The photos show the debris field, holes blown through the security fence by flying debris and the bricks on the walls of the flame trench ripped away. Interesting stuff.
If Adobe is developing a superior product for Apple's computer/OS competition, but not for the Mac, one has to wonder if this is a just wee little bit of payback for the iPhone/Flash Light drama from a few weeks back.
...how do we check our sites to ensure that this code has not been planted. The article gives no clue at all. It doesn't even identify if is platform or technology specific, etc. Just that someone else has set up a huge botnet.
Even sysadmins and webmasters that use best practices and diligently patch, etc. can be gotten because there are always undisclosed holes that are utilized. In fact, were I in that game and I figured out something to defeat security, it would keep it under my ragged black hat and never share that info.
Google does have some cursory protection against adult material appearing. From the Google site's Preference's page:
Google's SafeSearch blocks web pages containing explicit sexual content from appearing in search results.
Granted it is not a completely effective deterrent, but the Vivid web site offers little more than an assent click and age verification -- not exactly a strong wall to keep out minors either.
That leads me to believe that Vivid is more interested in squeezing out the little guys (pun unintended) in the business and gaining larger market share through greater obscurity on search engines.
Agreed. That and the widespread adoption of 1080p sets is starting to happen, because of price. Blu-Ray players are starting to come to Earth (I recently got one for $200) and they too are starting to be adopted.
Given that most major network shows, sporting events and movie channels are now in HD, having a standard-res recorder is virtually useless for me for the purposes of archiving shows and events. It looks like the old-style DVD to CDR rips used to back in the day.
Compared to Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, the difference is astonishing. Given that series disks for weekly shows and movies are coming out in one or the other (or both) formats now, it's just easier to purchase the disks and watch them in the preferred format -- and oh, save a lot of time by so doing.
That doesn't mean I wouldn't like to have a 1080p capable DVDR for live events, because rarely if ever are they played back in situ.
It's amazing that this film was passed over for an Academy Award for Special Effects because "using computers was cheating." Times have certainly changed in that regard.
One of the great questions of "Blade Runner" is whether Deckard (Harrison Ford) is, or is not, a replicant himself.
"Knowing" Phillip K. Dick (through reading most of his works) I think personally the answer is a yes, but the debate has raged on for a long time, at least when the subject comes up. Others say no, and that's the greatness of the movie: you can't be completely sure.
Read #14 of the Blade Runner FAQ here and ponder it for yourself.
For...
Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford have stated that Deckard was meant to be a
replicant. In Details magazine (US) October 1992 Ford says:
"Blade Runner was not one of my favorite films. I tangled
with Ridley. The biggest problem was that at the end, he wanted the
audience to find out that Deckard was a replicant. I fought that
because I felt the audience needed somebody to cheer for."
Against...
- Could you trust a replicant to kill other replicants? Why did the police
trust Deckard?
- Having Deckard as a replicant implies a conspiracy between the police and
Tyrell.
Sure, "faster" sensors will be a boon to the consumer market, and will surely have some applications in the pro market as well -- existing light press photography come to mind.
For me, though, the problem is not so much speed as it is noise and dynamic range. That's because a lot of the time I still do fine-art level landscape and studio glamour photography -- neither of which are speed starved, but even the finest digitals could still use even less noise and wider dynamic ranges.
While DSLRs have a huge advantage over handhelds in this regard, it would still be nice to see improvements in s/n such that the darker zones maintained their clarity and detail. Even the finest Canon cameras suffer to a degree in this regard, at least for people with very high standards. Some of us have those standards because that is what our clients demand - and in some cases we still must use film to meet their criteria.
It's a virtual law that to obtain the best noise performance you need to use the lowest ISO speed that the camera can attain. So instead of bottoming out at 100, like most DSLRs, I'd like to see 25. Or better, 12.
There are a myriad of coppper outside plant (the industry term for copping cabling and accessories) here at Tyco Electronics Outside Products and here at 3M's telecom products pages among many others. There are a bunch of vendors selling cables, and all of the other goodies one might need to construct or maintain a POTS (plain old telephone service) copper plant system. Tyco Electronics still has a healthy business selling sealed splice closure, NIDS and other equipment. 3M's business generates notable profits for them in this product sector as well.To say it is unavailable is at best ridiculous.
