My view of the world

Bethesda released Fallout 3 at midnight at 2000 locations.

Just before the release they pulled all trailers for the game.

According to Bethesda pulling the trailers was done to comply with ESRB regulations.

From Guidelines: Violence

* Graphic and/or excessive depictions of violence
* Graphic and/or violent depictions of the use of weapons
* Graphic and/or excessive depictions of blood and/or gore
* Allusions or depictions of acts of verbal or physical abuse toward children
* Allusions or depictions of violent or degrading behavior toward women
* Allusions or depictions of torture or other violent acts toward animals
* Allusions or depictions of torture, mutilation or sadism
* Violence toward a political or public figure
* Allusions or depictions of acts of arson or fire play

Yeah I can see the problem. But they don’t let you set kids on fire any more. Doesn’t that count for something?

You notice they kept the trailers until the last minute and then pulled every last one of them in what looks to me to be a publicity stunt.

I suppose if you had something like $60 million invested in a game you’d do whatever you could to get that ol’ ROI.

After talking to a friend on the subject of Oblivion he came up with an accurate description of what Bethesda’s main problem is. Every quest is developed in isolation and then spliced in to the main game.

There are no alternative solutions so the main NPCs have to be immortal in order for any of it to play out to it’s neatly ordered solution.

The list of problems goes on. I was impressed by the graphics and unimpressed by identical dungeons, leveled loot and the same voice actors playing opposite each other while discussing mud crabs.

I wouldn’t say that the ongoing discussion of mud crabs and goblins annoyed me, but did you know that it’s impossible to kill everyone in the Imperial City?

Because I expect Fallout 3 to be a pretty but unimaginative replay of Oblivion, until I hear something different from someone whose expectations are similar to my own, I’ve decided Bethesda can get richer without my help.

From the BBC: Men who suffer from premature ejaculation may be able to blame their genes, work suggests.
–We told you it’s not our fault. It’s our grandfather’s fault.

The volunteers in Dr Marcel Waldinger’s study were 89 men who had so-called primary premature ejaculation, meaning they had always suffered from it from their first sexual contact onwards.

For a month, their female partners were asked to use a stopwatch at home to measure the time until ejaculation each time they had intercourse. —If your lady has nothing better to do that watch a stopwatch I think that premature ejaculation is the least of your problems.

Paula Hall, a sexual psychotherapist for Relate, said: “Premature ejaculation is definitely not purely psychological.

“But there can be a psychological element. The acid test is how much control they have on their own. If the problem only occurs with their partner then it is more likely to be psychological.” –”Sorry Hon, gotta go, the game’s starting.”

Treatments involve counselling and the use of anti-depressants - not for depression but for their unexpected yet wanted side effect of delaying ejaculation. –Trust me. If this is an uncontrollable problem, the guy will be depressed.

The Flying Alarm Clock.

This digital alarm clock launches a rotor into the air that flies around the room as the alarm sounds, hovering up to 9′ in the air, and will not cease ringing until the rotor is returned to the alarm clock base.

This means that there’s no snooze button and you have to get up and fetch the propeller.

Or how about a personal favorite:
The Runaway Alarm Clock.

This is the alarm clock that rolls away and hides when you hit its snooze button, and it continues to emit a random pattern of beeps and flashes, encouraging drowsy sleepers to seek it out in order to shut it off. It is built from shatter-resistant ABS and has two rubber wheels that allow it to roll off your nightstand from a height of 2′ when it sounds its alarm.

Both of these are available from Hammacher Schlemmer

This is from Improbable Research Medical Review

U.S. patent #2033357 [NOTE inserted later: This was a typo. The correct patent number is 7,255,627.] was granted to Elena N. Bodnar of Hinsdale, Illinois, and Raphael C. Lee and Sandra Marijan of Chicago on August 14, 2007 for an “Garment device convertible to one or more facemasks.” Their intent, they say, is “to provide a garment which is operable to be converted into a facemask” and “to increase accessibility to facemasks.”

This is:

a garment device which converts into one or more facemasks. In one embodiment, the garment device is a bra or a brassiere garment. The bra has two cups…. The inner portions of the cups are disconnectable, and the outer portions of the cups are disconnectable. As such, the bra is separable into two halves. Each halve is securable to a user’s face to form a facemask….

If a country or a territory is facing an on-going threat of air contamination, there is a need for these individuals as well as regular civilians to have a higher degree of access to facemasks.

It’s also handy if you happen to rob banks for a living…. “No officer I don’t know how tall she was, but her facemask was a D-cup.”

In case you missed it:
The U. S. Association of Rock Paper Scissors, held it’s first national play off here in Vegas. The tournament was shown on the A&E Network on June 12, 2006. It was sponsored by Bud Light.

In April 2006, the inaugural USA Rock Paper Scissors League Championship was held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Following months of regional qualifying tournaments held across the US, 257 players were flown to Las Vegas for a single-elimination tournament at the House of Blues where the winner received $50,000.

$50k and a free trip to Las Vegas? And their mothers said they’d never amount to anything if all they did was hang around in bars playing silly games.

I don’t know if the USARPS still exists, but the World RPS Society seems to be doing well.

