Via Slashdot, BBspot – MPAA Lobbying for Home Theater Regulations, Apparently the MPAA wants to reach into your living rooms and bedrooms and regulate the size of your equipment and the arrangement of your furniture:
The MPAA defines a home theater as any home with a television larger than 29″ with stereo sound and at least two comfortable chairs, couch, or futon. Anyone with a home theater would need to pay a $50 registration fee with the MPAA or face fines up to $500,000 per movie shown.
Then, again, they want to control your social life:
“Just because you buy a DVD to watch at home doesn’t give you the right to invite friends over to watch it too.”
It’s clear that the MPAA is a girlfriend from hell. She wants to get rid of your gadgets, rearrange your pad, alienate your friends and control your entire life. You’ve got to dump her before she ruins your life permanently.
Dude, she’s insane and needs therapy.
Too bad the story is fake. The lesson here is that the MPAA must be really, really bad if people are willing to believe they would do this kind of thing for real. This kind of asshattery is not unbelievable even if it isn’t real.
This is something that I realized a long time ago about fooling people: It’s neither hard nor skillful to get people to believe believable things. That’s just telling a lie. The skill is getting people to believe things that are unbelievable. That’s funny. If the BBspot story were well written, the level of abusrdity would have increased to the point when laughter burst from the reader. But, no. The reader is left unsatisfied. Obviously, the author of the BBspot joke story isn’t very good in bed.
On the other hand, this is a good time to reflect that the voice of authority, in this case Slashdot, can be used to legitimize lies, like laundering money. Authority in an of itself cannot be a test of veracity and therein is the character flaw of the republic. To believe authority is to conflate messenger with message.