Also, who doesn’t love theoatmeal:

…As someone who creates content for the web, earns a living from it, and has had his content pirated, I do feel that we need better legislation against online piracy.
I do not, however, think that SOPA or PIPA are the legislation we need.

Want to help in the fight against SOPA / PIPA? First, go learn about the bills. After that go contact your elected officials. Wikipedia has a handy-dandy page set up which allows you to locate your state representative.

Hugs and jet skis,
-The Oatmeal

Discovery, on the other hand, has a much more cynical analysis of the occurrence.

“Much of the interest is rooted in superstition and numerology, the idea that numbers are inherently lucky (such as 7) or unlucky (such as 13). Numbers are of course artificial and man-made, and they have no more or less significance than humans give them. Still, numerology has been around for millennia and is embraced today by millions of New Agers and others.

We tend to give special significance to certain numbers (or sequences of numbers) because we see them as meaningful when in fact they are not. There is a well-known psychological bias in the way humans perceive and remember our experiences called confirmation bias. Often described as “remembering the hits and forgetting the misses,” it refers to the ways in which our brains selectively recall information. Our minds are good at remembering coincidences and making connections between unrelated events in the world.”

The math surrounding the number is also rather interesting.

“The number eleven has a special characteristic in mathematics where it is a prime number. It contains some interesting peculiarities where the number eleven times itself equals a palindrome:
(2 digits) 11 x 11 = 121
(6 digits) 111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
(9 digits) 111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321″

HAPPY 11/11/11 11:11:11!
Now make a wish!

“…donned a hazmat-type protective jumpsuit and gloves, inflated a small boat and rowed out into the [Petaluma's Lucchesi Park] pond to begin collecting floating debris.

Within a few minutes, she was told by a city employee that she wasn’t allowed in the lake. When Castellon said she wasn’t coming out, the person said she’d call police.

Two officers arrived at Lucchesi about an hour later and left after about 15 minutes, never approaching Castellon. Lt. Tim Lyons said no city laws prevent floating on the algae-filled pond, or even swimming if one wanted to.

After a couple of hours, Castellon, her husband, Albert, and her brother, Walt Bagley, had amassed several large garbage bags filled with all manner of flotsam and jetsam…”

[via the press democrat]

Thank you Castellon family.

Then I was like, wooo!

But still, hmm; it was a lot of $$ for a very part time player.

And for awhile after, I was like arrrgh. But since I bought from

I was like, yeeeah.

This is the kind of bullshit “Intellectual Property Rights” that discourages the hell out of me and innovators in general. No longer does the best product, a melting pot of all the best ideas executed, rise to the top on its own merit. This instance with Samsung has hit mainstream media because it’s one big player against another.

As far as Apple is concerned, I have long since strongly disagreed with their uber proprietary worldview. This news further fuels the fire that this company is, at the core: greedy, secretive, anti-entrepreneurial tech mongers. Epitomizing “If you’re not with us, you are against us.”

For more on the extremely sorry-state of IP & patent rights, I encourage you to hear This American Life’s “WHEN PATENTS ATTACK!” podcast containing some eye-opening investigative journalism that has certainly colored my optimism a shade darker. Or, for the hard and fast version from the same reporters, Planet Money’s “The Patent War“.

The source of the madness ultimately lies with faulty copyright legislation. It’s unlikely to be resolved anytime due to the state of big business which has evolved to coddle and encourage patent-rights beginning most strongly with Microsoft’s infamous rise to (one of) the world’s largest software makers.

You can bet your ass we won’t see any ambitious young startups who may employ early-Microsoft like tactics obtain success. They will be dealt a swift strike from the cease & desist ban hammer. Not to say it is utterly impossible to make it as a startup; hundreds of young companies continue to weather the storm. I’m just saying it’s is a stifling environment these days.

As for the big players, they’ve their “hands” full with the highest cards – armed with an arsenal of patents. But, I digress: there is a bit of positive news in the Apple slaps Samsung injunction. Samsung has its own arsenal of funds and patents. Maybe, together, they’ll tear down the acrid system unintentionally whilst fighting the tablet market-share war.

Unsurprising Update – Apple is also suing Motorola in Europe over the Xoom tablet’s design

Ze is revisiting his show, “The Show”, likely because it epitomized a time of great change for him and pretty much made him famous. Though odds are, he’d have attained said fame one way or another. Of “Brain Crack” an episode from July 11 ’06. He elaborates on the concept articulated in song form. Tho, apparently the prolific use of fuck turned people off, which actually surprised me. One of my favorite bits, which I wish upon myself to seriously take to heart:

“Execute as quickly and faithfully as possible. What I like about this is the quickly and faithfully pull in opposite directions. The first reminds you to act without delay and the second tells you to try not to cut corners.

