This is awesome.

Automated advert placement is the best comedy invention since the whoopie cushion.

Inappropriate Ad

I love the Japanese!

Two different pranks on this clip that you could only get away with in Japan. I wish we could just laugh at stuff like this in England without health and safety concerns.

Secret Spaces - Brittania Manor

That's one hell of a house. I wonder if it ever gets boring activating all the secret latches.

Copyright gone all wrong?

This is an interesting article about how an average American (I'm sure it's roughly the same for the UK too) racks up millions of dollars of copyright infringement liability in an average day, even if he doesn't go near one of the much publicised file sharing networks.

It's not exactly scary, because it's never going to be enforced, but it does show just how broken the system is.

Article

Inventive use of technology

I was looking for some software that would move my mouse periodically to prevent a time out on a Terminal Services connection when I came across this:

Inventive!

Things like this always make me smile :-)

DRM Hell

A good, real-world example of DRM doing what it does best: being eeeeeeevil.

Baseball fans in America who have purchased videos of full games of baseball, from the MLB no less, have found that the DRM license server (which is used to ensure that only those people who have paid can see the footage) has been shut down. As a result all of those videos will now no longer play.

I think there are two key questions raised by this:

1) Will this push honest consumers more towards illegal pirate copies of games taken from HD TV recordings?

2) Why the hell would anyone want to watch a baseball game twice?

Yet again DRM proves that it makes only the honest suffer and makes people suspicious of downloadable content.

Source (Via Digg)

Japanese crazy taxi extreme prank!!!

What. The. Hell.

I don't think he was too happy. I'm guessing he didn't tip the driver.

Neil Gaiman does Sherlock Holmes. Very well.

My wife got me a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories set in the Cthulhu Mythos for my birthday (along with the Wiiiiiiiii) and the first story in the collection is by Neil Gaiman, probably my favourite author.

I've just found out that it's available on his website as a pdf. Well worth a read.

Also interesting is the wikipedia page on the story, though not until after you've read the story as it's very spoiler-heavy.

A letter to Andrew Orlowski of the register

Unfortunately this article doesn't have comments enabled as I disagree strongly with both the way the article was written and with the conclusions it drew. I did fire off a quick email to the author though.

------

I don't quite follow your thinking on the creative commons. Surely anybody using the attribution license has actually agreed to give away their work? Personally I would only license something like that if I would be proud to see it on a bus shelter.

Virgin was clearly never going to pay the users of flikr for their work, they specifically chose CC commercial-use-allowed photos. If the photo in question was originally licensed all rights reserved then it would never have been used and the photographer would have been no better off, but considerably less famous. I'm not sure where the benefit comes in that scenario.

The fault does indeed lie with the user here, no matter which way you spin it. Ignorance of the law does not excuse you from it and using a license you haven't read is just the same as signing something you don't understand - stupid, but not an excuse.

Claiming that there is no place for the creative commons is paramount to claiming that there is no place for public domain. I'd love to see you write an article explaining why we should abandon that tired old institution.

The land of the free

An American woman is arrested for refusing to submit to an unconstitutional stop and search.

At least she still has the right to refuse and was later acquitted of any wrongdoing. We in Britain are giving up our freedoms with alarming speed.

Strange

Link

Seems like they fell in love all over again and the first thing they
do when they realise? Get a divorce.

Some people...

Internet People!

All the awsomeness of the recent internet fads gathered into a catchy pop song.

Watching it and recognising damn near all of the references does make me realise that I spend way too long on the internet though...

Amazing Hand Shadows

Bush Vs. Zombies

Human Pixels

Stunning. This is choreography on a massive scale.

3D Facial Modelling

Not too impressive at the offset, but shows some pretty cool applications of their model later on.

Panda Escape!

Never underestimate the Panda!

Hostel

Well, I watched Hostel last night and I wasn't terribly impressed. I was expecting an ultra-gory horror classic but instead I got a bad Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake with a story that just didn't make any sense.

One of the worst parts was the awfully drawn-out and tacked-on conversation nearing the end which only seemed to be there to explain the plot to anyone who somehow had failed to get it by then.

In fact, the hostel of the title was completely unnecessary and illogical too. Surely there's no need to build a luxurious hostel and populate it with naked super models to lure gullible americans into a kidnapping when everybody in the country seems to work for you.

There were a few scenes that were downright unpleasant to watch, which is actually a good thing in this kind of film, but most of them were somewhat spoilt by the instant recovery of the recipients who seem to possess godlike pain tolerance. Suspension of disbelief shouldn't be so necessary if a director does his job well, especially in a horror flick.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Errr... kind of.

