers, not Microsoft, who produced them, and made bucket-loads of money from them. An apologist argument if ever there was one!
"There's no reason you can't write software for Windows 98 that works fine on NT as a non-Admin user. Windows 9x has supported per-user profiles and similar since the OSR2 release of Windows 95 in 1997 (certainly it can't actually restrict cross-user access, but that's no reason for not storing everything per-user in the appropriate place)."
This argument would hold water _if_ Microsoft's own Windows-9X Logo guidelines hadn't told people to write applications in precisely the way you are saying they shouldn't have. Of course, from an apologist's viewpoint, the blame still lies with third party developers, who should have known that MS were talking crap and ignored them.
Note the wording though, and in particular the "possession for commercial purposes" bit. This is not a blanket "thou shalt not" directive like the DMCA, but a measure designed to prevent commercial piracy of protected media and encoded broadcast services such as cable and satellite television. Owning and using such a device for purely private domestic purposes is not illegal, but selling it to you would be, _if its primary purpose_ is circumvention of protection measures, and it is advertised or sold as such. Thus, a general purpose recording device that incidentally contains a circumvention system would be OK, but selling a box that adds circumvention capabilities to existing general purpose recording systems is illegal.
As with most laws, the key to understanding it is knowing who they want to tread on. What this essentially means that they don't actually have to catch you selling pirate media to get shirty: mere possession of the means for commercial-scale piracy is now sufficient for a successful prosecution.
I remember Trumpet, quite fondly in fact. The problem of course was that of the chicken and the egg: you needed to download Trumpet to access the Internet, but could not download it without access to the Internet...
Automatic variable declaration is OK for very small programs with low line counts and very few variables. Once you go beyond that, it becomes a right royal pain in the backside. IMO Python and Ruby would therefore be much better off if it was allowed when running them interactively, and disallowed when executing application code contained in files.
LOL! What a wonderful idea for all those LOC counters that encourage kids not to comment their work properly by ignoring comments. However, IMO comments should not only be counted, but also be mandatory in any project. And I don't mean a crappy line saying something obvious like "// A loop": every function or method should have a block saying what it's meant to do, what inputs it expects, the nature of any outputs, pre-conditions, post conditions, invariants, possible secondary effects, descriptions of any exceptions it throws and the circumstances under which they can occur, etc. The presence of such information is not solely an aid to calling a function -- it also tells me that whoever wrote it has probably expended more than the usual amount of effort to ensure that it functions in the way that the comments describe.
Slashdot Mirror
"Correlation does not imply causation! "
I really wish this had been written before my remaining mod points had expired.
And rather interestingly, the American revolutionaries had a lot more success when they used what we now call asymmetric warfare against the British than they did trying to slug it out with them on the battlefield.
This is nothing new. When I was a teenager back in the 1970s, I would pool my meagre resources with those of some friends to buy a vinyl album which the person with access to the best stereo would then record on cassettes for all the others. Note though that we only bought the album if there was nobody around with a decent tape of it that could be traded for a recording of something one of us had, so we'd have quite happily used torrents or whatever if they'd been available to us.
"you realize it is always a net economic gain in the short run to destroy all barriers to entry(you're effective end to copyright on music)."
He was actually proposing an end to restrictions on the _non-commercial_ copying of recorded performances. This is _not_ the same as ending copyrights on music.
"It would be like saying all software should be free."
No, it would not. The act of running a program is _always_ effectively a recorded performance (albeit an interactive one) -- programmers do not have the option of reciting code from a print-out to packed houses (One night only: Linus Torvalds and guests will be reading code from the Linux kernel. Book now!).
"There are artists that only make money performing and there are artists that want to charge people 16 or 20 bucks a CD."
Them wanting to charge a certain price for something is _not_ the same as convincing consumers to pay that price. Technology gave the recording industry a magical century during which they could make large sums of money from distributing a single musical performance over and over again. Now, technology has bypassed that business model, just like radio, records, and movie technology bypassed the previously lucrative music hall / vaudeville business model, and movie sound ruined the careers of many silent stars whose voices weren't "right", and television came along and changed the landscape again, and... Yet every one of these changes (each of which caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth from entrenched interests) ended up generating vast sums of money for the industry as a whole. But the people making fortunes from new, ground-breaking technologies were often not the same people who had made fortunes from whatever got replaced, because far too many of those clung to the deck of a sinking ship until it disappeared below the waves.
