Homeopathy is governed by two main principles:

• The “law of similars”, or ”let like be cured by like”, which states that by taking a preparation that induces the symptoms of a disease, it will cure the disease itself;
• The more diluted the preparation is, the more effective it gets. In some preparations the dilution is done to a point where not a single molecule of the active ingredient is left.

I’ve seen doctors calling it witchcraft, TV shows debunking the whole thing, and campaigns like 10:23 trying to raise awareness to what must be one of the biggest myths of modern times. But people are still spending billions of dollars per year in homeopathic treatments. Yes, billions!

Steve DeGroof at MadArtLab found a very interesting (and fun) way of explaining it. He looks more closely at that second principle, and uses Felicia Day to put it all into perspective:

He puts Felicia into various categories (like women named Felicia, redheads, people on Earth) and compares that number to how much homeopathy dilutes various solutions. The conclusion is that for typical homeopathic solutions, the concentration of the active ingredient is comparable to having one Felicia Day dissolved 100 million universes. If that doesn’t help you grasp the nonsense of homeopathy, I don’t know what will…

Flight of the Conchords, the New Zealand folk comedy duo, will be coming to Europe for a 15-stop tour with dates in the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, and the UK. Jemaine and Bret will be joined by co-stars Kristen Schall (fan-turned-stalker Mel) and Arj Barker (shop owner Dave).

That’s awesome news, right?

Well, kind of. Maybe it’s good news for the lucky ones who got tickets, but us mere mortals won’t make it.

Here’s what happened. Tickets went on sale at 9:00 today. And by… I don’t know… 9:00 they were sold out (at least the Dublin and London dates). I know that because I was at the the bloody ticketmaster page refreshing it over and over again, and still all the tickets were gone as soon as the “Find tickets” button showed up. How that happened I don’t know, but it’s very frustrating that I didn’t even get a chance. Kudos for the Conchords for having such loyal fans (maybe the tickets were all bought in the Fan Club pre-sale).

As usual, some tickets are already showing up on eBay and other such sites. For 3 times their original price. I feel like shooting those people…

For reference (not that you’ll be able to get tickets…) all of the Flight of the Conchords 2010 Tour Dates are:

3rd May- Amsterdam, NL at Melkweg Max
4th May- Amsterdam, NL at Melkweg Max
5th May- Dublin, Ireland at Olympia
6th May- Dublin, Ireland at Olympia
10th May- Birmingham, UK at NIA
11th May- Manchester, UK at Apollo
12th May- Manchester, UK at Apollo
14th May- Glasgow, UK at SECC
15th May- Glasgow, UK at SECC
16th May- London, UK at HMV Hammersmith Apollo
17th May- London, UK at HMV Hammersmith Apollo
20th May- Bergen, Norway at Grieghallen
22nd May- Oslo, Norway at Folkteatern
23rd May- Copenhagen, Denmark at Vega
24th May- Stockholm, Sweden at Cirkus

This is part of my most recent rant against the Cupertino company for the 20 iPhone patents Apple’s suing HTC over.

As soon as Steve Jobs gave birth to the iPad, the Internet went crazy with all the reviews/opinions about this new device. Everyone was in awe because of its slickness and beautiful design. And the ease of use of the multitouch, and the lightness and thinness of it. It looked perfect.

While more details kept being revealed, the first doubts started to appear, and by the end of the keynote the fight started. On one side the die-hard fans of Apple defended it as something magical. On the other the Apple-haters that automatically discard every Apple product without even looking at it. And somewhere in between the ones that looked at it with a critical eye, trying to make sense of this new thing.

I’ve avoided commenting on it earlier because I wanted to know what I’m talking about before giving my opinion. Now that I’ve read way too many stuff about the iPad (the only thing missing is the experience of holding one), I’m ready to share my opinion about it.

And to put it short and simple: the iPad is a useless device. Allow me to elaborate:

It’s not the best way to browse the web

One of the things I heard more than once during the iPad promotional video was “the iPad is the best web surfing experience”. Well I’ll have to disagree with that. It can be argued that it’s the best way to browse the web in a mobile device, but then again, calling the iPad a mobile device is debatable (it’s small, but not small enough for my pocket, unless I get the iPants…).

The big problem: no support for Flash! Which means that you won’t be able to use that gorgeous screen on all those video sites on the web. Not to mention all the games and other apps.

While there are some arguments for Apple’s choice to not enable it, how can a device be considered “the best way to browse the web” if one of the most ubiquitous web technologies is not present? Start getting used to the blue legos…

No multitasking or file management system

Because it uses some variant of the iPhone OS, there’s no multitasking in the iPad. This means you can’t listen to Spotify and browse the web at the same time. No working in Pages while making a VoIP call. And the list goes on…

And because of the closed nature of all things Apple, there’s no simple way to transfer files to and from the iPad. Why is this relevant? Well, it means all the media files will have to be synced through iTunes, which always involves conversions to the mad Apple formats. There’s no way to just drag and drop them over WiFi or using a USB Mass Storage Device.

