I'm currently at war with my Windows 2000 Pro box. Under 98, you can check a box that says "Log on to Windows NT domain" and when you log on locally, you are then presented with a domain logon screen. Under 2000, that doesn't seem to be possible.
I've been hunting around for reference, and a good lot of it is on the Microsoft site (which is currently MIA). Am I screwed?
No, thanks to Google.
If you haven't used the cache feature on Google to get at the content of a dead link, you're missing something wonderful (just click the little grey "cached" under the link name). I can view all the Microsoft pages without Microsoft even being online. Wonderful!
I had a friend who owned a video store, and thanks to him I know that there are, in fact, pr0n industry trade mags. The big one is called "AVN" ("Adult Video News" I believe). They are the ones who also host the "pornies" or whatever they call their awards ceremonies. But it is a true trade magazine (ads for display cases and title library storage systems).
I went to work on a one-month contract doing software evaluation for a firm. I was reading over their employment form and voila, a non-compete section. I asked the hiring manager about it ("1 months of work and I can't go anywhere for a year?") and he said, "Oh, that's boilerplate. Never mind that" and we crossed the section out, initialed it, and it was done. I'm still there (it's been 4 months now), but knowing that it will never rear it's ugly head is reassuring.
The moral? BEWARE OF BOILERPLATE! Even in the most tame circumstances, things like that slip in. Read what you sign.
(I'm not sure if crossing out a section and initialing it really nullifies it, but my father's a lawyer, so if it gets ugly, I might have a chance at receiving justice)
Ever wondered what a suitcase nuke might look like?
Behold the SADM and the MADM (between.1-1 and 1-15 kilotons respectivly). Hell, you wouldn't need a truck. A small car would be sufficient.
Now a 747 cruising around blasting VW bugs would be cool...
A number of states are suing Publishers Clearing House for, among other things, suggesting an affiliation with the US government or using phrases like "You have been selected to recieve 1 million dollars".
The defense team, when confronted on this issue replied that the end recipient would know that it was a contest and that it was "understood" that they were not actually going to recieve 1 million dollars. If I recall correctly, the judge told them that putting "You are a Winner" (or whatever) on the package or atempting to impersonate federal documents, regardless of the awareness of the recipient, was illegal.
By using ibm.net, the spammer attempted to legitimize his spam, and thus is guilty of a vast amount of naughtyness. I'm surprised that IBM isn't attempting to spank him as well.
Please do not lump me in with the rabid, foaming at the mouth, anarchists seen at WTO protests.
I have to make the point that I have no hate for (most) corporations. In fact, I see nothing wrong with tax deductions. Hell, my parents took tax deductions because of me (I was a dependent), yet I don't see them as greedy, just sensible.
Motorola has an obligation to it's stockholders. If it has a system that is sucking in cash with no chance of payout, then it is in the stockholders interests to get out of that venture while minimizing the losses. It would be totally foolish to do otherwise. And since they're taking tax write-off's why not take this one too?
Even if they couldn't get the writeoff, absorbing the costs of a useless system makes no sense from a bottom-line standpoint. And altruistic notions such as "open source satellite systems" are filtered out before they get there.
I was at the US embassy in New Zealand for a few months about a year ago, and I recall both the Ambassador and the Deputy Chief of Mission received spiffy new Iridium handsets (follow the link; it cracks me up that the antennas, which were monstrous, are conviently not shown).
I think it was a great idea: Unclassified but Sensitive information could be phoned back to the US without high level personel having to locate a STU (secure telephone unit). Bypass landlines and possible wiretaps, and you can call from anywhere. I believe conversations from the handset to the satellite were encrypted, so it was a great investment. Of course, the Iridium shut down around 6 months later and the phones were useless...
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure the driving force behind the destruction of Iridium comes down to one thing:
Tax Writeoff
If Iridium ever comes down, Motorola can turn to the IRS and say "Even though we made around $44 billion USD this year (intial projection value for 2001, though this has been revised), we just lost a $5 billion dollar system. Please have pity on us." And the IRS will cut them some slack.
The irony of this is that in a manner of thinking, the US governnment will have partially funded the cost of Iridium through lost tax revenue. So the DoD buying it seems strangely logical, given that a) the government would have footed the bill in one way or another and b) it's better to have a working orbital communications system than a rain of space garbage.
PS: I seem to recall an old animation on the Macintosh that showed a Star Destroyer-esque ship from the underside. A fleet of spacecraft flew out of the hold, there was a pause, and then a bunch of crap started coming out of the hold as the words "SPACE GARBAGE" flashed on the screen.
