IANAL, but ISTM that any business that provides services in a particular country is subject to that country's laws to an extent. The order didn't block iCrave from rebroadcasting in Canada (or any other country for that matter) just the US. I see no authority by which a US court could force a Canadian entity to turn over records kept in Canada, but practically speaking it would be good for iCrave do cave on this so as to stay on the court's good side, if they ever expect to prevail.
OTOH, I note that iCraveTV's domain is registered to a US company, William R. Craig Consulting. Perhaps that places them under the jurisdiction of the US courts.
But if they really are a Canadian company and not just a US company that has set up operations in Canada, the broadcasters are going after iCrave in a US court because under Canadian law they wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
I saw NOS in the article and immediately wondered why they were running tests using obsolete CDC Cyber mainframes. Just shoot me now.
This sort of test is just one more argument in favor of distros, particularly big commercial ones like Red Hat, shipping different editions tuned for different uses. Kind of like NT Workstation vs. NT Server. A home user who wants his machine mostly for word processing and web surfing on a dial-up account doesn't have the same needs as someone setting up a file server on a LAN. Of course the entire distro should ship in each package, but the default configurations should be different, and maybe the kernel could be tuned differently in each case. And the home user especially does not want to have to read a book to learn about how to set up his system - he wants to use it right out of the box.
At least with this scheme, when Linux performs poorly on benchmark tests we could always say they were using the wrong version.
The named Defendants and their officers, directors, principals, agents, servants, employees, attorneys, successors and assigns, representatives and all persons acting in concert with them, are here by enjoined from...
Just what does that mean, anyway? Is anyone who feels like posting DeCSS on his website a person "acting in concert" with the defendants, even if he's never met them, has had no personal contact with them, and has not contributed to the code at all?
I am somewhat relieved in that the ruling was not entirely irrational. The judge rightly recognized, even while confusing the World Wide Web with the Internet, that it's unreasonable for webmasters to be held responisble for content on sites they link to. Had he granted the part of the motion that sought to ban links, the ruling would have been truly draconian.
I am reminded of a recent "Ask/." discussion about whether techies understand legal issues as poorly as lawmakers understand technical issues. One advantage techies have in understanding the law is that all terms that are not standard legalese must be explicitly defined (declared?) at some point in the statute. My interest is particularly aroused by this bit:
(B) a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Here, the lawmakers have attempted to generically describe encryption or copy-protection schemes without actually mentioning any such scheme explicitly. I suppose this might be done so that future schemes currently not foreseen by the current state of the art may also be covered by the law. But haven't they shot themselves in the foot here? All digitally encoded information, be it music on a CD or a movie on a DVD, requires "the application of information, or a process or a treatment" in order to present the information to the user in its intended form. Presumably when one slips, say, a CD into the stereo one is initiating the decoding of the digital information sitting on it with the authority of the copyright holder. (They do want you to play the music, right?) To extract the information, i.e. play the CD, in a manner not authorized by the copyright holder - such as using it in a public performance without payment of suitable royalties - is already illegal by existing copyright law.
Copy-protection schemes merely add another level of encoding to the information, requiring different information to be applied in order to extract it, but not differing qualitatively in that the information needs to be decoded regardless. So as far as I can see, this section of the code adds no protections whatsoever to copy-protected or encrypted information.
But in order for the lawyers to see that, they have to be able to understand how the law as phrased relates to the processes they are regulating. It's clear to me that they do not.
Imagine one of these things loaded with two or three different code morphing modules. Your boot loader begins by asking which architecture you'd like to emulate. Want to run your games? Boot up as a x86 with Windows. Doing graphics design (or running one of Ambrosia's cool games, which they refuse to port to Wintel)? Boot as a PPC with MacOS. Doing some TT&C on your satellite constellation? Zap, you're an Alpha!
OK, I'm just an applications geek, and know next to nothing about hardware, so this probably sounds pretty stupid. Live with it.
Hedy Lamarr did get rich from making movies. Believe it or not, the reason she invented frequency-hopping wasn't to make a wad of cash, it was to help the Allies win WWII. If she'd have made any money from it, it would have been nice but besides the point. Some people do respond to nobler motives than the almighty dollar, you know.