New entertainment technologies have always offered huge money making opportunities to those with the vision to see ways to take advantage of them, but they have a notable penchant for laying waste to anyone who tries to cling to old ways of doing things, irrespective of how much money and power they have, and who they can buy.
"of course, the face of music would change completely."
It would indeed. But then it's changed completely many times in the past due to the influences of new and different technologies, and it will do so again many times in the future. And there will be both visionaries who make huge fortunes from embracing those changes, and those who lose what fortunes they had because they thought that laws, publicity campaigns, and daft restrictions on the technology itself would allow them to pretend that nothing had really changed at all.
"Would music still be around, yes. would it be anything like it has been for the last 200 or so years, no."
The first commercial recordings were actually made a little less than 120 years ago, but this is irrelevant to your central point...
Music is already nothing like it has been over the majority of the mainstream recording industry's history due to the fact that video, which started out as a marketing tool for music, has now become the dominant medium, often relegating the music itself to a more or less throwaway backing track for what amounts to soft porn for the recently post-pubescent. It has now reached the stage where a Janis Joplin or Louis Armstrong would not stand a chance in that industry because they aren't "videogenic" enough, while a musically inept Kate Moss type would get a lucrative contract, massive promotion, instant stardom, and an almost equally instant slide into total obscurity after a couple of years.
So while it may change, it is hard to imagine a situation that could be worse than one where the general level of music being offered to consumers is so bad that a stupid frog ring-tone backed by a not-very-wonderful rendition of the theme from an old Eddie Murphy film can reach number one in the charts of several countries.
Where is there anything in the grandparent's post indicating that he's breaking any laws? All he said is that he's not buying music that he otherwise likes on principle -- nothing in his post indicates that he is obtaining said music in any other way (except possibly by listening to the radio etc., which is perfectly legal).
"Sound is the first thing to truely be 3 dimensional"
Strange. I was labouring under the (possibly erroneous) assumption that space has n dimension, the first three of which are rather older than sound which, unlike space, needs a medium to travel through.
A far better analogy would be paying five dollars for an illegal copy of a pair of name-brand trainers knowing that the workers at both factories got paid the same. Downloading songs from the Internet is not free, because Internet links cost money; they are however much cheaper than buying a CD, just like those cheap pirate trainers are much cheaper than the name-brand originals.
"They simply take the magic "projected sales if internet didn't exist and we were still in the 80's""
And cassette tapes hadn't been invented, and home taping was not therefore killing music by taking food from the mouths of poor, starving musicians and the poor, starving executives of record companies who were trying to live off of them.
I think that the grandparent is trying to point out the fact that most of artists who are signed to major labels either earn nothing from what can be quite a substantial number of CD sales, or actually end up owing money to the label. So while agreeing that paying somebody for creating something one wants is indeed fair, the grandparent is stating that this rarely happens for all but the top acts who are signed to major labels, so more and more artists are choosing to either independently market their works via services such as CD Baby (who can get you on iTunes), or go with one of the growing number of independent labels who give artists a much better deal than the bigger, more established companies.
In any case, I wouldn't want Intel to die, because that would leave AMD with a monopoly, so they could get away with churning out crap just like Intel used to. IMO the ideal situation would be one where both companies were more or less the same size with similar market shares, thereby giving AMD more to spend on R&D, fabs, etc, while Intel would have to be both more agile in a development sense, and less able to foist crap on the market just because they dominate it. Consumers would benefit from this sort of situation far more than would be the case if we simply exchanged one chip-making monolith for another with a different name.
For the same reasons, I would very much like to see both Apple and desktop Linux with bigger market shares than they have now. This doesn't mean I want to see MS die, but rather that I would welcome an MS which is forced to produce new, better products on a regular basis instead of papering over the cracks in old and deficient offerings while their successors languish in a limbo of slipped shipping dates and feature trimmings.
Water is a very poor conductor: it is what is dissolved/suspended in it that conducts electricity, not the water itself.
"Windows users learned the hard way that they have to be careful"
The number of viruses, worms, and trojans that are still spreading widely via security holes which MS have already fixed with patches months or even years ago would seem to indicate that large numbers of Windows users are being anything but careful.
"No-one is to "blame", it's just what happened."
OK, fair enough -- not much to argue about there!
"Customers wouldn't (or couldn't) migrate away from DOS-based Windows, ergo Microsoft had to update the product for them."
