If Romney gets the Republican nomination, this will have to show up in attack ads

"I'm also unemployed." Being too rich to need a real job and retiring early from the governor's mansion so you can run for president doesn't really qualify as unemployed in any normal person's book. Throw in a bit about his support for making the Bush tax cuts, including the cuts in dividend taxation that he no doubt profits from significantly, and you've got political gold.

Nintendo's Wii U won't play DVDs or Blu-Rays

This isn't surprising, considering that their consoles have never been standard-media friendly. They've also consistently been a generation behind in storage capacity, though that was only really a problem with the Nintendo 64 since it opted out of the optical storage revolution and single-handedly took Nintendo from being the undisputed champion of the video game world to being an also-ran surviving solely on it's own first party franchises (which were and are extremely popular).

Nintendo's always been paranoid about piracy. That's one reason why they chose to keep cartridges in the Nintendo 64, killing their massive third-party support, and that's why they opted for funky proprietary optical solutions in the Gamecube and Wii.

The scare thing about the Republican strategy on debt...

which is to vote for ever more extreme measures that don't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming law is that it might actually convince people that they're serious about reducing the deficit. Of course whenever they're really in power they run up enormous deficits (see Reagan, Bush II, and to a lesser extent Bush I).

I particularly enjoyed the congressman who brought up abortion when the Democrats were pointing out how their stupid amendment would affect children. No doubt they'd do that to defend themselves if they were proposing that the children of parents who defaulted be sold into slavery to pay their creditors. The sad thing is, I think a lot of religious people would probably buy it then too. I've spent enough time on conservative religious blogs to know that nothing else matters to them. No matter what the Republicans do, many will never fail to vote for them and most of the rest will never consider voting Democrat.

Update: Okay, I've got the text of the amendment. It's basically the same idiotic supermajority requirement (with three-fifths instead of two-thirds) for tax increases and (practically) for budgets that California has (or had, they got rid of the budget part last year, thank goodness). It doesn't apply to times of war, so it's basically a dead letter since we're always at war nowadays. That makes it even dumber.

DRM for ebooks will probably be the last to go

Music DRM is already dead because it never made sense in the first place. Every work of music was and is available in a DRM-free lossless digital format called the compact disc. Music also never had a history of copy-protection. Video still has DRM, but that's because the content holders are out of touch with reality. DVDs may be DRMed, but the DRM is useless and effortlessly cracked by even a novice with an outdated computer. Video does have a long history of copy protection though, going back to Macrovision for VHS (Macrovision is still around in DVDs, but it's much better to copy DVDs digitally than by hooking a DVD player up to a DVD recorder).

Books are a whole different animal. Paper books aren't copy protected, but copying them requires a multi-stage process. The first part, scanning them, is either very labor-intensive or requires very expensive equipment. The second part, OCR, requires expensive software if you want good quality image-to-text conversion. The final part, proof-reading, is also labor-intensive. Even some publishers aren't bothering with that. The Victorian Internet, a great little book about the history of the telegraph, is one such example. It is full of blatantly obvious OCR errors in the Kindle edition. I've been meaning to complain about that, actually.

So I don't expect publishers to offer DRM-free ebooks any time soon. I suspect it will take DRM-stripping of Kindle/Nook/Etc. ebooks to become truly pervasive before it's even considered. It will also require book piracy to reach the level of music piracy.

Stallman thinks we should boycott ebooks

I don't agree with that, but I do think that DRM in general is damaging and mainly punishes people who don't pirate. All DRM can be cracked or worked around, through the analog hole if nothing else, and if there's sufficient interest in a artistic or literary work, it will become generally available on the Internet with or without DRM.

The only place where DRM makes a real difference is in less-popular works, since it increases the barrier to pirate and they might not reach the heightened threshold. Popular works will already surpass that barrier; no amount of DRM will change that. It is debatable, I suppose, whether the higher exposure easy piracy provides to lesser-known works ends up making up for the readers who don't pay.

I don't think that legalizing file-sharing and instituting a quasi-communist author-compensation scheme is the answer (enact an Internet tax and have it paid to the artists based on the cube root of their popularity on p2p, BitTorrent, etc.). I do, however, think a new model is required for the new technology.

The paywall seems to be working for the New York Times

The article-writer's snarky attitude aside, this is an interesting development. I wasn't expecting this to be positive for them any more than anyone else, at least not until I saw how porous the paywall really was. That, I think, is the key to its success: most people will never see the paywall since they barely ever read the Times except for Twitter, Facebook, and blog links, which don't trigger the paywall. The "digerati" themselves are savvy enough to set nytimes.com cookies to be session-only so their article quota resets every time they restart their web browser. I strongly suspect if they locked down the paywall and made it water-tight things would be different.

It is worth noting, though, that the biggest benefit of the paywall is to encourage more print subscriptions. One reason is that the print version comes with digital access. I guess that's okay, but it does feel like promoting obsolete technology because they haven't figured out how to make as much money on the new technology. I don't think it really is, but it feels that way.

The take-home for this is that the New York Times has hit on a winning formula for general interest newspaper paywalls. Let's hope they don't change it.

It certainly does seem like the Libya no-fly zone is illegal

It is inexplicable that the Obama administration hasn't come to Congress for authorization. If they refused to give it, or if they tried to hold it hostage, it would be almost as big a political gift to Obama as the Medicare abolition plan.

