Best Game Ever
Improv Everywhere pulls public stunts that usually have a tinge of the bizarre. They’re probably best known for their annual — yes, annual — No Pants Day where, at a pre-determined time on a pre-determined date, thousands of people worldwide drop their trousers in major subway systems and ride the trains in full pants-free glory. Frequently, their pranks poke fun at corporate targets, e.g. getting 80 people to dress up like Best Buy employees and loiter around a specific Best Buy answering questions and being friendly or having 100+ shirtless men pose in an Abercrombie & Fitch store that had a shirtless male model as a greeter.
But the Best Game Ever prank is by far the best prank ever. Not only does it create a public spectacle, but it brings joy to a bunch of kids by turning a random, everyday little league game into a major league event covered by NBC Sports, complete with Jumbotron, Goodyear blimp, and chest-painted fans.
[via Kottke]
Culture
Shover Robot in 2008!
If you don’t get the reference, it’s from , which as we learn here is derived from this. Thus ends this week’s lesson in old school Internet memes.
PAK CHOOIE UNF!
Culture
With disappointing repetitiveness, I stumble across some bozo up in arms over some company that’s attempting to “steal your copyright.” These are usually in a lather because they’ve actually read the Terms of Service for [insert web-based application here] and noticed language that looks something like this:
“the submitting user grants [company] the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license.”
A good example is this comment on the Slashdot story last week about Adobe launching an online version of Photoshop Express. I’ve had to deal with these kind of complaints for the web properties I’m responsible for, but my annoyance is nothing new. The first time I remember coming across complaints about these kind of terms is almost a decade ago when Yahoo! took over Geocities. It annoyed me even back then when I was just a humble ed tech trainer, not a product manager responsible for honest-to-goodness web applications.
Although I am not a lawyer and you definitely shouldn’t take legal advice from me, let me explain to you what the heck is going on here: it’s called the Internet.
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Intellectual Property, Technology & Internet