Not So Fast

If only Warner Bros. weren’t so uptight about copyrights we could enjoy a short instead of a compilation.

To discover that the oil problem in the Gulf is fixing itself.

This is why I’m so blase about global warming too. The planet doesn’t need us, we aren’t as all powerful as we think we are. We might cause grief briefly to a limited number of flora and fauna, but on the whole, the Mother Nature ignores us and goes on to create far larger problems than we can.

The Library of Congress has acknowledged that there are legitimate reasons to bypass some encryption schemes, loosening the DMCA’s unreasonably strict rules.

So, feel free to jailbreak your iPhone, copy small portions of DVDs for non-commercial purposes and crack your ebooks so you can listen to them read aloud and not worry about the FBI knocking on your door. You know, like they did when you tore the tags off your mattresses and copied VHS tapes.

Also, a federal judge has ruled that it is okay to crack DRM for Fair Use. I expect this to be overturned.

But, here’s hoping things keep loosening up.

Kid trades up from an old cell phone to a Porsche on Craigslist.

About a week late, but props for the lyrics, animation.

There’s some good stuff in there. All linking to porn and cialis, but still.

It is practically imposible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

thanks !! very helpful post [invariable a comment on the most inane post in a month]

I just lacked focus at the time I was playing.

When I die I’m going to leave my body to science fiction.

I hear Glenn Hoddle has found God. That must have been one hell of a pass.

I read blogs on a similar topic, but i never visited your blog. I added it to favorites and i’ll be your constant reader. [I like these ones]

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

The worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

Thanks spammers.

Hon. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, politician, Montreal, QC, 1863

What will you actually do once elected?

Traffic cameras in Arizona are being pulled because everyone ignored them.

In January of this year Arizona began considering the shut-down a state-wide traffic cam program. This is because there was wide-spread non-compliance. Many, many citizens of Arizona simply refused to pay their tickets.

I don’t even remember her name, but it was 5th grade. We’d just moved and I’d left an awesome teacher. I have no idea why, but I didn’t like the new lady, so I stopped caring about pleasing my teachers and I stopped doing my homework. A habit I continued right through the rest of my schooling, to my grades detriment.

I remember her as a shrew that didn’t particularly like kids, but at this point, I can’t back that up in any way. If you told me she was the opposite, I would believe you. But something about her sent me off.

No one cares about facts.

Scales of Justice (Detail)

Life isn't fair.

Annoying to receive, useful to live by.

World War II writers should have been fired for cliche abuse.

It makes more sense now.

If I needed a GPS, this is the one I would get. Who cares if it’s accurate, or has good signal strength or anything like that.

Just probably not from the global problem du jour.

Global per capita income, corrected for inflation, had trebled in my lifetime, life expectancy had increased by one third, child mortality had fallen by two-thirds, the population growth rate had halved. More people had got out of poverty than in all of human history before. When I was born, 36% of Americans had air conditioning. Today 79% of Americans below the poverty line had air conditioning. The emissions of pollutants from a car were down by 98%. The time you had to work on the average wage to buy an hour of artificial light to read by was down from 8 seconds to half a second.

Not only are human beings wealthier, they are also healthier, wiser, happier, more tolerant, less violent, more equal. Check it out – the data is clear. Yet if anything the pessimists had only grown more certain, shrill and apocalyptic. We were facing the `end of nature’, the `coming anarchy’, a `stolen future’, our `final century’ and a climate catastrophe.

The Feds are taking control of the BP leak website. To create more transparency. Yes, as the Feds are known for in their websites, and indeed general communications, transparency.

It’s 3500 feet high and they could build a walking path on it. This angers the mountaineers of England.

‘Next they’ll be wanting to put a lift up Everest or filling in the Grand Canyon. It is one of the most preposterous things I’ve heard of.’

See, Everest is 10x bigger. That’s why it’s a mountain.

Life has some cool pictures of writers and their typewriters.

