Because experience shows that even a little bit of drug and alcohol use impairs your ability to act responsibly, so other people have to take that responsibility for you.
Oh, horseshit. Different drugs have different effects and blanket statements like yours are moronic. Tell someone with attention deficit disorder that Ritalin (a powerful stimulant not unlike methamphetamine) impairs their ability to act responsibly. I wonder how many of those methamphetamine users have undiagnosed ADD and actually function better on the drug.
Aside from that, there are short term and long-term responsibilities. A few drinks or some pot may make me less responsible in the short term, but if I have long-term control over my use (i.e. I rarely have more than 2 drinks in a week, or smoke pot more often than once a month), I'm still exhibiting long-term responsibility.
Yeah, the powers-that-be really, really want you to notice the two examples that actually worked. Of course they do. They'd rather have people sitting in gyms singing "kum-by-ya" than actually doing something that threatens their power.
Calling Valenti a cocksucker and smashing up a Starbucks. Yeah, that really threatens their power.
You want to know what really threatens their power? Not watching them. Not going to movies. Not watching television. Building a life that doesn't revolve around participation in a spectacle, either as a viewer, or as an actor (which is all you are when you trash a Starbucks).
Good god this is true. I'm sitting at my desk at a very large consulting firm bored almost to tears everyday. I'm being paid well over $100k per year to sit here and once in a while spend 15 minutes writing a shell script to find out if a process has died.
If you aren't good enough to be an independant consultant, you probably shouldn't be in consulting. Otherwise, you're probably just padding out the project team for some consulting firm, giving them an excuse to bill the customer for a few hundred more dollars per day, and not really expected to do anything. You're not learning much, either, so you're doing serious damage to your future employability - once you don't look so young, they won't be able to sell you as a junior consultant, and you won't have the leadership or technical skills that you'll need for them to sell you in a senior role. And besides all that, you feel like shit, don't you?
I was in exactly the sort of job you describe last year (except for the 6 figure salary). I got out. Now I'm in a job where I have real responsibility, and get real satisfaction from doing real work. In 10 years, when I know far more about software engineering, I'll think about going into consulting again.
Walk out. Take another job where you get to do something actually productive, even if you have to take a pay hit to do so. In the long run, you'll be better off.
I have 608/128kbps service with SpeakEasy in the Boston area. I ordered it in the beginning of May and was given an install date two weeks later.
Wish I could say the same. Mind you, the fault seems to be Verizon/BA's, not Speakeasy's. But yesterday was the second that BA was scheduled to do their part of the install, and the second time that they failed to show. Worse, they can't give me any sort of a window, so getting someone from building maintnance to show up to open the phone closet at the right time is a bear, as well.
I'm on the verge of cancelling the DSL order and getting a cable modem.
RSA's been patented for 17 years now. Look at the number of products that use it, and the ways it's used in those products.
This time next year, look at the number of products that appeared since the patent expired, and the ways they use it.
Where do you see the innovation happening?
The innovation happened when RSA was developed. Maybe, had they not gotten a patent, RSA would have never publicized their algorithm. Maybe instead they would have kept it as a trade secret, releasing only closed-source binary implementations of it. And as a result, it would have never recieved the peer review that it has, and all of those products that will begin using RSA encryption in novel ways over the next year would never get that opportunity. The point of the patent system is to encourage inventors to disclose how their inventions work. And in this case, that's exactly what it did. You can argue that maybe that patents shouldn't last as long as they do. But RSA is not the best case for demonstrating that the patent concept is fundamentally unsound.
1. Thinking there's a difference between Gore and Bush - there isn't
Think about the sort of people that Bush is likely to nominate as Supreme Court justices. Now think about the sort of people that Gore is likely to nominate.
Scripts and remote control are the biggest failures of non unix OS (I know applescript , visual basic, etc.. but they're weak)
Actually, Windows and the Mac are both way ahead of Unix when it comes to scripting of graphical applications. Unix makes it easy to glue together a lot of little command-line tools. Windows and the Mac both have systems that make it relatively easy for graphical applications to expose interfaces so that they can be scripted (without having to include a whole scripting language interpreter and system). Unix doesn't really have anything comparable, yet. Gnome and KDE are working on it, but neither is as mature or as ubiquitous as the Windows and Mac solutions.
