If all you say is true, then it should be trivial for you to find some actual case law that supports your position. I await more than your mere argument of your assumptions with baited breath.
Your click license misses a big point: There are many ways to use your text that do not require clicking 'reply'. I could make a new comment without hitting 'reply' that used your text. And yes, it was as stupid (as are most reducto ad absurdum arguments). But quite a bit less so than the iTunes license agreement or countless other click-through licenses in use today.
But that's a tempest in a teapot.
If a book came in a sealed container that had a license agreement, then yes, you would be licensing the book. That license could restrict you from any number of things. Contrary to your assertion, this is indeed a concept supported by US law. It's called a "contract." There is a genuine meeting of the minds so long as you have the opportunity to back out of the agreement without cost or obligation before you indicate your acceptance of it (by clicking 'next' or breaking the seal or whatever).
I challenge you to cite any case law that says otherwise.
1. People keep talking about "Fair use." It's a moot point. Fair use is what you can do with intellectual property that you posess (note I did not say "own") WHERE THERE IS NO OTHER GOVERNING AGREEMENT. When you started up iTunes, you clicked through a license that spells out what you may do with the songs you purchase. That is the difference between the iTMS and a CD - CDs don't have shrinkwrap licenses.
If you are in the United States, giving PlayFair to someone else or posting it on a web site probably violates the DMCA: It is not authorized by the rights holder, and it defeats an effective means of copy control.
Using PlayFair to decode your purchases to use on machines that don't have iTunes (such as Linux machines) probably is legal under the reverse engineering for compatibility sections of the DMCA, but that law is very full of contradictions and has not been fully tested in the courts.
I have a suggestion for the PlayFair authors: As you decrypt each song, put the account information in a hidden or comment section of the output file. Anyone using PlayFair to simply use their purchased content themselves would not be hurt by this, and it would provide an additional deterent against putting decoded content up on $P2P_NETWORK_DU_JOUR. It would bolster your eventual defense in court that you were not making a tool for piracy.
For years now, the folks guarding nuclear plants have been armed to the teeth.
They have no-fly zones around nuclear plants now. Not really because flying inside the line gets you shot down, but so they can aim a SAM at an incoming threat without worrying about hitting the wrong plane (not that they're worried about hitting the wrong plane - it's really that they're worried about missing the right one).
So let's pretend we're mad as hell and not going to take it any more. What's the plan?
9/11 style air attack won't work. You'll either get SAMed or the containment building will likely survive the impact.
Armed assault will be met with armed resistance. The minute the attack starts, someone presses the panic button and the cavalry arrives.
No, the only credible terrorist threat in my mind is an inside job - someone gets a job as a plant worker and sabotages the plant. If the plant were a fail-safe design, however (as a previous posted pointed out, current plants are designed with redundant systems, but are not fail-safe), the worst the criminal could do is shut the plant down and perhaps try and disperse the fuel with explosives (note that due to a failsafe system, he won't get any help dispersing the fuel from the plant itself). His ability to smuggle explosives into the plant without being detected will limit the effectiveness of that plan. Never mind that he'd have to be able to breach the containment building (yes, even a fail-safe reactor will likely have one).
Sabotage is certainly a threat at current nuclear facilities, just as it is a threat at, for example, petrolium refineries (I'd actually put Richmond, CA ahead of, say, San Onofre on a threat list). Better design mitigates that risk, just as it mitigates so many other risks.
You contradict yourself. If AAC->CD->AAC gives you the same file, then why wouldn't AAC->CD->AAC->CD->AAC? And therefore, so would CD->AAC->CD, which is in the middle of that operation.
But in any event, many of the iTMS tracks are encoded from 24 bit sources. Burning to a CD gives you 16 bit audio. You already have lost some of the original's dynamic range.
Try it sometime, AC. Take a m4a file and turn it into a AIFF, then re-m4a it. You won't get the same file. Promise.
