Great news: The DC Circuit of the US Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC can not enforce the "Broadcast Flag" that movie and television cartels want to put into future TV hardware. Basically, this little flag would tell your TiVo/Replay/VCR if it could or could not record the latest episode of American Idol or Dr Phil for you to archive or watch at a later time. The Broadcast Flag was an attempt by media companies to control how and when you watch the shows they produce and to make you buy the DVD of a show you wanted instead of archiving it yourself. From BoingBoing:

The rules set out to ban the use of Open Source/Free Software in digital television applications, and to require hardware components to be designed to be hard or impossible to create open drivers for. Fox exec Andy Setos told me that we were there to create "a polite marketplace" where no one would be allowed to disrupt his business model without getting his permission and cooperation first (cough planned economy cough commies cough).

Although now the studios are going to try to buy themselves a law through Congress, this should make it more difficult. In the end, hopefully we'll still be able to catch the few remaining shows worth watching on television.

Update: Read Susan Crawford's post for a more complete analysis of the ruling.

The DC Circuit (in a unanimous opinion) found that the Commission didn't have power from Congress to make rules about what devices do with content once that content has been received.

Orson Scott Card, who wrote one of my all-time favorite books Ender's Game, decided to post his thoughts on Star Trek in the L.A. Times (login may be required, that's why there's bugmenot). I'm not sure why he's so negative on Star Trek, but he really didn't like the series.  

The original "Star Trek," created by Gene Roddenberry, was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad. Nimoy was the only charismatic actor in the cast and, ironically, he played the only character not allowed to register emotion.

He goes on to propose that the success of the show was based on the fact that few people were reading the really good science fiction available then. That Star Trek was just successful because the public at large hadn't been exposed to enough good science fiction. So, the series was successful because it gave the audience more of the B-movie cowboy sci-fi they were familiar with from the movies of the 60s and 70s? I find that hard to believe. It seems to me that Card just can't accept that Star Trek could connect so deeply to its audience without having very complicated story lines, complex characters, or good characters. I think what hooked early fans and kept the series going was precisely that - it allowed fans to contribute to the Star Trek mythos and universe, to imagine themselves in it more readily since it wasn't as clearly defined.

Thanks to Sandy for pointing out that the save my info checkbox for comments wasn't working. I've fixed that and also have relaxed my tag stripping in comments. Bold, Italic, Paragraph, and A (link) tags will now render.