Not to mention all the documents produced with iWork (which even deserved to be ported to the iPad). Where will those go? And while we’re in this department, how can a device coined as a “great productivity tool” lack the support for non-Apple office software (Microsoft and Openoffice).

It’s not the best way to watch movies

Again, the iPad video… (that thing is so over the top… it’s ridiculous). Full HD is not supported, 720p will be the maximum. Also, the display is not widescreen. So any widescreen movie will be framed inside yet more black space (in addition to the bevel, which is not that small).

These are not huge problems, but the “best movie watching experience” should take care of them.

It’s not as affordable as it might look

The base price for the iPad is $499 (and apparently will be €499 in Europe, because Apple fails to acknowledge that 1€ > $1). For that you’ll get 16GB of storage and WiFi. Want 3G? Prepare to spend $130 more. Want more storage? That’ll be $100 extra for the 32GB version, and another $100 for the 64GB. You might be able to use an external disk for storage (again, not sure about the syncing), but for that you need to buy some kind of adapter since the iPad doesn’t have a USB port. Same for SD cards, so go on and buy the adapter to be able to transfer photos from your camera to the iPad.

How much does it cost now?

It’s useless

One may think that the most obvious buyers are the Apple clients. But I think that even those won’t find a use for it. They already have an iPhone and a MacBook. The iPad can’t make calls or take pics like the iPhone. And it’s also way bigger and not that portable. It can’t be used for video conferencing like the MacBook, and the lack of multitasking make it useless for any kind of serious work.

It makes even less sense for the non-Apple crowd. With half the money you can buy a pretty decent netbook that will do everything the iPad does and more. It will be a bit heavier and it won’t have touchscreen, but at least it will have more functionality than a digital coffee table book.

Stan Schroeder, of Mashable, makes a good point by asking when do you plan to use the iPad:

It’s going to be very hard to find enough time to use the iPad. When you’re at home or at work, you’re going to use your computer. When you’re on the go, you have your smartphone. If you’re on a train or a plane and need to do some work, you can use a laptop. When you’re doing something else, such as running, well, then your attention is focused on that. When, exactly, are you going to use the iPad?

Waiting for the next version

Now, with all that said I’m still waiting to see if this will end up becoming the next big thing. If I remember correctly, the iPod also faced some resistance when it was first announced, and even the first version of the iPhone was quite poor compared to the current one.

We might as well be looking at the New World of computing and not even know it. All the negative reactions to the iPad could be just “Future Shock”. Only time will tell.

But as it is now, the iPad is virtually useless.

No, it’s not a joke. This was the cover for the December edition of Playboy Portugal… The man in the cover is Ricardo Araújo Pereira, a comedian that was considered the “Man of the Year” by Playboy for his influence in the Portuguese society.

Well, that’s all very nice, and I respect the guy and all that. He’s my favourite Portuguese comedian, and his TV show this year managed to mix politics and comedy in such a way that I believe a lot of people (myself included) got more interested and involved in Portuguese politics than ever before.

But having him as the first man ever to be featured, alone, in the cover of Playboy… is a bit too much.

There’s only so much one can take, and the amount of Xmas-related stuff we get bombarded with every single year is just too much.

The constant talk about Christmas subjects is excruciating. Christmas presents, Christmas tree, Christmas decorations, Christmas presents, Christmas dinner, Christmas lunch, Christmas tea, Christmas breakfast, Christmas presents… Isn’t it supposed to be a religious holiday? A celebration of the birth of this guy Jesus Christ that lived some 2000 years ago?

Because gift-giving and many other aspects of the Christmas festival involve heightened economic activity among both Christians and non-Christians, the holiday has become a significant event and a key sales period for retailers and businesses. The economic impact of Christmas is a factor that has grown steadily over the past few centuries in many regions of the world.

Oh… I guess not… But at least it helps the economy…

And the songs! Oh, the songs! I believe there’s no such thing as a good Christmas song. Some are more tolerable than others, but that’s as good as they get. And here in Galway’s pubs they think it’s a good idea that the last 4 or 5 songs are Xmas songs… Argh!

Now, not everything is bad. Here’s some of the things I actually enjoy about this season:

• I welcome the Christmas decorations at work. A Christmas tree here and there, socks hanging in every other cubicle, an inflatable reindeer (?!). They give a bit of “color” to the otherwise gray-ish cubicles;
• The lights on the streets look good, and sometimes quite impressive. Again, they’re a welcome change to those streets that look the same every day;
• I love the fact that Christmas is an excuse to organise dinners and parties with every group of friends. It’s a great opportunity to get back in touch with people you haven’t seen in a while;
• One thing I would like to see becoming a tradition is girls dressing up in Xmas-themed clother. Nothing like a tiny green “Santa dress” with knee-high (also green) tights and high heels… Ho! Ho! Ho!

