Other than the horrible grammar in the title, the first thing that struck me aboutthis article about OPEC cutting output:
”OPEC will do whatever is necessary to balance oil markets.”
Yeah, they were super concerned about balance when oil was almost three times what it is now.
The Seawolves won on home ice tonight, our first home game of the season. We beat the Charlotte Checkers 5-2, with two power play goals and one empty net goal. I’d say more, but I’m exhausted. The crowd was, however, strangely small.
I do have one note, though: Dear Parents of the bastard children who blew on those stupid horns the entire game. Please do not return to future games. That was ridiculous and these children were way too old to spend two hours and seventeen minutes blowing out a single note with their every breath. It sounded like a herd of horny male moose were in the arena. Seriously, control your fucking children.
Edited to clarify: It wasn’t just me pissed off about the kids — it was pretty much everyone except their parents.
Again, anyone who votes for Obama is not allowed to talk about Republicans being stupid. I’m pretty sure Bush can count to four.
Listening to the debate a bit and mostly, Obama seems like he’s floundering a lot and lying — “100% of McCain’s ads have been negative.”
He just seems like a whiner to me, but, whatever. It’s going to be fun putting the shoe on the other foot for four years and acting like the leftists have for the last eight on the internet — oh wait, I doubt we’d sink as low as Kos and DU. Either way, when all his little plans fall flat while he’s president, you can expect a lot of I TOLD YOU SOs from me.
Appaloosa was pretty good, for a cowboy movie. Mostly because I dug the big shotgun Aragorn carried around. My biggest gripe, honestly, was Bridget Jones’s face. Usually she only looks a little weird but all throughout this movie she looked like someone had been injecting her with bee venom between takes. Jeremy Irons was one of the highlights, to me, at least in the way he acted.
Quarantine was a pretty good movie with one major flaw: The camera is too jumpy. Even I started to get motion sickness from it, and I rarely get motion sickness at all. I know it was sort of meant to be jumbled because it was from a handheld camera’s point of view, but still. It can be too much. That was really the only problem with an otherwise creepy (if predictable) movie.
This sums up my opinion on music downloads pretty well. I will never, ever buy DRM’d music (sorry Apple) — I love Amazon.com’s music downloads, because they have no real DRM (they do, however, have ID3 tags that identify them and possibly the user; I don’t care enough to find out, as I don’t distribute my music so it’s not a problem for me). But a few examples of bad DRM burns: MSN Music, Yahoo!’s music service, Walmarts, the MLB ripping people off with video systems.
When you lock down digital files and then change the way the files are played, you are in essence screwing your customers. And DRM is only a problem for legitimate customers. I can’t say this enough. Pirates of all sorts are the type of people willing to get around DRM to play music, or watch video, or play video games. They have the know-how, or know people who do, and can break any system that you can come up with. If it can be seen, heard, or loaded into RAM, it can be ripped off. There is no solution for this.
If it can be enjoyed under any circumstances it can be pirated. Period, end of story. Bootlegging and the like will never be stopped. Ever. There’s no reason to talk about punishing the people that do it, there’s no reason to try and stamp it out, because whatever line is drawn, they will cross. Government cannot stop illegal trade of merchandise: Just ask the drug barons of the world. Government is not ruthless enough to truly stamp anything out. We can’t even fight terrorism harshly enough to eliminate the problem and scare people off of it. We certainly won’t stop music piracy.
Now that I got that out of the way.
As a consumer, DRM pisses me off. Trying to get a DVD to play in Linux? I can’t, not legally, because of DRM. DRM that doesn’t prevent me from actually pirating said movie in the first place — it just prevents me from legally playing a movie I paid for on my personal computer. I should be forced to use software I find abhorrent in order to view media I pay for on a PC? That’s ridiculous, especially when the DRM and DMCA give absolutely no gain to the content producers. CSS, the encryption scheme on DVDs, has stopped zero piracy. Every movie I own I could download for free from bittorrent, in many cases as a DVD rip without any DRM.
It just annoys people that legitimately bought their wares. And I know some (and I’ve seen this in the blogosphere and won’t name names) would like to blame pirates for this sort of thing, but it isn’t their fault. The media companies — specifically the MPAA and RIAA members — would like nothing more than to arrange for a pay per view system, and they’ve said as much. During the VCR hearings, Jack Valenti, then head of the MPAA, unironically compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler. Because people would be able to watch movies whenever they wanted!
