Using John Kerry's Senate voting history to say that he supported or opposed any given thing is like trying to upconvert a low-bitrate signal... you end up guessing to make data you don't really have.
For example, there never was a true vote "on the war". Congress has not ever even voted on an official decloration of war during recent years. What was actually voted on was permission to use the armed forces if things couldn't be resolved any other way. Kerry claims that Bush forgot about that if-clause and went to war too quickly.
This is a problem anybody who tries to advance from the legislative branch into the executive branch always faces. Legislators are always asked to vote on hundreds of things on the record, while the President and governors only have to consider the final versions that have cleared their legislature. It may seem like a flip-flop to vote yes "on" version A, but "no" on version B of the same bill, but versions A and B by definition cannot be the same thing. What such a voting record indicates is not that the person was opposed to the main concept of the whole bill and then changed their mind. It instead indcates that there was some flaw in version A that was fixed by the time version B came around so they could now support the bill.
For those who forgot their high school civics our live outside the USA...
The president cannot directly write make a law at all. Only members of the House and Senate can nominate bills for consideration. (When the "President's Budget" comes every year, some member of the House must support the bill enough to put it into "the hopper" or it doesn't get off the ground.) The president's only role in the legislative process is to approve bills that have passed both houses of Congress, and that can even be bypassed
Therefore, even if Kerry wins the presidential race, he still will have no direct impact on laws. He'll only be able to sign a DMCA repeal or softening amendment if Congress sends him one to consider.
As always happens in the even-numbered years, all of the House and 1/3 of the Senate seats are up for re-election. Right now, it's a "Republican steamroller" because Republicans control both houses and and the White house. However, the Republicans hold on to a very thin margin to make their majority in both cases, so this could completely flip or end up in a mixed state after the elections. The Congress has much more say over the laws than the President gets.
Red Hat's reply to this issue is pretty straight-forward. They've already taken all of the steps to properly sign their real updates, and this should stand out as a fake because it lacks all of those digital signatures.
However, what good is that against Joe User who falls for the bait and things the e-mail is authentic because they believe everything they read on their screen? They don't know to check for the "security seals" and since they don't see any red flags indicating that this is bogus.
It's something in info security that disconnects when dealing with average users. They don't know what to look for, and therefore the absense of those marks is not alarming to them as it is for us... a little something that needs to be cleaned up before Linux is ready for desktop primetime.
I'd say it has more to do with the fact that the Media Center is a piece of software that's being implemented on hardware that ranges from $1000 to $6000 depending on what brand you get... meanwhile this review was limited to settop boxes that are one-size-fits-all kits.
Call for Help with Leo (now broadcast out of Toronto) and Screen Savers (AKA what happened on slashdot today) and maybe that Martin guy is all I watch on the channel.
One thing that should be noted is that Leo Laporte's Call For Help show got continued by G4TechTV Canada in a primetime slot... but the show is nowhere to be found on the USA version of the channel. Odd for a show to get upgraded and canceled at the same time by two networks that share the same name.
Something economically is going very wrong in our medical system when everywhere else in the world is getting the same goods and services we are for much less...
Remember, perscription medications are very much an IP-based business. The first pill costs millions in research and approvals. Once the pill is ready for mass production, the actual ingredients cost very little to gather and put together. That's the reason why there has to be patents on medications... without that IP-based protection, nobody would pay to do the research that creates new drugs.
Still, when Canada's getting the medications for less than they're being sold in the USA... something's very wrong. It feels like every other first world country has set price controls that the drug makers are bowing to, and because we don't have price limits, they charge us to make the money.
It's an interesting dilema... if we pull out of funding the world's research, that research just isn't going to get done. On the other hand, we're funding the research that the rest of the world is benefiting from and not paying for.
I'm pretty sure the developer thought that this would be funny... people seem to get offensive and funny mixed up these days.
You should know better when designing something from a broad base that if you offend people, those are potential customers you won't get. Turn away too many potential customers and yhou won't have enough actual customers to make anything work.
