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All well and good. Except some people are afraid that the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC) is going destroy the planet. The biggest fear is that it's going to spawn a black hole that'll suck down the entire Earth. At least one lawsuit has been filed on those grounds, seeking to impose an injunction against the LHC's activation.
And then there is the tale going around that the LHC has an even more nefarious purpose. That it is going to be used to open up a portal to an unknown dimension. Or even a known one.
Namely, Hell itself...
Yup, some folks are claiming online that when the guys at CERN in Switzerland get the Large Hadron Collider going, the "bottomless pit" talked about in the Bible's Book of Revelation is going to throw out the welcome mat and all kinds of unholy terror is going to come forth, just like in the videogame Doom.
Personally, I doubt it.
Because I'm betting that the LHC will either...
1. Work just fine, and perhaps even be used to find the elusive Higgs boson.
or
2. As the award-winning documentary film Hellboy has shown, it will open a doorway to the realm of the Ogdru Jahad, which will bring about the end of the world.
Gizmodo has the full rundown of what went on at Apple's "Let's Rock" keynote address by Steve Jobs in San Francisco today. In what has become an annual event - and perhaps the most-watched PowerPoint presentation in history - Jobs unveiled the coming year's new iPod models and whatever features that die-hard Appleholics should be lusting after.
So what new ubercoolness has the Jobs Mob for us this time? Frankly: not much. Jobs officially unveiled the new iPod nano, but if you've been paying attention to the rumors over the past few weeks this wasn't unexpected at all. The new iPod nano goes back to the "tall" design that existed before the "fat" one last year, and displaying a widescreen movie means watching it with the iPod nano sideways. It also features an accelerometer, which among other things lets you violently shake the iPod nano and it automatically goes into shuffle mode. And it'll be coming in a psychodelic array of new colors.
But that seems to have been it for any innovation that Apple followers might have been hoping for this year. Jobs also showed off the second generation of the iPod touch: basically the same but with the same tapered re-design as the nano, bigger storage (now all the way up to 32 gigs of flash memory) and an accelerometer (oh yeah and Niki+ built-in). The 80 gigabyte iPod classic (which is what I'm a proud owner of) is getting an "update" to 120 gigs and the 160GB model is being discontinued. iTunes 8 is coming out today (and is probably available even now) that has a new "Genius" feature which somehow figures out the kind of music that you like to listen to. NBC is making its shows available on iTunes and for $2.99 you can buy television episodes in high definition.
Not really all that much to get excited about, if you ask me. I still don't understand why Apple can't or won't engineer user-replaceable batteries into at least the classic and touch iPod (and the iPhone for that matter): they would make a huge amount of money from people who would gladly pay to have a spare battery or two in their pocket or purse or backpack for their iPod. I can think of at least two or three ways that Apple could engineer their appliances for replaceable batteries without sacrificing the products' aesthetic. So why isn't Jobs and crew taking up that challenge? It's the only real innovation left to pursue for the iPod/iPhone (in addition to beefier flash storage, and that's coming in the next few years anyway). There wasn't anything during today's product reveal that would compel me to upgrade to a newer iPod from the one I already own.
But I probably will be getting Lisa one of those new iPod nanos, if she can decide which color she wants :-)
Here's a screenshot I just made of the Amazon product page for the new video game Spore, which came out yesterday for Windows and Mac computers...
How does a video game simultaneously occupy #1 on Amazon's sales rank, and get hundreds of one-star reviews?
In three words: "Digital Rights Management". People who purchase Spore can only install it on three computers. And apparently the DRM that is installed is continuously running in the system's background even when the game isn't being played, sucking up resources that could be used for other processes. I don't think that BioShock's DRM last year was that bad (incidentally, 2K eventually removed the DRM from BioShock altogether).
Can't say that I blame the players. Spore doesn't look too much like my cup of tea (although it was created by Will Wright, the mastermind behind SimCity) but this kind of DRM for what is an online multiplayer game, however innovative, is ridiculous. Games like Guild Wars and World of Warcraft have never needed such draconian measures before, and they have remained profitable by a substantial margin. Why then is Electronic Arts doing this?
They need to strip this out, and fast. If only because at least in the blogosphere, there is still a working semblance of a free market and a free press. Electronic Arts has honked off both with this move.
How terrible? According to this person, who saw an advance screening in Chicago over the weekend, the funeral scene is not in the film (yeah there were two funerals in the book but if you've read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince you know which one I'm talking about). It also has the Death Eaters attacking the Weasley house at Christmas (?!?) and apparently makes several other significant deviations from the novel.