In fact, one need not look far to find the oldest of old telephone cabling still in service: the old paper wrapped twisted pair cables with lead Western Electric splice closures. There are plenty of old-style WECO terminals, surge protectors and everything else. Many of these items were placed in service over fifty years ago and due to robust engineering are still in use today. Verizon is a huge buyer of these items.
While all of that are facts, it is also a fact that outside plant is shifting FiOS at a rapid pace. Despite quantum leaps in copper technology, a single-mode fiber has a very distinct advantage: infinite bandwidth. It is the future, plain a simple, and the much anticipated "copper cliff" (where placement of copper plant outside the US drops precipitously) has been passed for a few years now.
The question then becomes how long the copper legacy systems will be supported. The best answer is probably as long as it takes to make them completely superflous. Many industry best-guesses are putting that time at 10-15 at max.
No space launch is ever "routine." While the world (especially the Russians and the US) are roughly fifty years past the days of rockets usually exploding rather than flying, there is still a great deal of risk involved whether the payload is a satellite for cable tv, a manned mission to orbit the Earth or even a robotic mission to another celestial body.
People seem to forget the number of failures exploring Mars. The Americans lost the Observer, the Climate Orbiter, Deep Space 2, and the Polar Lander since 1990. The Russians lost Mars 96. The Euros lost Beagle 2 -- all of which offset the spectacular successes of the Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity, and the Mars Reconnaisance Observer. So yeah, it's "routine" all right to travel the vast distance from Earth and explore the nearest planetary body.
Linux users do not pay for software; that's the nature of the beast.
Please, tell me how much the Flash plug-in for Internet Explorer costs. I forget.
I don't see what the incentive is for Microsoft to support Linux.
Another view is that they should support their paying customers who develop Silverlight content for their websites who may not give a hoot about Microsoft v. Linux and simply want the people viewing the sites they create to see all of their content no matter the OS platform they are using.
Of course, this could backfire on Microsoft too -- without all of the pertinent platforms supported, I won't migrate from Creative Studio to Microsoft products because I am not going to go to my customers and say that my preferred development platform is going to reduce their potential viewers.
The NY Times prints corrections on a near daily basis. Go and search for them on your web site, it will not take you long. The point is not whether the NY Times is an august source of journalism, it is. The fact is, however, that they make mistakes as does any journalistic entity and that they too correct them, as does Wikipedia. Or anyone else for that matter. It is virtually impossible for any compendium to be 100% accurate - and those inaccuracies are hardly "world news."
For example, did you know that A picture with a report in the National Briefing column on Saturday about a revelation by Fife Symington, the former governor of Arizona, that he saw a U.F.O. in 1997 was published in error in some copies. The photograph showed Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky, not Mr. Symington. Missed that on the BBC this morning, but there it is on the Times online corrections for the day:
As for Wikipedia itself, anyone who has read much about its accuracy knows that it is relatively close to the online edition of Encylopedia Britannica, at least in terms of the areas that the British journal Nature looked at:
However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature -- the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science -- suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.
The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three. In other words, Wikipedia is exactly what we learned in elementary school (or should have): encyclopedias are good starting points but are not single sources. They are good to tell you who won the 1983 NCAA men's basketball championship (NC State) but not necessarily authoritive on hot-button political issues like abortion, etc., and that a resposible and careful researcher would go to that dusty old anachronism, the library.
Bias. Slander/Libel. Misrepresentation of academic credentials...and other malfeasances. These are unique to wikipedia? Hardly. These very things happen in the mainstream mass media from outlets we all know -- for example, the New York Times. Have they forgotten about Jayson Blair?
Blair is only one example of many. Fox News has had David Milloy, discredited author of junkscience.com on their payroll for years. Reuters has been shown to doctor photographs of Beiruit. And so forth and so on. Yet these organizations will tell you that they maintain the highest standards, and that they can be trusted. Thing is, their history shows that they make mistakes too. That they have been burned by liars and miscreants in their employ.
So what's the real issue here?
It has to come down to money, somehow, somewhere. Wikipedia is a free open-source reference center that sees widespread usage. This surely has to displease those that operate similar services in the for-pay space.
Yes, wikipedia needs to evolve and put in controls to limit vandalism, bias and academic fraud. But that does not imply for one second that other sources are any better and that they are free and clear of these problems themselves.
Considering that the Rutan/Scaled Composites and the SpaceX efforts had two completely different sets of objectives, and that Scaled met their objectives completely, that is, winning the X Prize, while the SpaceX second attempt failed in its own mission, what exactly is the point here?
