Wait a second. Are you saying that the Music Industry isn't greedy, arrogant or cheap? Go talk to anyone who has ever had a record contract to clear up that misconception:)
According to the article, he originally used the Americium to build a neutron emitter. His Americium gun wasn't powerful enough, so he moved to radium/beryllium. He then trained this gun on some pitchblende.
Then he threw everything he had (Americium, Radium, Uranium powder) into a ball of foil. Yeah, it would never have made a reactor, but he didn't pull all of his material out of smoke detectors.
... especially when the market's going down, as it has been for quite some time now. Makes it really easy to take a loss.
And by the way, short term capital gains is no different from income tax. I'm not entirely sure why money you make from selling stock should be in some way exempt from income tax... but apparently those who make their money from the purchase and sale of stock have a considerable amount of influence in our gov't (look at what happened to our Estate tax.) In any case, you have to be making a pretty considerable amount of dough in order to have a Federal tax rate much higher than 20% (the long term Capital Gains rate). If you make $100,000 you're unlikely to be paying more than 23% or so. If you're making significantly more than $100,000... well, my heart bleeds:)
The Internet and property in information were widely believed to be incompatible, and technology would win against law and set information free. The reverse process is now underway: technical protections of intellectual property over networks may protect property interests in digital artefacts more comprehensively than has ever been possible in real space
While laws and treaties like the DMCA and WCT are attempting to make the protection of digital work stronger, there's no real evidence that this approach actually works. For every instance of a copyrighted document or "circumvention device" removed under the provisions of the DMCA, dozens of copies spring up. Perhaps eventually these laws may be used to their full potential, to truly wipe a document off the net, but it's very unlikely that things could ever get to that point-- no court could be that effective without the creation of a police state. It's more likely that these laws will become something like the prohibition laws-- not really achieving their purpose, but having a lot of unintended consequences.
In that case, it's hard to accept his argument that intellectual property law really "protects property interests in digital artifacts" better than non-digital artifacts. The new laws are more comprehensive (probably too much so), but only because they're fighting a much tougher-- even unwinnable-- battle. What we're seeing are the opening salvos in that battle; it's certainly way too early for people to be calling winners and losers. In fact, I wonder if this guy has even thought about what it would be like to live in a world where either side has "won".
Therefore, any new TLD which conflicts with a pre-existing TLD is
destabilizing, no matter where it comes from.
Well, that may be true... But it seems to imply that everyone wildly creating new TLDs on their creaky 486 Linux box is a stabilizing thing; therefore anybody who creates the same TLD somewhere else is destabilizing the net. This is one way of looking at things, but why should it imply that the first person to get there has some particular right to run that TLD?
I do not believe that ICANN "owns" all TLDs, or should have rights to them own them in the future. I'm simply pointing out that anyone can stake out a TLD, whether they have the resources to maintain it or not. Calling this "stabilizing" is a bit misleading.
What happens if I'm a farmer and you laid the fiber in the ground across one of my fields. I go out one weekend and rebuild a few terraces in that field and end up digging up that piece of fiber.
While I admire your spirit, and I certainly do think that the Telcos should pay something, what you just described probably wouldn't happen. These lines are being laid only a few inches below land that has already been allocated (and paid for) by the train companies. Nobody's running them across your fields, and unless you choose to trespass into the land that you've already leased to the railroads, there's really no chance that you're going to do damage to those lines.
The idea of suing the telcos because they don't have 'drilling rights' is a bit squeaky. It's basically a way to amend a previous agreement to pump a little bit more money out of it. I certainly don't see any reason not to try it-- why should the Telcos have it? But I won't buy any argument that revolves around the fiber giving you any more trouble than the tons of metal laid above it. If the train companies had had some way of looking ahead, those agreements would have included provisions for running cable-- and the owners probably wouldn't have made a dime more than they do now.
Despite a 100% matter to energy conversion rate antimatter has got to be one of the most inefficient fuel sources out there when you look at the entire picture! We'd be conserving resources by making coal-powered spaceships...
If we could have done it some other way, NASA wouldn't have needed to put plutonium in their space probes. That was hardly cheap (forget safe), but at the time it was the best way to provide a long term energy source far from the sun. The reason to use antimatter is purely for the amount of energy you can produce per gram by reacting it with matter; the efficiency of the storage/retrieval transaction isn't a concern, as long as enough of the stuff can be produced for a price proportional to the value of the mission.
