What the hell does the resolution of the example image have to do with anything? If someone says, "hey, this 5 series is prettier than a Honda Element" and hands you a 640x480 image of it, coming back with a 10-megapixel image of an Element proves nothing.
It's the implementation that is expressed that is important, not the quality of the visual symbol. If it's too vague a concept for you, walk up to a Mac and use one in person, or hell, Google for a better picture if you've never seen this mysterious "OS X."
As for specific examples, just open any window and post a screenshot. The fonts used in Linux by default are horrible. It's like a bastardized cross between a monospace font and a proportional one, harboring the problems of both and the advantages of neither. The visual presentation as a whole is lacking. UI elements are in desperate need of antialiasing and some toning down of the garish colors. There's bright coloration, and there's "OMG look 16 colors!"--use some more nuance, some shadow, some gradient. A solid, pure hex green check mark on an okay button (apart from being superfluous) looks like a child created it.
Neither KDE nor Gnome offer the level of visual polish that OS X or even Vista provide. Yes, there's Beryl/Compiz now, but no, it's not the same. Desktop effects wizardry that looks like a five-year old nVidia demo is not a viable competitor in the face of rich blacks, glossy reflections, and fluid slides and fades. Some of the Beryl effects are quite tasteful and impressive, just like some KDE UI elements are competently executed. It's the other 75% that need to be cut from the team or polished dozens of times over.
Modded funny, but true story. Same thing happened to me. All of the computers in the house are Macs, and none of them would run the Comcast installer, last updated in 2004. It installed IE 5.5, but it won't do anything after that. All the files are there on the CD, in the application bundle, but everything's javascripted to death so you can't even run the HTML pages manually.
The only answer is to call Comcast (two or three times, since the first person you talk to will point you to a site to download the same broken installer again and again, and the second person will set you up "manually" but not actually ask you for any information or enter anything into their computer, so the third person will actually get your rumors on the internets up and running again).
Tip: tell them you're running an XBox and not a Mac and they'll skip straight to the part where they register your account over the phone (instead of having to do the three-call chase I did the first time this happened to me).
I'd contest this. The greater separation is more intuitive to people that have used Fahrenheit all their lives. To someone that has used Celsius all their life, it's baffling. I disagree. Having had the mixed blessing of childhood experiences in multiple countries (using both systems), I can say quite strongly that "21 is too cold; 22 is too warm" was a common complaint in the summers. In the US, you can set that temperature to 71 and get exactly what you want. If you have a digital Celsius thermostat (as I did in Vancouver), you can't regulate your temperature except in increments that are ~2.5 times the size of Fahrenheit units.
I'd say that people can certainly feel a 3-degree (F) difference in room temperature. 1 degree (F) is pushing it, but I certainly can tell the difference between 70 and 72 and so can just about everyone else I've ever lived with. The Celsius scale in integers just isn't sensitive enough in the temperate band, unless, of course, Americans are just more picky about temperature than everyone else.
I'm not contesting the clear advantages of the Celsius scale for science and for intuitive mathematical use. I'm simply saying that a Fahrenheit degree is a more intuitive unit for the narrow temperate band where people deal most with temperature (climate and cooking). 0-100F is irrelevant as "climatic (sic) experience"--it simply covers a range of temperatures likely to be experienced, avoiding negatives and scale-crowding. It has nothing to do with any mythical location that varies between those limits. It is no more or less arbitrary than a scale using the boiling and freezing points of water as those bounds. The Fahrenheit scale is more in line with human experience; the Celsius scale is more in line with logical scientific delineation.
'0 to 100F' is '-18 to 38 C.' If you're talking about the weather, which one is more arbitrary? Celsius. If you're cooking (particularly candymaking) and need to heat something to exactly 234F (soft ball stage), you can do that much more easily than scrambling to find 112.2C on the dial. Unless you have high-accuracy, science-grade equipment in your kitchen, cooking in Celsius is a trickier business because of those decimals. When talking about air temperature, why does it make sense to use negative numbers just because you've crossed the freezing point of water? It just makes the math slower for no reason to go from -17 to +17.
