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The creative talent in Hollywood (please don't snicker) should find that the chance to make art they think is meaningful and appreciated by others is reward enough.

Slow down??? That would assume that people are adopting digital tv in the first place. In fact survey's have shown that digital tv is catching on at a snail's pace. The reason? The cost and the benefit. In most areas (mine included) the digital cable is extremely expensive (about 75% more than regular cable), and what does it give me? Slightly better picture quality? Really, I'd be better to invest my money in a better TV set than digital cable, especially for the small ammounts of TV I watch (firefly, NBC news, CSI).

Not to mention that Digital Cable is more expensive (at least in my neighborhood) than the dish. Plus the dish offers a slightly better option given it has more channels for people who care about those things.

Personally I doubt that digital tv in general will be very slow to catch on.

The GATOS project is very mature and all the Linux video drivers and TV capture features work flawlessly.

Combine that with a 120G harddrive and I never need to remember to set the VCR to record West Wing! :)

Who thinks that he got cut because he pleged his money towards EFF on "The weakest link".
Somebody in hollywood gets pissed off, cuts his scenes, and his career distroyed forever!
eh?

That doesn't irritate me nearly as much as the frequent references to "chat room posts." They really need to hire a geek to vet their scripts or something. Hell, I'd do it for free if they just let me punch their marketing director every time he came out with a Columbiney, "Did video games drive this child to kill?" kind of promo.

"Ripped from the headlines: Did this TV show drive a geek to kill?"

I am a Worldcom employee, and here's my question, that I cannot seem to find an answer to anywhere. What does this mean to employees? I find lots about investors, bankers, and bond-holders, but very little about employees.

By the same token, if someone doesn't want to be linked to, then by all means, don't link to them. Link to their competitor. If they have no competitor, then link to something that they probably disagree with, as in the example below.

With all due respect to NPR, I think their policy is shortsighted and arrogant. However, I will not link to NPR, but to their competition instead.

How the hell can I read an article with so many links?

Let's ignore the rhetoric and examine the facts:

• she is overweight
• she wants to ban all firearms, but has hired bodyguards that carry concealed guns (you know how rough that Greenwhich village is!)
• she gets more pussy than all of slashdot combined.

Actaully, the tentative title of the new NBC show Watching Ellie was originally going to be something along the lines of "22 minutes". I can't find my source fo r that info right now. Anyhow, they were told that they couldn't name it that since 1/2 hours shows in the USA now take less than 22 minutes and they didn't want viewers to have this pointed out to them either by naming the show "21 minutes" or by going ahead with the "22 minutes" title and then dealing with an uproar when people noticed that it was in fact not a 22 minute long show.

Thank you... as much as I love debian and linux in general you've finally put me into that category of people who think the support problem in the linux world is arrogance.

This [and the last post] is the only time I've gotten a bad attitude about this problem [or any other problems].

Once again though, it's not the 'root' floppy it asks for, it's the rescue floppy it asks for. Just to check I've burned the CD again 3 times all 3 times a different way.

But please, let's be fair. Your attempt wasn't honest enough as it comes no where close to my problem. I'm sorry that you didn't help and that I've offended you because I told you it didn't.

No where though did I resort to name calling. You are the one who added the "why don't you try again after you've passed puberty?". This is civil conversation? And for what reason did you deduce I've not passed puberty?

That's simply childish. I felt belittled by the fact that you acted as if you were supreme computer god [Nick Burns is that you?] because you've used debian since way back when, and I'm nothing because I haven't.

Thanks.

..is that they recommend to do all this "...with free implementations of win32 (Wine)...".

This is plainly hilarious.

I know that cygwin will compile under Wine. But using it under Wine to run dpkg ... the idea is just beyond my mind!

Let me quote the whole parragraph:

This port is meant to run on any win32 implementation. Some win32
implementations are free (wine, reactos), others are not (microsoft).
free implementations are of course recommended and cygwin is proven
to work fine on wine.

Who had the idea in the first place? Terry Gillian? Pratchet? Benny Hill? Jay Leno? Chiquito de la Calzada?

I would have like to have had the chance to participate in this discussion, but I was asleep :(

If there is anyone still reading, let me ask you this. Do you watch TV? If so, is there anything that you like to watch religiously? Enterprise? Coronation Street? Friends back before it Jumped the Shark? And did you ever go out and forget to tape it, then ring your mom or your mate, ask them to tape it? Well unless they can break into your house, say goodbye to that.

Because DRM will also apply to TV. Programs will be copy protected. So you will be able to tape a first-run episode of The Sopranos, but only if you don't watch it at the same time, and you will only be able to watch it once. Or that old Friends episode, that's been on loads of times, so you will be able to tape it and watch it however many times you want, but don't expect to be able to lend it to your girlfriend's dad so he can watch it too.

