No kidding. I spent a while typing in an ELIZA-style program once into our 99/4A. It ran, and it worked... but you'd type in something, then sit back and wait 30 seconds for it to say something like, "Go on.":->
I think the Texas "Myth" was actually quite a real statistic in its time, you forget we didn't always have 6+ billion people on earth.
And in less than a hundred years we've reached 6 billion. That doesn't make you think?
From my article:Our best case above adds up to 60% of the continental US to feed everyone a minimal diet. The "realistic" (and still wildly optimisitic) case... 3.5 times the surface area of the U.S. Hmmm... only 19% of the US is arable land, and 25% is grazing land.
We don't have "plenty of land." Large chunks of land on Earth are not, and cannot be made, arable. And did you entirely miss the
whole discussion of water?
The "Greed Factor" makes it worse, not better. Didn't it strike you how much land is needed for support in the best case? Unless you have a magic cure for greed, we're going to have to take it into account in coming up with a solution.
Ah, well, if that didn't convince you that the current (and projected future) situation isn't sustainable, I can't imagine what would.
There was once a study done that showed every person in the world (this study was done between 1900-idon'tknow) could have a full acre in Texas.
Believe me, the Earth has plenty of land.
Actually, at this point it's around a ninth of an acre. And it's an extremely misleading statistic, if you think about it at all. I put together what I think is a pretty thorough refutation here.
Zelazny often experimented with different ways of telling stories; it's one of the reasons his work is so interesting. And he almost always pulls it off, which makes it so amazing.
"Creatures of Light and Darkness" is a really experimental work, where almost every chapter is told in a different style, from prose to poetry to screenplay. And, like I said, it mostly works.
But my favorite little gem of his is "Doorways in the Sand". Every single chapter begins in medias res, in the middle of the action, and the rest of the chapter is devoted to explaining how our protagonist got into this situation and how he works to get out of it.
Read it, if for no other reason than the first chapter, which is one of the funniest openings of any book, ever.
The only part they did affirm, and this only partially (with the rest reversed, not remanded) was the violation of part 2 of the Sherman Act by using anti-competitive means to maintain it's OS monopoly.
But it still opens up MS to civil lawsuits that are very hard to defend against. The plaintiffs can point to this ruling as proof that MS in fact violated the Sherman Act. I believe that it also has an effect on the size of damages awarded.
And $30 billion+ in cash is a powerful draw for litigation. I'd suspect that at least a few lawsuits result from this decision. I don't like how much litigation there is these days, but if it's going to happen it couldn't happen to a better company.:-)
The underground observatory is also part of the supernova early warning systems that will alert the world to the next celestial storm generated by a supernova...
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
This is a test of the Supernova Early Warning System. This is only a test. If there had been an actual supernova within a hundred light years of Earth, you would have been instructed to...
I've been thinking along these lines and I just can't find the time to work on it, so I'll jsut put this out for someone to work on. Maybe it can be used for prior art somewhere.
For beginning users, a graphical interface like this might be useful. I've thought of what I think is a good representation for files and directories, which could be merged with that DOOM-shell idea.
Directories are rooms. The texture of the walls and floor tells you what type of filesystem it is - e.g. marble for ext2, rotten wood for FAT, clouds for NFS. The color tells you what permissions you have on the directory - e.g. blue is read-only, green is writeable. A door to the parent directory is on one wall, doors to subdirectories are on the far wall. On one wall is a button. Push it, the wall drops down and there are all your hidden files and subdirs (.emacs,.netscape, etc.).
Files are objects in the room. The shape of the base tells you what kind of files they are - e.g. square for regular files, triangular for devices, round for pipes, etc. Colors indicate permissions again, and texture indicates detailed type - parchment for text, circuits for executable, etc. Height indicates file size, in a logarithmic mode. (Each unit of height means double the file size.) You can instantly tell a great deal about a file just by looking at it. Symlinks to other files are semi-transparent.
Like a game, you can select different tools (a delete tool, a copy tool, a link tool) and apply them to files and directories. Like most games, the "~" key brings down a shell console. You can switch to another user or "god mode" (root) and then the colors of things change to reflect your new permissions.
After years and years, sitting around in trash heaps, microbes developed that could eat the wiring found in the civilization's computer.
In The Ringworld Engineers it was revealed that the microbe was actaully seeded on the Ringworld by the Puppeteers. Hmmm. What are the UFO sighting rates down there?
