There ARE mediums that can be assumed to be reasonably long-lived.
Actually, laserdiscs and CD-ROMs probably are both reasonably long-lived. They're made by a pressing technique and there are physical indentations corresponding to the data. So it's not that it becomes unreadable, it's that the readers no longer work, or no longer work with current equipment. Given that computers are rather more standardized than they were in '86, it's likely that devices capable of reading CD-ROMs will be around for quite a while, so transferring current data to new machines will be a reasonably tolerable procedure.
And paper is no great shakes. My in-laws don't have access to the government records of their home from its construction in the 50's due to a fire, and there are other records (births, deaths, weddings, etc.) known to be lost to my family due to other fires. At least digital data has the clear advantage of being easily copied, so duplicates are more likely to exist.
Re:Compromise or be ignored - it's the only option
on
SSSCA Hearing
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· Score: 1
None - but who cares?
Apparently Valenti and company do. Or at least they thought it was worth the dog and pony show time, although it could be that this is the dramatic (but once you think about it, irrelevant) shocker to try and get what they really want, rock-solid DRM for the next gen CDs, DVDs, etc.
Re:Compromise or be ignored - it's the only option
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
Besides, why shouldn't effective DRM exist?
At the hearings, Eisner showed a movie snagged off the internet that had been created by pointing a video camera at a movie screen.
I think there are sufficient ideas among developers to find a better balance. Instead of spending time repeating "all copy protection can be defeated" over and over, how about a little time spent helping find that balance?
The problem is (or more properly, I guess, it *isn't*), the balance already exists. I have a cable modem and knowledge of how to find and copy all the music I could want. Yet yesterday I placed an order for a bunch of CDs. I know how to defeat macrovision. But my shelves have a number of tapes and DVDs. I know how to find warez cracks. But legal CD-ROM games are stacked up in front of me.
The simple answer really is, make good products and don't try to squeeze me for every last dime, and I'll buy those products. Trust in the honesty of most people, because the dishonest make lousy customers anyway.
Do you really think that if WarCraft III is a good game, it's not going to sell well? People have been pirating computer games since people started selling them, but Diablo still sold a heck of a lot of copies.
Therefore, unless Apple, and Sorenson (sp?) both give permission (read: unlikely), you won't find a legal open-source player.
Is the codec such that you can download it as a distinct item with a known interface? If so, even if it couldn't be distributed with an open-source player, the codec could be hooked into that player by the person using the player.
I don't mind DVD's being a bit more expensive than VHS tapes.
In a recent (PBS? BBC?) catalog, a number of the DVDs were actually cheaper than the essentially equivalent VHS tapes, for things like the full "Fawlty Towers" series. Presumably it was reflecting the cheaper production costs?
Isn't this just a creative variation on the one-time pad technique?
And all of these, really, are just techniques that split up the message, and then assume the decrypters can only get one part. So essentially you could do this with any encryption algorithm, just send part by the internet, and part by carrier pigeon, attack stoat, etc.
Finally, my favorite statement was: "the high-tech industry hasn't done nearly enough and foists costs onto consumers that should be picked up by the manufacturers themselves"
The point is that the costs are foisted onto the public, not the individual consumers of the machines. You can live a Luddite existence and you'll still pax taxes for the disposal costs for these items. If the manufacturers pick up the disposal costs, they'll pass them on to the consumers of their items, which is exactly as it should be.
Healthy competition -- as long as it does not translate into flame wars on the Internet -- is a good thing, and we're all the better for it.
Yes, but they already have competition: Windows and the Mac. The good thing about having more than one version of a product is that they may pursue different approaches, and in the end demonstrate that one of those approaches is superior. The bad thing is that you have a lot of essentially duplicate work. Given Miguel's desire to follow.NET, perhaps the former outweighs the latter.
Once [bnetd allowed Warcraft II beta], I think they just drew the line.
Yes, but (a) bnetd and FSGS didn't allow cracking; and (b) Blizzard doesn't have a legal leg to stand on anyway. These programs reverse engineering and reimplement Blizzard's protocol, which is perfectly legal. It was someone else who created the Warcraft hacking patch, and as I understand it neither bnetd nor FSGS directly linked to said patches. If anything, it was sites providing those patches that should have been pursued.
Hmm.. care to elaborate on where your philosophy goes with this? (That being, how our lives can have meaning if there is no eternal significance to our existance..)
Let me counter with a question: do you cheer when fellow churchgoers die? After all, they're off to Heaven, aren't they?
