Hans Engell giver ugens krammer til Retsforbundet (960 x 540) – Go’Morgen Danmark

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQNBD_kspd4

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GALEahJ0jhE

An introduction by Dave Wetzel, Labour Land Campaign

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yltJHY6g5I

Thanks for the feedback, I tried to fit a lot in but I know I missed a bit

My final project I made for my video productions class “Cutaway Productions” (Search them for their channel) at my high school. I don’t own the rights to the song or the pictures and I am not trying to claim them, I just did this video for fun and i spent many a hour on it.

I used Final Cut Pro to make this.

Enjoy!

Song: Mind Heist (yes it is from Inception)
by: Zack Hemsey
Visit his website here: http://www.youtube.com/zackhemsey

Pictures: from all over the internet

some of the space pictures, specifically the ones at 0:02, and 1:59-2:01 are made by the digital artist “antifanfan” and can be found on his youtube video:

also check out his website at www.visionafar.com

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrqqD_Tsy4Q

The documentary about the founders of the Pirate Bay. Share it with the world! Support the filmmakers of this free film here www.tpbafk.tv
A film by Simon Klose

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTOKXCEwo_8

Music video by The Clash performing London Calling. (c) 1979 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT (UK) Limited

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfK-WX2pa8c

When Megaupload was smashed into a billion ice crystals last winter, the movie industry breathed a sigh of relief, and quite rightly so.

What Megaupload did – and this may shock you – was hosted videos uploaded by its users.

The site had no control over what was uploaded and the DMCA allowed for that with a system known as ‘safe harbor’. It’s a pretty unimportant law that allows tens of thousands of companies to avoid trillions in damages caused by other people.

However, in its stupidity Megaupload over-estimated the credibility of the legislation and recklessly followed the DMCA to the letter, even going as fair as allowing rightsholders direct access to the company’s servers to remove content. A wild and stupid move that the company would live to regret.

Megaupload’s blatant following of the law showed that without doubt the company’s operators were all criminals who should be arrested and harshly punished. Not only were they hosting Hollywood movies among billions of other files, but profiting from them too. That was going too far.

If only Megaupload could be more like YouTube they wouldn’t have experienced such a crushing defeat in January. How much more like YouTube they would need to be in order to actually benefit from the DMCA’s safe harbor is up to the whims of the MPAA of course, but we’re pretty sure that since it’s almost Christmas the industry outfit will be keen on forgiveness.

So, since YouTube is operating just fine, when the new Mega launches in January it will presumably model itself on the Google-owned video site and discover It’s a Wonderful Life after all.

It could have drawbacks though – not having the MPAA continuously knocking might leave Kim Dotcom with a certain amount of uneasiness, like something was missing, like having A Christmas Without Snow. Decisions, decisions…

But with the new Mega just around the corner, it must be proving A Fairly Odd Christmas for Dotcom. Not that he’ll be Home Alone or anything like that, but I expect he’d rather be outside with The Snowman his kids might be building (if New Zealand even had any this time of year) instead of being hunched over a computer.

Nevertheless, it’s almost certain he’ll find time for A Christmas Carol, a verse of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer or two, and there’s bound to be lots and lots of gifts – no one could accuse the German of being a Scrooge that’s for sure.

And there’ll be the usual Christmas-themed movies on TV of course, one with awkward titles that can’t so easily be threaded into a sentence about festivities at the Dotcom mansion such as Christmas Child, Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas, A Mom for Christmas and Barbie in a Christmas Carol.

Happy Christmas Everyone!!!!!

…..and long live Mega YouTube!!

URGENT UPDATE: Everyone at Google has been arrested, more when we have it.

Source: YouTube Shows Megaupload How it’s Done with Christmas Pirate Movies

Copyright Monopoly: A lot of today’s bad policy stems from the misconception that the copyright monopoly is related to property rights, an illusion peddled by the copyright industry’s own powerful lobby. The idea that the copyright monopoly would be a property right doesn’t just lack factual basis, but it is 180 degrees and one hundred per cent wrong, factually wrong. The copyright monopoly stands in direct opposition to property rights.

The copyright monopoly is a governmentally-sanctioned private monopoly. No liberal, socialist, green, capitalist, or conservative can defend those constructions from their ideology; this construction only fits corporativist and protectionist ideologies.

Allow us to illustrate with a tangible example: assume that we buy a copy of a chair. We say “a copy”, as it is automatically made from a master in the form of a digital blueprint in some sort of plant; colloquially, we’ve bought “a chair” at IKEA. We own this copy of the chair, we have our receipt here in hand. This physical object, in all its aspects, is our property. We are allowed to do a number of things with this copy of the chair:

• We can take the chair apart, and use pieces of it for new projects that we make in our workshop.
• We can look at the underlying pattern to examine how the chair is built, make an identical copy, and sell it.
• We can put out our chair on the porch and use it there, and we can charge our neighbors to use it if we like.

All of this is typical for property. These are typical actions we can all take with our property without anybody raising an eyebrow. (To counter a common but false objection to this point: while there are some monopolistic protections possible for chairs, the overwhelming majority of chairs don’t come with patent or design patent monopolies, and the everyday chair is perfectly legal to reproduce using your own parts and labor, as is the normal case with property.)

In contrast, assume that we buy a copy of a movie. We say “a copy” as the disc with the movie is automatically made from a master in the form of a digital blueprint in some sort of plant; colloquially, we’ve bought “a movie” at the gas station. We own this copy of the movie, we have our receipt here. This physical object, in all its aspects, is our property. Yet, we are not legally allowed to do certain things with this copy of the movie:

• We are not legally allowed to remix the movie that we own and use parts of it for new projects.
• We are not legally allowed to examine the underlying bitpattern and make an identical copy on a different storage medium which is the property of somebody else, nor are we allowed to sell a copy we have produced with our own property and labor.
• We may not use our movie on the porch, and may not charge our neighbors to use it.

Somebody’s monopoly – a copyright monopoly – overrides our property rights and makes it illegal to use our legal property and exercise our normal property rights using our own work and labor.

The copyright monopoly is a governmentally-sanctioned private monopoly on certain forms of duplication and performance. It doesn’t just stand in opposition to property rights, but to free trade as well.

(Some people would argue that even property as such is a governmentally-sanctioned private monopoly, in order to downplay the fact that the copyright monopoly stands in opposition to property rights, but that would not be what we mean by “property” and “monopoly” as concepts. If I own an umbrella, I control that umbrella. If I have a monopoly on umbrellas, I get to control everybody else’s umbrella too, and get to call on the government to have that enforced.)

It is quite possible to argue for the copyright monopoly from a purely utilitarian, protectionist, or mercantilist perspective, but not from a “property is good” perspective: you will end up in the exact opposite conclusion. By extension, since we know that property rights are good for trade, we also deduce that the copyright monopoly is bad for trade and competition. This comes as no surprise, seeing how the copyright industry has been fighting tooth and nail against the more-efficient industries that would otherwise already have replaced them.

Taken at the International Space Station by astronaut Aki Hoshide (Japan), this awe-inspiring self portrait brings into one frame “the Sun, the Earth, two portions of a robotic arm, an astronaut’s spacesuit, the deep darkness of space, and the unusual camera taking the picture.” You’ll want to click the image above (or this link) to view the picture dubbed “Orbiting Astronaut Self-Portrait” in a worthy larger format.

Find other self-portraits taken in space here and here. And visit NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for more striking images each and every day.

via @coudal

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and now Google Plus and share intelligent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

Astronaut Takes Amazing Self Portrait in Space is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Hvad skal man kalde det… En dokumentaristisk skildring af Aabenraa Statsskoles 2012-studenters forløsning efter 3 hårde år – awesome studentertid!

Håber I kan lide den :)

Musikken, der er brugt, står i end credits.

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xJiLQmmWMo

It has been widely argued that the traditional manufacturing model of non-adjustable standarised products has started to shift towards alternative ways of manufacturing, such as 3D printing and other desktop manufacturing techniques. The need of adjustable or modular machines arose while the need of constantly improving machines and products followed suit. This is the point when peer production products and processes in combination with the “LEGO Bricks” and the LEGO Mindstorms NXT Educational Robotics Kit come to the fore.

A 15-year-old high school student from Greece, Marios Papachristou, has started building an open source LEGO-based 3D printer and he is looking forward to completely materialising his project. This project, inspired by Arthur Sacek’s Milling Machine, builds on the RepRap 3D Printer open designs and knowledge. It aims to motivate people in the fields of art, computers and design communicating the potential of open source and hardware movement. The webpage of the project can be found here.

Marios Papachristou has established a collaboration with the P2P Lab, located in Ioannina (Greece), with the goal to document the development of the project as well as to highlight the socio-economic impact of the conjunction of LEGO and peer production products and processes. Once the project is fully realised we will inform readers of this blog while a wiki section within our wiki will be created to document the on progress project. For the time being you may see pictures of its current status (for hi-re images join the project’s google plus group here).

The RepRap-inspired Lego-based 3D printer

The custom drill head

Y & Z Axises

15-year-old Marios working on his project

Motors controlling Y & Z Axises

Top Perspective View

From The Daily Mail:

The owner of Arsenal Football Club has bought the ultimate field of dreams – an £80 million farm…billionaire businessman Stan Kroenke has found an ideal location for Wenger to be ‘put out to pasture’ – this 124,000 acre ranch in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, USA.

Ignoring the value of the buildings/improvements etc, that’s £645/acre

From The Telegraph:

The property, if it was [sic] sold for £100 million, would surpass the previous record by £20 million and be the clearest sign that house price crash – the worst since at least the Second World War – might be over.

The stucco-fronted house is at one of London’s most prestigious addresses, Belgrave Square, home to many embassies, including the Portugese and Turkish, as well as Russian and Arab businessemen. It has more than 21,000 sq ft of living space, 20ft ceilings, its own mews house and is understood to contain every conceivable luxury but it has a relatively small garden..

Ignoring the cost/value of the building (21,000 sq ft @ say £500) that’s about £900 million/acre, i.e. over a million times as expensive (which is what we would expect).

Men indtil da blot en hurtig kommentar på denne kommentar af Krister Meyersahm til Berlingskes netomtale af relanceringen (af uransagelige årsager kan jeg ikke afgive min kommentar på deres site) :

Ingen kan betale skat uden indkomst.
…”Partiet vil blandt andet gå til valg på at sænke skatten på arbejde ved til gengæld at øge husejeres beskatning, så man ikke har arbejdsfri indkomster”.

Arbejdsfrie indkomster? Ja, tak – men husejernes forøgelse ( eventuelle ) af deres ejendommes værdi, beskattes jo allerede. Vil man have mere end det, nærmer man sig det begreb man kalder konfiskation og det er ikke tilladt jvnf. Grundloven.

Desuden – hvorfor gå over åen efter vand? Sagen er jo at ingen kan betale nogen skat uden at have en indkomst fra arbejde eller som kapitalindkomst. Så, den smarteste måde, billigste og mest enkle, er simpelthen at tage skatten ved kilden – nemlig af indkomsten.

Indkomstbeskatning er en kæmpe byrde, fordi den belaster de, der bidrager produktivt til vores samfund. Når vi så samtidig undlader at beskatte de kolossale værdier og værdistigninger på fast ejendom (som i alt overvejende grad handler om beliggenhedsværdier) inviterer det til spekulation i disse, og er reelt at regne for en omfordeling imellem de der arbejder – og de der ikke gør. Når lønnen samtidig presses, og virksomhederne presses på produktionen, er det dybt urimeligt at fastholde det nuværende system – og at argumentere for, at dette er “den smarteste, billigste og mest enkle” måde at beskatte på afspejler ikke bare et syn på skat som rene teknikaliteter (et syn man kun kan udvikle ved at distancere sig fuldstændigt fra virkeligheden og de konsekvenser politik altid har for almindelige mennesker), men også en total blindhed for de kolossale skadevirkninger det aktuelle skattesystem har for vores økonomi og samfund – skadevirkninger der betales dyrt i ulykkelige menneskeskæbner.

Det er kort sagt ikke rimeligt, at mange skal knokle – og knokle hårdere end før, og samtidig betale prisen i besparelser på offentlig service og udsalg af offentlige institutioner – og få mindre ud af det, for at nogle få fortsat kan nyde godt af arbejdsfrie indtægter. Det her handler ikke om den almindelige husejer, men om at lette presset på nogle af de der er allermest pressede i det danske samfund, ved at lette presset på priserne, herunder prisen på f.eks. arbejde.

Skat er ikke teknikaliteter. Det er ikke ligemeget hvor man “tager skatten” – som om at det ikke handlede om at foretage en omfordeling. Det gør det – fra de, der besidder privilegierne – til de, der ikke gør, og som må arbejde enddog endnu hårdere, når økonomien presses som den gør pga. den skødesløse spekulation i værdistigningerne, som har bragt os i den aktuelle krise.

“Og hører I ikke i al den dumme Snak, vi fyldes med, vi behøver blot tænke på vore Aviser, Narre pjatte, der lider af Sædelighedens, Lovens eller Kristen­dommens fixe Ide osv., og som kun synes at vandre frie omkring, fordi det Galehus, de spaserer rundt i, indtager saa stort et Rum? Man forsøge blot en­gang at røre ved en saadan Nars fixe Ide, og man vil hurtigt blive nødt til at værge sine Rygstykker mod den Gales Underfundighed. Thi ogsaa deri ligner disse store Narre de saakaldte smaa Narre.”

–Max Stirner, i Den Eneste og hans Ejendom, 1844 (dansk oversættelse 1902)

Pirate Parties – Zacqary Adam Green: “Pirate Party? Are you serious?” I hear that all the time when I’m canvassing. “With a name like that, how will you succeed?” Well, I reply, it got your attention, didn’t it?

The last time we canvassed in New York City parks, most conversations went something like this:
“Hi, are you tired of politics?”
The person keeps walking.
“Left vs. right always saying the same thing?”
They keep walking.
“I’m with the Pirate Party!”
They stop. They slowly turn around.

Pirates. Arr, shiver me timbers. Swillin’ grog an’ plunderin’ yer treasure. That’s the image the name immediately conjures to many people. They laugh. We tell them that we don’t have a chairman, we have a captain, and they laugh even more. We tell them we want to declare mutiny against the corrupt government, and their sides are splitting.

But now they’ve let their guard down. They’re paying attention. So we talk about how privacy and freedom of speech are at threat. We talk about how intellectual property laws are actually harming, not helping, the economy. We talk about liquid democracy, and its potential to make people more informed, engaged, and in control of their governance. And by golly, they listen. And it sounds like a pretty good idea.

Contrast this to being serious. What if we called ourselves the Knowledge Party, or the Intellectual Freedom Party? The Free Culture Party? The Empowerment Party? Most people wouldn’t give us a second glance. Especially in countries like the United States, where political apathy is at an all-time high, being safe and serious won’t get you anywhere. Counter-intuitively, acting serious is the biggest barrier to being taken seriously that a sociopolitical movement could possibly erect. If you want to engage only a small subset of policy wonks and hardcore activists, by all means, be professional. But if you want the attention of a public that increasingly gets more of its news from satirists and comedians than from journalists, there are worse things you could do than wearing an eyepatch and putting a parrot on your shoulder.

Don’t run from the pirate imagery. Ham it up. And for goodness’ sake, don’t talk like a politician. Loosen up. Talk to people like they’re your friends, get colloquial. Have a sense of humor, and don’t be afraid that cracking a joke or being tongue-in-cheek will harm your credibility. For every boring, uptight person whose support you lose by shouting “Y’arrrrrrr!”, you’ll gain the support of ten awesome people who haven’t paid attention to politics in years.

Et godt eksempel er Wi-Fi. Vi har seriøst brug for en teknologi, hvor vores individuelle trådløse netværk kan smelte sømløst sammen med andres, fremfor at spærre for andres brug af det trådløse spektrum.

Sidder p.t. i et tog på trådløst 3G modem. Kan jeg komme på nettet? Nej. Simpelthen fordi andres netværk “spærrer” for mit netværk. Den forretningsmodel der er baseret på “hver sit” er som en spændetrøje for hvor langt vi kan rykke i fht. at udnytte vore digitale netværk.

Vi hegner os selv inde digitalt, som vi gjorde og har gjort med vore analoge besiddelser, selvom der ikke er nogen egentlig grund til at gøre det. Digitale ressourcer er qua digital kopiering pr definition uudtømmelige, og den eneste grund til at fastholde “begrænsninger” er hensynet til en partikulær, eksemplar-baseret industriel forretningsmodel. Den bliver vi nødt til at vinke farvel til, hvis vi vil nyde det fulde udbytte – samfundsmæssigt, individuelt, kulturelt – af vore digitale netværk. Det er muligt, at det ikke kommer til at ske uden sværdslag, men det er en helt nødvendig forandring.

Lige i øjeblikket sker der så det, at der trædes vande. Imens folkene bag visionære tjenester som The Pirate Bay og MegaUpload retsforfølges, som om de var forbrydere, og ikke belønnes for deres visionære tænkning, køres hele det silo-baserede App- og iTunes-baserede forretningsmaskineri i stilling, i håbet om, at denne model vil kunne afløse “pirat”-tjenesterne. Sagen er bare den, at det skifte der finder sted lige nu, ikke handler om pirateri – men om et paradigmeskifte i vores måde at arbejde, tænke og dele informationer på, som ikke så let lader sig bekæmpe. Magten flyttes fra få vertikalt orienterede, centraliserede filtre (forlag, tv-stationer m.v.) til en bredt horisontalt funderet dele-kultur og dele-økonomi, der opererer på tværs af medier. De værktøjer og teknologier der understøtter dette nye paradigmes behov har en fremtid – de der ikke gør, har ikke.

Truslen er imidlertid, at skadevirkningerne af rettighedsindustriernes sidste krampetrækninger kan være store og langsigtede, hvis de får held til at spredes, som det f.eks. sker p.t. med indførelse af amerikansk-inspireret copyright-lovgivning i tredieverdenslande, under hårdt pres fra USA. Nogle af følgevirkningerne er f.eks. en underminering af retssikkerhed for oppositionsgrupper, hvis computere kan konfiskeres uden rettergang med henvisning til ‘pirateri’.

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6EI6qB5E0c

En kærlig hyldest til to store mænd i dansk film: Jørgen Leth og Hans Oluf Schou.

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cDejpqFpeI

Infopolicy: In a welcome gesture on October 16, Dr. Richard Stallman made a public note supporting the Swedish Pirate Party’s position regarding trademarks, patent monopolies, and copyright monopolies.

The article summarizing the party positions has been posted here earlier in a translation from a Swedish original. In a nutshell:

• Patent monopolies are counterproductive to innovation, and the entire patent system needs to go. Only the pharma industry needs re-regulation, which can be accomplished by opening up research from today’s healthcare subsidies and still saving tax money.
• Trademarks are okay as long as they protect consumers from fraud, etc, but never okay when they punish consumers.
• The copyright monopoly needs to be cut down to a baseline commercial-use monopoly of five years, extendable to 20 years through registration, and remixes are always ok, while digital restriction mechanisms are never so.

This is a large step forward in the long-standing discussion between the Pirate Party movement and the Free Software movement about the effect of copyright reform on the GPL and free software. Several activists have worried about the standing of free software and the GPL, which depends on copyright monopoly law for its enforcement of code freedom, when that mechanism is weakened – but Dr. Stallman has previously pointed out that it is a feature of the GPL that it scales with the strength of the copyright monopoly laws.

Additionally, as registration of a work is required to extend the baseline commercial monopoly to 20 years in the Swedish Pirate Party’s position, this provides a possible future legal hook for source code escrow mechanisms – for the source code to be made public on expiration of the monopoly – in exchange for the state granting an extension of the commercial monopoly. This hook isn’t present in today’s legal framework.

With Dr. Stallman’s note of agreement with these positions, I believe that this discussion will make it possible for our movements to align against the external threat, and also that such an alignment is necessary for a long-term victory for the freedom to code, create, and innovate without asking permission.

Dr. Stallman rightly points out, however, that it is unfortunate to describe the three laws of trademarks, copyright monopolies, and patent monopolies (and no other laws) in the same article, as it reinforces the counterproductive idea that these unrelated laws should be grouped together.

During the dying days of August, Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was arrested by Cambodian police in Phnom Penh, the city he made his home several years ago. From his comfortable apartment above the Cadillac Bar on the riverfront, Gottfrid was taken into custody.

The immediately recognizable Swede is best known for his connections to a rather infamous BitTorrent site and it was initially presumed he was going back to Sweden to face a pending jail sentence for copyright infringement offenses. That turned out to be only part of the jigsaw.

After landing at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, Gottfrid was hit with new charges relating to the hacking of an IT company closely connected with Sweden’s tax authorities.

Gottfrid has been detained ever since, with little to zero information coming out of the Swedish system as to his health or whereabouts. But one person, his mother Kristina Svartholm, knows exactly where he is.

“He’s being held in a newly built custody house 15 minutes by commute north of the city, Häktet i Sollentuna,” Kristina told TorrentFreak. “Very large, very impersonal, very frightening for visitors who don’t like surveillance cameras, lifts that move automatically, security checks…”

Of course, the most important questions concern Gottfrid’s well-being, but first let’s hear a little bit more from Kristina on her son’s circumstances to better understand his position.

“He is in custody suspected of hacking. It is called the ‘Logica case’ for which two other persons were arrested earlier this year. They are still under suspicion but free, waiting for the trial – if it comes to one,” says Kristina.

“This is not a proper case yet, no prosecution so far. The crime is said to have been going on from early 2010 to summer 2012 according to the prosecutor. The reason why Gottfrid is being kept in custody is that he ‘might destroy evidence and disturb the investigation’.”

Three weeks ago the authorities gave another reason why Gottfrid should continue to be locked up, unlike his co-accused who remain free. If he remained at large, the prosecutor argued, he would “continue with criminal activities.”

“Maybe the court realized that this latter claim was a bit stupid because he in fact should be in jail now anyway – if the Swedish police who picked him up in Cambodia were telling the truth,” notes Kristina. “His old Pirate Bay sentence, one year in jail, was what the international spokesman for the Swedish police, as well as people at the Swedish embassy, gave as the reason for bringing him here.”

Whatever the reasons, the end is result is that Gottfrid is now in custody, locked up for 23 hours a day in solitary confinement.

“He is kept under restrictions as decided by the prosecutor. TV in his cell. He can buy cigarettes and sweets from a kiosk that comes Monday and Wednesdays,” Kristina explains.

“He is offered one hour ‘outdoors’ each day in some kind of exercise yard with high concrete walls. That is all he is allowed to leave his cell for. No gym, no opportunities to meet other people except for the guards.

“I have got permission so far from the prosecutor to meet him once a week for an hour each time, together with two policemen who listen to our conversations and stop us if we get close to the ‘case’, which we happened to do in the beginning. It has been a process of amazing bureaucrazy (Freudian spelling!) every time before getting there, I assure you.”

Being locked in a cell for 23 hours every day must be a mind-numbing experience, especially for someone as intelligent as Gottfrid. But Kristina says that her son is filling his time watching television and reading books, since the one newspaper he’s given access to is a tabloid that he refuses to buy. “It’s not exactly his favorite,” Kristina says. Overall though, Gottfrid appears to be coping well.

“He is perfectly fine!” says Kristina. “I haven’t noticed any health problems whatsoever since his arrival. He is very thin, yes – but he is strong, amazingly strong, both physically and mentally, I assure you. When we meet we have fun together, he jokes and tells stories and makes me laugh.”

While Gottfrid’s stories are keeping Kristina entertained, it’s other people’s stories that are keeping the Pirate Bay co-founder entertained once his cell door closes. This is where every TorrentFreak reader can play their part.

Gottfrid is allowed to read books but what he also has access to are letters. To that end Kristina has set up an email address (see the end of this article) through which his supporters can write to him with words of encouragement.

Of course, there are some ground rules and a couple of things people should know.

