I know that wasn't your point. I was being pedantic. But I do disagree with your statement. I think it is perfectly possible to appreciate OSS without having one's software be OSS. Think of it as the difference between the ideal and the business reality.
What happens if/when there are 10 millions of these in some rural part of India and/or China, all susceptible to the same Zhombie Boxen WinCE virus and Beowulf Spam Cluster.
Which is exactly why the box is locked down. If you can't install or modify software, can't change the BIOS or the registry or run Java or ActiveX applets, then you don't need to worry about viri and worms.
Unless Tivo has gone out of their way to prevent it, the HD Tivo will record over-the-air digital TV (both SD and HD) just fine without having a DirectTV subscription. The HD Tivo contains 4 tuners, 2 for DirectTV and 2 for digital TV. It won't work for non-digital signals because there is no provision for receiving and encoding those.
I'm not sure exactly how this Disney box will work, I have seen numerous interpretations on it here. Some think it stores all 100 movies in the box, if that's actually the case then the wait time is no longer an issue as you wont know the movies are available until the are actually available.
The box is delivered with 100 movies pre-installed (see here
for a list of them), 10 or so are replaced each week. Movies are sent continuously in the blanking interval of normal TV signals (probably ABC stations). Dotcast claims datarates of up to 4.5mb/s for analog TV and 10mb/s for DTV (I'd assume it depends on whether SAP or other datastreams are also being shoe-horned in). There is no way to request a particular movie for download nor any way to watch a movie
that's been swapped out. Some will be in letterbox format and/or 5.1 Dolby depending on what the studio provides. No alternate soundtracks or DVD style extras. Rentals are for a 24 hour period and may be paused, rewound, fast forwarded, and watched an unlimited number of times during that 24 hours. Video connection is via composite or s-video, audio via L/R or S/PDIF (optical). MovieBeam claims that you can not record movies off the box (Macrovision?). And you must agree not to open the unit (at least one site has claimed the unit self-destructs if opened).
Even MovieBeam's FAQ admits that the only difference between this and cable/sat PPV is the rewind/etc feature and the fact you don't need cable or satellite service. So it may be good for people who can't get or don't want either. For those of us with hi-def satellite, 16:9 monitors, and surround-sound, it's not really too appealing.
2.
Enough bandwidth to support streaming, who wants to wait for it to download
This is NOT video on demand. It is a variation on Sat/Cable PayPerView. Where Sat/Cable offer a choice of 10 or 20 movies each month, Disney will offer 100. The choice of which 100 movies are available is controlled by Disney, not you. The only advantage I can see is that a locally hosted scheme allows for pause and rewind functions.
If only this were true. See
this article from the Washington Post about libraries and e-books. Having been involved briefly with e-books and talking to several publishers about fair use and DRM, it became obvious to us that book publishers want what the rest of the entertainment industry wants: pay-per-view. Libraries, used book stores, and people who loan books to their friends are all part of the same problem. And while the discussions started out about e-books, they always ended up talking about books in general.
You're a pititful little whiner. I feel sorry for you.
Since this has ceased to be a discussion between adults and instead has dropped to juvenile name calling and ranting, I won't bother to respond to any of your "points". Feel free to have the last word.
And there is the problem in a nutshell. The implementors only care about what they want. We don't want you to drive SUVs, we don't want you to eat McDonalds, we don't want you to use that ISP. If people can't get up the hill to their house, or can't afford the time to eat at Chez Paul, or can't send e-mail because their ISP can't keep track of what each of the thousands of clients do, that's just too bad, F 'em.
And I am tired of being victimized by lazy ISPs who can't be bothered to find out who those RBLs are actually blocking. I'm all for blocking spammers by whatever works, but I'm caught in the crossfire and don't like it and won't sit still for it. If that means harasing my ISP daily, fine. If it means sueing the RBLs to get my address off, also fine. As you said "The implementors don't care". If you want to call that whining, feel free.
I won't quibble over the entamology of the term. But do note that I orignally said double/confirmed opt-in. We use both terms since our clients don't always understand one or the other. But at least we both agree that whatever you call it, it isn't spammer action, and I believe that is the important part to both of us.
64.39.30.253. The entire range was blocked last time I looked.
Acting professional doesn't mean you are getting paid, just that you accept responsiblity for your actions. By it's very nature, an anonymous group can't do that.
