You make a good point, but I believe the article is referring more to things like the Cisco CLI, where you get automatic contextual help text by pressing the tab key or a question mark, and it actually does come pretty close to being natural language. See http://www.cisco.com/warp/cpropub/45/tutorial.htm for some examples:
Router# configure ?
memory Configure from NV memory
network Configure from a TFTP network host
overwrite-network Overwrite NV memory from TFTP network host=20
terminal Configure from the terminal
I'm going to take a contrarian position on this one, that may get me in trouble with a lot of Slashdotters, but I think Italy is right in this case. Google can claim that those suggestions are based on other users' searches, but until they make their algorithms public, we actually have no way of knowing where the suggestions come from. Furthermore, they already do filter certain terms. Try typing a swear word into the search box. fuc leads to a lot of suggestions, but as soon as you type that k, they all disappear. So there is clearly some business logic going on there. It is not just passing through user-provided content, which is what they claim. That's the problem with "selective-filtering." Once you start filtering anything, you admit that filtering is possible and that there is some person somewhere making the decisions about what to filter. In my opinion, that kills the safe harbor defense.
I know I personally would not want "truffatore" to show up after my name in Google suggest. If they're filtering the F word, why not the T word?
At one company I used to work at, we had a "last bug award." Every once in a while, somebody would claim to have fixed the "last bug" in a section of the software. They were treated to a round of ridicule, plus the award token (some kind of stuffed animal, if I recall), until someone else was foolish enough to make the same claim.
> they don't have the right to deny requests from law enforcement agencies
This is true, if the government comes to them while they still have the information or before they gather it. The difference is, Google will keep your information around a lot longer than Microsoft will, and they put it to all kinds of marketing purposes that may be pushing the "don't-be-evil" envelope. See http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2282232,00.asp
The problem is not necessarily with Firefox's security model - Firefox never claimed that plugins were secure. The problem is with perception. Users need to be aware that installing a plugin is tantamount to installing an application. You wouldn't willy-nilly install any old software on your computer. (Well, some people would, but hopefully not too many who frequent Slashdot.) You should take the same caution when installing a plugin.
The problem is that there is a perception that since Firefox is trusted then its plugins should be trusted. Especially those that are listed in Firefox's official plugin repository. Maybe some more verification is necessary before admitting these plugins, and definitely some more user education is required.
I fully agree that layoffs should be treated as a last resort to save a company from going under.
*If* you're going to do layoffs, though, do them all at once, like ripping a band-aid off a hairy arm.
From the article:
> Microsoft Corp. announced it will slash up to 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months, 1,400 of them immediately.
Now, if you're working at Microsoft right now, where is your morale? Unless you're one of the people deciding who gets laid off, it has to be hovering right around zero. If I knew I could become one of those 3,600 "dead men walking," the first thing I would do would be to put my resume on monster.com.
I don't think anybody really thought building a space elevator would be as simple as reeling out some cable and strapping on a cabin. There are a million complications, even before we get to solar winds or tidal pulls. How about something as simple as airplane traffic? Birds? Squirrels, for goodness sake!?
Plus a million things we haven't thought of, and won't think of until the product is built. When train tracks were first laid down, they were too close together, because nobody had heard of the Bernoulli effect. Trains were getting slammed against each-other by their own created air pressure. What did people do? They learned from it, and moved the tracks further apart. We take trains for granted, but they were not without their technological hurdles to overcome.
Of course something like a space elevator is not an easy accomplishment. Does that mean we shouldn't try?
While the 90% figure may be overblowing things a bit, there is a noticeable loss of sound fidelity when converting to a compressed format. In fact, it's actually quite impressive that the loss is not even more noticeable than it is, and that is a testament to the brilliance of the original MP3 algorithms, which have been tweaked and honed to make the quality even better.
The fact remains, however, that most listeners, in most situations, don't care. For one thing, popular music has, since the 50s, been designed for listening to on cheap equipment. The dynamic range is enormously compressed, the sounds are often fuzzy to begin with, the voices are straight front and center. This can explain the dwindling popularity of classical and jazz, and the rise of the louder, simpler, more beat-oriented music like rock, rap, or pop. Note that I'm not saying the music is of lower quality, but that it can be reproduced "faithfully enough" on lower quality equipment.
I don't have any statistics, but I would bet that most music listening happens while the listener is doing something else: driving, working out, coding python scripts, etc. In those circumstances, an average listener is not going to notice a little swishiness in the cymbals, or lack of crispness on the trumpet's timbre.
