The comment about "teaching to the test" isn't new for Microsoft. Way back when Word 6.0 was new (and I was an MS employee), one of the demonstrations of Word 6 was its WordPerfect importing capability and how "accurate" the imported document was compared to the original WP copy. WP came with this standard "demo document" at the time and we would import that document and it would be perfect in Word.. but an engineer told me that Word "recognized" the document in question was this standard test document for WP and there was "extra code" in the Word program to make sure it showed correctly. Results with your own WP documents, however, may not have been quite as accurate.

Why is Betty taking a writing class? Didn't this whole series start with her graduated from college with a journalism degree? Workshop, maybe, or writing group, but they made it seem like she'd never had any formal training and was starting school all over again.

Shortly after CDs started coming out in the early 80's, there was a company that released cassette tape blanks labeled as "CD Cassettes", which were supposed to be "Cassette tapes with the dynamic range of CDs"... there will always be unscrupulous companies preying on nieve consumers. As Audiophile magazine put it at the time, "What's next..? 'CD Vinyl??'"

I actually wrote to the MovieBeam people about the phone line. Here's my letter to them and their response.

My Letter
--------
Question: You have a new toy. This new toy will be first bought by early
adopters, those techie of kind of people who first bought Tivo and
DirecTV and digital cable and whatever else. These same people are also
the people who have given up their landline and just have a cellphone
because why pay for that extra line you never need? They do have a cable
modem for Internet, but no landline.

So why make your device require a landline? Why not put an RJ45 jack in
and use DHCP and just connect over the Internet? Tivo's forums are full
of people who have had to manually modify their boxes to use the
Internet instead of a landline.

I'd love to get your product, but since the only two people in my house
have cell phones and we have no landline, we can't use your product. If
it had WiFi or RJ-45, no problem... but I'm not going to get a landline
installed and pay another 26 bucks a month just to have it available for
a once-a-month phone call from your product.

-----

Their Response
-------------
Your specific question was as follows:

Why does it require a phone line and not any other forms of dialing in?

The MovieBeam player was designed to hookup to your landline only.
During the setup process, the player must call out in order to
initialize your account. Thereafter, it connects to MovieBeam by phone
in order to keep your account current. If you leave your player
connected to a phone line at all times, you will not have to bother with
it -- it will call in as necessary without interrupting your telephone
service or your movie-viewing. At the very least, your player must
connect with MovieBeam by phone at least once every 2 weeks or $28 of
movie-viewing charges, whichever comes first. You do not have to give us
any landline number; you can have your player dial in anywhere. I hope
this information has helped you. If you'd like we can add you to a
contact list to keep you updated on the latest developments.

You will notice that the player has a variety of hookups that are not
currently in use but are there for when the software has been developed;
Ethernet is one of these connections.

Thank you again for taking time to let us know how you feel about
MovieBeam. We welcome further comments and hope that you will always
feel free to contact us, either by email -- as you've done -- or by
calling us at 1-866-865-1500.

--future? Disney videos for sale via the iTunes store? Disney-branded iPods? --

Disney-branded iPods?? You mean big, stupid red plastic iPods with mouse ears that match those TVs and VCRs from Disney that Circuit City sells? I shudder....

>>future? Disney videos for sale via the iTunes store? Disney-branded iPods?

They just took the Apple Store down (9:30 PST) for updates

Does anyone know -- is this flavor of Mpeg4 using H.264 (which is Mpeg4 part 10 I think??) or another variation?

I was pretty impressed with Aquamind's Notetaker which I used on my iBook for the last 2 years of college. I like the fact that it's all organized within one virtual notebook, so I had all my classes on tabs and everything was in one file. (Which is not really true, since you can do Show Package Contents on your notebook and actually see separate files for each page, but still ... for appearance sake it's one notebook.)