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As Lessig said in his latest website chat, 75% of studies not funded by the cellphone industry found evidence for a connection.

I would like say that (as I understand it) Lessig pointed this out to get the obvious reaction from his audience ("Oh wow, the cell phone industry is trying to lie to us!"). He wanted to point out that this is the reaction people always have when they see something like this, and to examine what in our society causes that mistrust and how we may be able to fix it. He uses this specifically when he talks about corporate funding for political campaigns, later on.

the other han,d there is a tremendous psychological incentive here to wishfully believe that there is no danger-- because the proposition that cellphone radiation near your head (or wifi for that matter) actually is dangerous leads to thoughts horrific to contemplate-- namely that you'd have to stop/reduce the amount of calls you do, or worse, to live in a wifi-less world.

I strongly suspect that people are more likely to believe things that do not challenge/threaten their current lifestyle (or whatever it is that makes the money).

So I wonder if any of that bias leads to a more ready dismissal of the cellphone/cancer danger. As Lessig said in his latest website chat, 75% of studies not funded by the cellphone industry found evidence for a connection.

Here is is: http://blip.tv/file/3283837

I would like to contribute these three links to the discussion.

http://blip.tv/file/3120038

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100222/lessig_video

http://nitn.thenation.com/2010/02/03/sign-the-petition-to-change-congress-now/

I came across them last week. They concern a lecture by Lessing on the problems of governing America, on 'Institutional Corruption' in general and of Congress in particular.

Worth looking at.

A.

Here are some links, and here is a link to a video presentation given to the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Berkeley. TWR is teh bomb (well, not literally).

Because there might be a milder form of the disability which is useful to have in society. And you risk losing it as well. The full blown version might even be useful for society as a whole (possibly not for the individuals though) in small doses.

The obvious example if sickle cell anemia. Being heterozygous for HgbS in areas where malaria is prevalent is beneficial, homozygous for HgbS completely sucks.

http://www.blip.tv/files/2204956 is long, but just the first 10 minutes has a bunch of examples (including the sickle cell anemia one of course).

His lecture goes on to claim that things like obsessive compulsive disorder and schizophrenia were beneficial for early societies as long as only a small number of people had them.

No because our fool politicians granted Comcast a monopoly.

Because our laws are written by corporate interests, not the people.

...which is the inevitable result of "private funding of campaigns"

See Change Congress and Lectures by Lawrence Lessig on Institutional Corruption for more information. Hour Version Half-Hour Version

Against Transparency an article by Lawrence Lessig indicates why increased transparency is probably not enough to make a difference on it's own. A number of people have responded to Lessig's article. Someone was kind enough to provide a walkthrough of the article too.

No because our fool politicians granted Comcast a monopoly.

Because our laws are written by corporate interests, not the people.

...which is the inevitable result of "private funding of campaigns"

See Change Congress and Lectures by Lawrence Lessig on Institutional Corruption for more information. Hour Version Half-Hour Version

Against Transparency an article by Lawrence Lessig indicates why increased transparency is probably not enough to make a difference on it's own. A number of people have responded to Lessig's article. Someone was kind enough to provide a walkthrough of the article too.

By then we will not download ringtones anymore, but cartones. Think of the possibilities! Make your Focus sound like a Ferrari, make it swing like Michael Jackson. Living next to the highway will be very entertaining.

Perhaps something like this? http://blip.tv/file/1548179

According to Lawrence Lessig (6 min 30 in), some 75% of all books are orphaned. It's legally impossible to do anything with those works, because the copyright holder can't be reached for permission.

I think you're suggesting that that should be no problem, because if the copyright owner can't be found, who's going to sue you for using their work? The problem is that you don't know they're not going to suddenly appear and sue you afterward, and for this reason no right-minded company will publish/broadcast/produce your work unless you have secured all related rights.

So, to answer your question, these works are an issue because otherwise some 75% of creative works are just lost: out of print and inaccessible.

links ftw
http://www.jamendo.com/en/ (integrated with amarok2)
http://www.magnatune.com/ (integrated with amarok, found brad suck's here)
http://blip.tv/ (out of office)
http://libre.fm/ (pretty meh atm, but i appreciate the fact its agpl)

links ftw
http://www.jamendo.com/en/ (integrated with amarok2)
http://www.magnatune.com/ (integrated with amarok, found brad suck's here)
http://blip.tv/ (out of office)
http://libre.fm/ (pretty meh atm, but i appreciate the fact its agpl)

This is because all the followers of The Church of Steve Jobs are promoting anything iphone/apple on firehose.

