The issue in this case wasn't whether the employee was entitled to keep a copy of the contacts list after leaving employment. The question was whether the employer was.
The employer is probably entitled to the information. But the employee may be entitled to it, too. LinkedIn buddy lists ("networks") aren't a big secret. Arguably, they're not entitled to protection as a trade secret. Absent an non-compete agreement (illegal in California), the employee and the employer both probably have the right to a copy of the information.
As a someone who was a horseman for 15 years (show and racehorses) I can say that the only people who do not think dressage is boring is the dressage people.
I know, I know. I ride myself, I know dressage people, and I've ridden dressage tests. A friend of mine is in Hong Kong right now, as a groom for one of the USET dressage competitors. Watching dressage from a great distance in a big stadium seems pointless. You can't see anything that matters.
The BBC is measuring pollution themselves, much to the annoyance of the Chinese government. August 10 was a really bad day.
August 11, not so bad.
The equestrian events are in Hong Kong, which also has high pollution, but the drastic control measures being used in Beijing aren't being applied to Hong Kong. That's a small-scale competition.
Hong Kong's racing fans think dressage is boring, and more than half of the 10,000 spectators walked out yesterday.
It makes sense to exit this business. The future is clearly integration of more support functions onto the same part as the CPU. The support chipset is going the way of the separate FPU, the separate MMU, and the separate graphics controller. The future at the low end is one big part plus RAM.
Try CallClerk. This is a little program whose main function is to receive Caller ID info and do useful things with it, like pop up info from Microsoft Outlook. It implements a speakerphone, which is what you need. It can invoke other
programs on call receipt, so you can tie it to a "turn off entertainment" script.
There are other programs like this, intended for people who make and receive many phone calls and need to log and track them.
SMS does get through when voice can't. Especially since analog AMPS service was discontinued.
Last month I was using SMS to communicate with a friend who was spending a week horse camping in San Mateo County. This isn't exactly Outer Nowhere, but there's a big area of hilly parks west of Silicon Valley with no cell towers. She was camped in a valley, and I couldn't reach her with voice calls, but if I sent her a text message, it would be delivered the next time she rode up to a ridge line and briefly got line of sight to a distant tower. When she sent me a message back, it would queue in her phone until she got connectivity again. So we could communicate, with hours of delay.
When I went out to the horse camp, I couldn't get any service. A year ago, at the same place, I'd get service via Analog Roam, when my tri-band phone dropped back to AMPS. Now that AMPS is history, there's no more service in many remote locations.
It's not that there are no locations for towers in the parks. We could see a nearby radio tower, and rode up to it, but it was a VHF repeater for fire, police, and rescue services. Cell companies could co-locate there if they really wanted to, or were required to provide coverage.
But none of them had.
Originally, cellular licenses required the company to provide service in 100% of their area within a certain number of years. But the FCC backed off on that requirement, as "deregulation". This was a mistake.
They now have the world's largest airport terminal, built up in almost no time at all.
It's not the largest airport. It's just that they chose to build a really big single terminal, instead of going to a ring of smaller ones like most other big airports. DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth) is substantially bigger, and Atlanta and Heathrow have far more traffic.
Blair worked for the British Ministry of Information during WWII. Many of his memos are preserved in "Orwell - the Lost Writings", which turned up in the BBC archived a few years ago. This is where much of the detail of "1984" came from. "Big Brother" is actually some manager called "B.B." at the MoI. "Newspeak" comes from the BBC's effort to broadcast to the colonies in Basic English. One of Blair's jobs was translating material into Basic English, which, he discovered, is a political act. You have to detail the meaning of any idioms and metaphors when grinding down text into Basic English. Political ambiguity does not translate unless made specific.
Incidentally, Blair refused to write as George Orwell for the MoI; he took the position that they had hired Eric Blair, not George Orwell, and weren't entitled to use his professional reputation.
To get a sense of what the Ministry of Information turned out as propaganda, see this WWII MoI video.
