Some friends have been contemplating the question of how much longer there be anything worth viewing on “free” TV.  The question was inspired by a Business Week article about new technology like TiVo that allows you to easily skip commercials.  People using TiVo can record their favorite show, and even while the show is being recorded, watch it and skip the ads.

The answer to how much longer (assuming, of course, there’s anything worth watching now) is:  for a long time.  Why?  DTV.  Of course, there’s a ‘but’.

The government’s plan for digital television (DTV) broadcasting targets the end of analog broadcasting by 2006.  So far, so good.  You’ll have to buy some new equipment, but it will probably be time for a TV upgrade before 2007 anyway.  (Especially when the HDTV quality DVDs start coming out.  Oh yeah, did I mention that your DVDs will soon be obsolete?  But that topic is for another time.)

Okay:  new equipment, better picture.  Good stuff.  But what about the Pirates?  People can’t be trusted to not redistribute this high-quality signal.  Enter the “broadcast flag”.

Having failed in the Congress, the content industry has pushed the FCC to mandate the broadcast flag.  (Tech TV has an overview of the broadcast flag.)  Basically, it controls whether digital content can go through a gatekeeper, and there will be a gatekeeper on every digital device.

The broadcast flag can keep a show from being recorded by TiVo type equipment.  On the one side of their mouths, they say there are no plans for it to be used on regular broadcast TV shows.  On the other side they say that they need the protection to keep shows from being redistributed.

To read more about the flag, check out Jonathan Krim�s piece in the Washington Post.

McMerriam-Webster’s dictionary added “McJob”, then removed it from some versions due to pressure from McDonald’s. The following articles are all lifted from BoingBoing.

Original article:

McDonald’s should get a dictionary and look up “trademark”
McDonald’s misunderstands the nature of dictionaries: that is, to observe the language as she is spoken and document her. McDonald’s is up in arms over Merriam-Webster’s inclusion of “McJob” in its current edition. Naturally, McD’s has trumped up a completely groundless trademark claim to back this up. Trademarks don’t let you control how people speak — they only allow you to stop other commerical outfits from confusing your customers; certainly, they don’t give you the power to stop the reporting of the fact that English speakers use “McJob” to describe a crappy job.

Walt Riker, a spokesman for McDonald’s, said the Oak Brook, Illinois-based fast-food giant also is concerned that “McJob” closely resembles McJOBS, the company’s training program for mentally and physically challenged people.

“McJOBS is trademarked and we’ve notified them that legally that’s an issue for us as well,” Riker said.

(Note: Every time I post here about trademarks, I get a flurry of emails from people patiently “explaining” to me that you need to sue everyone who utters your trademark or risk losing it; without covering ground I’ve run over before, suffice it to say that this is wrong, and it’s a fairy tale that trademark lawyers scare their clients with in order to drum up more business, and I don’t care if your in-house counsel or nephew-in-law-school swore it was true, it’s not. Really.) Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:45:19 AM permanent link to this entry

Update 11/11:

Merriam-Webster 0wnz0red by McDonald’s
Jonas sez, “It appears that dictionary producer Merriam-Webster’s has yielded under pressure from McDonald’s. Yesterday, the word ‘McJobs’ disappeared from their web site’s page with “new” words in the new edition. I have links to the google-cached version with the word still there – and a pdf-print of it – , and to the ‘cleansed’ page (and the code).” Link Terry sent a letter to the dictionarians and got this back: “You’ll be glad to know that we have not removed the entry for McJob from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (which is available on-line by subscription at www.Merriam-WebsterCollegiate.com). Although we did alter some marketing text on our main Web site that quoted the entry, the dictionary itself remains unchanged.”

posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:32:01 AM permanent link to this entry

Update 11/11, #2:

Merriam-Webster stands its McGround
Despite having taken down its Web defintion of McJob, Merriam-Webster has now publicly announced that it will not remove McJob from the print and pay-for-click versions of the dictionary.

“For more that 17 years ‘McJob’ has been used as we are defining it in a broad range of publications,” the company said, citing everything from The New York Times and Rolling Stone to newspapers in South Africa and Australia.

Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:56:21 PM permanent link to this entry

Has the 2004 election already been decided?  Some believe that it has, due to difficulties with electronic voting.  Early audits showed that the machines consistently gave republicans the edge when there were errors.

The main companies (Diebold and ES&S count 80% of the votes in the country) are heavily tied to key republicans.  What follows are a few links for more information.  (It’s surprising how many links are dead when doing a Google search for Diebold ownership.  Were they taken off the air?)

