Buzz Out Loud 831: Marginalized whackjob fringe

Tom couldn't decide whether to go with the "marginalized whackjob" wall paint, or just get a marginalized whackjob fringe. Vote? In other news of the day, the McCain campaign discovers that the DMCA can be ANNOYING! Maybe they'll do something about it once they're back in politics-land! Also, EA says no one cares about DRM except an organized online cabal. We know how well that attitude worked out for the music industry.

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EPISODE 831

McCain campaign complains about takedown notice procedure
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1795
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081014-mccainpalin-campaign-angry-over-bogus-dmca-takedowns.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10066510-38.html

YouTube says: no special treatment
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10066738-38.html

99.8% of gamers don’t care about DRM, says EA
http://games.slashdot.org/games/08/10/15/1525259.shtml

Worldwide PC market grew 15 percent in third quarter of 2008
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=777613

YouTube passes yahoo as #2 search engine
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/14/1645227

First look: Firefox 3.1 beta 1 officially released
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081014-first-look-firefox-3-1-beta-1-officially-released.html

Software blocks car phone users
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7669533.stm

SanDisk releases $20 slotMusic Player, dozens of SD card albums
http://gizmodo.com/5063564/sandisk-releases-20-slotmusic-player-dozens-of-sd-card-albums

Amazon, EA, Microsoft, others win ‘Popular Mechanics’ Breakthrough Awards
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10066453-52.html

Banjo used in rain surgery
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/14/1945249

VOICEMAIL
Anonymous: Why with the MacBook Pro!? Why!?

E-MAIL

I’m still a day behind, so I just finished episode 830. Molly, you keep griping about this flash bug; I used to get it too, but no more. The solution is simple: Flashblock (http://flashblock.mozdev.org/). Flash items are not loaded, and are replaced with a little play button, allowing you to load selectively, so you never have enough flash things open to cause them all to break. It also ends up speeding up page load time, and you never have to see that annoying dancing person on the “mortgage rates” ad ever again.

Love the show!

-Anthony
Dallas, TX

**********

Totally disagree w/ your assessment. We have one Blu-ray player and several DVD players. Providing a DVD copy for the minivan, either of the kids’ rooms, and any of our computers is brilliant. I don’t want the kids handling the BD Disk b/c I’ve seen what they do to the DVD’s. Also, it allows my sister-in-law to borrow a movie, which she can’t whenever we only have it in Blu-ray.

Joe in WI

**********

Hi all of you,

I was checking out the new MacBook Pro on the American page of Apple
to see the specs and everything. http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs.html
Then I went the the Swiss page to check the price and… boom 30 minutes of
the battery life of the Mac Book vanished, only 4.5 hours. Then I went
back to the American site: 5 hours.
All the other specs are the same and everything except for the battery
life… strange

Pierre from Switzerland (Yes, I live nearby the CERN.)

P.S. could you send me a MacBook Pro from the USA with the 5 hours battery
life?

**********

Hola Buzz Brigade,

You guys have probably read that Sony has pushed out it’s latest firmware for the PS3. Some of the features include additional support for trophies and the ability to set a sleeper shutdown for the controllers (which is so freakin’ BOSS!). But the other “coolerer” feature that they didn’t mention during their original announcement is that Flash 9 was also included. Which mean now I can watch Hulu directly from the PS3 browser without having to use a third party app to stream it to my PS3 via XNLA. This is a great bonus.

Amazon on Demand doesn’t appear to work but I’ll take one win where I can. Besides, the PSN video store is pretty freakin’ huge and keeps growing by hundreds of titles each week.

Just thought I’d let you know.

Love the show (except when Molly rants on the PS3–such a lame 360 fanboi )

Tim

**********

Hey guys,
Just a “well actually.” The DisplayPort is actually a new industry standard. It’s not created by Apple. Dell started using it before Apple did, in fact. It’s supposed to be better in performance than DVI, not to mention plug in better than DVI ports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displayport

OK, fine, so maybe the “Mini DisplayPort” is a proprietary version of the normal DisplayPort.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_DisplayPort

They like to “improve” existing technology.

Oh, and you’ll probably know this by now, but the 9400M and the 9600M are not options. They’re BOTH found in the MacBook Pro. You get to switch between them to decide between battery life and performance.

Daniel from Singapore.

**********

FROM THE FORUMS — TOLLIE:
Here’s what I was hoping you’d amend/correct from your reporting yesterday: DisplayPort--not proprietary, VESA standard, will be Apple-wide, also backed by Dell, HP, Intel, et al… and Aluminum MacBooks have no firewire--Apple is bumping Firewire off the consumer line… Trackpad takes away a button, but you can now define TWO button regions (i.e. a right-click area). Hopefully not as dumb as the Mighty Mouse.

**********

Hey BOL crew, you said you wanted to try talking to the robots pretending to be humans online. Well actually, you can. http://elbot.com (press the red button)

I’m not sure if it’s exactly the same Elbot as in the test, because this has been on the Internet for quite a while.

Thanks for the great podcast ,
Keelin