I definitely remember them being around about 1996/97
Must be remembering something else. It didn't start development until 1999, and the "Revolution" name didn't come along until the next year.
Have you considered being a technical writer or something? There are many ways that anyone can help.
Indeed. After all, technical documentation is something anybody can do well. It's not as though it took skill or experience or specialized knowledge or anything. It's the "sweeping floors" of the open source world. "Want to help out? Even if you don't know anything, you can always do the scutwork, unskilled stuff such as writing documentation".
And people wonder why Linux is known for poor docs. It wouldn't have anything to do with the way the community continually disrespects writers, I don't suppose. Nah. Gotta be something else.
I swear to God, one of these days I'm going to hear this sort of thing once too often and I'm going to go postal.
I've said this before, but publishers are only hurting themselves with this insane obsession with spending millions on consumer-hostile "protection" schemes.
Look at Baen Books, which (in addition to dead trees) publishes books in electronic format, which uses good old documented and portable formats such as HTML and RTF with no passwords, encryption, "digital rights management", monitoring, locking the book to a single computer, or other nonsense, and which seems to be the only publusher of e-books that's actually making money at it.
I don't believe this is a coincidence. It may be time for other publishers to remove their heads from their asses, stop paying buckets of money to the concocters of baroque DRM schemes and various Congresscritters, observe Baen's experience, and learn. Imagine! A company that makes money, not by threatening its customers with legal action and hamstringing them with Evil Code, but by providing them a useful product at a reasonable price that yields a profit!
Does anyone know who uses.US now? And why is it America has not used this TLD like most other countries have had to do? (IE: www.myDomain.or.jp, etc.)
For a long time - this may still be true - the.us TLD was fragmented geographically. If you wanted a domain, you couldn't get foo.us, or even foo.ca.us - it was foo.sf.ca.us. This is:
no good for a company that has a presence in more than one city
no good for individuals (since you'd have to change domains every time you moved)
no good for projects and organizations either (who wants to make people remember what city and state you lived in when you started a site for exchanging vegetarian recipes or whatever?)
Basically, the geographic fragmentation made.us suitable only for organizations based on a geographic locale, such as local governments and community organizations. And that seems to be mostly who's used it. (Surprise, surprise.)
Praise of the EU privacy laws usually focuses on the limitations it puts on corporations to share data collected about customers without their permission. So far this is all well and good, but the data protection laws affect other areas as well. Here's a discussion of problems found with the Swedish implementation of the EU data directive for some examples of what the law can be used to suppress.
As far as I can tell, it's not really possible to be in compliance with the EU data directives without running into these suppressive effects on noncommercial speech and criticism.
The first step here is not to adopt a format or a set of tools from somewhere else - though you may find it very useful to look over some samples and templates from other sources - but to sit down first and do some thinking about what the documentation needs to accomplish. What docs you need to provide, what they should include, and how rigid or loose the format needs to be will follow from your organization's needs. Standards from elsewhere, while convenient, are likely to be a poor fit at various points with your company's needs, and poor process fits annoy people.
For example, you may find that developers and others aren't aware of other projects in the company, their purposes, and their progress. To fill this need, you might decide you need a project plan written for each new project. These can be simple (a couple of pages describing what you're making, why you're doing it, what you need from other people to complete the project, and when you're gonna be finished) or elaborate (up to a full, detailed specification). What's important here is to decide what information needs to be written down and accessible for each project, and produce some kind of specification or template document for that information. I find templates usually get the best results: it's relatively simple for a programmer to clone a document and fill in the blanks, doesn't take too much time.
Or another example: you might find that programmers want to re-use code but are having problems because of variance in coding standards, no or lame comments, and/or lack of interface documentation. This would indicate you ought to
- promulgate a standard for naming, indentation, or whatever is causing readability problems (good idea to avoid specifying any more than is necessary to achieve mutual intelligibility among the programmers)
- require people to comment their code, and provide templates (again)
- start formally documenting interfaces instead of assuming people will spend the time to pull the info out of the code
Now for the rant. WHY are technical writers given so little respect in the open source and Linux community? I hear endless complaints about the quality of documentation - and not just from users - but almost never do I hear "Hmmm, you know, there are these people who know how to do this stuff, and even specialize in it. Maybe we should get one to work on the docs!" Instead I hear about how programmers should hire an intern for a couple of weeks to throw together some documentation - after all, docs are easy, any apprentice programmer can do it just as well as a writer with ten years of experience, right? - or about how documentation is just an afterthought and you can't expect it to be good. Argh.
