An Interview With A Burnflixer by Scott R Heath

I recently became acquainted with a burnflixer. For those of you who don’t know a burnflixer is a netflix subscriber who copies each and every DVD netflix sends him. I was called to his residence to repair his burnflixing computer and he agreed to talk to me if I didn’t reveal his identity. For the purposes of this interview I will call him Simon.

SCOTT: So how long have you been copying netflix movies?

SIMON: I believe it’s been almost 5 years. It all started when I was attempting to collect Star Trek and other science fiction films and series. I guess it kind of snowballed.

SCOTT: So did you succeed in getting all of the Star Trek series and films? I have them all, too, but I bought them.

SIMON: Yes, I have every Star Trek series and films, as well as Star Wars, Space:1999, Lost In Space, just about every sci-fi movie there is.

SCOTT: What do you use to copy these discs?

SIMON: Mostly DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink. I play them in my dvd player that upconverts the picture to 720P and they look great on my HD screen!

SCOTT: So give me a run-down of your operation.

SIMON: Oh, it’s simple, I get the mail, run the dvds thru my decrypter and mail them back the same day, that way I maximize my collective potential. And I want to point out that I don’t sell anything to anyone. These discs go into my collection. I hand them out to my children and grandchildren and that’s it. I still buy movies all the time, usually thru amazon’s website. It’s just that I’m disabled and on a fixed income, and I can’t afford to buy all these films. I pay Netflix, copy the movies and watch them at my convenience.

SCOTT: I know quite a bit of people who do what you do and they’re all good people, none of them try to make money from movie copies.

SIMON: Usually people sell pirate copies of movies that are still in the theater – I hate those movies, they look like crap on the screen, and I don’t wanna watch crappy films. I’m hooked on HD. Soon everything will be digital, no more discs. I’ll enjoy it while I can. And these discs are archived for my family and I.

SCOTT: How do you store the copies?

SIMON: In spools that I order full of blank DVDs. For example, each Star Trek spool holds a different series, and I have spools for categories such as action, drama, comedy and so forth. They should last for decades if I store them right.

SCOTT: Thanks for sharing with me, Simon.

SIMON: No problem.

SCOTT: One last question, do you know why blank DVDs smell like pancake syrup?

SIMON: No, but now I’m curious so I’ll have to google that. Ha-Ha

Former Republican congressman says he has ‘no intention of being a spoiler’

Will Powers / AP Former Republican congressman Bob Barr accepts the Libertarian Presidential nomination at the Libertarian National Convention in Denver on Sunday. His wife, Jei Dobbin, stands to his right.

Video: Decison ‘08

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updated 4:14 a.m.

DENVER – The Libertarian Party on Sunday picked former Republican Rep. Bob Barr to be its presidential candidate after six rounds of balloting.

Barr beat research scientist Mary Ruwart, who also sought the party’s presidential nomination unsuccessfully in 1983, on the final ballot. The vote was 324-276.

Barr endorsed Wayne Allyn Root, who was eliminated in the fifth round, to be his vice-presidential running mate.

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Barr left the GOP in 2006 over what he called bloated spending and civil liberties intrusions by the Bush administration.

‘I’m in this to win’
The former Georgia congressman said he’s not in the race to be a spoiler.

“I’m a competitor and I’m in this to win. I do not view the role of the Libertarian Party to be a spoiler and I certainly have no intention of being a spoiler,” Barr said.

Barr said he expects the party to be on the ballot in at least 48 states and perhaps all 50 if the party can qualify in West Virginia and Oklahoma. Barr said he also expects to be invited to the national political debates by qualifying with poll support of 15 percent or more of registered voters.

New chapter for Gravel?
Sunday’s election also marked the end of the latest chapter in the political career of Mike Gravel, a former senator from Alaska who recently dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.

“I just ended my political career,” he said. “From 15 years old to now, my political career is over, and it’s no big deal. I’m a writer, I’m a lecturer, I’m going to push the issues of freedom and liberty. I’m going to push those issues until the day I die.”

Gravel left the Democratic Party after he was excluded from some Democratic debates because he failed to meet fundraising or polling thresholds. He said the Democratic Party no longer represented his values because it continues to sustain Iraq war, the military-industrial complex and imperialism.

