It's interesting to think about what kinds of food would be safe to eat after a large scale nuclear war. You certainly couldn't eat shellfish or snails, because they soak up toxins very readily. Also, you should probably avoid pigs, because they eat everything. And, if you eat meat, it would be advisable to bleed it first because toxins build up in the blood.
Makes you wonder about the real history of Kosher laws in Judaism.
Almost everyone on this thread seems to be missing a huge implication. This advancement will finally give us one type of cable to use for everything (except power).
What is my reasoning? Simple: Everything electronic that uses cables must currently have complex, expensive circuitry and jacks to interface with those cables. If you can pull an optical signal off a piece of silicon, the cost of producing a product that uses cables can be dropped significantly by just runing a fibre from an SPDIF type jack to your silicon. It simplifies everything inside and out of a piece of electronics (not in the chip, but out of the chip, between chips and between actual products such as TVs, Cable Boxes, Computers, LANs, WANs, etc...)
So while this is certainly useful for increasing bus speeds and simplifying motherboard designs, it's more profound promise may actually be to revolutionize how we connect pieces of electronic equipment together. Optical LANs, optical connectors to monitors, optical firewire or USB, etc..
The cost savings and simplifications of optical interconnects could revolutionize the electronics industry. But for most of us, the greatest advantage will be that we can throw away all 2932 custom cables we have and just use fibre for everything.
According to TFA: "People briefed on HP's review of its internal investigation say that it was authorized by Dunn, the chairwoman, and put under the supervision of Kevin Hunsaker, a senior counsel who is the company's director of ethics."
Imagine how much worse it would have been to put the program under a senior counsel who was not an expert in ethics!
The interesting question is, will anyone care enough about this to stop doing business with HP? Will any major corporate clients reject these practices and refuse to deal with a company that engages in them?
A much more interesting question is, will anyone do the research neccessary to establish whether these relationships to investigators was started with the board-leak or were they previously existing and established relationships. My point? In case it isn't clear from my first sentance, my point is that it may well turn out that this is an existing survailance program that HP uses for other purposes.
Naaa!!! No American Corporation would ever spy on people in everyday business (and HR) dealings, right?
Gee, I can't wait to see how Google finds a way to profit from a battered women's shelter.
Exactly.... In the boardroom:
What should we do to make more profit?
.. well... We could take our "Don't be evil philosophy and apply it to making money in performing valuable charity work for the poor, destitute and dehumanized populations of the world!"
.. hmm... Wow! Your right! "Don't be evil" will TOTALLY go over well with the poor! We'll make a fortune! Haha! I have a bigger bed on our Google Jet than you!!!
Just like you can't argue when the Discovery Institute uses math to "prove" that evolution is impossible.
In one case, you are taking a statistical sample and using well understood methodologies to extrapolate to larger populations, something that has been done with incredible success rates for many years across vastly different disciplines.
In the other case, you are basing your numbers on assumptions and postulations that cannot be directly observered or tested in a field that is not completely understood over a time period that lacks sufficient records to provide first principal assumptions.
I would say apples and giraffes, but some might just say apples and oranges.
You sir are an idiot. You dismiss agruements without thought because they disagree with your prejudices.
I don't see any argument, just a lack of understanding of the statistics of exit polls combined with a propensity for ad hominems.
It was'nt two young men polling mostly women. It was a work force made up of mostly college aged men (strange how that turned out almost like one side was putting their low level people into the exit polling process intending to skew the process, er, keep them honest after 2000).
The exit polling companys could just release a % female polled number. They refuse. Why? (They know their poll was bad, it was designed to supress Republican voter turnout in the western states.)
Do you have any idea how incredibly useless your argument is? Even if 100% of the voters polled were women it still wouldn't come close to accounting for the enormous deviations that the exit polls show, unless you believe that women in Ohio are all democrats while the males (from the same families) are republicans.
I can live with some idiot calling me not a geek. I'm so hurt though. Asshat.
