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#2 is what I do using Mythtv.

#3 will only work in Windows, but only work poorly, as Microsoft's DRM prevents them from fully functioning.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2006/11/8300.ars

http://www.geektonic.com/2009/05/cablecard-tuner-hack-for-diy-vista-and.html

It certainly would be fraud; but I have the unpleasant suspicious that it'd be the sort of fraud that is just white-collar enough to work for a surprisingly length of time. Consider the Blue Hippo case that hit slashdot a couple of weeks back. Those guys stiffed ~30,000 people, through the US mail, which means that virtually all of the stiffings are probably felonies, and the FTC is just now getting around to doing some investigating and sending harshly worded letters.

Or, more to the point, Look what just hit Arstechnica...

These pricks may or may not actually be a scam; but a scammer would have no trouble emulating that sort of look and feel, and (even more so if there are "legitimate" operations of the type floating around) could evade shutdown for a decent while.

The unexciting news is that we are all still here, and (barring a meteor strike) we will still be here when the LHC reaches 7.5TeV very late next year.

So it seems they are waiting for late next year.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/lhc-sets-new-energy-record-full-power-still-year-away.ars

The lowest energy supersymmetric particles are expect to reside in the 1TeV range, which is just barely in the detectable range of the Tevatron and the current LHC operating energy. But, to observe these particles, the LHC would have to stay at that energy for some time—of the order of many months—to generate a statistically significant sample of collisions.

Instead, the plan is to continue to increase the energy until ~3.5TeV is reached. At this energy, it will take considerably less time to generate a statistically significant sample. So, by not taking data now, the LHC staff are really saving themselves some time, as well as widening the net for higher-energy particles.

Is September 22, 2009 (and here) recent enough for you? It does say they plan to use the technology in their own products, but Microsoft has said that lots of times and not followed through. They are definitely killing the product line though.

I think you're looking for this. Not all browsing is done from smartphones.

Well, I know, I discussed this before, and I now have some more links on the flaws of "shareholder value":
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/599009962631/m/750009712041
http://www.aom.pace.edu/amle/AMLEVolume4Issue1pp75-91.pdf
http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~christ/vfecon_asee2008.pdf

Yes, actually:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2009/08/hands-on-kde-43-delivers-a-social-desktop.ars
http://www.kdenews.org/2009/10/09/social-desktop-winners

Since most academic research groups are not overly flush with cash, the authors put these results in terms that someone holding the purse strings would understand. It terms of computing power per cost, the PS3 delivers 50,000 LUPS/dollar, the super high performance IBM QS20/QS21 runs at 3500 LUPS/dollar, while a quadcore desktop machine is capable of putting out 17,000 LUPS/dollar.

However, there seems to be the issue with the memory though:

The researchers point out that LB simulations take a large amount of RAM and, when moving to a three-dimensional simulation, the amount of RAM will become very important. Since the PS3 has only 256 MB of RAM, even moderately sized 3D grids could end up being written and read into swap memory, which would be a significant performance bottleneck.

Didn't you hear? IBM have effectively killed the Cell.

End of the line for IBM's Cell
IBM has revealed that the Cell processor line is an evolutionary dead-end. Some of the ideas behind it will live on, but the Cell family itself will not
Ars Technica

Haven't we proven enough of our theories about this world that we know for certain things are stable to a known degree?

Not to be contrarian, but we haven't proven any of our theories at all.

First, you do not know what is occurring in every place in the universe. No number of experiments will ever prove a theory to be true because you cannot perform the test at every conceivable place in the universe. This is why Francis Bacon stated that the proper scientific method should be falsification. You only have to find one place where a theory comes up short to prove it wrong, but time constraints say that you can never prove that it is right. This is what modern science is based upon.

More importantly to his post, however, is the fact that we have no deductive reason to assume that the future will replicate the past. The GP says

Pointing out that it's worked before is just begging the question

He is referring to the problem of induction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

This is not "fancy footwork," it is a many centuries old philosophical problem brought up by David Hume. You cannot state "X happened in the past, therefor it will happen in the future" without using "X happened in the past" as your reason for believing "X will continue to happen."

Essentially, you cannot prove induction correct without being inductive. "The ice I've touched has been cold, therefor all ice is cold" is not deductive reasoning.

This is, for all intents and purposes, a genuine criticism of the scientific method. "All ice I've ever touched is cold" may be true, but "All ice is cold" is completely false. http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/03/turing-water-into-very-hot-ice-very-very-quickly.ars http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKN1621607620070516

This is the sort of thinking that science employs, however. Now, his point is not that science is not useful, nor is it that science is wrong. He is simply stating that inductive thinking is programmed into us, and that there is no good deductive logic which led us to it. You see neither causality nor time, these concepts exist inside of you -- i.e. Science is a byproduct of being an ape, not a byproduct of logic itself.

