Groklaw has posted an affidavit in the SCO vs. Daimler Chrysler case.
Essentially, SCO sent DC a letter saying “as per your license terms, send us a list of all the computers you’re using UNIX on.”
DC wrote back saying, “We haven’t used UNIX in seven years, so there is no list.”
And SCO sued them for not providing the list.
I’m not making this up, folks – this comes out of SCO’s own deposition!
I’ll be the first to admit that I go near-ballistic where cigarettes are concerned, from sprinting by smokers on a sidewalk to springing up to turn our window fan to exhaust mode. But, rude though I may be, I’m not as bad as the AMA. An R rating for smoking? Even when the smoker is an evil character, or when a would-be teen smoker lights up and doubles over coughing? What about random guy in the background on a busy street scene? How the hell are filmmakers going to deal with that?
Unfortunately, I have a guess, and it doesn’t involve parental permission cards. If this rating-system change does happen, the industry will know that any film involving smoking has no chance of hitting the PG-13 sweet spot for audience draw. Rather than making something like Forrest Gump inauthentic by leaving out the ubiquitious Vietnam cigarettes, they will instead add footage and sound that they may have held back on before, simply because they have that freedom under the measure. We will see films that are more violent and more full of sex and cursing where there is no cause for it, because there is nothing to lose. Imagine biographical movies about well-known smokers–Churchill, FDR, Einstein–done by John Woo, and you’ll have an idea what we’d be in for.
Now think of all the foreign films we import. Continue reading
Today’s pathetic recipe:
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APPLE YOGURT
2 c fruit-flavored yogurt
4 apples, cored and sliced
Spoon yogurt into 4 serving bowls and top with apple slices. Serve chilled. Serves 4.
*******
Now let’s look at just how craptastic this is. First off, it’s labeled a dessert. Secondly, 4 apples?? Unless we’re talking miniature Galas off your tree, this is not only difficult to spoon up but also way too much fruit for the yogurt. Laying the slices on top would overflow the dish and completely obscure the yogurt. I suppose one could arrange the slices standing up in a flower pattern and use the yogurt as dip, but why serve that chilled? Thirdly, this is the second recipe in the calendar for basically the same thing; the first one was with orange yogurt and tangerines. However, put some orange blossom honey (and possibly a little finely chopped candied ginger) on that and you’ve got something slightly resembling dessert. For this one to fly, you’d need to use Yoplait Whips (or a similar product) and some caramel sauce. Oh, and half the apples.
I have a page-a-day calendar at work called “The Quick Cook.” It advertises itself as containing a variety of recipes with low prep time and uncomplicated ingredients. After five months of it, I think I know what their sourcebooks were:
There are a few gems of the actually good kind, like an actual workable recipe for avgolemono soup and one for panzanella, but otherwise it’s less hit than miss. Continue reading
Is it just the fact that I was up way too late last night, or does the term “neocon” sound like a Transformers faction?
These people are no longer amusing. I’ve been getting about 10 messages a day from them. On Friday I actually had to add a rule to the server config to detect their domain names, since half of them didn’t score high enough to get labeled as spam. (Bayes training helped, but not enough.) And some of their ads are for really sick stuff – not just garden-variety porn, but fetishes I don’t even want to hear about.
They all have the same structure, the same types of misspellings, the same type of Bayes poison, and point to a website named after food. And while names like “hot carrot soup dot com” and “sexy naked sushi dot com” (I won’t list the exact URLs, since that would only improve their page rank) were funny at first, their persistence has gotten %@*! annoying. Why the heck do they need to send me 10 messages a day advertising what’s clearly one site? And why cluster them?
Mandated opt-out links aren’t enough. Even if spammers weren’t already known to ignore/abuse requests to be removed, it’s obvious that these aren’t complying with other provisions of federal law (fake return addresses, no street address, no “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” tag on the subject line), so why should anyone assume they’ll honor the unsubscribe links?
The two main email accreditation companies (OK, the only two I know of), Habeas and Bonded Sender, hold their clients to opt-in only criteria. So did California’s stillborn anti-spam law (superseded by federal law the day it was to go into effect). Why couldn’t congress do the same? I do think CAN-SPAM is better than nothing, but it’s done little to stem the tide in the 5 months it’s been active.
Maybe it’s egotistical to keep a list of who you would want to play your characters in a visual media production, but I do it. Some characters started out looking like celebrities; others grew into them. Sometimes I’ll see a star I’ve never seen before and think they look familiar, and a second later it’ll hit me that they’ve lived in my head for lo these many years.
So I’ve got this running tally. Last night, I added one to it and another character–there’s no other way to describe it–got jealous. Continue reading
