Re:We have a Tivo and a Cox DVR
on
TiVo to Offer SDK
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
this will pretty much destroy the TiVo when it happens. I love my Replay box, but the dual tuner motorola DVR box records digital channels far better and easier than Tivo or Replay can ever hope to... The advantage of having the decoding and descrambling hardware in the box is huge. While the "cable card" ready tivo is years away.
The outboard cable TiVo is doomed. As superior as the software is, it cannot compete with dual tuner HD cable boxes that are now available in most markets for a few bucks extra on your cable bill.
Of course, DirecTV users are enjoying the best of both--dual tuner TiVos--even HD if you are willing to pay the stiff price for a HD TiVo DVR. Between DirecTV and the TiVo equipped DVD recorders, TiVo will probably be OK for a while. But even DirecTV is looking to move away from TiVo to their own DVR (even though they just released a new Tivo equipped model).
So the future of TiVo is probably the CableCard equipped systems. To compete feature-for-feature with cable boxes (so that users can send back their rented cable boxes and save on rental fees, making TiVo's own monthly fees more palatable), TiVo requires the CableCard 2.0 standard, which won't be ready until next year (assuming the cable companies don't manage to beg a delay).
However, once the CableCard standard comes in, Tivo has a good shot at moving in on the high end of the cable box market. Since cable box DVRs are rented, users have no financial commitment, and can potentially be wooed away by TiVo. The delay may even work to TiVo's benefit, because in a year or two TiVo should be able to offer a system considerably more attractive than the cable company DVRs, and cable companies are going to have a hard time keeping up, because everytime they roll out a hardware upgrade, existing customers are going to want to swap their boxes.
The real wild card is Apple--the one company with a reasonable shot of surpassing TiVo for software design. Jobs was talking a lot about HD in his last address. I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple spring a DVR equipped Mac as soon as the CableCard 2.0 standard is final.
I'd probably prefer a dual-core G4 to a G5. In my experience, dual processor Macs just feel really snappier than single processor models, even when the clock speed is significantly lower.
Who is accountable for the security of the Linux kernel? Does Red Hat, for example, take responsibility?
I applaud Microsoft's recognition of the importance of accountability. I look forward to reading Microsoft's revised license agreement, in which Microsoft will presumably accept liability for consequential damages resulting from security flaws of Microsoft products.
There is not a single frame in a Pixar re-composited film that matches the creator's vision. It's still a hack job on a film, the only difference is that re-compositing allows a slightly finer tuning. Higher precision, if you will.
Who but the creator is to say what his "vision" was? Whatever he might prefer for a particular scene, he is constrained to work within the limitations of the aspect ratio of the medium. For all we know, there might be scenes that the creators would have preferred to do in 4:3, but were forced into widescreen by the demands of film production.
Yes, it's a bit better than pan-and-scanning the entire film. But it's still butchered. It's just butchered slightly less.
I don't consider it to be "butchered" when a film is specifically adapted scene by scene to another aspect ratio by its creators. That doesn't mean that every scene has to be recomposited. One aspect ratio is not inherently better than another. Some scenes will inherently work better in 4:3 (and sometimes simply cropping the sides will improve the composition or at least not harm it) and some will inherently work better in 16:9.
Apple's iPod and ITunes is just more vendor lock-in, and it's time for the consumers to stop "consuming" until they can use the hardware of their choice to play the music of their choice.
I do play the music of my choice on the player of my choice. That player just happens to be an iPod. I don't care to buy songs in a proprietary format, so I don't. I buy used CDs on Amazon and rip them myself to mp3, which play just fine on iTunes and my iPod. I doubt if Apple cares one way or the other; they make more money off the iPod than the iTunes store, anyway.
What about Stanley Kubrick, who shot all his movies in 4:3 and then re-cropped them for theatrical release?
