I went to see Alice in Wonderland this weekend (it was pretty good). But the best part of the movie was the Tron Legacy trailer at the beginning.

Behold: The Tron Legacy Trailer

Watch it in HD with the one you love.

Any geek half-worth their salt has been waiting for this movie for 25 years. I just hope they do not screw it up!!! If they do, there will be blood!

io9 has a delicious detailed analysis of images from the trailer.
(still not sure what I think about the new light cycles)

Someone from reddit posted this survey they got from JD Powers tracking TV usage.

The user is asked to fill in little Y/N circles asking if they watch any of the dozens of TV channel choices. Interestingly, the only set of Y/N boxes that are switched are the ones for Fox News.


Perhaps we have identified the real source for Fox's ratings...

Obama seems to be finally taking the fight to Republicans:

He also stressed that "we've been talking about health care for nearly a century," and "we have failed to meet this challenge during periods of prosperity, and also during periods of decline."

"If not now when? If not us, who?" Obama asked.

The President also took the opportunity to hit Republicans: "I got all my Republican colleagues out there saying 'No, no, no, we want to focus on things like costs.' You had 10 years. What happened? What were you doing?"

Unfortunately, the conservative mainstream media will ignore this great soundbite. Only Fox will likely report on it, and they will distort it to mock the President over something...

I do not know why anyone listens to Tom Delay, but the conservative mainstream media keeps talking to him so he can keep saying really stoopid things like:

"There is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits, keep people from going and finding jobs,"

I'm sure there are some twenty-something slackers that would be happy with the sub-poverty funds they get from unemployment benefits, but the idea that this represents anything but the smallest fraction of recipients is just ridiculous.
From later in the article:

"unemployment benefits are generally so small that much of it is often used to pay for COBRA health insurance, even when subsidized. The size of the benefits does not generally cover the cost of living and it would be hard to find a single person who would prefer unemployment to having a job so that they could get subsidized COBRA."

via io9

Victory for the good guys:
Texas school board elections kick out two of the worst wingnuts
The Texas school board was really pushing a wacko wingnut position including creationism ("Who else is going to stand up to these scientists") and a revisionist American history(1) (they were pushing to remove references to Thurgood Marshall).
This is a major victory for everyone because Texas is a huge buyer of textbooks. Textbook makers would write their books for Texas and then sell them to all states, dumbing down all American kids to Texas' level.
The election is not a major shift, but is is a start...


Victory for the bad guys:
Mormon Church killed Marie Osmond's son
Marie Osmond's son killed himself recently. The story was that he was suffering from "depression". Well there seems to be more to the story, namely that her son was gay.
As a gay kid in Mormontown, he would have been constantly assaulted with tales of how he was depraved, an abomination, a sinner. He would have been told that he was a disappointment to his family and church. He would have been subject to harassment and attempts to "save him" from himself. He would have been told that his natural feelings happened because he was not strong enough to overcome them and he was not good enough to be "normal".
Is it any wonder that the kid was depressed??
Under that kind of pressure, its not a surprise that he felt killing himself would be a better thing than to keep living and bringing that kind of hell to himself and his family.


Broken Priorities:
It costs an estimated $1 million to deploy a soldier to Afghanistan for a year and $49,000 to incarcerate a prisoner for a year in California. The state of California spends less than $10,000 to educate one K-12 student each year. The tradeoff is clear and unjustifiable.
We could massively increase the amount spent on education this year by cutting back the Iraq/Afghanistan war by just 10 minutes.


(1) Note: When LGF thinks you are right wing, you are _really_ right wing...

Here is something you will not see much play from the conservative mainstream media: ACORN was cleared of criminal wrongdoing...

In a move that will surprise absolutely no one with a functioning brain, it seems that O'Keefe and Giles - creators of the infamous original ACORN hit pieces - were utter liars. Splicing together the video to imply criminal wrong-doing on the part of ACORN.

