Having enjoyed the theatrical release of "Transformers," my wife and I decided to purchase the DVD upon its release. Tonight, we drove 20 minutes across town to the local store to purchase it so we could enjoy watching it again at home.

Upon inspecting the box, I noticed a little logo with the text "This DVD is copy-protected." Though I can find little online about the subject, the fact that the DVD may contain DRM above and beyond the easily defeated CSS caused me to sit it back on the shelf and walk out of the store without purchasing it. Movie studio executives can't be that smart, so let me be very clear: DRM cost you a sale. Josh wanted to buy it. Josh saw DRM. Josh didn't buy it.

Great Job MPAA! I am exactly your target demographic. I have disposable income, I made a special trip to a store to buy your product and your inclusion of DRM turned me from someone eager to give you money to someone who will tell everyone he knows *not* to buy the product.

By the way, there are already dozens of Transformers torrents out there. It truly makes one wonder: When will the massive media companies learn that they can only compete with piracy by offering a superior product at a fair price. Though this particular DVD was fairly priced at $15, the fact that it contains DRM instantly makes it inferior to the dozens of torrents of the same product available at this very moment.

I sincerely hope the product does not contain DRM as I would honestly like to own it, but Dreamworks won't be seeing a penny of my money until I know one way or the other.

For those of you unfamilar with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), check out Defective By Design by the Free Software Foundation.

Anyone that knows me know thats I go to great lengths to avoid using closed source software. Increasingly, I'm becoming aware of how limiting closed source hardware is as well. Take, for example, the Sirius satellite radio receiver I use in my car on a daily basis.

The designers at Sirius added a neat feature to the device that alerts you when a song or clip you've marked in memory comes on a different station than the one you are currently listening to. So, if I'm listening to Andrew Wilkow and a great song by Five Iron Frenzy happens to come on one of the Christian music channels, the device beeps and gives me the option of switching to that channel. My radio also allows me to pause content and resume listening to it later, so long as the radio doesn't power down. Unfortunately, if you are playing content delayed and you choose to respond to one of these alerts, it just throws away the remainder of the program you have cached and switches to the live broadcast of the alerting item.

A while back, I wrote a simple plugin for MythTV that gathers movie show time data from a SOAP web service provided by ignyte.com. The idea behind the plugin is simple: being lazy. A month or so ago, that plugin was accepted into the official mythplugins package over at mythtv.org. I can't take too much credit for it as its design is borrowed heavily from the great MythVideo and MythMusic plugins and ignyte.com provided the data source, but those of you who are lazy and happen to have a mythbox may want to check it out anyway.

Its not in a release version yet, but building myth from SVN should include it. For those of you uncomfortable with source code, it should be included in MythTV 0.21 (not due for a while). Rumor has it there are some bleeding edge deb packages out there that contain it, but I haven't verified this myself.If you do check it out, enjoy and let me know if you run into any issues.

Fark.com pointed me to an absolutely hilarious "The Daily Show" video clip over at Comedy Central. You can check it out on their site in an annoying media player window here or access it directly on my server. Its a "School House Rock" style view of the midterm elections, and its well worth the few minutes it'll take you to watch it.

TechCrunch has another good article today discussing a new product in the cell phone market. Newcomer Loopt is making waves by allowing groups of friends to track one another's physical locations via cell phone with automated alerts, mapping, etc. Currently, only Boost Mobile is supported, but other providers are rumored to be available soon.

I have to admit - the service does have some great legitimate uses such as parents tracking their kids, friends choosing to allow each other to be found, etc. However, it also has some startling privacy implications. Should Home Depot be told I just walked into a Menards so they can text message me a solicitation to use their store instead? Its certainly an interesting development.

Techchrunch has a story about Amazon unveiling their new Unbox.com online video rental/purchase service. So far, reactions to the service are underwhelming with complaints of high prices (Downloads costing more than purchasing the DVD) and privacy concerns.

Personally, I won't be using it at all due to my stance against DRM.

GeekPress has an entertaining refresher course on the common Logical Fallacies that always seem to creep into otherwise interesting debates. One thing I'd like to note is that the slippery slope logical fallacy is actually a valid argument in some instances - particularly in cases regarding legal matters.

Due to the impact of legal precedent, case decisions may have an important or decisive role in any or all future cases that are demonstrably similiar if not identical. In this way, it is logically sound to argue a "slippery slope" can begin when a legal decision is made. For example, if judge Y rules that action A is constitutionally protected, judge X may be required to rule that action B is also constitutionally protected if it is demonstrably similiar to action A.

This is one reason why I despise the suppression of speech in any form, even when the content of that speech is vile or dangerous. If the government can label something as "too dangerous to say," there is effectively no barrier to prevent them from labeling perfectly safe and logical speech that happens to go against their interest in this manner.

So, as usual, I've spent too much time on my bike to actually have time to post anything interesting. However, I thought the few of you who glance at this blog from time to time might be interested to know that I'm going Skydiving this weekend. It should be a lot of fun. Once I get back, I plan to start updating this little blog more often but I make no promises.

Update: Due to inclement weather, we were forced to cancel the skydiving trip. I hope to reschedule ASAP.

So, I went out and purchased a 2006 Yamaha V-Star 650 a couple of months ago and now the free time I used to spend blogging is spent riding. Don't expect much in the way of updates here, at least until the weather gets too cold to ride. I'll probably still throw a few links into the "Top Links" category each day as they are directly tied to my bookmarking system anyway and I *might* start discussing my bike on the blog if the mood strikes. I did just get new saddlebags...

The Fishbowl has an interesting article on a recent Washington Post screw up that may have allowed an anonymous source to be identified. The problem revolves around metadata attached to a photograph used in the article. Apparently, the photographer who took the photograph or someone at the post entered tracking information that included the small town the individual may live in. Essentially, they accidentally exposed that information to the world via the picture itself.

Quick read and definitely worth checking out.