If you need docs or documentation standards, why not hire a tech writer? This is what tech writers do for a living!
If it's fair use to share a recording with a few of your friends
It's not.
Yes, it is, under the Audio Home Recording Act. (At least in the US.) Section 1008 explicitly made personal, noncommercial recording legal:
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of a digital audio recording device or a digital audio recording medium for making digital musical recordings.
Like a lot of web sites, Salon's design makes it so hard to read it's almost not worth my time. Stories are squeezed into a teeny central column between a row of irrelevant links on the left and another row of irrelevant links on the right. The front page is an exercise in scrolling - scroll down to read the first column, scroll back up, scroll sideways, scroll down again... Augh. I'd stopped reading it except when someone would tell me about a particularly interesting story.
When I found this useful script that presents the current headlines in a simple list, linked directly to Salon's reader-friendly [aka "print this page"] layout, I started reading it again. But one assumes the "Premium" Salon won't be available via this unofficial portal.
I sent them a letter to the editor to the effect that I'd be happy to pay a subscription fee for a readable, crap-free layout that let me concentrate on the stories and not my scrollbars. Admittedly, I'm more of a curmudgeon about readability than most, but I doubt I'm alone in my annoyance.
Screw the ads, they're a relatively minor annoyance. I'd rather have an ad-ridden but easy-to-read page than one with no ads and two words per column (scroll down, scroll left, scroll right) any time.
In Canada, March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the Copyright Act came into force. Until then, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright. Part VIII legalizes one such activity: copying of sound recordings of musical works onto recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy.
So to fufill the spirit of Canadian copyright law, I assume Macrovision's technology will continue to allow me to make copies of all my friends CDs for my own personal use (which the law allows).
I have bad news for you: US copyright law contains the same provision (the Audio Home Recording Act). It's not stopped anyone from instituting measures to prevent copying for personal use anyway. It just means it can't be prosecuted as a copyright violation. (But attempting to get around the measures *can* be prosecuted, thanks to the DMCA, even if the intended use is legal. If Canada doesn't have a DMCA equivalent yet, I predict it will soon.)
Google only has the archives from August of 2000 and after up on the Web at the moment. Currently the archives going all the way back to 1995 are offline.
Actually, these aren't Deja archives. The current Google offering is its own archive, which it's been pulling since August. As far as I can tell they put this up when Deja took its archives down so that there'd be at least a little continuity while they were working on writing their own archive access software (and/or porting Deja's NT-based stuff to whatever Google is running...a BSD, I think).
This whole episode reminds me of the old saying that no good deed goes unpunished. Google buys the Deja archive, thus keeping it from disappearing forever, and people bitch and moan that it's not available immediately, platform compatibility problems be damned. Google does the work to keep at least a recent archive up during the transition, and people bitch and moan that it's not enough, they should have done it differently, they shouldn't have done it at all, they should have turned it over to the Library of Congress, they should never have been born....
I've noticed that parents of homeschoolers usually have such severe personality defects that public schools were traumatic for them.
Dude, you don't need a defective personality to be traumatized by the average public school. All you need is above-average intelligence plus a failure to develop the skin of an alligator.
(And while a thick skin can be a good thing, I don't regard emotional assault on a daily basis as a good way of creating the capacity to not be hurt.)
Seriously, Apple was fully aware of what Amazon did to Barnes and Noble when they attempted to go forth with their own one-click plan.
Apple didn't file a suit to try to torpedo Amazon's IPO, though. I doubt - given the bad publicity, and given that they haven't gone after anyone they don't have reason to go after ("Revenge is sweet") - that they would have sued Apple. But if someone asks to license your patent, you can't very well say no.
As other people have pointed out, the things that make one-click a reasonable idea for Amazon or similar sites, where people come back a lot and there's a fair amount of impulse buying, mostly don't apply to the Apple store. (Very few people buy a thousand dollar iMac on impulse.) It's a mystery to me why they want to use this feature in the first place. I can only suspect a Steve Jobs brainstorm followed by quick action with little or no second thoughts. One hopes at least they didn't pay Amazon much.