Here, the question is not so much what the shooting format was, but rather what format the director and cinematographer had in mind when they composed the scene. Knowing that the image would be cropped for widescreen, perhaps Kubrick staged the scenes to favor that format. Or perhaps he thought that his films would have their greatest longevity on TV and favored the 4:3 format (of course, now an increasing number of TVs are 16:9). Or maybe he compromised, trying to come up with something that would work in both formats.
I remember one scene in 2001, with a static shot (as I first saw it in Cinerama) of the two astronauts speaking to each other and HAL's camera eye in the middle, that was horribly mangled in the TV release, with the view panning back and forth.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Our thumbs did not evolve "to grasp things" or to do anything else in particular. We have thumbs simply because those individuals who did not have died off. Nature has no intent or purpose, and neither do our thumbs.
Natural selection has no "purpose" in the sense of foresight, but that doesn't mean that things happen for no reason. In other words, it is probably not mere random genetic drift that caused proto-primates with opposable thumbs to be more successful than their more manually limited cousins, but rather the result of a particular selective advantage of that feature. Exactly what that advantage was is to some extent guesswork. However, considering what primates do with their thumbs (hanging onto branches, throwing rocks, manipulating simple tools), grasping seems like the simplest hypothesis.
One thing we do know for sure--whatever the selective advantage was, it was not the ability to stretch their thumbs under their palms to hit an awkwardly placed mouse button.
To be fair, that motion is what makes our thumbs "opposable" and it's much of the reason the human species dominates the animal kingdom... I don't think it'll do you any harm:-)
Our opposable thumbs evolved to grasp things, not to press awkwardly located buttons hundreds or thousands of times a day. The fact that your thumb is capable of doing it does not make it healthy. As you may have noticed, humans are capable of doing all sorts of things that aren't good for them.
In fact, for quite a few movies the "fullscreen" version does contain more of the image than the widescreen version. Even in this case, however, there is an argument for the widescreen version, because the director composes a scene with widescreen in mind.
Finally, it isn't about ability to memorize. It is about USABILITY and comfort, particularly when doing repetative tasks. KEY+MOUSE requires two hands, slowing down a typist significantly, while RIGHT/MIDDLE CLICK requires only 1 hand, leaving the other where it belongs, ready to type.
This doesn't make any sense to me. You type the modifier key, leaving your left hand where it is, typing. It's no harder than hitting a shift key. While hitting a right button on a trackpad while controlling the pointer with your finger requires an odd and probably unhealthy wrist contortion as you reach under your right hand with your thumb to hit that right button.
The one button mouse, or rather glidepoint, drives her nuts. Not the glidepoint itself (she loves that), but the single button that forces her to memorize somekey+mouseclick to do basic things the rest of us do with the right mouse button and, in the case of us Linux/*BSD folks, the middle mouse button.
The advantage of the one button mouse is that there are no basic things that require you to memorize which mouse button to use. All basic operations of all Mac programs can be executed with one button, and modifier keys are used exclusively for shortcuts.
After watching computer novices struggling with 3 button mice, I'm move convinced than ever that Apple made the right decision.
And while I use a 3-button mouse (actually, I don't use the right buttons all that much, but I love the scroll wheel), I hate multibutton trackpads. Modifier keys are much less awkward. And I'm convinced that anybody who can remember "right button instead of left button" can remember command-click. And if they can't, you can get by pretty well without it.
But I do wish that Apple would add a little scroll wheel to the right of the mousepad. There are some utilities that turn the edge of the pad into a virtual scroll wheel, but that just doesn't do it for me.
The drive is too small for my music collection, although I'll bet there will shortly be little firewire drives that fit right underneath.
But in other respects it's kind of overkill for a music server anyway. I use a first-generation beige G3, which will easily hold a couple of hard drives. It's bigger, but not too unwieldy if you run it headless.
Based on the videos, it doesn't look hard at all, certainly much easer than adding memory to an original Mac 512 or even a first-generation iMac (both of which I've done). No weird screws (not even Torq), screws hidden under labels or specialized tools required. Most importantly, there is no "Your warranty is void if you break this" sticker. Which basically means that there is no way Apple could tell if you added memory. If, despite their public statements, they change their mind decide to be sticky about it, you just pop the case open and restore the original RAM before taking it in for repair.
