Let us be clear???online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs.
Rubbish.
“It is amazing to me that the opponents apparently don’t want to protect American consumers and businesses,” Republican Representative Lamar Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“Are they somehow benefitting by directing customers to these foreign websites? Do they profit from selling advertising to these foreign websites? And if they do, they need to be stopped. And I don’t mind taking that on.”
Smith stressed the bill would only affect websites based outside the United States and criticized opponents for failing to cite specific sections, saying many have failed to read it and were disguising their economic interests with rhetoric about Internet freedom. “There are some companies like Google that make money by directing consumers to these illegal websites,” Smith said. “So I don’t think they have any real credibility to complain even though they are the primary opponent.”
Smith’s list of supporters is not amazing to me, tediously typical.
About the Book
This book is a work in progress. A living document, of sorts. Start reading now, and it will grow month by month. Just don’t get it wet, and never feed it after midnight.
Music is both culture and commerce. Those two things are inextricably linked. In different periods of history, music culture and music commerce are profoundly different.
In the age of print, the main way in which music was produced, distributed and consumed was on paper. Music was dots on a page. The electric age, with its introduction of recordings and broadcasting, radically transformed the ways in which music made meaning for people, and consequently the ways in which it made money.
And just as the electric age was profoundly disruptive to the musicians, businesses and fans of music when it first came along, so too is the digital age.
- AcceleGlove. Equipped with accelerometers that track the exact movements of a person???s hand.
- Cubelets from Modular Robotics. The electronic building blocks are marketed as a toy for children but adults may enjoy it too. You attach power blocks, sensor blocks and action blocks together to make small robots that move, light up or perform other actions.
- Exmobaby. Biosensor baby pajamas feature a snap-on transmitter that measures vital signs in infants, including heart rate, skin temperature, moisture, and movement.
- Romotive. Lets you preprogram your smartphone ??? Android or iOS ??? to drive a small wheeled device in a preprogrammed pattern, or you can use your tablet to direct its movements.
- Solarmer Energy. Developing solar energy cells made of thin, flexible plastic that can be rolled up like a sheet of paper.
- Perpetua Power. Working on products that generate renewable power from body heat. It is developing a wireless wristband to monitor the location of Alzheimer patients
- Sun Innovations. Uses a nanoparticle film to project glowing animated signs on a window that look ???like a display floating in the air???.
- HealthMicro presented its disposable wireless sensors, designed to replace wired sensors that health care workers now stick on a patient???s body for medical examinations like an electrocardiogram.
- Emota.net. Used gesture controls embedded in a stuffed penguin to make social-networking technology more emotionally engaging. It creates a layer of social networking on top of Facebook.
As I mentioned in my previous post, my book was just reviewed on Slashdot. One thing that struck me in reading all the resulting comments was the (several different copies of an) apparently famous quote that goes something like:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think
“I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.It’s apparently quite well known, so it floors me that this is the first I’ve seen it.
Heard it here first
In case you haven???t gotten the punchline yet: academic publishing is highway robbery, and academic publishers make Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist.
Legislation, the last refuge of the monopolist.
Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro play around with a face tracker and color interpolation to replace their own faces, in real-time, with celebrities such as that of Brad Pitt and Paris Hilton. Awesome. And creepy.
See Castro’s video of him doing the same thing, but with a different blending algorithm. His looks more like a maleable mask rather than a face substitution.
Separately, the Directors are pleased to report that Minds + Machines has today been appointed as the registry services provider for DOT KIWI LIMITED, a New Zealand company that has publically stated it will apply for the ???.kiwi??? gTLD string. A proportion of DOT KIWI???s domain revenue and profit will be donated to a trust established to help fund the reconstruction of the earthquake devastated city of Christchurch, New Zealand. Dot Kiwi joins other geographical, brand, and entrepreneurial clients from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America that have chosen Minds + Machines, but who wish to keep their plans confidential.
Peter Dengate Thrush, Chairman of TLDH
Nicholas Negroponte famously insisted that the dotcom boomers, ???Move bits, not atoms.??? Ignorant of the atom heavy human bodies, neuron dense brains, and physical hardware needed to make and move those little bits, Negroponte???s ideal did become true in industrial sectors dependent upon communication and economic transaction. In the communication sector, atomic newspapers have been replaced by bitly news stories. In the transactional sector, coins are a nuisance, few carry dollars, and I just paid for a haircut with a credit card adaptor on the scissor-wielder???s Droid phone.
The human consequences of the bitification of atoms go far beyond my bourgeois consumption. This shift or what is could simply be called digitalization, when paired with their very material transportation systems or networked communication technologies, combines to form a powerful force that impacts local and global democracies and economies.
What are the local and political economics of granularity in the space shared between the fiduciary and the communicative? To understand the emergent political economy of the practices and discourses unifying around mobile media and digital money we need a shared language around the issue of granularity.
Grinding large incumbents into smart dust.
Contents:
- Page 2: The Patriot Act
- Page 3: SOPA & Friends
- Page 4: China’s Microblogging Crackdown Widens
- Page 5: Australia Trends Toward Censorship
- Page 6: India Turns on Social Networks
- Page 7: Twitter Subpoenas
- Page 8: Patent Law
- Page 9: Canada Preps Censorship Bills
- Page 10: Russian Spambots
- Page 11: The Internet Off Switch
In a conflict between government of the people, for the people, by the people and the people the outcome should architecturally favour the people. But all centralised governments appear to eventually be co-opted by powers that be under their regime.
But they all fall, eh Ozymandias.
Hamish MacEwan 