Feeding advanced physics back into gameplay creates a compatibility barrier.
True. But there's also a parallelism problem and a lag problem. Particle systems where the particles don't interact with each other parallelize easily. In other words, blowing stuff into little bits is easy to make run fast. Big-object collisions don't parallelize well; you need intercommunication between adjacent objects. This is transitive, which turns a parallel problem into a sequential one. Worst case: "Now let us all join hands around the world", or, "Everybody take hold of the rope and pull". Very few games do physics well enough that two players could pick up an object, one lifting each end, and move it realistically. I'd like to see a game where a raid team has to cooperate to pick up a boat, carry it to the water, and get it launched in the surf zone, timing the launch so they don't get pushed back onto the beach by a wave. That would be a good feature in any "special ops" game; SEALs train for weeks to get that particular skill nailed.
The lag problem is that the graphics pipeline normally runs behind the game engine, and the game engine doesn't wait for it. If some physics out in the graphics pipeline has to feed back into the game engine, either the game engine has to wait, which slows it down, or the effect has to be introduced into the game engine a few cycles late. In some cases that works; you could have a game where snow was falling and snowdrifts affected skiing or driving. That would work fine if the snowdrift updates reached the game engine a few cycles late. But large-object collision detection and response can't be processed late, or the results not only look awful, you get fly-throughs and instability.
(I used to do physics engines. I'm responsible for the "ragdoll falling downstairs" cliche (1997)).
Most of what Ageia has done so far involves particle systems for fire, explosions, and water. It's all part of the rendering; none of the Ageia-driven objects feed back into the game play. Have they gone beyond that?
The head of Applied Materials solar division said in a talk at Stanford last year that their solar panels took two years of their own output in energy to make. They hope to get the energy breakeven point down to six months. He said the sputtering process they use in coating is energy-inefficient, and they're trying to develop something better.
Total installed energy cost is probably higher. Home solar installations are about 50% installation cost. The big open-field installations are cheaper; they have economies of scale.
Forbes mentions that Mojave Desert real estate is becoming more valuable because many companies want to build solar facilities there. There's plenty of space in California, Nevada, and Arizona for solar panels.
Mike Splinter of Applied Materials (the largest maker of semiconductor fab gear) likes to say "Everybody else's costs (in the energy business) are going up, and ours are going down. We're nowhere near market saturation. This is a great business for us."
Right. Before the fix, you had to guess a 16-bit number. After the fix, you have to guess a 32-bit number. About 10 hours on a gigabit Ethernet should let you try the necessary 4 billion packets.
This isn't an attack one could run against a client out on a DSL line, but if you were able to take over one machine in a colo, you might be able, over time, to get traffic for other machines directed to yours.
If DNS used a 64-bit or 128 bit number to tie the response to the request, and the DNS client had a crypto-grade random number generator, guessing would be hopeless. An intermediate technical fix would be to define a "DNSv2" message format, with a 128-bit random message ID and a rule that no DNSv2 client will accept an answer to a question it didn't ask. (Some of the attacks depend upon an attacker forcing a query for "1245.example.com", which won't be found, and a phony DNS blindly blasting replies with random IDs for "www.example.com", which is accepted because it's in the same "bailiwick".) If everybody other than desktop clients went to an improved DNS, and desktop clients talked only to an improved server, we'd be reasonably OK.
DNSSEC, which has a whole signed-certificate chain like SSL, may be a way out of this, but it's much more complex than the existing DNS.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, before general-purpose personal computers, there was a whole industry for "word processors". These were special-purpose machines which offered text editing, printing, and storage for documents. They replaced typewriters. For the first time, people could edit documents without retyping.
Word processors were not intended to be user-programmable; they ran a built-in application.
Wang was a big name in that area, as were Datapoint and IBM. The original IBM PC reused the display from the IBM Displaywriter, IBM's family of word processors.
