1. Put aside your age biases 2. Hire one of the multitude of experienced COBOL developers who cannot find jobs because they're over 50
As a hiring manager, I see too many of my peers pass over older professionals in favor of some young hotshot they think is "cheap" and will work long hours. They don't recognize that this hotshot is padding his resume and biding his time until he finds the cool job he really wants, usually within 2-4 years. Meanwhile, those "old" pros would crank out far more quality code in their 40-45 hour weeks than hotshot would in 60, and they'll be happy to stick around for the long haul.
(And no, I'm not suggesting that all older developers are better than all younger ones. People are people. But rampant age discrimination is one reason this industry struggles to find good people.)
Seems like Byte should have paid more attention to its own health and let UNIX take care of itself.
(Yes, Byte lives on in an electronic version - I even subscribe to it - but it's a fading shadow of its former self. It's a lot closer to death than UNIX.)
How about, be satisified with the huge profits of their overwhelming market share instead of displaying an {MP|RI}AA-like obsession with chasing every last sale they imagine they're losing?
In other words, focus on customer service instead of greed. Take the money they spent on Macrovision and reduce the price of the package instead.
DRM is the tool of companies that offer inferior products for inflated prices. Offer a good product at a competitive price and most people will want to buy it instead of stealing it.
If the toilet crashes, does the shit hit the fan? Literally?
How can you tell a BBOD (Blue Bowl of Death) from regular Tidy Bowl?
Finally, a home for Microsoft's crappy software.
Way too many one-liners with this story.
I don't know. TurboTax is only good for one tax year, so the useage lifetime for the software is as long as it takes me to actually do my taxes, which is only a couple of days, if that.
But what if you get that audit letter from the IRS in two or three years? You may want to reinstall 2002 TurboTax so you can review your records, only to find that it won't work on your most recent PC.
What if you simply need to file an amended return later this year? What if you lost your paper copy of your return and want to print another? What if you have trouble exporting your 2002 data to 2003 TurboTax, or maybe to a competing product without such an obnoxious copy protection mechanism?
There are lots of scenarios where you might need to use this software long after your initial filing. It's too bad Intuit is adopting the same kind of customer-hostile philosophy pioneered by our beloved MPAA & RIAA.
I use Pricewatch and CNet together for price-checking - they index different resellers. CNet tends to include more of the big, mainstream companies like CDW. Pricewatch gets more of the smaller, less well known companies.
(And I'll throw in a "me-too" for those recommending Newegg. More often than not, they will have the lowest price, or be within a few percent of the lowest price.)
So when is Senator Hollings/Disney up for reelection, who is his opponent, and is he at all vulnerable? If he is, what's the address for a contribution?
If even 5% of the geeks who are appalled by the SSSCA/CBDTPA sent a small check to Disney's opponent, we could turn the election. If we include a quick note explaining the contribution, our message will be loud and clear. Formal lobbying groups, public education campaigns, and all the other trappings are nice to have, but the fundamental force comes from lots of people putting their money where their hearts are.
I think one key, however, is that Hollings must be vulnerable. If he has a token opponent, we should focus on someone else - key word being "one". Sending money to the opposing party, or to several candidates won't cut it at our level. Our pockets aren't deep enough, and we don't have enough of them.
Background: I have some experience with government IT procurement. I worked for a state agency several years ago. I was responsible for several UNIX and PC-related procurements for my agency since those were my areas of IT responsibility. Then, because I had both technical expertise and experience with our procurement process, I was part of several procurement committees for other agencies and for state-wide contracts. These activities were all led by a centralized purchasing group.
In my experience, the purchasing process itself discourages open source software. This isn't through malice, and it isn't even necessarily that management needs someone they can make responsible for problems. It's more of side-effect of the rules established to ensure open and fair use of public money. Other jurisdictions have their own rules with their own quirks, but I'll bet a lot of my experiences are common to others.