CNN in celebrity worship shocker

Oh how far we've come

The most incredible tech demo I've ever seen.

This just blows me away.

Tetris with people

So funny. We need quality programs like this in the UK :-)

Rubens Tube

Physics can be fun. This would make for one hell of a stage show!



Source

Microsoft threatens its Most Valuable Professional (theregister.co.uk)

A bit of a slip up there, Microsoft awards someone for writing a utility that improves their development software, then writes them a series of threatening letters because they think it's hurting their business.

Just another case of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing I hope, though withdrawing a new award seems to indicate that both hands are now in sync and they've decided to go with the nasty one.

It's always frustrating when someone puts in their own time and hard work to do something that's useful for many people and get bullied into retracting it.

If we didn't have proprietary software, where would the innovation come from? People like this who are being stifled by proprietary software vendors, that's where.

Al Gore on The Daily Show

Just think how different the USA might be today if this man was leading them. I still find it hard to believe that the race was so close despite the candidates being so... errr... different.

If the same election was carried out today I have a suspicion that Gore would walk away with it.



Part 2:

Perry Bible Fellowship

The Perry Bible Fellowship is a great webcomic, with a very twisted sense of humour. Normally the comedy comes from the unexpected pain of one of the strip's subjects.

This one, however, is a little more direct and not quite as tragic. Well... kind of.

Eight year old rock god.

Bloody hell, he's not even watching the screen for half of it.

Nintendo DS is a target for child molestors

Top quality scaremongering from Fox News. Obviously you should always be completely terrified of the child molesters that are stalking your kids 24-7.

They even go so far as to insinuate that child molesters might be cruising the highways, DS on their laps, just waiting for a pictochatting kid to pass them so they can follow and pounce.

So much more dangerous than, say, playing in the park or walking home from school.
Next week on Fox:
"Did you know that the air can transmit sound vibrations over distances of 300 meters? The child molesters do! Keep your kids safe from regions where air can be found."

Breakdancing... with a difference.

You will laugh. You will feel guilty for laughing. You will laugh some more.

I guarantee it.

(Incidentally, the original is quite sad)

Code Guardian

Amazing

Vista Speech Recognition

This is actually a pretty impressive display by Vista, but it's also pretty funny as the frustration starts to build.

Obelisk Chairs

How cool are these? Then again, at that price they should be... they cost almost $9000. Ouch.

Hamlet in... Cliffhanger

Co-Starring Sylvester Stallone. Errr... actually not, just Hamlet.


Isn't he a cute little chap?

Hamlet on his wheel

Our new addition to the family, the little hamster Hamlet.

He just discovered the joys of his wheel today and now he won't stop running.

Welcome to Hamlet the hamster!

A new member of the family - Hamlet. Isn't he a cute little fellow?

I wish I could do pull-ups like that.

OK Go - Here It Goes Again

Awesome! How long must that have taken to get right?

The ultimate green machine

Wow, this is pretty cool.

Grow your own car

Inside an SD card

Ever wondered what an SD card looks like inside? Nor have I, but this video shows you anyway and the result is quite surprising.

You would assume that miniSD and microSD cards would cost more because they have been miniaturised using some kind of awesome technology reserved for only the smallest of flash devices. Actually, it seems they aren't all that different.

Amazing modular robot

This is pretty cool. It's a group of robots that can latch onto one another to form different compound robots. They have a variety of videos of different combinations to download.

As they get smaller and more agile, just think what these little fellows are capable of.

Videos

Fight Music - D12

Take 1 great song, liberally apply censorship and what do you get?

Shit.

You have to wonder what the point is. If in order to make something fit for public consumption you also need to completely ruin it then why bother?

1984 in 2007

I'm currently reading 1984 by George Orwell. It's a brilliant book throughout but I just came to one of those sections that you only find in the truly great books that shocked me enough to make me put it down. Here it is:



"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive."


He's describing the move towards the new, totalitarian states that rule his vision of a dystopia. The really scary thing is that, while reading that list, you can hardly help but think of the American Government and their war against terror.


I wonder if the Bush administration will be able to complete the list before leaving power.

Colonel McQueen Vs Chiggy Von Richthofen

The best space dogfight ever seen on the small screen. Amazingly powerful and emotional when seen in the context of the series.

The day Space: Above and Beyond was cancelled was the day I completely lost faith in the American networks' ability to recognise a good show.

Losing firefly was not such a surprise after this.

Dreams

You know, when you put it like that it does sound a bit odd...

from xkcd.com - a great webcomic for geeks.