The next step was "shared-logic word processors", where several terminals connected to a central unit, with the central unit having a disk and printer. This was a low-end version of time-sharing. Datapoint introduced ArcNet, so the word processors could send documents to each other. But none of this stuff was user-programmable, although the hardware underneath was a general purpose CPU. It wasn't considered reasonable that users in a typical office could program something as complex as a computer. Also, these machines barely had an operating system; they were usually running the application on the bare machine.
After the IBM PC came out, Wang tried to enter that business. They weren't very successful. I used one of their early 8086 machines, the Wang PIC, which had a scanner. It ran a variant of DOS, which, interestingly, allowed
about 800K of user space instead of 640K, because they did the split between RAM and device space at a higher address than IBM did. (The real 8086 limit isn't 640K; it's 1024K minus whatever address space is needed for devices.) It used a completely different (and more rugged) plug-in card design than the IBM PC, and wasn't software-compatible. A nice machine, it just lost out for being incompatible.
So really, PCs are descended from these word processors.
The history of computer chess is the history of building brute force engines and then refining them by identifying where processing power is successful at winning.
The "brute force engines" are now rather modest. We're way past needing Deep Blue. 4-CPU X86 machines now play at grandmaster level. With 8 CPUs, the computer can spot a grandmaster a pawn and move and still win.
Chess is unforgiving of errors. We now know just how unforgiving. In human grandmaster play, about one move in ten is suboptimal, based on post-game analysis. This is enough to give computers a clear edge. Go isn't that unforgiving.
Checkers, of course, is solved. Perfect play leads to a draw.
It's a weak article, because it doesn't mention the TRIPS agreement. The "no formalities" rule that results in copyright by default is in the TRIPS agreement, which is enforced by the World Trade Organization. Anything in the TRIPS agreement is very hard to change, and it has a pro-copyright bias. For example, there's a minimum duration of 50 years for most copyrights, but no maximum duration.
Emirates has just upgraded their first class service, with private suites and showers on board. They fly to about 100 cities, connecting the world to Dubai. They have all the business cities on the way up, like Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur, Guangzhou, Moscow, and Nagoya. This is part of Dubai's plan to become the center of the financial world.
This isn't a Government-funded expansion plan. Emirates is profitable.
So yes, signaling your wealth IS a useful product function. The problem with the app is not that it "merely" signals wealth, but that it... doesn't, because it could easily be faked.
That's why it has to be expensive.
Rolex is notorious for this. As their CEO says, "We are not in the watch business. We are in the luxury business." The mechanical watch business turned into a status symbol industry (and shrunk drastically) when electronic watches became more accurate than mechanical ones.
Early iPhone users were screaming when the price was cut. Now every dweeb can afford one, and it's meaningless as a status symbol.
The jewelry industry has been through this several times. Sapphires and rubies were once rare; now you can buy industrial sapphire and ruby bar stock. Manufacturing of diamonds is well underway, and DeBeers isn't as big a deal as it used to be. They're frantically trying to make a distinction between natural and synthetic diamonds, but they've painted themselves into a corner by promoting the idea for decades that flawless=valuable. (If you think diamonds are valuable as an investment, try to sell some.)
The North Pole isn't quite open water yet. But it's getting close. A friend of mine just went there. By ship. Admittedly it was a nuclear-powered icebreaker. But pictures taken near the
pole show patches of open water.
They need a better reward system. Each person who signs up should get a gift card for use at gas stations. The more you post, the more free gas you get. McCain could probably get sponsorship for this from his oil-industry buddies.
Many posters wrote that they'd rather download content. But if you download content with DRM that's tied to some authentication server, you can't rely on the service staying up for more than a few years.
Major systems which have already shut down, making purchased content unplayable:
DIVX. Rent a cheap DVD, re-authorize to play again. Discontinued in 1999. Content now unplayable.
AOL MusicNow Downloadable music, Microsoft DRM. Service discontinued, customer base transferred to Napster. Existing downloads now unplayable. Previous purchases credited as Napster purchases where both services had the same content.
