I've been here for over a decade, and I generally ignore Slashdot posters who ignore reality in pursuit of an ideology. Sometimes that's means I'm reading only a meager proportion of the postings on some subjects.
There's certainly a contingent of posters in the, "If Richard Stallman doesn't like it, it must be bad" crowd. I like Linux, and think the GPL is a fine invention, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate good products from the likes of Apple and even Microsoft. I even, gasp, think there's a role for copyright in our laws, though not the hideous creature that Congress and the content industries have foisted upon us over the past couple of decades.
Some days it seems almost any subject can become a rationale for another round of useless debate over the merits of libertarianism and the horror of gun laws. When those become the subject of the conversation at the top of a discussion, I move on to the next article.
I was a little puzzled by your original reaction to my posting since I thought we were generally in agreement. I'm glad we cleared that up, Americano.
I would like to see more emphasis on statistics in high school as well. Too many otherwise intelligent people don't understand things like random sampling, estimation, and error. We'd have a lot fewer of those, "how can only 1,000 people in a poll represent the opinions of 250 million adults" types of questions.
Sadly we still see those types of comments here at Slashdot.
BTW, there's very little in statistics that requires more than Algebra I.
Observational studies like the CEEB report mentioned in the article suffer from the problem of self-selection. If we could conduct a pure experimental study, we'd assign students randomly to a "treatment" group, who then take Algebra II, and a "control" group, who do not. Because the assignments are randomized, any observed differences in performance between the groups can be assigned to taking Algebra II.
In reality, students select themselves into the treatment and control groups. This won't matter if the factor(s) that distinguish these two groups are uncorrelated with the measured outcomes. In this case, though, it's very likely that future success in life may have something to do with things like intelligence and determination, which are also likely to influence the decision to take Algebra II.
Anyone who wants to understand these issues should read Campbell & Stanley's Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research. Though the book is nearly fifty years old, it still remains a clear and cogent explanation of inferential problems in most social research. The original is out of print, but an updated version is at Amazon.
By the way, the comments by report's author in TFA show the researchers are well aware of this problem.
I just spent fifteen minutes or so searching for return rates on various products. The data seem to differ with your theory. Apple PCs are at or near the bottom in return rates across brands. There were apparently some problems with hard-disk based iPods, but to suggest that their products suffer from inferior engineering doesn't seem to jibe with published results.
A report earlier this year put iPad return rates at just 2% compared to 13% for Galaxy Tabs. The latter may partly be the result of buyer remorse.
I'll let you track down these figures for yourself. They weren't hard to find.
I'll just add I own no Apple products, nor do I intend to buy any in the foreseeable future.
why don't HP and Motorola hire a better marketing team and beat Apple at their own game?
People have memories. Companies have images. HP is probably still seen as a good printer manufacturer, but their image as a computer manufacturer declined quickly after the Compaq merger. Even a BestBuy sales assistant told me he was dismayed at the poor build quality on early HP netbooks.
Motorola has no leverage in this space. I think of them as a car radio company that became a solid manufacturer of early cell phones. Unfortunately the RAZR was the last product that seemed to generate any serious marketing buzz. My last Moto cell phone had a screen so fragile that it broke because I happened to have it in a back pocket when I sat down.
Apple doesn't suffer from these image problems. Unfortunately there aren't many other manufacturers who can compete on style and product quality in the same way. No one has a clue what an "HTC" is, and Nokia makes old, clunky-looking cell phones. Only Google might have had the image and marketing clout to become a strong competitor to Apple. Focusing on its core business of advertising makes sense for Google, but it takes Apple's most powerful competitor out of the arena.
Notice I haven't said anything about Microsoft in this comment. A company whose main product is associated with viruses and spyware, and whose image is stuck in the 90's, isn't a long-term competitor to Apple in the style+quality part of the marketplace either.
Sony could try to make a comeback in this space ("SonyStyle"), but they're not as entrepreneurial as a company like Apple.
Since the problem is keeping people from downloading crap like this and running it, the solution is pretty easy -- block executable files with a web proxy like Squid. It's really trivial to write a few ACL's in Squid that forbid the download of.exe,.bat,.com,.msi, etc. files. Obviously you need to exempt sites like Windows Update from this filter, and you might need to permit a couple of senior admins to download executables as well. Otherwise, there's just no reason in most organizations to let ordinary users download executable files. It's just asking for trouble.
