This isn't the BBC, this is Sky, Rupert Murdoch's tabloid cable-TV channel.
Had the BBC remade it (unlikely, as it was not a BBC programme), there would be some hope of the producers assuming that the viewers have some intelligence and wish to have it stimulated. With Sky, there is virtually a guarantee that it will be a no-brainer.
Sky are lowbrow and proud; the most significant things they produce themselves are "documentaries" in which celebrities express their opinions, backed up by flashy graphics and interviews with other celebrities, and not even a bare minimum of critical thought or intellectual engagement. Don't expect a Prisoner series in which they have creative input to appeal to anything but the lowest common denominator. Certainly don't expect it to have subtlety or be written on multiple levels, because that's not part of Sky's business model.
My guess is that it'll be somewhere between a 24-style action thriller and the sort of celebrity-sexploitation reality-TV that fills cable TV in the UK.
Sorry, but disruptive technologies are the ones that sneak in the back door, it's that thing nobody thought they needed but they really did. Lawyers by nature won't believe such a simple thing noone needs will be disruptive.
Though some environments are more fertile for such technologies than others. The largely academic internet of the 1980s, unknown to the outside world and able to ignore its rules, was such an environment. A network where the RIAA's lawyers scrutinise every new development and prepare to sue anyone making any innovation that threatens them, point-scoring politicians promise to do things about the menace of pornography and terrorism, and repressive states aggressively develop ways to suppress dissent, is a less fertile environment for such technologies; as such, there will be fewer attempts, and even fewer will make it to fruition.
BitTorrent is not actually illegal. For one, it is just a means of accelerating downloading from a central server by getting the downloaders to help each other. And secondly, BitTorrent makes no provision for anonymity and is about as much designed with illicit activity in mind as FTP.
The Iraqi uprising is hardly anarchist; it's a coalition of Baathist remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime (i.e., adherents of a combination of neo-Stalinism and pan-Arab nationalism) and Islamists with the goal of establishing a global caliphate, quite the opposite of anarchy.
The situation in France, meanwhile, is nothing more than a good old-fashioned race riot, with little in the way of a coherent ideology to shape it into a revolution.
On the other hand the majority of designers I know are simple minded idiots that can barely use Photoshop and Illustrator let alone anything else and all their designs look amazingly alike as they have no ability to think outside their own little box.
Unlike a lot of the graphic design coming from within the open-source community, which manages to boldly break the constraints of the box, paying no heed to outdated rules of colour, shape or composition.
Does BitTorrent use MD5 or SHA1 for computing hashes? How computationally feasible would it be for an organisation on the scale of Time Warner to poison torrents with bogus chunks whose hashes check out correctly? (Could they do it with a few powerful machines? What about a SETI@Home-style distributed-computing application running in the background on all corporate desktops?) If they did that, downloaders would not find out that the file was bogus until they downloaded the whole thing; such a tactic could render BitTorrent unusable for poisoned shows.
Actually, given the size and clout of the BBC, it is possible that they will extract DRM-free licenses from some rightsholders. That is certainly the strategy for the Creative Archive: to push for a blanket license for all rights involved in BBC-owned content which would allow such content to be distributed freely in the Archive.
The problem is that a lot of the content is not owned by the BBC, but licensed from rightsholders, and the licensing terms under which the BBC acquire it limit replay rights to 7 days (hence the DRM-enforced restriction).
Mind you, there are a lot of open-content idealists in the BBC, and undoubtedly there is a lot of negotiation happening behind the scenes to lift these licensing conditions.
Dirac is only a codec; it doesn't specify anything but the method of encoding video data; specifically, there is nothing in Dirac about DRM.
If the BBC are bound by licensing constraints to enforce conditions (prevent use by unauthorised (i.e., non-license-fee-funded) users, delete after 7 days, or other), they will need a DRM container format to lock the files in. Desktop Linux (as opposed to embedded appliance systems based on Linux) does not have any marginally secure DRM formats in the way that Windows and OSX do. Furthermore, given that a Linux media player cannot rely on the operating system protecting its memory or output from being monitored by recording processes (as both Windows and OSX can), it's unlikely that **AA-approved DRM players would appear for Linux, except in the context of trusted, closed media-playing appliances based on Linux.
As such, I suspect that the BBC's Linux iMP client will be a perpetual "we're working on it".
