You beat me to it-- you must have posted this while I was writing mine. (see the post below this one!) A super-cybiko with a better transceiver and a form factor an adult could carry in a pocket would be the coolest thing ever.
Another optimization-- you could design the network to prefer the shortest route to an internet gateway (any unit in its cradle hooked to a PC would be such a gateway), to move traffic off the relay network as soon as possible. This would allow much greater scaling and distance even in low-density areas.
If Cybiko can do it for less than $100, surely an industrial-strength one can be made for less than $700 or so-- which would be a deal considering there would never be a network fee!
Cheaper transceiver-only cards could enable existing laptops to access the network as well.
I have been wondering if something like the Cybiko could be made to work for real use. If you haven't seen them, they are handheld computers for kids that communicate in an ad-hoc peer-to-peer wireless relay network. And they're like $80. A cable to your computer turns one into an internet bridge, so that your unit can pass signals from nearby units over the net to span larger ranges. Their biggest drawback (aside from being cheesy and designed for kids) is that the range is only a few hundred feet, so the device density has to be high to span any distance. (like in a high school or a mall, where their target audience spends all their time)
If, say, a palm-pilotish device could be coupled with a cell-phone level transceiver (or possibly an FRS radio component for 2-5 mile range) we could have ad-hoc wireless wherever we go without paying network fees. In dense areas, the power could be lowered to prevent interference with all the other devices in the area, and internet bridges could help span large rural areas.
Is there anything preventing a company with no networking interests (they'd want monthly fees, then) from doing this?
See this post I made in the previous article about this for quotes and a link to the CNET article the quotes are from. Basically, networks will be given the ability to opt out of having shows shared. So this feature will probably be disabled for everything but PBS as soon as the networks realize their shows are being swapped around.
One of the replies to my post makes the creative suggestion of using a VCR to pass the information through to make it appear on a different channel (3 or 4) to trick the Replay into sharing stuff it shouldn't-- but this will only work if everything on channels 3 and 4 (according to the unit's guide data, I would assume) is blocked from sharing too.
I'm sure somebody will figure out a way around it, but then we're right back to having to hack it together yourself.
Wider car tires work better because the rubber is less likely to tear due to the force. When stopping or starting, the force on the car tires is often enough to tear off rubber (hence the tracks you leave on the road). This means that the limiting factor in tire traction is not the actual coefficient of friction, but rather the strength of the tire. (Because we are sliding due to tearing rubber *before* we run exceed our force of friction) Since the strength of stuff *is* dependent on area (think 2x4s vs. a broomstick), wider tires will not tear as quickly, meaning more of the friction is available before we slide.
So it's not the friction that's changing due to area, but how quickly the tire tears.
For a reference (quick search on google) see:
http://www.cosm.sc.edu/~phys153/tirefriction.htm l
Every time I get money from a bank machine, I get charged something between $1.50 and $3.00 for the privilege. Some banks (www.firstib.com) will reimburse fees. (up to $6/mo. in their case)
Even if you only get hit once in a while by fees, it's still more than the $0 transaction fee you get with a credit card you pay off.
Those little bits add up-- cash costs you more to use than a carefully managed credit card. Especially one with a monthly rebate like the previous poster mentioned.
I'm doing dynamic DNS with the Linksys 4-port router. There's a python script called ipcheck for this that supports devices from Linksys, Netgear, Draytek, Netopia, HawkingTech, Watchgard, Cayman, Nexland, ZyXEL, SMC, Compex, UgatePlus, DLink and Cisco. That should about cover it...
Just set it up to run with a cron job, and if your IP has changed, it will be updated. With the linksys router, it doesn't even need an external CGI to detect your IP address-- it can query the router. I'm sure some of the other units have similar functionality, too, but my experience is only with the linksys.
According to this cnet article, the networks will be able to opt out of having their programs shared, even over the local network. This seems to put a serious cramp in ReplayTV's plans-- the only networks who won't immediately opt out are NASA TV and PBS. (Note that SonicBlue has purchased ReplayTV and that the names are used interchangeably in the article) To quote:
Sonicblue jumped into the market for digital video recorders Wednesday, unveiling four high-end boxes it will sell under the ReplayTV brand.