While an embryo's brain has not formed to the point where synapses are firing and "consciousness" has been achieved you still cannot ethically snuff out his/her life.
Yet we can amputate a finger and snuff out the lives of thousands and thousands of human cells, every one of which, in principle, could be cloned into an individual human being. A woman can ethically decline to have sex during her fertile period, even though it prevents a living, human egg in her ovaries from developing into a human being with thoughts and feelings. Potential is not actuality.
For example, if we had a patient who was "brain dead" yet we knew that in a few months her brain would become conscious and walk out of the hospital, and I were to tear the unconscious body apart, society would have every right to throw my butt in jail. This is closer to the scenario we have in human beings who have not yet developed far enough to become conscious.
Yet every ovum has this same potential to develop, yet it is considered ethical to decline sex, and thereby to destroy this potential human being (or more accurately, deny it the opportunity to become a human being with thoughts and feelings). Potential is not actuality.
Yes, yes, yes. The whole point of an abortion, however, is to dismember a human being who is presently in an early stage of development such as blastocyst, embryo, or fetus. Technically dismembering a human being in these stages of development who is not in a womb would not be called an abortion. Calling it murder would be accurate, however.
"Dismember" is a term obviously calculated to create a misleading impression of a person being ripped limb from limb, and to obscure the fact that such an early embryo is an undifferentiated ball of cells--it has no members to "dis."
Calling it "murder" is to exalt cells over mind. The term is normally "murder" used to refer to the snuffing out of a human consciousness. You cannot murder a body in which brain death has already occured, for example, even if all of the other organs are still alive. But like limbs, an early embryo has no consciousness--indeed, no brain to feel pain, nor nerves to feel it with. It is the human mind that is worth of protection. Yes, an early embryo (like a sperm and an egg) has some chance of eventually developing into something that has a brain and a mind, and can reasonably be called a person. But it doesn't have them yet.
That makes this decision all the better. The current system that allows private companies to profit from research funded with federal grant money is broken. We should stop all such funding until the government gets royalties on discoveries made on it's dime, or until a compulsory license is issued for all patents on inventions discovered using public dollars.
This is one of those things that seems to make sense if you don't really know anything about it. Patents are a lot of trouble and a not inconsiderable expense. So the only reason universities bother to patent discoveries made with federal dollars is because they can license those patents and reap royalties to support more research.
So "compulsory public licensing" = no patents.
But it's worse than that. Companies would much rather invest in something that they hold the patent for. So they tend to pass up discoveries in the public domain in favor of trying to develop their own proprietary approaches. This was the problem that the current system was developed to cure. And much as it may rankle to see a company profiting from federally funded research, it is that very profit motive that ensures that the discovery does get developed.
Excuse me. Isn't an abortion the destruction of an embryo or fetus?
No, abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. When cells are merely dividing in a dish, nobody is pregnant.
Re:"New stem cell harvesting was outlawed in the U
on
US Stem Cells Contaminated
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How about here?
Whether or not a little network of nerve cells that can fly a plane can reasonably be considered to be conscious (and I think that the universal answer among neuroscientists would be "no"), these cultures at least have one crucial feature--there are actual neurons present, which are certainly necessary, albeit not sufficient, for consciousness.
But at the early stage at which stem cells are harvested, the embryo doesn't have any neurons.
To break this down, simply, there was no major change in his atraction to girls between 16 and 22, but unlike when he was 16, it is no loger 'right' for him to find a 16 year old atractive, now, the youngest he 'should' find atractive is more like 20
One generally doesn't stop finding younger women (by which I mean sexually mature) attractive just because one ages, but they become less appealing as sexual partners, simply because older women are more interesting to talk to. And there are ethical issues as well. A 14, or even 16, year old guy is just figuring out his own sexuality, and some ethical lapses can be forgiven. But an older man is expected to be cognizant of the potential consequences of his actions. The ethical burden of becoming involved with a woman so young that she has not had time to fully come to terms with her own sexuality, or learn how to protect herself physically and emotionally, is quite off-putting.