From TFA: "Citi also warned customers over Twitter about the incident"
So unless we're members of the twittering classes we're not deserving of notifications when a security breach occurs. Glad I'm not one of Citi's customers.
My daughter would not be attending the high-quality, CSS-requiring educational institution she is today without a very hefty financial aid package from that school. Take your stupid and uninformed class warfare crap somewhere else, fella. I'm guessing you're just bitter that you weren't accepted into one of those institutions.
The bad news (for MS) is that I think the user base currently engrossed in tablet world are destined to ultimately go to cell phones and set-top boxes, not the directions MS are particularly strong in relative to the desktop/laptop world.
Guess who wrote the operating system that's running on my Motorola DVR from Verizon FiOS? Hint, it's a rather large company located in the Pacific Northwest.
MS has been involved in the set-top market for a decade or more. The XBox is one result of those efforts. Just because you don't see a Windows sticker on your DVR doesn't mean MS had nothing to do with it.
Here's an article from 2005 on Microsoft's efforts in the set-top market. How about an article from 1999 on its efforts to port CE to the set-top?
Gee, I wonder how a Microsoft tablet would go over with their friends at HP and Dell. Microsoft could have chosen to produce their own hardware at practically any time in the past decade or two. They're a lot happier with the model they have now.
Asian manufacturers like Acer and ASUS starting releasing netbooks with versions of Linux on them because it wasn't possible to run Vista effectively on machines with first-generation Atom processors. They couldn't install WinXP on those machines because it had already reached its end-of-life, and MS wanted everyone to move to Vista. MS's partners like Dell and HP wanted nothing to do with netbooks because they feared, rightly I suspect, that these devices would erode the market for their more powerful laptops.
All that changed the day MS decided to extend WinXP licensing solely for netbooks. To protect its partners, MS imposed strict limitations on this license. "Netbooks" were defined by the screen size and limited to 1 GB of memory. Bigger screens or more memory meant no WinXP. Since Microsoft knew it was competing against a product that was free-of-charge, it dropped its OEM price for WinXP on qualifying netbooks to a mere $15 per copy, compared to four or five times that figure for OEM copies of Windows on laptop and desktop machines. Later they developed the crippled "Starter Edition" of Windows 7 to serve the same market and again charged hardly anything for it. It doesn't require a conspiracy theorist to see that these strategies were designed entirely to keep Linux off machines that might end up in the hands of ordinary people.
Well you can imagine what happened after that. The Dells and HPs of the world saw there was a demand for netbooks and began competing with the Acers of the world. People who wandered into Staples or BestBuy suddenly saw small form-factor devices with friendly old XP on them competing with systems offering some flavor of Linux with an unfamiliar UI. Guess which ones sold? Guess which OS comes with netbooks from Acer and ASUS these days?
Nowadays netbooks have 10" and 12" screens and often 2GB of memory. Which operating system are they running? Usually Win7 Home Premium. How much does it cost the OEMs to license that OS? A lot more than $15/copy I'm sure. The higher license fee pushed up the price of netbooks so they're no longer so price-competitive compared to low-end laptops. Dell and HP breathed a sigh of relief.
All this happened years before anyone ever touched an iPad.
The new paywall-enabled New York Times site for one. It charges differentially depend on how it's being accessed. Tablet access costs $5 more per month than does access from a mobile phone.
I happened to be listening to the public radio program "Here and Now" yesterday where they were discussing whether colleges and universities should be required to inform public mental health agencies about students or faculty suspended for making violent threats.
In the course of the discussion one of the interviewees mentioned a program called MOSAIC (no, not NCSA MOSAIC). From its home page:
MOSAIC is an error avoidance method, a computer-assisted method for conducting comprehensive assessments - in the same way that diagnosis is a method used by a doctor.
MOSAIC helps the assessor weigh the present situation in light of expert opinion and research, and instantly compare the present situation to past cases where the outcomes are known.
The program is used by many Federal agencies and some colleges and universities.
I suspect the real target for Win7 phones is the Blackberry for exactly the reasons you state. A seamless, and as you suggest probably proprietary, handheld messaging device for business users on the Exchange platform is probably the last thing RIM wants to see come down the pike.
Don't forget Outlook/Exchange. I still think the biggest draw for MS is making a phone that works seamlessly with Exchange. Word/Excel/PP is nice and all, but staying in sync with mail, calendars, etc., in the office while traveling is where MS will get the most leverage. From what I can tell Exchange is nearly ubiquitous in large and mid-sized enterprises. In terms of providing lock-in, it's more powerful these days than Office.
