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Slashback: Palmistry, Lecture, Quid Quo Pro

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the more-the-merrier dept.

Apparently, the Panasonic Showstopper is doing a fine job of living up to an unfortunate name, by -- yup -- stopping shows, thanks to the wonders of Macrovision. Ars Digita's long-heralded free online university has released its first lecture, and now you can use double coupons for presidential candidates! Well, you can trade like action figures. No, that's not right ... but is it wrong? Oh, and something else for you to do with your Palm, after work of course. All below.

Small-town boy makes good colnago writes "First discussed many months ago, here's ArsDigita's first streaming lecture on the design of computer languages."

This requires RealPlayer, by the way. Cool to see this effort bearing fruit -- I hope that Philip et al will serve as role models for a whole bunch of online learning centers, and they don't have to be computer-centric. Home schooling, anyone?

What we meant by "stop" was ... Reader Chris Reagan passed on this note regarding what initially sounds like an attractive toy: "There is a huge issue brewing with Panasonic Showstoppers preventing their owners from even watching TV. It appears they were over aggressive with their Macrovision copy protection and are blocking certain channels in certain markets.

Even though ReplayTV allowed Panasonic to modify their boxes they're passing the buck back to Panasonic, who in turn just say 'that's how we designed it.' They refuse to change or recall the defective product."

He also sent links to these AVS Forum on this topic -- it seems people don't like getting blue screens on that box, either:

I'll trade you a handful of boring statists for a Harry Browne. We noted the other day the Nader-centric politics-in-2000-A.D. site nadertrader.org, but now, like all things Internet, the same model gets "borrowed" quickly and rebranded. HP LoveJet writes: "Expanding the concept popularized by NaderTrader, votexchange2000 enables you to swap your presidential vote with an appropriate person in another state, whether your preferred candidate is Nader, Browne, or even one of those Other People. Fascinating. And possibly not illegal. (?)"

Besides administer servers, track inventory, save the world and list groceries, of course. Dum2007 writes: "An open sourced Gameboy emulator for the Palm is available here. It might not be as feature-filled as Liberty, but it's free."

5 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Irony: Macrovision is too confusing to non-techies by DeadMeat+(TM) · · Score: 4
    I have a friend who had to drive me out from my college (about 20 - 30 minutes away from her house) just so I could fix her DVD player. She thought the blasted thing was broken because all of her DVDs (except for The Wizard of Oz, which I'm guessing wasn't copy protected) kept playing really bright and then really dark.

    As you might have guessed, her TV had only one set of inputs, so she ran the DVD player through the VCR the same way most people do. Macrovision kicked in, and she couldn't watch her DVDs right. I tried looking for firmware hacks, but the only I found was firmware binaries, which didn't do my any could since I didn't have a EEPROM programmer and I really didn't feel like voiding my friend's player warranty, especially since she had to get a firmware upgrade anyway to get The Matrix to play. If not for the warranty voiding and the cost I would have told her to get a mod chip for the blasted thing just to make somebody in the movie industry mad.

    I ended up having to go with her to Radio Shack and get a $30 adapter that would work with the various video connectors she was using and her TV. The guy there told me that last Christmas people kept coming to him and buying the same thing, since they found out that thanks to the movie industry you can't run an unmodded DVD player through a VCR.

    The point I'm making is that if the movie industry doesn't get a little looser on their restrictions, then they're going to cut off their own growth. Sure, it all worked out for my friend since she knew someone who would dealt with this kind of thing all of the time, but what are the odds that most people have a techie friend to fix their DVD players for them? Even once I got it fixed, she was completely confused when I tried to explain exactly what Macrovision was to her, and I don't blame her.

    People just want to put in a DVD and play it like a VCR tape, not buy adapters and cables so the movie industry can be sure that she can't copy the movies she has with a VCR. The irony here is that the very thing that the movie industry has created to preserve its DVD sales may kill it prematurely if people can't figure out how to hook up their own DVD players. I trust my parents to hook up a VCR, but not a DVD player (which fortunately hasn't become an issue yet), and that's not the right way to have to handle thing is DVDs are supposed to supplant VCRs.

  2. Re:Better voting system needed by fhwang · · Score: 4
    My favorite alternate system is Instant Runoff Voting. How it works is simple: Everybody votes for the candidates they like, in order. They tally up everybody's first choice, but if no candidate has a majority, they knock off the candidate with the smallest vote (those people's votes go to their second choice), and count again. Repeat until somebody has a majority.

    For example: I'm a serious lefty, so the idea of voting for Gore kind of makes me wretch. Let's say I arrange my votes like:

    1. Ralph Nader
    2. Al Gore
    3. George Dubya Bush
    4. Satan
    5. Pat Buchanan
    Ralph won't get a majority, so my vote will probably end up going to Al Gore, who might be able to win. But I still can vote my conscience, and make a statement nonetheless.
    --

    Do domain names matter?

  3. Arrow's impossibility theorem by m.o · · Score: 5
    One of the most beautiful facts in economics is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (Ken Arrow got his Nobel prize for it), which states that there is no voting system that would satisfy a set of simple and seemingly reasonable assumptions (see below).

