MPAA WHAT?

From this article:
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2006/11/home-theater-regulations.html

MPAA Lobbying for Home Theater Regulations
By Scott Small

Los Angeles , CA - The MPAA is lobbying congress to push through a new
bill that would make unauthorized home theaters illegal. The group
feels that all theaters should be sanctioned, whether they be
commercial settings or at home.

MPAA head Dan Glickman says this needs to be regulated before things
start getting too far out of control, "We didn't act early enough with
the online sharing of our copyrighted content. This time we're not
making the same mistake. We have a right to know what's showing in a
theater."

The bill would require that any hardware manufactured in the future
contain technology that tells the MPAA directly of what is being shown
and specific details on the audience. The data would be gathered using
various motion sensors and biometric technology.

The MPAA defines a home theater as any home with a television larger
than 29" with stereo sound and at least two comfortable chairs, couch,
or futon. Anyone with a home theater would need to pay a $50
registration fee with the MPAA or face fines up to $500,000 per movie
shown.
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"Just because you buy a DVD to watch at home doesn't give you the
right to invite friends over to watch it too. That's a violation of
copyright and denies us the revenue that would be generated from DVD
sales to your friends," said Glickman. "Ideally we expect each viewer
to have their own copy of the DVD, but we realize that isn't always
feasible. The registration fee is a fair compromise.

The bill also stipulates that any existing home theaters be
retrofitted with the technology or else the owner is responsible for
directly informing the MPAA and receiving approval before each
viewing.

What the heck are they thinking?
1) Aren't they "not acting early enough" on this too? Even I have a
screen larger than 29", and I don't even have a TV! What about
Conference Rooms at work? what about people with the 30" Mac screens?
2) They want every one of our friends to own the DVD so they can come
watch it? I bet they want rental places to go out of business too.
I've seen tons of movies, but we don't own a single DVD.
3) How do they expect to enforce a retrofit of millions of TVs and
homes. Maybe they want to put a camera in evey living room. How bout
planting a bug in every DVD case, so they can track them with GPS.

Someone elect somebody who will stand up to this! Now! Call your
congress critter!

Random mail archive

Basically, I got a piece of spam today, and decided to see how many versions of it google can find. Google Results 1.
The first result looked interesting: Nokia mailing list archive of similar message.
Changing the message number gave an amusing cross section of the kinds of spam that this particular mailing list gets. This is apparently some kind of developers list that seems fairly open, and around the 800th message, they got put on a spam list. Going up a few levels revealed some more archives, which may be amusing for someone to look through. I'd love to see some comments posted about what was found.

See also: http://www-nrc.nokia.com/mail-archive/ext-ip-location/ starting at message 803, the signal to noise ratio goes haywire.

Avacado Sushi

Bought a book for my wife two Christmases ago. Been having sushi quite a bit since then. Hard thing to do is find a good source of nori (seaweed).

See more progress on: learn to make sushi

If not the end, at least the fixing

I can't tell you how many things are broken in IE. I currently use Firefox, and it's great. A few crummy sites won't render properly in Firefox (because the site does not follow established standards) and I have to use IE to do anything on the site. All of my online banking works in firefox though.

Long live W3C compliant browsers!

(See more progress on "witness the end of IE"...)

Damn Flu

Waking up at 4:30 in the morning throwing up really sucks. One good day of sleeping it off should fix this, right?

(See more progress on "get over being sick"...)

Just before College

I got to spend two weeks in Japan, four days in Kyoto, and ten in Shichigahama, which is my old town's sister town. Japan was great. I think I was most impressed by the street braile. I used it for about three blocks walking around in Sendai. Once you get used to it, you can get anywhere.

In Japan, they look at you oddly when you take steps two or three at a time.

(See more progress on "Visit Japan"...)

Crazy night last winter

I don't remember exactly when, but Boston got to see some of the Northern lights last year. There was this faint deep red tint to the sky, and it wasn't smog or sunset. It was darn cool. I want to go to Alaska and see them there.

(See more progress on "see the northern lights"...)

Just starting out

I managed to get my Palm to send email to my blog, so I can write on the go without an internet connection, but I haven't done it yet. Now my blog is mostly populated with things I want to do from 43things. (see link below for more on 43 things). I guess that means I have two blogs. Three if you count my home server (which is down right now because PostNuke won't talk to MySQL all of a sudden). AND I'm trying to make tiki-wiki work with my site too, and I'm just not getting it. It's hard to keep motivation sometimes.

(See more progress on "Be a better blogger"...)

Chuck it!

I've never owned a TV (my parents having one doesn't count), and after getting married, I have much more intereting things to do than TV or video games.

Current hobbies:
Photography (esp. spherical panoramic)
Geocaching
Electronics (designing my own stuff)
listening to podcasts while commuting

Why would I want to waste time with a TV?

(See more progress on "live without a television for a year"...)

Moved to Seattle

I took I-90 straight from Boston to Seattle, and WOW, what a trip. Did a couple quick detours (Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone) and skipped a few (Wall Drug) Made it 5 days with everything I own. Tip: if you do this in the summer, avoid the two weeks around Sturgis!

(See more progress on "Drive across the USA"...)

2 years next week

Getting married is a great thing. Knowing that you get to see the same person every day, knowing that life is more stable with two people working, and having someone to help you get up in the morning.

Another great thing about marriage is sharing excitement with your spouse. If I design something cool (even if it only really blinks lights in a fancy way), my wife will be excited and ask me how it works. It's great.

(See more progress on "get married"...)

Test post

I am doing 43 things.