All you've demonstrated is that you're used to Celsius and parent (now GP?) is used to Fahrenheit. I grew up with both and I'm telling you that Celsius is not intuitive for weather and Fahrenheit is not intuitive for science. It's also not intuitive to use different scales for different reasons, so there's no simple answer, except maybe to use Kelvin for everything.
Fine by me. I'm not allergic, but more to the point, that's perfectly within your rights. My home value, the aesthetics of my neighborhood, and the safety of my family are not threatened by that action.
If some kids or pets roll in the shrubs and get a rash, that just comes with the territory of being outside. They could crawl through poison oak in the foothills, and they shouldn't be in your landscaping without your permission anyway, generally speaking.
That's just not true. The only thing that has changed is that people aren't interested in buying the home they can afford anymore. They're interested in buying the home they see in magazines, and so both magazines and mortgages have upped the ante.
People can afford to buy homes much more easily than they could in the 60s. They're just overextending themselves, which has nothing to do with actual economic conditions and everything to do with cultural conditions and personal preference. The typical 1960s home was your post-war ranch home. 1500 square feet or so on a 1/6th acre lot at best. The number of people who can afford such a home today is DRAMATICALLY larger than the same proportion in the 60s.
You can't compare your numbers without comparing like goods. People are using (and abusing) debt spending more, but that is a personal choice, not a market requirement. People are over-reaching, leasing cars they can't afford and buying houses that are too big. The cost-effective and budget-neutral choices are still there, and they're available to more of the population than ever. People just don't want them. That doesn't mean by any stretch that houses are less affordable.
"Once in a while the system will go into an idle mode, requiring from five minutes to half an hour to unwind. It's weird, and I almost always have to reboot. When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing? Once in a while, after you've clicked all over the screen trying to get the system to do something other than idle, all your clicks suddenly ignite and the screen goes crazy with activity. This is not right."
In other words, "why won't the damn computer do anything when I try to wake it up? Why is the idle process still running so high when I've asked the computer to do something?" The very use of an idle process, if you're not a programmer, is absurd. Why not just say something like "total processor usage" and "free processor resources" at the bottom? The only function the idle process serves is to show you how little your CPU is being used. That could easily be shown without "Idle Process" shoving the number down your throat--they could take a page out of the Mac's book, even. "% idle" is shown right in the chart box, not as an entry in the process list.
0C and 32F are the same everywhere, too. A freezing point is a freezing point.
I think what parent was trying to say is that the Fahrenheit scale offers a better range of values for people to grasp. You are less likely to need negative numbers (which leads to confusion if the negative sign is missed), and the greater separation is more intuitive for people (1 degree C is nearly 3 degrees F throughout much of the "temperate" band).
Why, for example, should temperatures vary between 5 and 35 instead of 40 and 95? Both are arbitrary, but in casual use, avoiding things like negatives and decimals is arguably better for communication, and expanding the scale allows for easier expression and the average person is just faster at dealing with integers than with decimals (why, I don't know, since they're not complicated).
No, your house does not take up *any* part of your yard. It takes up a portion of your LOT, but that's not the same thing. The rules also only refer to your front yard (or street-facing portions), and the magic number is 50% of that front setback area, not 25%.
The reason is resale value and curb appeal--no concrete seas and in particular, no lawn parking. You want to fill your yard with vehicles? Move out of city limits. With 3 million people living in 11 square miles, you really have to balance the needs of everyone. Not looking like a landfill/junkyard is one of those needs. Covenants and agreements like this are almost ubiquitous in private housing communities; they're also quite common in densely populated areas.
And thank goodness. Your green concrete yard and pile of 30-year-old cars affects MY home's value and the aesthetic integrity of my neighborhood. If you live within 100 feet of another family, be considerate.
That's fine and all, but it's more than a little absurd to put on a show about dogfights all the damn time, and escaping from the more powerful and more numerous base stars in the nick of time every week.
There's only so much of that a normal person can take. What I feel is lacking is a bit more of the "algae planet" kind of storytelling--where does the fleet get its water and food? How do people clean their clothes? Where do all the consumables come from that can't just be collected from planets without processing? Obviously this shouldn't be overdone either, but there are plenty of stories to tell other than 30 v. 20,000 fighter clashes and watching poor Galactica get its hull bashed in to protect a bunch of whiny civilians.
