it doesn't seem right to me that I can tape the show on VHS and put that episode on my shelf and no one has a problem with it. Now, because the quality is better and I can copy it to a DVD, it's wrong and the companies have a problem with it.
From their point of view, they didn't have a way to prevent you from doing it and had to take the loss. If they thought a purchase history of blank tapes in excess by a non-business would be grounds for a warrant (and it would cost them nothing to do it) they'd be raiding homes daily.
Now they want that control and will threaten anyone who doesn't give them that control to which they feel entitled.
We get mad at TiVo for not having the capital to survive saying no to them.
if one can simply program their DVR to record every single show, they're not likely to buy it, especially if they can transfer the show to tape or DVD-R afterwards.
I can simply program my DVR to record every single show, and I can and do transfer shows to tape or DVD-R afterwards. I am still very likely to buy it on DVD because I know how inferior my copies are compared to the commercial offerings.
I wouldn't buy it on VHS though, but that's not because my recordings are better than VHS quality but rather because VHS is not durable enough for my money. VHS is a no-sale with me today.
And further, even if I had been archiving HD-quality broadcast recordings of Lost to hard drives and using a system that lets me play them back on my HDTV using swappable bays or other media server solutions, I'd still have bought the SD DVD box. The only thing that would have deterred me from buying SD DVDs is if HD-DVD or Blu-Ray options were available.
If you can't believe that, if you believe that no one would behave as I do, if you believe you would never buy what you'd already burned for free, then perhaps you should examine your own honesty.
It would be nice though if there was a site-specific hook to hang a user stylesheet upon, such as <body class="it-slashdot-org slashdot-org">, so that any tweaks will apply only to/. and no other site. I could then also override some of the tweaks I do web-wide that aren't necessary and distracting for/. like borders around every DIV (needed for certain pages at apple.com that don't work in narrow browser windows).
Having both classes listed would allow client-side rules specific to sections as well as site-wide. E.g., if I want to style div.block differently, I only want to style "body.slashdot-org div.block" and not every "div.block" across the entire web.
It would be more interesting to fork their reality. If someone doesn't want to play by the new rules, let him continue to play by the old ones with whomever else agrees with him, may the dominant reality persist.
Continuing on that thought, what if then you could convince people after the fact to change their vote and thus change their reality? If you are in the minority group, you can easily switch to the majority. If you're in the majority, you need enough people to agree with you to switch to reverse the minority/majority differential. This would counter the exponential fragmentation of the virtural world into multiple realities, as would requiring one voting with a strength of conviction decide whether you stay with the majority if your vote doesn't sway the result.
Ballot items would be limited to changes that could change the balance of the world, or just that some issues get elevated to being schism vote somehow.
And, then to take it even further you can test even more radical political approaches in MMO's like an institution REQUIRING it's denizens to vote or their account would be suspended.
IMO it would be more interesting to fork their reality. If someone doesn't want to play by the new rules, let him continue to play by the old ones with whomever else agrees with him, may the dominant reality persist.
There is no possible way that they could tell that the disc was copied from. How, exactly, would they be able to do that?
How fast does your DVD player read a DVD when playing it to screen?
How fast does your DVD-ROM drive read a DVD when making a copy?
The disks could be impregnated with something that retains a signature of how fast it was made to spin and for how long. Maybe tiny switches embedded in the hub that close at certain angular velocities causing data to be recorded in a small, practically invisible chip that can be read back using an RFID reader storing the playback history of the disk across several customers with timestamps. The power for the circuit could also be acquired from the motion.
Other physical effects of rate of DVD spin could also be detected to create a sufficient suspicion of guilt. Expect to submit your DVD player for forensic discovery in an attempt to disprove their evidence.
Now I'm not saying that the technology exists now or when the GP worked at Blockbuster. I'm just saying that the possibility exists. And to say FIRST ART to anyone looking to patent it (and a DVD reader that spins the head instead of the disk) and COPYRIGHT 2005 to any forensic drama writers looking to use it in their plotlines ("Comments are owned by the Poster").
