I've seen lots of posts complaining that the Slashdot editors aren't paying attention to what they post, and for the most part I just laugh and move on. But here's an egregious example - the web page referenced is indeed a review of the ViewSonic V150 AirPanel, but a Microsoft Tablet PC it is not. Rather, this is a "Mira" remote display device that requires a separate Windows XP system that actually runs the programs.
The anonymous contributor can perhaps be forgiven for making the error, but the editors should know better. Perhaps the editors need to first count to ten (or a hundred) the next time they want to post a "Microsoft is lame" article?
No, he's fine. Once HMO was made public, he's free to discuss what he does and doesn't like about the feature. What he can't discuss is anything not public, such as bugs uncovered during beta.
I was not a beta tester for this (and in fact my TiVo units aren't eligible for it), but I did beta an earlier software release and thems the rules TiVo made.
Some Replay models can be used without a subscription, some can't... The current models require a subscription. I am a TiVo user, not Replay, but I'd assume that people who already have Replay units shouldn't fear that their boxes will turn into doorstops overnight. The data service should continue for some time to come.
It does not bode particularly well for future development of the line, but who knows what D&M will do with it?
Um, because you're paying for much more than the raw manufacturing? A lot of the money goes to the movie studio and the production house which did the mastering, extras, DVD menus, etc. Some goes to the distribution chain.
Prices to purchase movies have come down a LOT over the past decade, and the quality has gone up. LCD panel prices have also dropped, as have plasma panels and other display technologies formerly considered "exotic". I expect that OLED, should it pan out, will help give us better product at lower prices - eventually.
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
His wording could have been better, but he was not trying to take credit for actually creating the Internet, despite all the jokes that followed.
My mother had been a WebTV user for a couple of years, but she was getting frustrated at the things she couldn't do, so I arranged for her to buy a new Compaq Presario. (At the time, I worked for Compaq and got it through the Employee Purchase Program, but without telling her, I subsidized her purchase by a few hundred dollars.)
It was the bottom of the line, with a Duron 800 processor, but it was more than enough for her and she loved it. She immediately started downloading every program she could find and wondered why her "puter" started acting strangely.
Soon after I visited (she's in Florida, I'm in New Hampshire) and I brought her a copy of Norton AntiVirus (the Compaq-installed CrapAfee AV had silently stopped working months ago) and got her ZoneAlarm as well. Thankfully, she had not yet gotten a virus - how she had managed avoiding that, I don't know. She was happy.
A few weeks ago, I get e-mail from her saying that when she used the new Kodak digital camera my brothers gave her, she would get "insufficient resource" errors (the Presario had Windows Me.) She told me that she had deleted a lot of files, but the errors remained. I explained that this wasn't related to files, and that upgrading to XP would take care of the resource problems. She knew XP, as she used it at work. So she goes off to Staples, buys and installs an upgrade.
For the most part, it went very well. But she soon wrote to say that her "puter" was very sluggish, and she was getting errors about "memory". Firing up the Remote Help facility (I had never used it before, and it's quite nice), I soon realized that the system had only 64MB of RAM, which was insufficient for XP and the things she was running.
As it happened, a few weeks earlier my Asus A7V133 had died - I replaced it with a P4S8X, but then I had these two 256MB sticks of Mushkin PC133 "Rev 2" RAM doing nothing. So I sent them to my mom, along with a printout of a Compaq booklet showing how to install them.
Bless her, she was actually willing to open the box and install the memory! I had her move the existing stick to a different slot, but when she was done, the "puter" was dead - no video display.
Several calls, with helpful suggestions, were made, but to no avail. She then proceeded to take the box to a woman in her office who "knows these things" and the problem was solved - my mother simply couldn't push hard enough on the DIMMs to seat them in the socket!
So now her "puter" is purring along with 576MB of RAM ("enough to pilot a starship," she says), and all is well.
My mother had done hardly anything with computers for most of her life, but she has found a new calling. Yes, for a while anyway, she forwarded jokes and hoaxes to me, but she has gotten into newsgroups in a big way and runs a web site with helpful information that a lot of people have thanked her for. Her calls for tech support are few and far between - she manages to work things out on her own most of the time. I'm very proud of her.
> My bet would be that someone's already done it > on a 1970's vintage VAX
Sure - Netscape, and before that, NCSA Mosaic, ran just fine on VAX/VMS systems with an Xwindows UI. The first VAX systems are from 1978 (VAX-11/780), and there are still quite a few of these in active use today.
