With Michael Anthony being replaced on bass by Eddie’s 15 year old son, Sammy Hagar also an outcast, and David Lee Roth still not committing to a reunion the band, Van Halen finally has received the news that every rock and roll band dreams about when creating music.

Daily India (and others)

While the band has been sidelined by turmoil and turnover since 2000, it is only one of seven Hall of Fame acts to have at least two albums sell more than 10 million copies in the U.S., ranking alongside the immortal likes of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and the Eagles.

Now the reunion cries will reach a frantic pitch and rightfully so. Come on already, get back together and go on a killer reunion tour, only get Michael Anthony with that Jack Daniels bass back into the band. I don’t see why they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — utilyze Eddie’s son, Wolfgang, as a second guitarist. The David Lee Roth band last year got me psyched.

Best Van Halen album ever? I’ve got to go with VH 1. That album is loaded with great songs and is one of their two albums that sold over 10 million copies (the other is 1984, another Roth vocal effort). Runnin’ With The Devil, Jamie’s Cryin’, Eddie’s famous Eruption solo leading to You Really Got Me, Atomic Punk, Little Dreamer, Ice Cream Man … Now I need to spin that CD.

Van Hagar had some good songs but the question was posed this morning would Van Halen have gotten into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Hagar at vocals? I say no way. You?

Listening to Howard Stern live this morning and the crew vacated the studio because of an as yet unidentified gas smell wafting through the air and throughout the studio. The crew came back and they were taking calls from people saying: “You need to get out of [the Sirius building].” It’s on the news:

“We have numerous calls and reports about a gas leak from midtown to downtown, river-to-river but we don’t have any locations or any injuries reported,” an OEM spokesman said. He said there was no immediate threat to public safety.

For those of us who aren’t at CES 2007 in the never sleeping city of Las Vegas, there are ways to cover the action through the eyes and ears of others (will be updated as I find more):

- [video] Podtech.net and Seagate are sponsoring a Bloghaus at the Bellagio for people coming in and out to podcast, videoblog and blog. That’s one thing — bandwidth at CES — that has notoriously been an issue for attendees (even with an EV-DO card). Scoble already posted an exclusive lunch video with Bill Gates.
- [blog] Engadget has the keynotes covered
- [video] CNET TV has live and recorded CES action including a discussion with Bill Gates (lots of Gates coverage so far) on the upcoming Windows Home Server. Nathan has a bunch of additional details.
- [agenda] The day one agenda for CES 2007 details the major happenings.
- [RSS] Receive “late breaking news from CES 2007″ with international CES 2007 attendees feed — subscribed.
- [blog] CNET also has a Best of CES show.
- [blog, pictures] Gizmodo reporters dressed as construction workers and took over a dozen pictures of the pre-show floor from as early as last Friday.

The BBC takes viewers up the final moments of Saddam Hussein’s life on earth before being hanged. He was defiant to the end, refusing to wear a hood over his head, thus giving onlookers a chance to see his neck snapped in grim detail.

Liveblogging executions? Don’t laugh, it might actually happen someday. Whatever your personal position on capital punishment, I don’t think we’re that far off from seeing live televised executions. Must admit being a bit disappointed that Osama Bin Laden wasn’t the one wearing the noose. I thought it was him we were going after? Don’t be surprised if Bin Laden is captured near the 2008 elections. I won’t be.

Update 12/31/2006 9:40am PST: Somebody posted on Google Video a cameraphone video of the whole execution. It’s already going viral at other video sites.

Can you imagine a policeman issuing a field sobriety test to Mike Tyson? “Over here, champ, walk the line. Bite, er, touch both ears.”

via SI.com:

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (AP) — Mike Tyson was arrested for driving under the influence and possession of cocaine after police stopped him leaving a Scottsdale nightclub early Friday.

This doesn’t surprise or shock me. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. What makes me go hmm is wondering what will shock me concerning Iron Mike any more. Murder? I really hope Iron Mike finds his way because whatever track he’s on doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere positive. What a sad, sad story. Cus D’Amato must be turning in his grave.