• One central location for this information is at Verified Voting.  They also have links to the Bev Harris book (Black Box Voting, in pdf format) which is based on the material that started a lot of the questions.  Buzzflash has an interview with Bev.  It is probably the shortest read that covers most of the ground.  (Harris’ website was shut down by Diebold.)
• Uncertified software may have been installed on electronic voting machines used in one California county during the recent recall election, so California is halting the certification process for new voting machines manufactured by Diebold Election Systems.
  Link to article
• In the past few months, the computer- security community has been increasingly vocal on the problems of DRE [direct recording electronic] terminals. �I think the risk [of a stolen election] is extremely high,� says David Dill, a Stanford computer scientist.
  Link to article
• “I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 [votes] when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here ‘looking dumb’.”
  Link to leaked Diebold memos
• Swarthmore students posted an email archive showing some problems with Diebold�s proprietary e-voting software engineering on the website of their student group.  Diebold then threatened Smith and Pavlosky with a suit for copyright infringement and successfully squelched the emails.
  Link to article and links
• Diebold, manufacturer of election equipment, has issued a Cease and desist notice to the upstream provider of San Francisco Indymedia for having links to mirrors of a leaked internal Diebold memo. More than just a case of a leak, Diebold has been raising a lot of questions about the fairness and security of elections in the United States.  The key here is that they don’t even have the information on their site, just a link to it.
  Link to article.  (Reminiscent of the illegality of posting links to the DeCSS code.)
• New touchscreen voting machines caused problems last night in the suburbs of Washington D.C.. Several machines failed and had to be rebooted, and nine were actually removed from the site, repaired, and returned, in violation of election laws. The machines also failed to report their results correctly due to network problems.
  Link to article
• Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud. Gore’s count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000–all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters.”
  Link to article
• DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEMS has brandished lawyers’ threats to take down that pesky citizens activist website blackboxvoting.org.
  Link to article
• Even more info that covers history in this area here.

Of course, this whole thing started for me with a BoingBoing link:

swarthmore�s weakness, swarthmore students� strength

So Diebold has hit new lows. After threatening anyone who posts information necessary to evaluate the claimed failure of their vote-counting machine, apparently Swarthmore is now caving to DMCA threats by forcing students to shut down mirror sites. Just the strategy for a company that�s trying to convince the world that they can be trusted with vote counting.

Here is more on the subject from the EFF, which is doing defense for some of those accused by Diebold.  It was taken from their newsletter:

ISP Rejects Diebold Copyright Claims Against News Website

EFF Defends Right to Publish Links to Electronic Voting Memos

San Francisco – Defending the right to link to controversial information about flaws in electronic voting systems, EFF announced this week that it will defend an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and a news website publisher against claims of indirect copyright infringement from the electronic voting machines’ manufacturer.

“What topic could be more important to our democracy than discussions about the mechanics and legitimacy of electronic voting systems now being introduced nationwide?” said EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer. “EFF won’t stand by as corporations like Diebold chill important online debate by churning out legal notices to ISPs that usually just take down legitimate content rather than face the legal risk.”

Links:
For the full release:
<http://www.eff.org/Legal/ISP_liability/20031016_eff_pr.php>

Cease-and-desist letter sent by Diebold to OPG:
<http://www.eff.org/Legal/ISP_liability/cease_desist_letter.php>

Security researchers discover huge flaws in e-voting system:
<http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/20030723_eff_pr.php>

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse on DMCA safe harbor provisions:
<http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/>

I managed to avoid politics for a while, but the notes were getting too long to not publish.

In the ‘too much time on their hands’ category, this guy is a qualifier.  He recorded and combined 64 nights worth of Conan, Leno & Letterman into three videos that run concurrently.

Each show definitely has its own style.

We won’t need to wonder anymore with the Bow-Lingual Dog Translator.  Now you can know what your dog is saying to you every time.

To top it off, it’s an �O List� Oprah-recommended product.  Need I say more?  Woof!

answered at last.  Create your own truth here.

How cool is this?  Amazon.com now searches the full text of books.  Over the past spring and summer, Amazon created a digital archive of more than 120,000 books by scanning every page.  They eventually plan to add most of Amazon’s multimillion-title catalog.  It went online Oct. 23, and every page is searchable and viewable.

If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know, Wired talks about it for four pages.

The Daily Show pointed out that Bush got his $87.5 billion for Iraq yesterday when it was passed by voice vote. The show played the voting soundtrack and the senate sounded empty. Host Jon Stewart explained that the reason for that was that there were only six senators attending the vote.

The news media isn’t saying much about this. A NY Times article put it like this: “The voice vote took place late this afternoon, with only a few senators in the chamber.”

Many articles stated, “The voice vote enabled lawmakers to sidestep the process that requires they attach their name to support for the bill and underscored the political struggles taking place on Capitol Hill and among lawmakers trying to appease their constituents.”

The lone ‘no’ voter has been identified in many news articles, but the names (or even the actual count) of the ‘yes’ votes is not being reported. Perhaps that is because it would point out that nobody was there.  However, reporting that there was a single negative vote implies strong support for the bill.

Nice spin. And a nice sidestep to go with it.

Update 11/6:

I found a link in the mainstream news to the number of voters in the NY Times:

The Senate’s action came on a voice vote with only six members present, meaning that the decisions of individual members on the administration’s vision for Iraq were not recorded. Not voting on the record appealed to both Republicans nervous about explaining the amount to their constituents, and Democrats who did not want their patriotism questioned for opposing the bill.

I always like to have a ‘reliable’ news source.

