An interesting idea occurred to me recently when I went out to find the DeCSS source...I flipped to altavista, and found plenty of sites with it. Now, the DVD-CCA can do the same. What I was thinking of doing was creating a same-sized, same-named file with a whatever miscellaneous.c and such files one might want to include.
The effect would be to muddy the waters a lot, and stymy (sp?!) any efforts to make another 500-people-long list of defendants.
The downside is that it might make us (Those that disagree with the DMCA and the DVD-CCA's actions) look weaker.
Probably too late to get this moderated up to be seen, but who knows.:-) Any thoughts?
We can look at a few parties that might (but wouldn't, IMO):
The consumer - Well, I for one am environmentally conscious enough that I wouldn't do this. Certainly it seems more Draconian in enforcement - I _like_ having the flexibility of returning my movies late if I don't get around to watching them. Besides that, it would have to catch on before it got cheap, and that's a huge barrier to entry - most people still rent VHS, and apparently DVD's cost about $1 to make - add that onto your rental charge and I say nuh-uh.
The rental store - Nope. 15% of their money comes from late fees (according to the article someone else pointed to at http://www.projo.com/cgi-bin/frame_it.cgi?URL=/rep ort/pjb/stories/03064261.htm ) Besides that, again, higher rental fees, etc. Perhaps there's some reduced overhead from returns, but there's added overhead of a steady flow of incoming discs, *plus* some customers (For environmental or whatever) reasons would refuse to use the throwaway kind, so many stores would end up providing both.
The content provider - What helps the rental stores helps the content provider. I can't see any reason that these companies would want this.
Seems to me to be a perceived market that doesn't actually exist. DIVX sounds like it tried the "right" way of doing this (though I don't know much about it) but couldn't make it cheap. Now people are making it cheap, but it just doesn't sit right with me.
Too many problems to be feasible, and _no-one_ wants it that I can think of.
From the press release: "By examining the entire Web and analyzing the billions of links between all of its documents, Inktomi can distill an index of the highest quality documents to provide users with more relevant and intuitive results."
Isn't that the "technology" that google has patented?
Heh. oh, the wonderful ironies of bringing up edison and the lightbulb in a patent-related conversation.
So, who invented the lightbulb? Most people would answer little Tommy Edison, but they wouldbe wrong.
In fact, they were being used as electric lights for more than 50 years prior to his patent date.
In addition, Edison was not the first to patent the modern design of the lightbulb.
It seems that an inventor named Joseph Swan demonstrated the same carbon filament lightbulb in Newcastle at least ten months prior to Edison's announcement. In addition, Swan received a British patent in 1878 for the same bulb that Edison patented in the U. S. in 1879.
Did Edison know about Swan's work, or did they simply work independently and arrive at the same conclusion? There is no question that Edison had seen a Scientific American article on Swan's preliminary work with carbon filament electric lighting. But Swan's work had not been perfected at this point, so Edison may have arrived at his invention by improving on Swan's preliminary designs.
from http://home.nycap.rr.com/ useless/lightbulbs/litebulb.html So, you see, Edison was an early abuser of patent law. Incidentally, many other inventions, research products, etc., are not attributed to their actual developers, but perhaps to the professor that the undergrad was working under, or the person to make the last small conceptual leap building upon a significant amount of ideas running before.
Seems to me another interesting consequence to this is new weaponry in already overdone usenet flamewars: Joe: "You're a dumb-head. You're probably some 12 year old script kiddie." Ed: "You're a loser-poopoo-head. You probably sleep with [insert barnyard animal here]" Joe: "Your mom was good last night." Ed: "You be careful, or I'll open a keg of legal wuppass on you, buddy. Restrain your ass out of this NG." Joe: "Oooh...I'm scared. You gonna get all your 12 year old lawyer friends after me?" Well, you've all seen it before, but now there's a new twist.:-)
But the _really_ interesting question requires a perspective flip. We look at these oppressed peoples and say "they've accepted what they get 'cause they've seen nothing else. they don't know of anything better, so they don't try and get there."
What better things don't we know about, because we cannot push ourselves outside of the box? Freedom is a spectrum, and while we (western/european/american/canadian/whatever) _may_ be slightly farther along that spectrum than some others, it has been my opinion for a while that we don't have a sniff what freedom really is. We are oppressed by society's rules, we are oppressed by conventions about what we should do or say. I had a conversation about this just recently, about how all too many people reply "fine" when asked "how are you?"...it's a small thing, but totally reflexive. Most people don't even consider it. In fact, I've heard people complain when someone *didn't* just say "fine," because the question was only a token.
Oppression of the mind is far far harder to see and break than oppression of the body.
I liked this quote: [re: Seastrom suit] ``But from what we hear it appears to be a groundless lawsuit, especially when the Windows operating system is priced less than our competitors,'' said the spokesman, Jim Cullinan. erm...according to a rather *important* document, you have no competitors in the PC OS space. I thought it was funny how he blatantly ignored that little tidbit from Mr. Jackson.
