Monday, April 26, 2010

Stare Decisis. Look it up.

U.S. Supreme Court to Review Game Ratings Law - U.s. Supreme Court - Kotaku

Finally. After every single version of this law across the nation has been struck down, with more photocopies on the way, the Supreme Court will step in to squish all of these short-sighted laws once and for all.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Brazil doesn't like Orkut, apparently

Google: U.S. Demanded User Info 3,500 Times in 6 Months | Threat Level | Wired.com

It's things like this that make Google's position on freedoms so interesting. All your data that you put on there belongs to them, but they hate censorship and secrets. Very odd. Love this thing, though.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

The 1st Amendment violates Apples dev agreement, apparently

Apple Blocks Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist From App Store - app store - Gizmodo

Freedom of speech, who needs it? Seriously, an anti-satire clause? I know that Apple are just reaching for the sky when it comes to dick moves these days, from the horribleness of the new iAd system (1 in three app launches forces a full-screen ad and all apps have 1/8th of the screen taken up by ads at all times), to freezing out coding languages to screw over Adobe, and suing to ban HTC phones for patent infringement over the blatantly over-broad patents that Apple holds as some kind of proxy war with Google over Android, Chrome OS and Google applications like Google Docs. Add in the generally crappy way they treat their customers ("You can only use the devices you paid for how we say you can use them"), and there's a very good reason why I don't buy Apple products.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

@loc WTFLOLBBQ

Your Past and Future Tweets Will Be Archived At the Library of Congress - Library of congress twitter - Gizmodo

Sweet Jesus, why? Now, when the aliens finally visit us and demand to see the finest repository of human knowledge, they're gonna get a face full of all of the pubescent whining and blatant corporate whoring that Twitter represents. That is, if YouTube comments haven't convinced them to glass the planet smooth first.

Obama Backtracks on NASA Capsule : Discovery News

Obama Backtracks on NASA Capsule : Discovery News

I don't know if it's because this was all part of the Obama Administration's master plan to drastically lower expectations, and then reap the rewards of not killing one of the most beloved US Government programs, or maybe the constant shouting from both sides of the political aisle about actually doing that, but they're backtracking on abandoning long-range manned space flight. Looks like they're keeping the one part of Ares that made sense (the crew capsule) and going with a "as yet unnamed" heavy-lift rocket system. Well, considering they're dumping $3.1 billion into the Marshall Space Center in Alabama, and that only does Constellation, which is still getting the axe, and the Shuttle, which is going away, I'm willing to bet $10 that this mysterious heavy-lift rocket system is the DIRECT/Jupiter rocket system, which is almost entirely made out of retrofitted, modified and updated Shuttle parts. Good for them, and good for NASA.