Unreliable data should not be relied on yes. In this case it's upload numbers provided by the user.
By the user or by the client controlled by the user, it's just as unreliable because the user can have compiled his own client. It is after all open source. There is no "fix" so long as the client can lie, and any secret handshake has to be in the open source of every client. Either you try to catch the client in the lie or you just discard the data as untrustworthy and redesign around the problem.
Also, someone lying about their quantity of shared data may not be doing it selfishly but rather altruistically, seeking to get more of the file faster so that they can provide more parts to others. (Though an algorithm that limits the downloading of clients would probably also direct sharing to those with less of the file than those with the whole file to aid in their promotion.)
BTW, I refuse to call them "upload numbers" because there really is no uploading involved. P2P as it exists today--even bittorrent--is strictly downloading. Not even the seeder uploads; no files get transferred without someone choosing to download. If it were uploading, it would be pushing data to people that didn't request it, creating additional mirrors; a bittsunami if you will. (There is at least one system that does behave that way, but its purpose is not to increase the performance of data transfer.)
We want a system where everyone is getting a fair chance to get the file using the protocol in the way it was meant to function.
Seems to me a truly fair system won't care how much any one user has shared; everyone would be served equally. The rate of download should be a function of the number of people sharing limited only by your own bandwidth cap. The amount any user shares is braggadocio points and should not have been relied upon to make trafficking decisions in the first place. A meritocracy that punishes latecomers leads to snobbery and those left out game the system at best and sabotage it at worst.
Anyway, it seems to be a basic tenet that unreliable data should not be relied upon.
So why is the bittorrent protocol doing (essentially) this?
Because it's considered unimportant data?
Consider that the only people truly relying on the accuracy of the amount of data shared for any serious purpose are the people who want to prosecute you for any illegal works shared.
That the field can be inflated now becomes a defense against inflated charges based on the quantity of data allegedly shared illegally. The accused can claim he falsified the figure and the prosecution would have to go to a greater effort to prove the figure accurate. Can an accurate figure be calculated from tracker-side sources?
I wouldn't recommend relying on this as one's only defense. IANAL.
However, if you can come up with a new type of crime that requires specialized expertise to commit, detect, prevent, and catch for which the penalty is not life in prison (in the short or long term) and can demonstrate your trustworthiness, you could still have a future in law enforcement, a high-level military position, an intelligence career, or some new field created specifically to cover the exploitation and/or interdiction of this particular expertise.
In other words, acquire an esoteric power others will want to keep for themselves.
I've kept some movies on my TiVo for years just to prevent a Wishlist created to find and record the series of the same name from recording the movies every 28 days and possibly conflicting out something else (because the series is higher priority but the movies is low priority).
Last I checked there was not a Not-Movie category, nor a Not-Actor to exclude Tom Cruise in a Title Wishlist for "Mission: Impossible".
Why in the world do you need six Tivo boxes, and five subscriptions to the same guide data?
It all started when TiVo had one $100 rebate and Circuit City had two $100 rebates on a 14-hour Series1 TiVo. Getting two then-$299 units for free after rebate made me willing to get $200 lifetime service on each of them. I'm not sure how much time passed between each unit's purchase.
I also got a 30-hour unit for my mother, but not with so many rebates, which allowed me to also image her drive and up the primary drive to 30-hour capacity (that being the only way to expand the primary drive at the time).
Then the Series2 boxes were coming out which were locked down harder against hacking and service was made a requirement for them even to do manual recordings. So I sought out another Series1 unit before they all disappeared and picked up a 20hr unit. To keep a monitor on any policy changes on unsubscribed boxes, it was never subscribed.