Not to mention those businesses are supposed to abide by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. One of my clients gets an email warning him about this from his payments processor every month or two.
Public higher education is one of the great benefits of living in the United States, and many of our best institutions of higher learning are state-run. The University of Wisconsin is one such prestigious state institution, and much of that prestige derives from the accomplishments of its faculty.
Now let's ask ourselves what will happen in the future if witch-hunts like these become widespread. Will serious academics in controversial fields seek employment at state-run universities? Or will they prefer to teach in private institutions where they can't be construed as "public officials" and forced to reveal every rash or ill-formed argument they might once have made as they conduct their research? I was once offered a position at UW; under these conditions I'm not sure if I would have even pursued the position in the first place.
The target of this attack (it's disingenuous to call it anything else) holds a distinguished chair in the UW history department and is the President-Elect of the American Historical Association. Do you really think scholars of his distinction will continue to serve in public institutions if they can be subjected to these kinds of tactics? Or will someone of his distinction choose Princeton over UW because he won't be a "public employee" at the former? What will be the effects of these decisions over time on the quality of education and research being conducted in public universities?
As to the person above who asked whether someone should be employed as a faculty member in a public university and paid to attack one political party, the answer is resoundingly yes. Should a Marxist who offers courses attacking capitalism be barred from the campuses of our state universities? How about an monetarist who rails against government intrusion into the economy? Or a Straussian political philosopher who complains that our entire political system is an affront to her notion that only elites should rule?
Or does Nielsen not trust the cable companies to send accurate data?
No, the advertisers don't trust the cable companies to send accurate data. They'd rather trust an independent third-party whose been measuring audience sizes for over half a century.
Back in the early 80's I worked on a foundation-supported audience measurement project. We used both diaries and telephone "coincidentals" to ask about viewing and attitudes toward programs. One question we asked was whether the person had "planned ahead" to watch a particular show. At the time that figure was only about 25% of a show's audience. (We had both cable and broadcast viewers in our samples, though the number of channels available to cable viewers was clearly much much smaller than today.) At that time, most people still seemed to fit the mold of the traditional "least objectionable program" viewer. I suspect that model still holds true for a lot of peoples' television viewing even today.
Do you really think cable operators don't know down to the minute how many of their subscribers' boxes are tuned to which channels? I'd be shocked if they don't know those figures already. I suspect that one reason Nielsen survives in the advertising marketplace is that they continue to provide an alternative measure of audience sizes independent of the cable and satellite operators.
That and the enormous amount of inertia in this field. When millions of dollars turn on a rating point, there's a lot of value in having an independent agency doing the measurements.
(Disclaimer: I once worked on audience measurement technologies in the early 1980's.)
I've already heard the argument that fast forwarding commercials should be illegal because the advertiser paid for that, and you should be obligated to watch.
I once expressed annoyance over at AVS Forum about the fact that I couldn't tell my cable box to jump to a particular timestamp. (In that instance, I had stopped watching a golf tournament after three hours and wanted to skip to the fourth hour of coverage when I returned.) Someone reminded me that there's no chance in hell a cable box would permit such a option. Ads these days are designed to insure that they make an "impression," to use the ad-biz term, even when watched at high speeds. So, no, you can't skip over all our ads again, even though you already saw them the first time through.
I wonder if the iPad app includes DRM for this very reason. How does TW control access to the stream? Is it encrypted via a proprietary method? Can I intercept the stream with another box like a computer running Linux and watch it on that? Having just fought to require HDCP so they can ensure complete end-to-end control over HD content, the program producers may well worry that this app won't provide an equivalent level of security for their content. Perhaps the channel operators and program producers have more tech savvy than we here give them credit for.
This is incredibly stupid - the iPad needs to be on the wi-fi network, so it HAS to be in close proximity, so it is ridiculous to assume it isn't being used by the content licensee.
Why? Cable operators have fought for years against illegal redistribution of their services. Suppose I'm a TW cable subscriber and make a deal with my fellow apartment dwellers to share the cost of my subscription with whomever can see my wifi router.
The article is rather short on specifics. Can I stream a different channel than the one to which the set-top box is tuned? If not, that seems to make the producers' concerns a lot less persuasive.
