Fark comment thread here.
October 21, 2009
October 20, 2009
Only in America? Yup.
Colby Cosh makes a convincing case that “the hoax apparently cooked up by world’s-worst-dad frontrunner Richard Heene” could only have happened in America:
Richard Heene obviously wanted to be an experimenter-entertainer in this American, Edison-meets-Barnum tradition. He was, allegedly, willing to embroil his family in a criminal conspiracy to advance the cause. His determination was so total, he doesn’t seem to have given any thought to the possibility that the suspected domestic-violence complaint recently investigated at his residence might be revealed. What sealed his fate, though, was a near-total lack of genuine scientific knowledge or understanding.
When it comes to detecting folderol, television networks have a poor track record, but even the suits at ABC detected the stench of flim-flam on Heene, who had been a success on their series Wife Swap. His pitch to the network consists of a mix of tiresomely familiar classroom experiments, untrue folkloric claims he obviously didn’t bother to double-check, plain nonsense and furiously-brainstormed wackiness (“How long can we drive before having to pee?”). Even an explicitly stupid show made by a presenter who still thinks of lasers as enticingly novel would surely be unlikely to succeed as entertainment. There are fools all over the world, but the awesome chasm between Heene’s ambitions and his actual abilities — and the sheer disrespect he had for his own limitations — that, I think, could only be found in today’s America.
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October 9, 2009
Awful book covers
John Scalzi has a nominee for the “Worst Book Cover by a Major Publisher” award:
Seriously, now, DAW, wtf? I know there’s a recession on, but there must be a better class of 12-year-old you can hire to push about the “liquefy” tool in Photoshop. I get that you were aiming for “chintzy, kooky fun” but you landed on “Fourth grade class project on Lulu.com,” and that just isn’t cool, and more to the point, you should know the difference. Were I an author in this particular anthology I would be sad I couldn’t show my friends the book I was in without them asking how much it cost me to publish it. I’m frightened to show it to graphic designers I know because I don’t want to be sued for damages when it causes blood to shoot from their ears. And as a reader, I can say the cover makes a really excellent argument for owning a Kindle.
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September 25, 2009
Honda decides it’s sick of being seen as a cool company
Honda has introduced something to help it shed that coolness factor that’s been bothering it for a while. I guess they figured that Segway shouldn’t be the only company whose name is mocked for innovation in personal mobility:
Gentlemen, start your incredibly lazy engines: Honda has a new answer for those of us too tired to get off our keisters. Meet the U3-X “personal mobility device,” a unicycle-like ride that makes heading into the kitchen for pie as easy as — well, pie.
Sure to excite mall cops everywhere, the Honda U3-X makes the Segway look like an outdated piece of junk that no one in their right mind would ride. (Actually, the Segway already looked like that. Disregard.) The device is a 2-foot tall infinity-symbol lookalike with two pull-out pads for your tuchas. Marketed as a mobility device that “co-exists in harmony with people” — yes, seriously — the U3-X lets you hop a squat and zip around a room simply by shifting your body weight.
August 12, 2009
Final appearance of the Free Agent drive
In February, 2008, I bought a Free Agent USB hard drive to use as a backup device for the various computers in our home network. It lasted a month before failure started to set in. A few tweaks, a few visits to the support website, and it worked … until April. This time, it really was dead, so I got an RMA number, shipped it back, and eventually got a replacement drive.
The fact that I’m posting yet another tale of woe should tell you that the replacement was no better than the original. In fact, the replacement drive timed its failure to be almost as inconvenient as possible, failing just before it was needed to move files off a failing internal drive.
So the replacement drive has been sitting around for nearly a year, gathering dust. Yesterday, I wondered if it might be a problem that it wasn’t designed to work with Windows XP (why some deep thinking designer might have made that decision, I’ve no idea, but bear with me for a second). So I plugged it into my laptop, which is running Vista. It was recognized and configured immediately. I tested basic functionality by copying a few files over to the USB drive, then verifying that they were identical to the originals. Having passed that rudimentary test, I then dumped a medium-sized backup to the USB drive.
Twenty-six gigabytes of data went down … and 56 bytes were recorded on the USB drive. Yep. Bytes. Not Gigabytes, Bytes.
Now I’m going to borrow a sledgehammer, to ensure that this particular Free Agent drive never bothers anyone else . . .
Update, 14 August: Misery loves company: James Lileks posted a couple of tweets on a similar note.
Just had my fourth pocket hard drive go south. It won’t mount. Why does tech-talk sound like a robot’s sex-chat transcript?
It’s a Maxtor drive, btw. Apparently I enabled Daisy Mae Mode: looks hot, but can’t read or write.
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August 11, 2009
Legal FAIL
Andrew Orlowski shows why Charlie Nesson might as well have been custom-created by the RIAA:
Nesson has achieved something I thought was completely impossible in 2009, and that’s to allow the US recording industry’s lobby group to paint itself in a sympathetic light. No longer must the RIAA explain why their biggest members are not using technology to make money for the people they represent. The Boston case allowed the four major labels to justify an enforcement policy against opponents who appeared compulsively dishonest, irrational, paranoid, and with an abnormal sense of entitlement.
Nice work, Charlie.
Nesson failed in his avowed mission “to put the record industry on trial”. He failed to show why disproportionate statutory damages are harmful, which could have had a lasting constitutional effect. He failed to paint the defendent as sympathetic, or “one of us”. He failed to demonstrate why copyright holders make lousy cops. He even had a Judge noted for her antipathy to the big record labels. In short, he ceded the moral high ground completely and utterly to the plaintiffs, the four major record labels. The labels’ five year campaign against end users is finally at a close, but Nesson’s performance leaves it looking (undeservedly) quite fragrant.
It’s hard to imagine a worse result for anyone except the RIAA . . . they won big, and it’s hard to fault the jury for deciding the way they did . . . Nesson pretty much handed the case to the RIAA on platter:
Nesson could have pointed to the billions of royalties that haven’t been collected by the major labels failure to monetize P2P file sharing. He could have added that the Big Four don’t speak for other parts of the music business in putting Enforcement first. He missed the opportunity to gain the moral and intellectual high ground. Now I’ve no doubt Nesson is sincere in his beliefs that he’s doing everyone a favour, but then again, there’s a bloke on my bus who thinks he’s Napoleon.
Nesson’s case was a misanthropic bundle of intellectual prejudices, a worker’s paradise in which everyone has rights, except creative people. In his Kumbaya world, we’d all be better off, except the people who actually do the art. But once the jury had heard from Tenenbaum — a deeply unpleasant defendant — the die was cast.
The final word, of course, should go to “Weird Al” Yankovic, with his heart-felt, moving “Don’t Download This Song”.
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August 10, 2009
QotD: “the federal government is unsurpassed at two things”
Cash for Clunkers has been a thrilling moment for advocates of expanded government, who say it proves what we can accomplish when our leaders put their minds to it. They are absolutely right. The program proves the federal government is unsurpassed at two things: dispersing money and destroying things.
Of course, it already proved that in Iraq. But for sheer rapidity of confirmation, this program is hard to beat. Cash for Clunkers managed to go through a billion dollars in about four days, vaporizing a fund that was supposed to last until Halloween.
Steve Chapman, “The Real Clunkers in this Deal: Why ‘cash for clunkers’ is a terrible idea”, Reason Online, 2009-08-10
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At the intersection of Unsound Policy and Political Expediency
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