Steaming Turd

So years back, I bought a Sony DVD player. Yeah, I was annoyed by things like UOP and region codes even before I got one, but get it I did.

It worked fine for the first six months or so. Then it started acting a little strangely, with the head doing unnecessary seeks. Then it started erroring out when trying to read discs, as if the disc were really dirty or scratched. This behavior got worse until eventually - a little over a year after I bought it - it stopped reading DVDs altogether. Sadly, this was a couple months after the warranty had run out, so I ended up with a large paperweight hooked up to my TV.

A bit of research on the web a year or two later (I’d long since replaced the player with a JVC one), and I find out that tons of people who own the same model of Sony player had the exact same problem that I was having. As in, exactly the same. We all just sort of grumbled and gnashed our teeth because the warranty had expired.

Well, fast forward a few more years, and I get a letter in the mail. The return address starts with “Sony DVD Settlement”.

Holy crap.

Yes, Sony got sued, and now they’re settling. They’re pointedly not admitting any guilt in the matter (the suit alleges that they engaged in deceptive practices regarding the problem), but they’re settling. The owners of something like a dozen different models of DVD player get their choice of (a) free repairs to their old player, or (b) a $40 voucher to Sony’s merchandising website for people who’ve already replaced the player.

Woot, a free $40. Most of the time, these lawsuits are a giant steaming load, but I’m sure I can find something on their website to blow $40 on.

That player was crap anyway. I like my JVC one a lot better, even though there aren’t any firmware hacks out for it.

This week, Spike has been running a daytime marathon of Star Trek: Vger episodes, in preparation for airing the series in their daily Star Trek block starting next year. Watching a few of these episodes has reminded me - at least, upon occasion - why this series sucked.

A lot of people say they hated Janeway as a captain, but I actually kind of liked her. Some people say that One of Two and Two of Two of Seven of Nine was gratuitous T&A, and she was, but most sci-fi series have at least a little of that. No, what was really bad about Vger was the writing.

Most episodes were horrible one-offs that had 39 minutes of laboriously building the suspense level, followed by 3 minutes of solving the problem through a deus ex machina plot device or an improbable leap in logic, followed by one minute of realizing that in the previous three minutes, someone had found and pressed the Magic Reset Button, restoring the state of the show to the way it was at the beginning of the episode, followed by one minute of closing credits.

Another thing that gets me about Star Trek in general (and Vger and Enterprise in particular) was the complete inattentiveness to any Star Trek episode that had boldly gone before. Canon is retconned on Star Trek more than any other series, and almost always in a bad way. An episode I saw today reminded me of just how bad this problem was:

Start of episode, Vger encounters some gigantic nebula gratuitously labeled as “Mutara class” (presumably to make the TWoK nerds happy). Janeway says to go through the nebula because it’s too big to go around. Harry says he’s detecting some strange radiation, and suddenly he grimaces with a tremendous headache. Rather than telling Tom to reverse course, Janeway and Chakotay instead tell Harry to shut up and go to sick bay for some ibuprofen.

The problem gets worse, as suddenly Tom is also incapacitated with the poo cramps. As people all over the bridge start clutching themselves in various places, Janeway and Chakotay stand there like bumps on a log.

Mind you that we’ve seen multiple times on Next Gen that you can pilot the ship by telling the computer what to do with voice commands. (It came in especially helpful in that really good Next Gen episode where Doctor Crusher is stuck on board an empty Enterprise inside a spheroid universe that’s 705 meters in diameter.) We don’t need Tom to suck it up and push the button to back up. All Janeway or Chakotay have to say is five simple words - “Computer, reverse course, full impulse” - and the problem is solved. No, instead, Janeway finally has her epiphany that “nebula bad”, and tells Tom to stagger his way back over to the conn and throw ‘er into reverse. Eventually, Tuvok has to waddle his way over there and do it, because Tom has pretty much keeled over.

End result: everybody has these nasty radiation burns on them, especially the one guy who probably would have been better off spacing himself two seasons ago, since a horrible death was inevitable for him. Seven of Nine shows up just in time to hold a tricorder over the poor sap and say, “He’s dead, Jim.” Roll opening credits.

Now, the ineptitude of the captain and her first officer would be understandable if it turned out that the episode writer had pulled a retcon and decided that you can’t tell the computer to change course by voice command. But twenty minutes later, the crew is in stasis pods to weather the nebula’s radiation, while the conveniently immune Seven of Nine is left awake to pilot the ship. On more than one occasion, she orders the ship to adjust its course by a fraction of a degree, by voice command. And what’s worse, the only reason she uses voice commands is because she’s apparently too lazy to push the buttons herself: when the ship’s voice command processor malfunctions and refuses to take her commands, she lets out a put-upon sigh and adjusts the course herself by pushing the buttons.

