Will Baude has been inquiring about the DVD industry’s Content Scrambling System (CSS) and its associated region (or locale) coding system. Today he asks:

The question that then plagued me was why DVD-players went along with this system. It makes sense that DVD makers would like the ability to price discriminate in different markets, but wouldn’t Dell disk drives be worth more if they could play discs from all regions? Who gains from the limited switching?

DVD player manufacturers have to license the patents of the DVD Copy Control Association (as well as patents for other systems, like the Macrovision video copy protection scheme) in order for their players to legally play DVDs. The DVDCCA’s licensing provisions require manufacturers to implement the region locking scheme—thus, you can’t get a license to produce a DVD player if you don’t implement the scheme.

Now, some far-east manufacturers evade this requirement by conveniently “forgetting” to lock the DVD region settings of their players, or by leaving secret menus available to allow people to break the DVD region coding scheme. And, it is my understanding that unlicensed players based on the “DeCSS” code circumvent this region lock scheme completely, but I don’t own any DVDs from outside region 1 (USA/Canada), so I’ve never tested this for myself.*

Arguably, the whole system is illegal under WTO rules, which specifically prohibit schemes like region locking and rules against “reverse imports” that are designed to maintain regional price differentials. But given DVD manufacturers’ interests in maximizing their profits (particularly in often egregiously overpriced Region 2 markets like Great Britain) don’t expect this to change anytime soon.

IMHO, $4/copy is a blatant ripoff for an official transcript, particularly when they’ll give you unofficial ones for 25¢ per page.

But at least I now have some proof I actually accomplished something the last five-and-a-half years:

(You’ll note the “Memphis State University” entry I ranted about before…)

I don’t exactly want to turn this blog into CramerWatch, but this post struck me as being, well, a tad odd. He quotes at length from a Reuters piece on penis enlargement spam (no, really) and comes across this lovely tidbit:

At the heart of the problem, [NYU psychiatrist Virginia] Sadock said, is that since men don’t see many penises other than their own, they have little basis for comparison.

The exception, she said, is pornography, which gay men view more that straight men. And comparing one’s penis size to a porn star’s could lead even a well-endowed man to feel inadequate.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that New York’s gay community self-help arena has expanded beyond problems such as alcoholism and over eating to the affliction of a small penis.

“What is Small, Anyway,” is the working name of a support group in Greenwich Village, which acts as a safe haven for gay men who have small penises, or feel as though they do.

Participants complain about a gay community in which men brag about being bigger than they are and a country where big is king. Like at other support groups, most in this group are grateful just to be in a room together with people trying to confront the same problem.

A slim man with reddish hair told a recent meeting that he is made to feel he doesn’t measure up. “In our community the idea of what’s average (size) is very distorted,” he said.

Cramer’s response: “Of course, this wouldn’t be the only area in which the gay community is a bit distorted about what it considers important.”

Now, this strikes me as something of a weird reaction. For one thing, you’d expect gay men to have a more realistic idea about penis size—not less—since they, er, see more of them than straight men do. For another, I’m not entirely sure that gay men watch more porn than straight men do; now, it’s possible that more gay men watch porn than straight men, and it’s likely that the porn gay men prefer (which, of course, would be “gay porn”) has more penises in it, but I’m not convinced that once you pass the “selection function” (to borrow from Nobel laureate economist James Heckman, who I’m sure would love to know his name is in this conversation) that the count is markedly different in the universe of “porn viewers.”

Lastly, anyone who’s seen the god-awful ads for “Enzyte”—a product for “natural male enhancement” (i.e. a penis enlargement pill, distinct from e.g. Viagra and Levitra, which are erectile dysfunction pills)—would know that it’s being aggresively marketed to heterosexual males. Show me a straight guy and I’ll show you a straight guy who’s obsessed with the size of his penis. What I can’t fathom is that Cramer is apparently more obsessed with gay men than the size of his.

Cool thing discovered recently: the Chronicle has RSS feeds of its job listings.

Not-so-cool thing discovered recently: the postal service needs a 46¢ stamp. I went through two books of 23¢ stamps in about ten minutes on Wednesday. So much for saving trips to the post office…