Publius has some good thoughts about the broader implications of the NYT rhetoric. He says it quite well (and appears to be back on his meds), so rather than excerpting or commenting, I’ll just play the role of InstaTgirsch and link it without substantive comment. Click the link and look for the Broder and Whittman post (he’s bloggered).
For the last year or so, I’ve been using a Magnavox MRV640 DVD+RW recorder, and it’s been frustrating to say the least. On the one hand, I like the features, but on the other, it’s had some weird and sporadic reliability issues. DVDs that I burn sometimes skip on other players, and many of them won’t play on other players at all.
Just this week, I burned something down to a DVD+RW. It plays fine on the Magnavox, of course; it also plays okay on my year-old Dell PC, and on our 3-4 year old eMachines laptop. It won’t even recognize on my six-year-old Dell PC, my five-year-old set-top DVD player, my three-year-old DVD-ROM drive, or my brand-spankin’-new Sony DVD+/-RW recorder that’s in my other PC. It’s mind numbingly frustrating not to be able to watch what you record!
Looking around the internet, I see a lot of people complaining of similar problems with other set-top DVD burners, and some opining that it’s the media, rather than the recorder.
I’m totally confused.
So I’m opening up this forum on DVD burners, in hopes that somebody will have some good advice and useful experience.
I’m still pondering a different set-top burner, but what I really want may not exist. In tgirsch’s dream land, I would be able to record to a DVD+R or DVD-R, then before finalizing the disk, take it over to a PC where I could do the chapter editing and so forth.
Let it not be said that I never admit it. See a good discussion on Bayes Theorem here and here and here — it is in this last thread where I admit I was wrong. 
This is also a good example of why I’m an ex-math major. I always sucked at statistics, and it was usually because of the kind of mistake I made here, wherein I misread and misunderstood the givens. My logic was sound, but it was based on a horrible misunderstanding of the premises. The bright side is, based on this, I’m halfway to becoming a successful right-wing pundit. I just need to eliminate the sound logic part.
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
