On Topic: My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement

See how small bands get bent over too: My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement

Change You Can Believe In

Sure, go ahead. Believe all you want. You're a nation of believers, it's what you do. While you're at it, believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny too, if it helps keep us in power.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/06/obama/index.html

"State secrets" is the executive branch's new checks and balances combo-breaker. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And suck.

Would you drink from this glass?

This pint glass aligns surprisingly well with Digg's anti-duplication efforts. (Duplication/reproduction...get it?) I'm sure it's probably just trace amounts of lead and cadmium at worst, and the sticker is probably just a nonsense legal requirement. Still, I wonder if Kevin and Alex would imbibe their "favorite frosty brew" from this possibly toxic pint glass. I have no doubt they would, but would they still enjoy it as much?

Backspace to the Future with Firefox

One more complaint to throw on the already gigantic pile that web browsers have earned:

PLEASE stop using the backspace key as the default shortcut for backwards navigation. Yes, its name has the word "back" in it. We get it. No, this does NOT make it appropriate to use for backwards navigation in a web browser. With that logic, we might have browsers closing themselves whenever the "End" key is pressed.

For everyone who has lost a long forum post, e-mail, lengthy form, or progress in a browser-based game due to an errant backspace, there is an easy fix. Install Firefox, navigate to about:config (you have to type it in manually), then scroll down to "browser.backspace_action" and set its value to "2". Done. No more backspace key tomfoolery.

Microsoft, I generally love your stuff, but I think you might lose even more market share to this poor browser design choice (among others). I hope you fix it. The dismal tradition continues with IE8, and there still doesn't seem to be any easy way of disabling that shortcut in it, either.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is broken

These two op-ed stories recently published in the The New York Times are amazing:

The Defect: Conflicts of interest in the SEC, as summarize in The End of the Financial World as We Know It

The Consequence: The Madoff scandal, huge Wall Street executive payoffs, bank and corporate bailouts

The Fix: Many suggestions provided in How to Repair a Broken Financial World