How about making the Federal Reserve Board the CA for the banks in its system? I've always been puzzled by the fact that there aren't more sector-specific CAs backed by large recognizable public or private entities as compared to the Comodos of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been here for over a decade, and I generally ignore Slashdot posters who ignore reality in pursuit of an ideology. Sometimes that's means I'm reading only a meager proportion of the postings on some subjects.
There's certainly a contingent of posters in the, "If Richard Stallman doesn't like it, it must be bad" crowd. I like Linux, and think the GPL is a fine invention, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate good products from the likes of Apple and even Microsoft. I even, gasp, think there's a role for copyright in our laws, though not the hideous creature that Congress and the content industries have foisted upon us over the past couple of decades.
Some days it seems almost any subject can become a rationale for another round of useless debate over the merits of libertarianism and the horror of gun laws. When those become the subject of the conversation at the top of a discussion, I move on to the next article.
I was a little puzzled by your original reaction to my posting since I thought we were generally in agreement. I'm glad we cleared that up, Americano.
I would like to see more emphasis on statistics in high school as well. Too many otherwise intelligent people don't understand things like random sampling, estimation, and error. We'd have a lot fewer of those, "how can only 1,000 people in a poll represent the opinions of 250 million adults" types of questions.
Sadly we still see those types of comments here at Slashdot.
BTW, there's very little in statistics that requires more than Algebra I.
Observational studies like the CEEB report mentioned in the article suffer from the problem of self-selection. If we could conduct a pure experimental study, we'd assign students randomly to a "treatment" group, who then take Algebra II, and a "control" group, who do not. Because the assignments are randomized, any observed differences in performance between the groups can be assigned to taking Algebra II.
In reality, students select themselves into the treatment and control groups. This won't matter if the factor(s) that distinguish these two groups are uncorrelated with the measured outcomes. In this case, though, it's very likely that future success in life may have something to do with things like intelligence and determination, which are also likely to influence the decision to take Algebra II.
Anyone who wants to understand these issues should read Campbell & Stanley's Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research. Though the book is nearly fifty years old, it still remains a clear and cogent explanation of inferential problems in most social research. The original is out of print, but an updated version is at Amazon.
By the way, the comments by report's author in TFA show the researchers are well aware of this problem.
Well, that's a theory. Yours perhaps?
I just spent fifteen minutes or so searching for return rates on various products. The data seem to differ with your theory. Apple PCs are at or near the bottom in return rates across brands. There were apparently some problems with hard-disk based iPods, but to suggest that their products suffer from inferior engineering doesn't seem to jibe with published results.
A report earlier this year put iPad return rates at just 2% compared to 13% for Galaxy Tabs. The latter may partly be the result of buyer remorse.
I'll let you track down these figures for yourself. They weren't hard to find.
I'll just add I own no Apple products, nor do I intend to buy any in the foreseeable future.
why don't HP and Motorola hire a better marketing team and beat Apple at their own game?
People have memories. Companies have images. HP is probably still seen as a good printer manufacturer, but their image as a computer manufacturer declined quickly after the Compaq merger. Even a BestBuy sales assistant told me he was dismayed at the poor build quality on early HP netbooks.
Motorola has no leverage in this space. I think of them as a car radio company that became a solid manufacturer of early cell phones. Unfortunately the RAZR was the last product that seemed to generate any serious marketing buzz. My last Moto cell phone had a screen so fragile that it broke because I happened to have it in a back pocket when I sat down.
Apple doesn't suffer from these image problems. Unfortunately there aren't many other manufacturers who can compete on style and product quality in the same way. No one has a clue what an "HTC" is, and Nokia makes old, clunky-looking cell phones. Only Google might have had the image and marketing clout to become a strong competitor to Apple. Focusing on its core business of advertising makes sense for Google, but it takes Apple's most powerful competitor out of the arena.
Notice I haven't said anything about Microsoft in this comment. A company whose main product is associated with viruses and spyware, and whose image is stuck in the 90's, isn't a long-term competitor to Apple in the style+quality part of the marketplace either.
Sony could try to make a comeback in this space ("SonyStyle"), but they're not as entrepreneurial as a company like Apple.
Since the problem is keeping people from downloading crap like this and running it, the solution is pretty easy -- block executable files with a web proxy like Squid. It's really trivial to write a few ACL's in Squid that forbid the download of .exe, .bat, .com, .msi, etc. files. Obviously you need to exempt sites like Windows Update from this filter, and you might need to permit a couple of senior admins to download executables as well. Otherwise, there's just no reason in most organizations to let ordinary users download executable files. It's just asking for trouble.
