Who Are You Protecting?

For the past couple of years I have made it a habit to record important sporting events like banner raisings, championship games or Opening Days. I liked to record them just in case something really spectacular or historic occurs. Now, up until this year I just used VHS tapes, because I fear change. But, since it is 2010 and I have the technology, I decided to burn the last two games of this year's NBA Finals directly onto a DVD. This also came in handy because, when the outcome of those games did not go the way that I wanted them to, I was able to delete the games with relative ease instead of trying to find a show long enough to use to tape over the games. While I wasn't going to keep either game I decided that, since I had the set-up ready to go, this would be a good opportunity to condense three or four of my old VHS videos onto one DVD and save myself some space on my shelves. The first couple went onto a DVD without a hitch, but when I went to add a third program onto the DVD I got an error message that said the VHS had "Protected Content" and the recording automatically stopped.

Apparently there is something embedded in the video that prevents it from being copied. I spent the next couple of hours trying to find away to circumvent this safety measure, but so far I haven't been successful. An Internet search revealed that there are ways people have found around it, but none of them are the kind of thing than can be done easily. It's a lot of downloading programs and entering codes, which I'm a little hesitant to do because, let's be honest, you shouldn't just blindly follow direction you find on random websites. The whole process is really annoying because I don't know why this feature even exists. Why else would you buy a DVD recorder unless you were planning to copy some VHS videos? Shouldn't this have already been taken care of? The videos I want to copy are almost a decade old, which makes it even odder that they seemed to have stumped a DVD burner that was made within the last couple of years. I highly doubt the producers of the movies would even care if I copied them at this point. At the end of the day I don't really like any of these shows enough that I couldn't live without them, but I did buy these so I don't want to just ditch them. Who knew that safety measures to prevent video piracy in 2001 would still be effective in 2010? Thank God those same people weren't working with the music industry or else my iTunes library would be a lot smaller.

-I was kind of surprised at the mixed reaction that Manny Ramirez got in his return to Fenway Park last night (well, the announcers said it was mixed but it sounded like more boos than cheers to me). Given the way that most fans were willing to overlook pretty much whatever Manny did during his time in Boston I would have expected overwhelming cheers simply for the fact that the Sox won two World Series with him in the line-up. I mean, Dave Roberts was in town for about 10 minutes, but his ALCS steal has guaranteed him standing ovations every Fenway appearance. Also, for all the back-and-forth that happened between Ramirez and the organization Manny never crossed the line and said anything about the fans. While it was not the cleanest of breaks, he didn't sign with the Yankees like Johnny Damon or burn every bridge on his way out the door like Roger Clemens, so I honestly expected a warm reception for him. Apparently, time has not healed all wounds.