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Pixar's newest kid flick good enough for adults, Finding Nemo was proceeded by a "classic" Pixar short, KnickKnack. The weird thing is that they felt compelled to change 2 characters (the "bathing beauty" and the mermaid) from a ridiculously geometric, cartoony bosomy shape to flat chested. What gives here? This reminds me of the changes Spielberg made in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and of course, the regrettable Greedo shooting incident in Lucas' Star Wars: A New Hope. My question is: When is it right to change an existing work, for whatever reason?
comment posted at 2:45 PM on Jun-1-03

Creative Commons license: could it force you to suffer for your users' sins? Dan Bricklin says the liability clauses could do just that. MonkeyX says the benefits outweigh the risks. The Commoners respond. Ming the Mechanic and others prefer an alternative scheme: Primarily Public Domain, in which all content is donated to the public domain by default unless otherwise specified. And then there's plain old-fashioned copyright, like MeFi. How do you limit the incorporation of your cyberself?
comment posted at 8:57 PM on May-22-03

The first blog conference? BlogTalk May 23-24, Vienna.
comment posted at 8:13 AM on May-13-03

The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism.
comment posted at 8:28 PM on May-12-03

Unpublished Coda to Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird." Via McSweeneys.
comment posted at 10:38 AM on May-11-03

And you thought the blink tag was dead. The RIAA strikes back at xmms, the Linux media player.
comment posted at 12:23 AM on May-7-03

U.S. warns Canada against easing pot laws "David Murray, right-hand man to U.S. "drug czar" John Walters, says he doesn't want to tread on another country's sovereignty, but warned there would be consequences if Canada proceeds with a plan to decriminalize the possession of marijuana." WTF?
comment posted at 11:43 AM on May-2-03

Children are being held at Camp X-Ray admits the US, as reported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
comment posted at 10:28 PM on Apr-22-03

Why Isn't Evelyn Waugh The Most Popular Great Writer On Earth? It's his centenary this year and it's time to ask why such an irrefutably superb prose stylist - after Samuel Beckett, I rate him last century's funniest and most perceptive tragicomic writer, the best since Dr. Johnson - is still not as widely known and loved as his work deserves? Is it because he was so utterly reactionary and misanthropic, as brought out by this adorable BBC interview? After all, other far more reactionary writers, such as Ezra Pound, Fernando Pessoa, Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Allan Tate or Philip Larkin are, arguably, more widely read today than Waugh is. Which brings me to my question: are poets forgiven their ideological trespasses far more than is the case with novelists and essayists? Why? Isn't this one of the most unfortunate - and unfair! - consequences of today's outrageously politically correct culture? I fear so. And hate so, too! [A little more on Evelyn Waugh inside... ]
comment posted at 11:23 PM on Apr-20-03

Penisblog Ben Brown did it ages ago, staking out the avant-garde as usual. Now the meme gets its own site. Can you match the member to the bloggeur? (Extra credit for spinning the project into a discursion on openness and self-revelation online.) Not, as they say, work-safe.
comment posted at 10:51 AM on Apr-16-03

Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Yo-Yo. Health officials in New York are concerned about "water yo-yos", a hot new toy imported from Asia filled with a "foul-smelling liquid" that has made some kids ill. So far, they haven't been able to figure out what the liquid is, who manufactures the toys, or who brings them into the United States.
comment posted at 10:04 PM on Apr-11-03

Blockbuster late fee. I recently returned a movie a few hours late at Blockbuster. I was surprised to learn that the late fee was equal to what I paid for the movie- $3.25. The company line now is- "We don't have late fees. We just bill you for another seven days." This can be as high as $5.44, apparently. There seems to be no mention of this in the usual places. Shouldn't there be a legal limit to how high late fees can be? [The store clerk told me that late fees represented 40% of his store's earnings- I am not sure if this is true across the board.] I am ready for Netflix. Are you?
comment posted at 6:05 AM on Apr-9-03

A study posted at Adobe's website describes how traditionally Mac-centric tasks (rendering using After Effects, Illustrator & Photoshop) are all faster on a PC. These kinds of studies are a dime a dozen; what's interesting isn't which platform is faster, but that Adobe would host a page proclaiming the PC is the "preferred" platform for such tasks. Given the notoriously fickle folks at Quark, I would have pegged Adobe as the biggest Mac boosters in the third party software market. Are times changing?
comment posted at 11:31 PM on Mar-26-03

The World Trade Organization ruled today that the steel tariffs imposed by President Bush last year were illegal. Today's ruling, which was not a surprise, was the second major loss for the United States at the W.T.O. in the last year. The trade panel awarded Europe the right to impose $4 billion worth of trade sanctions against the United States for giving tax breaks to American exporters through foreign sales corporations. Well, at least we are winnig the war...
comment posted at 11:34 PM on Mar-26-03