I would be more inclined to believe this if they hadn't launched Windows-95 with so much fanfare. That and the fact that Windows-95 had a new UI and control set, and whole slew of new APIs and capabilities which NT, still in its 3.51 incarnation, lacked (built in networking, TAPI, multimedia, DirectX, system policies, plug-and-play, FAX capabilities, etc.).
"If you really think Microsoft _wanted_ the hassle and expense of maintaining, supporting, and marketing two different codebases while trying to keep binary compatibility between them (and their previous releases), you've got a pretty weird idea about a preferable way to run a software business."
What you claim they wanted is neither here or there: as with people, companies are judged by what they do, not what somebody claims they meant to do. If they were so reluctant to maintain two code bases, then why did they continue to push Win9X hard long after most domestic users had hardware that easily exceeded the requirements for NT, while making no effort whatsoever to market NT to those same domestic users? Why did they launch and push the horrid Windows-ME in the same year as the excellent Windows-2000, when ME was so broken that its compatibility with old applications was actually worse than that of Windows-2000?
"That's a rather extraordinary claim. Evidence ?"
Unfortunately, the Microsoft page for the old "Designed For Windows-95" logo requirements is no longer there, and much Googling reveals many busted links and not a lot else. The oldest on-line version I can find is one for the "Designed for Windows NT and 95" logo, which obviously contains a lot of NT-aware stuff that wasn't in the older Win95-specific one. I still have the MS handbook, but neither the time nor the inclination to scan the whole thing in just for one passage, which basically states that software should store its configuration information in the registry, under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Company/Program name/Version/. You've possibly noticed that a lot of older software does this, thereby rendering it unsuitable for a multi-user system (whose users may not have write access to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or any other global registry keys), and perhaps wondered why. Now you know.
You soften them by chewing them, however. The sort of tents I was talking about are made from rawhide, not tanned leather, which is a technology.
I am not justifying anything. The entirety of my post was concerned with the _why_ of a particular situation, and made no references whatsoever to its desirability or otherwise.
"The problem is if this were a program from Windows we would be flying ape shit."
Because many, many more people would be affected. Apple have sold around 45 million iPods since 2001, while Dell shipped 188 million PCs in 2004 alone. Dell have approximately 30% of the PC market, so we can assume for the sake of this argument that something like 600 million PCs were sold in 2004, with 90% or so of those either having Windows on them, or being an eventual Windows recipient. That's 540 million people who would potentially be affected through one years' PC sales alone, versus maybe 45 million iPod users _in total_ (assuming that all iPods ever bought are still in active use, which is extremely unlikely). Thus, the potential for damage from something MS does is at least an order of magnitude greater than a similar act by Apple, and would consequently elicit a much higher level of general condemnation.
Which would be excellent names when one considers the fact that most working horses were usually mares (stallions are too aggressive when confronted by other stallions, and likely to try and mount any mares they come across).
Indeed. In other news, those who are used to modern radios had trouble building and using crystal sets, women that grew up with gas and electric stoves didn't get the same cooking results from a wood-fired ranges, and people used to buying ready-made houses weren't very good at killing animals and chewing their skins to make tents.
It's not the fantasising that surprises me so much as the fact that so many people believe it, and then get disappointed when it turns out to be wrong. Those who believe horoscopes in newspapers are much more sophisticated: they are satisfied when some vague piece of pap can be levered into a slight conformance with reality, and simply ignore the much larger number of cases where it bears no relation to anything in their lives whatsoever.
Perhaps you should read the explanation of what the ECD covers, and how it is to be applied at http://www.euro-copyrights.org/index/13/52.
Some quotes:
"It is important to note that this Directive focuses on copyrighted material such as texts, music and films. Software is explicitly excluded from its scope. The protection of technological measures applied to software products is governed by a different regime".
Not applicable to software, and by extension, firmware.
"The definition does, however, contain a limitation to the protection of technological measures. Technological measures need only be protected if they hinder to perform an act with copyrightable material. Technological measures, which are applied to material not protected by copyright - or by the neighboring or database rights - may lawfully be circumvented."
It is perfectly legal to circumvent technological protection measures for works which have passed into the public domain after copyrights have expired. One of the notable concerns for those living under the DMCA is not therefore in any way applicable to this directive.
"Not under all circumstances must circumvention be made illegal in national law. Only if a person knows or has reasonable grounds to know that an act leads to the circumvention of a technological measure, do the Member States have to declare that act unlawful. Thus, if, for example, person A sends a file to person B, who, not knowing it to be a crack and having no reason to assume it is one, runs the file which then turns out to crack a technological measure, then the Directive does not require the Member-States to target this act."
