Using "The Prisoner" and "Dr. Who" as previous examples of BBC releases, we'll probably see a Region 1 DVD in about 6 months. Both of the forementioned series (in the case of DW, various installments) were out in the UK and other Region 2 before Region 1, typically between 4 to 8 months.
Given that we also have MP, Blackadder, and Faulty Towers now out on R1 DVD sets, I very much doubt BBC is *stupid* enough to not put out a HHGTTG R1 DVD.
Ok, even if this is the case, then there should be an argeement between ISPs that mail forwarding should be implemented, for at least 6 months after a buyout as such happens. Yes, it may not be great for either company, but if email is 'critical', then email forwarding is just as important.
While email addresses are relatively a dime a dozen, compared to snail mail addresses, the analogy to how to the USPS forwards mail when you move for up to a year would seem to be apt. Particularly since maintaining such forwarding would be incredibly simple (at least, the various unix sendmail variants make it easy; I'd suspect that Exchange is sufficiently simple as well).
In this case, they'd only need to set up a single mail server at mediaone.com and attbroadband.com, and redirect addresses appropriately to the attbi.com addresses.
Maybe they could also include before resending a 4-line notice that they should ask the sender to change the reciever's address (whether in a personal mailbox, or updating a server profile). Then after, say, 3 or 6 months, it would be more reasonable to discontinue those addresses.
The only reason I think this can become more important is that as more people turn to online bill paying, they would need sufficient time to be able to point the various collectors' sites to point to the new address, and since some bills are only sent out every 2,3,4 or 6 months, this would allow for most billing cycles to occur once.
People keep overlooking that SSSCA had a grandfather clause that any hardware/software made before a given date (I believe 2 years after passage) would not be subject to such rules.
Not that I'm agreeing with anything in that bill, only that it would not require forced upgrades, etc. as many many many people mistakening state.
DTV advertizes UP TO 1.5/256, but the speed is highly dependant on your ILEC; for example, if you're in Verizon or Ameritech areas, you're locked to 768/128 as this is the best that those ILECs themselves offer as DSL service. I think people in BellSouth areas report 1.5/256. And typically, the ILECs and DTV only sell the service if you're close enough to the CO in the first place as to get the max throughput they allot.
That is, some company, the name I forget, had grabbed a large batch of domain names that looked like "pq.com", such as "pbooksq.com", "pflowersq.com". The idea was that if you wanted something in those areas, you'd mind your Ps & Qs, and just typed in those names as URL and be whisked away to a portal run by that company for those products. (and yes, there was advertizing for this as well on the TV, as well as net ads).
So yes, this was nice, but it failed because the portal was for only products or sales by that company, and wasn't a price-comparative thing. Since the prices that this company offered were somewhat high compared to Amazon or other sellers, they weren't really turning a profit. They appear to be out of business, or have at least let those domains rot, as spot-checking that pattern shows none of them existing.
If.uk.co or.com *always* went to a page run by a non-profit group that simply listed vendors and possibly had competitive price checking scripts, those types of domains certainly would be of use. But I suspect that it's too easy to find numerous examples where one for-profit company owns the generic name to push their own brand, instead of a comparitive site. If anything, the organization of Yahoo is better than nothing for finding competitive prices for a generic type of product.
IIRC, the idea behind TBL's vision for the World Wide Web would that all sites would be intralinked and indexed by search engines, such that the normal end user would never have to enter URL directly into the browser, instead clicking through a series of links or through bookmarks to get to the end site; thus, there would have been no need for the DNS system explosion that we saw and the need to continue to push it further (And most likely it would have remained uncorrupted by the WIPO policies and similar). URLs could have been entered by the power user, of course.
I wouldn't say Google is part of fixing the problem; search engines before Google could have just done the same. But now that Google is pretty much the only search engine in town, and that people tend to stick to whatever their default portal advertizes to them, the trend in the article is only natural, and really shouldn't be associated with Google directly.
IMO, it's that last mile, from the CO to your home, that's the most critical in the broadband arena. Right now, the problem is that that last mile is owned by the same people that want to sell you services over it, and thus are going to do as much in their power in order to make sure only their service is used over their wire.
