Archive for 2010
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Righthaven LLC: Suing Bloggers For Fun & Profit
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 19, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Thursday, August 19th, 2010Although the music and film industries seem to have eased up on suing as a business model, an opportunistic lawyer has filled the gap by doing the same for online news.
 Mickey Isn’t The Only One Shackled By Copyright Law Abuse |
Sometimes I wonder if poor Sonny Bono ran himself into a tree while skiing on purpose, to punish himself for his part in helping drive forward the endless onslaught of frivolous and abusive lawsuits and copyright trolling of the past decade or so. We’ve touched on issues relating to this before, mostly in reference to the RIAA or MPAA, but it appears there’s a new copybully on the block, and he’s here to save the world from all the money-grubbing bloggers that are apparently solely responsible for the continued demise of the news industry, with their felonious linking and article-citing practices. That Wired article just linked to sums up the story pretty well, but if you want to keep up to speed, visit RighthavenLawsuits.com, which is NOT the website of Righthaven LLC, but rather a site set up to track the insane number of lawsuits being served up by these greedy bastards. I say “greedy”, because the main guy behind this all has stated publicly that he’s doing it primarily for profit, and I say “bastard” because I think anyone could tell by looking at the bloated, smug, self-satisfied jerk in this photo that he is one. Interestingly, Righthaven doesn’t seem to have a site themselves, unless they’ve sued into oblivion everyone with a link to it. If you want to be sure you avoid any of the many news organizations being represented in these actions, a list of Stephens Media Newspapers can be found here, and Clayton Cramer’s Blog has a simple Firefox-based solution here. And to “avoid their wrath”, see this blog post by Las Vegas trademark and intellectual property attorney Ryan Gile.
Scientist #1: Blah, Blah, Blah. Scientist #2: Nuh-uh!
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 18, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010It’s interesting how two scientists with the same information available can arrive at diametrically opposed positions. Is science just another religion? Ray Kurzweil says we’ll reverse engineer the brain in 20 years. PZ Myers says “nuh-unh”. Oh yeah, and the web is dead. Or it isn’t. Or it is.
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| No it isn’t. |
I would like to clarify that I am not an expert in any of the areas I’m about to discuss. This is obvious to most intelligent people whenever I start to speak, but I just want to make sure that you know that I know. In spite of my lack of expertise (some may call it actual ignorance) in the fields of science, technology, religion, and philosophy, I have a great deal of enthusiasm for learning about and discussing them, which is why I love it when a real scientist or expert makes a broad, bold assertion, and another immediately refutes it. This happened twice today in the tech press, and in one instance, the contested “science” veered dangerously close to the metaphysical. The more mundane example was when Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson (who most recently got a lot of attention for his book Free
Why You Need To Stop Uploading Photos From Your iPhone To Facebook. Now.
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 17, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010With over 2 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month and 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE, when will we have time to enjoy it all? And where will we keep it until then?
As I bemoaned the fact the other day that I had nothing I wanted to listen to in my music collection, I had to pause and laugh. I have what some of my friends consider to be a rather puny collection at about 14,000 song files. Really? Nothing to listen to? If I DID choose to listen to it all, I just did the math, and it would play non-stop for just over 48 days! And my collection is only about 0.001% of the 13,000,000 songs on iTunes. This reminded me of a discussion I had years ago when I worked in a bookstore and I asked one of the more seasoned bibliophiles on staff when he thought was the last time a person might have read all the books in print, and without hesitating he replied “around the time of Voltaire”. I guess book store employees have time to ponder these things. Today, if you were to read a book a day, it would take you 355,794 years to accomplish the same feat, at least based on Google Books’ count, which is 129,864,880 books. Things get worse when it comes to user-generated content. If you wanted to watch all the videos uploaded to YouTube from JUST TODAY, it would take you about 94 years. Of course, somewhere in there you’d be watching a few thousand versions of Keyboard Cat, but that’s how much video was uploaded today; 24 hours’ worth every minute. And things are for all practical purposes just as hopeless if you have any intention of trying to keep up with feature films; this source says that globally, there were 6,324 made by major studios in 2009, and if you include indy films submitted to major festivals, the number jumps to 50,000 each year. Even if you stuck to only watching the major releases, that’s still 17 movies a day. So where do we store all this media? And when will we have time to consume it? Well, the answer to the first question may soon become a problem; 2008 was the first year in which the data we generated exceeded our available storage space. Thank God we delete old e-mails, right? And the answer to the second is up to you. Personally, this all made me realize that with an estimated 37 years to live (according to this MSN calculator, who knows how much storage space it uses) I probably need to select my media more carefully, and maybe read a book before years’ end. That hour on YouTube, 3 hours on Wikipedia, and 2 hours sharing it all on Facebook last night was probably time better spent. Read the rest of this entry »
Tell The Invisible Chimp I Can’t See Him Today
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 16, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Monday, August 16th, 2010In the bizarre and bloody PR battle of carnivores vs vegetarians, things can take strange turns, like when this PETA campaign against Dodge backfires.
