The site hasn't been updated in a while, for one it was a pain to keep up and it also wasn't very good anyway. Anyway, everyone who plays fantasy football should check out my latest project, Statfink. It's a live stat tracker for fantasy football leagues, and I spent a lot of time writing it. It's hosted at sourceforge and it is free and open source.

Eventually I'll decide to do something else here. Until then, don't forget all the cool stuff on this site:

Consumption Junction Video Search

Random Comment Generator for SCO Stories on Slashdot

The old rants are still funny today

My personal copy of Statfink

Our odds and ends collection of images

After a short haitus because of some dns issues, I'm proud to announce we're back in business! Sorry for the downtime, I won't let it happen again.

Hey, part of the reason there's not much news on the site is the excellent web based game, The Kingdom of Loathing. This hilarious game can be played from anywhere, and has quite a cool community built up around it. Feel free to join us sometime, my character is AC StickMan.

If you're reading this, then it means everything is working on the new host. My new hosting is fairly priced and should be faster/better/etc than the old one. I've been pretty happy with the service so far so if you're looking for hosting, check out NFanatic, they rock!

In other news, dingleberries.

Well, you know around here, we rant, we don't whine. This little bastard was a whiner! Give me a break you little prick! I'm sorry your mom is a drunk, that doesn't mean you get to shoot your school up. Oh boo hoo, I'll go shoot my school up and kill myself, I'm such a badass. Feh.

Don't want your kids to see porn on the net? Why don't we make it mandatory for Internet providers to provide a way to block content that is "harmful" to children, and then make it a felony if any of the smut makes it through the filter?

Welcome to Utah. The state just passed a law that does just this. Of course it probably won't pass muster in the courts, but it's nonetheless amazing to see how scared and misguided politicians can be. This is a prime example of good intentions paving the road that the short bus ran over a hobo on. The Internet Service Providers are not the issue here Dudes! But I beleive the prefered nomenclature is "ISPs".

Our government has control of a ton of information that can prove useful to scientists, researchers and students everywhere. Places like Los Alamos National Laboratory contain troves of research documentation, many that don't have anything to do with nuclear technologies. Much of this information has been declassified, allowing science and academia to reap the benefits of using older studies. Recently in an effort to thwart terrorists, the politicians have locked down the entire Los Alamos Technical Library by reclassifying it as secret.

This is not an isolated incident, as many other information streams coming from the government have been similarly halted. Information that is worthless to a terrorist but could save millions of dollars in research money wasted on duplicated efforts is being taken out of the public domain. Welcome to crazy town.

With all the drama surrounding p2p applications like Bittorrent lately, there has been a lot of debate about whether the current tactics of the content creators and the government can work. Obviously the recent crackdown on Bittorrent worked fairly well, but surely there will be another network that file sharers will flock to soon enough.

In a story that brings back memories of the DeCSS DVD decryption debacle, A professor at Princeton University has written a simple p2p app that is only 15 lines of code. This is a slap in the face to legislation on the table like the INDUCE Act, which seeks to ban p2p programs altogether.

Special thanks to JS for sending in this story.

Hope everyone has a safe holiday season this year. Sorry to you guys who I run the stat tracker for. I'll get it running tommorow, didn't realize there was a game today.

I know I havent posted in a while, but it's hard to stay raging when you're hopelessly in love. Me and my long time girlfriend Laura got engaged last Saturday at the town's Christmas parade. I did the whole thing big with me holding the announcer's microphone on a knee proposing. The town cheered me on and of course, she said yes. It was a big surprise to her and she's been on cloud nine ever since. I have a couple of pictures of us right afterward that I've posted here. I'll update that page with more images as I get them.

Happy Halloween people. The site has been a bit of a stale cookie lately, I know. I've been distracted working on a huge program. It's a stat tracker for my fantasy football league, and I'm going to make it available to anyone's league soon. And I'm releasing it under the GPL and anyone will be able to use it for free. If you want to check it out, I'm currently testing it on my league. It runs during the football games every week and updates my league's scores live. Check out my prototype here. I'm "The Meager Teagers" so root for me!