    Before you start proposing various systems, please, read this; e-mail me if you are interested. Please, mod this up - I am not karma whoring (couldn't care less); i'd just like people to actually know about this beautiful (and - surprise! - relevant) fact. Maybe some of you, like myself, will even switch to economics from coding :)

    /* the text below is copied from some webpage, but the theorem and its proof can be found in pretty much any graduate microeconomics book, e.g. Mas-Colell-Whinston-Green */

    Arrow's Impossibility Theorem was published in an essay called A Difficulty in The Concept of Social Welfare. It demonstrates a profound and a priori lack of reliability of joint decision systems and a lack of coherence of any notion such as the will of the people.

    Let Prefersi(a,b) mean that person i prefers a to b. Let Prefers be some joint decision procedure that, thus, generates either Prefers(a,b) or Prefers(b,a) for any a, b in some decision set, Set.

    Then Arrow's impossibility Theorem says that the following 5 reasonable conditions on the joint preference relation Prefers cannot all be met by any single decision process:

    1. Prefers is independent of irrelevant alternatives
      that is to say, the ordering of any 2 items in Prefers is a function only of their ordering with respect to each other within each of the Prefersi.
    2. Prefers is non-dictatorial
      that is to say, Prefers is not necessarily identical to Prefersi for some i.
    3. Prefers is pareto-inclusive
      that is to say, Prefers will rank 2 elements of Set in a particular order if all Prefersi do.
    4. Prefers is transitive.
    5. Prefers is a complete ordering on Set.
    A Brief Note on Consequences

    Note that the first 3 conditions are different from the last 2. The first 3 are what might be called the morality conditions. They say that a joint decision system should respect the individual wills of those elements of which it is composed. The last 2 conditions are what might be called rationality conditions. They say that a joint decision process should display consistent behaviour (which is really what rational means.).

    So what Arrow's Impossibility Theorem says is that any joint decision process which is in a reasonable sense democratic and respecting of individuality is also irrational or if you prefer a less loaded term, unreliable. It is likely to display behaviour where its decisions can be controlled by control of its order of making of parts of decisions; or where its behaviour does not respect the independence (in ethics and metaphysics, it's called the freedom) of its elements; or where it is capable of ignoring the unanimous will of its elements.

    In other words, you can't trust bureaucracy. This, I think, if there is one, is the reason why traditional state-run-enterprise socialism fails. There are also a great many other interesting consequences of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, many of them obtained when we abandon our instinctive prejudices regarding what a decision system is, and consequently what Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is about.

  4. die, dead horse by mattorb · · Score: 5
    This is a topic which has been hashed out again and again on these threads, but my tolerance has mysteriously vanished, leaving in its place a sudden, urgent desire to stand on a soapbox.

    IMHO, there is only one reason to cast a vote for anyone, ever : you believe that vote will have some net positive effect. Furthermore, a reasonable addendum might be that you should probably cast the vote which you think will have the greatest positive effect. That is, cast the vote which will make the world "best" according to whatever metric you like. This is assuming that you don't find the very act of voting for a particular candidate inherently immoral. So the question for prospective Nader (or Browne, Hagelin -- I'm mangling the spelling here, sorry) voters is just this: do you believe that the greatest good is accomplished by voting for Nader, possibly winning the Green Party more than 5 percent of the popular vote, hence guaranteeing that they will receive money in the 2004 elections, and hence maybe, eventually contributing to having more than a two-party system in this country? Do you think that the simple message sent by a vote for Nader -- loosely translated, perhaps, as "the major parties are completely ignoring issues of very real importance to me" -- in conjunction with the above possibilities for funding in later elections, are more important than the possible consequences of a Bush victory?

    This is something about which reasonable people may differ. I happen to think that the best outcome can be accomplished by voting for Gore -- that is, I think I like the results of voting for him more than the likely results of voting for any other candidate. Your results may vary.

    What complicates the decision is that estimate of the likely effect of casting a particular vote -- and that's where this "wait until the last minute" idea comes in. If you live in a state which is absolutely certain to go to one or the other of the major candidates, what is the net effect of casting a vote for one of those candidates? The way I see it, very little -- it sends no strong message, has no effect on who governs or what their policies are, etc. A vote for a 3rd-party candidate, however, might still have a net positive effect -- particularly with respect to the funding in 2004 issue. Waiting until you have the best sense of the effect your vote will have -- if such an estimate is ever possible -- can only make the decision easier.

  5. Better voting system needed by blackwizard · · Score: 4

    This point comes up every time the discussion comes up where people are only voting for the "better of two evils" -- but, c'mon people, shouldn't we change the system? How can people effectively vote their hearts if they are too distracted by the FUD in the media about how Gore might lose if Nader gets too many votes?

    What we need is some kind of reform -- either I should be able to cast an approve/disapprove vote for any of the candidates, or I should rank them in the order that I would like to see them as president. (or senator, or representative, or whatever.) I think it would be easier to implement the approve/disapprove model, but I think the ranking system would give more more accurate results.

    Any thoughts? All I know is that we need to kick this two-party duopoly in the butt.