The following story was passed along to me via Skype this morning by one of my fellow VTOR authors.

Barry Cooper, once a Texas drug agent, is turning to video entrepreneur and activist and allegedly making a film that will show how to conceal drugs from police, including dogs.

[Cooper] plans to launch a Web site next week where he will sell his video, “Never Get Busted Again,” … “My main motivation in all of this is to teach Americans their civil liberties and what drives me in this is injustice and unfairness in our system.” [said Cooper]

I’ve always felt the war on drugs was problematic for our legal system. Feel the same about gambling and prostitution (where not legal, of course). Prohibition doesn’t work and isn’t working. Let’s find a way to better educate, legalize and tax all these vices and use the revenue to make the schools better so our future — the children — will be educated to make up their minds with the best uses of their lives. I don’t see much difference in people getting stoned in the privacy of homes versus drinking themselves into a stupor, except in one case I can go to the liquor store and the other would get me arrested.

With that said, I can see why Cooper’s fellow policemen and women are up in arms over him cranking out all their secrets for busting people concealing drugs. The irony here is that by them making a big stink, they are helping to promote Cooper’s website if/when it goes live as well as the sale of this proposed video. Of course there’s always the chance Cooper is just saying he’ll do this video and then never pulls the trigger thus spinning as a PR campaign for being pro-drug.

As population grows, eventually we’re going to have to make a better distinction about who the real criminals are in society. If somebody wants to make him/herself incoherent, is that a threat to society (save for driving stoned or doing something that hurts other people), really? We need to keep the cops out there protecting us against violent criminals, rapists and the like. That’s what the jail space should be used for, not for the stoners.

Feel free, as always, to agree/disagree below.

Microsoft’s new homepage design has less clutter and spotlights its Zune player. I prefer it over the previous style.

Digg adds content specific videos and podcasts in addition to the news. It seemed like the firehose main digg feed has become like 70%+ videos, so this seems like a logical progression. Like Microsoft, although not as severe, they’ve also made a few design changes. I like the options to better target what I’m looking for from digg and will be adjusting my subscription accordingly.

Also, on the podcast front — and due to the weather the Hmmcast that was scheduled for last weekend has been postponed until this week instead — you can add podcasts that aren’t in the database (Hmmcast isn’t in the DB as of this writing) in the appropriate category. I think ‘tech’ is closest from the subcategory choices: art/culture, business, comedy, education, games & hobbies, gov/org, kids, health, music, news, religion, science, sport and TV/film.

Broken digg images everywhere during update
Curious sidenote: when Digg went down to implement this new site version they broke their digg count image for every third party site, including this one, which can be seen clearly in the image featured in my last post. I wonder why they didn’t at least use that image space to produce a static image to return during the update?

Maybe the downtime was minima I don’t know, but it made several other sites I saw this morning display broken digg images, particularly the ones who put the digg count button at the very top of their site like the screenshot in the last post. This was why we have the digg image set to only show on dugg stories down at the bottom of the page. Don’t get as many diggs with this placement but it doesn’t make the page look partially broken during times like these. Maybe next time they’ll serve up a static image of the last known counts? Hope so.

Alien Crush (TG16, pinball), Gunstar Heroes (Genesis, shooter), Ice Hockey (NES, sports) and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine (Genesis, puzzle) have been added to the Wii Virtual Console as of 9am PST today 12/11. I just verified on our Wii and all of them are available.

On 12/1 Donkey Kong Junior (NES), Columns (Genesis), Ristar and Victory Run (TG16).

Genesis titles are $8 USD (800 Wii Points)
Turbografx-16 titles are $6 USD (600 Wii Points)
NES are $5 USD (500 Wii Points)

Still no word on when the internet browser or multiplayer online gaming will be added, but there has been a fairly significant amount of coverage over the safety of the Wiimote wrist strap and a rumor that the Wii is now shipping with a more sturdy wrist strap.

