In any case, I don't agree that mere existance of incentives puts commerical projects in the viral category. The lack of choice is the key characteristic. Well, if you're not going to consider financial consequences, why consider legal ones? After all, you still have the choice to take GPL'd software and sell it as your own work, without giving away source code or granting your end users any rights. There are many examples of companies doing just that.
It'd be illegal, and you'd likely suffer the consequences when you eventually got caught, but nothing prevents you from making that choice except your own desire to avoid breaking the law - just like nothing prevents you from paying $2500 for a library and then giving your software away for free, except your own desire to avoid spending $2500 with no way to get it back.
Can we therefore conclude that the GPL isn't viral either?
First, we're talking about commercial licenses, not just "closed source".
Second, like I said, it's viral in that if you use a commercially-licensed library in your own software (particularly one that charges a per-unit-shipped royalty), you have to release your software under a commercial license as well. Otherwise you're paying those royalties out of your own pocket, and few people can afford to do that.
It's not exactly the same as the GPL situation: you don't have to use exactly the same license, and you're forced into it not by a contract but by financial necessity. But it's still viral.
And this is viral how? It's viral in the sense that it becomes impractical to release your own software for free when you have to pay for the libraries, particularly if you have to pay a royalty for each copy you ship. Unless you have piles of cash to burn, using a commercially-licensed library in your software forces you to release that software under a commercial license in order to get the money to pay for the library.
The CLR supports a lot of features that are sorely lacking in Java's VM: delegates, generics with strong typing at runtime, dynamic code generation (at least I don't think Java has that), and pointers in unsafe mode come to mind. For interfacing with native code,.NET's P/Invoke is also supposed to be easier to work with than JNI.
My 27" HDTV was $400 over a year ago. I have no doubt you can walk into any big-box retailer, and find at least one brand of HDTV equally cheap... It just won't be an RCA. Best Buy's cheapest 27" SDTV is $239 (marked down from $279). Their cheapest 27" HDTV is $522 (marked down from $549).
Circuit City: SDTV $239 (marked down from $299), HDTV $499 (marked down from $549).
Those are online prices, but my experience with both of those stores has been that the in-store prices aren't any lower.
Walmart.com's cheapest 27" HDTV is a whopping $748, but they have a 26" set for $598. I know their in-store selection differs a lot from the web site, though.
Most content has been 16:9 for years, from DVDs to TV shows. Huh. I suppose you could come to that conclusion if you only watch movies, network dramas, and HBO... but you realize Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, CNN, TBS, MTV, and dozens of other popular cable channels are still almost entirely 4:3, right?
There is inherent economic benefit to the car builder, but there is no inherent benefit at all to "build" creative intangible works, if there is no copyright.
Of course there is.
That's like saying there's no incentive to rake leaves in a public park unless potential leaf-rakers are allowed to run some crazy scheme in which they fence off an area, clear the leaves out of it, and then charge people to walk on that part of the grass - essentially selling the raked grass as a product. But raking leaves is a service, and someone who wants to get paid for it simply has to go to city hall and apply for a job as a groundskeeper, and then he'll get paid for his time directly.
Your mistake is thinking intangible works are products to be manufactured ahead of time and then sold later. They aren't: arranging bits is a service. The economically valuable thing there is the author's talent and effort, not the actual bits themselves, which can be reproduced for free by anyone with no talent involved at all.
My point--and the original point of copyright--is to provide significant tangible incentives for the creation of these intangible works, and as such they necessarily must deal with the concepts required to economically capitalize "ownership" of them.
Again, there already are tangible incentives, just like there are for performing any other service: you can refuse to perform the service until someone agrees to pay.
It's as if you're proposing that barbers need to somehow "own" the haircuts they perform, or accountants need to "own" the numbers on the tax forms they fill out, because otherwise there'd be no incentive for anyone to cut your hair or do your taxes. You're ignoring the most fundamental incentive of all: a person's time is scarce and inherently valuable, and if you want them to spend it doing something that benefits you, you have to pay them for it.