Mac OS X already has its own GUI framework, and there is absolutely no way that X could improve upon that. After all, the Mac GUI has always been its main selling point, whereas X is roundly, and deservedly, slated as being slow, buggy and holding back Linux on the desktop.
I honestly don't see the point in this. Surely it's not progress, it's going backwards?
The point is to give OS X users the ability to run legacy X11 apps, and to display X11 apps that are running on remote machines.
Just to make it nice and sparkling clear: This is not a replacement for Aqua. This X11 server will run under Aqua, and allow you to display X11 apps side by side with normal Mac applications.
X11 is nasty compared to a real GUI, but the network transparency is damned nice when you need it, and there are a few decent X11 apps around.
I know you're a troll, but you can't own an event. You can own a particular description of an event, but you can't restrict other people from recounting their experiences. At least not the last time I read copyright law.
Streetlawyer's right, here. The IOC most certainly can prevent what the athletes from saying anything about their experiences at the games, simply by requiring them to sign a contract agreeing not to do so as a precondition of their participation.
Which doesn't mean it isn't an asinine thing to do.
If this didn't happen, we wouldn't have big sporting events.
Not that this would be any great loss.
I don't say this because I hate sports. As a matter of fact, I love them. But I love them as an activity in which people can participate, not a spectacle for them to watch from the comfort of their couches.
If your field of work is computers, and you can't afford to drop 4 grand a year on a new system, maybe you're no good at your job?
I can certainly afford the money. The question is this: Will upgrading provide benefits that outweigh the costs? Remember, costs aren't limited to money: Time and energy must be put into choosing the new system, moving software and data from the old system to the new, etc. If your machine is something you're using to get work done regularly, the cost of this downtime could easily outweigh the performance benefits.
As for the Matrix, what more do you want? A hacker-mentality movie with an absolute (and you have to agree) kick-ass soundtrack around a wonderful never-done-before plot and cool fight sequences (they should pay royalties to John Woo though..). The Matrix is a true tour-de-force on the senses, and the DVD set the standard (currently the best selling DVD of all time) of all DVDs to come after it. Its a real trip to go into the mindset that nothing you do means anything for two and a half hours.
Gimme a break. The core of The Matrix was a few philosophical ideas that ought to be obvious to any educated and halfway-intelligent person by the time they're a teenager. Certainly the idea shouldn't be at all novel to anyone who's spent any time reading SF, particlarly SF that deals with virtual reality.
The Matrix is a dumb-and-overly-slick action flick, and not much else. Maybe if it had been presented to me as such, I'd have liked it. But I heard so many people talking about how "deep" and "thought-provoking" it was that I expected something halfway intelligent.
By the way...This is off topic...I don't like Atlanta all that much. I live up around Dunwoody, so maybe it's just the area, but it's a bit too stuffy. I'm not the type to want to go to Buckhead very often, so it seems a bit boring for me here. My girlfriend is coming in November so I have to find something to do by then (other than the obvious) so we can go out and have fun. Any suggestions?
Move elsewhere. This was the solution I chose, and I can't say I regret it. Maybe I would have felt different if I were a native, but as I see it, Atlanta's not really a city so much as a bunch of suburbs all run together. However, if you are stuck in Atlanta, the Virginia Highlands area is a much more pleasant area for hanging out than Buckhead. Also think about finding stuff to do outside of the city. There's some decent parks for hiking in the mountains north of the city, for example.
To the guy who moved to Atlanta from DC and wants to go back: When I first left Atlanta, I lived in DC for a while, and loved it. Simply not having to spend 1-2 hours of my life in a car every single day was a wonderful change. Even though I was only there for a year, I've got a tremendous nostalgia for the place.
I suspect that a lot of the people who are buying PDAs are still techie enough to hate MS. How can Palm compete with the cooler features (MP3 player, voice recorder, first to color, more RAM, etc.) offered by the Win CE devices.