If you want to send a ship to another star system, it doesn't matter that you're getting less than 1% of the energy you put into antimatter production, as long as you can produce enough to get the ship there. If interplanetary/stellar travel were to go commercial, they'd have to worry about that.
PocketPC has a consistent user interface with windows programs. That is great! I really wish other operating systems I use would be more consistent
Unfortunately, from a user's point of view, the similarities aren't too useful. The Windows interface isn't necessarily what you want on a pocket organizer (basically, it consists of a Start button and a basic window/dialog box/icon system), and it's not too well thought out beyond this. If PocketPCs were easily linked with existing MS systems, that would be useful... But as far as I've seen, you can't even mount a network file server on a PocketPC.
Shame on you for trying to play it as some sort of evil anti-competitive ploy. It is anti-competitive because it is GOOD.
I don't think he was trying to paint that specifically as anti-competitive. He was just saying that Microsoft does what it does well-- and what they do is leverage their desktop near-monopoly (and user's reliance on it) to pull people into new areas. There's nothing inherently great about WinCE. It crashes frequently (it's a nightmare compared to Linux on the same hardware), and the interface is still kludgy. And this is already the third version; versions 1 and 2 were disasterous. MS has just hung in there and pushed its OS to vendors (a lot of whom already rely on MS for their PC offerings) and to users (who see Windows and say "this has a Start button just like the computer on my desk.")
It's got to be slightly embarassing for MS that PalmOS has been so thoroughly kicking their ass for the past few years, despite the simplicity of that system. But they'll eventually get it right, they have the money to burn.
Sourceforge is a wonderful idea and a generous service to our community, but the community evolved in a decentralized environment, and I'm not sure centralization is the way forward.
If something happens to Sourceforge, couldn't people just de-centralize and go back to the way they used to do it (or something better)? I'm not really sure what's at stake here, as long as a few of the developers do reasonably frequent checkouts to their own machines.
The security breach seems like about the worst thing that can happen, but with any luck people will be doing diffs on the tree before they trust the code. If they fail to take such a simple security precaution, it's hard to lay the blame at SourceForge's door.
CNN already uses a bank of ISDN or modem lines and an MPEG encoder to ship signals from local stations into HQ. At some point in the not too distant future, we'll have enough fiber running around that traditional satellite distribution will be completely unnecessary.
Which is sad, cause I always loved watching Tom Brokaw bitching at his producers on those "not-for-broadcast" feeds. Not to mention getting next week's Trek episodes the Sunday before (although they always seemed remarkably similar to this week's episodes) with only half as many commercials.
Unfortunately, our BUD sits unused on a twenty-foot pole in our backyard. We got DirecTV.
The thieves are stealing the songs now and not buying from the companies
Well, strangely enough, they're still buying. I have to say, if there's one result of this whole mess, it's that a lot of people are taking a closer look at the RIAA's business practices. Hopefully this will eventually hurt their profits, even if the illegal trading doesn't.
They skipped gnutella because, as far as peer to peer systems go, it sucks
I used to agree with you, having used only the old Gnutella clients. Then I downloaded Bearshare; the experience is equal or better to Napster (the old Napster, not the neutered version), at least over a cable modem.
As far as scaling, Gnutella doesn't scale as badly as you think. It's true that as the number of nodes gets larger, you lose the ability to see the whole network. What that overlooks is that it's not necessary to see the whole network-- the radius that you can see contains about the same number of nodes as a single Napster server. Go check it out, it's pretty impressive.
In any case, after playing with it a lot I mostly got bored. There's very little stuff I actually want to download these days...
Instead of locking out a cheater, a better solution is to continue to feed data to that cheater, but ignore any results they submit.
Works great with a free system like SETI. But if a pay-for-cycles business ever does evolve, companies might end up spending a lot of money paying known cheaters (especially if a hack gets out there.) Of course, if there's some sort of business relationship, it might be more difficult for cheaters to switch their IP address and continue cheating. In any case, I don't know if that business model will ever make sense for businesses or PC owners, but with a few years of software refinement (and a few cycles of Moore's law), it's not inconceivable.
Someone slap that idiot. How are they supposed to be compatible with previous drives??? Find a answer to that question and then I'll give you permission to complain
Well, for one thing, these new drives require a proprietary adapter to connect to your computer. This adapter doesn't seem to be compatible with any other drives. Say what you will about compatibility with older media, but the connection to the computer shouldn't be proprietary and newfangled-- not at this stage in the game.
