It would seem that James Madison High School in Midwood, Brooklyn is living up to its new nickname as “Horndog High”.

Allegations have surfaced against 37-year-old gym teacher Lisa Guttilla of sexual assault on a 14-year-old girl at Poly Prep Country Day School where she worked part time as a volleyball coach.  She also worked at James Madison High School in Brooklyn as a gym teacher.

The accusations arose after the teenager’s mother began questioning her about a hickey on her neck.  The teenager eventually confessed to three sessions of fondling with Ms. Guttilla between Jan. 4th and 9th.  The complaint filed in Brooklyn Criminal Court has the teacher charged with misdemeanor sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of child and states that she did “touch, grab, squeeze and kiss the [girl] about the breast and buttock.”

Ms. Guttilla has been reassigned her to a job that teachers under investigation go to while being investigated.  She may encounter some familiar faces there as this is the third teacher sex scandal in two months for James Madison High School.  The first involved two teachers, Alini Brito and Cindy Mauro, being caught by a janitor while making out in a classroom during a school talent show.  The second incident involved a social studies teacher named Allison Musacchio who was discovered to have made over 200 calls and texts to a male student at the school. She was discovered after the ex-girlfriend of the student spotted the boy’s phone number on the teacher’s cell phone.

Either there is a serious problem at this school, or else students are finding a way to attack their teachers.  Accusations of this magnitude are a serious situation, but in all of the teacher sex scandals I’ve documented, I’ve never seen a concentration like this in one school.  Something is beginning to smell a might funny about all of this.

Only 51 posts this week … Conan O’Brien news last week really sent me over the top.

FunJug.com

• Mortal Kombat Is Not A Tournament
• MAFIA WARS Commercial
• Star Wars vs. Star Trek

Photo.BLORGE.com

• Panasonic announces three new Lumix models
• Apple’s iPad could be a great new tool for photographers

RememberingChristmas.com

• The Christmas Truck

SeanPAune.com

• Print Media Can Save Itself If It Tries
• iPhone May Be Headed To All Major U.S. Carriers
• CobWEBs Daily Edition: Rogers Canada show why Ben Parr is blowing smoke out his ass
• Avatar Highest Grossing Movie Worldwide Of All Time
• CobWEBs Daily Edition: Don’t forget your running shoes
• CobWEBs Daily Edition: Apple shows the world the iPad – an internet ready Kotex
• The Apple iPad Tablet Makes Its Debut
• NBC Picks Up Pilot From Conan O’Brien’s Production Company
• Miramax Films Closes
• CobWEBs Daily Edition: Sean discovers Apple’s plan for financial dominance
• Scattercast Episode 80: Dark Code
• CobWEBs Daily Edition: It’s Friday folks which means – it’s Techmeme time
• Buffy Season 8, Issue 31

StarterTech.com

• Donations To Haiti Deductible On 2009 Tax Returns
• Google Chrome 4.0 Gets Official, Brings Extensions
• Google Voice Comes To The iPhone Via The Browser
• The iPad Marks A Whole New Product Category For Apple
• SuperNews! Documents “The Death Of MySpace”
• Facebook “Ex-Girlfriend” Worm Spreading
• Google Begins To Cut Support For IE6

Tech.BLORGE.com

• Nexus One censors speech in voice-to-text feature
• Woman uses iPhone To Get Pregnant
• Rumor: AT&T may lose iPhone exclusivity this week
• EBay lowering auction fees for sellers as of March 30th
• Apple quarterly financial release leaves tantalizing clue to Apple Tablet
• Twitter is full of unused accounts according to recent study
• Apple finally unveils the iPad tablet
• VoIP calls now allowed over iPhone data plans
• Report: Twitter sees 7,000 Apple tweets per minute during iPad announcement
• Amazon fourth quarter sales up a staggering 42%
• Rumor: Facebook looking to take on Foursquare with “checkins”
• Amazon pulls Macmillan publications from the Kindle over price dispute