After years and years, sitting around in trash heaps, microbes developed that could eat the wiring found in the civilization's computer.
In The Ringworld Engineers it was revealed that the microbe was actaully seeded on the Ringworld by the Puppeteers. Hmmm. What are the UFO sighting rates down there?
In addition, they appear to have used a Linux box to connect to the test platforms. While I'm all for Linux, subtleties of the TCP/IP stack implementation could have influenced the results a bit. I'm sure Linux will talk just fine to Linux, but other platforms might not be tuned the same. (2.4 kernels were having trouble because of this recently. Linux implemented some feature that lots of routers didn't, and performance was hosed somtimes.)
It would have been nice if they'd tried Solaris, Windows, and FreeBSD clients, too.
hey, with innovation comes inherent difficulties. New communcations devices, new software, new virus.
Umm, not it's not "inherent". Why should an attachment be able to automatically initiate a call without user intervention? What possible
real-world advantage could this bring?
The answer, of course, is that allowing scripts
to do anything is easy and putting sensible limits on them is (a little) harder. It's
just laziness on the part of the developers.
There's a saying, I can't remember the source. "Unix doesn't prevent you from doing stupid things, because that would prevent you from doing clever things." But even in Unix a
tiny amount of initial setup of permissions will greatly limit the number of stupid things
you can do by accident.
But how does[sic] these emissions differ materially from, say light bouncing off people in the midst of committing some heinous crime...
The court made a distinction between technology (including eyballs) commonly available and those that only well-funded law-enforcement personnel would have. Presumably, if I don't want to be perceived by eyeballs, I can close the curtains.
If I don't want others to know what music I listen to, I can soundproof my home.
If high-res thermal imaging became common, people would presumably become aware of how to mask it or otherwise limit its effectiveness. As I believe was noted in the decision, maybe you don't want your neighbors knowing exactly when you like to use your jacuzzi.
I'd rather the courts made it even more restrictive than this, but hey, it's a nice first step.
If we regard IP as a legal fiction, why is physical property amything[sic] but?
One of Thomas Jefferson's letters addresses this. "It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,)
that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions... If
nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea... He who
receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without
lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light
without darkening me."
To reject IP as a legal fiction only leads us back to a terrifying fact that all property is, in essence, a lie. But it is a useful lie...
The U.S. Constitution does not grant patents and copyrights on the grounds of property rights. It grants them "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...". The phrase "intellectual property" is an oxymoron.
I agree that patents and copyrights, properly applied, have great social utility. But I would also argue that the DMCA and other current laws do not. Quite the opposite.
Of course, I want my friends and family to be immortal with me. But even so, there's so much to do, so much to see. How could you possibly get bored?
I want to stand on an airless planetoid in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and watch the Milky Way Galaxy rise over the horizon. Once I've done that, you can ask me if I've seen everything I want to see.
You state here that "What I believe is that the small finger or the toes are the transistor of the entire body. [...] You use a little bit of energy to turn on a larger amount of energy!!"
My father-in-law lost the fingers of his left hand in a construction accident. Is there any hope for him? What about a quadruple-amputee?
If these "transistors" are lost, what kind of effect does this have on the body?
Would it be technically possible to write a program that takes source code as input and heavily modifies it [...] so that the result has no similarity with the original?
All of these are designed so that people can release source code to compile elswhere without revealing "intellectual property", but there are other ways. NVidia ran their "open-source" drivers through the C preprocessor before releasing them, making them nearly useless for development.
Of course, simplistically renaming variables won't change the binary code output much. You need to at least rearrange variables and code, and maybe determine independent statements and reorder them, etc. Perhaps pad arrays with extra space on the end, and so forth.
I am absolutely amazed at the ability for one developer to whip up something so quickly - within months.
Fred Brooks' book, "The Mythical Man-Month", notes this is actually fairly common. But it's two to three times harder, he says, to make a prototype into a product, and two to three times harder than that to make it a system component.
The extra effort comes from testing, making sure
it works under the weird cases that the developer knows to avoid, testing, adding interface code to
make it usable to others, testing, adding features that people besides the developer want, testing, conforming to existing standards, and
testing.
Now, studies have shown that some programmers can be an order of magnitude more productive than others. And making a usable OS, however limited,
is a heck of an accomplishment. But it's not quite as amazing as it first appears.
