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Posts Tagged ‘south-carolina’

Last night, I spent a truly obscene amount of time reading through Action Button’s incredibly good reviews of games, old-school and new. The Super Metroid and Super Mario Bros 3 reviews in particular struck me in particular, because it was clear that the reviewers love these games even more than I do, which didn’t think was possible. These are deep waters indeed, I reflected — love of games can be far more intense and complex than I thought.

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Heartwarming: gamer helps blind gamer beat Ocarina of Time

Nicholas “Net Neutrality” Deleon here with truly shocking news: six Republican senators have tacked on an amendment to an appropriations bill that would block the FCC’s attempt to make Net Neutrality a reality. So remember, kids: when you think of a free and open Internet, don’t think of the GOP. It’s not your friend here.

More here: 
AT&T linked to GOP senators who have proposed anti-Net Neutrality bill in Congress. Pretend to be shocked, please.

TechCrunch Editor Sarah Lacy’s book Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good came out in paperback edition earlier this month. We posted some of the new Twitter history that she included in a new chapter included in this edition a few weeks ago.

You can buy the book here. But since most of you are way too cheap to actually pay for a book, we’re going to give away 15 signed copies for free (postage included!).

Here’s what you have to do - retweet this story using the retweet button at the bottom of this post (or just click here) by midnight California time tonight. We’ll choose 15 at random and contact you for delivery details. Good luck, and enjoy the book.

To be eligible to win, you must retweet the post by midnight California time tonight. We’ll send these anywhere mail is delivered, you don’t have to be in the United States. Residents of South Carolina are not eligible to win.

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Another public official of South Carolina shames himself: Governor Mark Sanford is extremely sad that he got caught cheating on his wife. The video is here, the transcript is here. Bottom line, he says “I’ve been unfaithful to my wife.” Read all about it everywhere.

All I’m wondering is, where’s South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster when we need him? Adultery is serious business. This is clearly, somehow, all Craigslist’s fault. For example, how do we know that Sanford didn’t meet his mistress in the adultery section of Craigslist? And also, can we please kick South Carolina out of the Union now?

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I like the Apple TV as a device, but it’s remote is awful. It’s the same little dinky white one that used to come with all Apple computers a few years ago. While it’s pretty good for using the FrontRow feature on a computer, your computer also has a keyboard for navigation and things like searching — the Apple TV does not. And so the white remote by itself is painfully slow navigating the Apple TV. But with an update to both the Apple TV and its Remote app available for the iPhone and iPod touch, Apple has completely revamped the way you can navigate the system using gestures and multi-touch.

Watch the videos below to see it in action, but to say this is improved is beyond an understatement. Rather than clicking those little buttons dozens of times, you can now just slide around the iPhone screen to move around. And it’s much easier to get to the iPhone’s keyboard to do things like searches — a funtionality which is basically unusable with the white remote.

Find the updated Remote app in the App Store here, it’s a free download and will work with iTunes on your computer as well.

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The poll results from yesterday are in, and it isn’t even close. 80% of you think Craigslist (46 million US visitors) is more important than South Carolina (4.5 million residents). Background on the conflict is here.

The numbers are obviously not statistically relevant since TechCrunch readers, a tech savvy lot, are going to be more likely to side with Craigslist. But South Carolinians (or whatever it’s supposed to be) apparently aren’t too thrilled with their state, either. The Palmetto Scoop, a popular conservative blog in South Carolina, held their own poll today and asked “Which is more important, 2,500 TechCrunch readers (the total number that had voted as of this post) or enforcing the law?”

As of right now, 60% of the 124 respondents say, well, TechCrunch is more important than enforcing the law (which isn’t really what the Craigslist issue is about anyway).

Your conservative voters have spoken, Mr Attorney General McMaster. We’ll draw up the secession paperwork for your signature.

Update: Just because it’s awesome:

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South Carolina has the dubious distinction of being the first state to secede from the United States, in 1860. You could say that they had very strong feelings on the issue of slavery. If they’re still up for it, I say let them leave. Craigslist is way more important than they are.

Congratulations to Craigslist for standing up to South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster and demanding an apology. The situation they find themselves in, facing threatened criminal prosecution, is absurd. I stand by my post last night that Craigslist should simply shut down the South Carolina site permanently, and discontinue any negotiations with the state. McMaster has no basis for threatening civil or criminal action, and this is clearly just a way for him to get press in his bid for governor. A Facebook group has sprung up around this as well.

But as an aside, this whole drama has made me wonder, just how important is South Carolina anyway? If it really came down to choosing between South Carolina and Craigslist, how many people would rather have South Carolina?

South Carolina a former slave state that has less than 4.5 million people and a median income of under $40,000/year, 39th in the U.S. 92% of the state’s residents are Christian, and the gross state product is around $150 billion. A main driver of economic activity is tobacco. On the upside, I hear Myrtle beach is nice, and my co-editor Erick Schonfeld’s mother lives there.

