SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the currently-we-have-no-digital-rights dept.
From the EFF press release:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the U.S. government today on behalf of technology creators and researchers to overturn onerous provisions of copyright law that violate the First Amendment.
...
Ostensibly enacted to fight music and movie piracy, Section 1201 has long served to restrict people's ability to access, use, and even speak out about copyrighted materials—including the software that is increasingly embedded in everyday things. The law imposes a legal cloud over our rights to tinker with or repair the devices we own, to convert videos so that they can play on multiple platforms, remix a video, or conduct independent security research that would reveal dangerous security flaws in our computers, cars, and medical devices. It criminalizes the creation of tools to let people access and use those materials.Copyright law is supposed to exist in harmony with the First Amendment. But the prospect of costly legal battles or criminal prosecution stymies creators, academics, inventors, and researchers. In the complaint filed today in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., EFF argues that this violates their First Amendment right to freedom of expression.
Section 1201 of the US Copyright act restricts the Circumvention of Technological Measures: more commonly known as Digital Restrictions Management.
I have always hated how DRM allows copyright holders to restrict what I do with my personal property: while being backed by the force of law.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday July 22 2016, @03:46PM
In Star Trek Voyager, I was always confused as to why the holographic doctor could not be copied. I just assumed hollywood propaganda.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday July 22 2016, @04:23PM
Yes, and more. They're also pandering to our desire for individuality and uniqueness. The transporter is possibly the biggest underused and misunderstood magical technology in the show. If it's so easy to transform objects, including living beings, into a "beam", and rebuild them elsewhere, it is also easy to create copies. Easier in fact, as the step of destroying the original can be skipped. They skirt around the edges of that with episodes in which transporter accidents do create a copy of someone, but mostly they ignore those possibilities.
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Friday July 22 2016, @05:05PM
My understanding of Star Trek's transporter technology, it was related/based/dependent on the replicator technology.
If my understanding is correct, then anytime the transporters are used, copies are made while the 'original[1]' is destroyed...regardless of what is being transported, including the 'can't be copied, holographic doctor. (at one point, he gained the ability to go on 'away missions' alongside the rest of the crew, using the armband, IIRC)
[1] the 'original' could already be a copy...of a copy, of a copy(ad nauseum, depending on how many times they had used a transporter)
Someone correct me if I have this wrong...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 22 2016, @05:37PM
Replicator tech was based on transporter technology, and transporter tech originally could only transport inanimate objects successfully.
By the time of TNG however it could be used to 'accidentally clone' individuals given the proper atmospheric feedback, as discovered by Thomas Riker (William T. Riker's clone) who got trapped on a planet they left for... 10+ years as a result of it?
He finally got killed off either in DS9/Voyager or in Star Trek Online sadly.
As to the Doctor from voyager being un-replicatable. I believe it was stated that was due to the use of the neural fiber packs that made voyager special compared to the previous isolinear computing systems, and the fact that his 'safeties' has been turned off, allowing him to grow beyond his original programming in a way no other holographic simulation had the opportunity to.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday July 23 2016, @03:36AM
Yes, the Thomas Riker episode was the very one I was thinking of. There is also an Original Series episode in which a transporter malfunction creates two Captain Kirks, but with their minds split so that one is super nice but unable to be decisive, and the other is decisive but has no self-control or manners.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday July 22 2016, @07:30PM
Perhaps the replicator could copy dead things, but not living things, because of some treknobabble counterpart to the no-cloning theorem in quantum mechanics [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Saturday July 23 2016, @04:44AM
That would explain it... except they allow teleportation: which the no-cloning theorem prohibits.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 23 2016, @07:43AM
The no-cloning theorem does not disallow teleportation. [wikipedia.org] It only disallows duplication.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday July 22 2016, @05:06PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 22 2016, @05:07PM
And wasn't it the Game of Thrones people who said (originally) that pirating wasn't hurting them, it was actually helping spread the word and get them customers.
Then someone got their hand slapped and the opposite was said.
I pirated BSG (the new series) (posting anon, in order to protect myself, my wife and kids, the grand kids i don't have yet and all their off-spring for eternity) and liked it so much i started buying the sets (basically to say 'I LIKE this kind of shit.... give me more!!!).
If i hadn't pirated it, i'd probably never have bought it and they'd have gotten no dinaro$ from me.
I was forced to pirate a movie called "How to get ahead in business without even trying" because i couldn't find anywhere to buy it.
THEY (the guys in the head office who 'know all') just don't get it: THEY know nothing, Jon Snow.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday July 22 2016, @05:10PM
I must be forgetting if that came up. Did it have to do with the mobile emitter?
On the other hand, Riker can be copied [wikia.com].
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday July 22 2016, @08:50PM
They never really discussed it. But often the dilemma of the episode revolved around the Doctor doing something dangerous.
The implication was that if something happened, whey would not have a doctor.