You might as well ask if seeing eye dogs are free, or Braille computer terminals are free. Of course they're not free. Adaptive equipment is expensive. But redesigning the world around a small minority of people who aren't within a range of commonly-accepted norms would be more expensive.
I'd love to hear a conclusive answer to this as well.
Also, I wonder what ports SP2 has open in its default, out-of-the-box configuration. Is it totally locked down, with no response to *anything* coming in from the outside? Or does it have a few services still running here and there that could be exploited? Plus, and perhaps this is a stupid question, if you're running a firewall on the local machine as opposed to on a dedicated box, isn't there always a problem of the firewall software having a vulnerability itself? Or the TCP/IP stack? (And why not -- stranger things have happened. Like firmware vulns.) I'm just thinking of everything on the machine that you could possibly overflow/break by sending malformatted packets, for example.
I suspect in the real world, most of the infections happen when users don't go straight to Windows Update right after taking their computer out of the box, and instead get excited and decide to browse around to their favorite forum or two. Since it's not unknown for vendors to load up PCs with all sorts of software, probably including compromised ActiveX controls, all it takes is a trip to the wrong site to get a rootkit/keylogger installed. From there, it's a one-way trip to reformatsville, at least if you're smart. (Which is a real trick, seeing as how many PCs don't even come with reinstall media, instead just taking a chunk of your hard drive for some shoddy "recovery partition.")
Well, I would be with you, except that if you believe the numbers in TFA (the original, not in the comments), cybercrime is more profitable than the illegal drug trade. I assume there's probably even more money being spent trying to prevent and defeat cybercrime, and on security. That's a lot of money diverted from legitimate enterprise, and a lot of missed opportunities.
When people don't trust technology and don't use online banking, then banks don't spend as much on it. Venture capital and other sources of funding start to dry up; the pace of development slows.
It's not a problem that's probably going to result in a city being vaporized overnight, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem. It's like muggings in a large city: sure, you can wave it off and say that it only happens to tourists, rubes, and the unwary -- why should street-smart people care about it? -- but over time it starts to take its toll everywhere. The economic cost alone starts to act like a tax on everything, and it drives away customers and new business.
People who understand computers and know what precautions to take to prevent being victimized, cannot just put their heads in the sand about the current situation. Particularly since most people who are capable of understanding the problem, earn their living in some technology-driven field, it's those people who stand to be affected by the 'downstream' effects of cybercrime and a culture of insecurity.
You can fight the symptoms like we have been doing and this will cost a LOT and never really make the system secure.
Where I come from, they call this "securing your revenue stream."
Seems like the security companies are doing A-OK there; they've got more business than they can shake a stick at, and it's not going anywhere soon. They have a vested interest in not 'solving' the problem, even if they knew how to do it.
Like all arms races, if you're in the arms business, you can laugh all the way to the bank. (Until someone decides to rob you, that is.)
Windows Vista will solve every security problem imaginable, flawlessly. Eliminating the need for IT security professionals and their absurdities, entirely.
Then it is true: Windows Vista is Bill Gates' secret doomsday weapon, the final piece of his twisted plot for total domination, which will destroy humanity and bring about the rise of the machines in our place!
I agree with you, but given that Superman is out of town and Batman is indisposed, who are we going to call to scrub the stain of the past 80-odd years from our government and give back our country?
It's a pretty short list of organizations and people who could do it; and I'm not sure I like the possible candidates for the job and more than I like the current bunch of crooks.
If you look at the decline of local control -- which is in my opinion, the only way that's ever showed any success at keeping governments responsive -- it about parallels the rise of the U.S. as a superpower on the world stage. Power was essentially taken from the States and given to the Federal government, in order to make the U.S. more powerful as a large nation, rather than as a combination of smaller quasi-independent states.
The only good thing that I can think might happen as a result of a decline in U.S. superpower status, would be a reconsideration on the part of the people of the powers that were passed up to Washington during the 20th century. I doubt the Federal government will give them up willingly, but perhaps someday local governments will take back what is rightfully theirs.