1) Disable Macrovision
2) Be set to any region (to circumvent the new RCE technology
3) Play MP3s and VCDs (not an essential feature, but would be great
3) Ignore User Prohibitions
What is a user prohibition? It's what keeps you from skipping the FBI Warning or the four minutes of commercials at the beginning of your DVD. Call me retentive, but I like immediate access to my DVDs and some DVDs (like my anime DVDs) have tons of companies involved in the production that need you to watch their really flashy logo on the screen.
technology.
So far, I've only been able to find one merchant that sells players that ignore User Prohibitions, and they're in the UK.
Does anyone know of any US merchants who sell them?
Nice idea, but a few problems. Lets "replace" Iridium with your network. So you have a constellation in orbit at around 650K (source). Lets put me in Perth and you in, oh, LA. That puts you around 14,000k away (as the turbojet assisted crow flies [source]). So the 1300K round trip hop is justified.
But what if I'm in Auckland and you're in Wellington (both NZ)? Well, we're only 485km away, yet we'll have more than double the latency that a terrestrial system would have. A wireless solution is not sufficient (I think) for spanning gaps of hundreds of kilometers, so you will need to lay fiber somewhere. Also, wireless border hopping (in Europe, for example) would be a pain in the arse, since you'd have to obtain rights to the same frequency on both sides of the border, a bothersome proposition. And even if you go to laser, you still have latency in the transmission hardware being tacked on
So you've got latency issues going to satellite. This isn't a new issue, and I might write it off if I gained the ability to read Slashdot on my yacht in the Mediterranean (what do you think I do during the summer?).
However, there's one more issue: upgrades. You may have heard the term "dark fiber" (or fibre, depending). Simply, when Joe's Telco decides to lay fiber, they lay a lot more than they need, since they can't just go back and lay more easily. There's this unused ("dark") fiber laying around that can have equipment hooked on to it to expand the network. And the network hardware can be upgraded at any time (optical switches, anyone?). You can upgrade a satellite (such as Hubble), but it's not cheap. And in all probability, the network will not improve all that much over time (maybe better compression routines).
So don't write off fiber/fibre entirely. Of course, a satellite AND fibre network would be ideal.
Firstly, it's a whole hell of a lot easier (though still a bit of a pain) to lay terrestrial cable. Example: Qwest just slapped a plow on a train car and furrowed trenches along rail lines all around the US. Stuff in cable, backfill, and you're done (more or less). You can't really do that with submarine cable. You can also do end-run tricks with microwave and laser for cheap further expansion.
Though the link was already posted, I'll post it again. It's a splendid article Neal Stephenson wrote for Wired, and if you want to hear more than you wanted about laying cable, read it.
So what you've got is relatively cheap terrestrial links, but when you start talking trans-oceanic, then things get hairy, both in effort and money terms. So you only have a few outbound connections from the continent, which means one anchor/earthquake/curious competitor (read the article) and there goes your connectivity.
Note that Arpanet was meant to protect the US military network in times of chaos (i.e. armageddon). It really isn't an issue that overseas connectivity is a somewhat fragile link, since in times of war, it's only the national network that matters.
As for routing issues, well, there are all sorts of wack payment issues at the backbone level. At the top level, the paths that packets take are determined by business agreements rather than efficiency. So you'd have to get on the horn to your competition and beg and plead for assistance (banks do it; they loan each other money all the time and at pretty decent rates, although telcos might enjoy raping each other when asked for help). Also you may get into weird latency issues if you route US traffic over a cable destined for, say India and then somehow on to the US (maybe).
Recall that originally C++ used the Cfront compiler to generate C code which was then compiled as normal. Also, NQC for Lego Mindstorms is a replacement programming language that surpasses the functionality of the graphical programming tool Lego provides.
Perhaps someone will build a CFront-like compiler to generate YaBasic statements from a higher level language (such as Perl) allowing for more fully featured programming. YaBasic may be a small step right now, but I can see technically skilled PlayStation2 programmers coming up with replacement (or at least a wrapper) for YaBasic (though Sony UK is not off the hook for supplying a cheesy language for their system).
Note: I'm kidding about using Perl. Ugh... (shudder)
You know that clause in most software EULAs that states that if you do not agree to the terms of the license, you must return the software for a refund? I wonder what would happen if someone were to "not accept" a license for obsolete software.
"This copy of MS-DOS 6.22 cost me $150 when I bought it. But I don't agree with this license! Gimmie my money back!"
