“The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history”
UPDATE: MS’ ass-raping of customers with DRM in order to get a lock on distribution channels seems rather poorly timed.
Monthly Archives: January 2007
Goodbye cruel world!
January 25, 2007 – 12:18 pm
Scifi archeology
January 24, 2007 – 11:38 pm
Two attempts to discern the real stories implied by the bits of on-screen wreckage we had to make do with:
The Matrix
Star Wars
Hopefully these’ll be read by some kid out there, who will treat us all to what Lucas & the Warchowskis didn’t.
Must be a coincidence
January 22, 2007 – 1:55 pm
Family Watchdog’s Google Maps hack shows you the bad apples. The red squares indicate convictions for offenses against children. I know you’d have to try pretty hard to not live or work somewhere relatively near a school in this town, but this seems like an alcoholic renting an apartment above a saloon.
If at first you don’t succeed, you fail - and the test will be terminated
January 20, 2007 – 1:24 pm
Via Hudnall, Wormhole guns!
Though the time I spend on video games will probably remain at zero, I have to admit this looks pretty inspired.
Live sex show disrupted by outbreak of Comic Convention
January 19, 2007 – 10:39 am
TJIC spanks* loser academics for self-congratulation crossed with Bond fanboyism:
“This [ academic ] conference [ on James Bond ] is a revolutionary act,” said Luc Shankland, a lecturer on media and cultural studies at the Sorbonne
Tenured academics, you see, don’t really like revolution at all. They’re the biggest stasists on the planet.
What they like is [...]
Wow
January 14, 2007 – 1:51 pm
Just wow.
As good a reminder as any of why I stopped watching CNN years ago.
I’m wearing my black armband
January 10, 2007 – 10:00 am
Today in 1946 the UN General Assembly met for the first time in London. It is also the anniversary of the founding of the League of Nations. Will they never learn?
On the plus side, its also the anniversary of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.
Some Common Sense money quotes:
Some writers have so confounded society with [...]
Administrivia
January 10, 2007 – 1:15 am
After upgrading to WP 2.0.6, Spam Karma got a little wobbly - so I reset all its MySQL tables. I’m not sure if this means those of you who’ve been commenting freely might need to be manually re-approved, but if so, I apologize.
Our brains are just faking it, apparently
January 9, 2007 – 11:59 pm
It seems we have only the vaguest sense of the world around us. Check this out, and look at other videos from the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois.
(via the afterword of Peter Watts Blindsight, an enjoyable and interesting hard-SF book & free download)
Real women in the real world
January 5, 2007 – 2:54 am
No one is made at all uncomfortable by acknowledgment of the contributions of evolutionary biology to the behavior of men. And yet, one’s wanderings through the MSM could easily give one the impression that women are unencumbered by base nature, allowing them to exist solely in a political context. IOW, female behavior is either portrayed [...]
Snarking at pre-Cambrian business models
January 5, 2007 – 12:10 am
Bob Frankston, mocking the Regulatorium:
Power Distribution to be like Telecom Distribution
For Immediate Release: POWER SHARING RENEGOTIATED
Inspired the the success of faux-ATT in its BS acquisition the owners for the power generating companies including Niagara, Quebec, TMI and others have opted out of the shared power distribution agreements and will build their own local distribution systems. [...]
Paging Doctor Dalrymple
January 4, 2007 – 11:27 pm
The prognosis is grim (some reshuffling of ‘grafs by me):
BRITAIN is facing the first increase in crime for more than a decade and a 25% jump in the prison population to 100,000, a leaked Downing Street report reveals.
The confidential and unusually frank report from Tony Blair’s strategy unit also attacks the police for failing to [...]
Becky Cloonan is amazing
January 4, 2007 – 7:50 pm
I don’t know how I’ve missed Becky’s work, but I know what I’ll be looking for the next time I make it in to MYP.
Our boys in black
January 4, 2007 – 5:37 pm
Colleen Doran’s blog is awesome:
Well, my brother is [...] back on the police department and is already in the swing of things, this past week working a case where he had to go interview the Left Hand of Satan.
[...]
the Left Hand of Satan was a puzzlement to most of the police department who couldn’t figure [...]
Mother Russia rain down
January 4, 2007 – 5:36 pm
Cool:
PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. –A spent Russian booster rocket re-entered the atmosphere Thursday over Colorado and Wyoming, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said.
NORAD spokesman Sean Kelly said the agency was trying to confirm a report that a piece of the rocket may have hit the ground near Riverton, Wyo., at about 6 a.m. [...]