Jack Abramoff, the Republican gangster, got his start lobbying at the Preston Gates law firm. The "Gates" in the title is William H. Gates Sr, one of the foremost corporate lawyers in America, who helped his son William H. Gates III start Microsoft. Microsoft later was officially declared a monopoly abusing its market dominance, while Democrats controlled the Executive Branch. But when Republicans took control during the remedy phase of the monopoly trials, Microsoft was let off without the remedies that actually stop monopolies. Those Republicans were (and are) part of Abramoff's gang.
Just because websites provide information explaining how people kill themselves, and what the details of the nasty process are like, doesn't mean those sites "support" suicide, in the sense of recommending, endorsing or encouraging it. In fact, the facts about suicide reveal that it's hard to kill oneself, that it's complicated, likely to fail, painful, embarassing, and just plain hard. Lots of people talking about killing themselves or just thinking about it will not go through with it if they know what will really probably happen, if they get a good look at the process with enough time to think about it, rather than just wash down a bottle of downers with a quart of liquor (which often doesn't work, as some of these websites explain).
Maybe the increased availability of graphic facts about what the person is thinking of doing is part of the reason that fewer people are doing it. Maybe the prevention services aren't entirely effective, but don't want to compete with simple websites that are often more approachable and carry less stigma from private viewing than asking another person for help, or admitting that one is seriously considering that desperate measure.
The fear-driven conclusion that sharing information about a practice is equivalent to encouraging it, when that info includes the discouraging facts about it, has got to go away. It's an old coping mechanism for "dangerous" information that relies on centralized authorities, and the control of the info supply, rather than growing the ability of people to think about whatever info we come across, and protect ourselves from what we filter as "bad". This is the Info Age. We've got a lot of growing up to do. Because the info flood is only going to gush more strongly, and only learning to think for ourselves can protect us.
No, Anonymous shiteater Coward, the difference between "tax per TV" and "tax per premises" is insignificant. The country in which simple logic is applied makes even less than no difference. They really should start teaching logic to you barbarians in Elbonia. Or at least that you should shut your mouth when you're outgunned both literally and intellectually.
Here's that story linked to English translations of the sites in question:
"In Paraguay we are at T-9 days to national elections. The ruling party has been in power for nearly 61 years (including more than 30 years of dictatorship). Now the state-run ADSL company is hijacking the DNS nationwide of a site that denounces the corruption in the party."
There are other languages available at those links (hay otros idiomas disponibles en los enlaces).
The UK taxes people per TV, supposedly to direct those taxes into the government production (BBC) and oversight (regulation) of TV broadcasts. The idea was supposedly that people who didn't have a TV wouldn't have to pay to support the government's work producing and overseeing TV.
But the benefit of that government work doesn't come only through the TV. TV is now, generations after introducing the tax, as integrated a societal activity, whether government produced or not, as any other largescale activity. It's as (and more) universal and impactful as, say, newspaper publishing.
The UK should stop charging TV taxes as a service fee, and just integrate the taxation into it's broadbased general taxation. That would drop the now arbitrary basis for the tax, and eliminate bottlenecks that call for even more arbitrary taxes to "fix" the problem of using the wrong basis for the tax in the first place.
I think something is better than nothing. That volume of evidence and "virality" of distribution means that even a snapshot will preserve traces that are hard to totally expunge from the entire Federal government's public records. But if that snapshot isn't even taken, that's much harder.
The dropping from inadequate archiving to none has crossed a threshold where people are now paying attention and demanding adequacy. The inadequacy of the prior policy means that both those in power in the Bush regime and many outside it agree on changing the program, which is a start for political compromise. Switching to the Internet Archive is a mediocre interim measure, but one which Republicans probably don't like, because even though it's their trademark privatization, it's still publicly funded, and not to a crony just skimming a contract while failing to expensively fulfill it. All of which creates political conditions and momentum towards a more distributed archival process, which could fund archives including libraries as I described.
So instead of giving up, now is a good time to demand more and better. Because it's the right thing to do, and because the way it's happening shows a path to actually getting it.
I'm familiar with NARA's archiving, and how they're thinking of turning it over to the Internet Archive.org. But there's a difference between publishing and archiving. Yes, those websites are available to the public, but if there isn't a mandated archiving system, then lots will slip away. The sheer volume of published materials, so often revised to cover up abuses after it's slipped out, means that relying on the public to archive it piecemeal will risk lots of important evidence being lost. That's the entire point of the government archiving even public materials.
