Senin, 28 Februari 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

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Piracy is the Future of TV: commercial TV sucks relative to illicit services

Posted: 28 Feb 2011 03:37 AM PST

"Piracy is the Future of Television" is Abigail De Kosnik's Convergence Culture Consortium paper on the many ways in which piracy is preferable to buying legitimate online TV options. None of these advantages are related to price -- it may be hard to compete with free, but it's impossible to compete with free when you offer something worse than the free option. De Kosnik finishes the paper with a series of incredibly sensible recommendations for producing a commercial marketplace that's as good or better than the illicit one. Alas, I fear that TV broadcasters would rather demand special online censorship powers and moan about piracy than fix their products:
Standardize
A single interface, a single mode of searching, a single way of listing new TV content, and a single file format that plays on a single media player and works on every OS and can be ported to any mobile device: this should be the goal of all legal services. Uniformity in each of these areas across services will make all services of this kind - will make TV viewing on the Internet as a practice - more appealing to all potential users. Once watching TV online can match the simplicity of clicking through channels on a TV set, a larger percentage of the TV viewing population will be interested in using the Internet as their primary interface for television content. And TV pirates will not migrate to legal services unless they are at least as straightforward as pirate protocols. In fact, legal services can model their protocols directly on established pirate standards, as they are hardly secret.7

Offer a Premium Service for Personal Archivists
At the moment, piracy provides the best means for individuals to build personal libraries of television content, for all of the reasons given above. Legal services should consider how to serve this niche even better than pirate communities do. Users interested in creating archives would likely pay a premium if legal services could:

• Offer downloads (both standard definition and HD) of canonical versions of classic and current television programs, either with their original commercials (an important feature for some TV archivists) or commercial-free.

• Make files of new TV episodes available for download immediately after broadcast.

• Persistently "seed" those files (i.e., guarantee that the interested user can always acquire TV files, even older ones, since on pirate networks, older files sometimes are "unseeded" and very difficult to obtain). In fact, the network of collectors could be encouraged to seed files as they come into demand, under some kind of incentive program. (Pirate communities dedicated to "cult" or "art" films often offer rewards to members who are willing to seed requested torrents; for example, if a member seeds a currently unseeded torrent that six other members want, then the community may reward that seeding member with an increase in her maximum permitted download volume for a month).

• Provide collectors with seedbox accounts so that individual users do not have to consume their personal bandwidth in order to download as much content as they wish.

• Offer to host collectors' libraries remotely, and to stream files from those libraries to any machine authorized via login and password.

• Give users the ability to organize their archives as they choose.

Piracy is the Future of Television (PDF) (via O'Reilly Radar)

(Image: Worship Me, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from bdunnette's photostream)

 


Inspiring manifesto from China's Jasmine revolution

Posted: 27 Feb 2011 10:53 PM PST

As Bruce Sterling notes, this manifesto of the Chinese Jasmine revolution (translated by Human Rights in China), "sounds almost identical to the gripes that the impoverished American populace might make to their own leaders. There's nothing specifically Chinese about these demands."
Every good and honest Chinese person, please think: So much public housing has been sold to individuals, so many state-owned enterprises and so much land have been sold, and nearly all state-owned property has been sold off. But where has all the money from these sales gone? It goes without saying that state-owned property belongs to the entire people. But what did the people get? Led by an authoritarian regime, the opaque process of privatization has made a small number of people rich, but what did the vast number of ordinary people get? Every good and honest Chinese person, please think: When Japan, Korea, and Taiwan were in the process of industrializing, they were able to make the overwhelming majority of their people prosperous. Why is it that during China's industrialization the ordinary people are becoming poorer? Why is it that in just the last few decades China has gone from being a country with the smallest gap between the rich and the poor to one with the largest? It is because the unfair system has made a small number of people incredibly wealthy, and the vast majority of people remain poor.
Chinese Jasmine Rallies: Beijing to Wuhan, since Feb. 20, 2011 (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Image: The square in front of the McDonald's restaurant during the peak of the rally, Voice of America/Wikimedia Commons)

 


Telephone ad extolling the virtues of interrupted suppers

Posted: 26 Feb 2011 11:57 PM PST

An early ad for extra landlines pimps the miracle of talking on the phone during the family dinner, and advises that Junior will love a "portable" phone that he can carry down to the living room when he's done with it.

"It's for you, we don't mind the phone cord in the dinner soup"

Update from Wisconsin

Posted: 27 Feb 2011 03:09 PM PST

I'm watching the live feed from the Wisconsin Capitol Building, and getting messages from friends inside. No arrests so far, the police are hanging back. Despite orders to close the doors, 100 new people were recently let inside from the thousands standing outdoors. WORT public radio has live coverage, as does Andrew Kroll of Mother Jones. Last I heard, CNN was talking about turtles. UPDATE: Live feed has lost their Internet connection. Situation hasn't changed much, though. Follow Andrew Kroll on Twitter for regular updates. He's in there. UPDATE AGAIN: There's not much going on right now. It looks like rumors that police would refuse to arrest or clear the building might be true. People have been confined to second floor. Otherwise, no arrests. No change.

Captain Beefheart's "10 Commandments of Guitar Playing"

Posted: 27 Feb 2011 12:04 AM PST

I haven't played a stringed instrument since high school, but "Captain Beefheart's 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing" sounds like damned good advice for whatever you're passionate about.
...2. Your guitar is not really a guitar
Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you're good, you'll land a big one.

3. Practice in front of a bush
Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread...

7. Always carry a church key
That's your key-man clause. Like One String Sam. He's one. He was a Detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument. His song "I Need a Hundred Dollars" is warm pie. Another key to the church is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty -- making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he's doing it.

