The forward slashes at the beginning of internet addresses have long annoyed net users and now the man behind them has apologised for using them.

lol

BBC NEWS | Technology | Berners-Lee 'sorry' for slashes

"Thinking aloud is a habit responsible for much of mankind's misery."

- "Benjamin Franklin" in HBO's John Adams

A prerequisite for free political discourse is that people feel like they can get up in the morning and throw some thoughts out on the public Internet on their way out the door to work and right or wrong the worst thing they might expect is a reply from someone who disagrees with them.

If we are to have intellectual property rights there must be a process for removing infringing content, but that process must be precisely applied and carefully limited, least it become a tool for over-broad acts of retaliation and censorship through intimidation.

If our legal system provides a mechanism for retaliation against disfavored opinions and our culture approves of its use, if people are made to feel that some day, when they least expect it, something they wrote on a personal blog might get them in real trouble, the whole public sphere will be diminished, and our democracy with it.

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned Texas Instruments (TI) today not to pursue its baseless legal threats against calculator hobbyists who blogged about potential modifications to the company's programmable graphing calculators....

"The DMCA should not be abused to censor online discussion by people who are behaving perfectly legally," said Tom Cross, who blogs at memestreams.net. "It's legal to engage in reverse engineering, and its legal to talk about reverse engineering."

Coverage on Slashdot, CNET, Ars, BoingBoing.

EFF Warns Texas Instruments to Stop Harassing Calculator Hobbyists | Electronic Frontier Foundation

9/11 happened a long time ago.

xkcd - A Webcomic - Scary

Dan Gillmor offers a manifesto for better journalism. There are a lot of good ideas in here. This is an example:

7. We would replace PR-speak and certain Orwellian words and expressions with more neutral, precise language. If someone we interview misused language, we would paraphrase instead of using direct quotations. (Examples, among many others: The activity that takes place in casinos is gambling, not gaming. There is no death tax, there can be inheritance or estate tax. Piracy does not describe what people do when they post digital music on file-sharing networks.)

The new rules of news | Dan Gillmor |

"For three weeks only, Amazon and Mojo Nixon are offering his entire catalog in MP3 format completely free, including his latest album, Whiskey Rebellion."

All of Mojo Nixon in free, legal MP3 - Boing Boing

This is absolutely mind boggling.

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad... Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration.

Seriously!? In my time I've seen many examples of lawyers abusing the imbalanced negotiating position present in employment contacts but this takes the cake. An agreement not to press charges for rape? Are you fucking kidding me?!

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.”

On the Senate floor, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) spoke against the amendment, calling it “a political attack directed at Halliburton.” In the end, Franken won the debate. His amendment passed by a 68-30 vote, earning the support of 10 Republican senators including that of newly-minted Florida Sen. George LeMieux.

30 United States Senators voted against this? What could the basis of their opposition possibly be? Al Franken is not above political grandstanding at all, but when push comes to shove, why would you oppose this? I've searched on Google for an alternative perspective to no avail. Does anyone know a source where these people have articulated their position? As LeMieux put it:

"I can't see in any circumstance that a woman who was a victim of sexual assault shouldn't have her right to go to court."

If anything Franken's amendment does not go far enough. This is prima facie evidence that there is a serious structural problem with employment contracts. No contract clause of this sort ought to be respected in any context relevant to US law and major reform of rules surrounding US employment contracts is needed.

People who voted against this amendment include:
Alexander (R-TN)
Bond (R-MO)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Corker (R-TN)
Isakson (R-GA)

The Halliburton/KBR employment contract rape clause.

There is going to be little demand for NASA's Space Station Webcam because it only really operates during the wee hours of the morning and its pretty grainy. In order for this to work you have to be able to provide people with a live view from space that is actually live and available when they want it, so they can put it up places and always expect it to show them a changing view of space - so they can allow it to be a part of the atmosphere of a room.