An open Authorization for the Use of Military Force is just as good. Congress doesn't declare wars anymore; they just hand over the reigns to the president to act in that capacity.
Regardless of the Constitution as written, the reality is that the second half of the 20th century has granted war powers to at least six presidents without a formal declaration of war. The only problem is that the current crop of legislators are either too spineless or licking too far up Bush's ass to rescind that grant of force.
Check your air filter, for starters, and then basically just fix your car. I drove an A4 with that exact engine (2.8 DOHC V6) and while I only got roughly 15mpg in the city (hilly Bay Area), my highway mileage was always at or above the advertised 27mpg. How old are your oxygen sensors? Fuel filter ever been cleaned? Did you check your timing and fuel mix?
Your car is six years old, and IIRC the advertised mileage new was 19/27. If you wanted a more efficient car, you should have purchased the four cylinder, gone with a manual gearbox, or skipped the Quattro. Make better choices in the future or don't bitch about a car that's within 3 mpg of its advertised economy after SIX YEARS.
Please. Contributing money != complete payoff. Just like that $15 you paid for a DVD doesn't pay for the ownership of the entire film (a realization of thought--not a thought itself), what you pay for magazines, newspapers, or television services doesn't come close to financing the entire operation.
You don't get to pick and choose which channels you support--if that's how it worked, there'd be no Sci Fi channel, because it sure as hell doesn't generate money on its own. Even Battlestar Galactica, its most popular program, is struggling to break even in first-run showings. Filling time with reruns gives people access to content and provides additional revenue to support projects in the red. An all on-demand distribution system would either explode at the seams with ads (you ain't seen nothin' yet if you think they're bothersome now) or would cost so much that no one would want to look at the price tags. It's not just production costs; it's broadcasting and licensing and redistributing profits to pay for valued and interesting, but ultimately unprofitable, ventures. I for one wouldn't want to see American Idol being the only program on TV.
Things cost money, and charging a subscription fee to the content doesn't necessarily cover it all. Whether or not 90% of that content is crap has no bearing whatsoever on what it cost to make it. If you don't want to bear the risk of the investment, don't make the investment.
you'd know about how making bitwise copies and images by consumers is prevented. Puzzling, then, how I have dozens of DVDs stored in this fashion using nothing more than Disk Utility.
False. "Fair use" and "interoperability" are not free-association terms. Your backup program is not licensed to access the content, and it doesn't provide for a gap in any fair use arrangement. You can make copies of the disc and keep them in a safe place without breaking the encryption.
"Interoperability" has also never been construed to mean "where you want it to work." It only goes as far as to apply to platforms where it has been established to work and for some reason fails to do so. The interoperability argument has NEVER been used successfully in a court of law (in jurisdictions to which I have case access) to apply to format-shifting where a competing market structure exists. HD-DVDs are meant to work in HD-DVD players (software or hardware) that support the format. If you want to copy that disc to your hard drive and run it off an ISO or DMG image, that would be perfectly acceptable.
Garbage in, garbage out. Isn't that the point? A pottery worker's stylus can't accidentally record recoverable sound available with modern technology. Could sophisticated laser imaging some time in the future be able to reconstruct some audio data? Probably. Mythbusters certainly isn't authoritative, but it's pretty clearly busted that a wooden stylus 2000 years ago did not produce audio recordings a la the X-Files.
Copying a disc to an image isn't a backup. Copying a disc to a disc is a backup. The image can reproduce exact copies of the disc. Or are you unfamiliar with what an "image" is? Whether you use that image to duplicate the disc or to store it on your hard drive is unimportant. Disc-to-disc copying can be done without breaking encryption.
Do you really think Joe Consumer gives a shit about whether a platform is licensed or unlicensed? He wants it to work. 1) The law doesn't give a shit what Joe Consumer gives a shit about 2) Joe Consumer won't have any trouble playing his discs in the player that the discs fit into. The lack of a Linux software player does not affect Joe Consumer.
