I think the idea is that your computer manufacturer (or installation cds) could determine what browser (and presumably other software) goes on your computer.
...and this would be different from what we've got now in what way, precisely? OEMs and users already have the ability to totally hide IE, block its entry points, set the defaults (browser, mail client, java vm, media player, etc) they want. They've had this ability since XP SP1.
The point is to make IE separately installable and sell and distribute Windows without it
Which will get you what, exactly? Keep in mind that the last time the EU did this, the product was Windows XP N, (a distribution of windows with no media player). Which nobody, it seems, but the EU regulators wanted- maybe 2000 of them were sold, ever. OEMs continued to purchase and sell Windows versions with media player bundled, and they still do.
If Microsoft was smart, they'd go pre-emptive in the same vein and make a SKU of Windows called EU edition, or Antitrust edition- and it'd have the kernel, maybe a shell, and pretty much jack shit apart from that. It would accomplish exactly what XP N did- sell zero units, but satisfy regulators that indeed, the public isn't being denied choices it really wants.
The economy needs at least as much saving and investing as it does consumption. One without the others doesn't sustain itself so well. Balance, in all things. Including economics. Especially economics.
State governments, especially California, just can't afford $1B projects. But the Feds sure can.
Actually, the difference between states and the Feds is that the states require themselves to balance their budgets. The Feds are actually in worse overall financial shape debt-wise, but are much more liquid by virtue of the size of their credit cards.
Did you ever wonder why they all touch the pad with both hands?
They touch the pad with both hands in butterfly and breaststroke because that's the prescribed form for the stroke. If they didn't, they would be disqualified in those events. I've competed as a swimmer using these systems for over 2 decades, and I've served as a stroke judge and timer at countless meets using these systems; competitors, coaches, and judges are notified about the rules and how they're enforced.
As far as I can tell, (this is just my white-box observation) the touchpad doesn't seem to know what stroke you're swimming, and so doesn't know whether to expect a one hand-touch vs. a two hand-touch, or any of the hand-then-foot or just-feet touches it measures for splits and turns, or any other touches (elbows, heads, etc) that touch the wall at the finish. The same pad is used to time backstroke and freestyle events, which don't presribe a two-hand touch, and yet the touchpad captures those results without the need to differentiate one kind of input from another. Based on my knowledge of how the rules are enforced, the timing of the second hand-touch is irrelevant. As an engineer, solving the problem of actually measuring the timing of the second hand-touch would not be trivial (specifically, how to determine which touch is the second hand-touch?). Given the irrelevance of such a measure, the lack of input into the system to tell it what sort of input to expect or how to differentiate differing kinds of touches, the complexity of the problem, and the fact that judges, coaches, and competitors are explicitly told that the touch pad captures just that first touch, I'd be very surprised indeed to hear otherwise.
I've played with and tested these systems over the years (you test the system every time you set it up). I've officiated at meets using these systems (both as a stroke judge and a timing official). I have never seen any procedure by which to tell the system what sort of touch to measure. The testing sequence by which to validate the timer is to start the system, then touch the pad once, firmly, with your fingertip. Hey, I could be wrong in my conclusion here, but I'd need to see some pretty compelling evidence to make me think otherwise. Got any?
If 1/100 second is the accepted resolution for swimming and any smaller interval is considered a tie, there doesn't serve much purpose in taking more photos
Indeed. There was at least one shared medal in these olympics as a result.
Note that when a tie needs to be broken (for example, to determine who advances on to semis or finals) it is done in a swim-off heat (this happened at least once during these games) rather than by going to the next decimal point.
according to fucking rules, you need to press the sensor(s) with both hands, eh? That's why people complained about the lack of frame(s) which show that moment.
Actually, his post is correct. The clock stops when the sensor is touched by that first fingertip- and Phelps clearly made it to the wall first by that measure. The camera and the electronic sensors agree on this.
The decision as to whether or not he did it according to the rules is a separate one. The rules for butterfly require that your shoulders be level, that your arms come around symmetrically and above the water, and that you touch the wall with both hands at the same time- but there are allowances for slight imprecisions in this regard, and Phelps was well within those tolerances. What the judges would look for is whether Phelps galloped his stroke (i.e., brought his arms around significantly assymetrically), if he would have stroked with one hand while lunging with the other, if he'd lunged over on one side, or if he'd kicked assymetrically in such a way that would get him some advantage. He did none of these things- at the finish, his body is straight, his shoulders and hips are level and square, his feet together.
