Below is the text from a Q&A session with ACTA negotiators held on June 28, 2010 in Lucerne. These were notes taken by hand by the questioner, and the answers were considered "on the record." I have highlighted some important parts, and omitted some irrelevant parts.
On June 28, 2010, at 7:30pm Swiss time, a group of civil society representatives met with 21 ACTA negotiators. The negotiators included representatives (21 in all) from the Switzerland, France, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Mexico, Japan, U.S., Morocco, Canada and Korea.
...
The questions raised were given to the negotiators in advance and the answers were represented as those of the collective views of the negotiators rather than of an individual negotiator unless otherwise indicated. Unless otherwise indicated, the speaker is the chair of the Swiss Delegation who was appointed to speak for the group.
There are a couple news items here. First, there is an “emerging consensus” to take patents out of the border measure chapter, but not out of the rest of the agreement. Some parties appear to desire to take patents out of the whole text. The EU appears to be in favor of leaving patents in the civil chapter. The change appears to be a rather direct result of concerns raised by access to medicines advocates.
There are still major concerns on access to medicines and free flow of goods in the border chapter. Negotiators seem committed to requiring in transit seizure and it is possible (although there seems some division) that it will include common trademark infringements and non-commercial scale copyright infringement, thus reaching far beyond TRIPS standards.
There was an admission that countries may have to change their laws to comply with ACTA. That may not be real news, but I have not heard it admitted by a delegate before. But the EU continued to press that they will not change their laws.
There seemed to be little desire to remove or narrow considerably the internet chapter. There was a desire by some delegates to ensure that DMCA-like protections are in the ACTA internet chapter. But several discussed (off line) the desire to combat “file sharing,” even apparently when not done on a commercial scale.
Meeting with ACTA negotiators, Lucerne, 28.06.2010; Compiled questions from the civil society for the Q&A session
1. Will negotiators commit to continue releasing the text of the Agreement following completion of this week's negotiating round and subsequently until the completion (or abandonment) of negotiations?
A:
This is a question that the delegation takes up at end of each round. This will be a question to be discussed and agreed by consensus.
On issue of public comments, this is a plurilateral process and each country will have to take that into account. It is not as if the ACTA group is a formal organization. For a pluralateral agreement, we have promoted a great deal of transparency already – more than in other agreements.
Q. Wait. In other processes – e.g. anything done at WIPO or the example of the Doha declaration – civil society got access to text before and after each round. That has not been the case here. We received text once, after years of negotiations and close to what you declared to be the end point of the discussions.
A. Those are multilateral negotiations. This is a plurilateral negotiation. We do not have a secretariat to assist with such matters. This has been an extremely transparent process.
2. Are negotiators reviewing the text of the Agreement to ensure it is fully consistent with the WTO TRIPS Agreement? Will the WTO or other independent legal experts be asked to review the text of the Agreement to ensure it is legally consistent with WTO rules? Will you provide clear and objective information regarding the evidence base upon which ACTA is purportedly justified, as
Well, to be fair, there are a lot of lawyers whose day jobs are essentially working to oppose ACTA. They're both academics like Geist and activists working at places like the EFF and Public Knowledge. Also, industry and business are not unanimously behind ACTA at all. The Consumer Electronics Association opposes it, for example. So do companies like Google and eBay, but they haven't been very vocal about it, likely because they don't want to upset content owners and big trademark names respectively.
That said, I agree with your conclusion - we can't win. I have no doubt that ACTA will be concluded and signed by Obama. However, the pressure exerted so far has gotten us unofficial leaks, official draft texts, and the removal of specific provisions that were especially controversial. By keeping the pressure applied, we can affect things, if only slightly.
You're spot on, ACTA has zilch to do with currency counterfeiting. The title comes from the time when it was envisioned as a tool to deal with fake Gucci, D&G, & Louis Vuitton products, basically. Knock-off purses, sunglasses, clothing, all that stuff you can buy in the streets of every major city from vendors who spread them out on blankets.