Of course, conservative media (we have little to no actual liberal media in the US) lept a the story and triggered a huge backlash including some questionable legislation.

Unfortunately, there will be virtually no coverage or apology for the witch-hunt now. The damage has been done, which was the goal of the hit-piece in the first place. Wingnuts have long hated ACORN for registering poor mostly inner city people who overwhelmingly vote Democrat, so it is no surprise that any smear campaign taking place in the media would work.

Just a shame that we do not have any kind of liberal reporting service with anything like the reach of the modern conservative elite media. More a shame that many of the poor who ACORN would have helped keep buying into the conservative media's lies and smears.


ACORN Wikipedia page
Press Release

Conservatives love to lambast the ACLU for all kinds of perceived "attacks on America". But what they always fail to realize is that the ACLU fights for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and it is abundantly clear in this article: ACLU Tells High School to Allow Students to Protest ACLU at Football Game.

Seems Gate City High School in Gate City had a bad practice of offering sectarian prayers over the PA system at football games. Something that clearly was the school promoting one religion over all others. So the ACLU warned the school that what it was doing was wrong.

Because of this "attack", conservatives organized a protest which the school moved to stop.

Showing integrity that is totally lacking from conservative groups like the ACLJ, the ACLU is moving to defend the protesters and ensuring that their free-speech rights are enforced.

The sad part is I'm sure the protesters won't understand the irony that they are only enjoying their freedom to protest because of groups like the ACLU.

Tho technically 'socialism' wasn't the boogey-word in the 1800's is is now, tho I am sure the sentiment was the same (and I know many modern tea-baggers who regret those previous "socialist plots").

I rarely if ever buy music these days. Mostly because I don't listen to much music, but also because I don't think that any money spent on CDs or tracks actually goes to either the artists or to produce better music. I think the industry is corrupt in general, abusive to artists, and it refuses to change with the times and provide services that people want.

Two good articles came to my attention this week illustration why I don't believe that most labels have the artist's interests in mind.
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http://www.guns-n-gardens.com/

Wubwife likes home improvement shows so I get to watch too many of them, but I like this one - A home improvement show helping you deal with the zombie apocalypse!

Funnee

I love the logic diagram in the middle... yep, sounds like what those wacky theists believe

I've blogged a few times about gay marriage. I know it will eventually be the norm and no one will even blink an eye (and on that day, I would just love for some of the current opponents to apologize and admit they were wrong)

And here's a great study (warning PDF) showing why gay marriage not only will happen, but is inevitable.



The graph (and report) clearly shows that support for gay marriage among 18-29 year olds is over 50% in all but a small handful of states. More than 1/3 of 18-29 year olds who support gay rights is in Alabama (the most backward state).

With each new generation, the percentage of support only grows. So it is only a matter of time before a majority of the whole population realizes what is plainly obvious to so many of us: gay marriage has no impact on the world for most people.

I just hate that it will take so much longer for some people to realize and accept the truth. And I hate to think of how many more people will be subject to hatred and discrimination before that day comes.

Last nite we saw Star Wars in Concert. A live orchestra playing select pieces from the Star Wars movies.

Anthony Daniels was live and narrated the event. He brought charm and wit to separate the individual pieces.
During each piece, huge screens played select scenes from the movies and gave more emotion to the pieces played and brought the music to life.

Nothing could match the adrenaline rush when the orchestra started up.
Blasting drums with the trumpet fanfare. Then the immortal words flashed up on the screen "A long time ago in a galaxy far away..."... a brief pause as the stadium faded to black... the audience held its breath.. and the opening blast of the Star Wars theme filled the chamber with power and emotion. I think everyone in there wanted to cheer and hoot but we were struck silent by the music we all love.

The entire event was absolute mesmerizing blend of music and visuals. We were entranced for the entire show and wished it could have gone on longer.

Took long enuf... but then again, I wasn't really trying, so not really surprising that it didn't work for so long!!!