Yahoo Music Downloadable music,
Microsoft DRM. Service discontinued, customer base transferred to RealNetworks. Existing downloads now unplayable. Coupons issued to former customers.
MTV URGE Downloadble music, monthly fixed fee. Service discontinued, customers offered "upgrade" deal by RealNetworks. Existing downloads now unplayable.
That's why downloaded DRMed content can't be trusted.
"Maybe it's also that line-doubling DVD players can be had for less than a hundred dollars."
True. Line-doubled DVD content played out via HDMI to a big LCD display isn't bad. There's a noticeable improvement when you go to an all-digital path to the display. As you'd expect, vertical edges get sharper. The transition from an analog video path to a digital one may provide more improvement than the next step of a data rate upgrade of Blu-Ray.
Audio formats better than CDs never caught on. DVD-Audio, at 96 kHz with 24-bit samples, solves the problems of CD-quality audio. With CD audio, soft passages may be only 4 or 5 bit audio, with the high bits all zero. That's quite noticeable. But only classical music has soft passages any more. Few people buy DVD-Audio discs. (Of course, they have DRM, which is another issue.)
Once Blu-Ray players drop to the point that they're no more expensive than DVD players, they will, of course, take over. But there's no big rush.
Kaminsky makes a point about how this bug can be used to spoof Certification Authorities who issue SSL certificates. For the cheap "domain control only validated" certificates, ownership of the domain is validated by sending an e-mail to the domain. If you can spoof DNS from the viewpoint of a CA, you can buy a valid SSL cert for a domain you don't own. Now you can spoof some banking site, and the spoofed site will properly display an SSL cert.
He also makes the point that DNS cache poisoning can be used to fake MX records in DNS, which will result in e-mail being diverted to the attacker, who can then look at it. If the attacker creates a high-priority MX record, they can read the mail, then disconnect without acknowledging receipt. The originating mailer will then resend to the next-priority MX record, the real one. So the mail reaches its destination without anything in the headers to indicate it was snooped.
The FBI press release says that "the indictment charges one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization". Conspiracy with whom? The indictment alleges that there were "co-conspirators", but who are they?
Slashdot Mirror
The issue in this case wasn't whether the employee was entitled to keep a copy of the contacts list after leaving employment. The question was whether the employer was.
The employer is probably entitled to the information. But the employee may be entitled to it, too. LinkedIn buddy lists ("networks") aren't a big secret. Arguably, they're not entitled to protection as a trade secret. Absent an non-compete agreement (illegal in California), the employee and the employer both probably have the right to a copy of the information.
As a someone who was a horseman for 15 years (show and racehorses) I can say that the only people who do not think dressage is boring is the dressage people.
I know, I know. I ride myself, I know dressage people, and I've ridden dressage tests. A friend of mine is in Hong Kong right now, as a groom for one of the USET dressage competitors. Watching dressage from a great distance in a big stadium seems pointless. You can't see anything that matters.
The BBC is measuring pollution themselves, much to the annoyance of the Chinese government. August 10 was a really bad day. August 11, not so bad.
The equestrian events are in Hong Kong, which also has high pollution, but the drastic control measures being used in Beijing aren't being applied to Hong Kong. That's a small-scale competition. Hong Kong's racing fans think dressage is boring, and more than half of the 10,000 spectators walked out yesterday.
It makes sense to exit this business. The future is clearly integration of more support functions onto the same part as the CPU. The support chipset is going the way of the separate FPU, the separate MMU, and the separate graphics controller. The future at the low end is one big part plus RAM.
Try CallClerk. This is a little program whose main function is to receive Caller ID info and do useful things with it, like pop up info from Microsoft Outlook. It implements a speakerphone, which is what you need. It can invoke other programs on call receipt, so you can tie it to a "turn off entertainment" script.