If letters are to get through there can be no discussion of specifics on the case, that much should be obvious. Also, anyone writing should be aware that although their email addresses will be stripped away by Kristina before she prints out letters for physical mailing, the Swedish authorities will read all emails before allowing Gottfrid access to them.

Hopefully a steady flow of letters will keep Gottfrid busy, encouraged and entertained before the next notable points in his detainment are reached. Some of those are due in the short-term, others in a more extended timeframe.

“Every second Friday there is a court decision about another two weeks in custody or not, as suggested by the prosecutor. Next time will be Oct 26. This will probably go on for another 1.5 to 2 months or so, it’s just a matter of wait and see,” Kristina explains.

“Then I would guess he will be taken to prison , whichever it will be. There will of course be restrictions for him there as well – including getting access to Internet and so on – but there will be more people around and hopefully it will be a bit easier for him as to receive visitors etc.”

With good behavior it’s expected that Gottfrid could be released in May 2013 but as for developments with the Logica case, the state of play is somewhat of a mystery.

“I know nothing,” Kristina concludes. “Absolutely nothing is known to me except for what has been reported in the media.”

To write to Anakata use the following address: gottfrids[at]yahoo.se

Special thanks to Jenny

Source: Pirate Bay Founder Held In Solitary Confinement – Write Him a Letter Today

Tomorrow the Federal Court of California
will be asked to decide whether a takedown notice issued by Universal Music in
respect of a home video
posted on You Tube is an abuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),
an organisation which seeks to protect online free speech, will represent
Stephanie Lenz in court tomorrow. It will ask the court to grant Lenz’s motion
for summary judgment and rule that Universal’s takedown was improper and an
abuse of the DCMA.

The pleadings and court orders so far can be
found on EFF’s website.

An old Downfall parody by Paul Fernhout, in which Hitler reacts to news of a post-scarcity economy. Any similarities to the current policies of the United States government are purely coincidental, of course.

“It looks like there are now local digital fabrication facilities here, here, and here.”
“But we still have the rockets we need to take them out?”
“The rockets have all been used to launch seed automated machine shops for  self-replicating space habitats for more living space in space.”
“What about the nuclear bombs?”
“All turned into battery-style nuclear power plants for island cities in the oceans.”
“What about the tanks?”
“The diesel engines have been remade to run biodiesel and are powering the internet hubs supplying technical education to the rest of the world.”
“I can’t believe this. What about the weaponized plagues?”
“The gene engineers turned them into antidotes for most major diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and river blindness.”
“Well, send in the Daleks.”
“The Daleks have been re-outfitted to terraform Mars. There all gone with the rockets.”
“Well, use the 3D printers to print out some more grenades.”
“We tried that, but they only are printing toys, food, clothes, shelters, solar panels, and more 3D printers, for some reason.”
“But what about the Samsung automated machine guns?”
“They were all reprogrammed into automated bird watching platforms. The guns were taken out and melted down into parts for agricultural robots.”
“I just can’t believe this. We’ve developed the most amazing technology the world has ever known in order to create artificial scarcity so we could rule the world through managing scarcity. Where is the scarcity?”
“Gone, Mein Fuhrer, all gone. All the technologies we developed for weapons to enforce scarcity have all been used to make abundance.”
“How can we rule without scarcity? Where did it all go so wrong? … Everyone with an engineering degree leave the room … now!”
[Cue long tirade on the general incompetence of engineers. Then cue long tirade on how could engineers seriously wanted to help the German workers to not have to work so hard when the whole Nazi party platform was based on providing full employment using fiat dollars. Then cue long tirade on how could engineers have taken the socialism part seriously and shared the wealth of nature and technology with everyone globally.]
“So how are the common people paying for all this?”
“Much is free, and there is a basic income given to everyone for the rest. There is so much to go around with the robots and 3D printers and solar panels and so on, that most of the old work no longer needs to be done.”
“You mean people get money without working at jobs? But nobody would work?”
“Everyone does what they love. And they are producing so much just as gifts.”
“Oh, so you mean people are producing so much for free that the economic system has failed?”
“Yes, the old pyramid scheme one, anyway. There is a new post-scarcity economy, where between automation and a a gift economy the income-through-jobs link is almost completely broken. Everyone also gets income as a right of citizenship as a share of all our resources for the few things that still need to be rationed. Even you.”
“Really? How much is this basic income?”
“Two thousand a month.”
“Two thousand a month? Just for being me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, with a basic income like that, maybe I can finally have the time and resources to get back to my painting…”

Yesterday saw the launch of what you’ll surely find the most intriguing use of Syria’s domain name extension yet, especially if you follow the visual arts. It serves the punning site Art.sy, to which you’ll soon point your browser whenever you want to discover new imagery that appeals to your aesthetic sensibility. Thus holds the theory, in any case, behind this service created by the Art Genome Project. It aims to become to visual art what Pandora has become to music: a virtual mind that can take your tastes, turn right back around to recommend works that please those tastes, and — in the best of all possible outcomes, little by little — broaden those tastes as well. Tell Art.sy what has recently captivated you in the museums, and it will dig through pieces from Washington’s National Gallery, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the British Museum, and elsewhere, trying its best to find something else that will do the same. In total, Art.sy hosts “17,000+ artworks by 3,000+ artists” from “300+ of the world’s leading galleries, museums, private collections, foundations, and artist estates from New York to London, Paris to Shanghai, Johannesburg to São Paulo.”

Melena Ryzik in The New York Times describes Art.sy’s elaborate system of code-based aesthetic classification as developed by “a dozen art historians who decide what those codes are and how they should be applied,” in which “some labels (Art.sy calls them “genes” …) denote fairly objective qualities, like the historical period and region the work comes from and whether it is figurative or abstract, or belongs in an established category like Cubism, Flemish portraiture or photography,” while others “are highly subjective, even quirky.” Ryzik lists the possible codes for a Picasso as including “Cubism,” “abstract painting,” “Spain,” “France” and “love,” and those for a Jackson Pollock as “abstract art,” “New York School,” “splattered/dripped,” “repetition” and “process-oriented.” Here we have yet another reason to maintain a high artistic awareness in our high-tech time. Still, I can’t help but recall the wise counsel Stephen Fry offered in an interview we featured back in August: a truly life-enriching recommendation engine wouldn’t give you the same art you’ve always enjoyed; it would give you the exact opposite.

You can learn more about the ins-and-outs of Art.sy here.

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Art.sy Rolls Out Huge Archive of Fine-Art Images and an Intelligent Art Appreciation Guide is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Det her er den slags, jeg gerne så alle politikere altid blev tvunget til at lave. Et geografisk scoreboard, så man som vælger kan se, hvordan ens liv er blevet forandret (gerne en smule til det bedre) af den førte politik. Den slags har jeg samtidig altid fået af vide er umuligt at lave, hvis gerne vil give et sandfærdigt billede. Både det er svært at redegøre for og kræver gode datasæt for at kunne give nogen menig for brugeren.

Obama kampagnen har da også valgt at fokusere på særlige områder essentielle for kampagnen og i stedet for den enkelte, fokuseret på lokalområdet. Det er et hurtigt hack, ser det ud til, men det er gode tal for kampagnen, når de gerne vil overbevise amerikanerne omkring “facts on the ground”.

Også selvom, der ikke er data for alle hovedområderne i alle stater, synes jeg, at de er sluppet godt fra forsøget.

Søndag aften d. 8.oktober 2012 var der reception for det nye danske strategispil Colonies i København.

Spillet er udviklet af en lille gruppe brætspilsdesignere som allerede har udtænkt flere brætspilskoncepter, men først med Colonies har haft lyst til at sætte det i produktion.

Colonies er et tungere brætspil

Colonies tager spillerne, som koloniherre i rummet, ud i kampen for ressourcer, mad, energi og teknologiske udviklinger. Spillet er i den tungere ende – men repræsenterer på flotteste vis at de danske designere kan lave et vaskeægte euro-game som er 100% båret af spillets mekanik – ressourcehandel.

Designere bag Colonies er

• Morten Andersen
• Tina Christensen
• Robert Bonde Jensen
• Lone Gram Larsen
• Claes Willina Hart Schütt
• Troels Vastrup.

Kun få tilbage ..

Spillet er produceret i Kina med Moxibox som fødselshjælper, og da det er usikkert hvor stor målgruppen er til et tungt strategispil er spillet i første omgang taget hjem i et par hundrede stk.

Man kan købe via info@amongmeeples.dk for for kr. 500. Ligesom spillet vil komme ud til et mindre antal special-butikker og potentielle websites. Desuden kan man se og prøve spillet på Viking Con og SPIEL12 i Essen. Hvor holdet bag Colonies bla. deler stand med Mark Rein-Hagen, det forventes at blive et stort tilløbsstykke.

Over the past two years a small group of copyright holders have started thousands of mass-BitTorrent lawsuits, targeting more than a quarter million people in the US alone.

The copyright holders who start these cases generally provide nothing more than an IP-address as evidence. They then ask the courts to grant a subpoena which allows them to request the personal details of the alleged offenders from their Internet providers.

The plaintiffs in these cases, often described as copyright trolls, are mostly adult movie studios. Malibu Media is one of the most active studios, and this year alone they have filed 349 mass lawsuits, targeting thousands of alleged downloaders across the U.S.

This strategy has earned the adult studio millions of dollars in settlements, without going to trial once. However, this is going to change soon thanks to Pennsylvania District Court Judge Michael Baylson who delivered a landmark ruling late last week.

In a memorandum covering three mass-lawsuits, the Judge reviewed the motions of five anonymous defendants who protested the subpoena which ordered their Internet providers to reveal their identities. Judge Baylson summarizes one of the Doe defendant’s motions as follows.

“Among other things, the declaration asserts that Plaintiff has brought suit against numerous unnamed defendants simply to extort settlements, that the BitTorrent software does not work in the manner Plaintiff alleges, and that a mere subscriber to an ISP is not necessarily a copyright infringer, with explanations as to how computer-based technology would allow non-subscribers to access a particular IP address,” Baylson writes.

“In other words, according to the declaration, there is no reason to assume an ISP subscriber is the same person who may be using BitTorrent to download the alleged copyrighted material. Similar assertions are made in memoranda filed in support of the other motions.”

However, the Judge also notes that the copyright holder’s rights can’t be ignored. Both the plaintiffs and the defendants present their own version of the truth and Judge Baylson believes that a trial is needed to decide who’s right.

“The Court cannot decide substantive issues on these conflicting documents. Discovery and, ultimately, a trial are necessary to find the truth,” he writes.

For this reason Baylson has ordered a Bellwether trial, which often take place when many plaintiffs file proceedings under the same theory swamping courts with an enormous caseload. The five defendants who filed a motion will now go to trial, and the verdicts will be used to rule on similar proceedings in the future.

The Judge notes that the five defendants can enter into a joint defense agreement, and ask for other interested parties to join them. He also calls for a speedy trial to resolve the matter in a few months.

“In this case, the Court will require that the pleadings be completed promptly and will enter an order which provides for discovery to start without delay and be completed expeditiously so the case can proceed to final disposition on the merits, within six months,” Baylson writes.

The Bellwether trial will be the first time that actual evidence against alleged BitTorrent infringers is tested in court. This is relevant because the main piece of evidence the copyright holders have is an IP-address, which by itself doesn’t identify a person but merely a connection.

In a past RIAA court case experts described the evidence gathering techniques of other file-sharing services “as factually erroneous”, “unprofessional” and “borderline incompetent.” In addition, academics have shown that due to shoddy technique even a network printer can be accused of sharing copyrighted files on BitTorrent.

Sophisticated Jane Doe, a critic of the copyright troll cases, is optimistic that the defendants will emerge as winners of the trial.

“The beauty of a Bellwether trial design is both in its pace and in its binding power: finally, trolls’ evidence (or lack thereof) will be tested. You won’t be surprised to learn that I really doubt that trolls will present enough evidence to declare victory; that’s why I’m excited and full of expectations,” she writes.

Considering what’s at stake, it would be no surprise if parties such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are willing to join in. They are known to get involved in crucial copyright troll cases, siding with the defendants. We asked the group for a comment, but have yet to receive a response.

On the other side, Malibu Media may get help from other copyright holders who are engaged in mass-BitTorrent lawsuits. A ruling against the copyright holder may severely obstruct the thus far lucrative settlement business model, meaning that millions of dollars are at stake for these companies.

Without a doubt, the trial is expected to set an important precedent for the future of mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. One to watch for sure.

Source: Finally: BitTorrent Piracy Evidence to be Tested in Court

Undertitel : Hvordan lærer vi eleverne at lære mere effektivt?

Formål : Projektets formål er at afdække, kortlægge og udvikle pædagogiske praksisser for visualisering/eksplicitering af faglige sammenhænge og læringsprocesser i læringsrummet i undervisningen indenfor gymnasiets fagrække.

Produkt : Projektet skal munde ud i to produkter, en bog og et website, der samler erfaringerne.

Antagelser : Projektets implicitte antagelse er at visualisering af faglige sammenhænge i undervisningen ved hjælp af værktøjer som f.eks. begrebskort (analogt eller elektronisk) og elektroniske, kollaborative visualiseringsværktøjer som f.eks. Prezi kan tydeliggøre, konkretisere og dermed styrke læringsprocesserne i et givent undervisningsforløb.

Værktøjer : Fysiske undervisningsredskaber som begrebskort, digitale redskaber som Prezi, Google Docs, blogs m.fl. med fokus på det ekspliciterende/visualiserende aspekt af anvendelsesmulighederne.

Deltagere : En gruppe interesserede lærere ved Aabenraa Statsskole, med en tilknyttet forskerfunktion, hvis fokus er at fungere som forbindelsesled til forskningsverdenen og projektets læringsteoretiske validitet samt styrke forpligtelsen på projektets mål og produkt. Deltagere mødes regelmæssigt, dels fysisk, dels via Skype, for at forpligte sig på den regelmæssige erfaringsudveksling. Skolens ledelse inddrages i fht det hensigtsmæssige i, at det kan lade sig gøre at fordele lærerne i gruppen på f.eks. 2 stamklasser.

Finansiering : Første delmål er at kvalificere projektet med henblik på at bringe det i en position til at komme i betragtning som forsøg i UVM, samt til at opnå støtte hos andre mulige interessenter, f.eks. GL m.fl.

Twitter handle: @musicreator
Website: http://hellotubers.com
Nowjobless
Read below for the detailed step by step procedure:

Link #1: http://cycling74.com/

Link #2: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Link #3: http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/ (mp3 encoder for audacity)

Recording audio from internet can seem like a task, but I’ve tried my best to simplify it
in a dummies kind of tutorial. There are websites which will extract audio from youtube
videos and make an mp3 for you, but that is very specific to sites ilke youtube or vimeo.
Using this technique you can record and save any audio that plays through your browser.
I do not support piracy or infringement of copyright. Please make sure that you have
permission to record audio from a particular site before you go ahead and do it.

Soundflower is an amazing app which works like a patch bay, sending and receiving
signals through a set of channels and buses. It has both 2 channel and 16 channel
options available. While 16 channel is for more advanced use, 2 channel should be
good enough as we’ll be recording stereo in most of the cases.

Step #1:
Download and install soundflower and audacity.

Step #2:
Go to your applications folder and launch soundflower.

Step #3:
You should be able to see a tiny soundflower on you menu bar on top.

Step #4:
Click on the logo and select your audio interface. Use ‘built-in output’ if aren’t using an
external audio device.

Step #5:
Go to system preferences and click on sound. Select your output device as ‘soundflower (2ch)’.

Step #6:
Launch your audio recording application, in my case it’s audacity.

Step #7:
Go to your recorders i/o preferences and select ‘soundflower (2ch)’ as your input device.

Step #8:
Start recording audio in your recorder.

Step #9:
Play the desired audio in your browser.

Step #10:
Stop recording and save the recorded audio.

I am looking forward to your response and comments. Please give in your suggestions on how I can
improve nowjobless and what kind of tutorials you would like to see.
Thanks a lot for watching!

Credits :

Trainer and editor: Rishabh Shah (twitter-@musicreator)

Camera work: Sonal Sagaraya (youtube.com/sonalsagaraya) & (twitter-@sonal_sagaraya)

Music: jasonshaw@audionautix.com

*Note*
I provide original music and editing services. Contact me on sharishabh@gmail.com if you need help with your projects.

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3FGOIW08gA

Since the copyright monopoly is primarily an economic construction, there is a chasm in public support between its abolition for noncommercial activity, and its abolition overall.

In the population, there is a strong majority for reducing the monopoly so that it doesn’t limit noncommercial sharing of knowledge and culture between family, friends, and strangers; when concentrating on the younger half of the population, that majority shifts from strong to overwhelming.

Needless to say, that younger half of the population – now stretching up to people in their early 40s – will neither change their habits nor values about this, regardless of any fever-induced wishful thinking on behalf of the incumbent copyright industries. (Add another two or three decades, and they’ll be pulling all the strings in policymaking, and the executives of the incumbent dinosaurs will be dead.)

When it comes to the commercial parts of the monopoly, however, there are a number of myths flourishing that keeps public support for an all-out abolition in the “unlikely” part of the Overton window. Let’s see what these myths are, and how they stack up against facts:

Myth: If you take away the copyright monopoly, there’s no way for artists to make money.

Fact: This is a very odd myth, given that the old gatekeeper system was the poster child of keeping skilled artists away from any form of income. Under the “sign-a-record-deal-or-remain-poor system”, 99% of artists didn’t get record deals with the abusive record industry – and out of those who did, 99.5% never saw a cent in royalties. Thus, we are moving away from a system that deliberately kept 99.995% of artists without any form of regular income for artistry.

Observing that, I find it preposterous to claim that any shift towards a more inclusive system without those gatekeepers will somehow “take away the possibility of making money for artists”, especially given that the now-obsolete gatekeepers took 93% of the cut, on average, for the 0.005% that did make money in this system. Eliminate those gatekeepers and those 93% of the money go to artists instead – or at least, a significantly larger portion of it.

Myth: The copyright monopoly is an essential source of income to artists today.

Fact: Out of the money spent on culture, a mere 2% (yes, two per cent) make it to individual artists through mechanisms of the copyright monopoly. This was studied in-depth in Sweden by Ulf Pettersson in 2006 (link to article, direct link to study, both in Swedish), who concluded that the vast majority of artists get their income from other means – everything from a day job to student loans.

Myth: The copyright industry is vital to the economy overall.

Fact: The “copyright industry” is deliberately measured in a thoroughly deceptive way that borders on ridicule. According to WIPO’s guidelines as to what should be included when calculating the size of the “copyright industry”, we find everything from paper pulp manufacturing, to kitchen appliance retail sales, to shoemaking (WIPO 2003, via Pettersson’s paper above). If you include practically every part of the economy in group X, and then claim that group X is a vital part of the economy, then it’s going to look like you’re right. Just don’t get caught looking silly when it turns out how you selected that X, and that there’s no correlation at all with what you’re really talking about – the industries benefiting from the copyright monopoly, which are about one-tenth the size of those being held back by it. Want to create jobs? Kill the monopoly.

Myth: With free sharing, nobody will spend money on entertainment.

Fact: The household expenditure on culture has increased, year by year, since the advent of large-scale file-sharing with Napster in 1999. (According to some reports, it’s constant – but none claim it’s falling.) It’s true, however, that record sales are slumping and falling through the floor. This fact is excellent news for musicians, who don’t need to rely on middlemen who take 93% of the cut, and have instead seen their own income rise by 114% in the same time period.

Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create.

Fact: People create despite the copyright monopoly, not because of it. YouTube sees 72 hours of video uploaded every minute. Arguably, most of it will remain unseen, but there are certainly gems in there. Also, the argument is bunk from the simple observation that there is a vast oversupply of artists compared to what the market will hold: you can easily find a professional accountant who picks up an electric guitar in their spare time for a bit of relaxation, but show me one single professional guitarist who relaxes with a bit of bookkeeping in their spare time.

GNU/Linux and Wikipedia are two excellent counterpoints that shatters this weird myth. The dominant operating system and dominant encyclopedia was created by unpaid volunteers. (When I say that GNU/Linux is “dominant”, I include the Android derivative, just for the record.)

We have created since we learned to put red paint on the inside of cave walls, not because of the possibility of making money, but because of who we are, because of how we are wired. (Usually, people who are into life for the money don’t go into artistry in the first place. They go to law school or medical school. There’s a reason for the parents’ face of despair when their child says they’ve decided to be a poet for a living.)

The myth that the copyright monopoly is needed for any kind of artistry to make money, or even to happen in the first place, is an obscene myth perpetuated by those who have something to gain from skimming off 90% of the artists’ money by denying them an audience in an old-style racketeering.

Can we please move on now?

Source: It’s Time To Debunk The Myth That Copyright Is Needed To Make Money – Or That It Even Makes Money

This week the U.S. Department of Justice awarded $2.4 million in grants to continue their ongoing ‘war on piracy’.

The money will make it possible for police departments to dedicate more personnel to fight intellectual property “theft”, and counter the claimed devastation of individual lives and legitimate businesses that comes with it.

“Without question, these new investments are coming at a critical time. As our country continues to recover from once-in-a-generation economic challenges, the need to defend IP rights – and to protect Americans from IP theft – has never been more urgent,” Attorney General Eric Holder said.

Holder also used the announcement to emphasize the successes booked by the Justice Department so far, achievements not just limited to the homeland either. Holder explains that the department has schooled thousands of people across the world on piracy and counterfeiting issues.

“Because IP crime is global in nature, I’ve prioritized increasing our international engagement. In fact, to date, Department officials have trained, educated, and met with thousands of foreign judges, prosecutors, investigators, and policymakers from more than 100 countries on IP protection,” Holder noted.

While it is no secret that the U.S. is helping foreign countries rewrite their copyright laws, it came as a surprise to us that judges are also being influenced by the Justice Department. Judges are supposed to be impartial and are generally quite aware of the law already.

However, Holder’s comments suggest that the U.S. was able to school judges on IP crime.

While this may have worked in some cases, there are signs that not all upholders of the law are siding with the U.S. stance. Talking about copyright related issues, New Zealand’s District Court Judge David Harvey criticized the U.S. push for harsher copyright laws.

“..we have met the enemy and he is [the] U.S,” Harvey said, a comment that made him later resign from the Kim Dotcom extradition battle.

That brings us to the Megaupload case, which was also referenced by Holder in his speech. According to the Attorney General the controversial raids and arrests are something to gloat about.

“In this year alone, we have prosecuted a number of significant IP cases,” Holder states.

“For example, in January – in one of the largest criminal copyright cases in U.S. history – the Department indicted two corporations and seven individuals with operating an international organized criminal enterprise responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works, through Megaupload.com and other related sites.”

This is an interesting comment since the Megaupload prosecution has been widely criticized by legal experts and it may yet turn out to be a fiasco for the Justice Department. Thus far most successes have been claimed by Kim Dotcom and his legal team.

But perhaps, with the proper education and training of New Zealand judges, the Justice Department will be able to turn the case in their favor.

Source: Justice Department Educates Foreign Judges on Piracy Issues

Video 1:

(Reagan tale 12 juni 1987)

Man er gået over i en politisk fase på makroniveau. Et forsøg på at skubbe til øst samt profilere sig selv i USA som præsident.

Der er et klart motiv med talen dvs. en klar tendens med en politisk dagsorden.

Geografiske placering for talen har en betydning for udbredelsen af budskabet og igangsættelsen af frigørelsesprocessen.

Video 2:

(tagesschau 10 november 1989)

Det folkelige oprør i Berlin på mikroniveau.

Det er en anden måde at fremstille situationen som et øjebliksbillede af den folkelige opstand.

En guidet tur i Odense centrum

Gråbrødre kloster

Odense var i middelalderen et religiøst centrum, som der stadig findes spor af. Middelalderens klostervæsen viser sig stadig i dag med Gråbrødre kloster som repræsentant. Selve klosteret var byens franciskanerkloster og blev grundlagt i 1279. Franciskanerordenen blev etableret i 1210 af Frans Assisi i Frankrig og blev herefter spredt ud over Europa.