I doubt it. Most of the business people at my company carry PDAs, and the ones that do all carry Palms. Why? Because they actually use the things as PDAs. They're not interested in playing games or listening to MP3s, and while color might help a bit on the UI front, it doesn't add much in the way of real functionality.
I love the drinker's mentality. "I can drink more poison than you without getting sick or passing out, therefore I am more of a man!
I love the puritan's mentality: "People who take pleasure in things I dislike always do so for stupid reasons!"
Proving one's manhood by drinking a lot is strictly for college boys and morons. This doesn't mean that everyone who drinks does so in this fashion. Tip: I drink maybe once or twice a week, rarely more than one or two drinks in a sitting, and almost always accompanied by a meal. But you'll never know how pleasant a glass of good wine is with a good meal, because you're too busy feeling superior to fratboys doing keg stands.
Wait a minute! What did the government imply that they would do? They offered 6 year work visas to those how wanted to work in the US. The 6 years are up, and back go the workers. So where's the problem?
Had you read the article, you'd realize that the government changed the wording on the H1B to imply that it was a path to a green card and then citizenship. To quote from the article:
To lure these workers, Congress struck a special bargain: The time limit was left in place, but made to seem irrelevant. Applicants no longer had to prove they intended to return home, and the visa was dubbed "transitional," implying: next stop, green card.
these people need to go back home. If there is a shortage of workers in the US, guess what, train some people. Don't import all these foreign bastards who won't do anything but bitch about how much they hate the US.
If they hate the US so much, why do they want to stay here? What they hate is the government that implied that it would do one thing, and then did another. This is a rather different thing from hating the country as a whole.
The problem with training Americans to do the job is that most Americans are too stupid and ill-educated to benefit from the training and get these jobs.
(For the record, I'm a natural-born American citizen.)
When American culture stops lionizing stupidity, and the American education system gets back to educating (rather than struggling to perpetuate established power structures), then maybe we can think about giving those jobs to Americans.
That the company actually tries to get R&D costs back somehow.
Heavens forfend that customers express an opinion on whether or not the product being sold is worth the price charged.
Heavens forfend that customers develop expectations based on a company's past behavior, and express surprise and disappointment when those expectations are not met.
The real gain comes from not losing 1/3 to 2/3 of your power generated to transmission line loss. Yes, it can be that much.
Generating electricity in a distributed fashion introduces another cost, though: You still have to expend some amount of energy in transporting the fuel to the generators. In this case, pumping the natural gas.
The amount of energy required to transport a unit of gas to the customer is probably a relatively small percentage of that unit's energy value, but that cost still needs to be taken into account when working out the overall economics of the scheme.
You mean these people are trying to protect copyright!
What you fail to mention is that they're also trying to undermine fair use.
Where is the evidence that rampant piracy is seriously hurting any of the major copyright holders who are pushing for this sort of thing?
Honestly, I think the people behind this and similar schemes (SDMI, for example) must have rocks in their head. There's nothing that they can do that will prevent piracy by someone who is sufficiently dedicated (such as organized pirates who sell bootlegged content). But they they do make it more and more of a pain in the ass for those who purchase their wares legitimately to use them, thereby increasing the attractiveness of the (unencumbered) bootlegs. Like prohibition and the current war on drugs, all that the war on piracy will do is provide a profit center for organized criminals.
Unless you have a sound card in your ear, you hear things differently than your computer does. Have you ever seen computer screens shown by television cameras? Conflicting scan patterns on the computer screen and the television system produce bands on all the computer screens. I think an "audio watermark" is supposed to work on some similar principle.
Unless your 'input' is simply accepting the digital output stream (and not the analog signal generated by the output), the watermark will probably be lost - if the watermark is inaudible, I can't imagine that it would survive the digital->analog->digital conversion. And if it does survive, you have another option: Fuck with the analog in some way (for example, by adding a known signal to it) that will foul up the watermark-detection, then subtract that known signal back out of the "clean" digital data you recorded.
