Steve is a primordial dragon-creature risen from the depths of the ocean by nuclear reactor leakage who calls his supper to him by using ESP to make them feel great.
Ken suggested I try out Steve’s story, another book by Christopher Moore. This story is a bit more smooth than Fluke. You can still feel the author’s familiarity with biology in his writing. I wonder if he has studied in that field. I digress.
I was having an argument with the sales guy at the high-end TV store. Based on a discussion I had with Pat, I asked him if the TV he was trying to sell me supported HDCP. I told him I was warned against it, that I shouldn’t support technology that restricts a user’s rights. And that’s how the argument began that led to an intersting idea about licensing.
HDCP is a technology layer on top of HDMI that institutes copy-protection on top of the high-definition digital signal that travels from the TV tuning device to the monitor. In high-definition TVs (especially good ones) the tuner is a separate device from the actual display. The cable that connects the tuner to the display is called a HDMI cable. To keep people from plugging that cable into something that could directly record the digital signal (and prevent you from, say, recording pay-per-view movies in perfect digital quality) they have invented HDCP.
The basic idea of not buying a set equipped with HDCP is to send a message to manufacturers that consumers want the flexibility afforded them by fair use. We like to record shows for later. HDCP could help prevent that. Being an early adopter, it’s part of your job as an aware consumer not to buy products that encourage technologies prohibiting fair use. Otherwise, the unaware public could buy products that are more restrictive in their fair use capabilities than those we have now.
In any case, he started off with the argument that it’s only fair that if a studio spends money to make a movie and pay its workers, then it should get a return on that investment. And I agree with that. But I don’t think it’s fair that the studio should get to prompt me for a fee every time I watch their movie, nor that I should have my ability to watch the movie at my pleasure restricted. It was all about poor licensing. And that’s when I had my idea.
I happened upon a post that talks about what might be in store for us in the future when we reach for the phone on our belts. It’s bogus.
I’ve seen many of these types of prognostications lately, and they’re starting to annoy me. It seems like the people reporting this stuff can’t tell the difference between a feature that is a futuristic accessory (powered car windows) and futuristic folly (hovercars).
Sure, I think many of the imagined ideas are neat, but I’m still even unsure of the utility of the custom-colored faceplates they sell for some phones at the mall. I guess I’ve always thought of my phone more as a tool than a fashion accessory. That is to say, I’ve never once thought, “Gee, if I must carry this, it might as well look good on me.” Whereas, I have had the thought, “If they didn’t waste all that space for two outer layers of plastic, they might have fit in some more useful electronics.”
This posting requires a huge preface and will still end up causing all sorts of heckling of me by my friends, but yet I think I still need to post it.
No. I do not like the move “Stargate”. I think that the movie as it stands alone had the best potential to be an amazing sci-fi movie, and then turned into a lame desert movie. I have long said that there is a point in the movie where you can feel the actual turning point from “hey, this is cool” into “holy crap, this sucks!”
That said, if you take what the movie might have tried to do and combine it with the ten seasons of Stargate SG-1 that followed, then you have something. Perhaps the movie should not have been about the discovery of the gate or the things on the other side of the portal it opened, but somewhere in the middle. Regardless, Stargate SG-1 (and the Atlantis spinoff) have become one of the few things I look forward to on TV these days.
And so, of course, they’re cancelling it.
These plans detail the construction of a breadbox that inhibits mold using UV light. Hadn’t anyone thought of this before? Ingenious!