What needs to be done is to force these phone companies to divest themselves of the last mile ownership, and instead treat that as a utility, thus which may be handled by a city, or by a small company or the like. Because it's a utility, the only care they have is to hook one end to your house, and provide several outlets at the other end (phone, cable, broadband, etc); you then simply sign up for the services at that other end, paying the phone or cable or broadband company for that service. This way, the last mile utility cannot control what goes in that pipe, only that you pay to maintain it, and that suddenly phone companies will find themselves in competition again with other service providers. That would clear up the pseudo-monopoly that phone co's have right now, *and* may be incentive enough to get fat pipe to every household in American by some means, including urban and rural areas. This could also mean the development of wide-area wireless communication hubs that might serve a small, rural city, since effectively that's much easier to get the last mile than wiring it.
Again, the key here is that the only service that the last mile utility can be concerned with is to make sure that what goes in one side of the last mile wire comes out the other. They cannot provide a service lest they give up their right to control that pipe, otherwise we're right back to square one.
Basically, the large media companies want control over their content because they want to "keep the honest people honest." Though this sounds very Big Brotherish in nature, keep in mind the fact that if 80%, 90%, or 100% of the population could make unlimited, perfect copies of digital media to share with their friends, it would likely put the entire industry out of business.
Except that for those 80-100% of 'honest people' have no idea how to make copies, much less record stuff typically in the first place. The VCR, as a prime example, without tools like VCR+, is very hard for average people to program, though I'm sure most geeks know their way around it. It took the intervention of this VCR+ system or things like TiVo with interactive program guides to get the common man familar enough with VCR programming.
So it's very doubtful the common honest person is the one they are putting this in place for.
As a few others have stated, while the tech they are trying to describe will prevent the wireless signals from going to other TVs in the same house, it's more than likely they're trying to make sure that a nearby neighbor cannot pick up on your wireless emissions and effectively 'steal' the signal, just as people used to do with cable. And those that would steal it would not be the honest people, but instead those with both the intent and the means to work out how to do it.
I figure that, at some point, I'll have the urge to just watch one episode from the series set, and this makes it easier to find it than VHS and much easier to store. Sure, I might only watch some episodes once ever, but, there will be others that I will watch over and over again.
I've read they've committeed to doing the full TNG run as series packaging, and will decide if the same is merited for DS9 and VOY depending on sales (and compare with TOS). If this method works, then they'll rerelease TOS in series format as well.
I hope more TV series are released in this fashion. For example, Farscape is still 2eps a disk, making it unweldly to get. If you consider that you can cut the cost of production by having one large inset booklet and combined packaging, it's much more reasonable on both end of the sale.
I read a NYTimes article coverage of the converence, and the second line of it was, paraphrasing "How can musicans produce music in today's age, preferrably without getting a day job?" Now I'm sure that's the NYT's bent, *but* it's not a uncommon sentiment from the populous at large, as "we"'ve come to expect that there's garage bands and then there's the professional musicans. The concept of a band purposely doing work for no profit, just the fun of it, is very new for most.
IMO, the essence of the internet, post-ARPANET but pre-commericalization, was that "There are no barriers". Barrier in the geographical sense, in language, in publication, etc. This in part was due to the unquested peering agreements between backbones, open standards on network protocols, and that anyone could publish without having to get a license or pay large fees to do so. Many in that time likened the Internet to the Gutenburg printing press, as both inventions allows the mass distribution of information more than the previous tech allowed.
Commercialization changed all that. While there are still places where there are no barriers, there are definitely barriers in various places to be had, both from executive choices, governement regulation, or otherwise. For any major ISP or software company, specifically AOLTW, Microsoft, and now Comcast/AT&T Broadband, they would make the most to gain by creating the walled garden where there is no barriers to information that they control, but it's impossible to get information outside of it or for outsiders to get information from it; at best, a walled garden with toll booths at the entrances would be a prime money-making model. This is not to say they are going this way, but certainly, if they suddenly found themselves with a walled garden, legally, they would be overjoyed to continue running it as such. However, achieving a walled garden from today's Internet structure would require not only changing the technology the Internet runs on, but also government restrictions and consumer outlashing. They'll try to put up more barriers (MSN restricted to IE only, online music ventures with propriatary formats, etc), and may sneak their way to this ideal condition, but I doubt they'll ever achieve it.