In all seriousness, I doubt this would stand up in any US court of law (though weirder things have occured) but I wonder how it would be worked around.
But is it possible for someone to just make an identical copy of my smart ID card, and 'become me'?"
If done properly, the short answer is "no" (the long answer is "not without a lot of work").
There is a project underway at my old school (Washington University to do magnetic fingerprinting of credit cards. The gist of the research is that a magnetic stripe with even a direct bit-for-bit copy would have different magnetic properties than the original, although the data would be the same.
If I recall correctly, the proof has been demonstrated and a commercial grade (i.e. not $12,000,000) device had been constructed.
So if included on the card was some sort of encrypted checksum of the fingerprint, a suitably equipped reader would flag a discrepancy between data and card, and thus the counterfeit would be immediatly obvious.
Now, I'm not so naïve as to suggest that the technology to defeat the fingerprinting won't come around, but it will take a while.
If either Bush, Cheney, Gore or Lieberman cared a whit about children, they would shriek instead about the paucity of decent Internet access -- and even decent computers -- in America's public elementary and middle schools.
I'm sorry Mr. Katz, but I believe you are guilty of thinking too much like a stereotypical Slashdotter.
I say this because I had a job going to kindergarten schools around Chicago and installing computers that were donated by my client.
It was a kind gesture, and I know he meant well, and at first the teachers and students were enthusiastic about their new classroom accessories.
But then they started asking me "What are we going to do with these things?" And it was then that I realized that the computers were not the means to avert the troubling future that those children face.
A number of the schools were in the middle of lower income neighbourhoods. Would having access to a PC make that child any less succeptible to gang violence? Or parental neglect? Or a dead-end job with no future?
Or perhaps you were thinking only of higher income, suburban children, who have the benefit of a decent future already partially laid out for them. But they alone are not the future, and technology will not, by itself, make their lives better.
The point is, the effect of technology on our children will be minimal until we handle far more important issues like crumbling schools, unfair allocation of education dollars, gang and drug related violence, absentee parents, poverty, malnutrition, and the like.
A rephrasing of your quote:
If either Bush, Cheney, Gore or Lieberman cared a whit about children, they would shriek instead that money is wasted on a classroom computer when a child doesn't even have a textbook, or cannot afford lunch.
I spent 5 months out in New Zealand this year, and I investigated if the NZ players were by law region free. Everyone I spoke to (even NZ-DVD mailing list ops) had no idea what I was talking about.
Now, most of the players for sale could be chipped by the store, but that's not the same thing.
I may be wrong, but until I actually see a legal document stating this fact (or even better, some sort of precedent in an actual legal case) I'll consider this wishful thinking.
Perhaps some of you have read Larry Niven's "Ringworld" series about the giant artificial ring-shaped world (if you havn't, I reccomend you do so, although I'm spoiling it a bit for you).
Recall that the ringworld was in a state of civilizational collapse when it was discovered. The cause? The Puppeteer race was so terrified of the race that created the Ringworld that they launched a nasty space-fungus that devoured the materials of the high-tech devices there. Voila; the downfall of a possibly threatening civilization.
I just got off a site today. My client has a small store and he wanted a barcode scanner for his point-of-sale terminal. Someone told him that it would cost him $15,000US to do this. I set him up with my CueCat and a copy of Catnip.
You, sir, need to have more faith in the US legal system!
While IANAL, I believe that you don't have to prove intent in violating intellectual property rights (the foundation of the L&F lawsuits). And US companies tend to just sue first and ask questions later.
Both current and planned US aircraft carriers run Windows NT, and Slashdot has carried an article about the story (and I saw the spec for the new carrier in a government technology magazine).
Are any of us going to go out and buy an aircraft carrier? Of course not. So then why post it to Slashdot? Because it's the technology at use and it's application that is of interest.
Also, the fact that a MP3/DVD/CD/Video media server is being mass marketed shows the migration of technologies that was once the sole purvey of the computer savvy into the general arena. As someone once said "I find the most amazing thing about computers is that they are no longer amazing" meaning their commonplace nature is striking given their role only a few years ago.
The techno-eliteism shown on Slashdot is very short-sighted; just because *we* can do better with our own skills does not mean that we should look down our noses at those who cannot. I imagine Seamus Heaney (nobel laureate poet) couldn't configure a Linux box to do this, but this does not reflect ill upon him. The fact that he can now have the same functionality in a device is striking.
