From Wired: A Nation Divided Over Piracy

Part two of this interesting, unvarnished multi-part look at the history of the organization, and its future.

Digitizing video signals might violate the DMCA

Dunno who’s worse, courts or legislators. From the article: “Could it become illegal to digitize analog signals? The District Court for the Southern District of New York has come perilously close to saying yes.”

From Wired: Secrets of the Pirate Bay

An interesting, unvarnished multi-part look at the history of the organization, and its future.

From CNN: Congressman delivers his own son

From the Article: “‘We certainly didn’t expect this.’” I’m thinkin’…

Episode #22 - Kermit the Hermit.

(Thanks to Kermyt Anderson for the one-line episode descriptions!)

 Jonathan Thomas - Episode 22 [12:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From The New York Times: Advertisers Trace Paths Users Leave on Internet

Another article guaranteed to creep you out. From the article: “We know based on your behavior that you are in the market, and we can target you as you bounce around the Internet.”

Use FireFox, and carefully decide what sites are and are not allowed to send you cookies.

The episode where The Brain recreates the ‘frozen peas’ commercial originally made infamous by Orson Welles - from YouTube.

(If you see nothing above, YouTube is still down.)

From USATODAY.com: TV gambles on more serials

From the article: “Viewers might be reluctant to invest in a lot of serials, fearing they could get burned by a tale with no end, such as the unresolved murder mystery of Fox’s canceled Reunion.”

Gee…didn’t some other smart guy just post that the other day?

From Ars Technica: RIAA defendant dies, heirs given 60 days to grieve before depositions

From the article: “How quaintly civil of them. Because the litigants believed that the case was nearing a resolution before Larry’s passing, it wants to move on with the proceedings rather than drop the case, and will request depositions from his heirs after the 60-day grieving period. Considering that deceased Enron executive Ken Lay’s assets may be safe from legal action after his death, the recording industry’s tenacity in this case is astounding.”

Gotta love those record lables. Can anyone think of any good reason to buy any music nowadays?

From SI.com: NFL Mascot injures opposing quarterback

From the article: “‘T-Rac,’ the Tennessee Titans’ raccoon-like mascot, hit Saints quarterback Adrian McPherson with a golf cart as he walked onto the field for the second half Saturday night, bruising him and knocking him out of New Orleans’ 19-16 victory in the teams’ exhibition opener.”

From CNN: ‘Undercover Kitten’ dies in traffic accident.

Fred, a tabby who found fame as the “Undercover Kitten,” has died in a traffic accident, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office said Friday.

Episode #21 - Jonathan Thomas grows large and small.

(Thanks to Kermyt Anderson for the one-line episode descriptions!)

As you can see, we’re trying something new here, thanks to some software we’ve installed during the update. If you’d like to listen to the program, simply click the Play button below, on the Flash-based media player!

Please post any comments, positive or negative, or problem reports to the blog here, or to me directly using the “Contact the Webmaster” button over on the sidebar. I’d appreciate knowing what you think of our new podcasting system.

 Jonathan Thomas - Episode 21: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From The New York Times: Your Life as an Open Book

From the article: “As it stands now, little with regard to search queries is private. No laws clearly place search requests off-limits to advertisers, law enforcement agencies or academic researchers, beyond the terms that companies set themselves.”

If you aren’t frightened yet, you just don’t understand the problem.

The software that operates this blog (WordPress, for those of you keeping score) has been upgraded yet again. No matter how hard I try to make sure everything’s ok, there are little issues that can get past me during the upgrade procedure. If you find anything amiss, please contact me either by email or by using the handly “Contact the Webmaster” button on the left-hand sidebar.

(FWIW, it’s always been a whole lot easier to update the software that controls the forums, phpBB, than WordPress. WordPress upgrades require an afternoon of re-adding custom code changes, where phpBB upgrades generally require five minutes per board and a few mouse-clicks. But then, phpBB can’t do podcasting…)

According to the logs at Jerry Haendiges’s website, The Perfect Maid Murder Case actually aired December 21, 1949 - not the 29th. This matches the “Merry Christmas” wish at the tail of the show.

Please correct your downloaded copies; I am not going to change the name of the podcast file to prevent those who have already received it from receiving it again.

From The New York Times: James A. Van Allen, Discoverer of Earth-Circling Radiation Belts, Is Dead at 91

James A. Van Allen, the physicist who made the first major scientific discovery of the early space age, the Earth-circling radiation belts that bear his name, and sent spacecraft instruments to observe the outer reaches of the solar system, died yesterday in Iowa City. He was 91.

Ah, out with the old, in with the new. The television season is dead, long live the next television season. And to prepare for it, I’m going to review new shows as the pilots become available.