What this came down to was stroke timing. Once you commit to the glide phase of a butterfly stroke, you can't break that straight-armed glide position unless you stroke through past your shoulders and recover both hands forward above the water. Approaching the wall, the two swimmers were out of phase with each other, with Phelps gaining ground- in such cases, it's always a matter of some strategery to time your stroke most advantageously, since in that drive phase of the stroke your hands can't reach forward to the wall and you're decelerating in your glide phase. Cavic stretched his last glide/lunge really well- given where he was in his stroke cycle, it wouldn't have made much sense to take another stroke. Phelps, on the other hand, was more than half-a-stroke away from the wall at the point where he needed to decide whether to take another one, so essentially he didn't do any gliding in- he touched the wall on the down-beat drive phase of his stroke, just barely in time to out-touch Cavic.
From what I can see, (based on having swum competitively for 20 years) I agree with the result- Phelps clearly won, if only by a very teeny margin.
That rule is intended to keep people actually swimming butterfly, and it's OK if your hands touch slightly apart time-wise. What's not OK is if you break form (by stroking with one arm while lunging with the other hand) to attempt to out-reach someone, or if you don't bring both arms forward on that next stroke.
Phelps' shoulders remained square, he brought both hands around consistent with the rules, and the judges made the right call here.
Also note- the touch pad has no way of measuring when a swimmer touches with both hands, it only measures when contact is made. It is this contact that determines one's time, not the placement of the second hand. Once the time is turned in, the decision of whether it was legally accomplished (or a DQ) is a separate one.
The original Olympic events were all military skills. Running (sometimes in full armour and weapons load!), javelin, wrestling, boxing, pankration (unarmed fight-to-win) discus. All direct military skills.
Yes, they measure military skills- but they're still made-up games. For example, to win the javelin, shot put, or discuss event, you throw for distance (which is only a small part of their military applications- for example, hitting a target isn't part of the game, but it is definitely the point of the skill). Wrestling is a game with rules to keep combatants safe, and is not something you'd see in actual real-life military application. Same with boxing, fencing, etc- they allow one to develop and practice skills transferrable to other (in this case, military) applications, but there's no inherent value or point to the actual game itself.
They do have an event where they can use any stroke they like. It's called "freestyle". And there are 3 other strokes recognized in competition.
What's the point of forcing the use of a slow stroke and then measuring speed?
All sports are made-up games. These things aren't particularly useful in any other context, they exist for the sake of competition. There is no point. As well to ask why cyclists have time trials separate from peloton races, or why all track events don't have hurdles in them, or why there are 3 different weapons in the fencing disciplines. Why? Because it makes it harder, because it's a bigger obstacle, because it pulls greater things out of those who take the challenge on.
People need to stop gawking at how many medals he's winning. They represent winning events that vary little in terms of training and skill.
Spoken like someone with neither the training, experience, or skill. The truth is that swimming is full of specialists now- and the training and skills from event to event are significantly different. There's a reason we haven't seen someone cross over so many events like this since Mark Spitz (36 years ago)- it's because that's how often someone comes along who can really compete across disciplines and beat the specialists at their own games.
I started swimming at age 6 and made it to the national level in college. I was a sprint freestyle specialist, and the training I did differed quite a bit from, say, what the backstrokers or IMers or the Flyers or the distance swimmers did.
For example, we would train for higher peak heart rate capacity than the longer-distance folk; we would hit heart rates of > 260bpm while most of the distance folks didn't have the ability to get there- they'd hit v02 max (muscle failure) before they could tax their hearts that much. This called for a lot more power training than the distance folks. Meanwhile, their aerobic-oriented training rendered them much stronger at distance than anybody in the sprinters' lanes.
Yes, it's all swimming, but to excel at different disciplines calls for significantly different training and approaches, which typically cost a swimmer the ability to train optimally for others. For someone to perform like Phelps has in these games is special indeed.
The IOC still seems to think it owns all use of the word 'olympic'.
http://news.opb.org/article/usoc-cracks-down-olympic-peninsula-winery/
I wish somebody could explain to them that owning the copyright to the games does not entitle them to prevent others from either using their symbol to protest them, or from using locale names (like the olympic penninsula in WA) that predate the founding of the modern olympic games.
The colombia river defines much of the OR/WA border. The river has several hydro generation stations on it.
The gorge is also one of the most consistently windy spots on the west coast. WA is currently in the process of tripling its wind generation portfolio, much of which is being sited along the gorge.
its also very unsafe to be driving around with a tank full of highly exlposive gas... so in that right, the electric is more viable.
