get it

INT. NEIMAN MARCUS FINE MERCHANDISE DEPARTMENT – DAY

MARK and SEAN, late 20's, are standing underneath a large dangling clock about to strike 2 o'clock, in front of a long sparkling vitrine filled with jewelry.

MARK

you just don't get it

 

SEAN

what is there to get it ? it's really stupid to give her that corny necklace

 

MARK

whatever, it's not corny

 

SEAN

dude, that's corny

 

MARK

if you say so

 

SEAN

c'mon, it's a corny necklace

 

MARK

why would you say that?

 

SEAN

because it's a corny necklace

 

MARK

but you don't know that

 

SEAN

that's what i think, i think it's a corny necklace

 

MARK

alright, but that's just your subjective opinion

 

SEAN

yeah, of course it's subjective

 

MARK

okay, so stop it, stop telling me it's stupid to get her the necklace

 

SEAN

but it's stupid

 

MARK

that's what you think

 

SEAN

you don't think so

 

MARK

no!

 

SEAN

but how ?

 

MARK

i think she's gonna like it

 

SEAN stares back silently in simultaneous disbelief and dismay at the magnitude of such a faux-pas display of erroneous judgement in taste.

 

MARK

what ? it's nice! you just don't get it

 

SEAN

what is there to get?

 

MARK

'it'! you don't get 'it'!

 

SEAN

oh, okay, so i don't get 'it', but you do, surely, you get 'it'

 

MARK

of course i get it! it's you who doesn't get 'it'! and that's fine if you don't get it

 

SEAN

but what don't i get?

 

MARK

that i've thought about the gift and i know she's going to like it

 

SEAN

but why?

 

MARK

i don't know, i don't know 'why', i just know, i know she'll like it

 

SEAN

you don't know why

 

MARK

right

 

SEAN

so i'm right, it's stupid

 

MARK

no, you're wrong!

 

SEAN

but you don't even know why you're giving her this ugly necklace

 

MARK

oh, so now it's corny and ugly

 

SEAN makes a 'yeah, duh!' face.

 

MARK

look man, i don't have to explain to you why it works

 

SEAN

why what works?

 

MARK

the necklace!

 

SEAN

why don't you want to tell me?

 

MARK

it's not that i don't want to tell you, it's just that.. okay, i don't wanna tell you cause it's complicated

 

SEAN

why is it complicated? is there something that i'm missing ? something i don't know ?

 

MARK

yeah! of course! there's tons you don't know

 

Instantly a sad expression turns on SEAN's face.

 

MARK

it's not like i don't want to tell you

 

SEAN

but you just said you didn't want to tell me

 

MARK

but it's not because i'm hiding something from you, it's just too much trouble to think up a long-winded explanation for why i think it's a good present

 

SEAN

it sure doesn't sound that way, why do you wanna hide stuff from me? it's not like i would care you know… i'm just curious, making friendly conversation

 

MARK

so why do you have to insist so much? i like the necklace. period. there's no huge explanation behind it. let's just call it a hunch okay? it's got nothing to do with your jewelry taste.

 

SEAN

alright! alright! you don't have to go all soap opera on me!

 

MARK

(to a passing SHOPGIRL in her mid-twenties)

hi!

 

SHOPGIRL

hi! how are you today?

 

MARK

good, and yourself ?

 

SEAN

(flirting overzealously with SHOPGIRL)

great actually

 

SHOPGIRL

(flirtingly back assertively at SEAN)

well good for you! what can i do for you boys?

 

MARK

i want to see this necklace… right… here

(pointing into the vitrine)

 

SHOPGIRL

(pulls the necklace out onto the glass)

that's one of my favorites, the design on the zaphire is based on a tiffany lampshade

 

SEAN

a lampshade? like the electrical appliance?

 

SHOPGIRL's frozen smile darts towards SEAN and bounces back to MARK seeking sympathetic refuge.

 

MARK

I'll take it

 

SHOPGIRL

(a broad smile and a playful wink)

great choice

 

MARK slides his American Express across the glass pane, SHOPGIRL rings the necklace up and hands them the case in a small translucent Neiman Marcus bag.