You don't buy completed tax forms from an accountant; you pay him to come up with the answers in the first place. You're essentially paying him to arrange bits, and you can do the same with a musician, author, or filmmaker (although due to the amount of effort involved, you'd probably want to split the bill with many other people, e.g. using the internet as a fundraising tool in much the same way that political candidates and sites like Sellaband have).
Most countries clearly state they "will not negotiate with terrorists" and I suspect the same applies to criminal "pirates" of intangibles.
Now this is getting silly. You realize that the terrorists in those scenarios are holding hostages or threatening violence, right? "We won't negotiate with terrorists" means "we won't submit to extortion". I don't see anyone threatening to download music unless their demands are met. Rather, they're pointing out that file sharing cannot be stopped, and the only effective ways to deal with it are to find another business model or offer a better product.
In the US, speed limit laws are summarily ignored by nearly everyone; it's quite unsafe to be the only one not to do so. I don't think this casual disregard is doing anything to end ridiculously low speed limits; it only serves to raise enforcement.
Actually, it is helping. I suppose this depends on jurisdiction, but in many places, speed limits are set according to the actual speeds of cars along each road, on the principle that drivers who take that route every day are better at judging safe speeds than bureaucrats. The DOT remeasures the speed of traffic every so often (or in response to complaints), and if they find that a lot of cars are exceeding the posted limit, they don't set up a speed trap - they raise the speed limit.
Whether [a generation growing up without a connection between information and property] is good or bad in the very long term remains to be seen. Ignorance is hardly the same as being a conscientious objector.
...and thus they must not exist? You say "other" so I guess you believe the GPL the only (tenuous, to you) exception?
It's the only one you mentioned specifically, and I don't believe it's an exception at all. I believe the GPL would be unnecessary in a world without copyright. We'd be able to modify and redistribute software anyway, and I don't think "you may not distribute this without including the source code" (the other purpose of the GPL) is inherently any nobler a restriction than "you may not distribute this without paying me a dollar".
Let me clarify: I've certainly seen other purposes for copyright alleged, in the years I've been debating copyright on Slashdot and other forums. I've never see a valid one, though. If you have in mind another purpose that copyright serves, I'd be glad to hear it.
You probably don't respect me enough to learn anything from me, but I'd humbly suggest that if you do a bit of research into the (very long) history of so-called "intellectual property" (and macro-economics, while you're at it) you'll see that there's actually a method to the madness.
Believe it or not, I have. Copyright certainly has economic effects, but I am not convinced that the outcome is any better for our society, especially in light of the freedoms we're giving up to support it.
If we lived in a utopia where the very concept of gathering possessions had became outdated, I'd be the first in line to ask to repeal all such laws. Until then, though, we are blissfully capitalist and these laws, properly throttled, do occupy a useful place in society.
But don't you see? That concept already is outdated when it comes to information. Or rather, there never was a time when it made sense - to call it "outdated" suggests that the nature of information has changed over time, but in fact information has never been a scarce, exclusive thing.
The laws relating to ownership of physical property are there for a good reason: we need a way to decide how each object will be used at any given time. I can't drive the car to Seattle while you're driving it to New York, and so on. Everything else follows from that basic, fundamental aspect of physical property, which simply doesn't apply to information. There is nothing I could possibly do to a particular song that would prevent you from doing something else with it, so there's no need for either of us to have the power to veto potential uses of the song.
I hear that strategy is going (and has gone) very well for the various religious extremists around the world, is it not? Come on.
It's been working quite well for religious extremists in the US, and most US politics in general, and indeed every serious negotiation. You don't get what you want by asking for exactly that and nothing more, especially if there's another group out there opposing you.
