And what would be wrong with being able to revoke/retrive an embarassing video or soundbite?
I want my computer to obey me, not some third-party that suddenly want to rewrite history.
And I also happen to like F/OSS software, which is fundamentally incompatible with DRM. If I am allowed to modify software on my machine, I could add code that removes the DRM from a DRM:ed file. See the incompatibility? DRM requires that only a select few high priests of certain companies are allowed to write software.
If there were a total artist control type of rights management this idiot could retrieve (forever extinghuish the existence) the now-regrettable work posted to the Internet.
They have to think before they publish. They already have total control over their works before they publish them. By publishing, they agree that they won't have total control over their works anymore.
Unfortunately, an attendant basic reality is that the production of (good) ideas is hard and time consuming, and transforming the basic idea into a completed work (be it a book, film, play, song, painting, etc) can be exorbitantly expensive and time consuming.
I'd argue that the generation of ideas is easy, while implementation is hard. Everyone can come up with an idea for a nice software program, or a nice program feature. Not everyone can implement this idea into a working program. That is why software should not be patentable (patents protect ideas) but only protected by copyright (copyright protects implementation). This protects the bulk of the investment put into the program, and allows competitors to implement similar programs but not copy the implementation.
In this, Linus is absolutely correct: Let people play with DRM; In the long term, it hardly matters.
He may be right about the studios being free to DRM their content as they wish. But that is not what the GPLv3 is trying to prevent. The GPLv3 is aimed to prevent you from taking my code (licensed under the GPLv3) and "protecting it" with DRM system on it so that it can only be modified by you, effectively disabling the right to modify the code provided by the GPL.
No, but the new version of the GPL will end GPLed code being used for DRM
That may be true, but the main reason for the DRM clause in GPLv3 is to prohibit a distributor from using a DRM system to remove the freedoms provided by the GPL from software licensed under the GPL. Exhibit A is the TiVo, which only allows firmware images signed by TiVo's private key to run, even though the firmware contains software licensed under the GPL.
What? You never heard about the TiVo, the device that brought the DRM clause to the GPLv3? The operating system of the TiVo is Linux, probably not only the kernel, but also other GNU utilities. It is supposed to be free to modify for the user. But TiVo signs the software with their private key, and the hardware verifies that the operating system image contains a signature created by their private key. If it doesn't, the system refuses to start.
This is effectively a DRM system that removes the ability to modify the software on the TiVo, even though it is mostly free software, where allowing modification by the user is a crucial part of the license. It barely complies with the GPLv2 by supplying the source code, but requiring that the modified software is used on another hardware device (not a TiVo).
their rights include how they let you "consume" their creation.
To a certain extent though. The fair use doctrine says that certain "reasonable" uses are allowed, such as copying for your personal use (e.g. to your iPod, your car or your computer-based music library). DRM is a way to remove this doctrine, so that you are forced to buy the same content again and again if you ever want to use it on another device, or if your copy breaks.
With respect to Microsoft, it could have a big impact, because they incorporate BSD code into their TCP/IP stack if I'm not mistaken.
According to Microsoft, this is no longer true. BSD code were only used earlier to get TCP/IP functionality into Windows quickly when it became obvious that Internet (and not Microsoft Network, a.k.a. MSN) would be the next "big thing"
But of course the source isn't available , so we can't verify this claim.
If the patent is not granted, which is very likely because there is a ton of prior art,
Are you sure? This does not seem to be a patent for all DRM, but for a system that saves the state of the application when detecting a condition that violates the rules.
It's not like many people don't think that anyway.
What do you mean?
Either way it will be proven that the patent system actually works, because a patent troll has been defeated,
Red Hat is no patent troll. A patent troll is a company whose only business is patenting and suing for infringement. And that isn't a description of Red Hat by a long stretch.
on top of that it will be shown that the people who most adamantly argue against patents a) don't refrain from trying to use the system to their advantage (double standard)
So everyone that don't like the current implementation of the patent system should refrain from patenting things at all? Let's face it, patents exist and don't seem to be going away. As a corporation, refraining from patenting anything would be an invitation to competitors to sue, as you would have almost no defensive capability. Avoiding infringement altogether is about as easy as walking through a minefield, so in case you are sued, you need some defensive measures to fight off the attacker.
file patents for other people's inventions, which we all know is STEALING (or intellectual theft or somesuch).