There are other programs like this, intended for people who make and receive many phone calls and need to log and track them.
Now, at last, medical care can be outsourced to low-wage countries.
SMS does get through when voice can't. Especially since analog AMPS service was discontinued.
Last month I was using SMS to communicate with a friend who was spending a week horse camping in San Mateo County. This isn't exactly Outer Nowhere, but there's a big area of hilly parks west of Silicon Valley with no cell towers. She was camped in a valley, and I couldn't reach her with voice calls, but if I sent her a text message, it would be delivered the next time she rode up to a ridge line and briefly got line of sight to a distant tower. When she sent me a message back, it would queue in her phone until she got connectivity again. So we could communicate, with hours of delay.
When I went out to the horse camp, I couldn't get any service. A year ago, at the same place, I'd get service via Analog Roam, when my tri-band phone dropped back to AMPS. Now that AMPS is history, there's no more service in many remote locations.
It's not that there are no locations for towers in the parks. We could see a nearby radio tower, and rode up to it, but it was a VHF repeater for fire, police, and rescue services. Cell companies could co-locate there if they really wanted to, or were required to provide coverage. But none of them had.
Originally, cellular licenses required the company to provide service in 100% of their area within a certain number of years. But the FCC backed off on that requirement, as "deregulation". This was a mistake.
They now have the world's largest airport terminal, built up in almost no time at all.
It's not the largest airport. It's just that they chose to build a really big single terminal, instead of going to a ring of smaller ones like most other big airports. DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth) is substantially bigger, and Atlanta and Heathrow have far more traffic.
Blair worked for the British Ministry of Information during WWII. Many of his memos are preserved in "Orwell - the Lost Writings", which turned up in the BBC archived a few years ago. This is where much of the detail of "1984" came from. "Big Brother" is actually some manager called "B.B." at the MoI. "Newspeak" comes from the BBC's effort to broadcast to the colonies in Basic English. One of Blair's jobs was translating material into Basic English, which, he discovered, is a political act. You have to detail the meaning of any idioms and metaphors when grinding down text into Basic English. Political ambiguity does not translate unless made specific.
Incidentally, Blair refused to write as George Orwell for the MoI; he took the position that they had hired Eric Blair, not George Orwell, and weren't entitled to use his professional reputation.
To get a sense of what the Ministry of Information turned out as propaganda, see this WWII MoI video.
Feeding advanced physics back into gameplay creates a compatibility barrier.
True. But there's also a parallelism problem and a lag problem. Particle systems where the particles don't interact with each other parallelize easily. In other words, blowing stuff into little bits is easy to make run fast. Big-object collisions don't parallelize well; you need intercommunication between adjacent objects. This is transitive, which turns a parallel problem into a sequential one. Worst case: "Now let us all join hands around the world", or, "Everybody take hold of the rope and pull". Very few games do physics well enough that two players could pick up an object, one lifting each end, and move it realistically. I'd like to see a game where a raid team has to cooperate to pick up a boat, carry it to the water, and get it launched in the surf zone, timing the launch so they don't get pushed back onto the beach by a wave. That would be a good feature in any "special ops" game; SEALs train for weeks to get that particular skill nailed.
The lag problem is that the graphics pipeline normally runs behind the game engine, and the game engine doesn't wait for it. If some physics out in the graphics pipeline has to feed back into the game engine, either the game engine has to wait, which slows it down, or the effect has to be introduced into the game engine a few cycles late. In some cases that works; you could have a game where snow was falling and snowdrifts affected skiing or driving. That would work fine if the snowdrift updates reached the game engine a few cycles late. But large-object collision detection and response can't be processed late, or the results not only look awful, you get fly-throughs and instability.
(I used to do physics engines. I'm responsible for the "ragdoll falling downstairs" cliche (1997)).
Most of what Ageia has done so far involves particle systems for fire, explosions, and water. It's all part of the rendering; none of the Ageia-driven objects feed back into the game play. Have they gone beyond that?
