The Daily Loper – July 25, 2008

I’m In Love With My Anxiety Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Here We Go Again: Yahoo! Music Throws Away the DRM Keys
  You know, this story is getting sort of old. It’s safe to assume that every (and I mean EVERY) DRM system will stop working at some point.
• STARTREK.COM
  Still dead, though I have my choice of clicking on one ad promising me that the AAA can save me money on auto insurance, and another ad promising me that State Farm can save me money on auto insurance. Yes, they are officially so lame that the desperate attempt to monetize the no-doubt dwindling traffic has resulted in two competing ads for the exact same product. Nice one, CBS Digital!!
• The A-11; Wave Of The Future, Or Satan’s Offense?
  Finally! Somebody’s figured out a way to institute the classic "everybody go long" strategy into organized football.
• Kayaking teens accused of tiki bar beer theft
  ‘Nuff said.
• Numbers show girls as good at math as boys
  Great. What’s next? That’s they’re as good as boys at driving? In the kitchen? Getting into basketball fights?
• Mad Men becomes first TV show with more articles written about it than viewers
  The previous record-holder was, of course, "The Wire," who shamelessly went after it by setting their final season in a newsroom, thereby guaranteeing an inordinate amount of coverage as the newspapers fell all over themselves dissecting the "authenticity" of the portrayals.
• Fears About Link Between Cell Phones and Cancer Reemerge
  Great. Now it’s only a matter of time between we start hearing about second-hand cell phone radiation.
• Microsoft finalizes Windows XP for OLPC laptops
  Which is funny because Microsoft recently stopped selling XP. So, it looks like you’ll need to enroll in a third world elementary school if you want to a new copy of XP.
• Apple 2.0 Who is to blame for MobileMe?
  Apple has somehow managed to emulate Microsoft during the MobileMe launch. We love the iPhone, but we’re sticking with GMail and Flickr for email and photosharing.
• Yahoo: Burn Your DRMed Tracks to CD Now
  One of the the great ironies of DRM has been the Orwellian phraseology designed to assure customers that hey! we’re doing this for you!!!! So what we have here is music that "PlaysForSure" you’ve legally purchased from Yahoo’s "Unlimited" music service, which is going to — you know — stop playing because that music service is going to end. You know what’s amazing? That any consumer whatsoever bought into this bullshit in the first place.
• Scientists expose mystery behind northern lights
  No spoilers! No spoilers!!
• Creators of Scrabble knockoff on Facebook sued
  There were so many ways to resolve this issue. Typical that Hasbro went with the all-American solution. And sad. Really sad.