Buzz Out Loud Podcast

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.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

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

On today's show, we get schooled about how cell phone 911 works, we school the music industry on its consistently terrible ideas regarding physical formats (seriously? Albums on micro SD cards? Are you kidding us with this?), Obama cools his pro Net neutrality stance, and Japan gets to work on the space elevator. Jason already volunteered to go. He's so brave. We'll miss him.

EPISODE 814

SanDisk, record labels announce new music format
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10047311-93.html
http://www.crn.com/retail/210602962
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/22/music-on-microsd-i-cant-believe-the-labels-fell-for-this/

Obama significantly revises technology positions
http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/09/22/0526237.shtml
http://versionista.com/diff/JAS9LMr5qU7q8BSroV8KzQ/

Verizon offers no-contract cell service
http://sprintconnection.kansascity.com/?q=node/802

WordPress ransom?
http://theideasblog.com/2008/09/19/wordpress-ransom/

CERN: Damage to new collider forces 2-month halt
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10047185-76.html

Apple recalling iPhone 3G power adapters
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10046749-37.html

Another useful tool banned from the iPhone App Store
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10047301-1.html

MIT wheelchair steers clear with Wi-Fi
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17912_3-10047399-72.html

Electric Mini spied in Munich
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/09/22/bmw_leccy_mini/

Japan hopes to turn sci-fi into reality with elevator to the stars
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4799369.ece

VOICEMAIL
RogueTess: The Goggle Rig

E-MAIL

Hi Buzz Crew,

In Episode 813, Jason asked how you could punish pirates, instead of subjecting actual customers to a ridiculous DRM. Well, the answer come from the Super Nintendo of all places: HAL laboratories (the people who made the Super Smash Bros. games) and Nintendo-published Earthbound (Mother 2 in Japan). This game is a cult classic now, and the beginning days of emulation revealed their antipiracy methods. If they detected you were playing a pirated copy of the game, they would display screens telling you that piracy was a crime and cause random enemies to spawn more often. The coup de grace was that, halfway through the final boss fight, the game would freeze and erase all of your save data.

All the technical detail: http://www.starmen.net/mother2/gameinfo/antipiracy/

-Scotty

**********

I just wanted to let you know that I launched an eBay auction this morning and one of the options was to provide your Skype ID in addition to e-mail. I don’t know what they ever planned to do with StumbleUpon, but at least they’re doing something marginally useful with Skype.

Adam (Centreville, Va.)

**********

JAMOTONA (hopefully),

On Episode 813 you wondered aloud as to how 911 service works on cell phones. Well hopefully I can enlighten you since I work in the E911 department of a major cell phone provider. 911 calls are routed based on what SECTOR of a cell tower they are being made from. So any call made from a cell phone SHOULD be routed to the county that the cell sector they are on is covering. Not all providers manage their 911 as well as they should, however, so this doesn’t always work like it should. We have a staff of about 100 people that work on the 911 system and it’s not an easy thing to manage, but our company is much better than most of our competition, especially when it comes to locating the cell phone making the call using the phones GPS chip (my specialty).

In conclusion, land lines will always be better for calling 911 because they are associated to an address and they don’t move.

Hope I cleared things up.

Ldub

Oh man. Molly is out for one day and look what happens. Well the Monster story comes form the cable makers attempting to sue the makers of a deer salt lick. Seriously. And Iron Butt refers to a character from X-Men after we got schooled on Magneto by Craig from Omaha. And we talked about porn too.
Listen now: Download today's podcast

EPISODE 771

Episode 771

TiVo and Amazon team up
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/technology/22tivo.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

What is Apple’s mystery product?
http://blogs.eweek.com/applewatch/content/rumors/what_is_apples_mystery_product.html

First hints of Microsoft's 'fight back' ads appear
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=499

Sandisk: Windows Vista not optimized for solid-state drives
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-9996317-64.html

Has Halvar figured out super-secret DNS vulnerability?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1520
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-9996316-83.html

Movie industry eyeing 3D movies for the home theater
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080722-movie-industry-eyeing-3d-movies-for-the-home-theater.html

Turns out porn isn’t recession-proof
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/07/turns-out-por-1.html

A Monster dispute is licked
http://www.startribune.com/business/25638124.html

Global warming stopped by adding lime to sea
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/21/1515229&from=rss

Floating cities on Venus
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/22/0040202&from=rss

VOICE MAIL

Anonymous Physician
How to cool things to (close to) absolute zero.