Maybe, but if you step back for a moment, you will also find that the church of Adobe (Flash) and the church of Microsoft (Silverlight0 has an alternative: the church of open standards. As an example, take the following page:

http://lessig.blip.tv/file/1714232/

and then simply select "MPEG-4 video" as the format. It plays without any extra magic.

I may use an iPhone, but I am very pro open standards. Sure anyone can keep a local copy of the MPEG4 file, but this is where Creative Commons comes into play.

Step 1: Find Copyrighted work Step 2: Create derivative work without appropriate agreements/contracts Step 3: Get sent cease and deist letter

Come on guys, wake up. This is someone else's work, you obviously misjudged the company you are dealing with. Why not start something from scratch, so that you don't end up in a situation like this.

This isn't some company stealing IP and creating a franchise. This isn't even a group of people attempting to destroy or dilute Square's market. CT:CE was simply an attempt by fans to continue the (arguably) deceased storyline that they loved.

Fan bases creating not-for-profit derivative works have created, sustained, and/or resurrected numerous corporate franchises, enough so that there's plenty of precedent of intelligent companies taking note of such behavior, supporting and encouraging it (World of Warcraft, Halflife, even Snakes on a Plane). Hell, most of the reason Chrono Trigger is still even relevant is because of its sustained Internet fan base! They complete the feedback loop, providing a voice to the creative consumer in the digital marketplace. This is not about IP; it's the suppression of digital culture itself.

Not only is Square just plain stupid to have let a franchise with clear fan interest die ... they're beating that interest out of the community themselves!

I'll end this with a link to a relevant presentation by Lawrence Lessig that I saw posted earlier on /.. It portrays quite nicely why behavior such as that taken by Square is destructive to culture, art, and human interests. Using IP laws to break the feedback loop and force art into a strict producer-consumer model is harmful to everyone in the end.

Mr. Lessig's a very clever man, watch the presentation and think about it ;) http://blip.tv/file/1937322

The bits that may have caused them to go apeshit probably starts at 9:07 in the video under the heading "Remix"

It starts with a clip from The Grey Album and then moves onto various other remixes

According to TFA, the presentation has been reposted here: http://blip.tv/file/1937322

After watching the first three minutes, my impression is that

(1) Should be clearly in favor of Mr. Lessig. Nonprofit, political speech, should have pretty strong First Amendment protection. One can argue if he really needs the photos (see point 2), but the character of the use doesn't get much more fair.

(2) He uses photographs that are probably copyrighted as backdrops for his lecture

(3) Depends on the source(s) - many small samples or all from one source?

(4) I don't see how the use of some photos in this lecture can substantially hurt the sale of the original collections. Especially since the "subtitles" get in the way of reusing the photos from the lecture elsewhere.

http://blip.tv/file/606719 - 2:20

Unfortunately there is a vast conspiracy. And it has nothing to do with any "wing".

It has to do with germany being a company, not a country. A protoype so to speak. The US are the owners. And our parliament is the management. The EU is the board of directors. And the germans are the employees.

Don't believe me? (Sure you don't :)
Then read the German "Grundgesetz" (basic constitutional law). I kid you not.

Why do you think our passports are in fact employee cards? (They are literally called "Personalausweis". Which means exactly that.)

And of course the whole bullshitting with money not being backed by anything anymore and every dollar out there being in fact a money storage voucher. Not the real thing. And this money being the debt of someone else. and so on. I guess you know the story.

Sadly you most likely do not understand German, or you would be able to understand this lecture, that an ex- stock expert gave in Swizerland, about this. With proper hard numbers and references behind it
But I heard there are audio translations from the live translators present there.

I've read it but asked a friend who hadn't read WATCHMEN to see the movie with me so we could review it. Our discussion is the video at the end of this review (the review focuses more on Alan Moore not wanting to see the movie than our different experiences watching it). http://r4nt.com/article/watchmen-the-what-is-alans-problem-review/ ...and the video itself can be found at either location (use blip for CC license)... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY7fCCmUxs8 http://blip.tv/file/1844574/ In a nutshell he never read it, but he is a comic geek, and he loved it and is seeing it again today. I HAD read the comic but don't consider myself a comic guy. I also loved it. Certainly the most interesting Alan Moore adaptation yet. In terms of quality, to ME its the best, followed by FFROM HELL and V FOR VENDETTA. He was never confused during the screening, and never felt anything was missing. Nor did I. Obviously stuff IS missing, and a longer version is coming. But it stands on its own as an excellent movie.

