Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Death to DRM

The head of Apple has done a great thing. Called for the end of DRM. And this from the guy who gave us iTunes and the iPod. Yes!

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, jolted the record industry on Tuesday by calling on its largest companies to allow online music sales unfettered by antipiracy software.

The move is a gamble for Apple. Its iPod players and iTunes Store have defined the online music market, and they have much at stake in the current copy-protection system.

Under terms reached with the major record labels, online music stores embed software code into the digital song files they sell to restrict the ability to copy them. Because Apple uses its own system, the songs it sells can be played only on the iPod. That limitation has drawn increasing scrutiny from European governments, pressure that Apple has recently begun to acknowledge.

Mr. Jobs’s appeal, posted on the company’s Web site Tuesday, came in the form of an essay titled “Thoughts on Music,” but in essence it was a letter to the “Big 4” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI.

DRM is a joke. The RIAA will never stop downloaders. More importantly, DRM stands in the way of music sales. Watch. Years from now, when DRM is forgotten, music will be doing gangbusters from downloads. 

Outrage DuJour

The prosecutor in this case should be the one getting beaten in prison. And shame on the president and the governor of this state for letting this happen. The fact that they didn’t pardon these men is a huge disgrace.

A former U.S. Border Patrol agent who was convicted of shooting a drug smuggling suspect and then lying about it was beaten by fellow inmates in prison, his relatives and a congressman said Tuesday.

Prison officials did not immediately confirm that Ignacio Ramos had been attacked.

The convictions of Ramos and fellow former agent Jose Alonso Compean sparked outcry from critics who argued that the men were merely doing their job defending the border against criminals.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., a vocal supporter of the agents and opponent of illegal immigration, criticized the Bush administration Tuesday for failing to protect Ramos and demanded a full presidential pardon for the two men.

“Not only did the administration choose the side of a foreign dope runner over the agents who stopped him from smuggling a load of drugs into the county _ now they’ve failed to protect that agent while his case is on appeal,” he said in a statement.

Ramos and Compean, who reported to prison in January, were each sentenced to more than a decade behind bars. Ramos is being held at a medium- and low-security federal facility at Yazoo City, Miss. Compean is serving his sentence at the Elkton Federal Correctional Institution in Ohio; no problems have been reported with his detention.

Here’s Your Global Warming

Check out this graphic of the earth’s climate over time. Gee, did they have SUVs back in the Sabretooth and Dinosaur era, too? My my.

Looks like a cycle to me.

This climatologist explains what the GW movement is all about.

We really should get off fossil fuels for a lot of reasons, including the wars they are funding and causing. But GW is BS. Let’s focus on constructive change and not economically hazardous, bureaucratically driven nonsense. 

[via Freedom Channel]

UPDATE: Solar activity increases global temperatures. Surprise!

Another thing that comes in cycles, lies from the NY Times. This article is from 1933. 

Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

The Surveillance Society is only getting worse.

In some cities in Europe and the United States, a person can be videotaped by surveillance cameras hundreds of times a day, and it’s safe to say that most of the time no one is actually watching.

But the advent of “intelligent video”—software that raises the alarm if something on camera appears amiss—means Big Brother will soon be able to keep a more constant watch, a prospect that is sure to heighten privacy concerns.

Combining motion detection technology with the learning capabilities of video game software, these new systems can detect people loitering, walking in circles or leaving a package.

New microphone technology can isolate the sound of a gunshot and direct the attached camera to swivel and zoom in on the source. Sensitivity may reach the point where microphones could pick out the word “explosives” spoken in a crowd.

“There’s just not enough personnel to watch every single camera,” said Chicago emergency operations chief Andrew Velasquez. “We are piloting analytic software right now ... where you can set that particular camera to watch for erratic behavior, or someone leaving a suitcase on the sidewalk.”

This software may be made with good intentions. But who decides what “erratic behavior is”? Imagine going to a mall or a restaurant and doing something the software flags as erratic and suddenly cops show up and arrest you. That may sound extreme, but if you have flown recently and experienced the absurd lengths they take to screen passengers, imagine that happening out there in the regular world. Cameras watching your every move and screening you. That’s where all this could lead. All in the name of “security”.

I don’t know about you, but I’m fine without all that nonsense.

* Who Watches the Watchers - Ancient Roman Graphitti

The Soldiers Speak

What the media won’t show you.

Secrets of Writing: Action

Action and conflict are two separate things. Action is the result of conflict. Conflict is the reason for most action.

Many writers think they are the same thing. So they put fights and explosions in their stories as a substitute for meaningful conflict. Audiences walk away from these stories feeling empty. In their heart of hearts they know what they just saw was fireworks, nothing more. There was nothing to remember or care about except for some flashing lights.

When action is used as a substitute for conflict, you have a meaningless story Oscar Wilde said it best: “The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.” Action does serve a purpose, but it should never be used as a device just to keep the story moving along. The true source of momentum isn’t action scenes. Don’t forget that.

When you set out to write action scenes, you need to create a sense of causality. We either need to see what lead up to this action, or we need to understand why it’s happening if we’re thrown in the middle of it. As we discussed before, we need to know who to root for. We need to have a sense of why we should care about any of this. It can’t be just a bunch of flying bullets and crashing cars. Everyone has seen that a million times. What they really want are good reasons for it all.

Action scenes also need to flow in a realistic manner. Too often comic creators do fight scenes that have little or no motivation and don’t make any sense when you follow them. Character A punches character B through a wall. In the next panel, character B kicks character A in the head. How did they get from flying backwards into a wall to flying forward and kicking someone? Whatever happened to physics?

