There is (was?) a pay-restroom right by the western end of the Charles Bridge in Prague, presumably to fleece the high volume of crossing foreign tourists. You pay the big beefy man sitting at the window, he hands you a few squares of toilet paper, and gives you a big thumbs up and a "Good luck!" What service. Ah, free enterprise.

Yeah, definitely not cool from the standpoint of visitors, but still highly amusing.

I've used vob2mpg, etc, in the past. However, I like the MKV format, and for my application, MKV is fine as the prime (really, only) use is from a home theater PC. MakeMKV was a simple, easy to use solution that just worked. If I want to put a movie on my phone, I'd shrink it anyway, so I'd convert it to MP4 at that time. (Likewise, it is simple to rip an HD disc to MKV, then Handbrake* it to a smaller h.264 MKV.)

As an aside, I've have TONS of issues with MP4 -- compatibility, non-seeking files, invalid streams -- and none with MKV. My BluRay player supports MKV too, for that matter.

*VidCoder, actually. Less headache, more options.

I wanted a home theater PC with instant-access to all of my films. My solution was as follows:

(a) Rip all discs to hard drive,
(b) Index and link to files with software solution

In detail:
(a) I chose to go with MakeMKV for most of my ripping. It rips the mpeg2/4 video directly to an mkv file, without reencoding, and you can choose all the tracks you want to go with it. (I.e., some titles I rip multiple audio streams and subtitles, some I take just English 2.0). For me, I just ripped the main title from each film; if I want to see the special features later, I'll take the box down off the shelf and pop the disk in. (Special features don't really matter to me that much.) Each rip averages 3 to 6Gb. Now MKV, while a great file format, isn't compatible with some (especially older) consumer electronics. You can always re-encode, if you really need to make a particular title portable. And for my Blu Ray / HD-DVD titles, I re-encoded anyway. I found a 1080P 6Gb-target-size h.264 two-pass re-encode to be indistinguishable on my 52" TV from the original. In fact, it's probably quite a bit of overkill.

  For storage, I have a couple of 3Tb drives in an external enclosure, with a duplicate unit for backup. (Got them for a song before the manic price gouging going on now started!.) So far, it's holding over 500 titles and several TV series, and plenty of room to grow. And I can always increase capacity.

(b) For keeping track of everything, I eventually went with Collectorz.com Movie Collector. I've tried many solutions, both free and payware, and Movie Collector was the one that fit my needs the best. (There is a lot of good software out there -- look around!) As I ripped my collection in my spare time, I simply scanned in the UPC on the back of each film using an old CueCat barcode scanner. The software then populates all of the data for the film. Once the film was ripped, I simply linked the title in Movie Collector to the video file on the hard drives. Now I can visually browse my entire collection and watch any title at the click of a mouse. And it's nice to be able to go, "Hey, how many Humphrey Bogart movies do I own?" and find out with a simple filter.

What worked for me might or might not fit your needs, but hopefully it gives you ideas.
   

Just to supply some more information:

The EU Treaty establishes four fundamental "internal market freedoms" which are the free movement of goods, services, people, and capital within the EU, without regard to national borders.

Article 28 of the Treaty affirmatively prohibits "quantitative restrictions" on trade. The court in du Roi (Procureur du Roi v Dassonville (1974)) found a "quantitative restriction" to be anything "capable of hindering, directly or indirectly, actually or potentially, intra-community trade." That's a very broad definition.

Article 30 exempts "Industrial Property" -- so, patents as defined under the Paris Convention -- but not copyrights under the Berne convention. If I recall correctly, that argument had been tried, and the Court found that the distribution right under Berne was curtailed by the prohibition on artificial partitioning of the markets under the EU treaty.

So overall it's not hard to see why the court would find such an exclusivity agreement to a single nation to be invalid.

>>
These days most employers have some boilerplate they hand out when you take a job that says they will do this if they feel it necessary. Really you should assume they monitoring you while you are on the job, if for no reason than protect themselves from things like that $2 billion loss UBS is stuck with.
>>

The point is that these were government workers. Your constitutional rights trump most of what they would ask you to waive. And courts have said that, say, your fourth amendment right require informed consent to waive, which a blanket waiver cannot satisfy.

I should have clarified. Yes, I updated the firmware when the issue became known and never experienced problems before or after, until now. I've run across threads mentioning that the first firmware released to correct the issue...didn't. Perhaps I nabbed that one without realizing it.

1.That's what backups are for.
2. I think that Seagate will fix it for you so that the data is recovered.

1. The video on the drive hadn't been worked with to be backed up yet; this is an additional 1Tb of raw footage. I've got 2Tb of completed video with a 2Tb backup already. And a crapload of DVDs padded by DVDisaster. I'm pretty serious about backups.
2. IF my issue was with the publicized bug, I've heard they offered free data recovery. If self-recovery doesn't work, I'll end up putting in a warranty claim and hoping its covered. Otherwise, it could be $300-500+, which I'd probably not pay. It'd just be a reaaaaaal pain to redo the recordings.

The bug is that if the pointer to the current log entry is evenly divisible by 64 (or some magic number like that), the powerup selftest code crashes and the drive never completes selftest.

Yeah, I remember reading a thread on ./ at the time from one of the Seagate engineers. I think it was something like, if the drive wrote a 360th log entry, but then powered off before writing the 361st, it got stuck. I created worse issues in assembly programming in college a decade ago, but thankfully my mistakes didn't make it to production. D'oh.

I've got a spliceable USB cable arriving tomorrow, so we'll see how it goes. Fingers crossed.