And maybe law should be straightforward enough that one doesn't need legal training. Maybe engineering should be straightforward enough that one doesn't need engineering training. Law is a complex pursuit and a balance of nuance and many ideas, interests, and concerns. The philosophies are basic, but the realizations of said are many. If you create a straightforward law, you create black-and-white law, which rarely benefits any party.
Probably not unintentionally, which was the premise of the myth. They also tried taking it to a professional. The problem was with the "encoding" as it were, and not with the playback. The clay just didn't carry precise enough information.
If that were really true, why would you need software like BackupHDDVD to begin with? You don't. Copying a disc to an image requires no breaking of encryption. A simple ISO can be played directly by many software video players.
Mr. Fair Use disagrees with you. See, once I've bought that content...I'm no lawyer Mr. Copyright disagrees with you. You haven't bought any content. Copyright holder still owns the content and of course the copyright to it. You own the copy and become part of a licensee class on terms negotiated by statute. Mr. Fair Use also doesn't show up in this play, because encryption isn't a fair use issue. Every manufacturer of HD-DVD discs and players is licensed to work with the format (including its AACS components), and fair use guarantees your right to use the discs on all of those platforms. It does not guarantee your right to use the content on unlicensed platforms. There is no interpretation of copyright which construes your right to bypass security encryption, and it has been in use for over 15 years with many attempts and opportunities for case law to support it. Perhaps you should leave it to those with legal training.
That's a load of crap. Copying does NOT require breaking encryption, nor does Linux playback. There's no reason why a licensed software player can't be produced. That proprietary retail content is not compatible with open source is not a relevant legal question and it's not the producer's responsibility. Backup copies are just that--identical copies.
It's not your content, plain and simple. It's not your own account you're locked out of.
Let me introduce you to an amazing fact: "fair use" is not limitless and it's not relevant to encryption in the corpus of case law. You can still exercise fair use with encryption in place. Also note that one of the biggest limits to fair use is that use which has a commercial impact on the market for the product. Broken encryption and unbounded use most certainly impacts the market, and there is no working definition of "fair use" that excuses the breaking of legally sanctioned encryption. Encryption schemas used by DVDs, HD-DVDs, and the like do not lock users out of any content to which they are legally entitled.
Well, their use of the DMCA is appropriate in a multi-faceted approach. The DMCA provides for the legal protection of encrypted electronic content--and provides the criminal penalties for illegal violation of those protections. Sharing the key most certainly falls under the purview of the DMCA. A DMCA takedown notice can be used either against illegally-distributed content or for any violation of the statutes of the DMCA (that is, Title 17 of the USC).
It's not your content and it's not your copyright. Until the system changes to reflect otherwise, you're the one confusing the issue. You don't like DRM or the fact that you don't own the content on the discs. I'd be inclined to agree with you. However, that does not make it censorship that is new or distasteful. You're already prohibited from disclosing this kind of information by law--you weren't allowed to shout passwords and encryption keys from rooftops before. You certainly wouldn't want someone to do it to you, and you'd be fully supportive of any action to stop that "invasion of privacy."
Well, here's the kicker. Disclosing this information is an invasion of THEIR privacy on content that THEY own the copyright to. You're the owner of a shiny, licensed copy. That doesn't give you any right to pass on information that compromises their security decisions that are sanctioned both by statutory law and by case law.
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What the hell does the resolution of the example image have to do with anything? If someone says, "hey, this 5 series is prettier than a Honda Element" and hands you a 640x480 image of it, coming back with a 10-megapixel image of an Element proves nothing.
It's the implementation that is expressed that is important, not the quality of the visual symbol. If it's too vague a concept for you, walk up to a Mac and use one in person, or hell, Google for a better picture if you've never seen this mysterious "OS X."
As for specific examples, just open any window and post a screenshot. The fonts used in Linux by default are horrible. It's like a bastardized cross between a monospace font and a proportional one, harboring the problems of both and the advantages of neither. The visual presentation as a whole is lacking. UI elements are in desperate need of antialiasing and some toning down of the garish colors. There's bright coloration, and there's "OMG look 16 colors!"--use some more nuance, some shadow, some gradient. A solid, pure hex green check mark on an okay button (apart from being superfluous) looks like a child created it.