Probably the best system would be for libraries, public and private (eg. universities and research institutes), to each independently archive the public sites, the way they do now with newspapers (microfilm, and lately CD/DVD-ROM). If we'd just relied on newspapers to keep their own archives, lots of coverups by newspapers could have revised history in their own master archives by now (and surely have tried). The government material is even more essential, and subject to coverup by an organized criminal regime like the one we're living through right now.
The NARA should not be considering quitting right when the Bush regime is caught red-handed deleting vast amounts of incriminating digital content that it was legally required to archive.
If anything, NARA should be required to archive even more now, to guard against losing the unique copies at the other ends of official communications and publications. It should upgrade to a policy of redundant archivers keeping separate copies under separate policies, so that a rogue Executive can't flip one switch and toss all the evidence of their actions into the fire.
As electric and cooling costs continue to rise, I wonder whether there will be good economic case for locating superconducting datacenters towards the poles (or atop mountains) because it takes so much less power to keep them running so fast. With ever more automated datacenter ops, they might be airdroppable into really remote locations, with fiber bundles or redundant satellite radios linking them to the Net, without needing human operations staff (and the power they consume for their 100F bodies).
The lawyer who will defend the subpoenaed blogger is also a "trial lawyer".
This blogger didn't get subpoenaed for criticizing "trial lawyers" as some large bloc, just those who they pointed out were dishonest and abusive of the legal system.
So some lawyer who was intimidated by that took some abusive legal action. Who could possibly be shocked by that?
Headlining this story about "trial lawyers" is some kind of BS attack on people's rights to be represented by lawyers when we're going to trial. Sure, lawyers suck, but "trial lawyers" are not just some monolithic roving gang, beating and scaring people around the countryside. Think about that the next time you need a lawyer to fix your outstanding traffic tickets or something.
Thanks for the chance to think it through. Following up on some of what I said that was kinda old news, I also learned that the cable industry is moving away from even CableCARD HW/smartcard, towards some kind of totally SW "downloadable authentication" instead. Which means it should be compatible with all HW, and be even more open, cheaper, and likely to run on something like a PC - or a PS3.
Well, Sony was pretty cagey about a release date, and the rumored "March 28, 2008" has come and gone. But since the entire PS3 schedule has always been a rush job, and always been running later than either announced or expected, but has always delivered fairly close to schedule, I'd say "any day now" is probably reasonable. It's certainly not vaporware.
PlayTV is not a UK-only device. More details of its release in New Zealand have leaked, because of negotiations with TV companies there (ie. FreePlay). And the rumors of the initial release have all been "European release", but no indication of any release targeting only the UK. Moreover, I don't think a single country release is technically feasible (at least, not locking out the rest of Europe, just because it's sold in only one country) because all Europe uses the DVB standard for cable transmission, so it should work anywhere it gets a signal. Especially if the PS3 Linux can run the PlayTV over the USB on arbitrary apps, and since there's no DRM in the HW, that would mean any DVB cable would drive it.
The OCAP used in N America instead of DVB would probably need its own PlayTV HW. But I really can't see Sony ignoring the American market, especially for something so American as TV.
Openness is the key to the way out. The FCC surprisingly mandated last year that no cableco can any longer bundle their locked-in set-top box with their network and data (video). I think it was a political move to force cablecos to pioneer that service model, years before the telcos which are opening their platform at their own rate, but also inevitably.
As usual, the cablecos aren't meeting the mandate on schedule, but they are all able, or nearly all, to use 3rd party settop boxes. I believe they're all supposed to take whatever standard box you bring, that takes the cablecard HW, and get a cablecard (smartcard) keyed to your account. Even where there is no competition between network providers in a town (99.9%+ of USA), the box is still supposed to be BYOB.
In the meantime I think all the SW will run on a PC kinda clabbered together. Before even the PS3 is ready, which probably won't be for another year or so (I'd guess Spring '09, to build momentum and fix bugs for Christmas '09). Really I think that could be LinuxMCE, with PS3 media directors. I know that's what I'm working on.
