It was my understanding that MP3.com's service allowed a user access to only his/her own legally purchased music. That is, if I uploaded Mozart and you uploaded Beethoven, I could listen to my Mozart over the net, from anywhere in the world. But I could not listen to your Beethoven at all. Similarly, you could listen to your Beethoven, but not my Mozart.
That's not like your freehtmlbooks.com example. It's more the equivalent of e-mailing something to yourself, so you can pick it up in another real-world location. It's not intended to let you share your music, it's intended to make it more portable.
This is why I don't understand the ruling; there doesn't appear to be any copyright violation, really. I'm allowed to make a copy of a CD for my own use. I'm allowed to use the US postal service to mail the copy to another place. Somehow, the judge feels that doing the same thing electronically is functionally and legally different. I can't understand how that could be.
I don't understand this ruling. MP3.com isn't making the copy of the music, after all - the users are. They're using MP3.com's tools and systems to do it, but the copy comes at the user's request, for the user's benefit. It seems very strange to me that MP3.com would even be forced into the "fair use" corner - they really are just a storage cabinet in this case.
Anyone have a link to the judge's own words, instead of just an article *about* the judge's decision? Maye the original document would make the litigator's arguments a little clearer.
I mean really, there are at last count, what, 6.02 X 10^23 TV channels out there. Does the government need to subsudize TV?
Well, if you want to have TV that doesn't completely suck, then yeah, apparently so. Subsidize PBS and you get "The Civil War," "Frontline," "Nova," etc. Turn things over to the free market and you get "Jerry Springer" and "Baywatch." 'Nuff said.
In a lot of ways, the cphack and DeCSS cases strike me as a lot of pointless legal wrangling. Like a misused antibiotic, these cases are going to make things worse for the Mattels and MPAAs of the future, not better.
Given the treatment the authors of cphack and DeCSS have had, the authors security cracking programs of the future would be wise to take pains to hide thier identities. And then what will Big Brother do?
The next DeCSS could be distributed strictly by Napster/Wrapster/GNUtella/Usenet. Then there would not be any one person the Powers That Be can crucify as an example to the rest of us. There won't be a handful of mirrored sites to slap with subpeonas, there won't be a teenager to rake over the coals in the back room at the police station. The program would be everywhere, yet nowhere that's worth going after.
I just don't see what Mattel and the MPAA hope to achieve. They will probably win all the court battles, and yet they will gain nothing.
Of course, when you buy a CD with a credit card, you do present your ID to the store, don't you?
What an interesting idea. You're right, paying with a credit card opens one up to that sort of abuse, doesn't it? Cash purchases, though, are (for now) anonymous.
But it would still cost the record biz a mint - every CD package would have to bear a sticker with the CD's serial number in bar-code, or some similar scheme, so the checkout computer could match up the purchaser and the purchased material's serial numbers. Manufacturing the CDs and packaging could get a lot more expensive. Either the CDs and the packaging would have to be carefully tracked to ensure they matched up, or the packager would have to have a quick way to scan every single disc for the watermark when putting the disks in the cases. Then of course the retailers would have to cooperate by setting up their systems to read the extra bar codes and reporting everything to Big Brother.
It's certainly possible, but I doubt the record biz is likely to foot the bill, so I'm not worried about it just yet. Heck, my favorite CD shops allow trade-ins, which sidestep the money thing all together.
Everything I've ever read about watermarking indicated that not only was the watermark intended to survive a simple D/A/D pathway but even conversion to and from a (very!) lossy format - like MP3. In fact, surviving MP3 (and its ilk) is pretty much the reason for using such an animal. They can be much more sophisticated than merely twiddling a few least-significant bits. With powerful, modern DSP at one's disposal, I'm sure they could base watermarks on things like subtule (to the ear) frequency-response variations, minor (again, to the ear) inter-channel phase anamolies, and other far more complicated things that I'd never understand. I'm sorry that I don't have a link to more info on this topic. Anyone else?
So if one were to create an MP3 that was made of a cassette recording of a CD, it would still be possible to find the serial number of the source CD in the watermark.
What I've never understood about the watermark system is what good it would do. Sure, you know this MP3 was ripped from CD#1237853, but unless you know who bought that particular CD, you haven't got a lead.
As far as I can tell, the best they could hope for with this scheme would be to do some sort of region coding in the serial number, allowing the authorities to figure that this pirated MP3 was originally ripped from a CD that was sold in, say, Ohio.