 

SHOPGIRL

thank you for shopping with us

 

MARK

thank you

 

SEAN

(winking at her and making a snappy crackling sound with his mouth)

thank you

MARK and SEAN walk towards the store exit.

 

MARK

(sighing)

you just, don't, get it…

End Scene.

Net Neutrality

In the U.S. of A.

Goliath Telecommunication Corporations Lobby Congress to allow them to dispense with the Network Neutrality.

What is Network Neutrality and why must it remain a bedrock of the Internet Infrastructure ?

Check it out.

No word yet on whether we even have any legislation in Mexico ensuring Net Neutrality.

Here's the link.

If you can figure out why the code to embed the youtube video directly onto the blog doesn't work help me get a clue.

<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/G5RQrxkGgCM"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/G5RQrxkGgCM&quot; type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5RQrxkGgCM

The civilized world condemns the US for its 1000th execution

from Reuters :

“Opponents of the death penalty around the world criticised the United States on Friday after double murderer Kenneth Lee Boyd became the 1,000th prisoner executed there since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 by the Supreme Court. “

“The European Union condemned the execution and called for the end of the death penalty worldwide.”

“‘We consider this punishment cruel and inhuman,’ the 25-nation bloc said in a statement issued by EU President Britain.”

“in the U.S. a lot of death sentences that are carried out invariably affect people of colour and poor people, “

“Thirty-eight of the 50 U.S. states and the federal government permit capital punishment.”

“Only China, Iran and Vietnam had more executions in 2004 than the United States, according to rights group Amnesty International.”

Internet Character Assassination

Retired journalist John Seigenthaler is understandably upset at the “biography” posting about him on Wikipedia and writes in USA Today about his experience with “Internet character assassination.â€?

The Wikipedia article read in part:

“John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.â€?

He explains his frustration…

“Major communications Internet companies are bound by federal privacy laws that protect the identity of their customers, even those who defame online. Only if a lawsuit resulted in a court subpoena would BellSouth give up the name.”

He tells us that U.S. law protects corporations like Wikipedia from being treated as publisher or speaker so that unlike print and broadcast companies, online service providers cannot be sued for disseminating defamatory attacks on citizens posted by others.

“And so we live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research — but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects. Congress has enabled them and protects them.”

Times have certainly changed. Here‘s a previous post of mine on “Internet Character Assassination” that dealt a little more with the importance of free speech against corporate interest. This USAtoday story is way more sympathetic than the Forbes article that inspired that post and it begs the question of how to deal with online gossip. Are we gonna be surrounded by gossip for the rest of our lives as if we’re trapped eternally a in a high-school or office from hell ?

How scary.

via: Public Eye , a CBS blog

Sony embedded spyware into their new CDs

Sony embedded spyware into their new CDs and everyone’s pissed. Lawsuits left and right and a public relations nightmare should have taught them a lesson about the futility of resisting file-sharing, but like the other major record companies, they’re in denial about the painful changes ahead.

More than 50 CDs across all kinds of music had the XCP (“Extended Copy Protection”) software that reported back to Sony on the user’s behavior like burning CDs and also exposed the user’s computer to third-party attacks by manipulating basic functions of the operating system; tactics employed by the ‘rootkits’ commonly used by online attackers. All because users thought they were agreeing to “Bonus Content”.
Sony is taking remedial actions (but never really apologizing) and blaming “First 4 Internet”, the software firm that developed XCP. They’ve promised to exchange all the XCP cd’s for safe cd’s and have made available a program to remove the dangerous malware that they installed in consumers’ computers. Of course by then a trojan had already surfaced to take advantage of the weaknesses in users’ systems.
Later it turned out that the uninstaller leaved security gaps in your system. Then it seemed like XCP was made partly with opensource programs whose only condition to be reused and repurposed was to be acknowledged, which of course Sony didn’t do.

The Department of Homeland Security has issued a reccomendation to never install software from sources that you wouldn’t expect to have software like audio CD’s.

