Oh My!
So I’m watching NBC’s Nightly News via a podcast last night when Brian Williams starts telling us about an upcoming asteroid near miss. He very briefly mentions “We’ll be hearing a lot about this in the next 11 months…”.
To be fair, the asteroid will pass pretty close. 16,800 miles at it’s closest pass and that is an estimate based on what little data astronomers have acquired since Feb. 23 when it was discovered. Some info on 2012 DA14 can be found here.
The end of the sound byte stats: “The experts all say there is nothing wrong with making sure your affairs are in order.” Wow! Talk about news sensationalism! What a load of crap. (Sorry about the stupid ad pre-roll. It’s MSNBC’s fault.)
Here is a link to the video. (Sorry couldn’t embed it, thanks WordPress.com!)
I have learned to take what the talking heads on TV say with a huge grain of salt. This because when they discuss topics I actually do know something about, they typically get the facts completely wrong or way over hyped. Case in point, Google’s new privacy policy.
I usually head over to Phil Plait’s website, the creator of Bad Astronomy, to see what a true expert has to say. It’s clear that everyone who is any one in Astronomy is saying that it will miss us next year.
Even if it did hit us, from what Wikipedia says, it would produce an event the size of Tunguska impact. If that happened over a populated city, there would be huge devastation. However, if it hit unpopulated land or water, the event might go unnoticed.
So, to offset MSNBC’s scary graph behind Brian, I’ll copy this image stolen from Phil’s website:
So like over a million others, I downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview yesterday. I have since been trying to install it without it doing very strange things to my Mac Pro.
Since we cut the cord here, we have discovered several shows. Some we might have discovered if we were still watching cable, but maybe not. After all, we skipped pretty much all the commercials we could with the TiVo and the DVR that we got from Charter. iTunes helps out a little by offering free pilot episodes of many new shows. That’s how I found out about 
Dave M.
Is it really piracy if…
My question to ponder is: Is it piracy if the person torrent’ing a TV show is only doing so to watch it once, then he throws away the video file?
Sure, I understand Andy’s “counterargument” perfectly. It is my choice not to spend $115 a month for the privilege to watch 10 episodes of Game of Thrones. HBO doesn’t have to bend it’s way of doing business just so I can watch Game of Thrones for a much more reasonable price.
Apparently, I could just wait a period of time and rent the DVD’s when they become available on Netflix. However, even this is difficult. 5 DVD’s for 10 episodes? What in the world is on these DVD’s that only 2 1 hour episodes fit on a standard DVD? Even if there is bonus content, only being able to watch 2 episodes before having to send the Disc back to Netflix and wait for them to send the next DVD in the series, kind of ruins the whole “renting” experience. At least for me.
It would be much better is we could just stream the show, but that probably won’t be available for quite some time. Maybe not until after season two is finished.
I suppose I should just accept the fact that HBO doesn’t give a f**k if their shows are watched or not. So long as they get their precious money from cable companies like Charter, Comcast and the others, they are more than happy with their situation.
1 comment | tags: andy ihnatko, comment, counterargument, game of thrones, marco arment, piracy, torrent | posted in Blog Comment, Opinion