TechnoBuffalo.com

• When Will Windows 8 Be Released?
• comScore Changes The Game
• Netflix 28 Day Delay Is Meaningless
• Five Dot-Coms That Didn’t Survive The Bubble
• Top 5 Google Chrome Extensions You Should Give A Try
• Has Twitter Replaced RSS?
• An Introduction To Google Voice
• What’s Missing From Apple’s iPad
• A Look Back At The Fading Glory of Iomega
• Will Digital Photo Frames Ever See Success?
• The iPad Is For The Masses, Get Over It
• Meet The New YouTube

Windows.BLORGE.com

• Top 10 best free Windows 7 themes

***MAJOR SPOILERS***

Continue Reading ->

Welcome to another week of the daily edition of CobWEBs, the flagship podcast of The Cynical Bastards!

For those who don’t remember from the other episodes, this is a new format for the show as we are going to try giving you daily bite sized chunks of our patented brand of cynicism over everything in the tech universe. The show will have a rotating host schedule between Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself. You’ll always get two of us, you just never know which two!

In this episode, Steven and I do our new weekly game of going through the TechMeme headlines and … well … making fun of them.  It’s a thing.

We also take a moment to see how people are spending money on Blippy, and Steven has some comments about a post by MG Siegler over at TechCrunch.(links by Steven)  Oh, and P.S. … expect some big things next week!

BoomTown’s Apple iPad Day, Starring Walt Mossberg (Plus a Steve Jobs Cameo!) – Kara Swisher
Apple to target iPad at business users with added features – sources – AppleInsider
Unexpectedly low Apple iPad price forces notebook vendors to re-evaluate their tablet PC strategies – DigiTimes
On the iPad – Alex Payne
Facebook Is Working On A Foursquare-Killer – Silicon Alley Insider
Amazon.com mysteriously removes Macmillan book titles – VentureBeat

Push the big green button and have a listen in!

Scattercast is 80 … and getting senile as I call it episode 79 in the intro.

- An hour and 15 minutes of Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and I talking the state of sci-fi movies.

- We start off with some talk of what happened with Conan O’Brien, and if you hear a blip early on in the episode, that was me editing out a technical error.

- We jump all over the place, and plan a third podcast in this series, but make sure to check out the first, Scattercast Episode 70: Chakotay – The Walking Plot Hole.

Here’s

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for those who wish to download it, subscribe to Scattercast via iTunes.

Welcome to another week of the daily edition of CobWEBs, the flagship podcast of The Cynical Bastards!

For those who don’t remember from the other episodes, this is a new format for the show as we are going to try giving you daily bite sized chunks of our patented brand of cynicism over everything in the tech universe. The show will have a rotating host schedule between Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself. You’ll always get two of us, you just never know which two!

In this episode, Steven and I talk about Jason Calacanis punking the media, how Amazon & Apple are making money hand over fist, how I might have figured out Steve Jobs ingenious plan to make money and get press coverage 12 months a year.  We wrap it up with a lot of speculation about Windows 8. (links by Steven)

Collage of Shame: Media Who Took Obvious iPad Prank Seriously – Valleywag
Amazon.com Announces Fourth Quarter Sales up 42% to $9.5 Billion – Business Wire
Earnings take-away: Microsoft is still powered by Windows – Mary Jo Foley

Push the big green button and have a listen in!

I feel like someone just kicked one of my dogs.

Miramax Films, one of the most notable supporters of independent films, has shut its doors today. Founded in 1979 by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, Miramax became synonymous with quality independent films.  It was sold to the Walt Disney Company in 1993, but was still helmed by the Weinsteins through 2005.

While you may not instantly recognize the name, believe me that you know its films.  Here is just a brief list of some of its most notable releases, you can see the rest here:

• Clerks
• Gangs of New York
• No Country For Old Men
• Pulp Fiction
• The Scary Movie series
• Scream series
• Shakespeare in Love
• Sin City
• Spy Kids series
• There Will Be Blood

This but a taste of what Miramax has helped bring to the local theaters, and with Miramax gone, there is a huge void in the film studio system.  Where smaller films will go now is unknown, and films that other studios have passed on that went on to great success may never have been given the chance without them.

