hehe, as if.. we're not talking small amounts of data here exactly... its something you'd notice..
Only if you're smart enough to be looking at bandwidth stats. You'd be amazed at how many small businesses and even local branches of government have nobody bothering to monitor that.
Things would turn into a right mess if the police would stop going after petty crime, traffic violations and fraud cases, until they had solved all murder cases.
A big problem with our justice system when it confronts these kinds of terrorists is that there was nothing left to prosecute on the 19 people most directly responsible on September 11th, 2001.
We need to be enforcing trivial violations because if we deported everyone who overstays their visa's expiration date, we would have deported enough hijackers to have caused problems with the plan.
We can't arrest somebody for being a suicide terrorist after they've comitted their terrorist act. The gut-reaction is to try to create a "department of precrime" that stomps on rights, but that's not the correct solution either. The solution is to enforce all of the laws we had on the books already, because it's mighty hard to comitt a terrorist act without having broken other laws on the way there...
There may just be three people involved in the backbone of this network, yet they could still have been sucessful enough hackers to have rooted machines located in 11 countries which they were using as their backbone. (Nobody would be dumb enough to host warez on a server they were paying for...)
...they put all that effort into hunting criminals that actually hurt people (as opposed to wallets).
The "real terrorists" need to be getting their money somehow. Wherever there's an illegal way to make money quickly, you can be pretty sure supporters of the terrorists will use it to make money to fund their destructive operations.
They didn't just catch three people in this operation, but they took down several servers, some of which the operators might not have realized were even being used for warez distribution.
In the perpetual cat-and-mouse game, the cat has just scored a few points.
I think that they're thinking about POP in the opposite direction... allowing you to give Google your username and password to a POP server you have an account on so that you can read your mail in Google's interface and store it at Google rather than your HD.
Mostly likely they'll never delete individual items from the tapes, just either reuse or destroy the tape after it is no longer "hot" as part of the disaster recovery plan.
Which means, a message saved on any part of the tape cycle won't be fully deleted until the entire tape cycle is completed. Since they're not going to release how often they're going to do a full backup tape, they also can't release how long it takes for tapes to get flushed out of their cycle...
Note that this information applies only to the PAL-based TiVo units sold in the UK.
The HDTV units have no MPEG settings, because they don't encode to MPEG at all, they just record the bits as they're given to it from either DirecTV or the broadcast digital TV station.
Even though the unit has four tuners on board, only two can be active at any given moment. Anything more and they'd end up having too much data headed to the standard hard drive at once. Optimized-for-DVRs HDs are in the pipeline, so eventually this limitation will go away in future models.
There's really no content loss in not having an MPEG encoder on board. Nearly every analog channel is now being repeated digitally on their sister digital channel, or in most major markets DirecTV has an MPEG-translated version you can get access to.
This is the early adopter's model. There's going to be better ones in a few years.
Re:Waiting for this Slashdot headline...
on
HDTV TiVo Now Shipping
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Does anyone know what Tivo's beef is with Canada?
Simply it's a market that they haven't chosen to enter.
The PR rep had a right to get angry, he was being ambushed with a question he didn't have a good answer to. There's really no technical or legal barrier standing in the way, but it's just a matter that TiVo hasn't seen fit to contract with Canadian dial-up network, program the IR software to work with Canadian cable and DBS companies, and create the channel lineups for Canadian cable systems.
For that matter, there's no TiVo in Mexico either. TiVo's only non-USA market is the UK.
HDTV broadcast signals are by definition MPEG compressed at the TV station. Therefore, all the TiVo unit has to do is just record the already digital bitstream without having to decompress/recompess.
MPEG is designed as a processes that's computationally cheap to decode, which means that it's computationally expensive to encode. Basically, TV stations, networks, and signal providers have more expensive MPEG encoders than can ever be included in a consumer device, so they come up with more-bang-for-the-bandwidth. It'll always be better to just save that bitstream to an HD than to decompress and re-encode.
Re:Waiting for this Slashdot headline...
on
HDTV TiVo Now Shipping
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Tivo is available in Canada. It's just not allowed to be used. I purchased a Tivo, paid the duty, and then was told a month later that subscribing to DirecTv as a Canadian citizen was illegal. When I asked for my Duty to be refunded, they made it expressly clear that owning the tivo was legal... using it was not.