Hell, just look at copyright: it's not hard at all to find extreme pro-copyright quotes, such as Jack Valenti's "forever less a day". And which direction has the law continually been moved? Copyright terms have gotten closer and closer to Mr. Valenti's ideal, not further away.
Real extremists sacrifice. If you go totally without label-produced music to protest RIAA tactics, I'll side with you. Let me say again, if you are not advocating breaking the law, then I have zero argument with you. However, if you ignore the law to get what you want anyway, then in my estimation you're not helping at all. I have no way to know which is which--I haven't seen any "open letter" from you--but I'm guessing from your responses that you don't respect this particular law.
You guessed right, but I'm not falling into your trap. There is no One True Way to protest, and in any case, promoting casual disregard for copyright will do more to end it than principled self-denial anyway. You can't arrest everyone, and a law that a wide majority considers quaint, unenforceab
Well, yes, it's an exceptionally good deal, which is why it's not really fair to use that as an example of how HDTVs aren't expensive. In general, you'll be paying about twice as much for a screen of the same nominal size, and the differing aspect ratios mean you'll need an even bigger nominal size if you watch a lot of 4:3 content.
You really should try to learn a bit of history, so you'll understand (or at least acknowledge there's an argument) that copyright does have valid purposes. If nothing else, how do you think we "enforce" the GPL, for example. That's right, we count on that evil concept of copyright. Yes, that's a common response. But remember, the main effect of the GPL is to give back the rights that copyright law takes away, and it's merely an ironic implementation detail that the GPL derives its legal power from copyright law. If the law were changed so that we could reverse-engineer, modify, and redistribute software regardless of its license terms, that would be enough to render the GPL all but unnecessary.
As for those other "valid purposes"... well, I haven't seen any. They all seem to boil down to laziness ("I want to keep getting paid forever for the work I did last year"), greed ("if someone benefits from something I did, they owe me"), or a misguided sense of personal harm ("if you write a sequel to my book in which the characters don't act the way I'd want them to, you're hurting me").
The only way to get things to change is slowly, calculated over a very long period of time. All of these "open letters" are useless; RIAA/MPAA will use folks like this, who blatantly thumb their collective noses, to justify their outrageous bullying tactics. That's one theory. Here's another: the only way to get things to change is through compromise and negotiation, and for that to work in your favor, you need vocal advocates of views you consider extreme, so that your own position looks moderate in comparison.
If you want to sell your car for $15,000, you don't say flat out, "15 grand, take it or leave it"; you start by offering it for $18,000 and let them talk you down to the price you had in mind all along. And if you want to get some of your rights back, you start by demanding all of them - or by pointing to people like me and saying "See? At least I'm not asking for all that!"
And Joe Q Public will either applaud that the cheaters were caught, or at the very least recognize that there are "bad people" out there, and (wrongly) conclude that the ends justify the means. Joe Q Public already realizes file sharers aren't "bad people". If he owns a CD burner, he's probably already used it to copy music for his friends.
A law-abiding voice carries much farther than any thief's voice. Don't be surprised when you don't get much sympathy with insults like that.
Target.com has one for $299, but it's only 26", and it's one of those "add to cart to see the real price" items, so who knows how long that price will last. Their cheapest 27" HDTV is $499.
Like the children you are, you have no concept that other people have property and rights. No, he simply understands that information is not property, and no one has the right to silence another person just because that person's speech undermines his business model.
Indeed, the people who are crying "mine, mine, mine" are the copyright holders themselves. They think they can own a number and prevent other people from using it without permission. It's like a child crying because he taught a game to some other kids and now they're playing it by themselves without him - he thinks he owns that game, but like any other piece of information, it doesn't really belong to anyone.
Haw haw, you sure got me. What a chump I am for buying a $40 DVD/DivX player instead of spending hundreds on a noisy PC, or even more on a quiet one, and then setting aside days or weeks to configure it, and then who knows whether interlaced video would even look right with a standard video card. (Cue anecdotal responses such as "I got my MythTV configured in half an hour, I had a spare PC just sitting around doing nothing, and I have a $2000 progressive HD display - doesn't everyone?")