Microsoft’s anti-spyware program is incorporating a Sony-rootkit remover.
Artists are posting instructions on their websites for disabling XCP. Texas, Italy and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are sueing Sony. EFF is asking Sony to also stop using another DRM (“Digital Rights Management”) software called MediaMax that spies on you.

a comprehensive collection of posts at BoingBoing : Sony anti-customer technology

The Register: Texas puts Sony BMG in its sights

Latest Beta Skype now with Video

The latest beta version of Skype 2.0 now has video conferencing!

Skype lets you make free phone calls all around the world with other Skype users and for very low fees (much lower than regular rates) you can make and receive calls to landlines.

You can even hack your cell phone to use with Skype (or with competitor imtel), through your computer, and avoid spending your preciously expensive minutes.
In Korea you can buy imFone and it’ll do all the work for you, all you have to do is plug the device into your USB port. It uses Bluetooth and gives you a 50 meter radius to use your cell phone.
For those of use without a webcam we can always hope that someone’s already hacking video-enabled cell phones to use with the new video-Skype.

BitTorrent founder signs pact with MPAA

Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent just signed a pact with the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) to cooperate with them in their imbecile tactics against piracy. I expect this will curb online piracy just as much as zombifying Napster did, which is zilch. The torrent technology is already out in the hands of users and since it’s been open-source, even when an MPAA-aproved version of BitTorrent is released on the official website there will still be dozens of other versions that will allow filesharing of copyrighted content. The main concern of the MPAA seems to be that the official BitTorrent site also offers a tracker -trackers coordinate torrent filesharers- that points copyrighted content. Cohen has agreed to remove all links to copyrighted content from his site. However, since the BitTorrent tracker isn’t a very popular tracker the MPAA should really go after many other more popular trackers to even dent the amount of filesharing.

Plenty of developers are working on new versions of Torrent software that won’t rely on centralized trackers and when this happens there won’t be any remaining middlemen to bully and the MPAA will have no remedy but to embrace torrent technology as an opportunity or go the moronic way and intensify its efforts in sueing movielovers and developers.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) made many enemies and no progress by treating the music-lover as criminal. Not until Apple showed them a reasonable business model have they been able to profit, and now that Apple became the undisputed leader in online music retail and showed them the way to profit, the record labels are applying pressure on Apple-God Steve Jobs to raise prices on iTunes. Luckily Steve Jobs has expressed that the labels are getting “greedy” and that he will resist their pressure. Now that broadband and BitTorrent have brought movies and tv shows into the revolution, it’s the MPAA’s turn to prove that they can take advantage of new technologies that empower the consumer and shed some light on this seemingly pointless deal with Bram Cohen.

Who will eventually offer a viable peer2peer business model for audiovisual content? Reportedly with this deal Bram Cohen expects to be able to offer licensed copyrighted content with BitTorrent. We’ll see, but elsewhere, NBC Universal signed a deal with Peer Impact and will start offering a couple of movies and tv specials which will be viewable for 24 hours after the download. Presently iTunes is selling music videos, primetime series from ABC and short animated films, although they’re not using p2p technology.

To get a feel for the opportunities that tv networks are missing out on try out TVTAD. This little program will automatically download all of the newest episodes of all the series on your Favorites list by combining torrents with RSS feeds from several tracker sites.
Who’s the MPAA ?

Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal City Studios and Warner Bros. Entertainment.

How does BitTorrent work ?