Don't forget, elections are coming up and you'd better be getting your asses out to vote. A wise man once said never to vote for a turd sandwich.

As we all know, the election is coming up, and I hear that one third of all voters will be using electronic voting machines this year. Things are heating up and people are a little uneasy about using these voting machines made in secrecy by companies like Diebold and the like. I saw a good article over at ArsTechnica about this, and figured I'd pass it along.

Wow. I knew the IBM vs. SCO case would get nasty, but I never imagined how great it would be for linux in general. Yesterday, IBM layeth down the smacketh by whipping out our old buddy, the GPL. As the first true test of the GPL in a courtroom plays out, we all sit with fingers crossed. IBM has filed a motion for partial summary judgement, which is legalese for pwnage, stating that SCO totally screwed itself by violating the terms of the GPL and attempting to collect royalties from linux. They also quote SCO saying that the GPL is unenforcable and voidable. I guess we can leave that up to the judge to decide. BAM! If this motion is ok'd by the judge, it's gonna be like geek Christmas. The GPL stands up in court for the first time and it happens to be smacking SCO around. I think they'll be partying extra hard at GNU headquarters tonight.

Ok, so as everyone probably already knows, happy awesome search engine Google is now GOOG on the NASDAQ. It had to happen sometime. Lets just hope they keep that motto, "Don't be evil". It's really hard not to be evil when you have stockholders on your butt, but hey, if anyone can do it, it's Google right?

Yum.

• Wal-Mart is evil. Latest victim? Toys R Us.
• Blockbuster is evil. Latest victim? Netflix.
• Weather is evil. Latest victim? Florida.
• AOL is evil. Latest victim? Black people.
• Diebold is evil. Latest victim? Voters.

Much has been said about controversial filmmaker Micheal Moore and his tactics against George W. Bush. While Moore's harsh criticism of the President can go overboard at times, most of his allegations have some sort of shred of fact behind them. Now we have the "Republican Micheal Moore", John O'Neill. This guy just wrote a book about John Kerry that makes accusations that two of Kerry's purple hearts were earned from self-inflicted wounds and other such nonsense. O'Neill has attempted to discredit Kerry for the last 30 years, going all the way back to the Nixon whitehouse.

In a win for fair-use regulations everywhere, TiVo has gotten FCC approval for features in their units that allow users to share recordings over the internet. It's no different from giving your buddy a tape right?

Doom 3 is out! Stop reading and go buy it right now! Then you can decide how much more money you'll need to spend on hardware to get it to run well. I bought it, and I must say, holy crap. It rocks.

As a side note, we got a paying advertiser here this month, so go check them out. It's GenXBox over there on the right hand side of the page. Looks like a pretty good XBox site. I'm more of a PC guy myself, but if you like XBox, they can give you your fix. Click damn you! Click!

We are currently looking for a few people to help out around the site with news and rants. A qualified person should have the following skills:

• A good command of the english language.
• Minimal HTML experience.
• At least 3 hours a week of time to give.
• A passion for politics, computers, or writing. One of the three will work, but the more the better.
• A sense of humor.

Lots going on lately. Hatchbo is at it again with another bill called the INDUCE act. Even worse than the PIRATE act, it broadly bans all peer to peer file sharing networks and anything else with the capability of violating intellectual property. Yay.

The RIAA recently had a settlement after allegations of price fixing, and part of this settlement requires them to give free CDs away to libraries. They're doing this, but being real turds about it by sending them thousands of copies of the same crappy CDs. Ugh.

SCO is totally screwed, having been owned in court by DaimlerChrysler, and then getting into a fight with their primary investors. It goes something like this: Investors try to work a deal to get at least some of their money back, SCO tries to squirrel out of it, It goes to court. That's the story so far. Lesson of the day? Don't mess with linux.

That annoying cellphone text-messaging spam may slow down soon since Verizon started sueing the spammers. Now they need to broaden this to take on the telemarketers that call your cellphone.

