The Daily Loper – December 20, 2006

Hot Geeks!! Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Largehearted Boy: 2006 Year-end Music Lists (A-M)
  Speaking of year-end lists, Largehearted Boy gives us a master list of all of the year-end lists that he could find. We’re sure that someone out there has put together a master master list of all of the master lists of year-end music lists out there. Tim’s job is to go through all of the lists and see how many put music first officially released in 2006 on their "reissues" list.
• Pitchfork Feature: Top 50 Albums of 2006
  Too much music, too little time. It means something when you spend as much time as you possibly can chasing down music and listening to it, and you still haven’t even heard of — much less experienced — many of the albums on a lot of these year-end lists. We’re still wondering which of us is going to give that Joanna Newsom album a try.
• ‘King of the Hill’ Climbs to New Timeslot
  Not only are we glad that the perennially underrated (including by us) long-running comedy was renewed, we already know that it will be better than whatever it’s replacing.
• Web developers’ pay soars after surge in Net activity
  Geeks are hot again.
• Viacom Backs Out of Web Venture Talks
  Could the majors’ YouTube killer be doomed before it starts?
• Time Lays Off For The Holidays
  Nothing says "Season’s Greetings" like a massive pre-Christmas firing party.
• Waste of Time
  One writer sees Time Magazines list of 100 greatest albums and finds much to dislike. Hmm, we should hire this guy to write for us.
• Record industry DRM from 1907
  So not only was Edison the first bootlegger, but he also invented DRM. Sousa was right, wax cylinders are killing music.
• The Surefire TV Formula: Ape the Boss
  When it comes to television drama, the tried-and-true continue to rule.
• Blogosphere Smackdown – DVR or DVD?
  Why choose one when you can have both? Actually, having both is part of the problem. There’s just too much programming available.
• 5 U.S. studios mark major win in China piracy case
  The Chinese company was ordered to pay, er, ,100 in damages. That means that the studios only have to recover, um, ,629,979,900 from the ,630,000,000 it was estimated they lost to Chinese pirates last year. However, they’d still prefer to go after U.S. college students who downloaded a copy of Superman Returns and burnt it for their friends.
• Sony To Launch A Movie Download Service?
  Playable, of course, on your PSP.
• 95 Percent Of Americans Having Premarital Sex
  That figure seems low.
• Marketplace: Goodbye VHS, farewell fair use
  I guess this means that some of you are going to be accusing Marketplace of advocating piracy.
• Sony BMG settles suit over CDs
  Cash and customer refunds. All due to DRM gone wild.
• Rock heavyweights sue Web site to stop memorabilia sales
  Honestly, we don’t really care about the memorabilia: we just want as many great rock shows to get out into the world as possible.