For example, in order to be invited to submit a proposal, the vendor usually needs to be on the state's vendor list. The state requires this to be sure that vendors are qualified and legitimate - they don't want some bureacrat's buddy to hijack a bid through inside information. To get on the vendor list, a company must usually approach the state and provide qualification documentation. Large companies have sales and marketing groups that seek opportunities like this. They follow up with whatever is necessary to become a qualified vendor, just for the potential chance to be approached and asked for a bid someday. Open source interests don't have the resources to do this on a wide scale.
Another obstacle for open source is the proposal process itself. When we issued an RFP (Request for Proposal), we typically provided dozens of pages of requirements and specifications. To ensure a level playing field for all vendors, every vendor had to provide a response for every one of our requirements, and every vendor had to rigidly follow every rule: deadlines, format of response, number of copies, and often some sort of up-front money as a performance bond.
As you can guess, responding to an RFP can be expensive. You can't just mail in a brochure with a price list. A compliant response routinely required 50 to 100 pages of information. A response to a major RFP might contain two or three binders full of information, much of it custom-written to answer our specific questions. Even worse, we required that the vendor submit one complete copy for each person on the procurement committee, as many as ten or twelve copies (up to 36 binders total). In other words, responses came in boxes, not envelopes. That's a lot of up-front expense for a slim chance of giving away software.
Other hurdles included mandatory in-person vendor conferences for each RFP, extensive reference requirements, contractual and legal requirements for vendors (are open-source interests prepared to certify EEO, ADA, OSHA, etc. compliance?), and on and on. In short, a massive bureaucracy of rules, regulations, and requirements, all enforced to make sure that the government agency can document that their public dollars are spent fairly and effectively.
The paradox, of course, is that this process is so burdensome, it actually only rarely results in effective use of money. Even worse, because the process is so convoluted, it is more ripe for abuse by insiders who know how to play the game.
The good news is that it is possible to bring open source software into government. The whole procurement mess only takes over when you try to buy products. If someone within the organization takes the initiative to make a decision, to select, download, and implement "free" (as in beer) software, there is no purchase, so there's no purchasing process. For example, while I worked in government, I brought in sendmail and Elm for our e-mail system. (I also had a lot of fun with Nethack, but that's another story.)
If you want to use open-source software in your agency, your best bet is to just do it. The formal purchasing process is heavily slanted towards expensive products from large companies with deep pockets. Your only other hope is getting someone like IBM to propose the open-source software as part of a package of hardware and services.
Jameco Electronics still has dozens of simple to moderate electronics kits, plus breadboards, complete selection of components, Basic Stamps, etc. They also have a modest selection of computer parts. Unlike some of their peers of the day, e.g., DigiKey and Mouser Electronics, Jameco still caters to hobbyists*.
If I remember right, Jameco's online site only has a subset of their inventory. For maximum browsing enjoyment, get their dead-tree catalog.
Great company, highly recommended. I've ordered from them on and off since I was in high school, way back in the 70's. (That's back when people still played with electronics as a hobby, and Edmund Scientific had some of the coolest, most exotic stuff I'd ever seen.)
*DigiKey and Mouser are more focused on commercial users, but they're great sources for hard-to-find parts, or a specific variant of a part.
FWIW, my comment was taken more literally and more negatively than I intended. Sorry for provoking people.
I'm not suggesting for a minute that we stop. I am truly in awe of what they have accomplished, and the incredible potential for improving human lives. I thought this was an exciting story, and I am happy for the boys who suffer from this disease. Maybe it's because I'm more of a physical sciences kind of guy, but thought of being able to mainipulate individual human genes, effectively retroactively as I understood this, is just mind-boggling. If we're advanced enough to pull this off, are there any limits to what we can do?
And that is where the negative side of my comment comes from. What are the limits to what we can do, and (rhetorically) are we up to the responsibilty? The answer is "no" - though the prospects for good are unlimited, some will abuse this technology. It's the inevitable cloud that accompanies the silver lining.