That argument actually has some truth, see: Here.

But in France, you are responsible for securing your own network, see: Here. Wonder how long till that migrates across the pond? ACTA anyone? Maybe, whats in that is secret because, you know, trade agreements are of national security...

Windows 7 Starter Edition won't let you run more than 3 windows at a time

You really have no idea what you're talking about, do you? Or else, given your posts here, you're intentionally spreading FUD. First, comparison with the Starter edition is at least misleading. In the USA the most usual versions are going to be Home Premium or higher. Unless Granny has a tiny netbook (which I wouldn't foist on any of my elderly relatives), you'd have to bend over backwards to get your grandmother a Starter Edition machine. Second, your assertion about the 3 application limit is just plain untrue. Go educate yourselfa bit before posting FUD.

Ars gives a short guide to locking down Facebook http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/08/meshing-social-networking-and-privacy-on-facebook.ars but once someone else has posted and tagged you via their account then all bets are off as your life good, bad or ugly is there for all to see.

They already DID produce it. Well, most of it, with a few exceptions.

Come on they did warn us when Google released it... :-P http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/microsoft-google-chrome-frame-makes-ie-less-secure.ars

If anyone is interested, I've seeded this idea on the: isoHunt Forums as well. It got off to a rocky start there but it is a specialized community well suited to developing this stance.

Also, the very first place I posted this stance began in this: This article over on ArsTechnica. I've also sent emails to The Pirate Bay and TorrentFreak to continue to sow the seeds of discontent.

Everyone? Where's the evidence for that? Most iPhone users I know spend more of their time using Safari versus appstore stuff.

Here's one from a little site you might know: "No iPhone SDK Means No iPhone Killer Apps" and one from a site with a better track record regarding Apple analysis : "iPhone (web) apps emerging in spite of missing SDK" ("As negative feelings towards the web application system for the iPhone cool down, a few applications are emerging.")

I've got a good sized chunk of offline native applications on my iPhone myself, don't know about other users.

I'm trying to figure out if I'll get a "woosh". Can you cite anything about China's once booming recording industry that's now died? The facts are that pirates (and I'm not one) spend more on music than non-pirates. Here are some citations:
http://www.switched.com/2009/11/03/music-pirates-also-buy-more-tunes-than-others-poll-finds/
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Pirate-Fileshare-Music-Download-Illegal,news-5001.html
http://www.mixx.com/stories/9014955/music_pirates_spend_more_on_tunes_than_non_pirates_finds_poll
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=27090916
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/11/02/music-pirates-spend-more-on-music-than-their-legal-law-abiding/
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-tons-more-music-than-average-folks.ars

In the US it is generally known that almost everyone speeds and have for 80 years or so

In some places where it's obvious that the speed limit for the road conditions are way too low. Especially during the '70s when the national speed limit was 55 and had been reduced from 70 or higher in most places. here in town I notice that people drive well UNDER the limit most of the time; the speeding is mostly on straight interstates.

Law enforcement has been "cracking down" and imposing draconian penalties on speeders since the beginning of the automobile era.

A hundred dollar fine is a draconian penalty? When I'm travelling I notice that the speeders are all driving Hummers and Escalades and the like -- to these people, a hundred bucks is NOTHING.

Are you trolling, joking, or just ignorant?

The Irony of you using a memory hungry OS and complaining about an application that diplays MEDIA is clearly lost on you.

Personally I want to access my information as quickly as possible.

For the uninitiated: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1298/sc750a.html

Why would you ever take that case OUT of use?
It's perfect.

How much protection does the average consumer need from marketing at this point? You're sliding down a slippery slope when you say that reading the fine print (which in the case of these offers isn't exactly that fine, there are various call outs all over these pages indicating that you are signing up for a service, that you get a month free and then pay money thereafter) is just too onerous for the average consumer and that the government must intervene to protect them. When offering something up like this is the company expected to just put up a big banner at the top saying, "HEY, WE ARE CHARGING YOU FOR SOMETHING IF YOU CLICK YES!" before even trying to sell the person on the product?

People like to say that they didn't know what they were getting into when they clicked through on these things. Well, how did you not know when it is spelled out in great detail on the page?

