Dude! Joe's Jottings, Mostly Junk

Left this on a comment at another blog, but it basically repeats something I wrote on FB when it happened:

I’ve got all of the Looney Tunes golden collections (then hunted on youtube the rest until they get officially released), though from there I ripped them all into individual ones I can shuffle so it is more like what Saturday Morning (when the BB-RR Show was 90 minutes long) was like when I was a kid. Thus, I’m already selective of which ones I’ll include, leaving most of the black-and-whites and some of the Tex Avery’s and Bob Clampett’s out.

One thing that bothered me is their repeat of gags that really just weren’t funny. It isn’t just that they were wrong (though they were), it is that they weren’t funny. Especially when they were totally out of theme of the rest of the material.

Case in point, a bit totally not in the original book of Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hatches the Egg, that Clampett added to the 1942 cartoon – at one point as the boat crosses the ocean to take him to the circus, a fish sees it, goes “now I’ve seen everything”, and quickly pulls out a revolver from nowhere and blows his head off. I’d forgotten it was there, as it had been cut from syndicated versions since the late 80s so Cartoon Network’s broadcasts never had it.

And it all happened faster than I could react to stopping it before my 3 year old daughter basically saw her first on-screen suicide (her first on-screen death was the dinosaurs in Fantasia, but I was there to talk her through that *before* it happened, making it clear that not all dinosaurs are nice like Buddy and Mr. Conductor ;-) ). The most I could do was repeat “it’s not funny” a few times and then start talking about the plot as it took over from there, because it’s true. It isn’t funny.

It is a gag that the Termite Terrace used at least a dozen times in those early years, and it has never been funny. I honestly have no idea why they thought it was funny enough to keep repeating over and over, and worse still, stick it into a Dr. Seuss work where it absolutely didn’t belong.

No wonder (besides the war and a few other projects) it would be more than two decades before Seuss was willing to let someone animate his work again.

In any case, not every aspect of the Termite Terrace years is bad because of stereotyped racism, or overt sexuality. Silly gun violence is one thing, but un-funny suicides are something different and deserve just as much a warning as the rest.

A touch over a year ago I ranted about how prismnet had sold off the domain 'io.com' (my original isp) and wouldn't say who they sold it to, having me worried about the idea that spammers had bought it in order to re-open customers email accounts (like my acroyear at io.com) in order to collect personal information and create either unwanted direct marketing spam or worse, identity theft.

It turns out all is well.  io.com is owned by I/O Data Centers LLC (official domain, http://www.iodatacenters.com/ ), and they're legit.  

after way the hell too many years, the account name I originally wanted (just acroyear, no 70) has finally been purged as having 0 friends, 0 posts, 0 watchers, 0 user pics, and 0 interest from whomever had it for so long.

now, with the great drop in LJ usage thanks to FB (and life in general), i'm not even sure I want it anymore...

Technology Devices Either Sell Big or Die Fast - NYTimes.com:

These days, big technology companies — particularly those in the hypercompetitive smartphone and tablet industries — are starting to resemble Hollywood film studios. Every release needs to be a blockbuster, and the only measure of success is the opening-weekend gross. There is little to no room for the sleeper indie hit that builds good word of mouth to become a solid performer over time.

When Microsoft released the Xbox 360 in 2005, there were widespread reliability issues and the console faced serious competition from the Nintendo Wii, yet the company stayed the course, and now the Xbox is one of the best-selling video game consoles of all time. That kind of tenacity seems to be in diminishing supply.

Some analysts trace the origin of this blockbuster-or-bust mentality to Apple. Each release of the company’s popular iPads and iPhones crosses over into being a mainstream media event

Apple Has More Cash Than U.S. Treasury | The Onion - America's Finest News Source | American Voices:

Well, the user experience in this country is just terrible.

Lou Gajda
Cable Splicer

Great, so why don't we sell them a couple of aircraft carriers and we'll be back in black.

Sonya Howland
Film Flat Inspector

This is why I took all my money out of U.S. currency and put it into safe, stable iTunes gift cards.

Philip Keeton
Yeast-Culture Developer

Google+ Growing As a Social Backbone - Slashdot:

Why is Google+ growing so quickly?

Because everybody on G+ only had to push one button to become a G+ user because they were already on Google in the first place. If you had gmail, google reader, picasa, google calendar, google documents, any google group, you were already in the unified system.  People don't have to "join" google the way they had to join facebook because they were already there.

If anything, G+ adoption is probably slower than it could have been.