Your ad hominem speaks for itself. I dare not even retort, less I lessen the strength of it.
The exit pollers in Ohio where young men.
They polled/hit on young women way more then random. It's there in the gender/age data. Next question.
Wow! Second time to see this meme tossed around. So you want to argue hard math with the assertion that the ratio of women to men polled was skewed by horny young male exit-pollers? If we really went down that road, how far would we get before we discovered that the exit-poll results were so far out of deviation with the actual results that even a 100% swing to female pollers in the exit-polls could not explain it. Do you believe that there is a significantly higher number of democratic women in Ohio than republican women?
Where exactly are you trying to go with this outrageous argument that has no bearing on the statistical results because it is, itself, going to be a statistical abberation that is offset by others in the poller population that tend to even themselves out?
Don't try to argue against mathematics with something that is already accounted for in the mathematics in a forum full of mathematicicians. Really, I am kind of emberassed for you.
The bias problem isn't tampering with the math, it is selectively reporting the numbers in order to emphasize his position. I don't really know or care if he is, but that's the issue with bias in this case, not the validity of the numbers he reports, but the completeness.
Hmm... Well, they are NUMBERS. There are really just one set of exit-poll NUMBERS. If you know of a way to misreport them, I would be curious to learn how? Did you even read the article?
As far as slashdot and geekdom go, the demographics of slashdot probably aren't quite as homogeneous as you seem to be assuming. Two slashdotters are going to be as different and alike each other as they are compared to people who are more likely to frequent a gym. Despite all the time that we spend doing it, people just don't sort into convenient little groups.
Very different indeed. I agree. But all geeks love math. Some might not really understand it, but all will respect it more than any particular source. You can't discredit math. Even if you discredit the person providing the math, it still doesn't discredit the math. This is one place the hypothetical propagandizers can't really go. They can't discredit math to a population of mathematicians. It will only serve to discredit them, instead. And my position stands. bye!
Exit polls are subject to sample bias. Such as in 2000 where college aged males were doing the polling.
They chose a disproportionate number of young females to poll/hit on.
The bias was predictable.
The data is there. Females were overrepresented in the sample. It's just ignored by those that want to believe, like the parent.
You are breaking the geek rule again. Any self-respecting geek will spot right away that there is a difference between a small set of mostly male college pollers and a rather large electoral exit-poll process. But not only that, if you look at the NUMBERS (remember, numbers?) they show statistical variation from results so aggregious that the slight variations in a female/male poller bias would register wouldn't even, ah, register.
So basically, I am saying - nope, your not a geek. Just more nonsense trying to argue with mathematics. No one will take your arguments seriously here.
Slashdot is heavily pro-regulation. "Network neutraility", which Slashdot supports (most posters and the editors themselves) is simply having the government regulate the Internet. The anti-Microsoft slant is also clearly a left-wing economic stance.
Not to mention "your rights online" which continually suggests that more regulation is required to ensure "your rights online". Which is ironic, if you think about it: regulation by definition is a set of restrictions on freedom, but Slashdot seems pro-regulation when it comes to the Internet.
Regulation of this type forces an even playing field, it absolutely does not restrict citizen rights - but it does restrict corporate abuses. Please tell us one way that your rights or freedoms as a user or citizen are impaired by network neutrality? I can assert many possible abuses that are possible without it (such as bandwidth throttling peer-to-peer or what amounts to denial-of-service for disliked sites).
Government regulation is neccessary to curb abuses. They enhance our freedoms by breaking monopolies, limiting the scope and depth of corporate fraud and malfescence and providing us with many different forms of consumer rights.
''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)
Whether you put faith in the Rolling Stone or JFK Jr is one thing. But to discredit mathematics because you don't like who is using it to prove their point is... well... it is not something any self-respecting geek would ever knowingly do...
