VistaPrint = Scammers

VistaPrint are a bunch of douchebag scammers.

Have I mentioned that VistaPrint are scammers?

If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck. It's a fucking duck.

Hey look! VistaPrint are scam artists!

Sellaband

Interesting concept. Pimp your favorite struggling local band, invest a little dough, and get a cut if they succeed.

Save The Internets

Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are lobbying Congress hard to implement what used to be a joke: an Internet tax. They want users to pay to ensure access to content and high speed performance, blowing up the very system that has made them stupid rich. Hmmm, that's funny, I thought I already paid every month. Does that mean I get my monthly DSL fee refunded? Didn't think so. In effect, they want to hold your Internet hostage, and they're willing to pay off Congress to do it.

Sign the petition at savetheinternet.com, write your congresspeeps, and tell them to support the "Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2006" (S. 2917) amendment that will protect net neutrality from the bloated telco vipers.

Halliburton Solves Global Warming

"The SurvivaBall is designed to protect the corporate manager no matter what Mother Nature throws his or her way," said Fred Wolf, a Halliburton representative who spoke today at the Catastrophic Loss conference held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Amelia Island, Florida.

http://www.halliburtoncontracts.com/about/

http://www.theyesmen.org/

You think traffic is bad now.

Save Chicago Transit.

napster

Metro.naps, a New York concern, recently opened a nap boutique where tired workers/shoppers could get their second wind in one of their shagadelic sleep pods. Pricetag: 14 dollars for a twenty minute nap.

It's a great idea but doesn't it take about 20 minutes just to fall asleep? and for 14 bucks they should wake you up with a lapdance.

Crazy Moneyball Stat

Over the weekend, I heard a stat that kinda made my brain wobble. Anyone who's read Moneyball (I haven't yet) probably won't be surprised, though.

Including the current season's games up to Saturday, and the past 4 full seasons, the Oakland A's have won just one fewer game than the New York Yankees.

This year, the A's payroll is $59,825,167.
The Yankees payroll is $183,335,513.

Harken back to those halcyon days...

One of the absolute Internet boom classics... Mr. Wong

"...he came with the estate / is it love or is it hate? / Mr. Wo-ong!"

I thought Icebox went PPV. I guess that revenue model didn't work either.

Dur. Like the crack dealer on the corner, the first one's free.

Rockettes vs. "Nutcracker" in Holiday Steel Cage Match of Death

I thought that the Rockettes weren't coming to Chicago anymore, but what do I know? What's the big deal with them anyway?

In other news, if you haven't seen the Joffrey Ballet's "The Nutcracker" at the Auditorium Theatre, you really should.

via tmn

Amazon's new search and potential copyright issues

For those of you who haven't heard, Amazon has introduced an amazing new service that allows users to search the entire text of over 120,000 books.

The Authors Guild has some (probably well-founded) issues with this. When I first read about potential lawsuits, I thought, "why would authors not want their works more accessible?"

When we learned of the program, we thought that it would be impossible to read more than 5 consecutive pages from a book in the program. It turns out that it's quite simple (though a bit inconvenient) to look at 100 or more consecutive pages from a single lengthy book. We've even printed out 108 consecutive pages from a bestselling book. It's not something one would care to do frequently, but it can be done. So a reader could choose to print out all the fish recipes from a cookbook in the program. Or the section on Tuscany from a travel book. We believe readers will do this, and the perplexing question is whether the additional exposure for a title -- and the presumptive increase in sales -- offsets sales lost from those who just use the Amazon system to look up the section of a book when they need it.

Oops. Yeah, that's probably no good. Technology, Ho!

I decided to see how difficult it would be to snake some free recipes from a cookbook, looked up "Jamie Oliver pecorino," and clicked to see the excerpt. In order to do so, you have to log in, and then provide credit card information for "verification." Sorry, I'm just not motivated enough to hand over my credit card information to Amazon to look inside a book. It's like online bookstore porn!

So, it looks like Amazon has taken steps to ensure abuses are kept to a minimum.

via kottke

Beer Here!

July 4, 2003 -- LIQUID Gold: According to local beer industry sources, the Mets' and Yanks' concessionaires purchase half-kegs in bulk for approximately $29 per half-keg, roughly half the cost charged to bars and restaurants. Each half-keg holds 1,984 ounces, or 124 16-ounce servings.

So, if the teams sell 16-ounce servings for about $6.50, which they do, the profit over the initial purchase price of each half-keg begins when the fifth beer is sold and that profit, per half-keg, is nearly $800.

And that's why, regardless of the escalation of brew-fueled episodes of incivility at ballparks and arenas, those who call for the ban of beer sales are wasting their breath, ink and time.

via New York Post

iTunes Music Store: 275,000 songs purchased in 18 hours

Wow.
(via Gil)

See also: iTunes Music Store and credit card micropayments. Interesting.
(via more like this)

The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped

What happened to moving toward the relatively successful unmanned, lower-cost probes and robotics projects at NASA? Who doesn't love a spunky lil' robot explorer that can be re-sold as a LEGO kit?

Capitalism, of course, is supposed to weed out such inefficiencies. But in the American system, the shuttle's expense made the program politically attractive. Originally projected to cost $5 million per flight in today's dollars, each shuttle launch instead runs to around $500 million. Aerospace contractors love the fact that the shuttle launches cost so much.

