Faceplant for Sony CEO

Oh my word!

Felicia Day put forward the links to this article. It's a pompous article by Sony CEO about how piracy is bad and all sorts of other nonsensical arguments.

Like Felicia Day pointed out, check out the fantastic comments by readers for that article.

Woot! All those guys made my day.

CCTV protest

I found this via Stallman's site.

Students walked out of a class in Loughton, to protest them being filmed on surveillance camera. Way to go, kiddies!

Quote from The Guardian:

PUPILS walked out of classrooms in protest against Big Brother-styled CCTV cameras recording their lessons.

And they came back wearing masks!

There's hope for the future just yet.

I wonder how bitchy publishers will react

Tell it like it is!

Actually, in all honesty, this was a fantastic answer, Google!

It was along the lines of "Do you know how to block our spiders?No? Well, here's the text for it."

I'm sure Good luck and happy new year would have worked well as a nice send-off after that.


Read full details here @ Beet TV.

Little bit of news from across the Channel

I came across a news article about Sir Terry Pratchett.

Quote from This is Gloucestershire:

The novelist, who revealed he had been diagnosed with the degenerative disease in 2007, has said he is 'disgusted' with counties such as Gloucestershire having no memory clinics.

Plagarism amongst the pros

Found this on twitter (via @doshdosh).

This was hilarious.

Apparently a bigwig NYT journalist just might have 'borrowed' a sentence from someone's blog.

She claims she heard that particular sentence (read: paragraph) from a friend and she thought what the heck, let's throw that in. Or something to that effect.

Then she found out friend was probably quoting this blog.

Ye, no one is going to call it "copy and paste".

Thing about so-called Chinese whispers is ... you never remember sentences word for word from other folks. Unless you have a photographic memory.

So it was funny to see the 'friend's random quote' being an almost exact copy of the other guy.

For shame!

Twitter Comedy

Oooh I thought I would mention this.

There is gonna be a twitter comedy club event on June 8.

Got lots of familiar names too.

Check out the full details on their site.

Oh, and here is their twitter account - @tweetcomedyclub

Real Life Twitter

Friday Links

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

FYI, David Bowie is a legend

Hmmm, the list itself disturbs me (yea, this is totally what Steinem fought for) but the title is what offends me the most.

"Weird looking guy"? Seriously? Is that what we are reducing people to now?

Just another sign of how shallow modern society is, I guess.

Read annoying list here.


Good response

This was a good answer indeed. It's Neil Gaiman's response to someone whining about GRR Martin.

It is annoying when people go yabba-dabba at writers and feel a sense of entitlement.

This is especially true for scriptwriters; it seems like too many of them seem to be caving into viewer pressure and then creating somewhat crap shows.

The example I would cite? Heroes, for one thing.

By the way, while we are on the topic ... whenever a movie goes PG-13 from the original grown-up only rating ... run, run far away.


WSJ rules = wtf?

Am I the only one who finds this set of rules absurd?

You can't dictate such terms, especially about online media, to your employees.

And, if that's how you conduct yourself on the internet, you won't get a big following. Cos that's not how they stuff around here...

A little bit about Mininova

I was wondering about Mininova. Apparently the trial is on 20th May and not the 12th as I iniially thought.

This was a nice little article about the company and what they are upto.

They are right about adapting to consumer needs and changing times.

When will big companies learn?

Read article here ....

MJ auction is kinda creepy

I have been hearing about the MJ auction and how it was canceled and yada yada.

Big deal I thought to myself.

Then I came across this site which has an interesting array of stuff that was up for auction.

And all I can say is ... WTF??!!

What's with the knight poses? And the gate? And the cartoon art thingy?

Update: I found a link on the above site to a video. You can view it here. Just gets weirder.

Can you spot him?

Oh come on!

This is an excellent ad!



I was wondering what the fuss was all about. People going on, complaining that this advert is patronizing.

You know, if I hadn't read the article in the first place, I wouldn't have seen the cameo appearance anyway.

The man's a good sport.

I like Wiki; at least they are transparent

This is so bad!

Quote from The Irish Times:

A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.

Three things:

a) So mainstream news media, despite their snobbery, does check and believe Wiki?

b) Basic rule of using a source - always check where the quote/news info comes from. By the way, Wiki is very strict about it and they took down the said quote since it did not adhere to the Wiki rules for citation. Who was hasty?

c) You want people to pay for your high quality news articles if they are online. None can access it for free. But apparently your news articles are based on freely available articles which by the way some people conveniently forgot to cite.

Hy-po-crisy! It's just a word.