Then for a short period TiVo had an offer to Series1 owners to upgrade to a Series2 box which would transfer lifetime service from the Series1 to the Series2. (Only certain grandfathered boxes could have a single transfer of lifetime service to a new box, for which mine didn't qualify.) You didn't have to give up your old hardware. Since the older boxes didn't require service and the new ones did, I took the offer and got two Series2 boxes and the lifetime service transferred. Then I resubscribed the two Series1 units to monthly.
The Series2 boxes had the Home Media Option available to move recordings between them. I bought it... before it became free to all Series2 subscribers.
TiVo raised their monthly subscription price, but dropped the price for up to 5 additional monthly subscribed boxes to $6.95/mo. Lifetime boxes counted as qualifying subscriptions.
Then recently came the offer to existing subscribers to get a refurbished Series2 box for free and free shipping with purchase of 1 year of service ($12.95 * 12). The new box would enjoy the lower monthly rate as another additional unit, so that 1-year subscription stretches to 1.86 years.
And that's the story on how I ended up with 6 TiVos with 5 subscriptions.
If I had instead bought DirecTV with TiVo Service boxes, each would have had two tuners and TiVo guide fees would not be charged for every unit. But then I'd have to have DirecTV service, and DirecTV is switching to MPEG-4 and obsoleting the TiVo combo boxes.
The individual units don't share their guide data. The Series1 units even ignore the presence of any other unit. There are those that have hacked in their own free guide data, but I've chosen to support TiVo and not cut out their revenue stream on my two monthly boxes.
And still, the primary purpose I'll put my MythTV box to will not be recording television but rather managing my DVD library, interleaving TV show DVDs so that crossover episodes play in order, trailers for the next episode inserted before the credits, and getting me on a schedule to get my whole collection watched.
And I plan to contribute code to MythTV that will make it useful beyond personal television viewing where the quality of the current user interface won't matter.
And if TiVo were to go away without throwing the big switch to unlock all boxes for recording without service or providing for another service provider, enough is already known about them to turn TiVos into front-ends for MythTV systems, so the investment in TiVos is still not wasted.
There's no need to go through DVD and CSS to be locked into Macrovision-honoring license terms. You can get there just by licensing MPEG-2.
Keep in mind that the earliest versions of TiVo was so good at locking onto the video signal that they defeated most analog channel channel scrambling methods. This did not get out in any consumer versions.
It should be possible to eliminate its ability to detect Macrovision to defeat this. (The TiVo effectively strips out Macrovision and only notes that it was present when the recording started.)
And enough is known about the video database TiVo uses that red-flagged content could be altered to be unflagged by a separate utility. Then it depends upon whether TiVo wants to get involved in an arms race of detecting unauthorized changes to such data with those determined to retain their recordings.
That is one good reason to ReplayTV as they have no new development...
At one point, ReplayTV did worse than TiVo in this regard. The Panasonic ReplayTV ShowStopper model refused to record or display any Macrovisioned content. But sanity prevailed and version 3.02 allowed such content to be recorded and reinstated it on playback.
If ReplayTV was still developing new versions, I'd expect their licensing of MPEG-2 which makes Macrovision support compulsary would require them to make the same restrictions as TiVo does now.
I'm hoping TiVo lives long enough to make a Series3 unit that will use a codec that doesn't make them contractually beholden to the industry.
I too plan to build a MythTV box. I've been planning to do it before this event.
Thing is, I don't have much to complain about in this situation. Of my six TiVos, the three Series1 units don't have this restriction and likely never will, two of them having $6.95/month service and the third having never been subscribed (and is full and idle). Of the three Series2 units, two of them are lifetime service ($199 ea. transferred from the Series1 units) and the other is prepaid for 1 year of service (equating to 22+ months of service at $6.95/mo.).
There's no reason for me to discontinue guide data service on the units unaffected by this change and less reason to give up service already paid for on the others.
I can however use the Series1 units preferentially over the Series2 units for any programming that seeks to exert control over my retention habits and look into boxes that filter out this variation of the Macrovision copy protection or otherwise disable the TiVo's ability to recognize it.
