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France, UK, US and Canada have the right idea - just dont track it. Any issues are in the distant past and shrouded in national security, nation building, export deals, patriotism and commercial secrets.
If the press still keeps on digging, the patients privacy kicks in to stop any questions about epidemiology. Still having issues? Stop offering/teaching so much about epidemiology.
Back to simple industrial toxicology, long term old people get sick... any detectors that spike are faulty and get removed for servicing for a few weeks.
With no hard data its your expert vs nothing.
If your still interested read and watch http://www.zerohedge.com/article/tellurium-129-presence-proof-inadvertent-recriticality-fukushima
"Newly released TEPCO data provides evidence of periodic chain reaction at Fukushima Unit 1"
http://vimeo.com/21881702
The hard data is been released, the press is just not very good. http://cryptome.org/0003/fukushima-areva.zip
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/attempt-pour-concrete-fukushima-pit-crack-generating-1-sieverthour-fails-new-unmanned-drone-

This isn't news. About 6 months ago, a boy & his father sent an iphone up up and away... it reached the upper atmosphere and the cold finally popped the balloon. The iphone fell... from much further up than just 100 wimpy ft. Here's the vid - http://vimeo.com/15091562 I thought everybody knew about this.

Well, you're an alien.

I couldn't get the video to play at the link in TFA. But this one did: http://vimeo.com/11386048

Just to be clear, you do know Obama lifted the ban on Cuba to connect to any cable and gave US companies the right to do business with Cuba with this respect several months ago, still Cuba didn't acted on it. If you watch this video, they say is because they don't have for sure the US wouldn't take the money and not provide the service:
http://vimeo.com/19402730

They will always find a reason not to give people access to information!. That video is also a prove why there is a need for people like Alan Gross to go to Cuba and do what he was doing, and only the Cuba government is to blain for that.

Let me be clear, I give the CIA or directly the US government is using here the USAID to do things that could potentially bring down the current Cuban government, which yes could get anybody in trouble anywhere, but that doesn't make the fact that what Cuba is fighting here is Internet access for the people. I'm Cuban, left Cuba 2 years ago when I was 29, my chosen field, bioinformatics, and yes I left Cuba not only because it was extremely frustrating to work in a field where internet is a must, I left because it was killing me from inside out to live in such a totalitarianism country, but believe me, controlled access to Internet will make the current dictatorial government fell one way or the other, doesn't matter if they choose not to give access anybody and then fell behind the rest of the world, or if the technology allow people circumvent the government control and they decide on their own with the information they will have to raise.

http://vimeo.com/3519680

It's about an hour long for anyone who's interested.

TL;DW version: no country is going to waste time developing attacks and trying to coordinate with physical attacks when they can be disarmed by Microsoft releasing a patch. Besides, if you want something DoS'd, it's much easier to just blow it up; that way the admins can't just reboot or restore the damn thing and have it up again within minutes. Most importantly, even if you've managed to cripple a country's networks -- including their military networks -- you need to still be able to back it up with physical force to exploit your temporary advantage. So, he concludes that criminals, terrorists, and spies will be a problem, but "cyberwar" will never really happen.

That's gobbledygook.
I don't see anything but speculation in TFA. Hell, if we are speculating, here's something that's better and a lot more believable to be Windows 8:

http://www.vimeo.com/13580196

Here is the video, in case you can't reach his smoldering server: http://vimeo.com/20286577

There's no way to make a decent animation in two hours, unless your movie is based on a bouncing ball in a squared box, heck even that would take more than two hours in blender

Maybe not, in Blender, anyway. Blender users regularly win speed modeling competitions. In fact, a team actually entered a two-day short film contest with Blender -- the first time anyone had entered an animated film in that competition AFAIK, since any film had to be four minutes minimum, and entirely produced from scratch within the span of two days.
  The result was Grey Justice:Puncher of Men

http://vimeo.com/5089426

Are you sure they arent going to find you? And just put bugs in your teeth?

