This reminds me of a beautiful plugin for one of the chat clients, I can't remember which one now, that exploited the 'realtime typing notification' option that one of the IM systems offered.
By default, the client would only show typing notifications if you were already chatting with someone. This plugin warned you of typing notifications from people just initiating a conversation, which usually gave you time to quickly reply to them before they had a chance to say something to you. Totally freaked out those who didn't realize that their client was providing realtime status information...
France will be an interesting one to watch as time goes on: On the one hand, they adore the CAP money-trough that allows their oh-so-picturesque agricultural to do assorted economically absurd but picturesque 'cultural' things. On the other hand, with EU membership showing signs of expanding eastward into some of the former Warsaw Pact nations, which are substantially poorer than France; but also have lots of picturesque and inefficient farmers who would be happy to claim to be culturally valuable in exchange for sweet, sweet, cash, France may end up having to come up with some relatively tactful way of either killing CAP without getting crucified at home, or er, capping CAP so that it can continue to serve its purpose of subsidizing French farmers, rather than being applied evenly across a broader EU, which would involve dangerously expensive engagements in eastern Europe....
We've all been conditioned by movies to think otherwise, but sound travel by vibrations and needs a medium to propagate, gas, liquid, or solid. There are no sounds in space, because there is nothing to support it.
The sound just propagates through waves in the aether...
Your distinction is correct; but it would be very interesting to know if there is any way of inferring, from the electrical noise, what the physical state and thus, (with some greater or lesser degree of inexactitude) what the situation would sound like if you had a mic on the scene...
On the plus side, Cassini has demonstrated the capabilities necessary to capture that distinctive noise that TIE fighters make as they fly past, inexplicably following approximately WWII aerial maneuvering constraints in hard vacuum...
It's so sweet to see a anarcho-cypherpunk currency all grown up... A lawyer, trademark claims, probably a white picket fence and a golden retriever in the suburbs...
More seriously, though, while it isn't clear that this guy is entitled to the trademark, it also isn't obviously deleterious for 'Bitcoin' to be a trademark(rather conveniently, the definition of a bitcoin is a quite specific bit of math, rather than some natural language handwaving, so it would arguably be a better defined trademark than many). Since(unlike patents and copyrights, which are enforceable against all comers with only a few 'fair use' and such exceptions) trademarks are quite broadly usable by others(so long as they aren't being used deceptively), somebody actually associated with Bitcoin having a trademark for 'Bitcoin' to the effect that "If it conforms to the protocol spec and cryptographic details laid out in the spec, it's a Bitcoin, and conveniently anybody who wishes can mathematically verify it on the spot..." wouldn't obviously be a bad thing.
More broadly, what I will be interested to see is if we ever run into the issue of there being multiple, parallel, issuings of "quasi-bitcoins". At least as best I understand it, there is a finite supply of Bitcoins according to the present definition; but that the present definition incorporates some arbitrary starting constants and then follows the defined protocol from there. A 'second issue' using a different set of arbitrary constants would not be compatible with the 'first issue'; but it would be equally amenable to following the protocol and being used for transactions, and would presumably trade at some discount against the original. Unless there are rather tight technical constraints on the initial values, there could potentially be thousands of different Bitcoin-sub-N chains in simultaneous existence...
Do you have any reason to suspect that SalesWatson's database of domain-specific knowledge wouldn't include the ability to procure the finest vice a given area has to offer? I'm sure a computer with an expense account is substantially more pleasant than some of the customers that escort services put up with. (Just wait until somebody attempts the 'But my expert system was the one who bribed the Chilean interior minister!' defense during an FCPA prosecution. That'll be a trial to watch...)
Humans certainly aren't especially logical('bounded rationality' to the polite optimists 'bugfuck insanity' for those on their fourth drink); but that may not stop a computer. In fact, it may even be helpful.
So long as humans are irrational in characteristic ways, their irrationality is just data to be evaluated. Truly random behavior would be rather confounding; but common emotional responses, cognitive biases, limitations in knowledge, etc. are all amenable to logical understanding, though they are not themselves logical. And, conveniently, the computer isn't going to let your emotional state bleed over and start affecting its rational operation, as a human typically would.