But whether it is SPEWS or someone else doing it, netblocks are simply wrong. They are blackmail at best and terrorism at worse. "We had to destroy the village to save it" didn't play then and it doesn't play now.
Obviously you need the tinfoil hat if you've got that many fingers! I got 1 in my inbox from AOL this morning. As for reading the headers, I was working for Jon Postel when he wrote the spec, I think I know a little about how e-mail works.
And just how are we trying to "weasel out of conditions for delivery"? We do everything possible to play by the rules; we do confirmed opt-in, we list who we are and how to contact us or unsubscribe on every e-mail, we answer our support e-mails, our domain registration has real contact info. And yet some snot-faced kid hiding behind a web site that laughs about the fact you can't contact them says that my choice of hosting services is somehow wrong and I should change? Just because you don't like SUVs may give you the right to keep me out of your driveway, but it doesn't give you the right to keep me out of your neighbor's.
Lying to us is always a possibility, but highly unlikely in my opinion based on their other (verifiable) behaviour. And my personal experience with trying to deal with SPEWS has been entirely negative (hiding behind an anonymous newsgroup isn't very professional in my book).
No, opt-out is spammer-speak, double opt-in is non-spammer speak. It means that you go to our web site and sign up. We then send a confirmation e-mail to that address and ask you to reply. Until we receive that reply, nothing more is sent to you. This keeps your "friend" from signing you up for e-mail and gives us a record of your having requested to receive e-mail from us.
Neither IP based whitelists nor PGP/SMime are workable until enough servers recognize them. If everyone could agree on a system, we'd be all over it. Plus global whitelists are susceptable to the same whims that blacklists are, both are a reflection of the group that maintains them. Some IPs are on blacklists for political or personal reasons. I'll bet that some whitelist will refuse to list us because we send e-mail for a Muslim newspaper, ignoring the fact that we do the same for a Jewish paper also.
What he doesn't seem to understand is that the blacklisting of entire netblocks is only done as a last resort when ISPs refuse to get rid of spammers on their networks. It is a punitive measure to try to force the ISP to act.
Then answer me one simple question. Why are only small ISPs netblocked? Why isn't AOL? Because the RBLs know that AOL would sue them into oblivion and the small guys can't afford to.
...do the right thing and take your business elsewhere
And who is going to pay for the thousands of dollars of relocation expenses to move our server farm, not to mention the 10s of thousands of dollars in lost revenue while we are down. Try climbing down from your ivory tower and work in the trenchs for a while, it's not a black and white world.
From the SPEWS FAQ:
Q: How does one contact SPEWS?
A: One does not.
Instead you are told to post to a newsgroup and hope for the best. Our hosting company has been trying for over a year to get their entire address block removed from SPEWS. But since they once sold service to someone who violated the TOS and spammed anyway, all of their clients (including us) are being punished. And telling us to get a new hosting company is absurd.
No, IP addresses as signatures don't work. My company (PublishMail) manages e-mail newsletters for major newspapers around the world (Detroit News, Chicago Sun-Times, Jerusalem Post for example). We do confirmed/double opt-in on all of our lists. Due to the volume of e-mail we send, we have multiple servers, each with it's own IP address. There is no way for a subscriber to know what IP address our e-mails will come from, they change dynamically based on load. If there were a standard way to digitally sign our e-mails, we'd implement it in a flash.
The mass killings you allude to are the exception. In spite of what you hear on the news, violent crime has been on the decrease for the past 10 or 20 years, most likely due to an increased standard of living.
Any statement that starts with "Everyone is lying to you..." is suspect. Please provide a source for this statistic.
The heavily circulated canard about acquaintance murders is deceptive - most of these murders can be explained as turf wars in inner cities.
My neighbor's (dead) wife would dispute that. How do you explain acquaintance murders in rural areas? Not a lot of gang warfare in Andover, NH.
Guns are used to prevent far more crimes than they are used to commit.
Please provide us with multiple examples of where private citizens have prevented a crime using a gun. Examples must be from 2002, happened in the US, and must be reported by a legitimate news source. NRA publications don't count. I'll match each of them 10 to 1 with examples where guns were used to commit a crime. Anti-gun publications won't be used.
A gun and a small amount of training put a small woman, a bodybuilder, and an old man on a near-level field. This tends to reduce the amount of sexual assault as evidenced by statistics pointing to the large number of assaults prevented by guns.
As above, please provide examples of assaults being prevented.