This makes me wonder what the damages really were. Also, was tehre a PFA (protection from abuse, or NH's analogous procedure) in place? Did the killer simply ignore these?
No - Liam Youens was unknown to Amy Boyer and her family. She had no idea he was stalking her.
I understand, and to some extent agree, with your remark that "It's all about the Benjamins", but the larger picture is that Amy's parents have been looking for someone to blame, and they fixed on Docusearch. I don't fault them for this, it's a natural reaction and part of the way they're coping with the tragedy. I was trying to suggest that perhaps some court may later find that actions similar to what Docusearch in this case constitutes criminal liability. I am certainly not a lawyer, so I don't know how that would play out.
I don't doubt that private investigators have an important role. But I think they can't wash their hands of their responsibility either.
I live in the city where Amy Boyer was murdered, and my wife knows Amy's mother. We've (my wife and I) have talked about this case a lot, especially every time the Remsburgs appeared in a new newspaper article about their fight against the "information" companies.
As horrible as this crime was, it's not clear to either of us that if Liam Youens hadn't been able to buy the information on where Amy worked that she would be alive today. Youens knew where Amy lived, and he had been obsessed with her for years. It was just a matter of time.
I think what Docusearch did was slimy, and possibly illegal - especially the use of "social engineering" to trick Helen Remsburg into revealing information about her daughter.
The issue at hand is whether or not Docusearch, and similar companies, have an obligation to warn people when their personal info is sold to someone, especially when the purpose is unknown. I think it's well established that this sort of information is often used for heinous purposes - remember the case of actress Rebecca Schaffer, who was murdered by someone who bought her address from the California DMV!
In my opinion, the NH Supreme Court got this one right - Docusearch knows or should know that the primary use of the information they collect is NOT for the benefit of the subjects. They should have an obligation to inform the subject that the information has been collected and sold.
However, I think it is wrong to assign the blame for Amy's death on Docusearch. They were an "accessory to a crime", but did not commit the crime itself.
There are so many "what ifs" in cases such as this, that can have people tied up in knots for years. Youens had a web page up which gave fairly solid clues that he had it in for Amy Boyer. Did anyone in a position to do anything see this beforehand? Probably not...
As for spyware ("spywear"? Is that the watch with a poison dart?), I don't see an obvious connection with this case.
Much the same for me. I am the first in my family to be born with my last name - the family changed it when they immigrated to the US in the 1940s. However, my last name is not uncommon as a first name, so I have spent my entire life correcting people who reverse them (my first name, Steven, is not common as a last name (at least not as a singular), so I am not sure where this comes from!)
The combination of my first and last names is so unusual that I've been able to locate using web searches only two other people in the world who have it. (The last time I did this search, the only search engine that found ANYONE but me was NorthernLight!) Needless to say, I had no trouble getting a domain name...
Like alzoron, anyone with my last name that I don't already know is unrelated to me. However, that doesn't stop the people who want to send me directories of all the people with my last name, or research my "family crest" (no such thing).
Ah, the Rodona Garst story. I can find one recent (sort of) Slashdot story on her, but I remember another one when the original "retribution" story appeared. I wasn't convinced that the retribution actually happened, but I sure hoped it did!
My Asus P4S8X motherboard claims it can boot off a USB mass storage devicem, and it lists my USB CF-reader as a possible boot device, so I think the answer is, theoretically, yes. It would be an interesting experiment to try.
Nothing happens - a char is still 8 bits. Now if you have an array of pointers, that does double in size.
The 64-bitness of Itanium refers to the size of the virtual address, and to a lesser extent, the size of the internal registers. Datatypes in your program don't magically double in size. Even a float or int is still 32-bits, though there are compiler options to change that.
Q10. Will Itanium 2-based systems be compatible with IA-32 systems? Will IT be able to effortlessly migrate their systems to Itanium 2-based systems?
A10. Optimal performance for Itanium 2-based systems will be achieved with 64-bit software. The Intel Itanium 2 processor does, however, support the execution of 32-bit code for ease of migration. Because compatibility is always also dependent on OS and system features, IT should work with their solutions vendors to validate their complete solution environment, including current IA-32 code.
In other words, your existing applications will probably run just fine on an Itanium system. The performance may be better than you expect, as well.