It's just as unsafe to drive around with a tank full of very flammable gasoline, or a battery loaded with lethal voltage. Each requires some safety engineering, each has dangers, each has different fail modes.
I found this interesting: http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=482
In it, a gas and hydrogen car have fuel line leaks that ignite- which car is destroyed? Not the hydrogen-fueled car.
Perhaps if we weren't spending 3 billion a week in Iraq, and driving large vehicles huge distances to grossly inefficient oversized houses, we'd be able to afford a heating oil subsidy until alternatives are available.
mmmmm... a heating oil subsidy would merely ensure that no alternatives become available. The purpose of a subsidy is to insulate people from the price pain of consuming, yes? If you watch the way people behave (as distinct from how they talk), you'll note that we respond to price, not to moralizing. Without the pain telling us to change, no change will occur.
A subsidy would signal to consumers that conservation is unimportant. It would also signal to producers of alternative energy and competing technologies that this isn't a market worth investing in, since the underlying utility (energy) is made artificially cheap and therefore hard to compete with.
If we'd been half-smart, we'd have done for ourselves 5 years ago what the market's done for us today: Drive up the price. A $1/gal tax on gas, whose revenue offset an equivalent cut in payroll taxes would have allowed us to pay for our investments in efficiency, while incentivizing the same- instead, we're just sending those dollars direct to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Frankly, I'd be OK if we did that today (even though I'd feel it in the pocketbook). Have a look around- see how SUV sales have fallen off a cliff, economy vehicles are backordered, and public transit ridership is waaaay up? None of that really happened when gas was cheap.
So in theory we could be seeing this with $2 or $3 a gallon gas fairly soon
Cost of production isn't the driver of current fuel pricing- the fact that demand is increasing is what drives commodity pricing of fuel. (if you think about it, this makes sense. It doesn't cost more to drill and refine fuel today than it did last year.)
The only way we'll see fuel prices go down is if supply increases to match demand.
How is this news? MS hard/soft blocked incompatible/badly behaved apps in Vista too. The criteria are explicitly spelled out, this guidance is posted publicly.
if you can use gasoline as the hydrocarbon, then you're not even changing the fuel you're putting into the car in the first place.
If you're not changing the fuel you put in the car, why bother? It's more energy efficient and less polluting to just burn the gas than it is to try to reform it to get H2 out of it- and that's BEFORE you figure in the energy costs of trying to capture and sequester the carbon in the gasoline. Will the end process be energy-profitable enough to make it worthwhile? Not polluting is nice and all, but gasoline is only going to become more scarce- and if your average consumer has to choose between not polluting and getting, say, half the mileage out of a tank of gas, guess what they're choosing?
Basically, you're trading one problem (how do we store Hydrogen?) for another (how do we capture and sequester carbon onboard a vehicle in a cost-effective way?). For the former, we have 3 proven solutions- compressed gas, liquid cryo, and metal hydride (which allows for the densest storage of the 3 and at room temperature to boot, but requires you to have a bunch of metal in your 'tank'). For the latter, we have no proven solutions.
You fuel at a station, but instead of just filling up with hydrocarbon (like we do now), you also give back the carbon that your car's been storing.
...so if you're going to reform hydrocarbon fuel to yield hydrogen, why do that on board the vehicle instead of simply having the vehicle take hydrogen as its fuel? If carbon capture and sequestration is anything but a pipe dream to begin with, it will be a damn sight easier to engineer without the added constraints of having to fit onboard a motor vehicle.
I think the question posed by the top post, "Do Engineers have a Terrorist Mindset?" might be asking the wrong question, or asking it backwards. My thought is that effective terrorists (as distinct from the shmoes who get caught) are ones with an Engineer mindset.
Never mind that one man's terrorist is another's "freedom fighter". Engineers make stuff happen.
Either way you look at this issue, in the end What we have here is a political authority decreeing something, which only goes as far as they can enforce it. After all, Spam and phishing and all manner of such activity is illegal where I live, but that doesn't stop torrents of the stuff from ending up in all our inboxes. So the EU folks now define your IP addy as 'personal'- the impact of this will fall solely upon entities that care.
I'm also always leery of legislating on technology- it has the funny effect of causing wierd workarounds that follow the letter of the law, but violate the spirit- you end up not getting ineffective legislation AND you end up with extra regulation, the worst of both worlds. For example, have a look at this, which is not an 'assault rifle' under california law, by virtue of the fact that the stock is an extension of the grip, which means the grip isn't a "pistol grip". It's functionally identical, it exists only because someone wanted to work around the rules as written- essentially the effect of this law was to make it worthwhile for people to devote energy to working around it.