You might consider starting to press "2" instead. I rather suspect you're likely to get a more clueful set of support reps. Besides, Linux has a lot more in common with OS X than Windows (for what that's worth).
If you read a science history book, you'll see that our models of the nature of atoms changed radically over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I'd even go so far as to suggest that if you take sub-atomic physics into account that the model is still changing today. It is obviously the nature of science that observations or experiments of tomorrow may invalidate models and ideas of today.
The best we can do is what we currently know. And given current knowledge, I'd say that planets are in the ecliptic plane and don't cross each other's orbits.
If you are going to suggest that alternate ecliptic planes are possible, then one of the first things you might want to do is suggest a mechanism by which they could theoretically occur, and whether your theory either explains any current observations or makes any predictions that can be tested observationally.
If we find multi-ecliptic extra-solar systems, or (as you suggest) another gas giant orbiting the sun (that somehow has not been predicted gravitationally) then clearly I'll have to revise my position.
Speaking for myself, I'd say the first criteria for planet status would be having an orbit in the plane (within reason) of the rest of the planets and not crossing the orbits of any of the others.
I wouldn't say that was sufficient, but I would say it is required.
I've used PCCard based wireless internet access devices in the past, and every one of them has been only "supported" on Windows, but every single one of them has simply emulated a standard COM port that required you to guess the particular "AT" command to bring up a PPP connecetion.
With data rates as high as claimed, this one may indeed be proprietary, although it would still, I believe, be *theoretically* possible to emulate a COM port that simply provided data a lot faster than you think it should (all of these virtual COM port style devices all ignored the baud rate setting anyway).
Can anyone confirm or deny? If you're using a Windows XP box, bring up the device mangler, properties of the device, Details, and give us the "Device Instance ID". Decoding that should tell us about the attachment (PCCard or Cardbus) and if it's Cardbus, should give us PCI vendor/device ID info.
I believe it was Wes Borg who once said, "Next time they say that their computer isn't working, tell them it's broken. Tell them to give it to you to play with and to go out and buy an iMac. It's a computer especiall made for id....... um.... for Mommies and Daddies."
If Sun goes for it, they lose complete control over Java, which is a cash crop for them.
If they dual license it, then they get to retain complete control over the commercial fork of it. Sun would be unique in that no other entity would have the rights that Sun does to use Java other than under the GPL.
I think that would keep Sun pretty firmly in the driver's seat.
If IBM is serious about this and Sun refuses to play ball, then I'd be surprised if IBM didn't suddenly decide to champion the Kaffe project or perhaps even start their own open Java system.
IBM, being, well, IBM, will have an open Java one way or another, if that's really what they want.
I was in in Pittsburgh one year when the KKK was given the right to march and hold a rally espousing their racist views. Is this what Freedom of Speech was meant for?
It's precisely what the 1st ammendment was meant for. Popular opinions don't need first ammendment protection. When the majority threatens tyrany against unpopular opinions is when they need protection.
It was not so long ago in this country that the KKK's position was, in fact, the favored one in the places where they were active. Organizations like the NAACP were the ones who needed first ammendment protection. Without such protection, it's an open question whether we would have wound up making the progress we have as quickly as we have.
Besides, the best thing you can do is let them have a soapbox and either ignore them or rebut them in kind. Anything else guarantees them more press coverage than they're worth (which is, in most cases, their goal).
According to what I read on the appelant's site (I may have missed something, and perhaps the site is a tad biased), the cop didn't even ask the guy his name, he simply demanded ID.
For the folks asking "What's wrong with X?", I suggest you seek out the X windows chapter of that seminal work on the subject, "The Unix Haters Handbook" by Simson Garfinkel, et al.
Me? I take a cue or two from the output of 'xdpyinfo'. When something requires more than 20 different extensions to fit in the modern world, it's perhaps time for a re-think.
But if Y is going to work, the some level of backwards compatibility might be reasonably expected. Personally, I would suggest library level shimming rather than protocol level (that is, Y windows should come with a libX11 that implements the X API but talks to a Y server).