Dungeons and Dragons, bigorexia, arse-licker, bass-ackward... The online OED (Oxford English Dictionary) quarterly adds a host of new words to the canon of what has become the standard dictionary of the english language(s). Some of the new and spicey words are: arsehole, arseholed, arse-lick,arse-licker, ass-backward, ass-backwards, bass-ackward, bass-ackwards, dragon lady, Dungeons and Dragons, telenovela, and transgenderist!! Thank the gods of language for these new words! So what is you favorite new word and why?
comment posted at 8:55 AM on Mar-17-03

Dr Pepper astroturf blog shows that the marketers are coming to blogland. What to do? AnilDash suggest that we create a new format.. TNL follows with a first pass at a fulll disclosure that still leaves too much open. What should we do to fight the marketers when they invade our turf?
comment posted at 9:02 PM on Mar-4-03

Open Source Content Management Systems Great resource for software (typically free) that allows you to start and maintain websites. The owners have gone so far as to install each one of them and give users admin access to try them out before downloading them.
comment posted at 8:53 PM on Feb-20-03

Google buys Blogger. Dan Gillmor has the scoop.
comment posted at 5:00 PM on Feb-16-03
comment posted at 7:18 PM on Feb-16-03

On top of being a teenager, on top of surviving cancer, on top of losing a leg to that cancer, 13-year-old Lacey Henderson, formerly of East Denver's Hill Middle School, had to suffer death threats and epithets because of her condition. This is just sick.
comment posted at 8:18 PM on Feb-9-03

Some interesting Q & A with Roger Ebert in the National Post regarding commercials in movie theatres. We assume that the only sure fire way to get your message across would be to walk out and demand your money back, but a theatre manager is quoted as saying Everything else is secondary to making sure all commercials are running -- including customer complaints. Yes, but for how long? And why does it seem that so few people are annoyed by this?
comment posted at 3:49 PM on Feb-8-03

Bush will raise the national terror threat level today from yellow to orange (CNN). This means little to us here in NYC where we've already been at orange. (At least that's what I've heard, although orange looks like a brownish color on my TV screen and a sort of muddy green on my computer monitor.) What, if anything, will your town, city, state, company, family do in response to this heightened threat level?
comment posted at 9:32 AM on Feb-7-03

Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity in words of four letters or less
comment posted at 5:10 PM on Feb-5-03

Why articulate people make bad colleagues Nick Denton, proprietor of various websites, sometime columnist for Management Today, and supposed intelligent person has come up with this gem in his weblog: "But I've been interviewing software engineers, and find myself prejudiced against those that talk fluently. . . . Either they were born persuasive, and so they've always been able to get away with it; or else they've always broken promises, so they've had to learn how to explain away their failures." For the most part, I think he's wrong, but I can see where he's coming from. Should articulate people be banned from time-sensitive positions?
comment posted at 2:51 PM on Feb-5-03

Not just selfcentered, but warmongers too. SUV owners are more likely the the general populous to support the war in Iraq (60%). When small SUVs are eliminated, the figure jumps to (80%). Probably not a causal relationship, but interesting none the less.
comment posted at 3:25 PM on Feb-4-03

The inventor of the term blog is giving up his verb. "I've gotta do something else with this site," says Peter Merholz, who began one of the first 25 weblogs in May 1998. "More essays. No blogging."
comment posted at 5:20 PM on Feb-3-03
comment posted at 9:49 PM on Feb-3-03

17 years ago today, the space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing all seven aboard. I share this primarily as I recall this being the first where-were-you-when of my childhood. So where were you?
comment posted at 10:02 AM on Jan-28-03

Snooker legend dies A very sad day for snooker lovers. Bill Werbeniuk, the only man to split his trousers on live television during a professional snooker match, has died. And he liked a pint or thirty.
comment posted at 4:32 PM on Jan-22-03

Best ad campaigns of the last 20 years Adweek posts its list of the 20 best ad campaigns over the last 20 years. Of the 20, two were single commercials rather than entire campaigns. One was Apple's "1984" ad; I won't spoil the other one for you.
comment posted at 11:24 AM on Jan-15-03

The Supreme Court has ruled, seven to two, that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 is not unconstitutional. The act automatically extended copyright by an additional 20 years, delaying by those two decades the entry of works into the public domain. Lawrence Lessig and others have argued that the Act places unreasonable and unnecessary bounds on the potential of the Internet, as well as effectively rendering unobtainable many works from the early decades of the twentieth century.
comment posted at 8:35 AM on Jan-15-03

"This car isn't meant to be an SUV, a mini-van, or a sedan" ... becuase, of course, it's a station wagon (the body type that dare not speak its name), albeit a sleek new Chrysler Pacifica, now starring in double-page spreads in your finer magazines. The Europeans have never stopped making great wagons, but its been a while since anything less apalling than the Taurus Wagon came out of Detroit or Tokyo.
comment posted at 5:41 PM on Dec-18-02

Santa Rampage! Last weekend a horde of Santa's wreaked havoc on Washington DC's clubs, bars and adult establishments. Amazingly only one santa was decked in the entire evening.
comment posted at 9:32 AM on Dec-15-02