To be sure, Rutan and company had setbacks in their early efforts. They engineered around them and ultimately met their goal and took home not only the prize but also the investments necessary for funding another generation of their technology. SpaceX will likely do the same, as it seems that they have a handle on what it was that caused the premature end of their test mission yesterday. That said, however, there is little basis to compare the two companies on. SpaceShip One was never meant to fly as high as is the Falcon. Nor was Falcon designed to carry human payloads, which entails another couple magnitudes of design complications and considerations.
Instead of negatively trying to compare one to the other, perhaps it is wiser to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.
Google is a trademarked name, and as such they are required to aggressively defend it or they will lose it.
There was even a case where Hershey Foods sued Simon and Schuster over using Hershey-owned images and trademarks in a book about their marketing of the book "Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire and Utopian Dreams." Hershey Foods ultimately lost, but by law had they not attempted to defend their mark they could well have been facing an attempt to have the mark thrown out.
But a good old fashioned tar and feathering and forced to write I am a scumbag 100,000 times on a white board might be a fitting punishment for his fraud.
IBM's lawyers are probably busy up in Armonk putting the finishing touches on Project "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" -- in which they countersue SCO for even more stuff than is in the countersuit already in the courts.
For damages, they ask for SCO. Not money -- the company. Darl goes with the deal.
When this happens, Phase II of "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" kicks in. Darl will be subjected to forced feminization and will assume his role as the new cleaning lady at the IBM plant in Matamoros, Mexico.
And to think, they will do it just for fun. Plus photos to send to Billy G as a warning to not try that again.
Microsoft is trying to make users have good hygiene -- that is, don't run as a super-user unless you need to. Well-meaning and well intended -- and a good idea. Ultimately, however, Aunt Sally is not going to deal with it for long, and you, the unofficial family Helpdesk tech, are not going to like all of the calls you get from apoplectic relatives dismayed that they suddenly can't open this that or the other because they do not understand the paradigm.
What will happen is what always happens: when there is a "problem" someone "fixes" it. In this case, the "problem" is the security model. I suspect that there will be a 3rd party "fix" that blasts through all the well-meaning security and basically restores the user-as-root scenario that Windows has operated in since forever.
So, you are saying that you probably messed up Firefox by loading one extension or the other, imply that you have no idea what it was, and then turn around and claim that IE7 renders pages quicker in pristine form?
You're right. It wasn't scientifically conducted, even if you ignore the variables of your net connection. Not knowing exactly what you were testing with Firefox, etc., and then comparing it to a new install of another browser is outside of common sense.
However, the fact that you were honest about that (unlike certain marketing people in Redmond, WA ever will be) makes it an interesting comparison.
When all is said and done, it is the market that will ultimately decide whether DRM is a "good" idea.
If, for example, the record companies leave the installed base of CD players unable to play the latest and greatest CD they are pimping, it will not sell.
Yes, I know it is not so simple, but really - think of it this way - if the next gen of DVD players is too cumbersome to use because of DRM, the whole platform will fail. Think of DiVX, the old rental DVD scheme that Circuit City and other sold for a time. You might have a hard time finding it today.
Patents cover working inventions, and TiVo was the first complete system that did what is perfectly obvious now.
You have to think back to when the invention was made, and ask yourself if it were perfectly obvious to build a system to do a given job using the technologies available at the time.
Consider, for example, Mauchly and Eckert when they began building the first working electronic computer. Atanasoff may have built a digital computer of sorts in Iowa a few years before, but he was rejected by the USPO because it did not work. Mauchly and Eckert, had they been more timely in their application, would have easily been granted a far-ranging patent for the electronic digital computer because their machine ENIAC worked as it was supposed to work and also was the first to do so in its field.
Fast forwarding to today, digital computing is perfectly obvious. To paraphrase Pres Eckert, ENIAC has been reduced to the head of a pin. That does not mean that Seymore Cray, Steve Wozniak and other computing pioneers do not owe a tip of the lid to Eckert and Mauchly, because they are the giants whose shoulders they stood upon.
Back to TiVo, they were the first. They deserve the patent because they did invent something, and before it was invented it did not exist in that form. It's obviousness today is irrelevant. The date of disclosure, however, is germaine.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean the one targetted for a test launch next March? (link)
The same Ares that has had key components tested? (link)
Yup, it's just in AutoCAD, or more likely Pro/E.
here are some closeup photos of the pad damage.