Open source personal health record: no need to open Google Health - O'Reilly Radar:

Predictably, free software advocates say, "make Google Health open source!" This also misses the point. The unique attributes of cloud computing were covered in a series of articles I put up a few months ago. As I explain there, the source code for services such as Google Health is not that important. The key characteristic that makes Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault appealing is...that they are run by Google and Microsoft. Those companies were banking on the trust that the public has for large, well-endowed institutions to maintain a service. And Google's decision to shutter its Health service (quite reasonable because of its slow take-off) illustrates the weakness of such cloud services.

I'm inclined to agree. What *should* be opensource is any library that is used to access a cloud system (which Google does for almost everything), particularly if there are security elements because more eyeballs looking at security source code improves it rather than makes it more vulnerable (an attitude Microsoft continues to fight, and lose as more and more viruses attack their software while other more open works prove more resilient).

But the client library is useless without the server, and if nobody will host the server, then there's no point.

Mike the Mad Biologist reaches the same conclusion I did about the "feature" that allows a concert venue to shut down your camera when it gets the infrared blip -

How a Future Feature of the iPhone Gives Civil Libertarians an Incentive to Unlock It : Mike the Mad Biologist:

But wait, Mad Biologist, this is just about the illegal recording of private events, isn't it?

Well, how long do you think it will be before your friendly local government decides to buy some of these things and flash them around political demonstrations? Maybe add some extra 'functionality' too, like shutting down the phone entirely or Teh Twitterz.

Or maybe cops might carry a device like this in their car and trigger it when they decide to pull someone over so their possibly illegal actions can't be recorded?

So PrismNet has said it sold off the io.com domain and won't tell us to whom.  Doesn't seem like much, right?

Except it is.  It is a huge deal.  And not just for those who currently have io.com email addresses.

Back in the golden age of a zillion ISPs, you didn't buy your own domain.  You hosted on someone else's.  Your account was YOURNAME@ispdomain.com, and your website was often www.ispdomain.com/~YOURNAME.  This was true for io.com, for erols.com, and continues to be true as a service offered by a number of cable and phone companies, as well as a handful of 90s-era ISPs still out there.

Prismnet acquired io.com (originally owned by Steve Jackson, as Illuminati Online, a spin-off of the BBS that the secret service tried to kill in 1990) sometime in the mid 2000s.  Out of my loyalty to SJ, io.com was my first hosting company, and I quite liked how they ran it.  When Prismnet came along, they (unlike A Small Orange's acquisition of Drak) changed the pricing structures to things that were horribly out of whack with industry practices.  I'd have paid my "lifetime" drak price and only gotten about 2 years, with fewer services and less support.  Needlesstosay, prismnet had to go.

BUT that meant going through every single place out there that was legitimately sending me email and changing my email addresses.  That took time.  And I know I didn't get them all.  I know that plenty of them ignore the email change and continued to send to the old one long after I'd said I'd changed it.  I also know that plenty of spam services out there have that ancient email, thanks to how public I was with it back in the 90s, particularly in usenet (AFR).

Spam messages tell someone a lot more than just that I'm a guy named Joe who doesn't need viagra.  If your email address is sold (perhaps in violation of terms of service, but there you go), it is often sold with other marketing information about your interests, and even perhaps your name and things you've bought from the company that sold you out.  The address might also be linkable to other online services and eventually connect to your real address (whois is horrible for this).

While Prismnet was still the owner of io.com, I could trust that they were a legitimate business that would be taking all email messages still floating out there going to acroyear at io.com and routing them into the /dev/null bitbucket.  Good riddance.

Except that's no longer the case.  acroyear at io.com is no longer trustworthy.  The new owners of io.com could configure their email systems to capture all io.com email traffic intended for current and former io.com customers, and perhaps some very personal information being sent by someone who didn't get the memo that your address changed (acroyear at io.com is still in plenty of address books out there I'm sure...).  Rather than route it to null, they could be capturing that and selling it to other servers that will use that to connect your old address to your new one and put you in touch with a whole new level of spam hell you never thought possible. 

The fact that Prismnet won't tell us who bought it is extremely troubling to me.

For the current customers still living on io.com addresses, its even more troubling to them: they now have less than 3 weeks to get everybody they know to change the email on file.  Most probably won't get to them all until its too late and this new company gets serious, and *current*, private information about them.

And the trouble is that this is true for any domain that goes into the "available" bucket - a piece of what was once your identity is now no longer in your control, or in the control of a company you trust.  This is a BIG deal...

[update] - I actually described a related problem with the resale of domains and addresses over 2 years ago.

but it is hilarious...

grokked from jwz