Breakfast Links: Politicians, DRM -> DCM & Quadradius
Hoo boy. Ok. So you remember the Mooninite debacle in Boston? Yeah the one where the Bostonian government decided that a bunch of lightbrites depicting a cartoon character were bombs and essentially shut down the city disposing of them? Well now in a blaze of ass covering glory they are trying to put a new bill through Congress - the Terrorist Hoax Improvements Act. Despite the title of the bill this is not a bill to fund more and better hoax’s, no. It means that whatever dumb ass thing the government decides is a hoax, is actually a terrorist hoax no matter what the original intentions of the event was and can be punished accordingly. It just follows our goverment’s new pattern of following up debacles and lies with ever greater power grabs and lies. So if this had been in effect… you know what? This is so stupid I can’t even talk about it anymore.
Then… THEN… Bob Zitter, HBO’s CTO, you know what he said? The problem with DRM? No, it’s not the fact that it sucks and is detrimental to it’s consumers, no.. the problem with it? It’s the name. He wants to rename Digital Rights Management to Digital Consumer Enablement. Yes, Digital. Consumer. Enablement. He’s the Chief Technology Officer for christmas’ sake! Why is he even thinking about that? Shouldn’t he be thinking about other stuff like networks and cisco and migrating everyone to OSX? He should be figuring out how to use his technology to make his shows not have > 1 year lag between seasons. Grrr. Argh.
Ugh.. so to wash away all that horriblosity this morning. I’ll leave you with Quadradius. It’s like checkers meets magic the gathering and… the future. A flash game where you get pieces that hop around sorta like checkers, but they pick up all these powers and can use them, sorta like M:TG and it’s all futuristic looking and sounding like… the future. You have to play other people, which is a bummer cause it’d be nice to get some practice games in to get a sense of it, but it’s pretty fun. There’s a lot of powers, though and just remember.. Bomb hits you just as much as it hits him. Quadradius, give it a looksee.
BONUS LINK! Chiggity check out these new fangled solar cells that promise to halve the cost of existing ones for personal use actually available later this year. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.
May 11th, 2007 at 11:14 am
I never understood why those idiots keep wanting to call DRM “consumer enablement”. What the hell does DRM “enable” us to do? Buy more DRM crap? Then there’s this enterprising company:
http://playlistmag.com/news/2007/05/10/mrt/index.php
“Oh no, nobody wants to use our product. I know! Let’s sue their asses!” F**ktards.
May 11th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
I believe the word you are looking for is frigtards. :)
The DRM world thinks their whole problem is a marketing problem. sigh. Hopefully the de-DRM’ing of iTunes will signal the beginning of the end.
May 15th, 2007 at 7:33 am
[...] trial to highlight just how ridiculous this whole thing was. It might help put the kibosh on the incredibly scary bill currently trying to get passed that would have made what they did illegal and punishable despite [...]
May 17th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
[...] one of the guys that runs Quadradius. Does that not make you want to play it? It is remarkably fun. I’m this close to buying a [...]
June 8th, 2007 at 6:23 am
[...] although I seem to have less and less time to play them. While I don’t think this replaces Quadradius for the king, Tactics 100 is pretty darn fun. It’s kind of like Archon (if you can remember [...]