I’d love to have one of these Gun Rulers– the trigger looks like it would make the ruler quite easy to use. Pew! Pew! I’ll bust a cap in your imprecise measurement! (thanks seventeenstars!)
Images via goodwin71.
Yes — the oh-so-predictable title for this post was already in the subject line of the tip email. All your soaked felines are belong to this excellent roundup post, and if you need more pissed-off kitty, smile-making for your friday there’s always Flickr. (thanks, zombie overlords!)
My pal Eli at Wilful Damage (NSFW) may just win the iPhone dork award — she went and made an iPhone countdown clock. Oh yes, it’s like that.
Wow! This is definitely the best argument put forth by the entertainment industry against P2P file sharing — best as in, it’s so outrageously over the top stupid, it shows exactly who we’re dealing with here. And why entertainment form these outfits sucks so badly — the brainpower behind the curtain, for sure. Okay — don’t drink a beverage while reading this unless you like being a human coffee sprayer, snip:
NBC Says that P2P is Robbing Poor Corn Farmers
In an odd statement made recently in a hearing with the FCC, NBC Universal tried to win over the hearts and minds of politicians by making the outrageous claim that P2P and file-sharing-related piracy hurts the wallets of poor corn farmers simply trying to make a living.
Their idea is that if more people went to the theaters to watch movies then more people would therefore buy popcorn and put more money in the pockets of farmers who could then “…earn greater profits and buy more farm equipment.”
They noted:
“Because of our nation’s interlocking economy, two-thirds of the lost earnings and lost jobs are in industries other than motion picture production. For example, in the absence of movie piracy, video retailers would sell and rent more titles. Movie theatres would sell more tickets and popcorn. Corn growers would earn greater profits and buy more farm equipment.”
I’ve been following this story here for a while, now SF Gate has the subpoena as headline news which is great. Snip:
The Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office Wednesday for documents relating to President Bush’s controversial eavesdropping program that operated warrant-free for five years.
Also named in subpoenas signed by committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., were the Justice Department and the National Security Council. The four parties have until July 18 to comply, according to a statement by Leahy’s office.
The committee wants documents that might shed light on internal disputes within the administration over the legality of the program, which Bush put under court review earlier this year.
“Our attempts to obtain information through testimony of administration witnesses have been met with a consistent pattern of evasion and misdirection,” Leahy said in his cover letters for the subpoenas. “There is no legitimate argument for withholding the requested materials from this committee.”
Echoing its response to previous congressional subpoenas to former administration officials Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor, the White House gave no indication that it would comply.
Link.
I just *had* to make that bad joke. I am not sorry. So, a tiny, tiny fraction of a portion of the pr0n spam email we get at Fleshbot might see a decline as two dudes have been convicted of porn spamming — they were so stupid as to embed explicit images into the email they spammed out, while falsifying headers and (gasp!) using false info to register domains. They are facing some serious prison time, but mostly for money laundering. I wish I could find out who they were spamming for, just because I’d like to expose (and ridicule) porn companies who think spamming is a marketing tool. Snip:
A jury in the US District Court for the District of Arizona convicted Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer on eight criminal counts.
The trial was the first to include charges under the anti-spam laws passed by the US Congress in 2003 in an effort to crack down on unsolicited commercial email.
The men made “millions of dollars by sending unwanted sexually explicit emails to hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including families and children”, Alice Fisher, assistant attorney general at the US Department of Justice, said.
Kilbride and Schaffer started their spamming operation in 2003, and the two made more than $2m by sending out spam emails advertising pornographic websites, the Department of Justice said. The two earned a commission for each person directed to one of the websites.
Hard-core pornographic images were embedded in each email, and were visible to anyone who opened the email, the department said.
Kilbride and Schaffer were convicted of two violations of the Controlling the Assault of Non-solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act. One violation occurred when Kilbride and Schaffer sent multiple electronic commercial mail messages containing falsified header information. The pair also broke the law by sending email using domain names that were registered using false information.
Link.
I have a lot of personal, shamelessly snarky theories about why commercial wikis are typically doomed to fail; on CNN right now there’s a good opinion piece on the subject that’s well worth a read. Snip:
At the beginning of February, for instance, Penguin Books – one of the biggest names in the global publishing industry – launched a month-long, publicity-soaked project that attempted to get Web surfers to create a novel. The idea seemed destined to belong in the Web 2.0 hall of fame (or shame), as the most audacious (or most arrogant) use of crowdsourcing ever.
And eighteen months ago, the L.A. Times started a Wiki to open up its editorial page content to user-editing. (Wiki software allows a lot of people to edit the same document simultaneously, as with Wikipedia’s encyclopedia entries). In January, Amazon (Charts) launched its “Amapedia” in a bid to create product pages that could one day replace, or at least enhance, Amazon’s product descriptions. Penguin opened up its Wiki novel at amillionpenguins.com in February.
But all of these efforts failed, to a greater or lesser extent. The L.A. Times failed spectacularly, as rampant, impassioned, and often obscene vandalism overtook its elegant op-eds. The Amapedia appears stillborn, as Amazon users stick with what they’re used to: individual, rather than collaborative, product reviews.
Link.
I really have a crush on Germany. Great beer, friendly people, yummy food, fun nightlife, lots of great artists and tons of kinetic art — but this solidifies our budding relationship. Snip from the Guardian:
Germany has barred the makers of a movie about a plot to kill Adolf Hitler from filming at German military site because its star Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, the defence ministry has said.
Cruise, one of the film’s producers, is a well known member of the Church of Scientology, which the German government does not recognise as a church and says is against the country’s constitution. Berlin says it masquerades as a religion to make money, a charge Scientologist leaders reject.
Link.
This is one of my favorite crime stories of the year: the burglary ring pulling off huge, mind-boggling jobs in Oklahoma. You have to read the details to even begin to grasp the organization and moxie — and possibly advanced tech — employed in their capers. They are unknown, and at large. From Gizmodo:
There’s a group out in Tulsa who does whatever it takes to get their haul. They cut open ceilings and walls, rappel down surfaces, disable security systems—even climb through air ducts—and manage to make off with $60,000 to $400,000 per strike. And all without leaving a trace of their identity. Sound a bit like the movies? It does to us, too, but we can’t help but imagine what kind of gadgetry these guys carry with them.
Now they’ve turned their eyes toward electronic heists. At a Best Buy in Tulsa, the burglars entered the store by breaching the ceiling, rappelling down to the store office and cutting a hole into it, taking care of the alarms and surveillance of the store, and then took around 50 laptops and 60-inch plasma TVs. And then they took the safe, weighing a few thousand pounds, which is evidently a trademark of this particular ring.
Their earlier exploits make equally interesting reads. (…)
Link.
Not a cheerful, too-many-kittens and fluffy thingies blog by any means, Dismal World has a post up called Unforgettable Photos (found via) that is a small assembly of extremely arresting, historic, disturbing but sobering images that I lingered over thinking about why it’s important to see photos such as these. They’re not shock-value bullshit like goatse, but images that remind me of the relevancy and urgency of the photographic medium and why when I see ultra-boring collections that purport to be global but contain nothing controversial — like the “24 Hours of Flickr” book — I feel cheated and a little outraged. “Unforgettable photos” happen every day.
Pictured: 1957: The first school day of Dorothy Counts at the Harry Harding High School in North Carolina. Counts was one of the first black students admitted to the school, and she was no longer able to stand the harassment after 4 days.
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