Freedom of speech is basic right

What's wrong with this idea?

I like it. I wish there was one in my school.

Looks like people are protesting atheist societies in schools in UK.

Quote from The Telegraph:

Backed by professors Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling, the initiative aims to establish a network of atheist societies in schools to counter the role of Christianity.

And some idiots claim these groups are militant? Seriously?

I remember stories of this preachy bully on the shuttle bus in between campuses on your varsity. He insisted on preaching to everyone on bus, didn't matter what everyone else believed. And he loved talking about non-believers and how they are damned.

Doesn't that sound more militant?

My friend who told me this story apparently complained a few times and didn't get much results. So much for that.

Books, books and more books

This was a nice article about finding books at affordable prices.

I am not sure about Amazon but I stick to Play. They have awesome deals; second hand books and a great new-used section.

Second-hand books are also excellent sources.

I wonder if we can bug a library and see if they have sales. I always see them as somewhat attached to their books. Surely sending a book to the library is like ensuring a lifetime enrollment?

Kinda like joining the Triad?

Wasn't going to watch Avatar crap anyway

WTF?

All these annoying annoying news today.

It's about glockgal protesting the lack of Asian actors in The Last Airbender. Well, she has a point; why cast white actor for movie with an Asian theme? Don't even get me started on the barf-fest that is Prince of Persia. *gag*

Well, she had some snarky t-shirts along the lines of: The Last Airbender: Brown/ Asian/ Colored Actors Need not Apply.

And then poor gal was hit with a copyright infringement notice.

Apparently her work violated the brand name or something. She does not appear to use any pics or anything from official folk. How does this come across as copyright infringement?

Satire is supposed to be "fair use", no?

Suddenly making social comment is no longer allowed?

Excuse me while I chase the springbok away from phone line

People like this make me make me angry. They spoil my weekdays. Actually it's worse if it is on a Sat/Sunday but then I don't read my feeds on the weekend. With due reason.

WTF is up with this stupid, pompous argument about social networking being 'socialist'.

Maybe he was being sarcastic and I just didn't get it? Sometimes American sarcasm is too hard to pick up.

But this sentence about the Third World is so blatantly insulting. Excuse me, but I had internet in the late 90s when you thought we were up there swinging from banana trees. Or running away from lions in South Africa.

And then last week The New York Times reported about the hazards of international expansion for the likes of Facebook. Getting million of new users in the Third World, it turns out, really sucks, because Facebook will never really be able to meaningfully monetize those eyeballs. It's tons of cash out (bandwidth, data storage, personnel) with little hope of cash in.

I shouldn't be too annoyed. Some people can be hoity toity all they want but they still have to dialv+91 for tech support. *loud snicker*.

And guess who is pumping much needed money into US? Right, it's China, isn't it? Surely that would be the main investor right now?

Source: Adage

And one more reason why I won't buy anything by Warner

I had been meaning to send links to this article to a friend for a while. 

Well, I finally found some of the links. 

It was about that kerfuffle between Warner, blogger Uruloki and Flickr. Regarding the batman pics. 

It's a translated page so excuse the structure. 

So stupid to pick on such a well-known blogger who was providing much needed publicity to stupid Warner anyway. 

Friday Links

Hunt for Gollum

Coming to a browser near you ... this Sunday. Keep your eyes hobbity! Check above trailer for more info.


Computers are important part of our lives, ye?

One BBC article screamed: Computers enter learning "core".

I was quite cautious. This doesn't mean they will teach ruby and other scripting languages from a young age, I told myself.

True enough, there was mention of Science not being a core subject.

Horror of horrors!

For me, science and maths are intricately linked to the IT field. This also depends on the exact computer field we are talking about.

I get the sneaking suspicion these folks are going to teach blogging and twittering as computer subjects.

Please tell me I am wrong?!


Tough times

Wow, the iPhone App store is getting some bad publicity.

Apparently some developers are claiming they didn't get money for sales of their apps.

People in the forum in question are quite worked up.

I'm not sure where this stands; it could very well be a disorganized billing department. Or messup on the side of the banks.


Duck! duck!

Ooh that is a bad gaffe! VP Joe Biden spoke a bit candidly about avoiding swine flu infections.

I think it was just a tad too blunt and perhaps misinterpreted.

It's still bad nonetheless; given that US citizens are quite panicked (more than usual), it hit a nerve.

Quote from News24:

"It's not that it's going to Mexico - it's that you're in a confined aircraft. When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft.

"I would not be at this point, if they had another way of transportation, (be) suggesting they ride the subway."

*facepalm*