To get better info than that, they would have to demand your ID when buying a CD, and keep a database of what CD serial numbers each person buys. And I don't think that would be cost effective, not to mention that it wouldn't go over too well with the general public.
My guess is that it will eventually be made to work well, and it will eventually be cheap enough for the mainstream, and that, like other high-tech safety features, (anti-lock brakes, traction control, halogen headlights etc.) the typical driver will just use it as an excuse to drive even faster at night and in bad weather, pretty much cancelling out any safety benefits.
You think things are bad now, wait until the namers start using gratuitous self-reference... I'm just waiting for someone to try to name a company "InterCaps"...
I always wondered why "Nova" did any better in English - you wouldn't buy a car called the Giant Atomic Catastrophe or the Unimaginably Huge Fireball, would you?
Yeah, but I don't think you can trademark "Titanium." It's already a word in common usage.
I guess Intel felt it was essential to use a trademarkable name, so competitors (i.e., AMD) couldn't call their chips the same thing as a Real Intel(tm).
Somewhere, somewhen, I read about the choice of "Pentium," and why it was made. "Pent" obviously implies the fifth-generation design, but "Pentium," it was felt, sounded like the name of a metallic element, which I guess they thought was a good thing, given the geek factor of the typical Intel customer.
Presumably they saw that "It-sounds-like-a-metal" thing in Itanium, but I agree it's even stupider sounding than Pentium. When I talk about computers, I feel like an idiot using the word "Pentium" - I usually end up saying "Pee Two" or "Pee Three." No way am I actually going to say "Itanium," at least not out loud.
I always believe that companies that are named after people, usually their founders, have the lamest names.
What's wrong with naming a company after a person? At least that way, they don't have to change the name of the company when the biz changes. Think how many companies will struggle with renaming debacles a few years from now, when everyone realizes clear that putting "Web" or "dot com" in your company name doesn't automatically make you hip and smart. Meanwhile Dell, Ford, Toyota et al. will march right along into the future, building their name recognition every step of the way.
The RIAA now has a deal where it gets a percentage of the price of blank media (CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DATs, etc), on the theory that some of the blank media is depriving the artists and the industry of sales. Its a daffy scheme that doesn't even produce very much revenue, but it's there.
I thought that as part of the deal, recording for personal use (like to play in the car) was specificially and explicitly legalized. Anyone have more info on that angle?
Of course, they can still lobby for all the technical barriers they want to.
Just wanted to second the opinion on American Movie. Went with two friends - we all agreed it was the funniest and most original thing we'd seen in a long time.
More info about Mark and the makers of American Movie can be had at www.americanmovie.com.
I like your point about how manageable a sum 50G$ (Gigadollars) turns out to be. Heck, the federal budget - over 1T$ - makes 50G$ look trivial, especially since the project would take several years. Never mind Microsoft - Gates could finance that personally, as a sort of a hobby. Maybe it's the best solution to the antitrust thing! Make Gates put all that nasty competitive energy into something that doesn't suck! He'd still have a few G$ left over, plus that house of his.
But there's something horrifying about the idea of corporate sponsorship. The place would turn out to be like Disneyland; a relentless, shameless, blatant ad for itself. Fun for the kids, but banal and irritating for anyone over 13.
Not to mention the horror of a Mars vehicle that's "Windows Powered." Shudder.
I see your point, but I think (in the most respectful possible way) that you're a little short-sighted about it.
We (humans) have been starving and dying of disease for all of recorded history. Why would stopping space exploration solve these problems, problems that better minds have pondered, and failed to solve, since before the pyramids were built?
It's not my intent to sound callous about such a thing, but the fact is that our race has been a mess forever. All evidence shows that we as a race either don't know how to solve problems like war, famine, poverty, disease, etc, or we just don't want to.
Throwing money at these problems may have relieved the suffering of some individuals in some cases, but it sure doesn't feel like we're any closer to solving the root political and social causes of such woes. Without figuring that part out, we're just trying to stop arterial bleeding with a band-aid.
Throwing money at the space program, on the other hand, has actually produced successes, both in the sense that we have reached our goals (orbit, moon, etc.) and in the sense that there were tangible beneficial side effects - engineering ones, if not scientific ones.
A pretty good argument could be made that if the US hadn't "wasted" all that money on blue-sky defense and NASA projects, the internet wouldn't exist, computer technology would be years behind where it is now, and Slashdot wouldn't even be here to give voice to our arguments. Many Slashdotters wouldn't have the jobs they have now. The developed world might be poorer and less able to entertain any charitable inclinations toward the third world.
