The recent Star Trek movie was weird in that it was both a sequel, a prequel, and a reboot of the franchise.

My first HDTV had that option. By default (and oddly) it would overscan but not rescale, which lead to a frankly worthless black box around the whole screen. It was easily turned off in the menu, though.

My current TV does not. It does the whole rescaling/overscanning thing, and it makes using a DVI/HDMI hookup for my computer worthless. Luckily, it has a VGA port, even though it doesn't maintain the aspect ratio when scaling non-16:9 resolutions (another downgrade from the earlier set).

I miss my old TV so much, dammit....

It's possible, with some caveats. On the original model PS2, at least (I don't know about the newer revisions) it breaks PS1 compatibility. The games will run, but the display is scrambled. And the component cables are (or were, at least) expensive and difficult to come by.

Still, it is a marked improvement in picture quality, especially on HDTVs.

The EFF has withdrawn their recommendation because the developers of Haystack have basically asked people to stop using it pending their security review.

There's nothing dirty or questionable going on here. CRC has been criticized for certain things, they've taken those criticisms to heart and are attempting to deal with the problems, and in the meantime are warning people that their tool shouldn't be used until those problems are resolved. The EFF's actions reflect this, and nothing else.

They did look at it critically. Research 2000 was fired by Daily Kos before anyone noted any impropriety in the figures, simply because the numbers weren't matching up with reality. Shortly after this happened, Grebner, Weissman, and Weissman approached Markos with evidence of deliberate impropriety.

Does Daily Kos have a responsibility to not promote questionable information as truth? Of course, and they've apologized for the situation. But keep in mind that this information is only coming to light because someone with sufficient statistical background took the time to pore over the data. That sort of expertise is hard to come by, which is the reason why smaller media/news outlets contract out to firms like Research 2000 in the first place!

It's only relatively recently that there's been much interest in the science of polling. Before the emergence of aggregation sites like FiveThirtyEight or Pollster.com, it was extremely rare that you'd ever see this kind of statistical analysis of polling data. The traditional method of testing a pollster's reliability was simple trial and error over a period of several elections. Really, that's *still* the primary method. If anything, Research 2000 only got scrutinized in this case because of the issues with their accuracy that led to them being dropped in the first place.

For me, it's not really a partisan issue, despite the highly politicized nature of Daily Kos. It has more to do with the size of the media outlet. I would expect a major news organization with dozens or hundreds of employees, like Fox News or MSNBC, to be able to detect problems like these very quickly. A relatively small blog with maybe a dozen part-time employees like Daily Kos, or Red State, or whatever, I'm more willing to give a pass. At least at first: I'd expect Markos to learn his lesson from this and be more proactive in ensuring that it doesn't happen again.

"Kleenex" I'll grant you, but I've never heard "Hoover" used as a verb in an American context. It's always just been "vacuum." The only people I've ever heard use it as such have been British.

Although, come to think of it, I haven't actually seen a Hoover-brand vacuum cleaner in ages. But I've yet to hear anyone talk about "Kenmoring" or "Dysoning" their carpet, either.

I'm wary of treating the concept of "lost sales" too seriously for precisely the reasons you state. It's too nebulous an area to make a straightforward connection between a pirate and a legitimate customer. Of course, let's not fool ourselves: I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would have ultimately paid for the movie who didn't because they downloaded it illegally. But I don't trust rights holders when they make the argument that because n number of people downloaded their work without permission, they lost n number of sales.

Ultimately, it should be a moot point. Copyright infringement is a crime, and it should be punishable to same level as any commensurate crime. I don't doubt that financial damage is done to the rights holders by piracy, or even that it's significant, but I still think there's a definite tendency to exaggerate the impact. And I think that's dangerous, because it leads to over-the-top legal responses like the DMCA, which punish the innocent just as badly as the guilty.

Sure. I'm not certain where you got the idea that I "don't give a shit." But not all crime is theft, and piracy is not theft in the same way that trespassing is not theft, or murder is not theft.

It's quite possible to condemn an action while recognizing that it's being misrepresented. And I think most people would agree that theft is the worse crime, from a moral standpoint, than piracy: it has all the same negative repercussions to the rights holder and additionally deprives him or her of a copy. There are degrees of both immorality and illegality.

If it makes you feel any better, I didn't like The Hurt Locker when I saw it in theaters. So I wouldn't have pirated it in the first place.

