I am not easily disturbed by most media. But this advertisement for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 is repulsive. Why would this make me download their browser? (Assuming I have a Windows computer which I do not). Watch it only if you have a strong stomach.
Update: Fake Steve Jobs offers his spot-on take on the ad.
Update 2: Microsoft has pulled the ad.
Finally. The Minnesota high court has ruled him the winner over Norm Coleman.
To celebrate his most recent return, take a look at this video of his Apple keynote in 1998, shortly after his big return to Apple and the launch of the iMac.
This is from the movie MacHeads (iTunes link).
Pirate Bay is preparing close its torrent tracking service (via Torrent Freak):
Alongside the news that The Pirate Bay will sell shares on the Swedish stock market come some other significant changes. The site itself will decentralize and stop hosting and tracking torrents. Instead, The Pirate Bay will use a third party tracker and torrent hosting service to serve its users.
Update from Torrent Freak:
According to Johan Sellström, the CTO of Global Gaming Factory, the plans have changed after Peter Sunde talked to us. “We had discussed closing it down initially so I think that’s why he said so. The plan is to use technology from Peerialism that makes bandwidth utilization more efficient and then it would not make sense to shut it down,” he said, adding. “Peerialism will modify the tracker but it will be backwards compatible. But all this is subject to change if for some reason it would not work. It is our ambition to do so.”
So who knows?
Check out There, I fixed it. A font of imaginative (and sometimes crazy) work-arounds. (via Daring Fireball)
Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker, profiles Chris Anderson, who has a new book out now called Free. A major premise of the book is that “free” will be the future. Of course, there are caveats, but the basic idea is that giving away content or product for free can create huge consumer demand and that demand can be leveraged to make money selling other goods and services that interact in some way with the free item.
This is an interesting read, both to follow Gladwell’s reactions and Anderson’s approach.
Anderson is the editor of Wired and the author of the 2006 best-seller “The Long Tail,” and “Free” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and “yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.”
According to the BBC, Russia and Nigeria formed a new natural gas venture. It has a very unfortunate name. \’a0Could it also be planning to produce rap records? (via TPM)
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Russia’s energy giant Gazprom has signed a $2.5bn (\’a31.53bn) deal with Nigeria’s state operated NNPC, to invest in a new joint venture.
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The new firm, to be called Nigaz, is set to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations in Nigeria.
According to the BBC, Russia and Nigeria formed a new natural gas venture. It has a very unfortunate name. Could it also be planning to produce rap records? (via TPM)
Russia’s energy giant Gazprom has signed a $2.5bn (£1.53bn) deal with Nigeria’s state operated NNPC, to invest in a new joint venture.
The new firm, to be called Nigaz, is set to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations in Nigeria.
Billie Tweets is a tribute to Michael Jackson, using Twitter posts. Very cool. (via lalawag)
Update: And here is Amanda Palmer’s tribute using the same song, recorded live the night Michael Jackson died.
Stonewall Inn, site of the 1969 Stonewall riots, New York City, USA On the Window: „We homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the Village—Mattachine“ (Source: David Carter: Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, St. Martin's Press, 2004, ISBN 0-312-34269-1, S. 143)
Today is the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which started the gay rights movement.
Frank Rich notes that today the progress being made in respect for gay people is much faster among the citizenry than in our government. Don’t ask, don’t tell is the still the law (and you can take a look at this for the pernicious effects of that policy), gay marriage is largely illegal, and equal rights in housing and employment are afforded in only a smattering of jurisdictions.
The cultural climate is far different today, besides. Now, roughly 75 percent of Americans support an end to Don’t Ask, and gay issues are no longer a third rail in American politics. Gay civil rights history is moving faster in the country, including on the once-theoretical front of same-sex marriage, than it is in Washington. If the country needs any Defense of Marriage Act at this point, it would be to defend heterosexual marriage from the right-wing “family values” trinity of Sanford, Ensign and Vitter.
But full gay citizenship is far from complete. “There’s a perception in Washington that you can throw little bits of partial equality to gay people and that gay people will be satisfied with that,” said Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter who won an Oscar for “Milk,” last year’s movie about Harvey Milk, the pioneering gay civil rights politician of the 1970s. Such “crumbs,” Black added, cannot substitute for “full and equal rights in all matters of civil law in all 50 states.”
As anger at White House missteps boiled over this month, the president abruptly staged a ceremony to offer some crumbs. The pretext was the signing of an executive memorandum bestowing benefits to the domestic partners of federal employees. But some of those benefits were already in force, and the most important of them all, health care, was not included because it is forbidden by DOMA.
The New York Times Sunday Magazine runs a moving report about the negative impact of the fall of the American auto industry on the members of the African-American community that achieved middle-class status as a result of the generous pay and benefits. Twenty percent of all autoworkers are African-American. It remains an open question as to what industry will function as a pathway to the middle-class for many, many Americans. The collapse of manufacturing in America is truly a catastrophe for many people, especially in Michigan.
Autoworkers still make up much of what is left of Detroit’s black middle class, but their numbers are shrinking fast. Last year, 20,000 black autoworkers nationwide were either laid off or took buyouts from the Big Three. A disproportionate number of those workers were from Detroit and its environs. When those who remain lose their jobs, have their homes foreclosed — Detroit has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation — and have to move elsewhere in search of work, when they accept an early-retirement package and no longer have any reason to stick around, that will truly spell the end of the city.
We’ve been hearing this phrase — “the death of Detroit” — for years now, but this is what it’s going to look like, how it’s going to play out. There’s a perverse paradox here, one that I was reminded of every time I met a black autoworker in an Obama T-shirt or with an Obama bumper sticker adorning his or her car. We have just elected our first African-American president, and yet, at the same moment, a city and industry that together played a central role in the rise of the black middle class — that made possible lives like Marvin Powell’s — is being destroyed.
Another pet peeve of mine is the claim that driving using a hands-free phone (say with a bluetooth headset) is somehow safe, as compared to holding the phone to your ear. Neither is safe. Both activities should be banned.
Hands-free legislation leads people to believe that it’s safe (or at least safer) to drive while talking on a cell phone with the aid of a hands-free device, reports Governing. Well, it’s not.
Governing points to a 2006 study that found no difference between drivers talking on hand-held phones and those talking on hands-free devices—as soon as people started talking, they became more likely to rear end another car than a legally drunk driver. More recently, researchers found that simply talking on a phone cuts the brain activity devoted to driving nearly 40 percent. Even the wireless industry seems to be having second thoughts: Traditionally opposed to handheld bans, in January the industry shifted its official line to “neutral.”