It's not that, actually. It's the scammy places where you buy your product, then they pop up another page that says "Thank you for shopping at Merchant.com". But scroll down, in fine print, it says "We also signed you up for a $10/month voicemail service. If you don't want this service, you must phone within 24 hours." or other crap like you must click a tiny link "No, I don't want this service" instead of the big shiny "Continue" button presented higher up. Of course, the merchant and the service split the $10/month that you've now signed up for, and the "continue" button serves as "confirmation" that you agreed to the service.

The even scammier sites sign you up for stuff like "messaging products" that charge your phone bill $10/month, knowing it's practically impossible to get your phone company to remove the charge, or prevent future charges, other than changing your phone number. This often plays out in those free sweepstakes offers that people often sign up for - win a free product! or other crap.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/cram-this.ars

I suppose the merchants use it as a way for you to get 10% off coupons and such for the next time you shop, too.

It's a play on a meme concerning Glenn Beck. Here is some back story to it if you're really interested. The most recent episode of South Park (Which you can legally stream online here if you're interested.) does a spoof of is as well.

It's about pay-per-view.

Yeah, that's what they said about the Broadcast Flag. Most people didn't believe them then, and rightfully so.

I modded my xbox (xbox 1) and since doing so haven't bought any games for it. It's just so much easier than buying them.

I also used to pirate loads of PC games, it was just so easy. Then Steam came out and it became easier to pay for them than pirate them, so now I do that. I suspect most pirates aren't evil thieves, just lazy (thieves).

Make it easier to pay for than pirate in terms of pure time (game-price/hourly-wage vs time-to-pirate) and we won't pirate it, then you can lower costs as more people pay (and lower costs a while after the release date) and you'll get more sales, and then less pirates, and so on.
This isn't one of those stupid theoretical "just make it free, man, and then I'll pay for it" arguments, this is backed up by the fact, works in practice, and is slowly changing the game industry for the better.

Maybe MS doesn't patent troll, per se, but they have certainly done some bullying using the patent system.

I'd think the use of BitTorrent for things like World of Warcraft updates, for about 5 years, is more validation than someone hosting a pay-to-join tracker for legal content.

Aren't there already totally free trackers for legal content (like Linux ISOs, etc)?

Is it backed by Google? I thought it was an engineer's "20%" project.

Objective C, which has recently introduced many of the features you admire in Go, is backed by Apple, but has never taken off outside the MacVerse.

Users are illiterate, for the most part. Their computer already talks too much to them and most of the time has nothing interesting to say, so they reckon it's safe to ignore it all the time.

That being said, *which* default password are we talking about? Which authentication method is ssh using on an iPhone? Arstechnica for a similar incident suggests that it's Apple who is setting default passwords, not the distributors of the jailbreaking software. Is this accurate?

Yes, see for example http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/03/rick-rolled-to-child-porn-youre-a-pedophile-says-fbi.ars from about a year ago or so. The FBI did exactly that and then raided and arrested people who clicked on the link. However, there was the slight saving grace in that no one outside the FBI knew about the link while the honeypot operation was running. To anyone who clicked on it it would have come across as a simply non-functioning webpage. So there's no reason for someone to use the link in question. However, someone in the FBI with clearance about the project could easily use this to frame someone.

It's new because the prosecutors are actually being reasonable about it. Remember this story from last year?

CP is disgusting but we shouldn't lose our freedom over it..

Oh right. Probably someone saw that story too and decided to have a little fun with the same gaping security hole too.

Ars technica reported a similar case in the Netherlands about a week ago. A teenage "hacker" replaced the wallpaper with one showing an alert that told the user to give him 5 euros for instructions to remove the "virus". Full article

Ars recently had a story about how Paramount was using Star Trek as an example of how piracy is out of control.
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/11/paramount-pictures-over-five-million-copies-of-star-trek-stolen.ars

Poor darlings. They only grossed $400M... at the box office alone.
http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&id=startrek11.htm

But Paramount cry poor. Their executives must be living out of dumpsters on their own lot. Well, let's we the public make a deal:

1. The public shall stop downloading torrents so long as
2. The studios make them available online immediately without DRM for a reasonable price AND I MEAN REASONABLE.. $400M suggests you're milking it *
3. The public backlash is being fueled by hatred at the erosion of fair use rights. Like the Sono Bono Copyright Extension act which has stopped works owned by filthy rich corporations from entering the public domain. So if Congress repeals that glutinous piece of legislation (and Disney cedes the rights to Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh to the public domain) then we'll have a deal. **
4. And stop bribing politicians too. Lobbyists who exchange cash or favours or "donations" should go to jail as the people who receive them.

* = and don't pull any of your Hollywood Accounting scams to try and "tell us you made a loss" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting )
** = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Here
Let's just say that BlueBeat is an interesting company.