Throwaway rockets can fail too. Last month a French-built Ariane exploded on lift-off. No one cared, except the insurance companies that covered the payload, because there was no crew aboard. NASA's insistence on sending a crew on every shuttle flight means risking precious human life for mindless tasks that automated devices can easily carry out. Did Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon really have to be there to push a couple of buttons on the Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment, the payload package he died to accompany to space?

And perhaps most sickenly:

The bottled water alone that crews use aboard the space station costs taxpayers almost half a million dollars a day. (No, that is not a misprint.) There are no scientific experiments aboard the space station that could not be done far more cheaply on unmanned probes. The only space-station research that does require crew is "life science," or studying the human body's response to space. Space life science is useful but means astronauts are on the station mainly to take one another's pulse, a pretty marginal goal for such an astronomical price.

via the morning news

Infamous Hacker's Laptop Up For Auction

The laptop belongs to the infamous computer criminal Kevin Mitnick, and on Feb. 15, 1995, it was seized as evidence when he was arrested in North Carolina by the FBI.

The bid as of mid-morning on 10-1-02 was $7,900.

Music Industry Seeks Permission to Sabatoge Sharing Sites

They want to fuck with you, file swappers!

21st Century Shipbreakers

These workers are sorting plastic by heating it with a cigarette lighter and sniffing the fumes. They complained of headaches.

This reminds me of the shipbreaking villages in India.

The scrap metal to be had from such an operation could be profitably sold, because of the growing need in South Asia for low-grade steel, primarily in the form of ribbed reinforcing rods (re-bars) to be used in the construction of concrete walls. These rods, which are generally of a poor quality, could be locally produced from the ships' hull plating by small-scale "re-rolling mills," of which there were soon perhaps a hundred in the vicinity of Alang alone. From start to finish the chain of transactions depended on the extent of the poverty in South Asia. There was a vast and fast-growing population of people living close to starvation, who would work hard for a dollar or two a day, keep the unions out, and accept injuries and deaths without complaint. Neither they nor the government authorities would dream of making an issue of labor or environmental conditions.

(William Langewieshe article from The Atlantic Monthly, who has also written the fascinating piece on unbuilding the WTC.)

via svn

It's the real-life Chicken Run

without the voice of Mel Gibson or that carefree, kooky plot. And not nearly as much clay.

In just over two hours, the chicken has been converted from a living animal to a plastic-wrapped supermarket product, virtually untouched by human hand.

via eatonweb

Celine Dion CD Will Crash Your Computer

According to a spokeswoman for Sony Music Entertainment, it is clearly stated on the front of the booklet and on the back of the jewel box that the CD "will not play on a PC or a Mac" in the language of the country in which it is sold.

That's a friggin' bargain in my book, now what can you do about Michael Bolton?

The Busy Beatle

"People like me and Neil Young and Bob Dylan and even U2, we're from a time you just played live, and the idea of playing with tapes is something you'd never consider," he says. "Today, the excuse is, 'Well, we've got to dance a lot. We're out of breath, so we can't sing.' Well, Fred Astaire could. Time it so you can do both."

i was a 20-something dethroned dotcom ceo that went to work the counter at mcdonald's

i walked in, filled out an application, and was interviewed. i was truthful. in my interview, the manager (ralph) asked if i can handle a fast-paced, intense environment. i said yes. he looked at my resume and asked about my current part-time job as chairman at i-traffic. i said, "it's an internet thing." he said "ok" and then asked me for my waist size.

Hah!

via kottke

Thanks, Bill!

Xbox (Microsoft's answer to PS2), was of course one of the "hot" gifts this season. Lisa's brother (and house 8 frequenter; Hi Jim!) Jim got one from his brother, Arn, for Christmas. I don't know about the other titles for this system, but Halo is a pretty damn cool game.

However, in yet another of its now patented "Screw You Mindless Consumer!"^TM moves, Microsoft requires you to purchase a silly little adapter and a remote to play DVDs on the darned thing. WHAT?!?

According to Microsoft:
TheXbox DVD Movie Playback Kit is a quick way to expand the functionality of the best gaming machine around! Xbox requires this kit to enable DVD movie playback. Simply plug in the infrared receiver to a controller port and use the remote control designed for DVD movie playback. No messy cables or confusing game controllers to deal with!

Well thank Kee-rist for that! What on EARTH would the mere recreational, or even serious, gamer do if they had to contend with "messy cables" or "confusing controllers" to play a movie. (Have you seen the Xbox controller? They're willing to admit that their controller is "confusing" in order to sell you more crap.) A much better solution is obvious: You part with $30 to buy an infrared doohickey and an otherwise useless remote just so you can have the $300 machine do what it's already capable of.

Offered without comment

The Problem With Music by Steve Albini

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke". And he does of course.

Steve Albini, a Chicago native and the man who produced Nirvana's In Utero, spouts off on the music industry and does a little math to demonstrate that after record label raping most band members make less than a job at 7-11.

In May of 2000, Courtney Love gave a speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference. In her speech, she discussed rock bands and record companies and did some recording-contract math. Most of that speech was taken from this.

via the shey network