Yostivanich

“It’s tempt­ing to count coup here and write Allen off as a hyp­ocrite, but there’s a more impor­tant story here. Allen just hasn’t thought this through. Copy­right is prob­lem­atic for every­one: musi­cians, fans, blog­gers. The absence of clear affir­ma­tive rights to make per­sonal copies, to share with your friends, to copy for the pur­poses of dis­cus­sion and com­men­tary (as opposed to the fuzzy and difficult-to-interpret fair use guide­lines, which have been fur­ther con­fused by the enter­tain­ment industry’s bold attempts to con­vince us all that they don’t mat­ter and can’t be relied upon) means that we’re all in a state of con­stant infringement. ”

“But the fea­ture, called Sidewiki, may anger some online pub­lish­ers who have com­ment­ing sys­tems of their own that they’d pre­fer vis­i­tors con­tinue to use. Google is walk­ing a fine line in its efforts to inno­vate in some areas that have long been the domain of tra­di­tional pub­lish­ers, while not alien­at­ing them.” I don’t like the idea.

“Kris looked flus­tered and mum­bled that “this is sur­real,” appar­ently refer­ring to hav­ing to respond to Franken’s ques­tion.” Seri­ously, can’t answer a ques­tion with Franken merely quot­ing the 4^th Amedment.

“But sev­eral weeks ago, a new step was added to that rou­tine: try­ing to prove to sud­denly skep­ti­cal secu­rity agents that he actu­ally was the per­son his board­ing pass and photo ID said he was.” This is going to be a stu­pid rule.

“Typ­i­cally, a fresh design will be a worse design sim­ply because it’s new and thus breaks user expec­ta­tions. A bet­ter strat­egy is to play up famil­iar­ity and build on users’ exist­ing knowl­edge of how a sys­tem works.”

“We wrote about Music-Rules! and sim­i­lar indus­try pro­pa­ganda efforts in May, out­lin­ing some of their false­hoods and biases. For instance, the RIAA tells kids, “Never copy some­one else’s cre­ative work with­out per­mis­sion from the copy­right holder” — omit­ting the impor­tant right to make cre­ative fair use of exist­ing con­tent. It also coins a mis­lead­ing term, “songlift­ing,” (which the cur­ricu­lum says is “just as bad as shoplift­ing”). Per­haps most dis­turb­ing of all given that the cur­ricu­lum is sup­posed to be adopted by schools, it teaches kids bad math as part of its lessons on peer to peer file-sharing.”

“Ear­lier this week, a fed­eral court in Los Ange­les ruled that Veoh, an online video host­ing ser­vice sim­i­lar to YouTube, qual­i­fies for a DMCA safe har­bor that pro­tects the ser­vice from mon­e­tary dam­ages for copy­right infringe­ments com­mit­ted by its users. The plain­tiff, Uni­ver­sal Music Group (UMG), alleged that many videos uploaded to Veoh included copy­righted sound record­ings owned by UMG. The rul­ing rep­re­sents a big win for all online ser­vices that host “user-generated con­tent,” includ­ing other video host­ing sites (like YouTube), music lock­er­ing sites (like MP3tunes.com), photo host­ing sites (like Flickr), and document-hosting sites (like Scribd). The Court rejected a vari­ety of the­o­ries that copy­right own­ers have been press­ing in sev­eral cases.”

“Two stan­dards, sep­a­rate and unequal, for the health of prop­erty and the health of peo­ple, are un-American. This bias in favor of prop­erty over peo­ple should be ended with all delib­er­ate speed by rais­ing the stan­dard for peo­ple to that of prop­erty. A pub­lic option would be one small step in that direction.”

“The irony here, as I see it, is that an old, inse­cure fea­ture Microsoft built to try to beat Netscape is now being used by Microsoft’s biggest cur­rent rival to patch IE. The upside for devel­op­ers is that Microsoft is going to have a hard time killing Chrome Frame because it actu­ally does the right thing — it’s not hack­ing IE via undoc­u­mented APIs or unscrupu­lous haxie-like code injec­tion. They used Microsoft’s own well-documented and fully sup­ported plat­form to do this. Bravo indeed, Google.”

