Would there be any problems with giving everyone a random GUID tied to their vote on a receipt, then at the end of the election allowing them to look up their GUID?
Ah, great minds...
I swear I didn't see your comment until I'd already written mine, but yeah, I think this is a great idea.
If I'm playing devil's advocate, the main problem I see with the receipt approach is the potential for abuse by litigation-happy election losers. If the receipts could be counterfeited, that would be a huge boon to otherwise shaky lawsuits alleging fraud. The obvious answer to that is to make the receipts difficult to counterfeit, but that might be cost-restrictive.
Still, flaws aside, I think it would be a much better approach than the current "hurl your vote into the ether and keep your fingers crossed" method.
Anonyminity: Not having one's vote tied to them personally. This last one is the bitch and is causing all the problems. I'm not saying we should give it up (because we shouldn't), just be aware this one matters more than we think in the overall scheme of things.
Agreed that anonymity is a key component of our electoral process, but there are ways of making your vote traceable without necessarily sacrificing anonymity.
Suppose, for example, that when you submit your electronic ballot, it is tagged with a unique number that combines the ID of the polling place or machine with some random component. At the voter's option, the machine could print out a "receipt" that includes that unique number. The voter remains anonymous, but has the ability to track his vote if he wants to.
After the election, all votes presumably are dumped into some massive database somewhere. At that point, voters could log on to a web site -- from a public terminal, if complete privacy is desired -- punch in their unique identifier, and verify that their vote did, in fact, end up in the bucket. At no point is the voter ever required to identify himself other than by a number that is not tied to the voter's identity.
You can bet that this would be an effective way to verify election results. I can't imagine that too many people, presented with concrete evidence that their vote was never counted, would remain silent on the issue. And because the ballot identifier encodes the specific polling place or machine, it would be much less difficult to root out the source of the inconsistency.
Of course, this all presumes that the voting machine manufacturers actually want their machines to be tamper-proof...
Second of all, I highly doubt these college 'record' stores closed because of illegal filesharing, more likely they closed due to big-box retailers offering CDs at highly-discounted rates, thereby making money by overall volume of sales, not individual purchases.
That, and the ability to locate previously obscure music cheaply and easily via Internet retailers.
In my recollection, most people went to the local college record store only begrudgingly. It meant braving the overwhelming reek of patchoulli incense and the disdaining sneer of the musical-elitist prick behind the counter when you plopped your import Morrissey single down in front of him. Not to mentioning the bowel-emptyingly awful sounds of kittens being garrotted with guitar strings that were invariably being played at jet engine levels over the store's tinny speakers.
If I could have simply jumped onto Amazon and ordered a copy of whatever off-kilter disc I was looking for, I would never have set foot in one of these dingy holes again. To say that file sharing somehow killed local college record stores is absurd; they killed themselves by being awful and obnoxious and in no way superior to the alternative means that sprung up in their wake. Good riddance to the bastards.
I have to take issue with the second "given" in the original post. Most people are more than capable of educating themselves; frankly, it's not that hard to do. Humans have a natural impulse to learn. The real problem with our education system is that it does everything in its power to stifle that natural impulse.
Prior to the advent of compulsory schooling in the United States, we had a literacy rate of 98%. At the time, education was partially obtained informally from the family. The rest was picked up on the fly through self-directed reading or interaction with the community (e.g., apprenticeships.) Education was not something that happened because the government willed it so, it happened because the people wanted to learn.
When compulsory schooling was enacted in 1852, our literacy rate rapidly dropped. Since then, it has never risen above 91% or so. No surprise, really, since our government-mandated schooling is based on the Prussian education system, which was scientifically designed to ensure that students didn't learn enough to think independently; the better to become obedient soldiers in the Prussian armies-for-hire. Or, in our case, the army of poorly-educated public school graduates that staff your local Burger King.
Think about some of the standard conceits that are an accepted part of the normal American school day. Each subject gets a little less than an hour a day -- barely enough time to just get up a head up steam about any particular topic -- after which students are rudely interrupted and shepherded to their next tiny slice of learning. Lessons tend to be taught totally removed from the context of why they are important or useful, leading students, quite rightly, to not give a damn. Students are isolated from those in different age groups, neither allowed to learn from older students nor to pass their own knowledge along to younger students. Students are taken away from the home and the community -- and removed from the myriad lessons freely available from both -- for the better part of the day. The remains of the day are eaten up by an ever-growing mountain of homework, leaving precious little time to absorb anything outside of the disjointed mishmash of concepts that make up the state-approved lesson plan.