The carnivore vs vegetarian conflict is a bloody battleground. In a marketing war being waged with weapons like cologne that smells like meat (see the commercial here), things can often take an unexpected turn. A couple of PETA’s most reliable weapons of mass distraction are nudity or scantily clad celebrities, which was for instance effective when PETA was the winner and the American Hot Dog Association was the wiener last year when PETA dogged the AHDA by suggesting you stick something different between your buns on National Hot Dog Day. You can’t win ALL the battles though, and we think a US automaker Dodged the bullet pretty cleverly recently when PETA complained about the exploding chimp in this commercial (also below), and Dodge responded by digitally making the chimp invisible, but otherwise leaving the commercial intact. Not surprisingly, Dodge got exponentially more ad views with their strategy. We tried to contact the invisible chimp for comment, and although his agent insisted we couldn’t see him, he did say in a phone interview that he expected to be bigger than Trunk Monkey. We also had the still grieving Bubbles the Chimp on the line, who disagreed, saying “Invisible Chimp, I knew Trunk Monkey, Trunk Monkey was a friend of mine. And sir, you’re no Trunk Monkey”. Decide for yourself. Both versions of the ad below. With a bonus Trunk Monkey clip. Read the rest of this entry »
The Terror Babies Of Texas & The Psychology Of Politics
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 15, 2010 by admin in Politics
Sunday, August 15th, 2010The most rudimentary understanding of psychology explains a lot of what’s wrong with American politics. Even delusions of monster babies from the future that want to kill us.
Because most political dialogue amongst the citizenry these days instantly spirals downward into irrational, knee-jerk, and poorly-reasoned rants about terror, immigrants, socialism and taxes, we often fail to step back and look at the psychological underpinnings of politics in general. Looked at through such a framework, the basic forces at work are quite simple. It all goes back to Psych 101, where one learns that the leaders of any group of people – elected or not – are essentially replacements for our parents. When we’re children, the parental role is first replaced by our teachers and school officials, and later, as we gain more autonomy, by our bosses and other figures of authority, which for some may include some kind of spiritual guidance or deity. As you enter adulthood, if you aren’t the leader of some other type of group, like a business, social, or religious organization, you probably lack the audacity or strength of character to be a political leader. You will forever remain – at least metaphorically – in the role of a child. On the other hand, if you have a sense of self that makes you feel entitled to make decisions on behalf of others, regardless of whether or not you know anything about them, and if you have the communication and organizational skills necessary, your narcissistic tendencies will have the opportunity to flourish, and you stand a good chance of being a politician or some other kind of leader. All of which explains a lot about the dynamics of American politics today. Speaking metaphorically, our parents – who are supposed to provide us with a secure home, feed us, educate us, and guide us into self-sufficient responsible adulthood – have flown the coop. They’ve absconded with our allowance, blowing it on big parties, scandalous relationships, brawls with the neighbors , and half-baked schemes for rebuilding the shattered financial security resulting from their irresponsible behavior. And then, in their guilt and dysfunction, they’ve gone on and tried to point the finger at us , as if their inability to run the household is our fault. As kids, we don’t know how to react to all of this, so instead of calling them out for their shenanigans, we fight amongst each other like dysfunctional siblings. For their part, our “parents” know in their hearts that they’ve created the social and economic mess we’re all in, but are reacting like any parent would when they lose control of the kids. They’re shouting and relying completely on hyperbole to try and scare everyone back into line. Which only riles everyone up more, causing some of the kids to run away from home, others to mope around demanding that someone take care of them, and yet others to scream and shout that they have the solution, even though they’re the ones that most recently trashed the house. So is there a solution? Personally, I think some other families in the neighborhood are going to see a more prominent role in the community before we get our domestic squabbles worked out. Especially when our parents’ guilt and frustration is leading them to create nearly psychotic delusions of, for instance, imaginary terrorist babies. I’ve included a couple of clips below that demonstrate some of the metaphors I’m joking about here. Both clips are with the generally mild-mannered (and probably bleeding heart liberal) Anderson Cooper. Read the rest of this entry »