Archive for July, 2009
Pirate Party Statement In Financial Times
By Christian Engström, the Pirate party’s member of the European parliament.
If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not “ours” at all.
On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down.
This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without…
It’s Official: The First (Professional) Comedian in the U.S. Senate
Faye Fiore, LA Times: Al Franken, the funnyman who wrote the best-seller Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, was sworn in as the junior senator from Minnesota on Tuesday, without doing one single funny thing.
Once he was known on the Saturday Night Live stage as the lisping, sweater-wearing bundle of insecurities Stuart Smalley (”I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me”). But Franken stepped into the ornate Senate chamber to take his oath of office in a charcoal gray suit from Men’s Wearhouse, Bible in hand, surrounded by political allies eager to cast him as a serious addition to Congress.
Dan Dennett on Dangerous Memes
TED Talks: Starting with the simple tale of an ant, philosopher Dan Dennett unleashes a devastating salvo of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of memes — concepts that are literally alive.
Join Us For Our ‘Bank Anger’ Tour
Geoff Williams, WalletPop: Bank fees are on the rise, and sometimes it may seem like there’s not much we can do but complain. But complaining is something.
Now, I know that it’s nothing new to blast a bank on a blog, or trash it on Twitter or spread your fury about their practices on Facebook, but with bank fees climbing and climbing (overdraft fees are estimated to cost Americans $38.5 billion this year), I went on my own little Internet tour today, looking around for reactions to banking fees, just to see what I could find and get a sense of how people are feeling toward banks these days. Not too surprisingly, I found a lot of ugly out there.
People are mad. As Hell.
First up, a blog posting at BigRobby.com. Seems this blogger and father from Maine rented five movies from a place called Redbox, and the folks at Redbox didn’t…
New Computing Method Guesses Social Security Number Using Date and Place of Birth
John Timmer, arstechnica: For citizens of the US, the social security number (SSN) is the gateway to all things financial. It fills its government purpose of helping us pay our taxes and track our (in many cases, hypothetical) government benefits, and it has also been widely adopted as a means of verifying identity by a huge range of financial institutions.
As a result, anytime you disclose an SSN you run a real risk of enabling identity theft. So far, most of the SSN-related ID theft problems have resulted from institutions that were careless with their record keeping, allowing SSNs to be harvested in bulk. But a pair of Carnegie Mellon researchers has now demonstrated a technique that uses publicly available information to reconstruct SSNs with a startling degree of accuracy.
The irony of their method is that it relies on two practices adopted by the federal government that were intended to reduce…
Can Avatars Face ‘Digital Discrimination’?
“Digital People” now see avatar rights as a philosophical issue, making a stand against the constraints of ethnicity, gender, and other unchangeable accidents of birth. “I must have lost almost half of my potential contracts because the companies wouldn’t deal with an anonymous avatar,” says an architect operating out of Second Life. “I offered the companies a real world proxy who could sign all the papers, but it didn’t seem to help,” complains the architect.
The controversy may raise the ultimate question about accepting the concept of “transhumanism,” so this article ended up featured in the World Transhumanist Association’s magazine H+. The article even points out that some Digital People are objecting to using physical-world standards for measuring their online reputation like earned degrees and past corporate employers.
Do self-designed avatars simply reflect our self image better? Or is it all a grand an elaborate lie? The article also notes Second Life’s ban on…
Has The Tunguksa Blast Mystery Been Solved by the Space Shuttle?
Brian Handwerk,National Geographic: Space shuttles blasting off from Earth may have helped solve the mystery of what came careening down from space to explode over Russia in June 1908. The so-called Tunguska event leveled 770 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) of forest in a remote area of Siberia.
What caused the blast has puzzled scientists, because only a handful of people saw the explosion and it left no easily recognizable debris. The leading theory has been a mid-air explosion of either a rocky meteor or an icy comet that rocked the region with the force of several hundred atomic bombs.
Now studies of so-called night-shining clouds sometimes linked to space shuttle launches suggest that it was, in fact, a comet that caused Tunguska. Atmospheric scientist Michael Kelley of Cornell University first noticed a potential link between the Tunguska event and night-shining clouds decades ago as he was combing through historic scientific papers.
