WombatNation

Do you think you have mastered all forms of logical thinking? Well, prepare to enter the Jack Valenti Logic Zone - The Engadget Interview: Jack Valenti. A place where hyperbolic bluster, falsehoods, and ignorance rule the day.

Jack Valenti is the departing head of the MPAA. Valenti, you might remember, is most notorious for his 1982 statement that:

“I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”

In the interview with J. D. Lasica, Valenti continues to make outrageous statements that are so provably false that I find it hard to understand what point he is trying to make. He’s not as bad as Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, but they’re entertainment tools working gimmicks to sell ads and books. While the MPAA effectively represents entertainers, Valenti’s not one himself. At least I assume he’s not trying to be funny.

“I really do believe we can stuff enough algorithms in a movie that only the dedicated hackers can spend the time and effort to try to plumb through those 1,000 algorithms to try to find a way to beat it.”

Okay, so no one expects Valenti to have a deep understanding of technology. Fair enough. But, doesn’t it seem like he would have at least a very superficial understanding of the technology that his industry depends on?

“We know that with DVDs and VHS, we lost $3.5 billion a year worldwide due to analog or hard-goods piracy.”

Valenti shares this approach with the RIAA and the BSA, that is, first produce an estimate of how many movies, music recordings, or commercial software products were illegally copied. While they are likely to overestimate the total, it’s reasonable to try to estimate (with an emphasis on estimate) the total. But, then they multiply that number by the full price of those items to get a grand total of lost revenue. While I can’t say just how many people who made illegal copies of movies, music, or software would have paid full price if making copies had been impossible, I assure you that the number is not 100%. Not even close.

“Now, fair use is not in the law.”

As Ernest Svenson and Ed Felten (see below) posted, Valenti needs to get acquainted with US Law, specifically 17 U.S.C. 107. He can plug his fingers in his ears and shout “I don’t hear the monsters” all he wants, but that law won’t be going away anytime soon.

“Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever. “

Guess what, Jack. Fox Home Entertainment, a division of MPAA member Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, is so convinced that DVDs don’t last forever that they offer an official DVD replacement program. From their website - “This DVD replacement program allows customers to replace damaged DVDs for $6.99. If you have a Fox Home Entertainment DVD damaged by scratching, sun exposure or other means, you may be eligible for this low cost replacement program.” Of course, not all companies make this offer. Also, not everyone is willing to pay $6.99 and “allow 4-6 weeks for delivery” to get a replacement, especially when technology is available to make the back up yourself.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that Valenti is a complete raving lunatic. He provides some perfectly reasonable answers in the interview. It’s just his occasional ventures far from reality that make you wonder how much he is taking up extreme positions in hope for a compromise versus how much he really believes what he says.”

Thanks to Ernest Svenson and Ed Felten for posting excellent commentary on their blogs about this Valenti interview.

I posted a photo last month of one my cats sitting at the table about to engage in a full scale assault on an ear of corn. This was an old photo from when he was a kitten.

As Alexi has gotten older, he demands access to the corn as soon as it comes out of the boiling water. After it cools, I cut off 30 or 40 kernels for him, which he quickly devours. But sometimes, that’s not enough …

Here’s Alexi after he has stalked and trapped an ear of corn in the wilds of my living room.

After trapping the ear of corn, he proceeded to bite off any remaining kernels. Then, he moved on to trying to eat the cob whole.

Finally, once he had torn away any visible remnants of corn kernels, he licked the cob end to end to siphon off any remaining corn juice.

Disclaimers: An ear of corn was injured in the filming of this spectacle. No digital editing wizardy was used in the composition of these photos. That’s a real organic ear of corn and a real 19 pound cat.

Update 7/7/2008: Courtesy of Boing Boing and YouTube, a video of somebody else’s cat eating an ear of corn:

What’s not to like from the list of the World’s 9 Worst Convenience Foods. Clam jerky, anyone?

This list seems to have drifted around the Internet for quite some time. Too bad none of the sites added links to where one might order these tasty botañas. Here’s a couple I found:

• Reindeer pate
• Corned mutton - scroll down to see the mutton on the Spam-shaped can
• Pork brains in milk gravy
• Musk flavored life savers

The contribution on the site linked to above appears to be adding Post Oreo O’s to the original list of eight. Now, I like a cereal that makes it own gravy, e.g., Count Chocula and Cocoa Krispies, as much as the next Extreme Breakfast Athlete, but Oreo O’s don’t seem to be a huge upgrade over just crumbling up some full-sized Oreos into a bowl of milk. I’ll have to take one in the stomach for science, though, before I’d be willing to put it into any top 8, 9, or 10 list.