That remark made me wonder what planet Dickinson lives on, where the inventor is in a position to "commit them to the public domain". That one comment makes it clear that the concept of a patent being owned by the corporation the inventor worked for is one that just doesn't come into his mind.
Which really makes you wonder whether he understands the patent landscape at all. Is he still living in a world where humble, hardworking inventors apply for protection for their innovations from a benign Patent Office, which enables them to profit from their inventions?
It's admittedly a lot to read into one sentence, but.
so, and i'm certainly not the first to point this out, it seems that all they're protecting is the DVD player makers.
Close. They're protecting the MPAA monopoly on use of the format. In other words, this is "artist control" aimed at controlling who can make movies in the DVD format.
As long as the MPAA, through the cartel organization DVD-CCA, can control who can make a DVD player, it can control the features of those players. (The MPAA already uses this control to, for example, bring pressure to bear against manufacturers of players that aren't region-locked, or that don't cripple the fast-forward function during commercials.) This means that, for example, the MPAA can require player manufacturers to make their players reject any non-CSS-encoded DVD....whereupon anyone who doesn't have access to a CSS title key (read: non-major-studio moviemakers) loses the ability to make DVDs that can be played in consumer players.
Other forms of control are possible as well.
Now, without the DMCA's provisions, it would be legal to reverse-engineer CSS and create a player without going through DVD-CCA. And of course such players would have an advantage in the market place. However, Judge Kaplan's ruling is, essentially, that under the DMCA it is illegal to create or use a DVD player - or even to assist in creating one - without submitting to the MPAA's regulations. It brings the format completely under their control and makes it illegal to attempt to disturb that control.
Next time the Slashdot editors think of posting yet another in the series of "Bu-bu-bu-but *why* aren't there more women posting to Slashdot/writing code/participating in the geek community??? We don't understand!" articles, maybe they could instead just point to this ugly little post, and the moderators who thought it was worth "+3, Funny". It'd answer the question nicely while saving some disk space on the discussion.
The primary purpose something is used for is very important when determining its legality
That actually isn't the case. Under the Sony decision (in which the Supreme Court ruled against the movie studios, who sued to force VCRs off the market), the test is whether a device is capable of substantial noninfringing use.
It doesn't need to be primarily or even substantially used for noninfringing uses in practice. (Although the RIAA argues that "as much as 87%" of the music traded over Napster is infringing, and I'd say 13% is substantial - even ignoring that the RIAA is more likely to underestimate this than overestimate it.) VCRs were capable of time-shifting, time-shifting was found to be a fair use, and therefore VCRs could not be banned at the request of the studios - Sony didn't have to show that "the primary purpose" of VCRs was time-shifting, and in fact as far as I know that's never been the primary purpose. But it's a substantial, noninfringing use of which VCRs are capable, and therefore VCRs are protected under the law.
Clearly there are plenty of noninfringing uses for Napster that are substantial:
Use as a marketing method by artists who allow this distribution under their copyright (we've had at least one person posting on Slashdot who does just this, so don't tell me they don't exist)
"Spaceshifting" by people who own a copy of the music, therefore can listen to it legally, and log on to Napster from work or some other location where they don't have their physical copy, in order to download and listen to the music
"Mediashifting" by people who own a copy and want it in MP3 format, but either lack the skills/equipment/time to rip their own CD, or own it on LP or some non-digital format
All these are clearly substantial uses, all fall fairly easily under fair use, and Napster is capable of all of them. This is not even getting into the argument under the Audio Home Recording Act that sharing music noncommercially (i.e. you don't charge for it - and neither Napster's users nor Napster charge) is itself a fair use.
Can you provide a URL to a movie that is being distributed by means of DeCSS? One will do. (The MPAA wasn't able to do so.)
you'll find plenty of movies there that are described as having been converted by a DVD rip.
And you conclude that the person who ripped the data used DeCSS because....?
Certainly it would be *possible* to use DeCSS for this purpose, then step down the quality to get the file down to a remotely reasonable size. But it's a serious mistake to look at files that say "This is ripped from a studio DVD" and conclude they've ever been anywhere near DeCSS. Rippers for DVD movies existed and were in circulation before DeCSS existed.
Of all websurfers, what percentage would you say even know about doubleclick, much less know what it is that doubleclick does?
My mom, unprompted, told me the other day that she'd been reading about DoubleClick and cookies and she'd found an article that told her how to turn on "ask for cookie confirmation" in her browser.