With the current technology, the solar cells required to power a train pulling any sort of useful load would not come close to fitting on the train.
However, around the Adelaide-Darwin railway, there is a lot of desert. If they were to plant solar collectors, and/or a few of those solar chimneys, near the track and feed the electricity generated into overhead power lines or a third rail, they could probably have electric trains running up and down the centre of Australia for free. (Of course, this does not factor in the cost of maintaining 3,000Km of overhead power lines in the desert.)
I think that the Free Software movement should respond to this by releasing Glimmer (GNU LIne-oriented MultiMEdia Representation). It'd work like Flash and Sparkle, only be based on Scheme and Cairo, and would allow the faithful Linux Jedi to see k3wl animations on their community websites.
Yiddish is written using the Hebrew alphabet, which is not a 1-to-1 mapping to the Roman alphabet. As such, Roman-alphabet spellings of Yiddish (and Hebrew) words are dependent on what convention one uses to transliterate (i.e., whether one transliterates a 'h' to a Polish 'ch' or an English 'h').
Having said that, 'chutzpah' is the most common spelling of the word in English, and the word can probably be considered a loanword rather than a foreign word.
Which could mean that she's not a geek, or that she has a PhD in compiler design and resents being condescended at by someone who assumes they know more than she does (even with geeks, the nuances of interpersonal communication matter), or that she's a Lisp/Python hacker who thinks that static typing is irrelevant but doesn't feel like getting into an argument about it.
Besides which, the assumption that women who like geeks must be geeks on the same level is not necessarily true. Nor is it necessary; the ability to have post-coital conversations about kernel optimisations is somewhat overrated.
Actually, a lot of American spellings and usages date back to older versions of English, with the British usages (such as "colour", or deprecating "fall" in favour of "autumn") being more recent. So it possibly has not so much with the Americans repudiating colonial ties as it does with the British demonstrating, in a somewhat circular fashion, that they speak more "properly" than the yahoos across the pond.
As for why the US drives on the right, I don't know. Perhaps it's the Napoleonic European influence?
The Tapwave Zodiac was a PalmOS-based handheld game console which fit this bill (assuming that applications didn't need to be signed to access the joypad and such). Pity that they stopped producing it, though.
Yes, except that a DVD player costs about 1/8 of the price (and a portable unit costs about 1/2), and is pretty much a commodity. Nobody gets particularly excited about DVD players these days. However, with all the PSP hype, you'd think it'd be something more.
And then there's the possibility that a significant proportion of the Israeli labour force have a genetic mutation that makes them think faster, a sort of neurological overclocking. Or so some scientists at the University of Utah have claimed.
but then I decided against it. Without hacks it'd be useless except as a means of consuming expensive commercial content, and Sony are doing their worst, technically and legally, to keep it locked down. As far as hackable, portable devices, the Nokia 770 looks far more useful.
OTOH, I'd be tempted to buy a PSP if Katamari Damacy was out for it (I don't live in the US or Japan and thus can't get the PS2 version), but apparently they're porting the next version to the Nintendo DS as well.
The main problem (other than the limited capacity and price) is the volatility. It has a battery pack, though if the power is out for more than 16 hours (or less, as the battery ages), it loses its entire contents. Which is somewhat precarious.
A better idea would have been to have a bank of Flash EEPROM built onto the card as a backup device, with loss of power triggering the automatic dumping of RAM contents to Flash, and resumption of power repopulating RAM from Flash on demand/during idle time. Given that it is now possible to fit 4Gb in a Compact Flash card, there is little excuse for not having such a backup subsystem.
It'll use GeoIP to detect where you're viewing from. In the US, it'll be festooned with flags and show ads for Ann Coulter's latest book. In Britain, it'll be done up in the Burberry tartan and run warnings about dark-skinned terrorist paedophiles and pictures of big-breasted blondes. In China, it'll administer an electric shock if you use the word "democracy".
This is an unconventional story about an entrepreneur (who happens to be the child of a mountain and a washing machine) who gets involved in a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless mesh network...using transceivers shaped like Disney tiki-kitsch objects, whilst being pursued by a cartel of DRM monopolists.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't the BBC, this is Sky, Rupert Murdoch's tabloid cable-TV channel.
