Perhaps I'm just not running the right Firefox plugin (AdBlock, FlashBlock, etc.), but that in-your-face popup ad for a service I will actively avoid in retaliation for the ad itself is quite annoying. Does anyone know how to kill this thing?
As for the article, what does MC have against MS? I don't like MS, but I'm sure they'd have to do something to me personally before I'd be willing to spend $1 billion to prove it.
Evidence? What would you accept/demand as evidence? I can't go back in time and take a picture, and the Internet wasn't around, so sources of pictures from then aren't readily available.
I was a mere lad in the mid-70's, and we lived in the midwest. I'm sure I saw the signs along I-70, since that was the most significant highway around, and the most likely place for 55 mph speed limits.
Since they were teaching the metric system in school, it surprised me at that time that they made such a strange choice of conversion on the roads, which is why it stuck with me. I chalked it up to lazy rounding.
But it's just a theory. You're welcome to disagree. YMMV. Etc.
My theory about why it failed is that this was the same time the government decided we needed to slow down on our huge highway system. So 70+ Mph roads were reduced to 55 Mph. About the same time, there was an attempt to introduce the Metric system, requiring cars to have kph on their dials and Speed Limit signs to include it as well. The problem (my theory) is that they chose to equate 55 Mph to 80 Kph. It didn't take a calculator to figure out that 80 Kph is closer to 50 Mph, because it was clearly obvious on your own speedometer! So drivers eschewed the Metric system so they didn't have to slow down even more. If the powers that be had had the greenest of green marketing team, even they would have realized posting 90 Kph (almost 56 Mph) would have garnered more public acceptance.
But as a result of the attempt, we now live in a perpetual limbo. Gas and milk are sold by the gallon. Cola (soda pop, whatever you call it) is sold by the liter. Everyday life is measured in inches, feet, yards, and miles, while anything scientific is carried out in meters. Dry medicine is measured in milligrams, but our weight in pounds. Sigh...
If this were (for example) an MP3 player that had violated a patent, the manufacturer (or retailer) would not be allowed to reclaim it from me. More importantly, they would not be REQUIRED to do so.
Maybe you can explain how the fact that they happen to have the ability to retract the feature on the device makes any difference compared to a device that they would not have had the ability to affect.
I'm trying to figure out how this applies to the few of us that actually OWN our DishPVRs.
I mean, if I bought a device that had a feature, and later it was judged that the device violated someone's patent, do they have the right to take the device away from me as the consumer, or to forcibly disable the feature in my device without my permission?
I wouldn't think so.
If that device enters a service center now and then (say it was part of a car on which I had routine maintenance performed), does this change?
And because in this case, control is always at the discretion of DishNetwork, does this change?
My point is that if the DishPVR is owned by DishNetwork, and it is just leased by me, then I can see how DishNetwork could be forced to disable the feature. But for those of us that own the box, and don't pay extra for a "feature," isn't it a violation of MY rights to have them cripple my property?
I've always assumed that the watermark was a low frequency thing, so that it wouldn't be filtered out by format conversion. For example, if it were done to video, it could be a slight brightening and darkening of the video over a few seconds at a very, very low frequency (say 1 Hz). That way ripping a DVD, throwing out every other field and scaling it, and converting it to DivX wouldn't destroy the data. Such a system would require a large number of frames to encode enough bits to give a unique identifier, but it seems like it would survive.
But it just occurred to me that simply combining two different watermarked copies, perhaps switching every GOP (to use MPEG as an example) would create a third set of data that didn't make sense when decoded.
Is there any difference between CDs and LPs to them? So if I want to get rid of my record player and all my old LPs by converting them to CD or MP3, I'm stealing!? Especially the titles that are not and have never been available on CD!?
Didn't someone file a countersuit to let the courts establish what Fair Use really meant in this type of case? What was the conclusion?
I put an HD (no hyphen) DVD Media Player (Sigma Designs based) in my Living Room and networked it to my HTPC. That way what the HTPC looks like doesn't matter. I use the Ziova Z500, but the other brands (IOData, Buffalo, DVICO, etc.) have their benefits as well. They play SD DVDs, and HD in MPEG-2 (TS), MPEG-4 (some support h.264), WMV (some support VC-1), and DivX (either over the network or from red-laser DVDs I can burn without breaking the bank).
The HTPC contains digital tuners and big honkin' hard drives.