Even though you are joking, you might be interested in: Clay Shirky: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (transcript)

Here you go...

• Why is Marijuana Illegal? - A brief history of the criminalization of cannabis
• The Union: The business behind getting high.

Gee, wonder why the fucking Constitution was written on HEMP paper...

The US Government has such bullshit hypocrisy on this "War On Drugs": Hemp For Victory

--
ALL Law is based on Contract Law.

Although I hate miro as software, I have to give them credit for getting the concept right (Tivo for internet TV) and having a great library of content feeds (including MAKE and most of the TED series) which makes me happy enough to use it despite it's resource hogging and glitches.

According to this version of blip.tv's wikipedia article, Lessig has praised blip.tv for already meeting some of these standards.

In general, blip.tv is an open platform. It offers direct download links for all videos it hosts, including videos that it has transcoded (i.e. Flash videos). This led Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig to call blip.tv a "true sharing site" (along with Flickr and Eyespot, among others) in contrast to YouTube's "fake sharing site" because blip.tv "explicitly offers links to download various formats of the videos it shares." [1]

The actual source is an article on Lessig's blog.

There is a lot of buzz around Scala and F#, and considering the limitations they lift from the more conventional mainstream languages it's understandable. But I think Clojure transcends both these languages and many other new on-top-of-another-platform languages because it doesn't just take the latest trendy language features and mix them with new syntactic sugar. It has a very well thought design that feels very right, elegant, and powerful.

I can't recommend enough the screencasts by Rich Hickey, the language designer and main implementer.

The 5th screencast, Clojure Concurrency, is most recommended by me for programming language aficionados. It's a long overview of the language and its philosophy regarding concurrency programming. After I saw that one, I was very excited about Clojure in a way that none of the latest languages made me feel.

There is a lot of buzz around Scala and F#, and considering the limitations they lift from the more conventional mainstream languages it's understandable. But I think Clojure transcends both these languages and many other new on-top-of-another-platform languages because it doesn't just take the latest trendy language features and mix them with new syntactic sugar. It has a very well thought design that feels very right, elegant, and powerful.

I can't recommend enough the screencasts by Rich Hickey, the language designer and main implementer.

The 5th screencast, Clojure Concurrency, is most recommended by me for programming language aficionados. It's a long overview of the language and its philosophy regarding concurrency programming. After I saw that one, I was very excited about Clojure in a way that none of the latest languages made me feel.

Since my site is now thoroughly slashdotted (thanks everyone!), you might want to check out the video at blip.tv: http://brucenash.blip.tv/#1425102 Bruce

..really.

Playing Hellgate in Hardcore Elite mode (one life - when you're dead, you're dead. Lose all your stuff and start again) is one of the most intense gaming experiences you will ever have.

If you've never felt your heart pounding in your chest *before you've even seen the boss monster*. Or had your hands shaking and your palms are sweating after a particularly intense battle, you haven't really played it. I've walked away from the computer and been *scared* to continue playing...

The repetetive tilesets, shallow quests and daft NPC's don't matter a toss at the end of the day. When you stand to lose *weeks* of levelling a character through one silly mistake, you're going to play as though your life depends on it...

It's impossible to explain to someone that's never played hardcore, but HG:L is at the top of it's class for full-on, in-your-face, adrenalin-pumping, non-stop 3D demon-slaying.

Here's a short video made by one of our guild members: Burn in Hell. There are a couple of other vids on that page too.

It's a damn shame that such a great game just didn't make it, but I'll be playing until I see "server not found" when I try to log in...

I'm with you on this one. I actually paid for 2 founders accounts, and even today I don't regret the decision. Hellgate: London is whole new game when played on HCE mode.

I plan to continue playing until the very end. I just hope we get a time frame that the servers will shut down so I know when to strip and run through the wilds.

..really.

Playing Hellgate in Hardcore Elite mode (one life - when you're dead, you're dead. Lose all your stuff and start again) is one of the most intense gaming experiences you will ever have.

If you've never felt your heart pounding in your chest *before you've even seen the boss monster*. Or had your hands shaking and your palms are sweating after a particularly intense battle, you haven't really played it. I've walked away from the computer and been *scared* to continue playing...

