Entries from November 2005 ↓

Apparently, the dreaded popup print ad is starting to appear offline as well as online.

ComputerAssociates has a watermark ad in the stock pages of The Nw York Times, according to AdRants. When you chck your stocks you are looking right at their CA logo.

Inventive, and not nearly as annoying as the online version.

To tell more the Computer Associates story, a small ad appears at the bottom of the page.

As mentioned yesterday in this blog, Times reporter Judith Miller has been given space to explain herself in the wake of her long-negotiated resignation from the paper.

In the Op Ed piece, she explains her decision to leave the Times after a distingushed 28-year career there.

She states her 85 days in jail for contempt for refusing to reveal her sources is more than twice as long a any other US journalist.

She agreed to testify only on the Valerie Plame Wilson matter , and only after Scooter Libby released her from her pledge of confidentiality. Once that was done, she did testify.

Some on Times felt she never should have testified, even if it meant she would be obstructing a serious investigation and therefore, would have been charged with obstruction of justice, a serious crime in itself.

The paper in response to the impasse between the court and Ms. Miller has advocated a Federal shield law to allow reporters to protect their sources without facing this level of legal coercion.

She has website, further discussing these matters, JudithMiller.org

CBS is trying to promote its new show, Threshold. It’s another alien mystery like the super popular Lost on rival ABC. (Lost garnered an impressive 23 million viewers for its season premiere.)

They’re actually offering as a free download , without advertising after the show airs at 9 pm on Friday nights. Threshold follows what happens when the US Navy discovers an alien spacecraft has landed in the Atlantic Ocean. It faces a tough race in the creepy alien mystery genre. (I like crime shows, but now I get my choice of investigator, city, and method of investigation — scientific or psychic. That’s too many crime shows.)

I have watched this show, and contrary to the TV critic at Salon.com, I think it is creepy but weak. Traditional sci-fi horror movies gloss over the fake science in the plot: this show revels in its hokum. One show used the “third generation copy of an MP3” as key forensic evidence. What does that mean? What is the third generation of a perfect digital copy, with no degradation or error at all? Maybe you could say “an imperfect copy of an MP3.” (Others online have been tougher on the science in Threshold.)

But does the accuracy of science hooha matter in a creepy TV show, anyway?