I'm a little surprised, in fact, that Apple didn't do such a thing for OS X. Rather than toss in an X server, they could have supplied a libX11 that simply implemented all of the calls in DPDF. One less bell to answer, one less egg to fry.
An X server is still nice for remote display situations, but honestly: Who does that anymore (and could they not be accomodated with VNC)?
Having written a Java/Cocoa application (www.macxm.com) and run into a lot of serious obstacles, I am here to tell you that Java/Cocoa is not the way to go. At best, maybe if you have good MVC, you can take Java model classes and hook them to an Objective C controller/view layer, but there are just too many stupid problems otherwise.
Maybe it would be different if Apple actually wrote an important application in Java/Cocoa. The team doing it would walk down the hall and beat on the Java folks to fix some of these things. Then maybe I'd change my mind.
Sure but that's not quite what I'm talking about. With that, you have to configure it in advance, and *anyone* who knows the "secret" can do it.
What I'm talking about is something closer to remote administration, but in a way that lets you do one simple thing from outside without the cumbersome web based UI navigation to get it done.
Seems like you could instead make a simple UDP ping-pong protocol (obviously with some encryption involved) that would let you set up arbitrary temporary NAT redirections. If such a thing were optionally available for those little firewall boxes from Linksys, Netgear, et al, it would make my life a lot easier (for when I need to VNC into my parent's machine to help them out, for instance).
The thing that really annoyed me about RealPlayer for Windows was its habit of always popping with stupid "message alerts" that were just for their frigging ads. The Real player for Mac is much, much better behaved, as is the Windows player for the mac (when compared to the WMP for Windows).
So I sort of put a pox on all of them for being proprietary, but at least on the mac, I call it a tie.
Slashdot Mirror
LindOs (put a line above the O). That way, it's pronounced exactly the same.
If all you say is true, then it should be trivial for you to find some actual case law that supports your position. I await more than your mere argument of your assumptions with baited breath.
Your click license misses a big point: There are many ways to use your text that do not require clicking 'reply'. I could make a new comment without hitting 'reply' that used your text. And yes, it was as stupid (as are most reducto ad absurdum arguments). But quite a bit less so than the iTunes license agreement or countless other click-through licenses in use today.
But that's a tempest in a teapot.
If a book came in a sealed container that had a license agreement, then yes, you would be licensing the book. That license could restrict you from any number of things. Contrary to your assertion, this is indeed a concept supported by US law. It's called a "contract." There is a genuine meeting of the minds so long as you have the opportunity to back out of the agreement without cost or obligation before you indicate your acceptance of it (by clicking 'next' or breaking the seal or whatever).
I challenge you to cite any case law that says otherwise.
1. People keep talking about "Fair use." It's a moot point. Fair use is what you can do with intellectual property that you posess (note I did not say "own") WHERE THERE IS NO OTHER GOVERNING AGREEMENT. When you started up iTunes, you clicked through a license that spells out what you may do with the songs you purchase. That is the difference between the iTMS and a CD - CDs don't have shrinkwrap licenses.
If you are in the United States, giving PlayFair to someone else or posting it on a web site probably violates the DMCA: It is not authorized by the rights holder, and it defeats an effective means of copy control.
Using PlayFair to decode your purchases to use on machines that don't have iTunes (such as Linux machines) probably is legal under the reverse engineering for compatibility sections of the DMCA, but that law is very full of contradictions and has not been fully tested in the courts.
I have a suggestion for the PlayFair authors: As you decrypt each song, put the account information in a hidden or comment section of the output file. Anyone using PlayFair to simply use their purchased content themselves would not be hurt by this, and it would provide an additional deterent against putting decoded content up on $P2P_NETWORK_DU_JOUR. It would bolster your eventual defense in court that you were not making a tool for piracy.
My understanding is that the size of the no-fly zones is sufficient to make a reasonably sized free-fire zone.
As another poster reported, this may not be possible if a plant is near an airport, but that's not the case at any of the plants in CA.