Hanover is supposed to run on Linux, by virtue (I think) of being Java-based. I've played around with a new version of Sametime that's cross-platform and (allegedly) built the same way, and it doesn't "feel" like a Java app (i.e. suck horribly); if Hanover is like this, it'll be a big step forward for Notes in general and groupware on Linux as a whole, at least for Notes shops like ours.
I'm not sure when Hanover is supposed to actually come out, but it's becoming the Duke Nukem Forever of the groupware world...
Well, it's difficult to compare the iPod and Zune launch, because the first batch of iPods were Mac-only. This limited their possible sales to a relatively small number of units, compared to later on when they really took off. At first, a lot of people saw iPods as a way to get people to buy Macintosh computers (and I know some people that were nudged in this direction), and I knew some diehards when it was first released that absolutely refused to acknowledge the possibility of an iPod as a product in its own right, separate from the Macintosh platform.
With the exception of our own CmdrTaco, the market was a lot less hostile to the iPod when it was originally released than they're being to the Zune.
In making the Zune brown, and coining the term "squirt" to refer to the act of wireless sharing with it, Microsoft has done the impossible: they have made a product that is simultaneously shittier, and more gay, than an iPod.
Yes, the 9th Amendment, sort of the red-headed stepchild in the Bill of Rights. Putting that in was a nod to Hamilton's and others' fears that a Bill of Rights would be constructed as a license for the government to regulate everything not specifically mentioned, but I'm not sure that it worked very well. The 9th Amendment has basically been ignored, and Federal powers expanded to a degree that essentially includes everything that isn't specifically mentioned elsewhere.
Had the 9th Amendment been enforced, much of the "jurisdiction creep" and usurpation of State powers under the Commerce Clause would have been prohibited, but successive Supreme Courts have found it easy to ignore, to the point where it's practically (but sadly) irrelevant.
Ultimately, I think Hamilton was right in fact, but not in intent. Just removing the Bill of Rights (as he seems to have advocated in Paper No. 84) wouldn't have helped; the demise of local powers and liberties would have just been accelerated. Nor would have creating more Amendments and enumerating various rights more explicitly helped, since a longer list would have just made individual items easier to ignore, and increased "explicitness" and precision would have created avenues for the subversion of rights on technical grounds.
I think you're wrong in illustrating the global warming / climate change argument in 'right or wrong' terms.
We can't tell, right now, for certain, whether the scientists are right or wrong. We'll only know that in hindsight. The question is "is there a significant chance that they're right?" and if so "what are the consequences?"
You don't have to be 100% convinced that man-made emissions are causing global warming to believe in reducing them. Heck, I'd say you don't even have to be 10% convinced. If you think there's even a significant chance that the current body of literature and science is right, and that there is any further significant chance of these changes causing catastrophic problems down the road, then you would have to be totally daft to say that it's a good idea to just keep burning coal and petroleum at the rate we are (and moreover, increasing the rate of increase of the rate of consumption).
We're talking about the possibility of whole cities and coastal areas being flooded. If there is any chance at all that we can prevent that, we would be silly not to try. This is not the sort of thing that we need to wait to be 100% sure about before we modify our behavior. All we need to do is look at the worst possible consequences of continuing on our current path, and the worst possible consequences of reducing emissions. If we move away from petroleum and it turns out that the climate scientists were wrong, then the worst thing that happens is we spent some money, effectively diverting some funding from one thing to another, on alternative energy, and probably also reduced our demand for petroleum in geopolitically inconvenient areas. But if we do nothing, and the worst of the models turn out to be correct, we could have massive drought, famine, and refugee problems in many parts of the developed world, leading to severe economic and social disruption.
If the consequences are severe enough, you don't need to be sure that a bad thing is going to happen, you just don't take the chance in the first place.
While I'm not necessarily agreeing with the GP, just because "the enemy has no real chance of succeeding" doesn't mean that we shouldn't attempt to destroy them. Although they probably can't ultimately win -- they don't represent what I'd call an 'existential threat' to the United States -- they could perhaps kill a lot of people and disrupt things in the process.