In other words, they have to show that one knowingly and with forethought bypassed a protection system.
"Probably, if a technological measure does not really and reliably restrict (unauthorized) acts, it is considered to be ineffective and thus not protected. However, it is up to the European Court of Justice to ultimately decide what the requirement means."
The fact that somebody puts a protection mechanism on something doesn't automatically mean that bypassing it is illegal. It is thus likely that copy protection systems that can be bypassed by simple measures such as holding down the shift key when inserting a CD would be ruled ineffective, and therefore exempt.
"Article 6(2) instructs them to prohibit the manufacture, distribution and sale of devices or services which:
are advertised, promoted or marketed for the purpose of circumvention, or
have only a limited commercially different use or purpose other than to circumvent, or
are primarily designed to enable circumvention.
The main purpose of these criteria is to distinguish equipment or software which can be used for circumvention, but which is also capable of other uses which are not related to circumvention. For instance, a regular PC of which the number crushing power can be used to decrypt a file, but which can also be used as a word processor, will not fall under the criteria."
I.e. precisely as I stated in my prior post. A digital music player that contained (for example) a mechanism for bypassing Apple's FairPlay system so that it could play songs bought from the iTunes store would not be illegal under this directive, whereas a device whose main purpose was circumventing Apple's DRM would (with the notable exemption of devices that bypass access protection mechanisms to allow activities which are protected by a member nation's existing "fair use" provisions -- more on this below).
"The Directive requires the EU Member States to provide 'adequate legal protection' against circumvention and against the provision of circumvention devices or services. This means that it is up to the Member States to decide
"That's because it was only ever meant to be a temporary, throw-away piece of software meant for transitioning away from DOS and DOS-based Windows. The original plan was for Windows 98 (and later) to never even exist, but people just wouldn't stop writing software that broke under NT. "
So the fact that Microsoft released _and sold_ no less than two versions of 98, and then WinME can be blamed on third party developers, not Microsoft, who produced them, and made bucket-loads of money from them. An apologist argument if ever there was one!
"There's no reason you can't write software for Windows 98 that works fine on NT as a non-Admin user. Windows 9x has supported per-user profiles and similar since the OSR2 release of Windows 95 in 1997 (certainly it can't actually restrict cross-user access, but that's no reason for not storing everything per-user in the appropriate place)."
This argument would hold water _if_ Microsoft's own Windows-9X Logo guidelines hadn't told people to write applications in precisely the way you are saying they shouldn't have. Of course, from an apologist's viewpoint, the blame still lies with third party developers, who should have known that MS were talking crap and ignored them.
Note the wording though, and in particular the "possession for commercial purposes" bit. This is not a blanket "thou shalt not" directive like the DMCA, but a measure designed to prevent commercial piracy of protected media and encoded broadcast services such as cable and satellite television. Owning and using such a device for purely private domestic purposes is not illegal, but selling it to you would be, _if its primary purpose_ is circumvention of protection measures, and it is advertised or sold as such. Thus, a general purpose recording device that incidentally contains a circumvention system would be OK, but selling a box that adds circumvention capabilities to existing general purpose recording systems is illegal.
As with most laws, the key to understanding it is knowing who they want to tread on. What this essentially means that they don't actually have to catch you selling pirate media to get shirty: mere possession of the means for commercial-scale piracy is now sufficient for a successful prosecution.
I remember Trumpet, quite fondly in fact. The problem of course was that of the chicken and the egg: you needed to download Trumpet to access the Internet, but could not download it without access to the Internet...
Automatic variable declaration is OK for very small programs with low line counts and very few variables. Once you go beyond that, it becomes a right royal pain in the backside. IMO Python and Ruby would therefore be much better off if it was allowed when running them interactively, and disallowed when executing application code contained in files.
LOL! What a wonderful idea for all those LOC counters that encourage kids not to comment their work properly by ignoring comments. However, IMO comments should not only be counted, but also be mandatory in any project. And I don't mean a crappy line saying something obvious like "// A loop": every function or method should have a block saying what it's meant to do, what inputs it expects, the nature of any outputs, pre-conditions, post conditions, invariants, possible secondary effects, descriptions of any exceptions it throws and the circumstances under which they can occur, etc. The presence of such information is not solely an aid to calling a function -- it also tells me that whoever wrote it has probably expended more than the usual amount of effort to ensure that it functions in the way that the comments describe.