Feels like Need For Speed

I think the Charger looks badass. Totally. But unless you have the Hemi version, it is impossible to burn the rubber. Mainly because of the automatic transmission so you can't play with the clutch. I had no problem burning the rubber on my 19 (!) year old Citroen BX back in college. It only had a 1.6L 4 cylinder engine, that had 110hp in 1982. I'm not sure if more than 60-75 were left when I had her... Well my Charger is the cheapest one. They don't sell her with this engine any more: 2.7L V6 180hp. Still not enough hp and torque to smoke or even squeak the tires with the 4 speed automatic transmission.

Now it rains since yesterday afternoon. After a long long time. And everybody knows that in such a case roads are slippery as hell. With a FWD (front wheel drive) car you usually don't even notice it. But FWD cars are lame. RWD (real wheel drive) cars go crazy though! If you played with NFS before and when you finally had the Ford Mustang and you played with the keyboards (PC) you remember that it was almost impossible to take off with the car, since the wheels were spinning but the car remained still.

Now this is how I feel on the road since yesterday, and I don't even put the pedal to the metal when I take off. And I have (I think) good quality Good Year all season tires. Quasi brand new since there's only ca. 16000 miles in the car.

Feels good though ;-)

SOPA

Yesterday big sites like Wikipedia and Google protested against the Stop Online Piracy Act. Even the White House made it clear that the bill will face presidential veto if it is not changed drastically. And I'm glad that even John Stewart spent the first half of his show yesterday on the topic bringing up some very good points and give a good explanation why the bill is broken:

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But if you want to know more why the bill is broken Chris Heald explains it here really well. According to his explanation, if I post a link on Facebook to a torrent file of the latest Disney movie, Facebook must be shut down within 5 days...

That explains it.

I understand that the entertainment industry is frustrated, but ever since the compact disk became a widely used medium in both the music and data worlds, and computers were able to read CDs these studios just couldn't find a way of taking an advantage of the situation.

Here's the deal: I can watch movies in an acceptable quality on Netflix for $7.99 a month, I can stream practically any music for free on Spotify, but I can't watch the latest Bleach episode at the same time as people in Japan. And I'm gone through 355 episodes now, and don't want to give up! It's still very exciting! :)

I'm not saying that piracy is good, no. I think if the 'information' was accessible otherwise, people would go the legal way. But I ain't gonna subscribe to Netflix and Hulu Plus both. And it annoys the hell out of me that I can't watch a video clip in Germany while I can do so in the USA. You think it solves things? It doesn't cause I can either go through a proxy and ta-dam I'm watching Youtube from the USA (but this would never work since open proxies are always under heavy load), or the working way is to go one of the Youtube down-loader sites, and get the clip in MP4 without having the chance to click on the ads on the site or in the video! Still makes sense?

Check out the Comedy Central website! They put up all their shows online there! If they'd give up limiting access on a geographical basis and give me the choice if I want to see the Hungarian, German or US versions, it'd be perfect!

I think in the 21st century we should just forget about geography, and geographically targeted content. It's either online or not. And if not, and I want it, the only option left is piracy.

I also most like will not pay $5 for each on-demand video. Yeah it is much cheaper then a movie theater, and I can stay at home, I can also get HD content if I'm streaming through my cable provider's on demand service. But I'm convinced that a subscription approach is way better. (Would you pay for TV per minute or per show?!) I have a digital preferred cable subscription, yet I watch only about a dozen shows (I should downgrade my package, I know, and American TV sucks. Go BBC!), and when there's nothing on, I simply switch to Netflix on my Wii and watch something there. Like Drawn Together or a documentary how cows are fed with corn they can't digest and stand in their feces up to their knees and these two causes major e. coli epidemics from time to time and people die and FDA doesn't have the power to shut down such ranches (!). Or find a great documentary about American history.

Things I most likely wouldn't watch if I didn't have that subscription (that doesn't apply to drawn together, though :D). So what did I do? Made money to those filmmakers!