Rant over.

(image from Times Online)

Ahh, what would be of an important football game without some controversy? And to make it even more disgusting, it had to involve, and be in favor of, France…

The Irish team had lost 0-1 at Croke Park and travelled to France in a very difficult position. After 33 minutes at the Stade de France, Robbie Keane got the goal (and qualification equalizer) for Ireland , which they kept until the 90 minutes were over. And then, 14 minutes into extra time, Gallas scored the goal that got France in the World Cup, after an assist from Thierry Henry. Small detail: Henry controlled the ball with his hand. Wait, there’s more. Henry controlled the ball with his hand… twice!

I’m not even going to comment on the game itself, because that’s of little importance and there’s plenty of sites discussing it. The real issue here is that it was proven again that soccer desperately needs to adopt what today’s technology has to offer. It’s outrageous that a game of such importance gets decided in a clearly illegal play, one that would be easily detected by watching a replay. And any replay would be enough, as it was so obvious that you could almost see it from the other side of the pitch…

Tennis has Hawk-Eye. Quite a lot of sports use instant-replay to help decide on controversial situations. But football remains in the dark ages, leading to situations like this one over and over again. Maradona’s “God’s Hand” was 23 years ago, I think we should have evolved enough avoid these mistakes…

I’m not blaming Henry, because most players would do the same. Although he’s still a sneaky bastard.

I’m not blaming the referees, because it is possible that they really didn’t see the (did I say it was double?) handball. Although this was France.

But things like these make me sick.

In related news, Portugal got the qualification after defeating Bosnia and Herzegovina by 1 goal in Zenica (aggregate 2-0).

Let’s forget about all the implications of going back to playing the game and focus on the post subject – the install process of WoW is something massive!

It starts with the installation of the game itself. That’s 5 CDs worth of stuff, which means changing the CD 4 times, and being there when the install program asks you to. That’s all fine, although it takes ages to complete each CD. The problems started when I got this error message about the setup process not being able to read some file on CD3, possibly due to scratches or dust on the CD. And what happens next? The whole installation fails! No chance to retry, no chance to clean the CD and continue from where the installation was forced to stop. So I had to do a brute-force uninstall, aka deleting the game folder, and restart the whole thing. Then when it asked for CD3, I carefully cleaned it before continuing, and spent the remaining installation time praying that nothing else would go wrong. It didn’t, and so I proceeded to install the first expansion – The Burning Crusade.

This ran smoothly with no errors, although it again took ages to install the contents of only 3 CDs. They must have some crazy encryption and/or compressing on those files for it to take so long. I don’t know. Anyway, so far there were 8 CDs worth of game data, which amounts to something like 5.6GB.

It was time for the second and last expansion – Wrath of the Lich King – and I didn’t have a physical copy of it. It is available for download from Blizzard, though, and I proceeded to do it. And that’s when I saw the size of it – 5GB! 5 fricking Gigabytes! That’s almost as much as the game plus the first expansion combined. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the fact that a lot of new stuff comes out in an expansion, and that besides that Blizzard issues patches and corrects issues constantly, and those add up to a lot of stuff that gets included in the expansion release. But it just seems too much… Couldn’t they have stripped some stuff out, like videos and that crap, from the downloadable version? Anyway, there was nothing I could do besides waiting for a few hours for it to install. At least the download speed was pretty decent.

4 hours later the expansion was installed and I thought I would be playing soon. The game was only released last November, so there shouldn’t be too many updates to install, right?

Wrong! After some downloads to update the updater program (cool, uh?), I got presented with a 600+MB download for some patch. OK, on second thought maybe 600MB is not that much for 9 months of updates, although with the slower download rate this would require 2 more hours to complete the download. All I had to do was wait and it would be all done. Right?

Wrong! After this update was installed, another one started. Around 60MB this time. And then another one – 41MB. Followed by yet another one – 56MB. And just when I was starting to get desperate, a 880MB monster showed up! That takes the total to about 1.5GB of patches and updates since November. Doesn’t it sound a bit mad? I can’t help thinking that there must be some fundamental flaw in the game design that prevents it from having more modular updates. And even if that isn’t the case, why not pack the whole thing into a big download in order not to keep the users on their toes to start playing, only to present another download window when they think they’ll start playing soon?