Then ACTA got an Internet chapter! Which is funny, you know, because there's really not much counterfeiting of that type going on online. (Actually, there is, what with the cases filed against eBay for allowing third parties to sell fake handbags and perfumes, but the Internet chapter is all about copyright infringement, not trademark infringement). And it wants to export all the bad parts of the DMCA and US copyright law generally, with very few of the good parts.
Then some countries decided for good measure to throw patent infringement into the mix, and all of the sudden, ACTA was no longer about handbags, but about ALL intellectual property law, affecting potentially every sector and issue IP geeks care about: the Internet, free speech, access to information, generic medicines and public health, innovation, etc.
Meanwhile, it's conveniently kept the same title, since it's much less interesting sounding than "Important IP Treaty (but not really a treaty, since it doesn't require Congressional ratification) that will effectively rewrite many laws (even though we keep saying it won't, which is funny because if that's really true, why is anyone signing it) and screw over users, independent producers, and several major sectors."
I've never heard of a paper presentation at a conference being considered as previous publication, but I'm not in the same field. Lots and lots of papers that are published start out by being presented at conferences, and then the authors rework them after that. Now if the conference is publishing proceedings, that's a different story.
But as some other commenters are suggesting, your best bet would likely be to find a professor who works in this area and maybe co-write a paper with them. You can provide the substance, but they can connect it with what's going on in the field, references to appropriate literature, etc. They'll also be up to speed with what the best publishing venue will be. No, it won't be Science, but there are plenty of other well-regarded journals as well as specialty journals that might accept it.
While there are advantages and disadvantages to various voting systems, isn't it the case that in theory, there is no panacea to the voting problem? Arrow's impossibility theorem
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard?
on
Flight of the Desktops
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I never understood this argument. My laptop is 7.5 pounds and it's got a 17" widescreen and a full keyboard + number pad. I've brought it to work with me most every day for the past 3 years and have never suffered a hernia or exhaustion or even noticed it. And it's in a bag that adds several more pounds when I'm transporting it.
For those of us who aren't just carrying it to and from work, but are out all day, 7.5 lbs + a few more for a bag gets heavy quite quickly. I don't have an office, so when I'm not working from home, I might be out of the house for 12 hours, shifting between walking, public transport, a library, outside, coffee shop, classroom, conference hall, etc. The difference between having a 5.5 lb notebook and a 2.5 lb netbook is very noticeable when you have to carry it around all day long, not just to work where you drop it on a desk.
I bought the netbook a few months ago, and now the notebook rarely leaves my desk -- only when I'm going to be taking an extended trip somewhere.
Nonetheless, to say these were contributed by EU countries is very much a stretch.
I think other posters hit the nail on the head when they say its more a representation of lobbying groups than countries.
You can blame lobbying groups (I do too), but they are not in the room with the negotiating parties. The leaked draft text with country positions (available here) clearly indicates that this Option 2 comes from the EU party, so it's not at all a stretch to say that they've contributed it.
Also, even if that specific provision of ACTA is struck down after the fact by the EP, that's not going to make it disappear from the treaty, where it will still affect non-EU countries. I.e., if the EU proposal for this text makes it in, it's setting a precedent for the rest of the world.
If you're going to blame lobbying groups entirely for everything bad in ACTA, you may as well absolve the US government of all responsibility in this as well, since our negotiating party (the USTR) essentially parrots anything the IP industry says.
The EP is actually not directly involved in ACTA negotiations, and has in fact expressed concern over the content of ACTA. The EU delegations that are negotiating the content of ACTA have bracketed text in the agreement that implicitly refers to three strikes laws. Specifically:
Option 2:
[Paragraph 3(a) shall not affect the possibility for a judicial or administrative authority,
in accordance with the Parties legal system, requiring the service provider to terminate
or prevent an infringement, nor does it affect the possibility of the parties establishing
procedures governing the removal or disabling of access to information
That comes from page 21 of the official draft text available here (PDF).
