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.

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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.