So with the sad demise of HD-DVD, Blu-Ray is declared the winner of the HD media war... A shocking turn of events, since Sony usually does something stupid enough to make their supported format fail. But, now that Blu-Ray is the only one out there, Sony's been making a bunch of new players! The catch?

They're expensive... Really expensive, with no signs of dropping in price.

People are surprised over this? You let SONY win the format war. The brilliant minds behind the Sony Memory Stick. You know, that proprietary solid-state drive format that failed to catch on and was only used by Sony technologies, and was expensive for an incredibly long time? You're going to see that happen here. Sony is going to find all sorts of ways to keep the price as high as possible. I mean, that's is what businesses do, but Sony is notorious for marketing their stuff at premium prices. Right now, their excuse is that they're introducing more features into their players, and discontinuing the old ones, thereby keeping the status quo on the price.

Me, personally, I won't even consider HD technology until the discs are 20 dollars, and the hardware is around 30 to 50, like DVDs are today. I have an HDTV, sure, but I use it strictly for gaming and as a second monitor. If anyone dares bring up the fact that a Playstation 3 is worth the cost for a Blu-Ray player? Go suck a lemon. I only bought a Playstation 2 when Okami came out, and I only did that when there was one on eBay for 20 bucks. I despise Sony's marketing practices with a passion, so there's no way in heck that I'm going to even consider getting a PS3 until I can find one on eBay for far, far less than the asking price.

But anyway, let's review: Sony wins the format war. People feign surprise when Sony doesn't seem to be too concerned with lowering the price of the format. The news itself isn't that Sony is doing this. The story here is that people are stupid enough to think Sony might actually lower the prices in the first place.

Indiana passed a law making it possible to revoke business licenses for people who hire illegal immigrants. Finally... The federal government, in all its sprawling Democratic stagnation, is forcing us to take of things ourselves. While this is why our government works so well, it shouldn't have to be this way for something so important.

Illegal immigrants work here, but they pay no taxes, but they go to school and use our health care and are generally a suck hole in our economy, yet the Democrats solidly believe that they boost our economy by working jobs. Or at least that's what they like to argue, that and the whole "anti-immigrant racial profiling" crap. What nonsense. So you, in a round about way, are also agreeing that the majority of illegal immigrants are from Mexico? We're not profiling race at freakin' all. We're telling businesses that if someone, ANYONE, isn't a legal citizen or at least with legal papers, tries to work for you, and you let them, you're going to be in very deep trouble. It could be someone from Germany, or someone from Australia, or someone from Japan or someone from Argentina. It doesn't matter who... If they're illegal, they're illegal, and they need to be taken care of. For people who enjoy the liberties of our great and powerful country, they sure don't seem to care to follow the rules very much.

Democrats are whining that this bill isn't going to fix enough of the problem, and that it's just a waste of time. What? Yeah, as if you have anything to say about wasting time with bills, you two-faced liars. But you know what? You have to start somewhere. Since the border fence is not being built, and we still have countless hundreds of thousands of economic leeches bleeding our government resources without giving anything back? We need to find a way to control the ones already here. You know why they're all here, right? To find jobs that are a heck of a lot better than the ones in their country. So that's where we crack down on them. With the businesses. If businesses won't hire them, then what are they going to do? Hopefully, they'll either legally register (and thus have to pay taxes) or they'll resort to stealing things to make money, and then get arrested and deported. (Or, actually, with the Democrats whining about racial profiling, I wouldn't be surprised if a felon illegal immigrant gets pardoned by them, because that's just what they work for.

This is not against immigration. That's another typical Democrat fallacy where they look at something we're trying to do, and then tip it to an amazing extreme. We're not banning immigration, we're banning ILLEGAL immigration. If it's not enough, well, I actually agree. But it's a start, and not doing anything at all because you all are too afraid of being racially discriminatory for doing what's healthy for this country, then you don't even belong in a capacity to make laws for this country.

I'd completely forgotten how freakin' awesome Surface was. No wonder I got it on DVD!

From the New York Times staff itself, so you all you liberals out there can't discount it as being some conservative hogwash, unless you denounce the New York Times as a whole, and thus resend any and all smear campaigns they've pulled out of their butts against the Republicans. Basically... If you don't believe this, you don't believe anyone, or... You close your eyes and ears to the things you don't want to hear, which is also a very strong possibility. (Yes, I'm grumpy, I have a headache, I think I'm getting sick, and I feel generally crappy, and then I read this on top of everything else, so of course I'm going to be snarky. Deal.)

Superdelegates for Sale?

For those of you who don't know what a superdelegate is, they're a sort of... Party appointed person who has more of a say in who wins the party primaries than the regular citizen does. You don't get to vote for them, but they very much affect the outcome of the elections. Anyway, apparently, the NYT even noticed that following the money flows usually turned up some interesting information about who the superdelegates were supporting. Is this any surprise? Face it. It's going to come down to who gives these superdelegates the most money or otherwise sways their decision as to who wins the Democratic nomination. The news is completely filled with Obama and Clinton chasing after these high and mighty superdelegates, so you can't at all deny the fact that they're there.