So yes, this is news for nerds; we get to see the fruits of our labors shared with the general public. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and that a company has decided to build a public product based on our private hacks should be something to feel good about, not to scoff at.
What people are you talking about? My brother listens to MP3s and DVDs and reads email, but he couldn't set up a Linux box to do this on his television (hell, it would be annoying for me to do it). Remember, this product needs to appeal to as many people as possible in order to make a profit. If only programmers and sysadmins can use it, it won't sell.
Also, if you don't mind hacking a remote control interface for your desktop and putting the tower on top of your television, then I guess you are fine. The point of this device isn't to best your desktop or a top-notch DVD player, but to be an all-in-one solution.
If you want perfection, buy indivudual components (and spend a fortune).
I imagine that a SDMI watermark is generated on the fly. The watermark probably encodes the owners info, the duplicate level, and other permissions. Perhaps on the CD, there would be some sort of default watermark that would just say "This is a first generation master; it may/may not be duplicated X generations", but I imagine for DL'd music or music you duplicate yourself, the Watermark would have to change. Just like on a Minidisc where it keeps track of what level the duplicate is and prevents X generation copying, that has to be altered each time a copy is made.
So again, if you can see where the watermark is changing, can't you still excise that location? Or is the watermark somehow checksum'ed? Perhaps if each copy permutes the entire song, it would be more difficult.
Of course, if the Watermark *is* generated on the fly each time, that makes having a standard diff of the watermarked track difficult, but still not impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been hunting around for reference, and a good lot of it is on the Microsoft site (which is currently MIA). Am I screwed?
No, thanks to Google.
If you haven't used the cache feature on Google to get at the content of a dead link, you're missing something wonderful (just click the little grey "cached" under the link name). I can view all the Microsoft pages without Microsoft even being online. Wonderful!
I had a friend who owned a video store, and thanks to him I know that there are, in fact, pr0n industry trade mags. The big one is called "AVN" ("Adult Video News" I believe). They are the ones who also host the "pornies" or whatever they call their awards ceremonies. But it is a true trade magazine (ads for display cases and title library storage systems).
The moral? BEWARE OF BOILERPLATE! Even in the most tame circumstances, things like that slip in. Read what you sign.
(I'm not sure if crossing out a section and initialing it really nullifies it, but my father's a lawyer, so if it gets ugly, I might have a chance at receiving justice)
Now a 747 cruising around blasting VW bugs would be cool...
Dude. Nuclear LAND MINE...
The defense team, when confronted on this issue replied that the end recipient would know that it was a contest and that it was "understood" that they were not actually going to recieve 1 million dollars. If I recall correctly, the judge told them that putting "You are a Winner" (or whatever) on the package or atempting to impersonate federal documents, regardless of the awareness of the recipient, was illegal.
By using ibm.net, the spammer attempted to legitimize his spam, and thus is guilty of a vast amount of naughtyness. I'm surprised that IBM isn't attempting to spank him as well.
Of course, IANAL....
It's been done.
I have to make the point that I have no hate for (most) corporations. In fact, I see nothing wrong with tax deductions. Hell, my parents took tax deductions because of me (I was a dependent), yet I don't see them as greedy, just sensible.
Motorola has an obligation to it's stockholders. If it has a system that is sucking in cash with no chance of payout, then it is in the stockholders interests to get out of that venture while minimizing the losses. It would be totally foolish to do otherwise. And since they're taking tax write-off's why not take this one too?
Even if they couldn't get the writeoff, absorbing the costs of a useless system makes no sense from a bottom-line standpoint. And altruistic notions such as "open source satellite systems" are filtered out before they get there.
I think it was a great idea: Unclassified but Sensitive information could be phoned back to the US without high level personel having to locate a STU (secure telephone unit). Bypass landlines and possible wiretaps, and you can call from anywhere. I believe conversations from the handset to the satellite were encrypted, so it was a great investment. Of course, the Iridium shut down around 6 months later and the phones were useless...
Tax Writeoff
If Iridium ever comes down, Motorola can turn to the IRS and say "Even though we made around $44 billion USD this year (intial projection value for 2001, though this has been revised), we just lost a $5 billion dollar system. Please have pity on us." And the IRS will cut them some slack.
The irony of this is that in a manner of thinking, the US governnment will have partially funded the cost of Iridium through lost tax revenue. So the DoD buying it seems strangely logical, given that a) the government would have footed the bill in one way or another and b) it's better to have a working orbital communications system than a rain of space garbage.
