sysrick.com

Congress Threatens To Leave D.C. Unless New Capitol Is Built

From The Onion: —"Calling the current U.S. Capitol "inadequate and obsolete," Congress will relocate to Charlotte or Memphis if its demands for a new, state-of-the-art facility are not met, leaders announced Monday."

Well, why should politics be any different?  It is, after all, mostly entertainment... 

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:21:21 PM -

Interesting JPB interview in the American Spectator. A sample: [Doc Searls Weblog]

We're in the middle of a thorough renegotiation of every power relationship on the planet. Those who have had power are going to have to earn it all over again. That includes schools, parents, employers, Wall Street, the recording industry, the people who do television news. And governments. The nation state is the most exposed, because it's the most removed from most people's actual lives. You have to ask yourself, what does the nation state do that most people want? Outside of your mother's Social Security, what does it do that you'd be willing to pay for? It's not a whole lot compared with what local government does­or compared with what's happening in cyberspace.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:39:22 PM -

"We have an attorney general that is, I don't know, how would you describe him, demented? We have an attorney general who doesn't seem to understand the law."  -- sobering observations.

RC

What Do We Really Know About This War?

Links to a report on remarks by investigative jouralist Seymour Hersh at a Chicago press club, and to an audio file of the speech itself. Hersh says the official version of the Afghan war is not consistent with the reality on the ground, and he sounds convincing.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:38:09 AM -

Good read about the US military in Afghanistan.  I liked this grafetti from a latrine:

Toilet 7: 'I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds'; 'I am become Bored, Destroyer of Motivation'

RC

Guardian Unlimited Observer | Observer site | When Uncle Sam meets 'Stan. The moon came up four hours ago, huge and the colour of a malfunctioning striplight on an office ceiling. [Daypop Top News Stories]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:16:50 AM -

"Falling Coconuts Kill More People Than Shark Attacks" [Daypop Top 40]

This story is an example of a couple of things. First, it calls attention to the lack of media integrity in some past reporting. Second, the innumeracy of reporters and readers alike is so often exposed when they are alarmed by headlines or statistics that have no relative reference. Shark attacks were not "up" in 2001, they were the same as 2000. (Coconut deaths also remained relatively "flat.")

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:10:02 AM -

Keanu Reeves, who reprises the role of Neo in the upcoming sequel films The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, told SCI FI Wire that his newly powerful character faces stiff challenges and continues his journey of discovery in the new films. "The brothers [writer-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski] have put up some great obstacles to test those powers, and the story kind of goes outside of the Matrix and starts to concern itself with the machines in Zion," Reeves said at a press conference at Fox Studios Australia in Sydney, where the films are currently in production.

....

For his part, producer Joel Silver promised to reporters that the visual effects in the two sequels will outdo anything seen in movies so far. "When we made the first movie ... we didn’t have an enormous amount of money to work with, and the boys had very strict ideas about a specific visual effect that they wanted to explore, and they ended up using it four times in the picture, and ... we called it ... bullet time. And it was during the Stone Age. It was a Stone Age effect. ... And immediately when the movie opened, we saw repetitions of that. ... Television commercials came first. They were the first out. And then we began seeing it in a few movies here and there. And then every movie. And it wasn’t just the visual effects that were being stolen.  ... It was the way the boys staged, shot, cut, moved the camera. It was pretty much everything they did began to be copied in every other movie." ...Were the Wachowskis flattered? "For a while ... I bet they thought it was flattering," Silver said. "But after a while, they kind of got angry about it. So they decided that, in these two movies, they would create visual effects that could never be copied. So we have done visual effects for the movie that, because of the time that we took to make them and the cost, will never be seen again. So I really think that the bar has been raised so high that, you know, there is no bar.

I can't wait for these!!! I'm wearing out my Matrix DVD!!

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:09:14 AM -

"John Scalzi is relying on readers to determine what his science-fiction e-book is worth. He's offering Agent to the Stars free from his website as shareware and asking for donations through Paypal. He's publicizing his offer with an advertisement at Penny Arcade, a site that's popular with video game fans.

In just a few days, more than 1,000 people have downloaded the book and those who have hit the Paypal button have paid on average $3.80 -- almost four times more than the suggested dollar amount the author requests. Authors with New York publishing houses get an average royalty of $2.50 on an e-book sale." [Wired News]

More BigCos (in this case, BigPubs) being cut out of the picture (and the profits).