You're going to see a slight loss in quality just from the D->A->D conversion, and probably also some from imperfections in your analog addition/digital subtraction process. But with good enough equipment, this loss can be made minimal. And you need to do it only once for each piece of music you want to copy: After that, you can make infinite pristine copies of the final, unwatermarked digital product. And if you're part of a large, organized piracy organization (which is who the RIAA really needs to be concerned about), this is quite feasable.
There have been numerous occasions that I've seen where the transition break was missing. Or even worse, they insert fake ones in between commercials. Local stations in particular usually insert their own advert for the evening news etc as the last "commercial" before going back to the show, and they very often insert a transition break before their ad. I don't think that's an accident, they probably do it deliberately to foil VCRs with commercial break detectors.
Okay, so blank screen detection won't always work. But the fact remains: If for any given channel there are programmatically-distinguishable characteristics that identify the beginnings and ends of commercials, they can be clipped.
How about a TiVo-like system that you "train" to recognize the beginnings and ends of commercials? Whenever a commercial break begins or ends, you click "commercial starting"/"commercial ending". Over time, by looking for common features shared by the short video segments surrounding your clicks, it works out a set of characteristics that it can use to mark the start and end of commercials for you, on a channel-by-channel basis.
If you've already got a Linux box with a network connection, why not add a some of hardware/software that will allow it to function as a TiVo?
Add a TV tuner card and a video card with NTSC/PAL out (unless, like me, you have a large enough monitor that you're happy to use it for watching video).
Write a few scripts that go to http://tv.yahoo.com, load the pages with listings for your area/cable system, and build up a database of what shows will be on.
From there it's a matter of building a relatively straightforward program to allow you to browse and play currently running shows, program it to record specific things, and that will learn your preferences and record things for you. The only really hard part I see is building your system so that the disk contention involved in simultaneously reading/writing to one drive when recording and playing back at the same time doesn't cause things to break down.
All this isn't exactly trivial to do, but from the hardware perspective, it's not so unreasonable: Mostly all you're doing is gluing together off-the-shelf stuff. And the marginal cost (if you already have a PC) isn't too big. You might end up paying as much as you would for a TiVo, but you'll end up with a more capable system, and have far more control over how it works. For example, you can ensure that it doesn't upload data your viewing habits back to anyone, if that sort of thing bothers you.
If I had any interest in watching TV, I'd be working on this. I'm half tempted to get cable connection and the necessary card and make a project of it for fun, anyways.
Claiming a right to a free service is absurd. Google is and remains an excellent, free, service. If it stops being free, or the quality starts to suffer -- stop using it!
So what's your point? The person you're responding to never said anything about a right to use Google. He did talk about a right to know if they're screwing around with their search result precedence to make a buck.
You know what? He's correct. The source for this story had every right to analyze Google's operation in the way that he did, and he has every right to disseminate this information, and users have every right to pick another search engine. All of these rights seem perfectly reasonable, to me.
Search engines perform a task that is somewhat "journalistic" in nature. In the long term, they're going to need to develop something like journalistic integrity in order to maintain the respect of most users. Giving preference to people who are paying you to do so without disclosing to users that you are doing this is probably a violation of this integrity. Not punisble by law, but certainly worthy of censure in the public eye.
Well, I like google, though I don't go directly to their page to start my search anymore. I have a page on the local server with just the simple form to launch a google query. Not a real big deal, but I find I just keep a browser window open to that page so I can go do a search without having to stop what I'm doing, open a browser window, go to a bookmark, etc.
I wrote a quick dumb script that grabs the contents of the current X selection, then uses Netscape Remote Control to open a new browser window that searches Google for the selection string. Then I make alt-mouse2 execute that script. The result? I can search for something onscreen by highlighting it and hitting alt-mouse2. I also bound the "search" button on my "Internet" keyboard to perform the same action.
(alt-mouse1 treats the current selection as a URL. Handy for when you get a URL and it doesn't show up as a link.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, horseshit. Different drugs have different effects and blanket statements like yours are moronic. Tell someone with attention deficit disorder that Ritalin (a powerful stimulant not unlike methamphetamine) impairs their ability to act responsibly. I wonder how many of those methamphetamine users have undiagnosed ADD and actually function better on the drug.
