Wired News: Shocking New Jacket Hits Street
Dubbed “exo-electric armor,” the No-Contact Jacket looks like an ordinary fashionable women’s coat. But an inner layer of conductive fiber carries a low-amp charge that delivers a nasty but non-lethal shock to anyone who messes with its wearer.
The founder of EasyJet, the dirt cheap trendsetting airline in Europe, is trying again with movies.
How much did you fork out last time you went to the cinema? It was probably considerably more than 20p. But that’s how much you can buy a seat for at Britain’s newest cinema, which opens in Milton Keynes on Friday.
Apparently, the film studios are giving him the blockbuster movies because of the lowball rates. In a way, this is not surprising, however. For a major release, the studio gets as much as 80% of the box office take. This is why concessions are so expensive: they are what pays the theater’s bills. At $8.50 a ticket, the studios are fine with $6.80 per admission to something like The Matrix Reloaded. With an average ticket price of $2.25 at Easycinema, that leaves only $1.80 for the studios.
Sal Randolph is interviewed at the Creative Commons site. She’s creating a new service called Opsound that offers CC-licensed music and sounds that other people can use. The article has a lot of discussion about gift economies. Sal concludes with:
With a large pool of sound files available, many things will be possible. Musicians, sound and video artists will be able to draw on them as elements in new work. For those who aren’t musicians, there will be the possiblitity of easily creating online microlabels. And of course I’m hoping for Opsound to be an interesting record label in its own right, producing and selling records and cds, holding events, parties, tours, etc.
Wow. Make sure you’re paying into your 401(k)… Indian man’s 65 years as a pensioner:
A man in the Indian state of Rajasthan has been collecting a pension for the past 65 years, it has emerged.
Habib Miyan has been drawing pension money since he retired in 1938, and says he is 132.
According to his pension book, he’s actually 125. Unfortunately, they can’t really confirm his age, but he’s got to be up there to have been retired for 65 years!
It’s not the best in terms of “artistic integrity”, but it sounds like some artists might be getting some pay for mentioning brands in their songs: Yahoo! News - Bling! Bling! Ka-Ching! Pop Stars Cash In. Sayeth the article:
[Lil Kim's] latest single, “The Jump Off,” scores the greatest number of brand mentions per song this year, with 14 different references, according to a company that tracks such information.
This evening, my allergies seem to be bothering me a bit. Last weekend, we went out to a park and I was fine. According to pollen.com, the pollen level was high that day, and I remember that oak was one of the predominant pollens. We have a big oak across the street, and since I was fine then, it probably wasn’t the oak. Predominant pollens listed now are oak, mulberry and grass. By keeping track here, maybe I’ll notice a trend about which pollens are listed as predominant when my allergies strike. Luckily, my allergies are not that bad and end before the first official day of summer.
By way of Dong’s Blog, I have learned of this Quick Reference Card site. Very nice indeed!
Here is a way to get something like C# Delegates in Java. A delegate is basically an object representing a bound method. I didn’t realize that C# had this, and it’s a very nice feature that I wish Java had. The implementation the authors have done is pretty good, but it would be nice to have the same kind of syntactic sugar that C# provides here. Maybe J2SE 1.6?
According to the latest Eclipse Project Draft 3.0 Plan, 3.0 Milestone 1 is scheduled to be released June 6th! Of course, their release plan goes all the way up to M5 in November, but still it will be great to start seeing new Eclipse features showing up. Here are the things that interest me most that are committed for 3.0:
The following are some nifty “proposed” items for 3.0, which means they don’t have a specific solution yet.
Lots of good stuff coming down the line, and the number of plug-ins grows all the time. Eclipse shows just how good an open source project can do when it has a bit of money backing it!
American Idol winner Ruben Studdard has signed a record deal and so has runner-up Clay Aiken. June 3rd (!), J Records will be releasing Ruben’s “Flying Without Wings” as a single. Personally, I didn’t think too much of that song. Clay’s “This Is The Night” comes out on June 10th, which I think coincides with Justin’s album release. So, we’ve got at least 3 new AI releases in the next couple of weeks, plus the movie. It will be interesting to see how long they can keep up this sort of pace.
