Steaming Turd

I normally find the Intarweb’s treatment of the English language to be disgusting, but for some strange reason I am highly entertained by these two guys.

We knew it was coming eventually - it appears that it’s almost time to get that pen and paper or pick up that phone to get in touch with your Senators and Representatives.

The MPAA is trying to sneak the Broadcast Flag into a budget reconciliation bill. For those who don’t stay on top of these issues, the Broadcast Flag is a bit of data on over-the-air (broadcast) digital TV transmissions that would instruct your digital-ready PVR (think “VCR” if you’re not familiar with the term) not to allow you to record a particular show, or not to allow you to do things like back it up to a DVD, skip commercials, or rewind to catch something you missed. The entertainment industry would be able to set this flag, meaning that you would no longer be in control of your PVR and TV.

Suppose you want to watch the Super Bowl on your new HDTV, receiving an over-the-air signal (because digital broadcast, unlike the old analog broadcast, is virtually flawless and snow-free). You’re using your PVR to record it, because some acquaintance had the brilliant idea to schedule a wedding that day. Now, Fox (or whoever’s carrying it that year) and the NFL decide to turn on the Broadcast Flag, meaning that your rights to record the Super Bowl and watch it later are hampered in any number of ways - maybe you just can’t skip the commercials that suck, maybe you can only watch it once before it’s automatically deleted, or maybe you can’t record it at all.

This isn’t technologically obscure legislation that will only affect television pirates, as the entertainment industry claims (though the validity of calling it piracy when it’s being broadcast to the universe is debatable at best). This affects everyone who chooses to try to record things from digital broadcast TV. And it doesn’t stop there - the entertainment industry has already taken steps to ensure that they will have control over your TV watching habits if you use digital cable. They’ve abused the patent system and pressured electronics manufacturers to get on board with a system that only benefits the entertainment industry.

Now, today, it’s unclear how far this attempt by Big Media will get through Congress. The EFF is keeping tabs on the situation, and as soon as they find something out, I’ll certainly make another post here. Just be ready to call your Congresspeople when the time comes - it worked the last time.

May we please have a brief cone of silence in memory of Don Adams.

Let’s see…

1. Demonstrate your ineptitude at handling explosives combined with your childish insistence upon solving things with violence when your enemy is unilaterally taking the diplomatic path
2. Get ten of your supporters killed and dozens more injured, including children
3. Instead of taking the blame like real men, use your enemy as a scapegoat with zero evidence to support your accusations
4. ???
5. Profit!

It’s good to know that politicians sometimes do listen when there’s a real public outcry about something.

Do you remember Oregon Trail? If you do, then rejoice, because it’s available at Home of the Underdogs. (You may need DOSBox to play it.)

Anyway, back in the day, I always liked to put in the names of people I knew when I played Oregon Trail. Nothing was better than making fun of one of your friends for falling off the wagon and drowning in the river you were fording.

So, Jennifer, I don’t know if you read my weblog or not, but I regret to inform you that you died of snakebite on August 2, 1848.

On a related note: Here’s a nifty T-shirt.

At a press conference regarding the new moon missions slated to replace the Space Shuttle in the next decade and a half, quoth NASA chief Michael Griffin:

It’s a significant advancement over Apollo. Much of it looks the same, but that’s because the physics of atmospheric entry haven’t changed recently.

Avast, ye mateys!

I was working today on Flushplayer (first mentioned here), my replacement “viewer” for Flash animations that skips the blinking and crap and instead gives you access to a context menu containing the links found in the file. One thing missing was support for parameters passed in via HTML (through the “flashvars” property contained in the embed tag used to put the Flash widget into the HTML file). I added that tonight, and came upon a stroke of luck (though honestly, when I think about it, it makes sense). It turns out that when a Flash widget opens a link, it does it the same way I open a link in Flushplayer. When a Flash widget submits a bit of Javascript (like javascript:window.open) to the browser, it does that the same way - which means I don’t have to handle things any differently depending on whether it’s a normal link or a Javascript link.

The only two big things missing now are (1) an option that lets the user choose to forward the widget on to the real Flash plugin and (2) some heuristic for determining whether a string found in a Flash file is an actual URL or just a string for display purposes (there’s no real way to tell the difference without playing the entire Flash file instead of just sifting through for the good bits).

In any case, it’s practically ready for me to post up here for adventurous users to use. I’ve been using it myself in various forms of functionality for months now, and I’m glad I put the time into it. We’ll see if I get around to posting it sometime

A truck that I saw parked illegally today reminded me of a story I sometimes tell people about my days of riding the bus to and from my co-op job several years back.

One afternoon, I was on a bus headed up Fairmount toward South Taylor. Just before South Taylor, there are several parking spaces in the right lane (out of two lanes), forcing everyone to merge left until they reach the intersection. Anyway, this particular day, there was a UPS truck double-parked next to these parking spots. He had moved as far over to the right as he could without sideswiping anyone, and that was sufficient to let cars pass, but we were on a bus, so the driver faced quite a conundrum.

He opted to drive the bus onto the median, and drove that way just fine, getting most of the bus past the UPS truck, clearing by mere inches. Unfortunately, the engine is at the back of the bus, and part of the cowling sticks out several inches past the side of the bus. The cowling clipped the side-view mirror on the UPS truck and wrenched it around to the front. I’m sure the UPS driver was in for a surprise when he got back outside. I looked around, and everyone on the bus was exchanging knowing glances.

This makes me think, though. I’ve seen lots of delivery trucks of all kinds park in places that are decidedly illegal and that easily wreak havoc with the flow of traffic, but for some reason the emergency flashers cure all. But you never see any cops do anything about it. I guess the prevailing logic must be, “Hey, buddy, I don’t deliver stuff to you while you’re doin’ your job, so don’t write me a ticket while I’m doin’ mine!”

Or something.