If I were to put my tinfoil hat on for a second... okay, here goes... The fact that there are so many posters on this thread that are dismissing mathematics and using association with a magazine or a clearly democraticly bent author would indicate to me that they are not from the typical geeky slashdot croud. They would appear to be (drumroll) some other type of beast alltogether... Is slashdot picking up propaganda dispensers? If so, you would be wise to adopt certain religions to be taken seriously here and mathematics is at the very top of the list of those religions.
In fact, this has me thinking now... We may constitute a particularly difficult demographic to brainwash for exactly that reason - geeks don't take anyone but other geeks seriously and that means if you don't bow to geek religious beliefs (such as science and her language), you have very little chance of adjusting our opinions. If there are enough of you and you push buttons fast enough, you might be able to sling your comments around and mod-up the memes of your cohorts, but you will have little chance of making any difference to the thought process of the readership here.
Ok, tinfoil hat off... We geeks are probably just as gullible as everyone else and even easier to control... Just promise us dates if we go along with you...
There is one indusputable fact and that is that the statistical proabibility that the exit-polls could have contradicted the actual results by such a huge margin are vanishingly small (on the order of 1 in a million). And further, that specific contradictions have an even more impossible probability.
You can trash this article all you want, but if you are a math-fearing geek (as you should be to have a slashdot membership card), then you simply cannot argue with the conclusion of this article. Being a republican or a democrat does not allow you to magically modify mathematical certainties. Personally, I am appalled at the number of people trashing this article because it is written by JFK Jr or published in the Rolling Stones. Use your geek sense! Geeks dont think like that... So who are you guys?
Frontrow is Apple's weakminded copy of MCE that can't do recording. What you're referring to is iTV. iTV is far from "the most eloquent PPV system ever conceived", it's in fact a direct copy of Microsoft Media Center extender.
Aside from a few MC*Es and Microsoft employees, I am aware of nobody who has ever (or would ever) connect their PC to their television. The problem with Microsoft zealots is far worse than Apple fanboys. The Apple fanboys go nuts over Apple products, without doubt, and annoyingly so at times. But they know something that "works" when they see it. Microsoft zealots delude themselves into believing that something that doesn't work, doesn't have legs and is heading nowhere slowly actually has a chance of survival. It is a mysterious phenomena.
Front-Row is a product designed to be turned on and used with a remote with 5 buttons and no skills. The iTV (!!) box is designed and marketed to be plugged in to a television and used with no skills. It is also sold specifically to be attached to a TV to watch movies, it is not bundled into a general purpose PC guerilla marketing style by PHBs that mistakenly believe that once the user realizes he has a media center on his desktop that he will move his PC to the living room and attach it to his television.
In comparison, MCE is something that is really only owned accidentally by people who don't even know they have it (because it was bundled with their PC from Best Buy), it requires the PC to be near the TV rather than on a desk and requires the user to know how to configure it and operate it with some crazy 300 button remote control (exaggeration, but the point is clearly made). It would probably require a class to get a user comfortable with the relationship between and configurations of MCE and Microsoft Media Player (and the derivitaves such as Amazon Unbox). It really doesn't matter if MCE can do any of the things that Front-Row does (which it really doesn't because Microsoft doesn't use zero-conf [bonjour] and whatnot). The simple fact is, it is not designed or marketed in a manner that will ever be used that way by the common man.
To say that something *can* be done is not the same as saying that people *will* do it. You *can* write an assembly language CGI script library for publishing a Blog site. But I doubt you *will*...
I understand what anamorphic is. My main point is that for $15 we get video that isn't even as good as DVD (and I rarely pay more than $15 for a DVD). I'm disppointed in the sense that it would have been nice to stream HD (720P) video to either of my HDTVs using the iTV and its HDMI output.
At least it doesn't seem like the joke that Amazon Unbox video is.
I agree with you on both points. The videos should be 480p and there is absolutely no excuse for any of these films being released with stereo encoding. I will not order one of these films until they have surround sound encoded audio. Period.
