and what did *you* use to DL your first pr0n? (crotchety old man mode) When I was your age, I had text-mode terminal program on a 286. Good enough for nabbing a few nekkid ladies off the local "adult" BBS. Xmodem over a 2400 baud modem, uphill, both ways, in the snow, barefoot! And I liked it!! (/crotchety old man mode)
How about throwing in: 1: A twinkie (they'll last forever) 2: A can of JOLT cola 3: Printouts (on acid-free paper) of the day's User Friendly and/or Penny Arcade strips 4: A printout of the/. main page 5: MP3s of some current music 6: The Bill Of Rights, the DMCA and the DeCSS lawsuits (the contradictions will have legal scholars puzzled for years!) 7: Any.com stock certificate 8: A gun (they'll probably be illegal by the time the capsule is opened) 9: A hard drive (or ZIP drive if you're short on $$) containing Linux, GCC and the source code to PGP, GPG, and any other good "stong" crypto. 10: Documentation of the EIDE or SCSI interface for the drive.
Anyone near Seattle who wants cheap computer parts should visit the Boeing surplus store. They usually have rolling bins with about 2 cubic meters of assorted keyboards, for $4-5 each. If you know what you're looking for, the "assorted circuit boards" bin can be a great resource too, I got enough 10-base-T NICs to set up a home network for about $5 each, and a Dell pentium-75 (now a firewall) for less than $50. You too can be the envy of your friends with a modem and telephone labeled "not for use with Classified data"
Coke: 1: n coal from which most gases have been removed by heating; used as an industrial fuel 2: n (slang) cocaine
If there is a dictionary definition for the word "coke" then then Coca-Cola(tm) IMHO should never have been granted a trademark on it in the first place. Also, I thought trademark infringment had to be within the same industry i.e. there can be an acme toilet-paper company and an acme brick company co-existing without infringing on each other's trademarks. (I don't have a TM law book to back that up, though)
Forgive me for asking a question that's probably obvious to everyone else, but why does a game console need an OS at all?
All the OS does for a game is provide a uniform interface to non-uniform hardware, like DirectX does. All the rest of an OS's functions, scheduling, resource managment, etc are irrelevant when only one process (the game) is running. Also, a console is uniform! One X-box will have the same sound and video hardware as another, why bother abstracting the hardware? All it can possible do is add more complexity and slow down the game. In this case it would seem to me that one library could provide the same functionality as an entire OS, with a fraction of the system overhead.
Perhaps you could direct us towards some benchmarks?
There is an article on Tom's Hardware Guide that does a bechmark of the GeForce256 against most other common 3D cards using a program that can take advantage of hardware transform & lighting. The graphs on page 5 pretty well sum it up. The GeForce is about 25%-30% faster than the other cards.
feel confident that if the MPAA took me to court concerning my CDs which have been MP3ed It would probably be the RIAA, not the MPAA, they want your DVDs. However, you are probably right, as a previous poster quoted, non-commercial recordings are specifically exempted from this act.
I'm happy to see that doubleclick is reversing their policy of openly disregarding every online privacy guideline in existance, but how would we know if they really stop cross-referencing or not? Doubleclick rates somewhere between microsoft's marketing department and the (U.S.) federal government on my list of people not to trust. As long as doubleclick owns abacus' database, I'll have a very hard time believing that they are keeping the databases seperate. For now, I think doubleclick will stay aliased to 127.0.0.1 on my box.
That's strange: I've used the nightly binaries and just built the current CVS, and they both run circles around communicator 4.6. (I haven't bothered to upgrade to 4.7's bugs yet) As an example, load Mozilla M13 or M14 and look at a graphics-intensive site like the Wallpapers section at customize.org. or any of the themes.org sites. It takes about 1.5 minutes to render a 20-image page from customize.org on Netscape, and less than half that on Mozilla. Slashdot and other text-heavy sites seem close to equal on both browsers.
