Silverwolf's Auditorium

In response to : Google Doodle for Australia Day

Harold Thomas,

Force an 11 year old to change her contest winning artwork design because you wanna get paid ?

Take your lame flag design and go home you greedy fuck.  Her artwork was way better than yours anyway.

Here's hoping you get run over by a bus real soon.

This story is frankly very disturbing to me because I have always been a firm believer in the whole "Google is not evil" thing.  Myself and most of my family and friends all use Google services, due in large part to the fact that I recommend them every chance I get.  But this feels like a Microsoft move to me and it's causing me to seriously re-think my opinion of Google.

Read the whole story here.

Blizzard sends a C&D to Warcraft Characters, other iPhone apps

If they start acting like the Mafia i'm going to cancel my paid account and start playing on free servers again.

Here's to you Blizzard

From Techdirt:

It would appear that the recording industry now likes to call any sort of business model it doesn't like "piracy." At least that's the only explanation I can come up with in its latest battle, where it has referred to traditional radio as "a form of piracy." It's almost too bizarre to be true, and that's before we even explain how this involves a (literal) can of herring.

I still just don't understand this kind of thinking.  The recording industry wouldn't even exist if it were not for Radio making it's artists popular.  In fact the status-quo in the past 50 years is for the Record Labels to pay radio stations to play their artists more often in order to make more money selling CD's.

From Techdirt:

Earlier this year, a court agreed to examine whether or not the fines the RIAA is asking for in its lawsuits against people accused of file sharing is constitutional (that whole "cruel and unusual" bit). The RIAA, in response, has fought hard to keep from revealing any information about how much a download really costs, but a judge isn't having any of that and has ordered the RIAA in the UMG v. Lindor case to turn over the data.

Anyone who is unbiased on these issues will tell you that the numbers the RIAA is seeking (and in one case was awarded) are clearly ridiculous.  Songs sell for 0.99 each on iTunes and any demand for more than three times that is extremely excessive.

Downloading 24 songs from the Internet should be a $72.00 fine, but in this case the RIAA was awarded over $200,000 from a single mother.  Would any unbiased person anywhere say that isn't excessive ?