I've always been an armchair theoretical physicist, and I think this is fascinating. But what does this do to the 3 degrees above zero theory that said the background radiation was a residue of the big bang? Sure doesn't sound like it now...
So what does this do to the "big bang" theory?
It's got nothing to do with that at all. The background radiation that is thought to be an echo of the Big Bang is microwave radiation equivalent to a black body at 3K. X-rays are much more energetic, and in the spectrum fall between ultraviolet light and gamma rays.
People seem to be misunderstanding the significance of this discovery. For almost 40 years, we've known about an "x-ray glow" with no apparent source that was scattered all over the sky. With Chandra, astronomers have been able to resolve discrete sources for the x-rays, so we now know exactly where they're coming from. I don't think the x-ray glow was ever as uniform as the background microwave radiation, which is identical in all directions with no apparent source.
The whine: This is old news. I submitted the same story back on Thursday, but Hemos rejected it. Possibly he thought it was a hoax.
I wonder how many people will be staying at a time. A launch is awfully damned expensive. IIRC it cost about $250 million to put a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Obviously, boosting a relatively light payload into a low orbit is not quite so expensive. But suppose you're putting 4 people up at a time. At $20 million apiece, that's only $80 million for the trip. Does that do much more than cover costs, especially when you figure in the cost of renovating Mir?
Despite all the talk about "Silicon Valley millionaires", $20M is still a whole lot of money. There aren't going to be all that many folks who can just drop a wad of cash that size on a lark. This sounds really interesting, but I begin to doubt that it'll ever get off the ground.
If I understand the comparisons with other attempted restrictions on the sale of individual copies of mass-marketed information, the bill as drafted is not likely to pass muster in the courts. But it'll be awfully inconvenient in the meantime, especially, as someone already pointed out, to companies like Funcoland. I buy nearly all my games used off of eBay or UGTZ. It takes so long for a case like this to get through the courts that these venues and commercial companies that sell used software may well be killed off in the interim.
This appears to be just the latest part of an ongoing effort by software publishers. Obviously, constant vigilance is necessary.
I agree comptelely. I can only describe the feel of Gilliam's films as chaotic. They always feel as if the world is not quite stable and that the walls can come crashing in at any time - as they often do! There is no other director who can do justice to Pratchett.
Good Omens is well worth reading. Normally I can't stand Gaiman's work, but under Pratchett's influence he's quite readable.
I've gotten into the habit lately of buying all of Pratchett's books from Amazon UK. They're happy to ship to the US and have great customer service. I'd gotten tired of waiting a year or so for his books to be published on this side of the Atlantic.
Don Martin was always my favorite MAD artist. I can still remember my favorite panel. It was in a piece on the sound effects you never see in superhero comic books. This one was Wonder Woman undoing her bra:
Snap! FLOOBADOOP!
It was funny enough just seeing how he would draw Superman, Spiderman, The Silver Surfer, Thor (pinkies extended) and Wonder Woman. As with all Martin art, it was the sound effects that really capped it off.
1) Strictly, "gender" refers to social constructs and "sex" refers to biological differences. Feminist theorists like to use "gender" as much as possible to support the idea that male/female differences are generally social rather than innate.
This is a new construction on the word. It formerly had no meaning other than the linguistic sense. If you consult an older dictionary, that's AFAIK the only definition you'll find.
In every instance, where the topic may be expected to be of equal interest to both sexes, there is equal or superior representation of women both numerically and in terms of participation.
Maybe I'm missing something but isn't that circular logic?
You're missing something. The article seemed to be assuming that women do not participate as fully as they might in online interactions where both sexes are involved due to their communication styles; that they are somehow disenfranchised for social reasons. In order to to give a valid counterexample, one needs to consider cases where one might reasonably expect women would want to participate. Now, while I certainly know a couple of women who enjoy FPS-type games, there are definitely in the minority. I would therefore not expect to see a whole lot of women on, for example, comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, regardless of whether they are discouraged from participating equally for social reasons.
Apples and oranges. Hedy Lamarr was best known as an actress. Here's a modern parallel: Suppose it turned out that Michelle Pfeiffer was a top-notch Lisp hacker who happened to have contributed half the code for emacs. You wouldn't find that the least bit surprising?
