This is an old one, but I somehow missed it.

Sony shut down thier music store last March, and any music tracks you purchased from them can no longer be moved between machines.

The current tally of companies to screw their customers over by shutting down DRM authentication services servers is Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Major League Baseball, Google, and Yahoo.

If you can't trust these major corporations, who can you trust? Authenticated DRM will screw you eventually, it's only a matter of when.

I found this Washington Post graph comparing McCain and Obama's tax plans enlightening in ways that a simple chart would have failed at.

(Via Mark Evanier's news from me.)

Anti-video game lawyer, media whore, and general nutjob Jack Thompson has been disbarred for life by the Florida Supreme Court.

I'm unable to verify, but it looks like the Florida Bar is a private organization, like many Bars are. I'm deeply uncomfortable with a private organization being involved so intimately with our judicial system. Indeed, the general idea that you need to be certified to practice law is worrisome. However, I'm not so mature that I can't appreciate having this nutjob lose a bit of credibility.

(Via Slashdot.)

In screwing their customers over, Wal-Mart joins an illustrious club, including Microsoft, Major League Baseball, Google, and Yahoo.

When you "buy" activation locked content, you will eventually lose access to it. Maybe the company will go bankrupt and no buyers will want to assume that liability. Maybe the company will switch to a new DRM system, meaning the old activation servers are simply an expense with no matching income. Maybe Microsoft Windows 2012 will be released, and updating the DRM to still work will cost too much. Whatever the reason, it's when, not if. Companies that promise long term access are either lying or clueless.

(Thanks to Brian De Smet for sending me the link.)

McCain committed to appearing on Letterman. He called to beg off, saying he needed to race back to Washington to help with the economic crisis. Instead, he went three blocks away and recorded a interview with Katie Couric. What the hell was he thinking?

John McCain.
He keeps his word.
Unless a better option comes along.

China's totally trustworthy official news agent reported on their glorious, successful space launch. Unfortunately the launch hadn't happened yet.

Knowing a good idea when they see it, McCain's election team started running ad declaring "McCain won the debate-- hands down." several hours before the debate.

I was originally just going to post the China story, but the coincidence is too excellent.

While Disney is running around stretching copyright so that Micky Mouse will never enter the public domain, Disney is perfectly willing to engage in legal trickery to destroy someone else's copyright.

Take the saga of Bambi, by Austrian Felix Salten. The story of the fawn was first published in Germany in 1923 without a formal copyright notice, which wasn't required there. Three years later, Salten republished it with a notice.

In the 1930s, Salten's rights were assigned to Disney, which made the famous 1942 movie. When Salten's heirs renewed the copyright in 1954, they correctly listed 1926 as the year of Bambi's first copyright.

But in a 1994 dispute over royalties with a small publisher that had acquired the Salten family's rights, Disney lawyers said the 1954 copyright was void because it was filed three years too late -- based on the fact that the story was first published in 1923. A federal judge sided with Disney, ruling Bambi was in the public domain.

Though that finding was reversed on appeal, the legal ordeal bankrupted the publisher.

Scum. I hope they lose the copyright to Mickey because of a similar minor detail. They've clearly established that they feel the law should be applied that way.

I love The Princess Bride. I first saw the movie as a kid and loved it's simple, magical story. It's aged well and I still enjoy watching it every few years. As an adult I found the novel, a grimmer tale wrapped in a decidedly dark framing story. I loved it too. So I was excited to hear that a video game was coming out. The game is now out. And it's utter garbage.

Demos of three of the five minigames are available online. What do we get? The exciting adventure in the Fire Swap has been turned into a mediocre platformer. Having tiny versions of Buttercup and Westley jump around on platforms doesn't really seem to capture anything about the movie. Matching wits with Vizzini is a trivia game about the movie. Who knew that Vizzini's keen mind turned to asking questions about what metal a crown is made of. For bonus points, there are ambigious questions. "If two people are holding a clock, how many hands are on the clock." It's possible that the two people are each contributing one hand each, plus the two on the clock face, for a total of four. Or maybe two hands each plus a second hand for seven. Sorry, the right answer is 6. The visit to Miracle Max mixes a hidden image search with a potion mixing game. The image search is like all image searches: boring and pointless. The potion mixing shows promise, but after several levels of play and failing to be challenged in the slightest, I'm unimpressed.