Star Trek Of Gods And Men Part 3 Release Date Announced

The final chapter of Star Trek Of Gods And Men is scheduled for release on Sunday, June 15th at 5:01 p.m. Eastern Time. This date is tentative and will possibly change. Trekkers around the world will be watching and downloading and possibly slowing the entire internet down. Now I have a few problems with the plot, but it’s certainly no worse than some of the plots in the many Trek series. The acting is great, the effects are great, and the action never slows down. Paramount is nutso for not backing this project, even a DVD release of the feature would make Paramount millions.

But if you need a geek fix before then, the Martian Probe Phoenix will be laning on Mars tomorrow May 25, 2008 – The Science channel is showing a special at 7PM. We don’t have great odds when it comes to sending probes to Mars. Between unknown problems and human error, we’ve lost a significant amount of probes sent there. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

Does the United States Need A Prime Directive?

With all the chaos and disorder in the world, I believe the US should adopt a Non-Interference Directive. That’s one of the reasons the Federation prospers in the 22-24th Centuries. Now some of you probably think that adopting a philosophy from a 60s TV Series maybe a little crazy, but I don’t. Then again, I’ve been a Trekker since my childhood in the 1960s. Having such a directive would still allow us to bring humanitarian help to the world, and sure, there are times when we need to hunt down our enemies, such as our forgotten enemies in Afganistan. You can say whatever you want about Saddam Hussain – he was evil, and he was a tyrant. But Iraq was stable and quiet before we went in and destroyed the entire region. The Federation doesn’t interfere with cultures that could be harmed by our advanced technology, and neither should we, unless we’re providing aid, and even then the technology should be concealed.

On Boston Legal this week a city in Massachusetts hired Alan to file papers in court that would allow them to leave the USA and become their own separate country. They cited the terrible acts that the US has committed, such as torture, denying prisoners due process and holding them for years without a hearing. They made a good case, then our favorite starship commander Denny Crane brought up the confinement of innocent Japanese-Americans after World War 2 started. His point was that our country has always been as corrupt as it is now. Now I don’t believe that this would be a good idea. What we should do is what Thomas Jefferson said, when Governments become corrupt, they should be overthrown, and there is a clause in the US Constitution that allows for that very act! Just saying this makes me a target of the US Government and a possible enemy, which is ridiculous. It is not unpatriotic to question our countries actions. I love this country and I have an obligation to speak out against our actions – some say we should just trust the government – but I say – not when it is corrupt. That’s all I have to say about that.

An Amnesiac Species in a Crowded Room by Scott R Heath

I’ve been asked to share my theory of how religion started. Imagine the human race started out as a small group of people with an amnesia. That’s not a big stretch to imagine. Humans arrived on this planet in a manner that was not recorded, so essentially we’re all victims of species origin amnesia. None of us know exactly how we got here. Science says evolution, religion says creation, but no matter how it happened, none of us knows the details. Now the human race is a group of humans, maybe 200 or so, all in a big gymnasium, for example. People begin asking one another, How did we get here? Then, all of a sudden, someone dies. The dying person starts to decompose and the humans drag him/her outside for burial.  Now people start realizing that the same will happen to them. Depression sets in, children become sad and begin to ask their parents what’s going on.  The mood of the crowd lowers, fights begin, panic and despair set in as well. One man sees the problem and decides to try and make a difference. He tells the crowd that he received a vision from the creator, and that if every person follows the creators rules, everyone who dies will wake up in paradise.  Spirits begin to rise and people start to believe it, even though the idea is insane. People believe it because it’s a brighter future than the realistic one.  Soon people start asking more questions about life and the man makes it up as he goes. Later another man says he has the answers and another creator, the real one, has a different set of instructions to follow for eternal life. Now people become confused and the group splits up into 2 large groups who are buying the creator story, and one small group of skeptics who know darn well it’s all been made up to make people happy and comfort children with the fictional god and heaven myth.  And that, my friends, is how religion developed these imaginary invisible friends. I remain faithfully agnostic.

Clinton has big lead in Kentucky, Obama on top in Oregon

Clinton has big lead in Kentucky, Obama on top in Oregon

Posted: 11:35 AM ET

From CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney

Clinton and Obama each hold leads in Tuesday’s voting states.

(CNN) — A new CNN “poll of polls” shows Hillary Clinton holds a big lead in Kentucky while Barack Obama is on top in Oregon — the next two states to weigh in on the Democratic presidential race.

According to CNN’s analysis of several recent polls from both states, Clinton holds a 30-point lead in Kentucky while Obama is up by 10 in Oregon.