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:36:33 PM -

Roger Ebert was one of the first to talk about the idea of home grown movie commentary in his article "You too can be a movie critic".  The idea is simple, anyone can supply commentary for a movie by recording an mp3 of their comments to be played along side the movie.   There is a lot that is possible beyond simple comments, from alternative soundtracks to Mystery Science Theater 3000 style commentary.

Cory points out a hosting service at DVDtracks.com that is now hosting these: "Unauthorized DVD commentary. Amateur DVD commentary on DVDtracks.com -- anyone can make an alternate commentary track to any DVD, upload it and share it. [bOing bOing]"

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 8:01:47 AM -

Check out this great site PDAsupport.com
This site has links to hardware, software, reviews, pdas in education, and a bunch of
other categories. This looks like a fairly comprehensive and well organized page on
pdas. Thanks to them for linking to us too!

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 7:13:18 PM -

"In all of the time we spend observing the Rebel Alliance, we never hear of their governing strategy or their plans for a post-Imperial universe. All we see are plots and fighting. Their victory over the Empire doesn't liberate the galaxy--it turns the galaxy into Somalia writ large: dominated by local warlords who are answerable to no one. "

An alternative look at the Star Wars epic.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 5:51:18 PM -

 Proposed bumpersticker/t-shirt...

BEEN THERE, STILL THERE [EGR Weblog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:11:17 PM -

—When a male polar bear and a human are face to face, there occurs a brief kind of magic: an intense, visceral connection between man and beast whose poignancy and import cannot be expressed in mere words. Then he rips your arms off.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:49:03 PM -

Lobsters online.

Charlie Stross's Hugo-nominated story, "Lobsters," is online. This is some powerful extropian singularity stuff, right here. Best read I've had online all week. It’s a hot summer Tuesday and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops it and squirts at his website to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: he’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed. Link Discuss (via Charlie's Diary) [bOing bOing]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 7:15:25 PM -

JD Lasica, senior columnist for Online Journalism Review and veteran blogger, has an article about why so few online cartoons are animated. It's a comprehensive review of the issue with lots of good links and interesting tidbits. It seems to boil down to this: Adding a very simple level of animation doesn't enhance the cartoon enough while doing it right requires turning cartooning into an expensive team sport. Or maybe we're still locked into the old rhetoric of single-panel political cartoons and multi-panel "funnies, awaiting the genius who will invent the new genre. We'll know it because it will seem so obvious as soon as we see it.

Meanwhile, proof that the comic strip is at the end of its cycle can be viewed at mnftiu's latest Get Your War On where genius is already at work. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:50:36 AM -

>>>In one demonstration, the researchers taped a woman speaking into a camera, and then reprocessed the footage into a new video that showed her speaking entirely new sentences, and even mouthing words to a song in Japanese, a language she does not speak. The results were enough to fool viewers consistently, the researchers report.<<<

>>>''This is really groundbreaking work,'' said Demetri Terzopoulos, a leading specialist in facial animation who is a professor of computer science and mathematics at New York University. But ''we are on a collision course with ethics. If you can make people say things they didn't say, then potentially all hell breaks loose.''<<<

>>>MIT's Ezzat said that he would like to develop a more complex model that would teach the computer to simulate basic emotions.<<<

There is also a quicktime video of the technique in action. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:41:37 AM -

" 'Information Rules' (1999, Harvard Business Press, $29.95) was written at the height of the dotcom craze as an antidote to the IT industry's hyperbolic declarations and muddled thinking. Clearly, not enough people read it. Authors Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, distinguished professors in both economics and business at Berkeley, set forth the key economic principles that underpin the exchange of information goods. This is a not a dense economics text however. It is a practical guide to the information economy written for the business leaders and MBA graduates who were to revolutionize society. As such they use clear examples, short sentences and small words. [kuro5hin.org]

Another book for my reading list.  Right now I'm finishing 'The Tipping Point' and I have 'Going Wireless' and 'Growing Up Digital' waiting in the wings.  All of these books were recommended by Jenny so I'm thinking that perhaps she should make up a summer reading list. How about it Jenny?" [Ernie the Attorney]

Well, The Shifted Reading List is my running list of titles that await the day my news aggregator breaks down. If I could pick titles Audible would make available tomorrow, they would be (in order):

1. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
2. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig
3. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web by David Weinberger
4. Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives by Todd Gitlin

And that's just for starters. However, this raises an interesting point that I've been contemplating recently. MP3 audiobooks that can be downloaded and made portable are a fantastic idea, and Audible has worked out a lot of the kinks. They deserve to be the leader in this area because of their efforts.