Aside from that, there are short term and long-term responsibilities. A few drinks or some pot may make me less responsible in the short term, but if I have long-term control over my use (i.e. I rarely have more than 2 drinks in a week, or smoke pot more often than once a month), I'm still exhibiting long-term responsibility.
Calling Valenti a cocksucker and smashing up a Starbucks. Yeah, that really threatens their power.
You want to know what really threatens their power? Not watching them. Not going to movies. Not watching television. Building a life that doesn't revolve around participation in a spectacle, either as a viewer, or as an actor (which is all you are when you trash a Starbucks).
If you aren't good enough to be an independant consultant, you probably shouldn't be in consulting. Otherwise, you're probably just padding out the project team for some consulting firm, giving them an excuse to bill the customer for a few hundred more dollars per day, and not really expected to do anything. You're not learning much, either, so you're doing serious damage to your future employability - once you don't look so young, they won't be able to sell you as a junior consultant, and you won't have the leadership or technical skills that you'll need for them to sell you in a senior role. And besides all that, you feel like shit, don't you?
I was in exactly the sort of job you describe last year (except for the 6 figure salary). I got out. Now I'm in a job where I have real responsibility, and get real satisfaction from doing real work. In 10 years, when I know far more about software engineering, I'll think about going into consulting again.
Walk out. Take another job where you get to do something actually productive, even if you have to take a pay hit to do so. In the long run, you'll be better off.
Wish I could say the same. Mind you, the fault seems to be Verizon/BA's, not Speakeasy's. But yesterday was the second that BA was scheduled to do their part of the install, and the second time that they failed to show. Worse, they can't give me any sort of a window, so getting someone from building maintnance to show up to open the phone closet at the right time is a bear, as well.
I'm on the verge of cancelling the DSL order and getting a cable modem.
RSA's been patented for 17 years now. Look at the number of products that use it, and the ways it's used in those products.
This time next year, look at the number of products that appeared since the patent expired, and the ways they use it.
Where do you see the innovation happening?
The innovation happened when RSA was developed. Maybe, had they not gotten a patent, RSA would have never publicized their algorithm. Maybe instead they would have kept it as a trade secret, releasing only closed-source binary implementations of it. And as a result, it would have never recieved the peer review that it has, and all of those products that will begin using RSA encryption in novel ways over the next year would never get that opportunity. The point of the patent system is to encourage inventors to disclose how their inventions work. And in this case, that's exactly what it did. You can argue that maybe that patents shouldn't last as long as they do. But RSA is not the best case for demonstrating that the patent concept is fundamentally unsound.
Think about the sort of people that Bush is likely to nominate as Supreme Court justices. Now think about the sort of people that Gore is likely to nominate.
Still see no difference?
Actually, Windows and the Mac are both way ahead of Unix when it comes to scripting of graphical applications. Unix makes it easy to glue together a lot of little command-line tools. Windows and the Mac both have systems that make it relatively easy for graphical applications to expose interfaces so that they can be scripted (without having to include a whole scripting language interpreter and system). Unix doesn't really have anything comparable, yet. Gnome and KDE are working on it, but neither is as mature or as ubiquitous as the Windows and Mac solutions.
Mac OS X already has its own GUI framework, and there is absolutely no way that X could improve upon that. After all, the Mac GUI has always been its main selling point, whereas X is roundly, and deservedly, slated as being slow, buggy and holding back Linux on the desktop.
I honestly don't see the point in this. Surely it's not progress, it's going backwards?
The point is to give OS X users the ability to run legacy X11 apps, and to display X11 apps that are running on remote machines.
Just to make it nice and sparkling clear: This is not a replacement for Aqua. This X11 server will run under Aqua, and allow you to display X11 apps side by side with normal Mac applications.
X11 is nasty compared to a real GUI, but the network transparency is damned nice when you need it, and there are a few decent X11 apps around.
Streetlawyer's right, here. The IOC most certainly can prevent what the athletes from saying anything about their experiences at the games, simply by requiring them to sign a contract agreeing not to do so as a precondition of their participation.
