I noticed some people coming from Google looking for reviews or information on the Acoustic Research HC6 speakers. Now, admittedly, there isn’t much on the web out there, so I can see how my post, however content free could have made it’s way up there, after all, even AudioReview doesn’t have a review on it.. To help out those poor searching souls out though, here’s what I found when doing research: Google Groups has one or two posts, basically mentioning the The Perfect Vision‘s very positive review ($3 if you want to read it, I didn’t bother). Just recently (after I got my speakers, I found a review of the AR HC6 at AudioRevolution, a very cool site. Now, they like the Energy Take 5.2‘s better, and there certainly are more reviews of the Take 5.2‘s online (also, here’s a review by Sound and Vision and a 5.2 review at AudioRevolution). I got my HC6’s pricematched at 800.com to $457+s/h (looks like 800.com no longer pricematches, or doesn’t advertise it anymore at least). Doing a quick search shows two (very similar) places w/ Take 5.2’s for around the same price range (Note though, that in both cases, the Energy 8.2 Subwoofer is being sold separately for $225, so your total price ends up being probably around $750 w/ shipping to the HC6’s $500; the price difference and my preference for how the HC6 looked made my decision; shallow, but we’re not talking about a big difference in quality on high end equipment or anything anyway. Having gone and tested a number of various lower and higher end systems, either would do equally well for my purposes, I’m sure.)

I picked up my Harman Kardon AVR-520 (purchased from etronics.com) from UPS yesterday, and will be figuring how much speaker wire I’ll be needing to hook everything up tonight. I’ll post up my own review this weekend when I get everything setup.

Carriers Aim to Kill Number Portability – yah, cell phone companies suck.

Many cell phone companies, including Verizon, lose 2% to 4% of their subscribers every month–or between 30% and 40% a year, according to Telephia Inc., a wireless industry research firm.

Those customers are making the switch despite the number issue, the need to pay a penalty for breaking service contracts and the fact that moving to a new carrier forces customers to buy a new phone because of technological differences.

Yeah, you know why? Because VERIZON SUCKS. They were so bad that they motivated me to write my one and only epinions review. They were so bad that they continued billing me after I cancelled, and I had to call and bitch at them multiple times.

This has not been a good week for me and computers. I came into work, and every single program I tried to run on my Mac in the Finder/Dock ended up executing StuffIt Expander on the contents of the .app package. That sucked. I figured I would delete StuffIt, but couldn’t get the permissions to do it without getting to there terminal. Couldn’t do that because I couldn’t run the application (it’d just try to unstuff it). So, I ended up ssh’ing remotely into my box and su’ing to delete StuffIt. Talk about a royal PITA. Now, I do _need_ stuff it, but I’m thinking that perhaps I shouldn’t reinstall it until I figure out where and how the file associations are stored (Google turns up nothing, but I expect it some cryptic mishmash of resource fork types, extensions, and MIME types. No central control panel to manage any of this, of course. Who said that Macs were easier to use?

Thinking back about it, I think that trying to open a corrupt .sit file may have set this whole ball of wax rolling… StuffIt certainly has a lot of bugs with OSX.

So, a friend and I were talking in the car, and I brought up my USC Staff/Faculty parking pass hanging on my rearview mirror. It occurred to me that it really is a strange thing that USC charges money for faculty and staff to park. In fact, with all of our collected work experiences, USC was the only “company” that we were aware of that had this sort of practice. You need to get to work, and you need to park to be there to do your work. The analogy my friend was that there was if there was a computer usage fee for your work computer…

We ended up agreeing that this was most likely a policy instituted to limit the number of people parking, and to maximize the amount of spaces available for the ticketing nazis (we both agreed that on the whole, the student ticketers are as a group, a scary set of small-minded mutants).

Hah, now may be a good time to say that all these thoughts are of course my own opinion (duh, it’s on my frickin’ weblog). This of course is obvious, but hits up an interesting topic; say if hypothetically speaking, some bigwigs of a University of Some College were to want to implement a technological solution to this very problem. It seems that in this hypothetical situation, a big disclaimer doesn’t cut it (nor does… um, common sense?) when some bigwigs receive hate mail because some people discover some objectionable material? Now, my questions are: Is the current disclaimer inadequate? What kind of precedent/legal implications would this hypothetical type of dynamic modification entail (would the next step be dynamically erasing all mentions of certain topics?)? What happens when (not if) such technological solutions are hacked/bypassed? And lastly, what kind of hate mail will be sent once some disclaimers gets tacked onto every page? (stemming the flow of such feedback being the original impetus for such a hypothetical endeavor).