Franciskanermunkene kaldes gråbrødre, fordi deres munkedragte var grå.

Reformationen

Da den katolske kirke mistede sin magt i det danske samfund med reformationen i 1536, overgik dette kloster til kongen og blev omdannet til et hospital for syge og fattige.

Den kirke, som man nu kan se i forbindelse med klosteret, var oprindeligt munkenes sovesal. Kirken er i funktion i dag.

Klosteret anvendes i dag også som refugium, hvor ældre over 50 år kan ansøge om et ophold i fred og ro.

Huset, som anvendes til dette, er placeret hvor munkenes kloster tidligere var.

Kongehuset

Dronning Christine, Christian den 2.s moder, drog omsorg for klosteret, og kirken blev for en tid gravkirke for kongehuset. Her var Christian den 2., som vi kender fra det stockholmske blodbad i 1520 – deraf hans svenske øgenavn Christian Tyran, var en overgang gravsat i forbindelse med kirken.

Senere blev de kongelige flyttet til Domkirken.

Domkirken

Den blev opført på foranledning af Erik Klipping, som vi kender fra mordet i Finderup Lade i 1286.

Kongemordet i Odense

Knud den Hellige blev i 1086 myrdet i Skt. Albani kirke. Senere blev han flyttet til Domkirken, hvor han i dag sammen med sin bror kan ses i kælderen.

Christian den 2. og hans familie blev ligesom Knud den Hellige flyttet til Domkirken. Hvor den folkelige anekdote lyder, at svenske turister stamper på Christian d. 2′s rester – reaktionen på det Stokholmske blodbad.

Som fodnote er en af Odenses nyere historiske personligheder Hans Christian Andersen konfirmeret i Domkirken.

We recently brought you an interview with Steven Spielberg and his father, discussing the films the director made as a teenager. Of all American auteurs, Spielberg may be the most in touch with his inner child, so it comes as no surprise that the young Spielberg recorded train crashes and battles using his own room or yard as the backdrop.

What no one, including the DreamWorks co-founder himself, knew until recently is that all those 8 mm shorts were more than just a pastime. In a recent interview Spielberg revealed that he is dyslexic and that he was only diagnosed five years ago. “It explained a lot of things,” Spielberg told Quinn Bradlee. “It was like the last puzzle part in a tremendous mystery that I’ve kept to myself all these years.”

Always two years behind the class in reading, Spielberg was teased by other kids in school. He dreaded having to read in front of the class. He never lacked for friends, though looking back on it several of his friends were probably also dyslexic.

“Even my own friends who were just like me, we didn’t have the skills to talk about it,” he recalled in the interview for Friends of Quinn, a site for people with learning differences. “I got bullied. I dealt with it by making movies. That was my cover up.”

Spielberg, whose films have spanned all genres over more than four decades, says that moviemaking was his “great escape” from feeling painfully different.

“I never felt like a victim. Movies helped save me from shame, from guilt from putting it on myself when it wasn’t my burden,” he says. “In light of feeling like an outsider, movies made me feel inside my own skill set.”

He says that it takes him about three hours to read what most people could read in a little more than an hour.

“I’m slow, but I’ve learned to adjust,” he says. “I am in a business where reading is very important. I read often and I have great comprehension. I retain almost everything I read. I really take my time going through a book or a script.”

With all of that said, don’t miss our previous post: Steven Spielberg’s Debut: Two Films He Directed as a Teenager

Kate Rix is an Oakland-based freelance writer. Find more of her work at katerixwriter.com.

Steven Spielberg Reveals He Is Dyslexic. Making Movies Offered Him a “Great Escape” as a Child is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

The 1709 Blog is committed to furthering the copyright debate on all matters of public interest and is therefore pleased to host this response by James Mackenzie (Commercial Director, Cutbot Ltd) to Simon Clark’s recent comments on the dispute between Meltwater and the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA):

Last week Simon Clark from Berwin Leighton Paisner argued here that the infamous High Court and Court of Appeal rulings on Meltwater v NLA don’t “break the internet”, as others have claimed.

There were two odd omissions from his piece: first, an acknowledgement that he helped to represent the NLA, and second, any direct quotes from the courts’ judgments. I should therefore explain that I am a founder of Cutbot, a new online media monitoring firm. Nevertheless, my objections to his position and to the courts’ rulings are to the principle more than to the commercial consequences.

Let’s start by disposing of one of Mr Clark’s red herrings. He claims that the rulings rested in part on the terms and conditions posted as public notices (in the Hitchhiker’s Guide sense) on publishers’ websites. Entirely untrue. To quote the Court of Appeal (§49):

The purpose of these proceedings is to ascertain the rights of the parties in relation to copyright, not some independent contractual right of a publisher.

He also sets out a straw man argument, which he claims is regularly made, that the Court of Appeal has made “all browsing on the internet illegal”. No, it has not. But nor does the ruling only affect paid-for monitoring services like Meltwater or Cutbot. To quote from the High Court (this is the bulk of §103):

When an End User clicks on a Link a copy of the article on the Publisher’s website which appears on the website accessible via that Link is made on the End User’s computer. … [I]t seems to me that in principle copying by an End User without a licence through a direct Link is more likely than not to infringe copyright.

The Court of Appeal, summarising the High Court’s ruling, explained that (from §5):

[T]he copies made by the end-user’s computer of … the article itself when clicking on the link indicated by Meltwater News are and each of them is, prima facie, an infringement of the Publishers’ copyright.

Remember these are not copies in the sense of republication elsewhere for any purpose, commercial or otherwise. These prima facie infringements occur when a user clicks on a link in an email and their computer asks a publisher’s server for a copy of a legitimate article, as posted on the publisher’s site. The publisher’s server freely provides the HTML and associated code required to view the page. Receiving this information is, the courts argue, prima facie an infringement of copyright.

Furthermore, just viewing an email containing headlines and links to legitimate content will infringe, (High Court, §104):

An End User who uses the share function to forward a headline Link (and, a fortiori, an End User who simply forwards an email) to a client will make further copies and thus further infringe. Such forwarding will also be issuing a copy to the public under s. 18 CDPA.

The scope of the courts’ rulings is actually this. All browsing of copyright material is a potential infringement unless a defence of non-commercial or private use applies. So too is merely referring to a work by its title (such as the headline). Simply receiving an email with links can be infringing – even if you have no contractual relationship with any media monitoring firm. The fact that the NLA have only hit media monitoring firms and our clients should not reassure anyone else who visits the Guardian or Telegraph websites at work. You should also worry that they require a licence from a small UK startup like ours, with a turnover of below £30k, but have exempted Google, whose UK turnover alone is nearly £400m.

The Google News site is, of course, free to the end user, but Google is hardly a charity. As the two pigs fail to notice in the context of Facebook, we’re not the customers, we’re the product. But Google News is a sideshow compared to Google’s main operation. They aim to index every public page with copyright material, and are not charged for the privilege. We index a small subset of those pages and are threatened with a charge equivalent to a third of our turnover (Meltwater are asked to pay 0.14% of theirs, incidentally). The upshot is that any search engine could, if the publishers wanted, be charged or excluded. They gave up in Belgium, but that’s hardly reassuring either.

Clearly newspaper articles are works for copyright purposes, which is why we do not show clients any part of the body of the article, unlike Meltwater. Headlines are titles, though, just like titles for any other work. Whether or not they are copyright, they are also the only clear way to refer to a work. Even if one agrees that headlines can be copyright, that should not necessarily imply that using them to reference articles constitutes infringement. That’s an essential part of the democratic flow of information, as protected by Article 10 of the ECHR. In fact, the protocols on which the internet is built include inherent implied licences.

We intend to challenge some of the consequences of these confused rulings: by negotiation with the NLA if possible, or through the Copyright Tribunal if not. For example, the NLA, acting as a collecting society, charge us and our clients a licence fee, and obtain our clients’ contact details, while running a partially competitive service called eClips. It’s hard to imagine a clearer prima facie breach of competition law, facilitated in this case by unclear legislation and a collecting society determined to see what Professor Lionel Bently calls “innocent acts” defined as infringements.

Other problems caused here may be resolved in the Supreme Court, especially given developments in EU law (notably Infopaq II and FAPL). Some, I suspect, will have to be legislated on if Ministers don’t want a uniquely heavy-handed copyright regime to stifle the sorts of legitimate businesses that thrive elsewhere, and if they don’t want to hand UK markets over to our unhindered competition in the US or elsewhere in the EU.

http://itunes.apple.com/app/wafflepwn-the-greatest-freak/id367293715?mt=8

http://www.youtube.com/user/wafflepwn?feature=mhee

http://www.wafflepwnvideo.com/

http://www.youtube.com/user/ImaHooiser

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002675675007

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YersIyzsOpc

Image source: http://wcrz.com/websites-go-on-strike-to…

Throughout the first five weeks of the hardboiled Freshman seminar I’m teaching, I’ve taken pains to reinforce how essential it is to read for context. To read for the things that don’t make sense, read for the things you do not know, and read for the ideas that make you stop and think. And in the process take the time to play detective. Look things up. Follow the lead the writer gives you, try and build a context for your reading. What’s more, with the ubiquity of the web the process couldn’t be any easier.

I love the idea of fashioning one’s approach to reading as a series of clues, cues, and details the writer provides to come up with both an emotional and intellectual theory beyond what’s on the surface. It’s a process I spent a lot of time in college working on as a literature major, and I’ve never regretted the time I spent because it kept me entertained and interested—and I learned a ton in the process.

So, in turn, I am starting from the basic assumption in the hardboiled course that the act of reading is not to be taken for granted, but rather something they should all be keenly aware of what they’re reading and what details they are failing to contextualize. I’ve spent a good part of the last three weeks of discussions asking them if they stopped and looked into certain allusions, terms, or names. For example, did anyone stop to wonder, and even do a quick Google search, on the periodical The New Masses Bandini references in Ask the Dust? No one had. How can you get the context of the moment and the reference to the depression era masses that are organizing around alternative political viewpoints if you don’t look this up? You miss something in the reading. You miss something in the understanding. And with the web always already right there it makes the excuses of not doing it nothing short of paltry. Contextualizing and augmenting one’s understanding of any book is that much easier, faster, and more powerful—and it should increasingly be expected of students.

So anyway, I’ve been beating this drum for the last couple of weeks when, as is always the case with the beautiful bounty of the web, my point gets illustrated for me magically on my very own blog earlier today. I wrote a post about last night’s class discussion and referenced this very issue lamenting how few students had stopped to find out more about Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist referenced by Bandini in Ask the Dust early on in the novel. And the first comment on that post is from a gentleman named Chris (who has no associate with the UWM hardboiled class) who was searching for The Antichrist to make sense of the reference in Ask the Dust. You can’t make this stuff up! How crazy is that? Here is his comment:

I have no idea what this site is. I am currently reading ask the dust for the first time and with all books I instantly love I pay attention to refrenes of an author’s influences. This is what brings me here, I saw the mention of the book The Anti-Christ and as an atheist I am intrigued, hence the google search and link to this page. Anyone know of this book or who it is by? Curiosity has won this time.

How nuts? So, I respond to Chris, all the while marveling at how awesome the web, when Jillian, a student from the Hardboiled course at UMW, chimes in on the comment thread and acts as a respondent and resource for Chris:

Hi! I’m in Professor Groom’s class at UMW and just finished reading Fante’s Ask the Dust for class. The Anti- Christ was written by Neitszche, an existentialist, originally published in 1895. The book not only puts down Christianity, but all organized religion. In class we talked about how Ask the Dust is very autobiographical, and Bandini, in some ways, is a manifestation of Fante himself. Fante was a big fan of Neitszche, and other existentialist writers such as Dreiser and Mencken (mentioned in chapter 1, page 13). H L Mencken, in fact, is the real life version of Hackmuth. I’ll make it simple for you: Fante is to Bandini as H L Mencken is to Hackmuth. Get it? Mencken was Fante’s idol, and, just like Bandini would to Hackmuth, Fante would write twenty page letters to Mencken, send him stories, ask him advice, etc. H L Mencken was also a huge fan of Neitszche.

I hope this helps! If you’re curious about Neitszche or existentialism, we talked about it a lot in class last night; you might find listening to Professor Groom’s radio link to be helpful!

I love that Jillian went beyond providing Chris the simple reference, which is where I stopped, and actually started giving him or her tips on reading the book and understanding Bandini as Fante and Hackmuth as H.L. Mencken. What’s more, the whole ordeal helped me learn that H.L. Mencken, Fante’s mentor and godhead, actually translated Nietzsche’s The Antichrist into English. How nuts is that? Another day on the web, and another mind blown.

The Pirate Bay is among the 50 most visited websites in Canada. Considering this popularity, it wouldn’t be strange for the government to reward the site for its loyal service to the Canadian public.

However, the banner campaign for the Department of Finance’s Economic Action Plan that went on display this week was not supposed to show up on The Pirate Bay.

The Ottowa Citizen reports that The Pirate Bay ran the ads but that the site wasn’t targeted intentionally. Instead, the feds are quick to point the finger at one of the advertising networks they teamed up with.

“The Department of Finance did not purchase ad space on The Pirate Bay web site. We did however, include four ad networks in our media buy (Bell Media, Canoe, Microsoft, Yahoo),” The Department of Finance explains.

What’s in it for you?

According to the Finance Department the advertising networks they work with follow strict guidelines and have “brand safety filters” in place. However, somewhere down the line a mistake was made and the feds point their finger at Yahoo.

“Each network confirmed that this site is not owned by them and that the appearance of the ad on this site is unauthorized. However, upon further research it was determined that some banner ads were appearing with an ‘ad choices icon’ which traces back to Yahoo,” the department states.

However, Yahoo! say they have conducted a thorough investigation into the misplaced banner and conclude that actually Sympatico is to blame.

“We have confirmed that Yahoo! was not responsible for the EAP ad showing up on The Pirate Bay. We have been able to trace the ad to Sympatico who were responsible for this ad’s appearance on the site, and they have been notified of the issue so they can take the appropriate actions.”

And so the finger pointing continues.

The Pirate Bay has witnessed the drama with a smile and has even considered plastering their entire site, especially the home page, with ads for Economic Action Plan. There’s no way the Department of Finance can stop that.

But first they have to buy a boat and loads of rum using the Canadian tax dollars generated by the ads.

Source: Canadian Government ‘Sponsored’ The Pirate Bay

Problemet er at kun meget få fatter hvorfor det både er retfærdigt, fordelingspolitisk en god idé, og en måde at sætte virkelig gang i vores økonomi igen qua de sænkede skatter på arbejdsindtægter.

Hvad angår det første, det retfærdige, så er grundsynspunktet bag grundskylden, at vi alle har lige meget ret til at være her – uanset vores ankomsttidspunkt og “held” på ejendomsmarkedet. Grundskylden er en skat på et privilegium – det privilegium du har i kraft af at du ejer en grund og har den eksklusive brugsret – på bekostning af alle de, der ikke har. Værdien af grunden er ikke een, du selv skaber, det er en grunden har dels i kraft af sin beliggenhed, og dels i kraft af samfundets økonomiske aktiviteter. Når din grund stiger i værdi, er det fordi andre knokler for at skabe merværdi i det område grunden ligger i. Du kan da sælge – og score en gevinst, der dybest set er en gevinst på andre menneskers arbejde. Ikke at beskatte grundværdierne er usolidarisk af h… til.

Hvad angår igangsætningen af økonomien er der ikke noget mere frigørende, end at nedsætte såvel skatten på arbejde som skatten på egen virksomhed (dvs. produktiv aktivitet). Skatten flyttes fra den produktive del af økonomien til den uproduktive – det er sagens kerne, og stiller dermed såvel virksomheder som lønmodtagere i en langt stærkere position.

Tak for tippet om artiklen til Stig Libori.

Kavinsky – Nightcall (feat. Lovefoxxx)
Released by Record Makers
Buy it here (digital & vinyl) : http://kavinsky.bandcamp.com

Produced by Kavinsky & Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (Daft Punk)
Mixed by SebastiAn

Featured on the Original Soundtrack of “Drive”, a movie by Nicolas Winding Refn.
Starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks.

Drive (OST) released in France by Record Makers.

Follow Kavinsky :

http://facebook.com/pages/Kavinsky/5675452364

http://twitter.com/IamKavinsky

More information at :

http://recordmakers.com

http://facebook.com/recordmakerspage

http://twitter.com/recordmakers

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV_3Dpw-BRY

ITUNES: http://bit.ly/DriveSoundtrack
AMAZON: http://amzn.to/DriveAmazon
LIKE: http://www.facebook.com/DrivetheMovie
GET THE MOVIE: http://amzn.to/DriveBD

UK vinyl Version on double LP available now on INVADA RECORDS- http://www.invada.co.uk/drive

DRIVE – Official Soundtrack Preview – Score by CLIFF MARTINEZ

Drive – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
1. “Night Call” – Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx – 0:00-0:32
2. “Under Your Spell” – Desire – 0:32-1:05
3. “A Real Hero” – College feat. Electric Youth – 1:05-1:30
4. “Tick Of The Clock” – The Chromatics – 1:30-1:50
5. “Bride Of Deluxe” – 1:50-2:30
6. “After The Chase” – 2:30-3:00
7. “Kick Your Teeth” – 3:00-3:20
8. “They Broke His Pelvis” – 3:20-3:50
9. “Skull Crushing” – 3:50-4:20
10. “Drive” – 4:20-4:45
11. “Rubber Head” – 4:45-5:05
12. “Hammer” – 5:05-5:25
13. “Oh My Love” – Riz Ortolani feat. Katyna Ranieri – 5:25-5:45

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9J4R4KYv-s

I want to drive on the Web, but instead I’m being driven. All of us are. And that’s a problem.

It’s not for lack of trying on the part of websites and services such as search engines. But they don’t make cars. They make stores and utilities that try to be personal, but aren’t, and never can be.

Take, for example, the matter of location. The Internet has no location, and that’s one of its graces. But sites and services want to serve, so many notice what IP address you appear to be arriving from. Then they customize their page for you, based on that location. While that might sound innocent enough, and well-intended, it also fails to know one’s true intentions, which matter far more to each of us than whatever a website guesses about us, especially if the guessing is wrong.

Last week I happened to be in New York when a friend in Toronto and I were both looking up the same thing on Google while we talked over Skype. We were unable to see the same thing, or anything close, on Google, because the engine insisted on giving us both localized results, which neither of us wanted. We could change our locations, but not to no location at all. In other words, it wouldn’t let us drive. We could only be driven.

Right now I’m in Paris, and cannot get Google to let me look at Google.com (presumably google.us), Google.uk or Google.anywhere other than France. At least not on its Web page. (If I use the location bar as a place to search, it gives me google.com results, for some non-obvious reason.)

After reading Larry Magid’s latest in Huffpo, about the iPhone 5, which says this…

Gazelle.com is paying $240 for an iPhone 4s in good condition, which is $41 more than the cost of a subsidized iPhone 5. If you buy a new iPhone from Sprint they’ll buy back your iPhone 4s for $235. Trouble is, if you bought a 4s it’s probably still under contract. Sprint is paying $125 for an 8 GB iPhone 4 and Gazelle is paying $145 for a 16 GB iPhone 4 which means that it you can get the $199 upgrade price, your out of pocket could be as little as $54.

… I wondered what BestBuy might give me for my 16GB iPhone 4. But when I go to http://bestbuy.com, the company gives me a page in French. I guess that’s okay, but it’s still annoying. (So is seeing that I can’t get a trade-in price without visiting a store.)

Back in the search world, I’ve been looking for a prepaid wireless internet access strategy to get data at sane prices in the next few countries I visit. A search for “prepaid wireless internet access” on google.fr gets me lots of ads in French, some of which might be more interesting if I knew French as well as I know English, but I doubt it. The “I’m feeling lucky” result is a faux-useful SEO-elevated page with the same title as the search query. The rest of the first page results are useless as well. (I did eventually find a useful site for my UK visit the week after next, but I’ll save that for another post.)

To describe what the Web has become, two metaphors come to mind.

The first is a train system that mostly runs between commercial destinations. In a surreal way, you are transported from one destination to another near-instantly (or at the speed of a page loading ads and cookies along with whatever it was you went there for), and are trapped at every destination in a cabin with a view only of what the destination wants you to see. The cabin is co-occupied by dozens or hundreds of conductors at any given time, all competing for your attention and telling you something they hope will make you buy something or visit other sites. In the parlance of professionals on the supply side of this system, what you get here is an “experience” that they “deliver.” To an increasing degree this experience is personalized, and for every person it’s different. If you looked at pants a few sites back, you might see ads for pants, or whatever it is that the system thinks you might want to buy, whether you’re in a buying mood or not at the time. (And most of the time you’re not, but they don’t care about that.)

Google once aspired to give us access to “all the world’s information”, which suggests a library. But the library-building job is now up to Archive.org. Instead, Google now personalizes the living shit out of its search results. One reason, of course, is to give us better search results. But the other is to maximize the likelihood that we’ll click on an ad. But neither is served well by whatever it is that Google thinks it knows about us. Nor will it ever be, so long as we are driven, rather than driving.

I think what’s happened in recent years is that users searching for stuff have been stampeded by sellers searching for users. I know Googlers will bristle at that characterization, but that’s what it appears to have become, way too much of the time.

But that’s not the main problem. The main problem is that browsers are antique vehicles.

See, we need to drive, and browsers aren’t cars. They’re shopping carts that shape-shift with every site we visit. They are optimized for being inside websites, not for driving outside them, or between them. In fact, we can hardly imagine the Net or the Web as a space that’s larger than the sites in it. But we need to do that if we’re going to start designing means of self-transport that transcend the limitations of browsing and browsers.

Think about what it means to drive.  The cabin, steering wheel, pedals, controls, engine, tires and chassis of a car are all controlled by you. The world through which you move is outside, not inside. Even in malls, you park outside the stores. The stores do not intrude inside your personal space. Driving is no less personal and no less masterfully yours when you ride a bike or a motorcycle, or pilot a plane. Those are all personal vehicles too. A browser should have been like one of those, and that was kind of the idea back in the early days when we talked about “surfing” and the “information highway.” But it didn’t turn out that way. Instead browsers became shopping carts that get fresh skins at every website.

We need a new vehicle. One that’s ours.

The smartphone would be ideal if it wasn’t also a phone. But that’s what it is. With few exceptions, we rent smartphones from phone companies and equipment makers, which collude to sentence us to “plans” that last for two years at a run.

I had some hope for Android., but that hope is fading now. Although supporting general purpose hardware and software was one of Google’s basic ideas behind Android, that’s not how it’s turning out. Android in most cases is an embedded operating system on a special purpose device. In the most familiar U.S. cases (AT&T’s, Sprint’s, T-Mobile’s and Verizon’s) the most special purpose of that device is locking you to a plan and soaking you for some quantity of minutes, texts and GB of data, whether you use the full amounts or not, and then punishing you for going over. They play an asymmetrical knowledge game with you, where they can monitor your every move, and all your usage, while you can barely do the same, if at all.

So we have a long way to go before mobile phones become the equivalent of a car, a bicycle, a motorcycle or a small plane. I don’t think there is an evolutionary path to the Net’s equivalent of a car that starts with a smartphone. Unless it’s not a phone first and a computing/communication device second.

The personal computing and communications revolution is thirty years old now, if we date it from the first IBM PC.  And right now we’re stuck, mostly because we think having the Web “personalized” is the same thing as having a personal vehicle. And because we think having a smartphone makes us independent. Neither is true. That’s why we won’t make progress past those problems until we start thinking and inventing outside their old boxes.

Julia Schramm is a well-known German blogger and prominent member of the local Pirate party.