Those who care (like me) will shell out the extra bucks for higher fidelity. Those who don't care, which are in the majority, will use whatever technology is most convenient.
I find it difficult to understand how anybody would have taken that pledge seriously in the first place. For one thing, the way it was phrased. It's pretty safe to say anybody who use the word F-followed-by-four-asterisks in a sentence is not stating official company policy. Add to that the inherent ridiculousness of the claim. It's like me saying I can dig any hole in the ground you want in two hours. Sure, maybe I have a pretty good grave-digging track record, but it doesn't matter if I have trapezoids of steel, I'm not going to dig the town well in 120 minutes.
Sony is not suing because the rootkit damaged people's computers, or because it invaded people's privacy, or because it is evil. Sony is suing because they lost money. Customers complained, CD sales suffered, Sony's reputation took a nasty hit. Although Sony probably should have known what it was getting into when it hired a firm to mess with customers' computers, I can't say whether Sony's case against The Amergence Group has any validity in a court of law. Whether it does or not, however will not be affected by the goodness or badness of the rootkit.
Bigger question: why would anybody want to work there? It's bad enough that most technical jobs are in the suburbs these days. I can't imagine commuting to a barren wasteland, trudging through miles and miles of bleak desert. Well, as long as they have free sodas...
What they'll probably need to do is kill a few hundred mice and rats with booze and coffee to figure out why and how it works.
Sweet! Where do I sign up?
Every time I hear about tickets to washed-up old men like the Eagles or Bob Dylan going for hundreds or thousands of dollars, it makes me cringe. In my town, at least, there are thousands of local musicians who struggle to make a living, sometimes working three or four day jobs to support their music. Yes, the quality can be hit-or-miss, but you'd be surprised how many talented local artists are out there if you go looking for them. Try visiting a site like http://www.garageband.com/ for some examples, or just go down to your local music club on a Tuesday night. I guarantee you'll find something you like, and have fun doing it. I don't understand why people cringe at a $5 or $10 cover charge, yet are willing to shell out hundreds for overproduced crap.
I try to think, it only hurts my brain. My PCI-bus arbiter is driving me insane My memory's scrambled, bytes are getting swapped. My registers are caching out, my carrier was dropped.
Sanity check. Making sure I didn't break the world. As in a sea of bugs we swirl. Sanity check.
Under my desk I try and hide away But soon i know I have to face the burning light of day. The network's down, the router doesn't route, And since it's Thursday, pretty soon the power will go out.
Sanity check. Making sure I didn't break the world. As in a sea of bugs we swirl. Sanity check.
Nothing works: the way it was designed, 64-bit integers are coming undefined. The hardware's buggy, the manual's arcane, And every day I ask myself if I've already gone insane.
Sanity check. Making sure I didn't break the world. As in a sea of bugs we swirl. Sanity check. Sanity check.
It's hard to tell exactly what this project is going to deliver, but it looks to me like an abstraction layer that will run on top of whatever GUI toolkit is available, rendering with native widgets.
This has been attempted before, and it usually doesn't catch on. There are plusses and minuses to both toolkits (as there are in any GUI toolkit). The problem that arises when you try to combine them is you end up with a superset of the negatives and none of the plusses that would lead you to choose one over the other. Essentially, it's the "lowest common denominator" problem. If a certain feature is present in one toolkit but not the other, then guess what? It's not going to make it into DAPI. If similar tasks are accomplished differently in the two toolkits, the Portland project is going to have to choose one, and shoehorn the other to fit. Either that, or introduce a third way of doing the same thing.
People view the existence of two competing desktop standards a "problem." I disagree with that. As a developer, if I see a certain application already exists on my platform of choice, I'm not going to make another one, even if mine would have been better. On the other hand, if I were a KDE man, and there was an existing app for Gnome, but one that I didn't really like, then there's a little more incentive to make a native KDE version, in the mold of what I really want. In the end, it's the users who win, because they can pick and choose between both apps.
So for now, pick one and go with it. Don't fall into the trap of trying to conquer both worlds at once.
It's like P.T. Barnum said,
on
Why Phishing Works
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"There's a sucker born every minute." Listen, we can put an evil Devil's face on the browser, along with flashing neon lights and big signs that say "WARNING: This site is suspicious", and a gloved hand that comes out of the monitor and slaps the user silly, and you know what? People will still fall for these scams! It's not people like you and me that are the targets of phishing. Ask your grandmother what a URL is, and (with some exceptions, of course) you'll get a blank stare. Heck, ask the cute cocktail waitress at your local bar, and you'll get the same response (and I wonder why I can't get a date...). That's what we're up against.
