RIAA losing money, firing employees, giving execs raises
RIAA losing money, firing employees, giving execs raises
The RIAA has submitted its latest Form 990 tax filing to the IRS, which details the organization’s precipitous shelving off in budget and employees (though the execs gave themselves fat raises):
The drop in income can be solely attributed to lower membership dues from the major music labels. Over the past two years label contributions have dropped to $23.6 million, and over a three-year period the labels cut back a total of $30 million, which is more than the RIAA’s total income today.
The cutbacks are not immediately apparent from the salaries paid to the top executives. RIAA Chairman and CEO Cary Sherman, for example, earned $1.46 million compared to $1.37 million the year before. Senior Executive Vice President Mitch Glazier also saw a modest rise in income from $618,946 to $642,591.
…The reduction in legal costs is even more significant, going from to $6.4 million to $1.2 million in two years. In part, this reduction was accomplished by no longer targeting individual file-sharers in copyright infringement lawsuits, which is a losing exercise for the group.
Looking through other income we see that the RIAA received $196,378 in “anti-piracy restitution,” coming from the damages awarded in lawsuits against Limewire and such.
RIAA Makes Drastic Employee Cuts as Revenue Plummets [Ernesto/TorrentFreak] 
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Annoying lawsuit for Annoying Orange
Annoying lawsuit for Annoying Orange
An advertising agency is suing the creators of Cartoon Network’s The Annoying Orange, accusing them of ripping off a character, The Talking Orange, that they created for a 2005 public information ad. [Mercury News]
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Masturbation ‘at the root of culture wars’
Masturbation ‘at the root of culture wars’
The Atlantic’s Hugo Schwyzer has a theory: that masturbation, as the most common sex act, is the heart of modernity’s war between Christianity and secularism<.
Many progressives were bewildered by Antonin Scalia’s blistering 2003 dissent in Lawrence v Texas, in which he warned that state laws against evils such as “adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, and bestiality” might be invalidated as a result of the decision. Why, liberals wondered, was masturbation included on that list? The answer is simple: masturbation remains not only a grave sin in the eyes of the Catholic Church to which Scalia belongs, but its acceptance as benign and healthy is perhaps the foundational error of modern sexual culture.
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Annoying lawsuit for Annoying Orange
Annoying lawsuit for Annoying Orange
An advertising agency is suing the creators of Cartoon Network’s The Annoying Orange, accusing them of ripping off a character, The Talking Orange, that they created for a 2005 public information ad. [Mercury News]
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Annoying lawsuit for Annoying Orange
Annoying lawsuit for Annoying Orange
An advertising agency is suing the creators of Cartoon Network’s The Annoying Orange, accusing them of ripping off a character, The Talking Orange, that they created for a 2005 public information ad. [Mercury News]
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Anatomical pinball table
Anatomical pinball table
Canadian artist Howie Tsui redesigned a pinball machine to turn it into a crude simulation of a musket-ball rattling around a soldier’s guts for a War of 1812-themed exhibition currently running at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre at Queens University in Kingston. It’s meant to demonstrate the way that repetition and concentration can inure you to the horrors of war:
The first part of his exhibition is a re-themed pinball machine, which now, having been Tsui-ed, is called Musketball! Tsui repainted the front glass panel and it now shows a British soldier reeling back as his guts explode from a musket shot (no rolling around inside for this one). The playing surface is painted with organs, tissue and bone, with the words “mangled viscera” at midfield. It would all be tame in a modern shooter video game, but it’s shockingly graphic on a vintage board.
I step up to the game and fire my first ball, which gets back in the gutter faster than I thought possible. I fire the second ball — which I note are gold, not silver, to which Tsui says, “I kind of blinged it up a little bit.” This ball stays in play just long enough to hit a few bumpers and set off sound effects of rifle shots and artillery blasts. I fire my remaining three balls, and my final score is slightly less than one-tenth of Tsui’s high score. “It’s your first time playing. I had to do a lot of testing,” Tsui says, showing he’s also talented in the art of diplomacy.
“After a while,” he says, “you sort of get hooked on the game, and the whole idea for me is that it distances the player from the idea of violence.”
Pinball, bones and animal skins: Howie Tsui’s wonderful horrors of the War of 1812 [Peter Simpson/Ottawa Citizen]
(via Kadrey) 
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Anatomical pinball table
Anatomical pinball table
Canadian artist Howie Tsui redesigned a pinball machine to turn it into a crude simulation of a musket-ball rattling around a soldier’s guts for a War of 1812-themed exhibition currently running at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre at Queens University in Kingston. It’s meant to demonstrate the way that repetition and concentration can inure you to the horrors of war:
The first part of his exhibition is a re-themed pinball machine, which now, having been Tsui-ed, is called Musketball! Tsui repainted the front glass panel and it now shows a British soldier reeling back as his guts explode from a musket shot (no rolling around inside for this one). The playing surface is painted with organs, tissue and bone, with the words “mangled viscera” at midfield. It would all be tame in a modern shooter video game, but it’s shockingly graphic on a vintage board.