Sonicblue acquired the digital video recording pioneer on Aug. 2 after announcing the deal in
February. Digital video recorders (DVRs) allow consumers to record TV shows onto a hard drive
instead of onto videotape.
As reported earlier by CNET News.com, the four boxes vary in price and capacity from $699 for
40 hours of recording to $1,999 for 320 hours. Unlike its competitors, Sonicblue will not charge
a monthly service fee.
The new boxes include broadband access and allow consumers to send TV shows via home networking to other ReplayTV boxes. However, Sonicblue Vice President Steve Shannon said the company will allow TV networks to decide if this capability should be disabled for their particular shows.
So, in short, this feature will probably be disabled by angry networks before it leaves the gate. And it also answers the lawsuit question-- ReplayTV won't be sued, because this feature will come pre-disabled for your convenience.
Without a way to prioritize your "record all" stuff, these things quickly become a giant pain to use. Just try getting a season pass to the simpsons and anything else, and watch how quickly you get conflicts. Being able to prioritize is nice. I had to get my Tivo replaced under warranty (fried modem, of course) and use the old 1.3 software (no way to set show priorities) for a few days-- it was absolutely impossible to get it to record all of my shows, since some episodes always overlap with others. (Simpsons/Junkyard Wars, for example)
As much as I bitch, I do love my Tivo-- but I hope this is a swift kick in the rear for Tivo and that we see ethernet-enabled, commercial-skipping, internet-show-sharing, remotely-programmable, 480p-output Tivos with 320 hours of storage space in the near future.
Lots of VCRs do this now-- they tag the commercials on the tape for auto FFWD when you replay it. Look for the "commercial advance" logo on the box/VCR. Since cheapo commodity VCRs can do it (although I don't know how...) it's a no-brainer to stick it into a PVR.
Here's an article about one model. (just a quick search on google)
There isn't a feature I can think to add to this thing! I've been complaining since I got my Tivo that it wouldn't automatically skip commercials-- if an $80 VCR can auto-FFW through the commercials, why can't my PVR? This solves that problem, and throws content sharing in just to sweeten the deal. Not to mention the huge storage capacities they have available!
Tivo has always been chicken to try anything like this, and it looks like it's going to bite 'em now that somebody else has the guts to do it. Why would you ever buy a unit now that didn't allow commercial skipping and content sharing?
It's probably too good to be true, though-- I imagine that this will be sued into oblivion before 20 units leave the stores. *sigh*
"An experienced IT person could recover the master key in two weeks
given four standard PCs and fifty HDCP displays,"
I'm sure there are a couple of experienced IT people around here, and most of them probably have four PCs sitting around their homes... now we just need to scratch up FIFTY FREAKING HDCP DISPLAYS. That's a lot of hardware!
You are quite right of course-- it is *exactly* as interactive as a DVD. The original was just a laserdisc player that skipped to the right part of the video when you did something. Which made the game more than a little boring. (to me, anyway)
I won a 14-hour model in a wacky 200-word essay contest they were having. (mine was something like "I want a Tivo. Please send me one.") I never would have purchased one on my own, but after having used it, I can safely say that I would certainly buy one now.
The biggest difference between it and a VCR, is that I can't tell my VCR things like:
-"Record every episode of the Simpsons, regardless of when the network schedules or re-schedules the episodes"
-"Record every show with Actor X in it"
-"Fill your remaining space with shows you recommend based on my viewing habits"
-"Let me watch a recorded show while another is being recorded"
-"Record at a sensible resolution, not that lousy VHS stuff"
Even without everything but the first item, the Tivo is much easier to use. Just select from the menu or type in the name of a show, and record every episode ever with just another click. Sit down at the TV later and pick the show you want to watch from a menu of 20 or so shows that you are much more likely to enjoy than just channel surfing.
All you need is a cheapo $50 winTV card and the patience to get it all set up.
Other alternatives include using bttv-grab and mpeg2encode, rather than vcr and avifle+divx as outlined in the howto. I have yet to get it all working quite the way I want it to, but I expect it will be done in a week or two.
