Since Boing Boing started including ads in their feed, I stopped reading. And their main page is so horrible that I don’t even read it through a web browser. I never bothered communicating why I really hate advertising in RSS feeds, but there’s writeups at OnFocus and A Whole Lotta Nothing that explain my reasoning better than I could.
Allofmp3.com is is under investigation for copyright infringement. No surprise there.
Derek and James both let me know this morning that Hunter Thompson commited suicide. Also from the sites I read:
While playing EverQuest II just type /pizza and a web browser will launch the online ordering section of pizzahut.com. Fill in your info and just kick back until fresh pizza is delivered straight to your door.
Warcraft needs this feature! (Not really.)
Paul Martin - a leader who I was pretty apathetic towards until today - gave a speech earlier about his support for bill C-38, which would give equal rights to gay couples. His support isn’t crucial to the bill being passed, but he’s still the leader of the country voicing his support for not only gay marriage but true equality among the people:
The rights of Canadians who belong to a minority group must always be protected by virtue of their status as citizens, regardless of their numbers. These rights must never be left vulnerable to the impulses of the majority.
To me that’s some inspirational stuff. And more so, near the end of his speech he indicated that his opinion on a subject is dictated by situational events and knowledge as opposed to being an immutable belief:
Four years ago, I stood in this House and voted to support the traditional definition of marriage. Many of us did. My misgivings about extending the right of civil marriage to same-sex couples were a function of my faith, my perspective on the world around us.
Let me say that again: our Prime Minister stood up and said that four years ago he was against this - and attributes at least some of the basis of that opinion to his faith. Then he stands up and says that he was completely wrong on the subject. He had faith, but then realized he was wrong. Awesome.
This genuinely makes me proud. The only downer is that most of the Canadian news sources are covering the hockey season’s cancellation more than this. Yet that too kinda defines us, doesn’t it?
Update: The Wikipedia has a page with recent numbers for the bill.
Ugh, I had to hit three different pharmacies in my quest to find a box of Nicoderm Step 2. I almost started smoking there for a minute!
Look at this table of memory usage for various interpreter- and bytecode-based runtime environments. Java uses ten times the amount of memory that Perl does for the example GTK+ application. I like Java, but I’ll keep it on the server-side.
I’m a big fan of Hunter Thompson and just picked up one of his collections that I hadn’t noticed before (Songs of the Doomed). I had previously thought that he actually had a doctorate in journalism, but according to Wikipedia the doctorate is from a mail-order church. It makes sense that he would never aquire something as time-consuming as a doctoral degree, but his writing skills are still absolutely superb - so if anything this just adds more character. I think.
On a related note a new HST movie is possibly in the pipeline, based on The Rum Diary. Both Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro will once again emulate Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta (respectively). Sounds good to me.
Has anyone used Allofmp3.com? It’s a Russian-based site that’s like Napster or iTunes. It allows you to download music without the bullshit DRM trappings though. Even cooler though is the fact that when you buy a track or album, you can choose the encoding type (MP3, OGG, WMA, etc) and the bitrate. It’ll throw the conversion job in a queue and e-mail you a few minutes later with the download links.
I bought a Green Day track in lossless FLAC format just now - total for the track is about 20 megabytes. The site charges you based on the size of your downloads as opposed to per track - and at USD 0.02 for a megabyte, I paid 40 cents for the song.
It also apparently complies with Russian copyright laws, and (again apparently) royalties are paid to the appropriate parties. It definitely seems to be an interesting service - am I cynical to think that there may be some horrible catch?