Blackhacker

Defense Attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. Dies

By LINDA DEUTSCH, AP Special Correspondent

LOS ANGELES - Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., who was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in December 2003, died Tuesday at his home in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles. He was 67.

What every you may think about this man. If I every get into legal trouble I can’t think of anyone I would rather have in my corner.

Edward Abbey

“No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.”

Kuro5hin.org

Over the last few days I’ve been collecting information about what people would shell out for a pay-per-episode (not pay-per-view) series. Compared to four years ago when I last pondered this question, people seem much more willing to spend a little to get good entertainment, which in itself is a massive shift of opinion. But in the process of gathering this data, I think I may have discovered that you can only ever charge $1 for anything online, no matter how much it costs to make…

The thing is: if $0.99 is your starting point, how do you deal with differing levels of quality? If Futurama is worth $0.99, what is a bad episode of Alias going to cost? $0.75? If it’s that, you’ll have to increase your audience to compensate (which doesn’t seem likely since it’s a bad episode). But if you keep it at $0.99, the audience will feel like they’re being ripped off if certain episodes don’t meet their standards. In this system there is an implied level of quality that the producers of content must meet or exceed to stay in business. You’re only as good as your last episode, and that becomes even more severe in a pay-as-you-go scenario.

I was ranting about this a little while ago. ActuallyI was rantimg for this. I think this is the kick in the pants that the Media Industries need to bring quality back and cut the crap.

Check this!.

Berkeley, CA (March 10, 2005) - Online record label Magnatune and Samsung spinoff Hana Micron today launch TunePlug-a reusable USB Flash Drive that will feature 10 complete albums from 10 leading Magnatune artists as MP3 files. The newest way to distribute music, TunePlug offers consumers a simple way to experience emerging music on an easy-to-use, transferable information device.

This looks an innovation to distribute music and other digital media. It make so much sense I can’t think of a good reason why main stream media have not thought of this.
dap: Creative Commons

NY Times

Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, said yesterday that it would offer its customers a video recorder service from TiVo, news that helped send TiVo’s shares up nearly 75 percent.

Investors had soured on TiVo lately, on fears that its pioneering service for digitally recording and playing back television programs was being eclipsed by house brands offered by satellite and cable companies.

Negotiations with Comcast broke down last summer, and DirecTV, which has been TiVo’s largest source of new customers, has said it is building its own video recorder system.

I wouldn’t stop the Tivo deathwatch. The Comcast deal doesn’t pay as much as the DirectTV which DTV is going to let run out. Anyway I hope sombody buys them and continues to offer there service, at least long enough for me to get in on the action.

Sony is going though some stuff right now, with a new CEO, and problems moving over priced AV & PC hardware. One bright spot for Sony has always been gaming aka The Sony Playstation. Sony is FINALLY going to try to extend it game console dominance into the portable area. Portable gaming has been owned for more than a decade by Nintendo and it’s Game Boy. But now Portable Sony Playstation is here .. almost here anyway. Walt Mossberg from WSJ has a review.

Next week, Sony will release in the U.S. a flashy new portable audio and video device that some believe could mark the start of a resurgence for the beleaguered Japanese electronics and entertainment giant. The $250 Playstation Portable, or PSP, already a hit in Japan, could become Sony’s first iconic portable, personal product of the digital era — Sony’s equivalent of Apple Computer’s iPod.

Mossberg found issues with the music/video playback & PC integration features. But Mossberg being outside the core demographic for his product doesn’t understand this shot across the bow of the Nintendo GBA. The other features are just value added features to justify the $250 price tag. Don’t know if it will work. We’ll see.

Update:
A more comprehensive review of the PSP is at engaget. I won’t summarize it here ’cause its way long but it might prove more useful to hard core gamers than Mossberg.

I signed this petition. And apparently joined a movement that is opposed to the regulation of blogs buy the FEC under McCain-Feingold.

I do this with reluctance because I agree with the premise of McCain-Feingold. I believe that there is legal, corruption in the Federal Government. One of the more prevalent places is in the area of Campaign financing. Being that the lion share of funds raised for a campaign is used for advertising, it makes sense to apply the pressure there. That being said I have yet as of this post have to even read the bill.

So I don’t REALLY know what I am objecting to. But I am such a HUGE fan of the the First Amendment I am willing to give this petition the benefit of the doubt.

dap: La Shawn Barber

All the while the most boring, obscene, and cliché music, movies and television are being produced.

It is very ironic that the "Creative" industry is devoid of any creativity. How many spin-off shows are there going to be next season. How many sequels or remakes will come out next summer? How much popcorn cookie cutter pseudo hip-pop music will we be forced to endure.

Does no one have an original song, a new script? I would like to go to a movie and not know who will be dead by the end of the film. It would be nice to hear an original melody, not some crap where they ripped the whole of a chorus, and add some new "hip" words and call that a song. How many bad reality shows will waste valuable airtime because Studios are too cheap to pay real writers, and set designers, and all the people that bring us great TV. (For you information the Apprentice does not fall into this category. At least not yet.)

It would be nice for the subject matter of music to vary a little bit. Talk about something other than party and BS, or sex, or how you dumping some scrub. Even Ice Cube wrote simply about having a good day. "And I didn’t even have to use my AK"

I just want to be surprised for once. Challenged. Provoked to actual thought.

Anyone who has a site that displays the TTLB Ecosystem status, or has visited one, knows that when TTLB slows down, every one slows down. This is a handy plugin I found on the WP-Plugin database that caches your status daily to a file. It both alliviates stress on TTLB and bullet proofs your site when TTLB is having a “growing pain.”

Found this cool piece of Trek tech via slashdot. A cloaking device !!!!

The idea of a cloak of invisibility that hides objects from view has long been confined to the more improbable reaches of science fiction. But electronic engineers have now come up with a way to make one.

…the invisibility shield proposed by Alù and Engheta in a preprint on arXiv1 is more ambitious than this. It is a self-contained structure that would reduce visibility from all viewing angles. In that sense it would be more like the shielding used by the Romulans in the Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror” in 1966, which hid their spaceships at the push of a button.

Pendry warns, however, that the concept as it stands is “no magic cloak”, because it would have to be delicately tuned to suit each different object it hides. Perhaps even more of a drawback, he points out, is the fact that a particular shield only works for one specific wavelength of light.

An object might be made invisible in red light, say, but not in multi wavelength daylight.

And crucially, the effect only works when the wavelength of the light being scattered is roughly the same size as the object. So shielding from visible light would be possible only for microscopic objects; larger ones could be hidden only to long-wavelength radiation such as microwaves. This means that the technology could not be used to hide people or vehicles from human vision.

…but this might work as radar or microwave cloak, becoming the ultimate weapon against speed traps.
hmmmm Doing 120 down I295 and no worries ….

dap: /.