That's crazy, I'm in the UK and I've never seen a glass that size outside of a novelty catalog. I'll concede that wine glass sizes have increased (they used to be sold in 125ml measures, nowadays it's usually 175ml or 250ml) but I've never seen a restaurant or pub selling a measure larger than 250ml, and I drink a lot of wine!
It looks good, but... I can't see a way to sort feeds by "oldest first" (I hate reading things out of order) and there's no obvious way to make the feeds list permanently display, every time I switch feeds it slides off again.
Perhaps most annoyingly, there's no contact information or anything else on the site which allows users to ask questions like this on the site.
Coincidentally, I'm currently fighting a running battle with Steam support to reclaim a hacked Steam account. After about five messages back and forth, it has finally emerged that the person actually stole my account by "reclaiming" it from Steam, after providing my steam account number, and my credit card details.
I don't have any spyware on this machine - I checked with SpyBot and Ad-Aware. I surf using Opera, I read mail using Eudora, and internet security is part of my job. I am at a loss as to how anyone could have got both my Steam account number and my credit card details by hacking a third party, however, unless that third party was Steam. (Yes, I could be an idiot, riddled with spyware that I have no idea is there.)
...I've never been able to get Dance Dance Revolution on a PC and that's the game she really wanted
Check out Stepmania. It's an open source DDR clone, runs under windows, and can import third party songs and patterns (there are *cough* allegedly *cough* lots of these available on various file sharing networks).
Without wishing to sound like flamebait, Stepmania is head and shoulders above most homegrown software - it's much better than most commercial stuff. I'm not a huge DDR fan, but I was incredibly impressed by how well this was put together. Best of all - it's available for Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows.
Just add a USB to Playstation adapter, and you can plug a playstation dance mat into your PC and get going...
Actually, the game is by Monolith (of NOLF, NOLF2, Contract Jack etc fame) and the engine is their proprietary lithtech engine.
The game itself is pretty good, and is very true to the original film. The voice acting ranges from passable to excellent, and the graphics are pretty and very "tron like". It's not a top tier FPS like HL2, Far Cry etc (and it's also almost a year old now, iirc) but it's a fun way to kill a few hours, especially if you enjoyed the film.
They don't. Organised crime isn't selling things via spam - they're selling spamming services to either businesses who believe that they can make a profit by bulk mailing, or (presumably) to other third party spammers.
Spammers don't care whether people buy products through spam. They're not selling to you. They're selling "marketing services" to people too stupid, lazy or unethical to care about the overall effects of their actions.
I've been using AllOfMP3.com for the past few weeks, and put about 40-50 dollars into it. The main draw for me was the ability to choose the encoding format, rather than the low cost - I grab everything at lame --alt-preset extreme, which tends to run at about 80-140 Mb per album, thus 80 to 140 cents.
Their range is pretty good, and the site "feels" nicely put together (although it can sometimes be a little slow at peak times). They provide a download manager for free (called AllOfMP3 Explorer) which does clever stuff like automatically renaming and filing tracks, setting up your chosen options for ID3 tagging, and validating your downloads (and correcting any errors) using checksums. You can, of course, just download using standard HTTP if you'd prefer, but I've found it pretty handy.
I initially assumed this was some sort of scam, but the general level of support and professionalism shown makes me suspect there's a fairly large business behind it, and they seem fairly confident that it's legal, at least in Russia.
From a moral standpoint, I'd rather use a service where I knew that a reasonable amount of money went to artists, and I'd be willing to pay substantially more if one was set up... of course, the same criticism could be applied to the current major labels as well, who aren't exactly fair with their "clients" either.
I used to buy a reasonable number of CDs (and I still do from indie labels) but the major labels have repeatedly shown that they're not interested in a a fair deal - they just want everything they can get. I don't feel too bad about returning the attitude.
Hmm. It should be possible to do something like this using a proxy server, so it would work with any browser. Just hook something like Lucene in and index everything.
Plus, you could then get the proxy server to intercept certain pseudo-urls and treat them as search queries, so the whole system would be browser based and transparent to the user. ie - request something like http://history.search/ to show a search form, or something like http://quick.search/your+query+here to jump straight to results pages.
I could even see ISPs offering it as an optional service to customers, or businesses running it transparently... although there are obviously privacy concerns there.