As a bonus, I'm sticking it to the HD-DVD and BluRay camps.
Hey Kevin Martin! It's not that the FCC can't stop swear words from primetime TV, it's that the FCC has to define what constitutes a swear word (here's the hard part) BEFORE they can slap a fine on a TV station. You can't be intentionally vague with the definition of indecency and then come down hard (to the tune of millions of $$$) on the TV stations who have no idea where the line is drawn.
Kevin buddy, write down what indecency is, and everyone will comply. It's a neat idea...give it a try.
This is so much like the court system is sometimes. Both parties work hard and spend effort fighting. In the end, only the intermediaries (lawyers or encryption "specialists") make any money.
If they just spent all that effort and money making things MORE compatible, and EASIER to get from legitimate sources, they'd be much more successful.
I think you are confusing temporal and spatial dithering.
Temporal dithering changes the color between refreshes.
Spatial dithering changes the color of adjacent pixels.
Depending on the display, temporal dithering can indeed claim to be displaying colors between those that are actually being sent to the screen. It's effectively a pulse code modulation scheme that relies on the decay characteristics of the panel. It's the visual equivalent of a 1 bit DAC for audio. And just like audio does indeed move the speaker cone to all of the positions between the 0 and 1 positions, the display really does display the colors between the discrete values.
Even for displays that cannot actually reproduce the colors themselves (e.g. TI's DLP technology), they claim the higher number of colors because they rely on the characteristics of the human eye in the perception of the color on the part of the viewer.
However, for direct-view computer displays, temporal dithering is usually only used with CSTN displays, not TFT. CSTN displays used to be common in laptops for their lower power, but pretty much only TFT LCDs are sold today.
Spatial dithering is the technique used for TFT displays. It uses different colors near one another to produce colors between.
Say you have a 6-bit monochrome display. You can display color intensities from 0% to 100% in steps of about 1.59% (there are 63 steps from 0 to 63).
Say you wanted to display 50% intensity. The closest you could come with 6 bits would be either a value of 31 (49.20%) or 32 (50.79%), both of which have about.80% error. But, if you make every odd pixel 31 and every even pixel 32, you can produce an average color over the display of effectively 31.5 or exactly 50%.
One question is whether the pattern will be noticeable. If you alternated on every other column of the screen, you may find you can see the vertical stripes. But if you shift every other line by one pixel, creating a checkerboard pattern, this usually (in the specific case of the 64 intensities of 6 bits) makes the pattern unnoticeable.
But then you get the objection of this article.
However, what I'm trying to point out is to consider the three elements that make up what we call a pixel. The red, green, and blue elements each can produce 64 intensities. But our eye combines them for an effective 265K colors.
So let's say we call a "pixel" 6 such elements, two red, two green, and two blue. Why is this combination any less valid than just a set of 3? Or what if I combine 12 elements?
The only argument I can see is that we arbitrarily treat a triplet as a "pixel," so the three elements are always together. But even that isn't always the case. Microsoft's (controversial) ClearType breaks up these three elements and uses them to increase the apparent resolution of the screen.
Spatial dithering attempts to go the other way, by combining more sub-elements to create more colors. There is some other precedent in decreasing the color resolution in images (color subsampling) to take advantage of the characteristics of the human visual system. I'm wondering why this is any different.
That's my point. If it's accepted that three elements emitting three colors out of 256 combine to give 16M colors, then why isn't it acceptable for six elements (two pixels) emitting six colors out of 64 (256K) to give 2M? Or twelve pixels (4 pixels) giving twelve colors out of 64 (256K) to give 16M?
LCDs have three distinct elements of light for each "pixel." A "24 bit" display assigns 8 bits to each. So there can be no more than 256 levels for each of these three elements.
Yet, I don't see an argument that such a display does not show "millions of colors" when the three elements are viewed together. I don't see anyone making the argument that they can't advertise more than 768 (256 x 3) colors.
So why couldn't the same be said for side-by-side pixels with a dither pattern?
Is there anything we can do!? I'm an American (and a conservative one who disagrees with most of the political opinions posted here), but I'm appalled by this. There is no way he should have been extradited to the U.S. at all, let alone facing a trip to American jail! I wouldn't stand for an American being ripped from here to another country for something done here, so I'm not quietly going to stand for the reverse.