Only one chapter of ACTA deals with enforcement in the digital environment. There are other real-world implications if ACTA passes, especially if it includes border measures relating to patents. The implications for the shipping of generic medicines, or medicines produced under compulsory licenses in one country but still on-patent in another country, may mean increasing costs for developing world health agencies, for example.
The problem with the way that ACTA is being negotiated is that, to be frank, writing letters to Congress probably won't make any difference. This is because Congress is really not involved in the ACTA negotiations at all. It's being done as a "sole executive agreement," which means essentially no oversight from the legislative branch. Only a few members of Congress have expressed any interest in ACTA (notably Senator Ron Wyden, who sent a letter to the USTR on the issue a few months ago).
I am actually currently at a conference at AU law school and just heard Jamie Love discuss this issue this morning. He pointed out that it's not entirely true that the US wants patents out of ACTA. We would like to avoid discussing patents on the section involving border measures, but we are not opposed to the inclusion of patents in the section on civil penalties, including new measures on injunctive relief that would establish standards in areas of US law that are still hotly contested. The USTR's letter in response to Senator Ron Wyden makes this position quite clear. We can't totally blame the EU for patents being in ACTA, only in the border measures chapter.
To be fair, it works both ways. The current draft text of ACTA still includes language that permits "graduated response" or "three strikes" laws in a section that was contributed by EU countries. While the original footnote that referred specifically to three strikes was removed, neither is it explicitly forbidden.
Having gone over the draft text and the leaked version that indicated the various country positions, I'd say the US and EU are equally responsible for some of the nasty things in ACTA - just different nasty things.
Actually, the reason Morocco is involved in the ACTA negotiations (it is definitely an outlier when you look at the rest of the parties) is likely because the US already has a free trade agreement with them that includes IP enforcement provisions that the USTR points to as a basis for ACTA.
Yes, I know it was amended. The OP also mentioned a repealed amendment (prohibition) as one of the "not great" guiding points, yet failed to mention this.
Also, it's hardly irrelevant - it's history, and represented the content of the document for nearly 80 years.
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. (Art. 1, Sec. 2, Para. 3)
Reminds me of a scam were crooks were fake sending invoices to small companies for printer/copier toner cartridges that were never sent and demand payment. The scam worked because it was cheaper to pay the invoice(s) than paying a lawyer to go after them.
Why would you bother to do either? If it's truly a scam, are the crooks really going to hire a collection agency to harass you? They're not going to be able to put a black mark on your credit report, either.
I had a disaster of a DSL installation by AT&T about two years ago. Apparently the salesperson shouldn't have even offered my service in my area, but they did. Three technician visits and about three weeks later, I had had functioning service for a total of about 72 hours. I called and canceled, and sent my modem back in a prepaid box that it had come with.
A few weeks later, I got a bill for an entire month's service, plus a bill for the modem - they claimed I had never returned it. It ended up being something like $90. I called them up, essentially told them to go screw themselves, that I would pay for three days of prorated service since that was what I had used, and that they should send me a new bill with the correct total. I never heard from them again, and I certainly never paid them the $90 they falsely claimed I owed them.
I have an ebook reader that supports PDFs, it's just that PDFs make crappy ebooks.
Maybe there's some ebook reader that supports ODT, but I haven't heard of it. ODT isn't even on this table that describes file format support of various ebook readers.
Epub, on the other hand, is a free and open standard. In any case, people interested in this topic should look into calibre, a cross-platform, open-source program that can convert practically anything to any ebook format (this would include, for example, ODT to EPUB or MOBI).
The trick is to use a wired card with a PXE ROM attached directly to a wireless router with firmware that supports a bridged mode. In my case, I used a WRT54G running DD-WRT.