The games come on DVDs. PC games still come on CDs because they are still afraid of alienating the vanishingly small segment of the population that still has no DVD player on their computer. ( So far only games really utilize the huge amount of space available on a DVD so for non gamers, DVD is not really a neccessity, but neither is it a neccessity for PC gamers since no games for PC that I know of require it )
Yep, that's a plus. However, we're (finally) starting to see some games (UT 2004, Far Cry) available on DVD.
On the other hand, PC games can usually be installed to the hard drive, and load up in a few seconds - you only need to use the CDs once (barring dumb copy protection, which can invariably be NoCDd into oblivion).
The PS2 costs about as much as the graphics card I would have to buy to get comperable performance out of my PC
Hmm... not really. You can pick up a GF4 series card for drastically less than a PS2, and GTA3 on that card is way, way better than the PS2 version. I'm just being picky, though, consoles are far better value for money - point conceded.
My TV screen is bigger than my computer screen. For theatrical games, 27 inches is nice, even if the resolution sucks. Resolution isn't as important as size unless there is alot of text and menus. Inability to display text forces game designers to largely eschew them which lets you get more 'into' the game.
True to an extent, although I find it hard to consider quality of graphics a negative point.:) Plus, I sit about two feet from my 19 inch screen - to get the same viewing angle on your 27 inch television, you'd need to be three feet away, and you'd still have much worse quality.
I can play a game while someone else uses the computer or vice versa. Why get that video card for the same price as a game system when you'd just have to share?
Funny - I don't use the console much because it would mean nobody could watch the television, whereas the PC doesn't interfere with anyone else. This may be less of a factor in the US, where I understand you have several televisions per room.;)
Console games are Bugfree (TM). They are. I have maybe found 1 or 2 MINOR bugs in console games over the years. Every third PC game I buy must be returned to WAL*MART because it won't install correctly on my computer.
Yep, the tendency to release games before they're ready (especially just before the holiday season) and then patch them later is horrible... although it's not universal.
The controllers are the best designed ever.
For certain games, yes they are... which is why I have a USB adapter that lets me plug a playstation controller into my PC. So I can play console racers like NFS: Underground the way they were designed. And then I switch to a mouse and keyboard for something like Far Cry.
Both platforms have advantages and disadvantages... and they also tend to appeal to different people. Claiming that "the only advantage to the PC is for games like Sim City" isn't really accurate.
That would be like one of the RIAA people being found trading CDs on P2P networks in his off hours...
Actually, some record industry guys were merrily quoting from an independent report a few months back, and when the author of the report asked where they'd read it (as not many copies had been purchased), they went a bit red and admitted they'd been emailing copies of it to each other.
If they don't respect copyrights themselves, they really ought to realise why the general public don't seem to do so either.
Doh - just realised, your point about putting them on the dash was about not hitting them accidentally, not "ease of access"... my apologies. Although I'd still say that on these machines the best solution would probably be to disconnect the reset buttons entirely.
-1 for the position of the reset buttons (upper left towards the open space in the trunk). They need to be on the dash, or enclosed in the trunk.
Nah... modern macs are close to bulletproof. I'm running 10.2.6 on a G4/400 (similar to this guy) and I honestly don't think I've hit the reset button since I installed, despite the machine being on 24/7, usually running a good dozen apps.
This stuff apparently works by placing five small circles (in yellow, green or orange) in a certain pattern on the document. That triggers the warning - and also apparently causes colour photocopiers to lock up, etc etc.
All very clever, but it's very reliant on "security by obscurity". After all, magazines don't like being photocopied either, right? So what's to stop them from placing the same pattern discreetly on the background of their pages? Suddenly *wham* the magazine can't be scanned, photocopied, and so on. Repeat as required with newspapers, books, corporate logos and anything else they'd like to protect.
Another idea would be to print this design onto a t-shirt and hang out in the background at events, trying to get into the press photos. Suddenly a whole bunch of editors will find they can't edit (or even view) their news photos in Photoshop because they contain currency!
It would be very easy, now this is out in the open, to get these five small circles everywhere. Which would effectively destroy this particular anti-copying device - or roll duplication back into the stone age, one or the other.
What people disgusted by RIAA actions need to do is to work hard to educate the public about why the industry does not deserve our support.
This is quite an apt link along those lines - http://www.whatacrappypresent.com. Something light hearted like this is generally much more effective that preaching (no matter how good your arguments are).
I'm not saying that Proxomitron isn't as good as you claim, but how exactly could it do better than blocking *all* popup ads I don't want to see?
