John Hughes

John Hughes dies of heart attack, age 59. Damn. As a child of the 1980's I grew up on the man's movies.

You'd Think No Real News Happened Today

I don't know if you've heard (snicker), but both Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died today.

King of Pop Michael Jackson is dead.

Farrah Fawcett, 1970s sex symbol, dies aged 62. (The only thing Farrah was ever in that I cared about was LOGAN's RUN. So that alone warrants a mention of her death here.)

I guess I should feel old since both were super famous during my childhood.

David Carradine Hung Himself

I find it incredibly shocking that David Carradine killed himself.

Pirate Bay Verdict And Reactions

Probably the biggest tech story out there right now is the verdict from the Pirate Bay trial came back and it was guilty. I'm not really surprised. The Pirate Bay guys called a lot of attention to themselves and their amusing public "screw you" responses to any copyright notices they received were bound to blow up on them eventually. I figured that the courts would try to please the politicians and corporations that pushed for this trial, and despite every article I read about the trial showing that the prosecution's case was flimsy and poorly argued, this was pretty much a foregone conclusion. The surprising things were that the defendants found out from a source the night before that they were found guilty. A bit ironic, considering the nature of the case. Of course the TPB guys will appeal, so it'll be awhile if they go to jail, if at all. They've also stated that they have no plans to pay the surprisingly small amount the court says they owe the corporations. Public opinion is mostly in favor of the TPB gang, so it'll be interesting to see where this goes from here.

Here's a big list of links with related stories.

Pirate Bay's fileshare four get year in jail

The Pirate Bay Trial: The Official Verdict - Guilty

Pirate Bay Trial Verdict: Guilty as Charged

Pirate Bay Loses - Courtroom Leak from “Trustworthy” Source

The Pirate Bay Guilty; Jail for File-Sharing Foursome

Content Industry Applauds Pirate Bay Guilty Verdicts

Pirate Party Membership Surges Following Pirate Bay Verdict

Pirate Bay server to be placed in Swedish museum

Sweden's Pirate Party condemns Pirate Bay verdict as 'gross injustice'

Swedish ISP Starts Deleting Log Files To Protect Users From IPRED Law

Two In One Day

Whoa. Both Number Six and Khan died on the same day. Awful.

Ricardo Montalban dies at age 88

"The Prisoner" star Patrick McGoohan dead at 80

Another Original Trek Castmember Passes

Trek's Majel Roddenberry Dies

Not only was Majel the widow of TREK creator Gene Roddenberry, she was also Nurse Christine Chapel in the original series, Lwaxana Troi in STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and performed the voice of the USS Enterprise computer. (That's including the upcoming TREK reboot film directed by J.J. Abrams.)

I'm amazed I restrained myself from titling this post, "She's dead Jim."

Paul Newman 1925-2008

We're Still Here?

Large Hadron Collider comes online, world fails to end. Well, not immediately, at least.

Large Hadron Collider: Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios. Get your crowbars ready. This is exactly like how HALF-LIFE began.

Oh shit, it's true!!! Gordon Freeman spotted in CERN tessst chamber.

Large Hadron Collider Day

It's Large Hadron Collider day. Let's hope all of the doomsayers who said that it will bring about the end of the world and universe were wrong. If they're not, then I suppose we can all take comfort in knowing that we won't have to hear them say, "I told you so."

Don LaFontaine Died

Don LaFontaine Dies at 68

Damn. He was a legend and no matter how cliche some of the phrases he had to read had gotten (like, "in a world...") he was still THE movie trailer narrator.

(I don't normally pay the slightest attention to ET, but it was the first news link I could find on this story.)

Comcast Wants You To Guess How Much Bandwidth You Use

Comcast limits bandwidth, yet doesn't provide you with tools to monitor your usage. Bumpy road ahead.

This is an addendum to that story about the "new" Comcast bandwidth limits. First, these limits aren't really new, they're just finally disclosed to the public. People have been being cut off for exceeding for awhile but Comcast steadfastly refused to tell those people exactly what the hidden limit was.

