“An Inconvenient Truth” Wins Documentary Oscar: Arkin, Hudson Also Win — AP

In case you needed more evidence that liberalism thrives in Hollywood; and, in case you needed more evidence that the Academy Awards is rife with liberal politics: in a stunning turn of non-surprise, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” won the Oscar for “Best Documentary.”

To my knowledge, this is the first completely fiction movie to win “Best Documentary.”

Ok, admit it; it really is the cutest damn picture you’ll see today.

It’s two weeks out from spring break, 2007, here at Campbell law, and I figure it’s time for an update. I just finished the first part of my major research project — an objective “memo” — and have the second part due immediately after spring break. In addition to that, I have a Contracts assignment (worth 20% of my grade) due before spring break.

I had another one of my few “friends” drop out this week. (I use that term loosely, in the colloquial sense, as I have a high standard for what a real “friend” is, but I digress.) That actually brings the total number of people that I have felt any kind of kinship down to zero. Five left the first semester, and two have left this semester. I’m officially friend acquaintance-less. It’s not that big of a deal, except that it somewhat sucks to not have someone to complain about everything with.

I don’t connect with the vast majority of people here; they gossip too much, inter alia (thank God for that legal education). I think it comes from the cut-throat competitive nature that is nurtured at law school, but there are all kinds of rumors flying about everyone, including, unfortunately, myself, and such things make me not want to be around such people. The point being that none of that appeals to me, so I don’t engage them.

Oh well, it’s all a triviality, I suppose. I wrote a script to help me find the light at the end of the tunnel. Pennies make dollars.

Arcade extinction is almost upon us — popmatters

Ryan Smith has an excellent article for those of us who grew up in arcades — a pre-eulogy of sorts.

Ah, the atmosphere …

The arcades I grew up in were dark, sweaty, dungeon-like rooms filled with loud obnoxious lights and sounds with even louder and more obnoxious people. I remember the plethora of mohawked misfits, D&D-obsessed geeky types and various other mallrats. Even the typical arcade employee embodied the aesthetic — the longhaired burnout or the twentysomething underachiever celebrated in virtually every Kevin Smith movie.

True.

Ironically, though arcades were viewed by the older generation as seedy dens of teen corruption, the games themselves were often simplistic and childish affairs, especially compared with today’s popular over-complex and over-stimulating console games. Back then, video games didn’t revolve around fighting virtual lifelike recreations of World War II battles or murdering gang members; rather, we were innocently helping a pixelated frog across a street or saving a princess from a dragon.

Yes.

And despite all the unblinking eyes staring at video screens, arcades also often bred a sense of community — we’d chat with strangers about how to get past the Nth wave of aliens in Galaga, look on in awe for the guy who got past Act V in Ms. Pac-Man without losing a life, or bicker over who got the turkey leg in Gauntlet.

Spot on. Especially the turkey leg.

For many teens in the late ’70s and ’80s (before the advent of Xbox, cellphones and MySpace), arcades were actually prime destinations. It wasn’t just that my generation was dying to guide a yellow anthropomorphic hockey puck through a maze or help a mustachioed plumber rescue his girlfriend from a barrel-tossing ape, but because arcades were one of the few shared spaces we could hang out that felt decidedly adult-unfriendly. For some of us, going to the arcade was a small act of anti-authoritarian rebellion.

It’s kind of a sad fact, but it’s been a long time coming. More and more games appeared that cost a lot more than a quarter (often as much as a dollar) to play. I don’t know if that’s still true today because I haven’t been to an arcade in years and years.

But I certainly count myself among those people spoken of in this article. I used to spend all day after school on Friday, and all day Saturday, at the local arcade (Flickers) when I was in middle school and high school (for the most part anyway). Don’t even get me started on summers.

After Flickers closed down, they opened another one in the same mall. It was never the same, though, because it was much cleaner and more professional (more, dare I say, corporate). My friend Shane and I used to lament the loss of the dingy, hole-laden carpets, the flickering, humming florescent lights, the burnt-in screens, the always-broken-yet-always-there games.

That’s why this article really makes sense to me. It really was about the atmosphere — the dark, dingy, counter-culture, geek-filled atmosphere.

Vista has speech recognition hole

Microsoft Vista has an “exploit” whereby the speech recognition engine can be used to delete files (or perform other potentially malicious actions). This is an example of non-news news.

“The exploit scenario would involve the speech recognition feature picking up commands through the microphone such as ‘copy’, ‘delete’, ’shutdown’, etc. and acting on them,” a Microsoft security researcher wrote on the team’s official blog.

Some Vista users have already tested the exploit and were able to delete files and empty the trash can so that the documents were not retrievable.

Microsoft has said that even if the machine was primed to accept voice commands it would be unlikely the user would not be in the room to hear the file with malicious instructions being played.

This is common sense and in no intelligent way should this be construed as an “exploit.” While I’m not Microsoft apologist, it’s common sense to me that using voice recognition to perform functions on your computer otherwise performable with a keyboard is a type of perceived performance. Voice recognition is used to operate a computer without a keyboard as seamlessly as possible. It follows from that that a user should be able to speak to a computer to delete a file.

Obviously, if someone sent an MP3 with a command to delete a file via email; and if the recipient had voice recognition on; and if the recipient had his microphone on; and if the recipient had voice recognition on; and if the quality was clear enough to be recognized (after all, I request “open Firefox” and for some reason my computer hears “enter standby mode”); and if the recipient didn’t bother to stop playback after hearing the command, then that function should, as a matter of design, be executed.

To require otherwise is to defeat the purpose of voice recognition. As I said, this makes this officially non-news. If we are going to bash Microsoft, let’s adhere to the very acceptable reasons we already have to do so.