Not jazzed at all about this movie now. I'm tempted to say that the Hogwarts Express has jumped the track on this one.
Maybe Warners should just wait a few years and "reboot" the film franchise with a clean start, now that we know where the story is going and how it ends, instead of mucking it up with the current series.
During the past few days American Rights Counsel LLC has forced YouTube to pull more than four thousand videos that are critical of the Church of Scientology. At this time it's unclear whether American Rights Counsel are representing the cult and did so at the behest of Scientologists. What is known is that a butt-load of Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices went out from the firm over a period of twelve hours this past Thursday and Friday, and YouTube had no legal alternative but to immediately yank the contested clips.
The affected YouTube users have already begun responding with DMCA counter-claims (which might explain why this blog has been registering a ton of visits to how I filed my own counter-claim a year ago against Viacom). That is indeed a wise step to take in fighting back.
But YouTube users shouldn't be forced to deal with this anyway. I've said many times since my own dealings with Viacom: the DMCA has turned out to be horrible legislation, rife for all kinds of abuse. Think about it: if anyone currently running for office wanted to, he or she could simply deluge YouTube with fraudulent DMCA infringement notices, and YouTube would be obligated to remove every video that's critical of that candidate... and maybe even official campaign ads from the opposition. And YouTube would have to do it without consideration or oversight.
Isn't that what's happening now with the Church of Scientology?
It was ten years ago today, on September 7th, 1998, that Sergey Brin and Larry Page took some investment capital and a database algorithm and from it spawned Google: the search engine that more than anything else transformed the Internet from a technological novelty into an indispensable application.
I used Google on the first day it was announced, in one of the computer labs at Elon. Even then I thought this was the most superior search engine of the lot that I'd been using up 'til then. In a few months Google supplanted those. And there hasn't been a day that's gone by whenever I've had to use the Internet (which is most) that I haven't employed Google.
Back then it ran on four computers. Today Google has a vast campus in California and data centers all over the place. The company has developed its own operating system, is about to roll out a cell phone, and has just applied for a patent on what many are calling the "Google Navy". All that innovation might make Google, on the basis of a ratio between ideas attempted and ideas that are profitable, the most successful company in American history.
This is, by an order of some magnitude, a much more important story than McCain versus Obama right now.
It's also one of the reasons why I don't believe it really matters which candidate or party wins in the November elections. If Obama wins, he's going to immediately face a ruined economy the likes of which have not been seen since the Depression and if he stays true to the policies he's running on, he'll likely make the situation that much worse. If McCain wins, the state of America's finances is going to be an automatic indictment against not just him and Palin but on the previous eight years of the Bush Administration.
Oh yeah, and another bank - this time it's Silver State in Nevada, with $2 billion in assets - failed today. That's the 11th big bank this year to go under. And so far as I know they've always been announced on Friday evenings.
If there's going to be a bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I cannot recall that there will have been a bigger measure taken in United States history. This is going to hurt the taxpayers like all get out.
I'm just now hearing about Fuel for the first time. Created by British game studio Codemasters and due for release in 2009, Fuel is an open-world racing game featuring five thousand square miles of navigable terrain: if you can see it in the game, you can drive right up to it. Fuel takes place in a near future where the environment has run amok and global supplies of oil are running out: sorta like Mad Max meets Grand Theft Auto.
Here's the image that made me take notice and decide that I might have to add Fuel to my library...
In addition to tornadoes, players will also have to deal with snowstorms, driving rain and a realistic day/night cycle.
Variety is reporting that Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky - the producers and writers of NBC's The Office - have been tapped by Columbia to write the script for Ghostbusters III. And the aim is to bring back the original cast of Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson.
Presumably this means that we could expect to see the movie coming out for the summer of 2010: twenty-six years after the original Ghostbusters premiered in 1984 and over twenty since 1989's Ghostbusters II.
Incidentally, Ghostbusters: The Video Game was supposed to be out in time for the 2008 holiday season, but corporate takeover politics has pushed it back to possibly 2009 and the quarter-century anniversary of the first movie. The Ghostbusters game features a script written by Ackroyd and Ramis, and features all four of the core Ghostbusters actors lending their voices (in addition to William Atherton and Annie Potts coming back).
I'll be keeping my eye on this new film project, 'cuz in over ten years of speculation this is the closest I've seen it becoming a reality. There was a third Ghostbusters movie being planned as far back as 1996, which would have had the Ghostbusters dealing with Hell itself and have Chris Farley playing a new team member. The first movie has held up amazingly well over the years (and Ghostbusters II seems to be more appreciated today than it was on its first release). If done right, Ghostbusters III will make for a terrifically fun transition for the franchise into the modern era.
