Interesting news about the animals escaping death in the recent tsunami on the BBC.

“They’ve got extremely good hearing and they will probably have heard this flood coming in the distance.

“There would have been vibration and there may also have been changes in the air pressure which will have alerted animals and made them move to wherever they felt safer.

Link to full article on the BBC. But I suppose in the scheme of things, who gives a fuck if the animals lived or not.

From an RTE article:

US investigators are reported to be examining a spate of cases in which laser beams have been shone into the cockpits of aircraft.

The most recent case was in Cleveland, Ohio, where a pilot says a green laser light was shone through the window of his cockpit.

The laser pens are powerful focused beams that can temporarily blind people if shon into an eye. Like this one. The FBI has issued a warning (scroll down) about it.

Awesome Spot (that little yellow dog) comic on B3TA. Link.

President George W. Bush soundboard. He laughs like a cartoon character. Link.

It’s all going down in torrent town. LokiTorrent owner/operator Edward Webber is raising funds to mount a legal defence against the threatened action by the MPAA. It will be interesting to see if the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps him out. He makes a good point:

“Personally, it’s ludicrous to be suing a tracker for copyright infringement that hosts no copyright material,” he said. “It’s tantamount to suing the highway department for having roads that drug smugglers use. The random pirating of software just doesn’t add up to being able to shut down the site.”

The force will be strong with the MPAA though if they can demonstrate that the majority of the content linked to by the site is copyrighted - ala napster.
Link to internetnews.com article. (via.)

Fish Fucking. Obviously. (via.)

Check out this complete rip off of flyguy. - Come Fly With Me. The original flyguy is much much better. Is there anything left that hasn’t been turned into a trendy viral from some shite company?

SuprNova founder Sloncek (little elephant) announced tonight that the public beta of the new P2P software based on torrent technology will be released soon in form of eXeem (looks a lot cooler than Exeem or any other punctuation). For the past couple of weeks, eXeem was undergoing internal beta testing with around 5,000 people included in the process and the reports were promising.

The ability to allow any of the users connected to eXeem to become a tracker is going to take the load off the servers which traditionally had to do this task - sometimes overloading them. The ability to create torrents, rate other user’s torrents and comment upon them sounds brilliant.

The announcement should be updated soon on the SuprNova’s website - www.suprnova.org. Welcome to the world of tommorow!

Update: It’s going to be full of adware

Q: Will they have to pay for it (eXeem)?

A: Its gonna be ad supported… A lot of adware in it is gonna be optional… Only the ones that really dont bother you at all and are unharmful (cydoor) are gonna be a must for it to work.

Hopefully, someone will figure out how to make Azureus work like eXeem (damn, all the websites use the same punctuation as we do).

If you wish, you can download the interview from here and wonder why Sloncek sounds a lot like Stephen Hawkings.

Wired has a nice article up, delving into the behind the scenes activity of the mega-pirates - the guys who get the original pirate copies and seed them in the pirate channels and watch them eventually filter through to the mainstream p2p networks. It all sounds so sensational and matrix like, I’m half expecting to read about ‘the one’ - a character who can fly around and star in crap sequels. It’s a fun read.

The upper reaches of the network are a “darknet,” hidden behind layers of security. The sites use a “bounce” to hide their IP address, and members can log in only from trusted IP addresses already on file. Most transmissions between sites use heavy-duty encryption. Finally, they continually change the usernames and passwords required to log in. Estimates say this media darknet distributes more than half a million movies every day. It’s also, by any reading of the law, a vast criminal enterprise engaged in wholesale copyright infringement.

Link. (via.)

Great article.

At 28, John Doyle was an overworked New York investment banker on the fast track. By most measures, he was a success. But he was also miserable. So during a semiannual review 2 1/2 years into the job, he simply quit. “Almost immediately I lost 35 pounds,” says Doyle. For four months, he did little more than relax, rollerblade through Central Park, and read books. “Honestly, it was one of the happiest times in my life,” he says.

Read the rest at Yahoo News. (via.)

Removal of The Crazy Frog Petition.

“We” (The undersigned) demand that the “Crazy Frog” mobile phone advert be removed from TV (MTV UK & other TV networks & stations) indefinitely. We also demand compensation for days of endless mental trauma from this horrid advert. In addition to the removal of the “Crazy Frog” advert, we also demand removal of all ring tone adverts from TV.

Compensation may come in one of the following.

(i) Public execution of the creator of the crazy frog.
(ii) Public execution of the person whole stole the sound sample.
(iii) A free lunch to the limit of €9.99

154 signatures so far. Click here to view it. From this boards.ie thread. Those advertisements are a great cancer that eats at peoples brains.

Texas wants to build a super highway.

The Trans-Texas Corridor project, as envisioned by Republican Gov. Rick Perry in 2002, would be a 4,000-mile transportation network costing an awesome $175 billion over 50 years, financed mostly if not entirely with private money. The builders would then charge motorists tolls.

But these would not be mere highways. Proving anew that everything’s big in Texas, they would be megahighways — corridors up to a quarter-mile across, consisting of as many as six lanes for cars and four for trucks, plus railroad tracks, oil and gas pipelines, water and other utility lines, even broadband transmission cables.

Link. $175 billion for this sounds pretty disgusting at the present time, but I suppose life must go on, and everyone knows life can’t continue without quarter-mile wide super highways. (via.)

Helicopter rescue game. Nice. Link. (via.)

Any game asking you to plug the doom funnel sounds good on paper, and its an instant classic in reality. Fire your duct tape ball, obeying the forces of gravity, to plug the doom funnel. Make sure you play past the first few levels, it gets really cool. Link. (via.)

Ralph Wiggum is a legend. And so it follows that the Ralph Wiggum soundboard should be good, and it is. Link.

Cory rants more on DRM:

DRM isn’t protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition. If you believe that “much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots,” then you believe that the guy who makes the record should get a veto over the design of the record player. That the film studios should be able to ban the VCR. That the recording industry should have been able to shove SDMI down all our throats and make MP3 disappear.

Particularly nice is the warning he suggests should be put on DRM enabled stuff:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Just read the whole thing. It’s brilliant. Link.

I laughed out loud.

Lobot Is Lando Calrissian’s #1 helper. Lobot runs plant operations in Cloud City for Lando.
But one day, something happened.

Now you should look at the story.
it is 13 pages long!

Warning: The animated background may cause head explosions. Link. (via.)

BoingBoing has links galore to a 5 meg MP3 mashup of about 40 of the Beatles tunes. - Sometimes 5 of the songs are playing at once. Link to BoingBoing post. Direct MP3 link from www.digitalapoptosis.com.

Nice flash game, you’re a little mouse. Move with cursors, throw snowballs with the ctrl key. Throw enough snowballs to cover a monster completely, then move close to him and kick him with the ctrl key, and you kill him. Link.