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What’s that saying again? If you can’t beat ‘em…

2 Player Productions officially debuted its big gaming documentary this weekend on Microsoft’s Xbox Live platform, but before you get upset that you, a PlayStation or Nintendo Wii owner (or console hater in general), have no way to viewMinecraft: The Story of Mojang, a little something strange happened.

By that, we mean that 2 Player Productions decided to go ahead and upload its movie directly to The Pirate Bay – even though the filmmakersintend to sell the film as an $8, DRM-free stream or a $20 physical disc starting Dec. 23. Why, then, would they ever want to release it for free on a file-sharing site?

“We wanted to come here first because we knew the movie would end up here eventually, and the best thing to do seemed to be opening a dialogue,” the company said. “Torrents and piracy are a way of life and it probably won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. There are many people that want to punish you for that, but we have a more realistic outlook on things.”

“We’ve been there. We’ve all needed to do it at some point. Maybe you don’t have the money. Maybe you want to try before you buy. Maybe you’re pissed at us for premiering the movie on Xbox Live. These are all fine reasons. But if you feel that piracy is, in Gabe Newell’s words, ‘a service problem,’ please consider that we are selling DRM free digital downloads that you can watch in whatever manner you please,” reads the torrent’s description.

The 2.52GB movie is up to just under a thousand seeders and more than a thousand current downloaders as of this article’s writing. As a testament to 2 Player Productions’s plan, however, reactions to the movie being released as a downloadable torrent actually seem to be meeting the filmmakers’ intent.

“Wow. You guys are awesome. I had a lot of respect for you before, but uploading your own production for torrent is just a new level. Just because of this, I will buy it. Well done on all your hard work; you deserve every penny no matter how good or bad this movie is,”commented one member of The Pirate Bay.

“Was going to use some of my visa gift card for the steam sale, but you guys just won eight of my dollars. Thank you,” said another.

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So why is compromise so hard in the House? Some commentators, especially liberals, attribute it to what they say is the irrationality of Republican members of Congress.

But the answer could be this instead: individual members of Congress are responding fairly rationally to their incentives. Most members of the House now come from hyperpartisan districts where they face essentially no threat of losing their seat to the other party. Instead, primary challenges, especially for Republicans, may be the more serious risk.

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A group of religious figures in Saudi Arabia have threatened to strike the labor minister who seeks to create jobs for women with “deadly prayers.” They threatened to pray that he gets cancer like his predecessor Ghazi al-Gosaibi, who died of the disease in 2010.

During a meeting at the labor ministry on Tuesday, about 200 religious figures accused Minister Adel Fakeih of executing a “Westernization” plan and asked him to ban women from working in lingerie shops within a month or he will face their dangerous prayers.

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A rickety truck packed with 14 people rumbled down a desert road from the town of Radda, which al-Qaeda militants once controlled. Suddenly a missile struck flipping the vehicle over. Then a second missile hit the truck.

Within seconds, 11 of the passengers were dead, including a woman and her seven-year-old daughter. A 12-year-old boy also died that day, and another man later died from his wounds.

The Yemeni government initially said that those killed were al-Qaeda militants and that its own Soviet-era jets carried out the September 2 attack. But last week US officials acknowledged for the first time that it was an American strike and that the victims were civilians.

Furious tribesmen tried to take the bodies to the gates of the presidential residence, forcing the government into the rare position of withdrawing its claim that militants had been killed. The apparent target was the senior regional al-Qaeda leader Abdelrauf al-Dahab, thought to be travelling on the same road.
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The two survivors and relatives of six victims, interviewed separately and speaking to a Western journalist, said they would be willing to support or even fight alongside al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula.

”If we are ignored and neglected, I would try to take my revenge,” said Nasser Mabkhoot al-Sabooly, the truck’s driver who suffered burns and bruises. ”I would even hijack an army pickup, drive it back to my village and hold the soldiers in it hostages.”

”The people are against the indiscriminate use of the drones,” the Yemeni Foreign Minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, said. ”And more important, they want to have some transparency as far as what’s going on – from everybody.”

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Is the McDonald’s beef washed in ammonia? (No). Do you put anti-nausea agents in the food? (Absolutely not)

Those and a multitude of other no-holds-barred questions (including the “secret” recipe to Big Mac sauce) were answered at McDonald’s Canada’s groundbreaking “Our Food. Your Questions.” social media site, a real-time twist on standard corporate frequently asked questions Web features.

The company gamely promised to answer any and all consumer questions about its food that were not profane. It was pretty much a polar opposite approach to the U.S. parent company’s mum reaction to the 2004 film Super Size Me, in which documentarian Morgan Spurlock gained weight and made himself ill on a steady 30-day diet of McDonald’s food. The critical response to the Q&A site was overwhelmingly positive and in the process McDonald’s managed to debunk a number of long-standing myths about its food.