If these examples keep being ignored, we will be where we were in the early 1900s in europe . . . masses of starving people who had nothing to lose, and so joined revolutionary movements to overthrow the existing governments and try bizarre social experiments that ended in horror.
With one crucial difference:
Your historical revolutionary movements were typically motivated by some grievance with the share of the product (not) going to those who labored to produce it, along with opportunistic participation by those who weren't enjoying their freedom to starve very much.
The hypothetical automation-driven revolutionary movement would be in a substantially weaker position: It would consist of people who had been made redundant by robots, so its members would be irrelevant to the production activities of society, and it would be opposed by computerized surveillance/intelligence systems and combat robots, so there would no longer be tricky and dangerous need to arm, and court the sympathies of, a pretty substantial fraction of the population in order to kill or suppress the rest.
An advance in automation reduces the number of people whose cooperation, however grudging, is needed to keep your operation going. The people so reduced won't like it; but they will also no longer be necessary. Historically, the powers that were ran into trouble because they needed the people who they also wished to squeeze dry. In the not so very distant future, that constraint will likely be abolished...
Actual robotic servants may well be further off than substantial advances in expert systems/AI(wherever one chooses to draw the line between those).
Writing good expert systems has proven to be difficult; but they've improved over time and are just software, which means that they can run on general purpose computers that get cheaper every year and can fairly easily interact where needed via whatever telecom systems are available. And, once written, you can run as many copies as you wish
Physical robotics, by contrast, includes a number of hard software problems; but it also includes the nontrivial challenges of building reliable, complex, mechanical devices. Even if you do get a design hammered out, even mass production is unlikely to get an approximately human-spec robot churned out for less than the price of a new car, each. In certain controlled environments, designed around what the machines can do, robots are so absurdly superior to humans at the given task that the price isn't a big issue(depending on how hard you want to stretch the term "robot" this trend might go back as far as the mid 18th century, with Jacquard looms and the like; but it is certainly the case with modern industrial robots). Outside of those controlled environments, though, human-mimetic robots are still well within the realm of expensive toys. The relatively cheap ones are pretty miserable and the relatively good ones are very much not cheap.
Particularly with the progressive gutting of industrial workforces by application-specific robots and the eventual similar reduction in white-collar types by the expert systems, it is going to be hard to compete with the price of a fully human-equivalent Actual Human(tm), especially if supplemented with an expert system to order them around under unfamiliar conditions, or even an electronic muscle stimulation mechanism to exploit their durability, dexterity, and easy replaceability in combination with a machine's knowledge of a given task. Ugly? certainly; but if you can get a human for $8/hour and throw it away when it breaks, are you going to spend $100,000+ to have ASIMO model N gimping around gingerly?
So the method is common in notebooks today... meaning it has been in wide use for at least a few years now. The patent holder just waited until everyone had committed to selling that design, so that they could just sue everyone. Submarine patent tactics if I ever saw them.
I'm just wondering how they received it in the first place. Processor activity/thermal throttling is, um, not exactly news. Dynamic clocking for power savings was an option starting with some of the P3s. All the P4s have done thermal protection underclocking(and a fair few have needed it) and those were released in 2000. This isn't even counting the sort of stuff that presumably has been going on rather longer in embedded devices, which have always been greatly power and/or heat constrained.
VGA can get pretty nasty, especially if there are any cheapo splitters or 'SNR? What's SNR?' "amplifiers" in the chain. It's just been my experience that you can pull off some fairly horrid "30 feet of whatever VGA cable was on top of the pile in the cable graveyard going from the laptop to the wall jack, which was put in by the low bidder 10 years ago and consists of a gender changer and another 20-40 feet of who knows what exactly between the wall plate and the projector" type wiring and still get a perfectly usable, if slightly soft and not exactly pro-level color calibrated, image. With HDMI, by contrast, your image would be sparkling like a Myspace.gif or getting no link at all under similar circumstances.
VGA is never perfect; but it has a very wide band of 'tolerable, some other part of the system probably offends you more'. HDMI has a decent slice of perfect; but then dives right down into broken. The only place where VGA really makes me sad is when you are trying a dual-monitor configuration with two identical monitors; but a PC that has one VGA, one DVI. Getting the image to match drives me to madness.