However, I also agree with some of the posters that this is a temporary situation. We will see HD content as soon as Steve can deliver it. I suspect that a big part of the holdup is with the other studios. They are already balking about the price and I'm sure they would freak out about high-definition content (or any quality advantage over DVDs and perhaps even parity) at these price-points. Of course, they are making a grave mistake with that mindset because they have stripped users of resellability of content as well as fair use. Steve is probably pulling his typical genius manuevers on them. He will release this content now, get some of the studios to sign, show them that he can force people to pay for content twice by upgrading quality and use that to get concessions out of them for HD. [ My theory ]
Yea, it's messy. The studios are evil - they really have a hostility problem towards their customers.
But I do have a point to make: The reason that this scheme will work is that Steve's plan has a new value proposition that has more or less never been seen before (the closest is DirecTivo caching PPV movies). With the new Front-Row box it becomes possible to sit on your couch and surf through your movie collection and (presumably) watch previews and order new films for your collection all with your remote. It is simply the most eloquent PPV system ever conceived and it turns your mac or PC into a media server on the sly. iTunes is the media server. Everyone will fall in love with the experience, but it won't happen until January (shame, that - would have been a great Christmas gift).
Amazon Unbox really is (unbox - no box, no Front-Row). All the disadvantages with none of the advantages. Sad, really.
The things that I would love to see, but for obvious reasons probably never will:
* $0.49 upgrade of already owned content (e.g. 720p comes out and I can upgrade movies for $0.49 to pay for Apple's bandwidth or whatever)
* $0.49 different encoding charge in general (e.g. let me download the 640x272 H.264 at 700kps instead of 1.5mbps because my network is slow or I will only watch it on my iPod)
* Let me burn the damned thing to DVD
* Ripping directly into iTunes from my DVD collection (I don't care if the result is a FairPlay encoded H.264, I just want to toss my DVDs and be able to select from my entire DVD collection in Front-Row - I want the default behavior of sticking a DVD movie into my mac to be to RIP it, not to play it)
That is a problem with TOR trying to fix the problem.
If they start filtering the content they could be then responsible for the content. I.E. They wouldn't have any protection as a common carrier, if they even have that now.
I am not convinced that this is true in this case. Exit policies already exist and are at the discretion of Tor exit node operators. I was suggesting that the OSS community perhaps examines how to increase the effectiveness of these exit policies as a way to combat abuses (again, strictly at the discretion of the exit node operator). It is not censorship because nobody is actively filtering content - it is simply a decision system sitting at the exit node that either allows the external connection or not. Most node operators would (I am sure) prefer not to have known illegal traffic flowing through their network, and in fact the use of such policies themselves could be shown as good faith on the part of the node operator (indicating that such and such an operator's intentions are clearly to not add to the problem).
This is a good question, however. IANAL - I wonder what the EFF's position on exit policies is. Such policies do exist and Tor is sponsored by the EFF so one would assume that they have already considered this question.
So the "few arguments" against anonymity on the Internet are the same few arguments that we have for laws and the police. To protect property and lives.
I was attempting to present the fact that there was essentially only one argument against anonymous internet usage, not that there is only one bad thing that can be done behind the cloak of anonymity. I also agree that many vile things can be done behind such a screen. I am not an advocate of protecting criminals.
I do, however, believe that eliminating anonymizing networks like Tor will not stop such criminal behavior. However, it will stop dead the ability of legitimate citizens to securely publish information that has the potential to save lives or advance civilization in profound and unmeasurable ways.
Perhaps the focus should shift in discussions like this one to "How can we encode exit policies in the Tor network to minimize or altogether limit criminal behavior without sacrificing it's noble principle of maximizing free speech?"
It is irresponsible and foolish to demonize a valuable tool because that tool may be used for evil. A Knife can take human life (and does so rather regularly), but we do not blame the knife and criminalize ownership of them. The same can be said about guns, but it is understood (at least in America) that the right to bear arms is more important than the threat of their misuse.
