The LA Times has an interesting story about Warner Bros.' attempts to prevent early releases of pirated copies of The Dark Knight. In it, a consultant for the entertainment industry says “If the movie's a stiff, and word gets out too early that it's a stiff, it's devastating to the business model”.

No, this does not surprise me. After all, studios are in it for the money, and with lousy movies, they want to recover as much as possible to limit the disaster. But still, what a way to treat your customers. They don't care if you enjoy the movie, as long as you pay for it. When I think about it though, a bad experience has a much worse effect on me than just reading about other people's disappointments. When I left the theater after actually watching the entire Ang Lee Hulk movie (also mentioned in the article), I felt cheated. To such an extent that I now even wonder if I should even watch the new Incredible Hulk movie. In fact, I may even be more likely to just download it, to limit any possible mental “damage” from paying for another bad movie. Had I avoided the 2003 movie because of the bad reviews, I would be more open-minded about the 2008 movie. Maybe that is just me though.

This whole approach makes me wonder though. It must be pretty easy for studios to pull this off. They don't have to account for anything, nobody will personally “attack” them for this. It's not like a death metal band suddenly performing jazz music on tour, where fans might actually voice their frustration or where the band can see people leave the concert.

“In a recent poll of international travellers [...] 70 per cent of respondents said they feared US officials more than terrorists or criminals.”
[Source]

This doesn't really come as a surprise, but it is still interesting to see my view isn't so extraordinary. Although I don't “fear” US border guards as more scary than terrorists in general, I do worry more about border guards than I do about terrorism. My encounters with US border guards are more frequent than encounters with terrorists actively working on a plot. As far as I know, of course. And my odds of being the victim of a terrorist attack seem much slimmer than the risk of being detained by a US border guard.

Indeed, most border guards are extremely unfriendly and make me feel unwelcome. After a couple of visits, I sort of got used to their demeanor, but every time I stand in line with other foreigners who visit the US for the first time, I can hear their disbelief of what they are witnessing. I know Dutch border guards are probably very scary to some foreigners as well, but I wonder if they come close to their US colleagues when dealing with foreigners.

Thankfully I have had a few positive encounters with border guards as well. Too bad these seem to be the exception and not the rule.
[Source]

“I'm not 100 percent sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD.”
[Source]

Apparently, porn actors are a little reluctant about the new high definition dvd formats such as HD DVD or Blu-Ray (which kinda sounds like a cheap porn movie if you ask me). The reason? The picture quality is so good, it shows all imperfections of the actors/actresses. Now there's a novel approach to image quality. I don't know, I sort of figure people watching porn movies are too busy paying attention to other things than actor's bodily imperfections.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” - [V for Vendetta].

The tagline of the movie and probably the most famous line from it. An interesting line, and one that has meaning even in a society that is not being suppressed by a violent government.

As for the movie itself, well, I was pleasantly surprised by it. Based on a comic book, it tells the story of a character rebelling against its government. A British government in a not-so-distant future, after a major disaster. A government that pretends all is fine and it is taking care of all sorts of dangerous things (scary diseases, criminals) while in fact it is more dangerous to its own people than any of the people it hunts.

All in all an interesting movie that will no doubt rekindle “terrorists or freedom fighters/rebels” discussions in many homes. A very entertaining movie too, one of those movies where at the end you wonder if over two hours (the length of the movie) have really passed already.

“We've determined the cause of tonight's outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d'oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad.” [Source]

Now, let's see. Google runs an official blog on its own blogspot service. Somehow the official blog gets deleted. Someone else registers the blogspot address. Then the problem gets “fixed” and the old blog is back. What about the guy who took the address when it became available until “Google had regained control of it.”? What would happen if I had a blogspot blog that I managed to delete, after which someone else would register a new blog with the same name? Would Google let me regain control of that name again, or would I just have to deal with it? I have a feeling I'd have a hard time convincing the folks at Blogger to give me back my old site. Unless it was a bug and not a simple human mistake.

“Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts.” [Source]

Makes me wonder just exactly which blogs this man has been reading. Yes, there are blogs out there that seem to be written by 3-year olds with Alzheimer's and Parkinson (which might begin to explain the seemingly random sequence of letter-combinations they string together), but there are also a lot of quality blogs out there. This kind of article makes me wonder about the kind of people that elected this “president-elect of the American Library Association”.

[Edit: I understand that “president-elect” probably quite mean what I thought it meant, so maybe there was no-one responsible for any kind of “electing”.]

Bruce Schneier usually has something sensible to say about security. His latest blog entry addresses one of the flaws of a lot of anti-terrorism security systems: they are built in the hope/expectation that terrorists will actually be dumb enough to go and confront them, instead of simply changing their plans and moving to unprotected targets.

“If I had some millions of dollars to spend on terrorism security, and I had a watch list of potential terrorists, I would spend that money investigating those people. I would try to determine whether or not they were a terrorism threat before they got to the airport, or even if they had no intention of visiting an airport. I would try to prevent their plot regardless of whether it involved airplanes. I would clear the innocent people, and I would go after the guilty. I wouldn’t build a complex computerized infrastructure and wait until one of them happened to wander into an airport. It just doesn’t make security sense.” [Source]

“Firefox benefits from being perceived as the best Windows browser on the planet, while remaining free and open sauce.”

Open sauce? A case of phonetic spelling, after a telephone-only interview, or is this some kind of new sauce that is freely available to all?
[Source]

Microsoft is certainly taking it more seriously than three years ago, when they ignored it completely.

As long as we all are willing to buy insecure software, software companies don't have much incentive to make their products secure.
[source: Bruce Schneier]

How very true that last statement is. Too bad there aren't always good alternatives though. It's kinda hard to run Windows-based programs that actually are secure, without running Windows.

The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance [...] is published 5 times a year ... (emph. mine). A quarterly review, five times a year? Oy. How am I supposed to understand this?

Taken from the Publication Information of the journal.