...you got here first and you don't want to share. If you're so concerned about overpopulation, why don't you kill yourself and set an example?
Because I put the rights of existing people above the rights of potential future people who don't exist yet.
Don't get me wrong, I want the future to be a nice place, if for no other reason than my son (who actually exists) will be there. Heck, I hope to be there, too. But I don't think we need to go killing off existing people; maybe, just maybe, we should consider limiting our own reproduction instead.
No, it's not easy. My wife wants a bigger family than I do, and it's a source of some tension. But I do think it's irresponsible to have a huge family these days. Understandable but irresponsible.
There is no propulation[sic] problem! There is a resource distribution problem.
Okay, quoting Dieoff.org, "Approximately 99% of the world food supply is derived from terrestrial ecosystems with the percentage from aquatic systems shrinking (Kendall and Pimentel, 1994). The availability of arable land at world level is less than 0.27 ha per capita, lower than it has ever been in history, and much less than the average of 0.7 ha per capita in the United States (WRI, 1994). Note that 0.5 ha per capita has been suggested as the minimum requirement for a diverse diet of animal and plant food products (Lal, 1989)."
How do we get enough food these days? Fertilizers! How do we make them? Fossil fuels!
We are using up fossil fuels faster than they are being replaced. Obviously, we will run out of them someday. The energy in fossil fuels ultimately comes from the sun. We are using more energy today than actually arrives from the sun. We will run out of fossil fuels eventually.
So what will we do to make the fertilizers to grow the food to feed everyone? If you're so concerned about people of the future, why aren't you working on this mathematically certain problem they will face?
Just remember, the life you abort might have grown up to save yours.
Who said anything about abortion? Unless you think life begins at erection...
Or just do what I did: Remove the IR filter and flood the inside of the boat with IR light. The intruders won't see it but you'll have full view of them. I've done this to catch the neighbour's cat in my garbage and it works wonderfully.
...until they turn the lights on. It'd be best to set something up so, to turn the lights on, they have to go right by the camera.
It might not be too hard to set it up so that it starts recording when it detects motion. Then it runs for, say, five minutes and then goes back to waiting for motion. Reduces the amount of data stored, lets you get a good frame rate.
Of course, if you can detect motion, then just hook it up to a klaxon. If someone triggers it and doesn't punch in the right code within 30 seconds, they get an earsplitting howl (and maybe you get paged).
At this point, though, you're pretty close to a standard security system. Probably cheaper just to buy and install one. Maybe set up the webcam to start recording when the alarm goes off (or just before), so you get good evidence.
By rejecting the holy and spiritual basis for our Constitution...
Sometimes it's worth replying to trolls, if only to help correct the common mistakes that they exaggerate.
This essay points out how the most central principles of both the Declaration of Independance and the Consitution not only are not supported by the Bible but in fact contradict it directly.
Of course, the support of slavery and conquest of native peoples are well-supported by the Bible...
What bothers me is this quote from paragraph 92 of the ruling:
Thus a farmer whose field contains seed or plants originating from seed spilled into
them, or blown as seed, in swaths from a neighbour's land or even growing from germination
by pollen carried into his field from elsewhere by insects, birds, or by the wind, may own the
seed or plants on his land even if he did not set about to plant them. He does not, however,
own the right to the use of the patented gene, or of the seed or plant containing the patented
gene or cell.
So he owns the plants, but doesn't have the right to use them. Huh? What's the point of owning the plants if you can't use them? In this case, what's the difference between "owning" and "not owning" the plants? What rights, if any, does "ownership" confer?
I question SGI's overall commitment to Linux.
They agreed to host our local Linux user's group meetings, [...] we had two meetings with light attendance. [...] Based on these two small meetings, SGI told us they weren't interested in hosting our meetings anymore, because we weren't bringing enough people for them to advertise to.
SGI hosted the Metro Detroit LUG for several years, from its inception up until last year. They moved to a new facility in January and we had to find a different place to meet, but they've always been supportive.
We got an Internet connection and space for installfests, etc., etc. I don't remember more than two "sales pitches", and they were at our invitation. (And I was quite impressed with the graphics performance of their Linux boxes.)
They've been good to us and I have no reason whatsoever to doubt their commitment to Linux. The comments from their employees on our mailing lists are good evidence to me.