Again, why should I pay more per month for that? That's why I like the CableCard concept that I can plug into other devices of my choosing. As the other poster noted, some are coming out.
You'll pay more because for a lot of people DVR features add value. CableCard will give you more choice as to whether you pay the extra money up front or spread out over months as a monthly rental. However, 3rd party boxes probably won't save you money, because it is likely that CableCard based devices will be aimed for the high end of the market, since a free box for a few dollars a month is hard to compete with on a price basis. Also, cable companies have an incentive to subsidize their boxes, to lure you to pay for their services.
And no, Cable Card does not work with satellite. Customers of satellite companies will likely remain at the mercy of the company, with limited choices.
Furthermore, the human ear doesn't perceive all frequencies equally loudly, as illustrated by the lines on an Equal Loudness Contour chart [gsu.edu]. If that ipod really does produce a near-flat response, users will be missing out on lo and hi frequency ranges, as we are much better at hearing frequencies in the 1kHz-4kHz range.
However, recording artists make the music sound good to their ears, so the sound as recorded is already appropriately balanced for the response of the human ear. To preserve that correct balance, all of the playback devices need flat frequency response. The only need for equalization is to correct problems with a room (irrelevant if you are using headphones) or deficiencies in the headphones.
Are we supposed to CARE how you use random play? How you use random play is a personal decision, and should NOT factor into the review or the score you give the product. You might play it that way - others might not
A reviewer can reasonably state a personal preference. Readers can weight it appropriately. I keep my iPod on shuffle play and pretty much never look at the screen. I don't need the reviewer to tell me that that makes the iPod shuffle perfect for me (or would if I didn't already have an iPod).
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this will pretty much destroy the TiVo when it happens. I love my Replay box, but the dual tuner motorola DVR box records digital channels far better and easier than Tivo or Replay can ever hope to... The advantage of having the decoding and descrambling hardware in the box is huge. While the "cable card" ready tivo is years away.
The outboard cable TiVo is doomed. As superior as the software is, it cannot compete with dual tuner HD cable boxes that are now available in most markets for a few bucks extra on your cable bill.
Of course, DirecTV users are enjoying the best of both--dual tuner TiVos--even HD if you are willing to pay the stiff price for a HD TiVo DVR. Between DirecTV and the TiVo equipped DVD recorders, TiVo will probably be OK for a while. But even DirecTV is looking to move away from TiVo to their own DVR (even though they just released a new Tivo equipped model).
So the future of TiVo is probably the CableCard equipped systems. To compete feature-for-feature with cable boxes (so that users can send back their rented cable boxes and save on rental fees, making TiVo's own monthly fees more palatable), TiVo requires the CableCard 2.0 standard, which won't be ready until next year (assuming the cable companies don't manage to beg a delay).
However, once the CableCard standard comes in, Tivo has a good shot at moving in on the high end of the cable box market. Since cable box DVRs are rented, users have no financial commitment, and can potentially be wooed away by TiVo. The delay may even work to TiVo's benefit, because in a year or two TiVo should be able to offer a system considerably more attractive than the cable company DVRs, and cable companies are going to have a hard time keeping up, because everytime they roll out a hardware upgrade, existing customers are going to want to swap their boxes.
The real wild card is Apple--the one company with a reasonable shot of surpassing TiVo for software design. Jobs was talking a lot about HD in his last address. I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple spring a DVR equipped Mac as soon as the CableCard 2.0 standard is final.
I'd probably prefer a dual-core G4 to a G5. In my experience, dual processor Macs just feel really snappier than single processor models, even when the clock speed is significantly lower.
Who is accountable for the security of the Linux kernel? Does Red Hat, for example, take responsibility?