A lot of patents cover the same or almost the same thing. It's a feature of the current implementation of patents, and whose patent is valid is left for the courts to decide.
One could suspect that the system is set up only to enrich lawyers, as lawyers in the patent office earn money proportional to the number of granted patent applications. Then their patent lawyer friends earn money when corporations battle it out in court. A different implementation might require the patent office to not issue patents that cover each other, but then the lawyers would not be able to enrich themselves as much.
Oh wait, that didn't work out so well for TBP now did it...
It didn't work out well for a few days, then they had relocated their servers to several other countries. They are actually back in Sweden now. Whether they will actually face any charges is still unknown, but the police is still holding most of the servers from the colocation facility, even many of those that had nothing to odo with TPB. I suspect that the police does this to make TPB a pariah that no colocator can accept as a customer. "Host TPB and risk shutdown of your entire operation for months or even years, even those servers that have nothing to do with them".
If the police cannot use the law to stop them, they'll have to come up with other ways. Anything to satisfy their MAFIAA masters.
As a minor issue, the SSL key is sent during the connection set up, before the client can send a Host: header. This means that each host wishing to employ HTTPS has to have its own IP address - otherwise, the server doesn't know which key to use.
If you create a certificate with the x509_v3 extension subjectAltName set to a number of hostnames all those hosts can use the same certificate. I use this setup at work on an internal server that provides several name-based virtual hosts. The setup is further described here (called CN+subjectAltName). I don't know if this method is the one you referred to below:
There's actually a way around this: HTTP 1.1 specifies how to upgrade a connection to HTTPS, which can be done after the Host: header has been sent. Unfortunately, a lot of software appears not to support this feature.
Not only that, but free Certificate Authorities (like CAcert.org) are not allowed to issue these EV certs. Only the large commercial CAs like Verisign can issue them.
Not allowed? By whom? I understand if Verisign very much would want this, but do they have that power? Are all browser vendors in on this "conspiracy"?
An inch as the smallest unit is not small enough. Today everything is miniaturized and I would rather talk about 2mm. instead of 1/134 inch or whatever that comes to.
Or Intel/AMD talking about 2.55905512×10^-6 inches instead of 65 nm.:)
Of course, they could use 2.55905512 microinches (where micro = 10^-6).
Part of the nice "features" of commercial software (where most non-OSS is admittedly, and most OSS isn't), is that it has a certain amount of market pressure to be of a minimum quality, or it doesn't last long.
One of the disadvantages of commercial/proprietary software is that it often only has the minimum quality required to receive enogh sales. An increase of quality beyond this minimum will seldom happen, especially if it doesn't generate enogh return on investment. In contrast, non-commercial developers couldn't care less of return on investment and other such financial issues, which enable them to increase quality beyond the minimum needed to barely satisfy its users.
IF Novell gets to foreclose on SCO for none payment and gets back all the rights for Unix they could turn the Unix code base over too the FOSS community.
Novell? Who is in bed with Microsoft? They'd probably turn it over to them instead.
That may be true for certain genres of games, but not the games I like. When I play games, I play strategy games (both turn-based and real-time), simulators and driving games. Few of these do very well, or even exist, on game consoles.
Oceans are a huge source of Deuterium, which can be used for Fusion (if we have it figured out), and possibly we could even use it as fuel (burning it).
Burning deuterium? That would really be a waste of money. Why not use ordinary hydrogen is you want to burn it chemically?
But I'm not sure of the effects of having slightly radioactive water vapor. Maybe it's not a good thing.
Hydrogen is just a 25% efficient battery. We already have much better batteries.
Except that batteries have to be recharged with the electrolyte in place, while a hydrogen tank can be refilled just like any normal fuel tank. I read about some battery prototype a few years ago that would allow you to replace the electrolyte, but the drawback was that it would deteriorate quickly.
Deuterium is normally made from sea water. That's the major hydrogen source most scientists are talking about when they say hydrogen.