But the publishers are still holding back and as a result, I've been disappointed with the number of current technology titles available to me from their site. Doesn't it seem like a no-brainer that the crowd paying for Audible's service would embrace all four of the titles listed above? Am I the only one that sees the potential revenue stream here?

So I want to do an experiment. It appears to me that no audio version of "Emergence" currently exists. This was true for "Fast Food Nation" when I first purchased it from Audible last year, but now the cassettes are available for purchase. Obviously the Audible experiment proved there was a market for the audio version of the title. (I'd love to see sales figures for this, but I've never been able to find them for MP3 audiobooks. If you know where to find them, please let me know!)

I'd like to see the same thing happen with "Emergence." Do distribution on the cheap through Audible, and then decide if there is a market for the physical product. If Scribner would follow up with an Audible version, I bet it would be Audible's number one download within a week. It would bring in a new revenue stream for Scribner and probably new customers for Audible.

But of course, this is out of Audible's control. It's totally up to the publisher to create an audio version. So in the spirit of the net, I've created a petition to ask Scribner (a division of Simon & Schuster) to provide an Audible version of Steven Johnson's title "Emergence." If you think this is a good idea, too, please consider signing it. If anyone besides me signs it, I'll send it in to the publisher. Don't forget, too, that a move in this direction means libraries working with Audible could circulate this title, and a company providing MP3s legally (that you purchase and own) is rewarded for their foresight.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:27:12 AM -

Pope on the Internet: The Church's message on the Internet gets it surprisingly right ... and unsurprisingly wrong.
Bombastic Truth: Christopher Locke's new book is brave personally and...
Getting Personal: ...the personal on the Web connects in a way that broadcast can't.
The Gift of Lying: Honesty is overrated.
Stop me before I'm inconsistent again!: Noting the inconsistency of the previous articles
Walking the Walk: the Navy gets all KM-y.
Cool Tool: Mitch Kapor may have something for us, and Kanguru storage.
Now Playing: The games people, um, I , play.
Internetcetera: CIO survey.
Beijing and Peru Escape Hostage Plot: Two slip past the Microsoft sentries.
Why Search Engines Suck: They just do. Except Google, of course.
Virtual Everything: On the heels of the virtual keyboard, our labs have been busy...
The Anals of Marketing: Why marketing sucks.
Links: Your contributions, outstanding as always
Email, Scurrilous Attacks and Premeditated Insults: Must get more email!
Bogus contest: Kids Versions

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:56:46 PM -

18 Tips for Better Windows XP Gaming. On ActiveWin [News Is Free: Popular Items]

Not just for gamers, these are some great general XP performance tips. You won’t find much help for playing DOS games, but you will learn many of the best performance tuning tips for XP. Enjoy.

Cheers,

Dusty

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 7:19:44 AM -

AKMA:

My resistance to binary approaches to complex problems stems from my conviction that simplification generates more advanced cases of the very problems it's invoked to resolve.

Wow. That one unpacks into a book-length volume, doesn't it? [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 8:09:26 PM -

Preaching against God is permitted under the Constitution, but it is more than a man's life is worth to preach against Brands.

In the olden days, you could not publish a picture of God. Today you cannot publish a picture of Mickey Mouse without paying tribute.

I could paint and post a picture of Jesus, no matter how homely or irreverent my effort. But Mickey Mouse?

Brands have more rights than God. They also contribute more to the GNP and have a better lobby.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 7:45:55 PM -

Banner Ads

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 5:07:17 AM -

An excerpt from The Zen TV Experiment [via Curry].

TV And the Social Construction of Reality

The Technical Events Test dramatically reveals the functions of the political institution of television in (a) training us to shorten our attention span, (b) making ordinary life appear dull, (c) injecting a hypnotic quality into our ordinary awareness and (d) coercing us into its reality.

