CCCP

A court in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don has established that Deep Purple, who gave a concert in the said city, by doing so have violated their own rights to their songs.

The court declared that since the rights of all foreign performers are represented in Russia by an organisation called "The Russian Authors Society", it was illegal to hold a concert without agreeing it with the organisation. The band themselves did not give their consent to be represented by the said organisation, neither they were even aware of its existence.

The court has ruled that the organisers of the concert (a local Russian organisation) are to pay a fine of 450 000 roubles (approx. 14 000 USD). The money (minus legal fees) is then to be transferred to Deep Purple as a compensation for their violation of their own rights.

Source

Go Russia!

This is quite ridiculous


Edit: apparently the whole story is a hoax: http://www.tian.cc/2007/05/hoax-chinese-counterfeit-eggs.html but still funny


The article says that a guy who worked in a Chinese grocery store has posted a method that they have used to produce fake chicken eggs.

They use a mixture of chemicals (potassium algenate, potash, gelatine, benzoic acid and something else that I don't know the word for) to emulate egg whites. They use the same mixture with food dye and citric acid added to emulate yolk.

They first put the yolk mixture into a solution of calcium carbonate, where it assumes a spherical shape and a thin film surface forms on it. After it dries up a bit, they add the white mixture to it. Then the same process is used to make a complete egg with yolk in the center and white on the outside, held in shape by the thin surface film that the calcium carbonate solution produces.

Then they carefully roll the egg in a mixture of plaster, paraffin and calcium, which becomes a shell when it dries up.

The result is that the fake egg is nearly impossible to tell from the real egg without breaking it. Apparently when broken, it smells funny, and the "yolk" and the "white" quickly intermix because of the same composition.

This guy has also said that while a kilo of real eggs sells for 6-7 yuan, a kilo of fake eggs costs only 0.5 yuan to produce, which allowed them to make a profit of 100 yuan a day selling fake eggs.

Hi guys,

I would like to order a present for a person living in New Mexico, US. I am not from US, so I have no idea what services are good.

Could you suggest something?

I would like to send some flowers and (more importantly) a bottle of good cognac. I googled that of course, but the problem is that the florists do not have a good selection of spirits, only some dodgy wine/champagne, and the spirits stores do not provide gift packaging/flowers.

Thanks!

... and everything you love, and want to control your mind and read your thoughts, suck all the money from you and then make you a voodoo zombie and sell you into slavery for even more money.

Fucking EA!

What the hell is this, a second bloody game in what, 4 years that I was actually going to buy, and that I am NOT buying again because of this DRM crap. First Mass Effect, now Red Alert 3.

Brain-damaged idiots, when will they finally realize that this does NOTHING to prevent piracy but does a HUGE amount to encourage it instead.

Oh well, fuck 'em. Saved me another $50 though.

EDIT: DRM explanation.

Digital Rights, or rather Restrictions Management is a system that goes a step beyond your usual copy protection. In particular it limits how many times you can install a game on different machines using your serial number. Which means that changing some of your hardware, for example, will lead to the game thinking that you are using a new machine and making you use up another installation. It requires activation over Internet on installation, and some versions went as far as to require Internet authentication each time you start the game.

People are pissed because basically the companies demand similar amount of money as they used to before for their games, but under totally different terms of use. I.e. you can do whatever you want with you Starcraft CD, install it and play it whenever and wherever you like. With Red Alert 3, for example, you cannot install it without a working Internet connection, you cannot give it to a friend because of the limited installations number, you are not guaranteed that in some years the authentication servers will even work and you will be able to install your game. There were actually precedents where a company ceased to exist, shut down their authentication servers and as such made all their previously sold DRM-protected software unusable.

People are also pissed because this only affects a legit user. Pirated versions appear as fast as they did before, and clean of this stupid protection, thus much easier to use.

There were precedents where companies used no copy protection whatsoever, and their sales were as good as anybody's else. I feel really bad for the actual developers who put their heart and talent into the games only to be butchered by soulless corporate executives.