Now consider this: If you were to start totally from scratch and design a means of teaching our youth, would any of the above be on your short list of good ideas?
It's a pity that we can't throw out the first assumption -- that there won't be a wholesale uprooting of the American education system any time soon -- as well. But that one, sadly, is all too accurate. The massive bureaucracy of the educational institution itself, and the school-related businesses that have risen up around it, are far too powerful and politically saavy to allow that to happen in this or the next generation.
Crap. Forgot about that one.
I s'pose I could try to make the case that Saudi Arabia should be considered a war zone, since they're among the chief backers of terrorism in the area and our war is, technically, on terrorism... but I don't feel like fighting that battle, especially since I think it's a bit of a stretch myself.
Instead, I'll just downgrade my statement from "outside of a war zone" to "on American soil", which is really the intent of our anti-terrorism measures.
-- Bum
That's a pretty unjustified assumption. How many occurences of 9/11 or similar have there been in the last 200 years of US history? Does that mean anti-terrorism efforts for the 195 years prior to 9/11 were fine - I mean, they managed to prevent all those terrorist attacks right?
Don't be silly. Prior to the last couple of decades, terrorist action against the U.S. was a non-issue. Leading up to 9/11, an increasing number of (debatably) unprovoked, increasingly heinous attacks were perpetrated successfully; the U.S.S. Cole bombing, the first WTC bombing, to name a few. Since 9/11, the number of successful attacks -- outside of a war zone -- against U.S. targets has held steady at nil; all the while we hear near-weekly threats from Al Qaeda and their ilk about coming attacks that will make 9/11 look like a cakewalk.
Meanwhile, there have been continual reports of thwarted terrorist activity. As you point out, there has been a decrease in the frequency of such reports, but this is exactly what I would expect to happen as repeated terror attempts meet with failure. And of course, one can't discount the possibility that these stories are simply not given the exposure they previously received, since they no longer carry the impact they previously did.
You, of course, know all this already, which is why I didn't see the need to recount the bases of my assumption in the first place. Either way, my original point still stands; and as we're getting far afield from both it, and the article topic, I intend to leave it at that.
No, honestly, for all the speeches about the imminent threat, exactly how much danger has been eliminated?
I can't know the answer to that any more than you can. I am willing to make the assumption, based on the fact that we haven't seen a reoccurrence of 9/11 or anything similar, that anti-terrorism measures have met with at least some modicum of success. If so, then the poor have benefitted every bit as much as middle- and upper-class Americans, which was my point.
Now consider all the shootings, knifings, murders and random acts of violence (like the Washington Sniper) that were completely unrelated to terrorism and went completely ignored by these anti-terror intiatives.
Again, these are issues that impact rich and poor alike. They don't really apply to a complaint against the federal budget, either, since violent crime is generally dealt with by local police, who are funded by local government revenue.
All federal spending, of course, not including the Pentagon's budget (which is being increased to $419 billion, not counting the money for Iraq and Afganistan) You're right, though, they did manage to cut the programs that serve the poor.
Right. Because the poor are not at all served by programs that keep them from getting blown up in their homes by terrorists.
I am not down with this either except maybe in the area of sports games. I'd pay $10 a year for roster updates and maybe some new features on essentially the same game, rather than the $50 they want now. For some reason though, I don't think the game publishers would find that scenario very convienent.
Indeed, EA and Take Two have just put the kibosh on that very thing by entering into exclusive agreements with the NFL and the MLBPA respectively. I can't speak to Take Two's reasoning, but EA undoubtedly penned their contract because Sega was eating into their market share by charging an unprecedentedly reasonable $20 for their sports titles.
He said the distribution method for games would also change radically in the next round of consoles.
"A gamer could buy a starter disc for 10 euros. When he goes home he goes online and he could buy AI and levels as you go.
This sounds like a stillborn idea if I've every heard one.
Digital distribution was already a major irritant with Steam, on a platform where users have grown used to having to download hundreds of megabytes of patches over the lifetime of a game. Console gamers don't expect to have to put up with this kind of crap. Not to mention that parents like to feel secure that they they plop their kid down in front of a console, that kid's not going to be costing them 10 bucks a pop to download new levels.
Frankly, I'm getting tired of hearing about the wonderful benefits of digital distribution for games? Who's asking for this great advancement exactly? Besides the game companies, who see it as the first step toward squeezing the consumer beyond the already exorbitant 50 bucks they charge now, that is?