I applaud Microsoft's recognition of the importance of accountability. I look forward to reading Microsoft's revised license agreement, in which Microsoft will presumably accept liability for consequential damages resulting from security flaws of Microsoft products.
There is not a single frame in a Pixar re-composited film that matches the creator's vision. It's still a hack job on a film, the only difference is that re-compositing allows a slightly finer tuning. Higher precision, if you will.
Who but the creator is to say what his "vision" was? Whatever he might prefer for a particular scene, he is constrained to work within the limitations of the aspect ratio of the medium. For all we know, there might be scenes that the creators would have preferred to do in 4:3, but were forced into widescreen by the demands of film production.
Yes, it's a bit better than pan-and-scanning the entire film. But it's still butchered. It's just butchered slightly less.
I don't consider it to be "butchered" when a film is specifically adapted scene by scene to another aspect ratio by its creators. That doesn't mean that every scene has to be recomposited. One aspect ratio is not inherently better than another. Some scenes will inherently work better in 4:3 (and sometimes simply cropping the sides will improve the composition or at least not harm it) and some will inherently work better in 16:9.
Apple's iPod and ITunes is just more vendor lock-in, and it's time for the consumers to stop "consuming" until they can use the hardware of their choice to play the music of their choice.
I do play the music of my choice on the player of my choice. That player just happens to be an iPod. I don't care to buy songs in a proprietary format, so I don't. I buy used CDs on Amazon and rip them myself to mp3, which play just fine on iTunes and my iPod. I doubt if Apple cares one way or the other; they make more money off the iPod than the iTunes store, anyway.
Does that mean they have an artist redo the object locations, action, and camera moves? Or maybe they just give different camera parameters?
It sounds like they do all of the above to some extent.
What about Stanley Kubrick, who shot all his movies in 4:3 and then re-cropped them for theatrical release?
Here, the question is not so much what the shooting format was, but rather what format the director and cinematographer had in mind when they composed the scene. Knowing that the image would be cropped for widescreen, perhaps Kubrick staged the scenes to favor that format. Or perhaps he thought that his films would have their greatest longevity on TV and favored the 4:3 format (of course, now an increasing number of TVs are 16:9). Or maybe he compromised, trying to come up with something that would work in both formats.
I remember one scene in 2001, with a static shot (as I first saw it in Cinerama) of the two astronauts speaking to each other and HAL's camera eye in the middle, that was horribly mangled in the TV release, with the view panning back and forth.
Pixar actually renders the widescreen and fullscreen versions separately, with the scenes recomposed appropriately.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Our thumbs did not evolve "to grasp things" or to do anything else in particular. We have thumbs simply because those individuals who did not have died off. Nature has no intent or purpose, and neither do our thumbs.
Natural selection has no "purpose" in the sense of foresight, but that doesn't mean that things happen for no reason. In other words, it is probably not mere random genetic drift that caused proto-primates with opposable thumbs to be more successful than their more manually limited cousins, but rather the result of a particular selective advantage of that feature. Exactly what that advantage was is to some extent guesswork. However, considering what primates do with their thumbs (hanging onto branches, throwing rocks, manipulating simple tools), grasping seems like the simplest hypothesis.
One thing we do know for sure--whatever the selective advantage was, it was not the ability to stretch their thumbs under their palms to hit an awkwardly placed mouse button.
To be fair, that motion is what makes our thumbs "opposable" and it's much of the reason the human species dominates the animal kingdom... I don't think it'll do you any harm :-)
Our opposable thumbs evolved to grasp things, not to press awkwardly located buttons hundreds or thousands of times a day. The fact that your thumb is capable of doing it does not make it healthy. As you may have noticed, humans are capable of doing all sorts of things that aren't good for them.
In fact, for quite a few movies the "fullscreen" version does contain more of the image than the widescreen version. Even in this case, however, there is an argument for the widescreen version, because the director composes a scene with widescreen in mind.