In this case, the "64-bit" really refers to the size of a virtual address, and not a lot more. A 64-bit processor (and an OS that can use it) allows problem sizes to grow past the 32-bit address limitation. By itself, a 64-bit processor doesn't buy you any speed improvement - in fact, it can be a bit slower than an otherwise identical 32-bit processor because doubling the address size comes at a cost in chip circuitry and OS overhead. There's also a memory usage tradeoff - if you're storing lots of addresses, it takes twice as much memory as it does for 32-bits.
I've been through the 16 to 32 bit transition as well as 32 to 64 (ten years ago!). While the marketeers love to tout the "bit-ness", what has really happened each time is that the processor architecture was redesigned to accomodate new technology, and this is what delivers overall performance improvement.
Where a larger address space really shines is in VERY large applications, such as relational databases, weather modelling, etc., which have to use disk segmentation to work around the limits of a smaller address space. This is why 64-bit processors are much more important for servers than for desktops.
As for 128-bit, etc. - I suspect you are looking at some specialized processors which operate on data that size, not virtual addresses. Will we move to 128-bit someday? Perhaps someday - after all, software expands to fill the available address space (Windows certainly demonstrates that!) Once 64-bit becomes mainstream, I expect it to not be supplanted for at least a dozen years.
Maine launched its do-not-call initiative in September 2001 and experienced a surge last September when the state began offering online registration on the Internet. Maine forwards its names every month to the Direct Marketing Association, which maintains the registry.
Louis Mastria, spokesman for the Direct Marketing Association, said state do-not-call laws are growing in popularity -- as evidenced by the 7 million people who have signed on in just a couple of years. Another 8 million names are on the association's "telephone preference service" list, a voluntary do-not-call list that was created in 1985.
Mastria said telemarketers like the idea of do-not-call lists because it saves them money --and earns them goodwill -- if they avoid calling people who don't want to be called at home.
"Knowing in advance to not call customers who have said 'Don't call me' is embraced by the industry," he said.
So not only do we have the DMA endorsing Do Not Call lists, but many of the states who have them subcontract to the DMA to maintain them!
The article does go on to say that the many states which have their own lists are a logistical problem. It does mention the DMA's objection to a federal registry, but I'm unclear as to why they think that's worse than 50 states each with their own registry...
Interesting. Just the other day I read a newspaper story about DNC lists saying that the DMA liked them because they wouldn't waste their time calling people who didn't want their calls...
As far as I know, there has never been any regulation as to who can and can't register a.org domain. The association with not-for-profits is a convention, not a rule. Same with.net, which initially was for ISPs and other network service providers.
Nowadays,.org and.net are largely used by registrants who couldn't get the.com they wanted. (On the other hand, I have two.org domains registered for legitimate non-profits, a town band and a cat shelter.)
"Heaven forbid anyone should maybe get off their lazy ass and write a new fucking 'happy birthday' song and use that instead of complaining and whining. Sheesh."
Mike Jittlov ended up doing exactly this for his movie The Wizard of Speed and Time. (I feel fortunate in owning a laserdisc copy of this wonderful film - only 6000 were made before it got yanked off the market due to copyright disagreements.)
Originally, Jittlov had a scene where a group of people were singing the classic Happy Birthday song, but he then found he'd have to pay significant royalties on it, so he wrote his own "Merry Birthday" song and used that instead. It's actually quite good!
Some restaurant chains have their own compositions as well for when the servers come out to wish a guest a happy birthday in song.
Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants, referenced by others here, beautifully expresses a downside to extending copyrights to infinity.
If you buy a current model TiVo ("Series2"), then it is pretty much a doorstop without service. All you can do is watch "Live TV" and scroll the 30-minute buffer. No recordings, even manual.
The only TiVo models you can use without a subscription are those that came from the factory with version 1.3 or earlier of the TiVo software - that is, the Philips HDR312 (and similar) and Sony SVR-2000 (with some exceptions on the latter.)
I find the TiVo service well worth the money, especially for its ability to keep track of ever-changing schedules, avoiding rerecording the same episode, and more.
Slashdot Mirror
I read it. Three times. I don't think you did...
I've seen lots of posts complaining that the Slashdot editors aren't paying attention to what they post, and for the most part I just laugh and move on. But here's an egregious example - the web page referenced is indeed a review of the ViewSonic V150 AirPanel, but a Microsoft Tablet PC it is not. Rather, this is a "Mira" remote display device that requires a separate Windows XP system that actually runs the programs.