Circuit City hired these employees, and set their salaries. When these employees were there long enough, or performed well enough, they were given raises, by Circuit City. And now, Circuit City has decided that they can't afford the salaries that they were responsible for setting?
What gets me is that they could have laid off the employees, and then a month or so later begun hiring new replacements. The ex-employees would have suspected (or even been sure of) that they were just cutting costs. But they come right out and admit that Circuit City's mistakes are costing the employees their jobs. What a set of cahones!
I cannot possibly fathom why this isn't grounds for a class-action lawsuit. Regardless of any "agreements" signed, this is not acting in good faith on the part of Circuit City. It also shows a serious lack of loyalty to those employees that Circuit City itself acknowledged were good enough to warrant raises. I hope Circuit City doesn't expect loyalty from the remaining employees in return.
Besides, what were the employees supposed to do? Turn down the raises because they were worried that they might out-earn their value!?
OK, before you call me a troll, I genuinely think this is a reasonable compromise. If you are actually stealing your content, and you think this is perfectly OK, please stop reading now. We won't agree.
But if you are like me, and would like to keep your Fair Use rights completely intact, this seems like a good compromise. Of course, all other restrictions must be removed. But if I'm only interested in copying stuff for my own use, then I don't care if it's watermarked (assuming the watermark doesn't degrade the quality of the content). Even if I want to give a copy to a friend, I'm probably not bothered.
It's posting content for just anyone to download (or mass producing copies), which coincidently is what I think usually crosses the line, that becomes unattractive.
Someone above pointed out the potential for abuse, like if someone covertly takes some content with your watermark on it and distributes it illegally. But life is full of these types of risks. If someone steals your credit card info and anonymously contributes to Al Quaeda, you're going to get a visit from the Feds. But as with any other situation, a reasonable (I know, the **AA have not historically participated in anything "reasonable," but I hold out hope) investigation will almost always turn up the truth.
With this setup (and removal of the other mechanisms in place, like the DMCA), I could be archiving my favorite team's best games to watch later (in HD), something I can't do when they play on ESPN. I can buy DVDs from the UK and convert them to NTSC to watch. I can duplicate DVDs (and protect the originals) for use by my kids in the car. I can even give a copy of a video to a friend or family member that missed it.
This just seems like a good mid-ground between absolutely no protection and making me a criminal for trying to use my content the way I see fit.
Don't blow a gasket, man. The money comes from the profit from selling the spectrum freed up by the switch to digital. In other words, if they didn't sponsor the changeover, it wouldn't occur. The vouchers are just overhead for the switch. They aren't robbing the homeless or spending money that would have been used to fight crime.
Not according to the FCC's site:
By March 2007, all TVs (and other devices that are designed to receive broadcast television signals) are required to have digital tuners built in. I believe the mandate specifies that if it has an NTSC tuner, it must have an ATSC tuner. Yes, that could exclude "monitors" that include neither, but I've never seen a consumer VCR or DVD recorder without a tuner.
What gets me is that we are 3 days from the March 1, 2007 date when every device with an analog tuner, must have a digital one (see "Digital Receiver Availability and FCC Tuner Requirements"). That means not only all TVs (even 13" and below), but also VCRs, DVD recorders, etc. But where are they?
You call ME self-righteous? You weren't in front of my machine, but you claim you know what TaxCut did!?
I ran through the "interview" three times. It most certainly said it would ask later, and it most certainly did not. If I put the tax paid into the interview as if it were on the 1098 form, things worked as expected. Except that the instructions were very explicit that I should not do that (and filing the taxes that way should have easily been flagged by the IRS, since the 1098 and the 1040 forms wouldn't have matched).
BTW, we DO use escrow. And perhaps the 1098 should have had the tax. But it didn't and the instructions from TaxCut on what to do about it would have cost me $1700. And their technical support never denied the problem or led me to the place where you say it asked for the tax.
Also, as I said, the previous year's TaxCut most certainly DID ask for the tax. But not last year's.
I punted H&R Block's TaxCut last year. I had a 1098 form that didn't have my real estate taxes in block 4. The instructions in their "interview" said, that was OK, and they'd ask for it later. But they never did. As a result, their calculations had me paying an extra $1700 in taxes!
I contacted their customer support with a very detailed and specific query: "When entering Mortgage Interest Statement Information, my 1098 doesn't have my real-estate taxes in block 4. I have a separate statement from the county showing the real-estate tax paid.