I find it funny that they always select the week before the May Sweeps to be TV turn-off week. Many TV shows put up reruns that week because they're spending that week preparing for their May Sweeps episodes...
It'd be a much louder message to try to depress the ratings during a sweeps period.
From the Slashdot random quotes file...
on
Good Bad Attitude
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This showed up at the bottom of the page while reading this thread...
We question most of the mantras around here periodically, in case you hadn't noticed.:-) -- Larry Wall in
Given the facts that the price has dropped dramatically, HD sizes have expanded, and TiVo's now discounting second subscriptions in the same househoud... why not consign the old unit to her and get a new one?
It should be pointed out that on the semi-offical TiVoCommunity.com boards, any form of getting video out of a TiVo other than playing back the file and recording that is a verbotten topic. Digital video extraction from a TiVo is possible, but it requires modifying the TiVo software to remove intentional encryption that's being applied.
TiVo doesn't support moving files to your computer yet, and it's highly likely that TiVo-To-Go will permit storing and watching of files but nothing more.
Bottom line... if you want to get unrestricted MPEG files out of your TiVo, you can, but you have to go a long way to make it work, and you end up no longer being officially supported. TiVo's ass is covered.
Video on demand as a technology is here and works just fine over cable TV systems. What's tying video to physical media isn't technical, it's political. Hollywood's scared of people being able to download HDTV broadcasts and store them, because there'd be nothing left to sell on the DVD if people are able to burn their own recordings to DVD...
Replay got beaten into submission by lawsuits over their ability to share shows over the Internet and their automatic commercial skipping. They eventually removed both features from their products, even the ones already sold, via a software update. Both of those features are things TiVo never had.
As a result, they're now a total also-ran being dwarfed by TiVo's market share. They still exists... but you might as well be compatible with the rest of the world and get a TiVo. ReplayTV just lacks any features that makes them stand out since they got thrown off the anti-Hollywood wagon.
TiVo most definitely beats the homebrew options for working with DirecTV because by being in the same box, the unit never slips over a channel-change command because there's no need to go through infrared signal emulation.
Additionally Tribune Media Service's data feed isn't free. (Neither is TV Guide / Gemstar's data.) That's what really can hold a homebrew project back... a last-minute lineup change has a chance of being caught by TiVo, your homebrew project will end up recording based on the time instead of the scheduled series.
How are you negotiating your relationship with Hollywood after they essentially put your main competitor out of business?
Our role is to create a great experience for people who want to watch television. ReplayTV crossed a line, and they kind of asked for it, and they were put out of business.
The Hollywood industry never really liked the Betamax VCR, so they certainly must be scared of DVRs. The features that got ReplayTV into trouble was "Show sharing" accross the Internet, and a semi-automatic skipping of commercials it could detect.
TiVo of course has never offered such features, and TiVo-to-Go will be based on a USB dongle to tie recordings to the user who recorded them and try to stand in the way of user-to-user sharing.
It's a strange world they live in... loved by consumers, but being careful to keep the Hollywood megacorps from crushing them.
i.e. "How do I get to the Bostom Museum of Science from Alewife". and they get back an answer something like "Take the Blue line to Fenway, then take the Red line to government center".
For those of you outside of Boston... those dirrections are clearly incorrect to anybody local because Alewife is the western terminal station for the Red Line, you can't get on the Blue Line there.
It will probably become quite effective once the useage gets high.
That usage factor is going to be very interesting, because in order for their system to works there needs to be an answer to every question asked, and to work well many answers per question.
But where exactly are the answers going to come from since there's no direction reward for answering? There needs to be some sort of rule or incentive protecting the question-to-answer ratio, otherwise this system could colapse with piles of unanswered questions.
Is "Tell a Friend" spamming the friend?
on
Search By.... Email?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This system brings up an interesting e-mail marketing situation.
When a site invites its user to "tell a friend" by sending a pre-scripted e-mail, the friend ends up getting an e-mail that looks a lot like a spam message, but it's not really a mass-distributed e-mail because it only goes to those whose e-mail addresses were turned in by other friends.