Neither KDE nor Gnome offer the level of visual polish that OS X or even Vista provide. Yes, there's Beryl/Compiz now, but no, it's not the same. Desktop effects wizardry that looks like a five-year old nVidia demo is not a viable competitor in the face of rich blacks, glossy reflections, and fluid slides and fades. Some of the Beryl effects are quite tasteful and impressive, just like some KDE UI elements are competently executed. It's the other 75% that need to be cut from the team or polished dozens of times over.
Modded funny, but true story. Same thing happened to me. All of the computers in the house are Macs, and none of them would run the Comcast installer, last updated in 2004. It installed IE 5.5, but it won't do anything after that. All the files are there on the CD, in the application bundle, but everything's javascripted to death so you can't even run the HTML pages manually.
The only answer is to call Comcast (two or three times, since the first person you talk to will point you to a site to download the same broken installer again and again, and the second person will set you up "manually" but not actually ask you for any information or enter anything into their computer, so the third person will actually get your rumors on the internets up and running again).
Tip: tell them you're running an XBox and not a Mac and they'll skip straight to the part where they register your account over the phone (instead of having to do the three-call chase I did the first time this happened to me).
I'd say that people can certainly feel a 3-degree (F) difference in room temperature. 1 degree (F) is pushing it, but I certainly can tell the difference between 70 and 72 and so can just about everyone else I've ever lived with. The Celsius scale in integers just isn't sensitive enough in the temperate band, unless, of course, Americans are just more picky about temperature than everyone else.
I'm not contesting the clear advantages of the Celsius scale for science and for intuitive mathematical use. I'm simply saying that a Fahrenheit degree is a more intuitive unit for the narrow temperate band where people deal most with temperature (climate and cooking). 0-100F is irrelevant as "climatic (sic) experience"--it simply covers a range of temperatures likely to be experienced, avoiding negatives and scale-crowding. It has nothing to do with any mythical location that varies between those limits. It is no more or less arbitrary than a scale using the boiling and freezing points of water as those bounds. The Fahrenheit scale is more in line with human experience; the Celsius scale is more in line with logical scientific delineation.
'0 to 100F' is '-18 to 38 C.' If you're talking about the weather, which one is more arbitrary? Celsius. If you're cooking (particularly candymaking) and need to heat something to exactly 234F (soft ball stage), you can do that much more easily than scrambling to find 112.2C on the dial. Unless you have high-accuracy, science-grade equipment in your kitchen, cooking in Celsius is a trickier business because of those decimals. When talking about air temperature, why does it make sense to use negative numbers just because you've crossed the freezing point of water? It just makes the math slower for no reason to go from -17 to +17.
All you've demonstrated is that you're used to Celsius and parent (now GP?) is used to Fahrenheit. I grew up with both and I'm telling you that Celsius is not intuitive for weather and Fahrenheit is not intuitive for science. It's also not intuitive to use different scales for different reasons, so there's no simple answer, except maybe to use Kelvin for everything.
Fine by me. I'm not allergic, but more to the point, that's perfectly within your rights. My home value, the aesthetics of my neighborhood, and the safety of my family are not threatened by that action.
If some kids or pets roll in the shrubs and get a rash, that just comes with the territory of being outside. They could crawl through poison oak in the foothills, and they shouldn't be in your landscaping without your permission anyway, generally speaking.
That's just not true. The only thing that has changed is that people aren't interested in buying the home they can afford anymore. They're interested in buying the home they see in magazines, and so both magazines and mortgages have upped the ante.
People can afford to buy homes much more easily than they could in the 60s. They're just overextending themselves, which has nothing to do with actual economic conditions and everything to do with cultural conditions and personal preference. The typical 1960s home was your post-war ranch home. 1500 square feet or so on a 1/6th acre lot at best. The number of people who can afford such a home today is DRAMATICALLY larger than the same proportion in the 60s.
You can't compare your numbers without comparing like goods. People are using (and abusing) debt spending more, but that is a personal choice, not a market requirement. People are over-reaching, leasing cars they can't afford and buying houses that are too big. The cost-effective and budget-neutral choices are still there, and they're available to more of the population than ever. People just don't want them. That doesn't mean by any stretch that houses are less affordable.