For the people keeping score at home, that's Netscape Communicator 4.61 and Mozilla current CVS configured with --disable-mailnews --disable-debug --enable-x11-shm, on a P200 running Linux 2.2.13
Point 2: Yes, it does. You can't take GPL source and put it into a commercial binary. See the John Camack vs QuakeLives article from yesterday. You can put QT into a comercial app, close the source, and charge money for it, provided you pay TrollTech for the license.
Point 3: Yes, he is. I just think that insisting that GNU projects be called GNU/whatever is a little ridiculous.
I call FUD when I see it, and insinuating that TrollTech, or Debian, or RMS can yank the GPL rug out from under KDE is creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about the future availability of KDE. Karma whoring and zealotry aside, if the FUD shoe fits, wear it.
And when Debian defines their spec for licenses requiring that it be free for both personal and commercial use.. that sorta screws KDE over (provisions in the QPL
Why is requiring a commercial QT license worse than the provisions in the GPL which make it illegal to use GPL software in commercial products under ANY circumstance? You would be having a fit if somebody was putting GNOME code into a commecial product. QT realizes that despite the zealots, commercial software isn't going to go away any time soon, so they might as well make money from businesses using their code.
You have to expect a little zealotry from Debian, the call it "GNU/Linux", which seems like needless RMS ass-kissing to the non-zealot linux user community. (GNU/Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 GNU/CD 4, the entire GNU/source-tree of GNU/Emacs)
Seriously, the fact that KDE is less buggy, compiles on the first try every time, and adheres to most of the existing X standards that GTK ignores more than makes up for the crufty QT license. Speaking of which, I have read the QPL, and it seems fine to me. The continued availability of QT is assured, despite the FUD thrown out by the GNOME crowd. If TrollTech folds or is bought out, QT reverts to the BSD license.
What do you use as a cd-drive to read these things? Is it something specific to laptops, or what?
Open your cupholder...err.. CD drive. See how there are two rings in it, the outer super-jumbo-slurpee sized ring is for normal CDs. The inner, coke-can sized ring is where these things go.
Granite probably isn't the best choice either. Over time the feldspar in the granite breaks down, and the rock falls apart. Pollution and water accelerate this process. Basalt would probably be a better choice, or pure quartz, or some corrosion-resistant metal like gold or platinum.
As for me, I'm backing up my data by encoding ASCII text as a pattern of platinum-plated titanium pins hammered into a slab of good dense shale. After that, I'll drop the slabs into the Mississippi delta, and in a few million years, my wit and wisdom will become part of the rock strata. The MTBF should be about 100 million years, barring a major tectonic event. </offtopic>
They call you bitch, ho, slut and basically LOSE IT when they get beaten by a "woman".
You think the basic female model provokes a good reaction? I used to play Quake 2 as Sailor Moon. Losing to her really pisses off the little 14-year-olds. There are very few things funnier than Sailor Moon with a railgun.
No, it is most certainly NOT the library's perogative to do so. The library is an agency of the government, and as such, is subject not to it's own policies that it deems appropriate, but such ideas as freedom of speech and non-censorship.
What color is the sky on your planet? Go to your local city library (not a college/university library, a municipal one) and ask them where they keep the pornography. Look for "hustler" in the periodicals section. See if they have any pornos in on the free films shelf. I bet they don't. The closest to things paper pornography you'll find in most public libraries are romance novels.
Just because the first amendment says the government can't restrict freedom of speech doesn't mean it has to spend tax dollars to buy porn for the library. Most libraries are pressed for cash as it is, without having to maintain porn collections in the name of free speech.
slightly more on topic: Just as the government has no business spending my taxes on purient magazines, it also has no right to spend it on blocking software. The blockers are technically dificult to maintain (see the bit about trying to unblock "the onion") they cost money, and they restrict legitimate research.
totally off-topic What the/hell/ is up with this color scheme? It's icky, nasty, and above all, UGLY! I mean, I love dirt-brown and snot-yellow as much as the next guy, but it doesn't go with the rest of the site. This page is the best advertisment for lynx I've ever seen!