People don't appreciate the power of ambient television. Television as atmosphere - as background. Thats the reason they ruined MTV. They found that people paid more attention if they had shows on instead of videos. If people paid more attention they made more money. So they made shows, and in doing so they destroyed one of the more interesting parts of the world I grew up in, a TV channel that was kind of like a radio station. You could leave it playing. It just presented interesting pop culture all the time. If you wanted to, you could pay attention for a few minutes, maybe see something interesting. Then you could go back to doing something else and let it fall into the background, and it didn't disturb you. You could half listen to it, just like people half listen to the radio while driving or doing other things. You could multitask it.

You can't really do that with a normal television show. You loose track of things; you can't follow the plot unless you devote your attention to it. And radio stations aren't always as interesting as MTV was. There is a lot of depth to a video - a lot to process. MTV in some respects epitomized what Brian Eno talks about with his music.

I like [Ambient Music] as an ambiguous term. It gives me a certain latitude.

It has two major meanings. One is the idea of music that allows you any listening position in relation to it. This has widely been misinterpreted by the press (in their infinite unsubtlety) as background music. I mean music that can be background or foreground or anywhere, which is rather a different idea.

Most music chooses its own position in terms of your listening to it. Muzak wants to be back there. Punk wants to be up front. Classical wants to be another place. I wanted to make something you could slip in and out of. You could pay attention or you could choose not to be distracted by it if you wanted to do something while it was on. I can’t read with a pop record playing, or with most classical records. They’re not intended to leave that part of the mind free – my mind, anyway. Ambient music allows many different types of attention.

The other meaning is... creating an ambience, a sense of place that complements and alters your environment. Both meanings are contained in the word ambient.

Digital picture frames are good examples of ambient television. It ought to be easy to su... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: NASA - NASA TV - Space Station Webcam - Television as Atmosphere

For a long time I've wanted a webcam in space. There have been numerous posts on MemeStreams about Gore's attempt at this. Fortunately now that the Republicans are out of power, his satellite may finally launch, but its going to take a long time to make that a reality.

But Gore's satellite is an ambitious project. When I originally considered this I was thinking of a cheap camera on a cheap satellite - something within the budget of amateur satellite operators and not a nation state.

But its worth pointing out that NASA has a space station. They send people up there all the time. Why not just send someone up with a camera and leave it running all the time? How expensive could that possible be?

In March NASA finally did this, sort of. They announced a channel (linked here) with views of the earth from one of the cameras that is already mounted to the outside of the International Space Station. You can now tune into this channel and see exactly what you would want to see if you were actually in space. Its the next best thing to being there.

Why couldn't they have done this before? Is it possible that this was announced in March because we have a new Presidential administration?

Whatever the reason, its here now. Although for some reason today its only showing telemetry data. I wonder how often it shows actual footage. I wonder if I can get this in HD?

Update: Apparently this only works when the crew is asleep. They are awake now, so I will have to try later. As for HD, not on my cable system, or on Direct TV. It doesn't even sound like this channel goes out over C-Band.

There is going to be little demand for this because it only really operates during the wee hours of the morning and its pretty grainy.

NASA - NASA TV - Space Station Webcam

Clearly corporate America sees the DMCA as authorizing them to censor any material on the Internet that they disapprove of.

Last month, Xeni blogged about the photoshop disaster that is this Ralph Lauren advertisement, in which a model's proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body ("Dude, her head's bigger than her pelvis"). Naturally, Xeni reproduced the ad in question. This is classic fair use: a reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting," etc.

However, Ralph Lauren's marketing arm and its law firm don't see it that way. According to them, this is an "infringing image," and they thoughtfully took the time to send a DMCA takedown notice to our awesome ISP, Canada's Priority Colo.

For a brand like Ralph Lauren, class matters. This obviously photoshopped image was pretty classless and it placed RL in rather philistine company on Photoshop Disasters. But, it was forgettable. An attempt to use baseless legal threats to enjoin the fundamental rights of a popular blog will not be so quickly forgotten. RL ought to apologize, lest that little horse become a symbol for having absolutely no respect for the right to freedom of speech.

Ralph Lauren DMCA's BoingBoing