One very good outcome will be that the Internet with BYOB DVRs means you can use the cableco network to access content not controlled ($) by the cableco. There is also competition from telcos for network termination, so we're also finally seeing the rise of geographic competition for both WANs and "TV" at the same time.
Which is why openness is important. For them to steal each other's customers, their equipment needs to interop on shared standards. They're not as clever as SW outfits like MS in "embrace and extend" to pervert public standards to proprietary advantage. So what's really necessary is developers racing to get the public hooked on a GUI that's not bundled with either the network, or the content, or the terminal settop box either of those providers would like to command. In the time while they're all scrambling to establish "the one true GUI", those incumbents will all be busy with their core deployments. So there's an opportunity for independent developers to get in there and grab mindshare, before one or the other giant corporate player locks it down.
The PS3, like all Blu-Ray players, includes a Java VM, running JME. That's also the standard for both European and N American cableboxes, as well as Google's Android phone profile (and lots of existing mobile phones). So there's a lot of room in this emerging open platform for reusing the same GUI objects across devices, executed across the network. I hope there's enough development of it to run circles around the likes of Sony, TimeWarner and AT&T/Verizon.
"Mysterious sound waves" like years of speeches by a lying president who cancels NASA programs, lies about a Mars mission, and instead converts NASA to Star Wars "missile defense"?
Well, I used my PS2 almost exclusively to play DVDs until I got a PS3 last year, because I'm not a gamer.
But the multimedia multiprocessing power of the PS3 is really game changing. Since Sony controls all Blu-Ray player licensing, I'm sure whatever lowest price point they're available at will be consistent with Sony's PS3 plans. The power of the PS3 to flip between TV, movies and games in a blink is really different from how any other previous config has worked. And they're positioning the PSP as the "dumb terminal" for the PS3 hub, a $200-300 satellite that uses the PS3 for the "heavy lifting", and WiFi/Gb-e for the media distribution. I don't know if that setup will all be available by Christmas 2008, but I do expect it, along with a developed network and portal for PlayTV, by Christmas 2009.
The oil deposits aren't animal remains. Their precipitating CO2 and other gaseous carbon poisonous to animals out of the atmosphere helped make the environment hospitable for animals. To say nothing of a climate cool and mild enough for humans to survive nad build a civilization. Humans and a civilization that would collapse if that oil quickly reentered the atmosphere, bringing back those ancient, pre-human conditions.
The PS3 is the bestselling Blu-ray player in the world. With the death of HD-DVD, it's the bestselling HD videodisc player in the world. It was the first BD player on the market, and has always had more movie than game titles. I don't think it's locked in a definition as "videogame" by a longshot.
The PlayTV unit isn't quite released yet, but it will be the gateway to selling lots more PS3s. And that's before Sony really launches a campaign to show the PS3 as the "media hub" for all its products, including networked picture frames, mobile cameraphones, and all the other stuff people will suddenly realize is all Sony, and all works together.
Sony's approach to piracy has long puzzled people who'd expect Sony to build in more DRM. The latest PS3 Internet auto-upgrade lets it play DivX off the hard drive, no questions asked, which is obviously an appeal to people who download pirated content. But Sony has sold a lot of Vaios and flatscreens hooked up to them for people to play pirated content with. Sony might just be coming around, especially after getting so beat up over the wrong directions it went too far in, like the rootkit etc. If Sony really cared about DRM it would have long ago enabled end-to-end DRM including its MemoryStick, all of which hardware has it built in. Maybe they're taking the indefinitely prolonged stealth approach, expecting that once people are using all Sony DRM compatible products, and the analog equipment is a distant memory, they'll finally close the trap. Or maybe they're making so much money, and recognize that keeping the flow going and not pissing off customers into being hostile to their brand gives them an edge, and all that money that would eventually flow to their kinds of products will do so anyway, but to them instead of their more hostile appearing competitors.
In any case, the platform is fairly open (except the PS3 videochip under Linux, but it's not necessary now that the lockdown has forced development of SPU drivers). And here now. All that's necessary for the platform I described is for PlayTV to finally be released, which is any day. All without real DRM, all with high-end quality HW for fairly cheap. I like it.