So the question then becomes, which way results in the smallest number of U.S. casualties? Fighting them or just ignoring them and cleaning up the mess while they ineffectually blow up buildings that we will rebuild anyway?
Leaving aside foreign civilian deaths (they don't vote in the U.S. and are therefore expendable except insofar as people in the U.S. care about them, which seems to be very little, at least those in non-Western parts of the world), there might be military operations against a losing enemy which are worthwhile, if it results in a smaller number of casualties than letting the enemy be.
Then add to that the 'predictability factor' -- the human desire to prefer known risks (going to war) versus unknown ones (maybe being blown up while at your desk): a steady stream of military casualties might be preferable to a smaller number of civilian deaths in unpredictable mass-casualty accidents. Provided that you can find enough people to voluntarily go to war (really not a problem, if you create the right incentives: I doubt you'd need a draft, if you took the money that a draft would cost and increased a soldier's combat pay by that amount), this might be economically far less disruptive also.
Now, there's no way a private group could compete with the US Military.
Right. There's no possible way that a bunch of people with improvised explosives and small arms could possibly inflict enough losses on a modern army to cause it to reconsider a major military operation...
Actually I think the Constitution was quite clear that just because they failed to enumerate something, doesn't mean that the government should feel free to regulate it into oblivion.
In fact, in the Federalist Papers (no. 84, if you're counting) Alexander Hamilton described the very road you're going down as one of the reasons why a country shouldn't have a Bill of Rights:
I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power.
Unfortunately, I think time has shown that the founders greatly overestimated both the leadership and citizenry that would come after him; "men disposed to usurp" have indeed usurped practically every right not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, just as Hamilton feared.
This is not how things are supposed to work. The founders of our country lived in a time that was rife with invention and development; they certainly did not mean for only certain bits and pieces of speech to be protected. To say that books are protected under the First Amendment today, but not the Internet, would be as ridiculous as saying in 1788 that only handwriting was protected, but words printed using movable type were not. Either way is quite obviously the same content and due the same protection.
What's unfortunate in this case is that the activist has said that he's not going to appeal the decision due to lack of funds.
Currently there is a conflict between various state and Circuit courts as to whether the CAN-SPAM act overrides stricter State laws regulating unsolicited email. The only thing that's going to resolve the issue is a ruling from the USSC, barring further legislation to clarify the issue. If this guy were to push on, he could conceivably bring it before the Supreme Court and get a real decision; more importantly, he'd probably concentrate enough media attention on it so that even if the decision were to go in favor of the spammers, it might make a tougher anti-spam law a campaign issue in the national arena. Right now, the spammers win if people don't make noise.
Based on context of the original quote in TFA, I don't think the Google exec meant all the video content in the world, but was referring only to music videos. I'm not exactly sure when the first music video was made (I'm sure Wikipedia could help me here), but I suspect that you could fit the back catalog in less than 100TiB plus a few TiB a year, with good (lossy) compression.
I think the move to high-definition content is going to eat up a lot of this capacity increase, though. 320x240 video seems to be acceptable to a lot of people right now, but I doubt in 10 years that it'll still be viewed as anything but crummy. People are going to want 1080p with six channels of surround, and I don't think you're going to cram that into 1.5Mbps or whatever today's video iPod capacity statistics are based on.
It does all the recompression in under 20 minutes as well?
What takes a lot of time in moving a video onto an iPod isn't the ripping, but recompressing it to a format that the iPod will play. According to Apple:
iPod can play the following video formats: * H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 x 480, 30 frames per sec., Baseline Low-Complexity Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in.m4v,.mp4, and.mov file formats * H.264 video, up to 768 kbps, 320 x 240, 30 frames per sec., Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in.m4v,.mp4, and.mov file formats * MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 x 480, 30 frames per sec., Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in.m4v,.mp4, and.mov file formats"
If you can rip a DVD and recompress it into a 1.5Mbps H.263 or 2.5Mbps MPEG-4 stream in 2/3rds real time, that's quite impressive.