“Several…
UK Weapons Inspector, Who Was Writing Expose, Found Dead
John Byrne, RAW Story: British weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly was writing an expose about his work with anthrax and his warnings that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction at the time of his death in July 2003, according to a report published in a British newspaper.
Kelly’s death — said to have been a suicide — has stirred controversy, as it came on the heels of testimony to the House of Commons about a memo which purported that Britain had “sexed up” a dossier on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. A Parliamentary inquiry ruled that the death had been suicide, though it also included testimony from a former British ambassador who quotes Kelly as having said, “I will probably be found dead in the woods” if Iraq were invaded.
The new report says Kelly had spoken with an Oxford publisher several times about a book. “He had several discussions…
Michael Jackson To Be Buried Without His Brain
Michael Jackson will be buried without his brain today after doctors retained it following an autopsy to help determine the cause of death.
The King of Pop will be saluted in grand fashion at the Staples Centre memorial ceremony, and reportedly laid to rest at Los Angeles’s Forest Lawn cemetery. However, the LA coroner’s office has still not completed its tests on Jackson’s brain, and the singer’s family have been advised that unless they wish to wait, he must be buried without it.
Jackson died from an apparent cardiac arrest on 25 June. Though his body was released the next day to relatives, his brain was not. The pop star’s inert brain must “harden” for at least two weeks before doctors can conduct their neuropathology tests.
Doctors will examine Jackson’s brain to help determine the cause of death, suspected of being linked to painkillers. Such examinations can also reveal unknown diseases, evidence of…
‘Sewer Monster’ Is Real. (Real Gross)
If you’ve been following the ongoing sewer monster story from North Carolina, I’ve got some seriously crazy news for you. First of all, the video of the throbbing poop-esque creature has been confirmed as real. But what is it?
We’ve been tipped off by an anonymous source about how the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, is responding as the viral video of a seething blob in the city sewers made its way across the internet yesterday. Marti Gibson is the Environmental/EMS Coordinator for Public Utilities in the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, and she has been as confused as the rest of us. When she first looked at the video, she emailed our anonymous source to say it was a slime mold that was in the phase of its lifecycle where it looks like a throbbing, breathing animal (see io9’s report on slime molds from a few weeks ago where we…
What’s Happening in China’s Xinjiang Province?
Salon.com: Every week lately seems to bring a new round of unrest in some corner of the world. Iran, Honduras and now Xinjiang, where 140 people died in rioting yesterday. Any such outbreak of civil conflict, of course, has its own complex history, with rival factions and long-held grievances that aren’t immediately obvious to far-off observers.
Follow the link to Salons coverage, or get more analysis below from Democracy Now!:
Dan Brown’s ‘The Lost Symbol’ Cover Revealed
So the rumors were true, the new Dan Brown book is set in Washington, D.C. and there’s a focus on freemasonry. The UK cover (below right) is more revealing than the US version (below left). Here’s the official blurb:
Following pandemic speculation about content of the eagerly-awaited new novel from phenomenal bestselling author Dan Brown, Transworld Publishers today released the UK jacket of The Lost Symbol.
For the first time, fans worldwide will discover the setting for the action and key themes from the forthcoming thriller which will have a global English language first print run of 6.5 million copies: the largest first print in the history of Random House worldwide.
Since announcement of publication in April 2009, anticipation for the release of the new novel featuring Brown’s unforgettable protagonist, Robert Langdon, has reached epic proportions amongst fans, especially in the online community. The book trade has been equally enthusiastic, predicting that The…
The Goldman Code Is Stolen
He is no John Dillinger, no public enemy No. 1. But Sergey Aleynikov nonetheless masterminded a dazzling bank theft, the authorities say, and he did it without brandishing a gun or cracking a vault.
Instead, he cracked — or, rather, hacked — the secrets of Goldman Sachs, according to federal agents.
Until a few weeks ago, Mr. Aleynikov, 39, was a computer programmer at Goldman, whose prowess in trading has long made it the envy of Wall Street.
But over five days in early June, the authorities say, he stole proprietary, “black box” computer programs that Goldman uses to make lucrative, rapid-fire trades in the financial markets. Their value, experts say, could be incalculable.
