When college financial aid officers got into trouble last year for accepting gifts from lenders, the moral of the story was clear: You could easily overpay for your student loan by simply borrowing from a college’s recommended lender without first shopping around.Full Article. Read Full Post »
I guess it sucks when the shoe is on the other foot -- Or something. Pixar could do a movie about a young witty paparazzo and call it Filthy. Who would voice the main character?
Read Full Story @ Animal Read Full Post »Paparazzo Claims 'Iron Man' Robbed Him A photographer from LA is claiming that his above photo was used without permission in the new Iron Man movie. Ronnie Adams, currently employed at JFX paparazzi agency, is suing Paramount and Marvel over copyright infringement for an image featured on the front page of a mock newspaper being read by Robert Downey Jr.
A hedge-fund swindler who was supposed to be driving himself to prison abandoned his car on a bridge with the phrase "Suicide is Painless" scrawled on its hood, but no body has been found in the river below -- and the victims of his fraud say they doubt he killed himself.
The FBI and state police are skeptical, saying they're still looking for Samuel Israel III.
Israel, 48, a co-founder and chief executive of the now-collapsed Bayou hedge funds, was sentenced in April to 20 years in federal prison for conspiracy and fraud, to begin Monday afternoon. He was also ordered to pay $300 million to his victims.
Full Story
Uh, yeah. What? A quick reminder to really drive the point home: Hubble is in space.
Skilled with computers? Understand how to configure a boot loader like GRUB? Jump into the emerging market of building Mac clone PCs for customers who like Apple products (but not enough to buy them). Or, do it for yourself. On an existing PC. For free. Like I did.
Using a Mac Pro that costs approximately $3000 as our point of reference, one can build and configure a clone with comparable hardware for about a third of the cost, by my calculations (at Mac Pro configuration page: downgrade CPU, double RAM, make hard disk 500MB, and change video card to Nvidia to see a machine roughly comparable to the one the article's author built).
In the quote below, he claims it is roughly half the cost, with roughly equivalent performance:
But the real question is, just how does the $950 Frankenmac compete with Apple’s hardware? Overall, quite well. To get a sense of just how well, I ran a few tests here, though I plan to ship the whole machine off to the Macworld Lab in San Francisco shortly, for an official run through our Speedmark test suite.It seems wrong to charge $500 to install two extra Gigabytes of RAM. I got two gigs of RAM on a PC I built last week for less than 50 dollars. My RAM has a lifetime warranty at no additional cost. Apple's entire system, including the RAM, has a free warranty that lasts a year. You can get an additional two years added to the warranty for $249. At Newegg, most of the RAM at the same specifications (roughly 80%), even the high end stuff, is between 25 and 75 dollars.
For the unofficial testing, I used a few old favorites—Xbench for overall benchmarking, Cinebench for graphics, and a quick blast through the standard Quake3 timedemo to give a sense for raw gaming performance. I ran the tests on the Frankenmac and my Macworld-provided Mac Pro (a 2.66GHz quad-core Xeon with 4GB of RAM and the ATI X1900xt video card). Using Xbench, the Frankenmac beat the Mac Pro on the overall score, 149 to 143. Within the individual tests, the Mac Pro was faster at the CPU, thread, and OpenGL tests, while the Frankenmac was better at the memory, Quartz graphics, user interface, and disk tests. Overall, there’s not much difference in the two machines’ Xbench results—and keep in mind that the Mac Pro is more than twice as expensive as the Frankenmac.
Despite collecting an estimated several hundred million dollars in P2P related settlements from the likes of Napster, KaZaA and Bolt, prominent artists’ managers are complaining that so far, they haven’t received any compensation from the labels. According to a lawyer, some are considering legal action.Full article at TorrentFreak
Record label sources said corporate bosses are still deciding on how best to split the money. In determining the payout, they said not every artist is owed money and it must be calculated with regard to the level of copyright infringement for each artist.Full article at NY Post
What's more, these sources said that after the labels recouped their legal expenses, there wasn't much left to pass along to the artists.
Yes, this is a horse fight. Whichever horse wins is the one you should imagine me as in this fight.We as a species know a relatively small amount about our environment, and it is possible that there won't be words or symbols to explain much of it for a very very long time. In fact, humanity might never be able to understand absolutely everything. In addition, at the rate we're going we might not last long enough to figure it all out.
That being said, I wish people would stop taking advantage of others who buy...heavily, into certain constructions of the unknown.
SYSTEMS work, PEOPLE fail... It's that simple!!
"Wherever we go, Coca-cola's already been."
I wrote about the involvement of the Kellogg company in organic brands back in May of 2007 (elsewhere).
GOOD Magazine has a chart in its March/April 2008 issue that talks about all that and more in a very well laid out chart. You can see it in its original habitat (here), but since this is the Internet and you are lazy, you can also see it here (click for full size DUH):
Consider that the competition you imagine when you go to the grocery store is an illusion. Large corporations might give you a choice from amongst their own product lines but why would they want to see actual competition from another company? They would not; Kellogg company makes a lot more money when your choices are Kashi, Morningstar Farms, Gardenburger, (if you've eaten foods from Morningstar Farms or Gardenburger you know that they sell foods that compete with each other) and Bear Naked. The illusion of competition. A brand is not a company; brands are owned by companies. I'll stop boring you.
See the rest of (GOOD Magazine) too -- there are other cool articles there. It's good enough to bookmark.