No, here are his exact words:
"Once in a while the system will go into an idle mode, requiring from five minutes to half an hour to unwind. It's weird, and I almost always have to reboot. When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing? Once in a while, after you've clicked all over the screen trying to get the system to do something other than idle, all your clicks suddenly ignite and the screen goes crazy with activity. This is not right."
In other words, "why won't the damn computer do anything when I try to wake it up? Why is the idle process still running so high when I've asked the computer to do something?" The very use of an idle process, if you're not a programmer, is absurd. Why not just say something like "total processor usage" and "free processor resources" at the bottom? The only function the idle process serves is to show you how little your CPU is being used. That could easily be shown without "Idle Process" shoving the number down your throat--they could take a page out of the Mac's book, even. "% idle" is shown right in the chart box, not as an entry in the process list.
0C and 32F are the same everywhere, too. A freezing point is a freezing point.
I think what parent was trying to say is that the Fahrenheit scale offers a better range of values for people to grasp. You are less likely to need negative numbers (which leads to confusion if the negative sign is missed), and the greater separation is more intuitive for people (1 degree C is nearly 3 degrees F throughout much of the "temperate" band).
Why, for example, should temperatures vary between 5 and 35 instead of 40 and 95? Both are arbitrary, but in casual use, avoiding things like negatives and decimals is arguably better for communication, and expanding the scale allows for easier expression and the average person is just faster at dealing with integers than with decimals (why, I don't know, since they're not complicated).
No, your house does not take up *any* part of your yard. It takes up a portion of your LOT, but that's not the same thing. The rules also only refer to your front yard (or street-facing portions), and the magic number is 50% of that front setback area, not 25%.
The reason is resale value and curb appeal--no concrete seas and in particular, no lawn parking. You want to fill your yard with vehicles? Move out of city limits. With 3 million people living in 11 square miles, you really have to balance the needs of everyone. Not looking like a landfill/junkyard is one of those needs. Covenants and agreements like this are almost ubiquitous in private housing communities; they're also quite common in densely populated areas.
And thank goodness. Your green concrete yard and pile of 30-year-old cars affects MY home's value and the aesthetic integrity of my neighborhood. If you live within 100 feet of another family, be considerate.
Perhaps I should have specified--television programs with fictional characters.
Game shows, reality TV, Planet Earth need not apply.
More to the point, I suppose, would be the question, "how is BSG a soap opera?"
If Firefly and BSG are soap operas, I'd like to know what your idea of a TV show that ISN'T a soap opera would be.
That's fine and all, but it's more than a little absurd to put on a show about dogfights all the damn time, and escaping from the more powerful and more numerous base stars in the nick of time every week.
There's only so much of that a normal person can take. What I feel is lacking is a bit more of the "algae planet" kind of storytelling--where does the fleet get its water and food? How do people clean their clothes? Where do all the consumables come from that can't just be collected from planets without processing? Obviously this shouldn't be overdone either, but there are plenty of stories to tell other than 30 v. 20,000 fighter clashes and watching poor Galactica get its hull bashed in to protect a bunch of whiny civilians.
An open Authorization for the Use of Military Force is just as good. Congress doesn't declare wars anymore; they just hand over the reigns to the president to act in that capacity.
Regardless of the Constitution as written, the reality is that the second half of the 20th century has granted war powers to at least six presidents without a formal declaration of war. The only problem is that the current crop of legislators are either too spineless or licking too far up Bush's ass to rescind that grant of force.
Check your air filter, for starters, and then basically just fix your car. I drove an A4 with that exact engine (2.8 DOHC V6) and while I only got roughly 15mpg in the city (hilly Bay Area), my highway mileage was always at or above the advertised 27mpg. How old are your oxygen sensors? Fuel filter ever been cleaned? Did you check your timing and fuel mix?
Your car is six years old, and IIRC the advertised mileage new was 19/27. If you wanted a more efficient car, you should have purchased the four cylinder, gone with a manual gearbox, or skipped the Quattro. Make better choices in the future or don't bitch about a car that's within 3 mpg of its advertised economy after SIX YEARS.
