Code Creating Culture
Mash-ups, if you don’t already know, originated in the U.K. with people taking higly popular songs and remixing them together for something that was arguably better than the sum of its parts. There’s a website out there that goes even further than that.
No very useful, but strangely mesmerizing in a wierd way. 
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On one hand, I can defend fandom as something that is exciting. On the other hand, this is really funny (Triumph the insult dog vs Star Wars fans).
Round one goes to MyDoom. The MyDoom.F variant targets the RIAA website between the 17th and 22nd of every month.
The new variant of the MyDoom virus, called the fastest spreading and worst virus of all time, installs a DLL which opens a backdoor, allowing it to be attacked. According to Panda Software, when the system date of the infected machine is between the 17th and 22nd of any month and any year, the virus will launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the RIAA and Microsoft Web sites, with 2 out of 3 attacks targeting Microsoft.
Something tells me Microsoft is pretty good about deflecting these attacks by now. The RIAA better get used to it.
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Ahhh… Last night I finished an on/off again quest that started with Nato several years ago. While barely a snap of the fingers in geological time, in human terms have danced with this game for nearly 1/6 of my life before beating it.
Granted, when Nato and I were co-playing we where on the hardest difficulty and had to resort to engulfing the entire planet in nuclear winter to have a shot at winning before time ran out; I also have only played sporatcially on friend’s machines over the years when the opportunity arose; still beating it solo for the first time was sweet. It’s just been one of those nagging games that I’ll get incredibly in depth with and then have to abandon close to the end because real life has the odacity to intrude.
I played the UN forces and ended up transcending (merging with the planet organic neural net) for victory. But not before coming to the end of every tech tree and bargining (or blasting) the enemies into submission. I ended with a final score of 109% and approx 2930 points – I’d be interested how this compares with other people.
I know Kitana repeatedy plays as the Spartans because there’s just something about a crushing military party run by a women that sexy – I’d be interested in how other people have beaten, played the game…
Maybe you should be like these guys (don’t worry, it’s clean).
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At least according to a judge in the Northern district of California.
Judge Susan Illston ruled that consumers do not have the right to make backup copies of the DVD discs they purchase. The case was brought by a Missouri company, 321 Studios, which makes a program called DVD X Copy. 321 Studios had hoped to establish the concept of consumer fair use in the digital age, so it picked a courtroom fight with the major motion picture studios.
The studios won.
So its legal to make a CD personal copy, but not ok to make a DVD copy? 
Another interesting grassroots protest via the web …the effort to free the Grey Album….
DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z’s the Black Album and the Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album. Jay-Z’s record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Album specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise from music fans and major media outlets like Rolling Stone (”an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time”) and the Boston Globe (which called it the “most creatively captivating” album of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Album.
Danger MouseÂ’s album is one of the most “respectful” and undeniably positive examples of sampling; it honors both the Beatles and Jay-Z. Yet the lawyers and bureaucrats at EMI have shown zero flexibility and not a glimmer of interest in the artistic significance of this work. And without a clearly defined right to sample (e.g. compulsory licensing), the five major record labels will continue to use copyright in a reactionary and narrowly self-interested manner that limits and erodes creativity. Their actions are also self-defeating: good new music is being created that people want to buy, but the major labels are so obsessed with hoarding their copyrights that they are literally turning customers away.
This first-of-its-kind protest signals a refusal to let major label lawyers control what musicians can create and what the public can hear. The Grey Album is only one of the thousands of legitimate and valuable efforts that have been stifled by the record industry– not to mention the ones that were never even attempted because of the current legal climate. We cannot allow these corporations to continue censoring art; we need common-sense reforms to copyright law that can make sampling legal and practical for artists.
Japanese Xbox promotions have gotten very creative. The latest coming from the land of the rising sun is a body length pillow with a video game character in a pink bikini on it (17 year old Kasumi from the Dead or Alive franchise, for the detailed).
“Our purpose of including the item is simply that those type of cushion has great appeal to fans of the title. It’s a pure promotion. I am aware that there are some stories written by overseas press with misconceptions,” said a Microsoft spokeswoman who would not provide her name.
However, on Monday the company said the precise design of the pillow was being reconsidered and refused to supply images of the pillow sent to games media at the time of the original announcement.
You’ll remember, the Dead or Alive series is known for its superb physics engine – or ‘bouncing boobies’ for the lay person.
There’s no way MS would even try a promotion like this in the US. In a small way it makes me smile. We may have Janet on TV, but our Xboxs are scantily-clad-adolescent-pillow free.
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The Govenator is pushing for a constitutional amendment that would allow immegrants that have been citizens for 20 years to run for president.
Is this just Skynets evil plan to get its hands on nuclear ordinance? 
Ok, it’s not Amish, but using the idea of communial ‘barn-raising’ to build a supercomputer really smacks of the group. At the University of San Francisco they’re using the idea of ‘flash-mobs’ to build a supercomputer in the school gym.
The group has high hopes for its gym machine. It plans to run a speed benchmark program known as Linpack. The group estimates that to make the next Top 500 list, scheduled to be released in June, the machine will need to reach a speed of about 550 gigaflops, or billions of mathematical operations per second. The No. 1 spot on the list is held by the Earth Simulator in Japan, which can run at more than 35 teraflops, or 35,000 gigaflops.
The biggest problem? Electrical power to run the 1300 volunteer’s machine.