I saw mention of this yesterday with some comments from EPIC, but I can't remember where, but in general, while these groups would rather not have a national ID card in the first place, agree that the proposed method for standardizing the drivers' licenses across states. Reasoning included:
Decentralized database. States would be the only repository of the information associated with the DL. This as opposed to a large federal database (and at much added cost).
Standardizing the info on the cards. This would include a photo id, signature, and a magbar for quick input into a computer. Instead of the mess in which some states don't have photo IDs, some require SSN, etc. This still leaves enough up to the states as to not trample their states' rights.
Improved communication between databases. Because the system would be decentralized, there would need to be an easy way for government officials to request info from such DBs; because states would be required to at least store a minimum of information, it would be simple to define a query standard. This way, rules can be put in place that if information is requested without a warrent, only specific pieces could be sent. If the database was centralized, then this would be much harder to enforce.
The groups are not completely at ease; this plan would suddenly give several DMVs near-absolute power, and unless regulations are put in place, this might be abuse. They also do worry, as many have posted, that there are both legal and illegal reasons not to have a DL; those that legally lack one may be forced to get one despite not having to drive -- this may cause states to have to provide DLs with "No Driving" restrictions to be issued in general for those currently without one.
In their 3rd point on the reputed email, ZDNet has to say:
We know this, because our logs include the Web address where visitors browsed from; when people click there from a Microsoft Exchange email message, Exchange helpfully gives us the subject line and username.
Certainly, Referrer is a common way to determine where people are coming from, but it seems to be a rather interesting privacy/security problem that MS Exchange would include the username in the HTTP request referrer field. If anything, I would expect a link in email to be a direct entry into a site, thus having no referrer field. (Of course, those of us that use plain text email simply cut and paste, and referrer ends up empty anyway). Even with this, I can see how this would easily work for spammers: have the 'click here to opt-out' link, and even if you have to do additional work on the end site to 'opt-out', they have guarenteed your email address at that point.
Why the heck do Linux developers copy Windows? A copy of a copy? Why not *pick* to copy Apple's HCI and adopt it for the Linux desktop?
Why do we need to *copy* anything anyway? Or at least, why isn't there a project to bring a new type of UI that is not WIMP, not Mac, not Win-like in any regards, that would be unique and well suited for maximum efficiency for power users? Yes, we still need the mac/win/WIMP clones in order to get Linux on the desktop and projects like KDE and GNOME cannot be overlooked in getting to that point. However, as we have the ability to define the UI at the system level instead of trying to add to an existing, there's no better place to try something other than WIMP than on Linux. And what if that becomes much more usable than WIMP for the casual user (doubtful, but not out of the realm of possibilites?)...it would be interesting to watch both Apple and MS run around like chickens as their user base switches to Linux for that great interface. Pipe dreams, sure, but that's half the problem with Linux development: we're always playing catch up in getting tools that are 'just like' what are already out there, and not a lot of time in developing systems that are new and completely different.
That said, it's not just a matter of writing code, but instead trying to figure out what this 'new interface' is. And that would require a large amount of brainstorming and idea generation to get to that. In addition, such a project might have to break from the X metaphore because of the high dependance of the libraries to support WIMP, and that would require a higher level of programming to provide a different graphically system for Linux. So there's a lot of undertaking that would have to be done for a tool that might only be used by a few. But I'm still curious to learn of any other UI metaphores that have been explored.
She had probably a rather strong case; just that the strenght was on the side of the employer, not employee.
From hearing this from NPR months ago (so the details are sketchy at best), the woman Williams was originally on the Toyota assembly line doing body/final touch work that involved repeative hand motions. She developed CTS on the job, and Toyota moved her to a desk position for some time after it was diagnosed. However, some time later, Toyota moved her back onto the plant floor, giving her a job that involved some reaching up to the top of cars and vans (though this was not the full duty of her job); this irridated her CTS and she complained to the management but they refused to move her from that job, or otherwise she would have been fired. She then filed the lawsuit for discrimination, which did go her way in two lower courts.