There’s a real lack of sense in many comics today when it comes to action. And just because some of these bad comics sell is no excuse to imitate them. They aren’t selling like they used to and they never sold because they were good stories. They sold because they appealed to a certain market of people who were more interested in making a quick buck than reading them. Or they sold to people who loved the art. 

Good comics require some thought. Action scenes, in order to be effective, need to have an emotional impact as well as a physical one. There must be some kind of repercussions, There must be stakes for the hero and the villain. When you create an action scene, think through all the possible combinations of outcomes. Write them down. Then pick the ideas that are the most original and surprising. We need to move beyond the same old Biff! Pow! Bam!

Also remember that action needs to define the characters, because the choices they make in these actions scenes illustrate the way their mind works under pressure.

Medias Res

This means “In the Middle of things”. It’s a term used mainly for a technique of starting a story in the middle the action. A lot of super-hero comics like to begin media res. It allows the creators to show the different characters in action, so we can see what their powers and abilities are. The secret to making such scenes work is to define who the protagonists are right away. You need to establish this by having them demonstrate their alignment.
It’s far too common these days to read stories where 50 characters are all in a big battle, shouting each others names out loud so we know who is who. But never are we given any insight into the characters themselves. The most we get to know is their powers and goofy costumes. Even little kids want more than that. Audiences need characters they can root for.

Since action in comics is basically a series of still shots of things happening, you need to make it really clear what is happening in each panel and you have to keep it simple. The more detail, the more the reader will be distracted. The more distracted, the longer it takes for them to read the panel. The more time it takes, the slower the scene feels.

Action scenes need to be exciting. So they must have a high emotional charge and they must play fast and loose. Too much dialog and we start to lose steam. The goal should be to build steam. Because the action scene should work toward it’s own climax.

So, when jumping into a scene, Medias Res, remember that you start with momentum, and you need to build toward a pay off. That pay off is the climax of the scene. And the pay off will work a lot better if we get some set up first. We need to know who is who, what is what and why the hell is all this going on.

There will be some instances where you want mystery in the scene, but we still need to know who to root for, even if it turns out to be the wrong person later. If we’re given no reasons to care, we won’t. And you don’t want the Audience to start off the story feeling indifferent.

REMEMBER: Action needs meaning. Conflict is the meaning behind all action

Monday, February 05, 2007

Straw Poll

Pajama’s Media has a straw poll up for the election. Who would you vote for and see what others think. I managed to pick the same Democrat and Republican as the majority last time I checked.

Just click the image to the right. In Firefox, it pops out to the side, so you have to scroll over.

UPDATE: If you want to have this on your site, go here.

The New Folding Chair

Wow, this is amazing. I don’t know how comfortable it is, though.

Power from Trash

This is a very useful and interesting development.

A group of scientists have created a portable refinery that efficiently converts food, paper and plastic trash into electricity. The machine, designed for the U.S. military, would allow soldiers in the field to convert waste into power and could have widespread civilian applications in the future.
Tactical biorefinery
Download photo
caption below

“This is a very promising technology,” said Michael Ladisch, the professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University who leads the project. “In a very short time it should be ready for use in the military, and I think it could be used outside the military shortly thereafter.”

The “tactical biorefinery” processes several kinds of waste at once, which it converts into fuel via two parallel processes. The system then burns the different fuels in a diesel engine to power a generator. Ladisch said the machine’s ability to burn multiple fuels at once, along with its mobility, make it unique.

Roughly the size a small moving van, the biorefinery could alleviate the expense and potential danger associated with transporting waste and fuel. Also, by eliminating garbage remnants - known in the military as a unit’s “signature” - it could protect the unit’s security by destroying clues that such refuse could provide to enemies.

Researchers tested the first tactical biorefinery prototype in November and found that it produced approximately 90 percent more energy than it consumed, said Jerry Warner, founder of Defense Life Sciences LLC, a private company working with Purdue researchers on the project. He said the results were better than expected.

See. People are constantly inventing ways to usefully recycle and provide alternate energy. I suspect that in a few years, we’ll see more and more amazing inventions like this. People are focused on it now. When our attention is on something, we often produce great things. 

Chavez II

Hillary Clinton has come out as a Marxist.

Last week ExxonMobil posted record-breaking profits. This news provoked an immediate reaction from Senator Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Committee in Baltimore on Friday. “I want to take those profits,” Clinton said, “and put them into an alternative energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy alternatives that will actually begin to move us toward the direction of independence.”

Clinton’s remarks are the first time that a nationally known Democrat has openly called for the government seizure of an industry since President Harry Truman tried to nationalize the steel industry in 1952. The U.S. Supreme Court slapped back Truman’s takeover in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. et al. v. Sawyer. (Like Senator Clinton, Truman also championed a national health-care scheme.)

While other politicians have suggested establishing an alternative energy fund, Clinton is the first to advocate funding it by taking the earnings of a publicly held American company. ExxonMobil has some eight-hundred thousand shareholders, many of whom depend on these earnings to fund their retirements.

This would be economically devastating, not just for the shareholders, but the economy i9n general as it would send a signal that would put the stock market in the toilet. Dow 1,000 anyone?

This woman revealed herself to be foolish when she tried to push a “health care” agenda on us when her husband was president. They told us they modeled it after Canada’s and we’re seeing all the time how Canada’s health care system is failing on so many levels. When you consider that many Canadians come here for their health care, that should tell you something.

Now she wants to nationalize the oil industry? What’s next, a law that makes her dictator for life, like Chavez just got?

We really don’t want a Hillary presidency. No way.