Todd from Canada
Old-timey copy protection.

Jim the Unix Admin
What about selling things from within games?

E-MAIL

In Episode 770 you guys were the death of PC gaming to piracy, I wanted to let you know just how wrong you are. I’ve been a hardcore gamer for years and I haven’t paid for a PC game since 2005. This isn’t due to piracy, but the crazy amount of money I’m expected to invest into a gaming PC every year.

Both my gaming PC and Xbox 360 are from 2005, and my PC is no longer capable of playing the exact same games available on the Xbox. Have you ever tried playing Bioshock on an Nvidia 6800? It’s a pretty slide show, but not a game.

Guys (and that’s “guys” in the gender-neutral way, Molly/FemaleGuest),

I thought of an analogy to Universal’s argument that they had to issue take-down notices in cases of supposed fair use: imagine a city where the the police automatically gave all people in a public park (who walked through or sat down) tickets for loitering because they assumed that they were homeless or bums, and their defense is that we’ll let the judge determine who’s who. Common sense dictates that the police use discretion in determining who was there for a picnic (fair use) and who was using the park as a toilet (”infringement” & not clog up the courts--unless you live in San Francisco and then nobody gets ticketed for loitering; yeah, I’ve been.

FYI, ordered my iPhone last Monday from AT&T, said it would be 7-10 days, still no love from Apple--love the show!

Chris New
Ankeny, Iowa

Hello Buzz Crew,
In episode 767 Molly mentioned a PS3 price cut, Well technically it’s not really a price cut. All Sony is going to do is replace the 40GB hard drive with an 80GB hard drive.

So you will now have a 80GB PS3 that is not backward compatible and as full featured as the current 80GB model. This is really what I don’t like about Sony. How Many people are thinking this is a real price cut and are going to wait to buy an 80GB model, just to find out its not really the current 80GB model...just the 40GB PS3 with an 80GB hard drive

Here is a quote from the Venture Beat article.

Sony says they will continue selling the 40GB at $399 until they run out of the models. In September, they will start selling the PS 3 80GB models at the $399 price. Those models will have the features of the current 40GB model, not the features of the current 80GB model. That's a bit of a loss for consumers.

Here's the link.

http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/15/with-a-100-price-cut-the-sony-playstation-3-joins-the-console-war/

Him: “OK. I left my iPod at home and want to put my music from iTunes onto my wife’s iPod.”

Me (sternly): “Did you PAY money to iTunes so that you own those songs?”

Him: “Oh, absolutely!”

Me: “Fine. Then you can’t do it.”

Him: “I get punished for playing by the rules?”

Me: “Yup.”

Him: “What if….. I get a DVD and burn all the music files onto the DVD and then load them onto her computer so I can load them onto her iPod?”

Me: “Nope. What you can do, though, is go buy about 500 blank CD’s and make audio CDs with no track information or anything at all then rip those CDs onto your wife’s computer and individually label them all.”

Him: “I see. They have a poison pill in the files?”

Me: “From now on, please buy your music from Amazon.”

Him: “I’m going to go get a cocktail.”

Here’s me. Here’s the dead horse. I will flog and flog and flog.

DRM.

grrr.

E

Emily Page

[Molly, please read this in your geeky voice]

Regarding your comments on yesterday’s episode (in which you wondered if Magneto could harm Wolverine if his skeleton was covered in graphene), I couldn’t disagree with your assertions more. If Magneto is truly the “Master of Magnetism” (as he is often called), then that means that he also has control over the strong and weak nuclear forces that holds all matter together. That means if he really wanted to, he could dematerialize anyone or anything that gave him the stink-eye.

Also, Magneto has such a strong power mutation, he could in fact recover his powers after getting dosed with several antimutation serum injections, as seen in the cinematic masterpiece X-Men 3: The Last Stand.

[end geeky voice]

Love the show,
Craig from Omaha, Neb.

In the great cycle of technology, today is the day-after-Jobs-keynote when we are bummed about the morsels that were dished out the day before. Witness: iPhone activation, lockdown, and data plan woes. Also, ISPs take one big step down the slippery slope, the SUV takes a nosedive, and Stewart and Colbert hit Hulu. Rejoice!

