shutdown now

I am relieved to finally stop using that Lexmark printer. Those crappy ink cartridges that cost $5 more than HP’s? The reason I harbor so much hatred for those little pieces of plastic, is that they not only stop working after they’ve dispensed a set amount of ink (even if there happens to be a gallon of ink left in them — sorry, you’ve already used your 2 ounces), but they actually have an end-user license agreement (the infamous EULA) on the packaging, which you agree to simply by purchasing the cartridge.

So basically, as I understand it, Lexmark is claiming that you are renting their shoddy piece of trash, and it’s illegal for you to use it in any other way than they see fit (aka - refilling the cartridge yourself). And when you’re done with it, they want you to return it to them, so they can refill it and sell it for another 60 trillion dollars. And, I think they might have actually won a DMCA lawsuit recently against someone that was either trying to hack their cartridges to be refilled or make non-Lexmark cartridges that would work in Lexmark printers.

Well, I need to go license (not buy) some Sunkist oranges soon — my Sunkist orange juicer won’t operate without the software chip they embed inside the orange peel. And if I hack some other brand of oranges to work with the juicer, I could get fined $100k per orange and up to 5 years in prison. My point, don’t buy from Lexmark until they stop this garbage.

UPDATE: Lexmark lost the DMCA suit, but won an almost identical suit under Patent law, based on the fact that the ink cartridge boxes are labeled with, “Single Use Only.”

Back in November 2007, I was playing on my HP dv9000z laptop, and all of a sudden my video card had fried on me. It would not boot into graphics mode at all, and text mode (boot to command prompt…) would have green block artifacts randomly appear on the screen. I called up HP for warranty repair, but because it was around 45 days out of warranty they wouldn’t do it, unless I paid $400. I knew it wasn’t under warranty, but it still felt like one of those “let’s design it to break as close to the warranty expiration as we can” sort of things.

Fast forward to a couple months ago; my wife’s cousin told me he was sure there was a recall on some of the recent HP Pavilion dv9000’s for video card trouble. With my success I had with Nintendo a week ago, I thought I’d again try to get my laptop repaired, this time under the recall. As before, I had impeccable timing — I missed the recall deadline by roughly a month and a half. BUT, because they had recorded that I called in about this issue back in November of 2007, they escalated my issue to a case manager who approved an exception!

And now, last weekend I decided to buy an HP printer (and yes, part of the reason was because they were so awesome with my laptop this time around; but the big reason was because the printer I wanted is compatible with Linux). I brought the printer home, hooked it up, and decided to install Ubuntu on my 2nd hard drive. I spent a few minutes getting all my updates installed, and video drivers working (I would add wireless drivers to this list, but my Atheros-based card was working with Ubuntu out of the box!).

I then went to install the HP PhotoSmart 4280 all-in-one drivers and get the printer set up, but to my surprise, it was already done for me. I printed a test page, which worked. Okay, I tried scanning something into the GIMP. That worked, too! The only thing I actually had trouble with, was finding the setting in XSane to tell the printer not to compress the scan, because I could see jpeg artifacts in the scans.

And if the laptop and printer weren’t enough for HP to win my loyalty, I went to buy a replacement ink cartridge and noticed that nowhere on (or in) the packaging was any sort of license agreement, and on top of that, it was $5 cheaper than Lexmark’s stupid-arsed piece of crap they like to call an ink cartridge! If HP continues to treat all their customers like people, they will definitely keep my business.

A couple weeks ago, I turned on my Wii and got the message, “The system files are corrupted.” I didn’t feel like paying for repairs, so I waited a few days before finally deciding that I should get it fixed and called Nintendo to get it repaired. To my surprise, even though it is almost 2.5 years old, it was still under warranty, because I had already sent it in for repair recently for the Super Smash Bros Brawl recall, which extended the warranty for a year after that repair. I have to admit I was pretty surprised.

I unfortunately wasn’t able to get my original Wii back (I could tell because they returned a Wii with a new serial number), which is a little sad, because I used to have an opening day unit. But wait, that’s not really the frustrating part. On my original Wii, I had broken the covers for the GameCube controller ports and memory card slots (hey, I have kids, it’s tough to keep things like that) — but my replacement Wii didn’t have any of the covers, either! Really?! Did they actually take the time to remove the covers off my replacement so it would match my original? I really shouldn’t complain since I got free warranty repair, but I just thought it was a little confusing.

I don’t normally think of myself as a masochist, but last night I watched the movie Bridge to Terabithia. Becky had warned me over a year ago never to watch the show, because she knew I’d hate it. I really should have listened to her — I must have cried for over an hour. Actually, other than the fact that it made me cry, I really did think it was a very good movie.

Windows Defender just now removed the line in my hosts file that maps localhost to 127.0.0.1. I could be wrong, but I don’t think that’s supposed to happen; but, I am curious if it would actually break any programs a person would normally use. I manually added it back in just in case.

