10:46 – I concluded that Netflix wasn’t likely to get the rest of Heartland, so yesterday morning I ordered series 3 on DVD from Amazon for $27. (Paul Jones commented, “Boy, if you’re actually buying the DVD’s, you must really like that show…”)
Shortly after I placed the order, I was looking at our instant queue on my computer, something I rarely do. I discovered that, although Netflix lists streaming availability as Season 1 and Season 2 with a total of 31 episodes, they’re lying. What they have is all 13 episodes of Season 1. They actually have only the first 9 of 18 episodes of Season 2. The names are shown for episodes 10 through 18, but if you try to play one of those you get a pop-up message saying that episode is unavailable for streaming. Rat bastards.
So now I need to get Season 2 as well. The way things are going, I might as well order Season 4 while I’m at it.
12:52 – O’Reilly just sent me the mock-up for the cover of the forensic science book. I think it’s great.
subtitle: “How to get away with murder.”
Nah, that would be socially irresponsible.
Subtitle: “How those bad, bad people who work for The Man in oppressing The People do their work”.
On the contrary, the vast, vast majority of forensic scientists and technicians seek to determine the truth, whether what they find helps convict a criminal or is exculpatory evidence that gains the release of someone who was falsely charged.
Unfortunately, most forensics organizations report to law enforcement organizations, which is an obvious conflict of interest. In North Carolina, for example, the state forensics lab is under the SBI (State Bureau of Investigation). Law enforcement people generally want to convict those they “know” did the crime, so they tend to press forensics folks to skew things in the prosecution’s favor. Most forensics folks are pretty good at resisting such pressure, but often their superiors are subject to political pressure that in effect makes them agents of the prosecution. And if a forensics guy’s boss is “suggesting” something to him, it takes a pretty strong will to resist.
Will lawyer, stockbroker and politician cadavers be available, sir?
RBT wrote:
“On the contrary, the vast, vast majority of forensic scientists and technicians seek to determine the truth…”
I’ve seen many many cases where this is, let us say, highly optimistic. The Dingo-Took-My-Baby case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azaria_Chamberlain_disappearance was just one case based on incompetent and biased forensic work. It took years before the Chamberlains were exonerated.
Duke LaCrosse rape case comes to mind.
Heartland 2 and 4 cost $26.55 + $38.69 = $65 , with free shipping, at amazon.com
The same thing (except the disks are region 2) from amazon.co.uk would cost (£13.99 + £14.97)*0.83 + £4.07 shipping (they remove 17% VAT if your address is outside the UK) i.e. about US$45.
Those forensics were accurate, just not disclosed to the defense.
That, along with RBT’s point about most (criminal) forensics techs working for the government directly or indirectly, was my point. I’m mostly willing to believe that most criminal forensics techs being competent though probably not inspired. Generally honest about their professional tasks but unwilling to defy a boss or a policy even if it would affect a criminal case. But I’m not completely willing to stipulate even that, given the issues with the gold standard, the FBI crime lab.
Hey Chuck, have you moved away from Firefox altogether? I’m still on FF 3.6.28 and I’ve been nagged to upgrade for a while now. Now I’m getting popups warning me to upgrade to FF 11, or else.
I don’t really want to, so would you suggest Chrome, or something else as an alternative?
SteveF, don’t you mean the iron pyrite standard, the FBI Crime Lab?
“Heartland 2 and 4 cost $26.55 + $38.69 = $65 , with free shipping, at amazon.com
The same thing (except the disks are region 2) from amazon.co.uk would cost (£13.99 + £14.97)*0.83 + £4.07 shipping (they remove 17% VAT if your address is outside the UK) i.e. about US$45.”
Alas, I no longer have anything region-free to play region 2 discs with. Some of my earliest DVD drives were region-free, but those are long gone.
I thought DVD players nowadays were either Region free or had firmware that could be zapped very easily. The player I bought in 1999 plays anything, even though a salesperson from a rival store said “they’ve just gone illegal”, which was a lie.
As far as I know, DVD players are still region-coded, although as you say it’s often easy to disable that. In the US, it is illegal under the DMCA to sell a region-free DVD player because it’s a device that’s designed to disable content-protection measures used by the copyright holder.