In any event, good fail-safe designs would still likely be safer and cleaner after an attack of that sort than anything in the inventory today.
For years now, the folks guarding nuclear plants have been armed to the teeth.
They have no-fly zones around nuclear plants now. Not really because flying inside the line gets you shot down, but so they can aim a SAM at an incoming threat without worrying about hitting the wrong plane (not that they're worried about hitting the wrong plane - it's really that they're worried about missing the right one).
So let's pretend we're mad as hell and not going to take it any more. What's the plan?
9/11 style air attack won't work. You'll either get SAMed or the containment building will likely survive the impact.
Armed assault will be met with armed resistance. The minute the attack starts, someone presses the panic button and the cavalry arrives.
No, the only credible terrorist threat in my mind is an inside job - someone gets a job as a plant worker and sabotages the plant. If the plant were a fail-safe design, however (as a previous posted pointed out, current plants are designed with redundant systems, but are not fail-safe), the worst the criminal could do is shut the plant down and perhaps try and disperse the fuel with explosives (note that due to a failsafe system, he won't get any help dispersing the fuel from the plant itself). His ability to smuggle explosives into the plant without being detected will limit the effectiveness of that plan. Never mind that he'd have to be able to breach the containment building (yes, even a fail-safe reactor will likely have one).
Sabotage is certainly a threat at current nuclear facilities, just as it is a threat at, for example, petrolium refineries (I'd actually put Richmond, CA ahead of, say, San Onofre on a threat list). Better design mitigates that risk, just as it mitigates so many other risks.
But in any event, many of the iTMS tracks are encoded from 24 bit sources. Burning to a CD gives you 16 bit audio. You already have lost some of the original's dynamic range.
Try it sometime, AC. Take a m4a file and turn it into a AIFF, then re-m4a it. You won't get the same file. Promise.
Um, no. AAC is a lossy format. If you burn it to CD, then rip it and re-AAC it, you get something not quite as good as the original.
You might consider starting to press "2" instead. I rather suspect you're likely to get a more clueful set of support reps. Besides, Linux has a lot more in common with OS X than Windows (for what that's worth).
If you read a science history book, you'll see that our models of the nature of atoms changed radically over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I'd even go so far as to suggest that if you take sub-atomic physics into account that the model is still changing today. It is obviously the nature of science that observations or experiments of tomorrow may invalidate models and ideas of today.
The best we can do is what we currently know. And given current knowledge, I'd say that planets are in the ecliptic plane and don't cross each other's orbits.
If you are going to suggest that alternate ecliptic planes are possible, then one of the first things you might want to do is suggest a mechanism by which they could theoretically occur, and whether your theory either explains any current observations or makes any predictions that can be tested observationally.
If we find multi-ecliptic extra-solar systems, or (as you suggest) another gas giant orbiting the sun (that somehow has not been predicted gravitationally) then clearly I'll have to revise my position.
Speaking for myself, I'd say the first criteria for planet status would be having an orbit in the plane (within reason) of the rest of the planets and not crossing the orbits of any of the others.
I wouldn't say that was sufficient, but I would say it is required.
I've used PCCard based wireless internet access devices in the past, and every one of them has been only "supported" on Windows, but every single one of them has simply emulated a standard COM port that required you to guess the particular "AT" command to bring up a PPP connecetion.
With data rates as high as claimed, this one may indeed be proprietary, although it would still, I believe, be *theoretically* possible to emulate a COM port that simply provided data a lot faster than you think it should (all of these virtual COM port style devices all ignored the baud rate setting anyway).
Can anyone confirm or deny? If you're using a Windows XP box, bring up the device mangler, properties of the device, Details, and give us the "Device Instance ID". Decoding that should tell us about the attachment (PCCard or Cardbus) and if it's Cardbus, should give us PCI vendor/device ID info.
I believe it was Wes Borg who once said, "Next time they say that their computer isn't working, tell them it's broken. Tell them to give it to you to play with and to go out and buy an iMac. It's a computer especiall made for id....... um.... for Mommies and Daddies."