The whole paradigm just strikes me as an excuse for game companies to maximize profits while doing less and less work. A lofty goal in itself, but if it means that when I spend good money on a game I don't really own anything, I ain't down with that.
Anybody else fail to see the utility in this much-hyped update?
So I've transfered a DRM-locked TV show from the TiVo in the living room to my PC in the den. Now what? Well, let's see... I can:
1. Watch it on that selfsame PC. However, the TV connected to the TiVo is only 30 feet away, and that has a couch in front of it instead of a back-wrenching desk chair. Furthermore, the TV doesn't suffer noise interference from the twin jet engine fans that keep my Prescott CPU from melting into a wad of silicon goo. Closer proximity to the beer fridge is also a key benefit.
2. Transfer the TV show to my laptop and take it with me when I travel. However, since my laptop -- and nearly every laptop I've ever run across -- has around 3 GB of empty space on its hard drive, I had better not plan on traveling for more than about an hour. That is, unless I recorded the show at the lowest quality setting, in which case I can expect to enjoy almost three hours of huge patchy blocks of color sliding around my screen at 1024x768. If you love quilting and are severely myopic, you'll adore Tivo ToGo!
3. Take advantage of yet another opportunity to abuse my Mac-using friends for not being able to join in the fun. I will artfully omit the fact that the "fun" in question pretty much consists of squinting at a tiny, dim LCD until your corneas bleed, whilst indistinct approximations of the cast of Mama's Family caper about, leaving ghostly trails in their wake.
I can not:
1. Archive shows from the TiVo hard drive to the PC for later viewing on the TiVo. Once it's on your PC, it's marooned there, Gilligan style. And something tells me our good friends in the TV industry won't be sending a rescue party any time soon.
2. Burn the archived shows to a DVD for later viewing back in the trusty living room. This is going to put a serious damper on my plans to assemble and distribute a complete collection of Small Wonder bootlegs. Good thing I can already do the exact same thing, with much less hassle and little loss in quality, on my twenty year old VCR.
3. Do anything that I might have actually wanted to do with the digital content. Until, of course, the professor manages to concoct a hack out of coconuts and palm fronds.
Seriously, I love ya, TiVo. But this DRM-hobbled bell/whistle is not going to do anything for your dwindling chunk of market share.
"If you transfer programs to your PC using the TiVoToGo(TM) Home Media feature, you can transfer the files (they will have a.tivo extension) to other storage devices, but they will only be playable on a PC that is running TiVo Desktop 2.0 or higher and has the correct Media Access Key and Playback Password. They will not be playable on a different PC or DVD player."
So indeed, it appears there is some built-in DRM. Anybody taking odds on what time today the hack will surface?
At the end of the day, I think the posting is flamebait. Judge this industry by how much they lose, and the actions they take to reduce that loss, not by how much they make.
That's the whole point. There's no accurate way to gauge exactly how much the industry lost as a direct result of illegal downloads. The fact that box office take is up 37% over the last three years is compelling evidence to the contrary.
Or perhaps the hidden subtext is "The biometrics signatures will enable white non-suspicious regular travelers to whizz through customs while suspiscious non-whites are filtered for more efective controls by customs".
The subtext isn't hidden at all. It's right there in the article:
"If her information doesn't raise flags during a government background check, she'll be certified to pass through a dedicated security line when departing from the Minneapolis airport."
I'm guessing that an individual being "suspicious" might be one of the flags they're checking for.
As for filtering on whiteness, if this program is a means of allowing us to more closely scrutinize travelers of Arabic descent without raising the hackles of the politically correct, then I'm all for it.
I paid $72 (new!) for a 20GB Archos about which I have no illusions as to hype factor but whose low price makes it an envied object by many of my friends.
Which clearly marks you as an educated consumer who ranks function above form. And I agree with your assessment of the iPod as less than cutting edge from that standpoint.
But given that Apple has sold 3 million iPods and counting, there are obviously a lot of people out there for whom form is paramount. To this kind of consumer, the iPod is very much cutting edge, and that's the perspective I'm using when I call it that.
Unless Sony's music store brings something more to the table than iTunes does -- and I can't find anything in any of the articles that indicates otherwise -- the deciding factor for consumers is going to be which device they want to be DRM-locked into.
The iPod has a huge head start in the market, and owning one carries a lot of hipster cachet. Meanwhile, anybody still toting around a MiniDisc player looks like they're either hopelessly out of touch or in denial. OK, you bet on the wrong horse, just let it go, man!
