OT: Re: [TriLUG] incoherent ramblings

Daniel T. Chen crimsun at email.unc.edu
Sat Sep 21 00:55:59 EDT 2002


On Sat, 21 Sep 2002, Greg Brown wrote:
> I've been reading more and more about Palladium - Microsoft's latest
> ploy to control both the Internet and everything on your computers.
> The latest news is now AMD has opted in to support Palladium.  This
> means I'll be snapping up Macs so I can have SOMETHING that will still
> work the way I want.  At the time Palladium comes out I can hopefully
> buy a current generation Mac running (hopefully) a non-Intel or AMD
> processor and maybe I'll still have some control over my own systems.

I think as "bad" as this might sound RE: cpus, there will be easily a
workaround for the culprit. Ah, the power of source...

> What really strikes me is aren't we going backwards with all this copy
> protection BS?  Right now I get most of my news from NPR and the web.
> If it comes down to me either bowing down to Bill Gates to surf the
> 'net or NOT surfing all I'll take the latter.  Just cancel my
> RoadRunner and DirectTV, thank you.  I'll get my news from the radio.

Hrm, but what's to keep reuters.com or npr.org from filtering only
things they want you to hear (yes, a stretch, but...)? It's more and
more difficult to find as many biased (!) articles in one's short
timespan to get a somewhat better feel for the "real" stories...

> Welcome to the 1940s!   Oh, the reason I'll be giving up my TV is the
> recording industry is pushing to have all television stations to
> digital by 2004, not 2007 which is the current date of all this going
> digital.  The recording industry is also pushing for digital signals to
> have a "digital watermark" which prevents the "unauthorized copying" of
> the signals.  This means all TV sets are obsolete as well as DVD-Rs,
> VHS, TiVOs, etc.  Nice, huh?

I am not a statistician, however I guess that for every 100 hard-
working legit programmers and engineers manufacturing the copy-
protection, there are 1,000 kiddies with a closet who are hacking
away at the copy-protection. ;-)

> So, if this sick plan comes to fruition I'll cancel the satellite and
> RoadRunner, quit what will then by a total joke of an industry (because
> we'll ALL be running M$ products - can't do anything else) and go into
> real estate or something.

Better yet, selling cemetery lots or swindling people out of bird-
seed. People never seem to tire of keeling over and dying or looking
at "all the pretty birds."

[reference urls snipped]

Actually what's going to be scarier is if the US gov't keeps pursuing
its logic. Soon _everything_ will be even worse than you imagined.

---
Dan Chen                 crimsun at email.unc.edu
GPG key:   www.unc.edu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc




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