I just went to check the facts around the case I was thinking of. I was wrong, the award was £50k - but he'd turned down a settlement offer of £50k beforehand and the legal fees bankrupted him.
do you think that your cable box and/or ISP don't already have the capacity to track what you do?
Since this technology is aimed at set top boxes, I'll answer from that perspective. I have subscription TV from satellite, not cable. The set top box decodes the signal and passes it to my TV, and to a radio transmitter. I have a corresponding receiver elsewhere in the house which receives the signal and routes it through a video recorder to another TV.
At no point after the signal leaves the set top box does the TV provider have a clue what I'm doing with it. At one point I had a second receiver routing through a PVR TV capture card, recording at 10mbps.
That's not going to be HD, it's an analogue signal rather than digital, but it sure as shit isn't watermarked.
My TV provider also provide 'DRM protected' film downloads via P2P for no additional charge. They also offer an ISP service. I choose not to use either of those services.
My ISP knows what a lot of my 'net activity entails. It knows for instance that I connect regularly to a server hosted elsewhere, and that I transfer a certain volume of data to that server. It doesn't know what that data is, as I use an encrypted protocol.
That data does on occasional include digital media.
So no, they don't have the capacity to track me. They don't know what I'm doing. They have no control over my actions regarding the TV signals I receive. I'm pretty comfortable with this situation, and if they want to degrade the quality of my TV by applying watermarks then I'm going to be an unhappy bunny.
I do hope you're doing cost comparisons on your thousands of x86 systems and partitionable midrange or even mainframe.
Thousands of server class x86 boxes is a hell of a lot of space, power, cooling, maintenance, cost. Are you really still buying more? Especially in a virtualised world?
Maybe it is a cost effective solution. I don't know your organisational infrastructure, politics, finances, etc. I also don't reject the big-box approach out of hand, just because I already have a vast x86 investment.
I must be a fucking lunatic. You're worried about running multiple systems on one box? I'm trying to find easier ways of running one system on multiple boxes.
Maybe it's a matter of scale.
My development teams however can go virtualised and like it - if there is something they're doing that's heavily IO constrained then they can ask nicely for dedicated hardware. The ease, speed and simplicity of providing new virtualised dev environments is not to be mocked.
Virtuilzation is not designed to make the bean counters save money
Cost savings are heavily emphasised by VM sales teams though. And being fair about it, if you do have a lot of machines spending a lot of time idle then there certainly is scope for reducing the overall volume of hardware in your datacentres.
After all, if it's important enough to need DR and failover, it's got those now, and if the boxes are idle outside business hours (for example) then it's still wasted capacity.
There's *always* opportunity to give yourself enough room to stop and not hit the car in front of you.
Unless the car in front of you just pulled out from the lane to your left (or right, if you're in the wrong country) into the gap that you had left. At which point you may no longer have adequate room to brake.
It's quite possible that at the same time another car has pulled out behind you, meaning that any sudden braking action would cause him to collide with you from the rear.
You no longer have opportunity to give yourself enough room. Sure, in 20 seconds time you'll be fine - but that window of vulnerability exists.
Of course, that's assuming the other drivers don't want you to hit them. There's a lot of that going on at the moment..
The perpetrators of the bombings in London were not isolated or economically disenfranchised. And the "coalition of the willing" is small because of point (1) and nothing to do with the chances of domestic terrorism.
I'd have said that the German gunnery was so good that radar assistance would have added little. The British needed it because we couldn't actually hit anything.
If Iran somehow gave us some credit for liberating the Iraqi Shia from the systematic murder torture and rape from the Sunni-Bathists minority..instead of reversing the situation.
That's odd. I'm typing this response on my work PC, running Win2K, and I haven't rebooted it since I switched it on 2 days into the year. I've changed password twice, and it's never rebooted when I've inserted a DVD.
Indeed. If sales is so important, how about we switch off the rest of the company.
Our web marketing team is a bit like that. They claim credit for all web based sales, and pretend that makes them important. We just write the software, host it, support it, etc..
