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Why I’m Suing the US Government

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Re: Why I’m Suing the US Government

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all of your body is high water content, and the heat will easily conduct the last little bit. By the time you have to worry about specific non-brain parts being overheated, your overall temperature is such that you're braindead.

Actually, no, you can easily sustain heavy damage to certain organs without being brain-dead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_burn

I should have chosen my words to be more focused, I suppose. You can damage certain organs. You will not be cooking deep internal organs with an unshielded microwave. Not without cooking everything else.

Pretend my original comment ended with "Past that, you basically fell in a fire and it doesn't matter what is heating you." Is there anything wrong with that? Or the rejection of the idea that bone marrow is at risk?

Re: Why I’m Suing the US Government

#224
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does your wife charge as a therapist? Everyone needs to make money. HN is a weird place to bemoan prices when many here are seeking unicorn valuations while disrupting industry. Everyone hates laws until its in their best interest to have said laws.

She barely takes home minimum wage and she is self-employed. Most of her peers are in a similar position. It is not a vocation you get in to for the money. Edit: A common problem in her sector, and other therapy sectors, is that all the recognised diagnosis and treatment systems get bought by the likes of Pearson and other big technical publishers who will demand recurring payments to use the system. For example Owls…

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Re: Why I’m Suing the US Government

#225
post #216

Can someone do a tl;dr? This is upvoted very highly but it's assuming a ton of context I don't have. All I get is that someone wants to be able to tinker, but today that necessitates breaking some legally-enforced protections on the product. That's a valid point but I don't see how it's gotten to 1000 points, so I think I'm missing something. What's the lawsuit? What's the egregious use case?

DRM. I assume you know of it, and that it's massively hated. It's "copy protection" software mechanisms that is meant to control how you use and copy media that you have. It's a pain. Nominally, it's there to prevent you from copying the media in illegal ways, but it often also prevents you from doing perfectly legal things with it.

However, it's not just a pain to be worked around. In the US, since the DMCA section 1201 became effective in 1998, it is illegal to try to work around DRM. Mostly.

Every couple of years, the Library of Congress gets to make a list of exceptions to 1201, of specific situations where you can work around DRM without it being illegal. Most recently was October 28, 2015.

Many people still objected to section 1201 on principal that it prevents tinkering, but the Library of Congress' list of exceptions has generally kept people placated.

As for context of their specific case: I'm not totally sure. User csydas suggested that this case became possible because of certain exceptions being removed from the latest version of the list (then some time for the EFF to compile the case). This seams reasonable to me, but to know for sure would involve legal details about the case that we don't have yet.

Re: Why I’m Suing the US Government

#226
post #193
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear much of the same. I don't think I've ever seen Snapchat mentioned here without an oogle of 40 somethings complaining about how useless and unintuitive it is.

We appreciate your defending the HN community against spurious putdowns, but adding another spurious putdown is not a great way to go about it.

I'm really apprehensive about replying to this because I don't feel like what I said was spurious (and I feel like this comment might have the same unintended message as the first) in any way when I try to recall[1] the threads[2] I've read[3] and participated[4] in. How should I less spuriously describe my experiences here?

[0] (This is only here because I wanted to make sure spurious meant "false" and not "fast or quick") http://www.dictionary.com/browse/spurious

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12039107 (2-3 negative, spurious comments about snapchat)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075336 (about 33-33-33 of completely dismissive, completely bewildered, and then simply trying as hard as they can to explain to the previous two groups)

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778392 (I honestly didn't want to continue doing this simply to explain my perception)

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606984 (This was actually my first comment on Hacker News :) Hopefully this one won't be my last...)

edited formatting of the links

Re: Why I’m Suing the US Government

#227

Good. My wife is a speech therapist and uses a system that is designed to help people who have had strokes regain their voice. It comprises a piece of software that comes with a "specially calibrated USB microphone". The microphone is actually a Samson laptop USB mic that had the voice improvement systems logo stuck on it. The system came with lots of legal warnings about not copying, not telling unqualified people a…

Would be easier to do a hex search on the binaries, find the device id of the old mic, and patch in the device id of the new mic. I'd be surprised if they had bothered to obfuscate the id in any way.

I don't know whether it still works in Windows 10, but you may be able to tweak an .inf file to map the driver to the vendor ID/product ID combination (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff...)

That also may require playing with settings that require drivers to be signed (http://www.alphr.com/blogs/2012/08/06/getting-older-drivers-...)

Re: Why I’m Suing the US Government

#228

If you're in this thread to support this EFF-backed action, I would strongly consider donating to a cause you support: https://supporters.eff.org/donate/

Also be sure to click their Amazon affiliate link before buying stuff, it's an easy way to give for free.

Re: Why I’m Suing the US Government

#230
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, if I am a content consumer that has legitimate access to content streams from two different sources, why am I not allowed to multiplex those streams in a way that is useful to me? This is not about Twitter, or CNN, but the users ability to consume content that they have legitimate access to in the way that they choose. Replace twitter in this example with the ability to feed an audio stream into a speech recognit…

Which is why I said circumventing copy protection shouldn't be illegal. You should be able to make that video and use it for your own purposes. My problem is with Step 2 of the article's hypothetical: instead of feeding the video into a speech-to-text machine for your own use, you put it on Twitter where Twitter makes a bunch of money off something that was mostly CNN's work.

I don't think you understood what his product does, it's a FPGA to defeat HDCP in realtime and then adds various overlays to the picture, e.g. a live twitter feed in the right corner.
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