The photos show the debris field, holes blown through the security fence by flying debris and the bricks on the walls of the flame trench ripped away. Interesting stuff.
If Adobe is developing a superior product for Apple's computer/OS competition, but not for the Mac, one has to wonder if this is a just wee little bit of payback for the iPhone/Flash Light drama from a few weeks back.
Sure seems like quid pro quo to me.
That will teach Apple to open Pandora's Box....
...how do we check our sites to ensure that this code has not been planted. The article gives no clue at all. It doesn't even identify if is platform or technology specific, etc. Just that someone else has set up a huge botnet.
Even sysadmins and webmasters that use best practices and diligently patch, etc. can be gotten because there are always undisclosed holes that are utilized. In fact, were I in that game and I figured out something to defeat security, it would keep it under my ragged black hat and never share that info.
As we speak, their combined lobbyists are no doubt preparing a line of battle in the halls of Congress.
This may actually work out to be the catalyst to getting Congress to solve the patent trolls problem once and for all.
Google's SafeSearch blocks web pages containing explicit sexual content from appearing in search results.
Granted it is not a completely effective deterrent, but the Vivid web site offers little more than an assent click and age verification -- not exactly a strong wall to keep out minors either.
That leads me to believe that Vivid is more interested in squeezing out the little guys (pun unintended) in the business and gaining larger market share through greater obscurity on search engines.
Agreed. That and the widespread adoption of 1080p sets is starting to happen, because of price. Blu-Ray players are starting to come to Earth (I recently got one for $200) and they too are starting to be adopted.
Given that most major network shows, sporting events and movie channels are now in HD, having a standard-res recorder is virtually useless for me for the purposes of archiving shows and events. It looks like the old-style DVD to CDR rips used to back in the day.
Compared to Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, the difference is astonishing. Given that series disks for weekly shows and movies are coming out in one or the other (or both) formats now, it's just easier to purchase the disks and watch them in the preferred format -- and oh, save a lot of time by so doing.
That doesn't mean I wouldn't like to have a 1080p capable DVDR for live events, because rarely if ever are they played back in situ.
It's amazing that this film was passed over for an Academy Award for Special Effects because "using computers was cheating." Times have certainly changed in that regard.
One of the great questions of "Blade Runner" is whether Deckard (Harrison Ford) is, or is not, a replicant himself.
"Knowing" Phillip K. Dick (through reading most of his works) I think personally the answer is a yes, but the debate has raged on for a long time, at least when the subject comes up. Others say no, and that's the greatness of the movie: you can't be completely sure.
Read #14 of the Blade Runner FAQ here and ponder it for yourself.
For...
Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford have stated that Deckard was meant to be a
replicant. In Details magazine (US) October 1992 Ford says:
"Blade Runner was not one of my favorite films. I tangled
with Ridley. The biggest problem was that at the end, he wanted the
audience to find out that Deckard was a replicant. I fought that
because I felt the audience needed somebody to cheer for."
Against...
- Could you trust a replicant to kill other replicants? Why did the police
trust Deckard?
- Having Deckard as a replicant implies a conspiracy between the police and
Tyrell.
And so forth and so on...
Sure, "faster" sensors will be a boon to the consumer market, and will surely have some applications in the pro market as well -- existing light press photography come to mind.
For me, though, the problem is not so much speed as it is noise and dynamic range. That's because a lot of the time I still do fine-art level landscape and studio glamour photography -- neither of which are speed starved, but even the finest digitals could still use even less noise and wider dynamic ranges.
While DSLRs have a huge advantage over handhelds in this regard, it would still be nice to see improvements in s/n such that the darker zones maintained their clarity and detail. Even the finest Canon cameras suffer to a degree in this regard, at least for people with very high standards. Some of us have those standards because that is what our clients demand - and in some cases we still must use film to meet their criteria.
It's a virtual law that to obtain the best noise performance you need to use the lowest ISO speed that the camera can attain. So instead of bottoming out at 100, like most DSLRs, I'd like to see 25. Or better, 12.
For more info, visit http://www.normankoren.com/digital_tonality.html
In fact, one need not look far to find the oldest of old telephone cabling still in service: the old paper wrapped twisted pair cables with lead Western Electric splice closures. There are plenty of old-style WECO terminals, surge protectors and everything else. Many of these items were placed in service over fifty years ago and due to robust engineering are still in use today. Verizon is a huge buyer of these items.