The anonymous contributor can perhaps be forgiven for making the error, but the editors should know better. Perhaps the editors need to first count to ten (or a hundred) the next time they want to post a "Microsoft is lame" article?
No, he's fine. Once HMO was made public, he's free to discuss what he does and doesn't like about the feature. What he can't discuss is anything not public, such as bugs uncovered during beta.
I was not a beta tester for this (and in fact my TiVo units aren't eligible for it), but I did beta an earlier software release and thems the rules TiVo made.
I use SpamCop - also $30/year with excellent spam AND virus filtering, plus a great web e-mail client and support for POP3/IMAP and SPOP to your ISP.
Some Replay models can be used without a subscription, some can't... The current models require a subscription. I am a TiVo user, not Replay, but I'd assume that people who already have Replay units shouldn't fear that their boxes will turn into doorstops overnight. The data service should continue for some time to come.
It does not bode particularly well for future development of the line, but who knows what D&M will do with it?
Um, because you're paying for much more than the raw manufacturing? A lot of the money goes to the movie studio and the production house which did the mastering, extras, DVD menus, etc. Some goes to the distribution chain.
Prices to purchase movies have come down a LOT over the past decade, and the quality has gone up. LCD panel prices have also dropped, as have plasma panels and other display technologies formerly considered "exotic". I expect that OLED, should it pan out, will help give us better product at lower prices - eventually.
No he didn't. What he said was this:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
His wording could have been better, but he was not trying to take credit for actually creating the Internet, despite all the jokes that followed.
For more on this, see snopes.com's writeup.
My mother had been a WebTV user for a couple of years, but she was getting frustrated at the things she couldn't do, so I arranged for her to buy a new Compaq Presario. (At the time, I worked for Compaq and got it through the Employee Purchase Program, but without telling her, I subsidized her purchase by a few hundred dollars.)
It was the bottom of the line, with a Duron 800 processor, but it was more than enough for her and she loved it. She immediately started downloading every program she could find and wondered why her "puter" started acting strangely.
Soon after I visited (she's in Florida, I'm in New Hampshire) and I brought her a copy of Norton AntiVirus (the Compaq-installed CrapAfee AV had silently stopped working months ago) and got her ZoneAlarm as well. Thankfully, she had not yet gotten a virus - how she had managed avoiding that, I don't know. She was happy.
A few weeks ago, I get e-mail from her saying that when she used the new Kodak digital camera my brothers gave her, she would get "insufficient resource" errors (the Presario had Windows Me.) She told me that she had deleted a lot of files, but the errors remained. I explained that this wasn't related to files, and that upgrading to XP would take care of the resource problems. She knew XP, as she used it at work. So she goes off to Staples, buys and installs an upgrade.
For the most part, it went very well. But she soon wrote to say that her "puter" was very sluggish, and she was getting errors about "memory". Firing up the Remote Help facility (I had never used it before, and it's quite nice), I soon realized that the system had only 64MB of RAM, which was insufficient for XP and the things she was running.
As it happened, a few weeks earlier my Asus A7V133 had died - I replaced it with a P4S8X, but then I had these two 256MB sticks of Mushkin PC133 "Rev 2" RAM doing nothing. So I sent them to my mom, along with a printout of a Compaq booklet showing how to install them.
Bless her, she was actually willing to open the box and install the memory! I had her move the existing stick to a different slot, but when she was done, the "puter" was dead - no video display.
Several calls, with helpful suggestions, were made, but to no avail. She then proceeded to take the box to a woman in her office who "knows these things" and the problem was solved - my mother simply couldn't push hard enough on the DIMMs to seat them in the socket!
So now her "puter" is purring along with 576MB of RAM ("enough to pilot a starship," she says), and all is well.
My mother had done hardly anything with computers for most of her life, but she has found a new calling. Yes, for a while anyway, she forwarded jokes and hoaxes to me, but she has gotten into newsgroups in a big way and runs a web site with helpful information that a lot of people have thanked her for. Her calls for tech support are few and far between - she manages to work things out on her own most of the time. I'm very proud of her.
Oh, she still uses her WebTV while in bed!
> My bet would be that someone's already done it
> on a 1970's vintage VAX
Sure - Netscape, and before that, NCSA Mosaic, ran just fine on VAX/VMS systems with an Xwindows UI. The first VAX systems are from 1978 (VAX-11/780), and there are still quite a few of these in active use today.