Television is the quintessential short-term medium. Like jugglers, television lives for the split second. Its relationship to viewers is measured in tiny fractions. Solemn hierarchies of men and women react to overnight program ratings with something approaching nervous breakdowns, because one percentage point can mean $30 million a year. The result of this manic concern is to design programming that will serve attention-getting rather than the humanistic substance that will stay with the viewer. The ratings race serves the advertisers, not the audience.

It is easier to shorten attention spans and increase distraction than to lengthen attention spans, increase concentration, and calm, quiet and still the mind. There is an old Zen analogy that the way to calm, clear and quiet the mind is similar to the way to clear a muddy pool -- not by action, by doing, by stirring it up, but by stillness, by letting it be, by letting it settle itself. The function of TV is to create, maintain and constantly reinforce what -- in the Zen tradition -- is often called "monkey-mind." The question to ask is: What is the good of a jumpy, volatile, scattered and hyper monkey-mind?

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:14:41 PM -

99 bottles of beer on the wall in 272 programming languages. Two of them are mine (Superbase and WordBasic), both written in the summer of 1995. I particularly like my comment in the Superbase program:

 REM [ If my boss is reading this, I'd just like to reassure REM him that I wrote this on my own time. -MP ]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 7:38:12 PM -

"Canadian author and columnist Jim Carroll provided the annual congress of the International Newspaper Marketing Association with the following reasons why media 'convergence' is like teenage sex:

• No one knows what it is but thinks that it must be great.
• Everyone thinks that everyone else is doing it.
• Those who say they are doing it are probably lying.
• The few who are doing it aren't doing it well.
• Once they start doing it, they realize that it's going to take them a long time to do it right.
• They'll also soon start realizing that there is no 'right' way to do it."

[E-Media Tidbits: A Group Weblog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:59:09 PM -

Andrew Orlowski puts us to an excellent column by Larry Elliot, economics editor of the Guardian, reflecting on the demise of ITV Digital in the UK. After a standard opening mocking the exaggerated claims of Net enthusiasts, he writes:

The demise of ITV Digital is a sign that we are now well into the endgame of the technology miracle. Outside the hi-tech sector, the impact will be minimal. When the boom in railway shares came to an end in the 19th century, it did not mean the trains stopped running; what it did mean was that investors came to their senses and realised that many of the lines built when the markets were at their most manic would never be profitable.

Eliot is concerned mainly with the effect on the hardware industry — PCs, mobile phones, etc. He says the recovery won't be fast because the technology is already good enough to discourage upgrading, over-production is lowering prices, and "there are signs that the passion for the new technology is cooling." For instance:

In the City, dress-down Friday is being replaced by no-email Friday. Workers are being told that they should rediscover the art of face to face communication rather than firing off electronic messages to someone in the next office.

And, he says, RW encounters provide a richness of nuance the Web can't. We like being with one another in person. It's human nature, he concludes.

If Elliot's argument is that the Web isn't going to replace RW interaction, then he's arguing against a strawperson. If he's saying that the Internet has hit us with the brunt of its blow, we have absorbed the impact and not much has changed, he's wrong on all three counts:

1. We're only at the beginning of the Age of the Net. My daughter's high school hasn't even yet figured out that all the kids are just "naturally" doing their homework collaboratively via IM. And at the other end of the spectrum, NPR today had a story about an attempt to wire remote Chinese villages so they can enter the world economy without forcing the inhabitants to move to one of the major cities. Not to mention the effect of the Internet on our basic self-understanding, but I'm trying (unsuccessfully) not to plug my book Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

2. We have absorbed much of the impact of the Internet, but our confusion about basic issues such as privacy, copying of content, and how to market indicate that we are at least as confused as we are complacent.

3. The Internet has already changed many of the basics. It just feels like normal already. Consider what would happen if you shut off email not just on Fridays but everyday. Consider what would happen simply within a single process such as recruitment and hiring. Think about the effect email has had on meetings. Not to mention the effect it is having on universities, government, journalism. And — to switch to another level — the role of authority and expertise.

