The HD dilemma

I have a nice computer. I have a nice monitor (23" LCD hp 2335, 1920x1200). I have a nice audio setup (Sondigo Inferno w/ optical out to Onkyo 5.1 speaker system). I want to watch blu-ray movies.

Simple, I thought, I'll just buy a blu-ray drive. I wonder how much they cost. Hey look, I can get a Pioneer blu-ray drive that also burns DVD's for $160. Great!

Oh, but I guess I need software to play blu-ray disks. Hey, there's an even cheaper Asus drive that's a retail version with software. Oh wait, that software is crap and only does stereo: that's retarded.

Oh, and my setup isn't HDCP. Wait, WTF? I need a new video card, a new monitor, and it looks like the software to decode and play might not even be XP compatible? That is RIDICULOUS. THANKS A LOT, FCC. WAY TO CAVE IN TO HOLLYWOOD INTERESTS.

Here's the problem: there are three classes of people, only one of whom actually gets screwed over by this HDCP/DRM nonsense:

1: the uploaders/pirates: DRM isn't going to stop them. AnyDVD HD is available for relatively cheap and will do the job.

2: the downloaders: DRM already removed and files uploaded by pirates, so HDCP setup is not needed, just a sufficiently fast computer and software that isn't restrictive like the commercial Blu-ray playing software. XMBC apparently will do the job just fine, even on computers with anemic video cards.

3: honest consumers: willing to buy blu-ray drive, blu-ray disks, even reasonably-priced software to play back the movies. (even after using various free software to play back plain vanilla DVD discs) Not willing to upgrade to Vista, pay $100 to PLAY BACK A MOVIE, buy a new GFX card, and a new monitor.

So, you ask, what's the problem? Just use AnyDVD HD to rip a blu-ray to your hard drive and use XMBC to play it back. Sure, except for a couple of things:

1) I shouldn't have to give up 20+ gigs and ripping time to play back a movie I own when I have hardware that is capable of playing it.

2) Oh yeah, it's illegal thanks to the DMCA. Thanks a lot Congress.

PS: filed under TV as well, cuz of Blu-Ray Firefly. Mmm, naked Nathan Fillion Morena Baccarin.

first things first

damn protestors, getting ahead of themselves. Where are all the people who support the cause to malloc Tibet?

That is so going on a t-shirt btw. Much easier to do than try my graphical chops at a ascii art rendering of the great firewall of China.

things that annoy me, part 1

The doors on the apartments in our new graduate housing complex. Which are NOT traditional locks, but fancy new card+code locks. The rationale behind installing them? Supposedly they make you more secure. I guess in the sense that if a traditional key were to be lost, the lock would be replaced, but here, a simple reprogramming can be done.

So what are the problems?

1) The card is our school ID card, which everyone generally agrees is lost more often than a key. Case in point, you take out your card much more often (such as to borrow books from the library). In addition, sometimes, your ID gets held as collateral (such as when you check out a table for a booth on Library Walk). Regardless, it would have made more sense to use a separate card whose single purpose is to open doors, rather than tack on another feature.

2) You need both a code and a card to open the door. Again, supposedly for security reasons. However, a lot of people use their apartment number as their code. In fact, that was a suggestion by the guy who set up our cards in the first place! So now, not only is the physical item (id card) to unlock the door easier to lose, but the code, which is supposed to be added security doesn't really add that much after all.

3) Apparently the doors can run out of batteries and stop working. I cannot tell you how awesome it is to be locked out because my door ran out of juice. There are at least 3 solutions to this problem that I can think of off of the top of my head:
- add an external crank for emergency charging of the lock so you can get in and replace the battery!
- add a warning for low battery power (I should note that the light is supposed to flash red after the door is unlocked when the battery is low, but I never noticed it if it did. The solution then is to flash red BEFORE the door is unlocked, adding in a noticeable delay before the door can be opened OR to have the door make audible beeps, like a fire alarm.)
- replace the batteries in ALL the apartments BEFORE the anticipated death of batteries. If they're supposed to last for 18 months, replace after one year, and recycle the batteries for something else.

things that make me sad

1) Jeremy Jackson's paper in August's issue of PNAS concerning ocean biodiversity, first seen here and brought up again here.

See especially table 1.

2) The fact that the major news media have way more coverage on the bigfoot hoax.

Red Alert 3

may be worth getting. I think RA2 did a good job with the story with some strange quirks (dolphins? psychics?), even under the hands of EA (we miss you Westwood!).

Still, one wonders about the necessity of a third rotor on the Soviet Twinblade unit: http://www.ea.com/redalert/factions-soviets.jsp?id=Twinblade

In a standard helicopter, the tail rotor provides the necessary balance to the rotational counter-force generated by a single main rotor. Without a tail rotor (or an unbalanced one), when the rotor spins one way, the helicopter body should spin the other way. This is countered by the tail rotor which adds the necessary torque to counter this spinning. However, with 2 main rotors spinning in opposite directions, no tail rotor is necessary, since the rotational counter-force is canceled completely. Just look at the V-22 Osprey.

