Extremely Lame

People always complain about the nanny state in the United States, the grotesque amount of video surveillance that goes on in the United Kingdom, and the love of censorship that’s seemingly inherent in Australia’s government. I think we may have found something more onerous than any of those. Congratulations, Australia, you’ve finally made it to the big time.

Apparently, the Australian government is in negotiations with the U.S. music industry to broker a deal where you could be thrown in jail “for being in possession of commercial-scale quantities of copied music” when you come into Australia and are forced to give up your laptop and iPod for inspection.

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One of the things about the Information Age that is good is how it’s empowered the little guy to do things that once only giant companies were able to do before. Of course, that’s also one of the bad things about the Information Age. But I digress. Movies that died an untimely death due to [...]

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I’ve finally got FiOS installed, and I’ve got to say, so far I’m extremely underwhelmed by the experience.

First off, the modem is now installed in my bedroom, so now I have to rely on 802.11g to transmit stuff. Not even 802.11n, that sucks. Connecting FIOS to wireless is like taking a fire hose and throttling it into a garden hose.

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Well, it’s official. Jack Thompson has gone off the deep end. A judge has reviewed a complaint by the Florida Bar Association leveled against anti-video game crusader Jack Thompson and recommended that he be found guilty on 27 of their 31 complaints.

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DRM stands for Digital Rights Mangagement, but what it really is is a draconian method of copy protection.  It is supposed to prevent people from copying it and distributing it to everyone willy-nilly, but it unfortunately goes a lot further than that in its agressive war against consumers. Basically it hinders a consumer’s ability to [...]

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As Rock Band has been out for some time, Harmonix is finally starting to release their first complete albums as downloadable content, starting with Judas Priest’s Screaming For Vengeance, then eventually The Cars by The Cars, Doolittle by The Pixies, and the coup de grâce for me, Who’s Next by The Who. At $15 bucks [...]

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Ever since it’s come out, people have been lamenting Windows Vista as a collossal failure and just a big pile of suck overall. I’m not going to argue the failure part, as that much seems apparent. The big pile of suck part? I’ve got some issues with that.
I’m not going to say it’s the best [...]

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In news that pretty much everyone here in Dallas already knew but couldn’t prove,  Ars Technica has an article up that shows that red light cameras that ticket people for running red lights have not reduced traffic accidents. It seems that quite the opposite is the case. They, in fact, actaully cause more rear end [...]

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Yesterday I went to Circuit City to pick up a couple of DVDs I’d misplaced and hopefully an HDMI cable to connect my laptop to my EXTRA BIG ASS TV. The DVDs were no trouble. The cable, on the other hand? What a ripoff. The cheapest cables they had were over fifty bucks, and those [...]

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In the beginning, there was QuickTime. A media player designed to play Apple’s proprietary formats on their proprietary computers. Shortly afterwards, it was released for Windows computers as well, so they could easily watch things in these formats as well.
Then came iTunes. This allowed you to easily sync up your Apple iPod to your computer. [...]

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