The iPod also has arguably a near-perfect design for a portable music device, a design that no other manufacturer has yet been able to equal. Sony's players will likely be well-designed, but they will be hard-pressed to best the iPod, especially since they still require the owner to carry around a pocketful of unwieldy discs. How very late '90s.
Who's going to shell out $200-$400 dollars for an ancient, unloved format, when they could pay $250 for a cutting-edge 4GB iPod Mini that will make them the envy of their technologically inferior friends? I'm guessing only Sony fanboys and misguided grandparents looking for a Bar Mitzvah gift.
Yeah, and that huge Japanese market is so fundamental to a musician's success.
Assuming you're David Hasslehoff, that is.
I think they'll be able to clobber Apple.
In time, maybe, but it will be an uphill battle.
Unless the music store brings something more to the table than iTunes does -- and based on the article, it certainly doesn't seem like it -- the deciding factor is going to be which device the consumer wants to be stuck with.
The iPod has a huge head start in this market, and owning one carries a lot of hipster cachet. The iPod also has arguably a near-perfect design for a portable music device, a design that no other manufacturer has yet been able to equal. The Sony devices will likely be well-designed, but they will be hard-pressed to best the iPod, especially since Sony's players will still require the owner to carry around a pocketful of unwieldy discs. How very late '90s.
Who's going to shell out $200-$400 dollars for an ancient, unloved format, when they could pay $250 for a cutting-edge 4GB iPod Mini that will make them the envy of their technologically inferior friends? I'm guessing only Sony fanboys and misguided grandparents looking for a Bar Mitzvah gift.
So we could end up with a dozen or so least-common-denominator channels that a strong plurality subscribes to (ESPN, EmptyV, Cartoon, Spike, HBO) being successful, and the more specialised niche channels (some of which would be some people's personal favorites)unable to get a large enough casual subscriber base and withering on the vine.
If not enough people are watching the Avocado Channel to support it, I daresay it should wither on the vine.
One of the positive things that a la carte channel selection would bring to the table would be to apply the principles of free market economy to cable TV. Basically, any given cable channel would be required to produce a product for which there is actual demand. If nobody wants to watch The Avocado Channel, it would, and should, go away, to be replaced by different content that somebody might actually enjoy.
By contrast, the current model allows the cable provider to support literally dozens of channels in the upper reaches of the lineup that do nothing but take up bandwidth. I'd much prefer a system wherein The Office Supplies Channel and Left-Handed Epileptic Aluminum Siding Consultant Television would disappear and be replaced by something that more than three people have an interest in.
As for new channels not being able to get a foothold, it seems like it would be simple enough to do free previews of new channels, similar to what Showtime and TMC do from time to time.
The article mentioned that this thing literally sped through the legislature.
Can't say I'm surprised that this moved quickly. It is, after all, an election year, and spam is something that virtually every voter with an e-mail account is against. I believe that Stephen Urquhart, the bill's sponsor, is looking at the end of his first 4-year term this year, so I'm sure he fought pretty hard for it.
I also find it pretty amusing that Urquhart, who you might expect to be at least somewhat technically savvy, doesn't even have his own web site.
(4) Except as provided in Subsection (5), "spyware" means software residing on a
computer that:
(a) monitors the computer's usage;
(b) (i) sends information about the computer's usage to a remote computer or server
Which means that your browser, which routinely sends each web site you visit a referring URL, is spyware in Utah.
Well, except for Internet Explorer, that is. Since IE is part of the operating system, it is excepted from the definition of spyware by subsection (5)(c).
I'll leave it to the foilhats to decide whether Bill Gates has been donating heavily to the Mormon church.
Incidentally I played (most of) phantasmagoria and aside from deciding it was a really cheesy game, I was nauseated by the experience of having my female character raped to further the story line.
Phantasmagoria was certainly cheesy, but as I remember it the so-called rape scene barely qualified as controversial, let alone nauseating. The main character, Adrienne, is fully clothed in a nightie the whole time, the "rapist" is her husband (albeit, a husband possessed by the vengeful spirit of a dark magician, but hey, who isn't?), and technically, the scene never even shows Adrienne raped. Her husband only grinds against her from behind for a bit. Pretty tame stuff, really, especially considering what dark beings get up to in Japan (tentacles, anyone?)
Given their track record i'm not sure "banned in Australia" really merits inclusion on the list.
