Apple Takes a Stand on DRM

Steve Jobs at Apple writes Thoughts on Music today and everyone should read it.

DRM or Digital Rights Management effects us all and it is something that every American should be acutely aware of. DRM is becoming pervasively more and more a part of our lives and, if allowed to continue down its current path, will significantly impact the value that Americans will be able to derive from all media in the future. DRM serves to reduce the rights of Americans, not to enhance it. It is a step backwards. It is a step into 1984

Right now we stand on the edge of a brave new world. As Americans we can embrace this new world and step bravely forward into the twenty-first century and be a pioneer for the world. Or we can cling to the dark ages and hide our heads in the sand* and let the digital revolution count us as another casualty lining the shoulders of the information superhighway.

* I acknowledge that ostrich put their head in the sand to search for water and not to hide from enemies like children are often taught but I use this as a literary example rather like irony. Irony is used one way for people who understand the English language and another way (as coincidence) for people who study literature and cannot grasp the complexities of the lexicon. This, in and of itself, may be irony.

February 6, 2007: Josh Returns to New Jersey

Dominica ordered Chinese take-away for dinner last night so that was quick and easy. Oreo was still restless but he is feeling much better had he didn’t cough all day. In fact, he hasn’t coughed since first thing yesterday morning so today he gets to go back to daycare. It is really obvious that he is looking forward to getting back to daycare. He gets so bored if he is home too long. Once he is all rested up he really wants to get back so that he can play with his friends.

Min was playing Kingdom Hearts II when I got home. She managed to play for two hours tonight. She really loves the Kingdom Hearts games. We watched a little bit of The Family Guy and then Oreo needed me to take him outside. Boy was it ever cold. We ran through the park as quickly as we could so that we could get back to the warm apartment as soon as possible.

Once we were back in the apartment it was time to clean. It was a short evening since I had gotten home so late. It was almost eight by the time that I got home 🙁 So I didn’t get to play any Dragon Quest VIII like I had wanted.

Once we were wrapping up our cleaning spree I ended up getting paged out because of a production outage and I had to get to work. That was around nine thirty. I had to work a lot longer than I would have guessed that I would have to have. That made for a really boring night. I had to spend a lot of time sitting on a conference call to discuss the outage. I had to work until after ten thirty. So much for my evening. Then it was time to head off to bed.

Oreo was very excited to be going to day care this morning. He was up and out of bed without having to be asked and wasn’t about to let Dominica leave without him today.

I worked from home a little this morning, grabbed breakfast at Food for Life and headed into the office.

A diaper wearing, adulteress NASA astronaut drive from Houston to Orlando to abduct and maybe kill her illicit lover’s girlfriend! Now seriously, what kind of screening do we do in the US Armed Forces that we have these types of people in high ranking Navy, Air Force and NASA positions? Do we really feel that people with this level of immorality and mental instability represent the finest people to defend our nation? I don’t want these people working as janitors in our nation’s schools let alone flying multi-billion dollar research projects and deciding who to kill and who not to kill. Even in their regular social life the life and death decisions aren’t coming so easily. And isn’t a person willing to cheat on their spouse (to whom the made a pact before God) also willing to cheat on their country (to whom they made a pact before God?)

In Rochester news in the midst of a flurry of, well, flurries Kodak announces that it is entering the ink jet market. This is an interesting move that I can only imagine has some ties to the fact that a major printer manufacturer, Xerox, is located right across town and provides access to a large number of now out of work printer engineers as Xerox has gone through heavy layoffs just as Kodak has. Still, one has to wonder if the low-margin inkjet margin that is completely dominated by Hewlett-Packard is really a wise move for floundering Kodak. Kodak says, according to eWeek, that they will profit on both the printers and the ink but will sell the ink much less expensively than other printer makers do since other printer makers generally take a loss on the printers themselves and earn all of their profits on their ink (much like video game console makers.)

 

A study came out today that states that sixty percent of children are exposed to pornography online (and apparently a few of them weren’t even looking for it.) This begs the obvious question, of course, of what percentage of children are exposed to pornography offline? I mean seriously. Between skimpy clothing fads (often worn in school), school uniforms (practically the symbol for the porn industry) and beachwear – all of which fall clearly within the realm of pornography – not to mention television and print advertising, magazines put within improper reach, movies rated based on questionable criteria, etc. is it really possible that less than sixty percent of children don’t see porn in real life? Doesn’t this therefore mean that we are doing a better job of protecting our children online than we are in real life? The fact that people are upset by this study shows that we are living double standards. Just because the porn is digital suddenly we are up in arms but the naked people walking down the street are fine. It really has to be one way of the other.

Speaking of NASA Astronauts and children finding porn on the Internet, the newest laser sighted rape device (aka taser) is now available. Nothing like a device that leaves no marks and incapacitates your victim to make robbing or worse, easy. Now in pink.

Don’t forget to claim your long distance excise tax on your 2006 US Income Taxes this year! Finally – some of our hard earned money back!

Today while reading Wil Wheaton dot Net I realized that I am starting to recognize where he gets some of his ideas from when I knew that he was inspired by Monday’s XKCD cartoon in the first sentence of his post. I guess that this is “blog bonding” or something.

Josh arrived at the apartment around a quarter to five. The plan is to go out to dinner someplace tonight and just hang out so I am posting quite early so that I don’t have to worry about the daily. It is currently five and I hope to be out of the office by five thirty which will put me at home about the same time as Dominica.