IANAEE (I am not an electrical engineer) so take this with a grain of salt. If it's an LCD panel, it could be nearly impossible to decode, because the decoder and the display driver could be in the same chip package. There would be no exposed contacts between the encrypted input and the half million or so wires going into the LCD matrix.
If it's a standard CRT there must be a point where the decoder puts out analog R/G/B signals that feed the picture tube. You could hook something up to that and convert the signal to NTSC or PAL to feed a VCR, or digitize it into unencrypted MPEG. There would be a loss of quality in the digital -> analog -> digital conversions, though.
Pay no attention to the parent of this post, "tilleyrw" is just another shill for the RIAA, hammering on the tired old MP3==stealing argument.
What you did has a techical name, jerk. It's called "theft".
#ifdef flame Assholes like you give all the legitemate MP3 listeners a bad name. If you want to steal, that's your problem, but don't f---ing brag about it on a public message board! #endif
Just because you can steal something doesn't make it right to do so. Just because the RIAA is a bunch of greedy lawyers doesn't justify stealing from them, or from the artists they screw over err... represent.
Yahoo is the reason that "Internet" is synonymous with "World-Wide Web" these days. And we're supposed to be thankful for this??
they made it possible for normal people to find the web sites they wanted to go to Because they invented the search engine? Oh...wait, they didn't. Veronica and WebCrawler were cataloging categorizing, and searching the web before Yahoo was around.
And Amazon and eBay were also pioneers in their respective fields Stupid patent lawsuits and black market kidney sales, respectively?
Don't like the fact that the Web is a corpoplayground"? That's just a curmudgeony "these are my toys, and I'm not sharing" argument No, it's a sad commentary on the direction the internet is taking. Radio used to be an exciting new technology, promising instant communication, like the net.hype promises today. Then it was dominated by large corporations, and today it is nothing but top-40 crap and insipid talk shows. Anything creative or thought-provoking has been squeezed out in favor of safe, easy to digest, bland, boring, profitable pablum.
the only solution that mankind has ever come up with that works is to make rules and enforce them I don't see what you're driving at here, there are already laws against this.
There are no social or legal rules Tell that to Kevin Mitnick, or the DeCSS defendants.
Re:Yes, I'm just plain asking for it this time. :-
on
Excerpt From "Geeks"
·
· Score: 2
What the Hell is it about JK that brings out the worst in you guys? I can't speak for the others, but JonKatz pisses me off for several reasons.
1. He pretends to be something he's not. Katz sees himself as a "geek" and a "nerd" and thinks he's an expert on them. This from a man who can't figure out a better way to turn his writing into HTML than to use the HTML output filter of MS Word on his Macintosh. Look at his older stuff, you'll see question marks in the place of double quotes all over the place as well as other annoying HTML errors.
2. He does #1 for the purpose of making money. Wannabees are bad, but sellouts are worse.
3. He never lets lack of factual information stand in the way of a good story. Read his pieces on installing Linux. He's clueless.
4. He's in the midst of a downhill slide in quality. The hellmouth series was good, if only for the discussions they generated. Recently, he's just plain sucked. As mentoned before, dictionary quotes in an essay are a middle-school trick to waste paper, not a good professional writing style.
I know I was avoiding what was "popular" as much as the "popular" were avoiding me
Exactly! Most/.ers (the ones who post intellegably, anyway) are/were the same way. JonKatz: we don't want to be one of "them", and if you do, stop representing yourself as a geek/nerd/techno-junkie/whatever, cause you're not. You're the LinuxOne of writing; hoping to make a fast buck off the buzzwords before people figure out you're clueless.
This article is really about the geek stereotype Agreed. It's the stereotype as seen by other "normal" people. It's not my stereotype, leave me out of this.
At least I know of one more book I don't need to waste my money on. JonKatz: you're going downhill. The hellmouth stuff was good, thought provoking material, but this is just fluff.
The only other approach would seem to be some kind of detection after the fact. For instance, if every copy included a watermark of some kind in the encryption then it would be possible to track down the person who made the copy.