Anyway, finally got posting fixed. Now if I'll just get off my ass and post more often, everything would be fixed!

When TiVo and other Digital Video Recorders were new, the TV industry went insane with lawsuits and hysterical rhetoric about how DVRs were going to destroy the world!!!

Industry analysts claimed that DVR "potentially threatens the very lifeblood of how television is funded and how it's used for marketing and advertising."

Of course, what was really happening is what always happens when new technologies come along that change things: New companies talk about a "brave new world" that the tech offers, old companies fear for their very life and fight tooth and nail to avoid any change.

We saw it with VCRs, cassette tapes, radios, and every new technology to ever come forward.

Via an EFF posting, it seems that once again, history has shown that new technology improves things rather than destroys everything.

This weekend, The New York Times announced that "DVR ratings now add significantly to live ratings and thus to ad revenue."

Yes, new technologies disrupt things and sometimes business models have to change, but I, for one, am getting tired of the moral panic, doom-and-gloom we hear from the likes of MPAA, RIAA, TV and Movie studios and basically anyone wrapped in the old industry. History has shown them time-and-time-again to be wrong.

Some fun quotes below the cut
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Follow up to my earlier post: Judge won't marry interracial couples...

A Louisiana justice of the peace who drew criticism for refusing to marry an interracial couple has resigned, the secretary of state's office said Tuesday.

Of course, the racist doesn't think he did anything wrong

"It's kind of hard to apologize for something that you really and truly feel down in your heart you haven't done wrong," he said.

Luckily he didn't try to defend himself after his earlier comments

"I'm not a racist," he said. "I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house.

I don't like sounding like a petulant child, but I tend to like working with intelligent people and when the people I work with do dumb things, I tend to lose respect for them (we are not talking dumb things like a bad cut and paste error, we're talking dumb things like not realizing that they could use cut and paste in the first place).

Last week, I finally got around to making a visual change to one of our landing pages. Screen real estate is fairly valuable. You only have a certain area to work with, so you want to put important features high on the page and less important features on sub-pages or where the user has to scroll down to see them.

On one of our landing pages, there were a series of links that represented functions that will only be exercised occasionally by some of our users. They won't even be visible to most of the users (just blank spaces for them). These links were products of very early "sketch" layouts done by a cow-orker who is no longer here and they are absolute prime candidates for moving to secondary pages, so I moved them. In their place, I put functions that will be used daily by a majority of our users.

Now, another thing about landing pages and things like that. You do not want to make changes to them too often. As any developer can tell you, users are dumb. They do not like change and will be confused even if you remove a link they don't use.

I wanted to make the layout change before delivery of the final code because to make the change later will generate confusion among the end users. I would have made it a long time ago, but I was busy designing the back-end code that actually runs the site and didn't have enough time to fix all the little visual improvements that the site needs desperately.

So I made the change to the layout and our testers complained (note: we have 2 testers, not a whole suite of them).

They had pages of scripts that were "invalid" because the links were now wrong. These are not automated scripts. These are hand scripts that they follow. i.e.: Go to this page, click this link, on the next page, enter 12 in the text box, etc...

The change I made would mean that they would have to adjust their scripts to click an intervening link on one page. Something most people can get used to. And again, this is a distinct improvement that will have very positive improvements for our real end users.

I was overridden by my boss who sides with the testers because he doesn't want to "invalidate their scripts"???? (remember, these are NOT automated scripts).

So we are going to deliver a bad layout to users who will not want it changed after delivery, all to keep two testers (who are supposed to be intelligent, remember) from having to mentally add one step to some of their tests.


So, yes, my respect for some of my cow-orkers just went way down. And what really bugs me is that to lots of our in-house engineers, I am the face of this tool even if it is mostly a team-effort. So this bad-design very directly reflects on me and I don't like it.

So now I am very pissed and don't feel like coding today... which is not good since we do not have many days left before we go live...

What a great way to spend an afternoon... blowing anvils into the sky!



via boingboing