Must post. Can't think of title.

My fellow nerds have been raving relentlessly about Battlestar Galactica for the past year. I finally managed to watch the mini-series that spawned the show, and it was, as reported, really good. When I went to Mediocre Buy to buy a portable hard-drive to save my files from my Cornell owned computer I saw a copy of the first season of the show for sale for 50 USD. I almost bought it on the spot, and I would have if I hadn't just spent 130 USD on the disk drive. This is a lesson the entertainment industry needs to learn. Focus on creating good products. I liked the mini-series a lot, and most of my friends who watch the show say it's great. This can rarely be said about most science-fiction offerings nowadays, which are diluted by formulaic Hollywood excrement. Based on my viewing experience many of these offerings fall victim to managerial attempts at reaching a "broader audience", which take products that were never desirable to an average entertainment consumer in the first place and make them completely undesirable to the only audience that might have made them succeed commercially: hard-core sci-fi fans. Charge fair prices for your products. Fifty dollars seemed to be a fair price for ~13 hours of material, although what's fair can be a matter of perspective. The copy I ordered later ended up being cheaper. In general though, greed rules the entertainment industry. Here are a few examples. A few years ago - you may not remember this since the product flopped - a company started trying to sell disposable DVDs at convenience stores in an attempt to compete with movie-rental chains. The idea was that the DVDs could be purchased at a general-purpose store, such as a supermarket, drug-store, or convenience-store. Once removed from its packaging the DVD would begin to decay, and in 24 to 48 hours it would become unwatchable. The marketing gimmick was that it was just like renting a copy of the movie, except that you wouldn't have to bother returning it. The fat white men in suits then got together, and decided that an appropriate price for this product was about 150-200% of the price of a movie rental. Simply because "you didn't have to return it to the store". Now, let's zoom out a little. The entertainment industry spends a significant amount of money to research and develop a method to decrease the functionality of a product it already sells: DVDs. Then they attempt to sell the product at half-again as much as its almost-equivalent and well-established competitor, DVD rentals. Is this not absurd? Here's another example. A year or two ago I went on a Glenn Gould kick. I went to a record store to buy some of his recordings. Those familiar with the music market are likely to know that CDs typically cost between 10 and 20 USD. Well, every single Glenn Gould recording cost about 50% to 100% percent more then an "average CD". One might justify this but claiming that Gould was among the greatest interpreters of classical music in the twentieth century, so the premium is both legitimate and worth it. Others might point out that Glenn Gould died childless in 1982. Which means that this markup above the already exorbitant CD prices is pure windfall for the record company that happens to own the copyrights to Gould's recordings, and it will remain so for about the next 100 years.

*  *  *  *  *

The local video store is under the impression that I did not return my most recently rented movie. As a consequence of this they no longer allow me to give them money for the purpose of renting more movies. Enterprising as I am, I decided to see if there happened to be any services offering legal movie downloads. Apparently there is one1. When I attempted to visit their website I was welcomed by a friendly message informing me that the operating system and browser of my choice have been excommunicated, and thus unworthy of viewing their actual website. I was forced to reboot into Windows today, so I decided to take a peek at what the obedient users equipped with Internet "Arbitrary Code Execution Vulnerability" Explorer and Windows XP were shown. Apparently, one can "rent", but not buy, a number of mainstream movies, for about 5 USD. A handful of non-mainstream movies were offered for "purchase". I could even choose the file format I preferred:

1. Another is supposedly on its way - a company founded by Morgan Freeman in partnership with Intel. We'll see how that goes.

Go Team Go!

"I guess this means we've won the war on terror," said one exasperated FBI agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity because poking fun at headquarters is not regarded as career-enhancing. "We must not need any more resources for espionage."

Story at eleven.

Please make it stop.

From my cryptography textbook (emphasis added):

The procedure is usually attributed to Shamir and to Massey and Omura. One drawback is that it requires multiple communications between Alice and Bob. Also, it is vulnerable to the intruder-in-the-middle attack (see Section 10.1).

Now that's a mouthful, isn't it? Intruder-in-the-middle attack eh? Who would come up with an awkward phrase like that? Well, perhaps it was someone too obsessed with the politically correct revisionism du jour to realize that he1 was making a total nincompoop out of himself. For the uninitiated, the correct term is "man-in-the-middle". Which makes sense, because the two 'm'-s form a cutesy alliteration, and the phrase is two entire syllables shorter. 1. I'm allowed to say "he" because I know the sex of the author. So there.

Project Steve

Project Steve.

Seething Rage - Première Partie

I just finished unpacking. A few minutes ago I went out to the car to get the last crate of my stuff that remained in its trunk. As I hefted the container to my hips I heard a sound that promised immediate frustration and pain. I heard the hiss of the automatic sprinklers. For the next ten or fifteen minutes I would be unable to approach the back door of my apartment building without getting soaked. I had no choice but to walk around the building, which was an uncomfortable task considering the crate of books I was carrying. I also had to unlock two doors while carrying said crate, since I neglected to leave the front door unlocked as a precaution against this event. Being inconvenienced by others' incompetence, laziness, negligence or thoughtlessness really hits a nerve with me. The idea that something bad is happening to me without a purpose, for no good reason other than that someone else decided that they didn't care really frustrates me. A shrink would say, "Why, Peter, has anything like this happened to you before?" I will postpone a rant on the idiotic concept of a "lawn", and the environmental havoc wreaked by our excessive water use for a later day.

Puerto Rico, Part the First

My friends and I played an interesting board game recently. The game is called Puerto Rico. It is a building/trading kind of game, where each player takes the role of an entrepreneur. It has some interesting concepts. For example, most games have a fixed set of phases in a given turn. First you move, then you attack, then you buy new troops, and so on. In this game, in any given round, only a certain number of phases take place, fewer then the number of phase types that exist. Each round each player picks one phase to occur, and any phases that are not chosen do not take place. I thought this was pretty neat. One of the phases is the "colonists" phase. In this phase, "colonists" arrive to the island of Puerto Rico on a "colonist ship". These "colonists" are distributed among the entrepreneurs, who can use them to enable production on plantations they may have, or for buildings they may own. To top it all off, the "colonists" are represented by small, dark brown, wooden disks. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Making a historical game that pretends slavery did not exist does far more disservice to society than making the same game that acknowledges the events of our past. Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it.