Looks like the MPAA is being a little smarter than the RIAA when it comes to respecting their customer's fair use rights. They're considering ways of allowing some copying of DVDs for backup and portable player usage. Good for them, at least they're trying.

Diebold is getting smacked repeatedly for their terrible voting machines. It's gotten so bad that two guys just sued them in California. The evidence for their suckery is laying around everywhere. Why do states still consider these people when awarding voting machine contracts?

Amazingly, Google has finally announced their IPO price. They're doing it in a wierd way by trying to predict how high it will go and starting at that price, instead of the normal tech IPO that starts out at five dollars and rockets up to $150 within twenty minutes of the opening bell. By starting the shares off at between $108 and $135, they're cutting out all the money grubbing by the rich investors that happens with most IPOs. At the same time, many people feel this valuation is too high. I'd say try to short sell it in a couple weeks when the new stock smell wears off.

After most hard drive manufacturers dropped their standard warranties from three years to one year, Seagate just bumped up it's warranty to five years. I knew I liked those guys.

Wow. About 4 days ago, I wanted to link this really disgusting video to my friends on IRC, but I couldn't find the link to the video, since it was rather old, and it was posted on Consumption Junction.(WARNING: They have lots of porn ads)

It's a great site for certain types of videos, like crazy stunt crashes, hilarious foreign commercials, animations, parodies and other internet classics. It also has some really gross, disgusting, revolting things on there that are great for linking to the unsuspecting friend for a good laugh at their terrified reactions.

Here's the problem: They don't have a search engine. This drove me up the wall when I was trying to find the links to these videos, and I actually ended up giving up looking. I decided to go ahead and make my own search engine for their videos section, just to find these gross ones I'd been hunting. Today the search engine is done. It can provide you with a wealth of hilarious footage that is sure to make you almost fall out of your chair laughing, and it can also show you things that could make you throw up on your keyboard.

So here it is, our own little Consumption Junction Video Search

Please don't go there if you have a weak heart, stomach, are at work, or are easily disturbed. The rest of you, have a blast.

Just finished up on a new rant. I've dusted off the keyboard and revitalized my anger for certain senators, plus it was long overdue. A new bill has been proposed in congress, and I break it down for you on multiple levels. Not only is it informative, you might just laugh too. Well, maybe if you aren't totally pissed about the motivations of Sen. Orrin Hatch. Oh well, read it up people, and get informed.


Hatchbo credit: Internet Weekly Report

The site hasn't been updated in a while. I know, it sucks. A lot has been going on lately, and I haven't been able to keep up on the site like I should have been. I'm currently thinking of ways to make the site easier for me to maintain, and I'm thinking of getting rid of the news and making it a rants only site. It's hard to find people to do news, but everyone loves to rant.

Look forward to some fresh rants coming down the pipe and some new guest ranters. I'm willing to give up a bit more of my editorial control of the site in order to get more rants flowing on the pages. To anyone still reading this far, thanks for checking in even during the times when the site is void of anything new, I promise you'll be seeing some new stuff soon, and it will be good. I'm gonna rant on current events and I'll have some other people ranting on other random topics. Stay tuned!!

Register.com and Network Solutions, two of the largest domain registrars on the planet, are being sued by a company called "Nizza" over a patent that Nizza holds. I'm thinking this won't stand up in court, but just the fact that it made it there is an atrocity. The patent involves the use of a particular style of domain naming. For instance, if you get a domain at blahblah.com, their patent says they invented the idea of tagging your name on the beginning, like stickman.blahblah.com. Wow, what an obvious idea to patent. On a related note, doesn't this new company name sound like a member of the Wu-Tang Clan? It's like, Method Man, Old Dirty Bastard, Inspector Dek, Raekwan, The RZA, The GZA, and The Nizza! Maybe Ghost Faced Killa changed his name.

