Meanwhile, California is $40 billion in the red and may have to lay off thousands of workers soon.
Dare I mention that "Hell Époque" thing that I first wrote about last year?
BioShock, 2K Games' smash hit first-person shooter that tries your personal ethics as much as it tests your aim, is now coming to mobile phones courtesy of Indiagames. The reveal came at the 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Indiagames is working on two versions of BioShock for mobile devices: a straightforward 3-D port of the original game, and... a 2-D rendition, believe it or not.(Can't help but wonder if the 2-D version will resemble this NES-style "demake" or perhaps this Game Boy mock-up.)
I'm of the opinion that BioShock is a game that needs to be played at night, or at least a way darkened room with all the lights out, on a fairly large screen and the sound turned way up. The ruined underwater city of Rapture with all its 1950s trappings is easily the most sinister setting of a video game that I've ever encountered. Putting it on a tiny device to play anywhere... sounds like it's gonna take away from that kind of atmosphere. But hey, the more BioShock the better, right? :-)
Here's some footage of the 3-D version, including the deranged Splicers and of course a Big Daddy in action...
Take, f'rinstance, what Leonard Abess Jr. did. Back in November he sold a majority share of his holdings in Miami-based City National Bancshares.
And then, Abess gave away $60 million of the profits to EVERYONE that was on his bank's payroll. He even went so far as to find 72 former employees so that he could give them a share of the money, too. More than 400 people got the "bonuses", and depending on how long they had been employed some got more than $100,000
This is an awesome story of capitalism and corporate responsibility, folks. And when I say "responsibility", what I mean by that is a company or business owner going above and beyond in rewarding its employees - who have already shown loyalty to the company - without it being mandated by some decree of government. Nobody made Abess give up his own money. In my opinion, Leonard Abess Jr. made a smart investment in his own company. And I'd be willing to wager an RC Cola and a Moon Pie that City National Bancshares might be among the better managed banks in this day and age.
Abess didn't publicize his good deed, but it was inevitable that news of it would get out. When asked about his motivation...
Abess said he had long dreamed of a way to reward employees. He had been thinking of creating an employee stock option plan before he decided to sell the bank.Leonard Abess Jr., you're a good man. And you deserve a tip o' the hat for your good deed :-)"Those people who joined me and stayed with me at the bank with no promise of equity -- I always thought some day I'm going to surprise them," he said. "I sure as heck don't need [the money]."
Apparently, what Michael and Kathleen Sharpe found so offensive is that Wrobel would constantly whistle the theme music from The Addams Family whenever he saw them.
In his defense, Wrobel claimed that he was only whistling at his dog. But "closed-circuit TV footage shown to the court depicted him repeatedly whistling when the couple left their house or arrived home."
I don't know what's more disturbing: this guy's whistling fetish, or the fact that England now has so many surveillance cameras that one was looking out for Wrobel's performance.
And what's more, Schmitt also states that "global warming" is being used as a political tool to increase the presence of government in people's lives...
Schmitt contends that scientists "are being intimidated" if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.Schmitt is a real scientist, and a former elected official. I'm far more inclined to trust his take on the "global warming" situation than many of the more current crop of either researchers or politicians. Sad to say: over the past few decades the trend has been that the science has increasingly become driven more by policy than it has been by empirical evidence. And in that regard, we simply do not have enough long-range climate data to satisfactorily proclaim that global warming is or isn't happening."They've seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming," Schmitt said.
Dan Williams, publisher with the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which is hosting the climate change conference, said he invited Schmitt after reading about his resignation from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration.
Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the "global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making."
A little over a year ago I posted the how-to tutorial on putting video content from a DVD onto an iPod. The workhorse program that I found perfect for my needs was HandBrake. When it came time to convert Lost Season 4 for my iPod classic ('cuz I like having all the Lost episodes hanging on my belt... along with my own movies, the Star Wars saga, etc.) I found that HandBrake had upgraded to version 0.9.3.So if you haven't checked it out yet, I heartily recommend giving HandBrake a looksee, because it has become significantly more powerful since the last time I used it en masse. HandBrake 0.9.3 introduces universal video input: it can now convert practically any format of video into MPEG-4, including DivX AVI files (very nice for putting those bootlegged Doctor Who episodes on an iPod or iPhone or any other portable video device). The video quality has been greatly improved, with many more presets and options available. Syncing of video and audio is said to be fixed, but I never saw any problems with that to begin with. I have however found that HandBrake 0.9.3 is far more stable in Windows Vista: previously, I had to re-install the program every time I wanted to convert a new DVD. Version 0.9.3 has fixed that bug: I've "fired it at the walls" (my own terminology for probing software for its limits) quite a bit over the past several days, and it keeps coming back and asking for more.
