France Riots! In Other News, No-One Cares...

300+ Riots Happen Across Farnce

Australia, Britain, Germany and Japan advised their citizens to exercise care in France, joining the United States, Russia and at least a half dozen other countries in warning tourists to stay away from violence-hit areas.

That's right. Don't go to France, and if you just must, stay away from the parts that are on fire and burning. Of course, if you're so screamingly stupid that you run TOWARDS fire and bloodshed, then I hereby pronounce you "Proof of Natural Selection" and wish you luck.


Oil companies are making tons of money right now. This is true, but still not due to "price gouging." See, if the price of crude oil hits $70 a barrel, then the oil companies will make more money than they would if they are selling it for $10 a barrel. Oh, hell, let Rich Lowry explain it; I'm tired of retreading the same ground.

New Jersey sums up the reason behind the current state of immense election fraud: total, crippling incompetence on the part of election officials. So, one judge in NJ has demanded a list of all registered voters in NJ who've died prior to the elections; this is, of course, because the official who was supposed to be doing it "didn't know it was his job." The judge said it was "truly alarming," that people might have used the names of dead voters to commit fraud; I call it par for the course in New Jersey, but who's counting these days?

You gotta love going online and forgetting to do something important, like get your domain name registered. That's what the Madison Observer found out the hard way, when they set up their website and discovered that the .com extension of their proposed domain name had been locked up by their competition - and plastered with a huge practical joke. Want to check it out? The hoax is at www.madisonobserver.com, while the real Observer is located at www.madisonobserver.org.

No, I'm not bored today, why do you ask?

Sony was dealt yet another blow yesterday in the controversy over its new DRM scheme, when Kaspersky Labs, a major anti-virus software maker, classed their DRM scheme as Spyware. Apparently, the rootkits which Sony released as DRM on their new media can actually induce new security vulnerabilities on your computer, as well as potentially crashing Windows. Since, of course, the safety of the music from pirates who don't buy it is far more important than the usability of the product to the customers who do buy it, Sony doesn't care.

Finally, even though Kaspersky classes Sony's DRM software as Spyware, apparently the software has also been found to call home by connecting to Sony's website. While it appears like it only looks for updated lyrics or images each time one of its copy-protected CDs is loaded, there is a potential for the remote server to log the IP addresses and how often the disc is played. However, according to a company spokesman, no information is ever collected.

Of course, that's what they're going to SAY. There is as yet no evidence one way or the other, so I'm currently withholding judgement, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least to hear about someone getting information stolen by Sony "as an experiment" sometime real soon.

And yet another boneheaded lawsuit just got settled, namely Chavez vs. Netflix, Inc. Apparently, Chavez got all pissed off that he couldn't rent 100 movies a month on Netflix' "unlimited" service, despite the logistics of sending and receiving 3 DVDs at a time fast enough to do so. Also, he was annoyed by the claims that the service averaged "about one business day" in snail-mail turnaround time; the fact that the actual delivery time is subject to the whims of the USPS seems to have escaped him.
Now, to me, "unlimited" rentals doesn't mean I can rent 1 billion movies, it jsut means that no-one's going to call me up and say "Hey, you're renting too many movies, and we're going to have to charge you more." I don't recall ever seeing a guarantee that you could rent upwards of a hundred movies a month on the Netflix ads, but hey. What do I know, anyway? And as far as I know, a claim of an "average" delivery time IMPLIES IN ITS NATURE the notion that "this might just not apply to you, there, chief."
But then, I have a brain that functions, at least some of the time. So I can figure out these really hard, unreasonable things - it's kind of like how I know when I buy HOT COFFEE from a fast food joint that it'll probably suck a lot if I pour it on my genitals; like my deep understanding that cigarettes are bad for me, and that therefore if I choose to start smoking it's my own damn fault when I die; and like my understanding that being molested as a child does not change the fact that you are now a full-grown adult with a brain, and as such, if you choose to anally rape little boys you are a horrible criminal who commits crimes of your own free, conscious will.
I also understand, dammit, that sometimes people are just plain CRAZY, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the music you listen to, the movies you watch, books you read, games you play, or some comment made in passing by a stranger. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE THINGS YOU DO, not anyone else. Deal with it.