Which is obviously communism.
As our culture evolves, we have more time for entertainment than at any time before, and entertainment becomes cheaper and more widely available — compare music now to music four hundred years ago. I would never have the access to such a vast library of beautiful music then. I do now, however. Technology lifts us up and improves our culture by improving our access to said culture, and it makes media cheaper to produce. These companies need to get with the program. It’s not like they’re hurting for money — stars still get paid millions upon millions of dollars to appear in movies, music executives are some of the richest people in the nation. What did the RIAA labels take in during 2007? 2008 so far? What about the MPAA studios?
The Dark Knight was available to anyone with an internet connection within hours of the first screening. I know because I checked out of curiosity; I didn’t pirate the movie, however, because I went and saw it at midnight (and then two further times over the course of the summer). Despite being available for free almost instantly, the movie made how much money? Worldwide, just shy of a billion goddamn dollars. That’s over 400% profit, and it hasn’t even hit DVD yet. It’ll probably make more money than God when it hits DVD. Yet it was pirated like hell. Because in the grand scheme of things, piracy isn’t the problem.
DRM probably costs more to implement for various companies than it’s worth in lost sales — and who knows how many future sales are lost over infuriating DRM (we’re looking at you Sony BMG, I see what you did there with the rootkit).
He’s Bob Dole II, and he’s going to get Jimmy Carter II elected. Hopefully, that’ll lead to Ronald Reagan II.
I haven’t been blogging much because this blog mostly started as politics, and I’m so burnt out on it. Plus, I’m busy as hell getting through everything with school as I wrap up my last real semester, and the whole girlfriend thing. I just find myself not giving much of a crap about politics — and part of it is because of how dire the situation has turned out to be. We have a guy running for president who wants an honorable campaign so bad he’s not willing to disagree with his fucking opponent. It’s just maddening.
And I don’t care any more. I don’t have the energy to make a difference, nor do I have the money. I’ll go, and I’ll vote, but I’m pretty much done with politics — at the least, I’m done with the Republican party. McCain wasn’t my last pick (Huckabee and Giuliani were), but he was damn close. And I was right to feel the way I did.
I like Palin a lot, and hope she’s our nominee in 2012 — a Palin/Jindal ticket would be enough to get me fired up again. But McCain just doesn’t want it bad enough and he’s trying too hard to be Mr. Middle and Mr. Nice. That doesn’t work with the media so far up Obama’s ass they can see the backs of his teeth.
I just went to a website and it refused to work without opening pop ups. Click a link, “Firefox prevented…” Yes, yes it did, and I navigated away. This is 2008; people have hated pop ups since they were invented. Why in the hell are sites still doing this? There is no point.
There are days when I want to browse the web with images, cookies, javascript, java, flash, and all that turned off, make a list of sites that I like that are unusuable, and then try to find alternatives. I’m like the crotchety old man on the internet. Get off my cyberspace! Damn kids and their flash and sounds.
It isn’t that I don’t appreciate it in a few ways — cookies are great when I want to log in to something and stay logged in, like G-Mail and Google Reader, or my word press account, or Youtube, which sort of relies on Flash. The problem isn’t the use of the tools — it’s the overuse. Pages using Flash that could be done in (X)HTML or even PHP, unneccessary garbage noises, etc. What’s even weirder is coming across a website that uses frames. Frames! I feel like I’m in the late 90s all over again.
I think my biggest pet peeve is probably also one of the (thankfully) rare ones — ads that talk. That right there is one of the primary reasons I use adblock. That, and flash advertisements. Second is definitely the over-use of Flash in general, followed by the rampant javascript heathenism.
The problem for me, at least, is that I’m a text type of person — I like to read information. All the flashy stuff just distracts from that, or slows down the page, or talks at me. That’s why I read so many blogs. Words. So all this other crap is really, at its heart, just an annoying distraction. I’m not saying don’t use these tools, but for the love of God — think about what you’re doing.
For the children.
Not quite yet.
The first exhibition/pre-season game is tonight. Two weeks from tonight is the first home game. I can’t wait. The team isn’t officially final yet, and I still don’t know where Torry Gajda went, but it looks like it’s coming together well.
Both of my Senators and my Representative (Gene Taylor, D-MS) voted against the atrocious bailout.
Thank the Jesus.