I don't think that they really can; they're just delaying the case while the executives and lawyers at SCO make money. I don't think they have any hope of winning anymore, it's just a stock-pumping scheme and a way to slowly liquidate SCO and feed it to its lawyers, so when they finally lose the case, IBM can't turn around and go after them for court fees. It's like Bleak House; at the end, there won't be anything left but a bunch of executives with big retirement funds and a lot of lawyers packing up and moving on to other projects.
I think because they're not flatscreens, and this is off-putting to a lot of people who want something they can mount on their wall.
I'm not entirely sure of this, but my understanding is that DLP "televisions" are really rear-projection TVs: they have basically a DLP projector in the back, shining on the screen. That means you also need to factor in bulb replacement costs.
I think those two factors, plus general unfamiliarity in the marketplace, has led to them being less popular. And then there's the issue of the key component only being available from one supplier (TI)...that may keep a lot of the low-cost TV manufacturers from getting involved, or keep prices artificially high, depending on how TI markets them.
There are *some* e-ink products around...
on
Self-Recycling Paper
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
FWIW, I believe Sony has an "e-ink" based product on the market, it's some sort of uber-expensive ebook reader. I'm fairly certain it's going to be a flop, but it's not a bad demonstration of the technology. I think it's called the Libre in Japan and the Sony Reader in the U.S. (As usual, it's supposed to use some ridiculously draconian DRM if you use it according to Sony's plan.)
It uses some form of e-ink passive display that involves "microcapsules" filled with dye particles. Frankly the whole thing sounds suspiciously like an electronic etch-a-sketch.
Even a screw gun / power driver with self-tapping screws takes a lot longer to drive each fastener, than a pneumatic nail gun. I don't think there's any way that you can drive a threaded fastener with anywhere near the speed that you can drive in a nail. In the time a person can drive in a screw, you can put in a handful of nails.
I thought I had posted this before, but it seems as though Slashdot ate my post...
Anyway, information about PaperBytes is available here. They also made a more sophisticated, 2D version of it, PaperDisk (circa 2001). It had a data density of around 140 bytes per square centimeter, or around 84,461 bytes on an 8.5x11 inch page.
Slashdot Mirror
You might as well ask if seeing eye dogs are free, or Braille computer terminals are free. Of course they're not free. Adaptive equipment is expensive. But redesigning the world around a small minority of people who aren't within a range of commonly-accepted norms would be more expensive.
I think my folks are holding out for the action-packed title "When I Was Your Age: Walking Home From School In the Snow, Uphill, Both Ways".
It's a sort of FPS/RTS hybrid game. The atmospherics alone are going to blow your mind.
I'd love to hear a conclusive answer to this as well.
Also, I wonder what ports SP2 has open in its default, out-of-the-box configuration. Is it totally locked down, with no response to *anything* coming in from the outside? Or does it have a few services still running here and there that could be exploited? Plus, and perhaps this is a stupid question, if you're running a firewall on the local machine as opposed to on a dedicated box, isn't there always a problem of the firewall software having a vulnerability itself? Or the TCP/IP stack? (And why not -- stranger things have happened. Like firmware vulns.) I'm just thinking of everything on the machine that you could possibly overflow/break by sending malformatted packets, for example.
I suspect in the real world, most of the infections happen when users don't go straight to Windows Update right after taking their computer out of the box, and instead get excited and decide to browse around to their favorite forum or two. Since it's not unknown for vendors to load up PCs with all sorts of software, probably including compromised ActiveX controls, all it takes is a trip to the wrong site to get a rootkit/keylogger installed. From there, it's a one-way trip to reformatsville, at least if you're smart. (Which is a real trick, seeing as how many PCs don't even come with reinstall media, instead just taking a chunk of your hard drive for some shoddy "recovery partition.")
Well, I would be with you, except that if you believe the numbers in TFA (the original, not in the comments), cybercrime is more profitable than the illegal drug trade. I assume there's probably even more money being spent trying to prevent and defeat cybercrime, and on security. That's a lot of money diverted from legitimate enterprise, and a lot of missed opportunities.
