Don't mess with the 20th Century Fox

20th Century Fox has issued subpoenas to find out who is uploading some of their content.

YouTube has itself been protected by the safe-harbor provision and as the article states, this provision does nothing to shield the individual uploaders, whose boats are kept outside the harbor, subject to wind, waves, and pirates.

Most people think the worst that can happen is your YouTube content is taken down and maybe your account is suspended. Looks like there might be more to it in some situations.

Imagine the poor soul in the big house who has to explain to his cell mate that he is in for uploading "A Very Special Brady Christmas".

Disco Alice

Can hardly wait for this year's theme for Alice Cooper's Golf event. Disco Alice was kinda scary.

Oh, and... DA BEARS!!!!!!!!!!!

Web 2.0 winners and losers

Some good and bad Web 2.0 company activities.

The Museum of Unworkable Devices

A museum celebrating fascinating devices that don't work.

Missing a link to www.foulballguy.com, but otherwise a keeper.

Text book untruth

This article on how the Israeli army takes a dim view on D&D players is a great example of how something that has no basis in fact can live for years as non-fiction.

Seems like if the story is funny enough, actual facts are not overly important.

P.S. I was a chaotic evil thief in my D&D days and frequently turned on my buddies. Shocking, huh?

e-voting

Interesting article on electronic voting. What I found most interesting is the software company claims their source code can not be reviewed because it is trade secret.

Hmmm. My coding days are fairly distant, but let me try and reverse engineer their code...

IF {vote is for person A} THEN {add 1 to vote total for person A}
IF {vote is for person B} THEN {add 1 to vote total for person B}
IF {no vote} THEN {go to next ballot}

Hope I didn't let the cat out of the bag here

Alice

Ms. Spears, Donald, and Rosie get the headlines... but Alice Cooper is the one doing newsworthy things.

Seek and ye shall find.... nothing

VERY dismaying article that asserts:

In a survey of 1,000 middle managers at large companies in the U.S. and U.K., Accenture found that managers spend as long as two hours a day searching for information and more than half of the data they find has no value to them.

Kinda makes you wonder exactly what you are getting out of those managers :) To further drive this point home (also from the article):

Just less than half -- 42 percent -- of those surveyed said that they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week.

Yikes Robot

If this is the most human-like robot developed to date, I HIGHLY recommended we keep trying.

Creeps me out on several levels :)

How I spent New Year's Day

About six months ago my niece bought a laptop (with a little advice from her uncle). In early October it began to REALLY slow down at start-up and even clicking a desktop icon was a major time commitment.

So, I offered to look at it over Thanksgiving and did my traditional trouble shooting process:

1. Run PC Pitstop
   
2. Check for spyware
3. Defrag
4. Reboot and hope it is a good karma day

Well, round one made it a little better, but over Christmas it was brought to my attention that the "slowness" remained. It had. Drat.

So on January 1 with the aid of CPU-Z and PC Pit Stop again (and 17 reboots at last count), I was eventually guided to discover DMA was not enabled on her hard drive anymore. Finally! A reason why the laptop could from fast to slow and NOT be motherboard related.

A few more Google searches got me to winhelp.com's DMA info and fix. And wonder of wonders, all is well and MySpace, Sims 2, and IMs galore are whistling through the laptop.

Also learned the "Always On" power profile can help make sure your laptop CPU is running at top speed.

So, why share this thrilling tale? Many others had shared similar tales of woe and their experiences - good and bad. These helped lead me to the promised land of a fixed problem. Maybe some other uncle will be out there some day searching for a solution to a similar problem and this posting will help.

Ink-blots

A tardy Christmas present... ink-blot wallpaper for your computer

Wikipedia vs. Google

Looks like Jimmy Wales thinks he can create a "Google killer". We will see. I am betting on Google.

A Wikipedia search would be based on the "wisdom of crowds". Crowds are not perfect (and mobs are worse). Keep in mind...

1. The crowd can choose between Alice Cooper and Ashlee Simpson
2. Ashee sells more records to the crowd
3. The crowd CLEARLY is in error in this case
   
   

More free stuff

Yet another service offering a free wiki with some pretty darn good functionality... Zoho

More on online gaming taxes

If you buy the $3 an hour rate stemming from the potential value generated in the game, Everquest has a per-capita gross domestic product nearly as big as Russia's. World of Warcraft exceeds it.

This article does a very good job in explaining the concepts behind taxing the virtual gaming world. To oversimplify, the more you play and collect gold, Linden dollars, experience points, whatever... the potential value if you "cash out" (sell your accumulations on eBay for example) can be significant.

So, is it fair to tax potential value? If I was at home writing "Harry Potter Balboa", should I be taxed on what might happen regarding revenue, or would it be better to wait until it actually hit the market before I had to pay up?

I think, therefore IM

Interesting article on IM. 50% of teens IM and one in five have asked someone out on a date via this medium. Basically the differences between IM and e-mail are minor, but it seems like popping the "date question" plays out better in IM.

Wonder why. Both result in text on a screen... I guess the cultural expectation of a response (any response) is higher with IM.

My parents went to Iconistan and all I got was the stupid T-shirt

I really like declaring the terrority engulfing the bottom of so many webpages for social networking purposes as "Iconistan"

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/internet/0,72282-0.html?tw=rss.index

Clearly a nation in unrest and with shifting borders. At some point, market (or Darwinian) forces will have to come to bear to thin the growing numbers of icons out at the bottom of content.

Options are good, but too many options would seem to limit the benefits we can gain from these tools.

Regardless, I totally want to apply for dual citizenship in Iconistan! Would that make me an Iconistanian?

Down the YouTube

I find it hard to believe the Bank of America's YouTube embarassment will be the last we see of some frustrated performers who got stuck in a crappy executive job instead.

Yet another reason YouTube will keep stealing time from me.

Wii

Will the Wii provide some push to the next model on human/machine interaction?

Dunno, but maybe I need to get one to find out. Research only of course.

Another gem from wikihow

I gap in my life has been addressed... I now know how to appreciate Death Metal

Swarmapaloosa

I still don't totally get it, but swarmbots are pretty interesting to read about. This article on swarmanoids further interests and confuses me.

The concept of 60 autonomous robots working in a virtual space to accomplish tasks -- coupled with all the Second Life activity lately -- makes we wonder if the deepest we end up going with AI and the like might occur in a 3-D world via your browser.