PJ has confessed she had to move six or seven times since starting to do Groklaw because she receives death threats she must take seriously. Anonymity is a defense against those jackasses that will bully you or worse in retaliation for spreading ideas they don't like and telling facts they don't want to be known. Insinuating that anonymity could be something dirty is nauseating. The right to anonymity is nothing less than a requirement to Freedom of Speech.

And yes the bullies and the issuers of threats are doing their misdeeds anonymously. It does not mean anonymity is wrong. Bullying and death threats are what is wrong.

Or to continue the analogy, kitchen knives are used to murder spouses. Should we consider kitchen knives bad?

It was a cable terminal from Videotron with the built-in personal video recorder.

You may like this article.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060521-6880.html

You are right. It cannot be the TV downgrading the signal. It wouldn't make sense for this would leave the HD signal being carried over the cable unencrypted and this is exactly what HDCP contracts wants to avoid. However swapping the cables to HDMI did fix the issue for my friend. That I am certain. Content providers have agreed not to activate ICT until 2012. We have some years to go. I wonder if some devices implement their HDCP legal requirement in a dumb way by downgrading all the time signals over non HDMI cables without checking the ICT flag.

I was referring to the contractual aspect of HDCP licenses that come with HDMI. Licensees, I mean electronic hardware makers, are required to never pass HD signals requiring "protection" to non protected ports. This is required to appease Hollywood and obtain of their agreement to provide HD content. As a consequence, although component cables have the capability to carry the HD signals, the appliance just won't send an HD signal that is not HDCP encoded for contractual reasons.

I have a friend that couldn't tell the difference. I told him to replace his component cables with HDMI cables because without them, his high price HDTV set would downgrade the HD signal to SD and of course he wouldn't see the difference. He swapped the cables and was able to tell the difference.