Compare that to Craigslist, which doesn’t have any physical territory but boasts 46 million monthly visitors in the U.S. alone, making it nearly ten times the size of South Carolina. The site has been a significant factor in disrupting old media, particularly newspapers, by making classified listings free. Craigslist has made the lives of tens of millions of people better by helping them get rid of unwanted couches, find a new job, or rent an apartment. And it has never charged much for what it does - it is a classic case of giving more than taking.

If you really had to choose, which is more important to you, Craigslist or South Carolina? Which has the bigger positive impact on our culture, and which adds more utility to your daily existence. Craigslist wins hands down.

That’s why I’d be very upset if McMaster has his way and puts Craigslist management behind bars. Or even if his attacks have the effect of chilling the freedom-loving Craigslist community. Kick South Carolina out of the Union (we can add Puerto Rico or Canada afterwards if we really need a nice round number of 50 states). Build a wall around it stop the inflow of federal dollars. We don’t want to do this, but the dangerously self-serving and backwards thinking of the state’s elected leadership leaves us no choice.

But don’t touch Craigslist. It’s too important.

What do you think? Take the poll below. And remember, even though what I’m proposing is absurd, how would you really answer?

Which is more important to you - Craigslist or South Carolina?(web polls)

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If you happen to live in one of Verizon’s FiOS coverage areas, you might be interested to know that at least one ISP is reselling the exact same internet service for almost $50 per month cheaper depending on the speed tier.

Read the original here: 
FiOS reseller undercuts Verizon’s own prices

Trading in your used video games could get even less personal (not that it needs to be personal in the first place) the next time you’re at Wal-Mart. The company is apparently testing out kiosks for buying, renting, and even trading in movies and games.

Originally posted here: 
Wal-Mart testing out game and movie trade-in machines

South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster is giving even the normally sleazy Attorney General title a bad name. This is an office that has little to do with protecting the public and everything to do with making high profile attacks on targets that will generate a lot of positive press. All that press leads to a run for higher office.

Eliot Spitzer was the alpha male Attorney General, attacking the securities industry, Internet fraud and the mortage industry, among others. He was rewarded with the governorship of New York until his spectacular resignation.

Which brings us back to the subject of hookers, and South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster. Earlier this month McMaster, who is of course eyeing a run for governor, threatened criminal prosecution against Craigslist management if pornography and ads for prostitution were not removed from the site. Craigslist took extraordinary measures to comply.

But quiet compliance isn’t what McMaster is looking for. He wants handcuffs and a trial, the kind of stuff that Spitzer got. He issued the following statement on Saturday “As of 5:00 p.m. this afternoon, the craigslist South Carolina site continues to display advertisements for prostitution and graphic pornographic material. This content was not removed as we requested. We have no alternative but to move forward with criminal investigation and potential prosecution.”

Craigslist fired back in an uncharacteristically emotional post that noted how tame the current Craigslist site was compared to a number of other listing services in South Carolina, including one run by Microsoft.

Seriously? The craigslist adult services section for Greenville, SC has a total of 1 ad for the last 3 days, featuring a photograph of a fully clothed person. The “erotic services” section for Greenville, which we recently closed, has 8 ads total which will expire in two days, and even for these ads the images and text are quite tame.

Meanwhile, the “adult entertainment” section of greenville.backpage.com (careful with link, NSFW), owned by Village Voice Media, has over 60 ads for the last 3 days, and about 250 in total. In sharp contrast with craigslist, many of these ads are quite explicit, quoting prices for specific sex acts, featuring close-ups of bare genitalia, etc.

Of course, no one in mainstream legal circles thinks either company should be subject to civil suit, let alone a criminal investigation. But if for whatever reason you were so motivated, would you target a venue with 9 PG-13 rated ads, or one with 250 XXX rated ones?

And FWIW, telephone yellow pages and other local print media have both companies beat hands down as adult service ad venues for South Carolina.

Any interest in targeting them for criminal prosecution? Didn’t think so.

As we wrote previously, Craigslist is the hot site right now that triggers an immediate response from the press (it used to be MySpace, then Facebook). There is no public saftey issue in targeting Craigslist. The only issue is politics, and McMaster sees an easy target. I think he made a serious mistake, though, in targeting Craigslist. Not only are the allegations absurd, but he’s failed to realize the huge community of rabid Craigslist supporters. Spitzer always went after deeply unpopular targets. He would never have touched Craigslist.

I say to founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster: Stand firm. Don’t back down. In fact, just turn off the South Carolina site entirely and ban IPs from that state. Forever. And if they press criminal charges, fight it with everything you have.

The community will support you, and that’s one hell of a community, with 46 million U.S. unique visitors a month (Comscore, April 2009). Get 5 million of them (less than 1 in 9) to sign a petition calling for McMaster’s resignation (that’s more than the population of South Carolina). It won’t get him to resign, but it may get enough voters to remember how irresponsible he is when the election for governor comes around. And I’m pretty sure that petition will be the top search result for his name for a long, long time.

And if you do end up in jail, don’t worry. I promise to visit at least once a month, even though it will be in South Carolina.

More on the story at TechMeme.

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