CNN shares a funny four minutes video showing a replacement for Andy Richter on Conan O'Brien late night show on TBS (mirror).

Next Media Animation (NMA) has an one minute and eleven seconds YouTube video.

Your ant overlord uploaded an one minute and 22 seconds Vimeo video from Late Night Show With David Letterman.

You can use YubiKey as hardware token.

http://vimeo.com/4163662

It's seems that ways of countering access to information are on the minds of many.

We certainly heard a few things about the significance of and attempts to control the flow in Egypt. We don't hear so much about Cuba. It got my attention when someone posted that the events in Egypt weren't getting covered there.

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/national_world/stories/2011/02/07/u-s-attacking-cuba-through-wi-fi-hot-spots.html

(translated text of video)
http://translatingcuba.com/?p=7111#more-7111

(the video, in Spanish)
http://vimeo.com/19402730

Your wish is my command: http://vimeo.com/18079655 Sure, it's just a concept, but...

Video: http://vimeo.com/7824102

Dude... seriously?

At least they SOMETHING to help the people in egypt. What do you want? a full scale google invasion?

And by the way a google employ (exec) was kidnapped by plain clothed security forces in cairo and is missing since several days. The arrest was caught on video. See around 1:11

Not quite so cushy after all.

This really impressed me!

Warning! Mute speakers first... Then it's impressive.

This is impressive bit of tech.

This really impressed me! No artificial vision involved, but awesome nonetheless. Explanation

Well, to offer some simple answers to John Gruber's simple questions:

1. Maybe.
2. Both yes and no. Android will be customised by device makers. Some may include H.264, some may not.
3. Transcoding of YouTube's library to WebM is already well underway. Look, here's one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMKmQmkJ9gg&html5=1&webm=1. Join the HTML5 beta (http://www.youtube.com/html5) and it will play in WebM automatically if you use, for example, Firefox 4. You can also do as I've done in the link and tack "&html5=1&webm=1" on the end of the URL.
4. Other companies can make their own choices. Vimeo, for one, is open to the idea of adding WebM support in time: http://vimeo.com/forums/topic:25295. DailyMotion using Theora presently: http://www.dailymotion.com/html5
5. Me, I am.

Personally, I don't have Flash installed anymore. Usage of open, royalty-free video and, even though there's still a lot of video that isn't in an open format, for me it's already grown enough to be practical.

i can see that you're not in the mood to be swayed by logic, reasoning, or facts, but i will still point out a worthwhile quote by Jay Rosen at NYU School of Journalism, "The watchdog press died; we have this instead."

http://vimeo.com/17393373
http://pressthink.org/

Dud, the idea of mass population reduction is not something I'd post if there wasn't more information I've come across. I.e. Chemtrails. I didn't believe it till I saw it myself going on and I even took some pictures of contrails being put down over Atlanta along with contrails in the same photos around 5pm. Later learned earlier that morning they were putting them down over North Carolina, apparently working west. Here is a video well done http://vimeo.com/16219493

Of the files in the wikileaks released archive of torrents http://wikileaks.ch/file/wikileaks_archive.7z is one on sterilization study and a few others catholic church related that are not available via torrents.

and there is more...
http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/56612/End_Game__Population_Reduction_Plans_/ and there are other videos as well on this. i.e. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiFcGRmagmk

I'm also quite aware that for some people, perhaps such as yourself, you cannot handle the truth or figure if you can't do anything about it them out of mind is better.

http://www.naturalnews.com/z030209_placebo_medical_fraud.html
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/03/press.htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096/rankin-on-thursday-where-communism-succeeded.htm
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-truth-about-the-drug-companies/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-26/glaxo-said-to-settle-u-s-drug-manufacturing-lawsuit-for-750-million.html

Wired on the orginal article:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/the-truth-wears-off/

Anyway, this New Yorker article once again underscores the folly of going to extremes against common sense or long standing cultural traditions, based on some new scientific report or another, without looking at the broad big picture on overall weight of all the evidence we have from a variety of perspectives.

