(2009-July)

A Sad Day: Our Loss of the Greatest Sea-Captains Ever to Have Sailed the Interwebs

The last (and perhaps most famous) standouts against the Armada of evil corporate "copyright group" lawyers have fallen; condemned by a group of judges that included at least one on the payroll...

And don't bother visiting the Pirate Bay anymore; not only are you likely to get hit with nasty PC viruses (embeded in the adverts), but the whole thing has been bought by a Swedish software company called "Global Gaming Factory X". (You can read their marketing bullshit (a.k.a. “press release”) here if you want to...)

The following is reprinted from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8121680.stm (BBC News article dated 26 June, 2009 ) :

Pirate Bay retrial call rejected

A Swedish court has thrown out a request for a retrial by the four men behind The Pirate Bay website.

The four were found guilty of promoting copyright infringement in April and face jail sentences and hefty claims for damages.

The Pirate Bay's lawyers called for a retrial when it emerged that one of the judges in the case belonged to several copyright protection groups.
[The four men behind the site said they would not pay the fine. ]

The Swedish court said the judge's affiliations did not bias the case.

The Svea Court of Appeal said Judge Tomas Norstrom should have declared that he was a member of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property and the Swedish Copyright Association before the case went to trial.

"The fact that he failed to shed light on this does not however mean that there was any wrongdoing during the proceedings that would require a retrial," said the court in a statement.

"This was not a case of bias," concluded the court.

No appeal is allowed against the judgement.

The Pirate Bay is well-known for hosting lists of links that give people access to pirated copies of movies, music, software and TV shows.

The Pirate Bay defended itself saying that it did not infringe copyright because none of the pirated material is stored on its servers.

The court found them guilty because, it said, they continued to operate the service even when they knew users were being pointed to pirated material.

The four men behind The Pirate Bay, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde, were sentenced to one year in jail and told to pay damages of 30m Swedish kronor (£2.3m, 2.7m euros) to entertainment companies such as Warner Bros and Sony Music Entertainment.

In response to the ruling Peter Sunde said The Pirate Bay would now file charges against Sweden for violating the human rights of the defendants.

 

In related news: the Recording Industry lawyers have been awarded damages of $ 80,000 per song against a 'a 32-year-old Minnesota mom'...

note that that's not 8 thousand dollars a song; that's EIGHTY thousand dollars a song (total fine: nearly two million dollars) .

check out this article by semi-famous WSJ technology reporter Robert Cringley, titled "Don't stop believing in the RIAA's capacity for evil" (June 22, 2009) ..

(2009-03)

What's 33 feet across, 22,000 pounds, and spins at 27 miles per hour?

[ quoted from the Sony site @ http://motionflow.eu/ : ]
"What's 10 metres across, weighs 10 tonnes, and spins at 44km/h? The BRAVIA-drome, the world's largest zoetrope and star of our latest advertising campaign due to launch in April 2009. This massive motion machine, featuring the skills of Brazilian football player Kaká, demonstrates how the world's first Motionflow 200Hz technology delivers the smoothest action ever on the BRAVIA Z4500. Get all the updates on the project here, including the latest news about the TV ad, exclusive interviews with those involved, technical details of how Motionflow and zoetropes work plus how Kaká's involved."

"Sight is so immediate and familiar that it’s easy to overlook just what a staggering process it is. While we all associate the sense with our eyes, that’s just the beginning of a breathtaking cascade of computation going on inside our heads.

Research suggests that our brains have separate systems for perceiving colour, objects, faces and motion, which is what we’ll look at here..... certain neurons seem to be associated with movement in particular directions[, and] just like muscles, neurons tire if you use them too much.

[You can see this for yourself:] if you stare for 30 seconds at an image moving in one direction, then look at a static object, like your hand, it will appear to be moving in the opposite direction. ... "

"Was it tricky, balancing speed and image size?
The rotational speed was a function of the desired quality of animation.
It was established that we needed to animate at 25 frames per second (the same as film) and that the image needed to be as big as possible, and that the animation should be as long as possible. After looking at many combinations and a careful consideration of the maximum size, we thought we settled on a measurement of 10 metres [33 feet] in diameter and 64 images. And that meant the zoetrope would be spinning at 23.4rpm, which equates to a velocity of just over 44kph [About 27 miles per hour - Editor] ...."

Here's the making of:

  blogger cred: http://halfsquatch.blogspot.com

  (2009-02)

Great Stoner Moments - Rocket Ship - from "Futurama: Bender's Game"

(remember, if you go to the source video, PLEASE click the 'Watch in High-Quality' link!)

The moment:

The original song is "Rocketship", by Kathy McCarty (Songs of Daniel Johnston):

  (2009-01)

An Internet Meme Trifecta

What happens when lolcatz meets OBAMICON and you add a timely US culturo-policital reference... internet meme gold.

 

 

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