I didn't bring up this topic with her; she initiated it. Now, my mom is an interested web user but she doesn't know the technical fine points, nor are her politics particularly attentive to such things. If she knows about privacy problems attendant on cookies, it's a fair bet at least half of web users have some awareness of the issue.
I'm not sure what whoever moderated that comment down as flamebait was thinking, but it is a reasonably informative response to previous post and the other remarks are not without relevant insight.
These 335,435 users were supposedly all busted in one weekend. Can someone with Napster confirm with a search that there are typically on the order of a quarter million Napster users online and offering Metallica songs on any given day? The numbers I've heard...how shall I say...do not seem wholly compatible with this.
But this enormous number does provide lots o' good publicity for the RIAA ("See what we're up against? HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of music pirate every day!!!"), as well as producing an enormous administrative headache for Napster. Perhaps enough of one to put them out of business.
Any application should be consisent with the look and feel of the OS. Mac was great with this in the "old days". Are they still (Just a question, not implying anything)?
Pretty much. If you use the toolbox for your app, it looks like a Mac application. Furthermore, third-party add-ons like Kaleidoscope override the toolbox so they change the appearance of the standard items in all applications, not just one.
The pathetic thing about Netscape 6's "skins" is that the application doesn't respect my Kaleidoscope theme. Instead, it gives this ugly Windows-oid appearance. So to customize the look of this "wonderful, flexible, customizable" application, I can't just use the tool I already have - instead, I'd have to develop a special skin just for it, an imitation of the theme I use for the rest of the OS. If I want to switch themes, I have to (or someone has to) create a new skin too, just for Netscape. Imagine what it'll be like if every application decides that it's too good to use the system settings, it will have its own special customization language instead. Feh.
There's not a huge amount of difference sizewise between a planet several times the size of Jupiter and a small brown dwarf star. The differentiation is that the star is massive enough for fusion to begin in its core...but EM radiation is emitted long before that point due to compression and friction. (Jupiter itself is large enough that it emits more heat than it receives from the sun.)
It may seem laughable that a site campaigning against censorship has been censored itself, but that is exactly what has just happened. We are making arrangements for the site to be mirrored offshore, where there is a bit more protection for freedom of speech. Don't worry, even the address online won't change, it'll just be based on web servers physically outside the UK. You won't be able to tell the difference.
Naturally, we are not caving in to the threatening insinuations that have been levelled against us. Check back here tomorrow for the full story.
Yikes. What the hell goes on in Britain? Does anyone know whether there's a connection to this story?
Two provisions in the CDA that imposed censorship on electronic communications were found to be unconstitutional (and therefore cannot legally be enforced). That didn't affect the rest of the CDA, including the provision limiting liability of a service provider.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. Because code generators normally cause the target device to catch fire. Ban the code generators! Quick!
I definitely remember them being around about 1996/97 Must be remembering something else. It didn't start development until 1999, and the "Revolution" name didn't come along until the next year.
Indeed. After all, technical documentation is something anybody can do well. It's not as though it took skill or experience or specialized knowledge or anything. It's the "sweeping floors" of the open source world. "Want to help out? Even if you don't know anything, you can always do the scutwork, unskilled stuff such as writing documentation".
And people wonder why Linux is known for poor docs. It wouldn't have anything to do with the way the community continually disrespects writers, I don't suppose. Nah. Gotta be something else.
I swear to God, one of these days I'm going to hear this sort of thing once too often and I'm going to go postal.
I've said this before, but publishers are only hurting themselves with this insane obsession with spending millions on consumer-hostile "protection" schemes.
Look at Baen Books, which (in addition to dead trees) publishes books in electronic format, which uses good old documented and portable formats such as HTML and RTF with no passwords, encryption, "digital rights management", monitoring, locking the book to a single computer, or other nonsense, and which seems to be the only publusher of e-books that's actually making money at it.
I don't believe this is a coincidence. It may be time for other publishers to remove their heads from their asses, stop paying buckets of money to the concocters of baroque DRM schemes and various Congresscritters, observe Baen's experience, and learn. Imagine! A company that makes money, not by threatening its customers with legal action and hamstringing them with Evil Code, but by providing them a useful product at a reasonable price that yields a profit!