In Kentucky, Clinton is winning 58 percent of the vote while Obama is at 28 percent. Kentucky has a broad swath of working class white voters — the demographic that has long supported Clinton and propelled her to a 41-point victory in West Virginia one week ago. Her large margin in Kentucky appears to indicate those voters are sticking with Clinton, even as Obama appears to be the presumptive Democratic nominee.

In Oregon, Obama is winning 50 percent of likely Democratic voters there while Clinton is at 40 percent. With a large population of young voters and those who are college-educated, that state has demographics that have long favored Obama’s candidacy.

Oregon is conducting a vote-by-mail primary, which means that a large number of voters in that state have already cast their ballots.

In Kentucky, 51 delegates are at stake while 52 are up for grabs in Oregon. It remains impossible for Clinton to catch Obama in pledged delegates, but the New York senator is looking to catch Obama in the popular vote total.

For more on the latests polls, check out the CNN Election Center

Indiana Jones Film Shown at Cannes Film Festival

Film receives more applause at outset than at the end of the movie

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CANNES, France – Indiana Jones received louder applause going in than he did coming out.

His latest adventure, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” earned a respectful — though far from glowing — reception Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival, avoiding the sort of thrashing the event’s harsh critics gave to “The Da Vinci Code” two years ago.

Yet Indy’s fourth big-screen romp is not likely to go down as one of the most memorable. Some viewers at its first press screening loved it, some called it slick and enjoyable though formulaic, some said it was not worth the 19-year wait since Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford made the last film.

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“They should have left well enough alone,” said J. Sperling Reich, who writes for FilmStew.com. “It really looked like they were going through the motions. It really looked like no one had their heart in it.”

Alain Spira of French magazine Paris Match found “Crystal Skull” a perfectly acceptable “Indiana Jones” tale, a sentiment echoed by the solid applause the movie received as the final credits rolled.

getCSS(“3053751″) Slide show Cannes Film Festival Bono joins Penn on the red carpet, Brangelina shows off twins bump and more. more photos

“It’s good. It’s a product that is polished, industrial, we’re not getting ripped off in terms of quality,” Spira said. “You know what you’re going to see, you see what you get, and when you leave you’re happy.”

The applause was louder at the outset, though. Fans at the early afternoon showing, which preceded the film’s glitzy formal premiere with cast and crew Sunday night, cheered and clapped wildly at an announcement that the screening was about to start. Some even hummed the Indiana Jones fanfare as the lights went down.

The applause at the end was more subdued.

Cast and crew were unconcerned about how critics might dissect the film.

“I’m not afraid at all. I expect to have the whip turned on me,” Ford told reporters after the screening. “It’s not unusual for something that is popular to be disdained by some people, and I fully expect it.

But, he said: “I work for the people who pay to get in. They are my customers, and my focus is on providing the best experience I can for those people.”

Catcalls avoided
The filmmakers kept the movie shrouded in secrecy, skipping the rounds of press screenings often held for big studio movies and going for a big blowout at Cannes.

Spielberg said he and his collaborators decided “that the fair thing to do and the fun thing to do would be to view it where the entire world is come together every year at this wonderful festival, and we thought that was the best place to introduce Indiana Jones to you again after 19 years.”

The film received none of the derisive laughter or catcalls that mounted near the end of the first press screening for “Da Vinci Code.”

There were a few titters from the “Crystal Skull” crowd early on over co-star Cate Blanchett’s thick, Boris-and-Natasha accent as a Soviet operative racing against Indy to find an artifact of immeasurable power. The rather corny romantic ending also drew a chuckle or two.

In between, the film packed a fair amount of action, though some viewers found the middle portion dull. Conchita Casanovas, of Spain’s RNE radio, said she was “bored to death.”

The new movie hurls archaeologist Jones into the Cold War in 1957. He survives a nuclear blast in the desert in typically creative fashion and is reunited with “Raiders” flame Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen).

Alien connection
As speculated, the film has an alien connection, though far more subdued than the “Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars” story Lucas once envisioned.

There are melancholy nods to Sean Connery, who played Indy’s dad in 1989’s “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” but declined to return for the new movie, and the late Denholm Elliott, Indy’s college dean in two of the previous movies.

And the film reveals the relationship between Indy and his new sidekick, an angry young motorcycle rebel played by Shia LaBeouf.