IANAL: The court's decision said that the woman had no right to sue under the ADA law. However, if your employer or HMO goes above and beyond the law to consider CTS as a disability, then they have every right to do that, and consider yourself lucky to have such a policy. Mind you, next time the policy's up for review, they may consider removing that because of this, but for a company that hires computer professionals, that would be a very Bad Thing.
On the other hand, if your policy does not explicit cover CTS as a disability, you will have a much tougher time if you decide to sue for benefits or discrimation, as you will have to prove that you cannot perform daily tasks from it.
In other words: this ruling cannot trump any policy that already allows for CTS disability payments. Just don't expect many of these policies to exist in the near future.
I remember a sci-fi short story on a group of scientists that were first to traverse the trip to Alpha Centauri. In the latter stages of the flight, because of their distance to earth, they developed a method to compress their reports by using a simple number cipher (A=1, B=2, etc), writing their text as a very large number, then finding some composite number N with a minimal number of unique prime terms within a few integers of their number. They then sent back that composite number and the integer. The reciever was then expected to calculate that number and then back out the message.
While this theorhetically could work to reduce messages down upwards of 100:1 compression, both the compression and the decompression would require huge resources of computer CPU time for a message of any reasonable length. Even if you had pre-built a table of 'short unique-prime-factors integers' to make finding the optimal composite to send back, you'd still have to generate some huge N-digit number, and then the decoder would have to be able to recalculate that N-digit number from the prime representations.
So while I'm sure this is possible, computing speeds are no-where near close enough. And it would appear this company is trying to vie it for use in compressing internet traffic. Maybe on 512-byte messages they can get something, but I doubt if it's anything close to effective for internet use.
One of MS's complaints and part of its request for more time was that several companies that are anti-Microsoft were being 'slow' in delivering documents to MS when they were requested; because it is in the best interests of those companies to play slow, MS wanted more time to get those docs. The decision to keep the trial going forward also includes stipulation that if these companies wish to testify during the penalty phase, they must cooperate fully with any requests for documentation from MS. Not only does this even the table for MS, giving them fewer reasons to cry for mistrial, but this also makes everyone else involved play fair. I'm sure companies like AOL and Sun would love to see more penalties on MS, but if those came about due to poor trial misconduct by others, then those penalties could easily be removed again by a higher court. At this point, the trial needs to move swiftly but with due process.
Another note is that the judge has stated that she plans to address every point that the 9 dissenting states have presented as flaws in the current agreement, plus possibly any other flaws as described by the period of public comment. In other words, all those fears that those 9 states have aren't going to be simply swept under the carpet, but instead will focus scurtiny on the details of the agreement, and possibly remove some of the gapping escape holes that MS had in it.
Another key feature: cost
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 5, Informative
CNN reported on the Time's flub with the pre-keynote news, but had additional analysis of the new iMac. Most importantly, besides Apple's attenuation with style, this iMac with DVD writer will be quite compariable in price to similar offerings from Dell or Compaq, $1800 vs $1600 respectively. If this was 3-4 years ago, I'd have expected similar machines from Apple and the PC clone makers to have a price difference of at least $500, but that appears to have evaporated; I'd suspect that the bulk of the cost of these units (Apple and PC) are in the flat-panel monitor, DVD-writer, and OS software; everything else is dirt cheap nowadays.
I don't ever expect an Apple and non-Apple machine to cost the same, but the more Apple can cut down that difference, the better off they are.
When this story first broke about a month ago with MS looking to license out WMA to DVD makers, many, including myself, pointed out the stupidity that would occur if MPAA converted to WMV for DVD playback, at least in the next 5 to 10-year timespan. There would be a large consumer backlash for those that have bought DVD players recently to find that the newest releases don't work on their boxes. Maybe in 5-10 years when consumers typically rollover their electronics for the latest and greatest, but not before that point.
