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Filed under: Time-Wasters

Don't copy that floppy

The MPAA recently ran a contest which pitted college and high school students against each other in a battle royale to produce the most striking anti-piracy PSA. The winners are fairly unimpressive, but watching the winning video made me think about anti-piracy PSA's from the past. Leave it to YouTube; This may be the cheesiest 10 minutes of anti-piracy propaganda footage ever. "Don't Copy That Floppy"



Check out the leather pork-pie hat on that guy! He certainly schools those two youths on the dangers of software piracy. How could anyone expect this video succeed in stopping its target audience from copying anything, ever? I find this video guilty. Guilty of being an incredibly effective waste of time, that is!

Filed under: Web services

How to get rid of Snap's obnoxious link previews

Snap Preview Anyway Be Gone!If you've seen them, you've probably been annoyed by them. I'm talking about Snap's "Preview Anywhere," a little gizmo people can stick on their web site or blog that, when the visitor rolls the mouse over any link, will pop up a big bubble with a thumbnail image in it, giving them a preview of the destination site. Sounds kinda cool, right? Yeah, in theory. In practice, however, Snap Preview Anywhere is bloody obnoxious. It disrupts the browsing experience without actually adding any value--in the words of Performancing's Nick Wilson, "It's bling, a silly little shiney thing designed specifically to increase awareness of Snap.com." Just say no to bubbles.

So how does an interruption-averse web surfer get rid of it? Conveniently, Snap's SPA FAQ has the answer. Just click on the link provided in the FAQ and your browser will be imbued with a cookie that will banish those bubbles from your view. As long as the cookie lasts, at least. An additional step you can take on behalf of your fellow web surfers is to email the folks who put these things on their sites and register your displeasure.

[Via kottke.org]

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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