Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I was really excited about the remaster of Snoop Dogg’s Tha Last Meal, titled Tha Last Meal: USDA Edition, but listening to it, I can’t tell any difference between the two albums. They contain an identical number of tracks, with an identical length per track. Pulling up the old/new versions of Hennesey N Buddah (Feat. Kokane) (Produced By Dr. Dre & Mike Elizondo), I imported them into Audacity to look at their spectrums:

This is just the first six seconds of the stereo tracks, with old on top, and new “remaster” on the bottom. I see no difference layering them on top of each other at 50% opacity:

As far as I can tell, the newer remaster of Snoop’s classic album is a reissue, rather than any actual remaster. Perhaps you are paying an extra $5 for new album art?

The upcoming videogame LittleBigPlanet (LBP) for the Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) console has received an unexpected blow to its release schedule. During the final review process, Sony Entertainment discovered that two verses from the Qu’ran were included in Little Big Planet’s background track. The verses are found in the early portions of this song, and to Western ears are utterly innocuous:

1- In the 18th second: “كل نفس ذائقة الموت” (“kollo nafsin tha’iqatol mawt”, literally: ‘Every soul shall have the taste of death’).

2- Almost immediately after, in the 27th second: “كل من عليها فان” (“kollo man alaiha fan”, literally: ‘All that is on earth will perish’).

I was curious as to why “we Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran deeply offending” and I came across this Yahoo Answers thread which tries to explain that “music is haram for believers of Islam.” I don’t find any of the answers convincing. Putting aside–for a moment–the question of whether music itself is acceptable to a Muslim, there merely remains the issue of why Sony Entertainment, a global company, would harm its own videogame release by giving into the demands of religious socio-terrorists.

It’s clear to me that merely offending a subset of people is not a good reason to give up creative direction, freedom of speech, or any of the other Western ideals. It’s also not a particularly good business decision. A product which satiates the myriad desires of every interest group, which pleases everyone, that offends no one is a product which has thus had every innovation stripped from it.

Little Big Planet is a family-oriented game where players control a Sackboy to play and explore the game environments, create their own content, and share creations with others around the world. It hardly merits a religious challenge over the inclusion of text into its soundtrack.

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There’s now a serious reason not to vote for Barack Hussein Obama in the upcoming election. On the issue of illegal wiretapping he voted for HR 6304, which grants retroactive immunity from prosecution to telephone companies who cooperated with Bush’s presidency to illegally spy on millions of Americans.

Illegal Wiretaps We Can Believe In

We are all disappointed, Obama. TechCrunch, in Barack Obama Breaks Promise, Flip Flops, and supports Telco’s, says it best:

In voting for the bill, Obama acted in direct contradiction to his earlier statements. In 2007 Bill Burton, an Obama campaign spokesman, said “To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

Update: BoingBoing just posted the same thing a little late to the game!