Category: General

Kill Bill

clevescene.com | Kill Bill is the story of a vicious software giant which sends out photocopied, baseless lawsuits to harass and intimidate the wrong college student.

He didn’t have any money… but he had a lot of time on his hands and a willingness to do a little legal research.

Microsoft’s lawyers never knew what hit them.

You know, I’d respect the Bush campaign against frivolous lawsuits by ordinary people against large corporations more, if they’d recognize that a large corporation is much less vulnerable to frivolous lawsuits by ordinary people, than ordinary people are vulnerable to frivolous lawsuits by large corporations. The “sue them till they run out of money defending themselves” technique is pretty powerful. If this had happened to an innocent head of a family with a 40 hour a week job, instead of an innocent smart and courageous college student with little to lose and a lot of spare time, well, it would have been a victory for the bad guys.

Story via Adam Black in instant messages.

Overheard at _why’s

_why writes:

Truthfully, I refuse to absolutely believe in reality as the great circumscribing bound of our existence. Imagination lies within the borders and is assuredly larger than reality. Adobe Photoshop also.

A fun post, too, with some images that may never leave your brain.

Retheming

Decided to do a little theme switch. This one’s from the WordPress Theme Competition. (I’m not more specific because I’ve changed my mind which one to go with like twice since I first wrote this post.)

I was so, so, so tempted to go with Taft. (Shut your mouth! I’m just talkin’ bout Taft.) But I understand the images required by the CSS are like a half a meg download, and it only looks right if you happen to have the right fonts installed (I do). So I’m gonna back off on that one. (Oh, I’m also digging Museum but I’m not sure what tolerance my readers have for marble buttocks.)

I’d like to come up with my own someday but I don’t know if I want to wade into CSS that deeply. There’s a lot of structure to a WordPress page and it seems like it’d be a big headache to get it all looking nice.

Supporting Your Web Page with Ad Revenue Less Tenable Than Ever

Remember when Google had no ads? Want to use Google without ever seeing an ad again? Just use Firefox and Greasemonkey and Customize Google.

In the war between web advertisers and web browsers who want to avoid ads, Greasemonkey is the freaking Manhattan Project. I installed it and saw what it could do and whispered, “I am become Death, the destroyer of ad revenue.”

So how can people ever afford to publish content on the web, if not via ad revenue?

Well… one way is by giving up control of the content. Bandwidth is expensive, if it’s bandwidth on a server you control. Bandwidth is cheap if you give up control and let people share in the task of distributing your stuff. Peer to peer technologies let you publish like crazy. Open source projects are never lacking for a dozen friendly mirror sites for their code. You got creative commons licensed content? No prob. Publish it on OurMedia or Archive.org. They’ll give you the storage. But you have to give up some control. Not all control. Just enough to make things easy on the sharers, to give them a stake, to give them some rights with regards to the stuff they’re helping you distribute.

That’s one way to do it anyway. There may be other ways. But the “Ad Revenue” trick is not seeming like a very viable option anymore, in light of the power of things like Greasemonkey.