Disney has said it would be willing to sell the brand … for $1.5 billion.  The odds of anyone coughing that up are slim-to-none.

Kevin Smith, who’s first film Clerks was released via Miramax, has blogged on the company’s demise.

So long, Miramax, you will be missed.

It would seem that someone at NBC has a twisted sense of humor.

Conan O’Brien has a production company named Conaco, and the company is currently working on a new series named Justice about a supreme court justice that retires to start his own law firm.  Not much else is known at this time, but it sounds like your typical law drama, and you know you can never have too many of those on the air.

As spring is approaching, the television networks are prepping for the 2010 – 2011 television season.  This is when all of the new shows are ordered to film pilots, or they even get series orders to go into full production.  Well, congratulations to Conan O’Brien’s Conaco as Justice’s pilot got picked up!

… by NBC.

What …
The …
Heck?!?

Is this someone at NBC’s idea of a joke?  As I am sure anyone who was born earlier than last Friday knows, Mr. O’Brien had a very public fight with the network, and he has now left the network as host of The Tonight Show.   Some speculated that this was part of his exit deal, but Nikki Finke has confirmed the production company is as surprised as anyone else by this turn of events.

The sad thing is, just because a pilot has been picked up, that doesn’t mean it will go to series.  There is every chance, and this is pure speculation on my part, that NBC picked it up merely to block it from going elsewhere.  There is a chance, albeit slim, that NBC truly did this to just mess with him.  Again, I stress this is slim, but you never know.

Congratulations?

At last the Apple Tablet rumors can die, but was it worth the long wait?

Steve Jobs finally lifted the veil of secrecy around the Apple Tablet today and revealed it as a device named the iPad. The unfortunate name choice aside, is it going to be worth the purchase?

The answer to that depends entirely on what your needs are going to be with such a device.  Unlike other items in the market, the iPad does not solve an existing problem.  The iPhone made smartphones truly smart, netbooks solved size problems for those that didn’t want to lug full sized laptops around, the iPod solved music issues, but the iPad … solves nothing.  There is no doubt that it is intriguing, and the implications of this device could be far reaching for years as other device manufacturers try to come up with their own solutions to answer this new challenge.

What you have could easily be described as over-sized iPod Touch, but at the same time it isn’t.  Yes, it will run the majority of the current 140,000 iPhone/iPod Touch applications, but due to its 9.7-inch screen, it will be able to handle a lot more.  App developers were able to download a new SDK (software development kit) that will allow them to develop for the 1024 x 768 resolution and the 1GHz processor.

Beyond the usual iPod Touch features, the iPad will also run the iWork office suite which means you can do word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, and although the screen will have a robust touch keyboard, writing a full document that way could quickly get tiring.  That’s why Apple is releasing a keyboard dock that allows you to plug the device into a physical keyboard, and to me that is where this device gets interesting.

Unfortunately no price was mentioned for the keyboard, but as a professional blogger I see where this could have a fairly large impact on journalism.  Yes, laptops are portable, but say you go to a news story, quickly pound out some notes on the screen keyboard, and then get back in your car, plug into the dock, and you can write up your full story on the fly.  You can then transmit the story via Wi-Fi or 3G depending on the model you purchased.

As a blogger, I am really intrigued by the possibilities here.  Could I blog easily from anywhere without carrying around a much heavier laptop?

Where this really gets complicated is when you look at the new iBook e-reader app.  You have a full book store you can purchase from, and while the Amazon Kindle better be quaking in its boots, the true star of this is the potential down the road.

Text books.