But again, as pointed out by others today, this is only for WMA, not WMV. From my occasional experience with WMV, I don't think it can live up to what we've come to expect for MPEG-2 DVD encoding, but I'm sure that if prompted, MS could certainly beef up the code to make it better.
The way I read it, it suggests that these DVD makers will continues to offer DVD, CD, VCD, and MP3 playback in addition to adding WMP features as well. This really can be a good thing in terms of making a single 'entertainment' unit that offers movies, audio playback, and, as rumors, possibly adding game console features. That's an ultimate mid-level consumer's dream.
As long as MS hasn't forced these companies into exclusionary contracts (Which would be a bad choice to make given their current anti-trust case), I can't see anything wrong with this initially. Unfortunately, this also ties in well with RIAAs plans to copy protect every CD. Since many DVD players appear to have problems with these, the new CDs can't play on them. However, I remember reading that MS was talking with the labels into licensing WMP such that every copy protected CD would include a second CD with the album as WMP files.
This case is very similar to what happened with the WA law, with the WA court ruling that a law that deals with the fraudulent aspects of spam (that includings not including valid return email addresses, or a way to opt-out of future mailings without significant hassle). Because the WA law allows WA residents to take on out-of-state spammers, the spammers were trying to argue that the law violated 1st Amendment rights and the Federal Commerce Clause. However, the WA state attorneys followed previous rulings that allowed states to regulate intrastate business when fraud was involved, and the law was kept constitutional. It sounds like the CA case was decided along similar lines since the law specific states that proper identifying and opt-out mechanisms must exist.
Remember that Microsoft wants to push a security model in which new bugs are reported only to the vendor and possibly a NDA-signed security group, and then in 'sufficient time' (
There's a part of me that says, ok, this type of reporting for a bug with this amount of security implications is probably a good thing, as if the bug was reported before the patch was available, you'd already have 'owned' XP boxes out there before MS had the patch. In the fashion they approached it, the amount of damage to XP (or other OSes) boxes will be minimized.
But I feel there MUST be some preannouncement on such bugs, even if the details are minimal. Whenever you work on something, you cannot expect that someone else in the world is not also working on the same thing, but not for the same purposes. In the case here, eEye, the group that found the bug, was looking for it for purposes of good, but I would not expect that someone else, maybe a malicious group, was also narrowing in on the bug 5 weeks ago when eEye reported it to MS. (And then you have to add cyber-espionge that might have garnered that info for themselves?). In the 5 weeks it took MS to verify the bug and develop and test the patch, that other group might have caught up and started 'owning' boxes already. A preannouncement of the bug, simply outlining the effects, and any short-term security measures, would have prevented that group from having any significant harm on the boxes if they did exist.
I know from a previous discussion that many sysadmins, when a new bug is discovered, want to know all the details up front so they can test the bug before and after fixing on their systems. This is understandable, but I think in the cases of bugs that can affect a significant large number of systems, such as this XP bug, that limited disclousure is better. I think a key step that could be done is institute a small group of trusted security people; bugs that are found are reported to the vendor and to this group. A person(s) from the group verifies the bug and puts out a digitalled signed statement that this bug exists, and that certain steps can be taken to correct it. Because of the status of these people, if they claim to have verified the fix, then that should be considered to be truthful, and thus limiting the need of sysadmins having to have full details to test it themselves. After a short period (no more than 6 weeks), the full details should be released, regardless if a patch from the vendor was available or not. That way, the limited disclosure lets the sysadmins know there's something going on and there's step they can take to prevent problems, and it gives the vendor time to fix the problem before that information falls into the hands of malicious people.
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Given that we also have MP, Blackadder, and Faulty Towers now out on R1 DVD sets, I very much doubt BBC is *stupid* enough to not put out a HHGTTG R1 DVD.
Ok, even if this is the case, then there should be an argeement between ISPs that mail forwarding should be implemented, for at least 6 months after a buyout as such happens. Yes, it may not be great for either company, but if email is 'critical', then email forwarding is just as important.
Maybe they could also include before resending a 4-line notice that they should ask the sender to change the reciever's address (whether in a personal mailbox, or updating a server profile). Then after, say, 3 or 6 months, it would be more reasonable to discontinue those addresses.