If I follow you argument correctly, what you are saying is there is an inverse relationship between the number of people under a single government and the amount of freedom individuals have under that government (for governments of the same type).
You do not. What he said is that there is an inverse relationship between the number of people under a single government and the influence an individual has on that government.
Just yesterday a group that portrayed itself as a defender of trees and claimed to use "tree-free" paper, and was raising funds to cover the costs of this alternative paper was found to be, in fact, using paper from trees.
Um, not "in fact", but claimed to be by a person (who makes his living as a Republican fund-raiser.) There is the possibility that he is lying, you know...
No they don't. They want reverse engineering/clean-room implementation prohibited. The legality of that led to the explosive growth of the home computer market. I'm not willing to give those rights up, no matter how nice their games are.
This is just Blizzard having been lazy about protecting their betas from being copied, and thus throwing lawyers at the problem even though the law isn't on their side, but the money is.
It does not take a lawyer to know that bnetd is not a "circumvention device" under the DMCA
You have this reversed.
It takes a lawyer to know that bnetd is primarily a "circumvention device" under the DMCA. The rest of us, not being lawyers, actually go by reason and common sense.
No, there's something seriously disturbed in your code - it's written for OS 9 and running on OS X.
No, it's cross-platform code. No UI, no Mac-specific calls, the *only* interaction with the OS is memory allocation. That's it, sum, finito, for the OS's contribution. (The code was originally developed on Windows/Unix, not Mac OS at all, with only a few #defines for compiler differences.) If you need to rewrite code like that for OS X, then it's more broken than I'd claimed.
OS X runs some non-UI, almost no OS interaction (dynamic allocations, that's it) code in the program I work on more than three times slower than the same executable in Mac OS 9.1. There's something seriously disturbed in that OS still...
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The gov't still gets its cut.
Not to mention it also could spend less on software itself by using the open source alternatives -- thus effectively having more tax money.
There ARE mediums that can be assumed to be reasonably long-lived.
Actually, laserdiscs and CD-ROMs probably are both reasonably long-lived. They're made by a pressing technique and there are physical indentations corresponding to the data. So it's not that it becomes unreadable, it's that the readers no longer work, or no longer work with current equipment. Given that computers are rather more standardized than they were in '86, it's likely that devices capable of reading CD-ROMs will be around for quite a while, so transferring current data to new machines will be a reasonably tolerable procedure.
And paper is no great shakes. My in-laws don't have access to the government records of their home from its construction in the 50's due to a fire, and there are other records (births, deaths, weddings, etc.) known to be lost to my family due to other fires. At least digital data has the clear advantage of being easily copied, so duplicates are more likely to exist.
None - but who cares?
Apparently Valenti and company do. Or at least they thought it was worth the dog and pony show time, although it could be that this is the dramatic (but once you think about it, irrelevant) shocker to try and get what they really want, rock-solid DRM for the next gen CDs, DVDs, etc.
Besides, why shouldn't effective DRM exist?
At the hearings, Eisner showed a movie snagged off the internet that had been created by pointing a video camera at a movie screen.
Exactly what DRM is going to prevent that?
There are remote control blimps, which might be rather safer (assuming you like at least some of your co-workers...)
I think there are sufficient ideas among developers to find a better balance. Instead of spending time repeating "all copy protection can be defeated" over and over, how about a little time spent helping find that balance?
The problem is (or more properly, I guess, it *isn't*), the balance already exists. I have a cable modem and knowledge of how to find and copy all the music I could want. Yet yesterday I placed an order for a bunch of CDs. I know how to defeat macrovision. But my shelves have a number of tapes and DVDs. I know how to find warez cracks. But legal CD-ROM games are stacked up in front of me.
The simple answer really is, make good products and don't try to squeeze me for every last dime, and I'll buy those products. Trust in the honesty of most people, because the dishonest make lousy customers anyway.
Do you really think that if WarCraft III is a good game, it's not going to sell well? People have been pirating computer games since people started selling them, but Diablo still sold a heck of a lot of copies.
Therefore, unless Apple, and Sorenson (sp?) both give permission (read: unlikely), you won't find a legal open-source player.
Is the codec such that you can download it as a distinct item with a known interface? If so, even if it couldn't be distributed with an open-source player, the codec could be hooked into that player by the person using the player.
I read yesterday that the major labels, in order to break even on their average album, have to sell upwards of 500,000 copies.
That's approximately $5 million gross to the RIAA. Perhaps they need a more efficient way to make and market albums?
