I’m sure you’ve all seen it, that annoying, unskippable advertisement from whichever anti-piracy outfit is infecting your particular country. It focusses on a teen girl in a bedroom downloading something or other from a site titled “Feature Films”. The dodgy, shakey-cam style titles read:
You wouldn’t steal a car.
You wouldn’t steal a handbag.
You wouldn’t steal a television.
You wouldn’t steal a movie.
Downloading pirated films is stealing.
Stealing is against the law.
Piracy. It’s a crime.
All well and good, except that downloading pirated films is not stealing, it’s Copyright Infringement. Piracy is where you board a ship out at sea and make off with it. Rum may be involved, and also planks.
But the best bit, the kicker, is that these ridiculous ads only appear on the legitimate, paid-for version of these films because pirates strip them out. Not only that, they serve to remind the buyer that they could have downloaded the film instead of paying for it, and without the annoying Anti-Copyright-Infringement ad on the front.
And yes, if I could download a car that had all the crap stripped out, but which was otherwise identical to the original, then I bloody would “steal” one.
Pork and Beans is the new video from Weezer, featuring a host of YouTube video stars. Below are the lyrics for the song as well as the video, and a list links to the youtube videos that appear in the Pork and Beans video.
I have only linked the first appearance of each YouTube video, alongside the line of the song in which it appears. I think I’ve got every reference but there may be others that are so subtle that I missed them – no doubt YouTube regulars will put me straight!
They say i need some Rogaine to put in my hair.
Work it out at the gym to fit my underwear.
Oakley makes the shades to transform a tool,
You’d hate for the kids to think that you’ve lost your cool.Imma do the things that I wanna do,
I ain’t got a thing to prove to you.
I’ll eat my candy with the pork and beans,
Excuse my manners if I make a scene.
I ain’t gonna wear the clothes that you like,
I’m finally dandy with the me inside.
One look in the mirror and I’m tickled pink,
I don’t give a hoot about what you think.
Everyone likes to dance to a happy song,
With a catchy chorus and beat so they can sing along.
Timbaland knows the way to reach the top of the charts,
Maybe if i work with him i can perfect the art.
Imma do the things that I wanna do,
I ain’t got a thing to prove to you.
I’ll eat my candy with the pork and beans,
Excuse my manners if I make a scene.
I ain’t gonna wear the clothes that you like,
I’m finally dandy with the me inside.
One look in the mirror and I’m tickled pink,
I don’t give a hoot about what you think.
No, I don’t care.
I don’t care.
I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.
Imma do the things that I wanna do,
I ain’t got a thing to prove to you.
I’ll eat my candy with the pork and beans,
Excuse my manners if I make a scene.
I ain’t gonna wear the clothes that you like,
I’m finally dandy with the me inside.
One look in the mirror and I’m tickled pink,
I don’t give a hoot about what you think.
The planets have completed their alignment and as according to the prophecy Bootblock has emerged from the seedy underworld of Scunthorpe to shower us with virtual goodness.
YouChoob is a tiny wee application that takes a YouTube page URL and downloads the video to your harddrive. It is entirely clientside and not dependent on any external website (except for YouTube, obv) and does exactly what it says on the tin, though v1.00 has a few quirks:
Links must be for http://www.youtube.com and not http://youtube.com
Only one video stream can be downloaded at any time (*)
No default filename is generated for your video file
Despite that, it’s a quick, reliable and easy way to download YouTube videos.
Recently I had the misfortune to view the latest pathetic steaming pile of crap to grace our TV screens in the form of a new ad for the Post Office – ”The People’s Post Office” no less, in which a bunch of rejects from The Office normal, everyday people sit about saying how great the Post Office is and how much they do for us.
Is this the same Post Office that intends to close up to three thousand rural branches because they don’t make enough money? You know… the ones used by actual people?
Is this the same Post Office that recently went on strike again, bring the delivery of important mail almost to a standstill? You know… mail intended for actual people?
Hah, it’s on YouTube already:
Whoever commissioned, produced and released this ad either has the biggest balls this side of Godzilla, or is so full of shit they could fertilise next year’s Chelsea Flower Show with a single bowel movement. Seriously – how exactly have the Post Office done anything for people just recently?
Oh, but at least it has Joan Collins.
HAH: Seems I’m not the only one to think the timing is great.
Seems I spoke too soon with the above post. While the browser lockup problem hasn’t occurred at all, videos from the BBC’s website are still shimmering within the embedded player. Oddly enough, videos played in either WMP or Quicktime seem to be fine – it’s just the embedded ones that give me the problem.
I finally got round to upgrading the nVidia drivers for my XFX 6600GT to the 81.98 version. I’ve had a couple of problems for a while:
Video Shimmering
Mainly in WMP but affecting all video players, videos would ’shimmer’ like a dodgy 5th-generation porno. It seemed to be every second line and didn’t matter which screen it was on. It may have been related to the sheer bandwidth required to run two 1600×1200 displays as a single desktop, but I’m pretty sure it used to happen with cloned displays as well.
Browser/Screen Locking
Frequent enough to be bloody annoying, browsing in IE (quiet, you!) would occasionally lock the whole desktop for a few seconds until the screen went black and then reappeared. So far this hasn’t manifested itself, as with the above video complaint, but we’ll see how this one goes.
I’d say these two problems were just as annoying as each other, since I’ve been watching a fair bit of video on The Beast just recently. I’ve even had the twins set up as two TVs – showing a DVD on one and WinTV on another.