As for letting go of the Wii while playing, I’d recommend buying one of the Wii protective gloves. Our oldest son has sweatier hands and this helps keep a better grip on the Wiimote. I also noticed it was easier to keep a grip on while bowling.

Is it safe now to assume that Niall Kennedy didn’t leave Microsoft thinking happy thoughts?

Once a Microsofty that I gave three to one odds being a possible blogger replacement for Scoble, he apparently was (is?) so at odds with official Microsoft RSS blog that when they hotlinked one of his Flickr images without permission, instead of dropping them a note asking them (politely/sternly/whatever) to remove it, he changed the hotlinked image to a semi-pornographic (note: never saw it, just going off Todd Bishop from the Seattle PI’s report below) image.

:

[Kennedy] wasn’t pleased that Microsoft used his photo on a commercial site, without attribution. In addition, he said, the use of the photo violated the Flickr terms of service by not linking back to the site.

“Basically they stole one of my photos and put it on their blog,” Kennedy said. “I decided to make them very aware of that fact.”

I don’t like unauthorized hotlinking either, but definitely wouldn’t have gone that far with people at a company I used to work at.

Couldn’t Niall just pick up the phone and call somebody over there he worked with and knew? Doesn’t he have some insider connection to the RSS team being he helped develope an RSS platform there? I’m not a Microsoft employee, never was, and even I know a few people at the big M internally I could contact to get help with a problem like this. It’s not like this was happening on some splog from somebody in Russia or China.

If all else failed he could have blogged about the negative experience and enjoyed 15 minutes of blogger attention for sticking it to Microsoft. Probably would/will get slashdotted and dugg anyway.

The Microsoft RSS blog probably burned through a small bit of bandwidth, but oddly, they weren’t even burning Niall’s bandwidth. A look at Niall’s Flickr account quickly reveals that he is a pro member which means for $24.95 USD a year he has unlimited bandwidth. The Microsoft RSS blog team was burning Yahoo’s bandwidth.

Come on, Niall, it’s not like this was your own webhosting account! If Microsoft had done the same thing to one of the images on Niall’s own web hosting that would have cost him money. Since we know that’s not the case, now we get that they violated the image copyright. Yes, that sucks and is wrong but if Kennedy hasn’t been ripped off hundreds, maybe thousands of times before in the same manner, I’d be shocked. Has he taken this action with anybody else or was it only Microsoft that was punished?

If that’s indeed the case that he singled out Microsoft, then let me provide the definition for this sordid affair in one word: grandstanding.

I get more pissed at hotlinkers who cost our company money and rip us off than those who do only the latter. I’d like hotlinkers to do neither but it’s a fact of running any website that people are going to link your content without paying any regard to the copyright. The solution if you can’t get their attention? DMCA takedown notice.

An unregistered commenter on the Seattle PI piece writes:

Mr. Kennedy may have had a point, but the way he did it was completely childish and unprofessional. Just a CC logo would have been much better and to the point. Good luck to him in getting any company to hire him, or work with his business… I know I wouldn’t.

This seems extreme too and unsurprisingly comes from some anonymous coward. My name is signed on this piece and Niall can contact me if he feels the desire or need to refute anything written here. Have some stones anon cowards and sign your name if you want to take a shot at somebody. These are the bottom feeders of the web.

BTW, the odds now of Niall Kennedy being the Scoble replacement blogger are “safely” a million to one

To end on a more positive note, I think Major Nelson’s blog has ascended to being the Microsoft blogger at the moment (certainly open to discussion/debate in the comments below on this if you feel differently as I haven’t read/followed all the Microsofty bloggers). Nelson’s blog is updated regularly, full of good insider content, interesting podcast and fresh material from the source. Scoble rarely covered games when he worked there and actually pointed to Major’s blog as being better than his at one time. Nice work, Major!