The help on the side says I will be asked for this information later if it's not in the 1098. But IT NEVER ASKS FOR THE INFORMATION! If I add the info to the 1098, it makes a huge difference in my tax burden!
And looking back at last year's return, filed with Tax Cut 2004, I see the forms are different and the real estate tax paid was asked for, even though it wasn't on the 1098 last year either."
They suggested I contact my "financial institution" to get a 1098. So I tried again, and again, and again, and again. After FIVE back and forth e-mails (each mistakenly beginning with "I have read and fully understand...") they finally seemed to comprehend what was wrong. Then their response was that I needed to modify the forms manually.
So basically they were saying if I hadn't been paying attention, a bug in their software (I program for a living, and this was most definitely a bug) would have cost me $1700.
And when I did notice, they were asking me to bypass their software and enter the taxes manually. H&R Block never admitted they had a problem.
Exactly what had I paid for!? So I asked how I could verify that what I was manually entering into the form was correct, since that would be bypassing their s/w, which is what I had purchased. They said they'd be happy to give me advice about the problem, if I'd use their "Tax Advisor"--for a fee:
"H&R Block offers an Ask a Tax Advisor service, which features highly qualified H&R Block tax professionals who will answer your tax questions. The Ask a Tax Advisor feature is available within the TaxCut program and allows you to connect with an experienced H&R Block Tax Professional via phone or e-mail for $19.95 per topic."
What a scam!
I purchased TurboTax (at a significant discount, at the last minute) and it didn't have such a problem.
I let H&R Block know that they'd lost a customer. I'm not sure what I'm going to do this year. TaxAct is interesting, but I'm not entering my tax information into someone else's database.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I'm just not running the right Firefox plugin (AdBlock, FlashBlock, etc.), but that in-your-face popup ad for a service I will actively avoid in retaliation for the ad itself is quite annoying. Does anyone know how to kill this thing?
As for the article, what does MC have against MS? I don't like MS, but I'm sure they'd have to do something to me personally before I'd be willing to spend $1 billion to prove it.
Xesdeeni
Umm. I thought the FCC tried to make it illegal, but was struck down by a court who said they overstepped their bounds. I believe they are still trying to make this a requirement, but I'm pretty sure it's not illegal to make a DVR that ignores the flag...yet. But some people are trying to prevent them.
Xesdeeni
Evidence? What would you accept/demand as evidence? I can't go back in time and take a picture, and the Internet wasn't around, so sources of pictures from then aren't readily available.
I was a mere lad in the mid-70's, and we lived in the midwest. I'm sure I saw the signs along I-70, since that was the most significant highway around, and the most likely place for 55 mph speed limits.
Since they were teaching the metric system in school, it surprised me at that time that they made such a strange choice of conversion on the roads, which is why it stuck with me. I chalked it up to lazy rounding.
But it's just a theory. You're welcome to disagree. YMMV. Etc.
Xesdeeni
We tried in the 70's.
My theory about why it failed is that this was the same time the government decided we needed to slow down on our huge highway system. So 70+ Mph roads were reduced to 55 Mph. About the same time, there was an attempt to introduce the Metric system, requiring cars to have kph on their dials and Speed Limit signs to include it as well. The problem (my theory) is that they chose to equate 55 Mph to 80 Kph. It didn't take a calculator to figure out that 80 Kph is closer to 50 Mph, because it was clearly obvious on your own speedometer! So drivers eschewed the Metric system so they didn't have to slow down even more. If the powers that be had had the greenest of green marketing team, even they would have realized posting 90 Kph (almost 56 Mph) would have garnered more public acceptance.
But as a result of the attempt, we now live in a perpetual limbo. Gas and milk are sold by the gallon. Cola (soda pop, whatever you call it) is sold by the liter. Everyday life is measured in inches, feet, yards, and miles, while anything scientific is carried out in meters. Dry medicine is measured in milligrams, but our weight in pounds. Sigh...
Xesdeeni
If this were (for example) an MP3 player that had violated a patent, the manufacturer (or retailer) would not be allowed to reclaim it from me. More importantly, they would not be REQUIRED to do so.
Maybe you can explain how the fact that they happen to have the ability to retract the feature on the device makes any difference compared to a device that they would not have had the ability to affect.