PS: I seem to recall an old animation on the Macintosh that showed a Star Destroyer-esque ship from the underside. A fleet of spacecraft flew out of the hold, there was a pause, and then a bunch of crap started coming out of the hold as the words "SPACE GARBAGE" flashed on the screen.
Man, that cracked me up at the time.
1) Disable Macrovision
2) Be set to any region (to circumvent the new RCE technology
3) Play MP3s and VCDs (not an essential feature, but would be great
3) Ignore User Prohibitions
What is a user prohibition? It's what keeps you from skipping the FBI Warning or the four minutes of commercials at the beginning of your DVD. Call me retentive, but I like immediate access to my DVDs and some DVDs (like my anime DVDs) have tons of companies involved in the production that need you to watch their really flashy logo on the screen. technology.
So far, I've only been able to find one merchant that sells players that ignore User Prohibitions, and they're in the UK.
Does anyone know of any US merchants who sell them?
But what if I'm in Auckland and you're in Wellington (both NZ)? Well, we're only 485km away, yet we'll have more than double the latency that a terrestrial system would have. A wireless solution is not sufficient (I think) for spanning gaps of hundreds of kilometers, so you will need to lay fiber somewhere. Also, wireless border hopping (in Europe, for example) would be a pain in the arse, since you'd have to obtain rights to the same frequency on both sides of the border, a bothersome proposition. And even if you go to laser, you still have latency in the transmission hardware being tacked on
So you've got latency issues going to satellite. This isn't a new issue, and I might write it off if I gained the ability to read Slashdot on my yacht in the Mediterranean (what do you think I do during the summer?).
However, there's one more issue: upgrades. You may have heard the term "dark fiber" (or fibre, depending). Simply, when Joe's Telco decides to lay fiber, they lay a lot more than they need, since they can't just go back and lay more easily. There's this unused ("dark") fiber laying around that can have equipment hooked on to it to expand the network. And the network hardware can be upgraded at any time (optical switches, anyone?). You can upgrade a satellite (such as Hubble), but it's not cheap. And in all probability, the network will not improve all that much over time (maybe better compression routines).
So don't write off fiber/fibre entirely. Of course, a satellite AND fibre network would be ideal.
Firstly, it's a whole hell of a lot easier (though still a bit of a pain) to lay terrestrial cable. Example: Qwest just slapped a plow on a train car and furrowed trenches along rail lines all around the US. Stuff in cable, backfill, and you're done (more or less). You can't really do that with submarine cable. You can also do end-run tricks with microwave and laser for cheap further expansion.
Though the link was already posted, I'll post it again. It's a splendid article Neal Stephenson wrote for Wired, and if you want to hear more than you wanted about laying cable, read it.
So what you've got is relatively cheap terrestrial links, but when you start talking trans-oceanic, then things get hairy, both in effort and money terms. So you only have a few outbound connections from the continent, which means one anchor/earthquake/curious competitor (read the article) and there goes your connectivity.
Note that Arpanet was meant to protect the US military network in times of chaos (i.e. armageddon). It really isn't an issue that overseas connectivity is a somewhat fragile link, since in times of war, it's only the national network that matters.
As for routing issues, well, there are all sorts of wack payment issues at the backbone level. At the top level, the paths that packets take are determined by business agreements rather than efficiency. So you'd have to get on the horn to your competition and beg and plead for assistance (banks do it; they loan each other money all the time and at pretty decent rates, although telcos might enjoy raping each other when asked for help). Also you may get into weird latency issues if you route US traffic over a cable destined for, say India and then somehow on to the US (maybe).
Caveat: This could all be bullshit. Comments?
Domo arigato gosaimasu!
Recall that originally C++ used the Cfront compiler to generate C code which was then compiled as normal. Also, NQC for Lego Mindstorms is a replacement programming language that surpasses the functionality of the graphical programming tool Lego provides.
Perhaps someone will build a CFront-like compiler to generate YaBasic statements from a higher level language (such as Perl) allowing for more fully featured programming. YaBasic may be a small step right now, but I can see technically skilled PlayStation2 programmers coming up with replacement (or at least a wrapper) for YaBasic (though Sony UK is not off the hook for supplying a cheesy language for their system).
Note: I'm kidding about using Perl. Ugh... (shudder)
"This copy of MS-DOS 6.22 cost me $150 when I bought it. But I don't agree with this license! Gimmie my money back!"
In all seriousness, I doubt this would stand up in any US court of law (though weirder things have occured) but I wonder how it would be worked around.
If done properly, the short answer is "no" (the long answer is "not without a lot of work").
