A deed restriction tells you what kind of mailbox you need and what color to paint your front door, or in the past that colored people and china-men aren't allowed to inhabit the premises unless employed in domestic service. That last one's a direct quote from the deed to my grandfather's house.

It's city ordinances that tell you that you can't have a chicken coop in downtown St. Louis, and that you can't run a junkyard from the 1/8 acre behind your McMansion, and it always has been.

Deed restrictions don't say, "make sure you get a building permit before you build your deck, or your garage, or your pool." The reason we have building permits is so that urban Mr. Fix'it doesn't build a deck that collapses at a party injuring dozens, so that he doesn't build a garage that catches fire and spreads to the neighborhood, and so that the pool isn't a hole in the ground attached to a sensitive wetland into which Suzi Homeowner diligently dumps a 20lb bag of chlorine a week.

All that said, while having actual engineers sign off on actual building projects is a good idea (and don't kid yourself, that pool is a building project), this is a money grab, pure and simple.

First, it's a really bad idea to think that geographical location has anything to do with evolution. Second, the history of human society has been away from migratory behaviors. Third, there's virtually no place on earth where you can move to prevent a disaster striking. And finally, even if there were a place immune from disaster, if large groups of people start migrating because they're hungry or because they think they're about to be hungry, that's going to have catastrophic consequences for the places they more to.

Humans already have so much food they don't know what to do with it all, and we've had more food than we could eat since sometime around 1890. The reason people go hungry has nothing to do with our ability to feed them and everything to do with corruption, transportation, and economics (usually in that order).

So yeah, there will be plenty of food in the Yukon - which is great for the 34,000 people who live there, the question is what do you do with the populations that grew up around what used to be fertile plains and that will likely become expanding deserts?

It gets even more interesting than that. There's two main types of drag, friction drag and pressure drag. Friction drag is generated from air molecules slamming into the object and the fact that very close to the surface of the object the fluid is slowed (known as the no-slip condition). Pressure drag is a bit less intuitive, but it's what makes drafting work in both nascar and cycling. As you speed up an area of low pressure develops behind you as the flow separates at the back of the object. This low pressure literally sucks you backwards. Finally there is a discontinuity in drag at mach 1 when shock waves and the like develop.

At low speeds friction drag tends to dominate and this drag can be reduced by improving the aerodynamics of the leading edge of the object. At high speeds pressure drag tends to dominate and this can be reduced by modifying the trailing end of the object - which why time-trial racing bike helmets are pointed at the back. The other thing you can do is add texture which separates the flow from the object and usually reduces the size of the low pressure bubble behind it, and this is why golf balls are stippled.

One last interesting bit. The angle the shockwave of a supersonic object takes is a function of speed, not shape. If you're a plane designer you want the largest wing area as possible within that shock wave (things projecting into the shock have a nasty tenancy to be ripped off.) So while the top speed of the SR-71 is still technically classified (or at least it was when I took fluid dynamics), by measuring the angle from the nose to the wingtips you can calculate the top design speed remarkably easily.

I think you're right about the meaning of the law, but who knows which way it would go if it were ever brought to court. On the one hand the language of the statute is clear-ish. On the other, Congress and the library of congress have clearly recognized the need for certain exceptions to the anti-circumvention rule, and it's completely unreasonable for every film professor and cell phone wielder to crack the DRM on their own.

It's sort of like legalizing the possession of marijuana but not the growing, sale, or transport. It could be done, but one law is totally incompatible with the other. A court could let it stand despite the affront to common sense it poses, or they could thumb their noses at the legislature (who deserve it).

sorry it reminds me of this: http://www.sweetney.com/sweetney/2007/12/all-i-want-for.html

Eh, I think the image in that story was licensed under cc-by which doesn't prohibit commercial use, unlike the submitter. The family in that case is suing for a whole variety of reasons that have nothing to do with copyright. What this article reminds me of is this

If you don't want to read some guys blog, no less an authority than boing boing covered it. I wonder if they have permission to use those photos?

(This post is brought to you by the office of the commissioner of slashdot. Any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the post without the AndersOSU's express written consent is prohibited.)

Is DMCA the right tool? My understanding is that the safeharbor provision/take down procedure was designed to protect hosts from being liable for user generated content. If a commercial website is using violating copyright, that's something else entierly, and I would think you'd have to look elsewhere. On the other hand, it's not as if the take down procedure hasn't been streached mightily already, so it might fit this too.

no.

here let me paste the whole thing in:

(1) Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

        (i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;
        (ii) Documentary filmmaking;
        (iii) Noncommercial videos.

First you have to fulfill the conditions under (1), i.e that you're breaking DRM "solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment". Then, once you've met that hurdle, you still have to fulfill any one of the three conditions under i-iii. Hence this clause, "and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:"

read it again.

It doesn't say noncommercial videos are ok, it says that if you break DRM solely to incorporate short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, AND it's non-commercial, it's ok.

http://www.copyright.gov/1201/

Yes you are. If you circumvent a copy protection measure, you're violating the DMCA irrespective of whether or not you have a right to copy the protected work.

The DMCA helpfully defines "effective" as "well, we gave it a shot."

(B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see anti-circumvention struck down entirely; but barring a constitutional problem that would have to come from the legislature, not the courts.

Not necessarily, fair-use is codified, and where the law conflicts, it's up to the judiciary to sort it out. I wouldn't hold my breath for SCOTUS to overturn the anti-circumvention statute, but it doesn't have to raise a constitutional issue to be brought up.

According to the DMCA;

(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

The question is, first, whether the DVD or the cell phone is still "protected under this title." You could probably make the case that cell phone OSs no longer are, so if you're distributing jailbreak tools you're off the hook. So you're probably right on that count.

On the other hand, it's not so clear with DVDs, which is odd since the tools are so much more readily available. The LOC's exemption for DVDs is pretty narrow, so you'd have to argue that DeCSS, for example, is primarily designed to crack exempt DVDs. This, I think, is a harder case to make, not least of all because DeCSS was developed long before any exemptions were granted. If you work at a store specializing in preparing educational films, you're probably in good shape giving educators a copy of DeCSS. If, on the other hand, you are a guy with a mirror on the internet that says: this code can crack the protection on any DVD for any purpose, you're probably still in hot water.

Finally, if you're working on cracking AACS and the MPAA gets a hold of you you're definitely SOL.

Unless you're putting together movie clips for commentary, you're still not allowed to break CSS. The library of Congress didn't say you're allowed to break DRM for any fair-use purpose, they said you can break it in order to accomplish the following activities

the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

        (i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;
        (ii) Documentary filmmaking;
        (iii) Noncommercial videos.

You'll note that backing up your movies or shifting the media of your movies is conspicuously absent.