I’d been discussing this topic with people I know recently, so I thought I’d try to write down my thoughts on the subject.

Probably a little more than 5 years ago, Joe Rogan, the host of Fear Factor, made a comment during a talk show on which he was a guest that said something along the lines that there should be no such thing as bad words. He is absolutely right. The trouble is this could easily be seen from two perspectives: existing bad words should never have been introduced into our language, or these words should never have been labeled as bad.

The only reason for bringing up the first, faulty perspective, is that I used to think exactly that when I was younger. And judging from Joe Rogan’s career, shows that he’s been in, and the language used in both, it seems a lot more than “more likely” that he was implying the second perspective. It is important to be polite to others; and I must confess that I sometimes, hopefully not too often, seem to have no “tact filter” (sorry). That said, I say it is a faulty perspective, because the sounds forming these words don’t have some magical property that makes them bad, evil, or inappropriate for kids — somebody has just decided to arbitrarily label them as such. There is definitely, however, bad meaning.

There was an article published in 1983 in the Ensign (an LDS magazine) that said: “Bathroom and sexual obscenities can now be heard in certain [places] that would have been unthinkable five years ago.”¹ I will conceded that it is tactless to discuss what goes on in the bathroom or the bedroom in public; but that doesn’t make any particular word any worse than words not regarded as profane: e.g. “poop”, “sex”, “vagina”. Even the most common bad words, when by themselves, only describe body functions, parts, or effects of.

To give an example or two, telling someone “screw you” is just as bad as “f*#% you”; or to rephrase, telling someone “f*#% you” is no worse than “screw you”. They are both disrespectful, but again, no worse or better than the other. Though for some strange reason, “screw” can be used in a PG movie, while the “f” word guarantees a PG-13 rating (or an R if used 4 or more times). Also, if I say I need to take a “s*#%,” it is no worse than saying, “Man, I have really got to poo.” I won’t argue that none of these are tactless; but I did say that I can sometimes have a bit of trouble with my tact filter (though, it’s actually more of a lack of a TMI filter, to be more specific — my language is usually “clean” by society’s standards).

A very common argument in “favor” of keeping bad words is that their use brings up negative thoughts that are not in line with ones’ religious beliefs, or that they cause emotional harm to others that have to hear them. But I must ask, can you think of a word that, by itself, is actually offensive to you personally, and also come up with an actual explanation of why that word is any worse than its equivalent; or is it that you are simply offended because you’ve been trained (aka programmed, brainwashed) to instinctively react that way to a particular laundry-list of words?

Now, there are arguably exceptions, though it could easily still be argued that it is the way the language is used, and not the actual words themselves:

Most, if not all, religions regard the name of their god as sacred (and also often the pronouns by which s/he is addressed). Using your or others’ gods’ names in a disrespectful manner is much worse than any form of profanity; and the use of that language should be given a PG-13 or R rating much more quickly than any other form of profanity, and yet there are PG movies that use that use that type of language more than 100 times.

The largest exception that I could come up with, and the only reason to avoid using words labeled as bad, is simply because others are offended by their use (even if the offense is artificial). So while I try to be polite to others, I have chosen not be offended by any particular word, and hope to teach my children to do the same. I make the point that avoiding their use is not the same thing as being offended by their use, because of what I have to say next.

To actually label specific words as bad, simply for the sake of the word itself, is completely pretentious. From the same Ensign article: “Obscenity, the open use of which used to be a mark of lower social strata, has somehow become acceptable in everyday conversation for everyday people.”¹ I’m sorry, could you repeat that?! “Used to be a mark of lower social strata?” So we shouldn’t use particular words simply because they were once used by the lower class? Well fiddlesticks, we better clean up our language, because we don’t want to sound like lower class peasants working in the fields or beggars on the streets. But seriously, it really is pretentious to think that we shouldn’t use certain words, just because they were used by someone else “that is not as good as you.” It is interesting that the word “vulgar” used to be defined as “of the common people” (see the word history listed on this) page.

I’m not intentionally trying to argue with religious leaders, I just feel that sometimes the majority of people “favoring” profanity are focusing on small, unimportant details rather than the bigger picture (think about ancient Jews and their detailed, excessive lists of things you couldn’t do on the Sabbath, when the law is simply to keep the Sabbath holy; I don’t plan to discuss this particular topic, it is way beyond the scope of this essay). I have too often heard people around me say things like, “that was a really good movie, but the language was horrible.” When I hear comments like that, it annoys me so much I want to “smoosh [their] face” (kudos to whomever names where I got that quote).

It is doubtful that most of you are actually being pretentious and instead truly believe there are bad words, because that’s just what you’ve been taught. Hopefully, though, I can get people to understand (or even agree with) the whole point of this essay –

there are no bad words, and it is infinitely more important that you watch what you mean than the words you actually use to say it.