But even when there is a wide variety of good science, often policy ignores it.
Problems with the recent timid vitamin D recommendation:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
Dr. Joel Fuhrman on how much money the USA spends on sick care for very poor outcomes:
http://vimeo.com/16682935

The Future:

logorama

A piano is as much a robot as a vacuum cleaner is. It's a tool you can use, nothing more.

A player-piano is indeed a primitive robot. You are right about that. Ever heard of conlon Nancarrow? One of the more interesting American composers who made music for player piano all his life. Here's a link to one of his pieces: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPdX85cv_D8 But one of the disadvantages is that because of the way it's built, a player piano can't do dynamics. You can only play louder if you play more notes at the same time.

Yamaha Disklavier and such CAN be used as robots. They're machines on their own, but if you feed them real time information by using a computer with sensors and a custom made program they can indeed react to their environment. About sounding mechanical, that's an illusion. When making a piano robot, there are only two parameters that count: the the timing and the pressure you use to push down a key. compared to windblowers, this is very simple, because you won't have to modify the sound a string after it has been beaten. If a Disklavier sounds mechanical, it is because of the way the piece of music is programmed, not because of the limitations of the instrument itself. If you want it to play some music you can either program it to play exactly what it says on the score, or build in some errors, like a human player would make. Slight deviations in timing and velocity. The first way would make the music a bit mechanically. The second way can sound perfectly realistic, if you do it right. But then you have to ask yourself what the point of making robots is, if you're asking them to make the same mistakes as humans do.

Now that robot clarinet is an interesting experiment. But not finished at all. It is interesting because it shows that much more research is needed in this area. It is very impressing to do a crude version of 'flight of the bumble bee' but it only shows that the fingering mechanism is working ok. Now that part is quite comparable with a technology used by a disklavier. Not that new at all, you just need smaller electromagnets. The real challenge lies with the mouthpiece, and they're not there yet. For now, the instrument plays everything at the same volume, and I have reason to believe it won't be able to make breaks between two notes. There's certainly no articulation at all, and just that is what makes a clarinet sound real. So it's a good project, but they haven't figured it all out, just as the people who are doing this project have not figured it all out.

The "figuring out" part is a challenge for every instrument you're trying to turn into a robot. And the video you watched is the result of an earlier experiment, where they tried to emulate an electrical guitar. If read a bit further, you'll see that they're working on wind- and string instruments AND on the interaction with human players. That's still a bit more complicated than the examples you gave.

Of course they're not the first trying to make a musical robot. One of them studied in Belgium for a year (also mentioned in the article) at Logos foundation. Here's their website, it has a small introduction video on the right: http://www.logosfoundation.org/mnm/index.html. And here's a recent video of their current robot orchestra improvising with two human performers: http://vimeo.com/11487694

What you will notice is that this orchestra doesn't have a string instrument. Simply because it's very complicated to make one. So what these people are trying to do is quite new indeed.

About the poor pitch and intonation you mentioned: you shouldn't think that

To be honest I'm not sure how you can call Sony security a failure.

If that's how you feel then you really should watch this video by fail0verflow. It's their presentation (with plenty of detail) of how exactly Sony's security fails and how remarkably pointless some security measures actually are. It also explains how badly broken their use of crypto is. I'm quite frankly amazed at how many mistakes Sony made now that we are learning more and these talented hackers are taking the PS3 apart piece by piece.

About a month ago the White House called TRUtv and told them to stop airing Governor Ventura's show about FEMA internment camps* on TV or their website. TRUtv complied since they were also told if they don't cooperate they'd be audited by the IRS. It makes me wonder if Amazon is under similar pressure: "Pull wikileaks or else we'll quit using your cloud services and audit you."

[citation needed]

* http://vimeo.com/17158872

No..., citing another web site that simply makes the same unsubstantiated claims is not a credible source. Please readjust your foil hat and try again.

Look I'm on the side of Wikileaks and I am just as upset as the next thinking person at how easy it is to buy influence from the federal government, but the bat-shit-crazy conspiracy theories only take a way from any intelligent discourse on the matter.