Phantasmagoria was also banned in the United States, to an extent: CompUSA, which I believe at the time was the largest retailer of computer software, refused to carry it. A gutsy move, considering the amount of hype surrounding the game -- it was one of the first really big FMV games, in the heady days when FMV seemed like the future of gaming, and people hadn't yet realized how crappy the games actually were.
I'm more concerned with the physical security of the machines after the vote is taken. Why bother to make off with the machines ahead of time and apply some complicated hack to them, when one could much more easily spend the evening carrying a small electromagnet into the polling places in districts where the vote is heavily skewed to the side you oppose?
This becomes an even bigger problem if the votes are stored locally on each machine. With a ballot box, the pollsters have one entity to keep their eye on and protect. With twenty-odd machines per polling place, each with a different database, security becomes a logistical nightmare.
Does anybody know whether the machines work this way, or do they copy their data off to a central database somewhere?
Problem being that it would be far too simple to slice off the bytes at the front of the file reserved for ID3 and run the hash on the remainder. To be effective, such a scheme would have to place noise randomly and at various points throughout the file. It wouldn't be that difficult, I suspect, to do something like this without affecting the perception of somebody listening to the song.
Seems to me, then, that it might not be a bad idea to code up an app to insert a few random bits strategically in your mp3 files before you put them in your shared directory.
It might not stop the RIAA from suing you -- they could always hire a staff of minimum wage lackeys to verify copyrighted content -- but it would presumably slow them down a bit.
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Ah, great minds...
I swear I didn't see your comment until I'd already written mine, but yeah, I think this is a great idea.
If I'm playing devil's advocate, the main problem I see with the receipt approach is the potential for abuse by litigation-happy election losers. If the receipts could be counterfeited, that would be a huge boon to otherwise shaky lawsuits alleging fraud. The obvious answer to that is to make the receipts difficult to counterfeit, but that might be cost-restrictive.
Still, flaws aside, I think it would be a much better approach than the current "hurl your vote into the ether and keep your fingers crossed" method.
--Bum
Agreed that anonymity is a key component of our electoral process, but there are ways of making your vote traceable without necessarily sacrificing anonymity.
Suppose, for example, that when you submit your electronic ballot, it is tagged with a unique number that combines the ID of the polling place or machine with some random component. At the voter's option, the machine could print out a "receipt" that includes that unique number. The voter remains anonymous, but has the ability to track his vote if he wants to.
After the election, all votes presumably are dumped into some massive database somewhere. At that point, voters could log on to a web site -- from a public terminal, if complete privacy is desired -- punch in their unique identifier, and verify that their vote did, in fact, end up in the bucket. At no point is the voter ever required to identify himself other than by a number that is not tied to the voter's identity.
You can bet that this would be an effective way to verify election results. I can't imagine that too many people, presented with concrete evidence that their vote was never counted, would remain silent on the issue. And because the ballot identifier encodes the specific polling place or machine, it would be much less difficult to root out the source of the inconsistency.
Of course, this all presumes that the voting machine manufacturers actually want their machines to be tamper-proof...
-- Bum
Who is this "John Galt" of whom you speak?
Second of all, I highly doubt these college 'record' stores closed because of illegal filesharing, more likely they closed due to big-box retailers offering CDs at highly-discounted rates, thereby making money by overall volume of sales, not individual purchases.
That, and the ability to locate previously obscure music cheaply and easily via Internet retailers.
In my recollection, most people went to the local college record store only begrudgingly. It meant braving the overwhelming reek of patchoulli incense and the disdaining sneer of the musical-elitist prick behind the counter when you plopped your import Morrissey single down in front of him. Not to mentioning the bowel-emptyingly awful sounds of kittens being garrotted with guitar strings that were invariably being played at jet engine levels over the store's tinny speakers.
If I could have simply jumped onto Amazon and ordered a copy of whatever off-kilter disc I was looking for, I would never have set foot in one of these dingy holes again. To say that file sharing somehow killed local college record stores is absurd; they killed themselves by being awful and obnoxious and in no way superior to the alternative means that sprung up in their wake. Good riddance to the bastards.
-- Bum
I have to take issue with the second "given" in the original post. Most people are more than capable of educating themselves; frankly, it's not that hard to do. Humans have a natural impulse to learn. The real problem with our education system is that it does everything in its power to stifle that natural impulse.
Prior to the advent of compulsory schooling in the United States, we had a literacy rate of 98%. At the time, education was partially obtained informally from the family. The rest was picked up on the fly through self-directed reading or interaction with the community (e.g., apprenticeships.) Education was not something that happened because the government willed it so, it happened because the people wanted to learn.