Should you succeed in removing guns from everybody who shouldn't have them, you will remove this equalizer; most likely, thnumber of violent crimes will increase, as young athletic men now have a decided advantage.
What happens in reality is that you only disarm those who follow the law. Criminals can still get guns, and now they know that their victims will be unarmed. Why do you think the murder rate is so high in Washington DC?
Except that most of the murders in DC are between people and groups who both have guns and are already covered by your first point, gang warfare. Do you honestly think that the only thing keeping criminals from attacking you in your home is that they think you might have a gun? The fact that you lock your door and your neighbor doesn't probably has a much larger say.
Guns are a fact of life. Hysterical raving won't help anyone.
Guns are a fact of life. Making absurd excuses for them won't help anyone.
I'm not going to deny this happened, but I will say that based on my experiences with Speakeasy and those of friencs, this is the exception, not the rule. I've found their tech support to be excellent and their billing people easy to deal with (I was double billed one month because of a credit card snafu and they had already fixed the problem by the time I found out and called).
These FCC rules are designed to enforce the proposed HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) standard over DVI/Firewire connections. HDCP will be used to "protect" all high-definition video content starting with over the air, cable, and satellite digital television signals and eventually hi-def videotapes and DVDs. Details may be found here, but basically HDCP ensures that only HDCP enabled devices can play hi-def video. Non-HDCP devices will only receive down-converted (S-VHS quality) signals.
So what does that mean for you. If you were planning on "sharing" hi-def movies over the web, you are probably out of luck (of course the multi-day downloads for a hi-def movie might also discourage you). Otherwise, this won't affect you much. When you buy your new hi-def TV, it will show you great looking hi-def video from your antenna or cable. You can still play your old video tapes and DVDs. Your new hi-def DVD player will look great.
So where is the problem? In most cases, you will be able to tape shows onto your existing VCR and TIVO as well as your nifty new hi-def VCR or TIVO. But there are several "flags" in the HDCP protocol that allow the broadcasters to either limit taping to low-def resolution or to prohibit it all together. The intent is to prevent you from making copies of hi-def DVDs or pay-per-view movies. The networks are unlikely to decide to prevent you from time-shifting, they understand it's value, but there is nothing stopping them. There has also been talk of a flag which would disable the fast-forward function (aka commercial skipper) on hi-def recorders/players. Then there are those of us who have spent thousands of dollars as early adopters and helped work the kinks out of the DTV system. If HDCP gets implemented, all existing DTV equipment becomes useless.
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I know that wasn't your point. I was being pedantic. But I do disagree with your statement. I think it is perfectly possible to appreciate OSS without having one's software be OSS. Think of it as the difference between the ideal and the business reality.
But if their existing client was Open Source, it would be much, much easier for someone else to reimplement it as a Linux client.
True, but if their existing client was Open Source, they wouldn't have any content to stream (cf MPAA).
Off topic, but it was widely reported that the entire cast took pay cuts and that Oceans 12 cost the same to make as Oceans 11.
Which is exactly why the box is locked down. If you can't install or modify software, can't change the BIOS or the registry or run Java or ActiveX applets, then you don't need to worry about viri and worms.
You forgot one other advantage:
* Simplied access control. Messages are only available to members without the need to login.
Unless Tivo has gone out of their way to prevent it, the HD Tivo will record over-the-air digital TV (both SD and HD) just fine without having a DirectTV subscription. The HD Tivo contains 4 tuners, 2 for DirectTV and 2 for digital TV. It won't work for non-digital signals because there is no provision for receiving and encoding those.
Looking at the MovieBeam web site helps :-).
The box is delivered with 100 movies pre-installed (see here for a list of them), 10 or so are replaced each week. Movies are sent continuously in the blanking interval of normal TV signals (probably ABC stations). Dotcast claims datarates of up to 4.5mb/s for analog TV and 10mb/s for DTV (I'd assume it depends on whether SAP or other datastreams are also being shoe-horned in). There is no way to request a particular movie for download nor any way to watch a movie that's been swapped out. Some will be in letterbox format and/or 5.1 Dolby depending on what the studio provides. No alternate soundtracks or DVD style extras. Rentals are for a 24 hour period and may be paused, rewound, fast forwarded, and watched an unlimited number of times during that 24 hours. Video connection is via composite or s-video, audio via L/R or S/PDIF (optical). MovieBeam claims that you can not record movies off the box (Macrovision?). And you must agree not to open the unit (at least one site has claimed the unit self-destructs if opened).
