The RIAA has successfully sued a woman in Minnesota for downloading and sharing music. Following the first actual jury trial in the RIAA’s anti-piracy legal campaign, one Jammie Thomas of Brainerd, Minn. has been ordered to pay $220,000 for 24 songs she downloaded and shared using Kazaa — that’s $9,250 per song.
Nothing too surprising about this — it’s an open secret that Bungie and Microsoft were never able to merge their corporate cultures successfully, to put it ridiculously mildly. One wonders if Bungie was under pressure to puke out more Halo sequels,but wanted to work on new IP…who knows. What is clear: Bungie got a much-needed [...]
I was going to post about the X-Wing that actually flies (but doesn’t land very well), or make some argument about how, oh, I don’t know, maybe the Zune isn’t such a bad idea after all. But instead I got sort of misty-eyed over Slashdot’s 10th anniversary instead. There’s a post there describing how the [...]
I have long felt that the minimal unit of computer-related annoyance, the bug, is a bit too large and unwieldy to truly and accurately express the actual experience of interacting with a computer. We all know about the regular bugs: the show-stoppers, the app-crashers and system-lockers. But what about those littler critters, the sub-bug issues [...]
I’m very very curious about what’s going on with Radiohead’s new album, which — you probably know this — they’re offering in a download format, for which you pay whatever you want. It all seems very on the level: you go to the site, you type in how much you’re paying, and you get a [...]
A few days ago somebody asked in comments what the hell nerd culture was anyway. Good question. Nerd culture — geek culture actually, I guess — is the phrase I came up with in 10 seconds when the guy who designed the banner for my blog asked me what it should say on it.
There’s a new (I think) clip from Wall-E here, the next big Pixar project. (With French text, found via Ain’t It Cool.) I’ve heard good buzz around Wall-E, but deep down I can’t help but wonder if Pixar isn’t groping its way toward its first flop with this one.
