Punditry

One thing I am having difficulty being with is when people use wild inaccuracies and untruths in their ‘arguments’ for or against something.  Along with hyperbole, ad hominem statements et al.

How the MPAA ate my signal

The great and mighty Fry’s held a sale the other day on upconverting DVD players.  My monitor can handle HD signals and so I said to myself, “Self, wouldn’t it be great to watch DVDs with your computer off on your beautiful widescreen monitor in upconverted 1080 glory?” 

Of course!  I went out and bought one, and brought it home, and duly hooked up the component output from the DVD player into my monitor, and set the DVD player to output to 1080i, and put in a disk, and pressed play, and awaited the glory.

Except, you see, the MPAA and the DMCA have decided that I cannot be trusted with a 1080i (or 720p, for that matter) signal through the component output.

Oh no, no way can I be trusted with it.  I could, I suppose, do something naughty.  Not sure exactly what, but I guess I would do something very bad.  See, they have mandated that only through HDMI can you send the upconverted signal.  You can’t even buy an HDMI to Component converter, those are illegal too.   So you are stuck with your 480p signal.  Note that this 480p signal is what would being upconverted by on-board electronics to a higher def signal (using code specifically designed for that).  It isn’t high-def to begin with.  

Thanks to the MPAA, I am not able or allowed to view my legit, store-bought disks in a manner that would suit them best.  Instead I am forcibly truncated to the straight 480p signal. 

The joke at the end of all this is that it is actually now advantageous for me to buy bootlegged disks, disks that have had the copy protection stripped; my player will happily upconvert those disks.  I would even save a few bucks doing that, it’d be a great deal all around for me. 

Good show, MPAA. 

Surprises

Saturday I snuck away up to a sakery in Berkeley for a surprise party for Patrick’s. Which turned out to be amazingly successful. The look on Patrick’s face was one of abject shock, confusion, disbelief and of having been hit with a frying pan. Mo did a fantastic job of organizing it all on the sly over the course of a couple of months, and much amusement and merriment was had by all. Oh, and great sake!

(And having been the recipient once of an equally successful surprise party I can totally relate to the frying pan look!)

Alas, the following is not a surprise: ExxonMobil has spent over the past few years around 16 million in a tobacco-company style FUD campaign, giving it to various front groups and the scientists who are members of about 9 to 12 of these groups at the same time. Their aim is delay and stagnation, under the guise of ’sound science.’ As I said, not a surprise.

Bloodstone continued apace on Sunday, the party making their way through the heart of the Duregar’s realm. Also did some studying, some Kung Fu/Tai Chi, and other weekendy stuff. Much niftyness at work this week that I now return to attend to!

Spread the Word

“Like any giant company suddenly “embracing” the green initiative, [the company's] rationale for all of this, of course, has absolutely zero to do with any sort of deep concern for the planet (though it does make for good PR), nothing at all about actual humanitarian beliefs or honest emotion or spiritual reverence, and has absolutely everything to do with the corporation’s rabid manifesto: cost-cutting and profit.”

Being green can save you gobs of $. Shock. Awe.

(If there’s one thing I find somewhat amusing and confusing is the constant vitriol that states better environmental policies = instant economic meltdown. FOX news and the Drudge Report spent a good chunk of time doing just that the other day. Given that there is usually these 10 year periods+ for targets and reductions and removals and all that — ok, natch, companies often do @#$! for that time then complain 1 year before the deadline that it’s too much hardship and they’ll drop into a hole in the earth and they will go bankrupt and the country will die and baby Jesus will cry, but ignoring that for a moment — what ever happened to their capitalist and entrepreneurial spirit? That the market will produce solutions, that it will create wealth, that it will empower and generate? With less disasters to pay for and clean up, less illness and all other good stuff to boot?)

All too true…

http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200605/df20060508.jpg

What’s in a name?

Been a while since I posted a rant.

So, just days ago, in the 2006 Farm Subsidy bill passed through the USA congress contains language that strips much of the meaning from the label of “Organic” on foods. Now, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the USDA’s standards for “Organic” were, already, on the whole, kinda lax. But this new bill eviscerates anything that could resemble rational meanings of the word.

GMO = Zero

From Cornell University: a study of root-shaking importance.

From the Wires

EPA To Drop ‘E,’ ‘P’ From Name
WASHINGTON, DC—Days after unveiling new power-plant pollution regulations that rely on an industry-favored market-trading approach to cutting mercury emissions, EPA Acting Administrator Stephen Johnson announced that the agency will remove the “E” and “P” from its name. “We’re not really ‘environmental’ anymore, and we certainly aren’t ‘protecting’ anything,” Johnson said. “‘The Agency’ is a name that reflects our current agenda and encapsulates our new function as a government-funded body devoted to handling documents, scheduling meetings, and fielding phone calls.” The change comes on the heels of the Department of Health and Human Services’ January decision to shorten its name to the Department of Services.

Suxxors!

As detailed earlier, last year was supposed to be the perfect tripple play of the Thunderbirds, Blue Angels and my beloved Snowbirds.

That, of course, didn’t happen at all. In fact, I didn’t get a single perfect out, due to mechanical and weather issues that threw wrenches into everything.

This year? The Snowbirds’s schedule hardly even brings them close to my current neck of the woods. Phooey!

Observation of the Vroom Kind

So, it’s been five years that I have resided in a state that is the true heart of the car culture. Prone to observation as I am, I’ve made an interesting discovery over that time about the ubiquitous speedy drivers. One that is a bit counter-intuitive.