When people don't trust technology and don't use online banking, then banks don't spend as much on it. Venture capital and other sources of funding start to dry up; the pace of development slows.
It's not a problem that's probably going to result in a city being vaporized overnight, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem. It's like muggings in a large city: sure, you can wave it off and say that it only happens to tourists, rubes, and the unwary -- why should street-smart people care about it? -- but over time it starts to take its toll everywhere. The economic cost alone starts to act like a tax on everything, and it drives away customers and new business.
People who understand computers and know what precautions to take to prevent being victimized, cannot just put their heads in the sand about the current situation. Particularly since most people who are capable of understanding the problem, earn their living in some technology-driven field, it's those people who stand to be affected by the 'downstream' effects of cybercrime and a culture of insecurity.
You can fight the symptoms like we have been doing and this will cost a LOT and never really make the system secure.
Where I come from, they call this "securing your revenue stream."
Seems like the security companies are doing A-OK there; they've got more business than they can shake a stick at, and it's not going anywhere soon. They have a vested interest in not 'solving' the problem, even if they knew how to do it.
Like all arms races, if you're in the arms business, you can laugh all the way to the bank. (Until someone decides to rob you, that is.)
Windows Vista will solve every security problem imaginable, flawlessly. Eliminating the need for IT security professionals and their absurdities, entirely.
Then it is true: Windows Vista is Bill Gates' secret doomsday weapon, the final piece of his twisted plot for total domination, which will destroy humanity and bring about the rise of the machines in our place!
I always knew that paperclip looked shifty.
I agree with you, but given that Superman is out of town and Batman is indisposed, who are we going to call to scrub the stain of the past 80-odd years from our government and give back our country?
It's a pretty short list of organizations and people who could do it; and I'm not sure I like the possible candidates for the job and more than I like the current bunch of crooks.
If you look at the decline of local control -- which is in my opinion, the only way that's ever showed any success at keeping governments responsive -- it about parallels the rise of the U.S. as a superpower on the world stage. Power was essentially taken from the States and given to the Federal government, in order to make the U.S. more powerful as a large nation, rather than as a combination of smaller quasi-independent states.
The only good thing that I can think might happen as a result of a decline in U.S. superpower status, would be a reconsideration on the part of the people of the powers that were passed up to Washington during the 20th century. I doubt the Federal government will give them up willingly, but perhaps someday local governments will take back what is rightfully theirs.
Hanover is supposed to run on Linux, by virtue (I think) of being Java-based. I've played around with a new version of Sametime that's cross-platform and (allegedly) built the same way, and it doesn't "feel" like a Java app (i.e. suck horribly); if Hanover is like this, it'll be a big step forward for Notes in general and groupware on Linux as a whole, at least for Notes shops like ours.
I'm not sure when Hanover is supposed to actually come out, but it's becoming the Duke Nukem Forever of the groupware world...
Well, it's difficult to compare the iPod and Zune launch, because the first batch of iPods were Mac-only. This limited their possible sales to a relatively small number of units, compared to later on when they really took off. At first, a lot of people saw iPods as a way to get people to buy Macintosh computers (and I know some people that were nudged in this direction), and I knew some diehards when it was first released that absolutely refused to acknowledge the possibility of an iPod as a product in its own right, separate from the Macintosh platform.
With the exception of our own CmdrTaco, the market was a lot less hostile to the iPod when it was originally released than they're being to the Zune.
In making the Zune brown, and coining the term "squirt" to refer to the act of wireless sharing with it, Microsoft has done the impossible: they have made a product that is simultaneously shittier, and more gay, than an iPod.
Yes, the 9th Amendment, sort of the red-headed stepchild in the Bill of Rights. Putting that in was a nod to Hamilton's and others' fears that a Bill of Rights would be constructed as a license for the government to regulate everything not specifically mentioned, but I'm not sure that it worked very well. The 9th Amendment has basically been ignored, and Federal powers expanded to a degree that essentially includes everything that isn't specifically mentioned elsewhere.