In common with many other Pirates the 26-year old detests the “content mafia” and she previously described the term “intellectual property” as “disgusting“.

At least… she used to.

Yesterday, when Schramm’s book “Click Me: Confessions of an Internet exhibitionist” was released both on paper and as an e-book, the tide started to turn.

To help her publish the book Schramm signed a major deal with the Random House owned publisher Albrecht Knaus Verlag. In addition to earning a 100,000 euro advance, this deal with the “content mafia” required her to sign away her copyrights.

This means that Schramm, nor any other person, is able to share a copy of the book. This is quite obviously an awkward position for a board member of the German Pirate Party.

To make matters even worse it turns out that Schramm and her publisher are policing the Internet heavily for unauthorized copies of the book. While it is still available on many torrent sites, a pirated version posted to Dropbox disappeared this morning, to be replaced by the following message:

“This file is no longer available due to a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by Julia Schramm Autorin der Verlagsgruppe Random House.”

A copy hosted on the Pirate Party’s wiki disappeared as well.

No pirates please

Responding to the controversy, the Pirate Party politician defends her move with the argument that people can still read her work elsewhere.

“There will always be free texts from me on my blog, and there are also book excerpts,” she told Welt, adding that she will make her book available for free in 10 years when she gets her copyrights back.

While we’re not condemning people’s right to sign copyrights away to publishers, it is certainly not something you would expect from a Pirate Party politician.

At the very minimum, it’s not in line with the party program which states:

“We propose to legalize noncommercial copying, publishing, storage and use of works to improve the overall availability of information, knowledge and culture, as this represents an essential prerequisite for the social, technical and economic development of our society.”

After the issue was widely reported in the German media, Schramm eventually came to the realization that it wasn’t her best decision ever. “In retrospect, of course, I could have negotiated more aggressively with the publisher on some aspects.”

“I was just very glad to be able to fulfill my dream to write a book,” she adds.

While writing a book is free and doesn’t require the exploitation of copyright (see other Pirates), being in the spotlight and making good money often requires sacrifices.

When that’s the case, it appears that certain ideals and aspirations are easier to throw overboard than others.

ARRR(GH)

Source: FAIL – Prominent Pirate Party Politician Goes After Book Pirates

Following his arrest less than two weeks earlier, last Monday Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm was deported from Cambodia.

Given that his visa had expired and that no extradition agreement exists between Cambodia and Sweden, Gottfrid should have had a choice of where to go. But instead he was taken to Sweden, ostensibly to serve an outstanding one year jail sentence for copyright infringement.

However, once he touched down at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, Gottfrid was handed new charges by the police who suspect him of being involved in the hacking of Logica, a Swedish IT company that works with the local tax authorities.

Gottfrid could be held until yesterday but prosecutor Henry Olin put in a request for him to be held longer. Friday morning the Nacka District Court decided that Gottfrid could be detained for another two weeks.

“This is a very comprehensive investigation into hacking that I as a prosecutor as well as other agencies take very seriously,” said Olin.

“Arrest, with the possibility of imposing restrictions, is one of the tools that the legislature has given us in order to conduct these kinds of investigations in an effective manner. From that perspective I feel that it was a success for the District Court to uphold my claim for custody,” he added.

Two other Swedish citizens, both in their thirties, were previously detained under suspicion of also being involved the hack. One of the suspects was a member of Piratbyran, the group that founded The Pirate Bay back in 2003.

Gottfrid denies all charges.

Source: Pirate Bay Founder Officially Arrested For Tax Hack, Denies Accusations

From The Telegraph:

House prices would be hit and many older people forced to sell family homes (1) by an increase in council tax to “fix the broken housing market”, as proposed by an influential think tank today.

Alternatively, rising numbers of younger people excluded from homeownership and trapped in ‘generation rent’, may feel that anything which tends to cause house prices to fall must be a good thing.(4)

1) So? Poor Widow sells family home and buys a flat; young family sells their flat and buys a family home. By and large and for many people, this might be just a straight swap with their own children or grandchildren (so the “family home” can “stay in the family”, if that’s what makes them happy). Why is that so terrible?

2) Typical Home-Owner-Ist circular logic. Yes, houses are a good hedge against inflation. But what they don’t mention is that it’s Home-Owner-Ism which is the PRIMARY CAUSE of inflation in the first place (and something which I hardly mentioned before):
- Home-Owner-Ism needs credit bubbles to prop up land prices, some of this money spills out into productive economy without increasing output capacity, so this leads to price inflation. For example, a semi-retired person MEWs and buys a new car. This increases demand for cars without increasing amount of work done.
- When Homey bubbles pop, the government quite deliberately and maliciously tries to create inflation in order to mask real house price falls. This trick worked fine in the 1970s when we still had currency controls, it doesn’t actually work without them, e.g. Japan over last twenty years, the UK today.
- Homeys just luuurv those ultra-low interest rates, which of necessity trigger speculative bubbles in commodities which tend to push up price inflation.
- If you can’t tax the rental value of land, you have to tax production and output instead, these taxes tend to push up prices (at least, relative to net incomes) and reduce output.

So what these shits really are saying is “Home-Owner-Ism causes inflation. Inflation is bad unless it’s in house prices. So we need even more Home-Owner-Ism.”

3) Other “stores of value”* have done so badly precisely because of Home-Owner-Ism.

If we’d got it over with and shifted from taxing production and output to taxing the rental value of land ten or fifteen years ago, the dust would have settled by now. Houses would have performed badly, viewed as a speculative investment, but shares would have doubled, interest rates and hence annuity rates would be much higher, price inflation would be more or less non-existent (sure, food is getting more expensive but electronics are getting cheaper, it would cancel out to nothing), fewer unemployed, far milder recession etc.

Once LVT has bedded in (i.e. once all the Poor Widows In Mansions, of whom there are several thousand in the UK have down-sized), everybody will have got used to the idea that land is useless as a speculative investment; that debts will not be eroded away by inflation; that share prices tend to go up; sticking cash in the bank is a good way of saving; and that it’s worth saving up for an annuity, because you’ll get 10% a year.

When we tell our children and grandchildren that people used to believe that you could become rich without working, just by buying a bit of land and keeping your fingers crossed (and that a lot of people did become rich this way) they will think you are mad.

“Yes, but how did you pay the tax on the land if you were not working?” they will ask.

“There wasn’t any tax on land in those days,” you reply.

“Wot? So where did the government get money from?”

“Ah… they used to tax people who went to work instead, and give the money to the people who owned land… Jesus, this sounds really stupid now I say it.”

* We can make an exception for gold, the gold price has done very well because a lot of the measures which governments are taking to subsidise land owners stimulate the economy spill over into higher gold prices.

4) Well, at least he admits that Home-Owner-Ism is inter-generational warfare. Remember: the person who starts the war doesn’t necessarily win it.

An example IFTTT action archives tweets to Evernote

The web service IFTTT (If this, then that) accesses popular web applications via their APIs, and lets users create new actions based on changes. For instance, actions such as “upload photos to Flickr when I add them to my Dropbox folder”, or “send me email when frost is forecast”.

I had been tempted to classify IFTTT as a merely an interesting toy for playing with social media. Granted, it’s nice that I can archive all my tweets into an Evernote note, but so what? However, IFTTT’s growth in features is showing it to be more than a bauble. The service is becoming an empowering tool that gives users more control over their own data, previously often accessible by programmers alone.

This evolution crystallized for me as IFTTT announced their Google Drive integration. In addition to supporting file storage functionality, much as it does with Dropbox, IFTTT allows you to add a new row to a Google Spreadsheet. Example applications might include copying all your bit.ly bookmarks (“bitmarks”) into a spreadsheet, or logging all the videos you upload to YouTube.

Why this is a big deal? Because for the first time, it gives IFTTT users fine-grained access to their data in a simple database. This data can be freely manipulated in Google Spreadsheets without the need for coding skills.

Web applications with APIs can provide a false openness. They empower developers to create value from data, under the terms the application provider dictates, but do little for regular users. The pledge of data liberation is a great thing, but again, what can the average user do with that data?

IFTTT is a great example of a solution that gives our data back, and lets us do useful work with it. It’s the kind of tool we’ll need more of as we adapt to the digital nervous system in our lives.

• Business users should also check out Zapier, a similar offering to IFTTT, but with more focus on business web services.

Example uses of Google Drive in IFTTT

Following his arrest last Thursday it was confirmed yesterday that Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm will be leaving Cambodia as a matter of some urgency.

Early Tuesday a meeting took place in Cambodia between National Deputy Police Commissioner General Sok Phal and Swedish authorities. Due to the lack of an extradition treaty, Sweden made a request for Svartholm to be deported. Cambodian authorities agreed.

“We will use the Immigration Law against him to deport him out of our country and Minister of Interior Sar Kheng will sign on the deportation request letter from the police commissioner soon,” said Phal. “We will have to just deport him, wherever he goes, we don’t know, but he has to be out of Cambodia.”

While it perhaps isn’t all that unusual for Swedish authorities to be in Cambodia, a development today will join a long line of interesting political coincidences in which one nation appears to be rewarded by another following an apparently unconnected favor that everyone but the politicians are suspicious of.

Today a senior Cambodian official announced that the Government of Sweden had signed to provide Cambodia with 400 million Swedish Kronor ($59.4 million) in financial aid. The money is destined for democratic development, education, and other causes.

Speaking after the signing ceremony between Cambodian deputy Prime Minister Keat Chhon and Swedish Ambassador Anne Hoglund, Chhon said his country was grateful for the package.

“Cambodia considers Sweden as a highly valued development partner and we will make every best effort to ensure that the aid be utilized effectively in an efficient and transparent manner,” he said.

Hoglund said that Sweden is committed to strengthening bilateral ties with Cambodia, something that interestingly enough was also said by President Obama’s trade ambassador on his visit to the country last Thursday, the day Svartholm was arrested.

Gottfrid Svartholm is currently in Cambodian detention and facing deportation.

Source: Pirate Bay Founder Arrest Followed By $59m Swedish Aid Package For Cambodia

Process of Law: Over 100,000 people demand that Peter Sunde, former spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, be pardoned from his sham verdict by the Swedish Administration.

In a petition started by Adrian Braekke and managed by Avaaz, 113,338 people signed the demand to grant Peter Sunde pardon, after reading his hair-raising story of corruption and a national system defending itself against at any price against upstart challenges. In late summer, the petition was presented to the Swedish Minister of Justice, Beatrice Ask.

Petition to pardon Peter Sunde about to be delivered to Swedish Ministry of Justice, with Adrian Braekke and Anna Troberg. Photographer: Jonathan Reider Lundqvist.

“It’s important that Peter’s struggle is known to the world,” says Adrian Braekke, starter of the petition. “The Pirate Bay trial was a political trial with many irregularities. Sunde was sacrificed to please the copyright industry and his conviction was unjust. I started the petition because he deserves some kind of redress for what he has endured.”

The Swedish Pirate Party has followed the Pirate Bay trial closely as has also leant its support to Braekke’s petition to pardon Peter Sunde.

“Laws need public support to work effectively, and the laws criminalising the free sharing of culture don’t have that public support,” says Anna Troberg, party leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. “More than two million Swedish citizens share files on a regular basis and a substantial part of the Swedish people doesn’t consider this a crime. The petition that Braekke started in support of Sunde is yet further proof of this. It’s time for the government to rethink its approach.”

The Swedish Administration has not commented further on the petition.

Download high quality version: http://bit.ly/v04Z25
Description: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4800.en.html

Jacob Appelbaum, Roger Dingledine: How governments have tried to block Tor

Iran blocked Tor handshakes using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) in January 2011 and September 2011. Bluecoat tested out a Tor handshake filter in Syria in June 2011. China has been harvesting and blocking IP addresses for both public Tor relays and private Tor bridges for years.

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX46Qv_b7F4

Yesterday wasn’t particularly a good day for the freedom of expression in Russia. On the same day that a top court banned gay pride marches in Moscow for the next 100 years, three young members of the punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in a penal colony. Their crime?  Staging an anti Putin protest on the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Protests supporting Pussy Riot were held in 60 cities worldwide (including one in the capital where chess champion Garry Kasparov was beaten by police); Western governments called the sentence disproportionate; and already the band has released a new single called “Putin Lights Up the Fires.” The Guardian has created an accompanying video. Watch it above….

via BoingBoing

Russian Punk Band, Sentenced to Two Years in Prison for Deriding Putin, Releases New Single is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

In many countries around the world, especially the United States, Germany and the UK, hundreds of thousands of Internet users have received letters from rightsholders demanding cash settlements to make supposed copyright lawsuits go away. The cases rarely end up in court, leading some to label these schemes “legal blackmail”.

Nevertheless, and erroneous accusations aside, the vast majority of these projects operate within the law, which is more than can be said for a new scam currently hitting Sweden. Unsuspecting Internet users are receiving demands for almost two hundred euros in letters that claim they have been engaged in illegal downloading.

At this early stage it is not exactly clear how the scam operates, but it is believed that Internet users browsed a website set up by criminals which had the ability to gather information from their phones.

After visiting the site, victims reported receiving an SMS followed up by a mailed cash demand from Arcad World Corp., a company registered at a post office box in Stockholm.

“You have downloaded copyrighted porn. Soon you will receive a civil claim. We ask you to pay it so that your illegal activity will not be a police matter. According to Swedish law, it is your duty to find out if the movies can be downloaded or not,” the scammers explain.

Victims are then told to send amounts between 90 and 195 euros to an account held at the Valartis Bank in Liechtenstein.

When action against illegal downloading is mentioned in Sweden, the name that often springs to mind is the infamous Antipiratbyran. That image was only reinforced when the scammers included a link to an Antipiratbyran webpage in their scam mails. The group says it has absolutely nothing to do with the letters.

“We have been approached by some 100 people across the country, consumer groups and others who are wondering what this is all about,” says Sara Lindbäck, a copyright lawyer at Antipiratbyrån.

Antipiratbyran’s advice is for letter recipients to inform the police and certainly not pay. In an announcement last evening the police said they are aware of the scheme.

“This is a new type of scam where the sender wants to intimidate the recipient into paying money. Anyone who receives one of these requests should absolutely not pay any money but should instead contact the police,” said Niclas Linér, Detective in cybercrime group at the Police Authority in Västmanland.

Police say that a person resident in southern Sweden is suspected of fraud.

Source: Police Warn Internet Users Not To Pay Fines To File-Sharing Fraudsters

I påsken 2013 afholdes fantasispilskongressen Fastaval” og nu inviteres DU til at lave brætspil dertil.

Selv beskriver de det således

“I 2012 var det for første gang muligt at udvikle brætspil til Fastaval. Det blev en (lærerig) succes, og Fastaval vil gerne tage skridtet videre i år, og på sin måde egen måde hjælpe kommende designere med at få deres spil FREM og UD i verden. Ved at sætte fokus på de gode brætspil, bygge rammer for udviklingsprocesser, sætte en forgyldt gipspingvin på højkant og frem for alt få spillene SPILLET af nogle af de sejeste spillere i Danmark: Fastavalgængerne!”

Hvis man ønsker at deltage med sit spil, så kan man via en beskrivelse/synopse tilmelde sig ved at skrive til pap@fastaval.dk. Fristen er 1. oktober 2012.

Du kan læse mere om begivenheden og om Fastaval på deres hjemmeside. Desuden stiller vi her på Papskubber naturligvis vores forum for brætspilsudvikling til rådighed.

A few weeks ago I openly asked Fred Wilson a serious question that’s been on my mind ever since I started writing on the net and encouraging others to.

What happens to all this stuff when the servers disappear?

It’s a fair question to ask anyone involved in techonology for two reasons:

1. They might know the answer.

2. If they’re aware of the problem we all might find an answer working together.

But if we never talk about it, one day I fear we’ll wake up to find it’s all gone. And we never do talk about it. Yet someday it will be the big topic. I’m sure of it, because I’ve lived it.

In 2003, after having heart surgery and leaving UserLand to try to rescue what was left of my life, I was caught in a tough spot, having to run a big dynamic blog hosting website on one of my servers. This was a “gift” from the people who were running the company. I don’t know what led them to do this at the time, but there I was holding the bag, and when the flow hit my server it crashed. Every time I tried to bring it back up, it crashed again. Having been responsible for managing this site a year before, when the stress was one of the factors that put me on the operating table, I understood what I was looking at. I could buy more servers, and you know what — the site would still crash. So I put up a static page that said I was going to do the best to get people their data, but that the server was gone.

The shitstorm that came from that was epic. I don’t think that’s too strong a term. I think I understood what it looked like from their point of view. One day they go to look at their blog and it’s gone. The server doesn’t respond. Connection refused. They come back an hour later and all they see is a message saying they might get their data at some point.

What! Rage.

People feel very personal about this stuff. One person wrote that I had murdered their blogs. This idea caught on. Now I was a murderer. It was just me. Not a company. They either didn’t know or forgot what I had gone through. I didn’t forget. You can’t forget something like that. But it didn’t happen to them, so it didn’t happen.

I don’t think there’s any moral conclusion to this, other than there are a lot of points of view of an event like this. From my own view, I knew that only a handful of the sites had been updated in the last year. So I believed that a lot of the rage was fake. We had also made their sites available for download almost from the start, and told the users about it, repeatedly — but almost no one took advantage of it. So the people who were enraged were at least partly responsible for the problem. Also, as an engineer I never promise certainty. I know about Murphy’s Law. So when I said we might be able to get them backup copies of their sites, I felt certain that I could get most of them, if not all. But the one person whose site could not be restored would want to hold me to the promise, so I hedged it. In the end everyone got their sites, if I remember correctly.

Back then all this was much smaller. There were far fewer bloggers. Maybe thousands. Today there are millions. None of them are thinking about what happens when Tumblr or Blogger or WordPress or Facebook disappear. But come on — we almost know for certain that one of them will. Given enough time they will all disappear. Doesn’t it make sense to think, in advance about what will happen then? Technically there are good practices that exist right now, that could ameliorate the problems. Don’t we have a responsibility to implement them?

Which gets me to the beginning. Yesterday I wrote a piece where I said that the web is socialist. I strongly believe if you try to turn a community of bloggers into a property, someday you’ll wake up to the realization that you bought a bag of air. There’s nothing inside the walls that’s worth anything, from a dollar standpoint. What happens then dear blogger? Do you think anyone is going to subsidize the hosting? You will be on your own that day. And you very likely won’t have any recourse, any more than my users had in 2003. I promise you I was well-intentioned, but that didn’t save the sites. Good intentions are no answer. Saying they’re not your users won’t help either. In 2003 they weren’t mine because I was no longer employed by the company. No salary. No upside. Nothing. I quit for a very good reason. So why me? It was basically an accident that the hits were coming to my server. That didn’t matter to the users. Were they right? Hard to say. But it didn’t matter.

In a way I’m writing this to encourage everyone who’s profiting from this stuff now to set aside some of the money to help the users in what is sure to come. But also to the users to wise up and also to stop being such children. If you feel there’s value in your writing, then treat it like it has value. If you depend on strangers to pay your rent, you have to know that isn’t going to work, long-term.

From the BBC:

The implausible series of accidents took place on Wednesday night on a rural road 225km (140 miles) north of Oslo, in Hedmark county.

The driver’s car sustained some damage in the accident. The moose and a few dozen pool frogs managed to flee the scene unharmed.

Last week Google announced that it would lower the search engine rankings of websites that receive a high number of DMCA takedown requests, independent of whether the linked content is lawful or not.

The algorithm change is being implemented this week and it should severely degrade the rankings of websites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. Today we are beginning to see the first signs that this is indeed the case.

A search for “The Dictator Download” returned several BitTorrent sites in the top results a few days ago, and now these have vanished entirely. While these results vary depending on people’s location and the search phrase, it could be the result of the algorithm change.

The “old” search results

That said, BitTorrent sites are not completely absent from the search results. For example, replacing “download” with “torrent” brings them right back to the top. Nonetheless, incoming searches via Google should decrease.

In a response to Google’s announcement, The Pirate Bay crew say that they’re not too worried by these development. Only a small fraction of their traffic comes through Google, and they now expect more people to access the site directly.

“That Google is putting our links lower is in a way a good thing for us. We’ll get more direct traffic when people don’t get the expected search result when using Google, since they will go directly to TPB,” they write.

Traffic aside, The Pirate Bay is disappointed that Google is caving in to the “dictate” of Hollywood and the major music labels.

“The thing we don’t like with this is that a corrupt industry is deciding what another industry has to do. They’re dictating terms.”

“It’s really ironic: an industry that makes funny movies about dictators, where the dictator is essentially calling the USA a dictatorship, is trying to dictate terms where they have no place to do so….”

Another major BitTorrent site impacted by Google’s changes is isoHunt. In common with the sentiments at The Pirate Bay a traffic dip isn’t a major concern for isoHunt owner Gary Fung, but downranking perfectly legitimate search results is.

“What is really wrong with downranking/censoring websites based on ‘valid’ DMCA notices however is that what’s valid is simply notices that have not been countered,” Fung writes.

“With millions of links subject to notices, we never bothered countering any DMCA notices on Google. That does not mean all links under isohunt.com which Google has filtered by notices are valid, just because we haven’t countered them.”

Another problem Fung signals is that Google’s YouTube may be excluded from the downranking, even though it’s one of the top receivers of takedown requests.

“Sounds exactly like antitrust to me,” Fung says.

IsoHunt and others are keeping a close eye on the impact of the algorithm change to see how it impacts access to legal content. According to Fung, Google should be held accountable, and to that end he’s calling for protest.

“We need a protest against Google censorship and antitrust,” Fung notes.

At the moment it’s too early to measure the total impact of Google’s search update, but it’s clear that the last word hasn’t been said on the topic.

Source: Pirate Bay and isoHunt Respond to Google Search Result Punishment

(1982) Toto was formed in Los Angeles in 1978 by David Paich (b. June 21, 1954, Los Angeles; keyboards, vocals), Steve Lukather (b. October 21, 1957, Los Angeles; guitar, vocals), Bobby Kimball (b. Robert Toteaux, March 29, 1947, Vinton, LA; vocals), Steve Porcaro (b. September 2, 1957, Connecticut; keyboards), David Hungate (b. Texas; bass), and Jeff Porcaro (b. April 1, 1954, Hartford, CT; d. August 5, 1992, Hidden Hills, CA; drums). Paich was the son of arranger Marty Paich; the Porcaros were the sons of percussionist Joe Porcaro. The bandmembers had met in high school and at studio sessions in the 1970s, when they became some of the busiest session musicians in the music business. Paich, Hungate, and Jeff Porcaro wrote songs for and performed on Silk Degrees, the multi-million-selling 1976 album that combined pop, rock, and disco elements into a slick combination which heavily influenced mainstream pop music.
Toto released its self-titled debut album in October 1978, and it hit the Top Ten, sold two-million copies, and spawned the gold Top Ten single “Hold the Line.” The gold-selling Hydra (October 1979) and Turn Back (January 1981) were less successful, but Toto IV (April 1982) was a multi-platinum Top Ten hit, featuring the number-one hit “Africa” and the Top Tens “Rosanna” (about Lukather’s girlfriend, movie star Rosanna Arquette) and “I Won’t Hold You Back.” At the 1982 Grammys, “Rosanna” won awards for Record of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Performance, and Best Instrumental Arrangement With Vocal; and Toto IV won awards for Album of the Year, Best Engineered Recording, and Best Producer (the group). In 1984, a third Porcaro brother, Mike (b. May 29, 1955), joined the group on bass, replacing Hungate. Then lead singer Kimball quit and was replaced by Dennis “Fergie” Frederiksen (b. May 15, 1951, Wyoming, MI).
Toto’s fifth album, Isolation (November 1984), went gold, but was a commercial disappointment. Frederiksen was replaced by Joseph Williams (b. Santa Monica), the son of the conductor/composer John Williams, for Fahrenheit (August 1986). Steve Porcaro quit in 1988, prior to the release of The Seventh One. In 1990, Jean-Michel Byron replaced Williams for the new recordings on Past to Present 1977-1990, then left, as Lukather became the group’s lead singer. Jeff Porcaro died of a heart attack in 1992, but was featured on the group’s next album, Kingdom of Desire. By this time, Toto was far more popular in Japan and Europe than at home. The group added British drummer Simon Phillips. Tambu, released in Europe in the late fall of 1995, appeared in the U.S. in June 1996. For 1999′s Mindfields, Bobby Kimball returned to the lineup after a 15-year absence. The group members continued to do session work during the band’s tenure, contributing significantly to the sound of mainstream pop/rock in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

funny cartoon about this song (thanks to my viewers for the tip)
http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1735

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCca5mPMp9A

As I write this, join.app.net just met our 500K goal, with 38 hours left.

