December 3, 2011
- Despite the internet's promise of connectivity, gatekeepers are still working as hard as ever to keep artists' work out of the hands of their fans. It seems counterproductive (to say the least) to withhold finished work until some magical date in the future when platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc. allow artists to connect directly with fans instantaneously. I'm sure the legacy industries have their reasons, but as much as a frustration as it is for the fans, it's even more so for the artists...
- Do you remember Mike McCurry? He's the former White House press secretary who was hired by the telcos to run a pure astroturfing group called "Hands Off the Internet," which was focused on attacking net neutrality. I've never been a fan of regulating net neutrality (though I believe that net neutrality itself is important), but McCurry and HOTI seemed ridiculously intellectually dishonest. My favorite trope was McCurry's repeated claims that...
- The Royal Society calls itself "a Fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists and... the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence." Its Fellows and Foreign Members have included Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Hodgkin, Francis Crick, James Watson and Stephen Hawking.
One of its chief claims to fame is that it has published the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,... - While there are a lot of debates going around about the wisdom of genetically modified organisms, a bunch of food scientists are working with edible concoctions that aren't GMOs. Traditional breeding of naturally-occurring varieties of fruits and vegetables can still produce some pretty amazing results. And ultimately, consumers are voting with their purchases -- which is creating all kinds of food innovations. Here are just a few examples.
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- Just a couple months ago, we pointed out how labels dropping out of Spotify were totally missing the point. A few labels had argued that Spotify only pays a tiny amount per stream, and that was somehow cutting into sales revenue. However, two recent stories we wrote about highlight how this is becoming an even more braindead move than before. And yet, the trend...
December 2, 2011
- We've pointed out, more than a few times, that it seems like so many of the big "terrorist plots" that the FBI has been "breaking up" (to tremendous fanfare and press coverage) really appear to be the FBI's own terror plots. It appears we're not alone in that assessment. The Guardian recently had an excellent article...
The founding of the Pirate Party in Sweden in 2006 was regarded by many as a joke. After all, the argument went, who would want to be associated with "pirates" or vote for such a narrow platform? This overlooked the fact that the traditional political parties had consistently ignored the concerns of voters who understood that the Internet raised important questions about areas such as copyright and privacy. By focusing on precisely those issues, the Pirate Party gave disaffected voters...
- A number of folks on both sides of the SOPA/PIPA debates have noted the seeming "irony" that the anti-SOPA/PIPA folks keep pointing to the DMCA and complaining about how SOPA/PIPA will undermine the DMCA. After all, many in the tech industry were quite worried about the DMCA when it first showed up and have continued to complain about it for years. Supporters of SOPA/PIPA point this out mockingly, as if to suggest that the anti-SOPA/PIPA folks are somehow being hypocritical (or doing a "sky...
- By the way, I wanted to embed the clips of Colbert's show in this post -- as is clearly allowed by the site. But because Viacom is crazy, they appear to set the embeds to autoplay as soon as you load up the page. And that's freaking annoying. I tried to find hidden variables to stop the autoplay... and nothing worked. So, sorry, no embeds. Meanwhile, Colbert: please, please, turn off autoplay, or at least make it an option. Thankfully, a few folks sent over the secret code...
- Just as politicians routinely invite us to "think of the children" when they want to push through some new liberty-reducing law, so the copyright industries regularly invoke "the artists" when they want to justify longer copyright terms or harsher enforcement laws.
They claim they are being hit so badly by piracy that artists are...
