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Can you find the center of the brain responsible for youtube comments and create a drug that turns that off? The internet will pay you. The internet will pay you a lot.

I use the ShutUp plug in for Safari, but there are ones for other browsers too. It hides comments on any page in an intelligent way. I started using it because of the horrible Yahoo News comments, but it will work for Youtube too. you can activate it with a white list, so slashdot comments are ok, although maybe we'd be better off without those too. as they say, easier to put on blinders than to change the world. http://stevenf.com/shutup-css. Slashgods take note - a constructive comment from noh8rz!

Well, there were also these warnings from Beagle Bros.:

http://stevenf.com/beagle/diskcare.html

I always would forget to not feed the disk to the alligator, and an more than one occasion forgot the warning and cooked the disk in a toaster. ;-)

My experience was that 5.25" floppies were really reliable. I had hundreds of 5.25" floppies and I don't remember any of them ever failing. I had some failures with 3.5" floppies, but not too often. IMHO, USB flash drives are much more unreliable than floppies were (although capacity of USB flash drives is much larger than floppies).

It would be interesting to check if the floppies that I used over 20 years ago are still readable. I have to try that some day...

Ah, Elephant Memory Systems. At least for the disk I booted, it's true: An Elephant Never Forgets. (The artwork that went into their marketing swag was some of the most surreal in the industry.)

All the manufacturers also had sets of helpful icons/instructions about care and handling on the backs of the envelopes, which were parodied by Beagle Bros.

My favorite warnings were on the dust jacket of 5.25" floppy disks from Beagle Bros, as seen here http://stevenf.com/beagle/diskcare.html

Best Software Company Ever!

Mind you, last I checked logos and their like are the domain of trademarks. How they got a copyright for something that should, by all rights, be a trademark is something that seems to be missing from this conversation.

Trademarks and copyrights are unrelated forms of protection, involving different policies, rights, remedies, and so forth, but it is possible, from time to time, to have a single object which is protected by both -- in different ways, of course.

Consider, for example, the Beagle Bros logo since it's a fairly fancy logo, and shouldn't be totally unknown around here.

Assuming that the portraits in the logo are not old public domain clip art (fat chance), they'd clearly be copyrighted works of visual art. That they are also used as a logo doesn't cause them to lose their copyrighted status. Copyright protections would prevent people from, for example, making copies of the logo, but would not prevent people from distributing lawfully made copies further, if the first sale had already occurred. So the copyright could not be used to prevent someone from putting a copy of MS-DOS on a 5.25" floppy disk, putting that disk in a disk jacket emblazoned with the Beagle Bros logo, and claiming that it was BB-DOS.

The trademark on the logo, OTOH, could be used to prevent people from making that sort of false claim. But a trademark would not prevent someone from just making copies of the logo and printing them on stuff, so long as they didn't place those goods into commerce. Copyright would handle that side of things, though.

Copyrights can never apply to just a word or a name or even a short phrase. So the _name_ BEAGLE BROS could only be trademarked. And a very simple logo might not be able to be copyrighted either. The McDonald's M logo, all by itself, is probably not copyrightable, for example.

I'm confident that Omega has a trademark on their logo as well, but so long as it meets the very low standards to be copyrightable, they get both kinds of protection.

There is a fun downside, however. A trademark cannot be pressed into service as a poor-man's copyright, per the Dastar case. When the copyright on the logo expires, it will enter the public domain, and Omega won't be able to use trademark law to prevent people from doing whatever they want with it. It is possible that it will still have some degree of vitality as a trademark, but it will be severely diminished. Of course, that assumes that things won't get even worse in the future.

Dude, there were a LOT of Beagle Bros software...
http://stevenf.com/beagle/products.html

Assuming a non-proportional font...

280 / 70 = 4 pixels / character ?? That's 3 pixels per glyph including a 1 pixel "whitespace" to seperate glyphs.

or

56 col = 5 pixels/character

Try shutup.css

Its a custom stylesheet that autohides comments on a lot of popular web pages. There are even some browser extensions for it so you can toggle it on and off at will.

If I was making that list, then I'd like to include Beagle Brothers Software , who not only made great and useful tools for the Apple ][, but made them with a whimsical sense of humor. I still have a copy somewhere of their poster of Apple ][ peeks and pokes. Great stuff!! See it here: http://stevenf.com/beagle/

The toolbar: large icons waste space.

#19 is fixed, and the developers somehow resisted the urge to slap the snot out of these jerks for not emailing them privately beforehand.

#19 is fixed, and the developers somehow resisted the urge to slap the snot out of these jerks for not emailing them privately beforehand.

Bloggers: 43 Folders, Kris Dresden, Diane Duane, Paul Ford, Neil Gaiman, Michael Hanscom, Jason Kottke, Anne Murphy, Jessamyn North, Alia Phibes, Quentin Tarantino, and Wil Wheaton.

Linklogs: Anil Dash, Best of Craigslist, Boing Boing, CoolGov, Daze Reader, Fazed, Kottke Remainders, LinkMachineGo, MetaJournal, Michael Hanscom's Linklog, Museum of Hoaxes, NewYorkish, Paul Ford's Linklog, Snopes: New, SubText, and UFies.org.

Chicago: Chicagoist, jamas.org, CHICAGO.Metroblogging, Chicago Snapshot, CTA Tattler, Gapers' Block, and L or El.

Miscellaneous: Ask Slashdot, Citying, Cult of the One-Eyed Cat, Good Plastic Surgery, I Work With Fools, Schmo Blog, TeeVee, This Is Broken, Today In Alternate History, and x-entertainment.

Apple Bloggers: Buzz Andersen, Bill Bumgarner, Todd Dominey, Folklore, Steven Frank, John Gruber, Dave Hyatt, Brent Simmons,

A brief history: The original N-Gage (combination cell phone & game system) from Nokia had its earpiece mounted along the side of the phone, meaning that you had to hold it sideways to your head to talk on it. It looked a bit like you had a taco up against your head.

Pretty much everyone besides Nokia thought this was pretty silly. The phenomenon known as "Sidetalkin'" soon had a (satirical) cult following, and people around the world got together to share pictures of themselves sidetalkin' on, well, whatever they could find around the house.