EPISODE 742

Apple may soon be free from AT&T
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-9964695-17.html

iPhone 3G: AT&T memo to retail managers shows iPhone 3G policy
http://gizmodo.com/5014909/att-memo-to-retail-managers-shows-iphone-3g-policy
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06/09/3g_iphone_to_be_in_store_activated_free_upgrade_for_recent_buyers.html
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/the-cost-of-the-199-iphone-10-more-per-month-for-data/
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/0,39029453,49297337,00.htm

3G iPhone ‘free’ on £45-per-month contract, says O2
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4102376.ece

Mac OS X 10.6 details leak out
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9963979-37.html

Why users should be scared of Apple’s new notification system
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9964040-2.html

ISPs agree to block access to child porn sites, newsgroups
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9964432-7.html

Judge orders teens to post apology on YouTube
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2008-06-08-youtube_N.htm

Rising gas prices finally kill the once-mighty SUV
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/06/rising-gas-pric.html

Out of the frying pan and into the power grid
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9961038-54.html

SanDisk acquires MusicGremlin for alternate music delivery model
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-sandisk-acquires-musicgremlin-for-alternate-music-delivery-model/

Surprise! Stewart and Colbert have come to Hulu
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-9964430-36.html

VOICE MAIL

Anish Vestal
So…about that iPod Touch

Martin Estonia
Games? You want games on the iPhone

E-MAIL

England hates the Moon

http://howtosplitanatom.com/news/british-scientists-create-moon-missiles/

Dear “scientists”,

Please don’t accidentally blow up the moon. We like it.

Best regards,

Humanity

P.S. Are you freaking kidding with ‘Penetrator’? If I was a missile named ‘Penetrator’, I’d bloody look forward to exploding.

--Nate.

One more thing…

You see? All the rumors, all the hype, all the anticipation as June 9th got closer, for what? Only to know you will have to wait yet another month to get that… phone?

I have a suggestion to all the media covering Apple rumors (and normal people):
- One rumor is enough, and is somewhat cool. After that, it gets really boring. So next time, after the first rumor, don’t come and tell me you saw a pile of boxes waiting to be delivered to an AT&T store. Just wait for the keynote.

Regards,
--Bernardo the Reservoir Engineer

P.S. Can I edit Excel files on that… phone? Because if I can, I’m getting one. Whatever, I can only display them, I’ll still might end up getting one. Sorry Xperia X1.

EPISODE 741

Live blog: Steve Jobs at WWDC 2008
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9960064-37.html

What’s good for Apple is better for everyone else
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/news/2008/06/iphone_smartphones

Supercomputer sets petaflop pace
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7443557.stm

MPAA wants to stop DVRs from recording some movies
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080608-mpaa-wants-to-stop-dvrs-from-recording-some-movies.html

Amazon working again, but what went wrong?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9962403-7.html

SanDisk confirms death of TakeTV and Fanfare
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9963059-1.html

Adapting Web sites to users
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20872/

Meet Sense Networks, the latest player in the hot ‘geo’ market
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-9962810-36.html

Voice mail

Ethan
About that whole voice mail thing.

Leif East Bay
Diamond notes.

E-mail

Rating ads on CNET

Hello —
In episode 740 you discussed the “new” idea of giving feedback on ads.
HELLO? Do you not know that the CNET BOL page has already had this
feature for some time? In spite of what Tom says “you will do”, I have
given positive feedback on the ads I find unobtrusive and/or clever, as
well as ranting about annoying ads. (especially the ones where I’ve
accidentally activated a pop-up by mousing over the ad. GRRRR– I
refuse to read ads that do this!!!)

Of course I’ve done the verboten “pause podcast” to write this, so I
hope you didn’t mention this later in the show.

Icelandscg in the Azores (for one more week– then moving to Germany)

**************

Just wanted to say congrats to some BOL listeners

Last week a couple of friends of mine who are Buzz Out Loud listeners
got married.

I know they’re listening so I just wanted to say congratulations to Jeff
& Cela Schiffman.
Also, for the benefit of any nerds who are reading this (Tom, Molly, and
Jason) check out the wedding ring…
http://img392.imageshack.us/img392/4976/2551835869343acf30d8bwj8.jpg
Designed by the groom it has Sapphires for the engine and a diamond in
the gun turret. It also split in two. When he proposed he gave her the
back half and said “You can have half now and the other half when we
reach Alderaan.”
Also, their wedding cake…
http://img392.imageshack.us/img392/5504/255266225048c007e233bjj5.jpg
Also designed by the groom.

This is what happens when two people meet in a 6 week long line for a
Star Wars film in Hollywood

Love the show!

JimJimBinks