You configure the router to bridge the wireless and wired networks, and enter the appropriate information for your wireless network. Then, you configure your netboot system normally (DHCP, TFTP, etc.). When the client boots up, the PXE ROM thinks it is directly attached to a wired network so everything works normally.
The downside is you need an extra router that must be configured as a bridge, but the upside is that it allows you to have the equivalent of a wireless, diskless machine.
I'm kind of suprised the only options available are PDF and ODT... would have been nice to see MOBI or EPUB formats, too, to make this more appealing to ebook users. Of course it's not hard to convert them yourself, just adds an extra step, and I'm not sure how well formatting will be preserved.
I still use PXE to boot a diskless MythTV client. For a while I had the machine connected to a wireless router set up in bridge mode, so the machine effectively netbooted wirelessly.
Digital cable boxes by law in the US (last time I checked) are required to have firewire ports to allow for unprotected content recording
AFAIK, that is only true for HD boxes. There is no such requirement for SD digital cable boxes. Also, the boxes aren't required to have the ports (as evidenced by the fact that the majority of HD boxes don't actually have them)... it's just that the company is technically required to give you a box with a firewire port if you have HD service and you ask for one.
I've also heard anecdotes about cablecos adding no-copy flags to content that was originally designated as freely copy.
As you're well aware, even with good software, nothing can replace an experienced operator. I used to work in manufacturing with a CNC machine, and there were lots of idiosyncracies of the machine and shop practices that I had to account for.
This particular machine used a vacuum pump to hold the material down for cutting, which was usually fine, but the suction would be weaker around the edges and strongest in the center. The practical result was that I very quickly learned never to place small parts near the edges of the material, since they'd potentially move and either be damaged, or more dangerously, be thrown off the machine. Automatic nesting algorithms, at least the ones in the software I was using, were only so useful.
Even though I no longer work there, I still occasionally send them a personal job, then come by a few days later to pick up the parts at material cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Below is the text from a Q&A session with ACTA negotiators held on June 28, 2010 in Lucerne. These were notes taken by hand by the questioner, and the answers were considered "on the record." I have highlighted some important parts, and omitted some irrelevant parts.
On June 28, 2010, at 7:30pm Swiss time, a group of civil society representatives met with 21 ACTA negotiators. The negotiators included representatives (21 in all) from the Switzerland, France, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Mexico, Japan, U.S., Morocco, Canada and Korea.
...
The questions raised were given to the negotiators in advance and the answers were represented as those of the collective views of the negotiators rather than of an individual negotiator unless otherwise indicated. Unless otherwise indicated, the speaker is the chair of the Swiss Delegation who was appointed to speak for the group.
There are a couple news items here. First, there is an “emerging consensus” to take patents out of the border measure chapter, but not out of the rest of the agreement. Some parties appear to desire to take patents out of the whole text. The EU appears to be in favor of leaving patents in the civil chapter. The change appears to be a rather direct result of concerns raised by access to medicines advocates.
There are still major concerns on access to medicines and free flow of goods in the border chapter. Negotiators seem committed to requiring in transit seizure and it is possible (although there seems some division) that it will include common trademark infringements and non-commercial scale copyright infringement, thus reaching far beyond TRIPS standards.
There was an admission that countries may have to change their laws to comply with ACTA. That may not be real news, but I have not heard it admitted by a delegate before. But the EU continued to press that they will not change their laws.
There seemed to be little desire to remove or narrow considerably the internet chapter. There was a desire by some delegates to ensure that DMCA-like protections are in the ACTA internet chapter. But several discussed (off line) the desire to combat “file sharing,” even apparently when not done on a commercial scale.
Meeting with ACTA negotiators, Lucerne, 28.06.2010; Compiled questions from the civil society for the Q&A session
1. Will negotiators commit to continue releasing the text of the Agreement following completion of this week's negotiating round and subsequently until the completion (or abandonment) of negotiations?