About a month ago the White House called TRUtv and told them to stop airing Governor Ventura's show about FEMA internment camps* on TV or their website. TRUtv complied since they were also told if they don't cooperate they'd be audited by the IRS. It makes me wonder if Amazon is under similar pressure: "Pull wikileaks or else we'll quit using your cloud services and audit you."

*
* http://vimeo.com/17158872

Japanese singer singing Esperanto:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4JO7wFvOxM

Turkish movie in Esperanto:
http://vimeo.com/13356766

Chinese government newscast in Esperanto:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5uFAM15SDA

Funny how I hear these tired worn arguments from people who can't speak Esperanto and clearly know nothing of it. It's not a western language. Over the years concepts worldwide have been merged into it through usage. And likely it'll change in the future.

Latin:
- EXTREMELY difficult.
- inconsistent.
- Purely western.

Latin by comparison is a purely western product. And very very difficult to learn. Esperanto is easy, yet fully expressive due to it's clever grammar system.

Your post sounds like just a psychological outburst as described in this essay by Claude Piron:
http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/reactions.htm

Try building a civilization without religion. So far every attempt has ended in Horrors far worse than any nuke unleashed to date.

Citation needed.

But we do have examples, today, of civilizations which seem to be getting along just fine without religion -- better, in fact, than their religious neighbors.

I'd describe myself as an agnostic

Which definition describes you? Do you think the question is just unknown, or actually unknowable?

And why agnostic instead of atheist?

Plus it's kinda like the Matrix, trying to Free a mind from Religion after a certain point in it's development is dangerous, far more likely to result in a Monster than an Enlightened Human.

Again, citation needed. Just because it's an interesting analogy doesn't mean it's in any way true, even if I couldn't drive a bus through the holes in this one -- the reason you're likely to get a monster in The Matrix is because there are Agents, and there isn't anything equivalent in the real world.

Evidence tends to show the contrary -- you can find few examples of violent atheists to begin with, and none which you can actually trace to their atheism. Very few even suggest atheism as a reason.

History also tells us that is entirely possible to be a rational, enlightened person who can contribute to the advancement of human knowledge, be an effective leader, exhibit a good moral compass, etc while being religious.

Or at least while claiming religion...

Mostly because for most of history, we didn't really have the idea of religious freedom, at least not in practice. Even today, it's impossible for an openly atheist politician in the US to be elected even to Congress, let alone the Presidency, though at least this time it's popular opinion instead of actual laws standing in their way.

So there are very, very few cases where it was possible to contribute anything to society while being openly atheist. So of course those who contributed anything to society would be religious, or at least claim to be.

Very few examples of good Atheist role models, even in the sciences.

Surely you're joking.

Watch some of these :-) http://vimeo.com/riscyd

I read a forum where much of this was posted and I'll try to find it for you. For starters check out this site where they post many of their vids :-) http://vimeo.com/riscyd It's going to take me awhile to find this in my history, some of the vids out there by others buzzing windmills are also "interesting"

I'm an indie filmmaker myself (used to be a tech nerd a few years ago, but turned into movie magic 3 years ago). I'm constantly trying to find such good shows too, online. And I have quite a list for you. :-)

- Continuum, scifi: http://www.facebook.com/ContinuumTV (shot with a Canon 7D dSLR)
- Pink http://www.pinktheseries.com/
- http://mindseyeseries.com/
- http://www.minglemediatv.com/CursedWebSeries.html
- http://www.crackle.com/c/Trenches
- http://www.crackle.com/c/Fear_Clinic
- http://www.asylumseries.com/ (shot with a RED One)
- http://www.crackle.com/c/The_Bannen_Way
- http://www.crackle.com/c/Urban_Wolf
- condition:Human http://vimeo.com/user1160921
- http://compulsions.tv/
- and of course, the videos in these two Vimeo Channels: http://vimeo.com/channels/hd and http://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks if you have a Roku, or a GoogleTV you can view most of these shows above via RSS, or via the Vimeo application for these two platforms. The videos in these two Vimeo channels, are really, really good indie work.