What dooms all of these slightly different boxes, whether cablebox, cablemodem, TiVo, or even gaming machines, is that people don't want a pile of different boxes, each one trapping them in a different "mode" in which they use their TV. Where each content mode has a different GUI, and lots of redundant overlap with the others. They certainly don't want to get locked into different boxes with different viewing modes for different sets of the same kind of content, like movies. Who wants to care whether they're watching a "cable movie" or a "TiVo movie" or a "disc movie" or a "Blockbuster movie"?
What will replace all these boxes and modes is an open standard box that does it all with a unified GUI. It might even take "expansion boxes", to handle retrieving and decoding different data types, especially if they're as different as, say, a videogame and a newshour.
That's why I say "game consoles" will replace all these different "media terminals". The Sony Playstation3 is probably the winner waiting for the world to catch up with it. With the imminent introduction of PlayTV, a TV decoder, the PS3's single GUI will play regular cable (or broadcast) TV and enable tivo DVR, and of course games and DVD/Blu-Ray, as well as on-demand and multicast Internet video (and music, and telephony...). Since the FCC has mandated that cablecos stop bundling set-top boxes with their networks and data (including TV data) service, the PlayTV cable decoder will fill that gap. If PlayTV had a DOCSIS modem built in, it would do it all - until then, the DOCSIS modem gets its cable from a splitter off the incoming cableco coax, just like now with the regular cablemodem, but the DOCSIS modem can plug right into the PS3 gigabit ethernet port (or one of its USB ports).
The important difference is the integration. The PS3 has a single GUI for all that. It's also got multiple parallel DSPs ("SPUs") onchip, for fast processing all of that different media, all in parallel, all flippable around "picture in picture" (or whatever paradigm Sony brings to true multimedia). The PS3 runs Linux already on its PPC, with drivers arriving for video and other media processing on those SPUs. So even the "PC" might get sucked into this single platform.
There will be a few years while the PS3 is still ahead of its time. In that time, Blockbuster and the others might have some markets they can reach with their dumbed-down, simple "single media" players. But they'll have to invest quite a lot into new kinds of tech they're not familiar with. All the while showing Sony what works and what doesn't, for Sony's paid-off manufacturing plants to adopt as software on the PS3s increasingly filling people's homes. Eventually the shakeout will come (not too far off), and Sony's position and diversity will win. The dominance of Sony in that landscape will also intimidate smart investors from backing competitors, further delivering the market to Sony instead.
This analysis could also apply to other game consoles, like the X-Box. But the X-Box took a serious setback by betting on HD-DVD instead of Blu-Ray, and against Sony which controls what has now won the HD format wars for physical distribution (which beats Internet speeds in the USA for the next couple years for most people). X-Box is also not able to compete with the PS3 parallelism, either in the multiple streams or in the ultimate rendering chip to the TV. And so even the leader right now, the Wii, will be underpowered for the multimedia challenge the PS3 will win.
It's a win for us, too. Because it will work only if these different media work on open standards, which is the only way to integrate them on a single box, rather than proprietary formats on proprietary, redundant, compartmentalized boxes. Which means the overall economics and tech directions favor openness. A non-PS3 PC with the same horsepower, and 3rd party integrated GUIs could come in and compete, too. Which means you.
No, there is objective consistency to measure these actions. It's not just a word game: "right" and "wrong" are measured against actual results, and actual values, usually stated in the laws themselves. So when a "Drug Use Reduction Act" doesn't result in lower drug use, just more people in jail (where they do more drugs), that is objectively wrong.
You have illustrated how majorities can control what's legal vs illegal, but not what is right or wrong. Even when many values are subject to change, when some do not, like logical consistency and responsibility of a cause for its effects, that leaves right and wrong independent of how majorities change.
I'd love to read some more research into exactly that question. With the change in regime coming next year (I'm betting Obama), but with the new president probably coming out of the Midwestern farm region, too, just Illinois instead of Texas (Texas is culturally West, but pretty much as Midwest overall as is Illinois as farm country), farm policies and budgets will get a lot of activity. The Upper Midwest has been more corn-oriented, not least under the stewardship of Tom Daschle (D-SD) while he was the Senate Majority Leader until Republicans took control.
Maybe you could write something from your "insider" perspective and post it on some political blog. It wouldn't even have to be that in-depth to get people looking deeper for themselves. Just the first-person experience is enough to add legitimate momentum to a business that's mostly spin.
