Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Trailer

By Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Is it July 15 yet? The new trailer for Half-Blood Prince is pretty awesome. So far it looks to be a great thing that David Yeats (director of Order of the Phoenix) is back for this one, as the dark aesthetic seems to be similar, which is fitting for this particular story. Just from the trailer, I think that visually this one will be great to see in IMAX.

Underwire points out that this trailer was released around the same time as the new Transformers sneak peek. Which one are you more excited about? (Note: “Neither, I’m too excited about Star Trek and/or Terminator” is a perfectly appropriate answer.)



New Transformers 2 Sneak Peek Looks Amazing

Some new footage of the upcoming Transformers 2 movie has just hit the web today, and the whole thing looks pretty darn awesome. While the first minute is kind of funny, there’s nothing really exceptional about it. But if the remainder of the clip is a good indicator of what we’ll be seeing in movie theaters, fans should be in for a great treat. Check it out.



Courtroom webcasting ban a “disagreeable” outcome

The good news for lovers of webcasting is that a federal appeals court has ruled that the medium is a form of broadcasting with equal status to that of television. The bad news is that that ruling was made to ban webcams from covering a music filesharing case.

The defendant, Boston University student Joel Tennenbaum, had asked for the hearing to be streamed live through the Harvard Law School website, a request the case judge approved in January. However, the Recording Industry Association of America successfully argued on appeal that doing so would violate local court rules banning broadcasts since 1996.

Tennenbaum’s lawyer insisted that those rules – brought in to ban TV broadcasts – were not relevant to webcasting. He said the difference was that an unedited internet broadcast would not add the type of emotion or hype which would come from television coverage such as news bulletins. The appeals court rejected that argument, saying the difference between TV and webcasting was “one of degree, not kind”.

One of the appeal court judges supporting the decision said he was forced to uphold the law, but that it made for a “disagreeable” outcome. Kermit Lipez said there were “no sound policy reasons” for banning a webcast and said it was questionable whether the law was still relevant today.

Snakes on a Plane (No, Really)

By Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

snakesDuring a passenger flight in Australia, four pythons escaped from the cargo area during the flight. Fortunately for the passengers, though unfortunately for all of us writing punchlines, this went unnoticed until after the plane had landed. A reptile expert searched for the snakes but never found them… the plane was eventually fumigated and sent back on its way.

Which leads one to wonder: what happened to those snakes? Are they going to show up in some poor tourist’s luggage? I’m suddenly having Arachnophobia flashbacks. As if flying weren’t bad enough.

Airlines: Didn’t Samuel L. Jackson teach us anything? Put the people and the snakes on separate flights.

Other things from movies I would not like to see on real planes:

– Decepticons
– Inflatable Pilots
– Serial Killers
– Spiders
– Tom Cruise

[Image Source: Flickr]

Oprah to Tweet on Friday’s Show

By Sterling “Chip” Camden
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

What’s the big news that Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, hinted at earlier today?  Oprah Winfrey will tweet for the first time on tomorrow’s Oprah show, which will feature famed tweeter Ashton Kutcher.  Her account is already active, and as of this writing she has 32,607 followers – increasing at the rate of about 15 with every browser refresh.

We can confidently project that after tomorrow’s show airs:

  • That number will skyrocket
  • So will the number of Twitter users (especially in a certain demographic)
  • So will the number of people following Ashton Kutcher – he’ll probably bounce right over the million follower mark.
  • So will the number of times Twitter goes down.

Regardless of what you may think of Oprah, she has an amazing power to lead her followers (pun intended) en masse into any activity that she promotes on her show.  Unless she has something negative to say about Twitter, this may be the moment when Twitter becomes a household word for more than just the social-media-savvy Internet population.  Provided, of course, that Twitter avoids turning off too many of these new users with its legendary failures, signaled by the arrival of the Fail Whale.  There’s even a Fail Whale Fan Club, “Celebrating Twitter and our favorite error page cetacean.”

As Veronica Sopher said:

Forget the whale.  it’s shark jumping time.

Is this Twitter’s big intro?  Or will it be all over once the fat lady tweets?

Mirror’s Edge Recreation (May Cause Super-Cool Motion Sickness)

By Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Mirror’s Edge, the EA game that sold over a million copies in just a few months, features a first person perspective that makes it pretty stylistically distinctive, and lots of running/jumping/sliding that gives it a kind of frantic feel. This video recreates that style/feel in real life, with the creator holding the camera in one hand as he runs around all over the place.

Somehow it’s a little more dizzying in the flesh than in pixels… if you felt a little queasy when watching The Blair Witch Project you might want to give this one a pass.

Spam wastes the power of 2.4 million homes

The energy wasted by spam e-mails could power 2.4 million homes a year according to security firm McAfee. But its report offers little advice as to how to avoid this problem.

The firm’s report, produced with the help of environmental consultants ICF International, concludes that spam is responsible for the waste of 33 billion kilowatt hours of energy each year. It also produces 17 million tons of CO2, the same amount produced each year by three million cars.

However, it appears the actual production and sending of the spams make up just seven per cent or so of the energy costs (though it’s not as if spammers are likely to be carbon offsetting anyway). Instead, most of the energy is used in filtering out the unwanted messages.

Around 16% of the energy costs come from automated filtering. The rest comes from recipients, with 27% coming from having to retrieve legitimate messages from a spam folder, and just over 50% coming from reading through spams which have evaded the filters and landed in the inbox.

According to the study, this means that the energy used in automated filtering actually pays for itself in environmental terms by saving on energy wasted by recipients. Of course, more effective filtering would cut down energy costs ever further.

It’s worth noting that there’s a major caveat to the figures. It appears the energy costs at the user end were estimated by taking the time it takes for people to sift through e-mails and working how much power their computers used during this time.

The drawback with that method is that is assumes the computer would otherwise be switched off or in hibernation mode. But in reality, it’s almost certain that people who didn’t have to sort through spam would simply spend the time working on their computers instead.