Had the 9th Amendment been enforced, much of the "jurisdiction creep" and usurpation of State powers under the Commerce Clause would have been prohibited, but successive Supreme Courts have found it easy to ignore, to the point where it's practically (but sadly) irrelevant.
Ultimately, I think Hamilton was right in fact, but not in intent. Just removing the Bill of Rights (as he seems to have advocated in Paper No. 84) wouldn't have helped; the demise of local powers and liberties would have just been accelerated. Nor would have creating more Amendments and enumerating various rights more explicitly helped, since a longer list would have just made individual items easier to ignore, and increased "explicitness" and precision would have created avenues for the subversion of rights on technical grounds.
I think you're wrong in illustrating the global warming / climate change argument in 'right or wrong' terms.
We can't tell, right now, for certain, whether the scientists are right or wrong. We'll only know that in hindsight. The question is "is there a significant chance that they're right?" and if so "what are the consequences?"
You don't have to be 100% convinced that man-made emissions are causing global warming to believe in reducing them. Heck, I'd say you don't even have to be 10% convinced. If you think there's even a significant chance that the current body of literature and science is right, and that there is any further significant chance of these changes causing catastrophic problems down the road, then you would have to be totally daft to say that it's a good idea to just keep burning coal and petroleum at the rate we are (and moreover, increasing the rate of increase of the rate of consumption).
We're talking about the possibility of whole cities and coastal areas being flooded. If there is any chance at all that we can prevent that, we would be silly not to try. This is not the sort of thing that we need to wait to be 100% sure about before we modify our behavior. All we need to do is look at the worst possible consequences of continuing on our current path, and the worst possible consequences of reducing emissions. If we move away from petroleum and it turns out that the climate scientists were wrong, then the worst thing that happens is we spent some money, effectively diverting some funding from one thing to another, on alternative energy, and probably also reduced our demand for petroleum in geopolitically inconvenient areas. But if we do nothing, and the worst of the models turn out to be correct, we could have massive drought, famine, and refugee problems in many parts of the developed world, leading to severe economic and social disruption.
If the consequences are severe enough, you don't need to be sure that a bad thing is going to happen, you just don't take the chance in the first place.
While I'm not necessarily agreeing with the GP, just because "the enemy has no real chance of succeeding" doesn't mean that we shouldn't attempt to destroy them. Although they probably can't ultimately win -- they don't represent what I'd call an 'existential threat' to the United States -- they could perhaps kill a lot of people and disrupt things in the process.
So the question then becomes, which way results in the smallest number of U.S. casualties? Fighting them or just ignoring them and cleaning up the mess while they ineffectually blow up buildings that we will rebuild anyway?
Leaving aside foreign civilian deaths (they don't vote in the U.S. and are therefore expendable except insofar as people in the U.S. care about them, which seems to be very little, at least those in non-Western parts of the world), there might be military operations against a losing enemy which are worthwhile, if it results in a smaller number of casualties than letting the enemy be.
Then add to that the 'predictability factor' -- the human desire to prefer known risks (going to war) versus unknown ones (maybe being blown up while at your desk): a steady stream of military casualties might be preferable to a smaller number of civilian deaths in unpredictable mass-casualty accidents. Provided that you can find enough people to voluntarily go to war (really not a problem, if you create the right incentives: I doubt you'd need a draft, if you took the money that a draft would cost and increased a soldier's combat pay by that amount), this might be economically far less disruptive also.
Now, there's no way a private group could compete with the US Military.
Right. There's no possible way that a bunch of people with improvised explosives and small arms could possibly inflict enough losses on a modern army to cause it to reconsider a major military operation...
In fact, in the Federalist Papers (no. 84, if you're counting) Alexander Hamilton described the very road you're going down as one of the reasons why a country shouldn't have a Bill of Rights:Unfortunately, I think time has shown that the founders greatly overestimated both the leadership and citizenry that would come after him; "men disposed to usurp" have indeed usurped practically every right not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, just as Hamilton feared.
This is not how things are supposed to work. The founders of our country lived in a time that was rife with invention and development; they certainly did not mean for only certain bits and pieces of speech to be protected. To say that books are protected under the First Amendment today, but not the Internet, would be as ridiculous as saying in 1788 that only handwriting was protected, but words printed using movable type were not. Either way is quite obviously the same content and due the same protection.