Don't get me wrong, I applaud these researchers and all other approaches to making the web a safer place, but in the end, at some point you have to trust that the user is going to take resposibility for their actions. The best we can do is bring the percentages down. The problem is it is so cheap to set up a phishing web site, that even if only one in several thousand potential targets fall for it, that's usually enough to ensure a profit.
Ok, Office maybe, but would anybody want to or need to buy Windows on eBay? Maybe I'm out of touch with the masses, but with the abundance of Free software out there, and with Windows coming with every new PC (whether we want it or not), what's the point? Add to that the fact that you can get pretty much any piece of commercial software you want off of BitTorrent, and I can't imagine the market for used software being very big. And don't tell me the buyers don't realize that the burnt CD with the hand-written label is counterfeit. These people know exactly what they're doing, but they don't have the technical savvy to use P2P.
Furthermore, I would be willing to bet Microsoft is spending more money on these lawsuits than they save by stopping the handful of pirates they sue. Basically, this is just a PR game to try and disuade potential pirates with the threat of a lawsuit. The majority of Microsoft's profits come not from individual consumers, but companies, and most companies are not going to be buying their software off of eBay.
Listen, I have no problem with a company trying to protect its source of revenue. They sell software. That's what they do, that's how they make money, so if they want to go after those who violate the software license agreement, good for them. But don't tell us you're doing it for the consumer. You're doing it for yourself and your bottom line. Maybe if Microsoft would be a little more straightforward and just come out and admit their motivations, they wouldn't have as much of a credibility issue as they have now.
The Future Of The Internet (TM) is going to be varying levels of service depending on how much you (and/or the content providers) want to pay. The specs are mostly there for providing multi-tiered Quality of Service (QOS), but the implementation is still some years away. As we know, there is also some controversy involved here.
As an example, if a given company (can anyone say "Google"?) wanted to provide VoIP telephone service with a guaranteed, deterministic, bit-rate allocated to each connection, they would sign a contract with a particular ISP and pay certain licensing fees and so on. The controversy arises because we could reach a point where a large chunk of bandwidth is dedicated to these paid-for streams, and the rest of the world is left with a best-effort attempt at whatever's left over. This would of course leave the smaller companies out in the cold. If CNN.com pays the premium to provided guaranteed QOS for it's streaming audio, and another, smaller site does not, well, guess who's video is going to look better?
At the moment, there is still a lot of dark fiber and unused bandwidth in the backbone, such that the real bottlenecks, if any, are in the last mile to the house, so it's not an issue. Yet. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out, but it's not hard to envision a future where the days of all internet sites being equal are long gone.
This appears to be a serious mis-step on the part of ATI. It's not clear that they intentionally tried to mislead people, but the signs sure point in that direction. It's possible some marketing wonk put out a memo that ATI is now "HDCP ready", and that propogated to all press releases without proper oversight or anyone picking and choosing which cards support it and which don't. Somehow, I doubt a company that has dealt with bleeding-edge technology for so long would make such a mistake. The alternative explanation is they pushed the fancy new buzzword, hoping that the average user would see it and say, "Oh, HDCP, I saw a PC-Magazine headline with that term, it must be good!" and buy the card. These users will never even know that they were duped. The more tech-savvy users are the ones that will really care.
And therein lies the rub. We, the "geek community" are making progress in educating the general populous about the importance of understanding technology, but there is a long way to go. Until more people learn to read advertisements critically and learn that knowing exactly what you're buying is important, companies will continue to perpetuate these deceiving business practices. In this case, ignorance truly is bliss, but it's the average consumer's ignorance that leads to ATI's bliss.
Seriously, what is a "safety czar" going to accomplish, other than blanketing parents with FUD? The only benefit I can see to this is that it will bring the issue of 'net safety to the forefront again, though the merits of that are questionable, considering the amount of hype these "internet stalkers" get on the local news anyway.
Parents, listen up! Do not let the safety czar be in charge deciding what's right for your kids. The only people who should be making those type of decisions are you, the parents. Think about it: the czar has hundreds of thousands of sites to monitor; you have one (per kid). It's a much easier job for you.