Even MovieBeam's FAQ admits that the only difference between this and cable/sat PPV is the rewind/etc feature and the fact you don't need cable or satellite service. So it may be good for people who can't get or don't want either. For those of us with hi-def satellite, 16:9 monitors, and surround-sound, it's not really too appealing.
This is NOT video on demand. It is a variation on Sat/Cable PayPerView. Where Sat/Cable offer a choice of 10 or 20 movies each month, Disney will offer 100. The choice of which 100 movies are available is controlled by Disney, not you. The only advantage I can see is that a locally hosted scheme allows for pause and rewind functions.
If only this were true. See this article from the Washington Post about libraries and e-books. Having been involved briefly with e-books and talking to several publishers about fair use and DRM, it became obvious to us that book publishers want what the rest of the entertainment industry wants: pay-per-view. Libraries, used book stores, and people who loan books to their friends are all part of the same problem. And while the discussions started out about e-books, they always ended up talking about books in general.
Obviously a troll, but Huxley wrote "Brave New World", a novel taking place in an imagined "future".
Since this has ceased to be a discussion between adults and instead has dropped to juvenile name calling and ranting, I won't bother to respond to any of your "points". Feel free to have the last word.
And there is the problem in a nutshell. The implementors only care about what they want. We don't want you to drive SUVs, we don't want you to eat McDonalds, we don't want you to use that ISP. If people can't get up the hill to their house, or can't afford the time to eat at Chez Paul, or can't send e-mail because their ISP can't keep track of what each of the thousands of clients do, that's just too bad, F 'em.
And I am tired of being victimized by lazy ISPs who can't be bothered to find out who those RBLs are actually blocking. I'm all for blocking spammers by whatever works, but I'm caught in the crossfire and don't like it and won't sit still for it. If that means harasing my ISP daily, fine. If it means sueing the RBLs to get my address off, also fine. As you said "The implementors don't care". If you want to call that whining, feel free.
I won't quibble over the entamology of the term. But do note that I orignally said double/confirmed opt-in. We use both terms since our clients don't always understand one or the other. But at least we both agree that whatever you call it, it isn't spammer action, and I believe that is the important part to both of us.
64.39.30.253. The entire range was blocked last time I looked.
Acting professional doesn't mean you are getting paid, just that you accept responsiblity for your actions. By it's very nature, an anonymous group can't do that.
But whether it is SPEWS or someone else doing it, netblocks are simply wrong. They are blackmail at best and terrorism at worse. "We had to destroy the village to save it" didn't play then and it doesn't play now.
Obviously you need the tinfoil hat if you've got that many fingers! I got 1 in my inbox from AOL this morning. As for reading the headers, I was working for Jon Postel when he wrote the spec, I think I know a little about how e-mail works.
And just how are we trying to "weasel out of conditions for delivery"? We do everything possible to play by the rules; we do confirmed opt-in, we list who we are and how to contact us or unsubscribe on every e-mail, we answer our support e-mails, our domain registration has real contact info. And yet some snot-faced kid hiding behind a web site that laughs about the fact you can't contact them says that my choice of hosting services is somehow wrong and I should change? Just because you don't like SUVs may give you the right to keep me out of your driveway, but it doesn't give you the right to keep me out of your neighbor's.
Lying to us is always a possibility, but highly unlikely in my opinion based on their other (verifiable) behaviour. And my personal experience with trying to deal with SPEWS has been entirely negative (hiding behind an anonymous newsgroup isn't very professional in my book).
No, opt-out is spammer-speak, double opt-in is non-spammer speak. It means that you go to our web site and sign up. We then send a confirmation e-mail to that address and ask you to reply. Until we receive that reply, nothing more is sent to you. This keeps your "friend" from signing you up for e-mail and gives us a record of your having requested to receive e-mail from us.
Neither IP based whitelists nor PGP/SMime are workable until enough servers recognize them. If everyone could agree on a system, we'd be all over it. Plus global whitelists are susceptable to the same whims that blacklists are, both are a reflection of the group that maintains them. Some IPs are on blacklists for political or personal reasons. I'll bet that some whitelist will refuse to list us because we send e-mail for a Muslim newspaper, ignoring the fact that we do the same for a Jewish paper also.
Then answer me one simple question. Why are only small ISPs netblocked? Why isn't AOL? Because the RBLs know that AOL would sue them into oblivion and the small guys can't afford to.