Not all of their hardware is so great. The protocol used by the Sidewinder joysticks (at least, the non-USB ones) is overly complicated and
uses lots of CPU, even worse than the original PC joystick port.
See, e.g., the comments of the author of the Linux joystick driver.
Or look at the source code for the driver... nice
comments in there.
A cousin who visited from Australia made about the same comments re: TV advertising. Actually, "15 minutes" is an underestimate of the amount of ads in a typical show.
Anyway, this is something that seems technically possible but there are wrinkles that might make it impractical, at least in real-time.
You'd need humans in the loop to detect what was
a commercial and what wasn't. We don't have AI
yet and whatever markers you came up with emprirically would be quickly eliminated by the
advertisers.
Doing it real-time would be a pain. You'd need people on-line all the time, watching the shows and marking when the ads started and stopped. If
you miss more than half a second your customers
get mad.
So you don't do it that way. You have a set of
people working, but they do it in batches. You automatically record the shows, and when the show's over, you give them to the humans. They
fast-forward through the shows, and mark the ads.
Maybe you have special software to help them locate probable ads.
A user who's recorded that show can have their
recorder box hit the AdClipper website and get
the "blacklist". During playback, it jumps over
chunks that have been marked as ads or whatever.
Popular shows get blacklists posted five minutes
after the end credits are broadcasted. Less-popular shows get updated within 24 hours. After
a week (or month, whatever your disk space fits)
the blacklists are purged from the website.
You don't need DSL for this, a modem's just fine.
The quantity of data is almost negligible for even
a two-hour show - maybe 1K plus a checksum. Not
doing it real-time avoids any lag issue.
Hmmm. The TiVo's Linux based. How hard would it be to hack this into it?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding. I spent a while typing in an ELIZA-style program once into our 99/4A. It ran, and it worked... but you'd type in something, then sit back and wait 30 seconds for it to say something like, "Go on." :->
And in less than a hundred years we've reached 6 billion. That doesn't make you think?
From my article:Our best case above adds up to 60% of the continental US to feed everyone a minimal diet. The "realistic" (and still wildly optimisitic) case... 3.5 times the surface area of the U.S. Hmmm... only 19% of the US is arable land, and 25% is grazing land.
We don't have "plenty of land." Large chunks of land on Earth are not, and cannot be made, arable. And did you entirely miss the whole discussion of water?
The "Greed Factor" makes it worse, not better. Didn't it strike you how much land is needed for support in the best case? Unless you have a magic cure for greed, we're going to have to take it into account in coming up with a solution.
Ah, well, if that didn't convince you that the current (and projected future) situation isn't sustainable, I can't imagine what would.
Actually, at this point it's around a ninth of an acre. And it's an extremely misleading statistic, if you think about it at all. I put together what I think is a pretty thorough refutation here.
"Creatures of Light and Darkness" is a really experimental work, where almost every chapter is told in a different style, from prose to poetry to screenplay. And, like I said, it mostly works.
But my favorite little gem of his is "Doorways in the Sand". Every single chapter begins in medias res, in the middle of the action, and the rest of the chapter is devoted to explaining how our protagonist got into this situation and how he works to get out of it.
Read it, if for no other reason than the first chapter, which is one of the funniest openings of any book, ever.
But it still opens up MS to civil lawsuits that are very hard to defend against. The plaintiffs can point to this ruling as proof that MS in fact violated the Sherman Act. I believe that it also has an effect on the size of damages awarded.
And $30 billion+ in cash is a powerful draw for litigation. I'd suspect that at least a few lawsuits result from this decision. I don't like how much litigation there is these days, but if it's going to happen it couldn't happen to a better company. :-)
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
This is a test of the Supernova Early Warning System. This is only a test. If there had been an actual supernova within a hundred light years of Earth, you would have been instructed to...
Ummmm...
For beginning users, a graphical interface like this might be useful. I've thought of what I think is a good representation for files and directories, which could be merged with that DOOM-shell idea.
Directories are rooms. The texture of the walls and floor tells you what type of filesystem it is - e.g. marble for ext2, rotten wood for FAT, clouds for NFS. The color tells you what permissions you have on the directory - e.g. blue is read-only, green is writeable. A door to the parent directory is on one wall, doors to subdirectories are on the far wall. On one wall is a button. Push it, the wall drops down and there are all your hidden files and subdirs (.emacs, .netscape, etc.).