Slashdot Mirror
You make a good point, but I believe the article is referring more to things like the Cisco CLI, where you get automatic contextual help text by pressing the tab key or a question mark, and it actually does come pretty close to being natural language. See http://www.cisco.com/warp/cpropub/45/tutorial.htm for some examples:
Router# configure ?
memory Configure from NV memory
network Configure from a TFTP network host
overwrite-network Overwrite NV memory from TFTP network host=20
terminal Configure from the terminal
I'm going to take a contrarian position on this one, that may get me in trouble with a lot of Slashdotters, but I think Italy is right in this case. Google can claim that those suggestions are based on other users' searches, but until they make their algorithms public, we actually have no way of knowing where the suggestions come from. Furthermore, they already do filter certain terms. Try typing a swear word into the search box. fuc leads to a lot of suggestions, but as soon as you type that k, they all disappear. So there is clearly some business logic going on there. It is not just passing through user-provided content, which is what they claim. That's the problem with "selective-filtering." Once you start filtering anything, you admit that filtering is possible and that there is some person somewhere making the decisions about what to filter. In my opinion, that kills the safe harbor defense.
I know I personally would not want "truffatore" to show up after my name in Google suggest. If they're filtering the F word, why not the T word?
I think you mean 3/14/16. The next digit is a nine, so you round up.
No really, we only have fifteen bugs! Trust us...
At one company I used to work at, we had a "last bug award." Every once in a while, somebody would claim to have fixed the "last bug" in a section of the software. They were treated to a round of ridicule, plus the award token (some kind of stuffed animal, if I recall), until someone else was foolish enough to make the same claim.
> they don't have the right to deny requests from law enforcement agencies
This is true, if the government comes to them while they still have the information or before they gather it. The difference is, Google will keep your information around a lot longer than Microsoft will, and they put it to all kinds of marketing purposes that may be pushing the "don't-be-evil" envelope.
See http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2282232,00.asp
The problem is not necessarily with Firefox's security model - Firefox never claimed that plugins were secure. The problem is with perception. Users need to be aware that installing a plugin is tantamount to installing an application. You wouldn't willy-nilly install any old software on your computer. (Well, some people would, but hopefully not too many who frequent Slashdot.) You should take the same caution when installing a plugin.
The problem is that there is a perception that since Firefox is trusted then its plugins should be trusted. Especially those that are listed in Firefox's official plugin repository. Maybe some more verification is necessary before admitting these plugins, and definitely some more user education is required.
I fully agree that layoffs should be treated as a last resort to save a company from going under.
*If* you're going to do layoffs, though, do them all at once, like ripping a band-aid off a hairy arm.
From the article:
> Microsoft Corp. announced it will slash up to 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months, 1,400 of them immediately.
Now, if you're working at Microsoft right now, where is your morale? Unless you're one of the people deciding who gets laid off, it has to be hovering right around zero. If I knew I could become one of those 3,600 "dead men walking," the first thing I would do would be to put my resume on monster.com.
I don't think anybody really thought building a space elevator would be as simple as reeling out some cable and strapping on a cabin. There are a million complications, even before we get to solar winds or tidal pulls. How about something as simple as airplane traffic? Birds? Squirrels, for goodness sake!?
Plus a million things we haven't thought of, and won't think of until the product is built. When train tracks were first laid down, they were too close together, because nobody had heard of the Bernoulli effect. Trains were getting slammed against each-other by their own created air pressure. What did people do? They learned from it, and moved the tracks further apart. We take trains for granted, but they were not without their technological hurdles to overcome.
Of course something like a space elevator is not an easy accomplishment. Does that mean we shouldn't try?
What do you think?
While the 90% figure may be overblowing things a bit, there is a noticeable loss of sound fidelity when converting to a compressed format. In fact, it's actually quite impressive that the loss is not even more noticeable than it is, and that is a testament to the brilliance of the original MP3 algorithms, which have been tweaked and honed to make the quality even better.
The fact remains, however, that most listeners, in most situations, don't care. For one thing, popular music has, since the 50s, been designed for listening to on cheap equipment. The dynamic range is enormously compressed, the sounds are often fuzzy to begin with, the voices are straight front and center. This can explain the dwindling popularity of classical and jazz, and the rise of the louder, simpler, more beat-oriented music like rock, rap, or pop. Note that I'm not saying the music is of lower quality, but that it can be reproduced "faithfully enough" on lower quality equipment.
I don't have any statistics, but I would bet that most music listening happens while the listener is doing something else: driving, working out, coding python scripts, etc. In those circumstances, an average listener is not going to notice a little swishiness in the cymbals, or lack of crispness on the trumpet's timbre.
Those who care (like me) will shell out the extra bucks for higher fidelity. Those who don't care, which are in the majority, will use whatever technology is most convenient.