From TFA: "Citi also warned customers over Twitter about the incident"
So unless we're members of the twittering classes we're not deserving of notifications when a security breach occurs. Glad I'm not one of Citi's customers.
My daughter would not be attending the high-quality, CSS-requiring educational institution she is today without a very hefty financial aid package from that school. Take your stupid and uninformed class warfare crap somewhere else, fella. I'm guessing you're just bitter that you weren't accepted into one of those institutions.
The bad news (for MS) is that I think the user base currently engrossed in tablet world are destined to ultimately go to cell phones and set-top boxes, not the directions MS are particularly strong in relative to the desktop/laptop world.
Guess who wrote the operating system that's running on my Motorola DVR from Verizon FiOS? Hint, it's a rather large company located in the Pacific Northwest.
MS has been involved in the set-top market for a decade or more. The XBox is one result of those efforts. Just because you don't see a Windows sticker on your DVR doesn't mean MS had nothing to do with it.
Here's an article from 2005 on Microsoft's efforts in the set-top market. How about an article from 1999 on its efforts to port CE to the set-top?
Gee, I wonder how a Microsoft tablet would go over with their friends at HP and Dell. Microsoft could have chosen to produce their own hardware at practically any time in the past decade or two. They're a lot happier with the model they have now.
What does she use when she needs to write up a report about a patient?
Asian manufacturers like Acer and ASUS starting releasing netbooks with versions of Linux on them because it wasn't possible to run Vista effectively on machines with first-generation Atom processors. They couldn't install WinXP on those machines because it had already reached its end-of-life, and MS wanted everyone to move to Vista. MS's partners like Dell and HP wanted nothing to do with netbooks because they feared, rightly I suspect, that these devices would erode the market for their more powerful laptops.
All that changed the day MS decided to extend WinXP licensing solely for netbooks. To protect its partners, MS imposed strict limitations on this license. "Netbooks" were defined by the screen size and limited to 1 GB of memory. Bigger screens or more memory meant no WinXP. Since Microsoft knew it was competing against a product that was free-of-charge, it dropped its OEM price for WinXP on qualifying netbooks to a mere $15 per copy, compared to four or five times that figure for OEM copies of Windows on laptop and desktop machines. Later they developed the crippled "Starter Edition" of Windows 7 to serve the same market and again charged hardly anything for it. It doesn't require a conspiracy theorist to see that these strategies were designed entirely to keep Linux off machines that might end up in the hands of ordinary people.
Well you can imagine what happened after that. The Dells and HPs of the world saw there was a demand for netbooks and began competing with the Acers of the world. People who wandered into Staples or BestBuy suddenly saw small form-factor devices with friendly old XP on them competing with systems offering some flavor of Linux with an unfamiliar UI. Guess which ones sold? Guess which OS comes with netbooks from Acer and ASUS these days?
Nowadays netbooks have 10" and 12" screens and often 2GB of memory. Which operating system are they running? Usually Win7 Home Premium. How much does it cost the OEMs to license that OS? A lot more than $15/copy I'm sure. The higher license fee pushed up the price of netbooks so they're no longer so price-competitive compared to low-end laptops. Dell and HP breathed a sigh of relief.
All this happened years before anyone ever touched an iPad.
The new paywall-enabled New York Times site for one. It charges differentially depend on how it's being accessed. Tablet access costs $5 more per month than does access from a mobile phone.
Bigger screen = Easier to read = Costs more
I happened to be listening to the public radio program "Here and Now" yesterday where they were discussing whether colleges and universities should be required to inform public mental health agencies about students or faculty suspended for making violent threats.
In the course of the discussion one of the interviewees mentioned a program called MOSAIC (no, not NCSA MOSAIC). From its home page:
The program is used by many Federal agencies and some colleges and universities.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/profile-vandi-verma.html
Pretty much a geek dreamboat; too bad she's married (and it wasn't even arranged).
I suspect the real target for Win7 phones is the Blackberry for exactly the reasons you state. A seamless, and as you suggest probably proprietary, handheld messaging device for business users on the Exchange platform is probably the last thing RIM wants to see come down the pike.
Don't forget Outlook/Exchange. I still think the biggest draw for MS is making a phone that works seamlessly with Exchange. Word/Excel/PP is nice and all, but staying in sync with mail, calendars, etc., in the office while traveling is where MS will get the most leverage. From what I can tell Exchange is nearly ubiquitous in large and mid-sized enterprises. In terms of providing lock-in, it's more powerful these days than Office.