Files are objects in the room. The shape of the base tells you what kind of files they are - e.g. square for regular files, triangular for devices, round for pipes, etc. Colors indicate permissions again, and texture indicates detailed type - parchment for text, circuits for executable, etc. Height indicates file size, in a logarithmic mode. (Each unit of height means double the file size.) You can instantly tell a great deal about a file just by looking at it. Symlinks to other files are semi-transparent.
Like a game, you can select different tools (a delete tool, a copy tool, a link tool) and apply them to files and directories. Like most games, the "~" key brings down a shell console. You can switch to another user or "god mode" (root) and then the colors of things change to reflect your new permissions.
What do y'all think?
In The Ringworld Engineers it was revealed that the microbe was actaully seeded on the Ringworld by the Puppeteers. Hmmm. What are the UFO sighting rates down there?
In The Ringworld Engineers it was revealed that the microbe was actaully seeded on the Ringworld by the Puppeteers. Hmmm. What are the UFO sighting rates down there?
It would have been nice if they'd tried Solaris, Windows, and FreeBSD clients, too.
Umm, not it's not "inherent". Why should an attachment be able to automatically initiate a call without user intervention? What possible real-world advantage could this bring?
The answer, of course, is that allowing scripts to do anything is easy and putting sensible limits on them is (a little) harder. It's just laziness on the part of the developers.
There's a saying, I can't remember the source. "Unix doesn't prevent you from doing stupid things, because that would prevent you from doing clever things." But even in Unix a tiny amount of initial setup of permissions will greatly limit the number of stupid things you can do by accident.
The court made a distinction between technology (including eyballs) commonly available and those that only well-funded law-enforcement personnel would have. Presumably, if I don't want to be perceived by eyeballs, I can close the curtains. If I don't want others to know what music I listen to, I can soundproof my home.
If high-res thermal imaging became common, people would presumably become aware of how to mask it or otherwise limit its effectiveness. As I believe was noted in the decision, maybe you don't want your neighbors knowing exactly when you like to use your jacuzzi.
I'd rather the courts made it even more restrictive than this, but hey, it's a nice first step.
One of Thomas Jefferson's letters addresses this. "It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions... If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea... He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
To reject IP as a legal fiction only leads us back to a terrifying fact that all property is, in essence, a lie. But it is a useful lie...
The U.S. Constitution does not grant patents and copyrights on the grounds of property rights. It grants them "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...". The phrase "intellectual property" is an oxymoron.
I agree that patents and copyrights, properly applied, have great social utility. But I would also argue that the DMCA and other current laws do not. Quite the opposite.
I want to stand on an airless planetoid in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and watch the Milky Way Galaxy rise over the horizon. Once I've done that, you can ask me if I've seen everything I want to see.
My father-in-law lost the fingers of his left hand in a construction accident. Is there any hope for him? What about a quadruple-amputee?
If these "transistors" are lost, what kind of effect does this have on the body?
You mean like this or this or this or this?
All of these are designed so that people can release source code to compile elswhere without revealing "intellectual property", but there are other ways. NVidia ran their "open-source" drivers through the C preprocessor before releasing them, making them nearly useless for development.
Of course, simplistically renaming variables won't change the binary code output much. You need to at least rearrange variables and code, and maybe determine independent statements and reorder them, etc. Perhaps pad arrays with extra space on the end, and so forth.
Fred Brooks' book, "The Mythical Man-Month", notes this is actually fairly common. But it's two to three times harder, he says, to make a prototype into a product, and two to three times harder than that to make it a system component.
The extra effort comes from testing, making sure it works under the weird cases that the developer knows to avoid, testing, adding interface code to make it usable to others, testing, adding features that people besides the developer want, testing, conforming to existing standards, and testing.
Now, studies have shown that some programmers can be an order of magnitude more productive than others. And making a usable OS, however limited, is a heck of an accomplishment. But it's not quite as amazing as it first appears.
Because I put the rights of existing people above the rights of potential future people who don't exist yet.
Don't get me wrong, I want the future to be a nice place, if for no other reason than my son (who actually exists) will be there. Heck, I hope to be there, too. But I don't think we need to go killing off existing people; maybe, just maybe, we should consider limiting our own reproduction instead.
No, it's not easy. My wife wants a bigger family than I do, and it's a source of some tension. But I do think it's irresponsible to have a huge family these days. Understandable but irresponsible.