If you are using a Windows machine, you will likely have to purchase and install SlySoft AnyDVD, which does the actual work of decryption of a DVD. But HandBrake itself is free and open-source, and is available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
There is no way we are going to be able to pay for all of this in our lifetime, the lifetime of our children, and quite possibly the lifetime of their grandchildren. Not if our politicians keep adhering to this insanity.
If this place looks more whacked than usual, it's prolly just me monkeying around behind the scenes trying to get it all fixed :-)
The reason for this, is that the American military is admittedly "stretched thin" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So let's go review what happened a little over a millenia and a half ago, when the cost of maintaining its vast empire utterly taxed Rome's martial capability. With not nearly enough proper imperial denizens to draw upon, the Roman government eventually acquiesced to enlisting barbarians from Germania and Gaul to bolster its forces. In many cases, the foreign soldiers were offered Roman citizenship as part of a package of incentives (which could also include some lucrative latifundia).
Fifteen hundred years later, and another great world-spanning power... is now doing much the same.
Don't anybody give me any harsh looks now. I'm just the historian here.
So with that said, here's the trailer for Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter, featuring the voice of Gerard Butler (Leonidas in 300) as the marooned mariner...
Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter will also include Hollis Mason's autobiography Under the Hood.
Thanks to Phillip Arthur for the heads-up!
So what did I think of it? I watched many of the episodes of the original The Electric Company a few years ago when they ran on Noggin, and was surprised at how well the show had held up over the years. The Electric Company circa 2009 remains faithful to the purpose of its parent... but is a fresh and rapid-fire delightful update aimed at a new generation. And I was surprised at how many homages to the Seventies series there are: right down to paying tribute to Rita Moreno's immortal warcry "HEY YOU GUYSSSSSS!!!" Didn't spot an appearance by Letterman (no, not the late night TV host) but there was an animated spoof of 24, among other clever sketches. The one with the farmer and his mixed-up signs: can't help but wonder if the original show would have ever tried to be, dare I say it, "risque"? :-)
All in all, I thought that the new The Electric Company holds a lot of promise, and maybe even quite a bit of entertainment value for (ahem...) those of us among the "older" set. There's a lot of potential here for PBS to have another classic show on its hands.
Now all it needs is something on par with Morgan Freeman taking a bath in a casket...
Final Language PostedThere is no reason at all why this bill, as bloated as it is, should not be in standard rich-text Acrobat format. 1,419 pages? In a document containing all text and no images, that would be extremely quick and easy to download, not to mention convenient to search and scan.
Posted at 11:00 pm on Thursday, February 12, 2009The final language has been posted; you can find links to the various docs at the Speaker's website. Update: The speaker's website is apparently down. Imagine that. Docs are also available here.
The total size of the four major files is over 100MB, and consists of 1419 pages. Three of the four files are huge "scanned" PDFs, meaning they were created by printing the original document and then scanning it in again --- and therefore contain no real "text" that can be easily searched. This will make our parsing process difficult and more time consuming, so we most likely won't have our versions ready until midday tomorrow. But we'll see...
But instead, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has published the "stimulus" as unwieldy scanned images.
In my mind, either the House website staff is inept and incapable of fully grasping available technology, or this is a deliberate attempt to prevent the legislation from easily being scrutinized by the public.
I'm inclined to believe the latter.
Alexandre Philippe is a filmmaker who is currently working on an ambitious project called The People vs. George Lucas (here's the official website: PeopleVsGeorge.com). Tonight, Alexandre and his crew released the first trailer for their film.
Behold!
Want to see it drastically embiggened and high-deffed? Mash down here!
And at 1:29 into the trailer, there's a black and white clip showing "George Lucas" furiously typing. No, your eyes ain't deceiving you: that is Chad Austin from my first film Forcery (click here to watch THAT movie)! Alexandre contacted me about using Forcery awhile back, and all of us at KWerky Productions are thrilled to have been invited to take part in this project.
The People vs. George Lucas is scheduled for a 2010 wide release. As you can expect, it will be a pleasure to keep y'all posted about it in the meantime :-)
...and listen very, very carefully to the scene early in the episode where Jin, Danielle and the rest of her team are on the beach. In particular, listen to the voice that's reading out "the numbers" on the radio.
It sounds like Hurley's.
As if this story isn't loopy enough already!
The patient has now been without detectable HIV for two years now, and is not currently on any antiretroviral medication. However, researchers warn that the therapy is "too extreme and too dangerous to be used as a routine treatment", and that a third of those who undergo it die from complications.
I'd still chalk it up as a victory for this kind of medical research, though. Who knows what kind of refinement might eventually come from such a development. And gene therapy is still a very new field: during the next ten or twenty years, we're likely to see even more powerful advances.