There's one more sci-fi web series coming out soon, but I can't remember its name. They use Canon dSLRs to shoot it.

Feel free to email me btw, if you like to discuss any of that, I'm a lot into indie filmmaking: http://eugenia.queru.com/

I'm an indie filmmaker myself (used to be a tech nerd a few years ago, but turned into movie magic 3 years ago). I'm constantly trying to find such good shows too, online. And I have quite a list for you. :-)

- Continuum, scifi: http://www.facebook.com/ContinuumTV (shot with a Canon 7D dSLR)
- Pink http://www.pinktheseries.com/
- http://mindseyeseries.com/
- http://www.minglemediatv.com/CursedWebSeries.html
- http://www.crackle.com/c/Trenches
- http://www.crackle.com/c/Fear_Clinic
- http://www.asylumseries.com/ (shot with a RED One)
- http://www.crackle.com/c/The_Bannen_Way
- http://www.crackle.com/c/Urban_Wolf
- condition:Human http://vimeo.com/user1160921
- http://compulsions.tv/
- and of course, the videos in these two Vimeo Channels: http://vimeo.com/channels/hd and http://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks if you have a Roku, or a GoogleTV you can view most of these shows above via RSS, or via the Vimeo application for these two platforms. The videos in these two Vimeo channels, are really, really good indie work.

There's one more sci-fi web series coming out soon, but I can't remember its name. They use Canon dSLRs to shoot it.

Feel free to email me btw, if you like to discuss any of that, I'm a lot into indie filmmaking: http://eugenia.queru.com/

I'm an indie filmmaker myself (used to be a tech nerd a few years ago, but turned into movie magic 3 years ago). I'm constantly trying to find such good shows too, online. And I have quite a list for you. :-)

- Continuum, scifi: http://www.facebook.com/ContinuumTV (shot with a Canon 7D dSLR)
- Pink http://www.pinktheseries.com/
- http://mindseyeseries.com/
- http://www.minglemediatv.com/CursedWebSeries.html
- http://www.crackle.com/c/Trenches
- http://www.crackle.com/c/Fear_Clinic
- http://www.asylumseries.com/ (shot with a RED One)
- http://www.crackle.com/c/The_Bannen_Way
- http://www.crackle.com/c/Urban_Wolf
- condition:Human http://vimeo.com/user1160921
- http://compulsions.tv/
- and of course, the videos in these two Vimeo Channels: http://vimeo.com/channels/hd and http://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks if you have a Roku, or a GoogleTV you can view most of these shows above via RSS, or via the Vimeo application for these two platforms. The videos in these two Vimeo channels, are really, really good indie work.

There's one more sci-fi web series coming out soon, but I can't remember its name. They use Canon dSLRs to shoot it.

Feel free to email me btw, if you like to discuss any of that, I'm a lot into indie filmmaking: http://eugenia.queru.com/

-1 Troll

Rails is dead? Ruby is "just perl with less powerful syntax"? I think we have someone here who has never learned Rails (or any other new language or framework, for that matter.) The thing Rails did was brought together MVC, ORM and "meta-programming" into a well integrated framework. I've written or been on teams writing several commercial frameworks. I've used nearly all of the open source frameworks and CMS products in my development career. Including the Rails rip-offs like CakePHP. Nothing is as good as Rails. There's a reason why Rails drives people into Ruby development, it's wonderfully elegant, effective and allows for flexibility and nearly instant development. Normally you can have one or the other.

