Right or wrong, the following two things will make me think less of you as a human being
1: If, in casual conversation, I ask you what you're currently reading or what books you've read lately and you give me anything other than a book title. If you give me a lame cop-out like "I only read technical books" or "I'm between books right now" or "I'm reading Practical C++ Templates", that's just another way of saying "I don't read", which itself is a way of saying "I'm willfully illiterate", and there's little sadder than someone who's willfully illiterate.
And you only fare slightly better if your answer is something like "I only read Discworld books" or "I'm reading Harry Potter And Prisoner Of Azkaban for the eighth time".
2: You own a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player. Both technologies are a scam. The only people who had any problem with the existing DVD technology were the big media companies, and for one simple reason -- with a couple of easily-obtainable pieces of freeware, you can easily convert a DVD movie into a freely sharable AVI file with no loss of quality.
The big media companies didn't like this, so they went on a multi-pronged campaign to eliminate this. First they developed new hardware that was built not with better quality at its core but better DRM. These players can (and in some cases must) have their software upgraded when the existing encoding is cracked. It seems that not a week goes by that somesuch player suddenly can't play new discs and requires an upgrade that may or may not render your old discs unplayable.
Meanwhile I can buy a Korean DVD player at my local corner store for $30 that'll play every DVD ever printed and never requires an update. This is progress?Then the media companies went on a marketing campaign to convince you that you wanted a player with more DRM. . .I mean. . .better image quality and fabulous DVD extras. Then they further tempted you by releasing a pile of empty-headed but very shiny and explosion-y crap like Fantastic Four, Fifth Element and Armageddon -- movies that would look awfully cool played on a $6,000 plasma TV at Best Buy.
Fact is, if you have a Blu-Ray or an HD-DVD player, that means that the big media companies convinced you that slightly better quality is worth the high cost and added DRM.
And that makes you a sucker. Might as well go buy some $7,000 speaker wire to hook it up. Then you'll be complete.
Is the difference noticable? [shrug] You can see little extras on some movies (in Dawn of the Dead, you can read computer monitors and background posters, and in some older films, you can see the reflection of the film crew in the actors' eyes) but you can't in most others (generic dark drama series).
I definitely don't like all the DRM for the bloody things. I'm tempted to crack mine open and see if I can prove to Sony that there is really no point trying to add software security into hardware I have currently targeted by my soldering iron. There's certainly no shortage of pirated Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs; hell, they even sell them on the street downtown.
Other than the films I already have, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray suck quite a bit. Luckily there's HD videogames to play. Pew! Pew!
Also, I'm reading Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. 2. It's a series of "newly"-translated (1956) historical essays on the political, nationalistic and economic traditions of the Land of the Rising Sun. My copy is quite a bit older than the Amazon link.