As with “Da Vinci Code,” which went on to gross $758 million worldwide, “Crystal Skull” is so hotly anticipated that it will be virtually immune from critics’ opinions. The film is expected to put up blockbuster box-office numbers when it opens globally Thursday.

“The movie was absolutely effective enough to score with audiences everywhere,” said Anne Thompson, deputy editor of Hollywood trade paper Variety. “This played way better than ’Da Vinci Code.’ No one was gunning for it. They were excited going in, hooting for it in a positive way.”

How scientists really feel about God

By Robin Lloyd

WASHINGTON – Scientists hate God. Or find God very disturbing. In fact, modern science has found no evidence of God and so it’s stupid anymore to think God exists.

The above statements are often presented as conventional wisdom, but are they true?

A new collection of short essays, discussed here Thursday at an event at the American Enterprise Institute, responds to that question with a more diverse set of voices than is usually offered. Edited by “Skeptic” magazine publisher Michael Shermer and backed by the John Templeton Foundation, the booklet features replies by 13 scholars and thinkers to the question “Does science make belief in God obsolete?”

The practical answer is, “Of course not.” Many people worldwide believe. In the United States, the percentage of the population without a religious affiliation is increasing but the majority still have one, according to American Religious Identification Survey 2001. The faithful aren’t going away despite a golden age of scientific descriptions of the mysteries of life and the secularizing, culture-draining force of consumerism.

The answers offered by the booklet’s two theologians, eight scientists, two cultural commentators and one philosopher are more creative and sophisticated than the mind-numbing “culture wars” portrayed on television. Some of the thinkers even find ways to synthesize or reconcile God and science without throwing up their hands.

The standard line

getCSS(“3088874″) Weird Science Ten mysteries of the mind From sweet dreams to phantom pains, the brain is a befuddling place.

The standard scientific line on God is well-represented in the booklet by several of the writers:

• Science has failed to find natural evidence of God. Natural evidence is all there is. No God. Case closed.
• Slightly softer is this line of reasoning: Science erases the “need” for God as an explanation of our experiences, and God either doesn’t exist or is at best a hypothesis (to the agnostic).
• And then there’s the view expressed in the title of University of Hawaii physicist and astronomer Victor Stenger’s new book, “God: The Failed Hypothesis — How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist.” Stenger also contributed to the new booklet.

These arguments are old news.

Shermer, who describes himself as spiritual and agnostic, adds a cosmic twist, casting doubt on our ability to recognize God. He claims that any encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence, should we go looking, is statistically likely to turn up civilizations that are far more medically advanced than ours and would have the ability to create life, so they will be indistinguishable from God.

“Science does not make belief in God obsolete, but it may make obsolete the reality of God, depending on how far we are able to push the science,” Shermer writes in the booklet.

Yet many scientists — 40 percent according to a 1997 poll cited by Shermer — believe in God. This isn’t big news to scientists, but might surprise people who rely on mainstream views of science. A handful of those folks — including Jerome Groopman, a professor of medicine at Harvard, and William D. Phillips, Nobel laureate in physics and a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology — are also represented in the booklet, arguing that the natural world and the world of faith are relatively separate, yet personally reconcilable domains.

“I think that we are all comfortable with the idea there are plenty of things in our lives that we will deal with outside of the scientific paradigm,” Phillips told about 70 members of the public who attended the discussion of these issues between himself, Shermer and AEI theologian Michael Novak. “And while I think faith is a particularly important part of our lives that we should deal with outside of the scientific paradigm, it is certainly not the only one.”

Reconciling God and science
Phillips, a Methodist, also drew from science to make his argument in favor of God’s relevance, saying physicists know there are things that are “really, really improbable, but they are not really impossible according to the laws of physics … From what I know about physics, it’s not impossible to imagine a world in which God acts but we never can prove it.”

In the booklet, philosopher Mary Midgley, who was not at the AEI event, states that science is just one worldview that has come to prevail. Science and religion need not be at odds.

“What is now seen as a universal cold war between science and religion is, I think, really a more local clash between a particular scientistic worldview, much favored recently in the West, and most other people’s worldviews at most other times,” she writes.

“Scientism … by contrast, cuts [the setting of human life in] context off altogether and looks for the meaning of life in Science itself. It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning … that makes science and religion look like competitors today.”

Worldviews that transcend that competition or dichotomy are offered in the booklet by Kenneth Miller, Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy and Stuart Kauffman.

