A 16-year-old boy being sued by five record companies accusing him of online music piracy accused the recording industry on Tuesday of violating antitrust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats. This kid RAWKS.

Outrage of Texas college Martin Luther King, Jr. party. Event featured Aunt Jemima, gang apparel, fried chicken, malt liquor. [Tarleston student Jeremy Pelz] noted that the party was started a few years earlier “because one of my best friends is black or African American, whichever you deem politically correct, to be his day not to dishonor him.”

Nerd Alert! Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula, a formula which graphs itself within the correct constraints. When graphed, a black pixel is plotted at every point where the inequality is true. Sigh, I love math.

YouTube - Little Superstar - I know, I know, this is ollllld (in internet terms), but there has to be someone out there who hasn’t seen this little Indian guy bust a move. Whether you have or have not watched, click it. (For all those interested, the song is Holiday Rap by MC Miker G & DJ Sven.)

Top 10 ugliest fashion trends of the past 25 years - I am so thankful I never had to experience any of these.

Top 10 coolest things seen with Google Earth

Top 100 music videos of all time

Where to Go Now - SEED Magazine article back in May about seven sites to visit now, before they are ruined by global warming.

Man fixes PCs in exchange for boobs - This is the policy I need to start implementing.

UMR reader, you are mighty!

Recording Industry vs The People (blogspot) - This blog covers the cases of the RIAA versus… everyone. Whatever the motive of the two lawyers for publishing this information (nice publicity for their firm, yeah?), the information is there nonetheless. Most notably, the RIAA sued Limewire, and Limewire said “Fuck you”.

Until December, the complete archives of the Royal Society will be available to the public for free. “Spanning nearly 350 years of continuous publishing, the archive of nearly 60,000 articles includes ground-breaking research and discovery from many renowned scientists including: Bohr, Boyle, Bragg, Cajal, Cavendish, Chandrasekhar, Crick, Dalton, Darwin, Davy, Dirac, Faraday, Fermi, Fleming, Florey, Fox Talbot, Franklin,” and that’s just up to F.

Why I hate Zach Braff - Slate article about the (terrible? maybe?) fact that Zach Braff has come to be the voice of the indie, slacker youth.

The Citizendium Project - An attempt to make a better Wikipedia (by using Wikipedia). “It will begin life as a “progressive fork” of Wikipedia. But we expect it to take on a life of its own and, perhaps, to become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects.”

There is NO manipulation of gas prices - An explanation of the falling (or rising) gas prices by Daily Kos.

Pandoras Box - A nice add-on to Pandora which enables a little box in your taskbar to show the currently playing song, change stations, and find lyrics.

Finally, I leave you with this:

Mario Brothers cake!

For those who have not heard, the big news in this arena is that the RIAA is suing YouTube. Probably not true, but they are at least taking action to have content removed from YouTUbe. Afterdawn.com reports the reasoning behind this as YouTube’s harboring of “unlicensed music videos, much of which is coming from MTV broadcasts…posted onto the site.” (example of letter sent by YouTube after removal of content at the RIAA’s behest).

I know this post is beating a dead horse, but I feel inclined to make it; some people are passionate about politics, I’m passionate about the stupidity of failing music associations.

This marks another in a long line of irrational moves by the RIAA. As much as their previous actions have been public relations nightmares, this in particular is an immense blunder. The music video is an object of pure advertising. A music video’s sole purpose of existing is to be viewed by as many people as possible in an attempt to instill within those people to buy music by the artist. Perhaps a few music videos are shot for artistic reasons, but given the financial and temporal investments, the overwhelming majority are there to make money. (Thus, MTV is generally just a collection of advertisements in one form of another; a rather good business plan if you asked me.) The only difference I can imagine between regular advertisements and music videos is that television stations like MTV and VH1 buy the rights to play the videos from the record labels. If this is true, then the RIAA is potentially losing money by having the videos on YouTube without any rights being bought.

Still, I have to wonder how much money could be made by the buying of such rights. Is it really reasonable to assume the videos are made to be sold to television channels? No, of course not. That would require exorbitant prices, since some videos are shown only a few times on one channel, or not even at all, and I don’t see this all working itself out like it does in the movie business (failed movies are acceptable since successful movies are so profitable). However, that does not eliminate the possibility of even a small charge to buy the rights. This may amount to a substantial number, but is it significant compared to the money the record label hopes to make by having the video viewed? I bet not.

So, if all my reasoning works is backed by real life, then why ask YouTube to remove music videos? Sure, the content is technically copyrighted and posting that content without permission infringes on those copyrights, but who cares? Interesting commercials find their way onto YouTube all the time without any uproar from the respective product’s companies. Shouldn’t the RIAA be happy for the free publicity its artists are gaining? If anyone should be upset, it is the music video channels who are being relegated to “just another way to see these videos” status. Maybe Viacom (owner of MTV, BET, VH1, and CMT) is in cahoots with the RIAA, forcing them to force YouTube to remove the videos, but I’m not going to get into conspiracy theories.

The bottom line is this move by the RIAA isn’t even arguably an almost, somewhat, kinda okay move. One could argue the RIAA’s never ending string of suits brought against unsuspecting downloaders has some sort of scare-tactic logic behind it, but this YouTube business is just nonsensical. I hope the RIAA realizes it might be better not to spend all its time inventing new ways to alienate its consumer base before it’s too late.

A lot of cell phones come with games, but most of those games are pretty terrible. Thankfully, vampent has created a mobile Nintendo emulator. Of course, you’ll need good games to go with it, so start off with Mario Adventure. Hell, just go play Mario Adventure on your computer.

Mozilla is hosting a contest, a really awesome contest, if I may say so myself. With the Firefox Flicks ad contest, you can win some cool prizes for creating a 30-second Firefox advertisement. This seems like a great win/win situation.

Albumart.org is a great site to find any CD or DVD covers. And it’s AJAX powered, so it’s fast and classy too.

A lot of importance is placed on getting the right amount of sleep. However, a Vietnamese man has spent the last 33 years of his life entirely sleepless. Admittedly, that is an extremely rare case, but new pills are being developed to cure the need for sleep. Until then, get a good nights rest, and maybe read up a little on how your sleeping life affects your waking life.

More RIAA goodness: space and format-shifting (such as ripping CDs to your iPod) are now deemed infringing by the RIAA. Okay guys, seriously, the RIAA is a bunch of assholes.

On a lighter note, Genesis in Rap Songs. Best mixtape ever.

And back again to those heavier notes. The Los Angeles Times recently published an article on evangelist Ken Ham, who seeks to “arm you with Christian Patriot missiles.” Forget evolution, because “the Bible is the history book of the universe.”

Bernard-Henri Levy, who appeared on The Daily Show last month, has published an impassioned Letter to the American Left. “Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left.”

Google Talk, another of Google’s steps towards complete web domination, recently added the ability to connect to Jabber servers. This might not sound very exciting to many people, but with a little tweaking you can now connect and talk to people on AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. Pretty snazzy, I would say. And while on the subject of Google upgrades, Gmail is now available for your domain. Although most website hosts provide some email addresses, Google is offering their usual unlimited amount of address and unlimited amount of storage. Pretty snazzy, I would say.

Japanese television is absolutely insane. For example, Nasubi.

Nippon Television’s (NTV) producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn’t have treated poor Nasubi the way they did. They wouldn’t have stripped him naked and shut him in an apartment, alone with no food, furniture, household goods, or entertainment. They wouldn’t have kept him there for over a year until he had won $100,000 in prizes by sending in postcards to contests. They wouldn’t have cut him off from the world and they would have told him that he was on nation-wide TV.

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