September 15, 2003
EXCLUSIVE: FAMILY GUY – The Movie!:
Creator Seth McFarlane has good news for his fans!
In an exclusive interview with Coming Attractions at Cinescape, FAMILY GUY creator Seth McFarlane told us that the rumor about the possible return of his TV show is about to become a reality. A deal is imminent for McFarlane to continue creating new animated adventures of Quahog’s nuttiest, funniest dysfunctional family, the Griffins.
“It’s all come down to the budget right now. We’re hashing it out,” McFarlane tells CA. “It would be a direct-to-DVD project.”
Even among geeks I’ve seen mixed thoughts on the show as a whole. Though, most of my friends (including myself) enjoyed just about every episode that was made — as they were so tangental. I don’t think it was as “smart” as The Simpsons (the ‘Frasier‘ of cartoons), but it definitely tickled my funny bone (yea, that was the gayest thing I’ve ever said).
Anyways, if I ever get a chance to see the movie or the new episodes that hit the DVD section of Suprnova (kidding kidding), I’ll let you know what I think. Gesundheit.
- Physics may have been hit with a nasty hoax:
Ars Master of the Universe Aleksey “Geon” Cherman, author of such memorable articles as The Ultimate Limits of Computers, wrote in with some rather interesting news. While he has cautioned greatly to take this all with the proverbial grain of salt, it’s fascinating to consider. I’ll let him tell you in his own words: Physics seems to have been hit with a reverse-Alan-Sokal-style hoax. In 1996, as you may remember reading, Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, wrote an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, in which he parodied cultural studies, postmodernism, and so on. The hilarious thing was that Sokal sent it to a leading (at the time) refereed cultural studies journal, Social Text, and they published it, not noticing that it was intentional gibberish (and hilariously obvious, to a freshman physics major). After Sokal revealed the parody, scandal ensued, the main result of which was that cultural studies and postmodernism got a nasty black eye (in my opinion, anyway), and scientists got to do lots of giggling. You can read a lot of the articles involved on Alan Sokal’s web site.
That was from a year ago and I haven’t heard much since then. News is a bit slow today, so I dug up that revisionistic gem along with a few others below. Prepare the wood for a public burning.
- String Theory: An Evaluation:
For nearly seventeen years now most speculative and mathematical work in particle theory has centered around the idea of replacing quantum field theory with something used to be known as “Superstring Theory,” but now goes under the name “M-Theory”. We’ve been told that “string theory is part of twenty-first-century physics that fell by chance into the twentieth century,” so this year the time has perhaps finally come to begin to evaluate the success or failure of this new way of thinking about particle physics. This article will attemp to do so from the perspective of a quantum field theorist now working in the mathematical community.
[...]
The experimental situation is best described with Pauli’s phrase “it’s not even wrong”. No one has managed to extract any sort of experimental prediction out of the theory other than the cosmological constant should probably be at least 55 orders of magnitude largert than experimental bounds. String theory not only makes no predictions about physical phenomena at experimentally accessible energies, it makes no predictions whatsoever. Even if someone were to figure out tomorrow how to build an accelerator capable of reaching Planck-scale energies, string theorists would be able to do no better than give qualitative guesses about what such a machine might see. This situation leads one to question whether string theory really is a scientific theory at all. At the moment it’s a theory that cannot be falsified by any conceivable experimental result. It’s not even clear that there is any possible theoretical development that would falsify the theory.
That’s from Peter Woit, a professor of mathematics at Columbia University. In it, he uses Wolfgang Pauli’s famous quote “It’s not even wrong” to knock Superstring Theory (M-theory).
Actually, in the paper only the name ‘Pauli’ is given. So I popped in his name along with the quote into our favorite search engine and you guessed it, I found Woit debating some guy in a forum – scroll down a bit, you’ll see it.
Anyways, Wolfgang Pauli wasn’t just some cough-syrup salesman, he was a Nobel-prize winning cough-syrup salesman — take that to the bank. (Note: check out this ‘Longbet‘ regarding the Nobel Prize and Superstring theory).
- Stephan Kinsella points out an even broader smack down at the establishment, this time an interview with Carver Mead (towards the bottom) who suggests that the just about all of the past 70 years of physics will be referred to as the “dark ages” because of how mathematical theories replaced physical reality.
And I’ll end with a plug for a book that I even managed to read through and understand (though, I’m not sure if everyone thinks that is impressive): Mirror Matter by Dr. Robert Foot.
Caution: don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out — or else the terrorists win.
Hlleo wrold. I fuond tihs naet-o sotry at Salhsodt. Bsaiclaly, jsut as lnog as the frist and lsat ltetres are in tehir porepr palecs, you sohuld udnretsnad msot of waht is bieng siad. Ture dat.
Yea, essentially so as long as the first and last letters in a sentence are the same as the original word, erveyhtnig sohuld be spuer dpuer.
Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey has mroe dteails on tihs.
Compulsory Licensing – The Death of Gnutella and the Triumph of Google:
However, if filesharing becomes legal through a compulsory license, what is the purpose of the Gnutella-based software anymore? Napster’s liability was based on theories of contributory and vicarious liability, which requires an underlying copyright violation. To the extent that filesharing is no longer copyright infringement, Napster could no longer be held liable. Since the Napster solution is far more efficient, particularly for searches, why would anyone use a Gnutella (or any decentralized P2P) network anymore? Virtually anything a Gnutella network can do can be implemented in a Napster-like network as well. Sure, current interfaces are better than Napster’s, but they could easily be ported from a Gnutella client to a Napster-like one.
