MegaAwesome

I’m a bit of a TV nut, in case you hadn’t noticed. While I don’t often associate the medium with the trancendant qualities of my fellow TV nuts, I think it leaves interesting clues about our culture.

The writers strike hasn’t been going for a week and I’m already starting to get antsy. The greatest casualty so far has of course been late night shows, made all the more tragic with Robert Reich getting bumped from the Daily Show.

Earlier this week, Medialoper raised a few interesting points:

It’s no secret that in the past few years, we’ve been living in an era with the best Television ever created. And while I think that era actually peaked in 2004-2005 (since then, we’ve lost The Sopranos, Deadwood, Veronica Mars, The West Wing) (and we are on track to lose The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Scrubs), the Writers Strike will hasten the demise. And not just because the networks will flood the airwaves with reality shows.

I have no idea how Rome got left off of that list of recently ended fantastic shows, but otherwise that sums up my concerns quite well. With some of my favorite shows already scheduled to end this season I’m concerned about next year. Many of the new shows this season are clunkers, but just this last summer there were a few really quite tremendous ones, specifically Burn Notice and Mad Men, suggesting that the well has not yet run dry for promising new ideas.

But with the possible loss of momentum and with so many shows finally coming in to their own, the future looks less bright. Many if not most of the best shows out there right now weren’t great at first but got better as the cast and crew got things figured out.

The writers have posted a series of short videos explaining their position and getting the word out on YouTube. This is the best of them, I think:

I don’t think they’re asking for anything unreasonable here, if anything it seems like they should be pushing for more.

Especially considering that not very long ago there was an ad campaign about how piracy takes money right out of the pockets of everyone who worked on that product. The lesson here seems to be that it doesn’t matter if I pay to download from one of their irritating official sources or I download it from a P2P network, because the people who worked so hard to make it happen won’t get paid. This is just ridiculous.

I hope that this is all over soon, but in the meanwhile I’m going to be looking overseas for some new material. Someone was talking to me the other day about a CBC show called ‘Intelligence’ that is supposed to be quite good. I looked it up and one of the stars is Max Headroom, so I’ll probably love it.

There’s a massive post that’s well worth reading on this subject over at the Carpetbagger Report, by writer Thomas McKelvey Cleaver. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), with co-sponsor Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), introduced the Cell Phone Consumer Empowerment Act of 2007 (S. 2033) earlier this month. From an article in the Minnesota Daily:

Among the provisions in the Cell Phone Bill of Rights is the idea that consumers should have itemized bills without unauthorized fees or charges.

The act also states that consumers should have a right to limited prorated “early termination fees.”

Under a prorated system, a consumer who decides to opt out of a cell phone contract prematurely would pay an early-termination fee based on how far along they were in their plan when they ended service.

I think that this is a fantastic bill. The idea of having prorated early termination fees is very appealing to me because under my current carrier (AT&T/Cingulair) I manage to lose about every other call that goes longer than one minute.

There have been a number of steps taken to try and make cellular service providers more responsive to consumer demand, like number portability, but I think that this one might really manage to pull it off. This act, combined with the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2007 (S 1782/HR 3010) (link is to Senate version) which will void mandatory arbitration clauses between parties of unequal bargaining power, could have a massive impact on how cellular service providers do business.

The National Association for Consumer Advocates has a ‘take action’ page for the Arbitration Fairness Act.

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There are a few interesting stories to be found.

Last week a Vermont judge ruled against the auto industry over whether the state of Vermont can implement California’s emission standards.

Under the Clean Air Act, California has permission to implement its own pollution rules if it receives a federal waiver. Vermont is among a dozen states that have adopted California’s standards.

In Vermont, automakers challenged the limits developed by California that would require a 30 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks by 2016.

The industry said that would require average fuel economy standards to surpass 43 miles per gallon, well above the current requirement of 27.5 mpg for passenger cars. Those standards were unattainable, the industry said during the April trial, arguing it would create a patchwork of regulations across the nation and cause financial hardships for the manufacturers.

Meanwhile the National Governors Association, led by Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, have launched a clean energy initiative.

“Our nation has enjoyed more than a hundred years of inexpensive energy, seemingly inexhaustible oil and a relatively forgiving environment,” said Gov. Pawlenty. “But America can no longer rely on business-as-usual to meet its energy needs, and the nation’s governors are prepared to lead the way in crafting a sensible, sustainable clean energy future.”

Securing a Clean Energy Future will enlist the efforts of all governors to enact meaningful clean energy policies at the state level. The initiative has the potential to significantly alter the landscape of clean energy policy in the United States by serving as the first bipartisan, governor-led effort of this magnitude to address these critical issues. Its efforts will be guided by a task force comprised of forward-looking governors, representing a cross-section of the country, that share a common desire to advance clean energy ideas.

It seems to me this the states way of showing that the Federal government is not doing job, here in regards to our energy plan, or lack thereof.