When compulsory schooling was enacted in 1852, our literacy rate rapidly dropped. Since then, it has never risen above 91% or so. No surprise, really, since our government-mandated schooling is based on the Prussian education system, which was scientifically designed to ensure that students didn't learn enough to think independently; the better to become obedient soldiers in the Prussian armies-for-hire. Or, in our case, the army of poorly-educated public school graduates that staff your local Burger King.
Think about some of the standard conceits that are an accepted part of the normal American school day. Each subject gets a little less than an hour a day -- barely enough time to just get up a head up steam about any particular topic -- after which students are rudely interrupted and shepherded to their next tiny slice of learning. Lessons tend to be taught totally removed from the context of why they are important or useful, leading students, quite rightly, to not give a damn. Students are isolated from those in different age groups, neither allowed to learn from older students nor to pass their own knowledge along to younger students. Students are taken away from the home and the community -- and removed from the myriad lessons freely available from both -- for the better part of the day. The remains of the day are eaten up by an ever-growing mountain of homework, leaving precious little time to absorb anything outside of the disjointed mishmash of concepts that make up the state-approved lesson plan.
Now consider this: If you were to start totally from scratch and design a means of teaching our youth, would any of the above be on your short list of good ideas?
It's a pity that we can't throw out the first assumption -- that there won't be a wholesale uprooting of the American education system any time soon -- as well. But that one, sadly, is all too accurate. The massive bureaucracy of the educational institution itself, and the school-related businesses that have risen up around it, are far too powerful and politically saavy to allow that to happen in this or the next generation.
-- Bum
Crap. Forgot about that one. I s'pose I could try to make the case that Saudi Arabia should be considered a war zone, since they're among the chief backers of terrorism in the area and our war is, technically, on terrorism... but I don't feel like fighting that battle, especially since I think it's a bit of a stretch myself. Instead, I'll just downgrade my statement from "outside of a war zone" to "on American soil", which is really the intent of our anti-terrorism measures. -- Bum
Don't be silly. Prior to the last couple of decades, terrorist action against the U.S. was a non-issue. Leading up to 9/11, an increasing number of (debatably) unprovoked, increasingly heinous attacks were perpetrated successfully; the U.S.S. Cole bombing, the first WTC bombing, to name a few. Since 9/11, the number of successful attacks -- outside of a war zone -- against U.S. targets has held steady at nil; all the while we hear near-weekly threats from Al Qaeda and their ilk about coming attacks that will make 9/11 look like a cakewalk.
Meanwhile, there have been continual reports of thwarted terrorist activity. As you point out, there has been a decrease in the frequency of such reports, but this is exactly what I would expect to happen as repeated terror attempts meet with failure. And of course, one can't discount the possibility that these stories are simply not given the exposure they previously received, since they no longer carry the impact they previously did.
You, of course, know all this already, which is why I didn't see the need to recount the bases of my assumption in the first place. Either way, my original point still stands; and as we're getting far afield from both it, and the article topic, I intend to leave it at that.
-- Bum
I can't know the answer to that any more than you can. I am willing to make the assumption, based on the fact that we haven't seen a reoccurrence of 9/11 or anything similar, that anti-terrorism measures have met with at least some modicum of success. If so, then the poor have benefitted every bit as much as middle- and upper-class Americans, which was my point.
Now consider all the shootings, knifings, murders and random acts of violence (like the Washington Sniper) that were completely unrelated to terrorism and went completely ignored by these anti-terror intiatives.
Again, these are issues that impact rich and poor alike. They don't really apply to a complaint against the federal budget, either, since violent crime is generally dealt with by local police, who are funded by local government revenue.
Right. Because the poor are not at all served by programs that keep them from getting blown up in their homes by terrorists.
Indeed, EA and Take Two have just put the kibosh on that very thing by entering into exclusive agreements with the NFL and the MLBPA respectively. I can't speak to Take Two's reasoning, but EA undoubtedly penned their contract because Sega was eating into their market share by charging an unprecedentedly reasonable $20 for their sports titles.
This sounds like a stillborn idea if I've every heard one.
Digital distribution was already a major irritant with Steam, on a platform where users have grown used to having to download hundreds of megabytes of patches over the lifetime of a game. Console gamers don't expect to have to put up with this kind of crap. Not to mention that parents like to feel secure that they they plop their kid down in front of a console, that kid's not going to be costing them 10 bucks a pop to download new levels.