'Including those that have been "stolen" by their *living* authors? That would be the most radical public domain position I've ever heard. I would support "Death + zero days" or "incentives to release to PD" or some such, but I can't imagine forcing things into the public domain for living authors.'

Actually, the current situation in the UK is that the copyright on sound recordings expires after 50 years (quite a few labels here have legitimately released material from the 50s and earlier, often doing a better job of claening up and packaging the recordings than the original copyright holder). We'd expect this to start happening to the Beatles in around 2013, but the music industry's tame EU politicians are in the process of deciding otherwise:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/eu-extends-musical-copyrights-by-20-years-eyes-movies-next.ars

I found a screenshot of Doom 5.

People were excited when they said Duke Nukem Forever had been ported to HTML 5 <canvas>, but man, Doom 5 uses plain old HTML 3.2! (Though I'm fairly sure Carmack is ashamed of the fact that the highly broken Microsoft HTML generator was used.) Clearly more impressive, even when the engine may be a bit outdated by now!

Hear hear. I've been reading this story over on Ars the last couple of days (here) and the title of the article on Ars is very appropriate.

I've cut kdawson a lot of slack in the past, sometimes just shaking my head and just letting the detractors do what they do, but this title is just fucking wrong. Have you seen what BlueBeat is trying to pull off legally here? Another Ars link to explain their confusing legal defense. This is under the same parent company who threatened to sue a bunch of multinationals because supposedly their DRM schemes weren't compliant with the DMCA and tried to get them all to license MRT's product.

kdawson...what the hell? The title is wrong at best, you cherry-picked the article to frame this so that there is some ambiguity here and make it seem like EMI is the big bad picking on the little company. Seriously, this whole article is trying to stir shit up. BlueBeat is not the good guy here. Let me be clear that I'm no supporter of what the RIAA does or generally the music companies behind it. This time though, EMI is not in the wrong here. Whoever is running BlueBeat seems to be fucking insane and that's how the story should be framed.

Hear hear. I've been reading this story over on Ars the last couple of days (here) and the title of the article on Ars is very appropriate.

I've cut kdawson a lot of slack in the past, sometimes just shaking my head and just letting the detractors do what they do, but this title is just fucking wrong. Have you seen what BlueBeat is trying to pull off legally here? Another Ars link to explain their confusing legal defense. This is under the same parent company who threatened to sue a bunch of multinationals because supposedly their DRM schemes weren't compliant with the DMCA and tried to get them all to license MRT's product.

kdawson...what the hell? The title is wrong at best, you cherry-picked the article to frame this so that there is some ambiguity here and make it seem like EMI is the big bad picking on the little company. Seriously, this whole article is trying to stir shit up. BlueBeat is not the good guy here. Let me be clear that I'm no supporter of what the RIAA does or generally the music companies behind it. This time though, EMI is not in the wrong here. Whoever is running BlueBeat seems to be fucking insane and that's how the story should be framed.

Since psychoacoustic is explicitly mentioned in regard to audio compression tech (like MP3) I think he just invented a term for "I ripped it to MP3"

Actually, the Bluebeat guys did something a bit more tricky. They compressed the music as MP3 (whch I guess is psychoacoustic simulation - after all, the MP3 was compressed by using psychoacoustic principles to reduce the data contained, producing a simulation of the original). But the trick they're using to get around copyright law was to embed images into it, turning it into an "audio-visual" work. There is a separation, because AV works (think movies) are one entity - you cannot copyright the sound part of a movie separately from the moving images part.

Of course, that defense must fail, otherwise Hollywood would be using music with aplomb instead of having to get licenses to it when they incorporate it into a movie or TV show. Many older programs are tied up from home viewing because licenses don't allow home video distribution, and are often edited to replace licensed works.

THIS is the sort of piracy that the RIAA (and member companies) should fight against. THIS is the sort of piracy that I think any intelligent human being opposes. THIS is the sort of copyright violation that the laws were written to combat.

Ironically, those Bluebeat guys are the ones arguing for mandatory DRM and suing all the music stores for using "inadequate DRM". A judge finds a company trying to promote their "unbreakable" DRM for copyright infringement.

It's not that rare. Many cellphones are going this route nowadays as well as the Mac OS X dashboard widgets and Mac OS X apps. Then of course, there are the gtk javascript bindings.

Javascript is finding itself in more and more places nowadays.

despite the fact that the human eye doesn't see it as particularly distinct from its neighbors

Color is culturally based. It's not so much that the human eye doesn't distinguish the color, but that our culture doesn't treat it as a distinct color. For example, Russians have distinct words for light blue and dark blue, segregating them into distinct colors where English speakers tend to just see 'blue' and not distinguish as much on hue.