Data Export

When you are logged into the App.net alpha, we provide a button which will email you a .zip file of all of your content in a structured format. If you are an alpha tester, go ahead and try it out. It works.

Impartial 3rd-party verification of results

We are using Stripe to host/power the billing aspects of join.app.net. In the very near future I will ask an impartial 3rd party take a look at our data (while preserving all privacy of our backers) and publicly verify that the join.app.net was operated in an honest manner. There has been zero manipulation of numbers, or “stuffing of the ballot box” by App.net.

Third party app development

We are excited to see quite a few 3rd-party apps already under development. If you are interested in taking a look, here is a crowdsourced directory of 3rd-party apps that are active or under development. This is especially exciting for us given that the API has only been live since Tuesday evening.

This is just an alpha test

Please understand that we built a functional web application and working API to demonstrate that App.net is not “vaporware”. We have a great deal of work to do. One of the most important things we need to do is put together a Terms of Service for the operating site. I will spending a great deal of time in the coming days creating a draft of our ToS, and our forward plan is to host it on github. This way, folks can see it, offer feedback (even pull requests), and will be kept abreast of any future changes. Along these lines, there are still a great many questions that need to be answered before App.net should be thought of as an operating service, rather than just an alpha prototype.

Account claiming

Please note that once the backing period is over, users will no longer be able to “claim” their Twitter usernames. From that moment forward usernames will be awarded on a first-come first-served basis. We implemented “claiming” as a fringe benefit for our backers, not as a go-forward plan. I want to make sure that latecomers are not surprised and disappointed to see that they can no longer get their preferred username. To repeat: if you want to “claim” Twitter your username, and haven’t already backed us, you have 38 hours left to do so.

To our early backers

Thank you for believing.

I know in my heart that what made join.app.net succeed was your willingness and openness to give App.net the benefit of the doubt, to read our github documentation, to ask to participate in the alpha, to write blogposts in our support. Thank you.

We couldn’t have done it without you.

The full debate from “Friday Night, Saturday Morning”, 9th November 1979.

On the edition of 9 November 1979, hosted by Tim Rice, a discussion was held about the then-new film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which been banned by many local councils and caused protests throughout the world with accusations that it was blasphemous. To argue in favour of this accusation were broadcaster and noted Christian Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood (the then Bishop of Southwark). In its defence were two members of the Monty Python team, John Cleese and Michael Palin.

After the heated debate, “The Blues Band”, headed by Paul Jones, performs “Boom Boom, Out Go The Lights”

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXmJHlqMvvE

The full debate from “Friday Night, Saturday Morning”, 9th November 1979.

On the edition of 9 November 1979, hosted by Tim Rice, a discussion was held about the then-new film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which been banned by many local councils and caused protests throughout the world with accusations that it was blasphemous. To argue in favour of this accusation were broadcaster and noted Christian Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood (the then Bishop of Southwark). In its defence were two members of the Monty Python team, John Cleese and Michael Palin.

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGI9UevrzGc

The full debate from “Friday Night, Saturday Morning”, 9th November 1979.

On the edition of 9 November 1979, hosted by Tim Rice, a discussion was held about the then-new film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which been banned by many local councils and caused protests throughout the world with accusations that it was blasphemous. To argue in favour of this accusation were broadcaster and noted Christian Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood (the then Bishop of Southwark). In its defence were two members of the Monty Python team, John Cleese and Michael Palin.

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku3GcPrW9xg

The full debate from “Friday Night, Saturday Morning”, 9th November 1979.

On the edition of 9 November 1979, hosted by Tim Rice, a discussion was held about the then-new film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which been banned by many local councils and caused protests throughout the world with accusations that it was blasphemous. To argue in favour of this accusation were broadcaster and noted Christian Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood (the then Bishop of Southwark). In its defence were two members of the Monty Python team, John Cleese and Michael Palin.

The first part is an interview with Cleese and Palin, the actual debate starts 3 minutes into part 2.

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ni559bHXDg

Liberal Alliance foreslår nu at ramme de mennesker, som har skiftet kurs. Dem som for en årrække siden har stjålet en cykel eller ødelagt en postkasse, men som gennem hårdt arbejde har bevist, at de for længst er kommet videre. Nu skal de straffes. Det er ikke rimeligt.

Liberal Alliance er i et svært dilemma. De forstår, at det er vigtigt for det danske arbejdsmarked at få skabt bedre vilkår for de klogeste udlændinge. Tilsvarende er de enige i, at vilkårene for de svageste udlændingegrupper må forbedres. Men de vil for alt i verden ikke kunne beskyldes for at være blødsødne humanister!

Så hvad gør man? Tilsyneladende har Liberal Alliance udtænkt en snedig plan: Hver gang der er risiko for, at de fremstår lidt for humanistiske, så griber de ned i skuffen efter de kriminelle udlændinge. Frem kommer befolkningsgruppen, som alle elsker at hade. Og så skal de stikkes på bedste voodoo-maner! Stik, stik. Og på med tommelskruerne!

Nu er netop denne gruppe mennesker blevet stukket og strammet ganske meget, siden Pia Kjærsgaard kom til magten i 2001. Men måske kan skruen få et ekstra lille nøk, synes Liberal Alliance at tænke. Måske kan der være plads til endnu en lille nål? Derfor kom der fredag et par forslag til nye stramninger.

Hvis det her bare var tom strategi og politisk kommunikation, så ville øvelsen jo have været interessant. Men sagen er: Det er rigtige mennesker, som det handler om. Og karakteren af forslagene er meget overraskende. For de er så langt fra virkeligheden, at man må spørge sig selv, om Liberal Alliance overhovedet har sat sig ind i de eksisterende regler eller tænkt konsekvenserne igennem? Lad os bare kaste os ud i substansen, for den taler helt for sig selv. Liberal Alliance foreslår to ting.

For det første: Folk med permanent opholdstilladelse skal udvises, hvis de begår personfarlig kriminalitet eller andengangskriminalitet. Og folk med en midlertidig opholdstilladelse skal udvises, hvis de bryder straffeloven. Lige meget hvor lille overtrædelsen er – herut!

Det forekommer jo meget tilforladeligt. Hvem har lyst til at forsvare kriminelle udlændinge? Men nu er det allerede i dag sådan, at kriminelle udlændinge bliver udvist, med mindre det vil være direkte i strid med menneskerettighederne. Man behøver altså ikke være jurist for at forstå, at stramninger vil være ensbetydende med konventionsbrud. Men det vælger Liberal Alliance at fortie. Enten fordi de simpelthen ikke har styr på reglerne, eller også fordi partiet kun er ude efter den hurtige overskrift og den forenklende oneliner. Det første ville være pinligt, men dog tilforladeligt. Det sidste ville være både kynisk og spekulativt. Men kender jeg Liberal Alliance ret, så er de ikke dumme.

Men lad nu motivet være. Hvorfor mon konventionerne ser ud, som de gør? Det kan i virkeligheden formuleres med ét ord: Proportionalitet. Domstolene er forpligtet til at tage stilling til udvisning på baggrund af en konkret proportionalitetsafvejning (som det hedder).

Det betyder, at det er muligt at udvise udlændinge for stort set ingenting, hvis de blot er på gennemrejse i Danmark. Derimod skal der mere til, hvis der er tale om mennesker med en stærk tilknytning til landet.

Hvis et menneske har boet her hele sit liv; har børn, arbejde og venner her; taler sproget flydende og så videre – så er det ikke muligt at udvise vedkommende, hvis han eller hun i et øjebliks dumhed har stjålet en cykel. For så bryder man menneskerettighederne. Konventionerne sikrer altså borgere et minimum af rimelighed. På den måde kan lande ikke bruge simple lovovertrædelser til at slippe af med uønskede mennesker og dermed nægte dem retten til et familieliv.

Vi skal huske på: Det er de samme menneskerettigheder, der beskytter os danskere. Dropper vi rimeligheden og proportionerne over for udlændinge i Danmark, så kan vi heller ikke selv forvente rimelighed og proportioner, når vi opholder os i andre lande.

Det er det ene forslag.

Det andet forslag handler om statsborgerskab. Liberal Alliancen mener, at man ikke længere skal kunne opnå dansk statsborgerskab, hvis man har begået en straffelovsovertrædelse. Som i: Aldrig nogen sinde.

Her er der ikke tale om et muligt konventionsbrud. Men igen kommer spørgsmålet om rimelighed og proportioner på banen. Det er allerede i dag sådan, at man er helt afskåret fra at søge om statsborgerskab, hvis man har fået en fængselsstraf på mere end 1,5 år. Al anden kriminalitet udløser en såkaldt karenstid på mellem 3 og 12 år. I karenstiden skal man holde sig inden for lovens rammer og i øvrigt opfylde de øvrige krav til statsborgerskab, bl.a. krav om danskkundskaber, selvforsørgelse, ingen gæld til det offentlige og viden om det danske samfund.

De stramninger, Liberal Alliance foreslår, vil altså ikke ramme de alvorligt kriminelle udlændinge, for de er allerede afskåret fra at søge om statsborgerskab. Liberal Alliance vil nu ramme de mennesker, som har skiftet kurs. Dem som for længe siden har begået en mindre lovovertrædelse, men som gennem en længere årrække har bevist, at de for længst har lagt det bag sig. Det gælder den nyuddannede læge, der som 17-årig med hjertesorg ødelagde to vejskilte på vej hjem fra byen. Det gælder folkeskolelærerinden med to børn, der for ti år siden lod sig presse til at stjæle tøj i en forretning.

De mennesker er allerede blevet straffet efter straffeloven. Men ud over denne straf, som for længst er udstået, skal de idømmes en evighedsstraf. En straf som aldrig kan appeleres, som man aldrig kan prøveløslades fra, og som videregives til den næste generation: De mennesker kommer ikke til at få et dansk pas eller stemme til et dansk folketingsvalg. Deres børn kan ikke se dem som rigtige danskere. Og deres børn bliver ikke danske statsborgere.

Jeg har svært ved at tro, at Liberal Alliances egne vælgere synes, at det er rimeligt. Men måske håber partitoppen på, at deres vælgere ikke kommer længere end til overskriften? Sikke dog et trist syn på egne vælgere. Tænk hvis vælgerne faktisk vovede sig til at spørge, hvad der ligger under de flotte og kortfattede hovedsætninger?

På Christiansborg er Liberal Alliance et fornuftigt og forhandlingsparat parti. Fra tid til anden har de så behov for at gå ud og sende surrealistiske signalpolitiske forslag afsted i medierne. Sandsynligvis tror de, at det er dét, som deres vælgere vil have. Jeg nærer nu højere tanker om Liberal Alliances vælgere. Og jeg vil kæmpe for, at deres forslag får lov til at blive, hvor de hører hjemme: Som indholdsløs signalpolitik i medierne, langt væk fra konkret lovgivning.

Joe Justice of why the WikiSpeed car project adamantly refuses VC investments:

“”Aptera took Venture Capital, a few million dollars worth, in exchange for the VC firm having the right to cancel the project and retain all rights and IP if they got cold feet. These terms are common from VC. While we were in the X Prize with them, the VC firm fired the original team of engineers (7 of them I believe) and by contract those engineers are forbidden to work on anything related to the Aptera project or its technology ever again. The original engineers had personal loans that in aggregate were over a million dollars in order to produce the first working prototypes that attracted the VC in the first place, and now those engineers had no job- no way to continue working on their passion and area of expertise, and still had these massive personal loans. the only group that was paid were the VC, which then liquidated the assets of the company (www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGGhH1LlUUE). Many revolutionary companies are looking for VC to help them “make it big” or otherwise take outside debt and then struggle with the reports, predictions, and process imposed on them by the larger non-innovative firm until they are smothered and go under, or are simply liquidated outright for short term gains that seem to make sense to the larger firm who is using cost-accounting. WIKISPEED has no debt- even if we don’ sell another car for another 3 years we will be here, innovating and iterating our products.

I’ll clarify, although we met the Aptera original engineers and their VC, I wasn’t in the Aptera or VC firm board room during the events above. This is my take, from what I observed in the news and from team Aptera themselves. Those original engineers are probably the best to ask, but are likely legally bound by a gag-order with further financial penalties if they speak about certain parts of the business deal. I’m so glad we’ve open-sourced a version of our car to the public domain- no matter what silly contract we sign that will always be out there. It’s like an insurance policy that the project has produced something the world can choose to use.”

So, How is WikiSpeed funded then?

“We have micro investors at $10 a month (see the right-hand side of www.WIKISPEED.com) and that’s what drives almost all of this. At that level it’s too much administrative overhead to authorize stock, so instead we have an agreement that if we make it at recognize profit, we repay them, and if we can afford interest, we repay them with interest. This makes sure we won’t laugh all the way to the bank and leave a supporter in the dark. Then we have traditional investment at $10k or bitcoin equivalent and on up. We offer them a promissory letter or convertible debenture- standard Angel investment documentation. What we do though is investors never retain the right to liquidate the company and keep IP, this protects us from what happened to Aptera. email info@WIKISPEED.com to rock with us.

So far every investor has declined signing any promissory note with us- they have simply said “when you profit and it is sustainable for the company please repay me with interest.” The world is awesome, I never expected this level of altruistic support from the global community.”

03. juli 2007 04:00
Af: JESPER BEENFELDT NIELSEN, Fyens Stiftstidende

En af Fyns mest markante ejendomsinvestorer tror fuldt og fast på, at der venter endnu flere gode tider for ejendomspriserne.

- Det har aldrig været så godt som nu, og det stiger stadig, siger Karsten Bill Rasmussen.

Da 2006 sluttede ejede han ejendomme for 2,2 milliarder kroner – og siden har han købt ind for yderligere 400-500 millioner kroner – oftest fra pensionsselskaber.

Der er ellers tændt flere advarselslamper. Renten er i en glidende stigning, som ikke ventes at stoppe lige med det samme, og økonomer taler hver anden dag om prisbobler, der nok snart eksploderer.

Ingen boble

– Det er rigtig dyrt nu, men det sagde vi også for fem år siden. Det havde ikke været klogt at stoppe med at købe dengang, og det er det heller ikke nu, for prisstigningerne vil fortsætte, siger den 51-årige investor.

- Hvis der kommer et fald i priserne, bliver det kun en lille kurve på tråden. Vi har bestemt ikke nogen boble, lyder vurderingen.

Karsten Bill Rasmussens ejendomme er i regnskaberne bogført til 2,2 milliarder kroner.

Værdien afhænger helt af, hvor stort afkast, ejeren beregner sig. En ejendom giver et bestemt beløb i kroner i husleje. Hvis det beløb skal svare til et afkast på fire procent, bliver ejendommen automatisk mere værd, end hvis det samme beløb skal svare til et afkast på fem procent.

Fokuserer på kontanter

I Karsten Bill Rasmussens tilfælde er afkastkravet i år 5,5 procent. Det er en halv procent mindre end året før men stadig et godt stykke over markedets niveau, og derfor er hans ejendomme reelt mere værd – måske 200-300 millioner kroner oven i det officielle tal.

Når han selv skal vurdere sit regnskab, fokuserer han mest på, hvor mange penge, der er tjent i kontanter – det vil sige uden at regne med reguleringer af ejendommenes værdi.

Her var tallet i 2006 126 millioner kroner før skat mod 98 millioner kroner året før.

Som sædvanlig er årets indkøb af erhvervsejendomme fordelt nogenlunde ligeligt mellem Københavns dyreste strøgkvarterer og Odenses bymidte. Der er dog også købt to samlinger af ejerlejligheder i Odense, men de skal sælges videre enkeltvis, efterhånden som lejerne forlader dem.

Døtrenes selskab

Alle pengene sættes ikke i ejendomme. En beholdning af aktier og obligationer til 434 millioner kroner kalder han "mit værn mod dårlige tider". Mangel på likviditet har tidligere fjernet mange store mænd i hans branche.

Karsten Bill Rasmussen styrer også forretningerne i to Mica-selskaber, som ejes af hans døtre. Her er ejendomme for ca. 350 millioner kroner placeret.

- De skal have noget til at betale arveafgiften med engang, smiler faderen, som allerede nu er sikker på, at 2007 bliver væsentligt bedre end 2006 – både for ham og for døtrene.

Kilde : http://www.fyens.dk/article/821779:Business-Fyn–Karsten-Bill-venter-mere-opsving (3. juli 2007)

Shared via Posterous on August 04, 2012 at 11:15PM

The land is made valuable by the the work and efforts of people around them. Taking back societies contribution in the form of a Land Value Tax would allow us to reduce taxes on workers and business.

Not only would this be fairer and more progressive, it would also boost the economy and incentivise increased development.

LIB DEMS ALTER
This video has been made and released by Liberal Democrat Action on Land Tax and Economic Reform.
Website: http://libdemsalter.org.uk/en/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/libdemsalter
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/LibDemsALTER

OTHER PARTY LVT CAMPAIGNS
Green: http://www.scottishgreens.org.uk/news/show/6530/greens-launch-land-tax-plans-fairer-more-sustainable
Labour: http://www.labourland.org/
Conservative: http://toryreformgroup.tumblr.com/post/17259025518/david-cowan-progressive-conservatives-should-support-a-l

LVT BILL PRESENTED TO PARLIAMENT
Caroline Lucas from the Green Party has proposed replacing Council Tax and Business Rates with land based taxes.

http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/landvaluetax.html

This would be the first step towards a full and comprehensive Land Tax.

http://libdemsalter.org.uk/en/article/2012/566443/baby-steps-to-wealth-tax-by-dr-tony-vickers-hon-sec-professional-land-reform-group

The bill will be voted on its Second Reading on 9th November 2012. If you support introduction of a Land Tax then lobby your local MP to vote in favour!

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTxyNQ0ea-k

It’s a sad state of affairs when we can say the US has had “yet another” mass shooting. It’s also a sad state of affairs when the obligatory resulting debate about gun control — yet again — achieves absolutely nothing besides a short-term media frenzy filled with vitriol. Every time, it’s hot air about whether we should keep guns out of people’s hands, with no mention of whether we can, nor the underlying social conditions that actually cause mass murder. Enough already.

For those unfamiliar with what happened, a psychologically disturbed man dressed in tactical gear walked into a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, armed with tear gas grenades and multiple firearms. He shot 70 people at random, killing 12 of them. The tactical gear didn’t raise eyebrows at first because it was the opening night of The Dark Knight Rises, and everyone thought he was wearing a costume. This is, unfortunately, not a particularly strange thing to happen in the United States.

“Enough already” seems to be everyone’s rallying cry this time around. It was after last year’s big shooting when the headline “Mass shootings are a fact of American life” appeared. So the anti-gun crowd says, enough already, let’s pass a bunch of gun bans and put an end to these tragedies. The pro-gun crowd says, enough already, stop politicizing tragedies, and oh by the way if everyone had a gun then people could defend themselves against trigger-happy madmen.

Meanwhile, my brain overdoses on epic fail and I nearly fall into a coma.

The Right of the People to Blow Holes In Stuff for Recreational Purposes

I used to be one of the stereotypical anti-gun people, ignorantly calling for a repeal of the Second Amendment and decrying anyone who’d want a gun as a backwards barbarian. Then two things happened. First, I started dating a national champion competition target shooter. Second, I read the part of Makers where people started building AK-47s with 3D printers. These things made me realize that even though I don’t particularly want a gun, I still ought to stand up for people’s freedom to have them.

Why is the right to bear arms important? “Guns are used for hunting, for self-defense, and as a last line of defense against tyranny,” says the upper middle class white male who just drove from his well-paying job to his nice, safe neighborhood (which is located hundreds of miles from any hunting ground) in the gas-guzzling, heavy-duty pickup truck that he bought in case he ever needs to tow the boat he’ll never own.

See, most gun owners I’ve met will never, ever use their guns to go hunting, to shoot an intruder, or to violently revolt against an oppressive government. The vast majority of people have guns for the same reason many people have ridiculous trucks: because they’re fun. And believe me, having shot an absurd four-barrel magnum which produces a muzzle flash longer than the gun itself (and it can fire underwater!), I know how fun it is to make these things go bang. There is nothing wrong with fun. But because the terrified anti-gun crowd won’t accept the legitimacy of fun, law-abiding gun owners have to come up with ridiculous, flimsy justifications for why they should be allowed to have their toys.

But no, I don’t stand for the right to bear arms because of the sanctity of human fun. I stand for the right to bear arms because taking it away would be like putting a band-aid on a brain tumor.

You Wouldn’t Download an Assault Weapon

In this NPR interview about the Aurora shooting, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne had this to say:

There are some very simple things that we know through common sense would make a difference if a shooter did not have a magazine with 100 rounds in it. He’d have to reload. If assault weapons were illegal, you would at least take an event like this and make it less lethal and we ought to at least try to do that.

Yes, it’s true that the illegality of assault weapons might make it less likely for a lone disturbed gunman to acquire them. Not so much for organized criminals (which is why Mexico’s famously strict gun control doesn’t do much of anything to curb its gun violence problem), but a ban on — for example — high-capacity magazines could have saved a few lives in Aurora.

This benefit would last only so long as it’s impossible to make high-capacity magazines on your Makerbot. Any kind of weapons ban would be effective for maybe 10 or 15 years before 3D printing becomes advanced, inexpensive, and widespread enough to render it completely moot.

In the near future, it will be even easier for a lone mentally ill person to get their hands on a dangerous assault weapon. We ought to be rehearsing for that reality, not pretending that it’s never going to happen.

So How Do We Get People To Stop Shooting Each Other?

Here’s the challenge we face: how do we stop gun violence if we can’t stop people from getting guns? Our only choice is to focus on why a person might want to commit senseless mass murder.

Obviously, you’d have to be seriously mentally ill to go through with a mass shooting. Therefore, it’s no surprise that a country as mass shooting-plagued as the US also leads the developed world in untreated mental illness. If we deal with our mental illness problem, we deal with our murder problem. If we eradicate mental instability, we no longer have to worry about whom we can trust with firearms. Plain and simple.

Well, it’s simple to identify that the problem is mental illness. Actually helping mentally ill people is a much more difficult topic. It’s not as simple as throwing money at the problem in a vague attempt to “improve our healthcare system”. You have to consider which treatment options are effective. You have to consider whether treatment even is the option, as some mental illnesses may be a symptom of another societal problem; as Bruce Levine said, “just how unjust does a society have to become before helping people adjust to it with behavior modification and medication is immoral?”

And let’s not forget that those same societal injustices cause poverty, which creates fertile ground for smaller-scale, non-mass murder gun violence. Countries that ban handguns see their poverty-generated gun violence replaced by similar levels of knife violence.

Perhaps the Christopher Nolan film which best complements this mass shooting problem isn’t The Dark Knight Rises. It’s Inception: these mass shootings are caused by problems within problems within problems; gun violence caused by mental illness caused by poor healthcare caused by income inequality and political corruption and so on and so on and so on.