Had the BBC remade it (unlikely, as it was not a BBC programme), there would be some hope of the producers assuming that the viewers have some intelligence and wish to have it stimulated. With Sky, there is virtually a guarantee that it will be a no-brainer.
Sky are lowbrow and proud; the most significant things they produce themselves are "documentaries" in which celebrities express their opinions, backed up by flashy graphics and interviews with other celebrities, and not even a bare minimum of critical thought or intellectual engagement. Don't expect a Prisoner series in which they have creative input to appeal to anything but the lowest common denominator. Certainly don't expect it to have subtlety or be written on multiple levels, because that's not part of Sky's business model.
My guess is that it'll be somewhere between a 24-style action thriller and the sort of celebrity-sexploitation reality-TV that fills cable TV in the UK.
Sorry, but disruptive technologies are the ones that sneak in the back door, it's that thing nobody thought they needed but they really did. Lawyers by nature won't believe such a simple thing noone needs will be disruptive.
Though some environments are more fertile for such technologies than others. The largely academic internet of the 1980s, unknown to the outside world and able to ignore its rules, was such an environment. A network where the RIAA's lawyers scrutinise every new development and prepare to sue anyone making any innovation that threatens them, point-scoring politicians promise to do things about the menace of pornography and terrorism, and repressive states aggressively develop ways to suppress dissent, is a less fertile environment for such technologies; as such, there will be fewer attempts, and even fewer will make it to fruition.
BitTorrent is not actually illegal. For one, it is just a means of accelerating downloading from a central server by getting the downloaders to help each other. And secondly, BitTorrent makes no provision for anonymity and is about as much designed with illicit activity in mind as FTP.
The Iraqi uprising is hardly anarchist; it's a coalition of Baathist remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime (i.e., adherents of a combination of neo-Stalinism and pan-Arab nationalism) and Islamists with the goal of establishing a global caliphate, quite the opposite of anarchy.
The situation in France, meanwhile, is nothing more than a good old-fashioned race riot, with little in the way of a coherent ideology to shape it into a revolution.
On the other hand the majority of designers I know are simple minded idiots that can barely use Photoshop and Illustrator let alone anything else and all their designs look amazingly alike as they have no ability to think outside their own little box.
Unlike a lot of the graphic design coming from within the open-source community, which manages to boldly break the constraints of the box, paying no heed to outdated rules of colour, shape or composition.
Does BitTorrent use MD5 or SHA1 for computing hashes? How computationally feasible would it be for an organisation on the scale of Time Warner to poison torrents with bogus chunks whose hashes check out correctly? (Could they do it with a few powerful machines? What about a SETI@Home-style distributed-computing application running in the background on all corporate desktops?) If they did that, downloaders would not find out that the file was bogus until they downloaded the whole thing; such a tactic could render BitTorrent unusable for poisoned shows.
Actually, given the size and clout of the BBC, it is possible that they will extract DRM-free licenses from some rightsholders. That is certainly the strategy for the Creative Archive: to push for a blanket license for all rights involved in BBC-owned content which would allow such content to be distributed freely in the Archive.
The problem is that a lot of the content is not owned by the BBC, but licensed from rightsholders, and the licensing terms under which the BBC acquire it limit replay rights to 7 days (hence the DRM-enforced restriction).
Mind you, there are a lot of open-content idealists in the BBC, and undoubtedly there is a lot of negotiation happening behind the scenes to lift these licensing conditions.
Assuming that there exist widely available UK-based HTTP proxies, and that the BBC don't blacklist them.
Dirac is only a codec; it doesn't specify anything but the method of encoding video data; specifically, there is nothing in Dirac about DRM.
If the BBC are bound by licensing constraints to enforce conditions (prevent use by unauthorised (i.e., non-license-fee-funded) users, delete after 7 days, or other), they will need a DRM container format to lock the files in. Desktop Linux (as opposed to embedded appliance systems based on Linux) does not have any marginally secure DRM formats in the way that Windows and OSX do. Furthermore, given that a Linux media player cannot rely on the operating system protecting its memory or output from being monitored by recording processes (as both Windows and OSX can), it's unlikely that **AA-approved DRM players would appear for Linux, except in the context of trusted, closed media-playing appliances based on Linux.
As such, I suspect that the BBC's Linux iMP client will be a perpetual "we're working on it".
With the current technology, the solar cells required to power a train pulling any sort of useful load would not come close to fitting on the train.