That's the status on DirecTV units in Canada.
Standalone TiVo's are perfectly legal to use, however TiVo's data service doesn't dial-in numbers in Canada nor do they bother to cover Canadian TV schedules and lineups. TiVo could offer that in Canada just fine, but they haven't bothered to.
The X-Prize is nothing but a milestone towards the eventual goal of viable commercial-passenger space travel, such as setting up a space station as a hotel no mission other than allowing paying customers to enjoy the view. Why should the Russians be the only ones who can do that?
Oh I see, they want to make money, not win the prize... which is... money...
The X-Prize is a lot of money, but it's not likely to be enough to cover the costs of what it demands... not just one space flight, but two in one week's time. Not to mention, if you plan it all but get beat to the punch, there's no prize for coming in second.
All of the ventures shooting for the X-Prize have to have a motive to keep going beyond the X-Prize, win or lose, to be viable.
I wonder if the legal quagmire around rebroadcasting comes into play when you are effectively transmitting the net radio station on the air from your access point
Consumer devices are by definition designed for home and office use, so they're not really "broadcasting" in that they don't reach far enough to distribute the signal to "the public". Sure, your neighbor might overhear such a signal, but it's not going to make it to the other side of town. Even if it could, it'd be blown out of the water by interference from all the other users of a "consumer band" between here and there.
your computer regulated by the FCC. But now that your data processing device has become a communications device, the FCC (or non-US equivalent) has jurisdiction over your computer.
PC components have always required FCC certification in the USA, and CRTC certification in Canada. There's always something in your motherboard's doumentation that states that it's designed to comply with part 15 of the FCC rules. Basically, any computer emits RF interference by nature, and that interference must stay within allowable tolerances to not interfere with FCC-licensed RF operations, and also must continue to function no matter what RF signals are in the environment. In the unlikely event that your device somehow falls out of compliance with part 15 by putting too much interference onto any given band, you'll have to shut it down under the same laws that say a unlicensed pirate radio station on the FM band also has to go away, but you can hook up a device to your iPod that effectively turns it into a "flea power" FM station.
More or less, part 15 of the FCC rules is also the section that you'll violate if you overpower your WiFi system with too much wattage. A Pringles can setup with a consumer device inside might even cross the line, if it's too sucessful at turning an omnidirectional signal directional, and the "ERP" or "effective radiated power" in its targeted direction becomes too strong.
So actually, Centrino or no, the FCC already has jurisdiction over your CPU chip...
I can give a firm recommendation to the T80 model of Sennheisser wireless headphones. It has one feature that even other models in the Sennhisser line that look the same does not... it uses FM signals on the 900MHz rather than AM ones.
When you compare broadcast transmissions, FM is always cleaner than AM on a level playing field, because it's much less at risk to picking up interference from other eletrical devices. FM is simply a better way to move sound over radio, but AM is more commonly used in consumer applications because the transmitter is cheaper to make.
Unfortunately, that's not quite the way our system is designed.
It's nearly impossible for somebody who is not affiliated with an established political party to win White House. Simply put, our electoral system requires that the most powerful single-person role in or system have more backing than can be obtained in just one race alone.
See, in order to win the Electoral College vote, a canadate needs a whole lot more than just a plurality of the popular vote. A majority of the Electoral College votes must be captured, and that means one must win a plurality in several states. Having an evenly distributed 5% of the vote will register as a 0 under this scoring system. You'll need to distact at least 40% of the vote, and you'll need to do that in multiple states. Not just more than both the Democratic and Republican candidate, but you'll need to get a majority of the Electoral College "points" to secure a victory.
No non-party candiate has much of a hope of ever pulling that feat. At best, in a 3-man race, the most likely outcome will be a roughly-even split, something along the lines of 38%, 32%, 30%. That kicks our electoral system into overtime...
In such a situation that no ticket gets a majority of the Electoral College, the presidential race kicks to the House Of Representives... in a one-state, one-vote configuration determined by the representives of that state. In short, it'll end up being a party-lines vote going to the side that has a majority in the House.