Linux DVR pointers (need divx.euro.ru mirror!!!)
on
TiVo Upgrade Isn't
·
· Score: 2
I'm working on this exact thing at the moment-- I've managed to get xawtv to display output from my cheapo hauppage winTV capture card, so that's a start.
VCR looks like a good way to go (and WebVCR is just a frontend to VCR) but it requires the avifile libraries, which are located on http://divx.euro.ru/ , a site which gives me a whopping 28 bytes per second. I've been trying for WEEKS to download the avifile libraries I would need to use VCR, but to no avail. I can't find a mirror, either-- if anybody's got one, post away!!!!
FAME looks good to-- it takes video4linux output and uses an assembly encoder to make short work of compressing it. This could be run via cron, if only I could get it to compile on my Mandrake 8.0 install.
FFMpeg, SAMPEG, and MPEG2Encode all have promise, too, but again, one problem or another is keeping me from getting them to run. MPEG2Encode is compiled and appears to be working, but it has to be the most complicated encoder I've ever used in my life. If anyone has a good sample config file handy for NTSC VCD and SVCD bitrate encoding with MPEG2Encode, let me know.
And lastly, bttvgrab is working too, but it dumps to a wacky format (.pmm?) and a separate.wav file for audio. Supposedly it integrates with mpeg2encode for realtime encoding straight to mpeg, but the docs don't describe what I would need to do to make bttvgrab aware of my mpeg2encode installation. If I can't make the realtime coder work, then I will do scheduled post-encoding. The problem then means I have to figure out how to multiplex the audio and video back together, something else I'm not sure how to do with most of the encoders. (again, mpeg2encode seems to do it, but I'll be darned if I've made sense of that program's 10 million config options yet...)
So, in short, there are nearly a dozen programs for linux to do exactly this, but like everything else fun with linux, putting it all together is going to be a challenge. Anybody with more information, please post!!!!!!
Is much higher than you would think. Solar is often singled out by skeptics like this because the panels DO require a large amount of energy to make. However, more common energy sources suffer from similar problems. It takes a good deal of energy to search, drill, ship, refine, ship again, and distribute gasoline, for example. Do you think driving all of those trucks around the country loaded down with tons and tons of oil, running refineries, searching out new drilling locations, setting up drilling equipment, and cutting through the rock is energy efficient?
According to this article, the actual cost of gasoline once the tax breaks the oil companies are given are added back in is around $15.14 per gallon. Ouch.
Nearly every source of energy suffers loss in production like this. If you're going to apply that standard to solar, apply it to other sources as well.
The author predicts 500GB hard drives in the future, which will most likely come to pass in some form or another-- and then goes on to suggest auto-ripping CDs to Ogg Vorbis files. Vorbis is great, but what the heck for? 500GB is about five times more than enough to store my entire music collection completely uncompressed. Add in a lossless compressor of some sort (musiczip? I don't know what else is available) to chop it in half if you like, but it's not really necessary at that sort of drive size.
Also... why is the VCR obsolete? Until my Tivo will spit out a VCD or DVD with a recorded show on it, it can't completely replace my VCR. In fact, the Tivo actually *uses* the VCR as its only method of producing a portable copy of a recorded show.
According to the article, game AI has traditionally been forced to use a meager.1% of the CPU in games, due to the huge resource requirements of making the pretty pictures. However, this has all changed with an earth-shattering 250% average improvement in the amount of CPU time allocated to AI-- leaving us with a remarkable.25% of the CPU dedicated to AI!! That's amazing!
I remember that the betas for Mandrake 8.0 had problems running on Via KT-133 chipset based motherboards. Has this issue been resolved in the release version?
Although I haven't played B&W, we used a gesture interface in the Mentor Graphics circuit design package at Purdue. The problem you mention with mouse sensitivity (and dodgy mice, too) was a serious problem in the labs, since those machines took a lot of abuse, and had huge monitors with tiny little arcane menus. But the gestures are size-independent and work anywhere on the screen, and so as long as you make approximately the same shape the gesture works. This is an excellent alternative to menus when the menus are a pain in the butt.
