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.
I don’t know anything …
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 site first got started, that …
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 …
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 code. Then you wait till October 10, when the album …
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.
It’s probably fair to say that Heroes is nerd culture. I don’t …
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.
I know, I know, Pixar is sacred and papal in its infallibility. And I know, …
I have a piece in this week’s Time about the Storm Worm, a remarkably clever, stubborn, well-maintained virus.
What I wanted to get across in the piece, and didn’t really manage to do, is how incredibly weird the whole botnet phenomenon is. I mean, I’ve been reading about them for years, and I’m still trying to get my mind around the …
This Iomega eGo portable hard drive. It holds 160 GB — it swallowed my entire life’s work and didn’t burp. Yeah, it’s also 160 bucks, so it’s probably not the ideal bucks-to-GBs ratio. But it’s such a happy red! And look carefully — you can see it’s curved, like a hip flask. It’s a flask full of delicious data!
This is a subject my Spidey-sense is telling me not to post about. And yet.
Tuesday night I was a talking head on CNN International, a cable channel that is probably mostly broadcast at one airport gate in Dubai or something. I was on to talk about the Halo 3 launch. I was having a massive allergy attack and was even less telegenic than …
Just so that somebody has said it somewhere: The Halo franchise is the story of a Western-style human civilization locked in a conflict with an enemy chiefly characterized by its zealous and inflexible religious beliefs and its hatred and contempt for said Western-style human civilization. The Covenant have subsequently suffered an …
Yeah, bit of a light posting period just now. Sorry about that. Should be back to normal soon. If you were me, would you be blogging right now?
I have been playing a good deal of Halo 3. I’m going through on Heroic, which I’m finding to be challenging, in a good way. It’s not clear to me that there’s ever going to be more Halo …
That is, this is what you get if you participate in the whole-hog, journalistically-ethically-murky Halo 3 promotional swagstorm. This morning I received this mailing from Microsoft in a box large enough to hold a small human body, or maybe a grunt:
(Sorry for the lame cell-cam photography — the colors came out weirdly saturated.) I …