Xesdeeni
I'm trying to figure out how this applies to the few of us that actually OWN our DishPVRs.
I mean, if I bought a device that had a feature, and later it was judged that the device violated someone's patent, do they have the right to take the device away from me as the consumer, or to forcibly disable the feature in my device without my permission?
I wouldn't think so.
If that device enters a service center now and then (say it was part of a car on which I had routine maintenance performed), does this change?
And because in this case, control is always at the discretion of DishNetwork, does this change?
My point is that if the DishPVR is owned by DishNetwork, and it is just leased by me, then I can see how DishNetwork could be forced to disable the feature. But for those of us that own the box, and don't pay extra for a "feature," isn't it a violation of MY rights to have them cripple my property?
Xesdeeni
F**ked-up Old Rebuilt Dodge
I've always assumed that the watermark was a low frequency thing, so that it wouldn't be filtered out by format conversion. For example, if it were done to video, it could be a slight brightening and darkening of the video over a few seconds at a very, very low frequency (say 1 Hz). That way ripping a DVD, throwing out every other field and scaling it, and converting it to DivX wouldn't destroy the data. Such a system would require a large number of frames to encode enough bits to give a unique identifier, but it seems like it would survive.
But it just occurred to me that simply combining two different watermarked copies, perhaps switching every GOP (to use MPEG as an example) would create a third set of data that didn't make sense when decoded.
But I my just be (probably am) oversimplifying.
Xesdeeni
Is there any difference between CDs and LPs to them? So if I want to get rid of my record player and all my old LPs by converting them to CD or MP3, I'm stealing!? Especially the titles that are not and have never been available on CD!?
Didn't someone file a countersuit to let the courts establish what Fair Use really meant in this type of case? What was the conclusion?
Xesdeeni
I put an HD (no hyphen) DVD Media Player (Sigma Designs based) in my Living Room and networked it to my HTPC. That way what the HTPC looks like doesn't matter. I use the Ziova Z500, but the other brands (IOData, Buffalo, DVICO, etc.) have their benefits as well. They play SD DVDs, and HD in MPEG-2 (TS), MPEG-4 (some support h.264), WMV (some support VC-1), and DivX (either over the network or from red-laser DVDs I can burn without breaking the bank).
The HTPC contains digital tuners and big honkin' hard drives.
As a bonus, I'm sticking it to the HD-DVD and BluRay camps.
Xesdeeni
Hey Kevin Martin! It's not that the FCC can't stop swear words from primetime TV, it's that the FCC has to define what constitutes a swear word (here's the hard part) BEFORE they can slap a fine on a TV station. You can't be intentionally vague with the definition of indecency and then come down hard (to the tune of millions of $$$) on the TV stations who have no idea where the line is drawn.
Kevin buddy, write down what indecency is, and everyone will comply. It's a neat idea...give it a try.
Xesdeeni
This is so much like the court system is sometimes. Both parties work hard and spend effort fighting. In the end, only the intermediaries (lawyers or encryption "specialists") make any money.
If they just spent all that effort and money making things MORE compatible, and EASIER to get from legitimate sources, they'd be much more successful.
Xesdeeni
I think you are confusing temporal and spatial dithering.
.80% error. But, if you make every odd pixel 31 and every even pixel 32, you can produce an average color over the display of effectively 31.5 or exactly 50%.
Temporal dithering changes the color between refreshes.
Spatial dithering changes the color of adjacent pixels.
Depending on the display, temporal dithering can indeed claim to be displaying colors between those that are actually being sent to the screen. It's effectively a pulse code modulation scheme that relies on the decay characteristics of the panel. It's the visual equivalent of a 1 bit DAC for audio. And just like audio does indeed move the speaker cone to all of the positions between the 0 and 1 positions, the display really does display the colors between the discrete values.
Even for displays that cannot actually reproduce the colors themselves (e.g. TI's DLP technology), they claim the higher number of colors because they rely on the characteristics of the human eye in the perception of the color on the part of the viewer.
However, for direct-view computer displays, temporal dithering is usually only used with CSTN displays, not TFT. CSTN displays used to be common in laptops for their lower power, but pretty much only TFT LCDs are sold today.
Spatial dithering is the technique used for TFT displays. It uses different colors near one another to produce colors between.
Say you have a 6-bit monochrome display. You can display color intensities from 0% to 100% in steps of about 1.59% (there are 63 steps from 0 to 63).