In any case, Michael's got a good point. It doesn't matter how right you are about the technical aspects. If the drive requires you to switch all of your media and turns out to be a significant pain in the ass for consumers, it'll die a flaming, hellish death-- regardless of whether it's fair or not.
Not exactly. You could make an argument that the DVDCCA license is overbroad, since it bundles piracy protection with region coding and macrovision.
You could also make an argument that the laws themselves are overbroad, make fair use impossible and have serious speech implications. Such an argument is working its way through the US courts right now. The problem is, it takes a lot of time and money to successfully challenge such a license under the existing laws, which give an enormous amount of leeway to content-producers.
I'm not aware that the European laws make a distinction between encryption to prevent copying, and encryption for other purposes (such as region coding.) The DMCA certainly doesn't draw any lines, hence the legal victories of the MPAA in the DeCSS case. Perhaps I'm wrong, and Europe did implement its laws a little bit more intelligently.
DVDs are not allowed to be sold before 6 month after the theater release REGARDLESS OF THE DVD ZONE. This was regarded as a strong point against DVD zoning
Well, it's a good point. But remember that France is only one country.
Given the fact that other European nations might not have the same laws as France, you could buy American DVDs in say, Belgium or Spain without concern for region coding and watch the DVD well before 6 months after the theatrical release. Remembering my experiences with French theaters, you'd probably be able to watch them before the theatrical release:)
In any case, the French laws probably do make it a lot harder to seriously screw up the movie companies' theatrical releases. And I'm not sure that they deserve special protection for a strategy that essentially screws the rest of the world.
So, recording and playing different streams is not hard with this architecture. Getting it all to work without underruns is not entirely trivial.
You're right. But this is more a question of implementation than invention. If Tivo's patenting some very specific techniques or devices that they've invented to get things to work, that's great. But to simply claim the ability to record and play back simultaneously (even if it is only in the context of a PVR) still strikes me as mucky.
the TiVo patents have more to them than many
Well, they have more to them than many of the patents posted here on Slashdot. But since the patents posted here are generally the most egregious, I'm not sure what that says. There are still plenty of good solid patents being filed, they're just buried under an avalanche of garbage. Perhaps Slashdot should post a sturdy patent from time to time, to give us all a good frame of reference.
From my reading of the patent application as linked above, you will see that what they are patenting is not being able to watch one program while taping another, but the ability to tape one program while watching another one that is already recorded
Tivo is able to do what it does because a) it uses a multi-tasking OS (Linux), b) because it uses an MPEG chip that's capable of playing back and recording simultaneously (developed by IBM, I believe), c) because they can read and write to disk without monopolizing the CPU (DMA, using standard bus technology and IDE equipment.)
The only thing that they actually developed is the "feature" of being able to simultaneously play back and record. Given that I have been able to capture video to disk on a PC while viewing a different video file for several years now (using a capture board), I'm not sure how they can even claim that as an invention, much less a non-obvious one.
When you combine this requirement with all the other very specific stipulations the patent makes (must use MPEG, must separate audio and video, must have a little dancing TV-set as a logo), you might be able to come up with a unique product-- but not necessarily a novel, non-obvious invention.
I immediately saw other ways the same functionality could be achieved without infringing on the patent (such as licensing the Sorenson encoder, or not separating video and audio data)
Requiring a competitor to use another codec seems somewhat anti-competitive, considering that by using a standard like MPEG, Tivo reduces the cost of their encoders to about $14. To do the same thing in software, or with a different chip would probably cost significantly more. Separating audio and video is a fairly straightforward way to do things, and is the technique used by hundreds of pre-Tivo products.
Of course a competitor could work around the patent (at some expense), but I don't think it's reasonable for Tivo to combine a handful of standard practices (using MPEG, recording audio/video separately) and a couple of old ideas (time-shifting, schedule updates) and file such a broad patent on an entire product. Tivo is certainly welcome to file patents on the unique ideas they came up with-- and there are several-- but to patent the entire product is too much.
However, combining "time warping" with all of Tivo's other stuff is novel.
Throwing a bunch of existing ideas together does not a patent make, especially if the ideas were all suggested by people looking to include them in a single product. Manufacturers have been looking for ways to automate the recording process for years. Unfortunately, media has always been the problem. Ask the research dept. of any major video-recorder manufacturer (at least, those who have one) and they'll tell you that they mulled all of the "novel" ideas Tivo came out with at one time or another: Ideas like hard-disk recording of programs, automatic recording of specified shows (which necessitates schedule updates), suggestions, etc.