That is certainly the correct model for Cisco Systems, Inc.(which is why I classified my question as "idle curiosity"). I'm just curious, though, are the relevant Ciscolings, as they go about their dirty work, trying to comfort themselves or patting themselves on the back? Is their little internal monologue going through some sort of "Well, if we don't, Alcatel will..." rationalization? Is somebody growing awkwardly tumescent in their corner office at the 'utopian' vision of discipline and social order that he is blessed to be a part of?
It doesn't seem likely to have much effect, one way or the other, in terms of how Cisco behaves, I just really want to know how the people who actually make 'Cisco' do things feel about what their incorporated hive organism is up to...
I suspect, actually, that this would work substantially better at higher levels than at lower ones. Intro-level textbooks are weighty tomes, generally burdened with all sorts of pedagogical baggage; but far from the cutting edge of their fields(which means that you'll need to find experts willing to simplify their work, rather than working on it, and some poor bastards to reformat it every time a new fad concerning layout and graphic design 'to engage multi-sensory learners' or whatever the flavor of the month is emerges). Also, they are a comparatively large and potentially lucrative market. Now, I'm all in favor of the customers ganging up and using their market power to buy outright and end per-unit gouging once and for all; but I strongly suspect that they would(by way of their representatives hammering out a contract) have to pay for it. From what I've been told by friends who've had the misfortune to be involved, making textbooks is as distasteful, and about as exciting, as making sausage. Because they are fairly interchangeable, there is no reason to get shafted on them; but commissioning a work-for-hire and then releasing the results for free use by the public is likely the fastest, easiest, and still relatively inexpensive way to do it.
At the higher levels, by contrast, the texts are much closer to the actual state of the field(and thus something that actual experts might want to write about) and it is already the case that professors and researchers do a great deal of publishing, for essentially zero money on top of their day job, because that is just how the game is played. Journal articles often demand handover of copyright, or page-fees, or even both, so Dr. Somebody isn't exactly growing fat on those terms, and a substantial percentage of the stuff printed by academic presses, even if the author is entitled to royalties and so forth, appears in relatively tiny runs, for a relatively small audience. Not really something that you do for the money. As long as there were some mechanism for allocating prestige points, which are the currency that most high level academic stuff is really published for, I suspect that the body of academic experts would hardly notice a change to open distribution(if anything, the money that the university libraries saved on crazy-expensive journal subscriptions could be moved elsewhere and make the situation a net win. Right now, academics write the stuff, hand it over, and then pay to read it. At least the public would be tasteful enough to only free-ride on the reading part.)
In the spirit of idle curiousity, I have to wonder if Cisco is purely an amoral, sociopathic, profit-seeking entity, and just doesn't give a fuck, or whether their higher-ups actually get the warm and fuzzies from the fact that they are on the leading edge of Benthamite dystopia technology?
They could, certainly, just be swallowing their doubts and keeping an eye on the bottom line; but nothing says that the people within the corporation are having to battle pangs of conscience in order to do what is profitable.
Let's just say that conservatism isn't the only reason that boring old VGA is going to be the default projector install video interface for some time to come.... Without pricey and vendor-specific converters(sure, there's a standard: always plug unit A from manufacturer Y into unit B from manufacturer Y...) HDMI does not hold up well over distance.
There is a thin slice between "perfect" and "nothing", commonly referred to as "sparkle" or "snow". Substantial amounts of pixel data are being tossed on the floor; but not quite enough for the system to just give up and declare the link dead.
Unlike analog interference, though, if you are in sparkle territory, you can pretty conclusively declare the system "broken".
Thanks to some questionable design decisions(eg. simultaneously dumbing the standard down because it is "just consumer"(compare to what SDI and its descendants have been doing over simple BNC or fiber connections for ages now) and tacking on every feature that makes it to "fad of the month" status for at least one hype cycle. HDMI cables are, arguably, more complex than would be idea. Worse, they've been tacked on in a very unsystematic way: You've got a very high speed unidirectional bus, and a slower bidirectional one for CEC, DDC, etc. However, because both of these weren't really designed for elegant expansion, when they added ethernet, they couldn't just dump it into a logical slice of the bidirectional aux channel. Instead, there are two different cable types: the ones that support running ethernet over some extra signal lines and the ones that don't.