Please. Contributing money != complete payoff. Just like that $15 you paid for a DVD doesn't pay for the ownership of the entire film (a realization of thought--not a thought itself), what you pay for magazines, newspapers, or television services doesn't come close to financing the entire operation.
You don't get to pick and choose which channels you support--if that's how it worked, there'd be no Sci Fi channel, because it sure as hell doesn't generate money on its own. Even Battlestar Galactica, its most popular program, is struggling to break even in first-run showings. Filling time with reruns gives people access to content and provides additional revenue to support projects in the red. An all on-demand distribution system would either explode at the seams with ads (you ain't seen nothin' yet if you think they're bothersome now) or would cost so much that no one would want to look at the price tags. It's not just production costs; it's broadcasting and licensing and redistributing profits to pay for valued and interesting, but ultimately unprofitable, ventures. I for one wouldn't want to see American Idol being the only program on TV.
Things cost money, and charging a subscription fee to the content doesn't necessarily cover it all. Whether or not 90% of that content is crap has no bearing whatsoever on what it cost to make it. If you don't want to bear the risk of the investment, don't make the investment.
False. "Fair use" and "interoperability" are not free-association terms. Your backup program is not licensed to access the content, and it doesn't provide for a gap in any fair use arrangement. You can make copies of the disc and keep them in a safe place without breaking the encryption.
"Interoperability" has also never been construed to mean "where you want it to work." It only goes as far as to apply to platforms where it has been established to work and for some reason fails to do so. The interoperability argument has NEVER been used successfully in a court of law (in jurisdictions to which I have case access) to apply to format-shifting where a competing market structure exists. HD-DVDs are meant to work in HD-DVD players (software or hardware) that support the format. If you want to copy that disc to your hard drive and run it off an ISO or DMG image, that would be perfectly acceptable.
You own the DVD. You don't own the content. This is pretty clearly established, and wishing and stamping your feet won't make it go away.
Probably not unintentionally, which was the premise of the myth. They also tried taking it to a professional. The problem was with the "encoding" as it were, and not with the playback. The clay just didn't carry precise enough information.
That's a load of crap. Copying does NOT require breaking encryption, nor does Linux playback. There's no reason why a licensed software player can't be produced. That proprietary retail content is not compatible with open source is not a relevant legal question and it's not the producer's responsibility. Backup copies are just that--identical copies.
It's not your content, plain and simple. It's not your own account you're locked out of.
Let me introduce you to an amazing fact: "fair use" is not limitless and it's not relevant to encryption in the corpus of case law. You can still exercise fair use with encryption in place. Also note that one of the biggest limits to fair use is that use which has a commercial impact on the market for the product. Broken encryption and unbounded use most certainly impacts the market, and there is no working definition of "fair use" that excuses the breaking of legally sanctioned encryption. Encryption schemas used by DVDs, HD-DVDs, and the like do not lock users out of any content to which they are legally entitled.
I know more about this than you do, AC.
Well, their use of the DMCA is appropriate in a multi-faceted approach. The DMCA provides for the legal protection of encrypted electronic content--and provides the criminal penalties for illegal violation of those protections. Sharing the key most certainly falls under the purview of the DMCA. A DMCA takedown notice can be used either against illegally-distributed content or for any violation of the statutes of the DMCA (that is, Title 17 of the USC).
It's not your content and it's not your copyright. Until the system changes to reflect otherwise, you're the one confusing the issue. You don't like DRM or the fact that you don't own the content on the discs. I'd be inclined to agree with you. However, that does not make it censorship that is new or distasteful. You're already prohibited from disclosing this kind of information by law--you weren't allowed to shout passwords and encryption keys from rooftops before. You certainly wouldn't want someone to do it to you, and you'd be fully supportive of any action to stop that "invasion of privacy."
Well, here's the kicker. Disclosing this information is an invasion of THEIR privacy on content that THEY own the copyright to. You're the owner of a shiny, licensed copy. That doesn't give you any right to pass on information that compromises their security decisions that are sanctioned both by statutory law and by case law.