Ugh.

Terence at Fluggart posted a link to this article detailing what they consider to be the top ten underreported news stories of 2006. However, I have a couple of complaints about their article, as detailed below:

News Item 10, regarding the ePassport, a new form of documentation that uses an RFID tag to hold biometric data electronically: This story appeared on Slashdot (among many other places), and there is also information about that story in the Wikipedia article I linked above. One should note that the US is only issuing these passports to State Department employees and diplomats, and that they are currently only putting a picture of the person in the RFID tag. The breaking of the encryption (as far as I can tell from reports) does not permit someone to arbitrarily forge a passport, but it could allow someone to clone an existing one (in case you want to masquerade as your twin when you go overseas). Still, if you eventually do get an ePassport, you might take a few moments and make a tin foil hat for it to wear when you travel.

News Item 3, regarding a new law that gives the federal government more leeway in the use of troops to handle disasters where public order has gone out of control: This story was also reported on Slashdot a couple months ago (too long ago to go searching for the link), and I personally consider it largely to be FUD. The article indicates that Patrick Leahy was one of the only (the only?) people to speak out about the bill on the Senate floor, yet he voted for the bill. (In fact, the bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent, indicating to me, anyway, that Leahy’s trepidations were apparently not serious enough to deserve more than a few words to give Joy Behar’s conspiracy theorists something to chew on.)

The other eight stories I hadn’t heard before (well, for some of them, I’d heard some related stories, but not the story they pointed out).

Explain to me why it’s legal to kill some animals but not others.

So the RIAA justifies suing filesharers for several orders of magnitude above their actual damages by claiming that filesharing deprives the artists of much-deserved money. Then they say that the artists don’t deserve the compulsory royalties that they’re getting for special uses of their music, such as ringtones. Just goes to show you that the music industry is still one of the most corrupt industries in existence.

But who knows, maybe the artists really are overrated.

Never has such a large amount of ludicrosity been gathered in one place before. There, now that’s out of the way. What I really want to touch on is the following:

Austrian historian Wolfgang Froehlich, who served a two-year jail sentence in his home country for denying the Holocaust, did not read out his speech — which was handed out to participants — for fear of being jailed again. Denying the Holocaust is a crime in a dozen European countries, including Austria, where British historian David Irving was jailed in February for three years for denying the Holocaust.

Now, we’ve already established that Holocaust denial is stupidity incarnate. But why shouldn’t people have the right to be stupid? For all the complaining and threatening to move to Canada that people do in the US because of Homeland Security and the NSA, I’m thankful that we don’t also have the Thought Police to contend with.

Yet.

207 N. W. Second Street: an address that changes all the rules.

On the NOAA’s weather forecast website, they used this picture to represent “breezy”:

I know it’s tough to pick an image that conveys breeziness. I just found it amusing

1. A main thoroughfare intersects with a side street. The main thoroughfare has a left turn lane with no stop sign or signal. The side street has a stop sign. There is a car stopped at the sign on the side street as another car pulls into the turn lane such that whichever car proceeds first will cross the other car’s intended route of travel (see figure 1).

Which car has the right of way?

Figure 1.

2. A similar situation exists, except instead of stop signs, there is a traffic signal. However, the traffic signal is in flashing mode, i.e., the main thoroughfare has a flashing yellow signal, while the side street has a flashing red signal (see figure 2).

Which car has the right of way?

Figure 2.

Edit: I should mention (in case it wasn’t clear) that in both examples, both cars are signaling an intention to turn left.

Some of you may have heard of this incident in which six imams (Muslim religious leaders) who were traveling by plane were removed from that plane before takeoff due to several passengers reporting suspicious activity.

Now, almost assuredly, not all the facts are in on this case, but in the article I linked above, one of the passengers mentions her suspicions that the group of imams were actually trying to get removed from the flight in order to create a media circus. Whether or not that’s true in this particular case, again, I don’t know.

The particular case is not what I’m really interested in discussing, though. Hypothetically, if someone(s) behaves suspiciously in a fairly high-risk situation like traveling by plane, should they be detained under justification of “better safe than sorry”? What if someone’s suspicious behavior is really just bait to create controversy, by showing that the person was detained when they had no intention of doing anything actually wrong? In such a case, who bears a moral burden not to repeat their actions: the government officials removing the not-actually-dangerous traveler, or the person who fabricated a potentially hazardous situation for media attention (either for themselves or for some ideal)?