The Pope Joins Calls For New World Order
Pope Benedict XVI called for a new financial order with “real teeth” as Group of Eight leaders prepare to discuss ways out of the worst recession since World War II.
“Profit is useful if it serves as a means toward an end,” he wrote in a letter to Catholic bishops worldwide published today. “Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.” The encyclical, the third of his papacy, is entitled “Caritas in Veritate,” which in Latin means “charity in truth.”
The pope’s reflections on capitalism were two years in the making and publication was held up when the credit crunch crippled the world economy. Benedict said last month the crisis shows “how the economic and financial paradigms that have been dominant in recent years must be rethought.”
The German-born pontiff touched on…
Deconstruct: Texas Invades Plan B
Oh yes, oh yes, and yowza yowza yowza. The brutalcore show I have been looking forward to for the last month did not disappoint. In town from Texas were three of the best exports since the days when Dirty Rotten Imbeciles roamed the Earth playing rock and roll faster than the speed of light. Grandpa Nick Hate was also given the opportunity to play hardcore Santa Claus for the second time in a week, hooking up Dios Mio and High Life with a show while they were on the road. My karma is getting better every day.
D-Beat D-Bags: Your Chaos Days Are Numbered
What I am getting at in my ham-fisted way is that the brutal hardcore scene in which I was reared had a lot of different cultural elements that are largely missing in today’s prevailing memes of peacenik skater thrash or charming nihilist. Because there was no cohesive scene, the scene was made up of parts of refugees from other scenes. “The kids” were largely skater trash who didn’t fit in other “alternative” subcultures and happened to live in the Northeast so they could see bands like Devoid of Faith, Dropdead, Monster X, etc. pretty much all the time, so why bother with a Snapcase show? Older people tended to be a melange of the most well-behaved Sheer Terror-style skinheads you ever did see, aging peace punks (see also: Dropdead who were heavy in their d-beat thing at that point or the good folks over at Fast Forward), noise rock freaks…
Buzz Aldrin: The Man Who Fell To Earth
Forty years ago Buzz Aldrin became the second man to walk on the moon. He was there for two and a half hours, but the breakdown which followed lasted a decade. He tells Stephen Moss how he has finally managed to fill the space left by space.
Buzz Aldrin has been on many journeys in his remarkable life, and in some respects the one to the moon was the least challenging. Being the second man to walk on the moon in July 1969, stepping down from the landing craft 20 minutes after Neil Armstrong, gave him eternal name recognition, but it also brought a heap of problems in the decade that followed — alcoholism, depression, two divorces. He was on the moon for two and a half hours; his post-Nasa breakdown lasted for a decade as he looked for something to fill the space left by … space.
But now, praise the Lord…
Anti-Aspartame Campaign Launched in New Zealand
GHC: There have been numerous reports, campaigns and studies done about the health risks of aspartame. You may not even be aware of it, because the campaigns are normally directed at the brand name under which it is sold. Names like Equal & NutraSweet are more likely to catch your attention, as the artificial sweeteners that some like to claim as a healthy alternative to sugar.
Now, Phoenix Organics, a beverage company based in New Zealand, is launching their own campaign to warn people of the dangers caused by aspartame. Their campaign, “Think Before You Drink,” will see 20,000 bottles of their own Phoenix Organic Cola labeled with warnings, pointing to the potential health risks caused by aspartame.
In fact, Phoenix Organics has gone all out in their attempt to make people aware of the dangers of artificial sweeteners. A whole section of their website is dedicated to “information on aspartame“, with…
Cheap Trick Brings Back The 8-Track
Brad Wheeler, Globe and Mail: Those who swear by vinyl say that records provide a warmer sound compared to compact discs, and that the larger packaging and gatefold artwork offer a superior tactile experience (and certainly to digital downloads).
But where’s the love for the 8-track, those bulky blasts from the past which sounded fine enough in your El Camino, and which broke down classic albums indiscriminately into four programs. Don’t look now, but the cartridges are back, brought by a band from the same era, Cheap Trick.
This month the boys of the Budokan release their new album, The Latest, not only in CD and vinyl, but in a long-departed format as fashionable as Tang, bell-bottoms and porn-star mustaches.