The reviews page is borderline fraud. Many of the entries aren't reviews in any way shape or form. The Time "review" just mentions that it's coming. The same goes for the quote from Game|Life at Wired, the quote from Joystiq, and the quote from Gamespot. For the USA Today quote, they've taken the image caption! The remaining reviews? There is an anonymous web comment, short mentions, and a bunch of sites not known for video game reviews.

It's a damn shame. Someone took the brilliance of The Princess Bride and crapped out some of the worst license shovelware I've seen since Enter the Matrix. I hope the developers are ashamed of themselves.

Since I wrote my original call for the regulation of eBay, I've occasionally looked back on it and wondered if I was too harsh. eBay has now helpfully assured me that they'll keep abusing their monopoly position given the opportunity. (Backup link.) As of next month, sellers can't accept payments by check or money order. It's cash-on-pickup or online only. Want, say, Google Checkout? "Google's and Amazon's products and services compete with eBay on a number of levels, so we are not going to allow them on eBay." That's a surprisingly honest statement that they're using their monopoly in running auction to leverage and advantage in the unrelated area of payment handling. eBay are scum. At this point my primary hope is that they screw up badly enough that they implode, creating a vacuum for real competition. Unfortunately their monopoly power is so great that the screw up would need to be mind-bogglingly large.

(Via Slashdot.)

John McCain on healthcare, from this article he wrote (backup link):

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

I was just looking at our banking system and thinking how successful our new innovative, less regulated banking system is. (backup link)

(Added 2008-09-22: This is via Mark Evanier's news from me.)

It's been most of year since I got my iPhone. It's time to update my previous posts. Not much has changed. It's a remarkable device, sullied by a stream of stupid omissions and bugs.

As before, it's hands down the best portable browser I've ever used. Google Maps is great. The YouTube application is occasionally useful and works well enough. The SMS interface is a bit cutesy, but still really good. The voice mail interface embarasses every other cell phone.

One decided problem is that the EDGE data service has slowly degraded. It's gotten slower and slower. Worse, I'm frequently getting outages. Very frustrating.

I remain frustrated that I can't download podcasts directly on the iPhone. This is a stupid, stupid limitation. You've got a perfectly good web browser, you discover a new podcast, and you can't save it to the phone for later listening.

The iPod functionality is wonky. I almost exclusively listen to podcasts. Long podcasts. So I frequently stop in the middle of them. But frequently the phone will forget which podcast I'm playing, requiring me to remember and hunt it back down. (Thankfully it does remember where I was in the podcost.)

The iPod support also helpfully marked podcasts I've heard to as unheard. In some cases repeatedly. Since I'll jump around to interesting looking episodes, and some of the shows have cryptic titles, this is a non-trivial nuisance.

Similarly, I'll occasionally listen to the first few minutes of a podcast, then decide, "This is interesting, but not what I want right now." Unfortunately there is no way to mark the podcast as unheard.

Cover Flow still doesn't work for podcasts. It's still dumb, but it's a bit of shame.

I can update applications from the iPhone itself. That's a nice touch. I almost never sync my phone, so this is really useful. Less awesome: I need to type my password each and every time. Typing passwords on the iPhone sucks and is slow. I can begrudgingly accept needing to enter my password to buy something that isn't free, but for measly updates? Updates to free things?

When I update applications, it picks up the application's icon and puts it on the first available slot, totally trashing my organization. After a big update I have to spend time moving icons around. Lame.

The Weather application is garbage. It's like the primary purpose was to be shiny and cool, and maybe convince a casual observer that it's about giving you useful weather information. But it's actually pretty useless for making decisions about clothing for a day. It distills a day's weather down to two numbers and an icon. There are no details like, "Clear skies in the morning, 80% chance of rain in the afternoon." If I want that I have to go to Yahoo's page. Since that's what I really want, why bother? I ended up bookmarking the weather.gov page for Madison. More recently I got the pretty good replacement WeatherBug.

The "Looks cool, but is garbage" applies to Stocks as well. Big shiny buttons, itty bitty graph with few options. That's it. If you actually care get Bloomberg. It offers relevant news, detailed numbers, and you can rotate the screen to get a large graph of the stock price and trade volume.

