Since its available as a free Creative Commons-licensed PDF, I downloaded Kembrew McCleod’s new book Freedom of Expression. Unfortunately I get less than two pages into the book before noticing that McCleod’s book perpetuates a mini-hoax that would have been easy for him to do a little research and debunk. Back in 2003, Fox News…
February, 2005
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News.Com ran a story earlier this month about a consortium of companies promoting a holographic storage solution called HVD. According to News.Com, the holographic discs could replace Blu-Ray and HD DVD discs eventually and they . . . . . . will let consumers conceivably put a terabyte (1TB) of data onto a single optical…
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Via Boing! Boing! I ran across the Beatallica web site. Beatallica is a pardoy metal group combining the Beatles music with a Metallica sing-alike and some very very funny songs. My favorite is the Garage Dayz Nite album, which features The Thing That Should Not Let It Be (MP3) — Lovecraft-inspired metal. It just doesn’t…
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The New York Times had an interesting article about how the Lego Corporation tries to bully other companies that make interlocking plastic bricks that compete with Lego. Lego’s main patent on its interlocking plastic bricks expired in 1978, and a number of companies have produced competing products since then. Lego has taken a creative if…
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Rush Limbaugh was complaining this week on his show that on the Friday before the Super Bowl CBS ran a hit piece about him which deceived viewers about the 2003 controversy in which he said that sports reporters overrated Philadelphia Eagles Quarterback Donovan McNabb because the reporters wanted a black quarterback to succeed. Looking at…
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An unintentionally amusing paragraph from this Washington Post story speculating about the eventual disappearance of physical media for distribution of music, Indeed, Napster’s To Go subscription service allows buyers to essentially rent an unlimited amount of music for $15 per month. A subscription-based service will be built into the latest version of Microsoft Windows; for…
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Salon.Com has an odd little article on H.P. Lovecraft on the occasion of the Library of America creating an “H. P. Lovecraft: Tales” volume. My reaction to the HPL Library of America volume was “yuck.” Hey, I’ve got all of HPL’s fiction in e-book format on my PDA, but lets not start confusing HPL with…
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I already own an iPod mini, and if/when Apple releases an 80gb iPod I’ll be right there to scoop it up. Currently I’ve got 7,644 songs on my hard drive occupying 57.7 gb. But now Napster is preparing to unveil a new ad campaign with an interesting message — I’d have to be an idiot…
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The BBC actually ran a story in mid-January asking people of different faiths how the tsunami and other natural disasters affected their belief in whatever God(s) they believe in. For example, they talk with a Muslim who survived the Bam earthquake, Another who has not lost faith despite suffering terribly from natural disaster is Akbar…
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Cory Doctorow makes the ridiculous claimthat, . . . shut down the Lokitorrent site (Xeni’s post from yesterday), they hijacked the domain and put up a snotty note that included the phrase “You can click, but you can’t hide.” That follows on Xeni Jardin’s posting yesterday, which quoted reprinted speculation that the MPAA had hijacked…