That's technologically infeasable, at least for music. The record producers would have to make 3 million different CDs instead of 3 million copies of the same CD. That would drive the price of CD music up out of reach of a lot of consumers. Furthermore, if the watermarking is somehow coded into the MP3 encoder, then all MP3s that I make are watermarked with the same code, whether they're legal copies, illegal copies, or my own original works. And, if any mp3 encoder is released as Open Source, all the warez puppies will just take out the watermarking code, and have untracable copies. Either CD prices go up, or MP3 encoders go closed-source. Either way, the geeks get screwed and piracy continues.
This scheme might be criticised on civil liberty grounds There's an understatement. What music I own or listen to is my business and nobody else's. That includes the people who think they still "own" my music after I bought it.
The real problem I see with the DMCA is that (evil software co.) can put a clause in their click-through license that says you can't disclose problems with their software, and it's legally binding. How many security holes do you think (evil software co.) is going to fix if nobody can publish bug reports online? The pointy haired bosses will see bugs posted for (Open Source OS) but none for (evil, closed OS) and assume that (evil, closed OS) is a better system, because it has no bugs.
The second law of thermodynamics applies ONLY to a closed system. The earth is not a closed system. Several million tons of mass are added in the form of meteroites each year, as are vast amounts of energy from the sun. The same argument could be applied to growth: animals can't grow because that would decrease the entropy of the animal. It does, but at the expense of increasing the entropy of the surrounding environment. Furthermore, the earth as a a closed system can contain nothing external to itself, thus to invoke the second law, you have to accept that the Creator must have left!! (a rather unpleasent concept for most creationists)
Other than that, I agree with you, the science behind this sounds pretty suspect. But then again, so does the "science" behind creationism, and it's still a very popular belief...
Slashdot Mirror
touch, unzip, play, finger, yes, mount, fsck, fsck, fsck, fsck, gasp, done, unmount, sleep
and what did *you* use to DL your first pr0n?
(crotchety old man mode)
When I was your age, I had text-mode terminal program on a 286. Good enough for nabbing a few nekkid ladies off the local "adult" BBS. Xmodem over a 2400 baud modem, uphill, both ways, in the snow, barefoot! And I liked it!!
(/crotchety old man mode)
How about throwing in: /. main page .com stock certificate
1: A twinkie (they'll last forever)
2: A can of JOLT cola
3: Printouts (on acid-free paper) of the day's User Friendly and/or Penny Arcade strips
4: A printout of the
5: MP3s of some current music
6: The Bill Of Rights, the DMCA and the DeCSS lawsuits (the contradictions will have legal scholars puzzled for years!)
7: Any
8: A gun (they'll probably be illegal by the time the capsule is opened)
9: A hard drive (or ZIP drive if you're short on $$) containing Linux, GCC and the source code to PGP, GPG, and any other good "stong" crypto.
10: Documentation of the EIDE or SCSI interface for the drive.
Anyone near Seattle who wants cheap computer parts should visit the Boeing surplus store. They usually have rolling bins with about 2 cubic meters of assorted keyboards, for $4-5 each. If you know what you're looking for, the "assorted circuit boards" bin can be a great resource too, I got enough 10-base-T NICs to set up a home network for about $5 each, and a Dell pentium-75 (now a firewall) for less than $50. You too can be the envy of your friends with a modem and telephone labeled "not for use with Classified data"
Coke: 1: n coal from which most gases have been removed by heating; used as an industrial fuel
2: n (slang) cocaine
If there is a dictionary definition for the word "coke" then then Coca-Cola(tm) IMHO should never have been granted a trademark on it in the first place.
Also, I thought trademark infringment had to be within the same industry i.e. there can be an acme toilet-paper company and an acme brick company co-existing without infringing on each other's trademarks. (I don't have a TM law book to back that up, though)
Forgive me for asking a question that's probably obvious to everyone else, but why does a game console need an OS at all?