I don’t know what the situation is in the States, but I can buy region 2 DVD players here in Toronto. An alternative would be to set up an external DVD drive as region 2 and watch the DVDs with a computer. Of course with a computer there are other (illegal in the US) options.
Well, bittorrent is perfectly legal in the US, as long as you set your upload speed to 0.00. Downloading copyrighted files is legal; it’s uploading (so-called “making available”) that’s prosecuted.
I suppose I could grab a season 2 torrent and watch them on my office system. The display is actually larger angularly than watching the 42″ TV in our den from the sofa, and the sound is also better. Of course, with a 45-minute episode typically crammed into a 400 MB AVI file, the image quality isn’t great.
@Miles Teg
I strongly do not recommend upgrading Firefox. Go into the settings and turn off the upgrade notifications. I have only 2gb of addressable RAM, and Firefox pretty much instantly hogs 80% of that, and thrashes the hard drive for minutes at a time, preventing everything else on the computer from working. I literally have to go do something else, while Firefox takes over the computer completely for as much as 5 minutes at a time.
I suspect you must have at least 4gb of addressable RAM to avoid Firefox’ problems. Both my son and his S.O. run Linux on computers older than mine (5 years) and they both use Chrome and are quite happy. I may give it a try in upcoming months.
You should be able to get a higher quality download than that. Cursory inspection of The Pirate Bay suggests that an evil, criminal, pirate type could get them in 720p.
Yeah, but the resolution isn’t really the problem. Even HD looks terrible if it’s highly compressed.
re Heartland episodes: A quick look seems to show that if you want to grab an entire season in one torrent, 400MB/episode is what you get. If you grab single episodes, sizes are up to 1.6GB/ep. I should hope that video quality would suffice. Or, as you seem to be doing, just buy the disks. Even if only $1/season makes it to the producer and cast, as seems likely, it’s still supporting them.
I typically watch TV torrents at 1.09GB. They’re 720p and look great on the HD big screen.
Greg and Chuck: I can strongly recommend Chrome or its Linux variant, Chromium, and have used it since it came out. In my experience it is at least two to three times faster than Firefox and does not bug you about upgrades, it just does them; it’s at 18.0.1025.152 m now and I have had nearly zero problems or issues all these years. Lots of options and add-ons and themes and so on, scads, really, for all interests.
Thanks Chuck and Dave for the comments about FF.
I may well just get Chrome, my younger nephew, who has turned into quite a computer geek, uses Chrome exclusively, and has done so for years.
Chuck, the PC in question has 4 GB of RAM, I think. Might be more, but it’s two years old so I probably thought at the time that 4 GB would be enough. Next PC will probably have a lot more, I don’t know how much is common nowadays.
I am not buying any new computer with less than 8gb RAM in the future. May shoot for 12. Have been procrastinating, but will probably have both a new laptop and a new NAS server, on which I will build the radio automation system, by July.
Chuck; I have two HP Pavilion desktops, one bought fifteen months ago which is running Windows 7 Ultimate and that came with 8GB RAM. The other one I got maybe six months ago and it also came with 8GB and is now running RH 6.2 (and soon, more virtualized instances of RH 6.2 via KVM). If I do a system scan with either one via Crucial or whoever, they will each take a doubling to 16GB RAM. I also jacked up my Lenovo IdeaPad netbook from one to two GB RAM the same way. You probably won’t need that much RAM for the NAS box, and I am guessing your new laptop will come standard with 8GB RAM by the time you’re ready to buy it, and you can then double that or whatever you wanna do with it.
We’re a Canadian home schooling family, and aside from being fans of your books (just ordered the biology title), my kids are fans of Heartland as well. I’m wondering if you can order from Amazon.ca, which has season 2 for $26.83 CAN and season 4 for $29.99, to the US (although the exchange rate isn’t nearly as good as it used to be)? There’s also “A Heartland Christmas”…
Hi, Becky
Thanks. I’d never thought about ordering from Amazon Canada, but I may give that a try. Amazon US sells all four seasons. I ordered Season 3 from them for $27, which we’ve just started watching. I didn’t order Season 4, because it was $40 and I was waiting to see if they’d reduce the price.