Heroes; NBC, Monday 9:00 PM

Another “epic tale;” no, I didn’t call it that, the show itself did. There’s a crawl at the opening that pretentiously reads, “In recent days, a seemingly random group of individuals as emerged with what can only be described as ’special’ abilities. Although unaware of it now, these individuals will not only save the world, but change it forever. This transformation from ordinary to extraordinary will not occur overnight. Every story has a beginning. Volume One of their epic tale begins here…”

Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) dreams of flying

This episode, titled, “In His Own Image,” begins with a dreamer (Milo Ventimiglia, The Bedford Diaries) who has a recurring dream of flying yet cannot convince his brother (Adrian Pasdar, Desperate Housewives) the dream is real, and ends with unexpected truth that the dream reflects reality…in between, we witness normal people discovering extraordinary powers within themselves. Someone less jaded might suggest this is a metaphor for the best in all of us, but I’m thinking it has more to do with the success of various super-hero movies like Spider-man and Superman Returns than any nobler purpose. And it’s the brainchild of Tim Kring, known only for Crossing Jordan with no known connections to the fantasy genre.

The powers are as varied as the people experiencing them; while a college professor (Sendhil Ramamurthy, Blind Guy Driving) discovers his father, who died or was killed, had gathered evidence of the growing number of people experiencing these changes, a Las Vegas stripper (Ali Larter, Final Destination) with a genius son finds her reflection is more powerful than believable, a high school cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere, Ice Princess) who’s father holds a shocking secret learns that she is totally indestructible by trying to injure herself, in Japan, a young man (Masi Oka, Scrubs) develops a way to stop time through sheer force of will, an artist (Santiago Cabrera, Empire) whose drug addiction is destroying his life and the relationship with his girlfriend (Tawny Cypress, Third Watch), is terrified when he discovers he can paint the future. All of them are frightened as they discover they are not like normal people, and all are alone in their search for the reasons they are special.

It’s fascinating watching previously-normal people find extraordinary powers, but some of the discoveries are a little hackneyed, and some of the dialog is almost laughable it’s so trite (“C’mon, baby, let’s get out of here…you’re too good for this school,” or, “They are here…among us…in the shadows…in the light…”). At its heart, it’s a soap opera more than a super-hero series, which may with some love and care evolve into an interesting program. While few special effects are needed and I really liked the small scene where the cheerleader tries hurting herself by jumping off a scaffolding, I sure hope they work on the flying sequences now that they have gone to series…the final climactic sequence is really bad. Mostly, though, the special powers can be displayed with little more than clever editing, as when the cheerleader performs the only super-hero-like act, saving a man from a fire while emerging unscathed, or when the stripper discovers her reflection has handled a problem off-camera while she was unconscious, or when the software developer in China teleports himself into the woman’s room of a discotheque. (Hey, it ain’t all serious; his friend calls him, “Super Hiro.”) I was a little disturbed when the cheerleader sticks her hand into the garbage disposal, but those who know me know I’m not a big fan of hand injuries, which becomes a continuing theme as the artist decides to stop the paintings he believes are evil.

Again, though, no matter how successful this series is, we know going in that we will inevitably be disappointed…that the story won’t ever satisfyingly end, but rather be hurriedly wrapped-up (if even that) when the producer moves on to another project.

The question you need to ask yourself is whether you want to invest your time and energy in an interesting journey that will eventually just…stop.

On the Internet OTR Digest, there’s been a recent discussion on the series Mr. Chameleon. Dr. Joe Webb has been kind enough to make the two existing episodes from this series available to everyone, so we’ve added the shows to our OTR podcast. This is the second of the two episodes, The Perfect Maid Murder Case, which aired December 29, 1949.

If you’ve added our RSS feed to your podcast client (iTunes, Juice, etc.), you’ll automatically download the files, as well as our future programs.

On the Internet OTR Digest, there’s been a recent discussion on the series Mr. Chameleon. Dr. Joe Webb has been kind enough to make the two existing episodes from this series available to everyone, so we’ve added the shows to our OTR podcast. This is the first of the two episodes, Murder And The Million Dollar Smile, which is undated.

If you’ve added our RSS feed to your podcast client (iTunes, Juice, etc.), you’ll automatically download the files, and the second episode to be podcast tomorrow.

From The New York Times: A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749

Read this if you ever used a search engine, or ever connected to the Internet. Seriously…read it. This is one of the most important articles you’ll read this year - it details how easy it was for a reporter to personally identify someone simply from their search queries.

It’s time for us to start fighting back. And there are ways of surfing anonymously…check out Torpark, an optimized secure tunnel/browser combination that will allow you to surf in peace, or the Scroogle Scraper, which searches Google yet deletes its logs every 48 hours (this will not protect your searches from being logged by your ISP the way Torpark does)…just because you have nothing to hide doesn’t mean you want the entire world to know your business…