There have been several studies about how perception is influenced by language. It's not that the eyeball works differently in different cultures, rather that the arbitrary lines our different cultures have between regions of color space determine how we define various colors.

In Newton's case, it's possible that Indigo was a separate, well-defined color region that we've since lost in common usage. The color still exists, we can still distinguish it as unique when placed between it's neighbors, but on it's own we'd probably just call it either blue or purple. I'm not suggesting that Wikipedia is wrong about the history of ROY G BIV and Newton's fondness of the number seven, just that language defines our perception of color simply because in English, we have common words for those colors. Seven is pretty arbitrary, but so is three (RGB), four (CMYK), or five (Hexachrome). It all depends on why you're categorizing colors. This isn't even getting into gamuts or color theory. The human eye is based on red, green, and blue receptors, but that's just a physical adaptation to allow us to see all colors in our visible spectrum. We're more sensitive to some colors over others, but there's no reason we couldn't see indigo as a distinct color other than that in our culture it's not all that common to distinguish it as separate. There's no reason there should be six arbitrary colors in the rainbow rather than seven, eight, ten, or twenty.

Take teal, for instance, another rarely-used color. Some people will call it blue, others green. Still others will just call it teal. Our language doesn't change the color itself, just how we categorize it.

The idea that there are only seven distinct colors (or any arbitrary number) is silly when you take language out of it and just apply numerical values to colors. What color is #fc0? Yellow? Orange? Orangish-yellow? What is the exact wavelength of 'red'? What color is at 450nm? (Hint: it's somewhere between yellow and green). The seven traditional colors of the rainbow are all about 20-40 nm apart except yellow and green, and red and orange. There really should be a color in between, and in some cultures there are.

Fair price is a misleading question. The real question is whether they are pricing their product in the best way to maximise profits and I strongly suspect that they are not. I pay about the cost of an album every month to a company that lets me rent DVDs (two at once, as fast as I can watch them and post them back) and stream an unlimited number of TV shows and films. In comparison with this, an album seems stupidly expensive. According to iTunes, I haven't listened to any of my albums more than 128 times and very few more than 30 times. There aren't any that I've been listening to with 100% of my attention, so in terms of money per time spent entertained, music is much more expensive than video.

At the current prices, I'll buy 2-6 albums per year. If you priced an album at $1-2 then it would be an impulse purchase. If I heard a song I liked on Radio Paradise, then I'd buy the rest of the album to see if I liked it. Perhaps I'm unusual, but I suspect that I'm no. The cost of producing music has dropped a lot in the last few decades, but the cost of buying it has not. Meanwhile, the cost of other forms of entertainment has dropped a lot and music seems proportionally much more expensive. I've read a couple of studies indicating that around 5-15/track is the optimum price for maximising profit when selling music but the music industry seems to think that 99/track is the right price (which is fine) and that they should expect the same number of sales that they'd get with 5/track (which is completely unreasonable) and then blame piracy for their failure to adapt.

Coincidentally, Ars published quite a nice round up on this subject today.

It supports more sites, and protocold. Like Gopher.
Let's see IE7 do that!

Can we start a "50Mbps for every child" right here in the US, and maybe get some decent internet?

I'm serious. It works.

You haven't really thought this through, have you? Don't feel too bad; most people take to glib over-simplifications about data deidentification.

Maybe this will help.

What has me puzzled is why Nokia hasn't got any commercials out for it's N900. It runs a Debian Linux variant, and runs full flash right now, and it's [sic] hardware is superior to the Droids in some ways. Why they aren't shouting about it from the rooftops, I don't know.

Well, the N900 doesn't seem to be intended to be a mass-market device. I can't find the exact quotes at the moment, but I think the Maemo people are discouraging ordinary consumers from buying the N900. It's definitely step four out of five for making a mass-market device, and not a mass-market device itself.

Nevertheless, they do have a few ads for the N900.

If anything in this article is news its that its China and not some other country. Hopefully they are made better than most Chinese crap.

You know that the iPhone and iPod as well as Dell and Hewlett Packard PCs, Motorola and Nokia cell phones, Sony PlayStation 2 and PSP and the Nintendo Wii are made in China?

Here is the iPhone supply chain. The design of the phone and CPU is done in the US, the CPU and most chips are made in Singapore, the rest of the parts are made in Taiwan, and the assembly is in the PRC.

Next year, Intel with start producing chips from a 65nm fab facility in China.

TFA sucks and sucks hard. Ars Technica has a far better article. The suit is over, it started two years ago and the telco lost.