I know it's a pain to keep up with the constantly moving world of web development. However, it is necessary. I started with Perl CGI (in 1998), then moved to PHP and LAMP and now I've moved to Ruby. The improvement is really just as big as the move from Perl/CGI.pm to PHP. This video demonstrates the improvement I'm talking about, he doesn't pick Rails as his choice. I disagree with him of course. But it does show just how big the imporvement is.

this video is highly relevant to this discussion, its just a short animation about the future of 3d replication. http://www.vimeo.com/12768578 also, http://www.thingiverse.com/ is the website you need to look at. its all about sharing 3d files for printing. -jd

Some guy did something similar (though not quite as extensive) for the footage of the Apollo 11 lift-off.

http://vimeo.com/4366695

As for your last statement: I guess that makes you addicted to your tools. Going from milkshape to blender was innitally a disaster for me, until I realized there was a workflow. I would image it would be a lot worse if I had actually learned to use a real 3D application, and properly learned it. I would ask "where is my buttons?!", and "where is my workflow?!".

Geometry is not a question of tools or workflow or preference, it's a question of mathematics. Blender does not provide the user with a reasonably complete, standard set of geometric operations. And the consequence is not just that I'm frustrated, it's that if you look at tutorials and other people's workflows, even geometrically simple operations are really cumbersome. Nobody manages to construct 3D objects elegantly or efficiently with Blender, even people who are really experienced with it.

Have a look at how ridiculously and unnecessary complicated this is:

http://vimeo.com/785249

Tracing an outline should not require extruding little edge segments.

Check out this video where a guy has taken the model from the kinect and replaced the points with variable sized blobs. Looks cool. Fat Cat

ALSO: Because I just bleeping love his videos, Danny MacAskill. Except, you don't want your eight-year-old to even look at this stuff, he might try to imitate it.

How about the guy who drank heliobacter pylori to prove it causes ulcers? He got a Nobel Prize, even.

There's been some talk about the possibility of sending an airplane to Titan, the Saturn's biggest moon and I it sounds a lot more interesting and practical than a plane on mars.

For one, Mars's atmosphere is very thin, making flying in there very hard. You're going to need big wings to stay in the air and controlling it is going to be delicate. Titan, on the other hand, has a very thick and dense atmosphere, allowing for a lot smaller craft and easier manouverability. That also lowers the power requirements for the propulsion, so it could be quite feasibly be powered by a ASRG giving it a flight time of years.

There are a lot of other very good points, too, but instead of writing about them myself, I'll just post a link to a cool blog that explains most of it quite well: http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2010/06/aviatr-titan-plane-details.html

Here's a very informative presentation about it, too http://vimeo.com/11432536

Here we observe the later stage of the life cycle of the ancient javan fanboicus extremis. Scientists believe that the first of the species was born in the Sun Microsystems booth at a Comdex convention in the mid 1990s (reportedly from a fling between Grace Murray Hopper and James Gosling.) From there the species propagated by its strange inter-species relationship with management. Similar to the tape worm reproductive cycle (Taenia solium), the javan first infects the management of the organization by later stage infected programmers (salesmen) who have been infected coming in contact with management of the organization. Usually promises are made and buzzwords (the mating call of management) are dropped. Similar once again to the tapeworm life cycle the infection of a new host is caused by cysts being eaten. However, in this case those in the management cycle force feed the cysts to the programmer cycle. At first the new programmer recoils in disgust at the Javan experience. This is followed by the first sign of infection; browsing infective books and as the disease progresses - buying them. As the infection commences the programmer is told to like the experience, overriding any natural senses and instinct. In the second stage the programmer still has a mild distaste and at some basic level realizes they shouldn't be having the feelings they're feeling. In final stage infection the programmer can be seen tossing and turning in bed saying "pure java..... it .... must... be in .... pure java..." and things like that. During this stage it is common for programmers to begin writing everything in Java. Shortly afterward they begin reproducing by attempting to create other Java programmers. Although their chances of actual sexual reproduction go down significantly after infection.

It's easy to be immunized against javan infection, but no instant cure is now known. And immunize those you know and love. It's important to remember that ultimately this is a parasitic infection. Java causes many reams of code to be written in Java that should never be. It adds a minimum of 30% to development time. And contrary to typical management mating calls, because of the thousands more lines of code Java takes to express ideas, it costs many times more for long term support. Like COBOL before it, it rarely dies until the host dies. So the infection can only be prevented, not cured. Keep safe, and always use a prophylaxis.

