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Politics & Controversy

Charges Put Internet Radio On Pause

In early 2002 the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) set royalty rates for webcasters that were twice as high as for regular radio broadcasts. The Library of Congress reset those rates in late summer (yes, the LoC oversees those things).

Now it’s 2007, and the RIAA is at it again. Techdirt reports the Copyright Royalty Board is adopting royalty rates the RIAA has been asking for, “and making them effective retroactively to the beginning of 2006 — meaning that many small independent webcasters are now facing a tremendous royalty bill they’re unlikely to be able to afford.” Here, listen to the story on PRI’s Marketplace.

Save the Streams is following the issue, and Kurt Hanson tells us Congress is paying attention.

Dell Tells Linux Users Where To Put It

Holy smokes. As Dell’s sales slump and stock remains flat, the famously unimaginative company is trying to tap into the Mob for ideas about what new shade of grey to deliver its hardware in next. And what did the Dell IdeaStorm mob say?

“Give us Linux!”

“Give Us OpenOffice.”

And how did Dell respond?

“No. No. And, No.”

John Naughton reports on the story for The Guardian, explaining:

more than 85,000 people took the trouble to register with IdeaStorm in order to tell Mr Dell that they wanted him to ship his computers with Linux pre-installed. Moreover, 55,000 revealed that they would like the free open-source office software suite, OpenOffice, pre-installed on their shiny new Dell machines.

And all Michael Dell could say was that there are too many variants of Linux. Of course that doesn’t explain why the company, who’s biggest contribution to the technology world was an online store that allowed customers to chose computer configurations from a dizzying array of options, doesn’t simply allow customers to buy their PCs with no software at all.

Middlebury College vs. Wikipedia

Middlebury College is proud to have taken a stand against Wikipedia this year:

Members of the Vermont institution’s history department voted unanimously in January to adopt the statement, which bans students from citing the open-source encyclopedia in essays and examinations.

Without entirely dismissing Wikipedia — “whereas Wikipedia is extraordinarily convenient and, for some general purposes, extremely useful…” — the decision paints it with a broad brush — “as educators, we are in the business of reducing the dissemination of misinformation.” (Though a site search reveals it’s frequently cited there.)

Chandler Koglmeier’s op-ed response in the student newspaper, however, was rather pointed:

[Professor Waters’ states that] “the articles can improve over time, but there’s always an [emphasis on] change rather than something finalized.” I wasn’t aware that knowledge was a static thing. […] I think you should talk to our nation’s medical schools. They seem to have advanced beyond the world of Hippocrates and the Greek doctors in the past few years and might be teaching something that is dangerous.

Intrigue, indeed. My question is how will Middlebury students be taught to evaluate their information sources after they leave college? Who will tell them what to trust then?

Communities Are As Communities Do

Right there are the beginning of Esther Dyson‘s ten-year-old book, Release 2.1, she alerts us to the Web 2.0 challenge we’re we’re now beginning to understand: The challenge for us all is to build a critical mass of healthy communities on the Net and to design good basic rules for its public spaces so that […] » about 300 words

Helsinki Complaints Choir

Though some people prefer the Birmingham choir to Helsinki’s, there’s certainly something to be said about complaining in song, and something more when it’s in a language I can’t begin to understand. One blogger remarked of the video: To think of what might of been. What if I’d moved in with a bunch of angst […] » about 400 words

And Then The Feds Blocked Me

Via a friend who coordinated a program I presented at not long ago I received this message about difficulty accessing my blog post with notes from the presentation:

Do you have the notes electronically that you could send? Believe it or not our federal government internet filter is blocking access to the blog site below…..big brother is truly at work these days…..

Jessamyn has been dealing with this for a while now, but this is the first I’d learned that I’d been blocked.

It’s good to know that my site has joined the ranks of those like Jessamyn’s and MySpace and probably thousands (millions?) of others that are blocked but shouldn’t be. Thinking of that, I wanted to find a list of those websites, but Google came up short. Any suggestions?

What I did find, however, amused me: <a href=“http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_connect_to_myspace_at_school.html” title=““How can I connect to MySpace at school?” from the Ask Dave Taylor! Tech Support Blog”>How can I connect to MySpace at school?, What are YOU looking at?, and Elementary Student Threatened With Psychiatric Evaluation After Visiting 9/11 Websites.

And Fell The Wall

It’s worth taking a moment to remember that the Berlin Wall fell this day in 1989. Though orders had been been given, they were botched by East German propaganda minister Günter Schabowski, who mistakenly announced in a press conference that restrictions on border crossings would be lifted immediately. In fact, restrictions were to be lifted […] » about 300 words

Ministry of Truth = George Bush’s Whitehouse

The Huffington Post pointed out how the White House is doctoring video of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech from May 2003. Visitors to whitehouse.gov now get a video that crops out the mission accomplished sign.

How Orwellian will this president get? “The future of evil is in manipulating information.”

I Hope You’re All Voting Today

Okay, even if this Diesel Sweeties cartoon is a little disheartening, please vote. The fact is, vote suppression is probably more likely than vote fraud. A tip of the hat to Lichen for alerting me to this, and for making the point that our users’ notions of “authority” are among the fastest changing features of […] » about 100 words

The Political Parties In Vermont

Cliff took a picture of his absentee ballot because the new parties were just too good: Dennis Morriseau is the Impeach Bush Now candidate for Congress and Peter Moss is the Anti-Bushist Candidate for Senate. Anti-Bushist Candidate, Dennis Morriseau, Impeach Bush Now, Peter Moss, VT, Vermont, ballot, election, elections, political parties, vote » about 100 words

Midterms

Mentioned earlier, but worth mentioning again: TrueMajorityACTION’s Take It Back campaign. Among the videos and political graffiti of the moment, don’t miss Freedom, Beat Box Bush, and Hijacking Catastrophe. And as funny as the Brazillion Joke is, we need a government that doesn’t lie, a government that’s smart, a government that cares for its people, […] » about 100 words

Network-Enabled Snooping In The Physical World

We’ve got OCR. We’ve got cameraphones. We’ve got web-based license plate lookup services. Amazon Japan has a fancy cameraphone-based product search feature. What’s more naive, imagining that somewhere somebody has a SMS/MMS-based license plate snooping and facial recognition services and fingerprint scanners, or imagining that they don’t? cameraphone, civil liberties, facial recognition, license plate recognition, […] » about 100 words

GoogleSmacked

At a time when people are still wowing over the Google-YouTube deal (and wondering why their 2.0 company didn’t get bought for $1.6 billion), it’s good to know that Marc Cantor is dead down on it. Not because of the copyright issues or “limited” advertising potential of YouTube that others cite, but apparently because he […] » about 300 words

Teddy Bear Kills 2,500 Fish

From Associate Press: CONCORD, N.H. — A teddy bear dropped into a pool at a hatchery in Milford, N.H., killed all 2,500 rainbow trout living in the pool. Fish and Game Department hatcheries supervisor Robert Fawcett said the teddy — dressed in a yellow raincoat and hat — clogged a drain earlier this month, blocking […] » about 200 words

Beat Box Bush and DJ Cheney

Bush speech mashups rock. From Google Video:

So, you wanna learn how to beatbox? GWB is back with another amazing performance. Surprisingly he is actually very good.

Previously: State of the Union? Not good.

Also, note the tags on that video, and the way somebody snuck “????? ??? ? ???” past the filters.