“Music is exquis­itely emo­tion­ally evoca­tive, which is why a touch of happy music makes even unre­lated pic­tures seem more pleas­ant. In light of the above, then, we are led to the con­clu­sion that the arti­fact of music should con­tain some dis­tinctly human elements.”

“The FBI is inves­ti­gat­ing the hang­ing death of a U.S. Cen­sus worker near a Ken­tucky ceme­tery, and a law enforce­ment offi­cial told The Asso­ci­ated Press the word ‘fed” was scrawled on the dead man’s chest.”

“In a chap­ter in his new book pur­port­ing to explain to “idiots” what “our Found­ing Fathers really intended,” Glenn Beck praises an obso­lete pro­vi­sion of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion that pro­hib­ited Con­gress from out­law­ing the slave trade before 1808 and capped taxes on the slave trade at $10 per slave. In his expla­na­tion of the pro­vi­sion, Beck does not men­tion slav­ery, say­ing instead that the pro­vi­sion means that the Founders appar­ently “felt like there was a value to being able to live here” and lament­ing: “Not any­more. These days we can’t ask any­thing of immi­grants — includ­ing that they abide by our laws.”” Ok that was dumb.

“Now, choice is of course a good thing, but the prob­lem is that each of these ser­vices don’t really offer much choice. If you want a com­plete way to get movies over the web, you almost have to have all of these boxes. That’s because the movie stu­dios form part­ner­ships and alliances with var­i­ous ser­vices and not with oth­ers. And they have silly rules about who can stream/download what, when, and how. It’s a mess. And Hol­ly­wood really needs to sort it out soon, or they are just ask­ing for trou­ble as broad­band con­tin­ues to improve.” I want Hulu to be this.

“Google doesn’t use the “key­words” meta tag in our web search ranking.”

“What fol­lows are quo­ta­tions taken from inmates’ last state­ments in Texas. The state­ments, deliv­ered before fam­ily mem­bers, rel­a­tives of vic­tims, friends and the press, are com­piled out of chrono­log­i­cal order.” Really interesting.

“This graph fas­ci­nated us and so we wanted to share. It shows the num­ber of videos that receive spe­cific star rat­ings: one star for when you loathe some­thing, five for when you love it. Judg­ing from this chart, it looks like some of you are moved to rate videos when you don’t like them, but the over­whelm­ing major­ity of videos on YouTube have a stel­lar five-star rat­ing:” Another data point to elim­i­nate five star rat­ing systems.

“Even if it were the only one of its kind, Mike Estes’s brand-new, energy-efficient, wind-powered, water-conserving, envi­ron­men­tally sen­si­tive John Deere deal­er­ship here would attract con­sid­er­able atten­tion in Kansas. This is a state that con­sis­tently ranks among the top 10 in oil and nat­ural gas pro­duc­tion, and rou­tinely elects to Con­gress skep­tics on mat­ters of energy con­ser­va­tion and envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tion. But in July, Mr. Estes’s 28,500-square-foot, $3 mil­lion BTI Greens­burg deal­er­ship (BTI stands for Buck­lin Trac­tor and Imple­ment, the name of the orig­i­nal store, which has since expanded to four loca­tions) earned the United States Green Build­ing Council’s Lead­er­ship in Energy and Envi­ron­men­tal Design plat­inum cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, the high­est des­ig­na­tion, Six other build­ings antic­i­pate LEED certification.”

“Pacific Gas and Elec­tric announced today it is leav­ing the U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce because of the organization’s oppo­si­tion to cli­mate change legislation.”

“Under a new and expand­ing pro­gram for off­set­ting emis­sions, United Nations admin­is­tra­tors cal­cu­lated that the meet­ing would gen­er­ate the equiv­a­lent of 461 tons of car­bon diox­ide, with air travel being the sin­gle largest com­po­nent. They off­set those emis­sions by direct­ing money to a power project in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, through which agri­cul­tural left­overs like rice husks and sun­flower stalks are turned into elec­tric­ity for the local grid.”

