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Kazriko's Dive

Newscorp says that ad supported services are on their way out

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/05/hulu_may_adopt_subscription_service/I agree, news corp. But let me be the first to point out that you already sell your services by a subscription based service. Show us a little honesty here and start pulling all your ads off our subscription service (Cable, Satellite…) and then we might consider paying yet another subscription for your content. ;)

Banning future technology weaponry...

http://www.slugsite.com/archives/1126Huhwhat? Banning electromagnetic weaponry from hunting purposes? What kind of backward state is this “Wisconsin” place…

PSN Badge

The UK playstation site has this nice little badge to stick on websites…I wonder if they’ll ever get that on the US site…

CDs that do not participate in the Loudness War.

Given that every darn CD out seems to be wound all the way to the top on the loudness meter, it’s both surprising and annoying when I find ones that aren’t. When I try to play them on shuffle, I have to turn the volume up, then back down again at the end for the next song, at least on Amarok. I have an automatic adjuster on Winamp at work…In any case, the most recent one is Veruca Salt’s cd IV.

Multimedia Consumption

Not just for books anymore! I just looked back at my journal and found it’s been 3 months since I posted anything about books and such… So here goes.#5 Witches of Karres. Very amusing mix of magic and science fiction. Witches with a magic spacedrive basically force a guy to rescue them from slavery, then make him into a fugitive. Ultimately they travel all over the galaxy and end up fighting a race of transdimensional worms… This is the sort of thing Schmitz is known for, though even more magicy than his Telzey Amberdon series.

Another problem with Democracy

Last.fm… They pick their artist pictures via a democratic process where you can vote them up or down. The other major issue with last.fm is that they have no solution for disambiguation of artists, so when you get down into the small indie bands there’s a great deal of overlap in names with different bands songs getting intermixed as well as the tags related to them. In this case, both problems are cropping up at the same time.

Only one US car maker worth considering..

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=al89RU9gWof8&refer=homehttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a5326d50-332a-11de-9316-00144feabdc0.htmlThe government owns 50% of GM now. The UAW owns 39%. The UAW will own 55% of Chrysler, and the government gets 10%. There’s really no point in buying a GM or a Chrysler car anymore. The companies are going to go one of two ways. They’ll either make crappy cars and go under, or they’ll make crappy cars and be continuously propped up by the government. Either way, there’s no possible way they’re going to make good cars in the future.

Geocities being shut down, spiritual successor in Myspace.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/24/geocities_bye/One might think that because Geocities is shutting down, the era of teenagers making gaudy, amateurish, and plain old ugly webpages would be over and forgotten… But those who fail to learn from history or never studied it are doomed to repeat it. They’ve just all gone over to Myspace where it’s not only easier to make gaudy webpages, but you can be even more amateurish while making webpages that look ever so slightly better, but still horribly ugly.

What's with the handbasket, and where are we going again?

(Link Dead)They forced some banks to accept TARP funds, and now they’re refusing to take them back. Then they start dictating to the banks what they can and can’t do now that they have the funds. This is freaking totalitarianism in the flesh right here. It’s almost like the controllers of the government want the whole thing to fail.And not in a good way, the Demon Overlord Laharl taking control of our country would probably be better than what we have now.

Futurism, and hype

I’ve long been a fan of the idea of Futurism. It seems that Futurism and Modernism have started to fade away from the public consciousness and are often ridiculed and insulted by many Post-modern “thinkers.” They claim that Modern society has failed to provide the gains that it promised and thus we should abandon the whole futurism concept.(Link Dead)This article gives me another good reason why this isn’t true. In particular,