Update 6:56pm PST Looks like Niall is saying he did contact the author of the offending hotlinking post at Scoble’s blog:

Robert, want to review your facts at all? I contacted Sean Lyndersay, the author of the post, this morning telling him he might want to swap out the image and let him know each of both the CC violation and the Flickr ToS violation. After the image was removed from the Microsoft blog I swapped the original photo back in. Sean replied to my e-mail with his own interpretation of non-commercial.

Strangely, I just read Scoble’s post and it is very similar to what I said above. No, I didn’t read what Robert sais before writing my post. I wouldn’t change anything except that I’m still a little confused if Niall contacted the author of the offending post before swapping out with the porn image or after. I think if he did it afterwards that still was unprofessional and unnecessary. I’ll jump over to Scoble’s blog and leave that question right now in case Niall doesn’t get over here.

7:17pm PST: Sent Niall both a message through Skype and an email directly to get his side of what happened. Will update when/if I hear back from him or of course if he leaves a comment below.

12/5/2006 8:17am PST: I just got done speaking with Niall Kennedy on Skype before he left for work. He insists the image he swapped out was not pornographic, disputing Todd Bishop’s original blog post quoted above.

The official Seattle PI story published in the Business section does not say he used a pornagraphic image, saying specifically:

partially censored image of a naked person,

Hmm, I wish he would have showed me the actual image so I could see because that makes a big difference here but he refused to share them with me during our conversation.

I’ll have more details in a follow-up post and perhaps make more references and changes (with strikethru) to the above text shortly.

12/5/2006 1:26pm PST: Niall dropped me an email to let me know he posted his account of what happened.

After reading Niall’s post and reviewing the entire sequence of events, I feel like in particular with my direct Skype conversation he was being unnecessarily evasive and stoic with me — and totally disagree that the picture he used wasn’t pornographic (you can see the guy’s intentionally exposing genitals Niall, come on!) — about the photo.

Niall could have simply said “goatse” and I would have known the image he altered immediately and we wouldn’t have had to do the not going to show you neener, neener dance. It’s a well known internet story and I’ve been around the block awhile, but instead he felt this was only something he could share on his blog? Weak. As someone who came late to the story, long afer the picture had been swapped and removed, I missed the details of the picture itself but fortuantely others like Rogers Cadenhead helped fill in the details.

Niall also offered a link to a screenshot showing what was swapped on the Microsoft site for those who want to decide if it’s “porn” or not. I’m not going to strike the title again but I definitely would have left it “porn” if I had known it was the goatse image. I’m not going to further strike/change the title again.

I don’t know what kind of guy Niall is to work with, but if I worked with him and he pulled this Goatse swap nonsense, I’m guessing we’d have been exchanging terse words privately on the subject.

Niall seems to blame Microsoft the organization (???) for the acts of senior Program Manager Sean Lyndersay who when he realized his mistake promptly removed the image and apologized in an update on the same post. According to Niall, Sean did engage in some sort of a unnecessary discussion about whether the image being stolen used was for commercial use or not, which seems strange considering Sean didn’t attribute the usage either way (and very clearly should have — there is absolutely no disputing that). Sean’s actions were clearly wrong and ill-advised, but IMO, Niall’s response was too extreme in this circumstance.

As I said over at Scoble’s blog, if this was some splogger from China or Russia I’d be all for the Goatse technique. I’d applaud loudly in appreciaton of Niall’s actions if that had been the case. You are welcome to disagree and debate below, but that’s my opinion as of this moment in time.

Somewhat ironically Niall starts his piece out by mentioning other sources (”There have been a few accounts on the web about a copyright enforcement action I took yesterday morning …”) giving their account of the events but he doesn’t link out to any of those sources, including Hmm. This is one area I’m not crazy about either. If you are going to write a post at least in part complaining about proper attribution then link out for reader’s (and your own) sake. It supports your willingness to evaluate the point of view of others. Whether or not Niall thinks he did anything wrong, once he did this in public the public gets to scrutinize. Even if he doesn’t link to me, why not link to Todd Bishop or Scoble?