There is no propulation[sic] problem! There is a resource distribution problem.
Okay, quoting Dieoff.org, "Approximately 99% of the world food supply is derived from terrestrial ecosystems with the percentage from aquatic systems shrinking (Kendall and Pimentel, 1994). The availability of arable land at world level is less than 0.27 ha per capita, lower than it has ever been in history, and much less than the average of 0.7 ha per capita in the United States (WRI, 1994). Note that 0.5 ha per capita has been suggested as the minimum requirement for a diverse diet of animal and plant food products (Lal, 1989)."
How do we get enough food these days? Fertilizers! How do we make them? Fossil fuels!
We are using up fossil fuels faster than they are being replaced. Obviously, we will run out of them someday. The energy in fossil fuels ultimately comes from the sun. We are using more energy today than actually arrives from the sun. We will run out of fossil fuels eventually.
So what will we do to make the fertilizers to grow the food to feed everyone? If you're so concerned about people of the future, why aren't you working on this mathematically certain problem they will face?
Just remember, the life you abort might have grown up to save yours.
Who said anything about abortion? Unless you think life begins at erection...
It might not be too hard to set it up so that it starts recording when it detects motion. Then it runs for, say, five minutes and then goes back to waiting for motion. Reduces the amount of data stored, lets you get a good frame rate.
Of course, if you can detect motion, then just hook it up to a klaxon. If someone triggers it and doesn't punch in the right code within 30 seconds, they get an earsplitting howl (and maybe you get paged).
At this point, though, you're pretty close to a standard security system. Probably cheaper just to buy and install one. Maybe set up the webcam to start recording when the alarm goes off (or just before), so you get good evidence.
Sometimes it's worth replying to trolls, if only to help correct the common mistakes that they exaggerate.
This essay points out how the most central principles of both the Declaration of Independance and the Consitution not only are not supported by the Bible but in fact contradict it directly.
Of course, the support of slavery and conquest of native peoples are well-supported by the Bible...
Thus a farmer whose field contains seed or plants originating from seed spilled into them, or blown as seed, in swaths from a neighbour's land or even growing from germination by pollen carried into his field from elsewhere by insects, birds, or by the wind, may own the seed or plants on his land even if he did not set about to plant them. He does not, however, own the right to the use of the patented gene, or of the seed or plant containing the patented gene or cell.
So he owns the plants, but doesn't have the right to use them. Huh? What's the point of owning the plants if you can't use them? In this case, what's the difference between "owning" and "not owning" the plants? What rights, if any, does "ownership" confer?
SGI hosted the Metro Detroit LUG for several years, from its inception up until last year. They moved to a new facility in January and we had to find a different place to meet, but they've always been supportive.
We got an Internet connection and space for installfests, etc., etc. I don't remember more than two "sales pitches", and they were at our invitation. (And I was quite impressed with the graphics performance of their Linux boxes.)
They've been good to us and I have no reason whatsoever to doubt their commitment to Linux. The comments from their employees on our mailing lists are good evidence to me.
See, e.g., the comments of the author of the Linux joystick driver.
Or look at the source code for the driver... nice comments in there.
Anyway, this is something that seems technically possible but there are wrinkles that might make it impractical, at least in real-time.
You'd need humans in the loop to detect what was a commercial and what wasn't. We don't have AI yet and whatever markers you came up with emprirically would be quickly eliminated by the advertisers.
Doing it real-time would be a pain. You'd need people on-line all the time, watching the shows and marking when the ads started and stopped. If you miss more than half a second your customers get mad.
So you don't do it that way. You have a set of people working, but they do it in batches. You automatically record the shows, and when the show's over, you give them to the humans. They fast-forward through the shows, and mark the ads. Maybe you have special software to help them locate probable ads.
A user who's recorded that show can have their recorder box hit the AdClipper website and get the "blacklist". During playback, it jumps over chunks that have been marked as ads or whatever.
Popular shows get blacklists posted five minutes after the end credits are broadcasted. Less-popular shows get updated within 24 hours. After a week (or month, whatever your disk space fits) the blacklists are purged from the website.
You don't need DSL for this, a modem's just fine. The quantity of data is almost negligible for even a two-hour show - maybe 1K plus a checksum. Not doing it real-time avoids any lag issue.
Hmmm. The TiVo's Linux based. How hard would it be to hack this into it? :-)