Conclusion

I wish that horrible mass shootings like these could give us an opportunity to discuss the complex problems that cause them. A nuanced discussion about mental illness, and how it can be not only treated but also prevented, is what we ought to be getting out of this tragedy. It’s not that the American people are too stupid to hear about complex problems, it’s that nobody with a microphone ever brings them up. We’re all tired of this same old, dead end debate about whether we should ban all guns or arm every man, woman and child. But the media, for whatever reason, seems to believe that the same old idiocy gets more readers and viewers, which generates more profits.

Humor us, pundits. Just try something smarter, deeper, less cynical. Give nuance a shot. Give intelligence a chance. I think you’d be surprised at how little of your audience you lose. Maybe, just maybe, a little bit of intelligence and sensibility will prepare us to prevent the next mass murder. And perhaps fix a few other things too.

Few would call Wim Wenders, the auteur behind Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, The Buena Vista Social Club, and last year’s documentary Pina, a “commercial” director. Yet he has, now and again, put in time as a director of commercials — advertisements, that is, for beer, food, and cameras. His personal hymn to Leica’s craftsmanship aside (“As a boy,” he narrates, “I looked at my father’s Leica like a sacred object”), these spots don’t immediately betray the identity of the man at the helm. Even if you’ve seen many of Wenders’ feature films, you might not guess that he made these commercials if you just happened upon them; you would, though, feel their difference in sensibility from the ads surrounding them. The Stella Artois clip above includes several attention-drawing television tropes like a picturesque European coast, fast cars and motorcycles, vintage musical instruments, alcohol, and femininity, but it approaches them in a nonstandard way — one that, consequentially, actually stands a chance of drawing your attention.

“There’s a certain amount of objects that men like a lot,” says Wenders in a short documentary on the making of the commercial, “and they like them so much that they give them their girlfriends’ names.” We see first a motorcycle named Sophie, then a convertible named Victoria, then a guitar named Valerie, then a beer — Stella. We never see any actual women, or, for that matter, any men; just places and things. Wenders imbues the sequence with humanity through the camera’s gaze, and the behind-the-scenes footage shows it as no easy task, requiring take after precisely lit take shot with cameras mounted on elaborate mechanical arms that look more expensive than the treasured objects themselves. (It also requires the director to issue instructions in no fewer than three languages, though I understand that as business as usual on a Wenders set.) For an entirely different perspective on beer, watch his spot for Carling that involves bicycling over a waterfall. For a more epic take on the relationship between mankind and machinery, watch what he put together for food conglomerate Barilla’s 125th anniversary.

Related content:

Wes Anderson’s New Commercials Sell the Hyundai Azera

Fellini’s Fantastic TV Commercials

David Lynch’s Surreal Commercials

Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Commercial for Schick

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Wim Wenders Creates Ads to Sell Beer (Stella Artois), Pasta (Barilla), and More Beer (Carling) is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

With all the reporters using Twitter these days, it’s interesting to see that now this question might finally get a real look.

In the past, when issues of ethics came up, it was only the tech press around, and they were more or less unanimous in getting angry when their ethics are questioned. Tar and feather the accuser. Lots of excuses why they had to feed in the same trough as their competitors. The lure of millions of followers is too strong to resist. Let’s see if the mainstream press is any better.

Here are the salient facts.

1. Twitter just threw a reporter off the service for revealing the email address of an NBC exec. 2. NBC requested Twitter do it. 3. NBC and Twitter have a partnership.

So at this point, if you’re a reporter and you have a story that’s critical of Twitter, do you post a link to your followers? What if it reveals information they consider private? What if you violate some other of their terms of service? Have you disclaimed to your readers and followers that you are subject to their terms of service? Do you know what’s in their terms of service?

All this time the press has been acting as if Twitter were a public utility, when it is nothing like that. It’s a service operated for free by a private company. They don’t see it in any way as a public utility. They have good PR and have chosen a friendly logo, and they make jokes and they’re nice guys. But they’re running a business. And your writing is subject to their whims. And your recourse is nothing. Read the terms of service.

And lest you think Facebook is any better, it isn’t.

It’s time for journalists to take a serious look at this and decide if they are really serious about journalism. Imho.

A recommended article from the first issue of the Journal of Peer Production:

* Article: Caring About the Plumbing: On the Importance of Architectures in Social Studies of (Peer-to-Peer) Technology. Francesca Musiani. Journal of Peer Production, Issue 1, 2012.

Francesco Musiani writes in the abstract:

“This article discusses the relevance, for scholars working on social studies of network media, of “caring about the plumbing” (to paraphrase Bricklin, 2001), i.e., addressing elements of application architecture and design as an integral part of their subject of study. In particular, by discussing peer-to-peer (P2P) systems as a technical networking model and a dynamic of social interaction that are inextricably intertwined, the article introduces how the perspective outlined above is particularly useful to adopt when studying a promising area of innovation: that of “alternative” or “legitimate” (Verma, 2004) applications of P2P networks to search engines, social networks, video streaming and other Internet-based services. The article seeks to show how the Internet’s current trajectories of innovation increasingly suggest that particular forms of architectural distribution and decentralization (or their lack), impact specific procedures, practices and uses. Architectures should be understood an “alternative way of influencing economic systems” (van Schewick, 2010), indeed, the very fabric of user behavior and interaction. Most notably, the P2P “alternative” to Internet-based services shows how the status of every Internet user as a consumer, a sharer, a producer and possibly a manager of digital content is informed by, and shapes in return, the technical structure and organization of the services (s)he has access to: their mandatory passage points, places of storage and trade, required intersections. In conclusion, this article is a call to study the technical architecture of networking applications as a “relational property” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996), and integral part of human organization. It suggests that such an approach provides an added value to the study of those communities, groups and practices that, by leveraging socio-technical dynamics of distribution, decentralization, collaboration and peer production, are currently questioning more traditional or institutionalized models of content creation, search and sharing.”

Henrik diskuterer i indlægget Enhedslistens ønske om at nationalisere bankvæsenet og økonomen Paul Masons udredning i bogen Meltdown af årsagerne til finanskrisen. Mason er nogenlunde på linie, lyder det til, med udlægningen i en film som Inside Job (som jeg bl.a tidligere har diskuteret her) der udnævner den blinde neoliberalistiske tiltro til kapitalmarkedernes ufejlbarlighed – personificeret i direktøren for den amerikanske nationalbank Alan Greenspan – som hovedansvarlig for krisen – og den deregulering, som Greenspan m.fl. har været ansvarlig for siden begyndelsen af 1980′erne. Masons løsningsforslag er på linie med Enhedslistens forslag : at socialisere finansbranchen, så det at ‘levere kapital’ i fremtiden kommer på linie med levering af el, vand, varme, telefoni, internet osv. Helt sikkert et interessant forslag.

Men det kan ikke stå alene, hvis man spørger mig, for finansbranchen er ikke kernen af problemet, selvom det var investeringsbankernes spekulationer m.v. der udløste krisen. Finanskrisen skyldtes ikke kun de tvivlsomme lånetyper (papirpenge, derivativer, subprime lån osv.), dereguleringen og de neoliberales udsalg af statslige institutioner – selvom alle tre ting var helt centrale i fht. at udløse den aktuelle krise. Forudsætningen for den spekulation der har fundet sted og som tilbagevendende skaber økonomiske bobler, kriser og fattigdom er privat ejerskab til jord.

En socialisering af finansbranchen kan derfor ikke alene løse de problemer, som er blevet skabt i vores økonomi.

Man kan starte med at spørge sig selv, hvad det egentlig er, der kræver så stor finansiering? Fra et samfundsperspektiv burde det være nye virksomheder – men bankerne er ikke kendt for at være meget risikovillige leverandører af kapital til erhvervslivet – det der trækker mest er ejendomsmarkedet. Hvorfor dette? Fordi det med en økonomi i vækst er den mest sikre investering. Hvad er det der bliver mere værd? Det er næppe de mursten husene bygges af…. Der er derimod beliggenhederne – specielt i de store byer, hvor grundværdierne og huslejen stiger pga den økonomiske vækst. Faktisk stiger værdierne hastigere end samfundsøkonomien i forventningen om øget vækst og dermed større afkast i fremtiden. Problemet er bare at det er en spekulation i (fremtidige) samfundsskabte værdier. Når nogen indkasserer gevinsterne det ene sted er der nogle andre, der må betale gildet et andet sted i det økonomiske system – f.eks. ved at lønnen presses og virksomhederne skal producere mere – også mere end efterspørgslen kan bære. Hvilket naturligvis fører til et kollaps, på et eller andet tidspunkt, når virksomhederne er blevet presset helt ud over kanten.

Man kan også spørge, hvordan det kan være, at vi alle skal producere så meget og løbe så stærkt, at vi skal have vores børn passet af fremmede og at vi ofte er ved at stresse os selv til døde – selvom vi tilsyneladende lever i en overflodsøkonomi, hvor der hver eneste dag kasseres millioner ton fødevarer, fordi markedet er uhyggelig dårligt til at forudsige efterspørgslen?

Man kan også spørge sig selv, om det virkelig er rigtigt at økonomisk vækst har været effektivt til at udrydde fattigdom (som Mason o.a. mener), og om det virkelig er vækst der skal hjælpe u-landene ud af håbløs fattigdom? For mig at se er der slet ikke en sådan sammenhæng. Tværtimod præges vores verden fortsat – her i begyndelsen af det 21. århundrede – af stor økonomisk ulighed – indenfor såvel som imellem staterne, pga. den neoliberale vækstfilosofi.

Der er nogle meget fundamentale problemer i vores økonomi som den er indrettet p.t. som går helt tilbage til finansbranchens fremvækst i forbindelse med først korstogene – sidenhen kolonialismen og globaliseringen. Og i særdeleshed de vesteuropæiske staters afhængighed af kapital til finansiering af udplyndringen af den tredie verden (kanoner, skibe og jagerfly koster mange penge) – hvilket har ført til statslig gældsætning og et skattesystem baseret på overbeskatning – af arbejde – for at betale renterne (for ikke at tale om udsalg af offentlige serviceinstitutioner, som er blevet opbygget siden enevælden – med få knips på private hænder, for meget kortsigtede gevinster). Et system der betyder at alt andet lige har finansbranchen vokset lige siden – på bekostning af nationalstaternes magt og handlefrihed.

Et andet (og det væsentligste) problem går også tilbage til middelalderen – det er privat ejerskab til jord (dvs. beliggenheder) som da var på en lille priviligeret overklasses hænder – men siden er blevet fordelt på mange flere. Der er nu en stor middelklasse af boligejere, hvoraf en del må trælle for finansbranchen snarere end herremanden for at betale af på lån, der qua grundværdiernes spejling af samfundets økonomiske vækst (og forventning om yderligere vækst) bærer præg af en alt for høj og urealistisk vurdering. Ens situation på boligmarkedet handler for det meste om held. Man kan risikere at købe alt for dyrt og trælle for noget, som blot bliver ved med at falde i værdi – eller købe på det helt rette tidspunkt i et opsving, hvor investeringen kun bliver bedre med årene. Uanset hvad kommer man som boligejer i lommen på banken, og binder sig dermed til at skulle arbejde og trælle for at betale for finansieringen – af noget der ikke burde koste mere end de mursten, huset er bygget af.

Problemet består i at markedet for fast ejendom ikke opfører sig som andre markeder. Det er et marked i monopoler; i privilegier; i rettigheden til økonomisk udnyttelse af en given lokalitet. Det er dybest set en handel med privilegier, som er gået i arv igennem generationer, i mange tilfælde helt tilbage til middelalderen, hvor de på et eller andet tidspunkt blev tilranet ved erobring med militær magt. I tilfældet USA er tilraningen af noget nyere dato, ikke desto mindre blev USA’s magt grundlagt ved blodig erobring af indianernes land og slaveri af importeret arbejdskraft fra Afrika.

Hvad er så løsningen? Vi skal gøre omtrent det samme som det de enevældige fyrster gjorde i 1600-tallet, da de europæiske stater var på falittens rand efter adskillige blodige religionskrige, og som gjorde det muligt for centralmagten at vokse og udvide sin evne til at opbygge stærke stater med en forbedret offentlig service, og som derfor lagde grunden til oplysningstiden og europæisk velstand i adskillige generationer : vi skal gøre boet op, lave en national (og senere også global) opgørelse over vore grundværdier, og beskatte disse tilsvarende. En del af løsningen består således i en socialisering af vore fælles grundværdier ved gradvist at lade indkomstbeskatningen afløse af fuld grundskyld – fordi jorden og naturressourcerne retteligt tilhører os alle, og fordi værdistigningerne er skabt i fællesskab og ikke bør kunne indkasseres af den der tilfældigvis har købt fast ejendom på et gunstigt tidspunkt – men tværtimod bør kanaliseres tilbage i fællesskabets kasse – til gavn for alle (f.eks. i form af udbetalt dividende).

I Henriks indlæg lyder det bl.a. (i udlægningen af Mason, mine kommentarer i firkantede paranteser) :

Nedsmeltningen var ikke kun en krise for den globale økonomi men også for det neoliberale tankesæt. [Kunne ikke være mere enig] I dens efterdønninger er det dog ikke kun den neoliberale elite der må revidere sine økonomiske modeller. Kapitalismens kritikere må ligeledes genopfinde et politisk projekt, hvis de vil gøre sig håb om varige sociale forbedringer. Problemet er imidlertid, at de ikke har et sammenhængende verdensbillede at sætte i stedet for

Det er det vi er igang med at skabe og skitsere – jeg har selv tegnet og fortalt på min blog i de seneste tre indlæg især :

• Skatter! Skaaaatter! Underbara, tjusiga skatter!
• Live Aid-bevægelsen, Marx og statsgælden
• Et retfærdigt samfund

Der er i allerhøjeste grad et behov for at vi selv – uafhængigt af etablerede diskurser, medier og meningsmagere – stykker vore bidder af informationer og erfaringer sammen til en ny verdensforståelse – ét blogindlæg af gangen, og søger at realisere den politiske virkelighed vi ønsker. Vi kan ikke længere regne med at nogen andre gør dette for os.

People used to make fun of the politician who said the Internet was basically a bunch of tubes. This always bothered me because he was right. That’s exactly what the Internet is. Lots of tubes and over those tubes flows lots of ideas, very very fast.

To companies like NBC and Facebook, and to some extent Twitter, we’re not tubes, or people, we’re hamsters in cages, spinning wheels.

When NBC reports on what’s happening on Twitter, they talk about how many millions of times the name McCartney appeared vs how many people said something about the Queen or Bond or Mitt Romney. They seem to miss what people are saying about them. They should try to listen. That’s the good stuff. Look at the number of clickthroughs one of my bits about NBC got last night. That’s some kind of record.

I have bad news for NBC. On Twitter, they’re the story. Not the Olympics.

Meanwhile the athletes get involved. Same in tech, I think — the talent understands what a medium is. The suits still think in terms of how many times the wheel spins. Maybe the athletes think that too, maybe they just do a better job of faking it.

Doc Searls said something interesting. He’s not a range of ages — 18-54. We’re not coveted age groups. We’re people with hearts and minds and lives and ideas. We don’t use these things so much to make your wheels spin, rather to get a thrill about using something very futuristic, and wondering how it might evolve. I think even the newest Twitter user gets a lift from the possibilities. NBC had a chance to make sports exciting in some incredibly interesting ways. And all they think of, instead, is how to keep people from doing that. It’s the saddest story in tech, and it’s one that just keeps repeating.

In any case, the news system of the future keeps booting. Everything we said on Rebooting the News is still true. And we’re still experiencing a lot of friction between the old way and the new way. Change doesn’t come easy!

Last night Twitter unveiled their Olympics site.

When I saw it I was surprised at how useless it is. I had no idea what they were saying. There wasn’t anything about the Olympics that I could see. I think they made a mistake by rolling it out before there was any news. Or maybe they don’t plan to put news there? Hard to say.

But the site is not useful in any way that I can see. Maybe I’m old-fashioned guy. I don’t care much about snorts and grunts. I like stories and pictures and video. That kind of stuff.

Now, just so happens, I had a great A-B comparison ready to go.

http://olympics.newsriver.org/

It’s a very simple page.

1. It’s a river.

2. It’s subscribed to a few special Olympics feeds from NBC, BBC, Guardian, NYT, USA Today. I was looking for Olympics blogs, and if I find any, I’ll add them. I also am getting together my own Olympics feed to pick up stories from places that aren’t doing special coverage.

3. It updates every 10 minutes.

4. No ads. No flash. No tweets. Just links to stories with synopses and titles. A RT link if you happen to use a linkblogging tool.

5. It’s hosted on Amazon S3 so it can take a lot of traffic, theoretically.

That’s all there is. And I think that’s all you need.

It’s a partnership between a few great news organizations, and it didn’t require any agreements. They all get as much flow as they merit, and can put ads on their pages. They don’t have to point to it, but of course I wouldn’t mind if they did.

This is the escape hatch if it ever looks like Twitter is a media company that’s competing with the big publishing companies. Your RSS feeds are your secret security blanket.

Keep those updates coming. Love Dave

Somebody at The Unofficial Oxford United Forum reposted a pro-LVT article from The Guardian, and earned the following nigh incomprehensible response:

Presumably they would pay more up north as they have bigger gardens.(1)
Good ploy to enable more houses to fill up landfill sites.(2)
Hairbrained [sic] liberal socialist ideas.(3)

Very strange.

1) It’s called Land (or Location) VALUE Tax. The clue is in the name, the value of a plot is not so much to do with its size (unless you are comparing it with other plots in the very near vicinity) as with its location. But I suppose this makes a refreshing change from “LVT is an attack on London”.

2) LVT and planning regulations/restrictions are quite separate topics; LVT works conceptually and administratively with or without planning regulations/restrictions, and I’d hope that any rational local council would prevent houses from being built on land which is prone to subsidence (such as former landfill sites) anyway.

Either way, we actually happen to have plenty of housing, it is just very badly allocated because those who “got on the ladder” more than twenty years ago snaffled the nice big houses for themselves and then made bloody well sure than no new ones were ever built. Those people who are unhappy about paying more tax have a simple choice: trade down or simply allow more housing to be built, thus widening the tax base and reducing their own bill.

3) People have very little imagination.

It is perfectly easy to imagine a society where we have always had LVT as the only tax; people would get used to the idea; they’d save up more during their working lives if they want to stay put in an above average house in their old age instead of forcing subsequent generations to pay eye-watering taxes (as well as wildly overpaying for crap housing) to keep them in the manner to which they have become accustomed; various little wrinkles like quite how the annual revaluations would work would be ironed out etc.

Now, what if somebody came along and said, right, let’s stop this LVT nonsense and tax people’s earned incomes or profits at a marginal rate of about 50% and leave plenty enough loopholes so that the really rich don’t have to pay any. Would the vast hard working majority not decry such people as “hare brained liberal socialists”? Would nobody point out that the result of this would be a return to a stagnant economy, high unemployment, tax evasion, the boom-bust cycle etc?

So if going from B to A is a truly shit idea, surely moving from A to B is a very good idea.

Dated April 2012, the IFPI report obtained by TorrentFreak was put together by the music industry group’s chief anti-piracy officer Mo Ali.

The 30-page report presents a global view of IFPI’s “problems”, “current and future threats” and the industry’s responses to them.

IFPI says it has five possible reactions to a threat: Take down, Disruption, Investigation, Lobbying and Litigation.

The Threats: P2P

Initially IFPI splits illicit content availability into two sections. The first they classify as “content held on users’ computers” and distributed via P2P networks such as BitTorrent, Gnutella, DirectConnect, eDonkey and Ares.

It says it has taken “strategic action” against The Pirate Bay (BitTorrent), LimeWire (Gnutella) and also the semi-private tracker Demonoid (BitTorrent). IFPI doesn’t elaborate on action against the latter, but it was rumored that a member of the site’s staff was targeted a while back.

Central hosting/cyberlockers

The second category is content held on central servers, including file-hosts and cyberlockers. Interestingly, the IFPI diagram below shows that when the group examined allegedly infringing URLs on the world’s major cyberlockers, Megaupload’s stats paled into insignificance when compared to the others.

IFPI is clear on their requirements for cyberlockers to operate to their liking. Their number one desire is that they “proactively filter for infringing content” but if they don’t they must “operate an effective and efficient notice and take down system.” Failure to implement either means sites will be required to “shut down”.

Hacking and phishing attacks

One of the other threats detailed by IFPI include hacking and phishing attacks against email accounts of artists and their management. Through these techniques individuals are apparently obtaining unauthorized access to pre-release music.

IFPI say a number of techniques are being used, from bogus emails claiming to be from social networking, email, or cyberlocker sites, to the compromising of password reset features. Once accessed, mail is forwarded to other accounts, either with the music attached or with valuable information which allows other systems to be accessed.

The rise of mobile data and applications

IFPI is also keeping a close eye on the downloading and sharing of content across mobile data and other wireless networks. IFPI worries that these networks are providing here-and-now streaming of content via all-you-can-eat plans. Making matters worse is that IFPI reports “challenges” when it comes to matching an IP address to a subscriber.

The recording group also reports that Apple and Android architectures are encouraging the creation of 3rd party music apps. IFPI say they are crawling both the App Store and Google Marketplace and are focusing on “quick take down agreements” with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Palm to remove apps they don’t like. They are also mulling an expansion of their “payment provider program” to target “rogue” Android app developers.

Unauthorized pay MP3 sites

IFPI say they have identified in excess of 50 Russian and Ukrainian pay MP3 download sites. The group reports that law enforcement authorities have “secured evidence that the illegal sites are annually stealing hundreds of millions of dollars” which is creating opportunities for money laundering and tax evasion investigations. IFPI say their next steps will include strangling the sites’ finances with the help of payment processors, recovering proceeds of crime, and developing asset confiscation.

Advertisers and payment processors

IFPI’s advertiser strategy is based around the “disruption of revenue streams” to unauthorized sites by several methods. In the report they speak of a “structured notice and take down programme targeting Google’s AdSense and DoubleClick advertising networks,” plus “out reach” to IASH and IAB to implement “comprehensive infringing block lists.” IFPI says it also initiates direct contact with advertisers to flag when their ads appear on infringing sites.

Agreements are said to be in place with VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, CTIA, Monitise, PaySafeCard and PhonePayPlus to strangle finances to unauthorized sites.

Dealing with Internet service providers

In common with cyberlockers, IFPI have a set of rules they’d like to impose on Internet service providers. According to the industry group, ISPs should not provide Internet access to infringing sites, services or even unidentified customers. Furthermore, ISPs are required to “Implement a system of graduated response for infringing P2P users including warnings to an effective deterrent sanction.”

Site Blocking

ISPs are also required by IFPI to block access to infringing sites and services “located outside the local jurisdiction.” The chart below shows where blocking orders have been obtained (prior to April 2012) and how they are carried out.

Surprisingly, despite reports mounting to the contrary, IFPI seems to think that site blocking is an almost perfect solution to counter infringement.

“The effectiveness of such a ‘block’ will depend on the determination of the ISP subscriber
and the content/website provider to maintain access to each other and to use circumvention techniques to bypass blocking techniques,” they write.

“There is evidence to suggest that there is limited (between 3% and 5%) adoption of these circumvention techniques although subscribers with more technical knowledge could look to circumvent ISP controls using virtual private networks (VPN) or anonymous proxies.”

Conclusions

IFPI finishes up by stressing the importance of “co-operation, partnerships and information exchange” and the building of relationships with law enforcement, judges and legal bodies in order to “provide training built around ‘real world’ experiences and challenges rather than focusing on theory.”

Amendments to relevant laws need to be planned for the future, but in the short term IFPI should “consider ‘quick, curve ball’ solutions to impact more complex operations as
complement to long term investigations,” the group concludes.

Source: Leaked Report Reveals Music Industry’s Global Anti-Piracy Strategy

This is a interesting 40-minute conversation between International Economist, James Quilligan and Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics recorded at Immediacy Studio in Media, PA on June 27, 2012.

Key topic: How do markets, gift and commons economies fit in with each other, and do we need new forms of government/governance?