It just goes to show: presidents usually work to increase executive power. They will almost NEVER decrease it, especially when doing so is controversial. Alas, I doubt the Republican House will do anything serious to curtail executive power. They are, as ever, too invested in having it when they get back into the White House and they are full of full-fledged militarists.

Rand Paul advocates jailing attendees of radical rallies

This is quite incredible. He specifically referred to "someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government" as being someone who "should be deported or put in prison." Even putting aside his own flirtation with such rhetoric, as referenced at the end of the linked post, tons of his and his father's supporters would be open to prison-terms if "attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government" were to be made a crime. I guess it goes without saying that he only intended this to be applied to non-Christians.

OpenOffice.org to be handed over to Apache

I suspect this will lead to option number 2 of my predictions of OpenOffice's future being the case. Assuming the two projects don't find a way to run in parallel (with improvements of one being implemented in the other and vice-versa) or compete with each other until both flounder. The latter seems unlikely, because I have a hard time seeing anything else taking OpenOffice/LibreOffice's particular niche. Commercial software certainly can't, and I don't think Google Docs really fits in that space either. Aside from change-tracking and collaboration (which are phenomenal), Google Docs is too primative currently and doesn't work offline anymore (though that's expected to change sometime in the future).

Does this count as biased headline-writing or a pig-in-a-poke?

Daily Telegraph headline:

Hay Festival 2011: ex-CIA man claims Barack Obama 'doesn't have a clue'

The real story: it's Michael Scheuer restating that no Western leaders have a clue and that we could largely end the terrorist threat by dumping Israel and the House of Saud and pulling out of Afghanistan. Naturally I thought reading the headline that I'd get some right-wing attack on Obama for not torturing enough prisoners or something. Instead I got a left-wing attack on the United States and Britain.

So, is this bias on the part of the headline writer trying to spin this into an anti-Obama story? Or is it the headline writer trying to trick right-wing readers into exposing themselves to a point of view they'd usually roundly ignore?

The Daily Telegraph is a conservative paper, but it is a British conservative paper. I guess anti-Obama Tories might be anti-militaristic too. It was Labour that was gungho for Iraq, after all.

One thing Wolfram Alpha is great for...

is doing calculations with big numbers. Unlike Google, which always only gives you an exponentiated number,Wolfram Alpha gives you the real number too (and writes it out for you in English!). Much more useful for those of us who aren't math majors.

Most Americans more worried about deficit than default

That means that most Americans are either ignorant (whatever they may say) or very short-sighted or both. The consequences of letting the deficit spending continue unchecked this year can be fixed next year. Interest rates are at rock bottom, so the deficit isn't a huge problem...yet. On the other hand, if we default this year, we can't just fix it. It'll make financing our debt (which is currently five percent of our Federal budget) much more expensive and will drive up interest rates in general.

I doubt it will come to that. I still believe that the big money at the top of the GOP pyramid has more power than the foot soldiery at the bottom. Boehner isn't going to screw them over and Obama certainly doesn't want a default going into reelection. A deal will certainly be reached, but it may end up coming down to the wire. Again.

One of the defects of our political culture is that it simultaneously gives, at times, the out-of-power party the motivation and the ability to screw things up. The President usually gets the blame when things go badly. Great Britain, on the other hand, has no such problem. When a party's in government it has to take responsibility and when it isn't it can't do anything.

The Secret Service has a Twitter account?

Wow. I had no idea. Cutting him off from the official account seems appropriate. I do hope that the Right doesn't press this issue and try to get the poor guy fired, though. That would be ridiculous.

Square Enix post a large loss

There were some pretty insightful comments on the Slashdot article, actually. I don't agree with what some have said that they haven't released any good games since the merger (Final Fantasy XII was fantastic--fully worthy of the Final Fantasy brand even though it didn't feel like a Final Fantasy game), but they are right on the money with these:

They need to kill FFXIV (Score:2)

by _xeno_ (155264) on Friday May 13, @04:11AM (#36115856) Homepage Journal

Who knows exactly how much FFXIV is costing them in development costs and server costs, but that ship has sailed. There's no point sinking money into something that will never turn a profit.

It's been seven months now. The improvements the game has made are minor at best. (The two biggest are that leveling combat classes is now possible, and that the market place works. Not well, mind you, but it works.) If you ask anyone playing whether or not you should, they'll tell you flat-out it isn't worth it.

This is not the sign of a game on the road to profitability. With every week that goes by, the ability to earn new players goes down.

Once they've stopped throwing money at a failed game, then they can start worrying about creating new games that people actually want to play.

But first, they've got to stop the bleeding.

I always thought that making MMOs part of the main series was a bad decision. Releasing one that clearly wasn't close to ready was a truly idiotic one. More's the pity, because they actually got Nobuo Uematsu to come back to do the score for that game.

So what? They could make that any time they want (Score:1)

by XahXhaX (730306) on Friday May 13, @04:04AM (#36115844)

They've been sitting on remaking FF7 for years. $150 million would probably be covered by just the initial release if they were to produce an updated version with modern tech.

Not that I care either way--I hated that game and pay less attention to Square with each year. But they _could_ do it any time if they only wanted to.

Final Fantasy VII still has a massive fanbase. I'm one of the rare people who actually thought Final Fantasy VIII was better than VII, but even I would be enthusiastic for a VII remake on the PS3 a la the demo they released a few years back. Besides, of all the Final Fantasy games, VII seems most in need of a remake. It was their first foray into 3D graphics and the results did not age well at all.