Most of those ideas just weren't possible given the state of the hardware until very recently, and the big companies just didn't get their implementation moving fast enough. Even if they hadn't included all of these ideas in a bundle the way Tivo did, within a couple of years the boxes would have naturally evolved to include them (think "obvious"). Of course, that kind of evolution is impossible when companies can file such restrictive patents.
In any case, I'm sure we'll be seeing ten year old white papers that vaguely describe Tivo, if anyone takes this thing to court. Remember that the patent office does only the barest searches for prior art.
Actually slashdot might be a good medium to carry a message on as lots of people read and right to it every day and an extra coded message might be easily missed.
The disadvantage of using Slashdot (or any web-based bulletin board) is the potential for IP address logging. You'd be much better off posting to Usenet-- the message volume is higher and it's much harder to trace (plus, there's a lot more gibberish to hide behind.)
one is to breach foreign information security, but their other is to keep US information secure
Yes, unfortunately nowadays there are few cables in the world that don't contain information transmitted from the US. When tapping a cable, is the NSA restricted from monitoring US-originated packets, or is the information considered "offshore" the second it leaves our borders?
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a second. Are you saying that the Music Industry isn't greedy, arrogant or cheap? Go talk to anyone who has ever had a record contract to clear up that misconception :)
Then he threw everything he had (Americium, Radium, Uranium powder) into a ball of foil. Yeah, it would never have made a reactor, but he didn't pull all of his material out of smoke detectors.
And by the way, short term capital gains is no different from income tax. I'm not entirely sure why money you make from selling stock should be in some way exempt from income tax... but apparently those who make their money from the purchase and sale of stock have a considerable amount of influence in our gov't (look at what happened to our Estate tax.) In any case, you have to be making a pretty considerable amount of dough in order to have a Federal tax rate much higher than 20% (the long term Capital Gains rate). If you make $100,000 you're unlikely to be paying more than 23% or so. If you're making significantly more than $100,000... well, my heart bleeds :)
While laws and treaties like the DMCA and WCT are attempting to make the protection of digital work stronger, there's no real evidence that this approach actually works. For every instance of a copyrighted document or "circumvention device" removed under the provisions of the DMCA, dozens of copies spring up. Perhaps eventually these laws may be used to their full potential, to truly wipe a document off the net, but it's very unlikely that things could ever get to that point-- no court could be that effective without the creation of a police state. It's more likely that these laws will become something like the prohibition laws-- not really achieving their purpose, but having a lot of unintended consequences.
In that case, it's hard to accept his argument that intellectual property law really "protects property interests in digital artifacts" better than non-digital artifacts. The new laws are more comprehensive (probably too much so), but only because they're fighting a much tougher-- even unwinnable-- battle. What we're seeing are the opening salvos in that battle; it's certainly way too early for people to be calling winners and losers. In fact, I wonder if this guy has even thought about what it would be like to live in a world where either side has "won".
Well, that may be true... But it seems to imply that everyone wildly creating new TLDs on their creaky 486 Linux box is a stabilizing thing; therefore anybody who creates the same TLD somewhere else is destabilizing the net. This is one way of looking at things, but why should it imply that the first person to get there has some particular right to run that TLD?
I do not believe that ICANN "owns" all TLDs, or should have rights to them own them in the future. I'm simply pointing out that anyone can stake out a TLD, whether they have the resources to maintain it or not. Calling this "stabilizing" is a bit misleading.
While I admire your spirit, and I certainly do think that the Telcos should pay something, what you just described probably wouldn't happen. These lines are being laid only a few inches below land that has already been allocated (and paid for) by the train companies. Nobody's running them across your fields, and unless you choose to trespass into the land that you've already leased to the railroads, there's really no chance that you're going to do damage to those lines.
The idea of suing the telcos because they don't have 'drilling rights' is a bit squeaky. It's basically a way to amend a previous agreement to pump a little bit more money out of it. I certainly don't see any reason not to try it-- why should the Telcos have it? But I won't buy any argument that revolves around the fiber giving you any more trouble than the tons of metal laid above it. If the train companies had had some way of looking ahead, those agreements would have included provisions for running cable-- and the owners probably wouldn't have made a dime more than they do now.