From the World Rock Paper Scissors Society’s website:
After a tournament with extreme amounts of rocks (editors note: Don’t the Norwegian players know that “Rock is for Rookies?”) , the player that never retreated to scissors won - and won big. Vegard Berg will join Team Norway Vikings in next month’s Yahoo! RPS World Championships in Toronto. This will be the fifth year in a row that Norway will compete for the world title, with a well prepared and diverse team with skills in both street, physique, psyche and endurance.

Norway has publicly stated that they aim for a Norwegian world champion by 2010.

If you go to the World RPS Society website you will find a link titled “advanced RPS.”

Yup. There’s an advanced method of playing rock-paper-scissors. here’s a quote from that page: “Some players choose to retain the services of a personal trainer.”

I hope it’s all a joke, but somehow it seems too serious to be funny.

Washington Post - Someone was attacking women in Fairfax County and Alexandria, grabbing them from behind and sometimes punching and molesting them before running away. After logging 11 cases in six months, police finally identified a suspect.

David Lee Foltz Jr., who had served 17 years in prison for rape, lived near the crime scenes. To figure out if Foltz was the assailant, police pulled out their secret weapon: They put a Global Positioning System device on Foltz’s van, which allowed them to track his movements.

Police said they soon caught Foltz dragging a woman into a wooded area in Falls Church. After his arrest on Feb. 6, the string of assaults suddenly stopped. The break in the case relied largely on a crime-fighting tool they would rather not discuss.

So far, the U.S. Supreme Court has not weighed in on unwarranted GPS tracking, but supporters point to a 1983 case that said police do not need a warrant to track a car on a public street with a beeper, which relays the car’s location to police.

As a civilian, should you feel the need; you can go online to a company like Brick House Security and buy a device, place it on their vehicle and pay a monthly fee to track your future ex-wife, your teenager or your business partner.

This unit is attached by magnets, costs $1999 but doesn’t require a service since it reports directly to a cell phone tethered to your laptop.

The Brick House site has a bunch of other cool stuff. –Including voice changers for making those anonymous threatening phone calls to your boss… Oops. Did I say that out loud?

I traded in my Sigma 120-400mm and bought a Nikon 80-400mm. –There was nothing wrong with the Sigma, in fact it focused faster, but I feel more comfortable with the Nikon.

I got to Sunset Park just in time for the first annual Duck vs Coot race.

Obviously the little guy was at a disadvantage. In the excitement it seems he forgot he was allowed to fly.

And Duck wins easily.

Our proud winner swims out to greet his fans.

(Click on any of the images to view a much larger version.)

I also put up a photo gallery: Away From the Lights

For those of you that have wondered how Google was going to monetize YouTube, here’s the first clue.

After months of experimenting with long-form video, YouTube said on Friday it would start offering full-length episodes of some television shows on its sprawling Web site.

“This is what the users want,” said Jordan Hoffner, the director of content partnerships for YouTube.

With the addition of TV series like “Dexter,” “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Star Trek” through a deal with CBS, YouTube is catching up to other Web sites that have promoted long-form video for some time.

Most important for YouTube’s owner, Google, the longer videos will include advertising before, during and after each episode. Google is under pressure to raise more revenue from the nearly four-year-old video sharing site.

And there you have it: If YouTube can get exclusive rights to the TV shows or at least get them earlier than they appear elsewhere the advertising scheme just might work.

A 15 second commercial interupting a 1 or 2 minute video is too much. But several 15 second commercials attached to the beginning, middle and end of an hour long video won’t be as offensive.

Just a note in case you missed the Adrian Kingsley-Hughes Blog about it.

It seems that some of the laptop recovery DVDs from ASUS contain not only the OS and drivers, but extra bonus material.

This material includes, among other things:

If you have a fairly recently acquired ASUS laptop you might want to explore your recovery disk. —It could be more interesting than it seems at first glance.

To me it sounds like someone burned a personal copy of the recovery disk and added the tools and data they felt they might need and it somehow got loose.

Either that or someone got pissed and gave the company a computer geek’s one finger salute.

US patent number 7,415,666 describes “a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed”. —IBM keyboards, which were the standard for years, had this feature back when I was running an 8088 chip and a full meg of ram was to expensive for mere mortals even if their motherboard would support it.

Because there exists so much previous art their claim to be the inventors won’t stand up in court. But just in case you think this is a waste of time consider their obvious reasoning. With the size of Microsoft’s legal department(s) and their aggressive anti-competitor approach no one but the major competitors have deep enough pockets to stand against them.

M$ has something approaching 10,000 patents most of which are a pathetic as this one. But each of them gives M$ ammunition for a legal attack that can be used to bankrupt a smaller company.
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What? You really believe M$ invented something? —Fool, even their base os was purchased for about $60k. It was QDOS -Quick and Dirty Operating System. They just renamed it DOS and leased it to IBM.

When IBM first approach M$ about an operating system the company said they didn’t do operating systems, only ports of programming languages.

IBM then went to the inventor of CPM who immediately went off to play tennis or some such, leaving his wife to negotiate. She refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement so IBM went back to Dear ole uncle Bill and company, who by then had figured out an angle.

—And that boys and girls is how desktop computing was lost to the Dark Side.