Say you wanted to display 50% intensity. The closest you could come with 6 bits would be either a value of 31 (49.20%) or 32 (50.79%), both of which have about
One question is whether the pattern will be noticeable. If you alternated on every other column of the screen, you may find you can see the vertical stripes. But if you shift every other line by one pixel, creating a checkerboard pattern, this usually (in the specific case of the 64 intensities of 6 bits) makes the pattern unnoticeable.
But then you get the objection of this article.
However, what I'm trying to point out is to consider the three elements that make up what we call a pixel. The red, green, and blue elements each can produce 64 intensities. But our eye combines them for an effective 265K colors.
So let's say we call a "pixel" 6 such elements, two red, two green, and two blue. Why is this combination any less valid than just a set of 3? Or what if I combine 12 elements?
The only argument I can see is that we arbitrarily treat a triplet as a "pixel," so the three elements are always together. But even that isn't always the case. Microsoft's (controversial) ClearType breaks up these three elements and uses them to increase the apparent resolution of the screen.
Spatial dithering attempts to go the other way, by combining more sub-elements to create more colors. There is some other precedent in decreasing the color resolution in images (color subsampling) to take advantage of the characteristics of the human visual system. I'm wondering why this is any different.
Xesdeeni
That's my point. If it's accepted that three elements emitting three colors out of 256 combine to give 16M colors, then why isn't it acceptable for six elements (two pixels) emitting six colors out of 64 (256K) to give 2M? Or twelve pixels (4 pixels) giving twelve colors out of 64 (256K) to give 16M?
Xesdeeni
LCDs have three distinct elements of light for each "pixel." A "24 bit" display assigns 8 bits to each. So there can be no more than 256 levels for each of these three elements.
Yet, I don't see an argument that such a display does not show "millions of colors" when the three elements are viewed together. I don't see anyone making the argument that they can't advertise more than 768 (256 x 3) colors.
So why couldn't the same be said for side-by-side pixels with a dither pattern?
Xesdeeni
Is there anything we can do!? I'm an American (and a conservative one who disagrees with most of the political opinions posted here), but I'm appalled by this. There is no way he should have been extradited to the U.S. at all, let alone facing a trip to American jail! I wouldn't stand for an American being ripped from here to another country for something done here, so I'm not quietly going to stand for the reverse.
Who can we contact?
Xesdeeni
That makes absolutely no sense. Surely I misunderstood this:
You can wash your hands of patent infringement by hiding behind a redistribution license!?
That sounds like a loophole big enough for a 18-wheeler to drive through!
Xesdeeni
So let me get this straight.
Circuit City hired these employees, and set their salaries. When these employees were there long enough, or performed well enough, they were given raises, by Circuit City. And now, Circuit City has decided that they can't afford the salaries that they were responsible for setting?
What gets me is that they could have laid off the employees, and then a month or so later begun hiring new replacements. The ex-employees would have suspected (or even been sure of) that they were just cutting costs. But they come right out and admit that Circuit City's mistakes are costing the employees their jobs. What a set of cahones!
I cannot possibly fathom why this isn't grounds for a class-action lawsuit. Regardless of any "agreements" signed, this is not acting in good faith on the part of Circuit City. It also shows a serious lack of loyalty to those employees that Circuit City itself acknowledged were good enough to warrant raises. I hope Circuit City doesn't expect loyalty from the remaining employees in return.
Besides, what were the employees supposed to do? Turn down the raises because they were worried that they might out-earn their value!?
I think I'll choose to shop elsewhere.
Xesdeeni
OK, before you call me a troll, I genuinely think this is a reasonable compromise. If you are actually stealing your content, and you think this is perfectly OK, please stop reading now. We won't agree.
But if you are like me, and would like to keep your Fair Use rights completely intact, this seems like a good compromise. Of course, all other restrictions must be removed. But if I'm only interested in copying stuff for my own use, then I don't care if it's watermarked (assuming the watermark doesn't degrade the quality of the content). Even if I want to give a copy to a friend, I'm probably not bothered.
It's posting content for just anyone to download (or mass producing copies), which coincidently is what I think usually crosses the line, that becomes unattractive.