But yeah... I thought that was interesting. Not at all surprising, though. I mean, this perfectly fits with the liberal left way of doing things. Cram your own wishes down the throats of your people, because you know best. Just interesting that someone at the NYT picked up on it. You know, that in Indiana, we're trying to amend our Constitution to ban gay marriage. Yep, you better believe it. The federal government is going to drag their feet and cave to the minority, so the states are starting to deal with it, much in the same way they're dealing with illegal immigrants. Well, repeated polls and discussions show that a massive amount of Hoosier citizens WANT our Constitution amended, and that if it ever came up for a vote? It'd pass with flying colors, because, face it. It's what the majority of people want. Unfortunately, and very typical, the good ol' Democrats are refusing to let it come up in their little meetings, thereby refusing it the chance to get on a ballot and circulate for people to vote on. (In which case it would pass.) So they're letting it sit and mold so it doesn't even come up for a vote. How is that catering to the wishes of the people? In one breath, they proclaim that the majority thinks that Iraq is such a horrible thing, and that we need to work with the people and do what needs to be done, but, in the next breath, they don't let the people vote on something like a marriage amendment because... Why? Look:

The amendment died last year after encountering resistance from representatives of Indiana businesses who were concerned it would jeopardize their ability to recruit employees and offer domestic partner benefits. Since then, the Senate had been reluctant to take the lead.

Money. It all comes down to money. I honestly can not believe how someone could support a party like this. Anyone in their right mind would realize by now that the Democrats are doing things for themselves, and not for what everyone else wants. All they do is promise stuff to get the power, and then they sit there and do nothing, as is quite evidenced by their presence in Congress. Oh, I'm sorry, they do ban lightbulbs. Hahaha... That'll never get old. They get elected because they promise things about the war, and they ban lightbulbs instead. Boy, that sure is fulfilling the will of the people, isn't it. You know those florescent bulbs contain mercury, right? Oh yeah. We're preventing this fallacy of global warming, while poisoning ourselves in the meantime. How many bulbs have you broken in your lifetime? I can bet it's more than zero. Just imagine a biohazard every time you break a lightbulb, and your precious Democrats just forced you to live with that. Shouldn't they be worried about more important things? Oh wait. I'm sorry. They used all those issues to manipulate you and get into power. They didn't actually mean they would really resolve those issues... They merely brought them up. They had no intention of working on them.

So I kind of went off on a tangent. Oh well. Doesn't make it any less important.

Just in case you haven't noticed, I am a:

Crazy Right-Wing Conservative Republican Protestant Christian...

And darned proud of it, too.

(This because TW said he didn't know... Honestly.)

I'm in a class... An English Composition class. Lots of reading and lots of writing, but ultimately nothing more than a National Novel Writing Month that I have to pay for. Most of the challenge comes from deciphering cryptic questions about example articles and answering them to the best of your abilities. (I lucked out on my first timed essay and got a perfect score, so I guess I wrote about what I needed to write about.) It's fun, I guess. I don't write how they say I should, with a little bit every day... But I'm a NaNoWriMo Veteran. I can write 2000 words in a single day, and I've managed to get good scores.

However, I don't have a lot of faith in this instructor. Unfortunately, he's turning out to be another neglecting teacher. I emailed him last week with questions about sources and here it is Thursday and I still haven't had a response. This comes as no surprise, because the entire site for this class is riddled with "notes to the instructor" with instructions on how to erase certain parts if certain requirements were meant. Like, say, to submit our papers, we use something called "Groups", but in the syllabus, there are instructions for posting to both Groups and a place called "Exchange", with a bright yellow warning telling the instructor to remove one of the options. Naturally, both options remain, and these things are plastered all over the place. It's like the Linux instructor last semester who didn't realize that some options of the software were removed, such as something called a Digital Drop Box. One, it was my second semester using that software and I'd never seen an option called the "Drop Box"... Two, he was the instructor and he didn't bother to check out the new Blackboard before classes started and gave us orders to do things a certain way, and confused us all because of his... What? Incompetency? Laziness?

Even now, there's a class that demands we write papers in Rich Text Format and attach them to the forums when we make a comment... Sadly, there is no Attach button, and there hasn't been an Attach button in three semesters, so we all just paste our papers right into the thread. Good thing I grew up playing Myst, or I'd be waaay confused and seriously ticked off... As in... More than I am right now.

Modem update! Last night? Karazhan. Result?

So far so good! No disconnects, period. (As opposed to once a minute.) Nice latency throughout the entire experience, and I only had one instance of weird lag, which was when I died and my character kept standing in place without the Release Spirit dialog coming up. It lasted about 2 seconds, though, and I was able to run back in before the fight finished. Other than that, it was absolute perfection. We got clear to the Opera Event, but we didn't have the right people, so we called it a night. I'll need a little more time to gather enough information, of course, but it looks like it was a modem issue after all. (Which, as I've said before, I don't blame Blizzard for, although many on the forums do. Blizzard did something that brought up a bug in the firmware, and Blizzard doesn't know what it is. It's not Blizzard's fault... It's Siemens' fault. An accident, of course, but it's Siemens' responsibility to correct the issue.)

Another test result! I was downloading Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop yesterday via Bittorrent to test out the speed and consistency. Windows XP was downloading at a brisk 150KB/s, and there was only one actual disconnect somewhere around 60% complete. The internet light kicked red and the connection stopped, and when it came back, the IP had changed and I had to pause/restart the torrent to get it working again. However, after I downloaded the ISO, I pretty much downloaded the entire Desktop image again by doing an Aptitude installation on my existing Server. That was another 600MB that did not disconnect. It did get a little slow at one time, and the download stopped for a split second, but I was able to view websites and my IP didn't change, and it was able to recover itself because I could even do anything, so that's good.

So... Personally, my instinct tells me that this modem, while not quite as responsive as my last set up... As in, it takes a split second longer to form a connection and such... It seems to be stronger. So, slower but stronger, in the sense that it takes longer to forge a connection, but the speed is consistently high. Not peak bandwidth like the old modem could muster (and then promptly crash), but enough so that if it doesn't make a habit of crashing, it can surpass the old modem simply because there's no downtime. So far, I'm officially impressed with everything, even its router function. I'm enjoying using my Ubuntu box for playing around on now without the worry of breaking something and pulling everyone offline. I'm not worried about speed anymore, so I installed the GUI again. It's been really fun.

And now... I need to read my history book.