And those of us that do 30,000 miles of motorways a year with our journeys starting from/ending in cities because we happen to be unable to afford to live any fucking closer will be forced to either pay 80% of our gross salary in road charges or quit our jobs.
Hope the government is looking forward to losing my £1k/month tax revenue and instead paying me a hundred quid a week because I wont be able to afford to leave the house to look for work.
They are pretty fucking far from all being captured fighting against American troops in a war zone. They are not getting treated as prisoners of war. Many of them are citizens of countries that do recognise the Geneva Convention.
Don't try and excuse the hideous existence of that camp. It's wrong, it's been wrong since it was set up, and it will continue to be wrong until it's closed down, burned, and a dozen people from Bush down tried in a legitimate court of law for the crimes they've caused there.
Hmm. I was born into a protestant family, does that mean I'm ok to have projectile weapons in my car and home? The one at home is even based on a pre-1688 design.
I even use them with bare arms when it's warm enough..
Go and read up on the ANPR system in the UK. Forget GPS tracking, the Government is already monitoring car journeys, and proclaiming it a great boon to fighting crime.
Slashdot Mirror
I just went to check the facts around the case I was thinking of. I was wrong, the award was £50k - but he'd turned down a settlement offer of £50k beforehand and the legal fees bankrupted him.
Ah well. At least he proved his point.
do you think that your cable box and/or ISP don't already have the capacity to track what you do?
Since this technology is aimed at set top boxes, I'll answer from that perspective.
I have subscription TV from satellite, not cable. The set top box decodes the signal and passes it to my TV, and to a radio transmitter. I have a corresponding receiver elsewhere in the house which receives the signal and routes it through a video recorder to another TV.
At no point after the signal leaves the set top box does the TV provider have a clue what I'm doing with it. At one point I had a second receiver routing through a PVR TV capture card, recording at 10mbps.
That's not going to be HD, it's an analogue signal rather than digital, but it sure as shit isn't watermarked.
My TV provider also provide 'DRM protected' film downloads via P2P for no additional charge. They also offer an ISP service. I choose not to use either of those services.
My ISP knows what a lot of my 'net activity entails. It knows for instance that I connect regularly to a server hosted elsewhere, and that I transfer a certain volume of data to that server. It doesn't know what that data is, as I use an encrypted protocol.
That data does on occasional include digital media.
So no, they don't have the capacity to track me. They don't know what I'm doing. They have no control over my actions regarding the TV signals I receive. I'm pretty comfortable with this situation, and if they want to degrade the quality of my TV by applying watermarks then I'm going to be an unhappy bunny.
I believe it's perfectly legitimate to make a loss pursuing legal action.
One case in the UK a couple of years back, an actor sued a media organisation for libel. He claimed and was awarded 1p damages.
Legal fees on both sides were a little more.
The win in court was the important factor, not the financial reparation.
And as for many divorce cases..
Technically he didn't say it was ok to do that.
I do live there, and I'm not looking to leave.
Why run away? It's my fucking country too, and I think it's entirely appropriate to let the politicians know that I don't like what they're up to.
Let's hope they get the message fast.
Face-to face conference calls? what's not to like?
11000 UK employees, and you want face-to-face conference calls? Shit, the LAN can't take that, let alone the external connections.
Think of the bandwidth.
Fortunately for most companies they manage to run Windows without going out of business. Must be lucky I guess.
I do hope you're doing cost comparisons on your thousands of x86 systems and partitionable midrange or even mainframe.
Thousands of server class x86 boxes is a hell of a lot of space, power, cooling, maintenance, cost. Are you really still buying more? Especially in a virtualised world?
Maybe it is a cost effective solution. I don't know your organisational infrastructure, politics, finances, etc. I also don't reject the big-box approach out of hand, just because I already have a vast x86 investment.
I must be a fucking lunatic. You're worried about running multiple systems on one box? I'm trying to find easier ways of running one system on multiple boxes.