In my opinion, that's part of the price we pay for advancing. Genetic manipulation seems much like our first steps into atomic power (another subject that provoked fears of "playing God"). It is far more revolutionary than medications or cutting trees or most of the other ways we manipulate our world. These other things can have tremendous cumulative effect due to scale, but their potential individually is fairly narrow and limited. A new drug may heal - or hurt - a few individuals, but it can't change the shape of the human race.
Genetic manipulation is different. It can literally change the face of humanity. The potential for good is awesome, but it will come with a price. And that's the risk we accept every time we move forward.
Again, sorry for provoking a religious discussion. My use of "playing God" was only meant as a metaphor for the power and potential of this development.
Part of me is terrified at the potential for creating unimaginable horrors; the other part is completely in awe of the amazing things science can do. We're moving closer and closer to playing God. I pray we're up to the responsibility.
In addition to the possibility of 3-D TV, the solid-crystal molecules could act as ultrafast switches in optical computers. Stacked in a cube several inches high, they could provide unprecedented storage potential, perhaps many billion times that of current devices. Speed of access would prove dramatically faster than is possible with current computer designs.
Seems like this is a much more significant application than fancier television. We can't even get any momentum behind HDTV, and that technology has been available for years. What are the odds of getting any real progress on 3D-TV in the next 20 years? (Unless this stuff can make hands-on porn - then look for it in Best Buy by Christmas.)
On the other hand, optical switching and high-capacity storage could deliver practical benefits much more quickly. If this is more than another April-fools claim, I would look for the first developments there.
Would the RIAA try and make human cloning (well, copying the 'music') illegal?
No doubt. And blood tests would be a considered a violation of the DMCA - using reverse-engineering to access a copyrighted work.
I think I'll make songs out of the various cold and flu viruses, charge a dollar royalty every time someone gets sick. I could use the extra bucks for Christmas shopping.
Sorry, this is off-topic, but I wanted to correct the misinformation.
As I am typing this (7:25 a.m. CST) CNN is having a live interview with a reporter who is with Arafat. Reporter says he is quite well and just as defiant as ever.
We now return you to your regular program.
(Maybe I can salvage karma by getting back on-topic.)
Really interesting article re. mobos. I would like better information on stability. I've bought two Athlon/XP boards in the last year, both rated to be pretty good (Aopen AK-73 1394(A) and Iwill KK-266R-Plus). Both have stability problems, even when not overclocked. I use Micron memory, temps are cool, power supplies are good quality & high-power. Nonetheless, both systems will lock up randomly, anywhere from once every two weeks, to sometimes two or three times in one day.
Both systems have Geforce cards - one a G2 Ultra, the other a G3. I had a Sound Blaster Live in one of them; replaced it with a Santa Cruz - didn't help. Using on-board sound on the Iwill until I know which boards do/do not contribute to reliability problems. Both have 3Com NICS. Nothing else in common. I've updated drivers, etc., 'til the cows come home - no joy.
Any ideas? I'm really suspicious of the VIA chip set. I know this article dismissed that idea, says it's only a problem with cheap motherboards. It is the one common denominator I can see.
I heard the towers were build to withstand a plane crashing in, but I think they were more concerned with (part of) the towers not flipping over in such a case.
I saw a documentary that addressed this. Remember that the towers were designed 30-plus years ago. They were designed to withstand an airplane crash, but not a 767. It wasn't even on the drawing boards yet. The airplane they considered was a Boeing 707 - slower, less mass, and a whole lot less fuel.
I think the Republicans could really use this as ammunition against the Dems. It would be easy to flashback to the moral majority days and start trumpeting that those "godless Democrats are the handmaidens of the immoral movie industry." It's the lever Republicans need to deflect attention away from their role in the Enron scandal.
IMHO, the U.S. needs one of those hidden reset buttons to set everything back to factory (i.e., founders') defaults. We are truly FUBAR.