The Mail application is just barely good enough. The recent addition of letting you mark mark to delete or move did a lot to help. But the complete lack of threading makes it very difficult to do anything but trivial checks. This is the era of GMail, can't Apple do something more clever? Also, Mail displays HTML mail reasonably well. But it doesn't let you rotate the display. This is frustrating as a lot of HTML mail is written the way web pages are: stupidly, with the assumption that you have a wide screen display. Zooming in to read it is a nuisance, requiring lots of scrolling left and right.

The Camera had a really serious bug where deleting lots of images on the phone would cause it to stop taking new photos. I had to reset and reinstall the phone to fix it. That was a huge time sink and really annoying.

YouTube seems better than when I last wrote. I haven't run into an unavailable video in some time.

The calculator used to suck. With the addition of scientific mode it has advanced to servicable.

iTunes, naturally, remains utter garbage. It no longer crashes, but maybe that's because I haven't push it hard of late. It's still slow. It still rudely puts icons in places I don't want when I upgrade. It demands a credit card to download free things.

Apparently weddings are for greedy people.

When Eva and I went to arrange tuxedos, the clerk was happy to remind me that if I got a certain minimum number of tuxedos, one, presumably mine, would be free. The implication was that I could pad out the wedding party or number of ushers, make them pay for their tuxedos, and get mine free. Foul.

I also learned that some places offer you "free gifts" when you put certain minimum prices or numbers of things in your wedding registry. The minimum that stuck in my mind was the $1,000 of crystalware for some "gift" or another.. If you, and apparently your friends, are so wealthy that you actually think $1,000 of crystalware is an appropriate gift, you hardly need a free gift. Besides, isn't more than enough that your friends are kinda choosing to present you with a gift. I feel kinda dirty having a registry at all, it makes me feel like I'm asking for gifts which is absolutely not my intention. Getting bribed to make my registry larger is pretty foul.

Finally, Eva found a gem here on Amazon: "If the honeymoon is the newlyweds' reward, wedding gifts are the royalties that keep coming in." What a profoundly offensive sentence. If you're marrying the love of your life, do you need a reward, let alone royalties? Foul.

By avoiding a number of traditional things, Eva and I have avoided a lot of a the sleaze that I'm told permeates the wedding industry. But we still see bits and pieces oozing out of the edges.

Added 2008-09-08: Aaron's comment below pointed out to me that my introduction, "Apparently weddings are for greedy people" could easily be interpreted as being hostile to the entire idea of gift giving. That was not my intention. I was trying to convey the impression that the wedding industry as a whole gave me, that a a couple should have grotesque sense of entitlement that drowns out what is actually important.

I hate copyright abusers. For some reason the Jericho Historical Society (backup link) annoys the heck out of me. Their copyright claims are simply, absolutely, and completely wrong. These idiots claim:

Copyright/Public domain works

Wilson Bentley did not copyright his photographs and thus they are in the public domain and free to use for any purpose.
HOWEVER
No materials or images from this (or any other) website may be resold in any form (print or electronic). The Public Domain status does not give you the right to resell material unless you have access to the original source and permission from the owner to reproduce the material. Any published works of Public Domain material is only "Royalty free" if explicitly stated.

Bentley's works are in the public domain. Great. That means I can make all the copies I want, including for sale. Period. I can take their images off their web site and immediately resell them to anyone foolish enough to offer me some money. The JHS has no claim to stop me. "Unless you have access to the original source" is complete nonsense. There is no basis in law for this claim. Simply scanning the photographs and putting them online, even with a bit of cleanup, fails to meet the creative standards necessary to make a new claim of copyright. Public domain is the public domain; I can make and sell all the copies I want. By their insane claims only owner of the original folios can reprint Shakespeare's works.

Twits.

(To be clear, the logos, text, and any other original work they did is under copyright, and excepting fair use, copies are not allowed under copyright law.)

Thanks Illinois for reinforcing my opinion of your highway system as crap. You penalize people who wish to travel anonymously by not only making them wait in line to pay tolls, but also charging them more. (Why travel anonymously? I-Pass records have already been used in divorce cases. It's just a matter of time before those records are regularly searched for "suspicious" behavior.)

Anyway, I tried to log into your crappy web site to put money onto my I-Pass. Oops, you've changed login systems, so my old email and password doesn't work. There is no transition system in place, I need to start a new accont. Oops, your system doesn't seem to know my driver's license number, so I can't start a new account. Oops, when I call your phone system for help, I guess a busy signal.

I can suffer the tolls, but do you really need to remind us that you hate both your citizens and visitors to your state? Sure, you have a monopoly, but can't you at least pretend to care?