Frankly, I'm getting tired of hearing about the wonderful benefits of digital distribution for games? Who's asking for this great advancement exactly? Besides the game companies, who see it as the first step toward squeezing the consumer beyond the already exorbitant 50 bucks they charge now, that is?
The whole paradigm just strikes me as an excuse for game companies to maximize profits while doing less and less work. A lofty goal in itself, but if it means that when I spend good money on a game I don't really own anything, I ain't down with that.
Anybody else fail to see the utility in this much-hyped update?
So I've transfered a DRM-locked TV show from the TiVo in the living room to my PC in the den. Now what? Well, let's see... I can:
1. Watch it on that selfsame PC. However, the TV connected to the TiVo is only 30 feet away, and that has a couch in front of it instead of a back-wrenching desk chair. Furthermore, the TV doesn't suffer noise interference from the twin jet engine fans that keep my Prescott CPU from melting into a wad of silicon goo. Closer proximity to the beer fridge is also a key benefit.
2. Transfer the TV show to my laptop and take it with me when I travel. However, since my laptop -- and nearly every laptop I've ever run across -- has around 3 GB of empty space on its hard drive, I had better not plan on traveling for more than about an hour. That is, unless I recorded the show at the lowest quality setting, in which case I can expect to enjoy almost three hours of huge patchy blocks of color sliding around my screen at 1024x768. If you love quilting and are severely myopic, you'll adore Tivo ToGo!
3. Take advantage of yet another opportunity to abuse my Mac-using friends for not being able to join in the fun. I will artfully omit the fact that the "fun" in question pretty much consists of squinting at a tiny, dim LCD until your corneas bleed, whilst indistinct approximations of the cast of Mama's Family caper about, leaving ghostly trails in their wake.
I can not:
1. Archive shows from the TiVo hard drive to the PC for later viewing on the TiVo. Once it's on your PC, it's marooned there, Gilligan style. And something tells me our good friends in the TV industry won't be sending a rescue party any time soon.
2. Burn the archived shows to a DVD for later viewing back in the trusty living room. This is going to put a serious damper on my plans to assemble and distribute a complete collection of Small Wonder bootlegs. Good thing I can already do the exact same thing, with much less hassle and little loss in quality, on my twenty year old VCR.
3. Do anything that I might have actually wanted to do with the digital content. Until, of course, the professor manages to concoct a hack out of coconuts and palm fronds.
Seriously, I love ya, TiVo. But this DRM-hobbled bell/whistle is not going to do anything for your dwindling chunk of market share.
-- Bum
And furthermore:
.tivo extension) to other storage devices, but they will only be playable on a PC that is running TiVo Desktop 2.0 or higher and has the correct Media Access Key and Playback Password. They will not be playable on a different PC or DVD player."
"If you transfer programs to your PC using the TiVoToGo(TM) Home Media feature, you can transfer the files (they will have a
So indeed, it appears there is some built-in DRM. Anybody taking odds on what time today the hack will surface?
The subtext isn't hidden at all. It's right there in the article:
I'm guessing that an individual being "suspicious" might be one of the flags they're checking for.
As for filtering on whiteness, if this program is a means of allowing us to more closely scrutinize travelers of Arabic descent without raising the hackles of the politically correct, then I'm all for it.
Which clearly marks you as an educated consumer who ranks function above form. And I agree with your assessment of the iPod as less than cutting edge from that standpoint.
But given that Apple has sold 3 million iPods and counting, there are obviously a lot of people out there for whom form is paramount. To this kind of consumer, the iPod is very much cutting edge, and that's the perspective I'm using when I call it that.
Unless Sony's music store brings something more to the table than iTunes does -- and I can't find anything in any of the articles that indicates otherwise -- the deciding factor for consumers is going to be which device they want to be DRM-locked into.
The iPod has a huge head start in the market, and owning one carries a lot of hipster cachet. Meanwhile, anybody still toting around a MiniDisc player looks like they're either hopelessly out of touch or in denial. OK, you bet on the wrong horse, just let it go, man!
The iPod also has arguably a near-perfect design for a portable music device, a design that no other manufacturer has yet been able to equal. Sony's players will likely be well-designed, but they will be hard-pressed to best the iPod, especially since they still require the owner to carry around a pocketful of unwieldy discs. How very late '90s.
Who's going to shell out $200-$400 dollars for an ancient, unloved format, when they could pay $250 for a cutting-edge 4GB iPod Mini that will make them the envy of their technologically inferior friends? I'm guessing only Sony fanboys and misguided grandparents looking for a Bar Mitzvah gift.
