An even better option: PDF SpeedUp. A coworker clued me in to this great little utility. It basically disables all the extra junk in Acrobat Reader, cutting the load time down to 1-2 sec tops.
DRM cannot be "made to respect fair use laws." Fair use is an inherently fuzzy concept, and permitting all the forms of fair use that I am entitled to would also mean permitting many genuine copyright infringements. Any DRM scheme that permits this is not "DRM" in any meaningful sense.
There is no need to consume things like music, movies, television programmes, etc. Stop that consumption and the system will die, because the corporations that run the system will die.
In a well-adjusted market, this sort of correction could realistically happen. In the case of entertainment media, however, what we have is a monpoly---a controlled market. There's a reason such practices are illegal. Consumers can't take their business elsewhere because they'd be forced to avoid 95% of available products. The RIAA likes to claim that people have this option, but there are good reasons why it's not viable.
IE, as much as we all hate it, supports screenreaders pretty well. Look up a program called "JAWS" for example. Javascript and screenreaders *can* coexist in a non-text browser.
Someone should mod this up. There is indeed a legal precent, in the US, for attacking a site that merely links to a place to get something illegal. As the parent notes, this was a site that linked to another site where DeCSS could be downloaded.
Dude, MS Office has a pretty busted grammar checker--I wouldn't rely on it at all. Problem is, they have little incentive to improve it anymore. The old grammar tool in Win3.1 versions of WordPerfect did a far better job than MS's current offering.
If you read the whole sentence though, all those entities can only monitor your computer for the purposes described, such as repair or authorized updates.
The scary thing about that is pointed out in the post just below yours: one of the purposes for which basically any program is allowed to monitor you is "prevention of the unauthorized use of or fraudulent or other illegal activities in connection with a network, service, or computer software." Say hello to a wave of RIAA-sponsored MP3-eating worms that are protected by law... wonderful.
Yes, the company I work for owns everything I invent or produce on the job. But employees are rewarded for bringing success to the company. Tech firms usually give a bonus for any patent an employee secures on the job---that's how the business world works, right? So if you invent something that revolutionizes data storage and saves thousands of companies millions of dollars, you'd expect a pretty significant reward.
True, he doesn't own what he invented and he didn't do it all on his own (he admits this plainly in TFA). But in a capitalist world, he deserved more than the pittance he's getting.
The average user should not have to "know how to use IE" to do things like that. You act as if this is an important feature, but it's actually a flaw in the browser that such traps exist at all.
No---it is, in fact, completely illegal to create such an archive. The Sony/Betamax case is widely misconstrued as permitting people to record anything for personal use, but the decision actually made it illegal to assemble a "library" of taped TV shows. To this day, videotaping TV is only legal for the purposes of "time-shifting."
Slashdot Mirror
An even better option: PDF SpeedUp. A coworker clued me in to this great little utility. It basically disables all the extra junk in Acrobat Reader, cutting the load time down to 1-2 sec tops.
DRM cannot be "made to respect fair use laws." Fair use is an inherently fuzzy concept, and permitting all the forms of fair use that I am entitled to would also mean permitting many genuine copyright infringements. Any DRM scheme that permits this is not "DRM" in any meaningful sense.
In a well-adjusted market, this sort of correction could realistically happen. In the case of entertainment media, however, what we have is a monpoly---a controlled market. There's a reason such practices are illegal. Consumers can't take their business elsewhere because they'd be forced to avoid 95% of available products. The RIAA likes to claim that people have this option, but there are good reasons why it's not viable.
Check out the Sharkware project. I think this was actually mentioned on Slashdot recently.
IE, as much as we all hate it, supports screenreaders pretty well. Look up a program called "JAWS" for example. Javascript and screenreaders *can* coexist in a non-text browser.
Someone should mod this up. There is indeed a legal precent, in the US, for attacking a site that merely links to a place to get something illegal. As the parent notes, this was a site that linked to another site where DeCSS could be downloaded.
Dude, MS Office has a pretty busted grammar checker--I wouldn't rely on it at all. Problem is, they have little incentive to improve it anymore. The old grammar tool in Win3.1 versions of WordPerfect did a far better job than MS's current offering.
If you read the whole sentence though, all those entities can only monitor your computer for the purposes described, such as repair or authorized updates.
The scary thing about that is pointed out in the post just below yours: one of the purposes for which basically any program is allowed to monitor you is "prevention of the unauthorized use of or fraudulent or other illegal activities in connection with a network, service, or computer software." Say hello to a wave of RIAA-sponsored MP3-eating worms that are protected by law... wonderful.
Yes, the company I work for owns everything I invent or produce on the job. But employees are rewarded for bringing success to the company. Tech firms usually give a bonus for any patent an employee secures on the job---that's how the business world works, right? So if you invent something that revolutionizes data storage and saves thousands of companies millions of dollars, you'd expect a pretty significant reward.
True, he doesn't own what he invented and he didn't do it all on his own (he admits this plainly in TFA). But in a capitalist world, he deserved more than the pittance he's getting.
The average user should not have to "know how to use IE" to do things like that. You act as if this is an important feature, but it's actually a flaw in the browser that such traps exist at all.
No---it is, in fact, completely illegal to create such an archive. The Sony/Betamax case is widely misconstrued as permitting people to record anything for personal use, but the decision actually made it illegal to assemble a "library" of taped TV shows. To this day, videotaping TV is only legal for the purposes of "time-shifting."