So that’s two of Iran’s neighbors that want the nuclear facilities bombed.

“I think it’s a cost-benefit analysis,” Mr. al-Otaiba said. “I think despite the large amount of trade we do with Iran, which is close to $12 billion … there will be consequences, there will be a backlash and there will be problems with people protesting and rioting and very unhappy that there is an outside force attacking a Muslim country; that is going to happen no matter what.”

“If you are asking me, ‘Am I willing to live with that versus living with a nuclear Iran?,’ my answer is still the same: ‘We cannot live with a nuclear Iran.’ I am willing to absorb what takes place at the expense of the security of the U.A.E.“

And it sounds like others are unwilling to say it aloud, but agree. It’d be nice if they did something about it instead of making us the bad guys though.

Possibly the best artist’s rendition of Neanderthal man I have ever seen. It really captures his poetic side.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

-Robert Heinlein

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

It’s a steampunk summer. I shall don my brass goggles and endeavor to find a dirigible in  which to enjoy the fine zephyrs.

His Dark Materials Trilogy – Philip Pullman

Oswald Bastable Trilogy – Michael Moorcock

The Difference Engine – William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

Steampunk – Ann Vandermeer (editor)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 2 – Alan Moore, Kevin Oneill

His Majesty’s Dragon – Naomi Novik (continuation of series dependent on how I like the first book)

Sheepfarmer’s Daughter – Elizabeth Moon

This Scepter’d Isle – Mercedes Lackey

The Aeneid – Virgil

The 3:16 Promise – Max Lucado

The Romance of Three Kingdoms – Luo Guanzhong

You know, I’m okay with standing room seats on airplanes. I wouldn’t choose it on a trans-oceanic flight, but a couple hours or so, sure.

A computer program deciphered a long-dead language. Yay, science!

You can blame Lileks for this flashback:

note: this commercial was not banned in the US.

It’s on ebay. Act quick.

$10 a month for ad-infested access? No thank you.

A nice summary of Europe’s money woes and the the G-20.

At first glance, the G-20 looked harmless.  As predicted, it cost much and accomplished nothing.  No decisions were taken, no minds were changed.  Politicians had their pictures taken; the press hailed mushy communiques as breakthroughs and delusional protesters played silly ‘revolutionary’ games.

That would be fine under normal circumstances; wasting taxpayer money on pointless pageantry is one of the least harmful things the world’s political leaders ever do.

If officials won’t take action, it’s up to you, Real American At the Ball Game, to rip that evil thing out of your neighbors hands and crush it.

So much this.

Know who should be having hearings and seeing what can be done about the legislation, or lack thereof,  that allowed this? Congress.

Peter Jackson may direct The Hobbit. Oh please, oh please, oh please. How else can it all feel like one long story?

The surprising part of these graphs is that test scores remain constant.  Were the tests adjusted for grade inflation?

Not that I’m against school spending. America is dumb enough, it can use all the education it can get. It is one of the legitimate functions of government. Maybe not the federal government though.

$150. *drool* Getting very close to my $100 price point.

A third of the people that didn’t have the income to pay their mortgages a year ago, but the government let them have sweet deals on a refinance, don’t have the money to pay their mortgages now.

The White House and the State of Arizona are setting up to do battle. Be interesting to see how far executive power goes.

General McChrystal said some things about the White House he shouldn’t have to a Rolling Stone reporter.

I can’t believe Cap and Trade on utilities is still going forward. I know I’m looking forward to my higher electricity bill. At least, at the very least, they aren’t trying it economy wide. Yet.

This book was always my favorite of the series.

No doubt the game will look nothing like this, but awesome. Also, Boxleitner!

WordPress.com fails utterly with the whole video embed thing. Thanks for the free blog though!