For a long time - this may still be true - the .us TLD was fragmented geographically. If you wanted a domain, you couldn't get foo.us, or even foo.ca.us - it was foo.sf.ca.us. This is:
- no good for a company that has a presence in more than one city
- no good for individuals (since you'd have to change domains every time you moved)
- no good for projects and organizations either (who wants to make people remember what city and state you lived in when you started a site for exchanging vegetarian recipes or whatever?)
Basically, the geographic fragmentation madePraise of the EU privacy laws usually focuses on the limitations it puts on corporations to share data collected about customers without their permission. So far this is all well and good, but the data protection laws affect other areas as well. Here's a discussion of problems found with the Swedish implementation of the EU data directive for some examples of what the law can be used to suppress.
As far as I can tell, it's not really possible to be in compliance with the EU data directives without running into these suppressive effects on noncommercial speech and criticism.
The first step here is not to adopt a format or a set of tools from somewhere else - though you may find it very useful to look over some samples and templates from other sources - but to sit down first and do some thinking about what the documentation needs to accomplish. What docs you need to provide, what they should include, and how rigid or loose the format needs to be will follow from your organization's needs. Standards from elsewhere, while convenient, are likely to be a poor fit at various points with your company's needs, and poor process fits annoy people.
For example, you may find that developers and others aren't aware of other projects in the company, their purposes, and their progress. To fill this need, you might decide you need a project plan written for each new project. These can be simple (a couple of pages describing what you're making, why you're doing it, what you need from other people to complete the project, and when you're gonna be finished) or elaborate (up to a full, detailed specification). What's important here is to decide what information needs to be written down and accessible for each project, and produce some kind of specification or template document for that information. I find templates usually get the best results: it's relatively simple for a programmer to clone a document and fill in the blanks, doesn't take too much time.
Or another example: you might find that programmers want to re-use code but are having problems because of variance in coding standards, no or lame comments, and/or lack of interface documentation. This would indicate you ought to
- promulgate a standard for naming, indentation, or whatever is causing readability problems (good idea to avoid specifying any more than is necessary to achieve mutual intelligibility among the programmers)
- require people to comment their code, and provide templates (again)
- start formally documenting interfaces instead of assuming people will spend the time to pull the info out of the code
Now for the rant. WHY are technical writers given so little respect in the open source and Linux community? I hear endless complaints about the quality of documentation - and not just from users - but almost never do I hear "Hmmm, you know, there are these people who know how to do this stuff, and even specialize in it. Maybe we should get one to work on the docs!" Instead I hear about how programmers should hire an intern for a couple of weeks to throw together some documentation - after all, docs are easy, any apprentice programmer can do it just as well as a writer with ten years of experience, right? - or about how documentation is just an afterthought and you can't expect it to be good. Argh.
If you need docs or documentation standards, why not hire a tech writer? This is what tech writers do for a living!
Yes, it is, under the Audio Home Recording Act. (At least in the US.) Section 1008 explicitly made personal, noncommercial recording legal:
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of a digital audio recording device or a digital audio recording medium for making digital musical recordings.
Like a lot of web sites, Salon's design makes it so hard to read it's almost not worth my time. Stories are squeezed into a teeny central column between a row of irrelevant links on the left and another row of irrelevant links on the right. The front page is an exercise in scrolling - scroll down to read the first column, scroll back up, scroll sideways, scroll down again... Augh. I'd stopped reading it except when someone would tell me about a particularly interesting story.
When I found this useful script that presents the current headlines in a simple list, linked directly to Salon's reader-friendly [aka "print this page"] layout, I started reading it again. But one assumes the "Premium" Salon won't be available via this unofficial portal.
I sent them a letter to the editor to the effect that I'd be happy to pay a subscription fee for a readable, crap-free layout that let me concentrate on the stories and not my scrollbars. Admittedly, I'm more of a curmudgeon about readability than most, but I doubt I'm alone in my annoyance.
Screw the ads, they're a relatively minor annoyance. I'd rather have an ad-ridden but easy-to-read page than one with no ads and two words per column (scroll down, scroll left, scroll right) any time.
In Canada, March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the Copyright Act came into force. Until then, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright. Part VIII legalizes one such activity: copying of sound recordings of musical works onto recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy.
So to fufill the spirit of Canadian copyright law, I assume Macrovision's technology will continue to allow me to make copies of all my friends CDs for my own personal use (which the law allows).