This makes me wonder what the damages really were. Also, was tehre a PFA (protection from abuse, or NH's analogous procedure) in place? Did the killer simply ignore these?
No - Liam Youens was unknown to Amy Boyer and her family. She had no idea he was stalking her.
I understand, and to some extent agree, with your remark that "It's all about the Benjamins", but the larger picture is that Amy's parents have been looking for someone to blame, and they fixed on Docusearch. I don't fault them for this, it's a natural reaction and part of the way they're coping with the tragedy. I was trying to suggest that perhaps some court may later find that actions similar to what Docusearch in this case constitutes criminal liability. I am certainly not a lawyer, so I don't know how that would play out.
I don't doubt that private investigators have an important role. But I think they can't wash their hands of their responsibility either.
I live in the city where Amy Boyer was murdered, and my wife knows Amy's mother. We've (my wife and I) have talked about this case a lot, especially every time the Remsburgs appeared in a new newspaper article about their fight against the "information" companies.
As horrible as this crime was, it's not clear to either of us that if Liam Youens hadn't been able to buy the information on where Amy worked that she would be alive today. Youens knew where Amy lived, and he had been obsessed with her for years. It was just a matter of time.
I think what Docusearch did was slimy, and possibly illegal - especially the use of "social engineering" to trick Helen Remsburg into revealing information about her daughter.
The issue at hand is whether or not Docusearch, and similar companies, have an obligation to warn people when their personal info is sold to someone, especially when the purpose is unknown. I think it's well established that this sort of information is often used for heinous purposes - remember the case of actress Rebecca Schaffer, who was murdered by someone who bought her address from the California DMV!
In my opinion, the NH Supreme Court got this one right - Docusearch knows or should know that the primary use of the information they collect is NOT for the benefit of the subjects. They should have an obligation to inform the subject that the information has been collected and sold.
However, I think it is wrong to assign the blame for Amy's death on Docusearch. They were an "accessory to a crime", but did not commit the crime itself.
There are so many "what ifs" in cases such as this, that can have people tied up in knots for years. Youens had a web page up which gave fairly solid clues that he had it in for Amy Boyer. Did anyone in a position to do anything see this beforehand? Probably not...
As for spyware ("spywear"? Is that the watch with a poison dart?), I don't see an obvious connection with this case.
Much the same for me. I am the first in my family to be born with my last name - the family changed it when they immigrated to the US in the 1940s. However, my last name is not uncommon as a first name, so I have spent my entire life correcting people who reverse them (my first name, Steven, is not common as a last name (at least not as a singular), so I am not sure where this comes from!)
The combination of my first and last names is so unusual that I've been able to locate using web searches only two other people in the world who have it. (The last time I did this search, the only search engine that found ANYONE but me was NorthernLight!) Needless to say, I had no trouble getting a domain name...
Like alzoron, anyone with my last name that I don't already know is unrelated to me. However, that doesn't stop the people who want to send me directories of all the people with my last name, or research my "family crest" (no such thing).
I guess you didn't read the article either.
The WiFi support is on a separate chip from the processor, but "Centrino Technology" is for a combination of the Pentium-M and the support chips.
Ah, the Rodona Garst story. I can find one recent (sort of) Slashdot story on her, but I remember another one when the original "retribution" story appeared. I wasn't convinced that the retribution actually happened, but I sure hoped it did!
My Asus P4S8X motherboard claims it can boot off a USB mass storage devicem, and it lists my USB CF-reader as a possible boot device, so I think the answer is, theoretically, yes. It would be an interesting experiment to try.
Nothing happens - a char is still 8 bits. Now if you have an array of pointers, that does double in size.
The 64-bitness of Itanium refers to the size of the virtual address, and to a lesser extent, the size of the internal registers. Datatypes in your program don't magically double in size. Even a float or int is still 32-bits, though there are compiler options to change that.
BZZZZZT! Incorrect answer. (Though one I see expressed as gospel quite frequently.)
From an Itanium 2 FAQ:
Q10. Will Itanium 2-based systems be compatible with IA-32 systems? Will IT be able to effortlessly migrate their systems to Itanium 2-based systems?
A10. Optimal performance for Itanium 2-based systems will be achieved with 64-bit software. The Intel Itanium 2 processor does, however, support the execution of 32-bit code for ease of migration. Because compatibility is always also dependent on OS and system features, IT should work with their solutions vendors to validate their complete solution environment, including current IA-32 code.