At any rate, back to "What can be done to correct this issue with Tor?". I can envision an OSS type of project that, through a mixture of automatic classification and an online database could enhance exit-policies on Tor nodes to massively curb the types of offenses listed in this article. Hell, I would rather see Tor go to a white-list scheme (can only access approved sites) than dissappear completely.
Whether we like it or not, the technology behind Tor is already in the public domain. The cat is out of the proverbial bag. Big business and government may try to scare those that run Tor nodes into turning off their nodes, but there will always be a people who will not be intimidated. And, lest I forget to mention, Tor was originally conceived of by the U.S. Navy. Clearly, the US military seems to believe that such technologies are important.
So this is going to be compatibe with what digital cable providers?
Will it work with any variety of Satellite?
The thing about HD is that it REQUIRES a digital feed. Will the new Tivo act as a secure recipient of HDMI content or does it even have HDMI in? Is the output DRM encumbered HDMI or straight DVI / component?
At 800 bucks plus subscription, this thing better work with everything or Tivo will loose their shirts.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean the right to yell fire in a public building or...snip... bla bla...
There are many arguments for anonymity on the Internet. The most important of those is to protect those who wish to challenge powerful organizations (or governments), blow the whistle on criminal activities without fear of reprisals, present ideas (or even inventions such as alternate energy) without fear of intimidation or persecution, etc.., etc... The list is long and in almost all cases, anonymity is protecting those people who are trying to communicate for righteous purposes.
There are very few arguments against anonymity on the Internet. In fact, the only argument that I can even invoke is that anonymity interferes with the ability of powerful organizations to track down individuals who have moved data around in a manner that they do not like. Those "move data around" activities could include hacking, distribution of illicit or illegal data, pirated or copyrighted material, etc...
While it is true that online anonymity does interfere with the ability of powerful organizations to track down individuals, the crucial question that needs to be examined is "Does the greater good get better served by maintaining a mechanism for free-speach with no possible reprisal" at the expense of tracking down hackers and peddlers of illegal and copyrighted content?
If we destroy anonymity on the Internet, are we not simply sacrificing another of our freedoms for a perceived security? Certainly people will still hack, distribute illegal and copyrighted content and all of the other things. The bad guys will just steal someone else's identity to do their trash. But meanwhile, law abiding citizens are stripped of the ability to complain about the evils of the world without shouting, "Hey! This is John Smith and I saw a mafia hit last night! I want to report it to the police! Again, my name is John Smith!!!! EVERYONE!!!!".
I use Tor quite regularly and for a variety of reasons, none of them at all having to do with anonymity. The primary reason for running Tor is to avoid ISP man-in-the middle password phishing attacks while traveling in South East Asia (I started using Tor after having passwords stolen in this way while using my own laptop in a hotel in Manila). Tor encrypts traffic and bounces it around in Tor land until it bounces out, generally in Europe or the USA - and that brings me to the second reason for using it. Having my traffic coming from Europe or the USA while in South East Asia is beneficial.
It is still cheap to make compared with films.
That is partly because Holywood's business model has pushed up the cost of making films, but it is also because films are expensive to make.
Who believes it takes 250 million dollars to pay for some CGI and bluescreen acting? Really?
The reason such high production costs are show is to reduce the tax burden from the profit of such films. It is easy to create scores of companies and subsidiary-like corporate structures, overpay all in the production of such movies, and assuming that ownership is all within the same essential movie cartel, you can show losses on fantastically successful features and avoid taxes while in truth all you did was shuffle money around within the cartel.
It's called tax fraud. Don't confuse it with real costs.
I hope this doesn't work. if it does, there are probably going to be some dead Irishmen in a few months.
With trillions of dollars in oil revenue at risk, the oil cartels simply do not let such things live long, nor the people who understand how to reproduce them.
And before anyone starts shouting *tin foil hat* or *conspiracist*, I ask you, "Do you believe nobody kills over oil?"