(I just hope that Rick Moranis is up for returning...)
And there is no way, no how, that I would now feel comfortable voting for her as part of any ticket.
Palin's address at the Republican National Convention was, in my opinion, whiny and shallow. There was nothing of substance or vision that I found in her words. All I really got was that she's a mom, her kids play hockey, and she doesn't like her "opponents".
And that's it.
I've heard speeches with more passion at the... nah, nevermind. Don't want to go too far this morning (and I might be already anyway).
What happened to the great political speeches that we've come up reading about in the history books? The two last truly great ones that I can remember being given by a leader of this country were from the day of the Challenger disaster and then the 1987 "Tear down this wall!" speech in Berlin, both made by President Ronald Reagan.
When was the last time that a political convention speech was made about ideas and conviction, instead of being vindictive rhetoric? Or is it simply too much to hope for another William Jennings Bryan to come with a "Cross of Gold"?
Something terrible has happened to this country over the past few decades. American intellect has become anemic of ideas. And I cannot avoid the suspicion that there will be a terrible price to pay for our retreat from enlightenment.
This is the third death that I've had to report in the past day or so. Hope this is not about to become a trend...
Bill Melendez has passed away at the age of 91. He was an animator who began work at Disney, and then moved on to Warner Bros. But it was a 1959 meeting with cartoonist Charles M. Schulz that would propel Melendez to everlasting fame. The two became fast friends after Melendez was hired to work on a series of commercials featuring Schulz's Peanuts characters. And after that, Melendez was the only person that Schulz gave permission to animate Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and the rest of the Peanuts gang. A few years later Melendez collaborated with Schulz to produce A Charlie Brown Christmas: forty years later it remains a seminal classic of the holiday season.
In addition to the various Peanuts movies and television specials, Melendez also was involved with commercials using the characters (like this terrific spot for Regina vacuum cleaners featuring Pigpen: the only time he was ever depicted as clean!) and Melendez even contributed his voice for that of Snoopy.
Apart from his Peanuts work, Melendez was involved with animated versions of the comic strip characters Garfield and Cathy. And he also was part of the production of the 1979 animated The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe: to this day one of the most enchanting things that I ever saw on television.
Melendez earned 19 Emmy nominations for his work, and won six awards.
In case anyone's wondering: currently I'm registered as a Republican. I helped a friend run for statewide office this election season as his treasurer, running on a platform of parental choice in education. Prior to that I ran for office myself, partly regarding issues of fiscal conservatism. In my opinion Ronald Reagan was the last real President that America has had and I'm very thankful that I got to drive to Washington D.C. a few years ago to pay my respects as his casket lay in state at the Capitol.
I never vote for the party though. I've voted for Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians and independents and a lot of people in between since I first registered to vote several years ago (the day after my eighteenth birthday).
I would never vote for Barack Obama. The man's social spending ideas are a catastrophe waiting to happen. Neither can I ever vote for John McCain: this is a man bankrupt of any principle and I absolutely cannot believe that so many professed "conservatives" are now lining up to support him. This was the Senator who pushed through McCain-Feingold, fercryingoutloud. And as I've said before: any man who dumps his wife just so he can have a younger woman, does not have the moral fiber to be given the responsibility of the most powerful office on Earth.
Now y'all know where I'm coming from. Which brings us to the matter of Sarah Palin. A woman who I have had great admiration for.
Until now.
And trust me: this has nothing to do with what is going on with her family at this moment.
When McCain announced that Palin would be his running mate, I didn't know what to make of it. That Palin, who had previously expressed support for Ron Paul (a candidate as unlike McCain as there's apt to be) would now hitch her wagon to McCain didn't make any sense to me. And after considering it at length, my first assumption was that Palin is a very good governor, who has no idea what she is being drawn into and is perhaps not ready for this at all.
Let me put it another way: I thought that Palin was being used as a tool by the McCain campaign. As one friend put it, Palin as a running mate was analogous to putting lipstick on a pig. She's got a tremendous reputation and is by widespread acclaim "easy on the eyes", but she does nothing to change the fact that John McCain himself has a horrible record on so-called "conservative" issues. Palin, many have told me over the past few days, is only meant to be a distraction from the real John McCain.
Then I started, for the first time, to take a seriously hard look at Sarah Palin's record as mayor of Wasilla, and then governor of Alaska.
