Microsoft experiments with an international news search service in competition with Google’s, upping the ante in the hotly contested Web search market
New Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban trailer released. This site also looks quite pretty.
You can also check out www.azkaban.com where currently you can see an animated wanted poster of Sirius Black, and post sightings.
The third movie isn’t due to be released until 4 June 2004 though. At this stage Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), will be 30 when the 5th movie is released. It’ll be Beverly Hills 90210 all over again… AHH!! Imagine Aaron Spelling producing a Harry Potter movie. Not a covered navel in sight and Tori shamelessly paraded around as Hermione.
The Design Conspiracy, noticed a growing trend for silly, irrelevant and often unpronounceable names brought about by expensive re-branding exercises. They created a corporate name generator so you too can have a silly brand name, just like Accenture and Consignia
In 1909, residents of Wilmington, Delaware, were able to subscribe to an online music service that piped phonograph recordings over their telephone lines and through loudspeakers. This was one year after the sheet music publishers were told to get bent by Congress: see, they’d grown alarmed at the prevalence of unauthorized piano rolls and had asked the Congress for a Broadcast-Flag-like regime that would let them veto any new music technology that would endanger their business — like online music delivery — making it illegal. Congress told them to get lost. Good thing we rescued those idiots from themselves back in 1908 — can you imagine a music industry where the most lucrative product in the market was sheet music?
It’s a pattern: the Vaudeville artists sued Marconi over the radio — which made them rich. The movie studios boycotted TV until Disney sold out to get the funds for Disneyland — and TV rights made the studios rich. Jack Valenti told Congress that the VCR was the Boston Strangler of the film industry, and then it doubled his income through pre-recorded tape sales and rentals.
Now, of course, Congress has given up on saving the entertainment industry — and us — from itself. With the Broadcast Flag, new technologies will only come into the market if they don’t disrupt the industries built on the old ones. And with the WIPO Broadcast Treaty in the works, it’s fruitless to pray for some technology safe-haven where we’ll be able to develop our gear in peace, far from the short-sighted, greedy lunacy of the entertainment companies. The FCC should be ashamed of itself.
When plugged up to a phonograph the subscriber’s line is automatically made busy on the automatic switches with which the Wilmington exchange is equipped. Several lines can be connected to the same machine at the same time, if more than one happens to call for the same selection.
Each musical subscriber is supplied with a special directory giving names and numbers of records, and the call number of the music department. When it is desired to entertain a party of friends, the user calls the music department and requests that a certain number be played. He releases and proceeds to fix the megaphone in position. At the same time the music operator plugs up a free phonograph to his line, slips on the record and starts the machine. At the conclusion of the piece the connection is pulled down, unless more performances have been requested.
Wacky CSS driven tangrams from Mark Schenk; basic tangram set, tangram toolbox and the running man
Research done by Jennifer Richeson, Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, shows that political correctness in American society takes it’s toll on cognitive ability. It appears that white Americans, when placed in a situation where they are interacting with blacks, spend so much of their cognitive capacity ensuring that they show no racial bias that it impedes their ability to do other cognitive tasks
Caterpillar faced protests this week against its sales of bulldozers to Israel. A dozen protestors marched outside its head office in Iowa, USA. They included Cheryl Brodersen, the aunt of Rachel Corrie, the 24-year old peace protestor who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in March 2003
While record companies prepare for the sentencing of three Sydney men convicted of music piracy by the Federal Court, a new survey shows most musicians and other music professionals believe copyright laws are too harsh. It found that 81% of the 200 respondents felt that the Copyright Act should be changed to allow the copying of a user’s own legally purchased CDs, but not borrowed or downloaded music. Less than half of respondents felt that downloading free music constituted theft from artists and composers, while only 25% felt it was theft from record labels. 27% of respondents did not feel downloading music was theft
Some relative of the family passed away today causing much confusion. The first confusing episode was caused by the highly unimaginative Italian tradition of naming sons and and daughters after dads and mums. It took my mum almost two hours and 20 phone calls to figure out which Stella Something-or-other died. It’d have been much quicker to have photos with a name on the back sent out to respective family members via carrier pigeons.