Interesting in the context of MSFTs plans to implement a DB filesystem in future versions of MS Windows.
Even more than normal Microsoft bashing, this sounds like a huge challenge for MS to get right. I can't imagine that they'll manage to retrofit a DB filesystem and make it peform adequately on the first try. It would be tough enough even if they started with a clean slate and a small, independent team of top talent. Unfortunately, although they do have some first-class developers, they also have tremendous legacy baggage and a group-think culture.
I'll wait for at least Service Pack 2 before I put any real data on an MS DB filesystem.
I was thinking about something like that the other day. What I'd like is a Tivo-like device you could use with broadcast radio, XM radio, and even the TV audio for the DBS music channels. This would be handy for skipping commercials and rewinding to catch something you'd missed.
Even more, it would be great for capturing specific songs to add to your MP3 collection. If it were either built-in or highly portable, you could leave it on all the time. You wouldn't have to think about it except when you heard something you wanted to save.
He missed the one thing I want -- cheap clocks that set themselves. I've got cheap digital clocks in my VCR, TV, Microwave, coffee maker, etc. etc. Keeping them all set to the right time, especially when power is lost, is a real pain.
Once in-home networks become common, look for a WWV-driven time server to set all your clocks. This could probably be a service provided through your broadband provider, the time signal sent via PBS stations, or even a little WWV receiver with an NTP server and an Ethernet port. It becomes yet another reason to plug your appliances and electronics devices into a LAN.
Sounds a little goofy, I know, but once an internal NIC is cheap enough, you no longer need a killer app to justify networked appliances. You just need a few little benefits that are nice to have.
I bet you could convince more kids to brush if, say, you had a toothbrush that played the Barney theme song while you were brushing.
Yeah, but after about a week, the parents wouldn't let them use it.
Now that I think about it though, that's just as well, because the RIAA would demand a quarter every time you picked it up. Then they'd go to Congress and whine that Brushster was costing them $3 gazillion in toothbrush revenue, and they'd sue Colgate for not installing SSSCA/CPDTPA/WBATUTW* technology in their toothpaste.
Broadband is the very LAST thing the Distribution Industry wants, becuase it will allow non "approved" artists an easy and quick way to compete with them.
I wouldn't count on that. Suppose that part of this government-mandated standard requires that all "content" be encoded a particular way to ensure compliance with their magic decoders. Further suppose that this encoding process is only available through a special license, and that this license comes with an imposing price tag.
Or, maybe it's not encoder licensing, but some new, unholy twist in interpreting the DMCA that intimidates ISPs into prohibiting non-registered content suppliers. Maybe its an entirely new piece of purchased legislation, "protecting" we sheep from terrorism by prohibiting unauthorized transmissions - terrorists stream their training videos, you know.
Whatever the mechanism, it's easy to imagine a scenario where the majors are the only ones that are authorized to or can afford to distribute content over the Internet. Their whole cartel is based on exclusive control. I don't imagine for a second that they've missed this.
Oh, there's a special place in hell roped off for this guy. His role in hell? He'll be running satan's mail servers, hunting down open relays that will mysteriously never close. He'll spend hours per day blocking OTHER open relays, only to find twice as many open up. He'll have nightmarish visions of "Free XXX Adult Action," "Over 60 and still HOT TO TROT" and "FREE $$$ HOME MORTGAGES ON THE CHEAP!"
Wouldn't the ads be more like "FREE ice water!!!!!" and "Make your own air conditioner - absolutely legal", with maybe an occasional "Hidden heaven cam, hot teen angels! (34231)"?
Slashdot Mirror
It's even easier than that:
1. Put aside your age biases
2. Hire one of the multitude of experienced COBOL developers who cannot find jobs because they're over 50
As a hiring manager, I see too many of my peers pass over older professionals in favor of some young hotshot they think is "cheap" and will work long hours. They don't recognize that this hotshot is padding his resume and biding his time until he finds the cool job he really wants, usually within 2-4 years. Meanwhile, those "old" pros would crank out far more quality code in their 40-45 hour weeks than hotshot would in 60, and they'll be happy to stick around for the long haul.