But of course you're ignoring the actual point of my post, which is that the DVD format has these restrictions, and manufacturers are encouraged (if not required) to implement them, with the result that nearly every DVD player on the market exhibits the behavior I described. As you know, the context here is the impact of DRM on the commercial success of DVD vs. VHS, and the feature set of MythTV is irrelevant when most consumers play their DVDs on set-top boxes made for that specific task.
I want to make a difference, so I'd simply and respectfully ask that you keep your twisted view of the world of copyrights to yourself, for now, and let those of us who understand and respect the laws to put up the good fight on your behalf. On the contrary, the "twisted view" of copyrights is the one enshrined into law. The one that says that if you're the first person to come up with a particular string of bits, then you "own" it, you're the boss of those bits essentially forever (relative to the human lifespan), and you're morally entitled to silence anyone else who communicates those bits to anyone else without your permission.
Copyright law doesn't deserve respect. If you want help with your fight, then fight a better fight: the one against the very concept of staking claim to a number. Don't just push for some weak concept of fair use while ignoring the fundamental injustice of restricting the majority's speech in order to prop up a minority's lazy, outdated business model.
Well, Apple TV for one. And every HD-DVD and Blu-Ray play is, fundamentally, a H.264-in-MP4 player. There's also iPods and PSPs and such playing lower profile files of the same sort. Oh. That.
So in other words, for the vast majority of consumers who don't own an HDTV (and thus can't use Apple TV and have no need for HD-DVD/BluRay) and like watching DVD-resolution content on a big screen, DivX-in-AVI is really the only choice for hardware players. I agree.
The original claim was "when it comes to which has better hardware support, mp4 wins", which AFAIK is simply false, unless it's only referring to the MP4 container format (not H.264). Hardware DivX players are widespread and very affordable. H.264 players, not so much - even for the price of a single video iPod, you could buy a cart full of DivX players.
You'd also have to do it when there *is* a hidden volume, but it isn't currently being used, otherwise the lack of changes in empty space would suggest there was data in that space. I think the only plausible way of doing this would be to have multiple keys and randomly switch between them. I'm not sure what you mean by switching between multiple keys.
The thing about main volumes which contain hidden volumes is they're a pain to use. You have to supply both keys when you mount, to prevent the hidden volume from being overwritten, and then you still face the possibility of denied writes and a corrupted filesystem when the OS decides to store something in the protected space. Even with FAT, Windows will still sometimes write to the end of the disk when there's perfectly good free space at the beginning.
What that means is the problem you point out, while indeed it is a problem in theory, isn't much of one in practice. You only have to worry about it if you use the main volume a lot more than you use the hidden volume, but in practice, you'll probably use the hidden volume a lot more, and the main volume rarely if ever.
Of course, if you never use the main volume, the modification times on your files will pose another problem. You have a bunch of changing random data in the volume's free space, which you explain by pointing out that TrueCrypt automatically writes random data there when it's mounted, but then the attacker wonders "If you're mounting this volume all the time, why haven't you written any new files since last year?"
TrueCrypt (at least as of the last version, I haven't looked at the new one yet) requires a FS to be FAT in order to be able to make a hidden volume in it. Right, but that seems to be because of the characteristics of FAT, not because TrueCrypt needs to parse the filesystem. FAT is, at least in theory, able to only write its structures and your files to the beginning of the disk, leaving the end untouched. (Whether Windows actually operates that way in practice is another story.)
I double checked the specs and it says it supports EDTV and HDTV. Close enough. EDTV is still more than 80-90% of households have.
There are plenty of folks that do have HDTV sets out there (it's hard to find a new TV that ISN'T HDTV). The folks with HDTV are still a small minority, although you wouldn't realize it from watching Best Buy commercials or reading Slashdot. Finding a new TV that isn't HD is actually very easy, and they come at a fraction of the price of HDTV sets - you can get 3x the screen area (1.66x for widescreen content) for 2/3 the price.