I have one of the Seagate 7200.11 drives I bought in Sept 2009 that had the firmware issue at launch. Never experienced any problem with it myself, always passed all tests, and SMART status was great. Night before last, it disappeared under Windows. I shut down, checked the cables, rebooted and...failed SMART on boot. I should have done some more testing then, but I rebooted to run a disk scanner (Ultimate Boot CD - hightly recommend keeping a burn around) and it stopped being detected by bios. That quick - no warning, nothing.

The disk spins up to speed, then clicks several times before spinning down. After much looking, I found several people who'd had a similar issue and were able to resolve it via the serial interface, so I have some test tools and cables on the way. Hopefully I can get it reset and accessible again.

It's still under warranty (5 years, thank god), but I want the DATA on the blasted thing and don't want to spend 10x its cost. I have redundant copies of the important stuff (family photos, genealogy research, documents, music), but have probably 60 hours of old family 8mm & VHS recordings on there I hadn't gotten time to go through yet.

Fun, useless fact of the day:
There's an old English unit called the Pottle that is two quarts. :-)
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pottle

I had a dream a couple of years ago in which I somehow stumbled back in time to the late 80s/early 90s. It seemed very real and was quite entertaining. However, I cursed myself for not being better prepared. (Hey, it was a dream, okay?)

In the dream, I decided that "if it ever happens again" I am going to make sure I keep a notecard in my wallet with all the biggest stocks, when to buy, and when to sell like crazy.

Warren Buffet, eat your heart out ;-)

It doesn't surprise me much. I went to school from EE & CmpE, but the department had absorbed the CS program and I knew/worked with most of those students as well. I would say that 50% of the CS grads were one-trick ponies. They could hack together a program in MFC and that was it. They've probably gone on to be managers :-) Day to day IT work (building computers, installing software, setting up networks, etc) is not taught in a CS program -- it is IT, not CS, after all -- but one does kind of expect people in the CS field to at least have a minimal IT competence, right?

There were, of course, a few CS people I thought very highly of and would hire in a minute, including a guy who I would definitely hire if I ever wanted to knock over the world's banks. (Seems like there is always one brilliant and misguided computer hacker in every class.) On the other hand, there were definitely some class anchors. One guy I remember asking me a question that floored me. Bear in mind, this came from a senior CS major, final semester, in an advanced compilers class. "I just read the project assignment but...what's a command prompt?" Really. He wasn't faking. He'd never done any programming in anything but a GUI, never done any manual debugging, and had only ever owned a Mac.

I changed gears for grad school (physics / nuclear) and then law school, but I always loved the low-level CS/CmpE stuff. Chip design, assembly programming (barring the x86 instruction set - blech), electronics/software interfacing. Kind of miss it, especially when I get some cool project idea in my head and have zero equipment to implement it with.

There is an amusing-yet-horridly-terrifying story about one of Fermi's fission experiments, which took place underneath a football field at the University of Chicago, early in the war. Now, at that time, fission was only a theoretical proposition; nobody really knew what would happen when a sustainable reaction began. (E.g., some people thought they would set the atmosphere on fire.)

The experiment that day involved the gathering together of the first critical mass of fissile material -- literally a pile of uranium and graphite blocks. To control the reaction, Fermi had a cadmium rod dangling from a rope over a pulley (and an automatic safety rod too, to be fair, that they didn't know would work). When the reaction hit the point of being self-sustaining, one of his colleagues would take an axe and chop the rope, dropping the control rod back in place to absorb the excess neutrons and halt the reaction before it was too late.

It's a fun read. "The First Atomic Pile"

I actually had something like that happen to me. I attempted to purchase a couple of tacos from Taco Bell back in college with a $2 bill. The cashier gave me all sorts of lip about not taking a "fake" bill until the manager came over and called him an idiot. I mean, it's Taco Bell, so I'm not expecting geniuses, but still...

In 2000, I purchased my last 3.5" floppy, and then only because it was required for a class project.* I think the last floppy before that had been a boot disk for Slackware, c.1997. By 1998 I was in college and had access to high speed intra/internet, CD-RW, etc. Once Win98(SE) didn't require a boot disk anymore, there was little reason left to use them. Heck, I got my first Digicam in 2000 as well, which came with a USB reader for the 16Mb flash card - great for small file transport too.

I did recently piece together a c. 2000 system with a floppy drive, just to copy over a big stack of old floppies I ran across in the basement. Quite surprised that all of my disks were still readable, but many commercial disks were not. (Including every single floppy for the Quest for Glory games. Glad I have those on CD.)

*I had to manually create a boot disk to boot the mini OS I'd written in the mini programming language I'd produced with lex/yacc. Fun class, buy way too little time to do everything.

Growing up in Ohio, some of the pronunciations for local places are horrible.

The first are mostly just anglicizations. Not awful, but sometimes quaint, odd, and hickish. There are a lot more that I'm forgetting.
Lima - "LYE-muh".
Ravenna - "Ruh-VEN-nuh"
Medina - "Meh-DYE-nuh"
Berlin - "BER-lin' "
Milan - "MYE-lin'
Vienna - "VYE-en-nah"
Bellefontaine - "Bell Fountin' " Ack.

Then they just get really bad and annoying.

Nevada - "Nuh-VAY-duh". Really. And most locals pronounce the state Nuh-vah-da or Nuh-vad-ah, so what gives?
Mantua - "MAN-uh-way." The Italians are laughing and Shakespeare must be turning in his grave.
Versailles - "Vur-SAILS" Ugh.