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Jacob Andersen Posts

FCC hands Hollywood the keys to your PC, home theater and future

Published 02/05/2010 by Jacob

Cory Doctorow has a new piece up on Boing Boing about the FCC’s shameful decision to allow Selectable Output Control. Cory Doctorow sometimes goes a little far in his crusade against DRM. Don’t get me wrong, “far” seems a pretty good distance to go to rail against DRM, but in this particular case I’m not sure it’s far enough.

Now, the FCC could have solved this by saying that only movies that are in their first theatrical release run can have SOC turned on, but they didn’t, because they knew that the MPAA was lying through its teeth about using SOC to enable the “new business model” of showing you first run movies in your home.

via Boing Boing
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The problem with audio books

Published 11/04/2009 by Jacob

I have always avoided fantasy books. They tend to be long-winded, and for some reason they often consist of absurdly long series. I’ve always liked fantasy films though.

In the last year, however, I have read 27 very very long fantasy books:

The entire Harry Potter series (7 books)
The entire Sword of Truth series (11 books)
The Farseer trilogy (3 books – who would’ve thought.)

And I’m currently chewing through the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. So far I’ve read the first 6 books.

The secret to getting through all those book is that I don’t read them at all – I listen to them as audiobooks. The experience is pretty much as immersive as movies.

Great, right?

Well, yeah, except these movies are often about 30-40 hours long.

I have listened to these books during transport (makes me seem effective), during household chores (also good), during trying to sleep (not a good way to fall asleep), while trying to carry on conversations (not possible, and not very polite), while reading (also pretty much impossible), while writing this blog post (in all likelyhood making this post retarded and incoherent). Simply put. I CANNOT STOP listening to these things.

Audiobooks are great – but they’ll take over your life.

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