Leads, yeah, sure. I'll just check with the boys down at the crime lab, they've got four more detectives working on the case. They got us working in shifts! Leads...

tags: duh noshit noshitsherlock

Violation of privacy is inherent to the existence of Facebook. That is its raison d'être. The only scenario in which Facebook gets better about privacy breaches is "Host facebook.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)".

GP's diff puts a hard time limit on the protections and redefines them as revocable privileges. It's a significant improvement to the original line.

Orrin Hatch is one of the most deeply corrupt enemies of copyright reform in the history of copyright. Thankfully he has not been able to obtain a level of power sufficient to fully support his comically evil campaign of unconstitutional kickbacks to big media.

Look on the bright side. It means the whole scene will be burning out pretty soon and the internet can go back to its original purpose, the proliferation of misanthropy and technical arguments.

Are you saying that they've stopped asking you for your email address(es) and associated password(s) when you sign up for Facebook, so they can automatically add friends or whatever? I don't use the site, so forgive me if I am asking an obvious question about old news.

I used to work at a TV station and we never did anything to alter the sound of any of the programming or commercials.

This is our complaint exactly. We would very much like you to alter the sound of the programming or commercials to reduce the volume. If you did this, we might actually let the commercials play without muting the system.

in my opinion the broadcasters are responsible here, precisely because they are blindly (err, deafly) just running the tapes at the standard levels. sure, solving this problem flawlessly would require a lot of volume-monitoring technology and setting a standard average volume level and such. but they've failed to even attempt solve this glaring, decades-old problem with something as crude as "reduce all advertisements in volume by 6 dB for six weeks and see how it goes" or "return advertisements for remastering when they exceed a certain RMS volume". i've given up on the broadcasters because the ads are now so much louder than the programming that i fear they will damage my equipment -- i can't risk even seeing one ad because i can't afford to replace my speakers just because a bunch of antisocial assholes want to sell some more garbage to idiots.

i think i can entertain you both by sending you here: http://youtube.com/melodysheep

well, that's certainly more recent than i thought. but it's preeeettty pathetic that the 20 years since then have seen not a single work enter the public domain.

That reminds me -- when's the last time a copyrighted work passed into the public domain? I'm 28 years old; has that ever happened in my lifetime? A brief discussion with some of my lawyer friends a couple of weeks ago concluded that it probably hadn't.

well, my advice to them would be to stop selling it, of course, but it seems that the marketing scum have been running too much at microsoft, and the people who build their actual products running too little ... and it finally caught up with them. it's difficult to claim with a straight face that windows XP is a supportable configuration except on legacy boxes. microsoft should run, not walk, away from that train wreck.

apple keeps ramping up the pointless restrictions and i keep looking for another smartphone with minimal moving parts -- no slidey shit, no foldy shit, and definitely no no no physical keypad. i won't buy a pre. it's got all the planned-failure mechanical parts that i bought an iphone to avoid, even if the OS is the most promising thing i've seen in a year.

the best candidate right now looks like the HTC magic/G2/mytouch/whatchamacallit, although it's still got that nasty trackball, and that disastrous headphone adapter thing, both of which will hopefully be gone by the android phone that's shipping next time i'm shopping for a phone.

i basically want something with a good browser, nice fonts (so, never a blackberry), passable email, a passable library of apps, and as few moving parts as possible. right now the iphone is the thing that comes closest to meeting those criteria, even though apple's restrictive behavior has been juvenile and borderline illegal.