A: This is a question that the delegation takes up at end of each round. This will be a question to be discussed and agreed by consensus.
On issue of public comments, this is a plurilateral process and each country will have to take that into account. It is not as if the ACTA group is a formal organization. For a pluralateral agreement, we have promoted a great deal of transparency already – more than in other agreements.
Q. Wait. In other processes – e.g. anything done at WIPO or the example of the Doha declaration – civil society got access to text before and after each round. That has not been the case here. We received text once, after years of negotiations and close to what you declared to be the end point of the discussions.
A. Those are multilateral negotiations. This is a plurilateral negotiation. We do not have a secretariat to assist with such matters. This has been an extremely transparent process.
2. Are negotiators reviewing the text of the Agreement to ensure it is fully consistent with the WTO TRIPS Agreement? Will the WTO or other independent legal experts be asked to review the text of the Agreement to ensure it is legally consistent with WTO rules? Will you provide clear and objective information regarding the evidence base upon which ACTA is purportedly justified, as
OT, but in my state, they not only got slots approved, but actually managed to have the State government purchase the slot machines for them.
Well, to be fair, there are a lot of lawyers whose day jobs are essentially working to oppose ACTA. They're both academics like Geist and activists working at places like the EFF and Public Knowledge. Also, industry and business are not unanimously behind ACTA at all. The Consumer Electronics Association opposes it, for example. So do companies like Google and eBay, but they haven't been very vocal about it, likely because they don't want to upset content owners and big trademark names respectively.
That said, I agree with your conclusion - we can't win. I have no doubt that ACTA will be concluded and signed by Obama. However, the pressure exerted so far has gotten us unofficial leaks, official draft texts, and the removal of specific provisions that were especially controversial. By keeping the pressure applied, we can affect things, if only slightly.
You're spot on, ACTA has zilch to do with currency counterfeiting. The title comes from the time when it was envisioned as a tool to deal with fake Gucci, D&G, & Louis Vuitton products, basically. Knock-off purses, sunglasses, clothing, all that stuff you can buy in the streets of every major city from vendors who spread them out on blankets.
Then ACTA got an Internet chapter! Which is funny, you know, because there's really not much counterfeiting of that type going on online. (Actually, there is, what with the cases filed against eBay for allowing third parties to sell fake handbags and perfumes, but the Internet chapter is all about copyright infringement, not trademark infringement). And it wants to export all the bad parts of the DMCA and US copyright law generally, with very few of the good parts.
Then some countries decided for good measure to throw patent infringement into the mix, and all of the sudden, ACTA was no longer about handbags, but about ALL intellectual property law, affecting potentially every sector and issue IP geeks care about: the Internet, free speech, access to information, generic medicines and public health, innovation, etc.
Meanwhile, it's conveniently kept the same title, since it's much less interesting sounding than "Important IP Treaty (but not really a treaty, since it doesn't require Congressional ratification) that will effectively rewrite many laws (even though we keep saying it won't, which is funny because if that's really true, why is anyone signing it) and screw over users, independent producers, and several major sectors."
I've never heard of a paper presentation at a conference being considered as previous publication, but I'm not in the same field. Lots and lots of papers that are published start out by being presented at conferences, and then the authors rework them after that. Now if the conference is publishing proceedings, that's a different story.
But as some other commenters are suggesting, your best bet would likely be to find a professor who works in this area and maybe co-write a paper with them. You can provide the substance, but they can connect it with what's going on in the field, references to appropriate literature, etc. They'll also be up to speed with what the best publishing venue will be. No, it won't be Science, but there are plenty of other well-regarded journals as well as specialty journals that might accept it.
While there are advantages and disadvantages to various voting systems, isn't it the case that in theory, there is no panacea to the voting problem? Arrow's impossibility theorem
I never understood this argument. My laptop is 7.5 pounds and it's got a 17" widescreen and a full keyboard + number pad. I've brought it to work with me most every day for the past 3 years and have never suffered a hernia or exhaustion or even noticed it. And it's in a bag that adds several more pounds when I'm transporting it.