In addition to the list of convenience foods, Bert’s has collected some interesting recipes and art on his site. Good stuff.

[via GMSV newsletter]

Rumors about the feature set of the Treo 650 are getting more detailed and believable. Of the features described, I find the following very enticing, albeit not enticing enough to upgrade from the Treo 600. If I didn’t already have the 600, though, I would be trying to put in an order right now.

• 16 bit 320×320 TFT screen
• Palm OS Garnet (version 5.4)
• 1.3 MP Camera with digital zoom.
• Built in video capture capability.
• New browser that can display frames and upload files. It also has an integrated download manager.
• Moving to the “standard” palmOne application inventory with a more robust Contacts application and Today screen.

The upgrade to Palm OS 5.4 brings better security and multimedia support, plus the infrastructure for some of these other features.

While Bluetooth support sounds great, I don’t have any other Bluetooth capable devices. It’s one of those features those that’s hard to value before you fully adopt it.

[via PDABuzz]

I’m starting to think I need to add a new toilets category to my blog. I couldn’t resist posting about the Toto Neorest 600. While I thought my incinerating toilet was pricey in the $1,000-$1,500 range, I found the the Neorest 600 listed at $7,000, but available at the low, low discount price of $3,400 from The Factory Oulet.

As one would hope, nay, demand, this is no ordinary toilet. No sirree, it’s “The First Tankless Toilet and Integrated Washlet Cleansing System”. Sure, there’s the “gentle front-and back-aerated warm water spray, which can be regulated for preferred water pressure and temperature”. But wait, there’s more. The “technologically-advanced features include oscillating spray massage, heated seat, automatic catalytic air deodorizer, and warm air dryer”.

Even better, it recognizes your arrival, just like a pet racing to greet you at the door.

“The NEOREST’s lid automatically opens whenever an individual approaches it. If one continues to stand in front of the NEOREST, as would a man, the toilet seat automatically rises also. When the individual leaves, the NEOREST automatically flushes and the lid automatically closes.”

Wow, not only does it say hello, it waves goodbye.

As we delve into the astonishing technology powering this beast of a disposal device, we learn that it has a “revolutionary flush engine”. I’ll let you read part of the description and not say a word myself.

“During the first stage – Rim-Scouring Cyclonic Motion – a nozzle located at the back of the bowl fires a high-speed stream of water that scours the rim and initiates the water’s Cyclone action.”

Perhaps we’ve read too much already. I really don’t think I need to say anything more about the “Siphonic Jet Action” and the “final rim scouring”.

I swear I’m not making this up. Go take a look for yourself.

The recently released Survival Research Labs “Ten Years of Robotic Mayhem” DVD was reviewed in Bright Lights Film Journal. You can pick up a copy for $20 + $7 shipping at Music Video Distributors.

I previously posted pictures and video from an SRL show in Berkeley last year.

And congrats to Mark and Amy on their new baby! Hopefully, they will make rocket fuel experimentation off-limits to Jake until he is at least in grade school.

A great VoiceXML tutorial just showed up in the Voice section of the Developer.com website. It’s just part one of a three-part series, but IBM’s Jeff Kusnitz and Bruce Lucas covered a lot of ground in a fairly short article. I wish I had run across an introduction to VoiceXML like this one when I got started a couple years ago.

I was quite surprised this afternoon to see a story on Slashdot announcing that a group at ARL:UT (Applied Research Labs : University of Texas) had open sourced GPSTk, “a cross platform library and set of applications that provides both fundamental and advanced GPS processing algorithms”. I worked at ARL:UT for five years while I was living in Austin, but I didn’t happen to work with this group of researchers and engineers.

This group was, and presumably still is, in the south building. At the time I was there, they were doing a lot of satellite work, which entailed lots of GPS research and development.

I worked in the north building, which was mostly occupied by scientists and engineers doing acoustics research & development. I was in the Advanced Sonar Division, doing underwater acoustics research and designing software for sonars for submarines. Ah, the memories of writing code in Occam to run on transputers.

It’s very cool to see ARL:UT getting some attention. I really loved it there and I still have a lot of friends working there.