Anybody who hopes to be president without the Democrats or the Republican Party's help must start their own party, and establish it by winning House seats one-by-one first. They don't need to take a majority control of the congress, they goal is to control a majority of the delegation to the House of at least 20, perferably 26 of 50 states. That way, their candidate needs only win a small number of states to win the election.
Ralph Nader's reputation is to be a "challenge the system" kind of guy, but the electoral system is entrenched in the Constitution and it's going to take an amendment to get it out. It doesn't mandate that we have a 2-party system, but it more or less prevents one individual from taking over the executive branch single-handedly.
A third party should seek a firm control of lower offices before trying to reach for the big one. One Representive it all it takes to filibuster the House, which is almost as effective as a presidential veto.
Diebold is going to be drummed out of the voting machine business very quickly now...
In California, the process of revoking their license for their transgressions has already started. The software that ran on election day wasn't the software version that was "locked down" and approved. That's just a basic outright fraud, and not something that a company in a position of trust should be trying to cover up.
Game over. Their word is no good anymore... if your anywhere in your state these machines are scheduled to be used, write your state election officials. Even if you're not going to vote on one of those machines, errant tallies from elsewhere in the state could tip the balance in your state's popular vote because it's looking to be a very tight presidential election yet again this year.
If my cable company (or some satellite company) wants to bundle a DVR with the service, so what? If you don't want to use it you don't have to - go buy a Tivo or build yourself an HTPC or whatever floats your boat.
If my operating system company (or some really big software company) wants to bundle a Web Browser with the software, so what? If you don't want to use it you don't have to - go buy Netscape or code one for yourself or whatever flots your boat.
Actually, we were just talking about this today, and a co-worker of mine recounted an instance where an individual decided to give up his TiVo because it was too good at finding stuff he liked - he found he didn't have much of a life anymore besides catching up on all these cool TV shows he didn't know existed!
Uhm... That "Suggestions" thing always could be turned off with an option in the iuser interface.
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hehe, as if.. we're not talking small amounts of data here exactly... its something you'd notice..
Only if you're smart enough to be looking at bandwidth stats. You'd be amazed at how many small businesses and even local branches of government have nobody bothering to monitor that.
Things would turn into a right mess if the police would stop going after petty crime, traffic violations and fraud cases, until they had solved all murder cases.
A big problem with our justice system when it confronts these kinds of terrorists is that there was nothing left to prosecute on the 19 people most directly responsible on September 11th, 2001.
We need to be enforcing trivial violations because if we deported everyone who overstays their visa's expiration date, we would have deported enough hijackers to have caused problems with the plan.
We can't arrest somebody for being a suicide terrorist after they've comitted their terrorist act. The gut-reaction is to try to create a "department of precrime" that stomps on rights, but that's not the correct solution either. The solution is to enforce all of the laws we had on the books already, because it's mighty hard to comitt a terrorist act without having broken other laws on the way there...
There may just be three people involved in the backbone of this network, yet they could still have been sucessful enough hackers to have rooted machines located in 11 countries which they were using as their backbone. (Nobody would be dumb enough to host warez on a server they were paying for...)
...they put all that effort into hunting criminals that actually hurt people (as opposed to wallets).
The "real terrorists" need to be getting their money somehow. Wherever there's an illegal way to make money quickly, you can be pretty sure supporters of the terrorists will use it to make money to fund their destructive operations.
They will never stop piracy 3 people at a time.
They didn't just catch three people in this operation, but they took down several servers, some of which the operators might not have realized were even being used for warez distribution.
In the perpetual cat-and-mouse game, the cat has just scored a few points.
As long as it costs $40 for a game or $100 for software there will always be people pirating.
People will even pirate data worth 99 cents... so long as there's a price tag, there's people who try to get around it.
I think that they're thinking about POP in the opposite direction... allowing you to give Google your username and password to a POP server you have an account on so that you can read your mail in Google's interface and store it at Google rather than your HD.
Mostly likely they'll never delete individual items from the tapes, just either reuse or destroy the tape after it is no longer "hot" as part of the disaster recovery plan.
