It may be a hardware problem, but that doesn't give MythTV an excuse to crash.
Catch the error, display a useful error message, and return control to the user gracefully.

Am I the only person who thinks this is a good thing for consumers? Think about it. If the algorithm works the way it's supposed to, (that is, identifying copyrighted videos and video clips quickly) and is implemented on video distribution sites, then it will actually help fight piracy via these channels.

Once that happens, they can stop (or at least tone back) the addition of DRM to their media. If you can prevent things from being shared, who cares if you can't prevent them from being copied legally for backup purposes?

Why should they work with the other side? They are in the opposition.

Uh, because that's how things get done? Opposition to whom? The American people?

More to the point, the other side has shown little to no inclination to meet in the middle.

Interesting point of view considering the health care bill was completely eviscerated in order to meet with some level of approval from the 'Pubs who voted directly on party lines against everything. The clear air act now has no teeth, Obama McWishywashy is now expanding offshore drilling, etc, etc,...seems the left's been working hard against what they believe to be right just to get the 'Pubs to stop saying "no" to everything. Hell, even core beliefs of their "platforms" have been offered up (such as the move to privatize the low orbit space industry) and shot down as irresponsible.

The expectation that the GOP go along with an agenda that would be opposed by most of their base shows a lack of understanding of our political system.

And, to suggest that the 'pubs in Congress only represent the 'pubs in their constituency shows your (and their) complete ignorance of what they're supposed to be doing in the Capital Building.

> You understand that there are powers granted to the Federal
> government that the States Constitutionally cannot enforce, right?

False. A local authority always has the right to enforce the laws of the higher levels of government. Granted, your local police are not likely to arrest you for treason, but they certainly can, just as they could arrest you for fleeing arrest across state lines. OTOH, you could murder someone in front of an FBI agent (while not on a Federal reservation or property), and he or she can only make a citizen's arrest, until a local officer can take you in custody, because Federal authorities have no power to enforce state or local laws.

There is a reason that state government oaths of office include swearing to uphold the US Constitution and its laws, usually before the clause to uphold that state's laws, and local authorities swear to uphold the constitutions and laws of all their higher levels. It is not just to make the oaths of office longer.

Show me a single instance of government regulation of the internet -ever- increasing freedom and having a truly positive end.

Since the government sort of took the initiative in creating the thing in the first place, I'm not sure how to comment to that. I can tell you an example where deregulation had the opposite effect, where telling carriers that they didn't have to lease their lines to competing companies set up local monopolies and discouraged further development beyond high-rent urban areas. It's also sort of funny that we're discussing giving the FTC power to restrict throttling on certain content, and you're trying to tell us that this is what leads to... the FTC censoring certain content. That's a bit like telling me I need to go South to get to Canada from Houston, because eventually I'll swing all the way around the globe.

Regulation breeds monopolies and big businesses that are 'too big to fail'.

It's just the opposite, unless you don't consider antitrust laws to be regulation. We have large investment banks in control of much of our trading sector because we stopped deciding at some point that too-big-to-fail entities were in violation of monopoly laws. You should see how we used to break up large companies, even if they didn't control 100% of the market. It's sort of amazing that after a heavy downturn in the market that came about largely because of commodities being traded unregulated in a sort of a shadow market that people somehow believe that government regulation NEVER improves the market.

Daniel Gross does a decent job of highlighting the Chicken Little effect of regulation on Wall Street here. But of course, this was a discussion about the internet, not Wall Street. In order to believe that further regulation will hurt the development of the internet, you sort of have to believe that there's already healthy competition in the American broadband market, that local monopolies don't exist, that customer service isn't getting worse as the ISPs get lazy on lack of competition, and that the rest of the world isn't slowly smoking us on improving network speeds. But obviously if we'd just get out of Comcast's way, then the internet will be just fine, right?

40 man-years.

One guy's been using it since it was invented. Someone else found out about it eleven years ago and has been using it since them.

How do you purpose that McDonalds impose "personal responsibility" on their customers?

I don't.

The only thing even slightly interesting about this is how centralized the trackers actually are.

But I guess they wouldn't see the private trackers at all.

FAT32 and NTFS are getting there...

But the heat came round and busted me for smilin on a cloudy day

This is a weird world we're living in. Microsoft is offering patent protection to an open source product to counter lawsuits by Apple, thereby increasing the viability of the open source platform to spite Apple's own platform, even though Microsoft also has a competing platform.

Well, I guess I still hate Apple, so.. go Microsoft!

Going back in a song or video is still called "rewinding", despite the fact that nothing we use for these media actually winds/unwinds/rewinds anymore.
Multiple songs on a CD are still called "tracks", despite the fact that they aren't on separate tracks as they were on vinyl.
We still "dial" a phone.

Technology changes the way people think and how they describe things. The action (rewinding) starts to symbolize the intent (going backwards in a song), and after a while, the intent becomes the actual meaning of the word.

Well, the CMSes aren't much better. Blackboard, for example, is stuck in the 90s: it still uses frames for layout.

The defaults that schools pick probably don't help much either; at my school, the upload feature limits storage to 200MB per class; even in a relatively small class, that's 10 megs per assignment IF the professor clears it out between projects.

You're underestimating the way the brain remembers things. When grading assignments in an intro level programming class, you come across weird ways of solving the problem that technically work, but are bad style, etc. These things stick out in your mind, and you notice when you see the same thing twice. For example, as a TA for an intro programming class, I once graded an assignment where a student had written code something like this:

while (x == 0) {
    if (x == 0) {
        do something;
        x = 1;
    }
}

When another assignment used the same construct, I thought "hey, this kid is using an if statement inside of a while loop with the same condition; didn't I see one like this before?" I didn't have to look at every previous assignment to know that this kid was cheating, I just remembered. Maybe this breaks down for larger classes, but it worked fine for my section of ~30 students.
In other words, checking a list for duplicates is O(n) if you use the right data structures (hash table or 10^10-unit neural network).

Mod parent up. If you're really a talented programmer, it should show in a phone interview, so really your biggest hurdle is getting to the point where you can talk to a real developer. Have any friends that work at software companies? They may be able to get you into a phone interview.

Also, put a lot of effort into your resume. Make sure it shows how you stand out from everyone else that got a CS degree from your school. If you have worked on open source projects, put them on your resume. If you did well on a large project for a class, put it on your resume. If you programmed for an extracurricular activity, put it on your resume. Make sure it's clear that you have put significant effort into these things, and can actually work on a code base larger than a weekly coding assignment.