Augury

I’ve been quite busy lately working on a variety of projects. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the tide is going to abate anytime soon, with a good portion of every day in the coming week already dedicated to one thing or another — I’ll make it through, obviously, but I prefer to accomplish things and then check them off the list. Lately it seems like I’ve been adding things to the list and only crossing them off partially, leaving a thousand little loose ends about. Typically this sort of mental cluttering manifests itself in other ways as well — Desk clutter, desktop clutter… WordPress clutter. So, in the interests of cleaning up a bit around here…

I was introduced to http://www.somafm.com/ about two weeks ago and spent almost an entire week listening to it. They’ve got a number of stations for various tastes in electronic music.

About a week ago this link was featured on Digg.com. Although the comparisons of the sizes of the planets are nothing spectacular, the comparisons of the sizes of the suns is. Antares is just absurdly large. All I can say is that I hope we have salvaged ancient Orion technology before we encounter any Antarans, otherwise we’re toast.

When I saw this link about a teacher threatening a woman and child the first thing that came to mind was Deb Frisch. I think it’s probably a bit absurd to arrest someone for threats made via the internet (although I say this not having read the actual remarks — obviously there’s potential for the tenor to be serious enough to warrant action). I’d much rather see justice via social engineering, such as the southwestpaw’s own fan site: http://donthiredeb.blogspot.com/.

Stories like this are outrageous. They also seem to be quite common. I think the women pursuing these settlements need to be called what they are: prostitutes. I can’t imagine why any well-adjusted, ambitious young man would want to marry someone when things like this happen.

From Electronic Arts yet another story to get you mildly peeved: Electronic Arts to shut down game servers for roughly 50 games. Yes, in some ways, I think the people dumb enough to buy “Generic Sports Title (Year Numer)” deserve it. But EA’s brazen lust for money is just too apparent in this move. If I bought a game that was, say, five years old, I wouldn’t expect a thriving online community. But a game that’s two years old? That’s new to me. Clearly this move is just to force people into EA’s yearly ripoff upgrade cycle.

About a month or so back there was a ruling on the Clean Flicks legal battle. Clean Flicks lost and the judge ruled it was copyright infringement/unauthorized distribution to edit out objectionable content and then rent or sell the DVDs. The story appeared on Digg and many of the other top internet news sites, but sadly most people seemed to be in favor of the ruling. I find it hard to understand why people would celebrate a decision that reduces consumer choice. Can anyone explain this to me? The only rationale I can see is the “Stick it to those self-righteous Christians!” attitude. Is that all there is to it?