And by the way if all you do is shitty remakes of great old movies, or movies doesn't even worth watching (for money), er, then what kind of $58 billion loss are you talking about? Great movies don't equal green/blue box recordings mixed with CGI (see picture). I don't want to watch a video game in the theater!

source

Free money? In your dream!

I found an interesting ad spot on radio. One guy is wearing a clown outfit and explains his friend that he's short on money so he's working extra. His friend suggests that being a clown at children's birthday party can be a pain in the a** and he should rather get a loan on his car! Because at California Check Cashing there's a new product called Title Loan, where you bring in your car and you can keep it but you get some money (you'll have to pay back of course) based on your car's value.

Now check cashing is mainly used by less fortunate people with limited education... I understand that this is a free country, freedom of speech and capitalism and all, but this is just wrong.

And people are surprised that something like credit crunch can happen.

I understand that this is a new kind of credit product, and there's a market for that, but ads should be regulated not to suggest in any possible way that credit equals to free money. Because it isn't! It can confuse lot of people.

For a foreigner it is really hard to understand, but credit and credit cards play a whole different role here than in Europe. There's a whole bunch of special offers, introductory 0% APR, cash back, points, miles, discounts attached to them. You get a couple of prescreened offers in the mail every week. You need to have credit cards in case you want to buy a house in the future. You have to prove that you can handle credit with responsibility. Credit history, credit score all those things are important. A certain social class however gets into a credit trap and most likely can never ever get out of it. Also many offers are misleading, even someone I know with a university degree messed up his credit history, because he didn't realize that the special store offer came with a credit card, and he failed to pay back his balance on time. And this stays with him for up to 8 (?) years!

So credit is confusing, you need it, but you also need to be cautious, and you have to know what you're doing.

And then such an ad comes buy that tells you not to work but to get a loan... And how on Earth are you gonna pay that back? From another credit!? Most likely...

Classic rock

Since I got addicted to KFOX recently I started thinking about the term 'Classic rock'. Ever since I listen to the radio which probably started around 25 years ago the music that is covered by this definition is the same: music of the 60's and 70's. You'd think that what's classic shifts together with time, right? But it seems that whatever happened with music after the middle of the 80's cannot be classic. Ever. And probably that's the best for everybody...

And that's the time when the role of 'industry' in this context changed from distribution and marketing to complete control including producing. Instead of finding talent and giving them the opportunity to reach their audience which probably describes what Motown was doing (if you clicked that link, to see what Motown was, shame on you!), nowadays they 'create' talent. Which means to get a bunch of good looking guys and/or girls and let the army of producers and marketing people do something with them. And that's more or less the death of music.

Well I'm not working in this industry, but this video below seems to cover what's going on:


The clip above is from the movie Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, which is one of the most interesting projects around music of the last decade, I think.

So I don't really know what kind of music my kids will discover when they'll get to the phase in their lives, when every child goes through the record collection of their parents... But luckily I have a huge collection of the 60's and 70's, too ;-)

This brilliant picture below grasps the problem very well (source):

And you know what, if we'd go back to the concept to let musicians write and produce music, the industry wouldn't have problem how to get the money, because you'd pay the price to own that album! But would you be a proud owner of a Ke$ha album?? Not the same, now is it?!

Happy New Year!

A lot of things happened with us in the last 12-16 months. And only good things... I really hope, that life will continue treat us like this. I'll do everything not to anger the Angel looking after us! :)

Seriously I'm really thankful!

This New Years Eve was really retired style. We only went up to the city to see the fireworks. I took some pictures, and finally made my dream partially true and drove through the Golden Gate in a Dodge Charger (well, not one from the 70's but in a Charger). It was really windy and my tripod was constantly shaking so not too many pictures I took succeed, but here's some and a short video of the fireworks:


The lady next to me was constantly narrating the happenings to someone over the phone in a language I didn't recognize...