Slashdot Mirror
Jack Abramoff, the Republican gangster, got his start lobbying at the Preston Gates law firm. The "Gates" in the title is William H. Gates Sr, one of the foremost corporate lawyers in America, who helped his son William H. Gates III start Microsoft. Microsoft later was officially declared a monopoly abusing its market dominance, while Democrats controlled the Executive Branch. But when Republicans took control during the remedy phase of the monopoly trials, Microsoft was let off without the remedies that actually stop monopolies. Those Republicans were (and are) part of Abramoff's gang.
Just because websites provide information explaining how people kill themselves, and what the details of the nasty process are like, doesn't mean those sites "support" suicide, in the sense of recommending, endorsing or encouraging it. In fact, the facts about suicide reveal that it's hard to kill oneself, that it's complicated, likely to fail, painful, embarassing, and just plain hard. Lots of people talking about killing themselves or just thinking about it will not go through with it if they know what will really probably happen, if they get a good look at the process with enough time to think about it, rather than just wash down a bottle of downers with a quart of liquor (which often doesn't work, as some of these websites explain).
Maybe the increased availability of graphic facts about what the person is thinking of doing is part of the reason that fewer people are doing it. Maybe the prevention services aren't entirely effective, but don't want to compete with simple websites that are often more approachable and carry less stigma from private viewing than asking another person for help, or admitting that one is seriously considering that desperate measure.
The fear-driven conclusion that sharing information about a practice is equivalent to encouraging it, when that info includes the discouraging facts about it, has got to go away. It's an old coping mechanism for "dangerous" information that relies on centralized authorities, and the control of the info supply, rather than growing the ability of people to think about whatever info we come across, and protect ourselves from what we filter as "bad". This is the Info Age. We've got a lot of growing up to do. Because the info flood is only going to gush more strongly, and only learning to think for ourselves can protect us.
No, Anonymous shiteater Coward, the difference between "tax per TV" and "tax per premises" is insignificant. The country in which simple logic is applied makes even less than no difference. They really should start teaching logic to you barbarians in Elbonia. Or at least that you should shut your mouth when you're outgunned both literally and intellectually.
I don't see how you disagree with anything that I said. I didn't say it's not funding the BBC.
There are other languages available at those links (hay otros idiomas disponibles en los enlaces).
OK, the tax is per premises. Does that make one iota of difference to the point I made?
The UK taxes people per TV, supposedly to direct those taxes into the government production (BBC) and oversight (regulation) of TV broadcasts. The idea was supposedly that people who didn't have a TV wouldn't have to pay to support the government's work producing and overseeing TV.
But the benefit of that government work doesn't come only through the TV. TV is now, generations after introducing the tax, as integrated a societal activity, whether government produced or not, as any other largescale activity. It's as (and more) universal and impactful as, say, newspaper publishing.
The UK should stop charging TV taxes as a service fee, and just integrate the taxation into it's broadbased general taxation. That would drop the now arbitrary basis for the tax, and eliminate bottlenecks that call for even more arbitrary taxes to "fix" the problem of using the wrong basis for the tax in the first place.
I think something is better than nothing. That volume of evidence and "virality" of distribution means that even a snapshot will preserve traces that are hard to totally expunge from the entire Federal government's public records. But if that snapshot isn't even taken, that's much harder.
The dropping from inadequate archiving to none has crossed a threshold where people are now paying attention and demanding adequacy. The inadequacy of the prior policy means that both those in power in the Bush regime and many outside it agree on changing the program, which is a start for political compromise. Switching to the Internet Archive is a mediocre interim measure, but one which Republicans probably don't like, because even though it's their trademark privatization, it's still publicly funded, and not to a crony just skimming a contract while failing to expensively fulfill it. All of which creates political conditions and momentum towards a more distributed archival process, which could fund archives including libraries as I described.
So instead of giving up, now is a good time to demand more and better. Because it's the right thing to do, and because the way it's happening shows a path to actually getting it.
I'm familiar with NARA's archiving, and how they're thinking of turning it over to the Internet Archive.org. But there's a difference between publishing and archiving. Yes, those websites are available to the public, but if there isn't a mandated archiving system, then lots will slip away. The sheer volume of published materials, so often revised to cover up abuses after it's slipped out, means that relying on the public to archive it piecemeal will risk lots of important evidence being lost. That's the entire point of the government archiving even public materials.