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody's mentioned this yet that I've seen, but I've been unable to get through to The Hunger Site today. Are they being hit too?
Don't quit your day jobs.
Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot... You guys don't have day jobs!
OTOH, I note that iCraveTV's domain is registered to a US company, William R. Craig Consulting. Perhaps that places them under the jurisdiction of the US courts.
But if they really are a Canadian company and not just a US company that has set up operations in Canada, the broadcasters are going after iCrave in a US court because under Canadian law they wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
This sort of test is just one more argument in favor of distros, particularly big commercial ones like Red Hat, shipping different editions tuned for different uses. Kind of like NT Workstation vs. NT Server. A home user who wants his machine mostly for word processing and web surfing on a dial-up account doesn't have the same needs as someone setting up a file server on a LAN. Of course the entire distro should ship in each package, but the default configurations should be different, and maybe the kernel could be tuned differently in each case. And the home user especially does not want to have to read a book to learn about how to set up his system - he wants to use it right out of the box.
At least with this scheme, when Linux performs poorly on benchmark tests we could always say they were using the wrong version.
Boy, Nitrozac really prettyed you boys upo for your appearances in After Y2K, didn't she?
Replace "Chris_and_Christinas-Wedding" with "Chris_and_Christines-Wedding" in all cases.
I am somewhat relieved in that the ruling was not entirely irrational. The judge rightly recognized, even while confusing the World Wide Web with the Internet, that it's unreasonable for webmasters to be held responisble for content on sites they link to. Had he granted the part of the motion that sought to ban links, the ruling would have been truly draconian.
It doesn't even appear that it affects anything outside of California.
I think Elrond said it: "Often evil will evil mar."
Copy-protection schemes merely add another level of encoding to the information, requiring different information to be applied in order to extract it, but not differing qualitatively in that the information needs to be decoded regardless. So as far as I can see, this section of the code adds no protections whatsoever to copy-protected or encrypted information.
But in order for the lawyers to see that, they have to be able to understand how the law as phrased relates to the processes they are regulating. It's clear to me that they do not.
Surely, considering the buzz surrounding Linux and Open Source these days, going after an OS project is bound to be a bad PR move, isn't it?
OK, I'm just an applications geek, and know next to nothing about hardware, so this probably sounds pretty stupid. Live with it.
Hedy Lamarr did get rich from making movies. Believe it or not, the reason she invented frequency-hopping wasn't to make a wad of cash, it was to help the Allies win WWII. If she'd have made any money from it, it would have been nice but besides the point. Some people do respond to nobler motives than the almighty dollar, you know.
People seem to be misunderstanding the significance of this discovery. For almost 40 years, we've known about an "x-ray glow" with no apparent source that was scattered all over the sky. With Chandra, astronomers have been able to resolve discrete sources for the x-rays, so we now know exactly where they're coming from. I don't think the x-ray glow was ever as uniform as the background microwave radiation, which is identical in all directions with no apparent source.
I wonder how many people will be staying at a time. A launch is awfully damned expensive. IIRC it cost about $250 million to put a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Obviously, boosting a relatively light payload into a low orbit is not quite so expensive. But suppose you're putting 4 people up at a time. At $20 million apiece, that's only $80 million for the trip. Does that do much more than cover costs, especially when you figure in the cost of renovating Mir?
Despite all the talk about "Silicon Valley millionaires", $20M is still a whole lot of money. There aren't going to be all that many folks who can just drop a wad of cash that size on a lark. This sounds really interesting, but I begin to doubt that it'll ever get off the ground.
This appears to be just the latest part of an ongoing effort by software publishers. Obviously, constant vigilance is necessary.
As a resident of the SF Bay Area, I can assure you that on first viewing most Merkins will understand completely the evil inherent in the M25.
Good Omens is well worth reading. Normally I can't stand Gaiman's work, but under Pratchett's influence he's quite readable.
Or can't you tell I'm a Pratchett fan?
Funny, though. I can never manage to watch them for very long. *burp*
Apples and oranges. Hedy Lamarr was best known as an actress. Here's a modern parallel: Suppose it turned out that Michelle Pfeiffer was a top-notch Lisp hacker who happened to have contributed half the code for emacs. You wouldn't find that the least bit surprising?