I recently dug through some of my old Elementary school stuff. in grade 8, I was writing with very nearly as good grammar as I do now, spelling the same, punctuation, etc. Granted, I've always been on the high end of the curve, but still. 'course, I was educated in Canada.:-)
This really was something along the lines of what I was looking for someone to say.:-)
The problem with this is that an abusive relationship is infinitely more predictable than the mind of a youth. I'm 18, just graduated, and I can very well see myself scoring a false-positive, not because I'm antisocial or harrassed, (though I was when I was much younger), but because I've read the anarchist's cookbook, I've diddled with smoke bombs and the like. I've fashioned various makeshift weapons. I've considered as a time-waster, how I *would* take over the school, given that I wanted to make a great big hostage situation, or something.
Would I kill a person? I don't know. Certainly not out of anger. I am not an angry person.
The other point that has only been touched on in what I've read is this: I have a hard time believing that it would pick out people that kill girls for believing that they were stealing a boyfriend, or even the columbine killers. Really, if they were being profiled, do you think that they would know how to answer the questions?
Clearly their teachers didn't clue in very much, and their parents had no clue. So either (a) they are actively profiled ("Do you enjoy hurting animals?" "Well gee, no.") or passively profiled, in which case I find it very hard to believe that a software package can succeed where humans failed so miserably.
And if some teachers did really believe that the columbine pair were a threat, why didn't they do anything about it? and would it really change if they had some software backing them up? Frankly, as a principal or teacher, I'd be *more* afraid to go to a parent saying "Your son/daughter was pegged as potential violent by our new software package." than saying "We believe your son/daughter is having some trouble in school, and has a lot of issues to deal with. What do you think?"
Of course, nearly every parent thinks that their child is a lot "better" (definition left to the reader, or perhaps the reader's parents..:-) ) than they actually are, so they would be resistive in either case. I would be a lot more pissed off to an "objective" computer judgement than to a human judgement that came forward admitting that they were merely making judgements that were subjective.
Either way is subjective and biased. At least one way admits that it is.
People keep mentioning the printing press, and various other technologies as examples of when technology and religion got along.
However, if I recall my history correctly, the Protestant "revolution" was as much a revolution as a rebellion. A rebellion against what? why, against the then-current religion. So you see, at _that point in time_, technology (freedom) and religion *did not get along*.
It doesn't matter how it turned out, the point is that most of the time "mainstream religion" (defining this is left as an exercise for the reader) quells and stifles dissenting thought. Dissenting thought is generally expressed with technologies of mass distribution.
This, of course, requires the oft-challenged presumption that "mainstream religion" is a single entity.
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An interesting idea occurred to me recently when I went out to find the DeCSS source...I flipped to altavista, and found plenty of sites with it. Now, the DVD-CCA can do the same. What I was thinking of doing was creating a same-sized, same-named file with a whatever miscellaneous .c and such files one might want to include.
:-) Any thoughts?
The effect would be to muddy the waters a lot, and stymy (sp?!) any efforts to make another 500-people-long list of defendants.
The downside is that it might make us (Those that disagree with the DMCA and the DVD-CCA's actions) look weaker.
Probably too late to get this moderated up to be seen, but who knows.
Because once you've executed this little scenario, the car is no longer in the shop.
Whereas, with an mp3, or anything digital, it's still in the shop.
Arbitrarily assigned does not mean zero, either.
Who actually wants this product?
p ort/pjb/stories/03064261.htm )
We can look at a few parties that might (but wouldn't, IMO):
The consumer -
Well, I for one am environmentally conscious enough that I wouldn't do this. Certainly it seems more Draconian in enforcement - I _like_ having the flexibility of returning my movies late if I don't get around to watching them. Besides that, it would have to catch on before it got cheap, and that's a huge barrier to entry - most people still rent VHS, and apparently DVD's cost about $1 to make - add that onto your rental charge and I say nuh-uh.
The rental store -
Nope. 15% of their money comes from late fees (according to the article someone else pointed to at http://www.projo.com/cgi-bin/frame_it.cgi?URL=/re
Besides that, again, higher rental fees, etc. Perhaps there's some reduced overhead from returns, but there's added overhead of a steady flow of incoming discs, *plus* some customers (For environmental or whatever) reasons would refuse to use the throwaway kind, so many stores would end up providing both.
The content provider -
What helps the rental stores helps the content provider. I can't see any reason that these companies would want this.
Seems to me to be a perceived market that doesn't actually exist. DIVX sounds like it tried the "right" way of doing this (though I don't know much about it) but couldn't make it cheap. Now people are making it cheap, but it just doesn't sit right with me.
Too many problems to be feasible, and _no-one_ wants it that I can think of.
