Actually I'd love to read up on the speech jammer. I've often had my cell phone do the very thing. Repeat my words with a slight delay and it is nearly impossible to hold a conversation while listening to myself a half second later.

I've far too gorram many movies that already lock me out of the controls until I am forced to watch the government warnings, the anti-piracy commercials, the advertisements for the Blu-Ray format and how spiffy it is, the coming features...

I have one disk that literally forces me to sit there for 15 minutes before I can get to the menu, another 20 seconds of the menu's fancy-dancy artwork to finish, then another 15 seconds of the studio's bullcrap.

And they wonder why people go to piracy?

In my case I found a nice way to get around it. Quasi-legally in fact. And the idea came from the DVD/Blu-Ray Piracy software sector. When I found out that the software to defeat the copy-protection and the region encoding also defeated the control lockouts, I did my research and found one that was cheap and works. I went with Slysoft's AnyDVD software.

Now when I built my Media Center PC with the Blu-Ray drive, I have that program running. *If* I were to be pirating the movies, this program allows the next program (a ripper/compression/burner) to do its job. But as a nice side effect it deactivates the lock-outs and allows me to load a disk, bring up my DVD Software (VLC) and go straight to the menu. The only wait I have now is if there is the studio promo but I can tolerate 5-15 seconds as long as I'm not forced to watch 20 minutes of crap.

And this is why it's not going to make much of a difference. Either they're going to go up against people like us who are tech-savvy enough to do the same thing that I did and tell them to slag off, or they're going to up against pirates who are going to rent the movies from Blockbuster/Netflix/Redbox and burn copies (assuming that they just don't download .ISO's from The Pirate Bay).

Or they're going to shoot themselves in the foot by pissing people off to the point where they stop getting DVD's altogether and start using the online streaming providers. Between Netflix and Blockbuster's streaming services...I can get most of the movies and shows I want without having to worry about DVD lockouts and government warnings.

And there is the added benefit of watching over and over again and not having to worry about a physical disk to get scratched.

If they want to price storage out of the hands of the end users and thus cripple themselves then more power to them.

A tax like that is not going to do a damn thing for them because people won't be able to afford them and will either do without (and we get to read many MANY articles about how their aging tech running their government goes "tits up" on them) causing the government to not get any money or they find ways to smuggle the hard drives in on the black market also denying the government their tax money.

Either way this will be of vast amusement to us here on /.

Digital monkeys flinging digital poo at us.

Oh well. It would still be better than Trade Chat in World of Warcraft.

Didn't one of the earlier versions of "Journey to the Center of the Earth" involve a Dane with a duck?

The elephants can be used to stomp on the caine toads.

I can not remember which Science Show I was watching at the time but I learned that it was the lower frequencies at least in the early 2000's.

While I'm not sure if they mentioned the specific 2k-4k range, they had broken the noise into low, mid, and high frequencies and did a test with people listening to the noise. While some did flinch at the higher frequencies, most reacted to the lower range.

So unless they took almost a decade to isolate the specific frequency range...is this really new?

I wouldn't mind the campaigning if it wasn't for all the "I'm not going to run a smear campaign" then turning right around and start running a smear campaign.

Honestly I think it's a requirement that they have to break that campaign promise or they're not eligible to run for office.

And after a while you just get sick to death of the "My opponent kicks puppies" and the "Oh yeah? Well MY opponent whips babies with live rattlesnakes" ads everywhere.

Makes me glad I don't have television anymore.

Actually I'm fine with their decision. My media setup involves a dedicated Blu-Ray/DVD player, the media PC which has a Blu-Ray drive in it, and the PS3 which has a Blu-Ray drive in it. All of them hooked up to my home theater system and my 40 Inch LCD HDTV.

I really don't NEED "yet another Blu-Ray player".

Redundancy is nice and all but really.

The simplest solution that I can think of is to use an authenticator system.

That way the passwords can be as simple as the users want, they do not have to be changed every 90 days (the duration of a password in our facility) and with the code changing every 60 seconds, it means that even if they somehow managed to snag your passwords, they can't do anything with them.

And I know that such a system is not fool-proof. But until someone develops a way to break that system it may be the simplest and the best solution for now.

Couldn't think of anything intelligent to say so you have to nitpick the language? Sad really. You're like the little 5 pound yippy dog who barks at the big 200 pound Mastiff from the safety of his fenced in yard because you know that they can't get to you.

Bark away little yippy dog...bark away.

Don't care really. Since the recovery partition usually contains the data needed to recover the hard drive to its bloated, choked and drowning in useless crap state, I'm better off without it. In fact that's where I store a local copy of my PING backup so I can recover my kid's computers when (not if...WHEN) they download something and really shag it up good and proper. And if the hard drive itself goes tits-up I still have my PING recovery DVD's I made as a backup

My bad. At the hospital we use Desktop PC's except for the areas where we need mobility and we use laptops on rolling carts and more recently the Pellham Sloane PC's on Howard Medical mobility carts with built-in batteries.

For those machines, we're using an application called Cerner which is a web-accessible, citrix application with the hosting computers (and all the data and the backups, and everything) located at the remote facility. So there is no need for the nurses and the doctors to have anything saved on those machines be they the desktops at the observation areas and nursing stations, or on the mobile units.

The administrators on the other hand need things like Office and have non-EPHI data stored on their local machines. We encourage placing the data on the RAID where it'll be protected and backed up...but some just do not and thanks to the administration, this is not something we can force.

Already using it at home and on the servers at the hopsital. It works, it works well, and it's free. Can't beat that with a stick.

This is why whenever I buy a computer or a laptop, the first thing that I do is to slick the damn thing and install the operating system as I see fit.

Whether this be Windows or some flavor of *nix, I just wipe out all the partitions and install from fresh.

I learned that lesson with an HP laptop I bought in 2005. No matter what I did, no matter what I uninstalled, I could not get more than 45% of my hard drive free.

I did a fresh load of XP and low and behold, I was only using 10% of the drive with Office, XP, my music files, a couple of games and my applications in my "Must Have" list.

Ever since, I do this on all of the ones at the hospital. I made a fresh load version for every configuration we have and I keep an image saved on our servers. Since we don't allow anything to be saved on the local computers that are on the hospital floors (our way of enforcing HIPPA on our electronically protected health information (EPHI)), this means that if someone sneaks online and lets slip in a virus, I can just wipe-restore from the network, run updates, and the computer is back in business in usually less than an hour. Less than 15 minutes in some cases.

For administration PC's, it's a bit longer. I have to backup their data first and then slick and reload. Then I have to put the data back. So that's more in the 30-90 minutes category.