It is certainly true that(particularly for short runs, long runs pretty much cannot be saved by any passive cabling; because it's 'Just Consumer') as long as cable A and cable B check the same checkboxes, they are the same, and it isn't worth paying more; but there are rather more checkboxes in the feature matrix than one would like for a basic cable...
Unfortunately, while Democrats have a hard-on for Hollywood, 'Hollywood', in the sense that we are using here, consists largely of influential and rather parasitic multinational corporations, so they can be assured of Republican support.
In all fairness they would be morons if they didn't do that, book companies are there to make money just like any other business, if you take away the profit from publishing text books (which for many there isn't much profit in many of them to start with) then why would they continue to do it?
Arguably, unless their lobbyists are good, the publishers would be very nervy to try too much: If the state has just announced a bold plan to move all K-12 students to a single e-text platform, guess what; the state is now by far your largest customer and the only one large enough to matter. Publishers, on the other hand...
K-12 textbooks are arduous to write; but effectively interchangeable. A number of different publishers would be capable of offering something suitable. If they don't like your price, you'll be stuck with something that virtually nobody else will buy. Also, at that scale, the 'customer' isn't really a powerless retail peon. They could easily find that purchasing the rights, as a work for hire, would be more cost-effective than purchasing copies.
TFS makes that distinction, implicitly. "Requests for court permission". This suggests that even your neighborhood doughnut-eater, and those barely above him on the food chain, are getting hip to this "wiretap" stuff that the kids are all talking about these days. All the cool law enforcement are virtually exempt from even having to bother with a judicial rubber stamp.
As their name suggests, patents are designed to encourage otherwise secret matters to be made publicly available in exchange for a limited monopoly on their use. It would take a face much straighter than mine to claim, at least with respect to matters anywhere near software, that they are other than a mess today; but that was in fact the theory.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of a beautiful plugin for one of the chat clients, I can't remember which one now, that exploited the 'realtime typing notification' option that one of the IM systems offered.
By default, the client would only show typing notifications if you were already chatting with someone. This plugin warned you of typing notifications from people just initiating a conversation, which usually gave you time to quickly reply to them before they had a chance to say something to you. Totally freaked out those who didn't realize that their client was providing realtime status information...
France will be an interesting one to watch as time goes on: On the one hand, they adore the CAP money-trough that allows their oh-so-picturesque agricultural to do assorted economically absurd but picturesque 'cultural' things. On the other hand, with EU membership showing signs of expanding eastward into some of the former Warsaw Pact nations, which are substantially poorer than France; but also have lots of picturesque and inefficient farmers who would be happy to claim to be culturally valuable in exchange for sweet, sweet, cash, France may end up having to come up with some relatively tactful way of either killing CAP without getting crucified at home, or er, capping CAP so that it can continue to serve its purpose of subsidizing French farmers, rather than being applied evenly across a broader EU, which would involve dangerously expensive engagements in eastern Europe....
Sorry, ever since my first math class with grouping symbols my writing has gone all to hell. Just be glad I wasn't nesting them this time...
We've all been conditioned by movies to think otherwise, but sound travel by vibrations and needs a medium to propagate, gas, liquid, or solid. There are no sounds in space, because there is nothing to support it.
The sound just propagates through waves in the aether...
Your distinction is correct; but it would be very interesting to know if there is any way of inferring, from the electrical noise, what the physical state and thus, (with some greater or lesser degree of inexactitude) what the situation would sound like if you had a mic on the scene...
On the plus side, Cassini has demonstrated the capabilities necessary to capture that distinctive noise that TIE fighters make as they fly past, inexplicably following approximately WWII aerial maneuvering constraints in hard vacuum...
It's so sweet to see a anarcho-cypherpunk currency all grown up... A lawyer, trademark claims, probably a white picket fence and a golden retriever in the suburbs...
