Jon Alper's probably insufficiently humble opinion

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/are-f-b-i-warnings-on-dvds-really-necessary/?src=tptw

Pogue responds to a reader asking the perennial question about the annoyance known as the ‘FBI Warning’.

Every stupid little uncivilized incursion we tolerate because we just assume an annoying thing has to be that way, we screw ourselves by inches. If we know the real deal, we can make informed choices.

I am not a lawyer. I have authored (programmed though it’s hardly really ‘programming’) dozens of commercial DVD titles you have seen on offer at Netflix, Amazon or your local (if it’s still in business) Blockbuster.

Things you should know:

• The ‘warning’ is not imposed on DVD publishers by the FBI or any other Government Authority.
• The ‘warning’ does not afford the rights holders for the content on the DVD any additional legal protection. Copyright law applies regardless of whether the warning is there or not.
• Sometimes, the person who has presumed to ‘warn’ you doesn’t even own, or need to own, the rights to some or all of the content on the DVD you bought or rented.
• Whether the ‘warning’ is there and whether you can skip it is entirely at the option of the publisher of the disk and the person who authored (programmed) the disk had to go to extra effort to include it and to make it hard to skip.

This means they decided, the studio or producer of the DVD, to treat you like a child and warn you first. To tell you, with the disabling of controls, that you must watch it, even if you paid for the DVD. To invoke the fear of some faceless authority figure as implicitly in control of whether you had to watch it. To cow you into submission to media-big-brother while hiding behind the illusion of some special government stamp of power.

What can you do about it? Complain. Ask for refunds. Bill for your wasted time. Stop buying more of them and tell them why.

Hell, maybe there’s even some fun to be had finding out whether they had permission to use the FBI logo.

Ken Rockwell’s 9,27 post says, among other things:

“With all the discussion today, it’s astounding how few people actually take the challenge to try real photography and compare it to “digital”on the same scene.”

In reference to this example: http://www.kenlax.com/analog.html”

There’s a lot of good reason to choose film over digital and vice versa but the poor white balance and relative over-exposure of the digital capture on the left, vs the hyper-saturation of Kodak Portra VC film on the right isn’t really a meaningful comparison. Nor does the photo processor’s choices about the film and scan vs the digital image capture and any post get factored. This ain’t science.

But.. .Portra VC does make for a certain special and saturated beauty.

General Keith Alexander, who heads the U.S. Cyber Command doesn’t make me feel very good about the U.S. Cyber Command.

A comment on the above linked page says it very well:

“I’m not sure what’s so hard for the General to get about this. Either he gets a completely private network on private lines or he has a virtual network, and the technology for that is pretty well understood. He makes it sound as if some architectural restructuring of the Internet is necessary, and it makes no sense. BY LARRY SELTZER on 09/23/2010 at 19:08”

The question of how to secure critical infrastructure on the internet is….why is critical infrastructure on the internet?