More On (Moron?) Geniuses
While I was waiting for my turn at the Apple Store, there was a really pissy dude having trouble with an optical drive that had recently been replaced by a Genius. He was having problems ripping (as opposed to burning) DVDs. He attributed the problem to the optical drive, while the Genius put the blame on his ripping software. He's coming back with some of his bum DVD's to prove his point.
After he left, though, the Genius brought up the issue with the Managing Genius. Managing Genius said that they can't help him because ripping DVDs is illegal. It took several members of her staff to insist that ripping DVDs was legal if you ripped, say, home movies.
But they still seemed to be in some sort of legal pickle.
I don't really understand the difference between "burning" and "ripping," but let's face it -- most burning OR ripping is probably used to make illegal copies of copyrighted material. To test his drive, Managing Genius said, they would need to burn something illegally. (It's possible she's wrong about this, seeing as earlier she insisted that ALL ripping is illegal.) The final end-all question thrown out by the Managing Genius for any other Genius to answer:
"What if he's a spy from, like, Sony or something?"
Labels: observations
posted by Dan G @ 12:20 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Yeah. Somebody please explain the difference between burning and ripping. They aren't even verbs sharing the same nature. Why not "burn" and "torch" or something like that? Why rip? It must be in some substantial way different from a burn.
And what is "a rip," when used as a noun?
Help me.
Burning - Taking data from your computer and placing it on a disc.
Ripping - Taking data from a disc and placing it on your computer.
So, when you copy a DVD, you are actually "ripping" the content of the DVD onto your computer, and then "burning" that content onto another disk.
So, a "rip" would be a piece of content taken off of a disc.
As for Dan's question, only "ripping" copyrighted material is illegal. So, if this guy is a spy from Sony, and they help him by ripping a copyrighted DVD, they all are going straight to Hell. End of story.
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