2000/1/28
The Motley Fool tears into DVD industry stupidity. (via Slashdot)
I shouldn't be surprised when dumb things come out of Hollywood. Robert Heinlein once wrote a morality tale about how an overly militaristic society can be a bad thing, and based on that, Hollywood came out with the campy action movie Starship Troopers (i.e., "Beverly Hills 90210 goes to war").
So why is Copy Control so completely frantic to put the genie back into the bottle? Well, two reasons. First, remember that the DVD decryption takes place in PLAYERS, not in copying disks. The Linux people made their own DVD PLAYER. The DVD encryption gave Copy Control a monopoly on DVD players until somebody made a DVD player without them, and they're mad. They made a lot of money licensing their secret recipe to DVD player makers. Now, nobody needs them anymore.
Internet censorship, the Polyester raid, Romance banned: The rising tide of repressive censorship in John Howard's Australia. (The Age)
The technology of fashion: Filipino women using nasal inserts for more Caucasian-looking noses. (Salon)