If all you've read is "1984", you don't realize what a great commentator he was.
The head of Applied Materials solar division said in a talk at Stanford last year that their solar panels took two years of their own output in energy to make. They hope to get the energy breakeven point down to six months. He said the sputtering process they use in coating is energy-inefficient, and they're trying to develop something better.
Total installed energy cost is probably higher. Home solar installations are about 50% installation cost. The big open-field installations are cheaper; they have economies of scale.
Forbes mentions that Mojave Desert real estate is becoming more valuable because many companies want to build solar facilities there. There's plenty of space in California, Nevada, and Arizona for solar panels.
Mike Splinter of Applied Materials (the largest maker of semiconductor fab gear) likes to say "Everybody else's costs (in the energy business) are going up, and ours are going down. We're nowhere near market saturation. This is a great business for us."
Right. Before the fix, you had to guess a 16-bit number. After the fix, you have to guess a 32-bit number. About 10 hours on a gigabit Ethernet should let you try the necessary 4 billion packets. This isn't an attack one could run against a client out on a DSL line, but if you were able to take over one machine in a colo, you might be able, over time, to get traffic for other machines directed to yours.
If DNS used a 64-bit or 128 bit number to tie the response to the request, and the DNS client had a crypto-grade random number generator, guessing would be hopeless. An intermediate technical fix would be to define a "DNSv2" message format, with a 128-bit random message ID and a rule that no DNSv2 client will accept an answer to a question it didn't ask. (Some of the attacks depend upon an attacker forcing a query for "1245.example.com", which won't be found, and a phony DNS blindly blasting replies with random IDs for "www.example.com", which is accepted because it's in the same "bailiwick".) If everybody other than desktop clients went to an improved DNS, and desktop clients talked only to an improved server, we'd be reasonably OK.
DNSSEC, which has a whole signed-certificate chain like SSL, may be a way out of this, but it's much more complex than the existing DNS.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, before general-purpose personal computers, there was a whole industry for "word processors". These were special-purpose machines which offered text editing, printing, and storage for documents. They replaced typewriters. For the first time, people could edit documents without retyping. Word processors were not intended to be user-programmable; they ran a built-in application. Wang was a big name in that area, as were Datapoint and IBM. The original IBM PC reused the display from the IBM Displaywriter, IBM's family of word processors.
The next step was "shared-logic word processors", where several terminals connected to a central unit, with the central unit having a disk and printer. This was a low-end version of time-sharing. Datapoint introduced ArcNet, so the word processors could send documents to each other. But none of this stuff was user-programmable, although the hardware underneath was a general purpose CPU. It wasn't considered reasonable that users in a typical office could program something as complex as a computer. Also, these machines barely had an operating system; they were usually running the application on the bare machine.
After the IBM PC came out, Wang tried to enter that business. They weren't very successful. I used one of their early 8086 machines, the Wang PIC, which had a scanner. It ran a variant of DOS, which, interestingly, allowed about 800K of user space instead of 640K, because they did the split between RAM and device space at a higher address than IBM did. (The real 8086 limit isn't 640K; it's 1024K minus whatever address space is needed for devices.) It used a completely different (and more rugged) plug-in card design than the IBM PC, and wasn't software-compatible. A nice machine, it just lost out for being incompatible.
So really, PCs are descended from these word processors.
The history of computer chess is the history of building brute force engines and then refining them by identifying where processing power is successful at winning.
The "brute force engines" are now rather modest. We're way past needing Deep Blue. 4-CPU X86 machines now play at grandmaster level. With 8 CPUs, the computer can spot a grandmaster a pawn and move and still win.
Chess is unforgiving of errors. We now know just how unforgiving. In human grandmaster play, about one move in ten is suboptimal, based on post-game analysis. This is enough to give computers a clear edge. Go isn't that unforgiving.
Checkers, of course, is solved. Perfect play leads to a draw.
