Didn't realize this show was still on the air. Seems pointless now with the ability to read reviews online. But in their heyday, it was worth watching to get an idea of what movies to see.

I don't consider the Zune a design leader, rather a follower of Apple's iPod design, with improvements. And the new Zune has botched marketing writtern all over it.

I don't see how anyone would ever compare a music player with a game console. Hopefully we're not designing consoles around MP3 designs.

That being said, Microsoft should have re-engineered the Xbox 360 by now with a slimmer design. It would have helped spur sales, especially outside the US. But I suspect we're pretty much stuck with the existing design until the next model appears. Microsoft doesn't really think from a hardware perspective. They're more software centric.

One of the biggest selling points of a Tivo was the ability to avoid ads. It's interesting they're doing all this work to have Tivo-specific ads. Tivo is beginning to walk a fine line. If it becomes too obtrusive, it's goodbye Tivo.

"The firm argues that timing of the bans.....was designed to get as much money from Xbox Live subscriptions as possible"

That's ludicrous. For one, Microsoft has banned people from Live for as long as I can remember. Modding your console and being on Live is one way to receive ban. I know I've played against others who modified their consoles to have an unfair advantage. It's not right. And to say it was done to get as much money as possible is stupid, because it's a loss of revenue in that customer is no longer on Live.

This never gets to trial. And if it does, the clients don't have a leg to stand on. Modding your console is against Microsoft's policy. It's like a criminal robbing a bank, and getting away, only to be robbed in the parking lot by another criminal. Then the first criminal sues the second criminal for 'stealing' his money. The money was never his to be stolen.

My experience with Sony laptops has not been positive. Every Sony laptop we acquired for work broke within the first year or so. Intially we relied on service repair. But then the units continued to have issues. We ended up replacing all the units with an alternate brand that has proven more reliable. It wasn't matter if there was going to be a problem, it became more of matter of when. I'm not sure if we bought a bad batch, but it's one of those incidents that sticks in your mind. And I think what made it worse, is that we paid a premium for the Sony laptops.

It's a great idea, until you realize you're basically buying the same movie all over again. I'm tired of buying the same movie every time a new edition or format comes out. It's one of the reasons I stopped buying DVDs. Would much rather use Netflix for the bulk of the movies I want to watch.

@Casey Manley Just kicking the tires and checking out the new system.

The most interesting thing about the special were the commercials from the 70s. Tobor is robot spelled backwards. Classic! And a series called Flying High about flight attendants?

It seems to me DARPA's Spoken Language Systems project DRAGON predates this patent by a good number of years. It started in the late 70s and or early 80s. DRAGON eventually became DragonDictate, which evolved into Dragon Naturally Speaking.

There's a progress report on DARPA SLS back in 1991 that talks about speech recognition on a CD-ROM.

http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/H/H91/H91-1088.pdf

This patent in the case says it was filed in 1996 and approved in 1997. It states that "present day" (I assume 1996) optical discs do not have speech recognition templates, which apparently is untrue.

btw, the original posting is here...

http://www.black-friday.net/bestbuy-ad-scan.html#