All the OS does for a game is provide a uniform interface to non-uniform hardware, like DirectX does. All the rest of an OS's functions, scheduling, resource managment, etc are irrelevant when only one process (the game) is running. Also, a console is uniform! One X-box will have the same sound and video hardware as another, why bother abstracting the hardware? All it can possible do is add more complexity and slow down the game. In this case it would seem to me that one library could provide the same functionality as an entire OS, with a fraction of the system overhead.
Perhaps you could direct us towards some benchmarks?
There is an article on Tom's Hardware Guide that does a bechmark of the GeForce256 against most other common 3D cards using a program that can take advantage of hardware transform & lighting. The graphs on page 5 pretty well sum it up. The GeForce is about 25%-30% faster than the other cards.
I didn't sign any contract.
You don't have to. All it takes is the little © on the disc to put copying, redistribution, and "fair use" under the jurisdiction of (US) federal law. You bought the disc, but not the right to copy it. It's taken for granted thet you can't go buy a book, Xerox it's contents and hand it out on the street corner, why should music be different?
feel confident that if the MPAA took me to court concerning my CDs which have been MP3ed
It would probably be the RIAA, not the MPAA, they want your DVDs. However, you are probably right, as a previous poster quoted, non-commercial recordings are specifically exempted from this act.
IANAL, but I bet the FTC would have some really nasty things to say about a group that tries to influence stock prices.
I'm happy to see that doubleclick is reversing their policy of openly disregarding every online privacy guideline in existance, but how would we know if they really stop cross-referencing or not? Doubleclick rates somewhere between microsoft's marketing department and the (U.S.) federal government on my list of people not to trust.
As long as doubleclick owns abacus' database, I'll have a very hard time believing that they are keeping the databases seperate. For now, I think doubleclick will stay aliased to 127.0.0.1 on my box.
That's strange: I've used the nightly binaries and just built the current CVS, and they both run circles around communicator 4.6. (I haven't bothered to upgrade to 4.7's bugs yet) As an example, load Mozilla M13 or M14 and look at a graphics-intensive site like the Wallpapers section at customize.org. or any of the themes.org sites. It takes about 1.5 minutes to render a 20-image page from customize.org on Netscape, and less than half that on Mozilla. Slashdot and other text-heavy sites seem close to equal on both browsers.
For the people keeping score at home, that's Netscape Communicator 4.61 and Mozilla current CVS configured with --disable-mailnews --disable-debug --enable-x11-shm, on a P200 running Linux 2.2.13
Point 1: sorry, I thought it was off
Point 2: Yes, it does. You can't take GPL source and put it into a commercial binary. See the John Camack vs QuakeLives article from yesterday. You can put QT into a comercial app, close the source, and charge money for it, provided you pay TrollTech for the license.
Point 3: Yes, he is. I just think that insisting that GNU projects be called GNU/whatever is a little ridiculous.
I call FUD when I see it, and insinuating that TrollTech, or Debian, or RMS can yank the GPL rug out from under KDE is creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about the future availability of KDE. Karma whoring and zealotry aside, if the FUD shoe fits, wear it.
And when Debian defines their spec for licenses requiring that it be free for both personal and commercial use.. that sorta screws KDE over (provisions in the QPL
Why is requiring a commercial QT license worse than the provisions in the GPL which make it illegal to use GPL software in commercial products under ANY circumstance? You would be having a fit if somebody was putting GNOME code into a commecial product. QT realizes that despite the zealots, commercial software isn't going to go away any time soon, so they might as well make money from businesses using their code.
You have to expect a little zealotry from Debian, the call it "GNU/Linux", which seems like needless RMS ass-kissing to the non-zealot linux user community. (GNU/Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 GNU/CD 4, the entire GNU/source-tree of GNU/Emacs)
Seriously, the fact that KDE is less buggy, compiles on the first try every time, and adheres to most of the existing X standards that GTK ignores more than makes up for the crufty QT license. Speaking of which, I have read the QPL, and it seems fine to me. The continued availability of QT is assured, despite the FUD thrown out by the GNOME crowd. If TrollTech folds or is bought out, QT reverts to the BSD license.
What do you use as a cd-drive to read these things? Is it something specific to laptops, or what?