I find it difficult to understand how anybody would have taken that pledge seriously in the first place. For one thing, the way it was phrased. It's pretty safe to say anybody who use the word F-followed-by-four-asterisks in a sentence is not stating official company policy. Add to that the inherent ridiculousness of the claim. It's like me saying I can dig any hole in the ground you want in two hours. Sure, maybe I have a pretty good grave-digging track record, but it doesn't matter if I have trapezoids of steel, I'm not going to dig the town well in 120 minutes.
Sony is not suing because the rootkit damaged people's computers, or because it invaded people's privacy, or because it is evil. Sony is suing because they lost money. Customers complained, CD sales suffered, Sony's reputation took a nasty hit.
Although Sony probably should have known what it was getting into when it hired a firm to mess with customers' computers, I can't say whether Sony's case against The Amergence Group has any validity in a court of law. Whether it does or not, however will not be affected by the goodness or badness of the rootkit.
Our lineage re-gained a third
That's great and all, but why did it have to be cyan?!?!?Fine, you go Google. I'm gonna go Ask Jeeves.
Oh, wait, can we use "Ask" as a verb?
The Vatican was unavailable for comment.
As was Slashdot.
+1 for mentioning "Olive, the other reindeer" in an intelligent, logical manner. In June.
Bigger question: why would anybody want to work there? It's bad enough that most technical jobs are in the suburbs these days. I can't imagine commuting to a barren wasteland, trudging through miles and miles of bleak desert. Well, as long as they have free sodas...
What they'll probably need to do is kill a few hundred mice and rats with booze and coffee to figure out why and how it works.
Sweet! Where do I sign up?
Every time I hear about tickets to washed-up old men like the Eagles or Bob Dylan going for hundreds or thousands of dollars, it makes me cringe. In my town, at least, there are thousands of local musicians who struggle to make a living, sometimes working three or four day jobs to support their music. Yes, the quality can be hit-or-miss, but you'd be surprised how many talented local artists are out there if you go looking for them. Try visiting a site like http://www.garageband.com/ for some examples, or just go down to your local music club on a Tuesday night. I guarantee you'll find something you like, and have fun doing it. I don't understand why people cringe at a $5 or $10 cover charge, yet are willing to shell out hundreds for overproduced crap.
I try to think, it only hurts my brain.
My PCI-bus arbiter is driving me insane
My memory's scrambled, bytes are getting swapped.
My registers are caching out, my carrier was dropped.
Sanity check.
Making sure I didn't break the world.
As in a sea of bugs we swirl.
Sanity check.
Under my desk I try and hide away
But soon i know I have to face the burning light of day.
The network's down, the router doesn't route,
And since it's Thursday, pretty soon the power will go out.
Sanity check.
Making sure I didn't break the world.
As in a sea of bugs we swirl.
Sanity check.
Nothing works: the way it was designed,
64-bit integers are coming undefined.
The hardware's buggy, the manual's arcane,
And every day I ask myself if I've already gone insane.
Sanity check.
Making sure I didn't break the world.
As in a sea of bugs we swirl.
Sanity check.
Sanity check.
It's hard to tell exactly what this project is going to deliver, but it looks to me like an abstraction layer that will run on top of whatever GUI toolkit is available, rendering with native widgets.
This has been attempted before, and it usually doesn't catch on. There are plusses and minuses to both toolkits (as there are in any GUI toolkit). The problem that arises when you try to combine them is you end up with a superset of the negatives and none of the plusses that would lead you to choose one over the other. Essentially, it's the "lowest common denominator" problem. If a certain feature is present in one toolkit but not the other, then guess what? It's not going to make it into DAPI. If similar tasks are accomplished differently in the two toolkits, the Portland project is going to have to choose one, and shoehorn the other to fit. Either that, or introduce a third way of doing the same thing.
People view the existence of two competing desktop standards a "problem." I disagree with that. As a developer, if I see a certain application already exists on my platform of choice, I'm not going to make another one, even if mine would have been better. On the other hand, if I were a KDE man, and there was an existing app for Gnome, but one that I didn't really like, then there's a little more incentive to make a native KDE version, in the mold of what I really want. In the end, it's the users who win, because they can pick and choose between both apps.
So for now, pick one and go with it. Don't fall into the trap of trying to conquer both worlds at once.
