Last.FM
August 2009
Aug
14
2009
0This story has been going on a while but the verdict is the interesting part. Warner Bros. hand has just been forced on whether they make a new Superman movie or not . According to this new ruling they will lose the rights to the character completely in 2013 as they will revert back to the creators’ families. Siegel and Schuster were quite famously shafted by DC for the rights to the iconic superhero back in the day. There is more of this at the Variety page linked below. Frankly I’d like a different studio to have a bash at the Superman franchise. What do you think?
Warner Bros. and DC Comics have lost a little more control over the Man of Steel. In an ongoing Federal court battle over Superman, Judge Stephen Larson ruled Wednesday that the family of the superhero’s co-creator, Jerry Siegel, has “successfully recaptured” rights to additional works, including the first two weeks of the daily Superman newspaper comic-strips, as well as portions of early Action Comics and Superman comic-books.
The ruling is based on the court’s finding that these were not “works-made-for-hire” under the Copyright Act.
This means the Siegels — repped by Marc Toberoff of Toberoff & Associates — now control depictions of Superman’s origins from the planet Krypton, his parents Jor-El and Lora, Superman as the infant Kal-El, the launching of the infant Superman into space by his parents as Krypton explodes and his landing on Earth in a fiery crash.
The first Superman story was published in 1938 in Action Comics No. 1. For $130, Jerry Siegel and co-creator Joel Schuster signed a release in favor of DC’s predecessor, Detective Comics, and a 1974 court decision ruled they signed away their copyrights forever. [From Film and TV
Aug
12
2009
0Really cool images of impact craters seen from space. Yep, I’m pointing you to pictures of holes in the ground. Go and take a look while I just nip out and get a life.
Asteroid Impact Craters on Earth as Seen From Space
By Betsy Mason August 11, 2009
The Manicougan Crater in northern Canada is one of the largest impact craters known on Earth. The impact occurred around 210 million years ago at the end of the Triassic period and may have caused a mass extinction that killed around 60 percent of all species. Though the crater has mostly eroded, Lake Manicougan outlines what is left of the 43-mile wide impact structure. The asteroid that created the crater is thought to have been about three miles wide. Today the lake is a reservoir and popular salmon fishing location. [From Watermelon Man from the album “The Essential” by Herbie Hancock
Aug
10
2009
0Here is an interesting story of a young lady who didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut or her fingers off the keyboard. It just goes to show that you should always be careful what you write down, it may (read will) come back to bite you on the ass later.
Can we think of any more interesting and Web 2.0 ways of getting rid of staff?
How To Lose a Job Via Facebook In 140 Characters or Less | Applicant – Job Tips And Advice.
Aug
9
2009
0- So this must be insomnia? Not cool. #
- http://bit.ly/vny2w Iron Man 2 footage from Comic Con 2009 "leaked" online. #
- Rings bought and in my possession. I just need to keep them away from Cat for 4 weeks. #
- The cyclops from the first story of The Tomorrow People looks just like the Absorbaloff. #
- I remember the Tomorrow People to be a lot less cluncky. I guess I was only about four. #
Aug
9
2009
0I know absolutely nothing about this production but the couple of things that I have seen have definitely got me interested. Noel Clark keeps posting bits and bobs on Twitter, below is the latest cool image.
REIGN OF DEATH: EXCLUSIVE PEEP. Here is a still from Reign as… on Twitpic.
Aug
7
2009
0A couple of days ago I bitched about this. I wanted to add the follow up in the name of fairness and stuff. It seems that things are not quite as they appeared first of all.
Tuesday’s piece on Ninjawords was really about two stories. The small story is that of a clever $2 iPhone dictionary app, the developers of which removed “objectionable” words from its dictionary so as to get it published in the App Store. The big story is about the App Store itself, and whether Apple’s management is attempting to correct its course.
Yesterday afternoon I received a thoughtful email from Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller regarding Ninjawords and the App Store, and I think it bodes well for both stories. With Schiller’s permission, I’m reprinting the salient portions of it here:
When I read your column last night about the Ninjawords dictionary application I immediately investigated it with our App Store review team to learn the facts of what happened.
Let me start with the most important points – Apple did not censor the content in this developer’s application and Apple did not reject this developer’s application for including references to common swear words. You accused Apple of both in your story and the fact is that we did neither.
[From appl
Aug
7
2009
0
Some sad news came in today that legendary film director John Hughes died while out walking. I was such a huge fan of the Breakfast Club as a young ‘un. So much so that I named a club night that I used to run after that very movie. We actually used to serve cornflakes along with über cool indie music that no one had ever heard of.
This man brought us Molly Ringwald for chrissakes. For that alone we should be forever in his debt. Furthermore, as a result of one of his movies the Psychedelic Furs got the exposure that they deserved. (OK he didn’t direct that one but he wrote it.)
On the downside he did have something to do with Simple Minds becoming a global phenomenon but the world soon came to its collective senses.
The fact that he hadn’t made a movie for over 15 years makes no difference, he was a director of his time and will be sadly missed.
TMZ is reporting director John Hughes suffered a heart attack while taking a morning walk during a trip to New York City with family. Hughes is best known for writing and/or directing some of our favorite films from the 1980’s – National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, European Vacation, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes Trains & Automobiles, Uncle Buck, Christmas Vacation, and Home Alone. Hughes dropped out of filmmaking in 1991. via Breaking: John Hughes Has Passed Away | /Film.
EDIT: I like this obituary from the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/aug/07/john-hughes-life-clips
Aug
6
2009
0
Someone pointed out TypeTees to me yesterday. There are some pretty cool t-shirts on this website if slogans and stuff are your thing. You can also get paid $500 for your pithy witticism if they choose to put it on a shirt.
You simply submit your slogan and other bozos vote for your it. I say bozos because no one seems to like mine.
Not that I’m bitter at all. I’m just misunderstood dammit.
Aug
5
2009
0This wins the MFUTIST award. Apple I love your products but I’m afraid that you are going to have to get over yourself or employ people that understand the difference between enforcing the letter of a rule and the spirit of a rule. I’m guessing that the App Store rules were set out to prevent developer from submitting porn and other such “objectionable content” not to censor the English language. Even M$ wouldn’t do that…
Two years ago I linked to a web site called Ninjawords — a fast, simple online dictionary backed by a good data source (Wiktionary).
The developers behind Ninjawords, Matchstick Software, have released an iPhone version, currently available from the App Store for just $2. Here’s how they describe it:
Ninjas are three things:
They’re smart
They’re quick
They’re deadly accurate
Ninjawords is a dictionary for the iPhone built on these principles. We made it because we saw that the low-cost dictionaries on the App Store are slow, cluttered, and all use the same bad data source (WordNet) for their definitions.Ninjawords takes a different approach. We use awesome, fresh, high quality data with more words and synonyms than you can throw a ninja star at. And best of all, when you look up your words, they all stay on the page. No need to flip back and forth between different pages as you look up multiple words.
It’s a terrific app — pretty much exactly what I’ve always wanted in an iPhone dictionary, and, yes, with both a better user experience and better dictionary content than the other low-cost dictionaries in the App Store.
But Ninjawords for iPhone suffers one humiliating flaw: it omits all the words deemed “objectionable” by Apple’s App Store reviewers, despite the fact that Ninjawords carries a 17+ rating.
Apple censored an English dictionary. [From The most fucked up thing I saw today