The Wii can't stream DivX and other media files over a local network, and even for YouTube and other media sites (and the browser-based LAN media servers), you have to deal with the Wii's browser headaches: the button bar taking up 1/4 of the screen all the time, the obsolete Flash support, the poor handling of popup windows that breaks sites like Newgrounds, etc.
Hopefully the release version of the Internet Channel will solve some of those problems, but for now, XBMC is a much better solution for watching video. Plus, you can play all the emulated games you want for free, instead of paying Nintendo $4-$10 each for their depressingly weak selection of VC games (which have no quicksave, no net play, and some--like Mario Kart 64--are missing features that the originals had).
Well, good luck with that: HDTV is still wildly unpopular. Maybe if they'd waited a few years until it became affordable, AppleTV would be in a better position.
Modding the Xbox requires a USB memory card reader (about $20) and any one of a number of common games (the one I used, Splinter Cell, cost like $2). You can save $22 by doing a hot-swap mod, which only requires the use of a spare PC for 20 minutes, an ISO to boot from, and the courage to plug and unplug IDE cables while the devices are turned on.
When it comes to which has better hardware support, mp4 wins. Um.. really? I can walk into any Circuit City and buy a cheap DVD player that'll play DivX AVI files. Where are the cheap, readily available H.264-in-MP4 players?
It should not be difficult to distinguish (with good certainty) random data from "random-looking" encrypted data when given the device on which the data was created. Do you have any evidence whatsoever for this belief? Because I'm sure the creators of TrueCrypt, and the rest of the crypto community, would love to hear about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet: /ctcp #lamers PING +++ATH
It'd be illegal, and you'd likely suffer the consequences when you eventually got caught, but nothing prevents you from making that choice except your own desire to avoid breaking the law - just like nothing prevents you from paying $2500 for a library and then giving your software away for free, except your own desire to avoid spending $2500 with no way to get it back.
Can we therefore conclude that the GPL isn't viral either?
First, we're talking about commercial licenses, not just "closed source".
Second, like I said, it's viral in that if you use a commercially-licensed library in your own software (particularly one that charges a per-unit-shipped royalty), you have to release your software under a commercial license as well. Otherwise you're paying those royalties out of your own pocket, and few people can afford to do that.
It's not exactly the same as the GPL situation: you don't have to use exactly the same license, and you're forced into it not by a contract but by financial necessity. But it's still viral.
The CLR supports a lot of features that are sorely lacking in Java's VM: delegates, generics with strong typing at runtime, dynamic code generation (at least I don't think Java has that), and pointers in unsafe mode come to mind. For interfacing with native code, .NET's P/Invoke is also supposed to be easier to work with than JNI.
So load your apps at night or on the weekend, when airtime is free. Doesn't Sprint let you do that?
Circuit City: SDTV $239 (marked down from $299), HDTV $499 (marked down from $549).
Those are online prices, but my experience with both of those stores has been that the in-store prices aren't any lower.
Walmart.com's cheapest 27" HDTV is a whopping $748, but they have a 26" set for $598. I know their in-store selection differs a lot from the web site, though. Most content has been 16:9 for years, from DVDs to TV shows. Huh. I suppose you could come to that conclusion if you only watch movies, network dramas, and HBO... but you realize Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, CNN, TBS, MTV, and dozens of other popular cable channels are still almost entirely 4:3, right?
Luxury! Our red wire got repossessed! We had to hold the green wire out the window and wait for lightning to strike.
There is inherent economic benefit to the car builder, but there is no inherent benefit at all to "build" creative intangible works, if there is no copyright.
Of course there is.