So, the sending friend might think they're doing their friend a favor, while the friend getting the message would be within their rights to declare that they were spammed...
The article seems to have skipped over the entire blog culture as being a social use of software... one that we are playing a part in right now.
Slashdot might be called a "news site", but in technical format it's run as a blog where a select few chosen by the owner of the sute post stories, then we all chime in with our comments. That's exactly how a "blog" is defined...
And you can't say this doesn't change how news is processed in our world. Just look at all the trouble Dan Rather is having with blogs teaming up pointing out his recent mistakes...
Just read the summary again and you'll see this isn't that major of a victory for P2P fans... all the RIAA has to do is file a "John Doe" lawsuit, and then Verizon will have to turn over the info so that the user is identified and dropped into the defendant's chair.
Sorry, this doesn't make P2P copyrighted music stealing legal...
I had a rather frustrating experience with the Net2Phone Voiceline product. Simply put, no matter how I tried to install it, it wouldn't give the green "provisioned" light or a dial tone.
Their tech support was less than useless at telling me what was wrong... they just processed the return instead.
I've found that workers treat their IT staff according to how well they're treated by them. If you want to hide behind a nameless "tech support" system, then they'll blame you for everything that doesn't work. If you show them that you're working as hard as you can on the things you can control, they'll understand why you can't control the things you can't.
I could see them being spread out across a city to cover it with a signal
I can't. It's hard to have on-channel repeaters of the same signal work together propery... issues with phase shift will end up causing the signal to be spotty even right next to transmitters. It just wouldn't work on a city-wide basis.
The current setup of copyright laws establishes that there's a steep penalty for not taking down a copyrighted work, but no penalty at all for wrongly taking down public domain work...
No wonder the businesses involved reach for the trigger instead of stopping to think. Delaying when it's valid exposes them to risk, tripping over a false positive does not.
Re:So disappointed!
on
A Hack A Day
·
· Score: 3, Funny
There are some posts that merit there being a "-1 Failed humor attempt" mod...
Slashdot Mirror
Using John Kerry's Senate voting history to say that he supported or opposed any given thing is like trying to upconvert a low-bitrate signal... you end up guessing to make data you don't really have.
For example, there never was a true vote "on the war". Congress has not ever even voted on an official decloration of war during recent years. What was actually voted on was permission to use the armed forces if things couldn't be resolved any other way. Kerry claims that Bush forgot about that if-clause and went to war too quickly.
This is a problem anybody who tries to advance from the legislative branch into the executive branch always faces. Legislators are always asked to vote on hundreds of things on the record, while the President and governors only have to consider the final versions that have cleared their legislature. It may seem like a flip-flop to vote yes "on" version A, but "no" on version B of the same bill, but versions A and B by definition cannot be the same thing. What such a voting record indicates is not that the person was opposed to the main concept of the whole bill and then changed their mind. It instead indcates that there was some flaw in version A that was fixed by the time version B came around so they could now support the bill.
For those who forgot their high school civics our live outside the USA...
The president cannot directly write make a law at all. Only members of the House and Senate can nominate bills for consideration. (When the "President's Budget" comes every year, some member of the House must support the bill enough to put it into "the hopper" or it doesn't get off the ground.) The president's only role in the legislative process is to approve bills that have passed both houses of Congress, and that can even be bypassed
Therefore, even if Kerry wins the presidential race, he still will have no direct impact on laws. He'll only be able to sign a DMCA repeal or softening amendment if Congress sends him one to consider.
As always happens in the even-numbered years, all of the House and 1/3 of the Senate seats are up for re-election. Right now, it's a "Republican steamroller" because Republicans control both houses and and the White house. However, the Republicans hold on to a very thin margin to make their majority in both cases, so this could completely flip or end up in a mixed state after the elections. The Congress has much more say over the laws than the President gets.
