Category: Uncategorized

A tasteless energy drink marketing move

I’m sure Pepsi (who owns the AMP energy drink brand) really wants this one back. And yes, I know I’m late to the party on this a bit; I have a good reason for that, which I’ll explain in a future post.

Mashable reports on AMP’s new iPhone app “Before You Score” that was apparently released with one of two assumptions: AMP is only bought and consumed by men, or the women that learn of this marketing gaffe would be willing to look the other way and buy Pepsi’s products despite it.

I don’t know what Pepsi could have been thinking. I have never been that big of a fan of most Pepsi products; this does not help.

Not only is this a marketing blunder, it’s likely the women will be able to memorize the lame pick-up lines this thing spits out, so the men who rely on this get a really bum deal in the process. Shame on you, Pepsi; why not resurrect the Pepsi Challenge and see if you can get Coke to change their formula again? It can’t go any worse than this disaster.

Dogs on film

Okay, so not really on film, probably more like videotape or DVD, but the pun on the old song title was just hanging out there.

A recent story reported by Fastcompany.com, NPR, and ABC News tells the story of Robert Stevens. Robert is an independent filmmaker who compiled films of pit bull dogfights made in jurisdictions where dogfighting is legal, most notably Japan. He sold the films commercially to promote the proper care of pit bulls. For this, he received a jail sentence of 37 months, under a federal law that prohibits “knowingly selling depictions of animal cruelty, with the intention of placing them in interstate commerce” which was passed in 1999.

Robert appealed his case, and won on First Amendment grounds. The government compares these videos to obscenity, or “patently offensive conduct that appeals only to the basest instincts.” And so the case winds up in the US Supreme Court, where it is still being considered as of this writing as far as I can tell.

What I find disturbing here is that Robert’s sentence exceeds Michael Vick’s sentence for actually running a dogfighting ring. This is in effect saying that selling videos of legally conducted dogfights is a worse crime than actually running an illegal dogfighting ring. That, and I fail to see why Robert’s actions should be illegal. I do side with the appeals court here.

This does not change my viewpoint on dogfighting, however. I believe wanton animal cruelty such as staged dogfighting is despicable, which has been my view for the entirety of my adult life. I could go on and on about how I’ve always been an animal lover (I prefer cats to dogs). Suffice it to say, there are certain places such as Japan where it’s legal to stage dogfights, and it is equally their right to make the law what it is there as it is mine to condemn it.

Take off? Take a leak first

Apologies in advance to the easily offended… but this story was just begging for a few really bad jokes to be made.

The London newspaper Metro reports on a Japanese airline’s very strange new policy, which may already have some passengers a bit pissed off.

All Nippon Airways is desparate to reduce their carbon emissions, and is thus requiring passengers to urinate prior to boarding. This policy was put in place for a trial period of four weeks beginning on October 1.

Personally, I think ANA’s management is just peeing into the wind here. This is probably going to lose them quite a few customers, and probably for longer than a month. Customers tend to remember bad experiences longer than good ones. Put another way, ill will lingers longer than goodwill. Case in point: anyone remember ValuJet? (They are still around, but shed the old name with near-zero or possibly even negative goodwill when buying up a smaller carrier named AirTran.)

Astroturf a la Redmond: Windows 7 Parties

While cleaning out the draft posts queue, I found this. The original article is a bit old, but the parties haven’t happened yet.

A recent TechFlash article discusses a Microsoft initiative for the upcoming Windows 7 release, describing it as a “Tupperware-style twist.” The idea is to encourage users, partners, and of course Microsoft employees to throw parties to show off Windows 7.

I see, as the title implies, what is essentially astroturfing at its worst. If Windows 7 were that great of an operating system, Microsoft would have people volunteering, or even paying Microsoft, to have these launch parties.

As far as my personal PCs go, I haven’t really looked back since the spring of 2002 (I didn’t write down the exact date, unfortunately) when I reformatted two different Windows 98 PCs and installed, at the time, the GNU/Linux distribution maintained by Red Hat on one (today’s equivalent would be the community-supported Fedora Project), and FreeBSD on the other. (Both of those PCs eventually wound up running Debian GNU/Linux years later.)

I do use a Windows XP laptop PC, which still has what I deem to be an unacceptable crash rate. By unacceptable, I mean it crashes at least five to ten times as often as the Debian GNU/Linux PC next to it which is at least most of a decade old. No, that’s not a mistake. Simply put, even with less than half the CPU and a fourth of the RAM, I get much better stability, even with the obvious reduction in performance. Put simply, Centerpoint Energy (our local electric utility) and the forces of nature responsible for thunderstorms force reboots of the Debian PC more often than any technical problems with Debian itself.

(Why haven’t I bought Apple’s products instead? Regular readers should know this, but I’ll provide a starting point for the new readers.)

Microsoft has still done next to zilch with regard to helping ensure the freedom of its customers. In fact, Microsoft has pretty much made itself the sworn enemy of the free software movement, with apparently no shame or regret. While Microsoft has made token efforts to contribute to the open source movement, it is very important to note that the ideals of the open source movement only encourage access to the source code for convenience and open source licenses do not always protect all the essential freedoms of users and programmers of the software released under them. It is also important to note that without the work of Richard Stallman and the FSF on the free software movement, there would be no free software movement for the open source movement to have splintered from.

Those readers unfamiliar with what I discuss above are encouraged to read some of Stallman’s essays, most notably these two: “Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software” and an earlier version “Why ‘Free Software’ is better than ‘Open Source'”.

Several of Microsoft’s licenses appear to have been intentionally worded to provide the illusion of freedom while in reality providing just the opposite. Most notably, these are the Limited Public License (Ms-LPL) and Limited Reciprocal License (Ms-LRL). Both of these licenses require that any modified versions of the original code must run on Microsoft’s Windows operating system. To those who value freedom on their own terms, not those of a large corporation with no particular incentive to be nice, this type of restriction is abhorrent.

In summary, my view is rather simple. Windows 7: same song, seventh verse, even bigger and even worse.

Reality check: France set to rein in retouching mag pics

Mashable recently posted on France’s pending legislation intended to curb the manipulation of photographs in magazines toward unrealistic body images. As French MP Valerie Boyer is quoted in the article:

Many young people, particularly girls, do not know the difference between the virtual and reality, and can develop complexes from a very young age. In some cases this leads to anorexia or bulimia and very serious health problems.

I say, it’s about damn time someone does something about the patently absurd body images in print media, for exactly the reasons cited by Ms. Boyer. The author of the post laments in the first paragraph “(this) ‘would never happen in the US'” and I have to voice the unvoiced question: why? I know this problem doesn’t exist only on the other side of the Atlantic.

I do think the responsible thing would be for the authors of photographic editing software–and this includes Gimp as well as proprietary software like Photoshop–to include a section on ethical use of the software in the documentation. I do intend to imply here that editing of photographs to show unrealistic body imagery is unethical, absent clear disclaimers as to what the end result actually is.

I’m not anti-manipulation in and of itself–Gimp has saved my backside more than enough times to count during my aborted 365 Days project–but the moral and ethical lines need to be drawn somewhere. If those in charge of making the laws refuse to do something, the responsibility falls on us as a society to shame those who insist upon being part of the problem into acting in a more ethical and moral fashion.

The insidious part of all this, of course, is that edited pictures are hard to spot, even for trained eyes. That doesn’t mean we should give up, however.