However, around the Adelaide-Darwin railway, there is a lot of desert. If they were to plant solar collectors, and/or a few of those solar chimneys, near the track and feed the electricity generated into overhead power lines or a third rail, they could probably have electric trains running up and down the centre of Australia for free. (Of course, this does not factor in the cost of maintaining 3,000Km of overhead power lines in the desert.)
Aren't the Global Climate Coalition an astroturf group funded by fossil-fuel companies?
I think that the Free Software movement should respond to this by releasing Glimmer (GNU LIne-oriented MultiMEdia Representation). It'd work like Flash and Sparkle, only be based on Scheme and Cairo, and would allow the faithful Linux Jedi to see k3wl animations on their community websites.
Yiddish is written using the Hebrew alphabet, which is not a 1-to-1 mapping to the Roman alphabet. As such, Roman-alphabet spellings of Yiddish (and Hebrew) words are dependent on what convention one uses to transliterate (i.e., whether one transliterates a 'h' to a Polish 'ch' or an English 'h').
Having said that, 'chutzpah' is the most common spelling of the word in English, and the word can probably be considered a loanword rather than a foreign word.
Which could mean that she's not a geek, or that she has a PhD in compiler design and resents being condescended at by someone who assumes they know more than she does (even with geeks, the nuances of interpersonal communication matter), or that she's a Lisp/Python hacker who thinks that static typing is irrelevant but doesn't feel like getting into an argument about it.
Besides which, the assumption that women who like geeks must be geeks on the same level is not necessarily true. Nor is it necessary; the ability to have post-coital conversations about kernel optimisations is somewhat overrated.
Actually, a lot of American spellings and usages date back to older versions of English, with the British usages (such as "colour", or deprecating "fall" in favour of "autumn") being more recent. So it possibly has not so much with the Americans repudiating colonial ties as it does with the British demonstrating, in a somewhat circular fashion, that they speak more "properly" than the yahoos across the pond.
As for why the US drives on the right, I don't know. Perhaps it's the Napoleonic European influence?
The Tapwave Zodiac was a PalmOS-based handheld game console which fit this bill (assuming that applications didn't need to be signed to access the joypad and such). Pity that they stopped producing it, though.
Yes, except that a DVD player costs about 1/8 of the price (and a portable unit costs about 1/2), and is pretty much a commodity. Nobody gets particularly excited about DVD players these days. However, with all the PSP hype, you'd think it'd be something more.
And then there's the possibility that a significant proportion of the Israeli labour force have a genetic mutation that makes them think faster, a sort of neurological overclocking. Or so some scientists at the University of Utah have claimed.
but then I decided against it. Without hacks it'd be useless except as a means of consuming expensive commercial content, and Sony are doing their worst, technically and legally, to keep it locked down. As far as hackable, portable devices, the Nokia 770 looks far more useful.
OTOH, I'd be tempted to buy a PSP if Katamari Damacy was out for it (I don't live in the US or Japan and thus can't get the PS2 version), but apparently they're porting the next version to the Nintendo DS as well.
The main problem (other than the limited capacity and price) is the volatility. It has a battery pack, though if the power is out for more than 16 hours (or less, as the battery ages), it loses its entire contents. Which is somewhat precarious.
A better idea would have been to have a bank of Flash EEPROM built onto the card as a backup device, with loss of power triggering the automatic dumping of RAM contents to Flash, and resumption of power repopulating RAM from Flash on demand/during idle time. Given that it is now possible to fit 4Gb in a Compact Flash card, there is little excuse for not having such a backup subsystem.
It'll use GeoIP to detect where you're viewing from. In the US, it'll be festooned with flags and show ads for Ann Coulter's latest book. In Britain, it'll be done up in the Burberry tartan and run warnings about dark-skinned terrorist paedophiles and pictures of big-breasted blondes. In China, it'll administer an electric shock if you use the word "democracy".
Even better are the ones who misspell it "Damashi", which is a completely different word. That won't stop a Wapanese!
Let me guess; these are the people who use "bishonen" as a synonym for "bitchin'", right?
This is an unconventional story about an entrepreneur (who happens to be the child of a mountain and a washing machine) who gets involved in a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless mesh network ...using transceivers shaped like Disney tiki-kitsch objects, whilst being pursued by a cartel of DRM monopolists.