The scientific and engineering benefits of such programs sometimes apply to the problems you're worried about; for example, improved weather prediction (via computer models, computer networks, and satellites) and decreased reaction times (through all that same stuff) has probably played a part in saving a great number of lives through increased agricultural yields and lower food prices, advance warning of hurricanes, floods, etc, and better-coordinated, faster, and more cost-effective relief efforts.
I guess I'm a believer in "learn-by-doing." I think it applies on organizational and maybe even species-wide levels as well as on the individual level. If we try to explore space, we'll learn how to do it (and a lot of things that have to be done along the way) faster, cheaper, and better. If we don't do it, it will forever seem impossibly expensive and risky.
It would be a shame to lock ourselves in the house forever just because it's not yet as tidy inside as we imagine it could be.
Be prepared to pay your taxes
on
A 140GB CD-ROM?
·
· Score: 1
Hollywood will freak. The RIAA will freak. And they'll never let us buy this stuff unless they get a chunk.
1) DVD was intended as computer media from the start, rendering it pretty much completely insecurable. (Software - or more specifically, software-based DVD players - can be cracked. Even if the folks that did it first hadn't gotten lucky, even if the encryption didn't suck, it would have happened eventually.)
2) The developers of the DVD medium and the copyright holders of the DVD movies knew this.
3) The developers and copyright holders decided to use a really lame 40-bit-key encryption system that would get in everyone's way without protecting anything. A system that would have been laughed at in 1970.
So, now, the copyright holders can claim that a pirate not only broke copyright laws, but that said pirate must have engaged in questionably legal reverse-engineering activity to make the copy possible. If the DeCSS system is patented, the studios can claim patent infringement.
It's just one little thing the big-dollar copyright holders are doing to assemble a group of very special laws to protect their wallets.
A huge number of posts here say that 1) Disappearing UI stuff is a cool idea 2) It's debatable whether a touch sensor is really needed to make the UI enhancements mentioned.
Am I the only one that doesn't get it? Why would you want your toolbars, menus, icons etc. to disappear? It sounds very annoying, as well as confusing for newbies.
If you think automatically disappearing UI elements is a neat idea, and you use Win9x/WinNT regularly, try setting your taskbar to "AutoHide", and see if you still like the idea. I tried it for a while. I thought it would be great to get a little extra on-screen real estate. I've since changed my mind. It was always popping up when I didn't want it. It was slow, because I had to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen to pop the taskbar up, then I had to read the taskbar, then choose which item I wanted. When it's visible all the time, I can just move to the button I want directly, and it's much faster.
That's the whole point of a toolbar, it's supposed to be a FAST shortcut to a menu item. If it's invisible, selecting an item will take longer, and the purpose is defeated.
I'd turn off those pop-up tooltips things, too, if I knew how. They're always popping up and obscuring the control I'm really after.
Years ago, I worked as a Macintosh computer lab assistant. There were plenty of users who couldn't handle a mouse with ONE button, and NO strange self-disappearing UI features. I've seen plenty of intelligent folks (like me, sometimes) who still don't know when to double click and when to single click. I know otherwise graceful and coordinated people who have to try several times to complete a single double click successfully. My point is that if we need to change things about the accepted norms for GUIs at this point, I think we need to make them simpler and more consistent, not more complicated and more confusing.
To anyone who is interested in such matters, I'd reccomend the recently-slashdot-mentioned User Interface Hall Of Shame. Among the "Rules Of Thumb" for good UI design is "Make new-user features visible and accessible." Making things disappear clearly violates that one.
Slashdot Mirror
It was my understanding that MP3.com's service allowed a user access to only his/her own legally purchased music. That is, if I uploaded Mozart and you uploaded Beethoven, I could listen to my Mozart over the net, from anywhere in the world. But I could not listen to your Beethoven at all. Similarly, you could listen to your Beethoven, but not my Mozart.
That's not like your freehtmlbooks.com example. It's more the equivalent of e-mailing something to yourself, so you can pick it up in another real-world location. It's not intended to let you share your music, it's intended to make it more portable.
This is why I don't understand the ruling; there doesn't appear to be any copyright violation, really. I'm allowed to make a copy of a CD for my own use. I'm allowed to use the US postal service to mail the copy to another place. Somehow, the judge feels that doing the same thing electronically is functionally and legally different. I can't understand how that could be.
