YAWC: Misery Loves Sherman

It's been a while since I made a new YAWC post, and for anyone who has forgotten, YAWC stands for Yet Another Web Comic. I have a submenu button bar thing labeled Breakfast in Firefox and it opens 43(!) web comics every morning for me, along with Wired, Slashdot, and Angry Zen Master for news fixes.

I read Unshelved every day, and today's Sunday strip was by another webcomic artist, Chris Eliopoulos, a rare event. Chris has been nominated for Eisner and Harvery awards and actually makes a living as a freelance illustrator and has several mainline comicbooks for Marvel and DC to his credit.

His comic, Misery Loves Sherman is a pretty decent strip about a kid who's always getting beaten up by his little sister and happens to have two aliens living in his room. Christ started it on the last day of 2007 and has broken the 300 mark! Has a bit of a Calvin & Hobbs feel (IMO) along with some good contemporary criticism.

Check it out, you might like it. I've just started on the archive, hopefully I can stretch it out for a few days.

The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist

In February 2003, the main vault of the Antwerp Diamond Exchange was burlged. It was protected by ten layers of security, and the thieves opened the vault door and walked right in. It was claimed that over $100 million in diamonds was stolen, but the man who organized the robbery said that they only got about $10m worth: he says that a co-conspirator who stored diamonds in the vault told other brokers and they pulled their stones out before the heist and claimed they were lost in the robbery, perpetrating a pretty impressive insurance fraud.

The story of the burglary is rather interesting, the way they got past the security systems strikes me as something almost straight out of Mythbusters.

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/17-04/ff_diamonds?currentPage=all

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?

I can't imagine how many times that lyric has been, or will be, used to describe the Obama administration.

Among the things that concerned me about the Obama administration was the appointment of former RIAA attorneys into high positions in the Department of Justice. Add to that the fact that Veep Biden is a major friend of Hollywood and has been a proponent of DRM in the past, then this shouldn't be much of a surprise:

Obama DOJ Sides With RIAA
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held that the 1919 decision — rather than the Supreme Court's more recent decisions involving punitive damages — was applicable to an award against a Karaoke CD distributor for 44 times the actual damages. Of course none of the cited cases dealt with the ratios sought by the RIAA: 2,100 to 425,000 times the actual damages for an MP3 file. Interestingly, the Government brief asked the Judge not to rule on the issue at this time, but to wait until after a trial. Also interestingly, although the brief sought to rebut, one by one, each argument that had been made by the defendant in his brief, it totally ignored all of the authorities and arguments that had been made by the Free Software Foundation in its brief. Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/22/184221