So far I've seen no restrictions on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, the most likely show to be affected by restrictions in my set of recorded shows with HBO threatening to protect all their shows. Sports? I'd rather listen to the game on the radio than pay for PPV sports.
(Normally service is $12.95/mo., but up to 5 additional units in the same home are only $6.95/mo. each, but a one year commitment is now attached. Lifetime service fee is now $299.)
But when you show stupid jiggle-physics and scantily-clad girls cooing and moaning and wriggling, you show yourselves for what you really are: sex-crazed children.
Won't someone please think of the sex-crazed children?!
Nevermind the quotes in my previous posting. You forget though that there's another way to power the time circuits: lightning. Also, Doc got sent back to 1885 from 1985 when the hovering DeLorean was struck by lightning. He wasn't going 88 mph then.
So if he could recreate the situation that sent him back to 1885 with a parked time machine, then he'd only need a lightning rod during a storm for the power and not require precise knowledge of when it would strike. Then it would just be a matter of constructing the time circuitry set to take him a sufficiently future date to get him the rest of what he needed. He's got at least a set of 1955 tires, a 1981/82 blown fuel injection manifold, a 2015 hoverboard, and enough linear time to father two sons.
"Oh Doc, I tore a hole in the gas tank. We'll have to patch it up and get gas."
"You mean we're out of gas?"
"Yeah, no big deal, we got Mr. Fusion, right?"
"Mr. Fusion powers the time circuits and the flux capacitor. But the internal combustion engine runs on ordinary gasoline; it always has. There's not going to be a gas station around here until some time in the next century. Without gasoline, we can't get the DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour."
A lawyer friend once told me that the working definition of "waterproof" was not that something was impervious to water, but that when something was damaged by water the manufacturer was obliged to replace it.
As compared to "bulletproof" where when you die from a bullet penetrating it the manufacturer is obliged to resurrect or reincarnate you at their choice(*).
(*) Some states or other jurisdictions do not allow the substitution of reincarnation for resurrection, so the above vendor option of substitution may not apply to you.
They tend to call them "bullet resistant" rather than "bulletproof" these days due to the difficulty of enforcing those terms.
Is there any way to tell if they have a patent in the pipeline for the same device except instead of an imager for reading barcodes it uses a radio frequency scanner to detect the RFID tags and perform the same function?
And, if not, can I now say, "FIRST ART"?
BTW, from my scanning of barcodes on DVDs into Delicious Library, sometimes the same title can be given different barcodes for different vendors. Most of my Highlander TV series DVDs were bought at Best Buy and don't match the barcodes on record at Amazon.com, which appears to be Delicious Library's only barcode database source (apart from the other regional Amazon sites).
And a bonus, the Optimus keyboard can be configured to emulate Das Keyboard by disabling all the keycap displays. Even better, put randomized white noise animated on every keycap.
You know it will be featured in at least one Hollywood movie.
I picked up my copy at Best Buy during the controversy but before the rerating. The price tag obscured the ESRB rating on the front of the box.
The original distributor of the Hot Coffee mod has withdrawn it from his site. You have to get it from others now and hope you're not also installing malware.
GTA:SA now has a patch available for the PC version that fixes some bugs and blocks the Hot Coffee mod. I haven't heard of anyone unbundling the patch to apply the bug fixes and not the mod blocker.
The UK version didn't require rerating, but they may also have rereleased it there without the content withdrawn from the US market (single build source and the minigame not part of the localization), or had the aforementioned patch applied. If so, you might not be able to discern the difference from the packaging, and I don't think amazon.co.uk will ship software out of the country. (They won't ship toys either.)
Slashdot Mirror
it doesn't seem right to me that I can tape the show on VHS and put that episode on my shelf and no one has a problem with it. Now, because the quality is better and I can copy it to a DVD, it's wrong and the companies have a problem with it.