Finally, it isn't about ability to memorize. It is about USABILITY and comfort, particularly when doing repetative tasks. KEY+MOUSE requires two hands, slowing down a typist significantly, while RIGHT/MIDDLE CLICK requires only 1 hand, leaving the other where it belongs, ready to type.
This doesn't make any sense to me. You type the modifier key, leaving your left hand where it is, typing. It's no harder than hitting a shift key. While hitting a right button on a trackpad while controlling the pointer with your finger requires an odd and probably unhealthy wrist contortion as you reach under your right hand with your thumb to hit that right button.
The one button mouse, or rather glidepoint, drives her nuts. Not the glidepoint itself (she loves that), but the single button that forces her to memorize somekey+mouseclick to do basic things the rest of us do with the right mouse button and, in the case of us Linux/*BSD folks, the middle mouse button.
The advantage of the one button mouse is that there are no basic things that require you to memorize which mouse button to use. All basic operations of all Mac programs can be executed with one button, and modifier keys are used exclusively for shortcuts.
After watching computer novices struggling with 3 button mice, I'm move convinced than ever that Apple made the right decision.
And while I use a 3-button mouse (actually, I don't use the right buttons all that much, but I love the scroll wheel), I hate multibutton trackpads. Modifier keys are much less awkward. And I'm convinced that anybody who can remember "right button instead of left button" can remember command-click. And if they can't, you can get by pretty well without it.
But I do wish that Apple would add a little scroll wheel to the right of the mousepad. There are some utilities that turn the edge of the pad into a virtual scroll wheel, but that just doesn't do it for me.
The drive is too small for my music collection, although I'll bet there will shortly be little firewire drives that fit right underneath.
But in other respects it's kind of overkill for a music server anyway. I use a first-generation beige G3, which will easily hold a couple of hard drives. It's bigger, but not too unwieldy if you run it headless.
Based on the videos, it doesn't look hard at all, certainly much easer than adding memory to an original Mac 512 or even a first-generation iMac (both of which I've done). No weird screws (not even Torq), screws hidden under labels or specialized tools required. Most importantly, there is no "Your warranty is void if you break this" sticker. Which basically means that there is no way Apple could tell if you added memory. If, despite their public statements, they change their mind decide to be sticky about it, you just pop the case open and restore the original RAM before taking it in for repair.
While an embryo's brain has not formed to the point where synapses are firing and "consciousness" has been achieved you still cannot ethically snuff out his/her life.
Yet we can amputate a finger and snuff out the lives of thousands and thousands of human cells, every one of which, in principle, could be cloned into an individual human being. A woman can ethically decline to have sex during her fertile period, even though it prevents a living, human egg in her ovaries from developing into a human being with thoughts and feelings. Potential is not actuality.
For example, if we had a patient who was "brain dead" yet we knew that in a few months her brain would become conscious and walk out of the hospital, and I were to tear the unconscious body apart, society would have every right to throw my butt in jail. This is closer to the scenario we have in human beings who have not yet developed far enough to become conscious.
Yet every ovum has this same potential to develop, yet it is considered ethical to decline sex, and thereby to destroy this potential human being (or more accurately, deny it the opportunity to become a human being with thoughts and feelings). Potential is not actuality.
Yes, yes, yes. The whole point of an abortion, however, is to dismember a human being who is presently in an early stage of development such as blastocyst, embryo, or fetus. Technically dismembering a human being in these stages of development who is not in a womb would not be called an abortion. Calling it murder would be accurate, however.
"Dismember" is a term obviously calculated to create a misleading impression of a person being ripped limb from limb, and to obscure the fact that such an early embryo is an undifferentiated ball of cells--it has no members to "dis."
Calling it "murder" is to exalt cells over mind. The term is normally "murder" used to refer to the snuffing out of a human consciousness. You cannot murder a body in which brain death has already occured, for example, even if all of the other organs are still alive. But like limbs, an early embryo has no consciousness--indeed, no brain to feel pain, nor nerves to feel it with. It is the human mind that is worth of protection. Yes, an early embryo (like a sperm and an egg) has some chance of eventually developing into something that has a brain and a mind, and can reasonably be called a person. But it doesn't have them yet.