The repetetive tilesets, shallow quests and daft NPC's don't matter a toss at the end of the day. When you stand to lose *weeks* of levelling a character through one silly mistake, you're going to play as though your life depends on it...

It's impossible to explain to someone that's never played hardcore, but HG:L is at the top of it's class for full-on, in-your-face, adrenalin-pumping, non-stop 3D demon-slaying.

Here's a short video made by one of our guild members: Burn in Hell. There are a couple of other vids on that page too.

It's a damn shame that such a great game just didn't make it, but I'll be playing until I see "server not found" when I try to log in...

It's not another general-purpose programming language. It's a very narrow-domain language specifically designed to fit a certain niche. The fact that among its major influences the language designers list ML, Haskell, and TLA+ might ring a bell.

See this and this for more info.

To understand what specifically they are about, it helps to watch Anders' talk at JAOO. It's titled "Where are programming languages going", but to make more sense out of of it, it's best to mentally rewrite it as "What is the Microsoft language strategy for today" - which makes sense, given that Anders is the guy who "oversees the general programming language strategy for the company" at MS these days. It has a large section devoted to metaprogramming in general and DSLs in particular, among other interesting bits such as FP. If you have a reasonable knowledge of modern language design concepts, you won't hear anything new in that talk, and will probably find the explanations pretty dumbed-down; nonetheless, the interesting stuff is not what's being said so much as it is who is saying it, and in what context (particularly looking for phrases like ".. and this is what we'd like to do in future versions of our platform" - and metaprogramming/DSLs has that).

Perhaps the key statement is this:

"... and certainly, in a static world, we need more modern metaprogramming APIs ... C# 3.0 expression trees is a start, but it is but a start ... We need to get out of the black-boxness of our compilers and turn them into services, the APIs that you can use."

Hm... CommonLisp.NET?

I'm now using KDE3 with Compiz Fusion and Emerald Window Decorator. IMHO it surpasses Vista and Apple already in terms of look and feel. Once I went into an Apple store, I opened Safari on one of those things and I plaid a Youtube video showing Compiz Fusion on it. Customers where crowding behind me and even the staff had a hard time pretending they're not interested! Ok, maybe the average user would have a hard time trying to install it. But then again why should we make ourselves redundant? The article forgets to mention, that Mark Shuttleworth also said that it is about making software which gets it's users laid.

The amphibians are laggards, as usual. Here in the "Land of the Free"® we've had main core tracking perhaps 8 million threats to national security since 1982. Every URL on their computers, every email, all electronic financial transactions, travel arrangements, its all in the database. It is not even controversial here where 9/11 taught us how dangerous Maryknoll nuns and labor activists can be. Main core evolved out of FEMA and you may recognize some of the public servants that set it up, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, David Addington. They is a cute little video about it here. Makes me proud to be Ameri-kine.

I use blip.tv. They offer very good video quality in a Flash player and will host the original video file on their site so you can provide a download link as well. The Flash player is also very customizable, so you can fit it into your site and you don't even have to link to or otherwise advertise them. See also the comparison on Wikipedia.

...really.

Playing Hellgate in Hardcore Elite mode (one life - when you're dead, you're dead. Lose all your stuff and start again) is one of the most intense gaming experiences you will ever have.

If you've never felt your heart pounding in your chest *before you've even seen the boss monster*. Or had your hands shaking and your palms are sweating after a particularly intense battle, you haven't really played it. I've walked away from the computer and been *scared* to continue playing...

The repetetive tilesets, shallow quests and daft NPC's don't matter a toss at the end of the day. When you stand to lose *weeks* of levelling a character through one silly mistake, you're going to play as though your life depends on it...

It's impossible to explain to someone that's never played hardcore, but HG:L is at the top of it's class for full-on, in-your-face, adrenalin-pumping, non-stop 3D demon-slaying.

Here's a short video made by one of our guild members: Burn in Hell. There are a couple of other vids on that page too.

It's a damn shame that such a great game just didn't make it, but I'll be playing until I see "server not found" when I try to log in...

In canada, the MSM has given this issue pervasive coverage, and most of it from Geist's point of view (e.g. it's the worst thing since Hitler's Germany)

Granted it's had a little while to cool down since introduction, but that while has been rife with op-ed's and official stories ripping it a new one.

This includes big tv news, and many local print publications.

according to the end of this video, some MP's are actually making this bill a major campaign issue.

Imagine if feinstein were suddenly bombarded for a month straight with nothing but reporters and constituents asking why she's selling them out to hollywood through letters, print, and live tv.