Well, Proxomitron (and other filtering proxy servers) can do other tricks too... like removing ALL ads (not just popups), killing specific javascripts, stopping cookies, blocking some domains completely, killing iframes / ilayers... pretty much anything you can think of doing when you're running a regex on the incoming HTML.
However, Proxomitron has now been "discontinued" so anyone looking for a new filtering proxy might be best served with one of the alternatives. I've never used it myself, but apparently Privoxy is pretty good.
Macs have had this support since 1987 with the Mac II.
Not just dual support - macs have supported arbitrary numbers of monitors (complete with a control panel to drag and drop the "screens" around to orient them) for the same sort of period. Most people only get as far as two, but I've seen a few three screen systems. Not to mention neat tricks like A4 monitors that can be rotated between portait and landscape mode...
PCs have pretty much caught up now, but it's still interesting to see how much stuff is considered "new and cool" in the PC camp which macs have had for fifteen years.
Actually, a lot of studio costs are for the time of the engineer / producer / mastering engineer (which this won't help with) or for their huge library of microphones / amplifiers / instruments (which this also won't help with).
It's also worth bearing in mind that while computer technology has decimated the cost of recording and synthesizer equipment, it's not going to have much effect on the cost of drums, basses, guitars, amplifiers, microphones... at least not yet. (Yes, amplifier simulators are improving by leaps and bounds, but most people find them worse than the real thing - and you still need the real thing to play live.)
Computer Music is okay, but the real "semi pro" recording publication in the UK is Sound on Sound. You don't get a CD, but the quality of the information is quite a lot better.
Windows isn't any better. Sure, CTRL X/C/V are fairly standard, but anything more than that is terrible.
Want to do a "find"? Well, it's CTRL-F... usually. Unless you're in Outlook, where CTRL-F does forward, and find is (intuitively!) F4. Oh, except for the main message list, where Find doesn't have a shortcut at all, but advanced find is CTRL-SHIFT-F. And don't get me started on third party apps like Textpad (which is a great app, but uses F5 for find and F8 for find/replace).
Button location is another bugbear. OK and Cancel randomly move around dialog boxes, swapping positions with merry abandon. Always assuming they're present, of course - dialogs are sometimes closed with "Ok", sometimes with "Close", both doing the same thing (often in the same application. Sometimes there's a close box, sometimes not.
A much more consistent interface is the mac, for historical reasons. Find is always CMD-F in every major application. Closing a window? Always CMD-W. Quit an app with CMD-Q. When it comes to dialog boxes, Apple doesn't just specify the names of buttons - they tell you where they should be placed (to the pixel), how they should work, what types of icon should be shown for each type of alert and so on. Sure, apps don't need to follow the guidelines - but they pretty much all do, simply because anything that doesn't just looks "wrong" to mac users who are used to consistency.
It always bugs me when I see linux advocates pushing coders to take Windows as an example of a good interface. It's a dreadful interface (admittedly much improved recently), and despite Apple's recent minor UI setbacks in OS X, it's still by far the best designed interface available. Don't just copy the style - if you understand why the mac interface was designed that way it was, you'll be able to produce something nicer than 90% of apps on any other platform.
Fugu for OS X is quite a nice open source app for doing SCP / SFTP and also setting up SSH tunnels. I use it to connect to my home (linux) server from my G4 at work.
As for using the PDA while you're talking, the hands-free earpiece is what you need. Also good for freaking people out in the supermarket as you appear to talk to an invisible person.
Actually, here in the UK where hands free kits are becoming increasingly common, there's a corollary to this - when you actually do get some disturbed character walking down the street ranting to himself, nobody pays any attention as they assume he's just on the phone to someone...
Transport for London, who currently operate the tube network are a publically run company whose sole aim is to provide cheap and efficient travel for Londoners and visitors.
Without wishing to sound tinfoil-hatty... this is the same argument which was quoted for the Central London car tracking system (which charges a toll for anyone entering the centre). Unfortunately, as soon as it came online, Ken Livingston (the Mayor) started gleefully telling everyone that they could use the same cameras to track criminals, and (if I recall correctly) also started fantasising about using them for facial recognition...
So while hypothetically this might be an organisation which is solely concerned with "cheap and efficient travel", I can't help thinking that any time PC Plod asks for "all travel details of Mr X of 38 Any Street, Clapham) they'll be serving up a hot printout faster than Macdonalds. With the same privacy / potential abuse problems that you'll always get if this is happening with minimal oversight.