If we could have done it some other way, NASA wouldn't have needed to put plutonium in their space probes. That was hardly cheap (forget safe), but at the time it was the best way to provide a long term energy source far from the sun. The reason to use antimatter is purely for the amount of energy you can produce per gram by reacting it with matter; the efficiency of the storage/retrieval transaction isn't a concern, as long as enough of the stuff can be produced for a price proportional to the value of the mission.
If you want to send a ship to another star system, it doesn't matter that you're getting less than 1% of the energy you put into antimatter production, as long as you can produce enough to get the ship there. If interplanetary/stellar travel were to go commercial, they'd have to worry about that.
Unfortunately, from a user's point of view, the similarities aren't too useful. The Windows interface isn't necessarily what you want on a pocket organizer (basically, it consists of a Start button and a basic window/dialog box/icon system), and it's not too well thought out beyond this. If PocketPCs were easily linked with existing MS systems, that would be useful... But as far as I've seen, you can't even mount a network file server on a PocketPC.
Shame on you for trying to play it as some sort of evil anti-competitive ploy. It is anti-competitive because it is GOOD.
I don't think he was trying to paint that specifically as anti-competitive. He was just saying that Microsoft does what it does well-- and what they do is leverage their desktop near-monopoly (and user's reliance on it) to pull people into new areas. There's nothing inherently great about WinCE. It crashes frequently (it's a nightmare compared to Linux on the same hardware), and the interface is still kludgy. And this is already the third version; versions 1 and 2 were disasterous. MS has just hung in there and pushed its OS to vendors (a lot of whom already rely on MS for their PC offerings) and to users (who see Windows and say "this has a Start button just like the computer on my desk.")
It's got to be slightly embarassing for MS that PalmOS has been so thoroughly kicking their ass for the past few years, despite the simplicity of that system. But they'll eventually get it right, they have the money to burn.
If something happens to Sourceforge, couldn't people just de-centralize and go back to the way they used to do it (or something better)? I'm not really sure what's at stake here, as long as a few of the developers do reasonably frequent checkouts to their own machines.
The security breach seems like about the worst thing that can happen, but with any luck people will be doing diffs on the tree before they trust the code. If they fail to take such a simple security precaution, it's hard to lay the blame at SourceForge's door.
Which is sad, cause I always loved watching Tom Brokaw bitching at his producers on those "not-for-broadcast" feeds. Not to mention getting next week's Trek episodes the Sunday before (although they always seemed remarkably similar to this week's episodes) with only half as many commercials.
Unfortunately, our BUD sits unused on a twenty-foot pole in our backyard. We got DirecTV.
Well, strangely enough, they're still buying. I have to say, if there's one result of this whole mess, it's that a lot of people are taking a closer look at the RIAA's business practices. Hopefully this will eventually hurt their profits, even if the illegal trading doesn't.
I used to agree with you, having used only the old Gnutella clients. Then I downloaded Bearshare; the experience is equal or better to Napster (the old Napster, not the neutered version), at least over a cable modem.
As far as scaling, Gnutella doesn't scale as badly as you think. It's true that as the number of nodes gets larger, you lose the ability to see the whole network. What that overlooks is that it's not necessary to see the whole network-- the radius that you can see contains about the same number of nodes as a single Napster server. Go check it out, it's pretty impressive.
In any case, after playing with it a lot I mostly got bored. There's very little stuff I actually want to download these days...
And with that philosophy, we probably would have had an Internet by 2035.
Works great with a free system like SETI. But if a pay-for-cycles business ever does evolve, companies might end up spending a lot of money paying known cheaters (especially if a hack gets out there.) Of course, if there's some sort of business relationship, it might be more difficult for cheaters to switch their IP address and continue cheating. In any case, I don't know if that business model will ever make sense for businesses or PC owners, but with a few years of software refinement (and a few cycles of Moore's law), it's not inconceivable.
Well, they will be available. Sometime soon. Really. If you can get one, at least.
Well, for one thing, these new drives require a proprietary adapter to connect to your computer. This adapter doesn't seem to be compatible with any other drives. Say what you will about compatibility with older media, but the connection to the computer shouldn't be proprietary and newfangled-- not at this stage in the game.
In any case, Michael's got a good point. It doesn't matter how right you are about the technical aspects. If the drive requires you to switch all of your media and turns out to be a significant pain in the ass for consumers, it'll die a flaming, hellish death-- regardless of whether it's fair or not.
Oh wait-- they're still "in business". They just don't answer their phone anymore.