Dont belittle these efforts, they're actuall making headway there!

Oops, I forgot to mention the video which shows (from the outside) how the calibration is done. I'm not sure if this link will work as the URL is a mess, but you can also find it in Notebook.com's original post.

No paper: Pantone's huey calibration software is run, the lid is closed and reopened a minute later.

Actually, that would be "Boom De Yada."

Olberman has a fun statement on all of this.

DRM is being ditched (at least in Sweden). One of northern Europes largest online music stores CDON is selling WMA and MP3 files of the same music side by side. I know, this does not mean that the battle is won, but it does mean that the free market will do its drag-DRM-in-the-dirt thing.

In the left hand corner: a crappy version that will only let you create music compilations for a few times and in the right corner a perfect version with no limitations (price is the same for either - hahaha)

(now I know you thought you would actually be able to go through your entire day without reading about those swedes and that damn overhyped personal-freedom business)

Why does Alice have this obsessive need to talk to Bob? :-)

O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2007 - 5 minutes

I think he is talking about JavaScript, and I think he may be right. Doubt it, and here's why. In the eleventh paragraph, he mentions this:

JavaScript had Netscape, Sun, and Microsoft (among others). This, of course, means that JavaScript is already a big language in his eyes, therefore, it cannot be the next big language.

Cato daily podcast

Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog

TED Talks

NPR: Science Friday Podcast

You may relate to this talk given by Clay Shirky:
http://blip.tv/file/855937

Avi Bryant gave a fascinating talk about bringing technology developed for Smalltalk into the Ruby world at RailsConf 2007. Apropos of nothing, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Jeremy Davies (Daniel Faraday on "Lost").

Basically he's saying that many of the performance issues with the much-maligned Ruby VM were solved years ago in Smalltalk implementations, and that Ruby ought to incorporate those ideas. Maglev is a big step in this direction.

Wow, can't believe people still put out sites that look as crappy as this. C'mon, have to use the freeware Flash player? Can't make your own? I don't trust them. Would rather keep using blip.tv for my vids. Costs a little, but works darn good.

They could make the new OS a mixture of Windows CE, Windows ME, and Windows NT. They could call it Windows CEMENT*... (waits for boring Microsoft fans to mod down).

* Excuse blatant rip-off from Blimptv.net

What I still don't get, is how in this day and age, when 99% of windows utility apps like web browsers, word processors, spyware scanners, etc. use less than 5% of an avg cpu, can't they be run efficiently on a virtual machine layer in linux?

"How can a company that can afford to pony up $44.6 bn possibly be described as being "on the ropes"?!"

Here, let me fix that for you ...

"How can a company that feels it has to pony up $44.6 bn possibly be described as being anything but "on the ropes"?!"

... and its not an "all-cash" bid. 50% Microsoft stock. At least they aren't paying in

At least they're not offering to pay in Bush coins ... yet!

While away a useful few hours with Google Tech Talks
http://research.google.com/video.html

Then do some searching for podcasts, both audio and video. A quick sample of a hundred feeds or so:

http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/podcast/podcast.xml

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AiBquicktime

http://www.archaeologychannel.org/rss/TACfeed.xml

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/rss/archive.php?seriesid=1906978378

http://aaweekly.blip.tv/?skin=rss

http://www.techonline.mtu.edu/iTunes_Media/astronomy_rss.xml

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Audio/Podcast.xml

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Audio/Podcast.xml

http://astronomy.libsyn.com/rss

http://www.astronomy.com/asy/podcasts

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~clgroks/groks.rss

Pick your own subjects!

I looked at the Twine web site, and I can't figure out what they're actually doing. It's all buzzwords. There's a video of the Twine guy speaking at the "Web 2.0 Summit". The video is useless; the guy is doing a demo, but the video only shows the face of the speaker, not the demo.

Apparently the "natural language recognition" seems to consist of recognizing names of people, products, and companies. The examples were "Tim Bernars-Lee" and "Google", which are so unique that they're easy. But would it work for "Robert Smith" and "Joe's Plumbing"? There was no indication that it uses context to disambiguate the non-trivial cases. It still requires manual tagging for most data.

There's a scheme for tracking document changes. There's a system that builds up a profile of the user based on what they store, which sounds like a targeted advertising engine. There's a personalized search engine. There are "collaboration features". There are contact lists.

But from the available information, it's not yet possible to tell if this is useful.