I don't understand this ruling. MP3.com isn't making the copy of the music, after all - the users are. They're using MP3.com's tools and systems to do it, but the copy comes at the user's request, for the user's benefit. It seems very strange to me that MP3.com would even be forced into the "fair use" corner - they really are just a storage cabinet in this case.
Anyone have a link to the judge's own words, instead of just an article *about* the judge's decision? Maye the original document would make the litigator's arguments a little clearer.
I mean really, there are at last count, what, 6.02 X 10^23 TV channels out there. Does the government need to subsudize TV?
Well, if you want to have TV that doesn't completely suck, then yeah, apparently so. Subsidize PBS and you get "The Civil War," "Frontline," "Nova," etc. Turn things over to the free market and you get "Jerry Springer" and "Baywatch." 'Nuff said.
If you can get past the liberal propaganda and PC nature of their programs, yes they are generally well done.
Still PBS's time has come and gone... what a waste of my tax money, a big freakin' ad for a failed company.
Gee, I think a lot of PBS shows have an obvious right-wing slant to them. I guess it's all relative.
Government grants (taxes) are only a small part of PBS funding these days - around 16%, as you can see for yourself at PBS Financials.
Government grants to PBS came to about $47 million in 1999, or about 17 cents per US resident.
In a lot of ways, the cphack and DeCSS cases strike me as a lot of pointless legal wrangling. Like a misused antibiotic, these cases are going to make things worse for the Mattels and MPAAs of the future, not better.
Given the treatment the authors of cphack and DeCSS have had, the authors security cracking programs of the future would be wise to take pains to hide thier identities. And then what will Big Brother do?
The next DeCSS could be distributed strictly by Napster/Wrapster/GNUtella/Usenet. Then there would not be any one person the Powers That Be can crucify as an example to the rest of us. There won't be a handful of mirrored sites to slap with subpeonas, there won't be a teenager to rake over the coals in the back room at the police station. The program would be everywhere, yet nowhere that's worth going after.
I just don't see what Mattel and the MPAA hope to achieve. They will probably win all the court battles, and yet they will gain nothing.
Of course, when you buy a CD with a credit card, you do present your ID to the store, don't you?
What an interesting idea. You're right, paying with a credit card opens one up to that sort of abuse, doesn't it? Cash purchases, though, are (for now) anonymous.
But it would still cost the record biz a mint - every CD package would have to bear a sticker with the CD's serial number in bar-code, or some similar scheme, so the checkout computer could match up the purchaser and the purchased material's serial numbers. Manufacturing the CDs and packaging could get a lot more expensive. Either the CDs and the packaging would have to be carefully tracked to ensure they matched up, or the packager would have to have a quick way to scan every single disc for the watermark when putting the disks in the cases. Then of course the retailers would have to cooperate by setting up their systems to read the extra bar codes and reporting everything to Big Brother.
It's certainly possible, but I doubt the record biz is likely to foot the bill, so I'm not worried about it just yet. Heck, my favorite CD shops allow trade-ins, which sidestep the money thing all together.
Everything I've ever read about watermarking indicated that not only was the watermark intended to survive a simple D/A/D pathway but even conversion to and from a (very!) lossy format - like MP3. In fact, surviving MP3 (and its ilk) is pretty much the reason for using such an animal. They can be much more sophisticated than merely twiddling a few least-significant bits. With powerful, modern DSP at one's disposal, I'm sure they could base watermarks on things like subtule (to the ear) frequency-response variations, minor (again, to the ear) inter-channel phase anamolies, and other far more complicated things that I'd never understand. I'm sorry that I don't have a link to more info on this topic. Anyone else?
So if one were to create an MP3 that was made of a cassette recording of a CD, it would still be possible to find the serial number of the source CD in the watermark.
What I've never understood about the watermark system is what good it would do. Sure, you know this MP3 was ripped from CD#1237853, but unless you know who bought that particular CD, you haven't got a lead.
As far as I can tell, the best they could hope for with this scheme would be to do some sort of region coding in the serial number, allowing the authorities to figure that this pirated MP3 was originally ripped from a CD that was sold in, say, Ohio.
To get better info than that, they would have to demand your ID when buying a CD, and keep a database of what CD serial numbers each person buys. And I don't think that would be cost effective, not to mention that it wouldn't go over too well with the general public.
Good thing, too.