All that effort, all that clever programming optimizing the Gnutella protocol, gone in a flash of compulsory licensing. Sure Gnutella will still be around, but what will it be used for? Why will so much effort be devoted to develop and optimize it? Gnutella will be, as far as I can see, a dead end technology, at least for filesharing.
Right off the bat, a compulsory license is one required by law to have for the type of business you engage in. So just think of all the professions that require licenses/permits to operate.
Licenses erect an artificial barrier to entry to an otherwise equilibrium created by open markets. They effectively limit the amount of players in a given industry and have historically caused supply shortages.
So what Mr. Miller is essentially saying: if everyone is required to have a license for trading files with their PC or digital device, why have a ‘weak’ P2P search index solution (like Gnutella) when the original Napster solution was technologically superior.
I don’t think he’s on the right track for blaming a work-a-round to a poor system (‘copyrights‘) for intervening in what is not a free-market in the first place (IP laws = intervention).
From a technological point of view, I don’t think that centralized filesharing is necessarily optimal either, as the strength of the Kazaa P2P model (which Gnutella is now trying to emulate) is that every additional user adds that much more capacity to the system — this is better illustarted with the new Skype VoIP system now being rolled out. The traditional model for phone systems requires a central exchange with an ever increasing price tag as the number of users that join the system requires more supplies such as switches, servers, etc. — overhead out the yin yang. Skype eliminates all of that through its work distribution model which continually balances traffic as users come and go.
The same goes for Google, it could (and possibly will) be replaced by something even as simple as Grub (which itself is decentralized web indexing, the servers are still centralized – that in itself could be changed along the lines of a DNS shard system).
LawMeme also posted an article a few days back entitled: “RIAA PR Success = Kazaa Blowback and the Wounding of Innovation?” – where the author states that he would rather have users sued than innovation hampered through State intervention. Other than the fact that is a false dichotomy (there are more choices than that, how about toss all lawyers into a cage filled with hot tar, ignore the RIAA and marry your cousins?), the State already intervenes in the market process of individuals deciding which method of transactions they valued the most. Why create a double-standard when you can have it all one way?
Hollywood Faces Online Piracy, but It Looks Like an Inside Job:
But the early debut of “Hulk” was not the work of the armies of KaZaA-loving college students or cinephile hackers. The copy that made its way to the Internet was an almost-complete working version of the film that had been circulated to an advertising agency as part of the run-up to theatrical release. And “Hulk” is not alone.
According to a new study published by AT&T Labs, the prime source of unauthorized copies of new movies on file-sharing networks appears to be movie industry insiders, not consumers. The study is “the first publicly available assessment of the source of leaks of popular movies,” according to its authors.
Nearly 80 percent of some 300 copies of popular movies found by the researchers on online file sharing networks “appeared to have been leaked by industry insiders,” and nearly all showed up online before their official consumer DVD release date, suggesting that consumer DVD copying represents a relatively minor factor compared with insider leaks.
I remember seeing that version of the Hulk, in one scene (or rather, a significant amount of scenes), his legs aren’t rendered properly. Anyways, I didn’t “steal” that movie reel or hack into the studio offices, so it looks like I got off easy this time.
And a little bit of role-playing: how would you like to be that team at AT&T downloading movies and analyzing them to see if they’re part of the plumbing problem? I hope they recompensated all those starving artists with TB.
- OpenOffice trails MS Office in vulnerabilities:
This week Microsoft Office once again affirmed its leadership in the office software world by releasing news of not one, two, or three, but five security holes. Meanwhile, OpenOffice.org, the primary open source competitor to MS Office, has no vulnerabilities to report. And OpenOffice developers say they have no plans to introduce Microsoft-competitive vulnerabilities, even though most PC users obviously consider insecurity a vital part of the computing experience.
I love security holes, who doesn’t?
- MicroSCOff buys MundrakeSoft installation advertising:
MundrakeSoft has announced an exclusive adveritising contract with MicroSCOff for its 9.2 Edition.
I want me some of dat Mundrake. Right General Ripper?
- brykMantra – Ships ahoy matey, pirates off the port bow. I actually bumped into this blog from DFWBlogs — I thought it was amusing to see a fellow Texan all enthusiastic about pirates. How often does one see that in a lifetime?
- Terry Tate, Office Linebacker – I bumped into every white-collar workers best friend over at MarketingWonk (they changed their name yet again). I thought the interview with the guy behind the ad was pretty good, but in the end what I what I really liked was the ads themselves (kinda like Playboy, you don’t read it for the articles…).
“I ordered those eggs 20 minutes ago, don’t make me scramble you again, son!”
IBM KICKS OFF GLOBAL LINUX AD PUSH:
Muhammad Ali Appears in 90-Second TV Spot
SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) — IBM is launching a global advertising campaign for Linux, the open-source operating system that has become the world’s
Created by WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather, New York, and directed by Joe Pytka, the Linux TV effort breaks in the U.S. with a 90-second ad during Sunday’s National Football League games and the U.S. Open Men’s Finals. A 60-second version will then go into rotation. Print ads will encourage readers to visit Web sites with Linux content.
Yea, I know this is a couple week old, but I decided to actually watch it on a slow Sunday evening.
I understand the underlying theme and what it’s trying to convey, but it seemed a bit too 1980’sish to be too deeply profound anymore (maybe if it was the same chick that did the Mac 1984 ad, that would’ve been funny).
Donncha didn’t care much for it and I’m more inclined to agree with Dave who stated: “IBM is showing that it’s serious by spending lots of cash.”
This is what geeks do in their spare time, talk about how to produce a Linux ad.