“US offi­cials have ordered work­ers to stop the con­struc­tion of a tent for Libyan leader Colonel Muam­mar Gaddafi near New York, a local attor­ney says. The erec­tion of the tent “vio­lated sev­eral codes and laws of the town of Bed­ford”, attor­ney Joel Sachs says. It also emerged the Bedouin-style tent was being set up on prop­erty rented from real estate mogul Don­ald Trump.”

“Social Secu­rity checks have gone up auto­mat­i­cally every year since 1975, when the first auto­matic cost-of-living adjust­ment (COLA) took effect. Prior to that, a sep­a­rate act of Con­gress was required to grant any adjust­ment to com­pen­sate for infla­tion. But this Jan­u­ary, there won’t be any COLA, for the first time in the 35 years the sys­tem has been in oper­a­tion. The rea­son is sim­ple: The offi­cial mea­sure of the cost of liv­ing has gone down, not up. And the major rea­son for that is that oil prices plunged from the peaks of the pre­vi­ous year.”

“On Wednes­day, the group replied to the let­ter, dis­miss­ing Palm’s asser­tion that Apple was in vio­la­tion of its poli­cies. It also said that Palm’s strat­egy of hav­ing its Pre phone mas­quer­ade as an iPod so it would work with iTunes was a vio­la­tion of the group’s mem­ber­ship agree­ment.” Totally agree.

“Turns out, though, it’s a lot more fun when you imag­ine these guys are help­ing you plan a… slightly dif­fer­ent party.” So child­ish, but you know what it’s funny.

“Researchers have long puz­zled over the rel­a­tively poor health and edu­ca­tion out­comes for babies born in the win­ter months. Past expla­na­tions have focused on school atten­dance laws, vit­a­min D expo­sure, and other envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors, but econ­o­mists Kasey Buck­les and Daniel Hunger­man have found an over­looked expla­na­tion. They argue that less-educated women seem to have their chil­dren in win­ter, a fact that may explain some of the phenomenon.”

“In fact, in a dig­i­tal world where every­thing can be mea­sured, we all work on com­mis­sion. And why not? If you do great work and it works, you should get rewarded. And if you don’t, it’s hard to see why a ratio­nal orga­ni­za­tion would keep you on. You don’t have to like the com­ing era of hyper-measurement, but that doesn’t mean it’s not here.”

“Twitter’s new geolo­ca­tion sup­port was sup­posed to launch for devel­op­ers at today’s Twit­ter Con­fer­ence in LA (which I’m attend­ing), but it wasn’t quite ready yet. Still, Twitter’s plat­form lead Ryan Sarver announced sev­eral details about how it will work, at least ini­tially, in a devel­oper ses­sion.” Cou­ple inter­est­ing things, com­pletely opt-in, deleted by Twit­ter post-14 days, though in the future may be stored longer in a “safe” version.

“Health author­i­ties, mean­while, have urged peo­ple with asthma or breath­ing dif­fi­cul­ties to stay indoors. The offi­cial air qual­ity index for New South Wales recorded pol­lu­tant lev­els as high as 4,164 in Syd­ney. A level above 200 is con­sid­ered haz­ardous. In Sydney’s cen­tral busi­ness dis­trict the dust has even begun to set off smoke alarms.”

“Nokia has been on an acqui­si­tion tear lately, albeit mostly small deals (Plum, Cel­lity and Bit-Side all this year). A source close to the deal says that they’ve just made one more acqui­si­tion: bou­tique travel social net­work Dopplr, head­quar­tered in Lon­don.” Good job Dopplr, really like the service.

“We love find­ing ways to serve you bet­ter. Like help­ing you enjoy your cof­fee even more. Or mak­ing your life a lit­tle eas­ier. And with our two free new apps for the iPhone and iPod touch, weʼve man­aged to do both.” Star­bucks built some iPhone apps.