The only reason I think this can become more important is that as more people turn to online bill paying, they would need sufficient time to be able to point the various collectors' sites to point to the new address, and since some bills are only sent out every 2,3,4 or 6 months, this would allow for most billing cycles to occur once.
Not that I'm agreeing with anything in that bill, only that it would not require forced upgrades, etc. as many many many people mistakening state.
DTV advertizes UP TO 1.5/256, but the speed is highly dependant on your ILEC; for example, if you're in Verizon or Ameritech areas, you're locked to 768/128 as this is the best that those ILECs themselves offer as DSL service. I think people in BellSouth areas report 1.5/256. And typically, the ILECs and DTV only sell the service if you're close enough to the CO in the first place as to get the max throughput they allot.
That is, some company, the name I forget, had grabbed a large batch of domain names that looked like "pq.com", such as "pbooksq.com", "pflowersq.com". The idea was that if you wanted something in those areas, you'd mind your Ps & Qs, and just typed in those names as URL and be whisked away to a portal run by that company for those products. (and yes, there was advertizing for this as well on the TV, as well as net ads).
So yes, this was nice, but it failed because the portal was for only products or sales by that company, and wasn't a price-comparative thing. Since the prices that this company offered were somewhat high compared to Amazon or other sellers, they weren't really turning a profit. They appear to be out of business, or have at least let those domains rot, as spot-checking that pattern shows none of them existing.
If .uk.co or .com *always* went to a page run by a non-profit group that simply listed vendors and possibly had competitive price checking scripts, those types of domains certainly would be of use. But I suspect that it's too easy to find numerous examples where one for-profit company owns the generic name to push their own brand, instead of a comparitive site. If anything, the organization of Yahoo is better than nothing for finding competitive prices for a generic type of product.
I wouldn't say Google is part of fixing the problem; search engines before Google could have just done the same. But now that Google is pretty much the only search engine in town, and that people tend to stick to whatever their default portal advertizes to them, the trend in the article is only natural, and really shouldn't be associated with Google directly.
What needs to be done is to force these phone companies to divest themselves of the last mile ownership, and instead treat that as a utility, thus which may be handled by a city, or by a small company or the like. Because it's a utility, the only care they have is to hook one end to your house, and provide several outlets at the other end (phone, cable, broadband, etc); you then simply sign up for the services at that other end, paying the phone or cable or broadband company for that service. This way, the last mile utility cannot control what goes in that pipe, only that you pay to maintain it, and that suddenly phone companies will find themselves in competition again with other service providers. That would clear up the pseudo-monopoly that phone co's have right now, *and* may be incentive enough to get fat pipe to every household in American by some means, including urban and rural areas. This could also mean the development of wide-area wireless communication hubs that might serve a small, rural city, since effectively that's much easier to get the last mile than wiring it.
Again, the key here is that the only service that the last mile utility can be concerned with is to make sure that what goes in one side of the last mile wire comes out the other. They cannot provide a service lest they give up their right to control that pipe, otherwise we're right back to square one.
Except that for those 80-100% of 'honest people' have no idea how to make copies, much less record stuff typically in the first place. The VCR, as a prime example, without tools like VCR+, is very hard for average people to program, though I'm sure most geeks know their way around it. It took the intervention of this VCR+ system or things like TiVo with interactive program guides to get the common man familar enough with VCR programming.
So it's very doubtful the common honest person is the one they are putting this in place for.
As a few others have stated, while the tech they are trying to describe will prevent the wireless signals from going to other TVs in the same house, it's more than likely they're trying to make sure that a nearby neighbor cannot pick up on your wireless emissions and effectively 'steal' the signal, just as people used to do with cable. And those that would steal it would not be the honest people, but instead those with both the intent and the means to work out how to do it.
I figure that, at some point, I'll have the urge to just watch one episode from the series set, and this makes it easier to find it than VHS and much easier to store. Sure, I might only watch some episodes once ever, but, there will be others that I will watch over and over again.
