In which my theory stinks

I have a general theory of public actions (i.e. things that governments, politicians, corporations and large organizations do) which says that one ought to ignore what they say about their actions and treat the actual effects as though they were the actual goals. That is, all PR is lies, assume competent decision making creating desired outcomes.

The Republican Presidential candidates seem to be ignorant of my theory. Are they all incompetent as well as evil*?

*Evil by my standards, but still. Campaigning on an anti-contraception platform? Talking about your wife's two Cadillacs in this economy?

ann-tissa....

(wait for it)
dairy!

Erm. The new bit of kit that just arrived is a SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime. This small dark grey box will join its brother, the SiliconDust HDHomeRun, above the TV.

It will replace the cable box.

You see, we have never used the TV as a TV. It has always been plugged in to the MythTV-running computer named djinn (and a DVD player and a TiVo) and used to watch what we felt like. The cable box actually has never had video output plugged in to anything: instead, the cable came in, and a FireWire connected it to djinn.

This connection has been remarkably stable for the last few months, but it often had weird disconnects, and the cable box still turns itself off with dreadful irregularity. Worse, the cable box sucks up a lot of power, because the only FireWire equipped boxes (FCC mandates that they be available) that RCN stocks are their own dreadful DVR boxes. There's a hard disk spinning in that thing that I've never used. And they charge me for the privilege, although for the first year I successfully argued that they should only charge for a regular HD cable box as it was their fault that they didn't have one with FireWire.

Anyway.

The HDHR Prime has a CableCard slot, which will enable it to decrypt any three channels at once and send them over ethernet to djinn. The regular old HDHR doesn't do CableCard, and is thus limited to transcribing two unencrypted QAM channels, of which there are about a dozen. If all goes as planned tomorrow, we will have five simultaneous recorders available, three of which will handle any program we pay for.

$200 at Amazon or NewEgg with free shipping; that compares reasonably to the $144 RCN has been charging each year for their FireWire cable box.