My guess is that it will eventually be made to work well, and it will eventually be cheap enough for the mainstream, and that, like other high-tech safety features, (anti-lock brakes, traction control, halogen headlights etc.) the typical driver will just use it as an excuse to drive even faster at night and in bad weather, pretty much cancelling out any safety benefits.
From id's Graeme Devine:
software piracy has become such a serious issue that we need to use schemes such as CD keys to protect our future sales.
I'm all for anything that keeps id software around, but what protection does a CD key really give you, anyway?
You think things are bad now, wait until the namers start using gratuitous self-reference... I'm just waiting for someone to try to name a company "InterCaps"...
Well, almost too late.
I always wondered why "Nova" did any better in English - you wouldn't buy a car called the Giant Atomic Catastrophe or the Unimaginably Huge Fireball, would you?
Yeah, but I don't think you can trademark "Titanium." It's already a word in common usage.
I guess Intel felt it was essential to use a trademarkable name, so competitors (i.e., AMD) couldn't call their chips the same thing as a Real Intel(tm).
Somewhere, somewhen, I read about the choice of "Pentium," and why it was made. "Pent" obviously implies the fifth-generation design, but "Pentium," it was felt, sounded like the name of a metallic element, which I guess they thought was a good thing, given the geek factor of the typical Intel customer.
Presumably they saw that "It-sounds-like-a-metal" thing in Itanium, but I agree it's even stupider sounding than Pentium. When I talk about computers, I feel like an idiot using the word "Pentium" - I usually end up saying "Pee Two" or "Pee Three." No way am I actually going to say "Itanium," at least not out loud.
I always believe that companies that are named after people, usually their founders, have the lamest names.
What's wrong with naming a company after a person? At least that way, they don't have to change the name of the company when the biz changes. Think how many companies will struggle with renaming debacles a few years from now, when everyone realizes clear that putting "Web" or "dot com" in your company name doesn't automatically make you hip and smart. Meanwhile Dell, Ford, Toyota et al. will march right along into the future, building their name recognition every step of the way.
The RIAA now has a deal where it gets a percentage of the price of blank media (CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DATs, etc), on the theory that some of the blank media is depriving the artists and the industry of sales. Its a daffy scheme that doesn't even produce very much revenue, but it's there.
I thought that as part of the deal, recording for personal use (like to play in the car) was specificially and explicitly legalized. Anyone have more info on that angle?
Of course, they can still lobby for all the technical barriers they want to.
Just wanted to second the opinion on American Movie. Went with two friends - we all agreed it was the funniest and most original thing we'd seen in a long time.
More info about Mark and the makers of American Movie can be had at www.americanmovie.com.
I like your point about how manageable a sum 50G$ (Gigadollars) turns out to be. Heck, the federal budget - over 1T$ - makes 50G$ look trivial, especially since the project would take several years. Never mind Microsoft - Gates could finance that personally, as a sort of a hobby. Maybe it's the best solution to the antitrust thing! Make Gates put all that nasty competitive energy into something that doesn't suck! He'd still have a few G$ left over, plus that house of his.
But there's something horrifying about the idea of corporate sponsorship. The place would turn out to be like Disneyland; a relentless, shameless, blatant ad for itself. Fun for the kids, but banal and irritating for anyone over 13.
Not to mention the horror of a Mars vehicle that's "Windows Powered." Shudder.
I see your point, but I think (in the most respectful possible way) that you're a little short-sighted about it.
We (humans) have been starving and dying of disease for all of recorded history. Why would stopping space exploration solve these problems, problems that better minds have pondered, and failed to solve, since before the pyramids were built?
It's not my intent to sound callous about such a thing, but the fact is that our race has been a mess forever. All evidence shows that we as a race either don't know how to solve problems like war, famine, poverty, disease, etc, or we just don't want to.
Throwing money at these problems may have relieved the suffering of some individuals in some cases, but it sure doesn't feel like we're any closer to solving the root political and social causes of such woes. Without figuring that part out, we're just trying to stop arterial bleeding with a band-aid.
Throwing money at the space program, on the other hand, has actually produced successes, both in the sense that we have reached our goals (orbit, moon, etc.) and in the sense that there were tangible beneficial side effects - engineering ones, if not scientific ones.
A pretty good argument could be made that if the US hadn't "wasted" all that money on blue-sky defense and NASA projects, the internet wouldn't exist, computer technology would be years behind where it is now, and Slashdot wouldn't even be here to give voice to our arguments. Many Slashdotters wouldn't have the jobs they have now. The developed world might be poorer and less able to entertain any charitable inclinations toward the third world.
