Song of the Day – “Breaking the Law” by Judas Priest

Go ahead and listen to this song right now.

Watch the video if you want.  That Rob Halford is one entertaining dude.  My favourite singer, by the way.  He even edges out Dan McCafferty for that honour.

But I digest digress.
I’m not even going to pretend that this post is about that song you’re rocking out to.  No, I only chose the title to rope you into the following rant I’m about to give about DRM, the law (har har) and… uh… bear with me please, I took some diphenhydramine hydrochloride so I could get to sleep faster tonight and it’s kicking in.

Why does my browser want to spell-check diphenhydramine to GewÁ¼rztraminer?  What the fuck is GewÁ¼rztraminer

Whatever, no time for those sour grapes.  I had a CD/DVD drive fail on me last weekend.  Mechanical failure.  Bleh.  Lucky for me this is that refurbished off-lease cheapie HP I play all my old video games on.  I just happened to have an identical CD/DVD drive from the identical computer that died several months ago.

This got me thinking.  I had successfully copied some of my Windows game CDs to ISO files, and now mount them using a Microsoft Virtual CD app and play the that way.  Saves wear and tear on the discs and on the drive.

So I also finally figured out how to copy Age of Empires II and some other game discs.  Brasero came through (slowly) for me on that.

So now I can just leave the ISO files on the hard drive, leave them persistently mounted with the MS Virtual CD app, and play them without risking damage to the actual physical disc.

And I’m pretty sure this is illegal, and that this makes me a prison-bound criminal.  Fucking stupid laws.  I’m getting sleepy so I won’t take up much more of your time.  Thanks gentle reader, you really made my day.  It’s people like you who read this blog post.

One last thing… Judas Priest was best in the 70s.