If they dual license it, then they get to retain complete control over the commercial fork of it. Sun would be unique in that no other entity would have the rights that Sun does to use Java other than under the GPL.
I think that would keep Sun pretty firmly in the driver's seat.
If IBM is serious about this and Sun refuses to play ball, then I'd be surprised if IBM didn't suddenly decide to champion the Kaffe project or perhaps even start their own open Java system.
IBM, being, well, IBM, will have an open Java one way or another, if that's really what they want.
It's precisely what the 1st ammendment was meant for. Popular opinions don't need first ammendment protection. When the majority threatens tyrany against unpopular opinions is when they need protection.
It was not so long ago in this country that the KKK's position was, in fact, the favored one in the places where they were active. Organizations like the NAACP were the ones who needed first ammendment protection. Without such protection, it's an open question whether we would have wound up making the progress we have as quickly as we have.
Besides, the best thing you can do is let them have a soapbox and either ignore them or rebut them in kind. Anything else guarantees them more press coverage than they're worth (which is, in most cases, their goal).
Before doing something risky, type this:
:-)
:-)
sleep 600 && reboot &
Now if your risky maneuver makes the ssh session unusable, just wait 5 minutes for the machine to reboot.
This is great for fiddling with firewalls by remote control... through the firewall.
Oh... You say you're not using a POSIX-like system? That's not supported. Sorry.
For the folks asking "What's wrong with X?", I suggest you seek out the X windows chapter of that seminal work on the subject, "The Unix Haters Handbook" by Simson Garfinkel, et al.
Me? I take a cue or two from the output of 'xdpyinfo'. When something requires more than 20 different extensions to fit in the modern world, it's perhaps time for a re-think.
But if Y is going to work, the some level of backwards compatibility might be reasonably expected. Personally, I would suggest library level shimming rather than protocol level (that is, Y windows should come with a libX11 that implements the X API but talks to a Y server).
I'm a little surprised, in fact, that Apple didn't do such a thing for OS X. Rather than toss in an X server, they could have supplied a libX11 that simply implemented all of the calls in DPDF. One less bell to answer, one less egg to fry.
An X server is still nice for remote display situations, but honestly: Who does that anymore (and could they not be accomodated with VNC)?
For half your budget, you could get his iPod painted by the folks at http://www.colorwarepc.com/
Having written a Java/Cocoa application (www.macxm.com) and run into a lot of serious obstacles, I am here to tell you that Java/Cocoa is not the way to go. At best, maybe if you have good MVC, you can take Java model classes and hook them to an Objective C controller/view layer, but there are just too many stupid problems otherwise.
Maybe it would be different if Apple actually wrote an important application in Java/Cocoa. The team doing it would walk down the hall and beat on the Java folks to fix some of these things. Then maybe I'd change my mind.
Sure but that's not quite what I'm talking about. With that, you have to configure it in advance, and *anyone* who knows the "secret" can do it.
What I'm talking about is something closer to remote administration, but in a way that lets you do one simple thing from outside without the cumbersome web based UI navigation to get it done.
Seems like you could instead make a simple UDP ping-pong protocol (obviously with some encryption involved) that would let you set up arbitrary temporary NAT redirections. If such a thing were optionally available for those little firewall boxes from Linksys, Netgear, et al, it would make my life a lot easier (for when I need to VNC into my parent's machine to help them out, for instance).
So toss a Linksys WPC54G into the CardBus slot and enjoy your upgrade to AirPort Extreme at the same time. :-)
The C:\ wasn't clue enough? :-)
The thing that really annoyed me about RealPlayer for Windows was its habit of always popping with stupid "message alerts" that were just for their frigging ads. The Real player for Mac is much, much better behaved, as is the Windows player for the mac (when compared to the WMP for Windows).
So I sort of put a pox on all of them for being proprietary, but at least on the mac, I call it a tie.