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.

– Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879 – 1962)

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Slitastjórn Landsbanka Íslands krefur PriceWaterhouse Coopers um tæplega 100 milljarða króna í skaðabætur vegna tjóns sem hún telur fyrirtækið hafa valdið Landsbankanum fyrir hrun.

Í stefnu slitastjórnar gegn PriceWaterhouseCoopers, sem fréttastofa hefur undir höndum, kemur fram að stjórnin telur að endurskoðendur bankans hafi valdið tjóni með athöfnum sínum, athafnaleysi og rangri ráðgjöf.

For those you of not speaking much icelandic…

In the subpoena of the banks liquidation committee against PwC, which our news team has obtained, it is reported that the liquidation committee argues that the auditors of the bank have caused huge damage with their actions, inaction and wrong consultations

The company [PwC] has not audited the banks accounts according to regulations and not informed the Board of Directors [of the bank], the meeting of shareholders [of the bank] or the Financial regulatory agency about the banks serious violations

The prosecution is citing evidence that Landsbanki was making loans far in excess of the 25% of their total net worth, which is illegal.

PWC has refused to turn over their documentation.

This is significant, because in the reports submitted by PWC, everything was filed “without comment”. So whatever PWC was seeing at that time, they’re either guilty of incompetence for not seeing it, guilty of negligence by not reporting it, or guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud, and they appear to prefer paying a huge fine to turning over documentation that could clear that up.

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On 23 occasions over the past several years, wild dolphins were observed giving gifts to humans at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia. The gifts included eels, tuna, squid, an octopus and an assortment of many other types of different fin fish. While these gifts might not be your choice for a gift to find underneath your Christmas tree, some of the items that were offered to humans are highly valued food sources for cetaceans such as dolphins. Areport describing this rare form of food sharing behavior in wild dolphins was published on December 4, 2012 in the journal Anthrozoös: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People & Animals.

Food sharing is a fairly common behavior among animals of the same species, but it is a much rarer phenomenon between animals that are from different species. Perhaps one of the best known examples of inter-species food sharing occurs in domesticated cats that have a tendency to drop prey items at their owner’s feet. Inter-species food sharing in wild animal populations has not been widely documented in the scientific literature.

There has been one observation of inter-species food sharing in false killer whales, a member of the dolphin family (Delphinidae). During an encounter that National Geographic photographer Flip Nicklin had in Hawaii, a false killer whale swam up to the photographer, released a large mahi mahi from its mouth and backed away. The photographer accepted the gift then, returned the fish to the whale. I suppose that is proper etiquette if a large cetacean offers you food while you’re in the water with it.

The wild dolphins that were observed giving gifts to human in Australia were regular visitors to a provisioning program at the Tangalooma Island Resort. The provisioning program was started in 1992, and each evening staff members from the resort wade into the ocean to feed the wild dolphins fish. The program is regulated by a permit issued by the Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management.

In 1998, an adult male dolphin named Fred was observed giving a dead moray eel to one of the staff members. Since that first occurrence of gift giving behavior among the Tangalooma dolphins, staff members have documented an additional 22 other events.

Dolphins of diverse ages and both sexes engaged in the gift-giving behavior, and scientists are not entirely sure of what is motivating their behavior. Food sharing in animals is often motivated by an urge to play, a desire to reciprocate food sharing or the belief that the recipient of the food is an incompetent hunter. Based on their detailed observations, the scientists think that gift giving among the wild dolphins at the Tangalooma Island Resort was likely a form of play behavior.

The research was published by Bonnie Holmes and David Neil. They are scientists affiliated with the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Staff at the Tangalooma Island Resort assisted in collecting the data for the study.

Bottom line: On 23 occasions over the past several years, wild dolphins were observed giving gifts to humans at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia. The gifts included eels, tuna, squid, an octopus and an assortment of many other types of different fin fish. A report describing this rare food sharing behavior in wild dolphins was published on December 4, 2012 in the journal Anthrozoös: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People & Animals.

 

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People’s expectations tend to stretch far beyond anything that resembles reality. And the people whose expectations tend to stretch furthest beyond reality — especially at Christmas — are known by the colloquial term “the young.”

We should, therefore, bow in solemn gratitude to writer Jon Hendren, who tears himself away from his own personal Xmas in order to retweet the messages of those who aren’t happy with their gifts.

Yes, the young, the feckless, the occasionally heartless.

Here’s a tweet — retweeted by Hendren — offered in advance of Santa wafting down a sooted chimney.

@annemcgerber groaned: “If I got a black iPad I’d probably kill myself.” Yes, there’s nothing more disappointing than getting a black iPad.