What's unfortunate in this case is that the activist has said that he's not going to appeal the decision due to lack of funds.
Currently there is a conflict between various state and Circuit courts as to whether the CAN-SPAM act overrides stricter State laws regulating unsolicited email. The only thing that's going to resolve the issue is a ruling from the USSC, barring further legislation to clarify the issue. If this guy were to push on, he could conceivably bring it before the Supreme Court and get a real decision; more importantly, he'd probably concentrate enough media attention on it so that even if the decision were to go in favor of the spammers, it might make a tougher anti-spam law a campaign issue in the national arena. Right now, the spammers win if people don't make noise.
Based on context of the original quote in TFA, I don't think the Google exec meant all the video content in the world, but was referring only to music videos. I'm not exactly sure when the first music video was made (I'm sure Wikipedia could help me here), but I suspect that you could fit the back catalog in less than 100TiB plus a few TiB a year, with good (lossy) compression.
I think the move to high-definition content is going to eat up a lot of this capacity increase, though. 320x240 video seems to be acceptable to a lot of people right now, but I doubt in 10 years that it'll still be viewed as anything but crummy. People are going to want 1080p with six channels of surround, and I don't think you're going to cram that into 1.5Mbps or whatever today's video iPod capacity statistics are based on.
What takes a lot of time in moving a video onto an iPod isn't the ripping, but recompressing it to a format that the iPod will play. According to Apple:
If you can rip a DVD and recompress it into a 1.5Mbps H.263 or 2.5Mbps MPEG-4 stream in 2/3rds real time, that's quite impressive.
If by "beautiful" you mean Analog NTSC Composite Video, then I suppose you're right.
Pity they don't have Firewire or some other digital output...course the MPAA would never allow that. Lord, no.
I don't think that they really can; they're just delaying the case while the executives and lawyers at SCO make money. I don't think they have any hope of winning anymore, it's just a stock-pumping scheme and a way to slowly liquidate SCO and feed it to its lawyers, so when they finally lose the case, IBM can't turn around and go after them for court fees. It's like Bleak House; at the end, there won't be anything left but a bunch of executives with big retirement funds and a lot of lawyers packing up and moving on to other projects.
I think because they're not flatscreens, and this is off-putting to a lot of people who want something they can mount on their wall.
I'm not entirely sure of this, but my understanding is that DLP "televisions" are really rear-projection TVs: they have basically a DLP projector in the back, shining on the screen. That means you also need to factor in bulb replacement costs.
I think those two factors, plus general unfamiliarity in the marketplace, has led to them being less popular. And then there's the issue of the key component only being available from one supplier (TI)...that may keep a lot of the low-cost TV manufacturers from getting involved, or keep prices artificially high, depending on how TI markets them.
FWIW, I believe Sony has an "e-ink" based product on the market, it's some sort of uber-expensive ebook reader. I'm fairly certain it's going to be a flop, but it's not a bad demonstration of the technology. I think it's called the Libre in Japan and the Sony Reader in the U.S. (As usual, it's supposed to use some ridiculously draconian DRM if you use it according to Sony's plan.)
Here's a WP article with photo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Reader
It uses some form of e-ink passive display that involves "microcapsules" filled with dye particles. Frankly the whole thing sounds suspiciously like an electronic etch-a-sketch.
Even a screw gun / power driver with self-tapping screws takes a lot longer to drive each fastener, than a pneumatic nail gun. I don't think there's any way that you can drive a threaded fastener with anywhere near the speed that you can drive in a nail. In the time a person can drive in a screw, you can put in a handful of nails.
I think he was joking.
I thought I had posted this before, but it seems as though Slashdot ate my post...
Anyway, information about PaperBytes is available here. They also made a more sophisticated, 2D version of it, PaperDisk (circa 2001). It had a data density of around 140 bytes per square centimeter, or around 84,461 bytes on an 8.5x11 inch page.