Miller, the lead witness for the plaintiffs in the Dover trial of 2005 (in which Judge John E. Jones III barred intelligent design from being taught in a Pennsylvania public school district’s science classes), takes the classic Darwinian “grandeur in this view of life” approach. God is behind it all.

He rejects claims that the God hypothesis makes no sense, stating that “… to reject God because of the admitted self-contradictions and logical failings of organized religion would be like rejecting physics because of the inherent contradictions of quantum theory and general relativity.”

Healing the schism

getCSS(“3088874″) Weird Science Ten mysteries of the mind From sweet dreams to phantom pains, the brain is a befuddling place.

Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, takes a slightly New Age tack, saying we must “heal” the schism between science and religion by “reinventing the sacred” and evolving from a supernatural God to a “new sense of a fully natural God as our chosen symbol for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe.”

In other words, he suggests that we can get around the divide between science and God if we come up with a new concept for God that focuses on the wonders of nature, among other things.

This new concept is a global cultural imperative, Kauffman writes, if we are to overcome fundamentalist fears and reunite reason with humanity and the mysteries of life.

A middle ground that incorporates science more than the other God-friendly writers is offered by Hoodbhoy, a physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan.

Science hasn’t necessarily made belief obsolete, “but you must find a science-friendly, science-compatible God,” he writes. And that is possible, he claims, calling this entity a “scientific Creator.”

Hoodbhoy thinks that God can be seen as operating within the laws of physics, tweaking outcomes in small ways that have big impacts by relying on phenomena we have observed already in the universe, such as the butterfly effect (in which the flapping of a butterfly’s wings alters the atmosphere in a way that ultimately alters the path of a tornado).

In his own words, here are some things She (yes, Hoodbhoy uses the female pronoun) could do, Hoodbhoy writes:

“Extraordinary, but legitimate, interventions in the physical world permit quantum tunneling through cosmic wormholes or certain symmetries to snap spontaneously. It would be perfectly fair for a science-savvy God to use nonlinear dynamics so that tiny fluctuations quickly build up to earthshaking results — the famous ‘butterfly effect’ of deterministic chaos theory.”

Hoodbhoy ends by saying that God is neither dead nor about to die. There is still plenty of “space for a science-friendly God as well as for ‘deeply religious non-believers’ like Einstein … Unsure of why they happen to exist, humans are likely to scour the heavens forever in search of meaning.”

A total of 5,000 copies of the booklet became available on May 2. Free copies can be obtained at http://www.templeton.org/.

© 2008 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

Google to Launch Friend Connect on Monday

Three’s Company Or Three’s A Crowd? Google To Launch “Friend Connect” On Monday

Michael Arrington

Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.

MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).

Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.

The reason these companies are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).

If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.

We’ll have to wait until Monday for the exact details, though. But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want to access their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, well, social network (unless you count Orkut).

Google’s been scrambling for partners to announce on Monday as well. So far our understanding is they have their own Orkut and Plaxo. Compare that to MySpace (Yahoo, eBay and Twitter, plus their own PhotoBucket) and Facebook, which announced Digg as an early partner.

Another limiting factor with Google’s product is that, unlike Facebook and MySpace, they do not already control user profiles for tens of millions of active users. That means they’ll quickly need to get big partners on board as well. Will MySpace help them? They may – MySpace is already part of Open Social and said on Thursday that they will adopt Open Social initiatives in this space once they are defined. We’ll see.

More details as they come in.

I’m a Twit – This Week In Tech with Leo Laporte

Maybe you’re a twit, too. Twit stands for This Week In Tech, a brilliant podcast that I’ve been listening to for years. Most of the team from the old Tech TV Network days discuss what’s hot in the tech world, everything from computers, cell phones to Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo. Leo Laporte is the mastermind behind the project. I am a computer repair technician today because of the education I got from Tech TV. Leo and his associates put out several different podcasts each week, and you don’t have to be tech savvy to enjoy it. John C Dvorak, Wil Harris, Molly Wood and many other professionals in the tech industry discuss great topics with Leo. If you want to devote about an hour or so to listen every week, you’ll be able to stay on top of what’s hot in the tech world and you’ll be entertained, too. Leo won Podcast of the year last year, and his base of listeners are growing and growing. People love Twit so much they make crazy videos like the one above posted on Youtube. You can find his podcasts/netcasts at http://www.twit.tv/twit