Archive for the ‘culture’ Category.
5th November 2004, 04:48 pm
In this interview of the brilliantly talented bjork, she has some enlightening words about the current state of vanilla music and the Internet’s miraculous intervention:
So Björk is not superstitious then?
“You know, its ironic that just at the point the lawyers and the businessmen had calculated how to control music, the internet comes along and fucks everything up.” Björk gives the finger again, this time waving it into the air. “God bless the internet,” she adds.
And what about you, then?
“I’ll still be there, waving a pirate flag.”
I love it… er, well… I love her 
29th October 2004, 10:31 am
26th October 2004, 02:59 pm
It’s been rumored all over the Internet for weeks… Finally, the day has come when the “pod” part of the ipod really comes in to affect. See… everyone saw this coming… If it was destined to just be a music machine, it would have been called “iMusic” or “iPlayer” but when Jobs introduced it a few years ago, it was introduced as a device that would carry your stuff, not just your music. So, today.. the iPod carries Music, Data and now…. PHOTOS. Truly bad ass.
http://www.apple.com/ipodphoto/
On a less-exciting note, the sell-out U2 iPod leaves little to desired. Other than the cool darth-vader color, this iPod is very “meh” in my opinion…
http://www.apple.com/ipod/u2/
26th October 2004, 10:39 am
Wow, this is.. just awesome. Those Creative Commons folks sure make a lot of sense. This is the new license they made to let artists stamp their work in an official format: Sample this! or Sample this, just not for commercial use. or Sample This, the whole thing if you want, just don’t resell it at all.
I’m actually really pumped about this because I’ve always felt like there’s a whole army of musicians around me, and I’d love to do an audio interview with them and release the audio in CC format. It’s a great way to let the underground musician get some street cred, and it lets the listener get some insights into what underground musicians think about music and creativity… and it’s also great inspiration to keep creating music. With the audio as CC format, it then is able to be used as part of the creative work for people who get it and are on the same wavelength.
I’ve had a couple of conversations with Derek Scott somewhat recently about music and the future of music, and I remember thinking immediately afterwards, “dang, I wish I’d had that whole conversation recorded!”
25th October 2004, 06:05 pm
Limecat: “is not pleased”
But i am.
25th October 2004, 11:48 am
This is extremely impressive… Pretty smart compared to the “AI” I’ve seen in the past…
http://y.20q.net/anon
13th October 2004, 11:07 am
Ashcroft: “I don’t think we have a public domain attitude.”: “
Or so he is reported to have said here.
Note to General Ashcroft: We checked. You’re right. You don’t. Nor do you have a privacy attitude, a rule of law attitude, or a free speech attitiude.
So here’s the real question: How can you be Attorney General of the US, if you reject so much of the Constitution’s values? (Public Domain, Article I, 8, 8; Privacy, Amendment 4; Rule of Law: the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, in, say, Rumsfeld v. Padilla; Free Speech: Amendment 1).
Stay tuned: Oral arguments in Kahle v. Ashcroft on the 29th. (Could there be a better case name?)
“
(Via Lessig Blog.)
amplifying…
28th September 2004, 10:39 pm
This guy is freaking brilliant. Thank you Mr. You Have Bad Taste In Music… you took the words right out of my mouth.
28th September 2004, 09:28 am
From the Washington Post (link)
Sakinah Aaron was walking into the bus area at the Wheaton Metro station several weeks ago, talking loudly on her Motorola cell phone. A little too loudly for Officer George Saoutis of the Metro Transit Police.
The police officer told Aaron, who is five months pregnant, to lower her voice. She told the officer he had no right to tell her how to speak into her cell phone.
Their verbal dispute quickly escalated, and Saoutis grabbed Aaron by the arm and pushed her to the ground. He handcuffed the 23-year-old woman, called for backup and took her to a cell where she was held for three hours before being released to her aunt. She was charged with two misdemeanors: “disorderly manner that disturbed the public peace” and resisting arrest.
Those are the facts on which both sides agree.
The cops say that she was cursing loudly, and she says that she started cursing AFTER she was thrown to the ground.
The cops have a reputation for being heavy handed – they arrested a 12 year old girl for eating a french-fry and another metro rider for eating a candy bar.
So what is the deal here – why do we have heavy handed thugs who are tasked with trying to get people to talk quiter on their cell phones? Is it a government problem? No.. here’s why….
How about if we try to be a little more considerate. Your freedom ends at the border of my freedom. I guess that’s the thing that bothered me about smokers. All I can ask somebody to do is to not start smoking near me, but more often than not the smoker would blow smoke at me and ask “What are you going to do about it?” Well, the majority has done something about it. We’ve legislated it. Now in California there’s a definite decrease in the number of places where a person can smoke. If smokers had been a little more concerned for others, then maybe it wouldn’t have been legislated.