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Techdirt links to an article about the latest Sony rootkit scandal:

According to F-Secure, the fingerprint-reader software included with the Sony MicroVault USM-F line of flash drives installs a driver that hides in a hidden directory under “c:\windows”. That directory and the files within it are not visible through Windows’ usual APIs, said F-Secure researcher Mika Tolvanen in a posting to the company’s blog Monday.
[…]
Both Hypponen and Tolvanen pointed out that the MicroVault software is cloaking the folder for good reason: To protect the fingerprint reader’s authentication files from being tampered with or circumvented. The issue, said Hypponen, is that Sony’s left the door ajar. “What’s not justified is that others can use this folder,” he said. “If Sony was only hiding its own files, no one would object.”

This was also the second most egregious aspect of their last rootkit scandal: That it opened a massive security hole. The most severe in both is of course that they do this without notifying the user.
Read the rest of this entry »

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From the Everett Herald:

Comcast Corp. is paying $7.5 million in cash and advertising for a decade of naming rights to the Everett Events Center, home of the Everett Silvertips hockey team.

Well, they were going to sell it to someone. I guess it could be worse, and they already had their name on the building (the Comcast Community Ice Rink).

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From the Consumerist:

Here’s the creepiest complaint we’ve received in a long, long time. Reader Sam says he was filmed by a security guard contracted by Time/Warner during a recent showing of The Invasion at an AMC movie theater.

So, what’s the strategy here? Make the theater experience so awful that no one will want to go? It’s bad enough to sit in an uncomfortable and dirty space with obnoxious people without some idiot security guard filming me. I understand that the MPAA is all a-twitter about camcordering, but I didn’t realize the depth of their disorder. This is not a rational response guys, it’s the business equivalent of burning your name in gasoline on your ex-girlfriend’s lawn.

For the time being I’m going to try and pretend that all of this is a joke or propaganda from the Pirate Party US. It’s just too pathetic and creepy to be real, right?

Update: Boing Boing has more, including some similar reports.

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Robert Bazell has an excellent article on AstraZenica’s chicanery over at MSNBC:

Often drug companies seek creative responses to patent expirations. Some sue on specious grounds, trying to prolong the patent. Sometimes they combine the drug with another existing drug to create a “new” product.

AstraZeneca attempted and got away with what I would call brilliant biochemical chutzpah.

Almost all drugs exist in an equal combination of two mirror images of the same molecule called isomers. Nexium is nothing more than one of the two mirror images that make up Prilosec. AstraZeneca carried out clinical trials comparing Prilosec and Nexium. The most charitable interpretation of the results is that at equal doses Nexium is 3 percent better at relieving symptoms.

This is the first I’ve heard of it, and while it’s more Andrew’s beat (he’s Captain Science) I thought I’d point it out because it covers two of my favorite subjects: health care and patents.

There’s something severely wrong with AstraZenica being able to get away with this, on many levels. While I see the attraction of a Ron Paul-esque “burn it all down” approach to our current regulatory mess I think that this illustrates the need to really watch these bastards more closely. There’s usually a bit of a contest between the FDA and the Patent Office for the “which can be more comically useless on a given day” award, and I guess this time they’re both winners.

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The PI has a story today about the rise in counterfeit goods:

The culprits are counterfeit goods that have slipped onto shelves and into homes — each discovery more outrageous than the last. Exploding cell phone batteries. Medicines that don’t work. Auto brake linings made of sawdust. Poop bacteria in shampoo.

Counterfeiting has become a more serious problem than faux designer handbags and sunglasses, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored a forum on the topic Friday in Bellevue. In some countries, the odds of buying a legitimate product are one in nine. Thanks to globalization — which also has myriad economic benefits — those fake and faulty products are increasingly creeping into the U.S.

I love the “…which has also had myriad economic benefits…” at the end (a close second: “Poop bacteria in shampoo.”). Mission accomplished Andrea James, I don’t think that anyone is going to use counterfeit goods on US shelves to suggest that there’s something seriously wrong with our current trade situation.

Not when we have genuine goods that are deadly. Read the rest of this entry »

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From the EFF:

San Francisco - An eBay seller is taking on Universal Music Group (UMG) in court after the record industry giant targeted his online music sales with false claims of copyright infringement.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the San Francisco law firm of Keker & Van Nest LLP are representing Troy Augusto, whose online auctions included sales of promotional CDs distributed by Universal. Augusto does business on eBay under the name Roast Beast Music and specializes in sales of rare and collectible music.

Copyright law’s “first sale” doctrine makes it clear that the owner of a CD is entitled to resell it without the permission of the copyright holder. Nevertheless, Universal demanded that eBay take down Augusto’s auctions, claiming that CDs marked as “promotional use only” remain the property of Universal and thus can never be resold.

Every time I think that the music and film industry have gone off the rails into complete self-parody they do something even more ridiculous.

I’m beginning to think that a viable argument for dramatic wealth redistribution could be made based on the fact that these people are way too stupid to have acquired their money legitimately, and that we need to take it away from them so that they’ll leave the rest of us alone. Someone needs to step in and help these guys before they hurt themselves.

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Via Rolling Stone.

There’s a neat little tool at Portfolio.com that shows CEO pay relative to average worker pay over time. Just move your mouse along the time bar too see the comparison.

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