Since Toy Story 3 is coming out EW ranked the Pixar movies [Danger: slideshow]. Here is my corrected list:

10. Cars
9. Toy Story 2
8. Monsters, Inc.
7. A Bug’s Life
6. Toy Story
5. Finding Nemo
3. Up
4. Ratatouille
2. The Incredibles
1. Wall-E

Cars is by far the weakest story, and the annoying hick accents don’t help it. It’s the closest Pixar has come to mediocre. Up would be higher but it suffered from schizophrenia between the first and second half (it’s a tearjerker emotional growth story, no, it’s a action-adventure caper!).

Making the list I realized that I’m pretty firm on which go in the top and bottom half, but I kept moving them around within their halves. Obviously, I prefer the more serious story lines to the more typical kid’s story. Not that any of them are light on the points they’re making. And other than Cars, I’d watch any of them any time because they’re all awesome.

I put a lot of thought into this. Way more than I should have.

So, our government is now trying to take over BP? Or at least get a piece of it.  A failing company? Good plan. Suck it dry leave the rotting husk for the little people that invested their retirement money in it.

Walmart is going to subsidize college education for its employees.

Questions:

A. What do you do with a Walmart-centric education, won’t it be a laughingstock?

B. Why don’t we toughen up high school back up, possibly flunk some kids, and call the high school diploma the new bachelors?

C. Can’t they go to community college/state school for about the same price, eliminating that whole laughingstock problem?

Jon Stewart rips on Obama’s broken promises.

You’re campaign was premised on reining in presidential power, what happened?

Duh.

All that power that you didn’t like when someone else had it, you decided to keep it. Oh my god, you’re Frodo!

Hope and Change. Things don’t change and all we can hope to do is balance competing interest to keep them from actively harming us.

Stupid un-embedable video. Go here to watch the awesomeness.

Live Play:

I tried to like A Game of Thrones, I tried to like it for 1500 or so pages, but I couldn’t find a character worth caring about with so I got bored with all the jerks and wandered off. Maybe it’ll be better on TV.

Obama signed an executive order setting up a “Lifestyle Health Modification” program.

The nice thing is, eating a twinkie becomes an act of defiance toward the government. The down side is that what I eat is somehow government business. Thanks, Obamacare!

NPR says the Far Right hates soccer because they’re racist. You think it’s going to be  the usual liberal/conservative blah blah blah, but it get fairly interesting at the end.

I think that in another 5-10 years all these kids that have been playing soccer instead of Little League are going to raise the talent pool and interest level of soccer in America.

Voyager 2 is talking to us again.  Hopefully this will avert future problems.

Why Americans don’t like soccer. In lego form. 90 minute game, summed up in one minute, including replays. Also, it ends with a tie.

What global warming may save us from [Cracked, NSFW].

But I don’t. I care a lot.

Malt Salt. Now everything can taste like fish and chips. The Future Is Now!

Thanks to new regulation airplane airbags, you might just survive the initial impact and fire, so you can be eaten by sharks.

The real philosophic question is why these people haven’t drawn the obvious conclusion of their philosophy and killed themselves in a fire. “Yes we are the bane of the universe and are killing the planet and I refuse to bring another life into existence, but my life is good enough to keep, yo.” Perhaps your children might feel the same way?

Was Barak Obama in the Whoomp – There It Is video?

A gigantic building project in a communist country and it’s falling apart as soon as it’s done? What were the odds?

Your ratings can hardly get lower so why  not man up, and use your powers to legislate things instead of letting the Executive Branch and the bureaucracy do the work? Sure, the President takes all the blame for things as they are now, but the flip side of blame is credit and wouldn’t you like some of that? Did you really get elected so that you could question baseball players about steroids and declare June to be National Take A Dog To Work Month?

Also, enough with the corruption. Pretend like you are public servants and stop taking money and gifts from lobbyists and  kick the bastards that won’t stop out.  You wanted all that power and now that you have it you spend it trying to hold on to it. See how that isn’t really helpful to the  nation?

I know they’re crazy ideas, but it might work.

Doom is coming to the economy since taxes are going up next year, says the guy with a curve named after him. I guess I should say more doom is coming.