For those of us who aren't just carrying it to and from work, but are out all day, 7.5 lbs + a few more for a bag gets heavy quite quickly. I don't have an office, so when I'm not working from home, I might be out of the house for 12 hours, shifting between walking, public transport, a library, outside, coffee shop, classroom, conference hall, etc. The difference between having a 5.5 lb notebook and a 2.5 lb netbook is very noticeable when you have to carry it around all day long, not just to work where you drop it on a desk.
I bought the netbook a few months ago, and now the notebook rarely leaves my desk -- only when I'm going to be taking an extended trip somewhere.
Nonetheless, to say these were contributed by EU countries is very much a stretch.
I think other posters hit the nail on the head when they say its more a representation of lobbying groups than countries.
You can blame lobbying groups (I do too), but they are not in the room with the negotiating parties. The leaked draft text with country positions (available here) clearly indicates that this Option 2 comes from the EU party, so it's not at all a stretch to say that they've contributed it.
Also, even if that specific provision of ACTA is struck down after the fact by the EP, that's not going to make it disappear from the treaty, where it will still affect non-EU countries. I.e., if the EU proposal for this text makes it in, it's setting a precedent for the rest of the world.
If you're going to blame lobbying groups entirely for everything bad in ACTA, you may as well absolve the US government of all responsibility in this as well, since our negotiating party (the USTR) essentially parrots anything the IP industry says.
Option 2:
[Paragraph 3(a) shall not affect the possibility for a judicial or administrative authority, in accordance with the Parties legal system, requiring the service provider to terminate or prevent an infringement, nor does it affect the possibility of the parties establishing procedures governing the removal or disabling of access to information
That comes from page 21 of the official draft text available here (PDF).
Only one chapter of ACTA deals with enforcement in the digital environment. There are other real-world implications if ACTA passes, especially if it includes border measures relating to patents. The implications for the shipping of generic medicines, or medicines produced under compulsory licenses in one country but still on-patent in another country, may mean increasing costs for developing world health agencies, for example.
The problem with the way that ACTA is being negotiated is that, to be frank, writing letters to Congress probably won't make any difference. This is because Congress is really not involved in the ACTA negotiations at all. It's being done as a "sole executive agreement," which means essentially no oversight from the legislative branch. Only a few members of Congress have expressed any interest in ACTA (notably Senator Ron Wyden, who sent a letter to the USTR on the issue a few months ago).
I am actually currently at a conference at AU law school and just heard Jamie Love discuss this issue this morning. He pointed out that it's not entirely true that the US wants patents out of ACTA. We would like to avoid discussing patents on the section involving border measures, but we are not opposed to the inclusion of patents in the section on civil penalties, including new measures on injunctive relief that would establish standards in areas of US law that are still hotly contested. The USTR's letter in response to Senator Ron Wyden makes this position quite clear. We can't totally blame the EU for patents being in ACTA, only in the border measures chapter.
To be fair, it works both ways. The current draft text of ACTA still includes language that permits "graduated response" or "three strikes" laws in a section that was contributed by EU countries. While the original footnote that referred specifically to three strikes was removed, neither is it explicitly forbidden.
Having gone over the draft text and the leaked version that indicated the various country positions, I'd say the US and EU are equally responsible for some of the nasty things in ACTA - just different nasty things.
Actually, the reason Morocco is involved in the ACTA negotiations (it is definitely an outlier when you look at the rest of the parties) is likely because the US already has a free trade agreement with them that includes IP enforcement provisions that the USTR points to as a basis for ACTA.
Yes, I know it was amended. The OP also mentioned a repealed amendment (prohibition) as one of the "not great" guiding points, yet failed to mention this.
