Broadcast flag dying?

As the proud owner of a TiVo for better part of 4 years now (which also is apparently dying but whatever.. I am concerned about any attempt to block copying of whatever is on my coaxial. I pay my damn Comcast bill, so they can shove it if I don't want to be home on Friday night to watch SG-1. The TV industry's reaction to people having too much freedom over TV content, fastforwarding commercials, etc, has been to lobby for a "broadcast flag", which would require all hardware devices bought after July 1 to implement. My understanding is that the local TV stations could choose whether or not to toggle the broadcast flag, which your hardware would then recognize and then prevent you from copying, fastforwarding, etc. This is very icky.
So USA Today reported on Wednesday that:

U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards told the Federal Communications Commission it "crossed the line" requiring the new anti-piracy technology in next-generation television devices.

This is good news, and prompted several good quotes on a slashdot thread:

Ckwop :
The broadcast flag isn't quite dead yet, but at least it's in trouble

This is by no means dead. When the entertainment industry can't foist something on you by the backdoor they use plan B: Ask the senate for a nice bit of special interest legislation.

tji :
> This is by no means dead. When the entertainment industry can't foist something on you by the backdoor they use plan B: Ask the senate for a nice bit of special interest legislation.

Actually, this was the back door.
Congress told them to fuck off when they went looking for legislation.
Then, they went to the FCC, and Michael Powell was more than willing to bend over for big business. But, that seems to be standard operating procedure for the current administration. They talk "free markets", but in practice there are way too many gifts to big business. (letting polluters out of environmental enforcements, letting Microsoft out of antitrust enforcements, etc.) Locking the little guys out of the market and perpetuating the market for the big guys.

Martin Blank :
You don't have authority to require people to pay fines, and that is enshrined in law. The government does, and unless you're part of the government, even by extension (deputized, for example), you don't have such a power, and you are explicitly barred from collecting such fines.

Congress is usually pretty specific on the powers it grants to the FCC. There have been several occasions when the FCC has found a loophole, and Congress has closed it rapidly. If they don't have legal authority here, Congress will have to explicitly give them such authority, which will probably get bogged down in debate. Many members of Congress are not particularly keen on these kinds of powers.

sanityspeech :
From the article:

  He [U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards] said the FCC "crossed the line" beyond its authority approved by Congress. "You've gone too far," he said. "Are washing machines next?"

...Another circuit judge, David Sentelle, agreed...

"You can't regulate washing machines. You can't rule the world.

Anonymous Coward :
Cute, but to the extent you're serious, you're missing the point. The FCC has no authority to regulate communications equipment in this way. Congress did not authorize them to do so. The FCC admits that. The FCC argues that since Congress did not prohibit them from making this kind of regulation, they are allowed to do it. The judge is pointing out that if they are allowed to regulate something as long as it's not explicitly prohibited to them, then logically they can regulate almost everything. They can regulate washing machines, as long as there's no law stating "The FCC may not regulate washing machines."

It goes on and on but you get the idea.

Time to Reflect

So I took this week off from work, basically just to use up some vacation time, but also using the time to help Max move into my place, and catch up on some books I'm reading (UML Distilled and OOP Demystified). I made a huge long list yesterday of all the things I need to do, just to get me motivated; that was pretty scary. Actually it wasn't that long, just some very involved tasks like learning more about class diagrams and Eclipse java editing. And the resume additions.. My job is again on the chopping block. I was offered again the chance to move to NYC to follow my job, and turned it down last week. San Francisco is too great, and I really need a better career direction; I'm very dissatisfied with the way my position has turned out. It was a combination of being at the same company for too long and inheriting all the old tired projects, and being pegged the "public website guy" and being assigned a lot of UI and not enough architecture. I really like the people I work with, but it's time to move on. Good lessons learned, and it feels good to take my life back into my hands; way too complacent way too long. ANYWAY, I feel pretty good about my current state, but this is turning into a diary entry, so I'll stop now ;)

The Delphi Technique

Been thinking a lot lately about the conversations I have had with co-workers about the Anti-abortion/Pro-choice competing marches that took place in San Francisco recently. I still can't get over the disgust I feel over one comment I read in that article:

Walk for Life organizers Dolores Meehan and Eva Muntean said they knew holding an anti-abortion rally in the liberal bastion of San Francisco would spark outrage. But doing so would draw the greatest exposure, Meehan said.

Now, one can get into whether abortion is moral or not, whether it is murder, blah blah. Eating meat is murder, Iraq is murder but I don't see Christians out there marching against those things. The point for me is whether we should let the state make decisions that affect so intrinsically the quality and livelihood of women's lives. MUST we take every impregnation as a sign that "God" wanted another child in the world? MUST we take a broken arm in a little league baseball game as a sign that "God" didn't want the child to have an arm? No, and we as humans have the obligation to fix mistakes once they happen. Abortion is always a tough decision, but if contraceptives and the morning after pill were not being so furiously fought by, guess who, the christian right, then the rate of abortions would drop.

Anyway back to San Francisco. I came upon an interesting paper the other day citing something called the Delphi Technique. The gist of it is that a secretly biased facilitator will sway the audience to his/her point of view by provoking and singling out angry dissenters, and will then turn the emotions of the audience against the dissenters, thus effectively becoming one with the rest of the group. Then the dissenters are isolated, and the facilitator seems innocent and vindicated after being so "viciously attacked", and therefore must be correct in whatever their proposed conclusions are.

I propose that that is what the Right to Life people were doing by coming to San Francisco. By their own admission, no one would have noticed them if they didn't purposefully go somewhere where they knew they would not be welcome. By willingly jumping into persecutive waters, they hoped to gain more support for their cause, in the guise of pity.

...and to the "but I thought San Francisco was so accepting" crowd: San Francisco is accepting and tolerant of those who are also accepting and tolerant. I hate the analogy, but using San Francisco's tolerance against it is like using America's freedom to buy first-class plane tickets to bring down the Twin Towers- ugly, gruesome, and a horrible misuse.

Good project:

I've been looking for a good practical project for a while, something that would help me learn all the things I am trying to learn, and something I would also use. My idea: I've been working with a wiki at work all day and the one thing that bugs me is that rearranging contents is a little bit of a pain- it's just cutting and pasting in a free text field. But what if there was some kind of javascript control over the div's in the page, so I could drag and drop div's in different locations, with out clicking Edit, and cutting and pasting. There would have to be some state management, so some Save button that wrote out the current xy coordinates for all the div's into a text file. And if you click on the div itself, maybe it could become editable? Flickr does this with the comments for a picture. It's quite an impressive UI trick, I'll have to see how they do it. And not only does it become editable, but the div shows the modified state without refreshing the page (I think Netflix does this as well with the DVD rating system).

UI tweaks: have the div background color change when the user mouses over, so the extent of the div is apparent.