(And no, I'm not suggesting that all older developers are better than all younger ones. People are people. But rampant age discrimination is one reason this industry struggles to find good people.)
(Yes, Byte lives on in an electronic version - I even subscribe to it - but it's a fading shadow of its former self. It's a lot closer to death than UNIX.)
In other words, focus on customer service instead of greed. Take the money they spent on Macrovision and reduce the price of the package instead.
DRM is the tool of companies that offer inferior products for inflated prices. Offer a good product at a competitive price and most people will want to buy it instead of stealing it.
If the toilet crashes, does the shit hit the fan? Literally? How can you tell a BBOD (Blue Bowl of Death) from regular Tidy Bowl? Finally, a home for Microsoft's crappy software. Way too many one-liners with this story.
But what if you get that audit letter from the IRS in two or three years? You may want to reinstall 2002 TurboTax so you can review your records, only to find that it won't work on your most recent PC.
What if you simply need to file an amended return later this year? What if you lost your paper copy of your return and want to print another? What if you have trouble exporting your 2002 data to 2003 TurboTax, or maybe to a competing product without such an obnoxious copy protection mechanism?
There are lots of scenarios where you might need to use this software long after your initial filing. It's too bad Intuit is adopting the same kind of customer-hostile philosophy pioneered by our beloved MPAA & RIAA.
(And I'll throw in a "me-too" for those recommending Newegg. More often than not, they will have the lowest price, or be within a few percent of the lowest price.)
If even 5% of the geeks who are appalled by the SSSCA/CBDTPA sent a small check to Disney's opponent, we could turn the election. If we include a quick note explaining the contribution, our message will be loud and clear. Formal lobbying groups, public education campaigns, and all the other trappings are nice to have, but the fundamental force comes from lots of people putting their money where their hearts are.
I think one key, however, is that Hollings must be vulnerable. If he has a token opponent, we should focus on someone else - key word being "one". Sending money to the opposing party, or to several candidates won't cut it at our level. Our pockets aren't deep enough, and we don't have enough of them.
In my experience, the purchasing process itself discourages open source software. This isn't through malice, and it isn't even necessarily that management needs someone they can make responsible for problems. It's more of side-effect of the rules established to ensure open and fair use of public money. Other jurisdictions have their own rules with their own quirks, but I'll bet a lot of my experiences are common to others.
For example, in order to be invited to submit a proposal, the vendor usually needs to be on the state's vendor list. The state requires this to be sure that vendors are qualified and legitimate - they don't want some bureacrat's buddy to hijack a bid through inside information. To get on the vendor list, a company must usually approach the state and provide qualification documentation. Large companies have sales and marketing groups that seek opportunities like this. They follow up with whatever is necessary to become a qualified vendor, just for the potential chance to be approached and asked for a bid someday. Open source interests don't have the resources to do this on a wide scale.
Another obstacle for open source is the proposal process itself. When we issued an RFP (Request for Proposal), we typically provided dozens of pages of requirements and specifications. To ensure a level playing field for all vendors, every vendor had to provide a response for every one of our requirements, and every vendor had to rigidly follow every rule: deadlines, format of response, number of copies, and often some sort of up-front money as a performance bond.
As you can guess, responding to an RFP can be expensive. You can't just mail in a brochure with a price list. A compliant response routinely required 50 to 100 pages of information. A response to a major RFP might contain two or three binders full of information, much of it custom-written to answer our specific questions. Even worse, we required that the vendor submit one complete copy for each person on the procurement committee, as many as ten or twelve copies (up to 36 binders total). In other words, responses came in boxes, not envelopes. That's a lot of up-front expense for a slim chance of giving away software.