While all of that are facts, it is also a fact that outside plant is shifting FiOS at a rapid pace. Despite quantum leaps in copper technology, a single-mode fiber has a very distinct advantage: infinite bandwidth. It is the future, plain a simple, and the much anticipated "copper cliff" (where placement of copper plant outside the US drops precipitously) has been passed for a few years now.
The question then becomes how long the copper legacy systems will be supported. The best answer is probably as long as it takes to make them completely superflous. Many industry best-guesses are putting that time at 10-15 at max.
No space launch is ever "routine." While the world (especially the Russians and the US) are roughly fifty years past the days of rockets usually exploding rather than flying, there is still a great deal of risk involved whether the payload is a satellite for cable tv, a manned mission to orbit the Earth or even a robotic mission to another celestial body.
People seem to forget the number of failures exploring Mars. The Americans lost the Observer, the Climate Orbiter, Deep Space 2, and the Polar Lander since 1990. The Russians lost Mars 96. The Euros lost Beagle 2 -- all of which offset the spectacular successes of the Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity, and the Mars Reconnaisance Observer. So yeah, it's "routine" all right to travel the vast distance from Earth and explore the nearest planetary body.
Space is, in fact, far from routinely explored.
Please, tell me how much the Flash plug-in for Internet Explorer costs. I forget.
I don't see what the incentive is for Microsoft to support Linux.
Another view is that they should support their paying customers who develop Silverlight content for their websites who may not give a hoot about Microsoft v. Linux and simply want the people viewing the sites they create to see all of their content no matter the OS platform they are using.
Of course, this could backfire on Microsoft too -- without all of the pertinent platforms supported, I won't migrate from Creative Studio to Microsoft products because I am not going to go to my customers and say that my preferred development platform is going to reduce their potential viewers.
For example, did you know that A picture with a report in the National Briefing column on Saturday about a revelation by Fife Symington, the former governor of Arizona, that he saw a U.F.O. in 1997 was published in error in some copies. The photograph showed Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky, not Mr. Symington. Missed that on the BBC this morning, but there it is on the Times online corrections for the day:
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/pageoneplus/correction
But feel free to miss the larger point, feh.
As for Wikipedia itself, anyone who has read much about its accuracy knows that it is relatively close to the online edition of Encylopedia Britannica, at least in terms of the areas that the British journal Nature looked at:
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/43890
However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature -- the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science -- suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.
The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three. In other words, Wikipedia is exactly what we learned in elementary school (or should have): encyclopedias are good starting points but are not single sources. They are good to tell you who won the 1983 NCAA men's basketball championship (NC State) but not necessarily authoritive on hot-button political issues like abortion, etc., and that a resposible and careful researcher would go to that dusty old anachronism, the library.
Bias. Slander/Libel. Misrepresentation of academic credentials...and other malfeasances. These are unique to wikipedia? Hardly. These very things happen in the mainstream mass media from outlets we all know -- for example, the New York Times. Have they forgotten about Jayson Blair?
Blair is only one example of many. Fox News has had David Milloy, discredited author of junkscience.com on their payroll for years. Reuters has been shown to doctor photographs of Beiruit. And so forth and so on. Yet these organizations will tell you that they maintain the highest standards, and that they can be trusted. Thing is, their history shows that they make mistakes too. That they have been burned by liars and miscreants in their employ.
So what's the real issue here?
It has to come down to money, somehow, somewhere. Wikipedia is a free open-source reference center that sees widespread usage. This surely has to displease those that operate similar services in the for-pay space.
Yes, wikipedia needs to evolve and put in controls to limit vandalism, bias and academic fraud. But that does not imply for one second that other sources are any better and that they are free and clear of these problems themselves.
Considering that the Rutan/Scaled Composites and the SpaceX efforts had two completely different sets of objectives, and that Scaled met their objectives completely, that is, winning the X Prize, while the SpaceX second attempt failed in its own mission, what exactly is the point here?
To be sure, Rutan and company had setbacks in their early efforts. They engineered around them and ultimately met their goal and took home not only the prize but also the investments necessary for funding another generation of their technology. SpaceX will likely do the same, as it seems that they have a handle on what it was that caused the premature end of their test mission yesterday. That said, however, there is little basis to compare the two companies on. SpaceShip One was never meant to fly as high as is the Falcon. Nor was Falcon designed to carry human payloads, which entails another couple magnitudes of design complications and considerations.