Did you legally buy music online from Yahoo? At the end of September, you won't be able to move it between machines anymore. You've lost control of the music you "purchased."

In screwing their customers over, Yahoo joins an illustrious club, including Microsoft, Major League Baseball, and Google.

When you "buy" activation locked content, you will eventually lose access to it. The question is when, not if. Companies that promise long term access are either lying or clueless.

Yahoo Answers is a good idea. You post a question, and people with free time and knowledge answer. But in practice it's a wasteland of stupid. There are lots of people with plenty of opinion and little practical knowledge. There are people who apparently can't even be arsed to read the question. What motivates these people? It probably wouldn't bother me so much, but it's starting to dominate many real-world-practical queries I turn to Google for.

A recent gem. The asker clearly asks, "I asked my local vet and they said just to clean them out with warm water and its not distemper but what is it ????" So a vet has seen the cat and determined that it's not something to worry about. At least one person was bold and stupid enough to respond, "it is probably an eye infection and he needs antibiotics. take him to see the vet" Right, already done. Now shut your pie hole and go away.

I've seen worse, this just happens to be one I ran into today.

(I'll also childishly call out an answer here, which features the line, "Cats need vet care just like children." To be, I understood her intent, it's the sort of goof everyone sometimes does.)

So I took the time to log in and set up a Yahoo Answers account just to flag a few painfully stupid answers as bad. And was told I couldn't. I wasn't "level 2". The hell? Thankfully the link explained everything: Yahoo has a page helpfully explaining why Yahoo Answers sucks so much. There are experience points and levels. This is profoundly stupid. Like forum level systems, this encourages people to game the system. Answering a question, no matter how badly, is worth points. Voting for a "best answer" is worth points, but voting, "all the answers suck" isn't. They try to limit abuse with the system, but the system ironically rewards the worst abusers! It's a feedback loop of dumb.

I miss Google Answers. Answers put money up for a good answer, creating a market for actual relevant answers. I have no idea why it was shut down.

(Later) I couldn't help myself; it was like a train wreck, I had to keep looking. No only are the answers stupid, many of the questions are stupid. People are asking for help infringing copyright. They have completely useless titles. People are posting in wildly wrong locations. (There is, naturally, no proper way to report this. The "Report Abuse" option doesn't include "wrong category" as an option.)

(2008-07-20) Typo fixes.

Wizards of the Coast is now selling DRM-free (but watermarked) copies of the the 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons books. This is good. (Here's a direct link to the store, just in cases the previous link requires a login.)

They claim two stores are carrying it, RPGNow and DriveThruRPG. This is kinda sad. Those two stores are actually the exact same company; products end up on both sites by default. But whatever.

More ridiculous is the pricing, but it's what I've come to expect. The books are $24.95 each, or you get get the bundle for $74.85 for a bonus of no savings. They claim this is discounted off a $34.95 price. Which is silly, since this is the only place the PDFs are being sold, so it's not a discount. What they're comparing it to is the physical books. The books which have higher quality images, hardbound covers, and don't require a computer to read. And only a fool would pay $34.95 for each book. I supported my local gaming store and preordered the box set, getting a 10% discount. If I was more mercenary, Amazon would have sold them to me for $23.07 or gotten all three in a nice slipcase for $66.12 (a further savings of a few bucks).

How is it that a book can be printed onto paper, bound into a hardcover, shipped to a warehouse, then shipped to Amazon, then shipped to me all for cheaper than sending me a measely 100MB of PDF? The resulting book doesn't require a computer to use. The PDFs do offer the ability to search, but is that benefit so mind blowingly valuable that I should accept a markup of one thousand or more percent?

Yes, it is easier to make illegal copies of the PDF. But someone wanting such a thing could have had it weeks ago. And the watermarking should keep it to a minimum. In trying to compensate for lost sales, they've losing sales to people who would love to buy a copy. At $10 a book I'd have already purchased them. But I guess it's better to not sell me anything than risk losing sales.

(He doesn't specifically say he's taking about 4e, and many of his points apply to more than 4e. But it mocks much of the 4e response so accurately that I'm sure it was on his mind. As to my own 4e thoughts, they're coming. It's proving to be complex and I'm spending a lot of time sorting out my thoughts.)

(2007-07-09: As valleyviolet points out, I had a duplicate "out." Fixed.)