I have bad news for you: US copyright law contains the same provision (the Audio Home Recording Act). It's not stopped anyone from instituting measures to prevent copying for personal use anyway. It just means it can't be prosecuted as a copyright violation. (But attempting to get around the measures *can* be prosecuted, thanks to the DMCA, even if the intended use is legal. If Canada doesn't have a DMCA equivalent yet, I predict it will soon.)
Google only has the archives from August of 2000 and after up on the Web at the moment. Currently the archives going all the way back to 1995 are offline.
Actually, these aren't Deja archives. The current Google offering is its own archive, which it's been pulling since August. As far as I can tell they put this up when Deja took its archives down so that there'd be at least a little continuity while they were working on writing their own archive access software (and/or porting Deja's NT-based stuff to whatever Google is running...a BSD, I think).
This whole episode reminds me of the old saying that no good deed goes unpunished. Google buys the Deja archive, thus keeping it from disappearing forever, and people bitch and moan that it's not available immediately, platform compatibility problems be damned. Google does the work to keep at least a recent archive up during the transition, and people bitch and moan that it's not enough, they should have done it differently, they shouldn't have done it at all, they should have turned it over to the Library of Congress, they should never have been born....
I've noticed that parents of homeschoolers usually have such severe personality defects that public schools were traumatic for them.
Dude, you don't need a defective personality to be traumatized by the average public school. All you need is above-average intelligence plus a failure to develop the skin of an alligator.
(And while a thick skin can be a good thing, I don't regard emotional assault on a daily basis as a good way of creating the capacity to not be hurt.)
Seriously, Apple was fully aware of what Amazon did to Barnes and Noble when they attempted to go forth with their own one-click plan.
Apple didn't file a suit to try to torpedo Amazon's IPO, though. I doubt - given the bad publicity, and given that they haven't gone after anyone they don't have reason to go after ("Revenge is sweet") - that they would have sued Apple. But if someone asks to license your patent, you can't very well say no.
As other people have pointed out, the things that make one-click a reasonable idea for Amazon or similar sites, where people come back a lot and there's a fair amount of impulse buying, mostly don't apply to the Apple store. (Very few people buy a thousand dollar iMac on impulse.) It's a mystery to me why they want to use this feature in the first place. I can only suspect a Steve Jobs brainstorm followed by quick action with little or no second thoughts. One hopes at least they didn't pay Amazon much.
That remark made me wonder what planet Dickinson lives on, where the inventor is in a position to "commit them to the public domain". That one comment makes it clear that the concept of a patent being owned by the corporation the inventor worked for is one that just doesn't come into his mind.
Which really makes you wonder whether he understands the patent landscape at all. Is he still living in a world where humble, hardworking inventors apply for protection for their innovations from a benign Patent Office, which enables them to profit from their inventions?
It's admittedly a lot to read into one sentence, but.
so, and i'm certainly not the first to point this out, it seems that all they're protecting is the DVD player makers.
Close. They're protecting the MPAA monopoly on use of the format. In other words, this is "artist control" aimed at controlling who can make movies in the DVD format.
As long as the MPAA, through the cartel organization DVD-CCA, can control who can make a DVD player, it can control the features of those players. (The MPAA already uses this control to, for example, bring pressure to bear against manufacturers of players that aren't region-locked, or that don't cripple the fast-forward function during commercials.) This means that, for example, the MPAA can require player manufacturers to make their players reject any non-CSS-encoded DVD....whereupon anyone who doesn't have access to a CSS title key (read: non-major-studio moviemakers) loses the ability to make DVDs that can be played in consumer players.
Other forms of control are possible as well.
Now, without the DMCA's provisions, it would be legal to reverse-engineer CSS and create a player without going through DVD-CCA. And of course such players would have an advantage in the market place. However, Judge Kaplan's ruling is, essentially, that under the DMCA it is illegal to create or use a DVD player - or even to assist in creating one - without submitting to the MPAA's regulations. It brings the format completely under their control and makes it illegal to attempt to disturb that control.
I have a suggestion.
Next time the Slashdot editors think of posting yet another in the series of "Bu-bu-bu-but *why* aren't there more women posting to Slashdot/writing code/participating in the geek community??? We don't understand!" articles, maybe they could instead just point to this ugly little post, and the moderators who thought it was worth "+3, Funny". It'd answer the question nicely while saving some disk space on the discussion.