That's like saying there's no incentive to rake leaves in a public park unless potential leaf-rakers are allowed to run some crazy scheme in which they fence off an area, clear the leaves out of it, and then charge people to walk on that part of the grass - essentially selling the raked grass as a product. But raking leaves is a service, and someone who wants to get paid for it simply has to go to city hall and apply for a job as a groundskeeper, and then he'll get paid for his time directly.
Your mistake is thinking intangible works are products to be manufactured ahead of time and then sold later. They aren't: arranging bits is a service. The economically valuable thing there is the author's talent and effort, not the actual bits themselves, which can be reproduced for free by anyone with no talent involved at all.
My point--and the original point of copyright--is to provide significant tangible incentives for the creation of these intangible works, and as such they necessarily must deal with the concepts required to economically capitalize "ownership" of them.
Again, there already are tangible incentives, just like there are for performing any other service: you can refuse to perform the service until someone agrees to pay.
It's as if you're proposing that barbers need to somehow "own" the haircuts they perform, or accountants need to "own" the numbers on the tax forms they fill out, because otherwise there'd be no incentive for anyone to cut your hair or do your taxes. You're ignoring the most fundamental incentive of all: a person's time is scarce and inherently valuable, and if you want them to spend it doing something that benefits you, you have to pay them for it.
You don't buy completed tax forms from an accountant; you pay him to come up with the answers in the first place. You're essentially paying him to arrange bits, and you can do the same with a musician, author, or filmmaker (although due to the amount of effort involved, you'd probably want to split the bill with many other people, e.g. using the internet as a fundraising tool in much the same way that political candidates and sites like Sellaband have).
Most countries clearly state they "will not negotiate with terrorists" and I suspect the same applies to criminal "pirates" of intangibles.
Now this is getting silly. You realize that the terrorists in those scenarios are holding hostages or threatening violence, right? "We won't negotiate with terrorists" means "we won't submit to extortion". I don't see anyone threatening to download music unless their demands are met. Rather, they're pointing out that file sharing cannot be stopped, and the only effective ways to deal with it are to find another business model or offer a better product.
In the US, speed limit laws are summarily ignored by nearly everyone; it's quite unsafe to be the only one not to do so. I don't think this casual disregard is doing anything to end ridiculously low speed limits; it only serves to raise enforcement.
Actually, it is helping. I suppose this depends on jurisdiction, but in many places, speed limits are set according to the actual speeds of cars along each road, on the principle that drivers who take that route every day are better at judging safe speeds than bureaucrats. The DOT remeasures the speed of traffic every so often (or in response to complaints), and if they find that a lot of cars are exceeding the posted limit, they don't set up a speed trap - they raise the speed limit.
Whether [a generation growing up without a connection between information and property] is good or bad in the very long term remains to be seen. Ignorance is hardly the same as being a conscientious objector.
Oh, I don't think it's ignorance. They kn
...and thus they must not exist? You say "other" so I guess you believe the GPL the only (tenuous, to you) exception?
It's the only one you mentioned specifically, and I don't believe it's an exception at all. I believe the GPL would be unnecessary in a world without copyright. We'd be able to modify and redistribute software anyway, and I don't think "you may not distribute this without including the source code" (the other purpose of the GPL) is inherently any nobler a restriction than "you may not distribute this without paying me a dollar".
Let me clarify: I've certainly seen other purposes for copyright alleged, in the years I've been debating copyright on Slashdot and other forums. I've never see a valid one, though. If you have in mind another purpose that copyright serves, I'd be glad to hear it.
You probably don't respect me enough to learn anything from me, but I'd humbly suggest that if you do a bit of research into the (very long) history of so-called "intellectual property" (and macro-economics, while you're at it) you'll see that there's actually a method to the madness.
Believe it or not, I have. Copyright certainly has economic effects, but I am not convinced that the outcome is any better for our society, especially in light of the freedoms we're giving up to support it.
If we lived in a utopia where the very concept of gathering possessions had became outdated, I'd be the first in line to ask to repeal all such laws. Until then, though, we are blissfully capitalist and these laws, properly throttled, do occupy a useful place in society.