There was a guy that I worked with that was one of the most fair and considerate people I know. he was as hard as nails, but he wasn’t a jerk. He talked quietly on the cell phone, and more than once he helped carry the luggage of a woman through an airport terminal. He was considerate – he believed in the social contract and he did things because he wanted others to do the same. Why is it that whenever people break the social contract they try to use the constitution (or the bill of rights to be more specific) to justify it? Was the woman wrong? If she was loud on the phone – then yes. She should have appologized and moved on. Was the cop wrong – absolutely! It is never appropriate to throw a woman to the ground and treat her that way! Oh wait I forgot, that’s the social contract talking.
24th September 2004, 11:40 am
Universities offering classes inside of MMOs
Cory Doctorow:
Second Life, the Massively Multiplayer Online world where end users can design and trade their own game-artifacts, is offering free accounts to university profs to disburse to their students for the purpose of conducting in-game classes.
In order to help teachers bring their classes to Second Life, Linden Lab donates accounts for each student, as well as an acre of land in the metaverse for the teacher and students to work and build on. Afterward, anyone wishing to stay a member can do so at half price.
To date, in addition to Delwiche and Beamish, professors from San Francisco State University, the Rochester Institute of Technology and Vassar College have used Second Life in their courses.
Link [Boing Boing]
Totally perfect. In fact, I wish you could do most meetings in SL as well. I wish SL was an adjunct for AIM/iChat. I wish you could pipe video chat into SL, or maybe just provide an interface for alerting you when someone wants to video chat with you. I wish Linden Labs would license the AIM protocol, or tie into Jabber, or something. That would be really awesome.
23rd September 2004, 11:02 am
Xeni, I read this hours ago, and I can’t let this go without responding. As far as I can tell, sony’s main differentiator up until this point is that they specifically _haven’t_ supported MP3, like the rest of the industry, which is why they got totally buried. A sony digital music player wasn’t the same thing as an MP3 player up until this point. So, I have to disagree with your assessment that finally coming onto the same page as the rest of the industry is going to clearly differentiate anything for sony. This announcement is merely to let us know they’re joining the fray of a hot market with overpriced hardware. Woot. Join the crowd, sony. Get a better music licensing experience, sony.
Sony will support MP3 in portable digital music players: “Xeni Jardin:
Sony confirmed yesterday that it plans to add native MP3 support to digital music players, in a move that would clearly differentiate those products from more popular competitors like Apple’s iPod.
The shift from reliance on its proprietary format will begin with flash memory-based players, the electronics giant said, but plans are still being finalized on how and when products will add MP3 support. CNET News.com affiliate ZDNet France first reported of the change in Sony’s strategy for the European market. U.S. representatives said the company is making similar plans here.
Link“
(Via Boing Boing.)
22nd September 2004, 04:50 pm
Holy crap. Wendy, one of my coworkers who I handed my opml list of feeds to get her started with NetNewsWire asked me about iPodder, and I hadn’t really looked into it. I just did. I think it’ll fit perfectly into the musician netlabel project I’m working on. I have an RSS feed set up for news items, it would be (in theory) trivial to add enclosures. When you post a news item, you could potentially just select a song you want to enclose. Then when your subscriber cycles through for an update, they get pushed your new song. This is going to kick ass.
22nd September 2004, 10:48 am
CNN.com – Detained Cat Stevens heading home – Sep 22, 2004
Officials said Islam was on the watch list because of alleged associations and financial support for Muslim charities
“The intelligence community has come into possession of additional information that further heightens our concerns of Yusuf Islam,” Homeland Security spokesman Garrison Courtney told CNN. He would not describe the information further.
Another official said the department is “extremely confident in the information” which “without a doubt” is credible. Officials will not say which charities are involved.
Without a doubt? Like a “Slam Dunk” on the WMD in Iraq? And, I totally love this double standard of Bush pushing “faith based initiatives” on us, but not for muslim charities? Way to uphold that first amendment.
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
Oooh, wait, he’s a british citizen, our laws apply, but not our rights. Wait, i thought we liked the british?
20th September 2004, 03:37 pm
The best audio/visual asynchronous adapted connection I’ve ever experienced.
+
20th September 2004, 10:26 am
From:scooleyatheredotcom
Subject: Re: Didn't get the memo
Date: September 20, 2004 10:20:28 AM PDT
To: webb_jasonatthere.com
Hahahaha, cool.
- Le Roi
On Sep 20, 2004, at 10:14 AM, Jason Webb wrote:
Scoot is an old friend of mine from collage, who was also lead guitarist in my LA band. I just love getting the cool people in my life together.
-j
P.S. I am giving out colored names to all of my friend today. Yours is Le Roi Cooley. You get to keep your last name because of “Cooley High.”