More trouble for SCO, as today it has been reported that IBM and Intel have thrown some money into an anti-SCO defense fund. The goal of the fund is $10m, but so far, they've only managed to get 3 million in contributions from IBM and Intel. I can understand that IBM is already in a trial and can't afford to give a lot to the fund, but if they only have 3 million in the fund so far, I think Intel is slacking us. C'mon Intel, you can easily afford the 10 million bucks yourself. I think they see this as a cheap way of gaining enthusiast support.

This story is beyond imagination. These people are overweight couch potato slobs, and they've decided it isnt their fault. They say they're addicted to television, and they're sueing the cable company. Hey, I'm addicted to mp3s, maybe I should sue Kazaa!

Apparently SCO has set its sights on the popular search engine Google. This comes as no surprise to many, as rumors of this move were floating around months ago. Google runs a server farm of around 10,000 linux boxes, and that means big bucks for SCO if they win in court. Ok, this has gotten out of hand, first IBM, now Google? What's next, raping my little sister while you make me eat glass soaked in everclear?

Note: I know the site has been pretty stagnant for a while, but the holidays really broke my balls. I plan on getting back into the full swing of things in short order.

Doesn't this sound familiar? A company comes out with a product. Microsoft comes out with a similar product after seeing product 1. Microsoft dominates that product's market by using it's market power to do things like forcing PC makers to not include the competitors product on their computers while including the MS alternative as part of the operating system. Ahh, the glory of a monopoly.

Well folks, here we go again. Real Networks has sued Microsoft for $1 billion dollars. With a "b". They are charging that Microsoft used it's monopoly power to depopularize their RealPlayer software. Real is one of those companies that made their product suck in a desperate attempt to make money. They've been forced to adopt a different business model than they intended because their previous efforts had been stifled by Microsoft. If Microsoft had not been so aggressive in blocking them out of the market, maybe they would have been the most popular media player, generating their revenue through advertising to a massive userbase instead of charging outrageous amounts of money for "premium" content. The direction of the company could have been completely different, and this is why they want so much money. Well, who knows.

Showing hope for the US Court system today, a federal appeals court in D.C. decided that the RIAA was wrong in it's method of sueing people for downloading music. The problem is that the RIAA sent out requests for personal information of Verizon internet customers without filing formal lawsuits. The judges ruled that Verizon was not required to release this customer information to the RIAA under these circumstances, and that the DMCA did not grand the RIAA the rights to issue subpoenas in this way.

This ruling seemingly throws a monkey wrench into a vast majority of the lawsuits that the RIAA has already started, and takes a huge bite out of their overall anti-piracy strategy. Score one for the good guys!

Great. I love Miramax as much as the next guy, but they need to tone it down with the lawyers. They just sent out a cease-and-desist letter to a guy who runs a kung-fu movie website, demanding him to remove some links on his page. These were links to places that you could buy import DVDs of movies that Miramax is planning on redistributing to North America later this year. Well, the guy wasn't selling these items himself, just linking the store to buy them. Not only that, but the items in question are legal, these movies have been out in other countries since 2002. Linking is not a crime!

A huge pat on the back for our boys in Iraq today, with the news breaking that they got Saddam Hussein. All I can say is w00t! What a downward spiral that the once great dictator has traveled. They found him in a hole covered with bricks in Tikrit. He had a fan in there for ventilation, I bet that was a stinky hole! They also found a couple hundred thousand dollars in American cash with him. When you're buried in a hole for weeks, you don't look too good. It's great to hear that he couldn't even find a house in his hometown to stay in. People are partying in the streets in Iraq, at least the people we're seeing, but don't get too warm and fuzzy yet.

In this Al-Jazeera story, they used to have a quote from the a senior leader of Islamic Jihad saying stuff like, "The Americans have an emotional victory today, but the American government has created the illusion that the resistance in Iraq was run by Saddam. The resistance will continue. blah blah blah". I had to paraphrase there because I read that quote earlier this morning, and during the time that I was writing this post, Al-Jazeera removed the quote from the Islamic Jihad guys, at least on the english version of the page. Hrrm. So, once again, good job boys, we're moving towards a real "Mission Accomplished" over there.