The scientific and engineering benefits of such programs sometimes apply to the problems you're worried about; for example, improved weather prediction (via computer models, computer networks, and satellites) and decreased reaction times (through all that same stuff) has probably played a part in saving a great number of lives through increased agricultural yields and lower food prices, advance warning of hurricanes, floods, etc, and better-coordinated, faster, and more cost-effective relief efforts.
I guess I'm a believer in "learn-by-doing." I think it applies on organizational and maybe even species-wide levels as well as on the individual level. If we try to explore space, we'll learn how to do it (and a lot of things that have to be done along the way) faster, cheaper, and better. If we don't do it, it will forever seem impossibly expensive and risky.
It would be a shame to lock ourselves in the house forever just because it's not yet as tidy inside as we imagine it could be.
Hollywood will freak. The RIAA will freak. And they'll never let us buy this stuff unless they get a chunk.
Grr.
My spell-checker suggests that the correct spelling of "whois" is actually "whoops." How appropriate.
Back in 1988, when Gateway was young, they sold i386/20Mhz systems that used i386/16Mhz chips. But even at the time, they made no secret of it.
There is of course, the possibility that Divx is uncracked because no one tried - no one liked it enough to bother.
It's also possible that it's been done, but rendered irrelevant and obscure by the death of the format.
It strikes me that
1) DVD was intended as computer media from the start, rendering it pretty much completely insecurable. (Software - or more specifically, software-based DVD players - can be cracked. Even if the folks that did it first hadn't gotten lucky, even if the encryption didn't suck, it would have happened eventually.)
2) The developers of the DVD medium and the copyright holders of the DVD movies knew this.
3) The developers and copyright holders decided to use a really lame 40-bit-key encryption system that would get in everyone's way without protecting anything. A system that would have been laughed at in 1970.
So, now, the copyright holders can claim that a pirate not only broke copyright laws, but that said pirate must have engaged in questionably legal reverse-engineering activity to make the copy possible. If the DeCSS system is patented, the studios can claim patent infringement.
It's just one little thing the big-dollar copyright holders are doing to assemble a group of very special laws to protect their wallets.
Good review. Sounds like a good book; I've enjoyed Bear's other books, I'll be sure to give this a look when I have time.
Silly little nitpick: you said:
Humans have spent the last hundred years or so modifying nature to suit ourselves.
I'd argue that humans have been doing that since at least the dawn of agriculture.
A huge number of posts here say that
1) Disappearing UI stuff is a cool idea
2) It's debatable whether a touch sensor is really needed to make the UI enhancements mentioned.
Am I the only one that doesn't get it? Why would you want your toolbars, menus, icons etc. to disappear? It sounds very annoying, as well as confusing for newbies.
If you think automatically disappearing UI elements is a neat idea, and you use Win9x/WinNT regularly, try setting your taskbar to "AutoHide", and see if you still like the idea. I tried it for a while. I thought it would be great to get a little extra on-screen real estate. I've since changed my mind. It was always popping up when I didn't want it. It was slow, because I had to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen to pop the taskbar up, then I had to read the taskbar, then choose which item I wanted. When it's visible all the time, I can just move to the button I want directly, and it's much faster.
That's the whole point of a toolbar, it's supposed to be a FAST shortcut to a menu item. If it's invisible, selecting an item will take longer, and the purpose is defeated.
I'd turn off those pop-up tooltips things, too, if I knew how. They're always popping up and obscuring the control I'm really after.
Years ago, I worked as a Macintosh computer lab assistant. There were plenty of users who couldn't handle a mouse with ONE button, and NO strange self-disappearing UI features. I've seen plenty of intelligent folks (like me, sometimes) who still don't know when to double click and when to single click. I know otherwise graceful and coordinated people who have to try several times to complete a single double click successfully. My point is that if we need to change things about the accepted norms for GUIs at this point, I think we need to make them simpler and more consistent, not more complicated and more confusing.
To anyone who is interested in such matters, I'd reccomend the recently-slashdot-mentioned User Interface Hall Of Shame. Among the "Rules Of Thumb" for good UI design is "Make new-user features visible and accessible." Making things disappear clearly violates that one.
In regards to #3:
Dell is currently advertising PCs with "PC700 RDRAM at 356Mhz"
Not having kept up, I don't know what RDRAM is, why it would be called "PC700" and only run at 356Mhz, etc. But it sounds faster than 100 or 133 Mhz.