I hope more TV series are released in this fashion. For example, Farscape is still 2eps a disk, making it unweldly to get. If you consider that you can cut the cost of production by having one large inset booklet and combined packaging, it's much more reasonable on both end of the sale.
Commercialization changed all that. While there are still places where there are no barriers, there are definitely barriers in various places to be had, both from executive choices, governement regulation, or otherwise. For any major ISP or software company, specifically AOLTW, Microsoft, and now Comcast/AT&T Broadband, they would make the most to gain by creating the walled garden where there is no barriers to information that they control, but it's impossible to get information outside of it or for outsiders to get information from it; at best, a walled garden with toll booths at the entrances would be a prime money-making model. This is not to say they are going this way, but certainly, if they suddenly found themselves with a walled garden, legally, they would be overjoyed to continue running it as such. However, achieving a walled garden from today's Internet structure would require not only changing the technology the Internet runs on, but also government restrictions and consumer outlashing. They'll try to put up more barriers (MSN restricted to IE only, online music ventures with propriatary formats, etc), and may sneak their way to this ideal condition, but I doubt they'll ever achieve it.
- Decentralized database. States would be the only repository of the information associated with the DL. This as opposed to a large federal database (and at much added cost).
- Standardizing the info on the cards. This would include a photo id, signature, and a magbar for quick input into a computer. Instead of the mess in which some states don't have photo IDs, some require SSN, etc. This still leaves enough up to the states as to not trample their states' rights.
- Improved communication between databases. Because the system would be decentralized, there would need to be an easy way for government officials to request info from such DBs; because states would be required to at least store a minimum of information, it would be simple to define a query standard. This way, rules can be put in place that if information is requested without a warrent, only specific pieces could be sent. If the database was centralized, then this would be much harder to enforce.
The groups are not completely at ease; this plan would suddenly give several DMVs near-absolute power, and unless regulations are put in place, this might be abuse. They also do worry, as many have posted, that there are both legal and illegal reasons not to have a DL; those that legally lack one may be forced to get one despite not having to drive -- this may cause states to have to provide DLs with "No Driving" restrictions to be issued in general for those currently without one.Why do we need to *copy* anything anyway? Or at least, why isn't there a project to bring a new type of UI that is not WIMP, not Mac, not Win-like in any regards, that would be unique and well suited for maximum efficiency for power users? Yes, we still need the mac/win/WIMP clones in order to get Linux on the desktop and projects like KDE and GNOME cannot be overlooked in getting to that point. However, as we have the ability to define the UI at the system level instead of trying to add to an existing, there's no better place to try something other than WIMP than on Linux. And what if that becomes much more usable than WIMP for the casual user (doubtful, but not out of the realm of possibilites?)...it would be interesting to watch both Apple and MS run around like chickens as their user base switches to Linux for that great interface. Pipe dreams, sure, but that's half the problem with Linux development: we're always playing catch up in getting tools that are 'just like' what are already out there, and not a lot of time in developing systems that are new and completely different.
That said, it's not just a matter of writing code, but instead trying to figure out what this 'new interface' is. And that would require a large amount of brainstorming and idea generation to get to that. In addition, such a project might have to break from the X metaphore because of the high dependance of the libraries to support WIMP, and that would require a higher level of programming to provide a different graphically system for Linux. So there's a lot of undertaking that would have to be done for a tool that might only be used by a few. But I'm still curious to learn of any other UI metaphores that have been explored.
From hearing this from NPR months ago (so the details are sketchy at best), the woman Williams was originally on the Toyota assembly line doing body/final touch work that involved repeative hand motions. She developed CTS on the job, and Toyota moved her to a desk position for some time after it was diagnosed. However, some time later, Toyota moved her back onto the plant floor, giving her a job that involved some reaching up to the top of cars and vans (though this was not the full duty of her job); this irridated her CTS and she complained to the management but they refused to move her from that job, or otherwise she would have been fired. She then filed the lawsuit for discrimination, which did go her way in two lower courts.
On the other hand, if your policy does not explicit cover CTS as a disability, you will have a much tougher time if you decide to sue for benefits or discrimation, as you will have to prove that you cannot perform daily tasks from it.
