I will not buy any more music or see any more movies if they have anything to do with any of these entertainment conglomerates. I will shortly be cancelling my Comcast home internet and replacing it with DSL. I am going to tell them the reason why is because of their support for SOPA.
I will not be watching any more major league baseball, basketball, or football games. It's going to be harder not to support organizations such as 3M and Underwriters Laboratories, but for consumer goods like shoe makers and entertainment industry content providers, the choice is easy to live by.
Hit them where it hurts: the almighty dollar.
1-800 Contacts, Inc. 1-800-PetMeds 3M Company ABRO Industries, Inc. Acushnet Company Adidas America Advanced Medical Technology Association Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers American Association of Independent Music American Federation of Musicians Americans for Tax Reform Association of American Publishers Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association Beam Global Spirits &Wine Blue Sky Studios, Inc. Bose Corporation Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) Burberry CBS Corporation Comcast Concerned Women for America Council of State Governments Deluxe Entertainment Services Group Inc., Directors Guild of America Dow Chemical Electronic Components Industry Association Eli Lilly and Company Entertainment Software Association Estee Lauder Companies Ford Motor Company Greeting Card Association HarperCollins Publishers Independent Film & Television Alliance International Association of Fire Fighters International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers International Brotherhood of Teamsters International Trademark Association Johnson & Johnson Kekepana International Services Let Freedom Ring LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton Major League Baseball Merck Motion Picture Association of America National Association of Manufacturers National Association of Theatre Owners National Basketball Association National Cable & Telecommunications Association National Confectioners Association National Criminal Justice Association National District Attorneys Association National Electrical Manufacturers Association National Football League National Music Publishers' Association National Retail Federation NBC Universal News Corporation Nike, Inc. Nintendo Outdoor Industry Association Pfizer Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America Philip Morris International Recording Industry Association of America Retail Industry Leaders Association Screen Actors Guild Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council Society of Plastics Industry Software & Information Industry Association Sony Music Entertainment Sony Pictures Entertainment Specialty Equipment Market Association Sporting Goods Manufacturer's Association Taylor Made Golf Company, Inc. The Walt Disney Company Tiffany & Co. Timberland Company Time Warner U. S. Chamber of Commerce Underwriters Laboratories Inc. Universal Music Group Inc. Viacom Walmart Walt Disney Company Warner Music Group Xerox Corporation
System Primitives:
We are the direct manifestation of a Citizen's Network Anxiety; our metal and
flesh yields from a citizen's networked fears, doubts, delusions and the lies of others.
We carry the signal and as such are a part of that signal. What passes through
the air will pass through us.
We span the space between the invisible and the corporeal; as Adaptors
comprised of flesh and metal, we capture and reconstruct that which hides in
the air.
We are prisms: a citizen's network fears, doubts, delusions, desires and lies will
be revealed through us.
We are the lightning in an age of Cloud Computing.
All the time, we hear new horror stories of night raids gone bad, where women, children get hurt, and dogs, get shot. The best example being a raid in Columbia, Missouri just a few weeks ago. Alyona discusses these cases with police militarization expert, Reason Magazine's Radley Balko.
Nowadays, people have submitted ever bigger portions of their lives to "gaming machines" that make things at least superficially easier and simpler, but whose internal rules they don't necessarily understand at all. A substantial portion of today's social interaction in developed countries, for example, takes place in on-line social networking services. Under their hoods, these services calculate things like message visibility -- that is, which messages and whose messages are supposed to be more important for a given user. For most people, however, it seems to be completely OK that a computer owned by a big, distant corporation makes such decisions for them using a secret set of rules. They just care about the fun.
...
Video games, in many ways, surpasses traditional passive media in the potential of mental manipulation. A well-known example is the so-called Tetris effect caused by a prolonged playing of a pattern-matching game. The game of Tetris "programs" its player to constantly analyze the on-screen wall of blocks and mentally fit different types of tetrominos in it. When a player stops playing after several hours, the "program" may remain active, causing the player to continue mentally fitting tetrominos on outdoor landscapes or whatever they see in their environment. Other kinds of games may have other kinds of effects. I have personally also experienced an "adventure game effect" that caused me to unwillingly think about real-world things and locations from the point of view of "progressing in the script". Therefore, I don't think it is a very far-fetched idea that spending a lot of time on an interactive website gives our brains a permission to adapt to the "game mechanics" and unnoticeably alter the way how we look at the world.
...
The most prominent game-mechanical element in Facebook is "Like", which affects nearly everything on the site. It is a simple and easily processable signal whose use is particularly encouraged. In its internal game, Facebook scores users according to how active "likers" they are, and gives more visibility to the messages of those users that score higher. Moderate users of Facebook, who use their whole brain to consider what to "Like" or not or what to share and not, gain less points and less visibility. This is how Facebook rewards the "virtuous" users and punishes the "sinful" ones.
Decius wrote: Probably the best video of the tornado that hit Tuscaloosa - If you look carefully you can see large objects that were picked up and are spinning around in the storm.
Check this one out:
That sound you hear is this guy's big clanking brass balls.
Radley Balko of Reason.com posted this Tampa news channel's cheerful puff piece about a federal check point set up at a Greyhound bus station to pretend to stop terrorists, as well as nab unregistered immigrants, drug dealers, and cash smugglers.
It's not difficult to envision the day where anyone wishing to take mass transportation in this country will have to first submit to a government checkpoint, show ID, and answer questions about any excess cash, prescription medication, or any other items in his possession the government deems suspicious. If and when that happens, freedom of movement will essentially be dead. But it won't happen overnight. It'll happen incrementally. And each increment will, when taken in isolation, appear to some to be perfectly reasonable.