In April, one of the RIAA’s key employees informed a group of music industry insiders about the upcoming six-strikes anti-piracy scheme in the U.S. TorrentFreak received a copy of the presentation sheets which include a rather interesting chart on where people get their music files from.

The data presented by the RIAA comes from NPD’s Digital Music Study but has never been published in public in its current form. While NPD’s press release mentioned a decline in music acquisition through P2P file-sharing and hard drive trading, these numbers were not placed in a larger context.

A strange decision, because the chart below is of critical importance for the debate on music piracy.

As it turns out, two thirds of all music acquired in the U.S. is unpaid. However, offline trading is a much bigger source of unpaid music than online piracy. Of all “unpaid” music less than 30 percent comes from P2P file-sharing or cyberlockers.

Music sources

In total, 15 percent of all acquired music (paid + unpaid) comes from P2P file-sharing and just 4 percent from cyberlockers. Offline swapping in the form of hard drive trading and burning/ripping from others is much more prevalent with 19 and 27 percent respectively.

This leads to the, for us, surprising conclusion that more than 70% of all unpaid music comes from offline swapping.

The chart is marked “confidential” which suggests that the RIAA doesn’t want this data to be out in the open. This is perhaps understandable since the figures don’t really help their crusade against online piracy.

The RIAA is lobbying hard for legislation and voluntary agreements to deal with the online piracy problem, an issue that might seem less severe in the chart above.

While not insignificant, the fact that less than one in five music acquisitions can be traced back to online file-sharing isn’t really that convincing – especially when one takes into account that only a tiny fraction represent a lost sale.

Even if all online music piracy disappeared tomorrow, more than half of all music acquisitions would be unpaid.

But maybe the RIAA will go after these offline swappers next. The TSA could perform piracy scans of travelers’ computer equipment, for example. Or perhaps schools could search MP3 players, phones and computers of their students for unpaid music?

Just a thought.

More revealing findings from the RIAA will be published soon.

Source: RIAA: Online Music Piracy Pales In Comparison to Offline Swapping

Even if you’re not “technical” and don’t understand what OAuth is or how it works, you should still read OAuth 2.0 and the Road to Hell, because it is a historic moment, and unusually well documented.

I always talk about the cycles of tech, and this is a perfect illustration of a moment when things turn, what we call in math an inflection point. Hammer was the driving force behind OAuth 1 and 2. There’s always someone who plays that role in any successful new layer of technology. My guess is that he’ll never play exactly that role again, having learned about the moment when BigCo’s step in and take over, and seeing what they do with a basically good technology that offers a level playing field. They always try to subtract the level-ness. They don’t have to do it, but they always do.

I remember once clearly in the early days of the web, having been invited to chair a panel at the Seybold conference. I forget what the topic was, I’m sure it had to do with some open technology. So I invited someone from Apple, Steve Zellers. And two people from other big companies. Zellers, who I’ve known for many years was respectful, but the two big company guys wouldn’t take my questions, and just conversed between themselves on stage as if no one else were there. I let them go on, because what they were doing was a far better illustration of politics in tech than anything we could have talked about.

I remember thinking these are two little people who work in big companies. Inside those companies they must be treated like shit. But out here, they expect deference. I’ve seen this a lot too. People who have little or no sway inside their big companies throw their weight around outside. No one inside cares, because the rest of us matter even less to them.

Moral of the story, which the industry as a whole will never recognize, but individuals can — is that when an interoperable spec falls into your lap, say yes. That’s what I did with Netscape’s work with RSS. I had my own format that I created to perfectly fill my need. But no one else was supporting it. Along comes Netscape’s imperfect format, with support from a dozen publishers. I had already learned, in 1999, that has more value than a format that’s a better fit. So deprecate your own work, and accept the interop. It worked remarkably well. I’ll always take that approach, if given a choice.

So I urge you to read that document, even if you don’t understand the nouns — I don’t understand many of them myself — the verbs and adjectives, the human exasperation and fatigue are what’s important. Here’s a guy who has learned a big lesson, and we all can learn it along with him, without having to go down that path ourselves.

I should probably call thsi something other than a Twitter-like ecosystem, but that’s what it is — and that’s the only thing to call it.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about whether a for-pay or ad-supported model works better. What’s been overlooked is that there’s a third option. Use the web.

It turns out that most of what’s needed for something open that functions like Twitter is already out there, deployed, standardized, widely supported. There are a few things that need to be created, but not many.

I’ve got implementations of all of them. People are welcome to be plug-compatible. What I recommend is that no one try to do it all. That people pick off a component and try to do the best one possible, and connect up with the other components.

I’ve got some good stuff. Been working on it for a couple of years. I think you could do worse than having your networking stuff connect with mine.

1. For tweets, I use RSS 2.0 with the microblog namespace. My items don’t have titles, because tweets don’t have titles. So no Google Reader in this network, unless the adapt to feeds with items with no titles.

2. To read stuff, I like the river of news approach, always have. That happens to be more or less exactly how Twitter does it. There’s a JSON format that defines what a river is. We had an open project a while back to create a browser for this format. I suggest if you’re going to do a river, that you be plug-compatible with this JSON. Might as well have a little coral reef right there.

3. To identify users — please use DNS. It scales great. It’s deployed everywhere. Amazon has Route 53 which is like a gift from heaven. Use DNS. I know it’s hard, so let’s make it easy. Look at current DNS tools as you would a command line interface. You can simplify it. I know you can! (I did…)

4. A user is a feed. So the name points to a feed.

5. I use the cloud element in RSS 2.0 for pub-sub. Works great.

6. I think the part that’s hard to scale is the notification. But the fallback is to poll. It’s slow. Twitter will always be faster than the open system. But this will plug together like LEGO in ways Twitter never will. Unless they take this seriously, which they won’t (they shouldn’t).

7. This will be like an editorial system taht users can lurk on. (And use both ways.)

8. BTW, it has to hook into Twitter. Key point. The thing that’s kept the other networks from working is that they don’t peer with Twitter. Luckily this is in keeping with the new Twitter mandate of putting stuff in but not taking stuff out. Great. If you want to read what someone says on Twitter you have to use Twitter. Not a big deal it turns out.

I’m sure I’ll add more items to this list, and hot-up the names to the docs and software. In the meantime I have to admit even to me it sounds pretty exciting and I’ve been immersed in this for quite some time.

From The Evening Standard:

An architect and his wife were only able to build their own home because they secured a mortgage two weeks before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the economic meltdown that followed.

With their £500,000 mortgage, they built a four-bedroom home and moved in for Christmas 2010. Today it is worth about £1.8 million. Mr Lorraine said a way to help self-builders would be to rethink the community infrastructure levy which taxes all projects over a certain size. “Boris needs to take less tax in general,” he said.

Righty-ho.

I’m not sure if the £500,000 mortgage was in addition to the £395,000 cost of the land, but either way, that looks like a hefty windfall unearned tax-free capital gain to me – and he’s asking for a tax break?

What is most infuriating is that as an architect, surely he has a vague idea about land values? If, for example, he’d known that he’d get planning permission within three weeks, then the price he’d have had to pay for the site would have gone up accordingly; and London imposed a “roof tax” of £100,000 per new home, then the price he’d have had to pay for the site would have gone down accordingly. Whatever the tax is, and however stupid planning regulations are, the cost to him would have been the same.

Assuming he’s a reasonably high earning architect, has the penny not dropped that the absolute best thing for him would be to tax incomes less and tax land values more? TI’m awfully sorry that it took him three years to get planning, but just wait until somebody wants to build something near him, doesn’t he sound like the sort of Homey will be straight out there organising a petition against it? Those are rhetorical questions, by the way.

Blot 3.600 danskere har sat tænderne i Eddie – The Sleepwalking Cannibal, som dansk succesproducer håbede ville blive et nyt gennembrud for genrefilm.

Med den entreprenante Ronnie Fridthjof i spidsen har produktionsselskabet Fridthjof Film de seneste år været garant for den ene kassesucces efter den anden – fra Blå mænd til Alle for én.

Men adskillige sæsoners indbringende høst er ved at blive afløst af tørke. Thrilleren Over kanten har kun solgt små 28.000 billetter, og nu afslører de helt nye biograftal, at selskabets seneste skud på stammen, gyserkomedien Eddie – The Sleepwalking Cannibal, også … » Læs hele artiklen

Jettingen Germany is home to Ludo Fact, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of board and card games.

This documentary shows how a board game makes the leap from an idea to your table.
You’ll see every aspect of the manufacturing process: the technology and machines, the many detailed steps, and the hundreds of people that are involved in the production of a single game.

Mostly, we hope the film gives you a greater appreciation of the time, effort and investment that goes into every quality board game that makes it to the marketplace and your home. The business of fun requires a lot of hard work!

To see more of The Spiel’s media coverage of the board game world, visit http://thespiel.net

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvrmG7G7XqU

Websitet The Spiel har siden 2006 produceret mere end 150 videoer om brætspil – alt fra interviews og anmeldelser til dokumentar lignende film.

Senest har The Spiel lavet en dokumentarfilm om produktion af brætspil under titlen Made for Play: Board Games & Modern Industry

I videoen besøger The Spiel fabrikken Ludo Fact i Jettingen, Tyskland – som er en af verdens største producenter af kort- og brætspil.

I videoen bliver der stillet skarpt på bl.a.

• Den rette opskrift – komponenter og pris
• Spillepladen – størrelse, form og tykkelse
• Brikker – pap eller plastic, hvor mange skal der bruges
• Æsken – hvor stor skal den være og skal den have et “insert”

Made for Play: Board Games & Modern Industry

It sounds like a joke, but it isn’t.

As described by Gustav Nipe, chairman of Young Pirate and one of the people giving out waffles at the festival.

“Today a lady walked by and complained that we give our waffles away. Apparently, that is horrible behavior, as people are trying to sell waffles at the festival, and how could they get paid if there are free waffles?”

Instead of selling the waffles for 25 Swedish kroner [about 2.75 euros], the Young Pirates were sharing them for free.

In the minutes that followed the situation escalated quickly. Nipe tweeted, in sequence:

“… Status update on waffles: the giveaway continues. The responsible manager at the festival is busy and doesn’t have time to speak to us.”

“… Young Pirate is now being evicted from the festival. Security guards are on location, as well as the manager who has ordered the eviction.”

“… We called the police. The security guards are pulling back. No waffles being made right now. Our tent remains.”

“… Young Pirate is now making waffles again!”

Local media (in Swedish, linked above) picked up on the event rather quickly. But I think this serves as an excellent example of what’s happening in the world at large right now, even if this was a conflict over waffles in the remote parts of a frozen country the size of a shoebox on the Arctic Circle.

Guards and police are called in by businesses when there is a social or legal disturbance, on the assumption that maintaining the momentum of the economy is more important than people’s freedom to cause disruptions. But something interesting has happened lately.

The social norms have changed so much with the Internet, that business rules have changed unrecognizably for those who have run their businesses the same way for decades.

People are being pushed – no, shoved – out of their comfort zones. The waffle makers at this festival obviously viewed these youth (not of their social group) who were giving out free waffles as a social problem, for which security guards could be involved, and not a business problem, which would be their own failure:

The social norms have changed so quickly, that the forces upholding order in society have lost their ability to tell a social disturbance from a business disturbance.

The parallels to file-sharing are strong and present. If you can’t compete with the “free” that file-sharing offers, you can’t compete, period… but distribution executives around the world in monopolized copyright industries are trying to portray file sharing as a social disturbance to be dealt with forcefully, rather than a business failure.

In this, copyright industry lawyers and executives are no different from the sorry waffle sellers at this local festival who tried to get a political youth organization evicted for giving waffles to the festival visitors.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Book Falkvinge as speaker?

Follow @Falkvinge

Source: Young Pirates Evicted From Festival For Giving Out Free Waffles

Earlier this month Megaupload asked the court to dismiss its case because U.S. law doesn’t permit criminal proceedings against foreign companies.

The issue has become crucial in the ongoing Megaupload proceedings, as it may lead to a premature dismissal of the case.

According to “Rule 4″ of criminal procedure the authorities have to serve a company at an address in the United States. However, since Megaupload is a Hong Kong company, this was and is impossible.

However, the Government disagrees and in a filing last Friday asked the court to deny Megaupload’s motion. The Government claims that the federal rules shouldn’t be interpreted so narrowly. A company should only be served on a U.S. address if they have one, they argued.

The Government further claimed that because Megaupload was doing business in the U.S., there is no requirement to mail the summons to the company. Finally, if the court does decide that Megaupload has to be served, the Government says it could send it to an address of their choosing, such as the office of rapper and former Megaupload employee Swizz Beatz.

Responding to the Government’s claims, Megaupload’s legal team has now filed a rebuttal.

According to Megaupload none of the arguments presented by the Government are supported by case law. Instead of presenting cases that prove a legal precedent, the Government is rewriting Rule 4, Megaupload’s lawyers argue.

“None of the Government’s arguments squares with the plain language of the Rule or with any known precedent construing it. Each should be dismissed, along with the indictment against Megaupload,” they write.

The filing step-by-step refutes the Government’s attempts to amend the rules. Megaupload’s lawyers see no valid argument why the company can be brought to justice in the U.S., and they ask for a dismissal instead.

Only by dismissing the case can the court protect Megaupload’s due process rights, which are clearly at stake here according to the lawyers.

“It seems beyond dispute that (1) Megaupload has been deprived of its property, has had its reputation tarnished, and has had its business destroyed by the Government’s actions in this case; (2) to date, Megaupload has not been afforded a hearing or any other proceeding to contest these deprivations; and (3) absent service of process, this Court altogether lacks jurisdiction over the company.”

Talking to TorrentFreak, Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken previously noted that the Department of Justice is intentionally trying to keep this “flawed criminal action” alive.

It is now up to the Court to decide who’s right and who’s wrong.

Source: Megaupload: U.S. Government Trying to Rewrite the Rules

President Obama promised “change”. But did he deliver?
The war on Internet freedom was declared on his watch.
Download the song and video at http://www.kim.com

Follow me: http://twitter.com/KimDotcom

This song was produced by Kim Dotcom, Printz Board and Sleep Deez.
With lyrics and vocals by Kim Dotcom and friends.

The lyrics:

The war for the Internet has begun.
Hollywood is in control of politics.
The Government is killing innovation.
Don’t let them get away with that.

I have a dream, like Dr. King,
this is the time to stand up and fight.

By any means, if we dont do anything,
they will just blame it on the copyright.

Keep this movement going.
Keep this movement tweeting.
Keep this movement moving.

The pursuit of happiness.
Happiness. Happiness. Happiness.
The pursuit of happiness.

Let’s get together, lets all unite,
or they will do whatever they like.

Let’s get together, lets all unite,
or they will do whatever they like.

What about free speech, Mr. President?
What happened to change, Mr. President?
Are you pleading the fifth, Mr. President?
Are you going to fix this, Mr. President?

We must oppose, don’t vote for those,
who want to take us back in time.

We must expose, the people who chose,
to turn innovation into crime.

Let’s get together, lets all unite,
or they will do whatever they like.

Let’s get together, lets all unite,
or they will do whatever they like.

What about free speech, Mr. President?
What happened to change, Mr. President?
Are you pleading the fifth, Mr. President?
Are you going to fix this, Mr. President?

Hollywood marionettes,
taking over our Internet,
don’t let them get away with that,
don’t let them get away with that.

It starts with you and me
we will make history.

It starts with you and me
we will make history.

Let’s get together, lets all unite,
or they will do whatever they like.

Let’s get together, lets all unite,
or they will do whatever they like.

What about free speech, Mr. President?
What happened to change, Mr. President?
Are you pleading the fifth, Mr. President?
Are you going to fix this, Mr. President?

Keep sharing this song.
If you can’t blog – tweet.
If you can’t tweet – like.
But by all means – keep sharing.
But just this song :-)

—————————————
Video credits and thanks go to:

Andy Chiabrando
ANIMALNewYork
Jakob Kangur
Utopie TV
Lost in Stockholm (vimeo.com/lostinstockholm)
Vit Jurek
Piotr Marciniak
Polygoon-Profilti / Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid
YaBasta5000
19Alcibiades87

Let’s keep this movement moving!
Please share this video with all of your friends.
It’s time to fight back.

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MokNvbiRqCM

“The war for the Internet has begun. Hollywood is in control of politics. The Government is killing innovation. Don’t let them get away with that.”

These are the opening words of Kim Dotcom’s newly released track ‘Mr. President’. The song is directed at U.S. President Barack Obama who, according to Dotcom, played an important role in the destruction of Megaupload.

Despite being involved in what the Department of Justice describes as “the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States,” Kim Dotcom has not chosen to lay low. Instead, he is fighting the forces behind the criminal investigation both off- and online.

“Our Internet Freedom is under attack on President Obama’s watch,” Dotcom told TorrentFreak this morning commenting on the release of the song.

“President Obama should have a look at the situation and reassure his voters that Internet freedom and innovation are his priorities. He should consider helping millions of Mega users to get their files back. Obama should motivate Hollywood to innovate and adopt to today’s light speed Internet environment instead of freezing innovation and progress,” Dotcom adds.

Kim Dotcom’s Mr. President

Megaupload’s founder previously told TorrentFreak that Vice President Joe Biden was the one who ordered the shutdown of the file-hosting service. According to Dotcom the Mega investigation was a ‘gift’ to Hollywood, facilitated by corrupt Government forces.

By targeting Megaupload and teaming up with Hollywood, the U.S. Government chose a path of destruction that will kill many new and innovative businesses on the Internet, Dotcom believes. This needs to change.

“There needs to be a dialog leading to solutions. Aggression and destruction will hurt the US economy. The innovators of tomorrow will avoid doing business in the US. Shutting down one of the leading cloud storage sites, ignoring due process, the rule of law and the constitutional rights of our users is not the way to go,” Dotcom told us.

“Are you going to fix this, Mr. President?”

Dotcom is encouraging everyone who stands by him to copy and share the song. Or as Kim sings:

“We must oppose. Don’t vote for those who want to take us back in time. We must expose the people who chose to turn innovation into crime.”

The track and video are now available on Kim Dotcom’s newly launched website Kim.com.

Kim.com

Source: Kim Dotcom Sings: Are You Going to Fix This Mr. President?

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

The Internet

14

What Are The Politics Of The Internet?

Mike Barthel | July 5th, 2012

First in a series of two essays today on freedom and the Internet. Next: Google, Sci-Fi And The MTA.

Late last Friday, news broke that the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, an online discussion board and community commonly referred to as the WELL, was on the verge of being shut down. Founded in 1985 as a dial-up BBS, the WELL is an enormously important part of internet history, both as a place where things happened and as a model for how discussion and community should work on the web; the comments system below this post owes its existence, in many ways, to the WELL. The site’s ethos was one of open access and general personal freedom mixed with more than a slight whiff of hippiedom: it was a meeting place for Deadheads, and was titularly and organizationally linked to the Whole Earth Catalog.

Did you ever possess a print edition of the Whole Earth Catalog? If so, you are probably over the age of 30! For those unfamiliar, think of it as a sort of a print-edition Etsy for left-wing survivalists—or like a Michael’s for people who wanted to make geodesic domes and/or ham radios. It was, as you might expect, a popular item in places like Colorado, New Mexico, Vermont, and Humboldt County, and in communes, co-ops, and electronics-filled garages everywhere. The Catalog’s first edition, in 1969, began with a mini-manifesto, declaring:

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.

“Power of the individual” is a fine idea when applied within the context of something like Drop City, the legendary Colorado commune that Catalog and WELL founder Stewart Brand used as an inspiration for his ideas about community. It might even work on a small, isolated web community—the WELL only had a few thousand members at its height, and coexisted not with open, linked forums but with other closed communities like AOL or BBSs. But applied to an internet that is no longer a like-minded community with shared values, it means something else entirely. What happens when this countercultural ethos becomes less counter and more the culture itself?

***

We’re accustomed to thinking of the internet as being a neutral place, a blank sheet upon which we are free to write and do whatever we desire, whether liberal or conservative, corporate or anarchist, commercial or free. The internet is just a tool, and it is up to us what we do with it. But tools are not neutral. In a great book called Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (2004), Alexander Galloway argues that the values of a tool are not only determined by the people using it. They are also embedded in the tool’s design, and shape the way it is used. In the case of the internet, this control is embedded in its basic functions (TCP/IP, domain names) as well as later developments in web and app design. The development of the internet and of web culture, in other words, partially determines how it is used.

What does that development look like? We can draw a line from the San Francisco hippie culture that inspired the Whole Earth Catalog through to the WELL and to the online discussion boards and social media on which we talk, organize, and produce online. But in the course of that movement, something changed: the people living off the land all of a sudden got a lot of money. And once a company changed from that scrappy, personable startup or nonprofit venture to a profit-seeking enterprise, all those nice ideas about serving users often go out the window in favor of a nigh-irresistible economic imperative.

In 1994, a multimillionaire named Bruce Katz, who made his money selling Rockport shoes and the walking lifestyle, finalized his purchase of the WELL, paying almost a million dollars for the service. A WELL member since 1989, he nevertheless set out to turn it into a thriving business, proposing satellite WELLs, enlarging the membership base, and changing the forum’s software without consulting with the members. He also fired the existing general manager, a longtime member with the login “mo.” The users revolted. Katz backed off, and instead attempted to monetize the company through other ventures. The community splintered. Katz’s stance was that he couldn’t possibly do the wrong thing—after all, he was a hippie like the rest of the WELL’s members. “The fact is that in 1969 I came out here and I lived in the Haight in my truck,” he told Wired in 1997. “I lived in Berkeley. I went to all the rock festivals. I took all the same drugs. So I kind of felt like these were my people.”

By the logic of protocol, we’re now assuming that everyone is “my people.” The WELL’s linear comment system and persistent logins became the models used by media websites everywhere. John Coate, a WELL member, ported the system over to The Gate, the online presence of the two major San Francisco daily paper, and that was the first online newspaper to offer public forums. If Galloway is right, then he also ported over the WELL’s values. Members had to register with their real name and pay for access, and had a persistent login id that was always displayed next to their posts. This individual, persistent identity was strongly linked to those comments: you could remove a post yourself, but it would leave a notification that you had done so. Founder Stewart Brand’s saying “You own your own words” signaled that regulation was to be avoided in favor of personal responsibility.

Those values might work for a community like the WELL, but they don’t necessarily scale. The principles that “you own your own words” and that anyone should be allowed to speak are great, but in practice they’ve slipped into a blanket denunciation of any attempt to restrict content or access, even when to not do so is demonstrably harmful and exclusionary. On the WELL, you could delete your own post, but it would leave a marker that you had done so. As a value, the feature communicates that an incredibly offensive post is less worthy of notice than someone altering content. It makes it easier to say anything you want than to change your mind. Self-responsibility carries with it the assumption that everyone has an equal opportunity, and that loosing restrictions will let the best rise to the top. But that’s not really how the world works. Some pigs are more equal than others.

And so the values curdled. You must pay for access, one way or another: the WELL asked for cash money, the modern web asks for ad attention, tracking, and targeting. The idea of having a persistent identity trackable across forums—the WELL allowed you to see a user’s posts in different discussions, the modern web allows your activities to be traced from website to website—makes it nearly impossible to hide without devoting a large amount of time and attention to doing so. And hiding is important. For civil rights to exist requires a private sphere, an ability to shield a part of your life from public view. The web’s desire to expose everything about users (and nothing about corporations) opposes the privacy rights that lie at the heart of individual liberties. The innocent have nothing to fear from surveillance, and the meritorious have nothing to fear from brutal competition. In short, by moving from an openly expressed ideology up for debate (endless, endless debate) to a background ideology, that utopian hippie ethos soured into something that looks a lot more like social Darwinism.

If you’ve spent any time around the comment sections of political blogs (which, sorry!), you know that they’re frequented by a lot of people boosting Ron Paul or calling for drug legalization. We tend to think that the problem is that those people are libertarian. But Galloway’s argument suggests another possibility. It’s not that a lot of people on the internet are libertarian. It’s that the political ideology of the internet itself is, in some deep way, libertarian.