It is precisely because human nature is social that the effect of the Internet should not be underestimated, no matter what happens to cellphone shares. You can't hook up 500,000,000 people in a new persistent public place across cultural boundaries and think that the changes will be anything short of long-term and socially transformative. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:15:56 AM -

Add Wi-Fi to your TiVo: a card, some instructions, and then cut the cord [via David Sifry]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:34:47 PM -

"The Wachowski brothers are currently in residence at the Fox studios in Sydney, Australia, simultaneously shooting Matrix Reloaded (part two) and Matrix Revolutions (part three). The movies won't come out until 2003 (Reloaded in May, Revolutions in either August or November), but the hype has already begun. This month a trailer for Reloaded hits theaters, and not since the Star Wars movies has a film inspired so much breathless anticipation on the Internet." [Time.com, Slashdot]

Some clues about the second and third installments, plus a picture!

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:45:12 PM -

• A mismatch between inexpensive optical bandwidth at the core of the Internet and expensive last-mile bandwidth provided by copper wire and co-axial cable.

• A lack of available fee-based content caused by the media industry. 

• A distribution system that relies on expensive centralized sites.

In order to correct this, a couple things need to happen:

1. Last mile bandwidth needs to move to fiber in order to place it on the same 1 year doubling rate experienced by providers of core bandwidth.  The best way to force the regional bells and cable companies to move quickly to last mile fiber is to introduce competition into the local loop.  Clearly, the CLEC model didn't work (the regional bells actively worked to undermine their ability to ride their networks).  The only hope is a high capacity fixed-point wireless provider that can enable hundreds of Mbs of connectivity for a reasonable cost.  This would require that the US provide one or two companies with a sanctioned monopoly on the spectrum required (in contrast to selling it at an auction).  This new competitor could have a nation-wide system up and going in a couple of years.  The fear here is that this new competitor will chew up this available bandwidth by replicating current cable offerings.

2. A move to fixed price all-you-can-eat media services.  This new system would quickly trounce TV/cable as the best means to get professionally produced content.  The result would be a radical improvement in revenues for media companies and an increasing demand for fatter pipes to get it onto the hard-drives of consumer PCs faster.

3. A new distribution architecture.  A bright spot is the impending roll-out of smart desktop software (personal broadcast networks -- a combination of P2P, desktop-webapps, and webservices) that will use plentiful desktop storage and programmed downloads (24x7 utilization of the current thin pipe) to provide high-quality, media-rich consumer experiences.  When the pipe does open up, these low-cost systems will allow fill the available capacity as quickly as it becomes available without a corresponding increase in costs.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 6:41:51 PM -

Geek Coffee Site.

Now, here is the most important technical/geek blog/site I've seen in a long time [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:02:13 PM -

Chris Chanson writes:

Chip Morningstar wrote a great piece about literary criticism in the early 1990s called "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" after his experience at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace in 1991.

It's at http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html...

This is an amusing personal sociology of Post-Modern criticism.

Ah, let's deconstruct that sentence! "Amusing" is a gutless word, commitment-free. That's because I have mixed feelings about the article. First, it is genuinely amusing in the sense of being humorous and interesting. But it focuses its fury on the excesses of POMOism, an easy target. And yet, Chip also genuinely struggles with it, trying to find what's of value and where it goes off the rails. His explanation of why academics have developed a remarkably hermetic vocabulary strikes me as right. And he writes:

The Pseudo Politically Correct term that I would use to describe the mind set of postmodernism is "epistemologically challenged": a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff.

This is exactly right, but it — I hesitate to say it — needs to be deconstructed. POMO at its best challenges the comfortable notion of "reasonable." Buried in that term is an appeal to a privileged standpoint that is usually deeply conservative: facts, rationality or common sense.

Believe me, I am deeply sympathetic to Chip's reaction to POMO. His description of what it's like to swim among these fish mirrors my own experiences. But an appeal to the "reasonable" ignores what's most important about POMO analysis. POMO tells us that all understanding is interpretive, that other interpretations are possible, and that our interpretation seems right not because it is right but because it's our interpretation.

It seems like we have two choices: we fall into an indecisive relativism that says that all views are equally valid or we sprain our brains trying to see how there could be a way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. To say that there's a "reasonable way" to do so seems to me to miss the point because it assumes the very thing that we should be stubbing our toes trying to think through.

On the other foot (er, hand), I personally think it's a mistake to assume that we have to choose among fundamental interpretations. We don't get to fly above all interpretations, including our own, picking and choosing among them. We are our stance in the world, a stance given to us by history, culture, language and accident. So, the lesson I take from POMO is that absolutism is a mistake, that humility is warranted, and that we always have to decide among uncertain choices that are themselves delivered by the accident of history.