Instead of negatively trying to compare one to the other, perhaps it is wiser to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.
Google is a trademarked name, and as such they are required to aggressively defend it or they will lose it.
There was even a case where Hershey Foods sued Simon and Schuster over using Hershey-owned images and trademarks in a book about their marketing of the book "Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire and Utopian Dreams." Hershey Foods ultimately lost, but by law had they not attempted to defend their mark they could well have been facing an attempt to have the mark thrown out.
What Google is doing is much the same.
"Need" is subjective.
Once upon a time, Bill Gates said we would never "need" more than 640K.
Once upon a time, mainframes only had 32K of RAM -- and that was a vast amount more than their predecessors.
The '286 came out and was primarily aimed at the server and workstation market. "No one will ever need all of that power."
Thing is, people always "need" more speed, more RAM and more storage. And they'll pay for it too, so Intel may "need" to sell 8X cores.
But a good old fashioned tar and feathering and forced to write I am a scumbag 100,000 times on a white board might be a fitting punishment for his fraud.
IBM's lawyers are probably busy up in Armonk putting the finishing touches on Project "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" -- in which they countersue SCO for even more stuff than is in the countersuit already in the courts.
For damages, they ask for SCO. Not money -- the company. Darl goes with the deal.
When this happens, Phase II of "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" kicks in. Darl will be subjected to forced feminization and will assume his role as the new cleaning lady at the IBM plant in Matamoros, Mexico.
And to think, they will do it just for fun. Plus photos to send to Billy G as a warning to not try that again.
Good for you, Freeuser. Seriously. A mea culpa on Slashdot is as rare as an honest press release from SCO. You buck the trend.
Microsoft is trying to make users have good hygiene -- that is, don't run as a super-user unless you need to. Well-meaning and well intended -- and a good idea. Ultimately, however, Aunt Sally is not going to deal with it for long, and you, the unofficial family Helpdesk tech, are not going to like all of the calls you get from apoplectic relatives dismayed that they suddenly can't open this that or the other because they do not understand the paradigm.
What will happen is what always happens: when there is a "problem" someone "fixes" it. In this case, the "problem" is the security model. I suspect that there will be a 3rd party "fix" that blasts through all the well-meaning security and basically restores the user-as-root scenario that Windows has operated in since forever.
So, you are saying that you probably messed up Firefox by loading one extension or the other, imply that you have no idea what it was, and then turn around and claim that IE7 renders pages quicker in pristine form?
You're right. It wasn't scientifically conducted, even if you ignore the variables of your net connection. Not knowing exactly what you were testing with Firefox, etc., and then comparing it to a new install of another browser is outside of common sense.
However, the fact that you were honest about that (unlike certain marketing people in Redmond, WA ever will be) makes it an interesting comparison.
When all is said and done, it is the market that will ultimately decide whether DRM is a "good" idea.
If, for example, the record companies leave the installed base of CD players unable to play the latest and greatest CD they are pimping, it will not sell.
Yes, I know it is not so simple, but really - think of it this way - if the next gen of DVD players is too cumbersome to use because of DRM, the whole platform will fail. Think of DiVX, the old rental DVD scheme that Circuit City and other sold for a time. You might have a hard time finding it today.
You have to think back to when the invention was made, and ask yourself if it were perfectly obvious to build a system to do a given job using the technologies available at the time.
Consider, for example, Mauchly and Eckert when they began building the first working electronic computer. Atanasoff may have built a digital computer of sorts in Iowa a few years before, but he was rejected by the USPO because it did not work. Mauchly and Eckert, had they been more timely in their application, would have easily been granted a far-ranging patent for the electronic digital computer because their machine ENIAC worked as it was supposed to work and also was the first to do so in its field.
Fast forwarding to today, digital computing is perfectly obvious. To paraphrase Pres Eckert, ENIAC has been reduced to the head of a pin. That does not mean that Seymore Cray, Steve Wozniak and other computing pioneers do not owe a tip of the lid to Eckert and Mauchly, because they are the giants whose shoulders they stood upon.
Back to TiVo, they were the first. They deserve the patent because they did invent something, and before it was invented it did not exist in that form. It's obviousness today is irrelevant. The date of disclosure, however, is germaine.