All news in this entry comes from Fark.

Excitement

The New York Post reports that radio shock-jocks Opie and Anthony will be returning to terrestrial radio to replace David Lee Roth, whose show has been receiving terrible ratings. Opie and Anthony were fired back in 2002 after a couple was arrested for having sex in St. Patrick's Cathedral for an Opie and Anthony contest. The duo langoured for a while and were then picked up by XM Satellite Radio.

Anger

Royal Philips Electronics, makers of "Philips"-branded electronics, filed a U.S. patent for a system that prohibits viewers from skipping through commercials with their digital video recorders (DVRs). Philips cautioned, however, that "the anti-channel-changing technology might not sit well with consumers and suggested in its patent filing consumers be allowed to avoid the feature if they paid broadcasters a fee." Here's a great business model: take away rights that consumers are permitted by law, and then charge them to get those rights back. I think one of the big reasons that people like TiVo and other DVR services is that they can skip commercials. Already, other DVR providers are offering systems that don't respect stupid DRM flags inserted by content providers to prevent you from "time shifting" or "content shifting," which are your rights under the law (cf. Sony v. Universal, 464 U.S. 417 [1984]).