8. Don't wipe the sweat off your instrument
You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.

Captain Beefheart's 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing (via Making Light)

(Image: Trout Mask Replica, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from seventime's photostream)

Articulated cardboard Cthulhu

Posted: 27 Feb 2011 12:14 PM PST


Eddbagenal sez, "Students at Strode College in the UK staged a 'cardboard costume' catwalk show including this awesome articulated Cthulhu headpiece made entirely from old box cartons." Technically, the description calls it an octopus, but if that's not an elder god great old one, I'm not a damned soul

Cardboard Catwalk (Thanks, eddbagenal, via Submitterator!)

 


Alan Dean Foster: Predators I Have Known - orb weaver spider

Posted: 24 Feb 2011 04:08 PM PST

predators-i-have-known.jpg orb-weaver-spider.jpg

Humans are such visual creatures. Take away big eyes (baby seals) and fur (most mammals) and often what is left is the ick factor.

Not many creatures have a bigger ick factor than the spider. It seems like the more legs an animal has, the more alien it appears to humans. In that regard the centipede and the millipede have spiders beat. But spiders also have multiple eyes, and poison fangs: the words "poison" and "fangs" being enough to send any creature to the top of most folks' ick list.

Inhabitants of the U.S. and Western Europe have enough issues dealing with spiders of modest size. Those of us who dwell in the American Southwest can speak of silk-spinners boasting considerably more impressive dimensions. You have to go to the tropics of the world, though, to find the size champions of the spider world. Spiders whose legspan easily exceeds that of your open, spread palm. In contrast to the majority of popular feelings they regretfully inspire, these rainforest denizens are often startlingly beautiful.

Infographic on the relationship between the Koch Bros and Scott Walker

Posted: 26 Feb 2011 11:36 PM PST


SalJake sez, "Nifty infographic outlining the money path from the Koch brothers to Wisconsin's 'never negotiate, never surrender' governor and Tea Party darling Scott Walker. The blogger who successfully prank called to Da Gov was impersonating billionaire David Koch. Thanks to this prank, we have him recorded as asking Fake David Koch to finance advertisements in the home districts of GOP senators, because people there are PISSED OFF. And rightly so, I might add."

Koch Bros Present: Monopoly (Thanks, SalJake, via Submitterator!)

 


Freeman Dyson reviews Gleick's book on information theory

Posted: 27 Feb 2011 12:17 AM PST

"How We Know" is Freeman Dyson's essay on information theory in next month's New York Review of Books, inspired by James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Dyson's thoughts on Claude Shannon, Wikipedia, and twenty-first century science are illuminating, and man, does it ever leave me wanting to read the book -- Gleick being one of the greatest science writers of all time, and information theory being one of the subjects that interests me the most.
Jimmy Wales hoped when he started Wikipedia that the combination of enthusiastic volunteer writers with open source information technology would cause a revolution in human access to knowledge. The rate of growth of Wikipedia exceeded his wildest dreams. Within ten years it has become the biggest storehouse of information on the planet and the noisiest battleground of conflicting opinions. It illustrates Shannon's law of reliable communication. Shannon's law says that accurate transmission of information is possible in a communication system with a high level of noise. Even in the noisiest system, errors can be reliably corrected and accurate information transmitted, provided that the transmission is sufficiently redundant. That is, in a nutshell, how Wikipedia works.

The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.

How We Know (via MeFi)
 


Wisconsin update: More to come later today

Posted: 27 Feb 2011 08:17 AM PST

My friends in Madison say they've been told that the Capitol Building will be cleared of protesters today around 4:00 pm. Passive resistance—"Gandhi-style"—is planned. It's my hope that the protests will remain as peaceful and spirited as they've been so far, and that the people tasked with removing protesters will respond to that peacefulness. In the meantime, check out this Forbes article debunking one of the biggest myths to come out of this situation. The truth: Wisconsin public employees pay for their own retirement plans.

Why are America's largest corporations paying no tax?

Posted: 26 Feb 2011 11:44 PM PST

Inspired by the UK Uncut movement, Americans are taking to the street, asking why they're being asked to tighten their belts when the largest corporations in the country are paying no tax at all:
- BANK OF AMERICA: In 2009, Bank of America didn't pay a single penny in federal income taxes, exploiting the tax code so as to avoid paying its fair share. "Oh, yeah, this happens all the time," said Robert Willens, a tax accounting expert interviewed by McClatchy. "If you go out and try to make money and you don't do it, why should the government pay you for your losses?" asked Bob McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice. The same year, the mega-bank's top executives received pay "ranging from $6 million to nearly $30 million."

- BOEING: Despite receiving billions of dollars from the federal government every single year in taxpayer subsidies from the U.S. government, Boeing didn't "pay a dime of U.S. federal corporate income taxes" between 2008 and 2010.

- CITIGROUP: Citigroup's deferred income taxes for the third quarter of 2010 amounted to a grand total of $0.00. At the same time, Citigroup has continued to pay its staff lavishly. "John Havens, the head of Citigroup's investment bank, is expected to be the bank's highest paid executive for the second year in a row, with a compensation package worth $9.5 million."

REPORT: You Have More Money In Your Wallet Than Bank Of America Pays In Federal Taxes (via Reddit)
 


Tolk_en estate versus the Streisand Effect

Posted: 26 Feb 2011 11:22 PM PST

Zazzle user Harpocrates has a thoroughgoing response to the Tolkien estate's insistence that a badge reading "While You Were Reading Tolkien, I Was Watching Evangelion" infringes on its rights -- a series of tees and buttons.

C_ri_top_er T_lki_n C_ns_r_d My B_dg_ (Thanks, Moonbuggy, via Submitterator)

 


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