In total, the installation about 10 hours from start to finish, not including the dirty CD incident. 10 hours! A bit too much, no? And to think I’ll have to do it all over again when I install the final version of Windows 7… I wonder if it’s possible to just copy the files over? Or if an upgrade from the RC is safe…

Anyway, WoW is now running fine, apparently. Well, at least the game main screen loads OK, because I didn’t have time to actually play it. By the time all the updates were installed, it was time to go to sleep. I don’t even know if I will be able to test it today, because Blizzard might have released some big ass patch overnight…

So if I don’t show up for a while again, you’ll know that I’ve been imprisoned by the World…

…

… of Warcraft.

UPDATE: Oh wait! Apparently there’s more. 447MB! Jeez…

Much has been written about how bad the new Transformers movie is. A quick look at the reviews on  Rotten Tomatoes (which, by the way, shows a 20% score) reveals true masterpieces of movie-dissing:

“They’ve managed to make a movie that is so incredibly bad that it manages to mark career lows for pretty much everybody involved.”

“Will insult your intelligence, hurt your eyes, and offend your sense of decency until you worry that your skull might explode while your brain trickles right out of your ears.”

“Transformers: The Revenge of The Fallen is beyond bad, it carves out its own category of godawfulness.”

“Performance-wise, the machines do tend to upstage the humans.”

“Bay’s most unrestrained and ridiculous to date. The male teenage cinematic equivalent of snorting cocaine off a hooker’s ass.”

That alone was enough to convince me I wouldn’t waste my time and money to watch it. Then I saw this clip of “Transformers 2 in 1 minute”:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fqN_wCK9hM

The clip was put together by Chris Phillips, creator of MTV’s Mighty Moshin’ Emo Rangers:

I’d written a rather critical review of Transformers 2 on my facebook blog, which a few friends had read, and it seemed to divide opinion. I’d say roughly 70% of people agreed it was a terrible film, but then unbelievably 30% kind of enjoyed it. Unacceptable. I realised that reasoning alone would not be able to crush their ridiculous admiration for such a creative traversty.

So I set to work creating a youtube clip to rival the millions of dollars poured into the film, the hundreds of experienced technicians who spent years creating the explosive robotic battle sequences, and the unrivaled wisdom of the established script writers who weaved 3 hours of narrative gold from the Transformers universe. It took me 20 minutes.

Had enough? But there’s more! If you want to know more about the “plot”, just go ahead and read Topless Robot’s Transformers 2 FAQ. It’s hilarious!

Not everything is bad, though. There’s still only one reason to just barely consider watching it:

It’s not for her acting skills, though. And I don’t think she has enough on-screen time to be worth the ticket price.

So, that brings me to the title of this post. After reading so many bad things about it, now I must see it, just to gloat at how bad it is. And at how wasteful was all the money spent on cinemas to watch it. Because if you thought that such bad reviews would drive people away, think again. According to Box Office Mojo, the movie grossed nearly $420 million (about €300 million) in just it’s first week! That’s more than 3 Cristiano Ronaldos!! That means it already more than paid for the outrageous $200 million it allegedly cost to make.

And that makes me sad…

I don’t believe piracy is hurting the movie/music/game industry.

On the contrary, I believe piracy is helping these industries, by giving even more visibility to their products, with no cost for the publishers. They’re basically getting free publicity and benefiting from the fact that people who wouldn’t even think about buying their album or watching their movie might just feel inclined to do it or to buy some other kind of related product.

You might argue that there’s no proof of this. Well, of couse this theory is very hard to prove, but a blog post over at The Inquisitr presents some interesting facts on the recent X-Men Origins and Star Trek movies.

A month before X-Men Origins hit the movie theaters, a workprint copy of the movie was leaked to teh Internets. The copy was far from being finished, and most of the special effects were not yet included. 20th Century Fox screamed in pain and begged the authorities to find the culprits. The FBI was called in to investigate and one movie reviewer from Fox News was fired.

Star Trek had a flawless release, with no leaks or any other kind of fuss surrounding it. Pretty boring, uh?

Now let’s look at some numbers, more speficically to opening weekend box office dollar figures:

• Wolverine - $85 million
• Star Trek - $75 million

Interesting… So the movie that was leaked 1 month before the premiere and presumably was downloaded 4 million times actually had a  better opening weekend than the one that managed to remain safe from those horrible pirates and had everyone dying to watch it. I know what you’re going to say. Maybe the Wolverine movie was just so much better than Star Trek, and that’s why so many more people went to watch it. Right?

Wrong!

It turns out that, according to Rotten Tomatoes, X-Men Origins is pretty crappy, while Star Trek is one of the best movies of the year so far.

So there you have it folks. The movie that caused the most uproar over piracy in recent time actually earned more money than the other hot movie that garnered critic praise and not a peep about piracy. In the process an ISP data host lost millions of dollars and had their reputation severely impacted. As well a long time FOX freelance movie reviewer has lost his livelihood. All because of the pirating of an incomplete film that ended up earning more money on opening weekend box office that the golden boy movie.

Still think piracy is hurting the movie industry?