Jeff Hoy, American

A writer on a for profit blog full of advertising complaining about a for profit web site being … full of advertising…

On top of that, Office Web Apps’ landing page usually sticks an ugly ad in the lower-right corner, one you’re probably used to seeing on the sites of newspapers that have lost touch with their advertisers, blogs hungry for monetization, and other hey-whatever ad sections. It’s less than appealing, especially when the design seems to blend into the beige-ish focus of Live.com’s design. (Note that you can change your Live.com theme, but the ad doesn’t ever go away).

You could read the rest of the article if you want… but there’s nothing really to see there, kinda lame.

…which internet community has the worst commentors. I used to think it was YouTube, but some of the news web sites out there, especially local ones, seem to have higher percentages of feeble minded retards (fmrs for short) than even YouTube does.

[Update: Nevermind, I don't want your crap, I'd rather have a Nook. Why don't you do the truly ballsy thing and cut off all sales to Colorado to protest having to collect sales tax instead of just cutting off your affiliates like a stupid bully? ]

*Ahem*, just thought I’d tell ya that I’ve been a Prime member since March 2007 and I’ve spent nearly $20,000 at your fine establishment since late 2006, not counting orders from third-party sellers.  Also, have I told you that I love you and how great you look in orange and black?

Love,

Jeff Hoy

p.s.  GIMME A FREE KINDLE! Please?

12 years later and some real progress is finally being made on this stupid crap.

A prominent British medical journal on Tuesday retracted a 1998 research paper that set off a sharp decline in vaccinations in Britain after the paper’s lead author suggested that vaccines could cause autism.

Why did he do it? Possibly to make himself rich.

But an investigation by a British journalist found financial and scientific conflicts that Dr. Wakefield did not reveal in his paper.  For instance, part of the costs of Dr. Wakefield’s research were paid by lawyers for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers for damages.  Dr. Wakefield was also found to have patented in 1997 a measles vaccine that would succeed if the combined vaccine were withdrawn or discredited.

But the ramifications of this man’s behaviour are still being felt far and wide.  He was the spark that started a much larger wild fire.

But the retraction may do little to tarnish Dr. Wakefield’s reputation among parents’ groups in the United States.  Despite a wealth of scientific studies that have failed to find any link between vaccines and autism, the parents fervently believe that their children’s mental problems resulted from vaccinations.

[...]

In the United States, anti-vaccine groups have advanced other theories since then to explain why they think vaccines cause autism.  For years, they blamed thimerosal, a vaccine preservative containing mercury.  Because of concerns over the preservative, vaccine makers in 2001 largely eliminated thimerosal from routinely administered childhood vaccines.

But this change has had no apparent impact on childhood autism rates.  Anti-vaccine groups now suggest that a significant number of children have a cellular disorder whose effects are set off by vaccinations.

It never ends with these people, it’s not their child that’s flawed, it’s gotta be somebody’s fault.

(Part 1 here & Part 2 here)

Researcher Who Sparked the Vaccine/Autism Scare “Acted Unethically”

The MMR/autism hypothesis took off in 1998 with the publication of a study of 12 autistic children by Canadian gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield.  Wakefield’s study found traces of the measles virus in the guts of children he tested.  He concluded that the virus derived from the MMR vaccination, and suggested that it caused inflammation possibly related to the children’s neuropsychiatric dysfunction. 

Since then study after study has debunked Wakefield’s research.

This anti-vaccine hysteria that is being promoted by and through celebrities and psuedo-scientific nonsense has got to stop.

(Part 1 here)

[H]ard|OCP has a great editorial on NVIDIA’s newest graphics chipset, the GF100, also known as Fermi.  This new design is a major departure from and rethinking of the way graphics are rendered on computer video cards.  I’ll bet Valve Software’s Gabe Newell is rolling over in his corpulent body.  You see, cause he hates new computer hardware that is different.  Ha ha… zing!  I’m snarky.

But seriously, go check out H’s article.  It’s very interesting.

The Zune software allows you to assign disc numbers to your individual tracks.  This is useful if a particular track came from a multi-disc release.  In these examples I’m using Dethklok’s “The Dethalbum” Deluxe Edition which came on two discs.  You can see this feature in these first two screen shots.  Click them to embiggify for the illustrations.

In this next screen shot you can see that in the software’s track list it uses this info to properly group tracks by their disc number, and then each group is sorted by the track’s number.

On this screen shot of my Zune 80GB, you can see that the track list is only sorted by track number.  So each track one from each disc is paired together.  This problem is made worse by the more discs an album contains.  Some of my albums have as many as four discs, so my track list will have four track ones right at the start, then four track twos, and four track threes, and so on.

I was hoping this would be fixed in the newest firmware update, just released with the new version of the Zune software and Zune HD hardware, but it has been overlooked.  Of course, there are work-arounds for this issue, but it would be nice if the software and hardware worked in the same way.  I really wonder why they would work to create the feature in the software to begin with, only to leave it out in the hardware.  And considering how rare firmware updates for the Zune are, it’s probably going to be a long time before this changes, if it changes at all.

How could these guys release this information without providing a video of the mice floating around?  Come on guys!  Make with the video pronto!  I want to see the dizzy mouse kicking the air and spinning around.

The researchers first levitated a young mouse, just three-week-old and weighing 10 grams. It appeared agitated and disoriented, seemingly trying to hold on to something.

"It actually kicked around and started to spin, and without friction, it could spin faster and faster, and we think that made it even more disoriented," said researcher Yuanming Liu, a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. They decided to mildly sedate the next mouse they levitated, which seemed content with floating.

Frickin’ sweet dude.

Update:  The RiffTrax Encore is scheduled for October 8th.

If you missed the RiffTrax Live event, then go get your tickets for the RiffTrax Encore event.  It’s a rerun of the live show.

rifftrax Just got off the phone with @FathomEvents – an encore broadcast of #rifftraxLive is on its way! Details coming soon!

[ Be sure to get your Bob Executive t-shirts here ]

I just got back from the RiffTrax Live: Plan 9 From Outer Space event.

It was the best thing I’ve seen in a movie theater in a long, long, oh so very long, time.

Let me say that again… bigger.

It was the best thing I’ve seen in a movie theater in a long, long, oh so very long, time.

I cannot overstate that.  Seriously.  To say that RiffTrax Live was a laugh-a-minute would be an understatement.

The show was hosted by the very fine and geeky Veronica Belmont.  You might know her from the web tech show Tekzilla and as the host of the Qore electronic magazine on the Playstation Network.

It started off nicely with an incredibly funny riffing of a 50 year old “documentary” about stewardesses called “Flying Stewardess.”  The film told the story of a new stewardess going through her training and first day on the job.

Jonathan Coultan performed two of his nerdtastic songs, and the audiences sang along.  The RiffTrax crew, dubbing themselves the RiffTones, joined up with him for one song that was a send-up of the movie. The song told the story of the other 8 plans from outer space that the aliens tried before they got around to the 9th one.

Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, of Something Awful (.com) fame also contributed a few very funny short films/commercials.  Lowtax (and the pubic hairs on his head) also made an appearance on stage to help accept the prize give-away for some lucky viewer somewhere in a theater in New York.

The feature presentation was so hysterically funny that I just about shot soda out of my nose more times than I can remember.  It also brought back a ton of great memories of my youth spent watching MST3K.  It was just awesome.

If you didn’t go see it, boy did you miss out.  You really need to be kicking yourself right now.  I seriously hope the show was a big enough success and profitable enough for the RiffTrax crew to consider doing more of these live events.

Be sure to check out RiffTrax.com.