This is not stuff that will affect geeks only. We need to be telling people about this, people outside of the napsterriffic MP3 downloaders.

Here's an idea. Find out your TD/MP/Congressman/Tribal leader's favourite programme. I'm sure that this sort of person regularly has to get someone to tape the News to see if theyre on it, or Bull Island to see if they're on that. Then tell them that they will not be able to do that within 3 years.

Then see how long this shit lasts...

Ummm, wrong? Shrug, they can "talk" about putting something like this together all they want, but the WebTVs I've seen for sale are just for web surfing.

OK, then you're wrong too. Look here for info on a device that receives DirectTV signals, records video, cruises the web, and displays interactive TV content. Maybe it's not everything that was in the article, but it certainly isn't just for surfing. Especially the interactive TV part. Have you ever seen enhanced TV programming? I don't think you have. I did the NBA on NBC last year, and it rocked, if I do say so myself. Live stats during the game, player profiles, in-game chat with other users watching the same TV program. Go back to the NBC ETV link to see about a dozen shows that made the "light of day". Once you get a WebTV+ box, you can also watch E! 24 hours enhanced, datelineNBC enhanced, Comedy Central enhanced, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, 24 hour Game Show network, etc, etc. Is that enough "light of day" for you?

Ummm, so what? It still can't do anything mentioned in CmdrTaco's fantasy.

"So what"? The most successful convergence platform ever gets a "so what"? I already proved that the WebTV platform can do some of the stuff in the article by itself, and act as a GUI/controller for the rest, and that it's already in a million homes and costs way less than it could, and your reply is "so what?"? If that was flame bait, then let me just take the bait real quick:

One of less than 100 industry insiders in producing enhanced television content posts insider information on a possible solution to the problem posed, and you reply that you don't get his point. You should be ashamed of yourself, seriously. Stop getting your opinions on consumer television products from consumer television product sales brochures before you post a reply to an expert, dude. Next time, follow the links past the homepage, and don't waste my time creating anchors. If you don't see my point, just assume it's because you don't get it, which is probably the case more often than you know.

Wrong. Microsoft and others (AOL) are already well on their way to putting together this device minus DVD ripping (cough. MPAA. cough.). Check out The Microsoft TV Platform for more info. WebTV never "had" anything, since it's still in more than a million households, and is the most successful "convergence" platform ever. How do I know this? Because I helped build enhanced content for NBC. Part of the Enhanced Broadcast Group's responsibilities included HDTV and convergence. With the 9Mbs data channel of the HDTV feed, users have their downstream net connection built into the signal. They can use a modem for upstream if necessary. See the ATVEF site for news on what is probably the coolest thing in computing ever.

If I were designing it, I'd use a $99 WebTV+ box (or interface card) to allow an HTML interface to be laid over TV content. WebTV even has a CLI that can run basic hardware and serial port functionality in script. Also, WebTV's serial port could be used to communicate with and control a rack of devices, each of which could be used to implement any of the functionality described in the article when it is developed. Except for, of course, DVD ripping, which will arrive on a cold day in Hell. Why not just get a 500 CD/DVD changer/burner and screw the magnetic storage altogether?

Slashdot is the wrong place to trot out the "a republic not a democracy" bit. Has the smell of elitism.

But I'm grateful for a chance to quote a joke from my favorite political TV show (bite me, Sorkin, you feelgood geek):

"We've done it that way for 350 years!"

"But is that really an argument?"

"It has been -- for 350 years!"

__________

For example, I'll focus on pornography because it's everywhere and has been a hot issue. Porn has always been around. When the camera was invented, people whined about porn there. When the VCR was invented, people whined about people having or buying porn tapes. (Ironically, porn is one of the reasons that VCRs got so much market penetration so fast...pardon the pun.) When the camcorder was invented, there was complaining that people were using it to tape their sex romps.

For some reason when it gets to computers, people freak out more than usual. When BBSes became popular, people were being jailed (e.g. Amateur Action BBS). When the Internet became popular, the news media, public, and political scum went nuts, passed laws like the Communications Decency Act, made hit-and-run attacks on the Internet such as the "computer pedophile" episode of NBC's "Crusaders" back around 1995.

But look at the change in culture between, say, the mid-80s and the year 2000 in America. Sex is nowhere near as taboo as it was. "Alternative sexualities" (sexual orientiations as well as things like bondage) are tolerated and practiced far more mainstream. It's discussed more openly. It's more prevalent in movies and on TV. This is a pretty massive change. (As a side note, you can tell how tolerated sex has become by observing how readily people like Dr. Laura freak out.

