Heroes of the Writers Strike

So you are a Hollywood writer, and you find yourself on strike.
What will you do?

LA Times has more
hattip: LGF

Dumber and Dumber-er: Sheehan to Challenge Pelosi

Posted by: Idiocracy

Sheehan Launches Pelosi Challenge
Anti-War Activist Cindy Sheehan Announces Plan to Challenge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Sheehan, who turned 50 on Tuesday, stunned fellow anti-war activists in May by announcing that she would sell her 5-acre Crawford protest site. She said then that she felt her efforts had been in vain and that she had [...]

Finnish court rules CSS protection used in DVDs “ineffective”

Via Oikeuden edessä and slashdot:

Finnish court rules CSS protection used in DVDs “ineffective”
In an unanimous decision released today, Helsinki District Court ruled that Content Scrambling System (CSS) used in DVD movies is “ineffective”. The decision is the first in Europe to interpret new copyright law amendments that ban the circumvention of “effective technological measures”. [...]

09 f9: A Legal Primer … or … What is the AACS-LA’s Legal argument?

The AACS-LA made some news yesterday. Read about some of it here, here, and here, as well as the following from the EFF Deep Links section:
What is the AACS-LA’s argument? In its takedown letters, the AACS-LA claims that hosting the key violates the DMCA’s ban on trafficking in circumvention devices. The DMCA provides that:
No person [...]

Professor Lawrence “RW” Lessig’s “The Withering of the Net”

Professor Lawrence “RW” Lessig’s “The Withering of the Net”

On June 16, 2006, Professor Lawrence Lessig gave a talk at the Center for American Progress entitled “The Withering of the Net: How DC Pathologies are Undermining the Growth and Wealth of the Net.” This talk was the second in a series of three. The first talk [...]

Stockholm Syndrome For Millions

Via discarded lies and Dances With Typos
An excellent article by James Lewis…

The Left’s identification with murderous aggressors

Look at the behavior of the Left since 9/11, both in this country, Europe, and even Israel. Rather than feel righteously angered by the terrorist mass murder of 3,000 innocent people, large parts of the Left have [...]

Global warming ethics, pork and profits

This caught my eye…

Global warming ethics, pork and profits

Global warming alarmism generates political and financial incentives

The ink has barely dried on its new code of conduct, and already Congress is redefining ethics and pork to fit a global warming agenda. As Will Rogers observed, “with Congress, every time they make a joke, it’s a law. [...]

“Think Big” How would you fix Xbox live?

1up has some interesting news regarding XBox Live…

How Would You Fix XBL?
Microsoft soliciting ideas, feedback for future updates.

You don’t often hear corporations asking their consumers for suggestions, but Microsoft’s done it once before with Xbox Live and they’re doing it again. Andre Vrignaud of the Xbox Live Platform Strategy team is asking Xbox users to [...]

Our Techno-Utopian Future: Fallacies and Predictions

David Veksler waxes philosophic (as is his custom) on the subject of:

Our Techno-Utopian Future: Fallacies and Predictions

What’s the ultimate destiny of our civilization? Are we destined to become “living batteries” a la the Matrix, refugees in a post-apocalyptic radioactive desert landscape, or peons of a totalitarian surveillance state? Or, can be look forward to a [...]

Is Web 2.0 Communism’s Crowning Glory?

Here is an excerpt from a interesting Op-Ed piece on Bit-Tech:
The People’s Republic of Web 2.0

Karl Marx is famous for thinking up a system where everyone had a voice, where everyone was equal, and then went on to associate it with a political system. I suppose you can’t blame old Karl for the [...]

Microsoft’s Zune Advertising Is Really Strange

This is a good example of what I like to refer to as “WTF??? Marketing”

Piracy, the better choice for consumers.

Excellent opinion piece from the INQUIRER
HD disk format wars are over

By Charlie Demerjian

THE NEXT GENERATION disk format has been settled once and for all. Thanks to the due diligence, hard work and unprecedented cooperation between the media companies, the hardware vendors and the OS vendor, we finally have a solution. It is quite easy, Piracy, [...]

The Year in Review; 2006 Top Ten Lists

It’s almost 2007, and who doesn’t like looking back at the previous year by perusing the various Top Ten lists? Here are some of my favorites…
From Wired.com we have the 9th annual presentation of the Wired News Vaporware Awards, their ode to the year’s top technology products promised, hyped and scheduled, but not delivered. Click: [...]

Windows Vista: Not Worth the Upgrade?

Some grist for the conversation mill.

4 Reasons Why Windows Vista Is Just Not Worth It

As you all may have heard, Microsoft has released Windows Vista to manufacturing yesterday. A momentous event? Well that just depends on who you ask, and if the person is myself then you are going to get the following four reasons [...]