The game changer the education system has been waiting for may have just dropped into their laps.  A full-color e-reader that could properly display any type of text book.  Art?  No problem.  Statistics that needs to show all sorts of graphs?  Go for it.  Every college book store better start thinking now about what their futures will be like without … well … books.  There is no way that textbook publishers aren’t going to study the heck out of this thing and analyze that huge costs they will be able to cut in materials, printing, transport and so on.  I would say within 3 to 4 years you will see the first text books that have no print counterpart.

And don’t even get me started on what this could mean for comic books.

So, down to the business part of this:

iPad Specs

So, what is under the hood of the iPad?  What will be powering this newest entry from Apple into the consumer market?

• Memory capacities of 16GB, 32GB or 64GB
• 802.11n Wi-Fi
• 1GHz Apple A4 chip
• .5-inches thick
• 1.5 lbs
• 9.7-inch screen, 1024 x 768 resolution
• Bluetooth 2.1
• Speaker & microphone
• Accelerometer & compass
• 10 hour battery life, one month standby
• 3G connectivity for $30 a month via AT&T without contract.

iPad Price

And then comes the price.  The prevailing rumor leading up to today had been that we would be seeing a price of $1000, which Steve Jobs made mention of on stage at the introduction, and then he floored us with the following price chart.

So, what say you? Is it going to be worth it?

Check out my other posts from today on the iPad:

• CobWEBs Daily Edition: Apple shows the world the iPad – an internet ready Kotex – SeanPAune.com
• The iPad Marks A Whole New Product Category For Apple – StarterTech.com
• Apple finally unveils the iPad tablet – Tech.BLORGE.com
• What’s Missing From Apple’s iPad – technoBuffalo.com

Welcome to another week of the daily edition of CobWEBs, the flagship podcast of The Cynical Bastards!

For those who don’t remember from the other episodes, this is a new format for the show as we are going to try giving you daily bite sized chunks of our patented brand of cynicism over everything in the tech universe. The show will have a rotating host schedule between Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself. You’ll always get two of us, you just never know which two!

In this episode, Steven and I talk about … oh, what was it … some big techie thing … oh yeah, the iPad.  While we are somewhat positive about the device, we also tear it apart a bit … I’m still pondering buying one.

Push the big green button and have a listen in!

Welcome to another week of the daily edition of CobWEBs, the flagship podcast of The Cynical Bastards!

For those who don’t remember from the other episodes, this is a new format for the show as we are going to try giving you daily bite sized chunks of our patented brand of cynicism over everything in the tech universe. The show will have a rotating host schedule between Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself. You’ll always get two of us, you just never know which two!

In this episode, Steven and I talk about Twitter and the numbers that suggest not as many people are using it as you may think … and we wonder why it matters. (links by Steven)

Are There Only 15 Million Active Twitter Users? – The Next Web
New Data on Twitter’s Users and Engagement – RJMetrics
Rambler shoes Tweet with each step – Slippery Brick
Updated Zune software drivers hints at Zune “Phone” - istartedsomething.com

Push the big green button and have a listen in!

And James Cameron has beaten … James Cameron.

Avatar, the latest sci-fi flick from director James Cameron, has officially become the highest grossing movie all time worldwide.  Despite a disappointing opening weekend domestically, the film has just not slowed down, and the international numbers have been huge.  To date through Jan. 25th, the film has broken down as:

This now surpasses Titanic as the top grossing film worldwide at $1,843,201,268, but domestically Titanic is at $600,788,188 to Avatar’s $554,981,691.  It is expected that Avatar will be the number one domestic film sometime next week, but there is no doubt that it is going to happen.

It is estimated that Avatar cost $310 million to make, reduced to $280 million after tax rebates, making it the most expensive film ever made.

Normally Hollywood doesn’t crow too much about international numbers, but when you have numbers in this range, it’s difficult not to.  Only three other films have ever cracked $1 billion box office: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and The Dark Knight.

(I still haven’t seen Avatar, and I still have no plans to do so … it just doesn’t intrigue me enough)

[all data courtesy of Box Office Mojo]