Google confirms: Paris Hilton is a ho

Famed Trash: Google confirms: Paris Hilton is a ho

Download this one-page PDF file by clicking the link above and print (I suggest using heavy card stock). You can then cut out the strips, and follow the directions on the page to build your own fully functional Enigma machine.

This machine is compatible with the original 3-rotor German Enigma used during World War II.

Paper Enigma Machine

Nevertheless, a quiet little toast may be in order now that Pennsylvania, unprogressive in many ways and none more so than its liquor laws, has taken the commonsensical step of allowing beer distributors to open between noon and 5 p.m. on Sundays, following the recent lead of a number of state wine-and-spirits stores.

What might seem merely sensible in any other state is nevertheless significant in Pennsylvania, where the so-called blue laws once severely limited what its residents can do on the sabbath. A few vestigial restrictions remain, but Sunday beer sales by the case removes one of the greatest irritations. Currently, the only option for beer drinkers who find themselves running short that day is to go to a tavern where they can buy only one or two six-packs.

Editorial: Ale and hearty / Pennsylvania lets another blue law go

Here you are, diving in Lake Michigan with three of your dive buddies on a long holiday weekend. You flash the “ok” sign to your buddies, even out at 40 feet and then whoosh: you’re sucked into an 8-foot-wide water intake pipe. Seven minutes and half a mile later, you finally emerge in an open-air canal inside the property of a power plant.

Divester

On US Airways flights, blankets and pillows are still in -- but pretzels are out.

Free Pretzels Feel Pinch at US Airways

Help me with the economics of the marketing of Velvet Revolver.

It will be expensive. It will cost us $2 million for the first six months of the project, strictly in marketing.

How do you spend that?

It's a combination of video, video production costs, promotion at radio, advertising, especially retail advertising at record stores, any type of record store, whether it's Wal-Mart or Best Buy or Virgin, or the small mom-and-pop shop. All of that will require a monetary advertising investment on our part, which is one of the biggest differences between now and 12 years ago. It used to be maybe it would fall between number five and 10 on your expenditure list, and now it's generally one or two. That's just marketing. That's not counting whatever the cost of making the record is.

Why?

Because of the way that record retailers operate in this day and age. The Tower Records, the Virgin, the Sam Goodys of the world, those stores are having an impossible time trying to survive. So if you want a record on sale there, you pay to be involved in their external advertising campaigns and in-store advertising campaigns, which are extremely pricey. And when you're talking about certain mall stores, that's what helps them cover their margin and pay the rent, is the record labels putting that kind of money in.

For the big stores -- the Best Buys, the Targets, the Wal-Marts -- who are the bulk of our business -- those three accounts alone are 50 percent of our sales -- we're nothing to them. There's a great stat that music is one-tenth of 1 percent of all of Wal-Mart's gross revenues. So we're the smallest tadpole in the Wal-Mart pond, yet they're the most important thing in the world to us. And Best Buy is not much different. I think we're 3 to 5 percent of their overall revenue.

So if music disappeared out of some of these stores, they're not really going to feel it. But if we disappeared out of their stores, we would feel it. So that's why that dynamic exists.

These guys were sitting in a meeting that we shot, some of the Velvet Revolver guys, and they said that they had heard that day that because of Wal-Mart and Best Buy, they had to have clean versions of their songs. And they were all looking at each other like, "a clean version of one of our songs?" What are the implications of that?

The implications are you won't be in Wal-Mart. And you potentially could not be in Best Buy. But if the band didn't create a clean version, an edited version of the album, you could walk into a Wal-Mart and not be able to buy a Velvet Revolver record. And then, you've got to figure that in large chunks of the United States, the only place that a kid, somebody who's 20 years old, and maybe at the community college or not in college at all, just working, or the person who's over 30 and has a 9-to-5 day job but wants a great rock record, the only place they can buy a record is Wal-Mart. That's the only place they can buy a CD. And if Wal-Mart's not stocking it, I don't think they're going to be driving 30 miles to find a record store. …

And the music section at Wal-Mart is, you know, a third of the size of this office, maybe half the size of this office. It's tiny. And they are carrying maybe 600 titles at a time, 700 titles at a time.

Out of the 60,000--

Out of the 30,000 records that get released every year, they probably have 750 titles.

frontline: the way the music died: interviews: david gottlieb | PBS

Postmaster General John E. Potter featured Netflix in a recent presentation.

0.3% of USPS traffic?

Hacking NetFlix : Postmaster General Features Netflix in Presentation

I regularly receive emails from people who have come to this post via a search for dim sum in Pittsburgh. So for those souls that are looking for killer dumplings, the best place in Pittsburgh (and elsewhere, in my opinion) is:

widepipe.org

Joe Kraus from JotSpot has a great piece on how the last ten years has reduced the price of doing a startup from three million to a hundred thousand dollars for him. That’s definitely an interesting development and Joe is highlighting the right trends. But since Joe is coming from a company launched on angels and running on VC ($5,2 million, no less), his side is only one side of the story.

Entrepreneurs, angels, and the cost of launch - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

Thinking he was sending an e-mail to an aide, Assemblyman Willis Stephens instead sent a note to nearly 300 constituents, making the following comment on their listserv: "Just watching the idiots pontificate."

In the message, meant for aide Beth Coursen, Stephens wrote that he subscribes to the Brewster-based online discussion group to monitor area happenings, but he doesn't post messages.

I believe the long standing conventional wisdom, at least on Wall Street: don't type it if you wouldn't want to see it on the cover of the NY Times. This snafu only made the Washington Post...

Assemblyman Calls Constituents 'Idiots'