Someone above pointed out the potential for abuse, like if someone covertly takes some content with your watermark on it and distributes it illegally. But life is full of these types of risks. If someone steals your credit card info and anonymously contributes to Al Quaeda, you're going to get a visit from the Feds. But as with any other situation, a reasonable (I know, the **AA have not historically participated in anything "reasonable," but I hold out hope) investigation will almost always turn up the truth.
With this setup (and removal of the other mechanisms in place, like the DMCA), I could be archiving my favorite team's best games to watch later (in HD), something I can't do when they play on ESPN. I can buy DVDs from the UK and convert them to NTSC to watch. I can duplicate DVDs (and protect the originals) for use by my kids in the car. I can even give a copy of a video to a friend or family member that missed it.
This just seems like a good mid-ground between absolutely no protection and making me a criminal for trying to use my content the way I see fit.
Xesdeeni
Don't blow a gasket, man. The money comes from the profit from selling the spectrum freed up by the switch to digital. In other words, if they didn't sponsor the changeover, it wouldn't occur. The vouchers are just overhead for the switch. They aren't robbing the homeless or spending money that would have been used to fight crime.
Xesdeeni
You weren't entirely wrong. I believe July was the original date, but the FCC moved it up. No leather-tasting chew toy for you!
Xesdeeni
Xesdeeni
What gets me is that we are 3 days from the March 1, 2007 date when every device with an analog tuner, must have a digital one (see "Digital Receiver Availability and FCC Tuner Requirements"). That means not only all TVs (even 13" and below), but also VCRs, DVD recorders, etc. But where are they?
Xesdeeni
You call ME self-righteous? You weren't in front of my machine, but you claim you know what TaxCut did!?
I ran through the "interview" three times. It most certainly said it would ask later, and it most certainly did not. If I put the tax paid into the interview as if it were on the 1098 form, things worked as expected. Except that the instructions were very explicit that I should not do that (and filing the taxes that way should have easily been flagged by the IRS, since the 1098 and the 1040 forms wouldn't have matched).
BTW, we DO use escrow. And perhaps the 1098 should have had the tax. But it didn't and the instructions from TaxCut on what to do about it would have cost me $1700. And their technical support never denied the problem or led me to the place where you say it asked for the tax.
Also, as I said, the previous year's TaxCut most certainly DID ask for the tax. But not last year's.
I punted H&R Block's TaxCut last year. I had a 1098 form that didn't have my real estate taxes in block 4. The instructions in their "interview" said, that was OK, and they'd ask for it later. But they never did. As a result, their calculations had me paying an extra $1700 in taxes!
I contacted their customer support with a very detailed and specific query:
"When entering Mortgage Interest Statement Information, my 1098 doesn't have my real-estate taxes in block 4. I have a separate statement from the county showing the real-estate tax paid.
The help on the side says I will be asked for this information later if it's not in the 1098. But IT NEVER ASKS FOR THE INFORMATION! If I add the info to the 1098, it makes a huge difference in my tax burden!
And looking back at last year's return, filed with Tax Cut 2004, I see the forms are different and the real estate tax paid was asked for, even though it wasn't on the 1098 last year either."
They suggested I contact my "financial institution" to get a 1098. So I tried again, and again, and again, and again. After FIVE back and forth e-mails (each mistakenly beginning with "I have read and fully understand...") they finally seemed to comprehend what was wrong. Then their response was that I needed to modify the forms manually.
So basically they were saying if I hadn't been paying attention, a bug in their software (I program for a living, and this was most definitely a bug) would have cost me $1700.
And when I did notice, they were asking me to bypass their software and enter the taxes manually. H&R Block never admitted they had a problem.
Exactly what had I paid for!? So I asked how I could verify that what I was manually entering into the form was correct, since that would be bypassing their s/w, which is what I had purchased. They said they'd be happy to give me advice about the problem, if I'd use their "Tax Advisor"--for a fee:
"H&R Block offers an Ask a Tax Advisor service, which features highly qualified H&R Block tax professionals who will answer your tax questions. The Ask a Tax Advisor feature is available within the TaxCut program and allows you to connect with an experienced H&R Block Tax Professional via phone or e-mail for $19.95 per topic."
What a scam!
I purchased TurboTax (at a significant discount, at the last minute) and it didn't have such a problem.
I let H&R Block know that they'd lost a customer. I'm not sure what I'm going to do this year. TaxAct is interesting, but I'm not entering my tax information into someone else's database.
Xesdeeni