That makes this decision all the better. The current system that allows private companies to profit from research funded with federal grant money is broken. We should stop all such funding until the government gets royalties on discoveries made on it's dime, or until a compulsory license is issued for all patents on inventions discovered using public dollars.
This is one of those things that seems to make sense if you don't really know anything about it. Patents are a lot of trouble and a not inconsiderable expense. So the only reason universities bother to patent discoveries made with federal dollars is because they can license those patents and reap royalties to support more research.
So "compulsory public licensing" = no patents.
But it's worse than that. Companies would much rather invest in something that they hold the patent for. So they tend to pass up discoveries in the public domain in favor of trying to develop their own proprietary approaches. This was the problem that the current system was developed to cure. And much as it may rankle to see a company profiting from federally funded research, it is that very profit motive that ensures that the discovery does get developed.
Excuse me. Isn't an abortion the destruction of an embryo or fetus?
No, abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. When cells are merely dividing in a dish, nobody is pregnant.
How about here?
Whether or not a little network of nerve cells that can fly a plane can reasonably be considered to be conscious (and I think that the universal answer among neuroscientists would be "no"), these cultures at least have one crucial feature--there are actual neurons present, which are certainly necessary, albeit not sufficient, for consciousness.
But at the early stage at which stem cells are harvested, the embryo doesn't have any neurons.
To break this down, simply, there was no major change in his atraction to girls between 16 and 22, but unlike when he was 16, it is no loger 'right' for him to find a 16 year old atractive, now, the youngest he 'should' find atractive is more like 20
One generally doesn't stop finding younger women (by which I mean sexually mature) attractive just because one ages, but they become less appealing as sexual partners, simply because older women are more interesting to talk to. And there are ethical issues as well. A 14, or even 16, year old guy is just figuring out his own sexuality, and some ethical lapses can be forgiven. But an older man is expected to be cognizant of the potential consequences of his actions. The ethical burden of becoming involved with a woman so young that she has not had time to fully come to terms with her own sexuality, or learn how to protect herself physically and emotionally, is quite off-putting.
Again, why should I pay more per month for that? That's why I like the CableCard concept that I can plug into other devices of my choosing. As the other poster noted, some are coming out.
You'll pay more because for a lot of people DVR features add value. CableCard will give you more choice as to whether you pay the extra money up front or spread out over months as a monthly rental. However, 3rd party boxes probably won't save you money, because it is likely that CableCard based devices will be aimed for the high end of the market, since a free box for a few dollars a month is hard to compete with on a price basis. Also, cable companies have an incentive to subsidize their boxes, to lure you to pay for their services.
And no, Cable Card does not work with satellite. Customers of satellite companies will likely remain at the mercy of the company, with limited choices.
Furthermore, the human ear doesn't perceive all frequencies equally loudly, as illustrated by the lines on an Equal Loudness Contour chart [gsu.edu]. If that ipod really does produce a near-flat response, users will be missing out on lo and hi frequency ranges, as we are much better at hearing frequencies in the 1kHz-4kHz range.
However, recording artists make the music sound good to their ears, so the sound as recorded is already appropriately balanced for the response of the human ear. To preserve that correct balance, all of the playback devices need flat frequency response. The only need for equalization is to correct problems with a room (irrelevant if you are using headphones) or deficiencies in the headphones.
Are we supposed to CARE how you use random play? How you use random play is a personal decision, and should NOT factor into the review or the score you give the product. You might play it that way - others might not
A reviewer can reasonably state a personal preference. Readers can weight it appropriately. I keep my iPod on shuffle play and pretty much never look at the screen. I don't need the reviewer to tell me that that makes the iPod shuffle perfect for me (or would if I didn't already have an iPod).