In other words: this ruling cannot trump any policy that already allows for CTS disability payments. Just don't expect many of these policies to exist in the near future.
While this theorhetically could work to reduce messages down upwards of 100:1 compression, both the compression and the decompression would require huge resources of computer CPU time for a message of any reasonable length. Even if you had pre-built a table of 'short unique-prime-factors integers' to make finding the optimal composite to send back, you'd still have to generate some huge N-digit number, and then the decoder would have to be able to recalculate that N-digit number from the prime representations.
So while I'm sure this is possible, computing speeds are no-where near close enough. And it would appear this company is trying to vie it for use in compressing internet traffic. Maybe on 512-byte messages they can get something, but I doubt if it's anything close to effective for internet use.
Another note is that the judge has stated that she plans to address every point that the 9 dissenting states have presented as flaws in the current agreement, plus possibly any other flaws as described by the period of public comment. In other words, all those fears that those 9 states have aren't going to be simply swept under the carpet, but instead will focus scurtiny on the details of the agreement, and possibly remove some of the gapping escape holes that MS had in it.
I don't ever expect an Apple and non-Apple machine to cost the same, but the more Apple can cut down that difference, the better off they are.
But again, as pointed out by others today, this is only for WMA, not WMV. From my occasional experience with WMV, I don't think it can live up to what we've come to expect for MPEG-2 DVD encoding, but I'm sure that if prompted, MS could certainly beef up the code to make it better.
As long as MS hasn't forced these companies into exclusionary contracts (Which would be a bad choice to make given their current anti-trust case), I can't see anything wrong with this initially. Unfortunately, this also ties in well with RIAAs plans to copy protect every CD. Since many DVD players appear to have problems with these, the new CDs can't play on them. However, I remember reading that MS was talking with the labels into licensing WMP such that every copy protected CD would include a second CD with the album as WMP files.
This case is very similar to what happened with the WA law, with the WA court ruling that a law that deals with the fraudulent aspects of spam (that includings not including valid return email addresses, or a way to opt-out of future mailings without significant hassle). Because the WA law allows WA residents to take on out-of-state spammers, the spammers were trying to argue that the law violated 1st Amendment rights and the Federal Commerce Clause. However, the WA state attorneys followed previous rulings that allowed states to regulate intrastate business when fraud was involved, and the law was kept constitutional. It sounds like the CA case was decided along similar lines since the law specific states that proper identifying and opt-out mechanisms must exist.
But I feel there MUST be some preannouncement on such bugs, even if the details are minimal. Whenever you work on something, you cannot expect that someone else in the world is not also working on the same thing, but not for the same purposes. In the case here, eEye, the group that found the bug, was looking for it for purposes of good, but I would not expect that someone else, maybe a malicious group, was also narrowing in on the bug 5 weeks ago when eEye reported it to MS. (And then you have to add cyber-espionge that might have garnered that info for themselves?). In the 5 weeks it took MS to verify the bug and develop and test the patch, that other group might have caught up and started 'owning' boxes already. A preannouncement of the bug, simply outlining the effects, and any short-term security measures, would have prevented that group from having any significant harm on the boxes if they did exist.
I know from a previous discussion that many sysadmins, when a new bug is discovered, want to know all the details up front so they can test the bug before and after fixing on their systems. This is understandable, but I think in the cases of bugs that can affect a significant large number of systems, such as this XP bug, that limited disclousure is better. I think a key step that could be done is institute a small group of trusted security people; bugs that are found are reported to the vendor and to this group. A person(s) from the group verifies the bug and puts out a digitalled signed statement that this bug exists, and that certain steps can be taken to correct it. Because of the status of these people, if they claim to have verified the fix, then that should be considered to be truthful, and thus limiting the need of sysadmins having to have full details to test it themselves. After a short period (no more than 6 weeks), the full details should be released, regardless if a patch from the vendor was available or not. That way, the limited disclosure lets the sysadmins know there's something going on and there's step they can take to prevent problems, and it gives the vendor time to fix the problem before that information falls into the hands of malicious people.