Other hurdles included mandatory in-person vendor conferences for each RFP, extensive reference requirements, contractual and legal requirements for vendors (are open-source interests prepared to certify EEO, ADA, OSHA, etc. compliance?), and on and on. In short, a massive bureaucracy of rules, regulations, and requirements, all enforced to make sure that the government agency can document that their public dollars are spent fairly and effectively.
The paradox, of course, is that this process is so burdensome, it actually only rarely results in effective use of money. Even worse, because the process is so convoluted, it is more ripe for abuse by insiders who know how to play the game.
The good news is that it is possible to bring open source software into government. The whole procurement mess only takes over when you try to buy products. If someone within the organization takes the initiative to make a decision, to select, download, and implement "free" (as in beer) software, there is no purchase, so there's no purchasing process. For example, while I worked in government, I brought in sendmail and Elm for our e-mail system. (I also had a lot of fun with Nethack, but that's another story.)
If you want to use open-source software in your agency, your best bet is to just do it. The formal purchasing process is heavily slanted towards expensive products from large companies with deep pockets. Your only other hope is getting someone like IBM to propose the open-source software as part of a package of hardware and services.
If I remember right, Jameco's online site only has a subset of their inventory. For maximum browsing enjoyment, get their dead-tree catalog.
Great company, highly recommended. I've ordered from them on and off since I was in high school, way back in the 70's. (That's back when people still played with electronics as a hobby, and Edmund Scientific had some of the coolest, most exotic stuff I'd ever seen.)
*DigiKey and Mouser are more focused on commercial users, but they're great sources for hard-to-find parts, or a specific variant of a part.
I'm not suggesting for a minute that we stop. I am truly in awe of what they have accomplished, and the incredible potential for improving human lives. I thought this was an exciting story, and I am happy for the boys who suffer from this disease. Maybe it's because I'm more of a physical sciences kind of guy, but thought of being able to mainipulate individual human genes, effectively retroactively as I understood this, is just mind-boggling. If we're advanced enough to pull this off, are there any limits to what we can do?
And that is where the negative side of my comment comes from. What are the limits to what we can do, and (rhetorically) are we up to the responsibilty? The answer is "no" - though the prospects for good are unlimited, some will abuse this technology. It's the inevitable cloud that accompanies the silver lining.
In my opinion, that's part of the price we pay for advancing. Genetic manipulation seems much like our first steps into atomic power (another subject that provoked fears of "playing God"). It is far more revolutionary than medications or cutting trees or most of the other ways we manipulate our world. These other things can have tremendous cumulative effect due to scale, but their potential individually is fairly narrow and limited. A new drug may heal - or hurt - a few individuals, but it can't change the shape of the human race.
Genetic manipulation is different. It can literally change the face of humanity. The potential for good is awesome, but it will come with a price. And that's the risk we accept every time we move forward.
Again, sorry for provoking a religious discussion. My use of "playing God" was only meant as a metaphor for the power and potential of this development.
Truly awesome.
Just what we need, a nation full of toilets blinking 12:00.
Seems like this is a much more significant application than fancier television. We can't even get any momentum behind HDTV, and that technology has been available for years. What are the odds of getting any real progress on 3D-TV in the next 20 years? (Unless this stuff can make hands-on porn - then look for it in Best Buy by Christmas.)
On the other hand, optical switching and high-capacity storage could deliver practical benefits much more quickly. If this is more than another April-fools claim, I would look for the first developments there.
No doubt. And blood tests would be a considered a violation of the DMCA - using reverse-engineering to access a copyrighted work.
I think I'll make songs out of the various cold and flu viruses, charge a dollar royalty every time someone gets sick. I could use the extra bucks for Christmas shopping.
As I am typing this (7:25 a.m. CST) CNN is having a live interview with a reporter who is with Arafat. Reporter says he is quite well and just as defiant as ever.
We now return you to your regular program.
(Maybe I can salvage karma by getting back on-topic.)