Which means, a message saved on any part of the tape cycle won't be fully deleted until the entire tape cycle is completed. Since they're not going to release how often they're going to do a full backup tape, they also can't release how long it takes for tapes to get flushed out of their cycle...
Note that this information applies only to the PAL-based TiVo units sold in the UK.
The HDTV units have no MPEG settings, because they don't encode to MPEG at all, they just record the bits as they're given to it from either DirecTV or the broadcast digital TV station.
Even though the unit has four tuners on board, only two can be active at any given moment. Anything more and they'd end up having too much data headed to the standard hard drive at once. Optimized-for-DVRs HDs are in the pipeline, so eventually this limitation will go away in future models.
There's really no content loss in not having an MPEG encoder on board. Nearly every analog channel is now being repeated digitally on their sister digital channel, or in most major markets DirecTV has an MPEG-translated version you can get access to.
This is the early adopter's model. There's going to be better ones in a few years.
Does anyone know what Tivo's beef is with Canada?
Simply it's a market that they haven't chosen to enter.
The PR rep had a right to get angry, he was being ambushed with a question he didn't have a good answer to. There's really no technical or legal barrier standing in the way, but it's just a matter that TiVo hasn't seen fit to contract with Canadian dial-up network, program the IR software to work with Canadian cable and DBS companies, and create the channel lineups for Canadian cable systems.
For that matter, there's no TiVo in Mexico either. TiVo's only non-USA market is the UK.
HDTV broadcast signals are by definition MPEG compressed at the TV station. Therefore, all the TiVo unit has to do is just record the already digital bitstream without having to decompress/recompess.
MPEG is designed as a processes that's computationally cheap to decode, which means that it's computationally expensive to encode. Basically, TV stations, networks, and signal providers have more expensive MPEG encoders than can ever be included in a consumer device, so they come up with more-bang-for-the-bandwidth. It'll always be better to just save that bitstream to an HD than to decompress and re-encode.
Tivo is available in Canada. It's just not allowed to be used. I purchased a Tivo, paid the duty, and then was told a month later that subscribing to DirecTv as a Canadian citizen was illegal. When I asked for my Duty to be refunded, they made it expressly clear that owning the tivo was legal... using it was not.
That's the status on DirecTV units in Canada.
Standalone TiVo's are perfectly legal to use, however TiVo's data service doesn't dial-in numbers in Canada nor do they bother to cover Canadian TV schedules and lineups. TiVo could offer that in Canada just fine, but they haven't bothered to.
The X-Prize is nothing but a milestone towards the eventual goal of viable commercial-passenger space travel, such as setting up a space station as a hotel no mission other than allowing paying customers to enjoy the view. Why should the Russians be the only ones who can do that?
Oh I see, they want to make money, not win the prize... which is... money...
The X-Prize is a lot of money, but it's not likely to be enough to cover the costs of what it demands... not just one space flight, but two in one week's time. Not to mention, if you plan it all but get beat to the punch, there's no prize for coming in second.
All of the ventures shooting for the X-Prize have to have a motive to keep going beyond the X-Prize, win or lose, to be viable.
good catch... that was a mistake.
I wonder if the legal quagmire around rebroadcasting comes into play when you are effectively transmitting the net radio station on the air from your access point
Consumer devices are by definition designed for home and office use, so they're not really "broadcasting" in that they don't reach far enough to distribute the signal to "the public". Sure, your neighbor might overhear such a signal, but it's not going to make it to the other side of town. Even if it could, it'd be blown out of the water by interference from all the other users of a "consumer band" between here and there.
your computer regulated by the FCC. But now that your data processing device has become a communications device, the FCC (or non-US equivalent) has jurisdiction over your computer.
PC components have always required FCC certification in the USA, and CRTC certification in Canada. There's always something in your motherboard's doumentation that states that it's designed to comply with part 15 of the FCC rules. Basically, any computer emits RF interference by nature, and that interference must stay within allowable tolerances to not interfere with FCC-licensed RF operations, and also must continue to function no matter what RF signals are in the environment. In the unlikely event that your device somehow falls out of compliance with part 15 by putting too much interference onto any given band, you'll have to shut it down under the same laws that say a unlicensed pirate radio station on the FM band also has to go away, but you can hook up a device to your iPod that effectively turns it into a "flea power" FM station.