More seriously, though, while it isn't clear that this guy is entitled to the trademark, it also isn't obviously deleterious for 'Bitcoin' to be a trademark(rather conveniently, the definition of a bitcoin is a quite specific bit of math, rather than some natural language handwaving, so it would arguably be a better defined trademark than many). Since(unlike patents and copyrights, which are enforceable against all comers with only a few 'fair use' and such exceptions) trademarks are quite broadly usable by others(so long as they aren't being used deceptively), somebody actually associated with Bitcoin having a trademark for 'Bitcoin' to the effect that "If it conforms to the protocol spec and cryptographic details laid out in the spec, it's a Bitcoin, and conveniently anybody who wishes can mathematically verify it on the spot..." wouldn't obviously be a bad thing.
More broadly, what I will be interested to see is if we ever run into the issue of there being multiple, parallel, issuings of "quasi-bitcoins". At least as best I understand it, there is a finite supply of Bitcoins according to the present definition; but that the present definition incorporates some arbitrary starting constants and then follows the defined protocol from there. A 'second issue' using a different set of arbitrary constants would not be compatible with the 'first issue'; but it would be equally amenable to following the protocol and being used for transactions, and would presumably trade at some discount against the original. Unless there are rather tight technical constraints on the initial values, there could potentially be thousands of different Bitcoin-sub-N chains in simultaneous existence...
Do you have any reason to suspect that SalesWatson's database of domain-specific knowledge wouldn't include the ability to procure the finest vice a given area has to offer? I'm sure a computer with an expense account is substantially more pleasant than some of the customers that escort services put up with. (Just wait until somebody attempts the 'But my expert system was the one who bribed the Chilean interior minister!' defense during an FCPA prosecution. That'll be a trial to watch...)
Humans certainly aren't especially logical('bounded rationality' to the polite optimists 'bugfuck insanity' for those on their fourth drink); but that may not stop a computer. In fact, it may even be helpful.
So long as humans are irrational in characteristic ways, their irrationality is just data to be evaluated. Truly random behavior would be rather confounding; but common emotional responses, cognitive biases, limitations in knowledge, etc. are all amenable to logical understanding, though they are not themselves logical. And, conveniently, the computer isn't going to let your emotional state bleed over and start affecting its rational operation, as a human typically would.
If these examples keep being ignored, we will be where we were in the early 1900s in europe . . . masses of starving people who had nothing to lose, and so joined revolutionary movements to overthrow the existing governments and try bizarre social experiments that ended in horror.
With one crucial difference:
Your historical revolutionary movements were typically motivated by some grievance with the share of the product (not) going to those who labored to produce it, along with opportunistic participation by those who weren't enjoying their freedom to starve very much.
The hypothetical automation-driven revolutionary movement would be in a substantially weaker position: It would consist of people who had been made redundant by robots, so its members would be irrelevant to the production activities of society, and it would be opposed by computerized surveillance/intelligence systems and combat robots, so there would no longer be tricky and dangerous need to arm, and court the sympathies of, a pretty substantial fraction of the population in order to kill or suppress the rest.
An advance in automation reduces the number of people whose cooperation, however grudging, is needed to keep your operation going. The people so reduced won't like it; but they will also no longer be necessary. Historically, the powers that were ran into trouble because they needed the people who they also wished to squeeze dry. In the not so very distant future, that constraint will likely be abolished...
Actual robotic servants may well be further off than substantial advances in expert systems/AI(wherever one chooses to draw the line between those).
Writing good expert systems has proven to be difficult; but they've improved over time and are just software, which means that they can run on general purpose computers that get cheaper every year and can fairly easily interact where needed via whatever telecom systems are available. And, once written, you can run as many copies as you wish
Physical robotics, by contrast, includes a number of hard software problems; but it also includes the nontrivial challenges of building reliable, complex, mechanical devices. Even if you do get a design hammered out, even mass production is unlikely to get an approximately human-spec robot churned out for less than the price of a new car, each. In certain controlled environments, designed around what the machines can do, robots are so absurdly superior to humans at the given task that the price isn't a big issue(depending on how hard you want to stretch the term "robot" this trend might go back as far as the mid 18th century, with Jacquard looms and the like; but it is certainly the case with modern industrial robots). Outside of those controlled environments, though, human-mimetic robots are still well within the realm of expensive toys. The relatively cheap ones are pretty miserable and the relatively good ones are very much not cheap.