Probably the best system would be for libraries, public and private (eg. universities and research institutes), to each independently archive the public sites, the way they do now with newspapers (microfilm, and lately CD/DVD-ROM). If we'd just relied on newspapers to keep their own archives, lots of coverups by newspapers could have revised history in their own master archives by now (and surely have tried). The government material is even more essential, and subject to coverup by an organized criminal regime like the one we're living through right now.
The NARA should not be considering quitting right when the Bush regime is caught red-handed deleting vast amounts of incriminating digital content that it was legally required to archive.
If anything, NARA should be required to archive even more now, to guard against losing the unique copies at the other ends of official communications and publications. It should upgrade to a policy of redundant archivers keeping separate copies under separate policies, so that a rogue Executive can't flip one switch and toss all the evidence of their actions into the fire.
Yeah, and 60M+ of you people voted for that one guy twice, knowing that he was a murderer.
You've got blood on your hands. If you call that living, you should live a lot less.
As electric and cooling costs continue to rise, I wonder whether there will be good economic case for locating superconducting datacenters towards the poles (or atop mountains) because it takes so much less power to keep them running so fast. With ever more automated datacenter ops, they might be airdroppable into really remote locations, with fiber bundles or redundant satellite radios linking them to the Net, without needing human operations staff (and the power they consume for their 100F bodies).
The lawyer who will defend the subpoenaed blogger is also a "trial lawyer".
This blogger didn't get subpoenaed for criticizing "trial lawyers" as some large bloc, just those who they pointed out were dishonest and abusive of the legal system.
So some lawyer who was intimidated by that took some abusive legal action. Who could possibly be shocked by that?
Headlining this story about "trial lawyers" is some kind of BS attack on people's rights to be represented by lawyers when we're going to trial. Sure, lawyers suck, but "trial lawyers" are not just some monolithic roving gang, beating and scaring people around the countryside. Think about that the next time you need a lawyer to fix your outstanding traffic tickets or something.
Thanks for the chance to think it through. Following up on some of what I said that was kinda old news, I also learned that the cable industry is moving away from even CableCARD HW/smartcard, towards some kind of totally SW "downloadable authentication" instead. Which means it should be compatible with all HW, and be even more open, cheaper, and likely to run on something like a PC - or a PS3.
Well, Sony was pretty cagey about a release date, and the rumored "March 28, 2008" has come and gone. But since the entire PS3 schedule has always been a rush job, and always been running later than either announced or expected, but has always delivered fairly close to schedule, I'd say "any day now" is probably reasonable. It's certainly not vaporware.
PlayTV is not a UK-only device. More details of its release in New Zealand have leaked, because of negotiations with TV companies there (ie. FreePlay). And the rumors of the initial release have all been "European release", but no indication of any release targeting only the UK. Moreover, I don't think a single country release is technically feasible (at least, not locking out the rest of Europe, just because it's sold in only one country) because all Europe uses the DVB standard for cable transmission, so it should work anywhere it gets a signal. Especially if the PS3 Linux can run the PlayTV over the USB on arbitrary apps, and since there's no DRM in the HW, that would mean any DVB cable would drive it.
The OCAP used in N America instead of DVB would probably need its own PlayTV HW. But I really can't see Sony ignoring the American market, especially for something so American as TV.
Openness is the key to the way out. The FCC surprisingly mandated last year that no cableco can any longer bundle their locked-in set-top box with their network and data (video). I think it was a political move to force cablecos to pioneer that service model, years before the telcos which are opening their platform at their own rate, but also inevitably.
As usual, the cablecos aren't meeting the mandate on schedule, but they are all able, or nearly all, to use 3rd party settop boxes. I believe they're all supposed to take whatever standard box you bring, that takes the cablecard HW, and get a cablecard (smartcard) keyed to your account. Even where there is no competition between network providers in a town (99.9%+ of USA), the box is still supposed to be BYOB.
In the meantime I think all the SW will run on a PC kinda clabbered together. Before even the PS3 is ready, which probably won't be for another year or so (I'd guess Spring '09, to build momentum and fix bugs for Christmas '09). Really I think that could be LinuxMCE, with PS3 media directors. I know that's what I'm working on.
One very good outcome will be that the Internet with BYOB DVRs means you can use the cableco network to access content not controlled ($) by the cableco. There is also competition from telcos for network termination, so we're also finally seeing the rise of geographic competition for both WANs and "TV" at the same time.