So, how do we decide whether the post-feminist-meta-Marx-pre-Freudian interpretation of the Book of Job is worth our time? I don't think POMO actually helps us. It's better at freeing up creative interpretations that challenge the status quo than at enabling us to choose among those interpretations. My guess is that such decisions actually come after the fact: we're inspired/energized/heartened by the critique we just read and only afterwards do we try to "justify" why that critique is worthy of belief. Belief is the last in the series. And it's the least interesting. More important: Does it excite you? Does it reveal the world in a way that matters? Does it set the hairs on your neck on edge? Does it give you a chill?

Could any lesson of the Web be clearer? Belief is nice, but it's not why 500 million of us are here dishing the dirt. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 2:57:08 PM -

"A federal magistrate in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue to spy on thousands of digital video recorder users -- monitoring every show they record, every commercial they skip and every program they send electronically to a friend.

Central District Court Magistrate Charles F. Eick told SonicBlue to gather 'all available information' about how consumers use the Santa Clara company's latest generation ReplayTV 4000 video recorders, and turn the information over to the film studios and television networks suing it for contributing to copyright infringement.

'We've been ordered to invade the privacy of our customers,'' said Ken Potashner, SonicBlue's chairman and chief executive. 'This is something that we find personally very troubling.''

Privacy advocates condemned the ruling which came during the pre-trial discovery process of a series of lawsuits against SonicBlue....

The plaintiffs asked SonicBlue to turn over information on how individuals use the recording devices. SonicBlue said it does not track that information. The magistrate, who is supervising discovery, ordered the company to write software in the next 60 days that would record every 'click' from every customer's remote control.

Four separate lawsuits focus on a pair of features on the ReplayTV 4000: an 'AutoSkip' function that allows the device to bypass commercials while recording a program and a high-speed Internet port that allows users to download programs from the Internet or send them to other ReplayTV 4000 users....

Attorneys for the studios say they need this information to determine the extent to which the ReplayTV 4000 allows consumers to steal copyrighted movies and television shows....

The court ruling also requires SonicBlue to track individual users -- not by name, but through 'unique identification numbers....'

Privacy advocates said the ruling is a more egregious invasion of privacy than TiVo committed. In that case, TiVo collected aggregated data that was purposefully separated from personal details about the viewer. And consumers could opt-out, keeping their viewing habits from being collected.

ReplayTV users won't have that choice.

'It's an incredible invasion of privacy,' said Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property expert for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 'But second -- and equally important -- is what the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have been saying was going to happen now for some time. Basically, under the guise of copyright laws, courts are going to be put in a position of telling technology companies how to build their products.'' " [Mercury News, via Slashdot]

I'm glad SonicBlue is going to fight this order. This is unbelievable, and the last paragraph above really brings home the old adage "if you them an inch, they take a mile." This is why you can't believe Congress when they say the DMCA couldn't be used for inappropriate purposes, and it illustrates perfectly why we need to fight the CBDTPA.

And when you get down to the technical level, how are they gonig to count all of these missed commercials and sent shows? How will they distinguish between someone sending a TV show to a different room in order to watch it and someone sending it to a friend? Are they going to count if someone watches a commercial twice (after all, Replays have a button that lets you back up seven seconds). I catch the end of commercials all the time, so do those count?

And what about the fact that someone is storing more shows than they ever could before in order to actually watch them. If you put PVRs out of business and people start watching less television overall (as the whole Napster fiasco indicates could easily happen), can the production companies then sue the networks for destroying their industry? Where does it end? At what point do we equate SonicBlue's livelihood with NBC's? After all, if I'm paying extra for cable and the majority of programs I tape are on cable, why am I obligated to watch commercials on those stations? I've already paid my premium, three times if you count what I shelled out for the ReplayTV because its price included a lifetime subscription fee for their channel guide. Nobody's complaining that consumers aren't watching commercials during HBO's Six Feet Under, so how is this different?

Can you tell I'm upset about this? Something is really wrong when a company can be forced to spy on its customers for the sake of saving an industry that refuses to provide the very services the customers turn to the company for in the first place.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:00:01 AM -