We used an interface like this for VLSI circuit design back when I was at Purdue. The package was called Mentor Graphics, and their term for this type of interface was "strokes". You could even add your own, and it was extremely intuitive after you spent a half-hour fiddling with it. It saved a TON of time-- the interface to Mentor is pretty heavy without it. Lots of deep, nonintuitive menus.
I missed this riot, since I've graduated. But the last one (when the women's team WON...), which I got to witness firsthand was worse than what you see in these pictures. Either this one was lightweight, or the cameraman was always pointed in the wrong direction. If the fires were lit in the usual locations, then they were in the middle of pretty busy streets. The vast bulk of the monetary damage was probably done to:
1. Outdoor furniture. Lots of the frats and apartments near campus and the "popular" rioting areas have couches and crap outside, which quickly becomes part of the bonfire.
2. Campus buildings. Smashed doors and windows and whatnot. Plus vandalism.
3. Apartments and houses. So many people climbed the trees in my front yard that one was pulled down under the weight. Windows get broken. Our front porch railing and one of the supports that holds the porch up were completely destroyed. Someone nailed a dead raccoon to our front door, among other things.
4. Cars. Traffic stops, people stand on the cars, smashy smashy, etc...
5. A large quantity of footwear becomes entangled in power lines. (this happens all the time, though...)
6. Flaming trash in the street is a pain to clean up. Somebody has to pay the workers.
The sad thing is that most of those people probably didn't even watch the game. They heard about it at the bars and wandered out drunk into the streets to smash things.
A few of the pictures are questionable, but all of the people could have left when asked by the police.
I looked through all of the pictures, and most of them clearly show someone involved in an illegal act (smashing, burning, etc...). Many of the pictures are additional shots of the same person, and for the few where they don't seem to be doing anything really bad-- they are at least in violation of the police order to clear the area.
The pictures look like enlarged parts of a much bigger picture, which the police have carefully cropped to not show a lot of the people present. Awfully considerate for the awful, mean police.
This whole debate seems silly to me. These people were in a public place, rioting. The cops took their pictures and are posting "wanted posters", just like at your local post office, except without names and vital stats. All of the people in the pictures were violating at LEAST the police order to clear the area. Whose rights are being damaged? The right for criminals to not be sought by the police? I didn't think we had that particular right, but I could be mistaken...
Slashdot Mirror
You beat me to it-- you must have posted this while I was writing mine. (see the post below this one!) A super-cybiko with a better transceiver and a form factor an adult could carry in a pocket would be the coolest thing ever.
Another optimization-- you could design the network to prefer the shortest route to an internet gateway (any unit in its cradle hooked to a PC would be such a gateway), to move traffic off the relay network as soon as possible. This would allow much greater scaling and distance even in low-density areas.
If Cybiko can do it for less than $100, surely an industrial-strength one can be made for less than $700 or so-- which would be a deal considering there would never be a network fee!
Cheaper transceiver-only cards could enable existing laptops to access the network as well.
I have been wondering if something like the Cybiko could be made to work for real use. If you haven't seen them, they are handheld computers for kids that communicate in an ad-hoc peer-to-peer wireless relay network. And they're like $80. A cable to your computer turns one into an internet bridge, so that your unit can pass signals from nearby units over the net to span larger ranges. Their biggest drawback (aside from being cheesy and designed for kids) is that the range is only a few hundred feet, so the device density has to be high to span any distance. (like in a high school or a mall, where their target audience spends all their time)
If, say, a palm-pilotish device could be coupled with a cell-phone level transceiver (or possibly an FRS radio component for 2-5 mile range) we could have ad-hoc wireless wherever we go without paying network fees. In dense areas, the power could be lowered to prevent interference with all the other devices in the area, and internet bridges could help span large rural areas.
Is there anything preventing a company with no networking interests (they'd want monthly fees, then) from doing this?
See this post I made in the previous article about this for quotes and a link to the CNET article the quotes are from. Basically, networks will be given the ability to opt out of having shows shared. So this feature will probably be disabled for everything but PBS as soon as the networks realize their shows are being swapped around.