The Living Museum Art Center at Harbor View House is an arts program that is run by HealthView. Harbor View House is a non-profit residential mental health care facility in Southern California. The website has four pages of work (though unfortunately the first sent doesn’t appear in FireFox due to some IE proprietary HTML) done by people at the facility. Some of the pieces are very cool. Others are … well, hey, I’m not particularly impressed by everything I see at SFMOMA, either. But if you are into raw, emotional paintings, I think you will definitely find some pieces that interest you.

If you’re in the Oakland area and you find this artwork interesting, I highly recommend that you stop by Creative Growth Art Center. Creative Growth is a bit different in that the artists don’t actually reside there, but Creative Growth has a fantastic workspace for them to get engaged, experiment, and create art. You also get a lot of opportunities to meet with the artists.

The Living Museum is at 921 S. Beacon Street, San Pedro, CA, and their phone number is 310-547-3341 Extension 3154, and they are open Monday – Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Jennifer, thanks for the email about the Living Museum. I’ll try to stop by next time I head down to SoCal.

I had run across the online demo of the AT&T Natural Voices TTS engine quite awhile ago, but seeing a reference to it in an article today on Slashdot reminded me of how cool it is. You enter text in a text box and choose a voice from a list of thirteen. The list includes five US English, two Latin American Spanish, two French, two German, and two UK English voices, with a near even balance between male and female voices.

After you submit the request, a wav file is generated immediately on the AT&T server and downloaded by your web browser. The quality is really quite good.

While you can, of course, enter English text and have it synthesized by a Spanish, French, or German voice, the text won’t be translated. That would require a little hacking to pipeline the output of Altavista Babel Fish, Google Translate, SYSTRAN, etc. into this form. However, if you were ever wondering how someone from a German, Spanish, or French speaking country might mispronounce a particular English word, here’s your chance to find out.

FYI, the free VoiceXML hosting service at TellMe uses Natural Voices. BeVocal offers a couple options on their hosting service - male and female US English voices, a Spanish female voice from Nuance Vocalizer, and a German female voice from ScanSoft RealSpeak. I think that the US English voices, Jennifer and Mark, are RealSpeak voices.

It turns out that ScanSoft also has a demo page for RealSpeak. ScanSoft/SpeechWorks acquired RealSpeak from Lernout & Hauspie a few years ago after L&H self-destructed. You first pick from 19 different languages, and then from three different sampling frequencies. Assuming you are going to be using the TTS on PSTN phone calls, pick 8 kHz. On the next page, you select a voice (if more than one are offered for the language you chose) and then enter up to 100 characters to be synthesized. Unfortunately, when I clicked the Next button, I got an error message from my web browser that “The connection was refused when attempting to contact demo.lhsl.com”. Perhaps this is a temporary problem, or maybe they no longer support the demo running from that old L&H domain, but they haven’t updated the product pages on the ScanSoft website, yet?

ScanSoft also has a demo page for their premier TTS engine, Speechify. You get to pick from eleven different languages and voices. The text input is limited to 255 characters.

Nuance offers a demo of Vocalizer, but you have to fill out a form. Fortunately, you get immediate access to the demo after submitting the form. The Vocalizer demo includes a mix of eight language and voice combinations. The text you enter is limited to 200 characters.

As an aside, voices for TTS engines are traditionally given a first name. The name is typical of the language, e.g., Tomoko for a Japanese voice, Maarten for a Dutch voice, and Javier for a Spanish voice. The Vocalizer voices have a first name and last name, e.g., the male Australian voice is Josh Donnelly and the female Latin American Spanish voice is Catalina Romero.

If you want to try out more online demos from lots of smaller companies and from research groups and open source projects, check out this page at the University of Texas. It’s a pretty comprehensive list. There is also a good links page at the Oregon School of Science & Engineering website that provides links to a lot of TTS research projects.

Probably the best known open source TTS engine is Festival, from the University of Edinburgh. You can try an online demo of Festival at a site hosted by Carnegie-Mellon University. There are a combination of twelve voices and languages. The biggest differentiator is the male Scottish voice. Unfortunately, the quality of the Festival synthesized voices is a big step down from what ScanSoft, Nuance, and AT&T have to offer. If you used a Macintosh in the mid-80’s, you will have flashbacks to the talking moose. I would say that the output from the Festival engine is on par with the second or third tier TTS players, like Microsoft.