My woes with the Comcast DVR have been beaten to death by this point (#1, #2); so I'm going to to try and go easy on the little guy this time.  Even though it doesn't deserve my mercy because this is the fourth (maybe fifth?) box we've had and it's still skipping on HD playback, not playing any audio every third Tuesday, and worst of all, forgetting to record season passes.

When the last episode of Lost was missed inexplicably by mi pequeño amigo, I decided to just download the show off of iTunes and eat the $1.99 charge so we'd be able to watch the show on our flight yesterday.  Since this is a new MacBook and I hadn't purchased any iTunes content from it, I had to type in my Apple ID and password and then update my credit card.  About thirty minutes later the show was downloaded to my drive despite my brand new Apple Airport Extreme rebooting three times during the process (also inexplicably; and a subject for a future post about the state of wireless routers supporting Windows, Xbox 360, and Macs with WPA/WPA2).

I packed my laptop in my bag thinking we were going to have an hour of Jack, Kate, and Sawyer to keep us occupied on our flight.  About 20 minutes into the flight, I setup the laptop with two sets of headphones (for my wife and me) and double-clicked Lost from iTunes.  iTunes balked.  It couldn't play the show because the machine hadn't been authorized yet, and since I was on a flight and didn't have an internet connection, it couldn't be authorized.  Someone doesn't want us to watch this show.

Does this sound ridiculous to anyone else?  I bought the show off of iTunes with my account... why wasn't the machine authorized at that time?  I could use this opportunity to describe just how broken the state of DRM is today if this is the best option we have, but instead of doing that, I'm going to hope a cheaper HD Tivo is actually in the plans this year so I can use Amazon Unbox with Tivo and ditch both iTunes and the Comcast DVR at the same time.