And who is going to pay for the thousands of dollars of relocation expenses to move our server farm, not to mention the 10s of thousands of dollars in lost revenue while we are down. Try climbing down from your ivory tower and work in the trenchs for a while, it's not a black and white world.
From the SPEWS FAQ:
Q: How does one contact SPEWS?
A: One does not.
Instead you are told to post to a newsgroup and hope for the best. Our hosting company has been trying for over a year to get their entire address block removed from SPEWS. But since they once sold service to someone who violated the TOS and spammed anyway, all of their clients (including us) are being punished. And telling us to get a new hosting company is absurd.
No, IP addresses as signatures don't work. My company (PublishMail) manages e-mail newsletters for major newspapers around the world (Detroit News, Chicago Sun-Times, Jerusalem Post for example). We do confirmed/double opt-in on all of our lists. Due to the volume of e-mail we send, we have multiple servers, each with it's own IP address. There is no way for a subscriber to know what IP address our e-mails will come from, they change dynamically based on load. If there were a standard way to digitally sign our e-mails, we'd implement it in a flash.
No, you are thinking of Madison Priest. See this story for background and this one for the latest developments (federal drug and weapons charges).
The mass killings you allude to are the exception. In spite of what you hear on the news, violent crime has been on the decrease for the past 10 or 20 years, most likely due to an increased standard of living.
Any statement that starts with "Everyone is lying to you..." is suspect. Please provide a source for this statistic.
The heavily circulated canard about acquaintance murders is deceptive - most of these murders can be explained as turf wars in inner cities.
My neighbor's (dead) wife would dispute that. How do you explain acquaintance murders in rural areas? Not a lot of gang warfare in Andover, NH.
Guns are used to prevent far more crimes than they are used to commit.
Please provide us with multiple examples of where private citizens have prevented a crime using a gun. Examples must be from 2002, happened in the US, and must be reported by a legitimate news source. NRA publications don't count. I'll match each of them 10 to 1 with examples where guns were used to commit a crime. Anti-gun publications won't be used.
A gun and a small amount of training put a small woman, a bodybuilder, and an old man on a near-level field. This tends to reduce the amount of sexual assault as evidenced by statistics pointing to the large number of assaults prevented by guns.
As above, please provide examples of assaults being prevented.Should you succeed in removing guns from everybody who shouldn't have them, you will remove this equalizer; most likely, thnumber of violent crimes will increase, as young athletic men now have a decided advantage.
What happens in reality is that you only disarm those who follow the law. Criminals can still get guns, and now they know that their victims will be unarmed. Why do you think the murder rate is so high in Washington DC?Except that most of the murders in DC are between people and groups who both have guns and are already covered by your first point, gang warfare. Do you honestly think that the only thing keeping criminals from attacking you in your home is that they think you might have a gun? The fact that you lock your door and your neighbor doesn't probably has a much larger say.
Guns are a fact of life. Hysterical raving won't help anyone.
Guns are a fact of life. Making absurd excuses for them won't help anyone.I'm not going to deny this happened, but I will say that based on my experiences with Speakeasy and those of friencs, this is the exception, not the rule. I've found their tech support to be excellent and their billing people easy to deal with (I was double billed one month because of a credit card snafu and they had already fixed the problem by the time I found out and called).
So what does that mean for you. If you were planning on "sharing" hi-def movies over the web, you are probably out of luck (of course the multi-day downloads for a hi-def movie might also discourage you). Otherwise, this won't affect you much. When you buy your new hi-def TV, it will show you great looking hi-def video from your antenna or cable. You can still play your old video tapes and DVDs. Your new hi-def DVD player will look great.
So where is the problem? In most cases, you will be able to tape shows onto your existing VCR and TIVO as well as your nifty new hi-def VCR or TIVO. But there are several "flags" in the HDCP protocol that allow the broadcasters to either limit taping to low-def resolution or to prohibit it all together. The intent is to prevent you from making copies of hi-def DVDs or pay-per-view movies. The networks are unlikely to decide to prevent you from time-shifting, they understand it's value, but there is nothing stopping them. There has also been talk of a flag which would disable the fast-forward function (aka commercial skipper) on hi-def recorders/players. Then there are those of us who have spent thousands of dollars as early adopters and helped work the kinks out of the DTV system. If HDCP gets implemented, all existing DTV equipment becomes useless.