Which doesn't mean it isn't an asinine thing to do.
Not that this would be any great loss.
I don't say this because I hate sports. As a matter of fact, I love them. But I love them as an activity in which people can participate, not a spectacle for them to watch from the comfort of their couches.
I can certainly afford the money. The question is this: Will upgrading provide benefits that outweigh the costs? Remember, costs aren't limited to money: Time and energy must be put into choosing the new system, moving software and data from the old system to the new, etc. If your machine is something you're using to get work done regularly, the cost of this downtime could easily outweigh the performance benefits.
Gimme a break. The core of The Matrix was a few philosophical ideas that ought to be obvious to any educated and halfway-intelligent person by the time they're a teenager. Certainly the idea shouldn't be at all novel to anyone who's spent any time reading SF, particlarly SF that deals with virtual reality.
The Matrix is a dumb-and-overly-slick action flick, and not much else. Maybe if it had been presented to me as such, I'd have liked it. But I heard so many people talking about how "deep" and "thought-provoking" it was that I expected something halfway intelligent.
Move elsewhere. This was the solution I chose, and I can't say I regret it. Maybe I would have felt different if I were a native, but as I see it, Atlanta's not really a city so much as a bunch of suburbs all run together. However, if you are stuck in Atlanta, the Virginia Highlands area is a much more pleasant area for hanging out than Buckhead. Also think about finding stuff to do outside of the city. There's some decent parks for hiking in the mountains north of the city, for example.
To the guy who moved to Atlanta from DC and wants to go back: When I first left Atlanta, I lived in DC for a while, and loved it. Simply not having to spend 1-2 hours of my life in a car every single day was a wonderful change. Even though I was only there for a year, I've got a tremendous nostalgia for the place.
I doubt it. Most of the business people at my company carry PDAs, and the ones that do all carry Palms. Why? Because they actually use the things as PDAs. They're not interested in playing games or listening to MP3s, and while color might help a bit on the UI front, it doesn't add much in the way of real functionality.
I love the puritan's mentality: "People who take pleasure in things I dislike always do so for stupid reasons!"
Proving one's manhood by drinking a lot is strictly for college boys and morons. This doesn't mean that everyone who drinks does so in this fashion. Tip: I drink maybe once or twice a week, rarely more than one or two drinks in a sitting, and almost always accompanied by a meal. But you'll never know how pleasant a glass of good wine is with a good meal, because you're too busy feeling superior to fratboys doing keg stands.
Had you read the article, you'd realize that the government changed the wording on the H1B to imply that it was a path to a green card and then citizenship. To quote from the article:
If they hate the US so much, why do they want to stay here? What they hate is the government that implied that it would do one thing, and then did another. This is a rather different thing from hating the country as a whole.
The problem with training Americans to do the job is that most Americans are too stupid and ill-educated to benefit from the training and get these jobs.
(For the record, I'm a natural-born American citizen.)
When American culture stops lionizing stupidity, and the American education system gets back to educating (rather than struggling to perpetuate established power structures), then maybe we can think about giving those jobs to Americans.
Heavens forfend that customers express an opinion on whether or not the product being sold is worth the price charged.
Heavens forfend that customers develop expectations based on a company's past behavior, and express surprise and disappointment when those expectations are not met.
Generating electricity in a distributed fashion introduces another cost, though: You still have to expend some amount of energy in transporting the fuel to the generators. In this case, pumping the natural gas.
The amount of energy required to transport a unit of gas to the customer is probably a relatively small percentage of that unit's energy value, but that cost still needs to be taken into account when working out the overall economics of the scheme.
What you fail to mention is that they're also trying to undermine fair use.
Where is the evidence that rampant piracy is seriously hurting any of the major copyright holders who are pushing for this sort of thing?
Honestly, I think the people behind this and similar schemes (SDMI, for example) must have rocks in their head. There's nothing that they can do that will prevent piracy by someone who is sufficiently dedicated (such as organized pirates who sell bootlegged content). But they they do make it more and more of a pain in the ass for those who purchase their wares legitimately to use them, thereby increasing the attractiveness of the (unencumbered) bootlegs. Like prohibition and the current war on drugs, all that the war on piracy will do is provide a profit center for organized criminals.