Red Hat's reply to this issue is pretty straight-forward. They've already taken all of the steps to properly sign their real updates, and this should stand out as a fake because it lacks all of those digital signatures.
However, what good is that against Joe User who falls for the bait and things the e-mail is authentic because they believe everything they read on their screen? They don't know to check for the "security seals" and since they don't see any red flags indicating that this is bogus.
It's something in info security that disconnects when dealing with average users. They don't know what to look for, and therefore the absense of those marks is not alarming to them as it is for us... a little something that needs to be cleaned up before Linux is ready for desktop primetime.
I'd say it has more to do with the fact that the Media Center is a piece of software that's being implemented on hardware that ranges from $1000 to $6000 depending on what brand you get... meanwhile this review was limited to settop boxes that are one-size-fits-all kits.
Call for Help with Leo (now broadcast out of Toronto) and Screen Savers (AKA what happened on slashdot today) and maybe that Martin guy is all I watch on the channel.
One thing that should be noted is that Leo Laporte's Call For Help show got continued by G4TechTV Canada in a primetime slot... but the show is nowhere to be found on the USA version of the channel. Odd for a show to get upgraded and canceled at the same time by two networks that share the same name.
Something economically is going very wrong in our medical system when everywhere else in the world is getting the same goods and services we are for much less...
Remember, perscription medications are very much an IP-based business. The first pill costs millions in research and approvals. Once the pill is ready for mass production, the actual ingredients cost very little to gather and put together. That's the reason why there has to be patents on medications... without that IP-based protection, nobody would pay to do the research that creates new drugs.
Still, when Canada's getting the medications for less than they're being sold in the USA... something's very wrong. It feels like every other first world country has set price controls that the drug makers are bowing to, and because we don't have price limits, they charge us to make the money.
It's an interesting dilema... if we pull out of funding the world's research, that research just isn't going to get done. On the other hand, we're funding the research that the rest of the world is benefiting from and not paying for.
I'm pretty sure the developer thought that this would be funny... people seem to get offensive and funny mixed up these days.
You should know better when designing something from a broad base that if you offend people, those are potential customers you won't get. Turn away too many potential customers and yhou won't have enough actual customers to make anything work.
I find it funny that they always select the week before the May Sweeps to be TV turn-off week. Many TV shows put up reruns that week because they're spending that week preparing for their May Sweeps episodes...
It'd be a much louder message to try to depress the ratings during a sweeps period.
This showed up at the bottom of the page while reading this thread...
:-) -- Larry Wall in
We question most of the mantras around here periodically, in case you hadn't noticed.
I think that sums this one up.
Given the facts that the price has dropped dramatically, HD sizes have expanded, and TiVo's now discounting second subscriptions in the same househoud... why not consign the old unit to her and get a new one?
It should be pointed out that on the semi-offical TiVoCommunity.com boards, any form of getting video out of a TiVo other than playing back the file and recording that is a verbotten topic. Digital video extraction from a TiVo is possible, but it requires modifying the TiVo software to remove intentional encryption that's being applied.
TiVo doesn't support moving files to your computer yet, and it's highly likely that TiVo-To-Go will permit storing and watching of files but nothing more.
Bottom line... if you want to get unrestricted MPEG files out of your TiVo, you can, but you have to go a long way to make it work, and you end up no longer being officially supported. TiVo's ass is covered.
Video on demand as a technology is here and works just fine over cable TV systems. What's tying video to physical media isn't technical, it's political. Hollywood's scared of people being able to download HDTV broadcasts and store them, because there'd be nothing left to sell on the DVD if people are able to burn their own recordings to DVD...
Replay got beaten into submission by lawsuits over their ability to share shows over the Internet and their automatic commercial skipping. They eventually removed both features from their products, even the ones already sold, via a software update. Both of those features are things TiVo never had.
As a result, they're now a total also-ran being dwarfed by TiVo's market share. They still exists... but you might as well be compatible with the rest of the world and get a TiVo. ReplayTV just lacks any features that makes them stand out since they got thrown off the anti-Hollywood wagon.