Particularly with the progressive gutting of industrial workforces by application-specific robots and the eventual similar reduction in white-collar types by the expert systems, it is going to be hard to compete with the price of a fully human-equivalent Actual Human(tm), especially if supplemented with an expert system to order them around under unfamiliar conditions, or even an electronic muscle stimulation mechanism to exploit their durability, dexterity, and easy replaceability in combination with a machine's knowledge of a given task. Ugly? certainly; but if you can get a human for $8/hour and throw it away when it breaks, are you going to spend $100,000+ to have ASIMO model N gimping around gingerly?
So the method is common in notebooks today... meaning it has been in wide use for at least a few years now. The patent holder just waited until everyone had committed to selling that design, so that they could just sue everyone. Submarine patent tactics if I ever saw them.
I'm just wondering how they received it in the first place. Processor activity/thermal throttling is, um, not exactly news. Dynamic clocking for power savings was an option starting with some of the P3s. All the P4s have done thermal protection underclocking(and a fair few have needed it) and those were released in 2000. This isn't even counting the sort of stuff that presumably has been going on rather longer in embedded devices, which have always been greatly power and/or heat constrained.
VGA can get pretty nasty, especially if there are any cheapo splitters or 'SNR? What's SNR?' "amplifiers" in the chain. It's just been my experience that you can pull off some fairly horrid "30 feet of whatever VGA cable was on top of the pile in the cable graveyard going from the laptop to the wall jack, which was put in by the low bidder 10 years ago and consists of a gender changer and another 20-40 feet of who knows what exactly between the wall plate and the projector" type wiring and still get a perfectly usable, if slightly soft and not exactly pro-level color calibrated, image. With HDMI, by contrast, your image would be sparkling like a Myspace .gif or getting no link at all under similar circumstances.
VGA is never perfect; but it has a very wide band of 'tolerable, some other part of the system probably offends you more'. HDMI has a decent slice of perfect; but then dives right down into broken. The only place where VGA really makes me sad is when you are trying a dual-monitor configuration with two identical monitors; but a PC that has one VGA, one DVI. Getting the image to match drives me to madness.
That is certainly the correct model for Cisco Systems, Inc.(which is why I classified my question as "idle curiosity"). I'm just curious, though, are the relevant Ciscolings, as they go about their dirty work, trying to comfort themselves or patting themselves on the back? Is their little internal monologue going through some sort of "Well, if we don't, Alcatel will..." rationalization? Is somebody growing awkwardly tumescent in their corner office at the 'utopian' vision of discipline and social order that he is blessed to be a part of?
It doesn't seem likely to have much effect, one way or the other, in terms of how Cisco behaves, I just really want to know how the people who actually make 'Cisco' do things feel about what their incorporated hive organism is up to...
I suspect, actually, that this would work substantially better at higher levels than at lower ones. Intro-level textbooks are weighty tomes, generally burdened with all sorts of pedagogical baggage; but far from the cutting edge of their fields(which means that you'll need to find experts willing to simplify their work, rather than working on it, and some poor bastards to reformat it every time a new fad concerning layout and graphic design 'to engage multi-sensory learners' or whatever the flavor of the month is emerges). Also, they are a comparatively large and potentially lucrative market. Now, I'm all in favor of the customers ganging up and using their market power to buy outright and end per-unit gouging once and for all; but I strongly suspect that they would(by way of their representatives hammering out a contract) have to pay for it. From what I've been told by friends who've had the misfortune to be involved, making textbooks is as distasteful, and about as exciting, as making sausage. Because they are fairly interchangeable, there is no reason to get shafted on them; but commissioning a work-for-hire and then releasing the results for free use by the public is likely the fastest, easiest, and still relatively inexpensive way to do it.
At the higher levels, by contrast, the texts are much closer to the actual state of the field(and thus something that actual experts might want to write about) and it is already the case that professors and researchers do a great deal of publishing, for essentially zero money on top of their day job, because that is just how the game is played. Journal articles often demand handover of copyright, or page-fees, or even both, so Dr. Somebody isn't exactly growing fat on those terms, and a substantial percentage of the stuff printed by academic presses, even if the author is entitled to royalties and so forth, appears in relatively tiny runs, for a relatively small audience. Not really something that you do for the money. As long as there were some mechanism for allocating prestige points, which are the currency that most high level academic stuff is really published for, I suspect that the body of academic experts would hardly notice a change to open distribution(if anything, the money that the university libraries saved on crazy-expensive journal subscriptions could be moved elsewhere and make the situation a net win. Right now, academics write the stuff, hand it over, and then pay to read it. At least the public would be tasteful enough to only free-ride on the reading part.)
