Category: General

Thinking of what’s happening in the middle east, with Israel’s entaglement with Hizbullah and the entire mess in Iraq, one has to think back to Kissinger and Bismark and whether idealism failed.

The current American policy is absolutely on the side of right: promote democracy around the world, reduce reliance on regimes that are dictatorial and tyranical. In that vein, overthrowing Saddam and pushing the Syrians out of Lebanon were great successes. Then you have to think, not without cynicism, about whether a country is *ready* for democracy.

A great article in the Wall Street Journal adovcated the return of Syria into Lebanon; apologize to the Assad regime, and given his severing his relations with Iran, make Lebanon a Syrian protectorate. Syria has nothing of the issues democratic regimes have dealing with Muslim extremists; Syria has no problem reversing course either, lacking any opposition. Syria ran Lebanon and did a decent job, relatively, helping the country regain economical stability. If they agree to kick Hizbullah out, all the more better.

As for Iraq – was Saddam *really* that bad? was it really that bad to have a counterweight as vicious and evil for Iran? Saddam definitely treated his citizens in the harshest of ways. Still, Kissinger and McNamara would have followed the rationale that for the US, for the West, it is better to sacrifice the people of Iraq for the interests of the West.  Looking at Iraq today – are the people better now than 15 years ago?

So today it was announced that outside of Sony, nobody really cares about its proprietary Universal Media Disc – UMD – which is used on Sony’s PlayStation Portable. (Details)

It was not too difficult for people to make the PSP play movies off the just-as-proprietary-but-at-least-under-your-control Memory Stick memory card. You just compress a DVD and save the file to the memory card. You then look for the movie on the memory stick and play it. So who the heck needed the stupid UMD which you cannot write to or read ANYWHERE other than the PSP?

Is Sony finally waking up to a world dominated by Samsung, LG and cheapo no-name manufacturers. People are not too keen on overpaying to get just the same quality, and worse off – be locked intoa proprietary technology. Apple, in my opinion, is not too far behind with closed formats (read iTunes) and a pricing model that hopefully someone will wake up to.

So last year I was travelling a lot and spoiled myself with a subscription to MLB.TV – MLB’s TV service online that allows you to watch most games live online.
MLB.TV was not cheap, around $90, and now that I am a homeowner I am not going to splurge again.

One thing that is not too clear is that once you sign up, MLB assumes you want to auto-renew. Which means that they will charge your credit card, which they politely kept on file, without your explicit permission, really. They are nice enough to tell you that in an email.

That same email also tells you that if you do not cancel before the first day of the season – you CANNOT cancel or get any refund. How nice?

And how can you cancel? That part is NOT self-service, as opposed to their sign-up process. You have to either call or write them an email. You all know how useful email is in confirming its reception, so I gave them a call. The representative first told me that no, I cannot cancel becaue I committed to the subscription. I raised my voice a bit, got a bit more aggressive, mentioned the supervisor, and he put me on hold. 8 minutes later he told me that my subscription will be canceled and that I will receive a confirmation email within 3 days.

Bastards.