Be that as it may, that still doesn't make the "consumers have no choice" meme any less ridiculous. If anything, the presence of a browser in the distro makes it easy for them to go get any number of high-quality free browsers online, and the fact that everybody and their dog has not just a second browser, but toolbars and plug-ins for their browsers, points out the fact that users aren't the helpless lamers we all seem to think they are.
but the underlying issue is that users of MS aren't given a choice. They blindly accept Internet Explorer as the only option in the browser market
Am I the only one for whom this argument sounds completely stupid? When most of my friends use firefox and when I use opera, I have a hard time buying the notion that users of MS aren't given a choice. It's not like it's complicated to go download a browser, for God's sake.
Also consider that electronic copies opens up the door to source control and therefore auditable revision history. Ever wonder who added that earmark in the dark of night, after committee, just hours before a floor vote so none of the voters could review it?
Serious. My team can't check in code without leaving a revision history, why should congressional staffers be able to modify legislation without leaving an auditable (revertable) trail? This would do wonders for our transparency and accountability problems in congress.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the idea is that your computer manufacturer (or installation cds) could determine what browser (and presumably other software) goes on your computer.
...and this would be different from what we've got now in what way, precisely? OEMs and users already have the ability to totally hide IE, block its entry points, set the defaults (browser, mail client, java vm, media player, etc) they want. They've had this ability since XP SP1.
The point is to make IE separately installable and sell and distribute Windows without it
Which will get you what, exactly? Keep in mind that the last time the EU did this, the product was Windows XP N, (a distribution of windows with no media player). Which nobody, it seems, but the EU regulators wanted- maybe 2000 of them were sold, ever. OEMs continued to purchase and sell Windows versions with media player bundled, and they still do.
If Microsoft was smart, they'd go pre-emptive in the same vein and make a SKU of Windows called EU edition, or Antitrust edition- and it'd have the kernel, maybe a shell, and pretty much jack shit apart from that. It would accomplish exactly what XP N did- sell zero units, but satisfy regulators that indeed, the public isn't being denied choices it really wants.
The economy needs at least as much saving and investing as it does consumption. One without the others doesn't sustain itself so well. Balance, in all things. Including economics. Especially economics.
Actually, the difference between states and the Feds is that the states require themselves to balance their budgets. The Feds are actually in worse overall financial shape debt-wise, but are much more liquid by virtue of the size of their credit cards.
They touch the pad with both hands in butterfly and breaststroke because that's the prescribed form for the stroke. If they didn't, they would be disqualified in those events. I've competed as a swimmer using these systems for over 2 decades, and I've served as a stroke judge and timer at countless meets using these systems; competitors, coaches, and judges are notified about the rules and how they're enforced.
As far as I can tell, (this is just my white-box observation) the touchpad doesn't seem to know what stroke you're swimming, and so doesn't know whether to expect a one hand-touch vs. a two hand-touch, or any of the hand-then-foot or just-feet touches it measures for splits and turns, or any other touches (elbows, heads, etc) that touch the wall at the finish. The same pad is used to time backstroke and freestyle events, which don't presribe a two-hand touch, and yet the touchpad captures those results without the need to differentiate one kind of input from another. Based on my knowledge of how the rules are enforced, the timing of the second hand-touch is irrelevant. As an engineer, solving the problem of actually measuring the timing of the second hand-touch would not be trivial (specifically, how to determine which touch is the second hand-touch?). Given the irrelevance of such a measure, the lack of input into the system to tell it what sort of input to expect or how to differentiate differing kinds of touches, the complexity of the problem, and the fact that judges, coaches, and competitors are explicitly told that the touch pad captures just that first touch, I'd be very surprised indeed to hear otherwise.
I've played with and tested these systems over the years (you test the system every time you set it up). I've officiated at meets using these systems (both as a stroke judge and a timing official). I have never seen any procedure by which to tell the system what sort of touch to measure. The testing sequence by which to validate the timer is to start the system, then touch the pad once, firmly, with your fingertip. Hey, I could be wrong in my conclusion here, but I'd need to see some pretty compelling evidence to make me think otherwise. Got any?
Indeed. There was at least one shared medal in these olympics as a result.
Note that when a tie needs to be broken (for example, to determine who advances on to semis or finals) it is done in a swim-off heat (this happened at least once during these games) rather than by going to the next decimal point.
