General Exception – Page 5

Shout Out to our Spammer Friends

Gary March 12, 2006 February 24, 2013General Exception

Just a quick thank you to all those spammers out there who tried to use Wetmachine’s trackback feature to pump up the ratings of your worthless “hold ’em poker” web sites in search engines. While not a single one of your trackbacks were allowed through (thanks to the space-age technology of regular expression pattern matching), your rejected trackback submissions, all 16 thousand of them, take up space in our database.

So, thanks to you all, I’ve had to disable the trackback feature. I don’t think this hugely cripples the site, since we had only 5 legit trackbacks out of the 16,000+ in the database (leading to what has got to be one of the worst signal-to-noise rations I’ve ever seen).

It’s just bottom feeder greed, as usual, dumping shit in our communal water supply.

The War on the Consumer: Congress to Pass Secret DRM Law?

I guess I’ll make this into a reoccurring feature, since everyone seemed to like the last one I did, and it seems we have no end of stupidity from media companies and their hired hands.

So, let’s see what the media companies have been shopping for in Washington. I bet there’s a lot of post-Holidays sales of legislation going on…

Bellsouth recinds donation because of free community wifi

Gary December 5, 2005 February 24, 2013General, General Exception

I thought regular readers of Tales of the Sausage Factory might find this interesting.

Recently, the city of New Orleans (or what’s left of it) decided to set up free wifi for all residents to help bridge the damage to the communications infrastructure in the city and stimulate growth. This caused BellSouth to throw a little hissy fit, and snatch back the damaged building they donated to be the new police station.

Just shows the class of the telecommunications industry…

The ongoing war on the consumer

Gary November 1, 2005 November 1, 2005"A Republic, if you can keep it", General Exception

The entertainment industry continue to pursue what has to be labeled as an all out war on the consumer. We all know about the lawsuits filed by RIAA and the MPAA regarding alleged illegal downloading. Aside from the fact that any sane business model doesn’t include “suing your customers” as a major money making scheme, it seems that the RIAA lawsuits are simply a shakedown… pay us $7500 and we won’t sue you. Fortunately, some people are fighting back with the help of lawyers who realize the judicial system is being used like a bank robber’s gun.

But, of course, there’s another front in this war…

Senators want to jump-start Gattaca

Gary October 30, 2005 February 24, 2013General Exception, I Fear These Things

Ars Technica is reporting about a proposed amendment to the Violence Against Women act that would let police collect the DNA of everyone they arrest, just in case they are a sexual predator. What could possibly go wrong with that? Oh, you know, just fostering a future like Gattaca where genetics rather than actual merit is used to determine who advances in life. But then, merit doesn’t really play much of a role these days, does it?.

Of course, if those arrested by the police were to have their DNA confiscated, there are several rather interesting people’s DNA would now be on file… and perhaps even leaked out to the public. Who knows what could be turned up in that…

The Boston Globe shows it doesn't know jack about science fiction

Gary October 4, 2005 February 24, 2013General Exception, Memology

(in lieu of the usual “weird news things about space,” I give you a rant about science fiction on TV)

Apropos of apparently nothing, the Boston Globe decided to create a list of the top 50 sci-fi shows of all time.

And oh boy did they mess up.

Caution, the post contains nigh toxic levels of geekiness…

And now, a word from our polar opposite…

Gary August 12, 2005 February 24, 2013General Exception, I Fear These Things

Ray Kurzweil has has a piece in Forbes on his vision of the combination of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. According to him, we’ll have AI nanobots crawling bloodstream, repairing us, and augmenting our senses. In 20 years.

Umm… yeah.

The robot overlords command you to dance!

Gary June 8, 2005 February 24, 2013General Exception, Hardware

Want to learn ballroom dancing? Don’t feel like having all that icky physical contact with a human being? Well, you’re in luck! Japanese researchers have invented a ballroom dancing robot partner for you. Once again, technology comes to the aide of misanthropes and shut-ins everywhere who want to avoid actual human contact.

The cybernetic sausage

Gary May 25, 2005 February 24, 2013General Exception, Wetware

Hack a day had this link to a cyborg sausage that talks. It’s creepy and amusing at the same time. The Frankenstein stitches up the back of the sausage were particularly appropriate.

The new limit of DRM lunacy: requiring fingerprints for DVDs

Gary May 19, 2005 February 24, 2013General Exception, Hardware

Wired has this story about researchers at UCLA coming up with what has to be the most assinine form of DRM yet: a DVD that will be encoded so it will only play for the person who specifically bought it. This is accomplished through some handwaving mumbo-jumbo involving that recent poster child of privacy invasion: the RFID chip.