Which is why openness is important. For them to steal each other's customers, their equipment needs to interop on shared standards. They're not as clever as SW outfits like MS in "embrace and extend" to pervert public standards to proprietary advantage. So what's really necessary is developers racing to get the public hooked on a GUI that's not bundled with either the network, or the content, or the terminal settop box either of those providers would like to command. In the time while they're all scrambling to establish "the one true GUI", those incumbents will all be busy with their core deployments. So there's an opportunity for independent developers to get in there and grab mindshare, before one or the other giant corporate player locks it down.
The PS3, like all Blu-Ray players, includes a Java VM, running JME. That's also the standard for both European and N American cableboxes, as well as Google's Android phone profile (and lots of existing mobile phones). So there's a lot of room in this emerging open platform for reusing the same GUI objects across devices, executed across the network. I hope there's enough development of it to run circles around the likes of Sony, TimeWarner and AT&T/Verizon.
I Want My MyTV!
"Mysterious sound waves" like years of speeches by a lying president who cancels NASA programs, lies about a Mars mission, and instead converts NASA to Star Wars "missile defense"?
Well, I used my PS2 almost exclusively to play DVDs until I got a PS3 last year, because I'm not a gamer.
But the multimedia multiprocessing power of the PS3 is really game changing. Since Sony controls all Blu-Ray player licensing, I'm sure whatever lowest price point they're available at will be consistent with Sony's PS3 plans. The power of the PS3 to flip between TV, movies and games in a blink is really different from how any other previous config has worked. And they're positioning the PSP as the "dumb terminal" for the PS3 hub, a $200-300 satellite that uses the PS3 for the "heavy lifting", and WiFi/Gb-e for the media distribution. I don't know if that setup will all be available by Christmas 2008, but I do expect it, along with a developed network and portal for PlayTV, by Christmas 2009.
The oil deposits aren't animal remains. Their precipitating CO2 and other gaseous carbon poisonous to animals out of the atmosphere helped make the environment hospitable for animals. To say nothing of a climate cool and mild enough for humans to survive nad build a civilization. Humans and a civilization that would collapse if that oil quickly reentered the atmosphere, bringing back those ancient, pre-human conditions.
Which is exactly what we're doing.
The PS3 is the bestselling Blu-ray player in the world. With the death of HD-DVD, it's the bestselling HD videodisc player in the world. It was the first BD player on the market, and has always had more movie than game titles. I don't think it's locked in a definition as "videogame" by a longshot.
The PlayTV unit isn't quite released yet, but it will be the gateway to selling lots more PS3s. And that's before Sony really launches a campaign to show the PS3 as the "media hub" for all its products, including networked picture frames, mobile cameraphones, and all the other stuff people will suddenly realize is all Sony, and all works together.
Sony's approach to piracy has long puzzled people who'd expect Sony to build in more DRM. The latest PS3 Internet auto-upgrade lets it play DivX off the hard drive, no questions asked, which is obviously an appeal to people who download pirated content. But Sony has sold a lot of Vaios and flatscreens hooked up to them for people to play pirated content with. Sony might just be coming around, especially after getting so beat up over the wrong directions it went too far in, like the rootkit etc. If Sony really cared about DRM it would have long ago enabled end-to-end DRM including its MemoryStick, all of which hardware has it built in. Maybe they're taking the indefinitely prolonged stealth approach, expecting that once people are using all Sony DRM compatible products, and the analog equipment is a distant memory, they'll finally close the trap. Or maybe they're making so much money, and recognize that keeping the flow going and not pissing off customers into being hostile to their brand gives them an edge, and all that money that would eventually flow to their kinds of products will do so anyway, but to them instead of their more hostile appearing competitors.
In any case, the platform is fairly open (except the PS3 videochip under Linux, but it's not necessary now that the lockdown has forced development of SPU drivers). And here now. All that's necessary for the platform I described is for PlayTV to finally be released, which is any day. All without real DRM, all with high-end quality HW for fairly cheap. I like it.
What dooms all of these slightly different boxes, whether cablebox, cablemodem, TiVo, or even gaming machines, is that people don't want a pile of different boxes, each one trapping them in a different "mode" in which they use their TV. Where each content mode has a different GUI, and lots of redundant overlap with the others. They certainly don't want to get locked into different boxes with different viewing modes for different sets of the same kind of content, like movies. Who wants to care whether they're watching a "cable movie" or a "TiVo movie" or a "disc movie" or a "Blockbuster movie"?