In the spirit of idle curiousity, I have to wonder if Cisco is purely an amoral, sociopathic, profit-seeking entity, and just doesn't give a fuck, or whether their higher-ups actually get the warm and fuzzies from the fact that they are on the leading edge of Benthamite dystopia technology?
They could, certainly, just be swallowing their doubts and keeping an eye on the bottom line; but nothing says that the people within the corporation are having to battle pangs of conscience in order to do what is profitable.
If they didn't use RCA plugs, they wouldn't be able to accentuate the soundstage on that Home-Theatre-In-A-Box you got from BestBuy!
Let's just say that conservatism isn't the only reason that boring old VGA is going to be the default projector install video interface for some time to come.... Without pricey and vendor-specific converters(sure, there's a standard: always plug unit A from manufacturer Y into unit B from manufacturer Y...) HDMI does not hold up well over distance.
There is a thin slice between "perfect" and "nothing", commonly referred to as "sparkle" or "snow". Substantial amounts of pixel data are being tossed on the floor; but not quite enough for the system to just give up and declare the link dead.
Unlike analog interference, though, if you are in sparkle territory, you can pretty conclusively declare the system "broken".
But did it have oxygen-free copper EMI shielding? Optical signals can be seriously degraded if you have radio waves bullying your photons...
Thanks to some questionable design decisions(eg. simultaneously dumbing the standard down because it is "just consumer"(compare to what SDI and its descendants have been doing over simple BNC or fiber connections for ages now) and tacking on every feature that makes it to "fad of the month" status for at least one hype cycle. HDMI cables are, arguably, more complex than would be idea. Worse, they've been tacked on in a very unsystematic way: You've got a very high speed unidirectional bus, and a slower bidirectional one for CEC, DDC, etc. However, because both of these weren't really designed for elegant expansion, when they added ethernet, they couldn't just dump it into a logical slice of the bidirectional aux channel. Instead, there are two different cable types: the ones that support running ethernet over some extra signal lines and the ones that don't.
It is certainly true that(particularly for short runs, long runs pretty much cannot be saved by any passive cabling; because it's 'Just Consumer') as long as cable A and cable B check the same checkboxes, they are the same, and it isn't worth paying more; but there are rather more checkboxes in the feature matrix than one would like for a basic cable...
Is this because they know something about it, or because it is something that Congress is considering?
Unfortunately, while Democrats have a hard-on for Hollywood, 'Hollywood', in the sense that we are using here, consists largely of influential and rather parasitic multinational corporations, so they can be assured of Republican support.
In all fairness they would be morons if they didn't do that, book companies are there to make money just like any other business, if you take away the profit from publishing text books (which for many there isn't much profit in many of them to start with) then why would they continue to do it?
Arguably, unless their lobbyists are good, the publishers would be very nervy to try too much: If the state has just announced a bold plan to move all K-12 students to a single e-text platform, guess what; the state is now by far your largest customer and the only one large enough to matter. Publishers, on the other hand...
K-12 textbooks are arduous to write; but effectively interchangeable. A number of different publishers would be capable of offering something suitable. If they don't like your price, you'll be stuck with something that virtually nobody else will buy. Also, at that scale, the 'customer' isn't really a powerless retail peon. They could easily find that purchasing the rights, as a work for hire, would be more cost-effective than purchasing copies.
TFS makes that distinction, implicitly. "Requests for court permission". This suggests that even your neighborhood doughnut-eater, and those barely above him on the food chain, are getting hip to this "wiretap" stuff that the kids are all talking about these days. All the cool law enforcement are virtually exempt from even having to bother with a judicial rubber stamp.
As their name suggests, patents are designed to encourage otherwise secret matters to be made publicly available in exchange for a limited monopoly on their use. It would take a face much straighter than mine to claim, at least with respect to matters anywhere near software, that they are other than a mess today; but that was in fact the theory.