TiVo most definitely beats the homebrew options for working with DirecTV because by being in the same box, the unit never slips over a channel-change command because there's no need to go through infrared signal emulation.
Additionally Tribune Media Service's data feed isn't free. (Neither is TV Guide / Gemstar's data.) That's what really can hold a homebrew project back... a last-minute lineup change has a chance of being caught by TiVo, your homebrew project will end up recording based on the time instead of the scheduled series.
From the interview...
How are you negotiating your relationship with Hollywood after they essentially put your main competitor out of business?
Our role is to create a great experience for people who want to watch television. ReplayTV crossed a line, and they kind of asked for it, and they were put out of business.
The Hollywood industry never really liked the Betamax VCR, so they certainly must be scared of DVRs. The features that got ReplayTV into trouble was "Show sharing" accross the Internet, and a semi-automatic skipping of commercials it could detect.
TiVo of course has never offered such features, and TiVo-to-Go will be based on a USB dongle to tie recordings to the user who recorded them and try to stand in the way of user-to-user sharing.
It's a strange world they live in... loved by consumers, but being careful to keep the Hollywood megacorps from crushing them.
i.e. "How do I get to the Bostom Museum of Science from Alewife". and they get back an answer something like "Take the Blue line to Fenway, then take the Red line to government center".
For those of you outside of Boston... those dirrections are clearly incorrect to anybody local because Alewife is the western terminal station for the Red Line, you can't get on the Blue Line there.
It will probably become quite effective once the useage gets high.
That usage factor is going to be very interesting, because in order for their system to works there needs to be an answer to every question asked, and to work well many answers per question.
But where exactly are the answers going to come from since there's no direction reward for answering? There needs to be some sort of rule or incentive protecting the question-to-answer ratio, otherwise this system could colapse with piles of unanswered questions.
This system brings up an interesting e-mail marketing situation.
When a site invites its user to "tell a friend" by sending a pre-scripted e-mail, the friend ends up getting an e-mail that looks a lot like a spam message, but it's not really a mass-distributed e-mail because it only goes to those whose e-mail addresses were turned in by other friends.
So, the sending friend might think they're doing their friend a favor, while the friend getting the message would be within their rights to declare that they were spammed...
The article seems to have skipped over the entire blog culture as being a social use of software... one that we are playing a part in right now.
Slashdot might be called a "news site", but in technical format it's run as a blog where a select few chosen by the owner of the sute post stories, then we all chime in with our comments. That's exactly how a "blog" is defined...
And you can't say this doesn't change how news is processed in our world. Just look at all the trouble Dan Rather is having with blogs teaming up pointing out his recent mistakes...
Just read the summary again and you'll see this isn't that major of a victory for P2P fans... all the RIAA has to do is file a "John Doe" lawsuit, and then Verizon will have to turn over the info so that the user is identified and dropped into the defendant's chair.
Sorry, this doesn't make P2P copyrighted music stealing legal...
I had a rather frustrating experience with the Net2Phone Voiceline product. Simply put, no matter how I tried to install it, it wouldn't give the green "provisioned" light or a dial tone.
Their tech support was less than useless at telling me what was wrong... they just processed the return instead.
I've found that workers treat their IT staff according to how well they're treated by them. If you want to hide behind a nameless "tech support" system, then they'll blame you for everything that doesn't work. If you show them that you're working as hard as you can on the things you can control, they'll understand why you can't control the things you can't.
I could see them being spread out across a city to cover it with a signal
I can't. It's hard to have on-channel repeaters of the same signal work together propery... issues with phase shift will end up causing the signal to be spotty even right next to transmitters. It just wouldn't work on a city-wide basis.
The current setup of copyright laws establishes that there's a steep penalty for not taking down a copyrighted work, but no penalty at all for wrongly taking down public domain work... No wonder the businesses involved reach for the trigger instead of stopping to think. Delaying when it's valid exposes them to risk, tripping over a false positive does not.
There are some posts that merit there being a "-1 Failed humor attempt" mod...