Not really, since we have no use for deuterium in the context of fuel cells, only in the context of future fusion power plants. And I find a lot of scientists are involved in research related to fuel cells, and they can't possibly mean deuterium when they say hydrogen.
gnome-vfs - seemlessly edit files/watch vids/listen to music over ssh/ftp/smb/whatever
Sounds like FUSE, except that FUSE does not need Gnome (or even X to run). I really love sshfs, which uses FUSE. And there are a hundred other FUSE-enabled filesystems out there that I didn't even try yet.
Actually you two are both wrong. The current (2007) version of the office file formats are fully documented on the ECMA site, not MSDN (though MSDN does also have some docs on the file formats as well). In fact, it is actually the file formats and not just API documentation that you will find at ECMA.
Okay. Sometimes, Microsoft proponents argue that you don't need to know the details of the format, since they can be accessed though the API, which unfortunately would not work on other platforms.
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I want my computer to obey me, not some third-party that suddenly want to rewrite history.
And I also happen to like F/OSS software, which is fundamentally incompatible with DRM. If I am allowed to modify software on my machine, I could add code that removes the DRM from a DRM:ed file. See the incompatibility? DRM requires that only a select few high priests of certain companies are allowed to write software.
They have to think before they publish. They already have total control over their works before they publish them. By publishing, they agree that they won't have total control over their works anymore.
I'd argue that the generation of ideas is easy, while implementation is hard. Everyone can come up with an idea for a nice software program, or a nice program feature. Not everyone can implement this idea into a working program. That is why software should not be patentable (patents protect ideas) but only protected by copyright (copyright protects implementation). This protects the bulk of the investment put into the program, and allows competitors to implement similar programs but not copy the implementation.
He may be right about the studios being free to DRM their content as they wish. But that is not what the GPLv3 is trying to prevent. The GPLv3 is aimed to prevent you from taking my code (licensed under the GPLv3) and "protecting it" with DRM system on it so that it can only be modified by you, effectively disabling the right to modify the code provided by the GPL.
That may be true, but the main reason for the DRM clause in GPLv3 is to prohibit a distributor from using a DRM system to remove the freedoms provided by the GPL from software licensed under the GPL. Exhibit A is the TiVo, which only allows firmware images signed by TiVo's private key to run, even though the firmware contains software licensed under the GPL.
What? You never heard about the TiVo, the device that brought the DRM clause to the GPLv3? The operating system of the TiVo is Linux, probably not only the kernel, but also other GNU utilities. It is supposed to be free to modify for the user. But TiVo signs the software with their private key, and the hardware verifies that the operating system image contains a signature created by their private key. If it doesn't, the system refuses to start.
This is effectively a DRM system that removes the ability to modify the software on the TiVo, even though it is mostly free software, where allowing modification by the user is a crucial part of the license. It barely complies with the GPLv2 by supplying the source code, but requiring that the modified software is used on another hardware device (not a TiVo).
To a certain extent though. The fair use doctrine says that certain "reasonable" uses are allowed, such as copying for your personal use (e.g. to your iPod, your car or your computer-based music library). DRM is a way to remove this doctrine, so that you are forced to buy the same content again and again if you ever want to use it on another device, or if your copy breaks.
According to Microsoft, this is no longer true. BSD code were only used earlier to get TCP/IP functionality into Windows quickly when it became obvious that Internet (and not Microsoft Network, a.k.a. MSN) would be the next "big thing"
But of course the source isn't available , so we can't verify this claim.
Are you sure? This does not seem to be a patent for all DRM, but for a system that saves the state of the application when detecting a condition that violates the rules.
It's not like many people don't think that anyway.What do you mean?
Either way it will be proven that the patent system actually works, because a patent troll has been defeated,Red Hat is no patent troll. A patent troll is a company whose only business is patenting and suing for infringement. And that isn't a description of Red Hat by a long stretch.
on top of that it will be shown that the people who most adamantly argue against patents a) don't refrain from trying to use the system to their advantage (double standard)So everyone that don't like the current implementation of the patent system should refrain from patenting things at all? Let's face it, patents exist and don't seem to be going away. As a corporation, refraining from patenting anything would be an invitation to competitors to sue, as you would have almost no defensive capability. Avoiding infringement altogether is about as easy as walking through a minefield, so in case you are sued, you need some defensive measures to fight off the attacker.
file patents for other people's inventions, which we all know is STEALING (or intellectual theft or somesuch).A lot of patents cover the same or almost the same thing. It's a feature of the current implementation of patents, and whose patent is valid is left for the courts to decide.