The second part of the who died saga, was how to discern what responsibilities certain family members have now. For example, an Italian tradition is to basically have a house/place open for three days where other distant family members can come to pay their respects, or hold crying competitions. These gatherings of course, need to have food available, sometimes even a full blown dinner. Yes, I know any excuse for a feast. My mum and an aunt were very confused as to whether they needed to provide the food or not, the social standing with this particular deceased relative was very much in the grey area apparently.
Every Italian family does however have an oracle to consult in situations like these, an Italian Yoda if you will (normally female), and I’m sure my aunt Yoda has steered my mum in the socially responsible, and acceptable direction.
Now how much to spend on the flowers is a totally different thing altogether…
Everyone knows where Lego bricks come from. They’re scraped off the inside of magic trees by tiny Danish elves, right? Wrong! The truth is both more ordinary and much, much stranger. Take an interactive tour of a typical Lego factory and learn how Lego bricks begin the long journey that ends up under your couch
Noticing some commonalities in the spam flooding their e-mail in-boxes, a small group of hackers set out to track down who was responsible. Along the way they uncovered a trail that led them to an organised gang of criminals halfway around the world, and right back to some of the largest financial institutions in the US, and their customers, that became the gang’s prey
FilmForce has substantiated rumours of Farscape returning as a standalone project with no new episode commitment attached, independent of Sci-Fi Channel
Always been a fan of the homebrewed ginger beer. My great aunt used to make a legendary batch every year that was always a favourite amongst the hordes of relatives. I’ve always meant to start a batch and the Green Man has a recipe that has reminded me what a great idea for Summer the stuff is.
Worth remembering that forgotten batches of ginger beer can occasionally explode, as my aunt’s slightly mad neighbour discovered when he had a crack at her recipe.
Greens Senator Bob Brown says the Immigration Minister Senator Amanda Vanstone should appear before a Senate inquiry into last week’s arrival of suspected asylum seekers on a remote northern Australian island. The Greens also claim the Federal Government plans to excise more islands from Australia’s migration zone
In the Robert Redford Building, toilets flush themselves with rainwater — except for the urinals, which use no water at all — the floors are made of bamboo and the carpets from hemp
Russ Kick has proved himself a master at uncovering facts that ‘they’ would prefer you never hear about. The giant Disinformation Guide series edited by Kick has become the definitive place to find revelations about government cover-ups, scientific scams, corporate crimes, medical malfeasance, historical whitewashes, media manipulation, and other knock-your-socks-off secrets and lies. This CD-sized book packs the same powerful punch in a small, attractive package. Among Kick’s amazing discoveries, all thoroughly documented:
- The first genetically modified humans have already been born
- Hitler’s blood relatives are living in the US
- The CIA commits over 100,000 serious crimes per year
- The US planned to explode an atomic bomb on the moon
- An atomic bomb was dropped on North Carolina
- The main hero of portayed in the movie Black Hawk Down is a convicted child molester
- Pope Pius II wrote an erotic book
- Kent State wasn’t the only massacre of US college students during the Vietnam era
- Many of the pioneering feminists opposed abortion
- The world’s museums contain innumerable fakes
- The Government can take your house and land, then sell them to private corporations
- Carl Sagan was an avid pot-smoker
- The suicide rate is highest among the elderly
A uniquely valuable tool to debunk modern mythology and the people and institutions serving it up, 50 Things You’re Not Supposed To Know makes an amazing gift item and will prove just as essential in fashionable bathrooms as on the most well-heeled coffee tables.
Two days ago a boat load of Turkish Kurds arrived in Northern Australia by leaky boat. Both the foreign minister and the immigration minister stated unequivocally that ‘The passengers of the Minasa Bone did not claim asylum in Australia’. This is in spite of the fact that we can be reasonably certain that at least one of them was begging a Turkish interpreter, in Turkish, to be allowed to stay. But even if they were granted a Temporary Protection Visa, they would be forced into prison camps in inhospitable parts of Australia for years before being shipped back to their homeland to be killed
The US$10.99 Dakota reusable digital camera announced in July was usefully hacked on 6 November. First attempts to extract picture data took 10 hours to read out 16MB, but new code for Windows, Linux and Mac lets you get pictures quickly over USB and view or print them without Ritz’s help
In a rare sign of trouble for the booming search marketing business, Google is fending off complaints from angry customers who say recent changes to the company’s advertising program are costing them sales
An independent PC developer has created a program called MyTunes that lets users of iTunes share MP3 files almost as easily as they could using programs such as Kazaa
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