I don’t go around glorifying schoolyard violence or anything, but this little guy has such a sweet right hook I just had to share it.

You see from this how it doesn’t always mean something to be bigger. And drinking milk can do you good. This little guy is classy, though, as you can tell from the soft pat on the head after the knockout blow. Looks like he’s done this before…

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The following is an excerpt from Don’t Fear the Pirates, an interesting article about filesharing I found here.

Meghann Marco, author of Field Guide to the Apocalypse is someone who recognizes that obscurity is a much greater threat to the livelihood of a writer than piracy. Much of her day is spent trying to drum up attention for her book, and she was excited by the possibility of it being included in Google Book Search. Marco’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, on the other hand, told her that that would not be happening. They’re part of the Association of American Publishers, which is suing Google for copyright infringement.

Marco sent a letter of support to Google, which quickly made its way around the Internet. In it, she tells a story of being challenged by someone about giving away her work for free. “What if someone Xeroxed your book and was handing it out for free on street corners?” the person asked her.

Marco’s reply: “Well, it seems to be working for Jesus.”

I think the gist of the article can be summed up with this quote:

BitTorrent technology should have been recognized immediately by the movie studios as a way to make their distribution chain more efficient. But the industry was so locked in its old business model that they allowed an entire culture of free movie-sharing to evolve with no reasonable, legal alternative.

And another good quote:

You’d expect the technology-savvy people in the software industry to be a little smarter when it comes to balancing convenience and the risks of piracy, but Microsoft would prove you wrong. The company has spent millions on the Microsoft Genuine Advantage program to crack down on pirated copies of Vista and XP. All this, despite the fact that Microsoft would probably not have attained its dominance without software pirates. In the developing world, pirated copies of Windows are far more common than legitimate ones, but as happens in North America, illegitimate users are gradually being converted to legitimate users as they upgrade. Pirated Windows is easily the best marketing tool that Microsoft has ever had. Jeff Raikes, the president of Microsoft’s business group, recently admitted as much, at this year’s Morgan Stanley Technology conference in San Francisco. “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else,” Raikes told the crowd.

And now I’ve got to go. My torrent is done downloading.

Seam carving is an image resizing algorithm developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. This algorithm alters the dimensions of an image not by scaling or cropping, but rather by intelligently removing pixels from (or adding pixels to) the image — pixels that carry little importance.
Link

What follows is one of the most interesting things I have seen in months. Anyone who works with graphics on a professional level knows some of these things can be done with the current version of Photoshop, but this application certainly makes much lighter work of it.

Rumor has it this technology was recently purchased by On1 Software, so a third-party plugin is likely imminent.