And you know what?
There's no way that I could support Sarah Palin now, even if she were to run for President herself (which I earlier had suggested I wouldn't mind happening).
In fact, the notion about Sarah Palin being a heartbeat away from the most powerful position in the world, is now downright scary.
It was her record as mayor of Wasilla that sent the first red flag popping up in my mind. When she was sworn in after being elected in 1996, the town of Wasilla, Alaska had no debt. When she left, the town was twenty-two million dollars in the hole. We're talking a town with a population of about five thousand souls. My own hometown has about three times that amount, and I don't think it's ever been that much in the red.
Where did all that money go on Palin's watch? Much of it went to a new sports and entertainment complex. A bit went to a new park. None of it apparently went to actually improving the infrastructure of Wasilla or toward urban planning. I'm now hearing plenty of horror stories about how the town is a cacaphonic sprawl of bad streets, run-down buildings and big-box retailers like Wal-Mart.
But think about it: Wasilla went from owing no money, to owing $22 million during Palin's tenure. Does that sound like sound economic conservatism to anyone?
Then the tales came out Palin's dictatorial style: how she set down a policy that no city employee could talk with the press without her permission, and how she fired the town's respected librarian and lost a police chief (in addition to several others who she tossed out) because she believed they weren't "loyal" enough to her. So forget financial discipline: now we're dealing with matters of personal discipline and humbleness as a public servant. Palin apparently thought that since she was now mayor, she could be "the decider" of Wasilla. She quickly filled the vacant positions with people that she had previous relationships with. It began a pattern of cronyism that continued into her time as Governor of Alaska and is now come back to haunt her in the form of a state trooper firing scandal.
Maybe some of this could be attributed to being "young" and "fresh" on the job. Some eagerness to over-excel. Kinda like how Barney on The Andy Griffith Show is always getting in trouble because he wants Mayberry to be like a big city rife with organized crime. That's a heap of fun if we're watching a Sixties-era television comedy... but in real life, when the pattern persists from small-town mayor to state governor, it stops being funny or excusable.
It was how Palin became mayor of Wasilla in the first place that finally convicted me to no longer be able to give her any credence as someone I would ever want to be within a hair's breadth of so much power. In what is usually a non-partisan, friendly election in small town America, Palin injected her mayoral race with "wedge issues" like abortion. She received heavy backing from the Alaskan state Republican Party. At one point she was apparently making it out that she was going to be Wasilla's "first Christian mayor".
How is abortion possibly an issue for a sleepy burg of five thousand people tucked away in a valley in Alaska? That's like trying to teach A.P. history in what's supposed to be a high school woodshop class.
Palin's campaign for mayor of Wasilla had little to do with actual issues, and too much to do with exploiting people's emotions. That's how she came to elected office to begin with: not by appealing to intellect, but by playing off of base psychology.
Which brings me to the final reason that I will share for now about why I cannot ever support Sarah Palin being in the Executive Branch of the United States Government...
...namely, that the Book of Revelation is not a foreign policy manual.
Understand this about me too: I'm a follower of Jesus Christ. I've been a Christian for going on a dozen years now. And even before then I saw how having a faith in God is not something that is supposed to be used as a weapon against other people or other countries. In my opinion, God has not blessed America because America doesn't care about God anyway. Too many self-proclaimed Christians in this land think nothing of exploiting God for their own temporal motives, however. That's something that I not only cannot stand, it scares the hell out of me.
So now witness Sarah Palin, as Governor of Alaska, speaking before a church service and telling the congregants that the war in Iraq is a "task that is from God"...
Anyone else see that movie Jesus Camp? Anyone else think that Sarah Palin seems way too much of that same mindset?
As Christians, we are supposed to represent the Kingdom of God to those that we come in contact with. We are meant to do so by loving them, in spite of their beliefs or what their opinion is of us. We are called to love even our enemies. That doesn't mean that we don't defend ourselves when we must, because I believe that is a moral right for individuals and families and nations. But we were never given an ordained duty to seek out and destroy our enemies in the name of Christ! That's just more of the world's way, and not God's at all. And it is the absolute height of arrogance to assume that God's plan is our own plan enough that we have a license to believe He will grant a blanket blessing on all of our endeavors.
The more that I read of Sarah Palin, the more that I cannot but believe that the woman is an adherent of Dominion Theology. As a theology professor of mine put it ten years ago, that's something that "will beat a path straight to Auschwitz". And as I've studied it since then, the less that I've been able to deny that he was right.