I step up to the game and fire my first ball, which gets back in the gutter faster than I thought possible. I fire the second ball — which I note are gold, not silver, to which Tsui says, “I kind of blinged it up a little bit.” This ball stays in play just long enough to hit a few bumpers and set off sound effects of rifle shots and artillery blasts. I fire my remaining three balls, and my final score is slightly less than one-tenth of Tsui’s high score. “It’s your first time playing. I had to do a lot of testing,” Tsui says, showing he’s also talented in the art of diplomacy.
“After a while,” he says, “you sort of get hooked on the game, and the whole idea for me is that it distances the player from the idea of violence.”
Pinball, bones and animal skins: Howie Tsui’s wonderful horrors of the War of 1812 [Peter Simpson/Ottawa Citizen]
(via Kadrey)
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HOWTO move an immensely delicate 50′-wide circular electromagnet
HOWTO move an immensely delicate 50′-wide circular electromagnet
Fermilab just got a new Awesome Magnet, a 50′-wide jobbie that can’t be tilted by more than a few degrees without suffering irreparable harm. It’s in New York, though, and Fermilab is outside of Chicago, and this presents a logistical problem with a complicated solution:
The Muon g-2 ring, an electromagnet made of steel and aluminum, begins its 3,200-mile trek from New York in early June. From there, it will sail by barge down the East Coast, around Florida’s tip into the Gulf of Mexico, then up the Mississippi River until it arrives in Illinois.
Once on land, the electromagnet will be driven at night in a specially designed truck at no more than 10 mph until it reaches Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
The high-tech transport is all in service of a plan to use Fermilab’s powerful beam to send muons, a rare kind of particle that lasts just 2.2 millionths of a second, into the circular electromagnet, according to experiment spokesman Lee Roberts, who works at Fermilab. Once in the ring, muons “wobble,” or tilt like a top.
Huge magnet set for delicate voyage to Fermilab [Alexa Aguilar/Chicago Tribune]
(via /.) 
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HOWTO move an immensely delicate 50′-wide circular electromagnet
HOWTO move an immensely delicate 50′-wide circular electromagnet
Fermilab just got a new Awesome Magnet, a 50′-wide jobbie that can’t be tilted by more than a few degrees without suffering irreparable harm. It’s in New York, though, and Fermilab is outside of Chicago, and this presents a logistical problem with a complicated solution:
The Muon g-2 ring, an electromagnet made of steel and aluminum, begins its 3,200-mile trek from New York in early June. From there, it will sail by barge down the East Coast, around Florida’s tip into the Gulf of Mexico, then up the Mississippi River until it arrives in Illinois.
Once on land, the electromagnet will be driven at night in a specially designed truck at no more than 10 mph until it reaches Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
The high-tech transport is all in service of a plan to use Fermilab’s powerful beam to send muons, a rare kind of particle that lasts just 2.2 millionths of a second, into the circular electromagnet, according to experiment spokesman Lee Roberts, who works at Fermilab. Once in the ring, muons “wobble,” or tilt like a top.
Huge magnet set for delicate voyage to Fermilab [Alexa Aguilar/Chicago Tribune]
(via /.)
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HOWTO move an immensely delicate 50′-wide circular electromagnet
HOWTO move an immensely delicate 50′-wide circular electromagnet
Fermilab just got a new Awesome Magnet, a 50′-wide jobbie that can’t be tilted by more than a few degrees without suffering irreparable harm. It’s in New York, though, and Fermilab is outside of Chicago, and this presents a logistical problem with a complicated solution:
The Muon g-2 ring, an electromagnet made of steel and aluminum, begins its 3,200-mile trek from New York in early June. From there, it will sail by barge down the East Coast, around Florida’s tip into the Gulf of Mexico, then up the Mississippi River until it arrives in Illinois.
Once on land, the electromagnet will be driven at night in a specially designed truck at no more than 10 mph until it reaches Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
The high-tech transport is all in service of a plan to use Fermilab’s powerful beam to send muons, a rare kind of particle that lasts just 2.2 millionths of a second, into the circular electromagnet, according to experiment spokesman Lee Roberts, who works at Fermilab. Once in the ring, muons “wobble,” or tilt like a top.
Huge magnet set for delicate voyage to Fermilab [Alexa Aguilar/Chicago Tribune]
(via /.)
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