Sorry, Niall, this whole situation was handled poorly all the way around. That’s simply one third party opinion and you can do with it what you will. Agree, disagee, avoid, discard, whatever.

Who in the tech world hasn’t been following this story with a lump in their throat? CNET editor and Tech TV Alumni James Kim, his wife and children have been missing for eight days near Roseburg, Oregon.

Today a helicopter hired by the family found James’ wife, Kati, and two children. A state trooper on video offered no details on their medical condition although Kati Kim was said to be “walking.” They are in the hospital. Also in the video segment, the trooper used the word “crash” but then backed away from that when asked for more details.

James Kim left two days ago with snow shoes to find help and as of this writing is still missing. No details yet have come forward on what exactly happened but the roads in the area where they were traveling this time of year can be severe. The area where the mother and two young children were found wasn’t accessible by 4×4 and only Snocats could get around.

Kim has always struck me as an industrious guy and I remain hopeful that he too is found alive. I hope he only traveled during the day with the heat of the sun above him and was able to keep warm through the biting night. There are logger cabins strewn throughout that area and he could have stayed in those areas to avoid being outside when it grew dark and temperatures dropped further.

It’s good to hear that Kati Kim and the two daughters will be sleeping in a warm bed tonight, I hope James is found and he will be too. More news is supposed to be available at 5pm PST today (about 30 minutes from this post).

Please keep the Kim family in your thoughts and prayers tonight.

Update 5:00pm PST: CNET is offering a live stream of the press conference.

They found James tracks some two miles away. They will be continuing to search throughout the night. Searchers from various agencies are out there looking for James Kim. Kati Kim and the two children reportedly are in good condition.

They will be working 24/7 until they find Kim and bring him home. They will be using night vision gear to follow the tracks. Dog teams are coming in the morning as well as some horse teams will be deployed.

5:15p: To survive the eight days Kati Kim used the car to keep the heat on until the car ran out of gas. Then they burned their car tires to keep warm.

When available, updates and information will be made available via flashalert.net.

Techmeme currently enjoys the #1 tech news aggregator spot but Megite, who started out with — but has thankfully stopped — a questionable marketing blitz (hitting the comments area of blog posts that were marginally related to shoehorn in a link back to megite.com), has been making impressive, positive moves in the field.

Megite owner/operator Matthew Chen contacted me recently when he noticed that Hmm was blocking his spider and we had a short, but nice exchange about Megite. A quick aside: I like the name Megite better than Techmeme or the godawful named Tailrank which sounds like the name of a hotornot site for derrieres.

Hey Sterling, tried leaving the following comment on your blog which I’ve slightly modified below but it never showed up (false positive for Akismet, maybe?) and don’t see your trackback link any more:

Not sure if you knew this yet about Megite, but if you send Matthew your OPML he’ll make up your own Megite virtual newspaper based on the feeds you’re reading. This is a feature he’s had for quite some time, but I didn’t check out until he shared it with me.

He emailed me about this feature and asked for my OPML so I pointed him to it and he made this Megite page for Hmm . He said a version is coming that will better deal with dynamic OPML files like the one I use, that way it can deal with dynamically updated OPML.

Also if you use the WP Bad Behavior plugin you’ll want to get the Megite spider IP addresses so your site isn’t blocking his spider.

Megite river of news (RoN) is also new. The RoN style is how I prefer to read RSS feeds daily (still) using reBlog. Since March 2006 I’ve used Reblog to scan/read through over 100,000 posts and mark over 13,400 as ‘published.’

Reblog is a free rsss reader that can be installed on your own server [Hmm review: Reblog]. In August of this year I made a Reblog screencast showing how fast you can skim through posts. If you have a little extra time, install this program and then try it for a month. Try reading your RSS feeds this way and get back to me with how it works for you. Hands down to date this is the most efficient way I’ve found to skim/read the maximum amount of material in the minimum amount of time.