It's not necessarily a completely bad idea, but the fact that the Oyster card website completely glosses over the privacy implications is slightly disheartening.
What I'd like to know is how he can get a job (or do anything useful in college) when he's not allowed to use a computer. That even rules out working at McDonalds. Hopefully the actual restriction is slightly less harsh...
Microsoft's RMS, in conjunction with Outlook, would prevent emails from being forwarded or printed by individuals who had not been preapproved by the sender. (And methods like "Print Screen" don't work, either.) Obviously, this becaomes even harder to crack once Palladium/NGSCB takes effect in 2005.
Take a picture of the screen with a digital camera, and OCR it. Sure, it's not quite as fast as cut and paste, but it's not that inconvenient.
This is the fundamental flaw in DRM - you can prevent "perfect digital" copies, but there's always a workaround. It's pretty much useless for preventing leaks.
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That's crazy, I'm in the UK and I've never seen a glass that size outside of a novelty catalog. I'll concede that wine glass sizes have increased (they used to be sold in 125ml measures, nowadays it's usually 175ml or 250ml) but I've never seen a restaurant or pub selling a measure larger than 250ml, and I drink a lot of wine!
It looks good, but... I can't see a way to sort feeds by "oldest first" (I hate reading things out of order) and there's no obvious way to make the feeds list permanently display, every time I switch feeds it slides off again.
Perhaps most annoyingly, there's no contact information or anything else on the site which allows users to ask questions like this on the site.
Coincidentally, I'm currently fighting a running battle with Steam support to reclaim a hacked Steam account. After about five messages back and forth, it has finally emerged that the person actually stole my account by "reclaiming" it from Steam, after providing my steam account number, and my credit card details.
I don't have any spyware on this machine - I checked with SpyBot and Ad-Aware. I surf using Opera, I read mail using Eudora, and internet security is part of my job. I am at a loss as to how anyone could have got both my Steam account number and my credit card details by hacking a third party, however, unless that third party was Steam. (Yes, I could be an idiot, riddled with spyware that I have no idea is there.)
Check out Stepmania. It's an open source DDR clone, runs under windows, and can import third party songs and patterns (there are *cough* allegedly *cough* lots of these available on various file sharing networks).
Without wishing to sound like flamebait, Stepmania is head and shoulders above most homegrown software - it's much better than most commercial stuff. I'm not a huge DDR fan, but I was incredibly impressed by how well this was put together. Best of all - it's available for Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows.
Just add a USB to Playstation adapter, and you can plug a playstation dance mat into your PC and get going...
Actually, the game is by Monolith (of NOLF, NOLF2, Contract Jack etc fame) and the engine is their proprietary lithtech engine.
The game itself is pretty good, and is very true to the original film. The voice acting ranges from passable to excellent, and the graphics are pretty and very "tron like". It's not a top tier FPS like HL2, Far Cry etc (and it's also almost a year old now, iirc) but it's a fun way to kill a few hours, especially if you enjoyed the film.
Spammers don't care whether people buy products through spam. They're not selling to you. They're selling "marketing services" to people too stupid, lazy or unethical to care about the overall effects of their actions.
Their range is pretty good, and the site "feels" nicely put together (although it can sometimes be a little slow at peak times). They provide a download manager for free (called AllOfMP3 Explorer) which does clever stuff like automatically renaming and filing tracks, setting up your chosen options for ID3 tagging, and validating your downloads (and correcting any errors) using checksums. You can, of course, just download using standard HTTP if you'd prefer, but I've found it pretty handy.
I initially assumed this was some sort of scam, but the general level of support and professionalism shown makes me suspect there's a fairly large business behind it, and they seem fairly confident that it's legal, at least in Russia.
From a moral standpoint, I'd rather use a service where I knew that a reasonable amount of money went to artists, and I'd be willing to pay substantially more if one was set up... of course, the same criticism could be applied to the current major labels as well, who aren't exactly fair with their "clients" either.
I used to buy a reasonable number of CDs (and I still do from indie labels) but the major labels have repeatedly shown that they're not interested in a a fair deal - they just want everything they can get. I don't feel too bad about returning the attitude.
Plus, you could then get the proxy server to intercept certain pseudo-urls and treat them as search queries, so the whole system would be browser based and transparent to the user. ie - request something like http://history.search/ to show a search form, or something like http://quick.search/your+query+here to jump straight to results pages.