From their point of view, they didn't have a way to prevent you from doing it and had to take the loss. If they thought a purchase history of blank tapes in excess by a non-business would be grounds for a warrant (and it would cost them nothing to do it) they'd be raiding homes daily.
Now they want that control and will threaten anyone who doesn't give them that control to which they feel entitled.
We get mad at TiVo for not having the capital to survive saying no to them.
if one can simply program their DVR to record every single show, they're not likely to buy it, especially if they can transfer the show to tape or DVD-R afterwards.
I can simply program my DVR to record every single show, and I can and do transfer shows to tape or DVD-R afterwards. I am still very likely to buy it on DVD because I know how inferior my copies are compared to the commercial offerings.
I wouldn't buy it on VHS though, but that's not because my recordings are better than VHS quality but rather because VHS is not durable enough for my money. VHS is a no-sale with me today.
And further, even if I had been archiving HD-quality broadcast recordings of Lost to hard drives and using a system that lets me play them back on my HDTV using swappable bays or other media server solutions, I'd still have bought the SD DVD box. The only thing that would have deterred me from buying SD DVDs is if HD-DVD or Blu-Ray options were available.
If you can't believe that, if you believe that no one would behave as I do, if you believe you would never buy what you'd already burned for free, then perhaps you should examine your own honesty.
Time to get fired up about user stylesheets
/. and no other site. I could then also override some of the tweaks I do web-wide that aren't necessary and distracting for /. like borders around every DIV (needed for certain pages at apple.com that don't work in narrow browser windows).
It would be nice though if there was a site-specific hook to hang a user stylesheet upon, such as <body class="it-slashdot-org slashdot-org">, so that any tweaks will apply only to
Having both classes listed would allow client-side rules specific to sections as well as site-wide. E.g., if I want to style div.block differently, I only want to style "body.slashdot-org div.block" and not every "div.block" across the entire web.
fully consistent with both the fair use doctrine under U.S. copyright law and the principles underlying copyright law itself
After extensive undermining of copyright law it was determined that there are no underlying principles anymore.
It would be more interesting to fork their reality. If someone doesn't want to play by the new rules, let him continue to play by the old ones with whomever else agrees with him, may the dominant reality persist.
Continuing on that thought, what if then you could convince people after the fact to change their vote and thus change their reality? If you are in the minority group, you can easily switch to the majority. If you're in the majority, you need enough people to agree with you to switch to reverse the minority/majority differential. This would counter the exponential fragmentation of the virtural world into multiple realities, as would requiring one voting with a strength of conviction decide whether you stay with the majority if your vote doesn't sway the result.
Ballot items would be limited to changes that could change the balance of the world, or just that some issues get elevated to being schism vote somehow.
And, then to take it even further you can test even more radical political approaches in MMO's like an institution REQUIRING it's denizens to vote or their account would be suspended.
IMO it would be more interesting to fork their reality. If someone doesn't want to play by the new rules, let him continue to play by the old ones with whomever else agrees with him, may the dominant reality persist.
There is no possible way that they could tell that the disc was copied from. How, exactly, would they be able to do that?
How fast does your DVD player read a DVD when playing it to screen?
How fast does your DVD-ROM drive read a DVD when making a copy?
The disks could be impregnated with something that retains a signature of how fast it was made to spin and for how long. Maybe tiny switches embedded in the hub that close at certain angular velocities causing data to be recorded in a small, practically invisible chip that can be read back using an RFID reader storing the playback history of the disk across several customers with timestamps. The power for the circuit could also be acquired from the motion.
Other physical effects of rate of DVD spin could also be detected to create a sufficient suspicion of guilt. Expect to submit your DVD player for forensic discovery in an attempt to disprove their evidence.
Now I'm not saying that the technology exists now or when the GP worked at Blockbuster. I'm just saying that the possibility exists. And to say FIRST ART to anyone looking to patent it (and a DVD reader that spins the head instead of the disk) and COPYRIGHT 2005 to any forensic drama writers looking to use it in their plotlines ("Comments are owned by the Poster").