It's a weak article, because it doesn't mention the TRIPS agreement. The "no formalities" rule that results in copyright by default is in the TRIPS agreement, which is enforced by the World Trade Organization. Anything in the TRIPS agreement is very hard to change, and it has a pro-copyright bias. For example, there's a minimum duration of 50 years for most copyrights, but no maximum duration.
Emirates has just upgraded their first class service, with private suites and showers on board. They fly to about 100 cities, connecting the world to Dubai. They have all the business cities on the way up, like Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur, Guangzhou, Moscow, and Nagoya. This is part of Dubai's plan to become the center of the financial world.
This isn't a Government-funded expansion plan. Emirates is profitable.
So yes, signaling your wealth IS a useful product function. The problem with the app is not that it "merely" signals wealth, but that it ... doesn't, because it could easily be faked.
That's why it has to be expensive.
Rolex is notorious for this. As their CEO says, "We are not in the watch business. We are in the luxury business." The mechanical watch business turned into a status symbol industry (and shrunk drastically) when electronic watches became more accurate than mechanical ones.
Early iPhone users were screaming when the price was cut. Now every dweeb can afford one, and it's meaningless as a status symbol.
The jewelry industry has been through this several times. Sapphires and rubies were once rare; now you can buy industrial sapphire and ruby bar stock. Manufacturing of diamonds is well underway, and DeBeers isn't as big a deal as it used to be. They're frantically trying to make a distinction between natural and synthetic diamonds, but they've painted themselves into a corner by promoting the idea for decades that flawless=valuable. (If you think diamonds are valuable as an investment, try to sell some.)
The North Pole isn't quite open water yet. But it's getting close. A friend of mine just went there. By ship. Admittedly it was a nuclear-powered icebreaker. But pictures taken near the pole show patches of open water.
They need a better reward system. Each person who signs up should get a gift card for use at gas stations. The more you post, the more free gas you get. McCain could probably get sponsorship for this from his oil-industry buddies.
Many posters wrote that they'd rather download content. But if you download content with DRM that's tied to some authentication server, you can't rely on the service staying up for more than a few years.
Major systems which have already shut down, making purchased content unplayable:
That's why downloaded DRMed content can't be trusted.
"Maybe it's also that line-doubling DVD players can be had for less than a hundred dollars."
True. Line-doubled DVD content played out via HDMI to a big LCD display isn't bad. There's a noticeable improvement when you go to an all-digital path to the display. As you'd expect, vertical edges get sharper. The transition from an analog video path to a digital one may provide more improvement than the next step of a data rate upgrade of Blu-Ray.
Audio formats better than CDs never caught on. DVD-Audio, at 96 kHz with 24-bit samples, solves the problems of CD-quality audio. With CD audio, soft passages may be only 4 or 5 bit audio, with the high bits all zero. That's quite noticeable. But only classical music has soft passages any more. Few people buy DVD-Audio discs. (Of course, they have DRM, which is another issue.)
Once Blu-Ray players drop to the point that they're no more expensive than DVD players, they will, of course, take over. But there's no big rush.
Kaminsky makes a point about how this bug can be used to spoof Certification Authorities who issue SSL certificates. For the cheap "domain control only validated" certificates, ownership of the domain is validated by sending an e-mail to the domain. If you can spoof DNS from the viewpoint of a CA, you can buy a valid SSL cert for a domain you don't own. Now you can spoof some banking site, and the spoofed site will properly display an SSL cert.
He also makes the point that DNS cache poisoning can be used to fake MX records in DNS, which will result in e-mail being diverted to the attacker, who can then look at it. If the attacker creates a high-priority MX record, they can read the mail, then disconnect without acknowledging receipt. The originating mailer will then resend to the next-priority MX record, the real one. So the mail reaches its destination without anything in the headers to indicate it was snooped.
The FBI press release says that "the indictment charges one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization". Conspiracy with whom? The indictment alleges that there were "co-conspirators", but who are they?