While the movietickets.com website itself may be respectable enough, they rent their preconfirmation page to a bunch of jerks at a company called Reservation Rewards. They’re very much from the school of thought that says the customer is a transient beast, and should be as thoroughly fleeced as possible before they inevitably figure out what a terrible company you run.

After you submit your ticket order, you’re greeted to some over-happy and irritating woman’s voice telling you “Congratulations!” This is a good time to have your speakers up real loud (developers who create such things should lose their interweb privileges). But she’s not congratulating you on going to the movies, she’s just excited that you now have the opportunity to get $10 off your next movie ticket!

All you have to do is sign up for their shitty discount service, which offers discounts “up to 50%” at businesses they won’t actually name until you’re signed up. This is free! ..For 30 days, and then it costs $12 a month. What was that crazy website voice so excited about? You can’t even claim your $10 bucks off at the movietickets website; Reservation Rewards sends you your money (a process which I can only imagine takes six to eight weeks) after you make another purchase.

Best of all, you don’t have to give them any credit card information: they’ll just bill the card you gave movietickets.com. How nice of them! I imagine the vast majority of their customer base consists of helpless old ladies who entered their email addresses because they thought they won a prize, and now can’t figure out where 12 bucks goes every month.

Not cool.

The SciFi channel is rebranding itself as the SyFy channel starting this summer. My first thought when I heard this: “Why, that’s both silly and pointless!” But that’s why I’m a programmer and not a super marketing genius. I just don’t have the writing chops to take something that’s fundamentally trivial and unimportant, and write about it like it’s the greatest goddamn thing to ever happen in the world.

…the new brand broadens perceptions and embraces a wider and more diverse range of imagination-based entertainment…

Wow, imagination-based. Very impressive.

Syfy — unlike the generic entertainment category “sci-fi” – firmly establishes a uniquely ownable trademark that is portable across all non-linear digital platforms and beyond…

Non-linear digital platforms? Yeah.. because that’s a thing.

Syfy ushers in a new era of unlimited imagination, exceptional experiences and greater entertainment that paves the way for us to truly become a global lifestyle brand.

Finally, we live in an era where formerly imposed limits on imagination are eliminated. Thank you SciFi SyFy!

One of my favorite side effects the internet is that sometimes you learn the most unlikely things. Usually, this is wikipedia’s fault. But not always.

Today it started with this Gothamist article about Bernie Madoff. I happened to follow a link from the article to a pdf describing his federal charges. On page 5 I found the following:

Because the offenses involved a loss amount of more then $400,000,000, the base offense level is increased by 30 levels.

I think, “30 levels? What the hell does that mean? That sounds like a lot! But then I guess he did get a pretty high score.”

Off to Google: ‘offense levels’
First Hit: An Overview of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, a pdf training manual from the United States Sentencing Commission website

Closely paraphrased from the (really very readable for a goverment document) manual:

Sentencing guidelines take into account both the seriousness of the offense and the offender’s criminal history. The sentencing guidelines provide 43 levels of offense seriousness. The more serious the crime, the higher the offense level.

Offense levels are the government’s attempt to quantify the harm done by a criminal. That means you can take any two crimes, crunch some numbers, and figure out which one was more offensive to the federal government. They even take into account all kinds of factors. If it was a robbery, was a gun used? Five more levels! Seven if it got fired (although, if that bullet hits someone, that’s whole new crime). There’s a whole 600 page manual published every year that describes in great detail how to compute the offense level of any federal crime, including a wide variety of mitigating circumstances. That’s good to know. Pro tip: If you’re stealing money, make it way less than $400,000,000.

A quick stop at wikipedia reveals that the guidelines are “part of an overall federal sentencing reform package that took effect in the mid-1960s”, an effort to “alleviate sentencing disparities that research had indicated was prevalent in the existing sentencing system.” It actually sort of makes sense as of a way of trying to make the application of the law fair for everyone. Still, I can’t help but think of offense levels in terms of points a la Grand Theft Auto.

So back to Bernie Madoff. The good news for Bernie is that his other factor in sentencing, criminal history, is Category I (the lowest of six). Even better, because he plead guilty in a timely fashion, he gets a three level deduction. Also, in the afformentioned GTA, his ranking is something like super gangsta. That’s where his good news ends however.