Clueless TV Critic calls “Heroes” the fall season’s worst new network drama

Clueless TV Critic Says:

We Don’t Need Another Hero

‘Friday Night Lights’ … where the games are flat but the football players and cheerleaders have—gulp—real dimension … in ‘Heroes, … the superheroes all have predictable off-the-rack superpowers and the show itself is just superboring.

Heroes is the lousy hit … Friday Night Lights is the terrific flop [...]

More “Fizz” Than “Pop”

A toast to good foreign policy gone bad!

U.S. officials doubt Korean test was nuclear

U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that seismic readings show that the conventional high explosives used to create a chain reaction in a plutonium-based device went off, but that the blast’s readings were shy of a typical nuclear detonation.

“We’re [...]

YouTube Tags Political Video as “Inappropriate”

Wasting no time joining those champions of free speech, Google; YouTube has also now gotten into the business of censoring political speech. But they don’t limit the censorship to China.
First amendment? What’s that?
This video may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube’s user community.
Well the video will make you [...]

GooTube

This is just too funny to pass up, Gizmodo has named the YouTube / Google deal…

Google buys YouTube: GooTube.
Apparently the rumor that Google was buying YouTube was less of a rumor than someone on the inside letting it slip out to the entire world. But now that Google’s paid $1.65 billion in an all-stock acquisition—which [...]

Fight DRM: Ten things you can do today

“If consumers even know there’s a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we’ve already failed” - Disney Executive.

Defeating DRM is all about awareness.

The direct actions that we have taken are all about this. Today we are asking you to let the people around you know that DRM is bad for our society. [...]

By Next Year You Could be Playing Games on a Microsoft PlayStation 360.

Sony … between exploding laptop batteries (that must now be replaced), the way late - way expensive - Blu-ray drive, the T.V and Monitor business in steady decline, Sony spyware and rootkits intentionally loaded on their music CDs, and a Sony Computer Entertainment president (Ken Kutaragi) who said about the PS3 that it’s a premium [...]

Free-Market Science vs Government Science

Free-Market Science vs. Government Science By: George Reisman
In a free market, science originates in the minds of individual scientists, who have studied and thought about problems that interest them and who from time to time arrive at new insights, which they develop further and verify. State-sponsored science is the destroyer of science. If science is [...]

Lebanon photos: Take a closer look

From the L.A. Times article: The controversy this week over Reuters’ distribution of digitally manipulated, falsely labeled and - probably - staged photos of the fighting in Lebanon hasn’t been nearly as large as it should have been.
read more | digg story

Four countries order 4 million OLPC laptops

Four countries commit to buying 4 million Linux-powered OLPC laptops
A spokesperson for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program revealed July 31 that the countries of Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have each tendered commitments to purchase 1 million Linux laptops through the U.S.-based program.
Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand …
Dear Sir/M,
I am Mr. Pablo [...]

Arms For Wahhabi Sheiks Deal

From the article:
“I can just picture the State Department Weasel doing his sales pitch, “Hey Saudi Arabia, I have such a deal! How about you get some of those Wahhabi sheik dudes to denounce them Hezbollah dudes? In exchange the next day we’ll sell you six billion dollars worth of High Grade Military hardware!”
read [...]

Politicians Have Discovered YouTube

Cassidy: YouTube hits the big time in a short time
U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., must be the most creative user. He only has a handful of clips, but one stars Ben Stein in a relatively funny quiz-show bit.
The most prolific political YouTuber is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. She’s posted 58 videos. OK, her staff [...]

For Humans, it’s Food Food Food

Wisdom from the toons…

Stupid in America

A 20/20 John Stossel special.
Update: This video is 15 or 20 minutes long … fair warning

read more | digg story

The Palestinians do want peace.

The Palestinians do want peace and they’re the only ones working for it. Here’s why…
Their plan was to coerce Israel into taking on the authoritative cultural roles their society expects of them but unfortunately, for the cause of Peace, their strategy has been, so far, unsuccessful. At first they figured if they stoned the [...]

Are Scientists Debunking String Theory?

Columbia professor and mathematician Peter Woit’s new book tears apart the hype surrounding the superstring proposition. With calculated accumen and a nod to Pauli, Woit shows how strings have sapped resources from other avenues of discovery while encouraging a framework that is philosophy at best, non-science at worst.
Graphic courtesey The Gallery Walk
I doubt that many [...]

Is WinFS Dead? Yes. No. Yes.

Is WinFS dead?
Yes and No. Yes, we are not going to ship WinFS as a separate, monolithic software component. But the answer is also No - the vision remains alive and we are moving the technology forward. A lot of the technology really was database stuff – and we’re putting that into SQL and ADO. [...]