Actually, his post is correct. The clock stops when the sensor is touched by that first fingertip- and Phelps clearly made it to the wall first by that measure. The camera and the electronic sensors agree on this.
The decision as to whether or not he did it according to the rules is a separate one. The rules for butterfly require that your shoulders be level, that your arms come around symmetrically and above the water, and that you touch the wall with both hands at the same time- but there are allowances for slight imprecisions in this regard, and Phelps was well within those tolerances. What the judges would look for is whether Phelps galloped his stroke (i.e., brought his arms around significantly assymetrically), if he would have stroked with one hand while lunging with the other, if he'd lunged over on one side, or if he'd kicked assymetrically in such a way that would get him some advantage. He did none of these things- at the finish, his body is straight, his shoulders and hips are level and square, his feet together.
What this came down to was stroke timing. Once you commit to the glide phase of a butterfly stroke, you can't break that straight-armed glide position unless you stroke through past your shoulders and recover both hands forward above the water. Approaching the wall, the two swimmers were out of phase with each other, with Phelps gaining ground- in such cases, it's always a matter of some strategery to time your stroke most advantageously, since in that drive phase of the stroke your hands can't reach forward to the wall and you're decelerating in your glide phase. Cavic stretched his last glide/lunge really well- given where he was in his stroke cycle, it wouldn't have made much sense to take another stroke. Phelps, on the other hand, was more than half-a-stroke away from the wall at the point where he needed to decide whether to take another one, so essentially he didn't do any gliding in- he touched the wall on the down-beat drive phase of his stroke, just barely in time to out-touch Cavic.
From what I can see, (based on having swum competitively for 20 years) I agree with the result- Phelps clearly won, if only by a very teeny margin.
That rule is intended to keep people actually swimming butterfly, and it's OK if your hands touch slightly apart time-wise. What's not OK is if you break form (by stroking with one arm while lunging with the other hand) to attempt to out-reach someone, or if you don't bring both arms forward on that next stroke.
Phelps' shoulders remained square, he brought both hands around consistent with the rules, and the judges made the right call here.
Also note- the touch pad has no way of measuring when a swimmer touches with both hands, it only measures when contact is made. It is this contact that determines one's time, not the placement of the second hand. Once the time is turned in, the decision of whether it was legally accomplished (or a DQ) is a separate one.
The original Olympic events were all military skills. Running (sometimes in full armour and weapons load!), javelin, wrestling, boxing, pankration (unarmed fight-to-win) discus. All direct military skills.
Yes, they measure military skills- but they're still made-up games. For example, to win the javelin, shot put, or discuss event, you throw for distance (which is only a small part of their military applications- for example, hitting a target isn't part of the game, but it is definitely the point of the skill). Wrestling is a game with rules to keep combatants safe, and is not something you'd see in actual real-life military application. Same with boxing, fencing, etc- they allow one to develop and practice skills transferrable to other (in this case, military) applications, but there's no inherent value or point to the actual game itself.
All sports are made-up games. These things aren't particularly useful in any other context, they exist for the sake of competition. There is no point. As well to ask why cyclists have time trials separate from peloton races, or why all track events don't have hurdles in them, or why there are 3 different weapons in the fencing disciplines. Why? Because it makes it harder, because it's a bigger obstacle, because it pulls greater things out of those who take the challenge on.
Spoken like someone with neither the training, experience, or skill. The truth is that swimming is full of specialists now- and the training and skills from event to event are significantly different. There's a reason we haven't seen someone cross over so many events like this since Mark Spitz (36 years ago)- it's because that's how often someone comes along who can really compete across disciplines and beat the specialists at their own games.
I started swimming at age 6 and made it to the national level in college. I was a sprint freestyle specialist, and the training I did differed quite a bit from, say, what the backstrokers or IMers or the Flyers or the distance swimmers did.
For example, we would train for higher peak heart rate capacity than the longer-distance folk; we would hit heart rates of > 260bpm while most of the distance folks didn't have the ability to get there- they'd hit v02 max (muscle failure) before they could tax their hearts that much. This called for a lot more power training than the distance folks. Meanwhile, their aerobic-oriented training rendered them much stronger at distance than anybody in the sprinters' lanes.
Yes, it's all swimming, but to excel at different disciplines calls for significantly different training and approaches, which typically cost a swimmer the ability to train optimally for others. For someone to perform like Phelps has in these games is special indeed.