"There's a sucker born every minute." Listen, we can put an evil Devil's face on the browser, along with flashing neon lights and big signs that say "WARNING: This site is suspicious", and a gloved hand that comes out of the monitor and slaps the user silly, and you know what? People will still fall for these scams! It's not people like you and me that are the targets of phishing. Ask your grandmother what a URL is, and (with some exceptions, of course) you'll get a blank stare. Heck, ask the cute cocktail waitress at your local bar, and you'll get the same response (and I wonder why I can't get a date...). That's what we're up against.
Don't get me wrong, I applaud these researchers and all other approaches to making the web a safer place, but in the end, at some point you have to trust that the user is going to take resposibility for their actions. The best we can do is bring the percentages down. The problem is it is so cheap to set up a phishing web site, that even if only one in several thousand potential targets fall for it, that's usually enough to ensure a profit.
Ok, Office maybe, but would anybody want to or need to buy Windows on eBay? Maybe I'm out of touch with the masses, but with the abundance of Free software out there, and with Windows coming with every new PC (whether we want it or not), what's the point? Add to that the fact that you can get pretty much any piece of commercial software you want off of BitTorrent, and I can't imagine the market for used software being very big. And don't tell me the buyers don't realize that the burnt CD with the hand-written label is counterfeit. These people know exactly what they're doing, but they don't have the technical savvy to use P2P.
Furthermore, I would be willing to bet Microsoft is spending more money on these lawsuits than they save by stopping the handful of pirates they sue. Basically, this is just a PR game to try and disuade potential pirates with the threat of a lawsuit. The majority of Microsoft's profits come not from individual consumers, but companies, and most companies are not going to be buying their software off of eBay.
Listen, I have no problem with a company trying to protect its source of revenue. They sell software. That's what they do, that's how they make money, so if they want to go after those who violate the software license agreement, good for them. But don't tell us you're doing it for the consumer. You're doing it for yourself and your bottom line. Maybe if Microsoft would be a little more straightforward and just come out and admit their motivations, they wouldn't have as much of a credibility issue as they have now.
The Future Of The Internet (TM) is going to be varying levels of service depending on how much you (and/or the content providers) want to pay. The specs are mostly there for providing multi-tiered Quality of Service (QOS), but the implementation is still some years away. As we know, there is also some controversy involved here.
As an example, if a given company (can anyone say "Google"?) wanted to provide VoIP telephone service with a guaranteed, deterministic, bit-rate allocated to each connection, they would sign a contract with a particular ISP and pay certain licensing fees and so on. The controversy arises because we could reach a point where a large chunk of bandwidth is dedicated to these paid-for streams, and the rest of the world is left with a best-effort attempt at whatever's left over. This would of course leave the smaller companies out in the cold. If CNN.com pays the premium to provided guaranteed QOS for it's streaming audio, and another, smaller site does not, well, guess who's video is going to look better?
At the moment, there is still a lot of dark fiber and unused bandwidth in the backbone, such that the real bottlenecks, if any, are in the last mile to the house, so it's not an issue. Yet. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out, but it's not hard to envision a future where the days of all internet sites being equal are long gone.
This appears to be a serious mis-step on the part of ATI. It's not clear that they intentionally tried to mislead people, but the signs sure point in that direction. It's possible some marketing wonk put out a memo that ATI is now "HDCP ready", and that propogated to all press releases without proper oversight or anyone picking and choosing which cards support it and which don't. Somehow, I doubt a company that has dealt with bleeding-edge technology for so long would make such a mistake. The alternative explanation is they pushed the fancy new buzzword, hoping that the average user would see it and say, "Oh, HDCP, I saw a PC-Magazine headline with that term, it must be good!" and buy the card. These users will never even know that they were duped. The more tech-savvy users are the ones that will really care.
And therein lies the rub. We, the "geek community" are making progress in educating the general populous about the importance of understanding technology, but there is a long way to go. Until more people learn to read advertisements critically and learn that knowing exactly what you're buying is important, companies will continue to perpetuate these deceiving business practices. In this case, ignorance truly is bliss, but it's the average consumer's ignorance that leads to ATI's bliss.
Seriously, what is a "safety czar" going to accomplish, other than blanketing parents with FUD? The only benefit I can see to this is that it will bring the issue of 'net safety to the forefront again, though the merits of that are questionable, considering the amount of hype these "internet stalkers" get on the local news anyway.
Parents, listen up! Do not let the safety czar be in charge deciding what's right for your kids. The only people who should be making those type of decisions are you, the parents. Think about it: the czar has hundreds of thousands of sites to monitor; you have one (per kid). It's a much easier job for you.