One of the replies to my post makes the creative suggestion of using a VCR to pass the information through to make it appear on a different channel (3 or 4) to trick the Replay into sharing stuff it shouldn't-- but this will only work if everything on channels 3 and 4 (according to the unit's guide data, I would assume) is blocked from sharing too.
I'm sure somebody will figure out a way around it, but then we're right back to having to hack it together yourself.
Wider car tires work better because the rubber is less likely to tear due to the force. When stopping or starting, the force on the car tires is often enough to tear off rubber (hence the tracks you leave on the road). This means that the limiting factor in tire traction is not the actual coefficient of friction, but rather the strength of the tire. (Because we are sliding due to tearing rubber *before* we run exceed our force of friction) Since the strength of stuff *is* dependent on area (think 2x4s vs. a broomstick), wider tires will not tear as quickly, meaning more of the friction is available before we slide.
m l
So it's not the friction that's changing due to area, but how quickly the tire tears.
For a reference (quick search on google) see:
http://www.cosm.sc.edu/~phys153/tirefriction.ht
Every time I get money from a bank machine, I get charged something between $1.50 and $3.00 for the privilege. Some banks (www.firstib.com) will reimburse fees. (up to $6/mo. in their case)
Even if you only get hit once in a while by fees, it's still more than the $0 transaction fee you get with a credit card you pay off.
Those little bits add up-- cash costs you more to use than a carefully managed credit card. Especially one with a monthly rebate like the previous poster mentioned.
I'm doing dynamic DNS with the Linksys 4-port router. There's a python script called ipcheck for this that supports devices from Linksys, Netgear, Draytek, Netopia, HawkingTech, Watchgard, Cayman, Nexland, ZyXEL, SMC, Compex, UgatePlus, DLink and Cisco. That should about cover it...
Just set it up to run with a cron job, and if your IP has changed, it will be updated. With the linksys router, it doesn't even need an external CGI to detect your IP address-- it can query the router. I'm sure some of the other units have similar functionality, too, but my experience is only with the linksys.
So, in short, this feature will probably be disabled by angry networks before it leaves the gate. And it also answers the lawsuit question-- ReplayTV won't be sued, because this feature will come pre-disabled for your convenience.
I stand corrected.
Without a way to prioritize your "record all" stuff, these things quickly become a giant pain to use. Just try getting a season pass to the simpsons and anything else, and watch how quickly you get conflicts. Being able to prioritize is nice. I had to get my Tivo replaced under warranty (fried modem, of course) and use the old 1.3 software (no way to set show priorities) for a few days-- it was absolutely impossible to get it to record all of my shows, since some episodes always overlap with others. (Simpsons/Junkyard Wars, for example)
As much as I bitch, I do love my Tivo-- but I hope this is a swift kick in the rear for Tivo and that we see ethernet-enabled, commercial-skipping, internet-show-sharing, remotely-programmable, 480p-output Tivos with 320 hours of storage space in the near future.
Lots of VCRs do this now-- they tag the commercials on the tape for auto FFWD when you replay it. Look for the "commercial advance" logo on the box/VCR. Since cheapo commodity VCRs can do it (although I don't know how...) it's a no-brainer to stick it into a PVR.
Here's an article about one model. (just a quick search on google)
There isn't a feature I can think to add to this thing! I've been complaining since I got my Tivo that it wouldn't automatically skip commercials-- if an $80 VCR can auto-FFW through the commercials, why can't my PVR? This solves that problem, and throws content sharing in just to sweeten the deal. Not to mention the huge storage capacities they have available!
Tivo has always been chicken to try anything like this, and it looks like it's going to bite 'em now that somebody else has the guts to do it. Why would you ever buy a unit now that didn't allow commercial skipping and content sharing?
It's probably too good to be true, though-- I imagine that this will be sued into oblivion before 20 units leave the stores. *sigh*
Did anybody else catch this little bit?
