Do You Know The Difference Between…

A 6-year-old girl who won four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert with an essay falsely claiming her father died in Iraq isn’t going to the show after all.

The contest’s sponsor, a store chain named Club Libby Lu, withdrew the prize Saturday and awarded it to another contestant. It didn’t identify the new winner.

“We did the essay and that’s what we did to win. We did whatever we could do to win,” Ceballos said in an interview Friday with KDFW-TV of Dallas. “But when (Caulfield) asked me if this essay is true, I said `No, this essay is not true.’”

New air defense missiles for Iran

Published in December 31st, 2007

Posted by Eideard in General

27 Comments

Defense against whom? Can you guess?

Sex lessons must start at age five

Published in December 31st, 2007

Posted by Eideard in General

19 Comments

They are talking, of course, about education geared to that age level.

With Bhutto Dead, Bush’s Plan B For Pakistan Is… Stick With Plan A?

Published in December 31st, 2007

Posted by Uncle Dave in General

15 Comments

Not looking good.

If You Die Of An Easily Preventable Hospital Infection, Here’s Who To Blame

Published in December 31st, 2007

Posted by Uncle Dave in General

14 Comments

Easily followed checklist to prevent infection is too dangerous to test.

S.C. Republicans get bogus Romney card

Published in December 30th, 2007

Posted by McCullough in General

15 Comments

Republicans get bogus Romney card

Cartoon of the Day Dept.

Published in December 30th, 2007

Posted by hhopper in General

31 Comments

Cartoon of the Day Dept.

Belichick ends perfect season where it began

Published in December 30th, 2007

Posted by Eideard in General

18 Comments

Belichick takes it home.

Girl Gets Bizarre Message Instead of iPod

Published in December 30th, 2007

Posted by hhopper in General

15 Comments

MyFoxDC Reports

A little girl thought she was getting an iPod for Christmas but ended up getting a rude surprise. She got the box but when she opened it up, she found a surprising switch: the iPod had been replaced with a bizarre note.
[...]
Jay Ellis, the girls father, returned the ipod to the Germantown, Md. Wal-Mart store where he purchased it. The store manger told him that another customer returned an iPod with a similar issue.

Contents of the note:

Reclaim your mind from the media shackles. Read a book and resurrect yourself. To claim your capitalistic garbage, go to your nearest Apple store.

Video story here.

Looks like it might be a disgruntled Apple employee.

Thanks MJ Hopper.

U.S. Olympic Committee Begins to Sue Companies on the Washington State Olympic Peninsula over Use of the Word “Olympic.”

Published in December 30th, 2007

Posted by John C Dvorak in General

19 Comments

Will the National Park Have to Change its Name Too?

U.S. Olympic Committee pops its cork over a certain peninsula’s vintner and the ‘O’ word — This is hilarious.

Charlton, a former Texas Instruments executive who bought Olympic Cellars in 1999, said she wanted to resolve this issue woman-to-woman, by dealing directly with Maser. Then, in October, she got a second letter.

“It was very restrictive,” Charlton said.

The letter stated that as of Dec. 31, “if somebody ordered wine [online] and was not a previous customer,” who’d been to the winery near Port Angeles, “I had to turn them away.” Olympic Cellars has no right to promote itself outside Western Washington, according to the USOC. Doing so could dilute the committee’s control of its trademarked word, and confuse people about which companies are official Olympic supporters, the committee said.

These Olympic creeps are officially out of control. This all stems from that shit-head Senator Ted Stevens:

The letter, written by USOC attorney Kelly Maser, cited the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act of 1998, in which Congress gave the USOC exclusive commercial control of the word “Olympic.”

The federal law grants an exception to businesses on the Olympic Peninsula. They can use the O-word when marketing themselves – but only in Washington west of the Cascade mountains.

Does that mean the park cannot advertise? Seems so.

In a Money Grab, RIAA Now Attacks “Personal Use” Doctrine

Published in December 30th, 2007

Posted by John C Dvorak in General

42 Comments

Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use – washingtonpost.com — This sort of legal attack will lead to the end of “fair-use” and back up copies of anything. I can seriously see this extended to the copying machine too.

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industrys lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.

found by Aric Mackey