Really interesting article re. mobos. I would like better information on stability. I've bought two Athlon/XP boards in the last year, both rated to be pretty good (Aopen AK-73 1394(A) and Iwill KK-266R-Plus). Both have stability problems, even when not overclocked. I use Micron memory, temps are cool, power supplies are good quality & high-power. Nonetheless, both systems will lock up randomly, anywhere from once every two weeks, to sometimes two or three times in one day.
Both systems have Geforce cards - one a G2 Ultra, the other a G3. I had a Sound Blaster Live in one of them; replaced it with a Santa Cruz - didn't help. Using on-board sound on the Iwill until I know which boards do/do not contribute to reliability problems. Both have 3Com NICS. Nothing else in common. I've updated drivers, etc., 'til the cows come home - no joy.
Any ideas? I'm really suspicious of the VIA chip set. I know this article dismissed that idea, says it's only a problem with cheap motherboards. It is the one common denominator I can see.
I saw a documentary that addressed this. Remember that the towers were designed 30-plus years ago. They were designed to withstand an airplane crash, but not a 767. It wasn't even on the drawing boards yet. The airplane they considered was a Boeing 707 - slower, less mass, and a whole lot less fuel.
IMHO, the U.S. needs one of those hidden reset buttons to set everything back to factory (i.e., founders') defaults. We are truly FUBAR.
Even more than normal Microsoft bashing, this sounds like a huge challenge for MS to get right. I can't imagine that they'll manage to retrofit a DB filesystem and make it peform adequately on the first try. It would be tough enough even if they started with a clean slate and a small, independent team of top talent. Unfortunately, although they do have some first-class developers, they also have tremendous legacy baggage and a group-think culture.
I'll wait for at least Service Pack 2 before I put any real data on an MS DB filesystem.
Even more, it would be great for capturing specific songs to add to your MP3 collection. If it were either built-in or highly portable, you could leave it on all the time. You wouldn't have to think about it except when you heard something you wanted to save.
In other news, the start-up 2*Click has announced that it will begin offering a new, centralized banner advertising service to Internet web sites.
Once in-home networks become common, look for a WWV-driven time server to set all your clocks. This could probably be a service provided through your broadband provider, the time signal sent via PBS stations, or even a little WWV receiver with an NTP server and an Ethernet port. It becomes yet another reason to plug your appliances and electronics devices into a LAN.
Sounds a little goofy, I know, but once an internal NIC is cheap enough, you no longer need a killer app to justify networked appliances. You just need a few little benefits that are nice to have.
Yeah, but after about a week, the parents wouldn't let them use it.
Now that I think about it though, that's just as well, because the RIAA would demand a quarter every time you picked it up. Then they'd go to Congress and whine that Brushster was costing them $3 gazillion in toothbrush revenue, and they'd sue Colgate for not installing SSSCA/CPDTPA/WBATUTW* technology in their toothpaste.
*Whatever Bogus Acronym They're Using This Week
I think there's a t-shirt in there somewhere.
I wouldn't count on that. Suppose that part of this government-mandated standard requires that all "content" be encoded a particular way to ensure compliance with their magic decoders. Further suppose that this encoding process is only available through a special license, and that this license comes with an imposing price tag.
Or, maybe it's not encoder licensing, but some new, unholy twist in interpreting the DMCA that intimidates ISPs into prohibiting non-registered content suppliers. Maybe its an entirely new piece of purchased legislation, "protecting" we sheep from terrorism by prohibiting unauthorized transmissions - terrorists stream their training videos, you know.
Whatever the mechanism, it's easy to imagine a scenario where the majors are the only ones that are authorized to or can afford to distribute content over the Internet. Their whole cartel is based on exclusive control. I don't imagine for a second that they've missed this.
Wouldn't the ads be more like "FREE ice water!!!!!" and "Make your own air conditioner - absolutely legal", with maybe an occasional "Hidden heaven cam, hot teen angels! (34231)"?