You could also make an argument that the laws themselves are overbroad, make fair use impossible and have serious speech implications. Such an argument is working its way through the US courts right now. The problem is, it takes a lot of time and money to successfully challenge such a license under the existing laws, which give an enormous amount of leeway to content-producers.
I'm not aware that the European laws make a distinction between encryption to prevent copying, and encryption for other purposes (such as region coding.) The DMCA certainly doesn't draw any lines, hence the legal victories of the MPAA in the DeCSS case. Perhaps I'm wrong, and Europe did implement its laws a little bit more intelligently.
Well, it's a good point. But remember that France is only one country.
Given the fact that other European nations might not have the same laws as France, you could buy American DVDs in say, Belgium or Spain without concern for region coding and watch the DVD well before 6 months after the theatrical release. Remembering my experiences with French theaters, you'd probably be able to watch them before the theatrical release :)
In any case, the French laws probably do make it a lot harder to seriously screw up the movie companies' theatrical releases. And I'm not sure that they deserve special protection for a strategy that essentially screws the rest of the world.
You're right. But this is more a question of implementation than invention. If Tivo's patenting some very specific techniques or devices that they've invented to get things to work, that's great. But to simply claim the ability to record and play back simultaneously (even if it is only in the context of a PVR) still strikes me as mucky.
the TiVo patents have more to them than many
Well, they have more to them than many of the patents posted here on Slashdot. But since the patents posted here are generally the most egregious, I'm not sure what that says. There are still plenty of good solid patents being filed, they're just buried under an avalanche of garbage. Perhaps Slashdot should post a sturdy patent from time to time, to give us all a good frame of reference.
Tivo is able to do what it does because a) it uses a multi-tasking OS (Linux), b) because it uses an MPEG chip that's capable of playing back and recording simultaneously (developed by IBM, I believe), c) because they can read and write to disk without monopolizing the CPU (DMA, using standard bus technology and IDE equipment.)
The only thing that they actually developed is the "feature" of being able to simultaneously play back and record. Given that I have been able to capture video to disk on a PC while viewing a different video file for several years now (using a capture board), I'm not sure how they can even claim that as an invention, much less a non-obvious one.
When you combine this requirement with all the other very specific stipulations the patent makes (must use MPEG, must separate audio and video, must have a little dancing TV-set as a logo), you might be able to come up with a unique product-- but not necessarily a novel, non-obvious invention.
Requiring a competitor to use another codec seems somewhat anti-competitive, considering that by using a standard like MPEG, Tivo reduces the cost of their encoders to about $14. To do the same thing in software, or with a different chip would probably cost significantly more. Separating audio and video is a fairly straightforward way to do things, and is the technique used by hundreds of pre-Tivo products.
Of course a competitor could work around the patent (at some expense), but I don't think it's reasonable for Tivo to combine a handful of standard practices (using MPEG, recording audio/video separately) and a couple of old ideas (time-shifting, schedule updates) and file such a broad patent on an entire product. Tivo is certainly welcome to file patents on the unique ideas they came up with-- and there are several-- but to patent the entire product is too much.
Throwing a bunch of existing ideas together does not a patent make, especially if the ideas were all suggested by people looking to include them in a single product. Manufacturers have been looking for ways to automate the recording process for years. Unfortunately, media has always been the problem. Ask the research dept. of any major video-recorder manufacturer (at least, those who have one) and they'll tell you that they mulled all of the "novel" ideas Tivo came out with at one time or another: Ideas like hard-disk recording of programs, automatic recording of specified shows (which necessitates schedule updates), suggestions, etc.
Most of those ideas just weren't possible given the state of the hardware until very recently, and the big companies just didn't get their implementation moving fast enough. Even if they hadn't included all of these ideas in a bundle the way Tivo did, within a couple of years the boxes would have naturally evolved to include them (think "obvious"). Of course, that kind of evolution is impossible when companies can file such restrictive patents.
In any case, I'm sure we'll be seeing ten year old white papers that vaguely describe Tivo, if anyone takes this thing to court. Remember that the patent office does only the barest searches for prior art.
The disadvantage of using Slashdot (or any web-based bulletin board) is the potential for IP address logging. You'd be much better off posting to Usenet-- the message volume is higher and it's much harder to trace (plus, there's a lot more gibberish to hide behind.)
Yes, unfortunately nowadays there are few cables in the world that don't contain information transmitted from the US. When tapping a cable, is the NSA restricted from monitoring US-originated packets, or is the information considered "offshore" the second it leaves our borders?