Category: Human stupidity

Creator Of Flappy Bird Clone Claims His Duplication Is Covered By Trademark

(…) it takes a special kind of person to copy someone else’s game entirely and then try to prevent future cloning via a bit of peremptory legalese.

Samuel David couldn’t even be bothered to use his own screenshot on the game’s iTunes page.

You know, if you’re just going to clone someone else’s game, at least have the self-awareness to realize that trying to “protect” your “work” (especially with bogus claims) going forward just makes you look like an idiot, and a hugely disingenuous one at that.

Link (Techdirt)

faithInHumanity–;

Everyone Go Crazy: Prepare To Blame The Internet For Murder-Inducing Ghost Stories

Prosecutors say two 12-year-old southeastern Wisconsin girls stabbed their 12-year-old friend nearly to death in the woods to please a mythological creature they learned about online. One of the girls told a detective they were trying to become “proxies” of Slender Man, a mythological demon-like character they learned about on creepypasta.wikia.com, a website about horror stories and legends. They planned to run away to the demon’s forest mansion after the slaying, the complaint said.

Link (Techdirt)

“Of course” video games are to blame

The link, Pollard explains, is that these kids played Call of Duty and also killed themselves. Therefore, according to Pollard, there is reason to believe one is causal. According to a source of mine, a Mr. Lo Gic, this kind of thinking indicates the coroner may have some wires crossed in his head. Otherwise, he’d have to explain why four suicides of children that played a game that has sold over a 100 million copies is anything we should be noting at all. Those children may all have drank orange juice, as well, because that’s what kids do. 

Link (Techdirt)

You might be a terrorist

… according to the statistics.

You may recall the Feds’ contending with straight faces in 2004 that if “a little old lady in Switzerland gave money to a charity for an Afghan orphanage, and the money was passed to al Qaeda,” she met the definition of “enemy combatant.” Five years later, a federal Fusion Center decreed that “if you’re an anti-abortion activist, or if you display political paraphernalia supporting a third-party candidate or [Ron Paul], if you possess subversive literature, you very well might be a member of a domestic paramilitary group.”

Link (Techdirt)

Europe just banished free speech on the internet

(…) an absolutely insane ruling that came out of the European Court of Human Rights last fall, in the case of Delfi AS v. Estonia, which basically said that any website that allows comments can be liable for those comments. In fact, it found that even when sites took down comments (automatically!) following complaints, they can still be liable, because they should have blocked those comments from going up in the first place. Bizarrely, the court basically says the site should have known that the article in question might lead to negative reactions, and therefor should have blocked comments:

Link (Techdirt)

The US doesn’t do economic spying…

… but not because it doesn’t want to

Former CIA Director And Defense Secretary Says CIA Tried, But Failed, To Do Economic Espionage

But despite his attempt to work with, in his words, five or six commerce secretaries, “I never could get one of them interested in being the facilitator of getting that kind of CIA information to American companies. So this is something we don’t do.”

Link (Techdirt)

Do you want a government dicatorship?

… because this is how you get a government dictatorship

“The question is who decides [what to publish]. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government.”

Link (Techdirt)

I smell a patent lawsuit

DPS recently published a tutorial on how to do portraits on a white background. How to do this isn’t anything new or innovative, and should be something most pro photographers know how to do.

The sad part is, Amazon has recently been granted a patent on how to do just this, so DPS could in theory be sued by Amazon for patent infringement. For something photographers have been doing for 50 years or more.

You Can Thank The CIA For The Return Of Polio

The return of polio is also due to an ill-informed anti-vaccine campaign — not one driven by people confused by a fraudulent study, but rather by the Taliban. Many of the new cases are in Pakistan and a variety of nearby countries. The Taliban has been arguing for a while that vaccinations and vaccination drives are really efforts by western intelligence and/or imperialism.

The problem is: the CIA basically confirmed that for them by using a fake vaccination campaign to find Osama bin Laden a few years ago. Suddenly, crazy rumors about vaccination programs simply being fronts for the US intelligence community weren’t just more reasonable, they were flat out confirmed. And, soon after that was all revealed, suddenly the rates of polio shot up? Right around the same time that polio vaccination workers started getting killed in Pakistan?

Link (Techdirt)