The primary purpose something is used for is very important when determining its legality
That actually isn't the case. Under the Sony decision (in which the Supreme Court ruled against the movie studios, who sued to force VCRs off the market), the test is whether a device is capable of substantial noninfringing use.
It doesn't need to be primarily or even substantially used for noninfringing uses in practice. (Although the RIAA argues that "as much as 87%" of the music traded over Napster is infringing, and I'd say 13% is substantial - even ignoring that the RIAA is more likely to underestimate this than overestimate it.) VCRs were capable of time-shifting, time-shifting was found to be a fair use, and therefore VCRs could not be banned at the request of the studios - Sony didn't have to show that "the primary purpose" of VCRs was time-shifting, and in fact as far as I know that's never been the primary purpose. But it's a substantial, noninfringing use of which VCRs are capable, and therefore VCRs are protected under the law.
Clearly there are plenty of noninfringing uses for Napster that are substantial:
All these are clearly substantial uses, all fall fairly easily under fair use, and Napster is capable of all of them. This is not even getting into the argument under the Audio Home Recording Act that sharing music noncommercially (i.e. you don't charge for it - and neither Napster's users nor Napster charge) is itself a fair use.
DeCSS is being used for piracy today.
Can you provide a URL to a movie that is being distributed by means of DeCSS? One will do. (The MPAA wasn't able to do so.)
you'll find plenty of movies there that are described as having been converted by a DVD rip.
And you conclude that the person who ripped the data used DeCSS because....?
Certainly it would be *possible* to use DeCSS for this purpose, then step down the quality to get the file down to a remotely reasonable size. But it's a serious mistake to look at files that say "This is ripped from a studio DVD" and conclude they've ever been anywhere near DeCSS. Rippers for DVD movies existed and were in circulation before DeCSS existed.
Of all websurfers, what percentage would you say even know about doubleclick, much less know what it is that doubleclick does?
My mom, unprompted, told me the other day that she'd been reading about DoubleClick and cookies and she'd found an article that told her how to turn on "ask for cookie confirmation" in her browser.
I didn't bring up this topic with her; she initiated it. Now, my mom is an interested web user but she doesn't know the technical fine points, nor are her politics particularly attentive to such things. If she knows about privacy problems attendant on cookies, it's a fair bet at least half of web users have some awareness of the issue.
I'm not sure what whoever moderated that comment down as flamebait was thinking, but it is a reasonably informative response to previous post and the other remarks are not without relevant insight.
Now wait just a cotton-pickin' minute here.
These 335,435 users were supposedly all busted in one weekend. Can someone with Napster confirm with a search that there are typically on the order of a quarter million Napster users online and offering Metallica songs on any given day? The numbers I've heard...how shall I say...do not seem wholly compatible with this.
But this enormous number does provide lots o' good publicity for the RIAA ("See what we're up against? HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of music pirate every day!!!"), as well as producing an enormous administrative headache for Napster. Perhaps enough of one to put them out of business.
I smell a rat.
Pretty much. If you use the toolbox for your app, it looks like a Mac application. Furthermore, third-party add-ons like Kaleidoscope override the toolbox so they change the appearance of the standard items in all applications, not just one.
The pathetic thing about Netscape 6's "skins" is that the application doesn't respect my Kaleidoscope theme. Instead, it gives this ugly Windows-oid appearance. So to customize the look of this "wonderful, flexible, customizable" application, I can't just use the tool I already have - instead, I'd have to develop a special skin just for it, an imitation of the theme I use for the rest of the OS. If I want to switch themes, I have to (or someone has to) create a new skin too, just for Netscape. Imagine what it'll be like if every application decides that it's too good to use the system settings, it will have its own special customization language instead. Feh.
There's not a huge amount of difference sizewise between a planet several times the size of Jupiter and a small brown dwarf star. The differentiation is that the star is massive enough for fusion to begin in its core...but EM radiation is emitted long before that point due to compression and friction. (Jupiter itself is large enough that it emits more heat than it receives from the sun.)
I checked the Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain link referenced in the story and guess what I found there:
Yikes. What the hell goes on in Britain? Does anyone know whether there's a connection to this story?
I thought the CDA got repealed in '96 or '97.
Two provisions in the CDA that imposed censorship on electronic communications were found to be unconstitutional (and therefore cannot legally be enforced). That didn't affect the rest of the CDA, including the provision limiting liability of a service provider.