Not to mention those businesses are supposed to abide by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. One of my clients gets an email warning him about this from his payments processor every month or two.
Public higher education is one of the great benefits of living in the United States, and many of our best institutions of higher learning are state-run. The University of Wisconsin is one such prestigious state institution, and much of that prestige derives from the accomplishments of its faculty.
Now let's ask ourselves what will happen in the future if witch-hunts like these become widespread. Will serious academics in controversial fields seek employment at state-run universities? Or will they prefer to teach in private institutions where they can't be construed as "public officials" and forced to reveal every rash or ill-formed argument they might once have made as they conduct their research? I was once offered a position at UW; under these conditions I'm not sure if I would have even pursued the position in the first place.
The target of this attack (it's disingenuous to call it anything else) holds a distinguished chair in the UW history department and is the President-Elect of the American Historical Association. Do you really think scholars of his distinction will continue to serve in public institutions if they can be subjected to these kinds of tactics? Or will someone of his distinction choose Princeton over UW because he won't be a "public employee" at the former? What will be the effects of these decisions over time on the quality of education and research being conducted in public universities?
As to the person above who asked whether someone should be employed as a faculty member in a public university and paid to attack one political party, the answer is resoundingly yes. Should a Marxist who offers courses attacking capitalism be barred from the campuses of our state universities? How about an monetarist who rails against government intrusion into the economy? Or a Straussian political philosopher who complains that our entire political system is an affront to her notion that only elites should rule?
Or does Nielsen not trust the cable companies to send accurate data?
No, the advertisers don't trust the cable companies to send accurate data. They'd rather trust an independent third-party whose been measuring audience sizes for over half a century.
Back in the early 80's I worked on a foundation-supported audience measurement project. We used both diaries and telephone "coincidentals" to ask about viewing and attitudes toward programs. One question we asked was whether the person had "planned ahead" to watch a particular show. At the time that figure was only about 25% of a show's audience. (We had both cable and broadcast viewers in our samples, though the number of channels available to cable viewers was clearly much much smaller than today.) At that time, most people still seemed to fit the mold of the traditional "least objectionable program" viewer. I suspect that model still holds true for a lot of peoples' television viewing even today.
Do you really think cable operators don't know down to the minute how many of their subscribers' boxes are tuned to which channels? I'd be shocked if they don't know those figures already. I suspect that one reason Nielsen survives in the advertising marketplace is that they continue to provide an alternative measure of audience sizes independent of the cable and satellite operators.
That and the enormous amount of inertia in this field. When millions of dollars turn on a rating point, there's a lot of value in having an independent agency doing the measurements.
(Disclaimer: I once worked on audience measurement technologies in the early 1980's.)
I've already heard the argument that fast forwarding commercials should be illegal because the advertiser paid for that, and you should be obligated to watch.
I once expressed annoyance over at AVS Forum about the fact that I couldn't tell my cable box to jump to a particular timestamp. (In that instance, I had stopped watching a golf tournament after three hours and wanted to skip to the fourth hour of coverage when I returned.) Someone reminded me that there's no chance in hell a cable box would permit such a option. Ads these days are designed to insure that they make an "impression," to use the ad-biz term, even when watched at high speeds. So, no, you can't skip over all our ads again, even though you already saw them the first time through.
I wonder if the iPad app includes DRM for this very reason. How does TW control access to the stream? Is it encrypted via a proprietary method? Can I intercept the stream with another box like a computer running Linux and watch it on that? Having just fought to require HDCP so they can ensure complete end-to-end control over HD content, the program producers may well worry that this app won't provide an equivalent level of security for their content. Perhaps the channel operators and program producers have more tech savvy than we here give them credit for.
This is incredibly stupid - the iPad needs to be on the wi-fi network, so it HAS to be in close proximity, so it is ridiculous to assume it isn't being used by the content licensee.
Why? Cable operators have fought for years against illegal redistribution of their services. Suppose I'm a TW cable subscriber and make a deal with my fellow apartment dwellers to share the cost of my subscription with whomever can see my wifi router.
The article is rather short on specifics. Can I stream a different channel than the one to which the set-top box is tuned? If not, that seems to make the producers' concerns a lot less persuasive.
How about making the Federal Reserve Board the CA for the banks in its system? I've always been puzzled by the fact that there aren't more sector-specific CAs backed by large recognizable public or private entities as compared to the Comodos of the world.