May 2002 Archives
At 92, she's my only surviving grandparent. She's bounced back from a lot of things nobody expected her to in the past, and they say there are pretty good drugs to help stroke victims recover these days. But her health hasn't been great these last few years, and she's said she doesn't want to go on if she's too sick to live a good life.
My dad is on his way, and my uncle is heading down to Mississippi in the morning. Meanwhiled, I'm scheduled to leave for a week-long business trip to the wilds of North Carolina on Sunday. If there were any good it would do, I could probably get out of my trip, despite my boss being on vacation and the co-worker I'm travelling with being too young to rent a car. But it's only a question of where I'd be waiting helplessly, so I'm still planning on making my trip as scheduled.
I just don't know what else to do.Perhaps this isn't quite as bad as it sounds, if the recording doesn't cut into the user's normally available space, but I'd be out for blood if it displaced any of my deliberately recorded or saved shows. The TiVo folks certainly aren't doing themselves any favors if they aren't making it clear to users that this is only taking up "reserved" space. This incident makes me wonder if execs have any understanding of what TiVo subscribers want, and what they expect to get for their money.TiVo defended the new "Advanced Content" feature, insisting that it doesn't adversely affect a viewer's usage of the system. Sponsored programmes are recorded on a reserved section of the hard disk, and only if the viewer isn't watching or recording something else.
Anil notes that while debate on these important technology and political issues is growing on the net, there is little in meainstream media. Is that because the companies who publish said media have vested interests which appear to oppose the public interest?Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are the building blocks of modern digital technology. An ADC's job is to take samples of the strength (amplitude) of some analog signal (light, sound, motion, temperature) at some interval (frequency) and convert the results to a numerical value. ADCs are embedded in digital scanners, samplers, thermometers, seismographs, mice and other pointer devices, camcorders, cameras, microscopes, telescopes, modems, radios, televisions, cellular phones, walkie-talkies, light-meters and a multitude of other devices. In general, ADCs are generic and interchangeable -- that is, a high-frequency ADC from a sound-card is potentially the same ADC that you'll find in a sensitive graphics tablet.
The objective of a law like this is to make "unauthorized" synonymous with "illegal." In the world of copyright, there are many uses that are legal, even -- especially -- if they are unauthorized, for example, the fair-use right to quote a work for critical purposes. Any critic -- a professor, a reporter, even an individual with a personal website -- may lawfully copy parts of copyrighted works in a critical discussion. Such a person may scan in part of a magazine article, record a snatch of music from a CD or a piece of a film or television show in the lawful course of making a critical work.
Virtually everything in our world is copyrighted or trademarked by someone, from the facades of famous sky-scrapers to the background music at your local mall. If ADCs are constrained from performing analog-to-digital conversion of all watermarked copyrighted works, you might end up with a cellphone that switches itself off when you get within range of the copyrighted music on your stereo; a camcorder that refuses to store your child's first steps because he is taking them within eyeshot of a television playing a copyrighted cartoon; a camera that won't snap your holiday moments if they take place against the copyrighted backdrop of a chain store such as Starbucks, which forbids on-premises photography because its fixtures are proprietary works.
[via jessajune, on Fury]Many pundits were surprised by the Hollings bill. "Normally Senator Hollings only introduces legislation when it's in support of Disney. This support of the Sony Corporation is a welcome change and shows the bi-partisanship of the Senator."
*counts*
dammit[via Baylink — he's ba-ack!]It will be interesting to see how the entertainment industry responds to this one. The industry and the U.S. courts have been very clear on their position: a device which circumvents protection schemes is illegal under the DMCA, regardless of any legitimate uses it may have. The industry, it seems, must either (1) take the marker manufacturers to court, or (2) admit that, perhaps, some tools capable of circumvention might have uses that don't involve letting pirates take over the world. Which will it be?
- Apple's drives are so poorly engineered that they lack fault tolerance, and could just as easily be wrecked by a damaged or improperly-burned CD.
- Apple is deliberately working with the copy-protection developers to further penalize consumers who expect to be able to play music within the limitations of fair use.
Damn, I wish I could articulate my feelings on DRM issues as well as Chess can.What if I had no interest whatever in copying or otherwise having anything to do with any product of the Disney Empire, and simply wanted to use (or to build) a general-purpose computer made by people whose resources had been put into making it more useful to me, rather than by people who'd been forced to piss away man-years making it obedient to Disney?
By breaking all the rules, the producers and cast of Farscape have given television a new kind of space opera. It's more honest, more emotional, and a lot more exciting. The sort of risks Farscape takes are exactly what Star Trek needs to produce a great series again — and exactly what Trek's carefully guarded cash-cow status will never permit. Which makes John Crichton and company the only TV space crew boldly going where no one has gone before.
Oh, that branch of the family. If a fat computer geek shows up on the show as the Reinhold character's cousin, I will have to kill somebody.The WB has also ordered "The O'Keefes" as a midseason replacement, a comedy about two eccentric parents (Judge Reinhold, Kristin Nelson) who send their home-schooled children into the public school system.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
I'm not posting spoilers for anyone who didn't see it, but I'm sure a summary will be up at TWP in the next day or so. Now I have to reevaluate most of what happened in the series's first 23 hours in terms of the Big Revalation. One more hour to go.[via CamWorld]Though intended to be intuitive, iDrive is maddening, especially at first. The hardware becomes easier to use with practice, but just as you get the hang of it you run into some exasperating quirk of the software: you call up menus just to tune the radio or adjust the air flow. If you've wondered what a car from Microsoft might be like, the 7 offers a clue. You half expect it to ask, "Where do you want to go today?"
[via BoingBoing]The churches reflect a desire by congregants for "a universe where everything from the temperature to the theology is safely controlled," Dr. Ballmer said. "They don't have to worry about finding schools, social networks or a place to eat. It's all prepackaged."
Though many of the churches, which are largely in the South and Midwest, are involved in missionary work, their congregants may be able to isolate themselves from the greater community %u2014 to engage in a kind of "Christian cocooning," said Dr. Bill J. Leonard, dean and professor of church history at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Someone suggested that it's always been a crime to use a computer to violate copyright, so this isn't anything big and new. But I think it is. It's like the difference between making it illegal to drive over 65 miles per hour, and making it illegal to make a car that is capable of going over 65 miles per hour. It's like the difference between making it illegal to shout "fire" in a crowded theater, and making it illegal to sell any megaphone through which someone might shout "fire" in a crowded theater.
Persistent rumors claimed that the series was cancelled not due to the usual ratings or cast problems, but because network execs didn't like what the show had to say about the media. Current events make the future envisioned by the series look quite prophetic; I'm sure Jamie Kellner would love to introduce blipverts to foil those eeevil commercial-skipping thieves."Max Headroom" was the first, and so far the only, cyberpunk TV series. It was characterized by intelligent scripts, a quirky sense of humor, some serious speculation about the power and ethics of television, and a slightly satirical but intricately realized vision of the future with a gritty, "Brazil"-like, "retro-tech" style. It had frequent references to traditional cyberpunk concepts such as "ice," "flatline," and "nanotechnology," and some very good computer-generated special effects (mostly done on Amiga 1000s). Being an intelligent and sophisticated series, it was, of course, cancelled after one season.