One could suspect that the system is set up only to enrich lawyers, as lawyers in the patent office earn money proportional to the number of granted patent applications. Then their patent lawyer friends earn money when corporations battle it out in court. A different implementation might require the patent office to not issue patents that cover each other, but then the lawyers would not be able to enrich themselves as much.
It didn't work out well for a few days, then they had relocated their servers to several other countries. They are actually back in Sweden now. Whether they will actually face any charges is still unknown, but the police is still holding most of the servers from the colocation facility, even many of those that had nothing to odo with TPB. I suspect that the police does this to make TPB a pariah that no colocator can accept as a customer. "Host TPB and risk shutdown of your entire operation for months or even years, even those servers that have nothing to do with them".
If the police cannot use the law to stop them, they'll have to come up with other ways. Anything to satisfy their MAFIAA masters.
If you create a certificate with the x509_v3 extension subjectAltName set to a number of hostnames all those hosts can use the same certificate. I use this setup at work on an internal server that provides several name-based virtual hosts. The setup is further described here (called CN+subjectAltName). I don't know if this method is the one you referred to below:
There's actually a way around this: HTTP 1.1 specifies how to upgrade a connection to HTTPS, which can be done after the Host: header has been sent. Unfortunately, a lot of software appears not to support this feature.Not allowed? By whom? I understand if Verisign very much would want this, but do they have that power? Are all browser vendors in on this "conspiracy"?
Or Intel/AMD talking about 2.55905512×10^-6 inches instead of 65 nm. :)
Of course, they could use 2.55905512 microinches (where micro = 10^-6).
I thought that 100 degrees F represents normal body temperature, but I never figured out what 0 degrees F represent.
Having a basic unit of measurement between a cm and a m (ie a foot) seems nicely convenientIt's called a decimeter (dm). One meter is 10 decimeter, and one decimeter is 10 centimeter.
One of the disadvantages of commercial/proprietary software is that it often only has the minimum quality required to receive enogh sales. An increase of quality beyond this minimum will seldom happen, especially if it doesn't generate enogh return on investment. In contrast, non-commercial developers couldn't care less of return on investment and other such financial issues, which enable them to increase quality beyond the minimum needed to barely satisfy its users.
Novell? Who is in bed with Microsoft? They'd probably turn it over to them instead.
That may be true for certain genres of games, but not the games I like. When I play games, I play strategy games (both turn-based and real-time), simulators and driving games. Few of these do very well, or even exist, on game consoles.
Burning deuterium? That would really be a waste of money. Why not use ordinary hydrogen is you want to burn it chemically?
But I'm not sure of the effects of having slightly radioactive water vapor. Maybe it's not a good thing.Radioactive? Deuterium is not radioactive.
Except that batteries have to be recharged with the electrolyte in place, while a hydrogen tank can be refilled just like any normal fuel tank. I read about some battery prototype a few years ago that would allow you to replace the electrolyte, but the drawback was that it would deteriorate quickly.
I seem to recall that electrolysis of saltwater would create chlorine gas from the chlorine ions in the water. Are you really sure about this "fact"?
Not really, since we have no use for deuterium in the context of fuel cells, only in the context of future fusion power plants. And I find a lot of scientists are involved in research related to fuel cells, and they can't possibly mean deuterium when they say hydrogen.
Sounds like FUSE, except that FUSE does not need Gnome (or even X to run). I really love sshfs, which uses FUSE. And there are a hundred other FUSE-enabled filesystems out there that I didn't even try yet.
What is this? A vague hint that open source is communism?
Okay. Sometimes, Microsoft proponents argue that you don't need to know the details of the format, since they can be accessed though the API, which unfortunately would not work on other platforms.
You mean that the APIs for working with (MS) office files are well documented, not the formats themselves.