The copyright infringement problem you describe is only the beginning. The long-term flaw in this plan, I suspect, is that they are claiming to be able to detect a class of "illegal"/"bad" data.

In the early days of the net, this kind of detection was a major part of the pornography debate in addition to the usual copyright stuff. A major defense (one I suspect lead to the creation of the "safe harbor" provisions in the DMCA) was that it is patently unreasonable to force an ISP to decide the legality of each bit that moves across their network. Comparisons were made to the Common Carriers, etc. The consensus seems to be more or less that "safe harbor" idea - that it was only reasonable to request the ISP act after the fact, instead of trying to make them invent some sort of magic "evil bit" detector.

If an ISP wants to ignore all that, though, and volunteer that they have such detection capability... they might be asking for a long line of lawsuits for each item they *failed* to warn about. Even better: it's all the excuse the anti-porn (or anti-whatever) busybodies need to impose their ideas of a "child safe" internet. After all, if you can detect something complicated like copyright infringement, detecting pornography must be trivial.

TL;DR - their lawyer must be having a seizure over the potential liability exposure they seem to be asking for

"The Media" is overwhelmingly dominated by corporations, and it is not just Americas problem. Those corporations are overwhelmingly interconnected with the interests of a vast array of other unrelated businesses, be it just advertising revenue or outright arms of the same corporation. The mass corporate media is using FUD/muddying the waters/dumbing down just enough to make the majority of voters for political reasons, they are doing so because it is good business for other arms of their corporation and their partners.
[...snip...]

TL;DR version: "The Media is just a few more Lords. It's what we get for letting our government degrade back into feudalism."

Really? I guess my ISP doesn't count as "major"? They may not be the biggest player, but they've not exactly "small" either. Frankly I respect their business decision of going with the "slow and steady"growth rate instead of the "quickly oversubscribe as many people as possible" that most other ISPs seem to be going with. More importantly, they have a specific policy of treating all data equally:

At Sonic.net, we believe that customers buy our service with the understanding that we will simply deliver their traffic without inspection, modification or artificial limitations.

In summary: We don't touch yer bits! (We believe that would be inappropriate.)
Just because you have an anti-competitive and restricting contract with your ISP doesn't mean everybody does.

You should be careful not to project your own bad decisions onto others - some of us do research first, and choose the businesses we want associate with on more than just price.

"We paid for the internet one dialup account at a time."

Not really, though dialup paid for a bit of it. Much of the cash came from the federal government, in the form the grants that made ARPA/DARPA, and later the subsidies to AT&T/etc to build out fiber-optic to the entire country... which we're still waiting for... over a decade later.

Exactly!

Now, the big questions is: do you or anybody else truly believe that the NSA's (or anybody else's) search tools and data mining heuristics can magically avoid making that exact same mistake?

Too much data-capture just adds noise. Any database of sufficient size is going to be full of this kind of incorrect association. In the end, with the vast amounts of data available, you can probably find "data" that "supports" any conclusion you want.

This is the danger of sweeping data collection: not that they care about any traditional concern, but that decisions are being made because of sombody saw animals^Wterrorists in the clouds^Wemail and cell-phone metadata.

I normally don't resort to what is basically name-calling, but given how the 4th Amendment patently requires a number of criteria they are stating they will no longer bother with, that would normally make them criminals. However, with this statement, they've removed much of the ambiguity surrounding the searching issue, and added a significant amount of intent on their part. So instead of "merely" having criminals in high places at the DoJ, we have traitorous and un-American criminals instead.

This isn't, unfortunately, a conflict of law at the core, but instead a conflict of basic ideology and philosophy. If you believe in the constitution and the ideas about "freedom" and "equality" that it was built to maintain, you wouldn't try to argue your way around the spirit of the law. Everybody involve here knows damn well that the founders tried to stress the importance of limiting government's power and reach. So what do you call someone who willfully makes a point of acting against those very core ideas and protections? Someone who promises to continue violating the highest law of the land, in their own words?

  Simple: "un-American traitors".