At least for me: http://vimeo.com/16311288

Zooming into a Mandelbox, with weird music: http://vimeo.com/13886600

Thanks! More years ago than I care to remember (about the same time I was playing around with Fractint from a covermount floppy of some magazine) the great man came to our university to give a talk. Stupidly I didn't join the queue early enough and got stuck in an overflow room (the maths guys hosting his visit hadn't calculated the demand correctly). Still cool to hear him talk, though. I remember the Genesis Device got a mention:

http://vimeo.com/5810737
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM1r37zIBOQ

Try here instead. Also look for songs by Devil's Urethra for more DotA sing along fun.

Also no beards in space.

So apparently a user called "KC Allen" claims on the Vimeo page for the parody-of-the-ad that

The Ohio filmmaking community is outraged by a web ad published to YouTube, sponsored by the Ohio Democratic Party. The ad is an attack in response to a recent commercial from the Kasich camp, in which a local actor portrayed a man out of work. The ODP ad features clips from films in which the actor has appeared, in violation of copyright.

Setting aside the incredible hubris associated with speaking for the entire filmmaking community in a state (heck, at least he could have tried to claim something about speaking for a particular group of filmmakers in Ohio, were he the spokesman or president of the body), I am quite appalled at the shoot-from-the-hip nature of his alleged copyright infringement claim.

KC Allen continues:

One film, from Arginate Studios was produced in 2010 as part of an international film contest based in Washington DC, the 48 Hour Film Project, while the other was produced by Whiskey Tent films. No permission to use the clips was asked for or granted by the filmmakers or other responsible, legally permitted parties.

I hope when he says "responsible" he mean "people responsible for granting rights," not "people who act responsibly." I mean, the latter case is kind of a judgment call, no? :-)

And I fully appreciate his (likely) factual claim that no permission was asked for or granted. Of course (as others have pointed out), the authors of the parody work might have a strong fair-use defense.

The filmmakers of the state of Ohio demand an immediate public apology for this lack of respect and egregious violation of their hard work and professionalism.

Here we go again, speaking for a group of people without any evidence that you have the authority or position.

What, do you want me to claim that the Computer Programmers of the Whole Internet demand an immediate public apology from the filmmakers of the State (capitalizing the proper noun) of Ohio?

Then you have the witty comeback from "Modern Esquire":

You're right because no independent film maker has ever splice in footage from other films, tv shows, music, etc. It's called Fair Use. Which is part of the copyright law. There's absolutely no legal basis for your complaints. None.

Well, I wouldn't say "none," because I'm not a copyright lawyer, but yes, it does look like there's a pretty strong defense here.

Then, someone named "Sam" apparently knows the actors and decides to chime in:

You are seriously going to argue that actors don't have the right to not appear in political attack ads based of their completely unrelated narrative work?

I'm not talking about Chip here... if it was only Chip and actually used to illustrate his acting career... you know by including his work with larger companies like 'safe auto' and appearance on 'Lost' instead of editing a string of insults... which according to you add to the debate... I'm talking about Rick and the girls who are clearly recognizable. They have nothing to do with this and now their faces are stuck on an attack ad which nearly the entire central ohio film community finds offensive.

I've got to give Sam credit for at least saying "nearly the entire central ohio film community" as compared to KC Allen's bit of hyperbole. I'm also quite sympathetic to what Sam sees as a potential defamation against "Chip" and "Rick" and the women who feature in the clips. I can be a bit disconcerting to see your video chopped-up and used in a different fashion than it was originally intended. But on the flip side, I believe all of the clips used are from commercial productions, and there's got to be very little expectation of privacy or prevention of people doing things protected under Fair Use with these commercial clips.

This guy missed a golden opportunity to mess with the FBI. Like maybe taking the thing up in a plane and throwing it out the window. Or tie it to a giant helium balloon.

Like this?

Since apparently nobody linked to the original video as far as I can tell, here it is:

http://vimeo.com/15091562