"...plus Big Blue's recently announced Process Server."
process-server
n : someone who personally delivers a process (a writ compelling attendance in court) or court papers to the defendant
Unreliable data should not be relied on yes. In this case it's upload numbers provided by the user.
By the user or by the client controlled by the user, it's just as unreliable because the user can have compiled his own client. It is after all open source. There is no "fix" so long as the client can lie, and any secret handshake has to be in the open source of every client. Either you try to catch the client in the lie or you just discard the data as untrustworthy and redesign around the problem.
Also, someone lying about their quantity of shared data may not be doing it selfishly but rather altruistically, seeking to get more of the file faster so that they can provide more parts to others. (Though an algorithm that limits the downloading of clients would probably also direct sharing to those with less of the file than those with the whole file to aid in their promotion.)
BTW, I refuse to call them "upload numbers" because there really is no uploading involved. P2P as it exists today--even bittorrent--is strictly downloading. Not even the seeder uploads; no files get transferred without someone choosing to download. If it were uploading, it would be pushing data to people that didn't request it, creating additional mirrors; a bittsunami if you will. (There is at least one system that does behave that way, but its purpose is not to increase the performance of data transfer.)
We want a system where everyone is getting a fair chance to get the file using the protocol in the way it was meant to function.
Seems to me a truly fair system won't care how much any one user has shared; everyone would be served equally. The rate of download should be a function of the number of people sharing limited only by your own bandwidth cap. The amount any user shares is braggadocio points and should not have been relied upon to make trafficking decisions in the first place. A meritocracy that punishes latecomers leads to snobbery and those left out game the system at best and sabotage it at worst.
Anyway, it seems to be a basic tenet that unreliable data should not be relied upon.
So why is the bittorrent protocol doing (essentially) this?
Because it's considered unimportant data?
Consider that the only people truly relying on the accuracy of the amount of data shared for any serious purpose are the people who want to prosecute you for any illegal works shared.
That the field can be inflated now becomes a defense against inflated charges based on the quantity of data allegedly shared illegally. The accused can claim he falsified the figure and the prosecution would have to go to a greater effort to prove the figure accurate. Can an accurate figure be calculated from tracker-side sources?
I wouldn't recommend relying on this as one's only defense. IANAL.
However, if you can come up with a new type of crime that requires specialized expertise to commit, detect, prevent, and catch for which the penalty is not life in prison (in the short or long term) and can demonstrate your trustworthiness, you could still have a future in law enforcement, a high-level military position, an intelligence career, or some new field created specifically to cover the exploitation and/or interdiction of this particular expertise.
In other words, acquire an esoteric power others will want to keep for themselves.
Indeed, the headline contains a typo. It should read:
Microsoft to Bury Stake in AOL
I've kept some movies on my TiVo for years just to prevent a Wishlist created to find and record the series of the same name from recording the movies every 28 days and possibly conflicting out something else (because the series is higher priority but the movies is low priority).
Last I checked there was not a Not-Movie category, nor a Not-Actor to exclude Tom Cruise in a Title Wishlist for "Mission: Impossible".
Why in the world do you need six Tivo boxes, and five subscriptions to the same guide data?
It all started when TiVo had one $100 rebate and Circuit City had two $100 rebates on a 14-hour Series1 TiVo. Getting two then-$299 units for free after rebate made me willing to get $200 lifetime service on each of them. I'm not sure how much time passed between each unit's purchase.
I also got a 30-hour unit for my mother, but not with so many rebates, which allowed me to also image her drive and up the primary drive to 30-hour capacity (that being the only way to expand the primary drive at the time).
Then the Series2 boxes were coming out which were locked down harder against hacking and service was made a requirement for them even to do manual recordings. So I sought out another Series1 unit before they all disappeared and picked up a 20hr unit. To keep a monitor on any policy changes on unsubscribed boxes, it was never subscribed.