But don't you see? That concept already is outdated when it comes to information. Or rather, there never was a time when it made sense - to call it "outdated" suggests that the nature of information has changed over time, but in fact information has never been a scarce, exclusive thing.
The laws relating to ownership of physical property are there for a good reason: we need a way to decide how each object will be used at any given time. I can't drive the car to Seattle while you're driving it to New York, and so on. Everything else follows from that basic, fundamental aspect of physical property, which simply doesn't apply to information. There is nothing I could possibly do to a particular song that would prevent you from doing something else with it, so there's no need for either of us to have the power to veto potential uses of the song.
I hear that strategy is going (and has gone) very well for the various religious extremists around the world, is it not? Come on.
It's been working quite well for religious extremists in the US, and most US politics in general, and indeed every serious negotiation. You don't get what you want by asking for exactly that and nothing more, especially if there's another group out there opposing you.
Hell, just look at copyright: it's not hard at all to find extreme pro-copyright quotes, such as Jack Valenti's "forever less a day". And which direction has the law continually been moved? Copyright terms have gotten closer and closer to Mr. Valenti's ideal, not further away.
Real extremists sacrifice. If you go totally without label-produced music to protest RIAA tactics, I'll side with you. Let me say again, if you are not advocating breaking the law, then I have zero argument with you. However, if you ignore the law to get what you want anyway, then in my estimation you're not helping at all. I have no way to know which is which--I haven't seen any "open letter" from you--but I'm guessing from your responses that you don't respect this particular law.
You guessed right, but I'm not falling into your trap. There is no One True Way to protest, and in any case, promoting casual disregard for copyright will do more to end it than principled self-denial anyway. You can't arrest everyone, and a law that a wide majority considers quaint, unenforceab
Well, yes, it's an exceptionally good deal, which is why it's not really fair to use that as an example of how HDTVs aren't expensive. In general, you'll be paying about twice as much for a screen of the same nominal size, and the differing aspect ratios mean you'll need an even bigger nominal size if you watch a lot of 4:3 content.
As for those other "valid purposes"... well, I haven't seen any. They all seem to boil down to laziness ("I want to keep getting paid forever for the work I did last year"), greed ("if someone benefits from something I did, they owe me"), or a misguided sense of personal harm ("if you write a sequel to my book in which the characters don't act the way I'd want them to, you're hurting me"). The only way to get things to change is slowly, calculated over a very long period of time. All of these "open letters" are useless; RIAA/MPAA will use folks like this, who blatantly thumb their collective noses, to justify their outrageous bullying tactics. That's one theory. Here's another: the only way to get things to change is through compromise and negotiation, and for that to work in your favor, you need vocal advocates of views you consider extreme, so that your own position looks moderate in comparison.
If you want to sell your car for $15,000, you don't say flat out, "15 grand, take it or leave it"; you start by offering it for $18,000 and let them talk you down to the price you had in mind all along. And if you want to get some of your rights back, you start by demanding all of them - or by pointing to people like me and saying "See? At least I'm not asking for all that!" And Joe Q Public will either applaud that the cheaters were caught, or at the very least recognize that there are "bad people" out there, and (wrongly) conclude that the ends justify the means. Joe Q Public already realizes file sharers aren't "bad people". If he owns a CD burner, he's probably already used it to copy music for his friends. A law-abiding voice carries much farther than any thief's voice. Don't be surprised when you don't get much sympathy with insults like that.
A 27" HDTV for $300? Link please!
Target.com has one for $299, but it's only 26", and it's one of those "add to cart to see the real price" items, so who knows how long that price will last. Their cheapest 27" HDTV is $499.
Indeed, the people who are crying "mine, mine, mine" are the copyright holders themselves. They think they can own a number and prevent other people from using it without permission. It's like a child crying because he taught a game to some other kids and now they're playing it by themselves without him - he thinks he owns that game, but like any other piece of information, it doesn't really belong to anyone.