Torrent peer2peer technology speeds up filesharing considerably from the previous generations of p2p software programs. Instead of downloading a file from one user at a time like it happens on the Gnutella and Fasttracks networks (with such popular programs like Limewire, Kazaa, iMesh, BearShare, Morpheus and Grokster), BitTorrent breaks up a file into many smaller torrent files so that pieces can be downloaded simultaneously and in any order with multiple users. When all the pieces have been completely downloaded BitTorrent stitches the file back up for your enjoyment and makes you a Seeder, i.e. it keeps sharing the torrent files with the community. Even when you haven’t got all of the torrent files completed, other users can download the fragments that you do have. BitTorrent will also download the fragments that are least diffused throughout the swarm of Seeders and Peers so that when, say, seeders log off it might still be possible that all non-seeder peers (or leeches as they’re sometimes called) might all collectively have the whole file.
In a centralized system of distribution too many demands will overwhelm a server but BitTorrent uses the positive feedback mechanism I just tried to explain to turn a file’s popularity into its fuel. The improved model of distribution grows sturdier, more redundant and more efficient with every new file-sharer. CacheLogic, a British analysis firm, recently estimated that 35 percent of all internet traffic is BitTorrent traffic.

Comments, corrections or questions ?

SuicideGirls Vcast

The best reason yet to get the new video iPod is SuicideGirls.

Now you can get a new girl every week, onto your iPod and everywhere you go.  Even if you don’t have the video iPod, like me, just 4 minutes long, these erotic videoclips -cut to great music that I’ve never heard before but want to hear more of- will get your weekend started right.

just copy-paste the RSS onto your iTunes to subscribe : http://suicidegirls.com/rss/video/

Soundbites

another case of

OPEN VERSUS CLOSED

 

“(the switch) aims to
transform the state from an information technology

‘Tower of Babel to an IT United Nations.'”

-Peter Quinn in Business Week, Massachusetts’ chief information officer testifies at a recent legislative hearing on the proposal to transofrm the information technology of the state government from Microsoft’s proprietary file formats to an open-source proprietary-free format OpenDocument that Office does not currently support. The move is intended to keep government documents accessible as software evolves and independent of Microsoft’s future behavior.

 

=Cogey

In Space

AP reports…on the BBC, Boston News and elsewhere…

Nicolaus Copernicus face has been digitally generated from the remains of his skull found last August in a grave in Frombork Cathedral in Poland, where he worked and died. The likeness of the reconstruction to existing portraits strongly confirm the findings.

Copernicus, a clergyman first, astronomer in his spare time, is most famous for his heliocentric theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not that Earth was at the center of the universe like the prevailing Ptolemaic model indicated.

His work seismically shifted the foundations of astronomy work to come, it was continued in Tycho Brahe’s work, further developed by Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei.

It would’ve surprised Copernicus to know that the heavenly bodies he so admired as the work of God would lead to conflict with the church. In 1632 Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World – Ptolemaic and Copernican, a dialogue between Simplicio, advocating the Copernican model, and Salviati who advocated the Copernican. This eventually led to the Inquisition charging Galileo with Heresy and lifelong imprisonment. As the apocryphal legend goes, as the church denied his theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun and condenmed him, Galileo muttered under his breath “Eppur Si Muove” (“And yet, it does move”).

Copernicus would be even sadder to find that today religious fundamentalism on the rise is just as divorced from the natural sciences and clings on to ignorant superstitious counter-reasoning (i.e. ‘intelligent design’).

On other astronomy news of theological importance…

 

… from Scientific American and NASA …

“NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope snapped pictures of a distant quasar in the Draco constellation”

“We think we are seeing the collective light from millions of the first objects to form in the universe,”

“The objects disappeared eons ago, yet their light is still traveling across the universe.”

The top picture is the original photograph. It shows all the stars and objects we already knew about.

But after removing all of these objects we end up with the bottom picture. Clearly, it’s not nothing, the hazy clouds are nascent stars, the first to be formed in the universe.

Before them, it was mostly hydrogen and helium chaotically crashing into each other in the darkness. Then came this warm starry glow, the earliest light from these earliest nascent stars.

=Cogey

Also at Forbes

Check out the Special Report at Forbes on

Communicating

(free tedious membership required)

They have great interviews with Noam Chomsky, Stan Lee, Ray Kurzweil, Jane Goodall, Kurt Vonnegut, Steven Pinker, Vincent D’Onofrio and even David Copperfield among others as well as excellent articles categorized by “technology”, “science”, “commerce & culture” and “on the other hand” where I found find the following Penny Arcade strip.

=Cogey