There is a project underway at my old school (Washington University to do magnetic fingerprinting of credit cards. The gist of the research is that a magnetic stripe with even a direct bit-for-bit copy would have different magnetic properties than the original, although the data would be the same.
If I recall correctly, the proof has been demonstrated and a commercial grade (i.e. not $12,000,000) device had been constructed.
So if included on the card was some sort of encrypted checksum of the fingerprint, a suitably equipped reader would flag a discrepancy between data and card, and thus the counterfeit would be immediatly obvious.
Now, I'm not so naïve as to suggest that the technology to defeat the fingerprinting won't come around, but it will take a while.
I'm sorry Mr. Katz, but I believe you are guilty of thinking too much like a stereotypical Slashdotter.
I say this because I had a job going to kindergarten schools around Chicago and installing computers that were donated by my client.
It was a kind gesture, and I know he meant well, and at first the teachers and students were enthusiastic about their new classroom accessories.
But then they started asking me "What are we going to do with these things?" And it was then that I realized that the computers were not the means to avert the troubling future that those children face.
A number of the schools were in the middle of lower income neighbourhoods. Would having access to a PC make that child any less succeptible to gang violence? Or parental neglect? Or a dead-end job with no future?
Or perhaps you were thinking only of higher income, suburban children, who have the benefit of a decent future already partially laid out for them. But they alone are not the future, and technology will not, by itself, make their lives better.
The point is, the effect of technology on our children will be minimal until we handle far more important issues like crumbling schools, unfair allocation of education dollars, gang and drug related violence, absentee parents, poverty, malnutrition, and the like.
A rephrasing of your quote: If either Bush, Cheney, Gore or Lieberman cared a whit about children, they would shriek instead that money is wasted on a classroom computer when a child doesn't even have a textbook, or cannot afford lunch.
I spent 5 months out in New Zealand this year, and I investigated if the NZ players were by law region free. Everyone I spoke to (even NZ-DVD mailing list ops) had no idea what I was talking about.
Now, most of the players for sale could be chipped by the store, but that's not the same thing.
I may be wrong, but until I actually see a legal document stating this fact (or even better, some sort of precedent in an actual legal case) I'll consider this wishful thinking.
Recall that the ringworld was in a state of civilizational collapse when it was discovered. The cause? The Puppeteer race was so terrified of the race that created the Ringworld that they launched a nasty space-fungus that devoured the materials of the high-tech devices there. Voila; the downfall of a possibly threatening civilization.
Hmmm...
Cost?
Free!
Thanks Digital Convergence!
You, sir, need to have more faith in the US legal system!
While IANAL, I believe that you don't have to prove intent in violating intellectual property rights (the foundation of the L&F lawsuits). And US companies tend to just sue first and ask questions later.
Are any of us going to go out and buy an aircraft carrier? Of course not. So then why post it to Slashdot? Because it's the technology at use and it's application that is of interest.
Also, the fact that a MP3/DVD/CD/Video media server is being mass marketed shows the migration of technologies that was once the sole purvey of the computer savvy into the general arena. As someone once said "I find the most amazing thing about computers is that they are no longer amazing" meaning their commonplace nature is striking given their role only a few years ago.
The techno-eliteism shown on Slashdot is very short-sighted; just because *we* can do better with our own skills does not mean that we should look down our noses at those who cannot. I imagine Seamus Heaney (nobel laureate poet) couldn't configure a Linux box to do this, but this does not reflect ill upon him. The fact that he can now have the same functionality in a device is striking.
So yes, this is news for nerds; we get to see the fruits of our labors shared with the general public. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and that a company has decided to build a public product based on our private hacks should be something to feel good about, not to scoff at.
What people are you talking about? My brother listens to MP3s and DVDs and reads email, but he couldn't set up a Linux box to do this on his television (hell, it would be annoying for me to do it). Remember, this product needs to appeal to as many people as possible in order to make a profit. If only programmers and sysadmins can use it, it won't sell.
Also, if you don't mind hacking a remote control interface for your desktop and putting the tower on top of your television, then I guess you are fine. The point of this device isn't to best your desktop or a top-notch DVD player, but to be an all-in-one solution.
If you want perfection, buy indivudual components (and spend a fortune).
So again, if you can see where the watermark is changing, can't you still excise that location? Or is the watermark somehow checksum'ed? Perhaps if each copy permutes the entire song, it would be more difficult.
Of course, if the Watermark *is* generated on the fly each time, that makes having a standard diff of the watermarked track difficult, but still not impossible.