Then for a short period TiVo had an offer to Series1 owners to upgrade to a Series2 box which would transfer lifetime service from the Series1 to the Series2. (Only certain grandfathered boxes could have a single transfer of lifetime service to a new box, for which mine didn't qualify.) You didn't have to give up your old hardware. Since the older boxes didn't require service and the new ones did, I took the offer and got two Series2 boxes and the lifetime service transferred. Then I resubscribed the two Series1 units to monthly.
The Series2 boxes had the Home Media Option available to move recordings between them. I bought it... before it became free to all Series2 subscribers.
TiVo raised their monthly subscription price, but dropped the price for up to 5 additional monthly subscribed boxes to $6.95/mo. Lifetime boxes counted as qualifying subscriptions.
Then recently came the offer to existing subscribers to get a refurbished Series2 box for free and free shipping with purchase of 1 year of service ($12.95 * 12). The new box would enjoy the lower monthly rate as another additional unit, so that 1-year subscription stretches to 1.86 years.
And that's the story on how I ended up with 6 TiVos with 5 subscriptions.
If I had instead bought DirecTV with TiVo Service boxes, each would have had two tuners and TiVo guide fees would not be charged for every unit. But then I'd have to have DirecTV service, and DirecTV is switching to MPEG-4 and obsoleting the TiVo combo boxes.
The individual units don't share their guide data. The Series1 units even ignore the presence of any other unit. There are those that have hacked in their own free guide data, but I've chosen to support TiVo and not cut out their revenue stream on my two monthly boxes.
And still, the primary purpose I'll put my MythTV box to will not be recording television but rather managing my DVD library, interleaving TV show DVDs so that crossover episodes play in order, trailers for the next episode inserted before the credits, and getting me on a schedule to get my whole collection watched.
And I plan to contribute code to MythTV that will make it useful beyond personal television viewing where the quality of the current user interface won't matter.
And if TiVo were to go away without throwing the big switch to unlock all boxes for recording without service or providing for another service provider, enough is already known about them to turn TiVos into front-ends for MythTV systems, so the investment in TiVos is still not wasted.
There's no need to go through DVD and CSS to be locked into Macrovision-honoring license terms. You can get there just by licensing MPEG-2.
Keep in mind that the earliest versions of TiVo was so good at locking onto the video signal that they defeated most analog channel channel scrambling methods. This did not get out in any consumer versions.
It should be possible to eliminate its ability to detect Macrovision to defeat this. (The TiVo effectively strips out Macrovision and only notes that it was present when the recording started.)
And enough is known about the video database TiVo uses that red-flagged content could be altered to be unflagged by a separate utility. Then it depends upon whether TiVo wants to get involved in an arms race of detecting unauthorized changes to such data with those determined to retain their recordings.
That is one good reason to ReplayTV as they have no new development...
At one point, ReplayTV did worse than TiVo in this regard. The Panasonic ReplayTV ShowStopper model refused to record or display any Macrovisioned content. But sanity prevailed and version 3.02 allowed such content to be recorded and reinstated it on playback.
If ReplayTV was still developing new versions, I'd expect their licensing of MPEG-2 which makes Macrovision support compulsary would require them to make the same restrictions as TiVo does now.
I'm hoping TiVo lives long enough to make a Series3 unit that will use a codec that doesn't make them contractually beholden to the industry.
I too plan to build a MythTV box. I've been planning to do it before this event.
Thing is, I don't have much to complain about in this situation. Of my six TiVos, the three Series1 units don't have this restriction and likely never will, two of them having $6.95/month service and the third having never been subscribed (and is full and idle). Of the three Series2 units, two of them are lifetime service ($199 ea. transferred from the Series1 units) and the other is prepaid for 1 year of service (equating to 22+ months of service at $6.95/mo.).