Unless your 'input' is simply accepting the digital output stream (and not the analog signal generated by the output), the watermark will probably be lost - if the watermark is inaudible, I can't imagine that it would survive the digital->analog->digital conversion. And if it does survive, you have another option: Fuck with the analog in some way (for example, by adding a known signal to it) that will foul up the watermark-detection, then subtract that known signal back out of the "clean" digital data you recorded.
You're going to see a slight loss in quality just from the D->A->D conversion, and probably also some from imperfections in your analog addition/digital subtraction process. But with good enough equipment, this loss can be made minimal. And you need to do it only once for each piece of music you want to copy: After that, you can make infinite pristine copies of the final, unwatermarked digital product. And if you're part of a large, organized piracy organization (which is who the RIAA really needs to be concerned about), this is quite feasable.
So you obviously haven't watched much TV lately.
Good guess.
There have been numerous occasions that I've seen where the transition break was missing. Or even worse, they insert fake ones in between commercials. Local stations in particular usually insert their own advert for the evening news etc as the last "commercial" before going back to the show, and they very often insert a transition break before their ad. I don't think that's an accident, they probably do it deliberately to foil VCRs with commercial break detectors.
Okay, so blank screen detection won't always work. But the fact remains: If for any given channel there are programmatically-distinguishable characteristics that identify the beginnings and ends of commercials, they can be clipped.
How about a TiVo-like system that you "train" to recognize the beginnings and ends of commercials? Whenever a commercial break begins or ends, you click "commercial starting"/"commercial ending". Over time, by looking for common features shared by the short video segments surrounding your clicks, it works out a set of characteristics that it can use to mark the start and end of commercials for you, on a channel-by-channel basis.
If you've already got a Linux box with a network connection, why not add a some of hardware/software that will allow it to function as a TiVo?
Add a TV tuner card and a video card with NTSC/PAL out (unless, like me, you have a large enough monitor that you're happy to use it for watching video).
Write a few scripts that go to http://tv.yahoo.com, load the pages with listings for your area/cable system, and build up a database of what shows will be on.
From there it's a matter of building a relatively straightforward program to allow you to browse and play currently running shows, program it to record specific things, and that will learn your preferences and record things for you. The only really hard part I see is building your system so that the disk contention involved in simultaneously reading/writing to one drive when recording and playing back at the same time doesn't cause things to break down.
All this isn't exactly trivial to do, but from the hardware perspective, it's not so unreasonable: Mostly all you're doing is gluing together off-the-shelf stuff. And the marginal cost (if you already have a PC) isn't too big. You might end up paying as much as you would for a TiVo, but you'll end up with a more capable system, and have far more control over how it works. For example, you can ensure that it doesn't upload data your viewing habits back to anyone, if that sort of thing bothers you.
If I had any interest in watching TV, I'd be working on this. I'm half tempted to get cable connection and the necessary card and make a project of it for fun, anyways.
So what's your point? The person you're responding to never said anything about a right to use Google. He did talk about a right to know if they're screwing around with their search result precedence to make a buck.
You know what? He's correct. The source for this story had every right to analyze Google's operation in the way that he did, and he has every right to disseminate this information, and users have every right to pick another search engine. All of these rights seem perfectly reasonable, to me.
Search engines perform a task that is somewhat "journalistic" in nature. In the long term, they're going to need to develop something like journalistic integrity in order to maintain the respect of most users. Giving preference to people who are paying you to do so without disclosing to users that you are doing this is probably a violation of this integrity. Not punisble by law, but certainly worthy of censure in the public eye.
I wrote a quick dumb script that grabs the contents of the current X selection, then uses Netscape Remote Control to open a new browser window that searches Google for the selection string. Then I make alt-mouse2 execute that script. The result? I can search for something onscreen by highlighting it and hitting alt-mouse2. I also bound the "search" button on my "Internet" keyboard to perform the same action.
(alt-mouse1 treats the current selection as a URL. Handy for when you get a URL and it doesn't show up as a link.)