The government is charging Madoff with 11 felonies, including four flavors of fraud (securities, investment advisor, mail, and wire), money laundering, perjury, and theft. All that, apparently, gives him a base offense level of 7. Then he gets 30 levels for loss of more than $400 million, 6 levels for having 250 or more victims, and 2 levels because the crime “involved sophisticated means” and a substantial part of the fraud “was committed from outside the United States.” For substantially endangering the “solvency or financial security of 100 or more victims”, he gets 4 more levels. Because he was an investment adviser at the time, and because he was the “organizer or leader” he gets a total of 8 more levels. All told, Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme earned him an (off the charts) offense level of 54.

Even for a Category I history, a level 54 offense carries a recommended sentence of life. Since none of his crimes actually have maximum terms of life imprisonment, this (thanks to more references to the big book) computes to a guideline sentence of 150 years.

Yep, that’s about right.

Having been fortunate enough to get an original Kindle as a gift when it first came out, I’ve had some time to explore this brave new e-book world. I think it’s fair to say that while there are some significant advantages to reading via Kindle, I’m not quite ready to trade in my all my well-worn, paper-based books just yet.

There are a lot of great things about the Kindle that will pretty much guarantee there will the a bright future for e-books, especially ones sold through the Amazon empire. For one, it can hold the text of every book in your library, while weighing less than a single paperback. Forget about cracking book spines while trying to hold an overly stuffed book open, and forget about dog-eared, worn out pages or losing your place because a bookmark slipped out. While we’re at it, let’s throw in the ability to resize the font and search the text by keyword.

All of that, and we haven’t even mentioned the free cellular internet access, which allows you to grab any book from the Kindle library on the fly, and enables things like automatic delivery of daily newspapers and limited web browsing (wikipedia on the go!).

That’s a pretty compelling feature list.

Some of my issues with the Kindle are things that can be fixed as the technology evolves (or are even a bit improved in the newest Kindle incarnation). For example, the lack of color makes it pretty unpleasant for viewing anything with pictures. Obviously, you shouldn’t try reading Watchmen on your Kindle, but even pictures in newspaper articles are essentially a waste of monochromatic screen space. Page turning speed could also use some significant improvement. It takes a good second or two for a new page to render. While that may not seem like a lot, try flipping back a few pages to reread a passage; it quickly gets old. It’s also for this reason that I don’t recommend reference books on the Kindle. Granted, the full text search is useful in this case (but again, slow to navigate), it’s just not the same as holding a tome in your lap and opening to a random page for browsing, or flipping through a particular chapter.

While the Kindle is not terrible in the area of battery life, it’s hard to compete with hardcopy books that don’t need to be plugged in to anything, ever. This was less of an issue when I was using the Kindle almost daily and charging it with some regularity. However, now that I use it less frequently, I often run into the following situation:

I want to read something, but oh, the Kindle is dead. Plug it in, but oh, it’s so dead it needs some charging before it can even turn on. Go read a real book instead, come back a week later and repeat (since the Kindle’s battery drains in about a week even when it’s completely off).

I have other concerns about the Kindle, but they make me feel more like a Luddite than I’m used to. I’m just not sure how exactly they could be rectified by technology. Basically, I like the idea of having a collection of (real, paper) books. I like displaying them, and I like perusing the collections of others. You can learn a lot about a person from what’s on their bookshelf. Furthermore, I love sharing books, something that’s just not gonna happen (legally anyway) when the books are just bits. You can’t quite pull an old favorite off the shelf to lend to a friend, when that favorite is locked on your Kindle. Not to mention that the rise of e-books will necessarily mean the decline of the used book store, one of my favorite places to troll around looking for new (cheap!) reads.

Ultimately, I think the Kindle is a good start to digitizing the book industry. Clearly, this new medium has a lot of advantages. But unlike some media upgrades (DVD vs VHS, MP3 vs CD), this particular one has some tough trade-offs. I’m glad to be an early adopter, but I don’t think I’ll be scrapping my bookcase any time soon.

And hey! Today’s Penny Arcade is right on topic for this post.

From wiktionary:

cant (plural cants)

1. An argot, the jargon of a particular class or subgroup.
   He had the look of a prince, but the cant of a fishmonger.
2. A private or secret language used by a religious sect, gang, or other group.
3. Empty, hypocritical talk.
   People claim to care about the poor of Africa, but it is largely cant.

I’ve seen the word ‘cant’ (not the contraction of ‘can not’), several times in the past week or so while reading things on the internet. I understand the following sentence much better now that I’ve done of bit of research:

Gladwell’s is a prose accessible, mildly charming, with all sense of intellectual struggle or conflict neatly removed: a good read, in the cant phrase.

That’s meaning number three! Yay for learning!

In what is easily the best idea so far this year, an artist in London used helium, soap, vegetable dye, and some sort of black magic (science!) to make floating smiley face clouds.

Awesome.