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting to think about what kinds of food would be safe to eat after a large scale nuclear war. You certainly couldn't eat shellfish or snails, because they soak up toxins very readily. Also, you should probably avoid pigs, because they eat everything. And, if you eat meat, it would be advisable to bleed it first because toxins build up in the blood.
Makes you wonder about the real history of Kosher laws in Judaism.
How about Lawyers and their "Sound Energy"?
Almost everyone on this thread seems to be missing a huge implication. This advancement will finally give us one type of cable to use for everything (except power).
What is my reasoning? Simple: Everything electronic that uses cables must currently have complex, expensive circuitry and jacks to interface with those cables. If you can pull an optical signal off a piece of silicon, the cost of producing a product that uses cables can be dropped significantly by just runing a fibre from an SPDIF type jack to your silicon. It simplifies everything inside and out of a piece of electronics (not in the chip, but out of the chip, between chips and between actual products such as TVs, Cable Boxes, Computers, LANs, WANs, etc...)
So while this is certainly useful for increasing bus speeds and simplifying motherboard designs, it's more profound promise may actually be to revolutionize how we connect pieces of electronic equipment together. Optical LANs, optical connectors to monitors, optical firewire or USB, etc..
The cost savings and simplifications of optical interconnects could revolutionize the electronics industry. But for most of us, the greatest advantage will be that we can throw away all 2932 custom cables we have and just use fibre for everything.
Naaa!!! No American Corporation would ever spy on people in everyday business (and HR) dealings, right?
Excellent suggestion. Imagine? Reciprocity...
What should we do to make more profit?
In the other case, you are basing your numbers on assumptions and postulations that cannot be directly observered or tested in a field that is not completely understood over a time period that lacks sufficient records to provide first principal assumptions.
I would say apples and giraffes, but some might just say apples and oranges.
Do you have any idea how incredibly useless your argument is? Even if 100% of the voters polled were women it still wouldn't come close to accounting for the enormous deviations that the exit polls show, unless you believe that women in Ohio are all democrats while the males (from the same families) are republicans.
Your ad hominem speaks for itself. I dare not even retort, less I lessen the strength of it.
Where exactly are you trying to go with this outrageous argument that has no bearing on the statistical results because it is, itself, going to be a statistical abberation that is offset by others in the poller population that tend to even themselves out?
Don't try to argue against mathematics with something that is already accounted for in the mathematics in a forum full of mathematicicians. Really, I am kind of emberassed for you.
Very different indeed. I agree. But all geeks love math. Some might not really understand it, but all will respect it more than any particular source. You can't discredit math. Even if you discredit the person providing the math, it still doesn't discredit the math. This is one place the hypothetical propagandizers can't really go. They can't discredit math to a population of mathematicians. It will only serve to discredit them, instead. And my position stands. bye!
So basically, I am saying - nope, your not a geek. Just more nonsense trying to argue with mathematics. No one will take your arguments seriously here.
Government regulation is neccessary to curb abuses. They enhance our freedoms by breaking monopolies, limiting the scope and depth of corporate fraud and malfescence and providing us with many different forms of consumer rights.
If I were to put my tinfoil hat on for a second
In fact, this has me thinking now... We may constitute a particularly difficult demographic to brainwash for exactly that reason - geeks don't take anyone but other geeks seriously and that means if you don't bow to geek religious beliefs (such as science and her language), you have very little chance of adjusting our opinions. If there are enough of you and you push buttons fast enough, you might be able to sling your comments around and mod-up the memes of your cohorts, but you will have little chance of making any difference to the thought process of the readership here.
Ok, tinfoil hat off... We geeks are probably just as gullible as everyone else and even easier to control... Just promise us dates if we go along with you...
There is one indusputable fact and that is that the statistical proabibility that the exit-polls could have contradicted the actual results by such a huge margin are vanishingly small (on the order of 1 in a million). And further, that specific contradictions have an even more impossible probability.