*sigh*

I guess I will keep trying to teach people gpg/otr/etc. One positive thing to come of this is that there have been more people receptive to learning some basic crypto the last month or so, than in the last ~12 years. "Better late than never?"

http://www.hungry.com/~jamie/hacktest.text

0133 Ever fix a hardware problem in software?
0134 ... Vice versa?

...

0141 Ever physically destroy equipment from software?

WipeoutHD renders many frames at the full 1080p60, but uses a trick for "complex" areas with too much overdraw, that, at least in my opinion, is quite clever. They start rendering at full resolution, but time how long each row is taking, and if it looks like they won't reach the 1/60s deadline, they start rending the frame in half resolution in the horizontal direction only. This way, they always maintain a solid 60Hz which is important for such a dexterity-based game, and only degrade the image in the frames that need it.

Because it maintains the framerate and the full 1080 rows, any slight blur is totally hidden. Even better: because the blur only engages on the frames with *lots* of stuff happening on the screen, it's pretty much guaranteed you will always be distracted by the crazy stuff happening to even notice any quality change.

I really wish more games used this (or similar) tricks - just keeping the framerate consisten (at the expense of quality) really helps - you don't have those stutters that end up just drawing attention to the problem areas.

The kind of argument made by someone who understands the difference between criminal , reckless act likely to lead a nasty manslaughter, and an act that is simply a civil tort, likely to only incur statutory damages?

Of course, this "civil-vs-criminal law" being one of the most common distinctions made in all jurisprudence, I'm sure you already knew this... but i never like to accuse random people of willfully lying to blur a political issue, in the hopes of serving some hypothetical self-interest. So I'll assume this is a freak case of ignorance instead. Links to easily cure yourself of this unfortunate condition have been provided.

http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html

It's even worse than that: the horrible legacy of hacks that windows uses pretty much guarantees that apps will always render horribly in anything by the default PPI. Their rounding "tricks" cause the text to scale inconsistently, as it's snapping individual letters to horizontal pixel boundaries. (err, it's more complicated than that; see the above link for a very well written discussion of the problem, and a very nice discussion of font rendering issues in general)

As long as windows apps scale badly, there's a strong incentive to *not* produce a high-PPI display; customers would likely blame the monitor for "screwing up windows".

Ahh, yet again, Reality forcing it's way in the face of Idealism. Exactly as I predicted ~1.5 years ago. Once standards become entrenched, they are next to impossible to displace, and for better or worse, H.264 is the de facto standard.

But as i mentioned in that old post: this is not a total loss! The codec war may be lost (for this generation), but the CONTAINER and IMPLEMENTATION are easier to replace, and could still be a place to gain ground! To put it simply: displacing FLASH with a Free Software (but still patent encumbered) implementation is still a win! And more to the point - it's a win that's worth fighting for.

And even if a System Codec technique relies on a proprietary solution for now, that's a LOT easier to replace with a Free version in the future! (you're not telling people to replace all their existing infrastructure; it's just a "different install-and-forget driver")

Focusing on the codec ONLY ends up just giving these other areas back to Flash ("it makes my $FavoriteVideoSite work!"). for no good reason...

ext4, which was somewhat light on tools last i checked (have to look into that...)

More to the point, though... halting writes wasn't really possible, due to a lot of unrelated (and probably more important) things thrashing the disk.

It's a beautify example of why a well though-through backup plan is important, unfortunately. RAID doesn't protect against being an idiot with 'rm', and it's probably a good idea to research things like those undelete tools before you need them...

especially when combined with 'find' and 'xargs', in what is supposed to be a simple task.

If you don't, you'll do something like what i just did ("worst typo in a decade"): you see, i was trying to update emacs and wanted to purge all the .elc files from ~/.emacs.d
Unfortunately, through a bad typo, some miss-applied keyboard shortcuts, and rushing through without mounting a scratch monkey... what actually ran was effectively "find ~/.emacs.d | xargs rm".

accidently deleted the 'grep'. Oops. 15+ years of elisp/etc destroyed.

Was it backed up? Nope! Been meaning to check it all into git, but always put it off as a "minor, unimportant" task I'd get to later. Of course, we all think that way up until the disaster hits...

*sigh*