The Looming Showdown

Rupert Murdoch, the man who loves newspapers, is tinkering with the idea of preventing Google from indexing information on the servers of his leviathan media company. Murdoch believes that he can build a "pay wall" to prevent the unwashed masses from accessing his hard bought media without first paying for it. I appreciate the position that he is in; his company generates news information at a cost and they have failed to find a viable method to monetize Internet access to that information. There is no doubt that Murdoch is an extremely successful business man the problem is that the business that he knows and loves is dying out. For better or worse charging someone for news content is just not a workable solution given all the years of having that information freely available. Television and radio started stealing mindshare from newspaper a long time ago and the Internet is just the nail in the coffin.

America Online thought that they could make the "walled garden" idea of providing content a profitable business. For a while they were very successful because they had almost no competition. Once AOL users discovered the endless amounts of freely available content and services available on the Internet beyond AOL the game was up. Does News Corp. have enough compelling content to convince people to pay for it? There's an entire generation that has grown up with "free" access to media of all types via the Internet....no one likes to pay for something they used to get for free.

That sucks

Read this story about a woman that is allergic to her husband's sperm....talk about a buzkill. The story says they went out for two years before they discovered this little fact. I'll let you ponder the implications of that statement....needless to say he must really love her.

RIP PC Gaming

The Call of Duty series of games has been huge over the last few years selling millions of copies on virtually every platform out there. Not all of the version have been produced by the Infinity Ward but most agree the best versions of the game have been made by them.

They got their start making Call of Duty primarily for the PC because when the original game debuted that was the only good way to support online multiplayer. Then along came Xbox Live and for a while it was just kind of a joke compared to playing multiplayer games on a PC. While XBOX Live has come a long way in the last few years, especially since the XBOX360 launch, there are still HUGE problems that prevent the service from being superior to true online multiplayer.

Well Infinity Ward has officially stabbed PC Gaming in the back. The latest Call of Duty game is a console game first and a PC game just by accident. They have stripped anything of value out of the PC version of the game and basically turned it into a game not worth buying. I was really looking forward to Modern Warfare 2 but now I could care less. It shouldn't come as a surprise because console gaming is growing rapidly while PC gaming as a whole is dying.

Playing any game on XBOX Live these days in an exercise in pain. The average XBOX Live user is some 12 year old spoiled little shit with a mouth like a sailor who only cares about talking about how badass he thinks he is....until his mom makes him logoff to do his homework.

The Undead Car Brand

GM may have killed off Pontiac but you can never kill Pontiac fanboys. The TransAm depot is a company that specializes in restoring classic TransAms. But what they have come up with now is nothing short of staggering.

The Phoenix T/A conversion takes the newest Camaro SS (the long standing sister car to the TransAm) and completely re-skins it to look like what a true Pontiac T/A would look like. This thing makes the Camaro look like it was beat with an ugly stick.

I know....who in their right mind is going to pay $85K for a TransAm? Burt Reynolds?

Meet in the middle

Next time someone starts yammering about how ineffective Obama has been during the first year since he one the election you can bring up this article. Don't buy the hype....shit is changing.

ACT NOW!

Help save the Internet! Do your part to support Net Neutrality, you can contact your Congressional Representative via their website. Prevent Congress from allowing the telecommunications lobby to influence the direction of the Internet.

Subscribers wanted?

Apparently Apple is toying with offering a new service via iTunes. Basically, you would pay $30 a month for a subscription TV service fed via iTunes. So a flat rate $30 per month to download all the television shows that I normally pay 80$ to watch on cable? Hmm.....somehow I just don't think that is going to make Comcast very happy. If it's HD quality, the selection is good AND the commercials are shorter or non existent then this is could be fantastic!

This would really dovetail nicely with the rumors that Apple is re-thinking their lackluster AppleTV device. The AppleTV has pretty much failed to find a market and people were talking about Apple either revamping the existing device OR start selling LCD TVs with some kind of built-in "client" for iTunes. You can already buy a LCD TV with built in Netflix streaming so how hard would it be?

Awesome Costume

This is the best handicapped costume ever. May be NSFW.