I could even see ISPs offering it as an optional service to customers, or businesses running it transparently... although there are obviously privacy concerns there.
The games come on DVDs. PC games still come on CDs because they are still afraid of alienating the vanishingly small segment of the population that still has no DVD player on their computer. ( So far only games really utilize the huge amount of space available on a DVD so for non gamers, DVD is not really a neccessity, but neither is it a neccessity for PC gamers since no games for PC that I know of require it )
Yep, that's a plus. However, we're (finally) starting to see some games (UT 2004, Far Cry) available on DVD.
On the other hand, PC games can usually be installed to the hard drive, and load up in a few seconds - you only need to use the CDs once (barring dumb copy protection, which can invariably be NoCDd into oblivion).
The PS2 costs about as much as the graphics card I would have to buy to get comperable performance out of my PC
Hmm... not really. You can pick up a GF4 series card for drastically less than a PS2, and GTA3 on that card is way, way better than the PS2 version. I'm just being picky, though, consoles are far better value for money - point conceded.
My TV screen is bigger than my computer screen. For theatrical games, 27 inches is nice, even if the resolution sucks. Resolution isn't as important as size unless there is alot of text and menus. Inability to display text forces game designers to largely eschew them which lets you get more 'into' the game.
True to an extent, although I find it hard to consider quality of graphics a negative point. :) Plus, I sit about two feet from my 19 inch screen - to get the same viewing angle on your 27 inch television, you'd need to be three feet away, and you'd still have much worse quality.
I can play a game while someone else uses the computer or vice versa. Why get that video card for the same price as a game system when you'd just have to share?
Funny - I don't use the console much because it would mean nobody could watch the television, whereas the PC doesn't interfere with anyone else. This may be less of a factor in the US, where I understand you have several televisions per room. ;)
Console games are Bugfree (TM). They are. I have maybe found 1 or 2 MINOR bugs in console games over the years. Every third PC game I buy must be returned to WAL*MART because it won't install correctly on my computer.
Yep, the tendency to release games before they're ready (especially just before the holiday season) and then patch them later is horrible... although it's not universal.
The controllers are the best designed ever.
For certain games, yes they are... which is why I have a USB adapter that lets me plug a playstation controller into my PC. So I can play console racers like NFS: Underground the way they were designed. And then I switch to a mouse and keyboard for something like Far Cry.
Both platforms have advantages and disadvantages... and they also tend to appeal to different people. Claiming that "the only advantage to the PC is for games like Sim City" isn't really accurate.
Actually, some record industry guys were merrily quoting from an independent report a few months back, and when the author of the report asked where they'd read it (as not many copies had been purchased), they went a bit red and admitted they'd been emailing copies of it to each other.
If they don't respect copyrights themselves, they really ought to realise why the general public don't seem to do so either.
Doh - just realised, your point about putting them on the dash was about not hitting them accidentally, not "ease of access"... my apologies. Although I'd still say that on these machines the best solution would probably be to disconnect the reset buttons entirely.
Nah... modern macs are close to bulletproof. I'm running 10.2.6 on a G4/400 (similar to this guy) and I honestly don't think I've hit the reset button since I installed, despite the machine being on 24/7, usually running a good dozen apps.
All very clever, but it's very reliant on "security by obscurity". After all, magazines don't like being photocopied either, right? So what's to stop them from placing the same pattern discreetly on the background of their pages? Suddenly *wham* the magazine can't be scanned, photocopied, and so on. Repeat as required with newspapers, books, corporate logos and anything else they'd like to protect.
Another idea would be to print this design onto a t-shirt and hang out in the background at events, trying to get into the press photos. Suddenly a whole bunch of editors will find they can't edit (or even view) their news photos in Photoshop because they contain currency!
It would be very easy, now this is out in the open, to get these five small circles everywhere. Which would effectively destroy this particular anti-copying device - or roll duplication back into the stone age, one or the other.
This is quite an apt link along those lines - http://www.whatacrappypresent.com. Something light hearted like this is generally much more effective that preaching (no matter how good your arguments are).
Well, Proxomitron (and other filtering proxy servers) can do other tricks too... like removing ALL ads (not just popups), killing specific javascripts, stopping cookies, blocking some domains completely, killing iframes / ilayers... pretty much anything you can think of doing when you're running a regex on the incoming HTML.