You can trash this article all you want, but if you are a math-fearing geek (as you should be to have a slashdot membership card), then you simply cannot argue with the conclusion of this article. Being a republican or a democrat does not allow you to magically modify mathematical certainties. Personally, I am appalled at the number of people trashing this article because it is written by JFK Jr or published in the Rolling Stones. Use your geek sense! Geeks dont think like that... So who are you guys?
Front-Row is a product designed to be turned on and used with a remote with 5 buttons and no skills. The iTV (!!) box is designed and marketed to be plugged in to a television and used with no skills. It is also sold specifically to be attached to a TV to watch movies, it is not bundled into a general purpose PC guerilla marketing style by PHBs that mistakenly believe that once the user realizes he has a media center on his desktop that he will move his PC to the living room and attach it to his television.
In comparison, MCE is something that is really only owned accidentally by people who don't even know they have it (because it was bundled with their PC from Best Buy), it requires the PC to be near the TV rather than on a desk and requires the user to know how to configure it and operate it with some crazy 300 button remote control (exaggeration, but the point is clearly made). It would probably require a class to get a user comfortable with the relationship between and configurations of MCE and Microsoft Media Player (and the derivitaves such as Amazon Unbox). It really doesn't matter if MCE can do any of the things that Front-Row does (which it really doesn't because Microsoft doesn't use zero-conf [bonjour] and whatnot). The simple fact is, it is not designed or marketed in a manner that will ever be used that way by the common man.
To say that something *can* be done is not the same as saying that people *will* do it. You *can* write an assembly language CGI script library for publishing a Blog site. But I doubt you *will*...
However, I also agree with some of the posters that this is a temporary situation. We will see HD content as soon as Steve can deliver it. I suspect that a big part of the holdup is with the other studios. They are already balking about the price and I'm sure they would freak out about high-definition content (or any quality advantage over DVDs and perhaps even parity) at these price-points. Of course, they are making a grave mistake with that mindset because they have stripped users of resellability of content as well as fair use. Steve is probably pulling his typical genius manuevers on them. He will release this content now, get some of the studios to sign, show them that he can force people to pay for content twice by upgrading quality and use that to get concessions out of them for HD. [ My theory ]
Yea, it's messy. The studios are evil - they really have a hostility problem towards their customers.
But I do have a point to make: The reason that this scheme will work is that Steve's plan has a new value proposition that has more or less never been seen before (the closest is DirecTivo caching PPV movies). With the new Front-Row box it becomes possible to sit on your couch and surf through your movie collection and (presumably) watch previews and order new films for your collection all with your remote. It is simply the most eloquent PPV system ever conceived and it turns your mac or PC into a media server on the sly. iTunes is the media server. Everyone will fall in love with the experience, but it won't happen until January (shame, that - would have been a great Christmas gift).
Amazon Unbox really is (unbox - no box, no Front-Row). All the disadvantages with none of the advantages. Sad, really.
The things that I would love to see, but for obvious reasons probably never will:
* $0.49 upgrade of already owned content (e.g. 720p comes out and I can upgrade movies for $0.49 to pay for Apple's bandwidth or whatever) * $0.49 different encoding charge in general (e.g. let me download the 640x272 H.264 at 700kps instead of 1.5mbps because my network is slow or I will only watch it on my iPod)
* Let me burn the damned thing to DVD
* Ripping directly into iTunes from my DVD collection (I don't care if the result is a FairPlay encoded H.264, I just want to toss my DVDs and be able to select from my entire DVD collection in Front-Row - I want the default behavior of sticking a DVD movie into my mac to be to RIP it, not to play it)
Ah well... I was really hoping for an iPhone today, This fake commercial had me all orgasmic and stuff.
This is a good question, however. IANAL - I wonder what the EFF's position on exit policies is. Such policies do exist and Tor is sponsored by the EFF so one would assume that they have already considered this question.
I do, however, believe that eliminating anonymizing networks like Tor will not stop such criminal behavior. However, it will stop dead the ability of legitimate citizens to securely publish information that has the potential to save lives or advance civilization in profound and unmeasurable ways.
