It’s not HD, and isn’t engineered to do bullshit like this. We’ve never seen it refuse to record something, or insist that it needed to delete something because of restrictions placed on the recording by DTV. The HD-Tivo boxes apparently do this now, as do the halfass DVRs sold by myriad cable and dish companies.

We’ll stick with the device we have, since it seems to understand for whom it works: US, not the content providers. Tricks like automatically zapping PPV movies off your DVR after an arbitrary amount of time will serve to do one thing: drive more people to Bittorrent.

This actually reminds me of something else: Why are the TV people so stupid? Yes, I know, I need to be more specific, given how widely their stupidity gets deployed. I speak now of DVD release dates. SciFi had ample chance to get the 3rd season of Battlestar Galactica ready in time for, if not Christmas, then at least in stores in advance of the premier of season 4 in a few weeks. That way, folks could catch up, and do so with legal media.

Did they do that? Nope. The Season 3 DVDs are still unavailable, so in order for Mrs Heathen and I to get caught up, we’re watching episodes gleaned from Bittorrent. iTunes would have solved this, had NBC not taken its ball and gone home in favor of their own half-assed, commercial-ridden, streaming-only site, but who wants to watch like that?