February 5, 2007: Babysitting the Boston Terrier

I had to work from home this morning because Oreo is not going to daycare today. He was still a little sick yesterday and we don’t want to push our luck by sending him to daycare too quickly. I was super tired last night too. I went to bed just a little after nine and didn’t get up until around seven this morning! I did wake up in the middle of the night and was out of bed for a while and I was in bed awake a bit during the night so it wasn’t quite the full ten hour night of sleep that it sounds like but it was a lot of sleep for me either way.

Oreo wasn’t too sleepy today as he slept all weekend and he was actually pretty restless this morning. It was really obvious that he was bored while I worked. He paced around the apartment a lot and kept wanting me to play with him and pay attention to him. He was pretty much moping. When I took him out for his morning walk it was so cold that my breath was freezing to my mustache. This is one of those really brutal days for people living outside. We have a homeless man living in Military Park who has set up a pretty much permanent location there. I would have to say that he has been there for two weeks but at least he has one of those really nice super thermal sleeping bags that closes over his head and some plastic mats to lay beneath to keep him off of the cement.

I worked from home until noon and then ran over to Food for Life for a TBLT while Joseph got my car. The poor valets working in single digit temperatures! This is Joseph’s last week, though, he is heading for Atlanta this weekend. I bet he is really excited about that considering what a cold week it has been.

It was a busy day at the office. There has been a lot of work for me to do for weeks now and it hasn’t let up yet. I am starting to get some pretty serious eye strain and I have developed a twitch under my left eye that bothers me all of the time. I am looking forward to getting home and ordering in some Chinese take-away (we can’t go out to eat tonight since Oreo has been couped up at home all day and he was restless even when I was still there,) doing are mandatory “pre-visitor” cleaning spree and playing some Dragon Quest VIII. It is nice having a game console again even if it is an old one. Really we should have brought down the Dreamcast and hooked that up too. Maybe we will do that sometime soon. We still have a number of cool games on there that we want to play through.

I got stuck at the office a lot later than I had anticipated this evening. I had originally thought that I would get to leave around half past five as things had slowed down at the end of the day pretty much and I had one five o’clock deployment that I had to do. Well, that five o’clock deployment got held off until half past six! That is a long time to sit around waiting thinking that you might be done any minute. It was after seven by the time that I was able to leave the office. At least I made up for having to have worked from home for so long this morning. I actually put in quite a long day.

I got a hankering for white bread with butter and honey tonight. All of a sudden it just hit me. I haven’t so much as thought about eating butter and honey on bread in maybe ten years or more. I could not even begin to guess when the last time I thought of that food was. My mother use to make that for me when I was a kid. I didn’t have it much once I was a teenager or so but I definitely had it a lot when I was young. What a weird memory to suddenly have.

February 4, 2007: Relaxing and Playing PS2 RPGs

It is Super Bowl Sunday. And today I managed to make it all day without ever once even hearing who was in the game. And after the game was over I never heard who won. I heard nothing. Not a thing. And it was good.

Oreo got me out of bed early this morning to take him into the living room and get him set up in the sunlight. He has learned that sunny weekends means that there is a lot of bright spots in the living room for him to lay in and he wakes me up to take him out there. It is very cute. He spent the entire morning sleeping in the sun like a pat of butter.

I had office work that had to be done so I started on that and had plenty of time to work on it while Dominica slept. Today is mostly a relaxing day. Oreo needs his rest although he seems to be improving a lot. He only coughed once or twice all day and that was just in the morning.

We watched some DVDs today and Dominica played some of Kingdom Hearts 2. I got a chance to play just a tiny bit of Dragon Quest VIII but it looks like it is going to be a lot of fun. Dominica made sandwiches for lunch and we just stayed in.
Josh is coming out on Tuesday evening and is just planning on staying for one night. So we will be hanging out with him on Tuesday night. On Wednesday night Dominica and I also have some dinner plans. We will be going out to Mompou with a friend from the office.

We drove out to IHOP tonight during the game when we figured the world would be quiet. That worked out well. We were able to go out and didn’t have to deal with any number of crowds.

February 3, 2007: Video Game Buying Spree

As has become our habit on Saturday mornings, we got up late and went right over to Food for Life for breakfast. Occidental pockets and pancakes. Yum.

Dominica was totally exhausted today and spent most of the day napping. She was “sleeping” on the futon or in the bedroom for at least six hours after I got up and possibly quite a bit more. She pretty much slept until eleven, got up and we went to breakfast, then came home and went back to bed. I woke her up around six in the evening and then we went out to do some shopping.

We went north towards Nutley and got Oreo a humidifier (shaped like a cow) from Bed, Bath and Beyond. We went to GameStop to get some games too while we were out. Dominica decided that she really wanted a PlayStation 2 so that she could play games like DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) and Guitar Hero. They are pretty cheap now so we bought one and got Dance, Dance Revolution SuperNova with the dance pad and Kingdom Hearts 2 for Dominica. I got Final Fantasy X and Dragon Quest VIII for myself. I have never played any of the Dragon Quest series and this one is supposed to be amazing so I am really looking forward to it. I also got the only game that I am currently interested in for the XBOX 360: Enchanted Arms. There are a few games coming out in the future that look good like Blue Dragon and Assassin’s Creed but right now Enchanted Arms looks to be the only thing on the 360 that has any hope of being good. But Creed in going to be available on the PS3 so I am probably going to wait to get it for that as that will most likely be the primary platform with the best game play and graphics.

We came home and hooked up the PS2 and played a little of each game to try it out. I think that we are going to have a lot of fun with the system.