What will replace all these boxes and modes is an open standard box that does it all with a unified GUI. It might even take "expansion boxes", to handle retrieving and decoding different data types, especially if they're as different as, say, a videogame and a newshour.
That's why I say "game consoles" will replace all these different "media terminals". The Sony Playstation3 is probably the winner waiting for the world to catch up with it. With the imminent introduction of PlayTV, a TV decoder, the PS3's single GUI will play regular cable (or broadcast) TV and enable tivo DVR, and of course games and DVD/Blu-Ray, as well as on-demand and multicast Internet video (and music, and telephony...). Since the FCC has mandated that cablecos stop bundling set-top boxes with their networks and data (including TV data) service, the PlayTV cable decoder will fill that gap. If PlayTV had a DOCSIS modem built in, it would do it all - until then, the DOCSIS modem gets its cable from a splitter off the incoming cableco coax, just like now with the regular cablemodem, but the DOCSIS modem can plug right into the PS3 gigabit ethernet port (or one of its USB ports).
The important difference is the integration. The PS3 has a single GUI for all that. It's also got multiple parallel DSPs ("SPUs") onchip, for fast processing all of that different media, all in parallel, all flippable around "picture in picture" (or whatever paradigm Sony brings to true multimedia). The PS3 runs Linux already on its PPC, with drivers arriving for video and other media processing on those SPUs. So even the "PC" might get sucked into this single platform.
There will be a few years while the PS3 is still ahead of its time. In that time, Blockbuster and the others might have some markets they can reach with their dumbed-down, simple "single media" players. But they'll have to invest quite a lot into new kinds of tech they're not familiar with. All the while showing Sony what works and what doesn't, for Sony's paid-off manufacturing plants to adopt as software on the PS3s increasingly filling people's homes. Eventually the shakeout will come (not too far off), and Sony's position and diversity will win. The dominance of Sony in that landscape will also intimidate smart investors from backing competitors, further delivering the market to Sony instead.
This analysis could also apply to other game consoles, like the X-Box. But the X-Box took a serious setback by betting on HD-DVD instead of Blu-Ray, and against Sony which controls what has now won the HD format wars for physical distribution (which beats Internet speeds in the USA for the next couple years for most people). X-Box is also not able to compete with the PS3 parallelism, either in the multiple streams or in the ultimate rendering chip to the TV. And so even the leader right now, the Wii, will be underpowered for the multimedia challenge the PS3 will win.
It's a win for us, too. Because it will work only if these different media work on open standards, which is the only way to integrate them on a single box, rather than proprietary formats on proprietary, redundant, compartmentalized boxes. Which means the overall economics and tech directions favor openness. A non-PS3 PC with the same horsepower, and 3rd party integrated GUIs could come in and compete, too. Which means you.
No, there is objective consistency to measure these actions. It's not just a word game: "right" and "wrong" are measured against actual results, and actual values, usually stated in the laws themselves. So when a "Drug Use Reduction Act" doesn't result in lower drug use, just more people in jail (where they do more drugs), that is objectively wrong.
You have illustrated how majorities can control what's legal vs illegal, but not what is right or wrong. Even when many values are subject to change, when some do not, like logical consistency and responsibility of a cause for its effects, that leaves right and wrong independent of how majorities change.
These applications aren't that interesting for geeks, even if the basic tech is. This story is just an ad for Zoombak.
Ditto.
Your questions are even better than mine :).
I'd love to read some more research into exactly that question. With the change in regime coming next year (I'm betting Obama), but with the new president probably coming out of the Midwestern farm region, too, just Illinois instead of Texas (Texas is culturally West, but pretty much as Midwest overall as is Illinois as farm country), farm policies and budgets will get a lot of activity. The Upper Midwest has been more corn-oriented, not least under the stewardship of Tom Daschle (D-SD) while he was the Senate Majority Leader until Republicans took control.
Maybe you could write something from your "insider" perspective and post it on some political blog. It wouldn't even have to be that in-depth to get people looking deeper for themselves. Just the first-person experience is enough to add legitimate momentum to a business that's mostly spin.