] As already reported on quite a few blogs, Jeremy was
] detained and interrogated by US Immigration when he
] arrived in New York last week for a meeting with
] McGraw-Hill to discuss a great business opportunity for
] Jeremy in the area of blogging. It appears that the
] immigration people simply did not believe that Jeremy
] could make a living as a blogger. And they gave him the
] third degree - including an humiliating strip search - as
] a result for some hours. And banned him from entering the
] US.

Protecting our borders does not involve creating an opportunity for people who have chips on their shoulders to harrass random travellers. We need a bill of rights for travellers.

[Politech] Don't say blogger to customs!

] I'm Stratton, the CEO. This is a picture of me on the
] left. Nice tie eh?

IDN spoofing Verisign parody example

The FCC under Martin is likely to be more active on indecency than under Powell.

Coming soon: More bullshit enforcement of a specific set of cultural values on what should be a free environment for all culture.

American puritan values, new and improved. Next time a culture decides to escape westward to a new land, to practice their own values, it will require building an artificial continent in the Pacific. No fear, there is still space.

Washington needs to concern itself with managing the allocation and usage of the spectrum, not the content passed therein. The engineer should be limited to approved application of craft within the spectrum, but the purveyors of art and culture should not be limited in their ability to use the spectrum to share the products of their craft.

A grey line was already passed in regard to the broadcast flag. Now we are approaching the fine black lines. There is no level of momentum that can pierce the brick wall on the other side of those lines.

FCC's New Standards-Bearer

] Due to the fact that Jonnyx has been unresponsive to
] email and voicemail for over 48 hours we are proud to be
] able to make this once in a lifetime offer directly to
] YOU! Item is a slightly used Electric Cattle Prod that
] has been blessed by the Reverend Pope Jonny Anonymous
] himself!!! Item delivers high voltage shocks upon
] application!

My cattle-prod technique is unstoppable.

eBay item - Electric Shock Cattle Prod NORESERVE!!! L@@K!

These are histograms of the timestamps for all entries posted to three MemeStreams:

Jeremy, from the first post on October 8, 2001 through the post previous to this one on March 12, 2005;

Decius, from the first post on September 5, 2001 through the latest post on March 11, 2005; and

Rattle, from the first post on September 8, 2001 through the latest post on March 8, 2005.

You'll notice significant differences among the three graphs.

The X axis shows time of day (in Pacific time). Each day of the week is shown in a different row and color along the Y axis. The height of each bar in the Z axis represents the cumulative number of posts bearing a timestamp of the corresponding day and time.

Meme Maps for 'Jeremy', 'Decius', and 'Rattle', September 2001 - March 2005

] Warren Buffett, one of the world's most successful
] investors, has launched his most withering attack to date
] on the US trade deficit, describing Americans as "rich
] spending junkies" who could turn into a nation of
] "sharecroppers".

Contrast this with another choice. Music: Download and own? Or subscribe and stream.

Guardian Unlimited | Buffett attacks American spending junkies

] The advantages are spread widely. For the entertainment
] industry itself, recommendations are a remarkably
] efficient form of marketing, allowing smaller films and
] less-mainstream music to find an audience. For consumers,
] the improved signal-to-noise ratio that comes from
] following a good recommendation encourages exploration
] and can reawaken a passion for music and film,
] potentially creating a far larger entertainment market
] overall. (The average Netflix customer rents seven DVDs a
] month, three times the rate at brick-and-mortar stores.)
] And the cultural benefit of all of this is much more
] diversity, reversing the blanding effects of a century of
] distribution scarcity and ending the tyranny of the hit.
]
] Such is the power of the Long Tail. Its time has come.

] Rule 1: Make everything available
] Rule 2: Cut the price in half. Now lower it.
] Rule 3: Help me find it

This article might as well be a summary of much discussion here on MemeStreams about the future of media sales.

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail

] In common parlance, left is clearly code for "feckless,
] pseudo-intellectual wiener," while right is code for
] "winner" and "the people who are actually running
] things while you assholes are reading James Joyce."
] Left also emphatically stands for "wrong side of
] history," while right is explicitly understood to mean
] the only remaining legitimate vision for future social
] organization.

In other words, the US has gone so far to the right it has no idea where the center is.

Right Wing, Left Wing, Chicken Wing

] The ASCAP license is only the tip of the iceberg: there
] are also comparable licenses for BMI and SESAC, two other
] performing rights organizations; mechanical rights from
] the Harry Fox Agency, _and_ a "master use license" to be
] negotiated with the record labels for each track. The
] latter can be under any terms the label chooses, and they
] can refuse you outright.

ASCAP only has the right to license public performance of non-dramatic works. This is outside the scope of PROs. It is not a performance in the manor a "stream" is viewed, but a mechanical copy. Someone equated the "cast" part of podcast with streaming. The more knowledgeable techies know that even a stream is technically a copy of bits, but the copy prevention (legally protected from tampering via DMCA) changes the way its viewed.

Podcasts are not broadcasts, or more specificly, not public performance. If you played a podcast for a group of people in a situation outside a normal gathering of friends/family at a location such as your house (like a bar, coffee house, restaurant, hold music, a ra stream, etc), you would need a license from the respective PRO to play the podcast, regardless of how the mechanical licensing angle is resolved. However, a PRO is not able to license the mechanical copy. If a podcast was actually a "stream", it would be different. Its a different right. (Assuming your podcast contained protected works...)

Depending on the usage of the work within the podcast, it may be fair use.

Boing Boing: Wil Wheaton: So, ASCAP to *license* podcasts? Readers respond.

] LGL is a compendium of applications for making the
] visualization of large networks and trees tractable. LGL
] was specifically motivated by the need to make the
] visualization and exploration of large biological
] networks more accessible. Essentially the network is a
] graph, which is the data that you define, and LGL is
] responsible for showing it to you.

Soon to be played with...

Large Graph Layout (LGL) - Beyond Graphviz