Now, one interesting thing about this whole use of disclaimers, while perhaps its legal validity is strong, to me, it occupies the same sort of nebulous semantic space as say… of my use of the “hypothetical.” Anyway, interesting stuff to mull over, I think, hypothetically speaking.

• EFF “Legal Issues and Policy: Cyberspace and the Law” Archive

• EFF: Online Censorship & Free Expression
• The First Amendment vs. Federal Copyright Law
• Defamation and Libel Cases

Just thought I’d add that this whole, “disclaimer, what I’m saying is my opinion” thing reminded me of this psycho chick I met the other month who couldn’t seem to understand what I was saying were my own opinions on a topic. Umm, hmm, if I’m talking about something and my thoughts on the subject, why would you assume that it’s not my opinion? Who else’s would it be? Like I said, psycho chick (hello, Lithium, maybe?)

Internet Explorer SuperCookies bypass P3P and cookie controls

There is a significant privacy problem with Internet Explorer because of a design flaw in the Windows Media Player (WMP). Using simple Javascript code on a Web page, a Web site can grab the unique ID number of the Windows Media Player belonging to a Web site visitor. This ID number can then be used just like a cookie by Web sites to track a user’s travels around the Web.

However this ID number becomes a SuperCookie because it can be used by Web sites to bypass all of the new privacy and P3P protections that Microsoft has added to Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). IE6 ships today with all Windows XP systems. SuperCookies also work in all previous versions of Internet Explorer with all older versions of Windows…

But honestly, who’s surprised? At home, I’ve been using Mozilla almost exclusively for just about everything. Blogger I use in IE, but not for long.

Mac OSX tip: drag a PDF into the Desktop Preference panel to make it your background image. It scales. Wee…

An old high school buddy sent me a pretty amusing little clip entitled: why cows hate winter. It’s funny. Laugh!

I was surfing around and spotted this great little gem on a blog called SuperSquish.

See kids? Font choice matters.

Hmm, a rather strange Blogger/Mozilla bug – if you have an ampersand in a Blogger post, and you edit it, it automatically changes the ampersand to the HTML character entity (&). Of course, if you’ve already escaped the character, it becomes “&” and if you post and edit it again, it becomes “&” and ad nauseum.

I’m assuming it’s Blogger automatically sending out ampersands as the character entity for the textarea value, but Mozilla displaying it literally instead of translating it (which it probably should).

From the KernelTrap Alan Cox interview:

JA: You still maintain the stable 2.2 kernel, the most recent release in that series being 2.2.20. In the changelog building up to this release was a controversial tag, “Security fixes. Details censored in accordance with the US DMCA”. What prompted you to censor these fixes? Was it intended as a political statement, or done out of fear of possible prosecution?

Alan Cox: It was simply a matter of following the law and avoiding liability. The fact that American citizens are forbidden by their own government from hearing, or speaking the truth turns itself into a political statement.

It’s an unfortunate situation when the major Linux conference pretty much has to be in Canada because the US will not let some of the attendees even pass through their airspace, and many of the others fear to visit. I just hope that over time things will improve.

At the moment the US, UK and much of the EEC slide slowly toward a police state. Innovation is hard, and innovators are generally buried in courts by established interests. I don’t want to become a citizen of the new soviet union, forbidden from watching DVD’s from the outside world, from burning flags in protest, and risking jail for offending a large company. People have to get involved in fighting such things. If they do not fight, they may well be swimming to Cuba, or serving in restaurants in Mexico City while trying to avoid deportation within thirty years.

I’m working with FIPR (the foundation for information policy research) to do my bit. It’s up to everyone else to do their bits too.

JA: You mention the UK moving toward a police state, as well as the US. Has the UK passed similar laws to the US DMCA, or the proposed SSSCA?

Alan Cox: The UK already has certain anti-convention laws, and the EU is implementing a common set at the moment. In some ways it is a lot saner than the DMCA (eg its a lot more explicit about reverse engineering for compatibility) and it doesn’t seek to censor people in quite the same way. Nevertheless it has many of the same effects as the DMCA such as getting people arrested for helping the disabled read e-books.

Could Sklyarov have happened in the UK. I think the answer is yes but as a civil case. Regardless of what the law says large companies can always play the system against the little guy.

Damn the electric fence. One of my hard drives is having conniptions. I don’t think it’s an actual drive/head problem; it seems to be spinning up, but I may have to break out the old-skool kung-foo.