Perhaps the focus should shift in discussions like this one to "How can we encode exit policies in the Tor network to minimize or altogether limit criminal behavior without sacrificing it's noble principle of maximizing free speech?"
It is irresponsible and foolish to demonize a valuable tool because that tool may be used for evil. A Knife can take human life (and does so rather regularly), but we do not blame the knife and criminalize ownership of them. The same can be said about guns, but it is understood (at least in America) that the right to bear arms is more important than the threat of their misuse.
At any rate, back to "What can be done to correct this issue with Tor?". I can envision an OSS type of project that, through a mixture of automatic classification and an online database could enhance exit-policies on Tor nodes to massively curb the types of offenses listed in this article. Hell, I would rather see Tor go to a white-list scheme (can only access approved sites) than dissappear completely.
Whether we like it or not, the technology behind Tor is already in the public domain. The cat is out of the proverbial bag. Big business and government may try to scare those that run Tor nodes into turning off their nodes, but there will always be a people who will not be intimidated. And, lest I forget to mention, Tor was originally conceived of by the U.S. Navy. Clearly, the US military seems to believe that such technologies are important.
So this is going to be compatibe with what digital cable providers?
Will it work with any variety of Satellite?
The thing about HD is that it REQUIRES a digital feed. Will the new Tivo act as a secure recipient of HDMI content or does it even have HDMI in? Is the output DRM encumbered HDMI or straight DVI / component?
At 800 bucks plus subscription, this thing better work with everything or Tivo will loose their shirts.
There are very few arguments against anonymity on the Internet. In fact, the only argument that I can even invoke is that anonymity interferes with the ability of powerful organizations to track down individuals who have moved data around in a manner that they do not like. Those "move data around" activities could include hacking, distribution of illicit or illegal data, pirated or copyrighted material, etc...
While it is true that online anonymity does interfere with the ability of powerful organizations to track down individuals, the crucial question that needs to be examined is "Does the greater good get better served by maintaining a mechanism for free-speach with no possible reprisal" at the expense of tracking down hackers and peddlers of illegal and copyrighted content?
If we destroy anonymity on the Internet, are we not simply sacrificing another of our freedoms for a perceived security? Certainly people will still hack, distribute illegal and copyrighted content and all of the other things. The bad guys will just steal someone else's identity to do their trash. But meanwhile, law abiding citizens are stripped of the ability to complain about the evils of the world without shouting, "Hey! This is John Smith and I saw a mafia hit last night! I want to report it to the police! Again, my name is John Smith!!!! EVERYONE!!!!".
I use Tor quite regularly and for a variety of reasons, none of them at all having to do with anonymity. The primary reason for running Tor is to avoid ISP man-in-the middle password phishing attacks while traveling in South East Asia (I started using Tor after having passwords stolen in this way while using my own laptop in a hotel in Manila). Tor encrypts traffic and bounces it around in Tor land until it bounces out, generally in Europe or the USA - and that brings me to the second reason for using it. Having my traffic coming from Europe or the USA while in South East Asia is beneficial.
The reason such high production costs are show is to reduce the tax burden from the profit of such films. It is easy to create scores of companies and subsidiary-like corporate structures, overpay all in the production of such movies, and assuming that ownership is all within the same essential movie cartel, you can show losses on fantastically successful features and avoid taxes while in truth all you did was shuffle money around within the cartel.
It's called tax fraud. Don't confuse it with real costs.
I hope this doesn't work. if it does, there are probably going to be some dead Irishmen in a few months.
With trillions of dollars in oil revenue at risk, the oil cartels simply do not let such things live long, nor the people who understand how to reproduce them.
And before anyone starts shouting *tin foil hat* or *conspiracist*, I ask you, "Do you believe nobody kills over oil?"
hmmph...
I guess I am just dense, but I actually googled around for a bit before realizing that I had been had.
I tip my hat to you on that one, even though it should have been obvious, ya got me....