Open your cupholder...err.. CD drive. See how there are two rings in it, the outer super-jumbo-slurpee sized ring is for normal CDs. The inner, coke-can sized ring is where these things go.
Granite probably isn't the best choice either. Over time the feldspar in the granite breaks down, and the rock falls apart. Pollution and water accelerate this process. Basalt would probably be a better choice, or pure quartz, or some corrosion-resistant metal like gold or platinum.
As for me, I'm backing up my data by encoding ASCII text as a pattern of platinum-plated titanium pins hammered into a slab of good dense shale. After that, I'll drop the slabs into the Mississippi delta, and in a few million years, my wit and wisdom will become part of the rock strata. The MTBF should be about 100 million years, barring a major tectonic event.
</offtopic>
They call you bitch, ho, slut and basically LOSE IT when they get beaten by a "woman".
You think the basic female model provokes a good reaction? I used to play Quake 2 as Sailor Moon. Losing to her really pisses off the little 14-year-olds. There are very few things funnier than Sailor Moon with a railgun.
No, it is most certainly NOT the library's perogative to do so. The library is an agency of the government, and as such, is subject not to it's own policies that it deems appropriate, but such ideas as freedom of speech and non-censorship.
/hell/ is up with this color scheme? It's icky, nasty, and above all, UGLY! I mean, I love dirt-brown and snot-yellow as much as the next guy, but it doesn't go with the rest of the site. This page is the best advertisment for lynx I've ever seen!
What color is the sky on your planet?
Go to your local city library (not a college/university library, a municipal one) and ask them where they keep the pornography. Look for "hustler" in the periodicals section. See if they have any pornos in on the free films shelf. I bet they don't. The closest to things paper pornography you'll find in most public libraries are romance novels.
Just because the first amendment says the government can't restrict freedom of speech doesn't mean it has to spend tax dollars to buy porn for the library. Most libraries are pressed for cash as it is, without having to maintain porn collections in the name of free speech.
slightly more on topic: Just as the government has no business spending my taxes on purient magazines, it also has no right to spend it on blocking software. The blockers are technically dificult to maintain (see the bit about trying to unblock "the onion") they cost money, and they restrict legitimate research.
totally off-topic What the
this will probably be hard to do in practice,
IANAEE (I am not an electrical engineer) so take this with a grain of salt.
If it's an LCD panel, it could be nearly impossible to decode, because the decoder and the display driver could be in the same chip package. There would be no exposed contacts between the encrypted input and the half million or so wires going into the LCD matrix.
If it's a standard CRT there must be a point where the decoder puts out analog R/G/B signals that feed the picture tube. You could hook something up to that and convert the signal to NTSC or PAL to feed a VCR, or digitize it into unencrypted MPEG. There would be a loss of quality in the digital -> analog -> digital conversions, though.
Pay no attention to the parent of this post, "tilleyrw" is just another shill for the RIAA, hammering on the tired old MP3==stealing argument.
What you did has a techical name, jerk. It's called "theft".
#ifdef flame
Assholes like you give all the legitemate MP3 listeners a bad name. If you want to steal, that's your problem, but don't f---ing brag about it on a public message board!
#endif
Just because you can steal something doesn't make it right to do so. Just because the RIAA is a bunch of greedy lawyers doesn't justify stealing from them, or from the artists they screw over err... represent.
Yahoo is the reason that "Internet" is synonymous with "World-Wide Web" these days.
And we're supposed to be thankful for this??
they made it possible for normal people to find the web sites they wanted to go to
Because they invented the search engine? Oh...wait, they didn't. Veronica and WebCrawler were cataloging categorizing, and searching the web before Yahoo was around.
And Amazon and eBay were also pioneers in their respective fields
Stupid patent lawsuits and black market kidney sales, respectively?
