Cuppacafe

Here's a post that contains 35(? I lost count) different YouTube videos of dogs reacting to the theme to Law and Order.

Here's just one

You know how Apple finally took Digital Rights Management (DRM) off of its music on iTunes? Well, all that business about people being cheesed that the stuff they bought is tied to one platform is going to go through the wash cycle again:

When Apple launches its iBook store to sell titles for its new iPad device in March, many of its titles are expected to come with a set of handsome digital locks designed to deter piracy.

Veteran iTunes customers will recognize the locks as FairPlay, a digital rights management software that once limited how many times digital songs can be copied onto different computers. (Apple phased out FairPlay for music a year ago, and now sells unfettered tunes.)

Next month, Apple will be dusting off those digital cuffs for books, according to sources in the publishing industry.

No doubt some publishers, including O'Reilly Media -- which has vociferously argued that digital locks are harmful to sales -- will opt not to deploy FairPlay. (O'Reilly, which puts out technical books, was not on the list of five publishers during Apple's announcement of the iPad, but is discussing a deal with Apple.)

But the majority of publishers are expected to embrace FairPlay, along with other copy protection software such as Adobe's Content Server 4, as a means to squelch incipient book piracy as the e-book market begins to take off.
[LATimes.com]

h/t to Dwight

Most of the glory days of Rome took place when it seemed okay to plunder a foreign country for resources and slaves. Now, we just settle for resources.

That being said, I'm a sucker for Roman era stories. My lovely wife Alison makes sure every May I get the latest book about the Roman era detective Marcus Didius Falco by Brit author Lindsey Davis.

I'm watching the sex and blood filled TV show Spartacus:Blood and Sand [starz.com], currently on the Starz and insta-Netflix [netflix.com] and now comes one of two movies about Roman legion adventure. The first is Eagle of the Ninth [imdb.com], originally a children's book written in 1954 concerning a fictional retelling on why the Ninth Legion of Romans disappeared from history after traveling to the north of England:

A young Roman officer, Marcus Flavius Aquila, is trying to discover the truth about the disappearance of his father's legion in northern Britain. Travelling beyond Hadrian's Wall, in disguise as a Greek eye doctor, Aquila finds that a demoralised and mutinous Ninth Legion was annihilated by a great rising of the northern tribes. In part, this disgrace was redeemed by a heroic last stand by a small remnant around the legion's eagle standard. Aquila's hope of seeing the lost legion re-established is dashed, but he is able to bring back the bronze eagle so that it can no longer serve as a symbol of Roman defeat—and thus will no longer be a danger to the frontier's security.

One of the first subplots in the HBO series ROME [wikipedia.com] was the reclamation of a lost Eagle Standard. I can easily imagine this tale being taken out of the realm of the children's books and into a slightly more adult version for general audiences. Sounds cool, at any rate.

The second upcoming Roman movie has a plot that we've seen before, but with the setting that becomes one of the characters: Lost behind enemy lines in Roman era north Britain. Centurion [imdb.com] certainly looks good. Yes, we've seen the stalwart unyielding types before in recent movies, but you have to admit, it's a retread male audiences enjoy watching. This one has a kick ass woman as mysterious leader... I wonder how they're going to play that one out...

If the movies end up using the same "lost ninth legion" concept, I'll consider this one of those Hollywood situations where two movies came out about the same subject matter at the same time, ala Armageddon and Deep Impact.

Bing Maps [bing.com/maps] is going all out to out Google Maps er, uh, Google Maps. Whatever. It seems if you've geotagged a photo on Flickr and made it available to use via the Creative Commons license, there's a chance that Bing Maps will use it to provide streetside views, panoramas of cool events, all manner of geo-referenced items. A lot of this interactivity through Bing Maps is being announced at the TED conference. What you can see below should be available today. Other items, like tieing in things like live video from events, are in the planning stages (I'm not sure how that would work, but again, whatever)

Bing has certainly come a long way in the race to match what Google has done, and it's things like this that shows off that effort. Of course, you kind of have to ignore it's coming from Microsoft, the other behemoth in the computer game. I wonder which one of them will become Skynet first.

YouTube link
via Slashdot
and
Techflash
and
TED

This guy is a bit like the black George Clooney.

What's the commercial for? I think if you use it, your dick gets longer.

YouTube link

This one is just for fun. Watch as a sheet of snow and ice fall off the roof in a Russian town.

Now wasn't that fun?

The Perfessor