Extended Warranties

I wish I’d read this Techdirt post before someone from Dell rang me the other day. I appreciate good customer support and communications so I got a lovely warm feeling when he asked how I was getting on, and if I was happy with the machine, but got a tad suspicious when he mentioned that it “only” has a one year warranty; not least because it actually has a three year warranty. I interrupted him before he made me feel really seedy, telling him that if he was trying to sell me an extended warranty, I wasn’t interested. He immediately went from to sycophantic to condescending, and rang off. Prick.

Manager fired over wedding email

Read to the end. Busted not just once, but twice.

Stuff.co.nz: “Your wedding sounded cheap, nasty and tacky anyway, so we only ever considered you time wasters. Our marquees are for upper class clients which unfortunately you are not. Why don’t you stay within your class level and buy something from payless plastics instead.”

YouTube – Slow motion high FPS compilation

You’ve probably seen some of these before, but not all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX6aerxQPOs

Myspace.com

Watch the manifold get redder as the revs increase. Incredible.

BusinessWeek v Mark Cuban

Seconds away, round one! In the red corner…

Cuban Talks Trash to YouTube

Mark Cuban ridiculed Google for purchasing the copyright lawsuit-prone YouTube. Now he may be ready to back an adversary to prove his point

…and in the blue corner…

Is this BusinessWeek or The Enquirer ?

Now that is reporting at its best isnt it ? No speculation there at all.

Whatever about the rest of it, props to Cuban for this: “Im not out to get Youtube or Google. If anytihng I am out to get the DMCA. I think its a terrible law.”

It is a terrible law. Ours is even worse. The people that implemented both should be taken outside and shot for selling out our interests to people that lie and steal.

Now if only Mark would learn to punctuate properly. Trailing question marks do my head in. Sorry Mark, but spelling and punctuation are important.

A new home for The Pirate Bay?

Slate: In the wee hours of an early Saturday morning several weeks ago, about half an hour before Congress left for its pre-election recess, it passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. The act tries to bar credit-card payments to Internet gambling sites, and there has been much speculation about its wisdom and likely efficacy. What has been less noted, though, is that through this bill and a handful of similar missteps, the government has put itself in a position to be taught a sharp lesson about the nature of power in a globalized marketplace. Unless Congress and the Bush administration begin to pay a little more attention to how they handle Internet gambling, they could well end up creating an entirely avoidable headache for some very powerful constituents—holders of U.S. copyrights and patents—by punching a hole in the international web of agreements that protects them. Taken as a whole, these efforts offer a veritable master class in how not to regulate a 21st-century economy.

(For those of you living in the past/dark, you can read about TPB on Wikipedia.)

British Passports Cracked

The Guardian reports that British passports have been cracked, and have detailed the technology involved. I’m still reading this, I’ll post a comment later.

Universal Music: MP3 Player Owners Are Thieves

UMG chairman and chief executive Doug Morris says that: “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it, so it’s time to get paid for it.”

Here’s a UMG artist from each letter of the alphabet (ok, except for ‘x’), including a few from Ireland. U2, for example. Full ‘featured’ list here. You know what not to do.

• 50 Cent
• Amy Winehouse
• Black Eyed Peas
• Cardigans
• Def Leppard
• Elvis Costello
• Feeder
• Gwen Stefani
• Herbie Hancock
• INXS
• Junior Senior
• Kiss
• Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Mos Def
• No Doubt
• Ocean Colour Scene
• Portishead
• Queens Of The Stone Age
• Rubyhorse
• Snow Patrol
• Texas
• U2
• Van Morrison
• Will Smith
• Yasmeen
• Zed

Dems Seek to Restore Habeas Corpus

In a follow-up to this post, it seems the Democrats are working to restore habeus corpus rights to “enemy combatants” now too, thank god. Of course this is only part of the problem, as the Bush administration had granted itself the right to declare anyone an enemy combatant, including American citizens, thereby suspending habeus corpus across the board. That needs to be revoked too.