"An experienced IT person could recover the master key in two weeks
given four standard PCs and fifty HDCP displays,"
I'm sure there are a couple of experienced IT people around here, and most of them probably have four PCs sitting around their homes... now we just need to scratch up FIFTY FREAKING HDCP DISPLAYS. That's a lot of hardware!
You are quite right of course-- it is *exactly* as interactive as a DVD. The original was just a laserdisc player that skipped to the right part of the video when you did something. Which made the game more than a little boring. (to me, anyway)
But you can actually get it on DVD:
http://www.digitalleisure.com/pr981106.html
I won a 14-hour model in a wacky 200-word essay contest they were having. (mine was something like "I want a Tivo. Please send me one.") I never would have purchased one on my own, but after having used it, I can safely say that I would certainly buy one now.
The biggest difference between it and a VCR, is that I can't tell my VCR things like:
-"Record every episode of the Simpsons, regardless of when the network schedules or re-schedules the episodes"
-"Record every show with Actor X in it"
-"Fill your remaining space with shows you recommend based on my viewing habits"
-"Let me watch a recorded show while another is being recorded"
-"Record at a sensible resolution, not that lousy VHS stuff"
Even without everything but the first item, the Tivo is much easier to use. Just select from the menu or type in the name of a show, and record every episode ever with just another click. Sit down at the TV later and pick the show you want to watch from a menu of 20 or so shows that you are much more likely to enjoy than just channel surfing.
Is right here:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/VCR-HOWTO.html
All you need is a cheapo $50 winTV card and the patience to get it all set up.
Other alternatives include using bttv-grab and mpeg2encode, rather than vcr and avifle+divx as outlined in the howto. I have yet to get it all working quite the way I want it to, but I expect it will be done in a week or two.
I'm working on this exact thing at the moment-- I've managed to get xawtv to display output from my cheapo hauppage winTV capture card, so that's a start.
.wav file for audio. Supposedly it integrates with mpeg2encode for realtime encoding straight to mpeg, but the docs don't describe what I would need to do to make bttvgrab aware of my mpeg2encode installation. If I can't make the realtime coder work, then I will do scheduled post-encoding. The problem then means I have to figure out how to multiplex the audio and video back together, something else I'm not sure how to do with most of the encoders. (again, mpeg2encode seems to do it, but I'll be darned if I've made sense of that program's 10 million config options yet...)
VCR looks like a good way to go (and WebVCR is just a frontend to VCR) but it requires the avifile libraries, which are located on http://divx.euro.ru/ , a site which gives me a whopping 28 bytes per second. I've been trying for WEEKS to download the avifile libraries I would need to use VCR, but to no avail. I can't find a mirror, either-- if anybody's got one, post away!!!!
FAME looks good to-- it takes video4linux output and uses an assembly encoder to make short work of compressing it. This could be run via cron, if only I could get it to compile on my Mandrake 8.0 install.
FFMpeg, SAMPEG, and MPEG2Encode all have promise, too, but again, one problem or another is keeping me from getting them to run. MPEG2Encode is compiled and appears to be working, but it has to be the most complicated encoder I've ever used in my life. If anyone has a good sample config file handy for NTSC VCD and SVCD bitrate encoding with MPEG2Encode, let me know.
And lastly, bttvgrab is working too, but it dumps to a wacky format (.pmm?) and a separate
So, in short, there are nearly a dozen programs for linux to do exactly this, but like everything else fun with linux, putting it all together is going to be a challenge. Anybody with more information, please post!!!!!!
Is much higher than you would think. Solar is often singled out by skeptics like this because the panels DO require a large amount of energy to make. However, more common energy sources suffer from similar problems. It takes a good deal of energy to search, drill, ship, refine, ship again, and distribute gasoline, for example. Do you think driving all of those trucks around the country loaded down with tons and tons of oil, running refineries, searching out new drilling locations, setting up drilling equipment, and cutting through the rock is energy efficient?
According to this article, the actual cost of gasoline once the tax breaks the oil companies are given are added back in is around $15.14 per gallon. Ouch.
Nearly every source of energy suffers loss in production like this. If you're going to apply that standard to solar, apply it to other sources as well.