However, Proxomitron has now been "discontinued" so anyone looking for a new filtering proxy might be best served with one of the alternatives. I've never used it myself, but apparently Privoxy is pretty good.
Not just dual support - macs have supported arbitrary numbers of monitors (complete with a control panel to drag and drop the "screens" around to orient them) for the same sort of period. Most people only get as far as two, but I've seen a few three screen systems. Not to mention neat tricks like A4 monitors that can be rotated between portait and landscape mode...
PCs have pretty much caught up now, but it's still interesting to see how much stuff is considered "new and cool" in the PC camp which macs have had for fifteen years.
It's also worth bearing in mind that while computer technology has decimated the cost of recording and synthesizer equipment, it's not going to have much effect on the cost of drums, basses, guitars, amplifiers, microphones... at least not yet. (Yes, amplifier simulators are improving by leaps and bounds, but most people find them worse than the real thing - and you still need the real thing to play live.)
Computer Music is okay, but the real "semi pro" recording publication in the UK is Sound on Sound. You don't get a CD, but the quality of the information is quite a lot better.
Windows isn't any better. Sure, CTRL X/C/V are fairly standard, but anything more than that is terrible.
Want to do a "find"? Well, it's CTRL-F... usually. Unless you're in Outlook, where CTRL-F does forward, and find is (intuitively!) F4. Oh, except for the main message list, where Find doesn't have a shortcut at all, but advanced find is CTRL-SHIFT-F. And don't get me started on third party apps like Textpad (which is a great app, but uses F5 for find and F8 for find/replace).
Button location is another bugbear. OK and Cancel randomly move around dialog boxes, swapping positions with merry abandon. Always assuming they're present, of course - dialogs are sometimes closed with "Ok", sometimes with "Close", both doing the same thing (often in the same application. Sometimes there's a close box, sometimes not.
A much more consistent interface is the mac, for historical reasons. Find is always CMD-F in every major application. Closing a window? Always CMD-W. Quit an app with CMD-Q. When it comes to dialog boxes, Apple doesn't just specify the names of buttons - they tell you where they should be placed (to the pixel), how they should work, what types of icon should be shown for each type of alert and so on. Sure, apps don't need to follow the guidelines - but they pretty much all do, simply because anything that doesn't just looks "wrong" to mac users who are used to consistency.
It always bugs me when I see linux advocates pushing coders to take Windows as an example of a good interface. It's a dreadful interface (admittedly much improved recently), and despite Apple's recent minor UI setbacks in OS X, it's still by far the best designed interface available. Don't just copy the style - if you understand why the mac interface was designed that way it was, you'll be able to produce something nicer than 90% of apps on any other platform.
Fugu for OS X is quite a nice open source app for doing SCP / SFTP and also setting up SSH tunnels. I use it to connect to my home (linux) server from my G4 at work.
Actually, here in the UK where hands free kits are becoming increasingly common, there's a corollary to this - when you actually do get some disturbed character walking down the street ranting to himself, nobody pays any attention as they assume he's just on the phone to someone...
Without wishing to sound tinfoil-hatty... this is the same argument which was quoted for the Central London car tracking system (which charges a toll for anyone entering the centre). Unfortunately, as soon as it came online, Ken Livingston (the Mayor) started gleefully telling everyone that they could use the same cameras to track criminals, and (if I recall correctly) also started fantasising about using them for facial recognition...
So while hypothetically this might be an organisation which is solely concerned with "cheap and efficient travel", I can't help thinking that any time PC Plod asks for "all travel details of Mr X of 38 Any Street, Clapham) they'll be serving up a hot printout faster than Macdonalds. With the same privacy / potential abuse problems that you'll always get if this is happening with minimal oversight.
It's not necessarily a completely bad idea, but the fact that the Oyster card website completely glosses over the privacy implications is slightly disheartening.
Actually, they published it and then pulled it again - it caused network problems for some G4 towers, apparently.
What I'd like to know is how he can get a job (or do anything useful in college) when he's not allowed to use a computer. That even rules out working at McDonalds. Hopefully the actual restriction is slightly less harsh...
Take a picture of the screen with a digital camera, and OCR it. Sure, it's not quite as fast as cut and paste, but it's not that inconvenient.
This is the fundamental flaw in DRM - you can prevent "perfect digital" copies, but there's always a workaround. It's pretty much useless for preventing leaks.