You're undoubtedly right that there's a good amount of rationalization at work here. If nothing else, there are probably a good number of people who probably wouldn't have thought about the movie at all who are now predisposed against it. But I think it's easy to make the mistake of assuming that the same people who were praising the movie a year ago are the same people critiquing it now. It's just as possible that we're talking about two entirely different demographics with two entirely different takes on the same movie.

That said, I can't help but feel a little sorry for all the folks who are now being sued for pirating a movie that they didn't like. :-)

If it were theft, every pirated copy of the movie would have to come at the expense of a copy that could otherwise have been legitimately purchased. If I break into a store and steal a DVD, that's theft. If I break into a store and meticulously copy the DVD, it's not. File sharing is closer to the latter case than the former (although without the whole trespassing/breaking and entering aspect).

That's not to excuse piracy, mind you: copyright infringement is still illegal and (depending on your ethics) possibly immoral as well. But there's been a long-standing and deliberate effort among content producers to confuse copyright infringement with theft and it's not really hard to see why. Even if you feel that both crimes are inexcusable, theft is clearly the worse of the two. Plus, there are plenty of people out there who aren't familiar with the particulars of intellectual property laws who know about theft.

In short, it's a PR move. And while I certainly don't begrudge producers the right to protect their property to the fullest extent of the law, I personally prefer to call a spade a spade.

That's not technically true. In practice, there's little motivation for rights holders to go after downloaders/leechers and they generally don't do so. But they would be legally justified in doing so if they so chose.

But we're talking about BitTorrent, anyway, so it's probably reasonable to assume that there are no leechers, given the way the protocol works.

BitTorrent is peer-to-peer. Unless you've run through some unusual hoops, by downloading something over BitTorrent, you're uploading it at the same time.

If the suit was being filed against Usenet or IRC downloaders, then this would be a valid argument. As it is, the plaintiff is right about this.

Technically speaking, downloading a copy of a movie you already own may be illegal, but it's extremely unlikely that anyone will sue you for it. If they could even track you down in the first place.

But the issue here is that BitTorrent isn't a download tool: it's a peer-to-peer protocol. By default, while you're downloading any given file, you're also uploading it to others. And even if you have a legal copy of the work in question, you don't have the legal right to make it available to those who don't.

I've never tried green eggs and ham, but I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.

Well, then I suppose it's a very good thing that "a centralized healthcare system" was never under debate. The current deliberations started with a government-administered insurance plan that would compete with the private industry in order to exert pressure through competition. And even that's been off-the-table for months now.

American exceptionalism rears its head again. Our economic situation isn't great, but we're by no means the worst off in the world, nor do we labor under the greatest deficit. That other nations can manage it doesn't necessarily mean that we can manage it, but it suggests that a close evaluation may be in order.

Besides which, the cost question is a bit misleading. Our current health care industry is eating a huge chunk of our economy, and growing larger all of the time. Part of the point of reform is to stem that growth in order to save the country money: the long-term savings offset the upfront costs. Or so the argument goes, and so the CBO has found each time a new revision of the bill gets punted off to them.

There has been no credible mechanism for reforming the system without government involvement. Every one of the "alternatives" put forward has been, frankly, a joke. Tort reform? A handout to wealthy interests that would slice down only about 2% of the cost problem. Health savings accounts? Works very poorly for chronic conditions. Interstate competition? Fine, so where's the framework to prevent abuse when insurance providers flock to the state with the least regulation? The federal government would need to regulate as a matter of interstate commerce, but if the stated goal is to prevent "bigger government," then they're hardly going to be able to do a decent job of it.

The question of whether or not you should "trust" the government is a red herring. The issue at stake is that private insurance has proven that they cannot be relied upon to police themselves (nor, honestly, should they be expected to), and that the normal rules of supply and demand that might keep problems in check are too easily abused when dealing with something as essential as health care. Under the circumstances, the government is both more accountable and more responsive to the public, and increased government oversight is preferable to the status quo.

Is it a perfect solution? Maybe not. But this has been a public policy issue, on and off, for fifty years, and has dominated all other domestic policy items for almost a year now. It's not been rushed, and the parameters of the debate have been readily available to anyone who cares to look for them. And the "no bigger government" argument continues to spout the same old dubious talking points and non-sequiturs. It's not an argument being made honestly or in good faith.