I love racing…and can’t wait until RUSH hits the theaters this fall! Check out this preview, looks great!
Who’s paying for the pipeline spill cleanup work?
So, a pipeline broke in Arkansas, spilling about 12,000 barrels of a form of heavy crude oil being piped in from Canada. I’m learning a bit about this industry by following the spill. For example, I’ve learned that there’s something called the ‘Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund‘ that was established to ensure that if there’s an accident like this, the money will be available to pay for the cleanup. The bulk of the money for this comes from a per-barrel tax that the oil industry pays on oil produced in, or imported to, the US. It seems like a nice program. One would think.
So, this pipeline spill. Turns out that what it was carrying either was from tar sands, or is very similar to that (bitumen, to be exact). Point being, despite the environmental damage being similar to crude oil (or perhaps even worse, depends on who you ask), this form of crude oil is exempt from the barrel tax designed to pay for cleanups such as the one this same oil is currently responsible for! Amazing. The Keystone XL pipeline would also fall under this exemption, despite posing no small environmental risk.
(via Treehugger and ThinkProgress)
Video of the spill:
Reeder – free for a limited time for Mac and iOS
My favorite RSS reader, Reeder, is free for a limited time on both the Mac and iPad platforms! They’re promising future changes to deal with the imminent demise of Google Reader (it currently syncs with your Reader account) so now’s a great time to check it out. You can find it in the App stores, just be sure to spell it correctly (note the double ‘E’s).
(via Lifehacker)
More cracks in the TV industry’s business model
The TV industry is moving ever closer to either collapse or a reinvention of their business model. They’ve been resisting change for years, but just like the music industry before them, technology is enabling inevitable change. A federal appeals court just ruled in favor of Aereo, a service which lets people watch over-the-air TV when they want, where they want, delivered over the internet to iPads or any device. TV networks fought this, naturally, but lost (they may yet appeal to the Supreme Court, but that’s their only option at this point). Read here for more on that.
The other story of late is season three of Game of Thrones debuted to record numbers of viewers. What’s significant though is that it also set a record for the largest BitTorrent swarm – people are downloading this in huge numbers, as HBO does not make it available to non-HBO subscribers for quite some time. Remember how Napster helped lead to the upending of the music industry? Something similar is happening with TV. The cost to gain access to a single show is so high that people are choosing the only other option (other than wait months to a year for it to be available on DVD). As iTunes showed when it debuted, people are willing to pay a reasonable amount for content, if delivered in a timely manner comparable to other options on the market. The TV business model is more complex, but is proving to be incompatible with consumers’ current desires and technologies.
Combine this with Netflix and Amazon producing their own shows, and we’re seeing an imminent collapse of the TV industry as it has been known…and the birth of something much more consumer friendly.
Theft-proof USB flash drive?
Ladies and gentlemen, what you see here is perhaps the world’s first theft-proof USB drive…or at least a very theft-resistant one. I mean really, who’s going to want to steal one that’s designed to look like Jar-Jar Binks? You can buy it here if so inclined.
(via nerdapproved)