Also, it's hardly irrelevant - it's history, and represented the content of the document for nearly 80 years.
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. (Art. 1, Sec. 2, Para. 3)
Well, didn't some of the Technics kits come with different kinds of bands and wheels for them? So that's not too much of a stretch...
Reminds me of a scam were crooks were fake sending invoices to small companies for printer/copier toner cartridges that were never sent and demand payment. The scam worked because it was cheaper to pay the invoice(s) than paying a lawyer to go after them.
Why would you bother to do either? If it's truly a scam, are the crooks really going to hire a collection agency to harass you? They're not going to be able to put a black mark on your credit report, either.
I had a disaster of a DSL installation by AT&T about two years ago. Apparently the salesperson shouldn't have even offered my service in my area, but they did. Three technician visits and about three weeks later, I had had functioning service for a total of about 72 hours. I called and canceled, and sent my modem back in a prepaid box that it had come with.
A few weeks later, I got a bill for an entire month's service, plus a bill for the modem - they claimed I had never returned it. It ended up being something like $90. I called them up, essentially told them to go screw themselves, that I would pay for three days of prorated service since that was what I had used, and that they should send me a new bill with the correct total. I never heard from them again, and I certainly never paid them the $90 they falsely claimed I owed them.
In vim, g?G will perform rot13 from the cursor position to the end of the document; g?$ to the end of the line, etc.
Oh Snap! You told me!
I have an ebook reader that supports PDFs, it's just that PDFs make crappy ebooks.
Maybe there's some ebook reader that supports ODT, but I haven't heard of it. ODT isn't even on this table that describes file format support of various ebook readers.
Epub, on the other hand, is a free and open standard. In any case, people interested in this topic should look into calibre, a cross-platform, open-source program that can convert practically anything to any ebook format (this would include, for example, ODT to EPUB or MOBI).
The trick is to use a wired card with a PXE ROM attached directly to a wireless router with firmware that supports a bridged mode. In my case, I used a WRT54G running DD-WRT.
You configure the router to bridge the wireless and wired networks, and enter the appropriate information for your wireless network. Then, you configure your netboot system normally (DHCP, TFTP, etc.). When the client boots up, the PXE ROM thinks it is directly attached to a wired network so everything works normally.
The downside is you need an extra router that must be configured as a bridge, but the upside is that it allows you to have the equivalent of a wireless, diskless machine.
I'm kind of suprised the only options available are PDF and ODT... would have been nice to see MOBI or EPUB formats, too, to make this more appealing to ebook users. Of course it's not hard to convert them yourself, just adds an extra step, and I'm not sure how well formatting will be preserved.
I still use PXE to boot a diskless MythTV client. For a while I had the machine connected to a wireless router set up in bridge mode, so the machine effectively netbooted wirelessly.
Digital cable boxes by law in the US (last time I checked) are required to have firewire ports to allow for unprotected content recording
AFAIK, that is only true for HD boxes. There is no such requirement for SD digital cable boxes. Also, the boxes aren't required to have the ports (as evidenced by the fact that the majority of HD boxes don't actually have them)... it's just that the company is technically required to give you a box with a firewire port if you have HD service and you ask for one.
I've also heard anecdotes about cablecos adding no-copy flags to content that was originally designated as freely copy.
As you're well aware, even with good software, nothing can replace an experienced operator. I used to work in manufacturing with a CNC machine, and there were lots of idiosyncracies of the machine and shop practices that I had to account for.
This particular machine used a vacuum pump to hold the material down for cutting, which was usually fine, but the suction would be weaker around the edges and strongest in the center. The practical result was that I very quickly learned never to place small parts near the edges of the material, since they'd potentially move and either be damaged, or more dangerously, be thrown off the machine. Automatic nesting algorithms, at least the ones in the software I was using, were only so useful.
Even though I no longer work there, I still occasionally send them a personal job, then come by a few days later to pick up the parts at material cost.