cubicle17

Los Angeles County just added a new category to the rule that allows it to declare property a public nuisance. Under this law…

The county retains the right to shutter a property for up to a year for [engaging in music/video piracy] and also gives local authorities the right to bring a civil action to “temporarily restrain, preliminarily enjoin, and/or permanently enjoin the person or persons intentionally conducting, or knowingly maintaining or permitting the public nuisance from further conducting, maintaining, or permitting such a public nuisance.”

They can shutter your house for up to a year because you downloaded a song? Seems a bit extreme, don’t you think?

If it has a bill and webbed feet like a duck, lays eggs like a bird or a reptile but also produces milk and has a coat of fur like a mammal, what could the genetics of the duck-billed platypus possibly be like? Well, just as peculiar: an amalgam of genes reflecting significant branching and transitions in evolution.

Fascinating.

Richard Dunlop-Walters:

Wow, lots of buzz around Tumblize today. Those guys that, for “just $999” will supply you with a brand new theme for your tumblelog. No, seriously, it’s just $999. For a one-page design. […]

Personally, $999 seems like a lot of money for a Tumblr theme; however, for that amount of money, I would hope these guys weren’t making the kind of mistakes Richard points out.

The gist of the game is this: you’re a dinosaur, an asteroid has hit the Earth, and you have to outrun the devastation. Not only is there a fun single-player mode, but there’s a multi-player mode as well.

Sound like a game you’ll be losing an afternoon to? Yep, me too. (via Waxy.org)

I’ve been trying out a beta of Hahlo3 for last week or two, and it’s a vast improvement over version 2. In my opinion, if you have an iPhone/iPod Touch and a twitter account, you should be using Hahlo.

“It’s easily the most dramatic segment shift I have witnessed in the market in my 31 years here,” said George Pipas, chief sales analyst for the Ford Motor Company.

With gas prices new hitting record highs almost daily, I suppose this news shouldn’t surprise me, but Americans have historically been very stubborn where their SUVs are concerned.

I will, without a doubt, lose the rest of my afternoon to mastering this.

A recent post from the Opera Developer Community makes a case for why Ajax isn’t the great-and-wonderful thing it’s cracked up to be:

Striving for better things is not good enough, if in the process we lose some of our users completely. I think of progressive enhancement like a hierarchy of objectives: where accessibility is the highest, most important thing, followed by usability, followed by aesthetics. Ideally we want all three, but if achieving one of the lower levels means sacrificing one of the higher ones, then it’s simply not justifiable, in my mind.