It's been reported in a few different places, that despite imposing bandwidth limitations, Comcast won't be providing it's customers with a way to check how much bandwidth they've used. Instead they suggest buying a program to monitor your usage. I'd imagine in the future more consumer grade routers will have to come with bandwidth monitors, because more and more ISPs seem to be moving towards "charge more, give less" bandwidth capping business model.

Even the electric company and water department give you a meter. Most of us don't look at those meters, but the option is there for you to see how much you've used. Then again, the electric company doesn't tell you that you can only use your lights for x amount of hours a month and then we'll cut you off. Your bill just varies depending on how much you use it.

The closest tech equivalent that I can think of would be cell phones. You get x amount of minutes and then charged more, etc. However, the cell phone companies give you ways to see how many of those minutes they used. They have to do that. I imagine, that like Comcast, they didn't really want you to be able to look at your usage. If you couldn't then they could charge you more on their say so. I'm assuming there was some sort of intervention of some sort that forced their hand on customers being able to check their usage. Probably by the FCC.

That'll happen to Comcast. People that have been cut off in the past have talked about lawsuits, among the other bad word of mouth this has gotten Comcast. All it will take is them cutting off somebody with enough clout or money, or even just some lawyers getting greedy and coming up with a class action suit. Just you wait and see.

Also, Comcast aren't doing charges for bandwidth overages. Instead, it's go over the limit twice and they cut off your service. You can't attempt to get a new internet account with them for a year. Terrible enough as it is, but in many areas they're a monopoly with no other high-speed competition. You can thank exclusive contracts that cable companies have with municipalties for that wonderful sort of screwing of the consumer. Without competition these companies can charge what they want, and if you don't like it you don't really have anywhere else to go except back to an antenna for TV and dialup for internet.

Comcast Bandwidth Caps At 250 Gigs Starting October 1st

Well, the unsurprising has finally happened. Comcast have annouced their bandwidth caps. They're surprisingly reasonable, coming in at 250 gigs a month. Compare that with the 2-40 gigs a month I've read about other providers proposing as their own caps. A few things still haven't been made clear...

1) Is that cap 250 gigs up and down or just down?

2) What happens if you exceed 250 gigs? Do you get shut down? Will Comcast impose some sort of over-bandwidth charges?

3) Will Comcast provide some sort of web-based tool to check out your bandwidth consumption for the month? Call me cynical, but when it comes to things like being charged for every gig over the limit, I'm not a "take their word for it" sort of guy.

I can only imagine what'll happen to Comcast customers not computer savy enough to secure their wireless connections.

Then there's unwanted annoyances like Flash video commercials that play on websites. Not just banners, but actual TV commercials. Don't think the bandwidth from those doesn't add up.

So, while limits like these seem tolerable now, as more things go online they're going to chafe more and more.

The two biggest reasons for these sort of caps are to allow cable companies to continue to oversell their nodes without putting money into upgrading their infrastructure and to shut out their on-demand video competition. Think about it. Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Netflix, and Amazon, just to name a few are all offering HD video on-demand services. Those services will be crippled for users with bandwidth caps. Where will they have to turn for on-demand programming at that point? That's right, back to their cable company.

Read about this story at the following links...

It's official: Comcast starts 250GB bandwidth caps October 1

Comcast Metered Broadband Official — Beware What You Download

Comcast 250GB Cap Goes Live October 1

Comcast's own Announcement Regarding An Amendment to Our Acceptable Use Policy

Things In Threes Theory

Wow, first Morgan Freeman had that car accident, then Bernie Mac died. Now Isaac Hayes has died. Seems like a bad week to be an older black male celebrity.

Be Nice To Batman Or Else

Batman star Christian Bale arrested on assault allegations.

Who'd he (allegedly) assault? His mom and sister. Sounds like Batman might be a bit of a dick.

It's more than likely that somewhere out there is somebody who would pay good money to get smacked around by Bale. They'd probably even pay more money if he was wearing the Batman suit while he did it.

Edit: I've read in several places that the alleged assault was verbal. WTF? They actually arrest people for verbal assault in the UK? If they did that in the US the streets would be empty.

George Carlin Died

Here's the story. All I can say is that I'm bummed out about this. There aren't too many celebrity deaths that would make me sad, but this is one of them.