Yeah, and that huge Japanese market is so fundamental to a musician's success.
Assuming you're David Hasslehoff, that is.
In time, maybe, but it will be an uphill battle.
Unless the music store brings something more to the table than iTunes does -- and based on the article, it certainly doesn't seem like it -- the deciding factor is going to be which device the consumer wants to be stuck with.
The iPod has a huge head start in this market, and owning one carries a lot of hipster cachet. The iPod also has arguably a near-perfect design for a portable music device, a design that no other manufacturer has yet been able to equal. The Sony devices will likely be well-designed, but they will be hard-pressed to best the iPod, especially since Sony's players will still require the owner to carry around a pocketful of unwieldy discs. How very late '90s.
Who's going to shell out $200-$400 dollars for an ancient, unloved format, when they could pay $250 for a cutting-edge 4GB iPod Mini that will make them the envy of their technologically inferior friends? I'm guessing only Sony fanboys and misguided grandparents looking for a Bar Mitzvah gift.
If not enough people are watching the Avocado Channel to support it, I daresay it should wither on the vine.
One of the positive things that a la carte channel selection would bring to the table would be to apply the principles of free market economy to cable TV. Basically, any given cable channel would be required to produce a product for which there is actual demand. If nobody wants to watch The Avocado Channel, it would, and should, go away, to be replaced by different content that somebody might actually enjoy.
By contrast, the current model allows the cable provider to support literally dozens of channels in the upper reaches of the lineup that do nothing but take up bandwidth. I'd much prefer a system wherein The Office Supplies Channel and Left-Handed Epileptic Aluminum Siding Consultant Television would disappear and be replaced by something that more than three people have an interest in.
As for new channels not being able to get a foothold, it seems like it would be simple enough to do free previews of new channels, similar to what Showtime and TMC do from time to time.
Can't say I'm surprised that this moved quickly. It is, after all, an election year, and spam is something that virtually every voter with an e-mail account is against. I believe that Stephen Urquhart, the bill's sponsor, is looking at the end of his first 4-year term this year, so I'm sure he fought pretty hard for it.
I also find it pretty amusing that Urquhart, who you might expect to be at least somewhat technically savvy, doesn't even have his own web site.
Which means that your browser, which routinely sends each web site you visit a referring URL, is spyware in Utah.
Well, except for Internet Explorer, that is. Since IE is part of the operating system, it is excepted from the definition of spyware by subsection (5)(c).
I'll leave it to the foilhats to decide whether Bill Gates has been donating heavily to the Mormon church.
Phantasmagoria was certainly cheesy, but as I remember it the so-called rape scene barely qualified as controversial, let alone nauseating. The main character, Adrienne, is fully clothed in a nightie the whole time, the "rapist" is her husband (albeit, a husband possessed by the vengeful spirit of a dark magician, but hey, who isn't?), and technically, the scene never even shows Adrienne raped. Her husband only grinds against her from behind for a bit. Pretty tame stuff, really, especially considering what dark beings get up to in Japan (tentacles, anyone?)
Phantasmagoria was also banned in the United States, to an extent: CompUSA, which I believe at the time was the largest retailer of computer software, refused to carry it. A gutsy move, considering the amount of hype surrounding the game -- it was one of the first really big FMV games, in the heady days when FMV seemed like the future of gaming, and people hadn't yet realized how crappy the games actually were.
I'm more concerned with the physical security of the machines after the vote is taken. Why bother to make off with the machines ahead of time and apply some complicated hack to them, when one could much more easily spend the evening carrying a small electromagnet into the polling places in districts where the vote is heavily skewed to the side you oppose?
This becomes an even bigger problem if the votes are stored locally on each machine. With a ballot box, the pollsters have one entity to keep their eye on and protect. With twenty-odd machines per polling place, each with a different database, security becomes a logistical nightmare.
Does anybody know whether the machines work this way, or do they copy their data off to a central database somewhere?
Problem being that it would be far too simple to slice off the bytes at the front of the file reserved for ID3 and run the hash on the remainder. To be effective, such a scheme would have to place noise randomly and at various points throughout the file. It wouldn't be that difficult, I suspect, to do something like this without affecting the perception of somebody listening to the song.
Seems to me, then, that it might not be a bad idea to code up an app to insert a few random bits strategically in your mp3 files before you put them in your shared directory.
It might not stop the RIAA from suing you -- they could always hire a staff of minimum wage lackeys to verify copyrighted content -- but it would presumably slow them down a bit.