Maybe it's a matter of scale.
My development teams however can go virtualised and like it - if there is something they're doing that's heavily IO constrained then they can ask nicely for dedicated hardware. The ease, speed and simplicity of providing new virtualised dev environments is not to be mocked.
Virtuilzation is not designed to make the bean counters save money
Cost savings are heavily emphasised by VM sales teams though. And being fair about it, if you do have a lot of machines spending a lot of time idle then there certainly is scope for reducing the overall volume of hardware in your datacentres.
After all, if it's important enough to need DR and failover, it's got those now, and if the boxes are idle outside business hours (for example) then it's still wasted capacity.
Better yet, if they're his clients and he hasn't sorted those problems.. remind me not to give him any work.
I think Comp sci students would struggle with it
I think professional engineers would struggle if they were asked to take the ICAEW examinations for chartered accountant status. So what?
Not that I'm a computer science student (or graduate), professional engineer or chartered accountant.
There's *always* opportunity to give yourself enough room to stop and not hit the car in front of you.
Unless the car in front of you just pulled out from the lane to your left (or right, if you're in the wrong country) into the gap that you had left. At which point you may no longer have adequate room to brake.
It's quite possible that at the same time another car has pulled out behind you, meaning that any sudden braking action would cause him to collide with you from the rear.
You no longer have opportunity to give yourself enough room. Sure, in 20 seconds time you'll be fine - but that window of vulnerability exists.
Of course, that's assuming the other drivers don't want you to hit them. There's a lot of that going on at the moment..
with freedoms the west can only dream on
Antigua is 'west'. Plus they have a presence in the EU, so hardly third-world..
(although no, not sure why they're not bothered by DMCA, etc)
The perpetrators of the bombings in London were not isolated or economically disenfranchised. And the "coalition of the willing" is small because of point (1) and nothing to do with the chances of domestic terrorism.
I'd have said that the German gunnery was so good that radar assistance would have added little. The British needed it because we couldn't actually hit anything.
If Iran somehow gave us some credit for liberating the Iraqi Shia from the systematic murder torture and rape from the Sunni-Bathists minority
That's odd. I'm typing this response on my work PC, running Win2K, and I haven't rebooted it since I switched it on 2 days into the year. I've changed password twice, and it's never rebooted when I've inserted a DVD.
Maybe I'm just lucky, who knows.
Indeed. If sales is so important, how about we switch off the rest of the company.
Our web marketing team is a bit like that. They claim credit for all web based sales, and pretend that makes them important. We just write the software, host it, support it, etc..
Ah, a Rodriguez fan..
If the movie is good, then the process was good; if the movie sucked, I don't care whether she was a good actress or not
Counter example for you : Pirates of the Carribean.
Atrocious movie. Fucking terrible. Also utterly compelling entirely, purely and only because of the acting performance of Johnny Depp.
And those of us that do 30,000 miles of motorways a year with our journeys starting from/ending in cities because we happen to be unable to afford to live any fucking closer will be forced to either pay 80% of our gross salary in road charges or quit our jobs.
Hope the government is looking forward to losing my £1k/month tax revenue and instead paying me a hundred quid a week because I wont be able to afford to leave the house to look for work.
They are pretty fucking far from all being captured fighting against American troops in a war zone.
They are not getting treated as prisoners of war.
Many of them are citizens of countries that do recognise the Geneva Convention.
Don't try and excuse the hideous existence of that camp. It's wrong, it's been wrong since it was set up, and it will continue to be wrong until it's closed down, burned, and a dozen people from Bush down tried in a legitimate court of law for the crimes they've caused there.
Hmm. I was born into a protestant family, does that mean I'm ok to have projectile weapons in my car and home? The one at home is even based on a pre-1688 design.
I even use them with bare arms when it's warm enough..
As it happens, yes.
Go and read up on the ANPR system in the UK. Forget GPS tracking, the Government is already monitoring car journeys, and proclaiming it a great boon to fighting crime.