When I started the show I decided to put this into practice as much as I could. I tried not to leave concepts in my back pocket for future shows, but rather to get them out on the day I thought of them. This what I meant when I said I leave in mortal fear that I have run out of ideas. Because I did. Each day. It never really got easier from an emotional standpoint. It was always terrifying. But I did develop a voice inside of me that could yell over top the terror and tell me to stay the course. You can sort of see this process at work in a lot of episodes. Many ideas, lots of them could have been ridden longer to stretch time or for diminishing returns in laughter or thought, but instead they are pushed off by the next few in line.”

I was an avid The Show watcher, unfortunately I didn’t write much about it. Thanks again, Ze, for having and continuing to be brain crack.

Moose

From the Nature Bulletin No. 504-A of Cook County IL, October 27, 1973

The word “moose” came to us from Algonquian Indians. Consequently
its plural, instead of being “mooses” or “meese”, is the same as the
singular. That is true of most Indian names whether of a tribe, such as
the Winnebago and Potawatomi, or of an object such as papoose. It is
also true of many wildlife names not of Indian origin — for example:
deer, mink and grouse.

Perhaps coincidentally, moose are generally solitary animals.

Moose are the least social species among cervids, remaining fairly solitary except during the mating season.

The quote above from the answers page “are groups of moose called herds“, to which the answer is yes, but only during mating season – one male herds a group of females.

No image of a Moose herd could be found in the 15 minutes I spent looking. Sorry.

For the rest of you, anonymous tip seekers scouring the internets for possible solutions to an utterly frustrating and overly generalized error message, this info may help you.

“Connection Failure: The Xbox 360 could not connect to the Windows Media Center PC. Turn your Xbox 360 off then on again, and try to connect again.”

I attempted a plethora of configuration tweaks, tips and “fixes” to the windows firewall and registry, as gleamed from search engines google and bing*. All were no help until I stumbled upon this question “do you by chance have a fingerprint reader on this PC?”

Had I not spent hours learning how exactly Windows Media Center (WMC) “Extends” itself to the xbox 360 I would have completely overlooked the question. But since I now knew the ins and outs, *BOOM*, it became perfectly clear.

In short, the extender is simply a remote desktop connection to the single WMC application. And the stupid fingerprint reader on my Windows 7 ultimate laptop was preventing the login. Wasn’t there any error logs reporting (or hinting at least) this simple authentication failure in the windows event viewer? Nay!!

So finally, the solution: uninstalling the AuthenTec fingerprint software/driver (mine was provided by Lenovo for my X200). I lose the ability for fingerprint logins – at this point, SO what.

WMC via xbox 360!

Many hours were “invested” in troubleshooting this issue which could have easily been avoided given some better error reporting on either the xbox or windows side.

The real kicker is that I pretty much did this to myself; I must be a masochist. There is free software out there, like tversity, that do essentially the same thing for free. FREE. But since I have all this paid Microsoft shtuff (regardless if whether & what I actually paid…) I ought to use it, right!?

The Pitch: Open a Best Buy Credit Card and pay no interest 24 months!!

The typically skeptical Consumer thought process: Hmmm, free financing; what’s the catch? OK, so this is actually an HSBC bank credit card, sure… nothing else jumps out as odd in the immediate fine print.

This seems ideal for a large purchase like that washer and dryer we so desperately need. I’ll read the minimum payment from my first statement and put this baby on auto-pay. Score.

The reality:

• Month 1-6: minimum payment $10
• Month 7: minimum payment $23; auto-paid $10 minimum payment insignificant; $35 late fee assessed
• Month 8: minimum payment $36; oh shit, what’s all this now? LATE FEE? WTF!

According to a HSBC representative, “a new law was passed in January and you received a notice in the mail about your minimum payment.” To date, I have yet to find said notice. I did however, find the exact same claim from a blog post in The HSBC Monitor, “there was a new law that passed in January that requires them to charge a higher percentage of the balance” which, interestingly enough was posted in 2006.

Eventually, the representative passed me to a “manager” and the late-fees were waived. All was ok, I was alright even though I had spent hours on the phone talking to human script reading machines. I Had Won. So, I figure OK – boost the auto-pay amount to $30, well above that old minimum and I’ll be good. Then *two* months go by.

Minimum payment: $46. Auto pay shy of $16. Late fee bitch +$35.

Conundrum: call HSBC, waste hour(s) pitching how wrong they are to charge this fee. Or, pay it, stfu and take it.

Moral of the story: Signing up for a free financing offer means to mentally prepare to add that to your monthly checklist. Do not rely on auto pay to “beat the system”. Pay close attention to each and every message sent from the company providing that “free” credit. They Will Try To Screw You out of some money.

The billboard can make instant assumptions about the buying tendencies of passer-byers based on physical characteristics such as body build, gender and age. It could easily and might make racial profiling assumptions as well though the ramifications of such would be heralded by civil rights activists.

It could get interesting: by monitoring and tracking which stores you enter and what you come out with, depending on what you do or don’t buy, ad hoc discounts or bonuses could instantly be offered. An omni-present intelligence inventing ways on the fly to encourage patrons to dump more money.

It’s happening, just like in the Minority Report

While rather different technology than acute audience targeting on the internet, it has a similar gut privacy wrenching reaction.