I think the idea of cap and trade is that we need to drasticly cut emissions. The problem is it is hard to come up with a fair way for requiring all of the major polluters to cut emissions. The hope with "cap and trade" it that the free market can be used to fine-tune the original political decisions. If one major emitter finds it is prohibitively expensive to cut emissions because they are actually increasing production, they can buy credits on the carbon market. The hope is that industries with little growth may be able to accelerate equipment upgrades with funds from those industries growing faster than equipment upgrades help.

Of course, until every major government implements strong carbon caps, the carbon market is a shell game. Currently here in Canada they are still talking about "intensity-based targets"; that is to say: carbon releases are allowed to increase as long as there is economic growth. There is also the issue of using hard-to-measure things as "carbon sinks" such as forests. If a framer has a small forest they are being paid credits for; are the expected to pay back all that money if the forest burns down, releasing a lot of carbon?

Anti-copying mechanisms only work in soft science fiction like Star Trek (Transporters have strong anti-copy technology, as do the holodecks).

If the legions on Slashdot can support or disprove that claim, you would be doing me a favour.

Hint: We already know it doesn't work in the "real world" : http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

I worry that ISPs may start blocking IPV6 in order to start selling IPv4 addresses at a steep premium.

I know such a move would be self-defeating, but where are you going to go? In my local province (Alberta Canada) the "public-private-Partnership" Supernet is phasing out layer 2 links in favour of layer 3 links using IPv4.

I am sure that once people move to IPv6, all of the restrictions currently on IPv4 will follow: want a "static" network portion? that will cost. Want a /56 network portion? That will cost too. Want to use a Tunnel-Broker? sorry, you are not allowed. Want to host a server on a residential connection? Not allowed. Want to rent space from a webhost? Your website must look like a "normal" website.

Hopefully I am just being cynical.

Careful, that may be copyright infringement! (Only the copyright holder is allowed to publish)

I lost you at:

The effect on the amount of money in the hands of the average citizen is unchanged by a different tax structure that pulls the same amount out of the economy.

I suppose the implicit argument is that if you tax corporations, the citizens will pay more for goods and services. This ignores that fact that many corporations may sell their goods overseas. It also ignores that fact the tax revenue allows government to provide its own goods and services, often in the form of infrastructure that is a natural monopoly anyway.

Facebook has now reached so much critical mass that third-parties are advertising the service in their Advertising. That doesn't strike you as a little weird? "See, we're hip! We're on Facebook!"

The alternatives such as browser games, e-mail, IRC, and personal websites are a lot more distributed. As a result, people have a lot more control over their data.

I no longer consider Windows PCs open systems. Windows NT 6.x builds DRM deep into the system. Certain hardware such as video cards are required to implement undocumented features for Windows certification. This is done to facilitate the "protected path" for Blu-ray playback.

The Windows 7 EULA prohibits you from installing software that would add functionality to the system.

The reason "Linux gaming is still a sad affair, even with Wine" is because the hardware is undocumented. Without documented hardware, it is nearly impossible to write good drivers for that hardware. Wine sucks for games (aside form hardware issues) because of DRM. Currently, the Wine developers have a policy of not "patching out" the DRM on malware-infested games.

Digital Restrictions Management is a problem for Windows too. You can not install AAA titles on a computer you use for business because you can not install games under a separate limited user account. The DRM requires Administrative access: one of the reasons UAC was introduced. Why Microsoft didn't copy Apple in their MacOS9->X transition, I don't know. I suspect it is because they are hoping to make their money on DRM systems in the future.

My local newspaper is now doing "Facebook exclusive" letters to the editor. It is not clear if I can send a letter to the Editor and opt out of having it posted on Facebook.

Edmonton Journal Letters Facebook page.

I thought CRTC 2009-657 was bad, allowing Bell to charge resellers $1/GB over 300GB: per customer. Most webhosts in Canada charge $3/GB or less; and even that is expensive. It appear bandwidth is getting more expensive, not less expensive in Canada.

After that decision, I priced using Avian carriers for high bandwidth, high latency connections:

• About 10 cents per GB.km; cost increments by whole Gigabytes, minimum distance 10km.
• Moving 100 GB down the Edmonton-Calgary corridor would cost ~$3000.
• Parcel rates would be costed on a per flight.km basis (So you can save using your own USB key).

The difficulty is that the pigeons would require couriers to move them to their starting points. If the data is really not time-sensitive, why not use a courier to start with?

Another concern is that for long distances, fibre-optic may be cheaper; even at the inflated rates.

I seem to remember old Programmable ROM chips used "fuse wires" to store the data.

I don't see why you would need temperature constraints if used such technology. You can then burn a fuse in the write path to prevent tampering.

If I was designing such a thing, I would also run, not walk from any format requiring DRM such as CPRM. Why not use the CF form-factor? Many cameras even support it.

One thing I wonder: can this card be used in cameras directly? Most cameras use a FAT filesystem which requires the FAT to be updated for every picture.

Portions of the specification are secret.

My first thought: WTF? Archival storage implementing DRM?

This thing is useless anyway since copyright terms now last longer than 100 years (depending on the age of the author).

Yes, all "SD cards" include CPRM; that technology never introduced into hard-disks because of a consumer backlash.

That is not true: I am using a "TV" for a monitor with a native resolution of ~1280x768 (16:10). However, the monitor/TV only reports support for 4:3 modes (such as 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024) and 16:9 modes (such as 720x400, 1280x720, 1360x765).

No 16:10 modes matching the native resolutions are reported: why would a TV need to support those? This is a problem for the latest Ubuntu release because they don't make it easy to "force" the 1280x768 mode.

I think color reproduction is not as good for TVs as well, but don't have data to back that up.

In a previous blog post, you explain that there is no such thing as a patent-free video codec. The reason being that the existence of prior-art is not sufficient to prevent a patent from being granted.

This implies that even video (or image-based) codecs in existence for nearly 20 years will still be patent-encumbered when any original patents expire in a few years.

While it may be prudent for a large player like Google to vet their codecs against the MPEG-LA license pool, the real problem is that software patents are unworkable.

To tell the truth, those clauses are in the contract are mainly an excuse to charge/kick the heavy users.

Consumer Internet Access restrictions