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This really ticks me off. Quote:
"'On one level I think what Tom Cruise did was relatively minor considering the fact he wasn't endangering other people,' said Robert J. Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University."

Isn't he hurting people, though? He gives a hefty part of his money to an essentially insidious organization (Scientology) which kills people, attempts to destroy people's lives, and carried out the single biggest infiltration of the US government to date.

Make no mistake, Scientology has caused a lot of harm.

Spreading nonsense on TV, nonsense that may stop people from getting real medical care, is damaging. If even one mother refuses treatment for postpartum depression (a real medical condition) because of Cruise's words, and hurts her baby, then he's hurt someone. If someone is refused psychiatric care because of Scientology's zealous anti-intellectualism (like Gary Beals was, causing him to stab his mother to death), then these words do harm. What if people believe that AIDS is "a state of mind", as Jenna Elfman said in a magazine, opting for auditing instead of modern drugs? Isn't that harm?

Check this out:
Fox Web sites to sell movies
Most people these days have what's called "broadband". I wouldn't call it that, but what do I know? Anyway, most people either have between 768 kpbs (that's kilobits per second, where 8 bits = 1 byte) and 1.5 Mbps on their dsl or cable line. So, when digital downloads of music came along, it was no problem. An average user could go on itunes and download a 5 megabyte track in between 26 and 52 seconds. For a slower site, it might take 2 to 3 times as long, but that's no big deal.

That is to say, music downloads didn't push bandwidth any higher. But what about movies and tv? A typical LOL-HDTV distribution goes from a woeful 350 MB up to an adequate 700 MB for a 42 minute episode of some tv show. Realistically, any movie download would have to be at least the size of a DVD5, or 4.7 GB. That's 30-60 minutes at full tilt (meaning that the rest of the family has to suffer) for a tv show and 7 HOURS for a movie. Will the average consumer really wait that long?

Who here remembers all the jokes that went around about "buffering..." in the old days of dial-up internet? This distribution model, at present, is pretty damn far from on-demand. At the worst, it's far too annoying for the user. Not only isn't it streamable, but one would have to plan pretty far in advance what one wanted to purchase. Couple that with crippling DRM, and I just don't see this being adopted.

Two things could alleviate this: one is that we can finally upgrade our typical user's bandwidth to that of a first world country. South Korea is currently cleaning our clocks in bandwidth, and FIOS is basically a dream. Our upload speeds are ridiculously and artificially crippled, but download speeds could be significantly improved. Upload speeds become important if the media companies wisely decide to use a bittorrent-like distribution model rather than pay for every tranferred byte themselves.

The other thing that might be done is that you could leave your computer on all the time, and it updates as long as the computer is running, say during the middle of the night. This model seems to have worked ok for Steam.

Personally, I hope this development succeeds and spurs higher bandwidth in the US. As it stands, I have the same transferring technology as I did in 1997, whereas my computing power has increased at least 100 fold in the same time span. Something just ain't right.

Jessica and I are pretty enthusiastic about Chipotle, even though it's a 20 minute drive to get to one. So, they opened one of these knockoff Chipotles near us called Qdoba (Chipotle is owned by McDonald's and Qdoba by Jack in the Crack. It used to be called Zteca or something).

Barbacoa burrito aside:
A barbacoa burrito is perfection with barbequed seasoned beef, white cilantro rice, black beans, and medium hot green salsa all wrapped in a nice thin tortilla. yum.

Point by point:

• Qdoba's tortillas are pretty bad. They're tougher and thicker.
• Their meat is about as bland as you can make meat. None of the great chipotle flavor at all.
• Their rice is like rice.
• Their beans are ok. I've heard the pinto beans are bad
• Their salsa is disgusting. Seriously really gross. Bitingly tangy and thick.

In conclusion: skip Qdoba and plan a road trip to Chipotle.

ok, more small updates needed here. Not every post has to be a friggin treatise.

This is amazing:

One: Youtube is the awesomest fucking thing to have happened since google. Two: omfg chewbacca drums.

A few months ago I bought a reasonably large, reasonably priced monitor. It's a Viewsonic VA2012wb, a Costco exclusive. It looks really imposing on my desktop, and the picture is sharp and nice. However.

When I first bought the monitor, I had it attached to a fairly crappy GeForce 5200, or maybe 5250; I'm not sure actually but it wasn't very good. It didn't support the 1680x1050 which is this monitor's native resolution (and it looked like utter crap at the lower resolutions and incorrect aspect ratios that the card did support). But Reuben was upgrading his computer and I was getting his oldish but better-than-mine parts. Score. Except.

With the new card, the fucking monitor would not work with the DVI port. At all. It would work on VGA, and the newer card did support the correct resolution, but only analog. Grr. So, I "exchanged" it--returned it and rebought it with the fat wad of cash they gave me--and the new one seemed to work perfectly on the DVI port. Until today.

Because it is hotter than hell in August right now, and we were having a lovely electrical storm, the power kept going off. My computer is, supposedly, plugged into a UPS (battery backup, really), so should have no trouble; despite the relative dinkiness of the UPS, the box assured me that it should be able to power the computer for a few mintues. My monitor, because of its impressive size, I plugged into the surge protector (non-battery) part of the UPS, thinking it would drain the UPS too quickly to power the screen and the computer. So the power goes out, the UPS beeps, but the computer, judging by the lights, stays on. Except the display stays off, indicating that it is not getting a signal. So I shut the computer off, and turn it back on. And the monitor refuses to turn on, just like the initial faulty monitor had. Bitch.

Except, as an experiment, and because I want to buy a new video card anyway, I plugged the monitor into the computer that lives in the music room, and the monitor worked just peachy. Peachily. Hmmmm. What if... nah. But. Well. What the hell. So I carry the monitor back in and hook it back up to my DVI port, and reboot the computer. And the monitor works again. So apparently, if and when (if or when? what a stupid phrase, actually) the monitor stops working again, I guess I'll just, like, unplug it for a couple minutes and plug it back in again. And when that stops working I'm going to RMA the fucker. Hopefully by that time this model will be discontinued and they'll be forced to give me a better one. Because fuck this shit.