You don't even need to do that. Just get a Hauppauge HD-PVR and record from component out. I do this all the time to record cable TV with MythTV, and it gives an excellent quality result, with no DRM circumvention or camcorder required. I have zero interest in piracy: the recordings are for my own personal use only. But if I'm paying for cable with HBO, I'm at least going to have an uncrippled DVR.

If the FCC ever lets the cable companies turn off component out, then it's time for MythTV users to break out the HDMI-to-component converters. These are like $30 on Amazon and reportedly work just fine with HDCP.

And if they ever stamp those out somehow (they're made by random companies in China, so good luck to them), then, well ... HDCP is totally broken and the master key has been leaked. I'm sure some Verilog or VHDL sources for various FPGAs that include HDMI ports would soon pop up.

My view is they should give up on the DRM and just do watermarking. I don't give a shit if my recordings are watermarked, because I'm not going to upload them. Almost no homebrew DVR users want to upload pirated TV. So, if they do DRM, their opponents are "every geek with a homebrew DVR or other legitimate need for uncrippled media access, plus the few people who want to upload pirated TV". If they do watermarking, their opponents are "only the few people who want to upload pirated TV".

Seriously. Just invisibly watermark the damn movies and TV shows, then take legal action against the uploaders. It's a perfect win-win solution. Dumbass control freaks are dumbass control freaks, though.

There is something seriously wrong with your numbers. I think you mistyped something.

> and its quite likely you're reading this text thru her work, given the fact windows aero uses D3D to compose the windows etc

Pretty sure I'm not unless she worked on OpenGL, too.

$ uname
Linux
$ glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD KABINI (DRM 2.43.0, LLVM 3.8.0)

This is Slashdot, man. Or Sparta; take your pick.

I don't think it really matters who they based it on, as long as it seems "real" to someone in the target audience. I think the doll is good, as far as a plastic role model can be "good".

My concern, though, is that there's no reason she should be dressed "plainly". Barbie has a very distinct, flamboyant taste in fashion, and there's no reason she should be suppressing that just because she's a programmer. That plus the "geek glasses" could send the signal that "yeah you can do this, but you won't be pretty/fashionable/cool if you do". But, hey, molehill!=mountain ... especially compared to the travesty that was the "computer engineer Barbie" story.

I think the answer to that is inheritance from Bourne Shell.

Congratulations, you managed to get within a hair's breadth of Godwinning a story about men not liking Sex and the City.

Seriously, good work, man. That takes skill.

To each his own. I have six computers running Linux on the desktop and maintain three more, plus an RPi, soon to be multiple RPis. It's been quite a while since I've had any serious issues.

It was this one actually: the Cloudbook from 2008 won't suspend to RAM correctly, so I have to use disk, and the graphics card doesn't work except in VESA mode. I actually bought the damn thing with Linux pre-installed but then replaced their crappy Ubuntu derivative with Slackware and then everything broke and the children cried. I still kept Slackware on it, because neither of those issues was a big problem for what I wanted to use it for, but it was still frustrating at the time, just due to the principle of the thing.

Since then ... everything's been pretty much okay.

Ugh, network capable printers are such a stupid gimmick! They double the price for them just because they put in a shitty ARM chip running some shitty embedded OS like VxWorks and a wifi card. What a ripoff.

But they also should definitely work with Linux, and I have to imagine it was user error on your part. Windows has a standard network printing interface through SMB, and every network printer I've run into supports sharing itself with Windows via that protocol. Linux, through CUPS and Samba, support that protocol as well. Correctly configured, the printer should have worked.

They already have filed an amicus in this case. They also represented a child porn suspect in the 11th Circuit where they won and set a precedent that the 5th Amendment applies in these cases for that circuit.

Civil liberties advocacy organizations represented abhorrent groups and people fairly frequently, because the authoritarians come for them first. The ACLU represented the KKK in its lawsuit to win the right to publicly march, and won.

No, it doesn't. Derivative use is still use. Testimony is considered incriminating when it provides any link in the chain of obtaining incriminating evidence.

What you describe is known as the "manna from heaven" theory of evidence. It was dubbed that sarcastically by the Supreme Court when ruling it was bogus.

You're almost completely wrong.

Supreme Court case law is 5th Amendment says you don't need to provide a password to a safe. 11th Circuit case law expands this to say you don't need to provide the password to an encrypted disk.

There are no district court decisions which support your position, exactly. There are a few district courts and the Supreme Court of Massachusetts which rather obviously misapplied the foregone conclusion doctrine to get the result they wanted in specific cases, but nothing else.

Pennsylvania isn't in the 11th Circuit. The EFF supports an expansive 5th Amendment when it comes to disk encryption, so I suspect the EFF may take this case up and appeal it to get some precedent set, now that they know about it.

You win the Internet.

That doesn't sound like a joke to me. It was an honest statement, and relevant to the inspector's question. Granted, it wasn't a particularly helpful response, so perhaps was said with some annoyance, but still, pretty unassailable. I agree with the sibling poster: you were going to the room either way.

I'd like to know how they could have used that statement in interrogation. "YOU SAID IT WASN'T A BOMB? YOU KNOW LYING TO AN OFFICER IS A FEDERAL OFFENSE? YOU WANT TO TAKE THAT STATEMENT BACK?"

So surrender because we might be defeated? I don't think so. We can win this issue because Google + Apple + Microsoft + many others will join the EFF and all our traditional allies in lobbying against any backdoor proposal. Who will lobby on the other side? Law enforcement? Our allies have both deeper pockets and by far the better policy argument.

"Hefty penalty"? It's either a 1% tax rate increase or $95. Whine much?

Incitement to violence is a VERY narrow category of speech. See R.A.V. v. St. Paul and Snyder v. Phelps.