The company that makes these is Atlantis Energy, and you can check it out here:
HTTP://WWW.ATLANTISENERGY.COM/ATL/default.asp
The author predicts 500GB hard drives in the future, which will most likely come to pass in some form or another-- and then goes on to suggest auto-ripping CDs to Ogg Vorbis files. Vorbis is great, but what the heck for? 500GB is about five times more than enough to store my entire music collection completely uncompressed. Add in a lossless compressor of some sort (musiczip? I don't know what else is available) to chop it in half if you like, but it's not really necessary at that sort of drive size.
Also... why is the VCR obsolete? Until my Tivo will spit out a VCD or DVD with a recorded show on it, it can't completely replace my VCR. In fact, the Tivo actually *uses* the VCR as its only method of producing a portable copy of a recorded show.
yeah... I know... I was just making fun of the article, not the lack of good AI in games. There are some really awesome game AIs out there right now.
According to the article, game AI has traditionally been forced to use a meager .1% of the CPU in games, due to the huge resource requirements of making the pretty pictures. However, this has all changed with an earth-shattering 250% average improvement in the amount of CPU time allocated to AI-- leaving us with a remarkable .25% of the CPU dedicated to AI!! That's amazing!
I remember that the betas for Mandrake 8.0 had problems running on Via KT-133 chipset based motherboards. Has this issue been resolved in the release version?
Although I haven't played B&W, we used a gesture interface in the Mentor Graphics circuit design package at Purdue. The problem you mention with mouse sensitivity (and dodgy mice, too) was a serious problem in the labs, since those machines took a lot of abuse, and had huge monitors with tiny little arcane menus. But the gestures are size-independent and work anywhere on the screen, and so as long as you make approximately the same shape the gesture works. This is an excellent alternative to menus when the menus are a pain in the butt.
We used an interface like this for VLSI circuit design back when I was at Purdue. The package was called Mentor Graphics, and their term for this type of interface was "strokes". You could even add your own, and it was extremely intuitive after you spent a half-hour fiddling with it. It saved a TON of time-- the interface to Mentor is pretty heavy without it. Lots of deep, nonintuitive menus.
I missed this riot, since I've graduated. But the last one (when the women's team WON...), which I got to witness firsthand was worse than what you see in these pictures. Either this one was lightweight, or the cameraman was always pointed in the wrong direction. If the fires were lit in the usual locations, then they were in the middle of pretty busy streets. The vast bulk of the monetary damage was probably done to:
1. Outdoor furniture. Lots of the frats and apartments near campus and the "popular" rioting areas have couches and crap outside, which quickly becomes part of the bonfire.
2. Campus buildings. Smashed doors and windows and whatnot. Plus vandalism.
3. Apartments and houses. So many people climbed the trees in my front yard that one was pulled down under the weight. Windows get broken. Our front porch railing and one of the supports that holds the porch up were completely destroyed. Someone nailed a dead raccoon to our front door, among other things.
4. Cars. Traffic stops, people stand on the cars, smashy smashy, etc...
5. A large quantity of footwear becomes entangled in power lines. (this happens all the time, though...)
6. Flaming trash in the street is a pain to clean up. Somebody has to pay the workers.
The sad thing is that most of those people probably didn't even watch the game. They heard about it at the bars and wandered out drunk into the streets to smash things.
A few of the pictures are questionable, but all of the people could have left when asked by the police.
I looked through all of the pictures, and most of them clearly show someone involved in an illegal act (smashing, burning, etc...). Many of the pictures are additional shots of the same person, and for the few where they don't seem to be doing anything really bad-- they are at least in violation of the police order to clear the area.
The pictures look like enlarged parts of a much bigger picture, which the police have carefully cropped to not show a lot of the people present. Awfully considerate for the awful, mean police.
This whole debate seems silly to me. These people were in a public place, rioting. The cops took their pictures and are posting "wanted posters", just like at your local post office, except without names and vital stats. All of the people in the pictures were violating at LEAST the police order to clear the area. Whose rights are being damaged? The right for criminals to not be sought by the police? I didn't think we had that particular right, but I could be mistaken...