If for no other reason, this alone is why I cannot trust Sarah Palin. God Only can judge her heart, but in my mind the woman is way too infatuated with the power of God and not nearly enough with the love of God.
That won't deter a lot of the so-called "evangelicals" from adoring her, from supporting her without question however. I've even heard a few of them quite seriously declare that Palin is a modern-day "Deborah for America". They're the ones who still believe that America has a special place in God's divine plan for the world. They're also the ones who tend to hold that God allowed George W. Bush to be elected so that it would "help" to eventually trigger Armageddon.
Don't think that I don't know what I'm talking about here. I used to attend a school that was eventually taken over by such apostles of the Apocalypse. And Sarah Palin, now that I've examined her, is precisely the kind of politician that they have been hoping and praying for. Maybe... maybe... even more than George W. Bush turned out to have really been.
These people have forgotten that what makes America special is her virtue. And in the name of God, these people - who should have been the most virtuous - gave up their virtue for sake of a little power in the fleeting span of their lifetime.
And now it is a question of whether there is any virtue left for their children, and their children's children.
And it looks like they're ramping-up to sacrifice even more.
Suddenly, the idea of a John McCain presidency, which I've always felt would be a disastrous continuation of the policies of Bush, threatens to become something much worse than most of us have yet imagined.
There is nothing "conservative" about Sarah Palin, I must sadly conclude. If anything, she seems cut from the neoconservative cloth that espouses bigger government and glorious empire. To her credit, Sarah Palin seems very much to be an all-American wife and "action mom". I certainly respect her strong stance for the Second Amendment. But her track record as an elected official indicates that if given far more power, she would continue the precedent that the current White House administration has set for detaching the American government from the American people.
There is nothing about that which is the least bit conservative.
That's still not enough to prompt me to vote for Obama, however. Nothing could possibly entice me to do that. So this election year I'm either casting a write-in vote for Ron Paul, or writing in what is rapidly becoming the most sensible alternative to the mess that this country is hellbent on becoming...
Anyway, I posted the short clip of my commercial on Web Junk 2.0 on YouTube, 'cuz I was so proud of it and that Rockingham County, North Carolina got such a shout-out. A month and a half later YouTube yanked the clip at the demand of Viacom 'cuz... get this... Viacom claimed that I was violating their copyright! Well, I filed a protest and the whole thing got some notice, and two weeks later Viacom acquiesced and the clip was restored. Here's the clip that caused so much trouble, including very many less-than-polite comments aimed at Viacom made by other YouTube users, which for reasons that shall be left to myself, I am not choosing to delete.
A few months ago Jim Ernstmeyer wrote me. He's at Harvard Law School and is involved with the Citizen Media Law Project. It aims to be a very extensive database of law pertaining to ordinary folks who - willingly or no - find themselves on the front lines of copyright litigation. The centerpiece of the project is the Legal Threats Database. Ernstmeyer asked for some information about what happened between me and Viacom, which I was more than happy to oblige him with.
And now, Viacom v. Knight is an entry at the Citizen Media Law Project! Which kinda officially makes it legal history. The entire site is well worth checking out for anyone with an academic interest in digital copyright or (like me, unfortunately) comes under the gun of bigtime corporate legal action.
April 4th, 1984, Big Brother on the telescreen at the Ministry of Truth in London, Airstrip One, from the film Nineteen Eighty-Four (the 1984 adaptation of the George Orwell novel)...
September 2nd, 2008, George W. Bush on the telescreen at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, in real life...
Singer/songwriter and actor Jerry Reed, who had a string of successful hits in the 70s and 80s but will perhaps be best remembered for "East Bound and Down" from the movie Smokey and the Bandit (which he also appeared in), has passed away at age 71.
Reed was a beast on the guitar! Check out this clip of him from about thirty years ago...
Think I'll pop in Smokey and the Bandit on the DVD player tonight in his memory.
Don LaFontaine, whose work made his one of the most-recognized voices on the planet, especially for all the movie trailers that he contributed to, has passed away at the age of 68 from complications stemming from a collapsed lung.
Here's a bit of a documentary showing LaFontaine at work and others discussing his prolific vocal talent...
Yup, some folks are claiming online that when the guys at CERN in Switzerland get the Large Hadron Collider going, the "bottomless pit" talked about in the Bible's Book of Revelation is going to throw out the welcome mat and all kinds of unholy terror is going to come forth, just like in the videogame Doom.
2. As the award-winning documentary film Hellboy has shown, it will open a doorway to the realm of the Ogdru Jahad, which will bring about the end of the world.
