Don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind’s blowin’.
This kid created nuclear fusion in his basement:
In 2006 Thiago Olson joined the extremely sparse ranks of amateurs worldwide who have achieved nuclear fusion with a home apparatus. In other words, he built the business end of a hydrogen bomb in his basement.
Just a quick post (more for my reference than anyone else’s reading). I saw the Appleseed Cast at the Rock & Roll Hotel this past Tuesday (March 20). Here’s the setlist:
- The Clock and the Storm
- Forever Longing the Golden Sunsets
- Song 3
- (new song)
- Here We Are (Family in the Hallways)
- Innocent Vigilant Ordinary
- Secret
- Peregrine
- Fishing the Sky
- Fight Song
- (new song) (Norwegian Death Metal Song)
Encore:
- Blind Man’s Arrow
- Steps & Numbers
I also had the pleasure of seeing the Cast at Baltimore’s Ottobar last year.
On Saturday night, I had the pleasure of seeing Explosions in the Sky. I also purchased their newest album, All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone and was pleased to find that the last side of the album looks like this:
Its the extra effort like this, combined with the much larger artwork that helps vinyl to hold its appeal over CDs, at least for me.
Listen to “Welcome, Ghosts” from this album:
The other night I concocted an interesting chicken recipe that turned out really well and it’s really simple.
Cover your chicken in lemon pepper chicken spices (I used McCormick, but any will do). Let the spices sit on the chicken for about 10 minutes (per side). Then put your chicken in a frying pan, poking holes in it on both sides. Now just douse the chicken with red cooking wine (or drinking wine) and teriyaki sauce. I used a little olive oil as well. Now let the chicken “fry” in this sauce until finished. Yum!
You may have heard that Viacom has filed a suit against Google for $1,000,000,000 ($1b). While watching coverage of this story today on CNN, it’s pretty clear why traditional media is in trouble.
CNN’s coverage of this piece, until later today, did not mention the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA is probably the most essential piece of legislation to a story such as this, as it stipulates that an application service provider is not held liable for copyright infringement committed by users of its service, as long as it makes an effort to remove protected content when notified of it.
Adversely, CNN’s jimledbetter alleges that Viacom has a chance due to the fact that Google makes money off the infringing content. The suit states that
YouTube has harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale.
However, what jimledbetter does not take into account, but is mentioned in the previous piece is the fact that other media firms and Viacom have entered into agreements with Google to receive portions of the advertising revenues from their clips.
It seems to me that since Viacom had attempted to negotiate a settlement with Google and given Google’s protections under the DMCA that Viacom would not prevail in court. The intellectual property law junkie in me wants to see this head to court, but the realist (i.e. one who doesn’t believe in the technological intelligence of judges) in me is afraid for what this could mean for similar lawsuits in the future.
The weather has finally changed here in Warshington and this is coming live from outdoors! It’s still a tad chilly, but the pent up wintery nastiness is getting to us, so I decided to come outside for a bit while I interweb with the google.
Here are a couple new photos of our chunky monkey, Wallace Constantine:
Opera is one of the most progressive browser developers today. They make browsers for phones, various other devices, including the Nintendo Wii, and of course browsers for your computer.
Opera is also participating in the One Laptop Per Child program, an effort to make very reasonably priced, yet still very functional laptops available to “developing” countries. While I have some reservations about that project, I still think it’s mostly a good effort and I recognize that Opera has devoted a lot of resources, both monetary and non-monetary to it.
All of this is slightly beside the point of this post however. While reading this piece about Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie’s visit to the folks at Wired about the OLPC project, Michael Calore mentions:
Opera has developed a working internal demo of the
<video>HTML element. Håkon is also pushing for browsers to support playback of the open Ogg Theora video format. He wants to see videos easily embeddable in HTML pages, and the ability for videos to be played back within the browser without proprietary plug-ins.
Why should I care, you may ask. Well, you don’t have to, except that if <video> would become part of the HTML specifications AND all browsers would support it (Firefox, Opera, Netscape, Internet Explorer - yeah right!), life would be made much easier for web developers, because we wouldn’t have to use our current mess of code to put nice, pretty videos on web pages.
Where would we be without wishful thinking?
BitTorrent is a technology for file distribution on the internet. It differs from most peer-to-peer (computer to computer) technologies, in that it allows for pieces of files to be distributed as soon as they’ve be downloaded to an individual’s computer. This allows for the burden of sharing a file to be offset by recipients participation in the uploading. The technology is often blamed for clogging resources at internet service providers, and claims are also often made that it has no legitimate uses.
However, the company, BitTorrent, recently announced it would be
offering movies and TV shows for download.
The new site will rent movies for a 24-hour viewing period for $3.99 for new titles and $2.99 for older films
While it’s good to see that BiTtorrent is branching out to prove that the technology can be used for legitimate purposes, I hope that it will be able to move away from the 24-hour viewing period. The time it takes to download files through BitTorrent can vary great, depending upon the number of people participating in the torrent. Therefore, intended viewing periods may change drastically, making it difficult for users to truly see the benefits of using the technology for legitimate purposes.
One of my favorite bands, The Dismemberment Plan announced today that they will be playing a reunion gig at the Black Cat here in Washington, DC. The show will be a benefit for friends of theirs, whose child has been diagnosed with Type 1 SMA (Spinal Muscular Atrophy).
It’ll be a great show and I hope that I’ll be able to get tickets.
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