Cats...more balls than brains.

Check out this cat...video could have ended very differently.

I give her an F for effort

Now this is an inspiring piece of parenting. How disgusting.

Best recap ever

If you're a Lost fan then you have to watch this fan created video. Someone went through all five seasons and pulled together all the scenes of the crash of Oceanic 815 then put them together 24-style. It's hard to follow some parts but still awesome.



It would be awesome if the creators of Lost could come up with some way to do this for lots of pivotal moments on a DVD extra or boxset.

Ouch

I found it odd that recent articles had referred to the world's tallest building as the Burj Khalifa instead of the name it had always been known has, the Burj Dubai. The Burj was meant to be the ultimate example of the wealth, power and prestige that the leaders of Dubai have been spending billions of dollars to build over the last few years. Unfortunately, all that money spent has driven them into stratospheric levels of debt which resulted in them having to seek a 20+ billion dollar bailout from their SLIGHTLY more restrained neighbor, Abu Dhabi.

The new name, was announced only minutes before the building's official opening ceremony by the leader of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. What is the significance of that name....it's happens to be the family name of the leaders of Abu Dhabi. Now that amazing building stands as testament to Dubai's reckless spending.

That has to hurt.

Oh and here are some new interior pictures of the Burj Khalifa, they are pretty stunning.

I spit in your eye

NBC and Conan O'Brien may have finally come to an agreement about his leaving The Tonight Show but that doesn't mean that Conan is going to cut them any slack. Of course NBC doesn't have to play ball either.

That will help...

The Supreme Court may have opened the flood gates for corporations and other business entities to more thoroughly buy politicians. This is the extreme downside to the idea that corporations are entitled to the same Constitutional rights and protections as individual citizens. I'm not saying that corporations don't deserve protected speech rights but at what point does a deep pocketed multinational corporation have the ability to effectively drown out the voice of individual constituents or small local organizations?

I really disappointed that The Supreme Court as ruled in this manner because it is obvious that Congress is incapable of legislating these matters themselves. So much for checks and balances. The amount of money being paid to some Members of Congress is really sickening and if you don't think that it will ultimately result in a failure of the Democratic Process then you are an idiot. My personal favorite idea for removing the veil of bought politicians is the idea that they should be required to wear Nascar style uniforms with the names of their largest campaign contributors emblazoned on them. Or they should be required to talk like the Nascar guys do, "This bill was a really hard win but the Merck lobby team threw a ton of money at me and we greased this bitch right through committee."

Help for Haiti FAIL!

Here are some runners up to Pat Robertson for the most likely to not help Haiti in their current humanitarian crisis.

Faith Comes By Hearing sends 600 "audio bibles" to Haiti earthquake victims. Way more useful than actual radios that could pickup vital transmissions from overflying USAF radio stations. FAIL!

John Travolta to airlift "e-meters" to Haiti to help victims with Scientology "Purification Rundowns". Are you fucking serious? No, I don't need food and water because Xenu has polluted my soul! MEGA FAIL!

The Pay Wall

Learn that term because it is going to be THE topic of 2010. The idea of "The Pay Wall" is a paradigm shift in thinking about online information. For the last decade we have all been trained that Internet content is "free" because most content providers currently use an advertising supported model to run their websites. Well, that model is either not financially viable (bullshit) or just not lucrative enough (ding, ding, ding). Why do I say the ad supported works....how the fuck did Google become the behemoth that they are? If you answered by selling internet based advertising then pat yourself on the back.

The only really successful large scale "Pay Wall" based content provider is The Wall Street Journal which most people agree is a special case due to their limited audience. Apparently The New York Times thinks that they can follow the WSJ lead and start charging for access to their content. That means that ANYONE that clicks on a link to a NYT article is going to have a subscription and will have to login prior to reading the article that link points to. So the real question is...how much is NYT online content worth to you? Currently the WSJ online only subscription is $1.99 per week which is $.30 less than the print edition(6 days a week delivered.) The NYT is currently running $3.70 per week (five days delivered) for their print edition, so would you pay $1-$3 per week to be able to click on links to NYT content?

I'm sorry but I'm not going to sit and read enough of the NYT on a computer screen or even an eReader (Kindle, Nook, etc) to make that worth while when I can get similar content from any one of another dozen papers at no cost. You should pray that this fails because if this actually works and they get enough morons willing to fork over this subscription fee then you can bet that every other news organization with an Internet presence will follow suit.

This whole idea of a Pay Wall goes pack to the old days of America Online. AOL started out as not just an Internet Service Provider but a content provider. The concept was you were connecting to AOL to get information and content that AOL wanted you to see, content that they paid for or paid to have created. The problem was that once you could get to the larger Internet via AOL that bloated content infrastructure became irrelevant because there was so much more and better content beyond AOL's walled garden.

Freely available, ad supported content is what has grown the Internet to the amazing thing it is today. That model has made "New Media" companies into the successful businesses that they are today. Now "Old Media" behemoths have realized that they cannot support their massive infrastructure that was built around a dying business model with Internet advertising revenue. The newspaper industry, and I mean the idea of actually collecting information and printing it on paper then distributing that paper, is a Victorian throwback. The business has lost market share and relevance to every other form of media that as come along in the last hundred years. The radio came along and stole some of the advertising money that went to newspapers AND it eroded the newspaper's dominance on disseminating news to the masses. Then along came television which again cannibalized the ad revenue and now you can get your news by watching pretty people talk. But those types of media are fundamentally different than newsprint being audio/visual in nature.

The Internet represents the nail in the newspaper coffin because you consume content in nearly the same way, by reading text on a surface of some form. But think of all the HUGE advantages of getting your text based news via the Internet instead of a sheet of paper. Interactive content, audio/video integration, searchability, manipulation of the size of print.....how about COLOR images(I know that's a cheap shot.) I personally think that the death of the newspaper and professional journalism is a bad thing. I believe in the idea of "The Fourth Estate" and believe that professional journalism is vital to a stable society. Journalists provide a vital check against secrecy in both the private and public sectors.

There's an expression that has gone around the Internet for years, "Innovate or die." The Newspaper business in general has resisted Innovation and now they are dying.