I don't mind DVD's being a bit more expensive than VHS tapes.
In a recent (PBS? BBC?) catalog, a number of the DVDs were actually cheaper than the essentially equivalent VHS tapes, for things like the full "Fawlty Towers" series. Presumably it was reflecting the cheaper production costs?
Isn't this just a creative variation on the one-time pad technique?
And all of these, really, are just techniques that split up the message, and then assume the decrypters can only get one part. So essentially you could do this with any encryption algorithm, just send part by the internet, and part by carrier pigeon, attack stoat, etc.
Finally, my favorite statement was:
"the high-tech industry hasn't done nearly enough and foists costs onto consumers that should be picked up by the manufacturers themselves"
The point is that the costs are foisted onto the public, not the individual consumers of the machines. You can live a Luddite existence and you'll still pax taxes for the disposal costs for these items. If the manufacturers pick up the disposal costs, they'll pass them on to the consumers of their items, which is exactly as it should be.
It's from "Duck Soup."
Note that a search for "gala day gal more" on Google found it; a lot of useless trivia can be found that way.
Healthy competition -- as long as it does not translate into flame wars on the Internet -- is a good thing, and we're all the better for it.
.NET, perhaps the former outweighs the latter.
Yes, but they already have competition: Windows and the Mac. The good thing about having more than one version of a product is that they may pursue different approaches, and in the end demonstrate that one of those approaches is superior. The bad thing is that you have a lot of essentially duplicate work. Given Miguel's desire to follow
Perhaps this site only deals with issues that will be decided by circuit courts.
Do they rule only on issues like Ohm's Law?
Once [bnetd allowed Warcraft II beta], I think they just drew the line.
Yes, but (a) bnetd and FSGS didn't allow cracking; and (b) Blizzard doesn't have a legal leg to stand on anyway. These programs reverse engineering and reimplement Blizzard's protocol, which is perfectly legal. It was someone else who created the Warcraft hacking patch, and as I understand it neither bnetd nor FSGS directly linked to said patches. If anything, it was sites providing those patches that should have been pursued.
Hmm.. care to elaborate on where your philosophy goes with this? (That being, how our lives can have meaning if there is no eternal significance to our existance..)
Let me counter with a question: do you cheer when fellow churchgoers die? After all, they're off to Heaven, aren't they?
Aren't [hardware manufacturers] tired of being played around by the "culture industry"?
The problem is, quite often the hardware makers are also the culture industry. Take Sony, for example.
If I follow you argument correctly, what you are saying is there is an inverse relationship between the number of people under a single government and the amount of freedom individuals have under that government (for governments of the same type).
You do not. What he said is that there is an inverse relationship between the number of people under a single government and the influence an individual has on that government.
Just yesterday a group that portrayed itself as a defender of trees and claimed to use "tree-free" paper, and was raising funds to cover the costs of this alternative paper was found to be, in fact, using paper from trees.
Um, not "in fact", but claimed to be by a person (who makes his living as a Republican fund-raiser.) There is the possibility that he is lying, you know...
There can be no meaning in our brief lives if eternity itself lacks meaning.
I disagree with this assertion, and thus the rest of your argument. (Just so you know.)
I think they have a good point.
No they don't. They want reverse engineering/clean-room implementation prohibited. The legality of that led to the explosive growth of the home computer market. I'm not willing to give those rights up, no matter how nice their games are.
This is just Blizzard having been lazy about protecting their betas from being copied, and thus throwing lawyers at the problem even though the law isn't on their side, but the money is.
It does not take a lawyer to know that bnetd is not a "circumvention device" under the DMCA
You have this reversed.
It takes a lawyer to know that bnetd is primarily a "circumvention device" under the DMCA. The rest of us, not being lawyers, actually go by reason and common sense.
No, there's something seriously disturbed in your code - it's written for OS 9 and running on OS X.
No, it's cross-platform code. No UI, no Mac-specific calls, the *only* interaction with the OS is memory allocation. That's it, sum, finito, for the OS's contribution. (The code was originally developed on Windows/Unix, not Mac OS at all, with only a few #defines for compiler differences.) If you need to rewrite code like that for OS X, then it's more broken than I'd claimed.
OS X is mad stoopid tight
OS X runs some non-UI, almost no OS interaction (dynamic allocations, that's it) code in the program I work on more than three times slower than the same executable in Mac OS 9.1. There's something seriously disturbed in that OS still...
And my 22 year old housemate has a little stuffed Snorlax on his printer
Hah! I personify Snorlax! Beat that!