In theory, if these drives are being used by a US government agency for encryption, then the drives need to be FIPS 140-2 certified.

In order be certified, there is a stringent list of algorithms that may be used, for both encryption and random number generation, and these algorithms need to be tested and certified themselves.

We'll have to see if the hard drive companies want to go through the headaches involved to get FIPS certification, or whether this is meant as a gimmick for consumers.

This is exactly the sort of thinking that led Sony to try and develop UMD as a portable media format.

People buy movies, they don't buy UMDs and DVDs. If someone buys a movie on DVD, it is extremely unlikely they are going to turn around the next day and buy it on UMD, since they already own the movie.

The same, I suspect, is largely true with books. People buy a book, and whether they buy it as a paperback or a hardcover or an audiobook or an eBook, they do not then wake up the next day and decide to buy the same book again. There's no reason to, because they already own the book.

When I need to take a trip, and I'm going to drive, I'll sometimes go out and buy an audiobook to listen to in the car. I've never felt a need to buy the paper version of an audiobook I already own, or vice versa.

The Authors Guild, then, is contending that if you buy the eBook, and use TTS (even perfect awesome TTS with really good intonation and feeling), then they've lost an audio book sale, because if the eBook reader didn't have TTS, you would have bought the audio book.

What the Authors Guild is missing is that NO ONE DOES THIS; if the eBook reader DIDN'T have TTS, and I wanted the audio book, I would have bought the audio book and not the eBook. I would still only buy the book once.

Sure, the TTS is a nice feature, and of course it makes the eBook more versatile, but it hasn't lost an audiobook sale, it has replaced the audiobook sale. If the TTS wasn't there, I still wouldn't buy the book twice, so there's no sense giving them double royalties for eBooks.

This is only true if you assume that there are people out there who would buy both the eBook AND the audio book if there was no TTS. Otherwise eBook sales aren't causing a loss of sales in the audio book market, they are merely replacing those sales.

I own a few books as audio books (usually bought before a long drive somewhere), and even in the cases of the really good ones, I've never felt a burning desire to buy the book again in print.

Yes, but what is interesting and what is correct are two entirely different things. There have been many instances where one blog posts something false, and then it gets repeated and distributed by other blogs. (Witness Gizmodo's recent "new mac mini", "fake new mac mini" nonsense, or the "death" of Steve Jobs after Bloomberg accidentally published what was pretty obviously a false obituary).

While this can and does happen with "real" journalists, it happens a lot less often, because journalists have a code of ethics, which requires them to verify their sources. Journalists are inherently more trustworthy than the hacks who run blogs such as Gizmodo, or any of the zillions of blogs on blogspot, or Fox News, because real journalists will get fired if they don't check their sources and report the truth, whereas blogs will get linked and get more hits and more advertising revenue.

Almost exactly the same with CBC news here in Canada. The party of the day always accuses the CBC of much the same.

I see an "Ask Slashdot" in the making.

I would argue that reading something out loud does not "make a copy", no more so than displaying a text file on a screen "makes a copy". Rendering to a screen or to a speaker are simply different ways of presenting the same information.

The public performance notion is similarly broken. Is having numerous people sitting around listening to a Kindle read a book (a situation I think is extremely unlikely) any different from having numerous people sit around a Kindle and reading it at the same time? Perhaps not; perhaps neither are legal. But, the fact that the Kindle displays text is clearly not illegal, and I think similarly the fact that it reads text is equally so. There are no doubt illegal uses of the Kindle, but that doesn't make the technology illegal.

How many people go out and buy a book, and then buy the audio book? I own a pile of books, and a few audio books, but there isn't any overlap. So, assuming I'm only going to buy one or the other anyways, even if the eBook could be used as an audio book and was indistinguishable from a human read audio book, why not let the book serve as an audio book as well?

Also, you can expect organizations that promote accessibility to get up in arms about this. Text-to-speech is a very nice way for people with visual disabilities to get access to content that isn't available as audio books.

Yeah, come up here to Canada and say that.

My hard line is $18/month. The only way I can possibly beat that with a cell phone is to get a prepaid phone from Virgin, buy $100 worth of minutes, and then talk sparingly so those minutes would last me a year (every other prepaid phone here has minutes that last 1 month, maybe 2 if you're lucky). Event then, any savings would be instantly lost by the dry-line DSL charges.

We track bugs internally using Bugzilla. When we raise a bug against a project we depend on, we also raise a bug in our internal Bugzilla that links to the other bug, then we can use Bugzilla's depends-on and blocks to track the external bug.

The only downside is that someone needs to go and check periodically on the state of that external bug. It would be nice if Bugzilla let you mark a bug as "depends-on" a bug in someone else's Bugzilla.

Because if no one releases programs which play broken DRMed files, then people will eventually stop releasing broken DRMed files.

Media companies will whine and complain that the lack of DRM prevents them from selling their media on windows PCs, but it only takes one company to break rank and start making money (much like EMI with MP3s) and the rest will cave.

Besides, since I never buy DRMed media, it doesn't really matter to me whether any device I own can play it or not.