*sigh* I guess this is another instance of how when developers do research to make their games realistic, no one notices (because it's realistic), but when something goes wrong, people pick up on it.

who designed these things?

Does anyone else find the Twilight to look more than a little like the classic B-wing? You'll have to click through to see the alternate views of the Twilight, as there are two wings that fold out vertically (just like a B-wing).

As for why it is 100 bucks, well, hell if I know. It used to be there would only be one set in the $100 range for any particular lineup (with maybe two $5 sets, two $10 sets, two $20 sets, one $30 set and one $50 set), but LEGO has gotten a lot more popular it seems, especially with the Star Wars crowd, that they can charge these kinds of ridiculous prices.

Still, one does tend to find some good deals in the online LEGO shop, occasionally, such as the $200 ISD Mark I. Hmm, I wonder if anyone has made a retrofit into a Mark II yet?

and we return to our usual randomness

This is what happens when you let sound engineers do whatever they want:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/29040/psych-daredevils#s-p1-so-i0

Right before the first commercial break, Shawn bites into a churro to a nice satisfying *crunch*. But wait, you say, churros aren't supposed to be crunchy, they're supposed to be soft and chewy, full of delicious sugaryness. Funny how I pick up on these random errors as opposed to the more glaring visual ones that get covered on wikipedia and imdb. Alas, maybe I only have food-sound synaesthesia after all...

Will someone please give the team on Psych some tickets to the fair and a batch of churros?

problems with the world

1. I know I just LOVE having my gadgets seized at the border indefinitely without any suspicion of wrongdoing.

I haven't fully read through the slashdot debate, but it seems that the standard response to "this violates the 4th amendment" is the "you're not on US soil yet, so the 4th amendment doesn't count" and "border searches are ok". Fine, I'll grant you your quasi-legal border searches, but I damn well be walking into my own country with my iPod unless you are acknowledging that you consider me to be under suspicion of harboring terrorism. (And in that case, wouldn't you lock me up?) As far as I'm aware, border searches != border seizures of laptops. And since I'm "not on US soil yet", does the US customs office actually have any power? If customs decides to confiscate my laptop and suddenly I decide I DON'T want to enter the US, I bet you they would never let me fly back to whatever country I was returning from or send me off to the embassy.

(I especially love how this is one of the most viewed articles, as listed on the Washington Post homepage, but it is still relegated to a link under More Headlines...)

[via Schneier on Security]

2. I love the new Batman movie, which I is not entirely free of the pacing problems brought up by some critics. However, I think it works very well in keeping the viewer interested for the entire movie, which has multiple subplots. I think Taylor's analysis of why Batman does not make a good model for foreign policy hits a number of issues very well:

For example, the most ardent supporters of the administration think that this is the way the War on Terror works–for example, that everyone at Gitmo is obviously a terrorist (even if we know that that is not the case) and that they are all on the same level as Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers. In that world, just having the wrong name or being in the wrong place at the wrong time isn’t a problem as the wrong people are never punished or harmed because, again, we know who the bad guys are and no mistakes are ever made.

I feel that this point is often overlooked by the public (and the Media!) when discussing policy. Justifying policy by citing 24 is ridiculous. I will bet you any large sum of money you want that the number of times we needed to (1) torture a suspected terrorist for the key to disarm a ticking bomb but couldn't because of Geneva conventions, is zero, while the number of times we (2) held foreign and US citizens in Gitmo without access to lawyers or outside contact without charging them with anything, but still subjecting them to waterboarding (which is only "interrogation", regardless of what Hitchens thinks!) is, um, not zero. (I don't want to speculate on the number)

Real-life is NOT a comic-book. And even if we ever ran across situation (1), I'm pretty sure "Jack Bauer" would torture the terrorist, Geneva conventions be damned.

[via Stephen Bainbridge via Scalzi, even if I read a different post than the one Scalzi linked to.]

The overarching point I'm trying to make is that laws should not be made based on some idealistic vision of how they are implemented. In reality, TSA officials are humans, for the most part not rigorously trained, and will give travelers a hard time for questioning them. Yes, everyone SHOULD be polite, but just because you have the authority to make someone's life a living hell, doesn't make you any less evil for doing so because they point out that throwing out plastic water bottles is stupid and doesn't protect anyone from terrorism, but almost certainly contributes to that large gyre of plastic trash in the oceans. And yet, here I go saying people who do that in the TSA are evil, when again, they are just human. It's not entirely their fault that the government decided to give them enormous power without proper training. (1) the government shouldn't give individuals that kind of power to begin with, not without a usable system for reporting wrongdoings and geeting compensated and (2) what happened to training people properly?

These are the kinds of things lawmakers (and certain executive branch officials who think they are lawmakers) should think about before passing legislation. The public has enough to deal with, that they don't need to be tempted into voting for someone because of an idiotic, pandering, law that appeals to our short-term reward system. Politicians need to do what is good for the public's long-term interest, NOT what makes them appear to be tough on terrorism and empathetic with those who pay high gas prices.