I just watched “Rock the Vote”, where eight of the Democrats running out Bush where asked questions by the audience.  Four admitted to having smoked marijuana.  (Technically, Braun, one of the last to be asked, refused to answer with a laugh that implied that she had but to keep it to ourselves.)  I’m sure there will be lots of commentary on the news tomorrow.

It seems that ??? (from the previous post, so read the section below this first) was an experiment created by someone that won Europe’s “Top Talent Award“.

I’m guessing that the ??? link is a copy of the original Samorost.  It was fun, nice and short.  But in researching what it was, I found TimeHunt.

There goes the rest of the day.  No, it’s even worse: they say it takes a year to solve it.

Terry sent a bunch of links that I finally got around to checking out.  The fun one was was the Reaction Timer (flash required).

The others, well, you be the judge:  http://www.shotglasschess.com/customer/home.php, http://www.belch.com/, http://www.awfulplasticsurgery.com/, http://www.pottypager.com/different.htm, and last but not least http://daimaoh.kir.jp/ho/menssom.htm.

I don’t even want to know how he found some of them.  But that begs the questions, how did I find this:  ???, and what is it?  (Don’t forget to click after you go there.)

On November 23rd, after an absence of almost ten years, Opus returns to the nation’s Sunday comic pages.  No word about Bill the Cat.

Here are some clues, if you need them:  Bloom County.  Outland.  Ack.

The mojo article is from CNN.  I had assumed, without looking, that it was from The Onion.  No, what follows is from The Onion.  The text is copied here because Onion stuff goes away fairly quickly.

I’ve been a little busy watching news about the fires.  I also learned that it’s impossible to get news from TV until after it happens.  They were about ten to fifteen miles off on the fire location.  Surprise!  It’s in your backyard!

Well, not quite, but you get the idea.  There are also lots of other “I’ve been busy” things to put here, but I know that’s boring reading.  So I’ll skip that part.

Which brings us to the smoke.  Lots of it.  In some really cool pictures of the Simi Incident, as it’s now called.  If the specific link doesn’t work, try MODIS Fire Imagery

See what I’ve been putting up with?  All the smoke seems to be backed up before it goes over the Santa Monica Mountains.  That explains why I couldn’t breath or see the sun at all on both Sunday and most of today.  For some reason, most of it stayed higher in the air Saturday, which provided some nice pictures and kept it clear enough that I could see the flames in spite of what the TV news was telling me about how far away it was.

Thanks for the link, Terry.  Inspired to blog again!

Three days after a Princeton graduate student posted a paper on his Web site detailing how to defeat the copy-protection software on a new music CD by pressing a single computer key, the maker of the software said on Thursday it would sue him.

Links:  Yahoo, Washington Post, Forbes, CNN

The DMCA is at it again.  The instructions consisted of holding down the ‘shift’ key.

A pioneering elementary school district outside Chicago has been sued for installing a wireless computer network by parents worried that exposure to the network’s radio waves could harm their children.

Links:  Yahoo, MSNBC

What a great way to spend school funds.  Later, the parents will complain that their school isn’t providing internet access and that their children are receiving a substandard education.

British Pathe Film Archive has 12 million still images online that cover news, sport, social history and entertainment from 1896 to 1970.  The still images were scanned from the entire 3500 hour archive of the British Pathe newsreel, a movie theater news service that pre-dated television. 

It must be overused, because it’s very slow.

Spelling is easy, right?  At least it was until I started use a spell checker and forgot all the weird rules.  Or is that wierd?  I before E except…  But this is an exception to that rule.

This handy chart is a reminder of just how easy it is to spell correctly by sounding-it-out.

“A twenty dollar bill can be folded to show the Trade Center and the Pentagon in flames. The twenty dollar bill was changed in nineteen nintyfive. The designers and engravers of the Federal Treasury Department are certainly comprised of many Mason or others with Masonic connections.”

They even have a picture here.

The US seems to think that it’s a violation of NAFTA for Mexico to bottle it’s own tequila.  But that’s not really what I’m writing about.

Before I post something here, I try to find a permanent link.  That means I can’t use Yahoo or the LA Times links, but I do a search for the item to see who else is running it.

The results looking for the Tequila story just struck me as funny.  None of the major news publications are running it, but it’s big news in Montana, Taipei and Kansas City.  According to a Yahoo News search, the following are the only places that seem to be running this news:

Mexico seeks control over tequila bottling
Billings Gazette, MT – Sep 26, 2003
… Coleman said US bottling plants for tequila were operating in four states – California, Arkansas, Missouri and Kentucky. Cuervo, the …
       US, Mexico Tussling Over Tequila Bottles – Yahoo News
       Mexico attempting to block foreign bottling of tequila – Kansas City Star
       Mexico starts tequila battle as US makes margaritas – Taipei Times

Why is this news in Kansas or Montana, or especially in Taipei?

Part II

I ran across the definitions of some of the terms on Tequila labels that I should know, but wasn’t sure about.

• Anejo – Yeah, it should have a tilde.  It means “aged, but only for one year in oak barrels.
• Blanco – White, of course.  Fancy for “fresh from the still.
• Resposado – This translates to “rested”, but it means not quite aged.  It’s stored in wooden casks for two months to one year.

Somebody get me a lime.