Haw haw, you sure got me. What a chump I am for buying a $40 DVD/DivX player instead of spending hundreds on a noisy PC, or even more on a quiet one, and then setting aside days or weeks to configure it, and then who knows whether interlaced video would even look right with a standard video card. (Cue anecdotal responses such as "I got my MythTV configured in half an hour, I had a spare PC just sitting around doing nothing, and I have a $2000 progressive HD display - doesn't everyone?")
But of course you're ignoring the actual point of my post, which is that the DVD format has these restrictions, and manufacturers are encouraged (if not required) to implement them, with the result that nearly every DVD player on the market exhibits the behavior I described. As you know, the context here is the impact of DRM on the commercial success of DVD vs. VHS, and the feature set of MythTV is irrelevant when most consumers play their DVDs on set-top boxes made for that specific task.
Copyright law doesn't deserve respect. If you want help with your fight, then fight a better fight: the one against the very concept of staking claim to a number. Don't just push for some weak concept of fair use while ignoring the fundamental injustice of restricting the majority's speech in order to prop up a minority's lazy, outdated business model.
Not quite. A VCR doesn't prevent you from fast-forwarding over the commercials and FBI notices at the beginning of the tape.
So in other words, for the vast majority of consumers who don't own an HDTV (and thus can't use Apple TV and have no need for HD-DVD/BluRay) and like watching DVD-resolution content on a big screen, DivX-in-AVI is really the only choice for hardware players. I agree.
The original claim was "when it comes to which has better hardware support, mp4 wins", which AFAIK is simply false, unless it's only referring to the MP4 container format (not H.264). Hardware DivX players are widespread and very affordable. H.264 players, not so much - even for the price of a single video iPod, you could buy a cart full of DivX players.
The thing about main volumes which contain hidden volumes is they're a pain to use. You have to supply both keys when you mount, to prevent the hidden volume from being overwritten, and then you still face the possibility of denied writes and a corrupted filesystem when the OS decides to store something in the protected space. Even with FAT, Windows will still sometimes write to the end of the disk when there's perfectly good free space at the beginning.
What that means is the problem you point out, while indeed it is a problem in theory, isn't much of one in practice. You only have to worry about it if you use the main volume a lot more than you use the hidden volume, but in practice, you'll probably use the hidden volume a lot more, and the main volume rarely if ever.
Of course, if you never use the main volume, the modification times on your files will pose another problem. You have a bunch of changing random data in the volume's free space, which you explain by pointing out that TrueCrypt automatically writes random data there when it's mounted, but then the attacker wonders "If you're mounting this volume all the time, why haven't you written any new files since last year?" TrueCrypt (at least as of the last version, I haven't looked at the new one yet) requires a FS to be FAT in order to be able to make a hidden volume in it. Right, but that seems to be because of the characteristics of FAT, not because TrueCrypt needs to parse the filesystem. FAT is, at least in theory, able to only write its structures and your files to the beginning of the disk, leaving the end untouched. (Whether Windows actually operates that way in practice is another story.)
The Wii can't stream DivX and other media files over a local network, and even for YouTube and other media sites (and the browser-based LAN media servers), you have to deal with the Wii's browser headaches: the button bar taking up 1/4 of the screen all the time, the obsolete Flash support, the poor handling of popup windows that breaks sites like Newgrounds, etc.
Hopefully the release version of the Internet Channel will solve some of those problems, but for now, XBMC is a much better solution for watching video. Plus, you can play all the emulated games you want for free, instead of paying Nintendo $4-$10 each for their depressingly weak selection of VC games (which have no quicksave, no net play, and some--like Mario Kart 64--are missing features that the originals had).
Well, good luck with that: HDTV is still wildly unpopular. Maybe if they'd waited a few years until it became affordable, AppleTV would be in a better position.