In other words, your existing applications will probably run just fine on an Itanium system. The performance may be better than you expect, as well.
In this case, the "64-bit" really refers to the size of a virtual address, and not a lot more. A 64-bit processor (and an OS that can use it) allows problem sizes to grow past the 32-bit address limitation. By itself, a 64-bit processor doesn't buy you any speed improvement - in fact, it can be a bit slower than an otherwise identical 32-bit processor because doubling the address size comes at a cost in chip circuitry and OS overhead. There's also a memory usage tradeoff - if you're storing lots of addresses, it takes twice as much memory as it does for 32-bits.
I've been through the 16 to 32 bit transition as well as 32 to 64 (ten years ago!). While the marketeers love to tout the "bit-ness", what has really happened each time is that the processor architecture was redesigned to accomodate new technology, and this is what delivers overall performance improvement.
Where a larger address space really shines is in VERY large applications, such as relational databases, weather modelling, etc., which have to use disk segmentation to work around the limits of a smaller address space. This is why 64-bit processors are much more important for servers than for desktops.
As for 128-bit, etc. - I suspect you are looking at some specialized processors which operate on data that size, not virtual addresses. Will we move to 128-bit someday? Perhaps someday - after all, software expands to fill the available address space (Windows certainly demonstrates that!) Once 64-bit becomes mainstream, I expect it to not be supplanted for at least a dozen years.
An article pretty much similar to what I read the other day is here (Kennebec (ME) Journal Some quotes:
Maine launched its do-not-call initiative in September 2001 and experienced a surge last September when the state began offering online registration on the Internet. Maine forwards its names every month to the Direct Marketing Association, which maintains the registry.
Louis Mastria, spokesman for the Direct Marketing Association, said state do-not-call laws are growing in popularity -- as evidenced by the 7 million people who have signed on in just a couple of years. Another 8 million names are on the association's "telephone preference service" list, a voluntary do-not-call list that was created in 1985.
Mastria said telemarketers like the idea of do-not-call lists because it saves them money --and earns them goodwill -- if they avoid calling people who don't want to be called at home.
"Knowing in advance to not call customers who have said 'Don't call me' is embraced by the industry," he said.
So not only do we have the DMA endorsing Do Not Call lists, but many of the states who have them subcontract to the DMA to maintain them!
The article does go on to say that the many states which have their own lists are a logistical problem. It does mention the DMA's objection to a federal registry, but I'm unclear as to why they think that's worse than 50 states each with their own registry...
Interesting. Just the other day I read a newspaper story about DNC lists saying that the DMA liked them because they wouldn't waste their time calling people who didn't want their calls...
As far as I know, there has never been any regulation as to who can and can't register a .org domain. The association with not-for-profits is a convention, not a rule. Same with .net, which initially was for ISPs and other network service providers.
.org and .net are largely used by registrants who couldn't get the .com they wanted. (On the other hand, I have two .org domains registered for legitimate non-profits, a town band and a cat shelter.)
Nowadays,
"Heaven forbid anyone should maybe get off their lazy ass and write a new fucking 'happy birthday' song and use that instead of complaining and whining. Sheesh."
Mike Jittlov ended up doing exactly this for his movie The Wizard of Speed and Time. (I feel fortunate in owning a laserdisc copy of this wonderful film - only 6000 were made before it got yanked off the market due to copyright disagreements.)
Originally, Jittlov had a scene where a group of people were singing the classic Happy Birthday song, but he then found he'd have to pay significant royalties on it, so he wrote his own "Merry Birthday" song and used that instead. It's actually quite good!
Some restaurant chains have their own compositions as well for when the servers come out to wish a guest a happy birthday in song.
Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants, referenced by others here, beautifully expresses a downside to extending copyrights to infinity.
"hoover the rug" is common vernacular in the UK.
If you buy a current model TiVo ("Series2"), then it is pretty much a doorstop without service. All you can do is watch "Live TV" and scroll the 30-minute buffer. No recordings, even manual.
The only TiVo models you can use without a subscription are those that came from the factory with version 1.3 or earlier of the TiVo software - that is, the Philips HDR312 (and similar) and Sony SVR-2000 (with some exceptions on the latter.)
I find the TiVo service well worth the money, especially for its ability to keep track of ever-changing schedules, avoiding rerecording the same episode, and more.
True, but when CodeRed made its debut, the light was pretty much on steadily for several weeks!