Don't like the fact that the Web is a corpoplayground"? That's just a curmudgeony "these are my toys, and I'm not sharing" argument
No, it's a sad commentary on the direction the internet is taking. Radio used to be an exciting new technology, promising instant communication, like the net.hype promises today. Then it was dominated by large corporations, and today it is nothing but top-40 crap and insipid talk shows. Anything creative or thought-provoking has been squeezed out in favor of safe, easy to digest, bland, boring, profitable pablum.
the only solution that mankind has ever come up with that works is to make rules and enforce them
I don't see what you're driving at here, there are already laws against this.
There are no social or legal rules
Tell that to Kevin Mitnick, or the DeCSS defendants.
What the Hell is it about JK that brings out the worst in you guys?
I can't speak for the others, but JonKatz pisses me off for several reasons.
1. He pretends to be something he's not. Katz sees himself as a "geek" and a "nerd" and thinks he's an expert on them. This from a man who can't figure out a better way to turn his writing into HTML than to use the HTML output filter of MS Word on his Macintosh. Look at his older stuff, you'll see question marks in the place of double quotes all over the place as well as other annoying HTML errors.
2. He does #1 for the purpose of making money. Wannabees are bad, but sellouts are worse.
3. He never lets lack of factual information stand in the way of a good story. Read his pieces on installing Linux. He's clueless.
4. He's in the midst of a downhill slide in quality. The hellmouth series was good, if only for the discussions they generated. Recently, he's just plain sucked. As mentoned before, dictionary quotes in an essay are a middle-school trick to waste paper, not a good professional writing style.
I know I was avoiding what was "popular" as much as the "popular" were avoiding me
/.ers (the ones who post intellegably, anyway) are/were the same way. JonKatz: we don't want to be one of "them", and if you do, stop representing yourself as a geek/nerd/techno-junkie/whatever, cause you're not. You're the LinuxOne of writing; hoping to make a fast buck off the buzzwords before people figure out you're clueless.
Exactly! Most
This article is really about the geek stereotype
Agreed. It's the stereotype as seen by other "normal" people. It's not my stereotype, leave me out of this.
At least I know of one more book I don't need to waste my money on. JonKatz: you're going downhill. The hellmouth stuff was good, thought provoking material, but this is just fluff.
Start writing to your congressmen!
Yeah, that'll help. Maybe if we all chip in we can bribe them half as much as the RIAA does...
The only other approach would seem to be some kind of detection after the fact. For instance, if every copy included a watermark of some kind in the encryption then it would be possible to track down the person who made the copy.
That's technologically infeasable, at least for music. The record producers would have to make 3 million different CDs instead of 3 million copies of the same CD. That would drive the price of CD music up out of reach of a lot of consumers. Furthermore, if the watermarking is somehow coded into the MP3 encoder, then all MP3s that I make are watermarked with the same code, whether they're legal copies, illegal copies, or my own original works. And, if any mp3 encoder is released as Open Source, all the warez puppies will just take out the watermarking code, and have untracable copies. Either CD prices go up, or MP3 encoders go closed-source. Either way, the geeks get screwed and piracy continues.
This scheme might be criticised on civil liberty grounds
There's an understatement. What music I own or listen to is my business and nobody else's. That includes the people who think they still "own" my music after I bought it.
The real problem I see with the DMCA is that (evil software co.) can put a clause in their click-through license that says you can't disclose problems with their software, and it's legally binding. How many security holes do you think (evil software co.) is going to fix if nobody can publish bug reports online? The pointy haired bosses will see bugs posted for (Open Source OS) but none for (evil, closed OS) and assume that (evil, closed OS) is a better system, because it has no bugs.
The second law of thermodynamics applies ONLY to a closed system. The earth is not a closed system. Several million tons of mass are added in the form of meteroites each year, as are vast amounts of energy from the sun. The same argument could be applied to growth: animals can't grow because that would decrease the entropy of the animal. It does, but at the expense of increasing the entropy of the surrounding environment. Furthermore, the earth as a a closed system can contain nothing external to itself, thus to invoke the second law, you have to accept that the Creator must have left!! (a rather unpleasent concept for most creationists)
Other than that, I agree with you, the science behind this sounds pretty suspect. But then again, so does the "science" behind creationism, and it's still a very popular belief...