The IOC still seems to think it owns all use of the word 'olympic'. http://news.opb.org/article/usoc-cracks-down-olympic-peninsula-winery/ I wish somebody could explain to them that owning the copyright to the games does not entitle them to prevent others from either using their symbol to protest them, or from using locale names (like the olympic penninsula in WA) that predate the founding of the modern olympic games.
The colombia river defines much of the OR/WA border. The river has several hydro generation stations on it. The gorge is also one of the most consistently windy spots on the west coast. WA is currently in the process of tripling its wind generation portfolio, much of which is being sited along the gorge.
its also very unsafe to be driving around with a tank full of highly exlposive gas... so in that right, the electric is more viable.
It's just as unsafe to drive around with a tank full of very flammable gasoline, or a battery loaded with lethal voltage. Each requires some safety engineering, each has dangers, each has different fail modes. I found this interesting: http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=482 In it, a gas and hydrogen car have fuel line leaks that ignite- which car is destroyed? Not the hydrogen-fueled car.
Perhaps if we weren't spending 3 billion a week in Iraq, and driving large vehicles huge distances to grossly inefficient oversized houses, we'd be able to afford a heating oil subsidy until alternatives are available.
mmmmm... a heating oil subsidy would merely ensure that no alternatives become available. The purpose of a subsidy is to insulate people from the price pain of consuming, yes? If you watch the way people behave (as distinct from how they talk), you'll note that we respond to price, not to moralizing. Without the pain telling us to change, no change will occur.
A subsidy would signal to consumers that conservation is unimportant. It would also signal to producers of alternative energy and competing technologies that this isn't a market worth investing in, since the underlying utility (energy) is made artificially cheap and therefore hard to compete with.
If we'd been half-smart, we'd have done for ourselves 5 years ago what the market's done for us today: Drive up the price. A $1/gal tax on gas, whose revenue offset an equivalent cut in payroll taxes would have allowed us to pay for our investments in efficiency, while incentivizing the same- instead, we're just sending those dollars direct to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Frankly, I'd be OK if we did that today (even though I'd feel it in the pocketbook). Have a look around- see how SUV sales have fallen off a cliff, economy vehicles are backordered, and public transit ridership is waaaay up? None of that really happened when gas was cheap.
Upwardly mobile professionals with too much money and not enough compassion.
Compassionately spoken, sir.
The only way we'll see fuel prices go down is if supply increases to match demand.
Basically, you're trading one problem (how do we store Hydrogen?) for another (how do we capture and sequester carbon onboard a vehicle in a cost-effective way?). For the former, we have 3 proven solutions- compressed gas, liquid cryo, and metal hydride (which allows for the densest storage of the 3 and at room temperature to boot, but requires you to have a bunch of metal in your 'tank'). For the latter, we have no proven solutions.
I think the question posed by the top post, "Do Engineers have a Terrorist Mindset?" might be asking the wrong question, or asking it backwards. My thought is that effective terrorists (as distinct from the shmoes who get caught) are ones with an Engineer mindset.
Never mind that one man's terrorist is another's "freedom fighter". Engineers make stuff happen.
Either way you look at this issue, in the end What we have here is a political authority decreeing something, which only goes as far as they can enforce it. After all, Spam and phishing and all manner of such activity is illegal where I live, but that doesn't stop torrents of the stuff from ending up in all our inboxes. So the EU folks now define your IP addy as 'personal'- the impact of this will fall solely upon entities that care.
I'm also always leery of legislating on technology- it has the funny effect of causing wierd workarounds that follow the letter of the law, but violate the spirit- you end up not getting ineffective legislation AND you end up with extra regulation, the worst of both worlds. For example, have a look at this, which is not an 'assault rifle' under california law, by virtue of the fact that the stock is an extension of the grip, which means the grip isn't a "pistol grip". It's functionally identical, it exists only because someone wanted to work around the rules as written- essentially the effect of this law was to make it worthwhile for people to devote energy to working around it.
Be that as it may, that still doesn't make the "consumers have no choice" meme any less ridiculous. If anything, the presence of a browser in the distro makes it easy for them to go get any number of high-quality free browsers online, and the fact that everybody and their dog has not just a second browser, but toolbars and plug-ins for their browsers, points out the fact that users aren't the helpless lamers we all seem to think they are.
Also consider that electronic copies opens up the door to source control and therefore auditable revision history. Ever wonder who added that earmark in the dark of night, after committee, just hours before a floor vote so none of the voters could review it?
Serious. My team can't check in code without leaving a revision history, why should congressional staffers be able to modify legislation without leaving an auditable (revertable) trail? This would do wonders for our transparency and accountability problems in congress.