Of course, banning pornography was hard already. Banning it in the future will be nearly impossible with file sharing networks like Freenet. For better or worse, I expect that technology will have some of these effects over the next few years:

Restricting things like child pornography will rapidly become very difficult, if not impossible. (The legality and ethics of this is a completely separate issue, which is more complicated than most people think, involving things like different ages of consent in different countries.)

Intellectual property, in the form of software, music, and video, will rapidly become obsolete. New market models will have to be developed.

Strong cryptography will become more commonplace.

Many "undernets" will spring up across the Internet which use strong cryptography, tunnelling, and have their own email, news, and other systems. I know for a fact that this has already happened, and they have restricted access and fairly complex entrance systems. An infinitely more mainstream but very watered-down version of this is Gnutella.

In these cases, the law could try, but they can't readily enforce, just like they can't readily enforce laws against having sex in positions other than the missionary position. They can't regulate what they can't see. In the latter case, it's your house, curtains, or whatever. In the case of the Internet and technology, it's cryptography, systems like Freenet, and plain old practicality.

I don't know why, but this depresses me more than anything I've seen recently on the subject.

• Copy-protected VHS tapes didn't seem to matter. You could still copy them, but copying them left a tell-tale tag. Of course, it was only illegal to make illegal copies and then rent them out for money, so no harm done. Fair use is preserved, and people trying to make a quick buck off of the work of others get what they deserve.
• Copy protection on DAT recorders really sucked, but it still didn't seem all that bad. Maybe that was just because I wasn't a musician or musical artist.
• SDMI really rankled me, but hey, it doesn't stop me from recording my *own* MP3s. And now that things like Ogg Vorbis are coming out, this is really irrelevant.
• Encyrpted DVDs aren't great, but somehow I don't mind that as much. You paid for it, you play it, you can't copy it. I really don't like it, but somehow it seems like something we could overcome.
• The DMCA really really sucks, but that one seems destined to be destroyed in the Supreme Court. I'm pretty confident.
• But when the federal government starts mandating total copy protection of media broadcast on the open spectrum, the property of the people, I feel much more betrayed than I did before. The Executive branch, much harder to control than the legislative, is taking away an entire chunk of property that used to belong to the people as a whole, and giving it wholesale to a small handful of very large companies.

Interestingly, reminding myself that I don't watch TV doesn't seem to help. The FCC is overstepping its bounds, here, and I'm not sure there's anything we can do about it.

You mean he wasn't checking with Dr. Frasier Crane before posting?

The trouble with the argument that technology is to blame for a lack of interest in politics is that these are issues that don't really have a direct causal connection - it's not fair to say that because technology is improving people are paying less and less attention to politics.

At the risk of invoking a pretty good episode of The West Wing, "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc." Which is the pretentious Latinate way of saying that just because one thing happens after another, doesn't mean it happened as a result.

Unfortunately, this is a lesson I don't think you're taking to heart. For example:

[Technology] has also allowed us to concentrate on acquisitiveness at the cost of others, the roots of modern capitalism.

This is as silly a piece of luddism as I've ever heard. While I can't claim to actually have been around at the time, I'd be willing to bet that our ancestors were more than willing to beat each other senseless for the sake of food, or a desirable mate, or even plain old obedience. Just about any garden-variety anthropologist will assure you that technology isn't a prerequisite to avarice.

But, it cannot be argued that... technology has, in general, turned people away from the old USian small community ideal... Why would people care about politics in this situation? In fact, they're more likely to come to mistaken views about the evils of "Big Government" than the true evil - capitalism, and it's partner technology.

I think what you're trying to say that this point can't be disputed, not that it can't be argued. In any case, this is a clasic example of "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" at work: because capatilist societies sprang into being after technological innovation, you jump to the conclusion that technology creates capitalism. In doing so, you neglect every other economic and political system that has ever been devised since, as you put it, we "made the transition from hunter-gatherers." If technology causes capitalism, it also causes feudalism, democracy, socialism, communism, facism, and God only knows what else. Technology doesn't just allow us to focus on exploiting others, it allows us to focus on anything other than satisfying the most basic of needs.

Or, as my wife (a Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude - more Latin! - graduate in anthropology) put it, "Technology is what allows you to flush your poop away. So wipe it, bucko, and don't forget to put the lid down." Wisdom for the ages, I think.

To clarify your comment:
"I think the one where Michael Milkin guest starred, where Mulder and His character switched bodies would also qualify as this type of episode."
Michael Milkin was a Wall Street junk bond trader who did time...
The person you are referring to is Michael McKean, who has been involved in everything from Laverne and Shirley to Spinal Tap to Saturday Night Live.
Mmmm...Goooogle...and HTML posting... Yummy...

"Don't try to confuse the issue with half truths and gorilla dust."
Bill McNeal (Phil Hartman)