From the press release:
"By examining the entire Web and analyzing the billions of links between all of its documents, Inktomi can distill an index of the highest quality documents to provide users with
more relevant and intuitive results."
Isn't that the "technology" that google has patented?
oh, the wonderful ironies of bringing up edison and the lightbulb in a patent-related conversation.
from http://home.nycap.rr.com/ useless/lightbulbs/litebulb.html
So, you see, Edison was an early abuser of patent law. Incidentally, many other inventions, research products, etc., are not attributed to their actual developers, but perhaps to the professor that the undergrad was working under, or the person to make the last small conceptual leap building upon a significant amount of ideas running before.
Seems to me another interesting consequence to this is new weaponry in already overdone usenet flamewars: Joe: "You're a dumb-head. You're probably some 12 year old script kiddie." Ed: "You're a loser-poopoo-head. You probably sleep with [insert barnyard animal here]" Joe: "Your mom was good last night." Ed: "You be careful, or I'll open a keg of legal wuppass on you, buddy. Restrain your ass out of this NG." Joe: "Oooh...I'm scared. You gonna get all your 12 year old lawyer friends after me?" Well, you've all seen it before, but now there's a new twist. :-)
But the _really_ interesting question requires a perspective flip. We look at these oppressed peoples and say "they've accepted what they get 'cause they've seen nothing else. they don't know of anything better, so they don't try and get there."
What better things don't we know about, because we cannot push ourselves outside of the box? Freedom is a spectrum, and while we (western/european/american/canadian/whatever) _may_ be slightly farther along that spectrum than some others, it has been my opinion for a while that we don't have a sniff what freedom really is. We are oppressed by society's rules, we are oppressed by conventions about what we should do or say. I had a conversation about this just recently, about how all too many people reply "fine" when asked "how are you?"...it's a small thing, but totally reflexive. Most people don't even consider it. In fact, I've heard people complain when someone *didn't* just say "fine," because the question was only a token.
Oppression of the mind is far far harder to see and break than oppression of the body.
I liked this quote: [re: Seastrom suit] ``But from what we hear it appears to be a groundless lawsuit, especially when the Windows operating system is priced less than our competitors,'' said the spokesman, Jim Cullinan. erm...according to a rather *important* document, you have no competitors in the PC OS space. I thought it was funny how he blatantly ignored that little tidbit from Mr. Jackson.
I recently dug through some of my old Elementary school stuff. in grade 8, I was writing with very nearly as good grammar as I do now, spelling the same, punctuation, etc. Granted, I've always been on the high end of the curve, but still. 'course, I was educated in Canada. :-)
This really was something along the lines of what I was looking for someone to say. :-)
The problem with this is that an abusive relationship is infinitely more predictable than the mind of a youth. I'm 18, just graduated, and I can very well see myself scoring a false-positive, not because I'm antisocial or harrassed, (though I was when I was much younger), but because I've read the anarchist's cookbook, I've diddled with smoke bombs and the like. I've fashioned various makeshift weapons. I've considered as a time-waster, how I *would* take over the school, given that I wanted to make a great big hostage situation, or something.
Would I kill a person? I don't know. Certainly not out of anger. I am not an angry person.
The other point that has only been touched on in what I've read is this: I have a hard time believing that it would pick out people that kill girls for believing that they were stealing a boyfriend, or even the columbine killers. Really, if they were being profiled, do you think that they would know how to answer the questions?
Clearly their teachers didn't clue in very much, and their parents had no clue. So either (a) they are actively profiled ("Do you enjoy hurting animals?" "Well gee, no.") or passively profiled, in which case I find it very hard to believe that a software package can succeed where humans failed so miserably.
And if some teachers did really believe that the columbine pair were a threat, why didn't they do anything about it? and would it really change if they had some software backing them up? Frankly, as a principal or teacher, I'd be *more* afraid to go to a parent saying "Your son/daughter was pegged as potential violent by our new software package." than saying "We believe your son/daughter is having some trouble in school, and has a lot of issues to deal with. What do you think?"
Of course, nearly every parent thinks that their child is a lot "better" (definition left to the reader, or perhaps the reader's parents..:-) ) than they actually are, so they would be resistive in either case. I would be a lot more pissed off to an "objective" computer judgement than to a human judgement that came forward admitting that they were merely making judgements that were subjective.
Either way is subjective and biased. At least one way admits that it is.
However, if I recall my history correctly, the Protestant "revolution" was as much a revolution as a rebellion. A rebellion against what? why, against the then-current religion. So you see, at _that point in time_, technology (freedom) and religion *did not get along*.
It doesn't matter how it turned out, the point is that most of the time "mainstream religion" (defining this is left as an exercise for the reader) quells and stifles dissenting thought. Dissenting thought is generally expressed with technologies of mass distribution.
This, of course, requires the oft-challenged presumption that "mainstream religion" is a single entity.