There's no reason for me to discontinue guide data service on the units unaffected by this change and less reason to give up service already paid for on the others.
I can however use the Series1 units preferentially over the Series2 units for any programming that seeks to exert control over my retention habits and look into boxes that filter out this variation of the Macrovision copy protection or otherwise disable the TiVo's ability to recognize it.
So far I've seen no restrictions on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, the most likely show to be affected by restrictions in my set of recorded shows with HBO threatening to protect all their shows. Sports? I'd rather listen to the game on the radio than pay for PPV sports.
(Normally service is $12.95/mo., but up to 5 additional units in the same home are only $6.95/mo. each, but a one year commitment is now attached. Lifetime service fee is now $299.)
But when you show stupid jiggle-physics and scantily-clad girls cooing and moaning and wriggling, you show yourselves for what you really are: sex-crazed children.
Won't someone please think of the sex-crazed children?!
Nevermind the quotes in my previous posting. You forget though that there's another way to power the time circuits: lightning. Also, Doc got sent back to 1885 from 1985 when the hovering DeLorean was struck by lightning. He wasn't going 88 mph then.
So if he could recreate the situation that sent him back to 1885 with a parked time machine, then he'd only need a lightning rod during a storm for the power and not require precise knowledge of when it would strike. Then it would just be a matter of constructing the time circuitry set to take him a sufficiently future date to get him the rest of what he needed. He's got at least a set of 1955 tires, a 1981/82 blown fuel injection manifold, a 2015 hoverboard, and enough linear time to father two sons.
"Oh Doc, I tore a hole in the gas tank. We'll have to patch it up and get gas."
"You mean we're out of gas?"
"Yeah, no big deal, we got Mr. Fusion, right?"
"Mr. Fusion powers the time circuits and the flux capacitor. But the internal combustion engine runs on ordinary gasoline; it always has. There's not going to be a gas station around here until some time in the next century. Without gasoline, we can't get the DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour."
A lawyer friend once told me that the working definition of "waterproof" was not that something was impervious to water, but that when something was damaged by water the manufacturer was obliged to replace it.
As compared to "bulletproof" where when you die from a bullet penetrating it the manufacturer is obliged to resurrect or reincarnate you at their choice(*).
(*) Some states or other jurisdictions do not allow the substitution of reincarnation for resurrection, so the above vendor option of substitution may not apply to you.
They tend to call them "bullet resistant" rather than "bulletproof" these days due to the difficulty of enforcing those terms.
Is there any way to tell if they have a patent in the pipeline for the same device except instead of an imager for reading barcodes it uses a radio frequency scanner to detect the RFID tags and perform the same function?
And, if not, can I now say, "FIRST ART"?
BTW, from my scanning of barcodes on DVDs into Delicious Library, sometimes the same title can be given different barcodes for different vendors. Most of my Highlander TV series DVDs were bought at Best Buy and don't match the barcodes on record at Amazon.com, which appears to be Delicious Library's only barcode database source (apart from the other regional Amazon sites).
And a bonus, the Optimus keyboard can be configured to emulate Das Keyboard by disabling all the keycap displays. Even better, put randomized white noise animated on every keycap.
You know it will be featured in at least one Hollywood movie.
I picked up my copy at Best Buy during the controversy but before the rerating. The price tag obscured the ESRB rating on the front of the box.
The original distributor of the Hot Coffee mod has withdrawn it from his site. You have to get it from others now and hope you're not also installing malware.
GTA:SA now has a patch available for the PC version that fixes some bugs and blocks the Hot Coffee mod. I haven't heard of anyone unbundling the patch to apply the bug fixes and not the mod blocker.
The UK version didn't require rerating, but they may also have rereleased it there without the content withdrawn from the US market (single build source and the minigame not part of the localization), or had the aforementioned patch applied. If so, you might not be able to discern the difference from the packaging, and I don't think amazon.co.uk will ship software out of the country. (They won't ship toys either.)