Fly the creamy skies. One man’s flash of inspiration (and frantic legwork) translates 12,150 cups of chocolate pudding into 1,215,000 frequent flier miles. Total cost: $2,235 - including an $815 tax write-off to charity. Photo proof here. [via boing boing (via cardhouse)]
comment posted at 12:39 PM on Dec-13-02
comment posted at 12:40 PM on Dec-13-02

Bastard Pop is one of the more interesting developments in popular music in the last few years, but copyright laws preclude its distribution in stores. To hear it, you'll need to fire up your P2P or scour the internet. If you're not satisfied with the offerings, all you need is your home computer to make your own songs. Ever wonder what happens if you cross Joy Division with Missy Elliott?
comment posted at 12:15 PM on Nov-21-02

A Mad Parody Of The Onion Well, if this isn't Meta, I don't know what is. Certainly, we all know about The Onion (and, indeed, our consensus is that we don't post Onion links here). The fine fellows at MAD magazine have hoisted the Area Men by their own petard. I hate to say it, 'cuz I think The Onion is often quite funny, but they've got it nailed. (via Heath Row's Media Diet)
comment posted at 12:40 PM on Nov-13-02

Abigail and Brittany Hensel are in the 6th grade and continue to defy the odds. After the initial struggle with the personal pronoun (her? their?), one is left with both curiosity and sympathy. The greater issue is how to assimilate the truly miraculous.
comment posted at 3:37 PM on Nov-11-02

What do moedy, cruxtaposition, daugahyde and posolutely have in common? Don't bother looking up at dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster OnLine or britannica.com. All these words are newly made up words and only the pseudodictionary knows them. Don't know what NSFW means? Want to submit a new word creation of yours? You have no clue and want to brush up your vocabulary? Try the randomerizor and get smart!
comment posted at 11:16 AM on Nov-10-02

"President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won't."
From an article in The Nation...prompted by all the talk of lies in this thread.
comment posted at 4:31 PM on Nov-8-02

Are we using the worst voting procedure? "Voting theorists argue that plurality voting is one of the worst of all possible choices." Plurality voting, in which each voter selects one canidate, is vulnerable to a third party spoiler (Nader) or with many canidates can lead to the (near) election of a candidate most voters despise (le Pen). Some alternative voting systems include instant runoff where canidates are ranked by voters, a Borda count where voters assigns points to each canidate, or approval system where voters vote for as many canidates as they like. (via argmax.com)
comment posted at 2:45 PM on Nov-5-02

Linking to hate. Do links to hate-filled websites help to promote hatred or do they help to combat hate by exposing these sites to broader scrutiny? How does Google fit into the picture? (No direct links to hate groups)
comment posted at 8:43 AM on Oct-29-02

Your special day. Afterwards, you curl up in a corner with your new better half, gorging yourselves on leftover wedding cake and laughing over the pictures. You sift through the thoughtful presents your guests have selected, piles of dishware and linens, decorations and photo albums that will fill your home for years to come. Soon, you come to the most special present of all ... a coffee table book entitled Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America??!!
scroll down to #389
comment posted at 11:30 AM on Oct-28-02

Sniper Suspect Arrested in Richmond, VA
Police have surrounded a local gas station, and taken one person into custody for questioning. Individual was arrested at an Exxon station, making a pay phone call from a white van. No news links yet on local, national sites, but local tv interrupted programming to broadcast live. Press conference will happen shortly.
comment posted at 11:18 AM on Oct-21-02

Truth.org hacked. I'm generally against smocking. Well, entirely against smocking, I guess I'm not the only one who finds those condescending ads obnoxious. (site is now a free for all chatroom, with some porn thrown in for good mesure.)
comment posted at 10:09 PM on Oct-15-02

Facing Time: A family's yearly self-portrait from 1976 to 2002 is both uplifting and unsettling; a bit like human life itself. How does one separate the morbid fascination with aging from the spiritual joy of growth? Not to mention the element of voyeurism... [From ZoneZero, via Eclectica.]
comment posted at 11:24 AM on Oct-14-02

"By removing both costs and the barriers, weblogs have drained publishing of its financial value, making a coin of the realm unnecessary. A lot of people in the weblog world are asking "How can we make money doing this?" The answer is that most of us can't." Though he finally admits: "Right now, the people who have profited most from weblogs are the people who've written books about weblogging."
comment posted at 5:49 PM on Oct-5-02
comment posted at 5:56 PM on Oct-5-02

Educational post-mortem autopsy video. I found this utterly fascinating. Needless to say many people will not react in the same way. [QuickTime]
comment posted at 7:28 PM on Oct-4-02

When you wake up Monday morning (October 7), consider donning a pair of red undies to show your support for reproductive choice. Sadly, i think that most people will actually be hiding their support this way, but it's still a good cause.
comment posted at 2:46 PM on Oct-4-02