More or less, part 15 of the FCC rules is also the section that you'll violate if you overpower your WiFi system with too much wattage. A Pringles can setup with a consumer device inside might even cross the line, if it's too sucessful at turning an omnidirectional signal directional, and the "ERP" or "effective radiated power" in its targeted direction becomes too strong.
So actually, Centrino or no, the FCC already has jurisdiction over your CPU chip...
I can give a firm recommendation to the T80 model of Sennheisser wireless headphones. It has one feature that even other models in the Sennhisser line that look the same does not... it uses FM signals on the 900MHz rather than AM ones.
When you compare broadcast transmissions, FM is always cleaner than AM on a level playing field, because it's much less at risk to picking up interference from other eletrical devices. FM is simply a better way to move sound over radio, but AM is more commonly used in consumer applications because the transmitter is cheaper to make.
Unfortunately, that's not quite the way our system is designed.
It's nearly impossible for somebody who is not affiliated with an established political party to win White House. Simply put, our electoral system requires that the most powerful single-person role in or system have more backing than can be obtained in just one race alone.
See, in order to win the Electoral College vote, a canadate needs a whole lot more than just a plurality of the popular vote. A majority of the Electoral College votes must be captured, and that means one must win a plurality in several states. Having an evenly distributed 5% of the vote will register as a 0 under this scoring system. You'll need to distact at least 40% of the vote, and you'll need to do that in multiple states. Not just more than both the Democratic and Republican candidate, but you'll need to get a majority of the Electoral College "points" to secure a victory.
No non-party candiate has much of a hope of ever pulling that feat. At best, in a 3-man race, the most likely outcome will be a roughly-even split, something along the lines of 38%, 32%, 30%. That kicks our electoral system into overtime...
In such a situation that no ticket gets a majority of the Electoral College, the presidential race kicks to the House Of Representives... in a one-state, one-vote configuration determined by the representives of that state. In short, it'll end up being a party-lines vote going to the side that has a majority in the House.
Anybody who hopes to be president without the Democrats or the Republican Party's help must start their own party, and establish it by winning House seats one-by-one first. They don't need to take a majority control of the congress, they goal is to control a majority of the delegation to the House of at least 20, perferably 26 of 50 states. That way, their candidate needs only win a small number of states to win the election.
Ralph Nader's reputation is to be a "challenge the system" kind of guy, but the electoral system is entrenched in the Constitution and it's going to take an amendment to get it out. It doesn't mandate that we have a 2-party system, but it more or less prevents one individual from taking over the executive branch single-handedly.
A third party should seek a firm control of lower offices before trying to reach for the big one. One Representive it all it takes to filibuster the House, which is almost as effective as a presidential veto.
Diebold is going to be drummed out of the voting machine business very quickly now...
In California, the process of revoking their license for their transgressions has already started. The software that ran on election day wasn't the software version that was "locked down" and approved. That's just a basic outright fraud, and not something that a company in a position of trust should be trying to cover up.
Game over. Their word is no good anymore... if your anywhere in your state these machines are scheduled to be used, write your state election officials. Even if you're not going to vote on one of those machines, errant tallies from elsewhere in the state could tip the balance in your state's popular vote because it's looking to be a very tight presidential election yet again this year.
Overhead at TiVo Headquarters: "Can't sleep, clones will eat us..."
What's wrong with that?
If my cable company (or some satellite company) wants to bundle a DVR with the service, so what? If you don't want to use it you don't have to - go buy a Tivo or build yourself an HTPC or whatever floats your boat.
If my operating system company (or some really big software company) wants to bundle a Web Browser with the software, so what? If you don't want to use it you don't have to - go buy Netscape or code one for yourself or whatever flots your boat.
Uhm... wait a second.
Actually, we were just talking about this today, and a co-worker of mine recounted an instance where an individual decided to give up his TiVo because it was too good at finding stuff he liked - he found he didn't have much of a life anymore besides catching up on all these cool TV shows he didn't know existed!
Uhm... That "Suggestions" thing always could be turned off with an option in the iuser interface.
Furthermore, TiVo can answer the question the sponsors really want to know about... how many people actually saw my ad?