But it’s a strange kind of libertarian. The individualist freedom that inspired the Whole Earth Catalog, as exemplified in California communes like Drop City, has become the individualist capitalism as embodied in someone like Steve Jobs. It doesn’t seem to involve many of the things we’ve come to associate that Californian left with—things like social justice, pacifism, and equality. Instead, we get a lot of shockingly high-minded rhetoric about innovation and the internet’s magical ability to fix everything if just left alone. The ideology of the internet advocates throwing all the resources we can at those few people and companies that succeed, and telling everyone else “you’re on your own.” Maybe if you’re lucky, a video will go viral and you’ll get a few hundred thousand dollars in donations. Otherwise—well, I guess you just didn’t innovate hard enough.

***

This ethos of personal freedom coexists with a digital environment dominated by huge, multinational, oligopolistic corporations: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. That they use their power to manipulate users for their own gain is unquestioned. What the ideology of the internet allows is for that manipulation to be seen as in our interest. What’s communicated by open standards and cooperative development is that the best thing will win out, and that innovators must be allowed to continue to innovate—which is to say that our objections to the actions of the powerful are simply an expression of an erroneous preference for lesser options. The internet has been so built up rhetorically that it has approached utopian status itself, a commune that never ends. Any problems will be solved, generally by users spontaneously getting together to fix it and then dispersing. We spend a lot of time concentrating on the instances when that did happen. We don’t generally pay attention to all the times when it didn’t.

The internet has chosen, time and time again, efficient corporate power over any form of (visible) state control. The government can’t regulate what kind of content is available, but Apple can. The government can’t impose a universal identification system on the web, but Facebook or Google can. We do this because those corporations have been very good at convincing us they’re not those sort of corporations. They’re different. That Steve Jobs was able to convince well-meaning liberals that buying a tablet from one of the biggest multinational corporations in the world was an act of moral daring is certainly an impressive achievement, though I don’t know if it’s an admirable one. The rhetoric of the corporations mingles with the rhetoric of the users, because of course those corporations just want to do right by the users, don’t they? The economic theories of Clayton Christensen are pervasive among tech companies, and one of the things they dictate is that any successful innovator will be opposed by representatives of the status quo, who will complain about this new way. It’s a fancy way of saying “hi hater,” but it’s insidious: any criticism becomes evidence that your strategy is a good one.

This is not to argue that the internet is bad, though it would be great if we stopped thinking the internet is entirely and always good. Rather, it’s to suggest that if you are the kind of reader who thinks the government is, generally speaking, better than corporations, we might apply that to the internet as rigorously as we do the offline world. Governments in China, Pakistan, Egypt, and sure, even America have intruded on our legitimate rights online, but that doesn’t mean governments are inherently hostile to online activity. It just means we need to work harder to make sure those decisions are responsible and just. We’ve been trained to think the government is bad online, because it designs shitty websites, whereas tech startups are good, because they design nice websites. But maybe usability isn’t actually a marker of moral worth. We used to be against a labor arrangement where the workers (us!) identified more strongly with management (tech companies!) than with each other, but that’s what we’re encouraged to do online: libertarianism for you, oligopoly for us. We used to think that strong, persistent collective organizations dedicated to protecting our rights were the best way to ensure we weren’t trampled on by moneyed interests. Now we think everything will be OK if we flip out on Twitter en masse, or change the background color of our avatar. That’s fine for now, but if the internet really is becoming a central part of our lives and a place where we conduct our most important activities, then maybe we should have the same protections there as we do when we’re not on our computers.

John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a WELL participant (it’s where the EFF founders all met), legendarily once said, “The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Again, a nice idea! The problem is its implication: anything not routed around is therefore not censorship. If a thing on the internet is successful, by that metric of meritocracy, it must not be bad. Pangloss would be proud. But as a person on the internet, I certainly think this way sometimes! Don’t you? You spend all day interacting with (and on, and through) the WELL’s descendants, and you start to assume such triumphalist epigrams are right. And sometimes they are. But the utopian individualism that lies at the root of our online tools is an expression of a particular political ideology, one that you might not agree with. If you don’t, it’s important to be aware of when you’re confusing the (material, solid) structure of the internet for the (contestable, provisional) belief system that underlies it. The tool shapes the user too. How has it shaped you?

Related: Free The Network

Mike Barthel has a Tumblr.

Shared via Posterous on July 20, 2012 at 10:32PM

Dwight D. Eisenhower exit speech on Jan.17,1961.
Warning us of the military industrial complex.

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY

Under the DMCA copyright holders have the right to demand that websites disable access to infringing content. Without doubt, one of the top recipients of these notices is Google.

To give the public insight into the scope and nature of this process, Google started to publish all takedown requests online as part of their transparency report. Since then, the number of URLs Google is being asked to remove has grown rapidly.

Last week Google received takedown requests for a record-breaking 719,415 URLs, which is double the amount that were sent in two months ago, and four times as many as in January of this year. Google’s data further reveals that Microsoft and the RIAA are the most active senders.

# URLs in takedown requests per week

For the copyright holders the purpose of these takedown requests is to make pirated content unavailable through Google’s search engine. This happens through automatic takedown tools, with the unfortunate consequence that legitimate movie trailers and IMDB or Last.fm pages are censored too.

But, there is another issue that casts doubt over the effectiveness of the process.

Because Google indexes all takedown requests with the “infringing” URLs on the ChillingEffects website, the search engine is effectively building the world’s largest database of links to pirated content.

Around the same time next year, Google will have built a database of dozens of millions of pirated links, and a few years later it will be a billion links. Not just links to BitTorrent sites, but also files hosted on cyberlockers, blogs and a wide range of other websites all collected in one place.

Of course, Google’s search engine already indexes pretty much the entire Internet, but a database dedicated to infringing content opens up the possibility for outsiders to mine this data for pirate search engines. And that’s just one of the problems with Google’s transparency.

Disabling access to these “pirate” lists is harder than it seems.

Since all the takedown requests are published online, the URLs in question can still be found through Google. This irony leads to the absurd situation where copyright holders (intentionally or automatically) ask Google to take down their own takedown requests.

A Takedown-Takedown

Microsoft and others have already sent such takedown-takedown requests. In other words, Google is being asked to remove links to takedown requests, because these link to sites that link to copyrighted material. And even that is not enough.

Because the new takedown notice creates a link to the old notice, copyright holders have to send another request to take the new one down, followed by another… and another. A comical display of meta-censorship which could go on endlessly.

Of course, spamming Google with takedowns is much easier than contacting individual sites but as these companies should know by now, it doesn’t get rid of the infringing content. In the meantime, these same copyright holders are assisting in the creation of the world’s largest database of links to pirated content, courtesy of Google.

Source: Google Builds Largest Database of Links to Pirated Media

Peter @brokep Sunde’s insightful and moving account of The Pirate Bay proceeedings http://t.co/T7G9xzMI #corruption #copyfight

— Morten Blaabjerg (@mblaa) July 07, 2012 at 08:02PM

Et retfærdigt samfund – Om min vej til det politiske part #3 : http://t.co/n81snyeW #landvaluetax #copyfight

— Morten Blaabjerg (@mblaa) July 06, 2012 at 09:17AM

Nordahl Griegs digt “Til Ungdommen” (“Kringsatt av fiender”), sat til musik af Otto Mortensen i 1952, rummer på mange måder mit politiske hjerteblod – her i en forkortet udgave, men sunget uhyre smukt af norske Herborg Kråkevik :

Særligt ét vers (som af uransagelige årsager ikke er med i Kråkeviks fortolkning…) udtrykker i endda særlig grad hvad jeg står for politisk :

Ædelt er mennesket,
jorden er rig!
Findes her nød og sult
skyldes det svig.
Knus det! I livets navn
skal uret falde.
Solskin og brød og ånd
ejes af alle.

Men hvordan er den uret opstået, som der tydeligvis stadig er tale om i verden? – og hvordan kan vi som samfund komme “sviget” til livs og nå til en tilstand, hvor “solskin og brød og ånd ejes af alle”? Det er ikke nogen hemmelighed, at jeg mener, at jordværdibeskatning er måske den allervigtigste del af svaret på dette spørgsmål. Men ikke den eneste.

Mit første indlæg i denne mini-serie om min vej til det politiske handlede om min (fra min tidlige barndom) temmeligt rodfæstede skepsis til staten og instinktive modvilje imod statens opkrævning af skatter, og imod underlægningen af hver ny generation under den forrige generations åg af gamle love og institutioner. Det handlede også om mit møde med den tyske filosof Max Stirner.

Mit andet indlæg handlede hovedsagligt om, hvordan vi som verdenssamfund er havnet i en situation, der skyldes “svig” og hvordan den uretfærdige fordeling af goderne vi ser i vores nutid, er tæt forbundet med dels kolonialismen og dels det moderne skattesystem (som er karakteriseret ved notorisk overbeskatning af arbejdsindkomst, hvilket styrker kapitalinstitutionerne) – ihvertfald hvis man skal tage Karl Marx’ analyse for gode varer (og det er vi nogen, der mener at vi skal).

Dette tredie indlæg vil fokusere på, hvad der skal til for som samfund at løfte os ud over den aktuelle situation, og hvordan såvel de tanker, der engang blev tænkt af en Stirner, George og Marx (og herunder Gert Petersen og Robin Hood) i mine øjne kan forenes i en ny syntese.

Man skal desværre ikke være barn her på kloden længe, før man opdager, at goderne i verden ikke er ligeligt og retfærdigt fordelt. Nogen er mere magtfulde end andre. Nogen er rigere end andre, og måske, hvad værre er, nogen bruger begge dele til at undertrykke andre. Derfor har vi behov for en økonomisk omfordeling af samfundets goder.

Der findes næppe nogen ‘børnefilm’ der udtrykker dette mere klart og pædagogisk end Disney’s udgave af Robin Hood. Den barnlige Prins John opkræver selv den mindste skilling fra de fattige, der knapt nok kan fejre Skippys fødselsdag (det går med andre ord altid ud over børnene, og dermed fremtidige generationer). Dissidenter, der vover at tale magthaverne imod (Broder Tuck – aktuelt Julian Assange?) sættes bag lås og slå. Og den gode, frække og driftige Robin Hood bøjer begreberne og “låner bare” lidt fra de rige, for at kunne give til de fattige.

Mit møde med Stirner rummede for mig for alvor en udvidelse af mulighederne for at “bøje begreberne” i disneysk forstand, i Stirners kritik af ethvert absolut begreb udenfor det enkelte jeg : staten, loven, moralen, kristendommen, mennesket, menneskeheden m.fl. For Stirner ligesom for Machiavelli var der ingen illusioner. Verden er således indrettet, at de mere magtfulde vil søge at realisere deres fordele på de mindre magtfuldes bekostning. For at imødegå den mere magtfulde, må den enkelte benytte sig af alle tilrådeværende kneb, herunder (ligeværdigt) at forene sig med andre, som han eller hun deler fælles interesser med. Foreningen – og ikke staten – bliver i forlængelse heraf et bærende princip for samfundets indretning. Vel at mærke den frivillige forening – lige præcis så længe den ikke rummmer et imod min vilje fastholdt krav på min interesse, dvs. et krav på min deltagelse, når jeg ikke længere selv har nogen interesse deri.

Stirner fandt at det unikke ‘jeg’ pr. definition ikke kan beskrives uafhængigt af udfoldelsen af jeg’ets egen eksistens. Sproget fungerer kun ved den underforståede betydning, der f.eks. opstår ved at ‘pege’. Når jeg kalder dig for Ludwig, f.eks., er det ikke en hvilken som helst Ludwig jeg mener, ej heller ‘Ludwigs væsen’, men den virkelige Ludwig foran mig, for hvem jeg ellers ikke har noget begreb – mente Stirner i en samtidig debat, med henvisning til Ludwig Feuerbach’s bog Das Wesen des Christentums (Kristendommens væsen) fra 1841. De absolutte begreber og institutioner stiller alle den enkelte i et ulige forhold til et ideal, som indebærer at den enkelte skal tilstræbe at leve op til idealet, f.eks. ved at skulle være en “lovlydig borger” eller et “godt menneske” uden hensyn til, hvad der er godt for den enkelte.

Stirners kritik af staten er følgelig total, herunder det borgerlige demokrati – for hvad ændret er der ved, at det er mange, der er despoten, istedet for at det er en person, der er despoten? Staten sætter altid staten først, aldrig den enkelte, og selvom jeg det ene øjeblik skulle bifalde en beslutning truffet i fællesskab, i f.eks. en demokratisk forsamling, så trælbindes jeg efterfølgende af denne beslutning, således at vi i ‘statssamfundet’ bliver slaver af vore egne tidligere vedtagne beslutninger (og gør fremtidige generationer også til sådanne!).

Stirners bud på en alternativ samfundsmodel er anarkistisk og baserer sig som sagt istedet på frivillige foreninger, der kan opløses hvornår det skal være – dvs. hvornår medlemmerne beslutter at de ikke længere er nyttige.

Hvordan kan sådanne foreninger så opstå og operere? Siden agerbrugets udvikling har mennesker haft behov for at mødes og samles, bl.a. for at dele viden og nye ideer, og for at løfte fælles projekter, som var for vanskelige for den enkelte at løfte alene, og som kom alle i fællesskabet til gavn. I viriliosk forstand hænger vores evne til og mulighed for at mødes på denne måde og kanalisere vore kræfter i bestemte retninger for at tilgodese bestemte projekter, nøje sammen med byernes indretning og udvikling. Byerne udviklede sig i løbet af middelalderen til handelscentre, der faciliterede den økonomiske trafik i samfundet, hvilket var til gavn for magthaverne. Men det blev også her mennesker kunne samles, i gaderne, på pladser og i stræder, måske (og i mange tilfælde) for at organisere deres modstand imod det aktuelle regime, hvilket blev tilfældet i 1789.

Foto : Morten Blaabjerg. De-territorialisering i praksis : Rådhuspladsen i Odense ved en ‘demonstration’ i marts 2009, som ikke blev til noget.

I vore dage finder der en de-territorialisering sted, der i viriliosk forstand flytter forsamlingerne fra de fysiske pladser, gader og stræder til vore digitale fora, blogs, og wikier m.v. Ethvert blogindlæg (og enhver YouTube-video) med et kommentarspor er en potentiel forening, idet indlægget tiltrækker læsere og kommentarer og dermed opbygger en fælles bevidsthed hos deltagerne. Foreningen kan opstå og være momentvis eller få en længere udstrækning, fuldstændig afhængigt af indholdet, deltagernes grad af fælles bevidsthed om hvad de er fælles om, og deres ønske om at skride til handling. Clay Shirky har skrevet meget fornuftigt om hvilke betingelser, der skal være tilstede, for at en webtilstedeværelse kan udvikle sig til en løftestang for social aktivisme (og jeg har tidligere blogget om dette her).

Internettet og World Wide Web rummer da alle muligheder for at realisere en samfundsorden, der kan afløse ikke bare vore byer som ‘samlingspladser’ – men også de nationalstater, hvis reelle magt og indflydelse siden bankvæsenets oprindelse i de norditalienske bystater engang i renæssancen, er blevet langsomt undergravet og udhulet.

Et godt eksempel på at såvel byernes pladser som nationalstatens forestilling om en national ‘politisk offentlighed’ (i f.eks. avisspalterne) er blevet forpasset som betydningsfulde arenaer for den politiske kamp, som finder sted i disse år, kan man finde i historien om f.eks. ‘hackergruppen’ Anonymous’ konstruktion af en ny arena for politisk konflikt. Andre eksempler er opbygningen af internetopslagsværket Wikipedia, der forandrer teksten fra et produkt med autoritative afsender-modtagerforhold til en proces, der er til konstant forhandling. Wikileaks’ frigivelse af klassificerede dokumenter. Det arabiske forår. Senest mobiliseringen af almindelige webbrugere i Europa i kampen mod ACTA. Destabiliserende bevægelser og projekter, der går på tværs af tidligere nationale strukturer, fordi de er utilstrækkelige, og fordi digitale netværk gør det muligt at gå på tværs og skabe nye arenaer, der er baseret på nettets nye opmærksomhedsøkonomi.

Foto af zigazou76. Some Rights Reserved. Demonstration imod ACTA i Rouen 25. februar 2012

At nå til en transcendering af nationalstaten er og bliver næppe nogen skovtur – men det er for mig vanskeligere og vanskeligere at se en meningsfuld rolle for nationalstaterne i en globaliseret verden, hvis vi samtidig ønsker at indrette os socialt retfærdigt. Nationalstaterne – og deres drift efter territoriale besiddelser og ressourcer og kontrol over disse, finder sted på andre staters bekostning, og fordelingen baserer sig på anvendelsen af militær magt, eller den underforståede trussel om anvendelse af magt. Det er svært at forestille sig, at stater, der befinder sig i en priviligeret position i det aktuelle system frivilligt skulle afgive deres privilegier – derfor vil vejen til en syntese (en der ligner den jeg skitserer her – eller en anden) sandsynligvis gå igennem voldelig konflikt (med Karl Marx’ ord : “vold er jordemoder for ethvert samfund, der går svangert med et nyt”…). Hvordan og imellem hvilke parter er umuligt at forudsige.

En vej til et opgør med nationalstaten kunne imidlertid (fredeligt) gå igennem en eller flere af de internationale organisationer, som de fleste nationer i forvejen er medlemmer af, og en trinvis overdragelse af formel beslutningsmyndighed (hvad den reelle beslutningsmyndighed angår er historien en anden). Hvad der imidlertid er vigtigst af alt at gøre sig klart, er hvad der skal træde i stedet, og hvilken autoritet og beføjelser en ny struktur skal have. For målet kan ikke være at skabe en ny række af superstater (a la Europas Forenede Stater), der vil gentage tidligere tiders interesse- og konfliktmønstre.

Jeg forestiller mig nogenlunde flg. model for hvordan vi opnår ‘et retfærdigt samfund’ – et samfund uden ‘svig’ – hvor ‘solskin, brød og ånd ejes af alle’ :

Lige ret til jorden
1. Alle har lige ret til vores fælles jord. Det er forudsætningen for personlig frihed såvel som social retfærdighed. Der skal derfor (gradvist) gennemføres en global omfordeling af grundværdierne ved hjælp af jordværdibeskatning samt udbetaling af dividende til alle verdensborgere. Alle sikres herved lige ret til en andel af vores fælles globale arv, uanset om man ejer jord eller ej. Uanset hvor “heldig” den enkelte har været i det store livslotteri – om man er født i Bangladesh eller på Island – har man lige ret til en andel af jordens frugtbare udbytte. Og uanset hvordan rovet (for der er i sagens natur ikke tale om andet end krigsbytte) historisk er blevet fordelt af tidligere generationer, kan vi ad denne vej få ryddet op og ud i alle de konflikter, som skyldes en ulige fordeling af goderne, og dermed undgå fremtidige krige. Samtidig får vi skabt en fælles konstruktiv retning i vores økonomi, ved at private interesser (optimal udnyttelse af jord og ressourcer med henblik på økonomisk udbytte) er samstemt med offentlige interesser (optimal udnyttelse af jord og ressourcer med henblik på at undgå spild og få det bedst mulige udbytte – i alles interesse, og understøtte denne ved effektiv infrastruktur og service). Vi kan vinke farvel til kunstig skabt overproduktion, økonomiske bobler og depressioner, og vi kan lukke det ‘militære-industrielle kompleks’, som i løbet af det 20. århundrede er blevet bygget op over to verdenskrige, en lang kold krig og talrige “små krige”, et par golf-krige og en krig imod et begreb (den såkaldte ‘krig mod terror’).

Fri adgang til information
2. En global p2p-baseret (og dermed decentralt organiseret) struktur, hvor enhver borger har lige og uhindret adgang til information fra øvrige peers. Forudsætningen er en verden uden copyright – men med en stadfæstning af nogle af de principper, som har gjort copyleft-bevægelsen til det den er : at undgå at informationerne nogensinde hegnes inde, idet hver ny knopskydning må og skal distribueres på samme vilkår som den forrige. Selvom informationerne i sig selv ikke hegnes inde, er der stadig masser af forretningsmodeller og penge at tjene på at levere god service, effektive metoder til at kanalisere vores opmærksomhed de rette steder hen, ordentlig båndbredde, diskplads m.m. Intet er gratis – pengene skal blot tjenes andre steder. Men kraftanstrengelserne for med vold og magt at få digitale produkter til at ligne de analoge, industrielle produkter, og de heraf følgende opslidende juridiske tovtrækkerier og forsøg på at trække sin forretningsmodel ned over hovedet på andre igennem kvaksalver-lovgivning (som f.eks. ACTA) får omsider ende.

Det kan næppe overvurderes hvor stor en betydning, en frisættelse af ‘al information’ vil få for andre dele af samfundslivet. Et globalt informationssamfund som det her skitserede vil formedentlig først og fremmest betyde en dybtgående forandring af vores arbejdsliv- og arbejdsmarked. Hvis problemet med at opnå kontakt med interesserede kunder og samarbejdspartnere indenfor ens felt i højere grad lettes (traditionelt varetaget af reklame- og detailleddene), vil det også i høj grad kunne lade sig gøre at frisætte arbejdet fra den lønmodtagerkultur vi har udviklet og levet med siden industrialiseringen. Det vil betyde, at mange vil kunne agere i høj grad i kraft af den sociale kapital og merværdi de er med til at skabe på nettet, og at der i høj grad vil kunne leveres direkte uden mellemled fra producent til kunde.

Et globalt demokrati-meritokrati?
3. En global magtstruktur, der har til opgave at beskytte principperne bag 1) og 2) om nødvendigt med magt, samt understøtte begge dele ved at udbygge nødvendig infrastruktur og servicere borgere og virksomheder med f.eks. energi og andre vitale serviceydelser, som udbydes bedst på offentlige hænder. Denne magtstruktur er ansvarlig for opkrævning af jordværdiskatter og udbetalinger af dividende. Begge dele foretages i meget vid udstrækning ved hjælp af elektroniske værktøjer, som f.eks. satelitopmålinger og beregninger på baggrund af alle tilgængelige data, så systemet ikke bliver for bureaukratisk.

Det er ikke sikkert, at demokratiet er den bedste model at indrette en sådan global struktur efter, selvom det er vanskeligt for mange at forestille sig en anden model. Man kunne godt forestille sig et flerkammersystem, hvor ét kammer f.eks. er valgt, imens et andet optager sine medlemmer for en længerevarende periode, baseret på meritokratiske kriterier – dvs. f.eks. akademiske kompetencer. Målet skulle da være at sikre, at systemet er så stabilt som muligt, og ikke let kan bukke under for populistiske tendenser – men tværtimod varetage alles interesser, da andetkammeret ikke repræsenterer nogen bestemte grupper, men derimod hele samfundet.

Jeg kan næsten høre Max Stirner hviske, når jeg skriver et indlæg som dette : “Der er et ideal der vinker dig – du har en fix idé!” Ikke desto mindre skriver jeg det alligevel – jeg ser idéer som disse som pejlemærker, som er utrolig vigtige, fordi de forestillinger vi gør os om fremtidens samfund er med til at anskueliggøre, hvorfor vi indtager de standpunkter og positioner vi gør idag. Vil vi et lettere modificeret status quo – eller vil vi det jeg kalder ‘et retfærdigt samfund’?

Jeg gav i en anden sammenhæng følgende kommentar omkring fattigdomsproblemet, Henry George og jordværdibeskatning :

Jeg er enig med George i at fattigdomsproblemet er problemet i vores samfund : af dette kommer stort set alle øvrige alvorlige problemer vi slås med, fra kriminalitet, stofmisbrug, vanrøgt af børn – til, på den globale arena, krig, terror og undertrykkelse. Forudsætningen for, at vi kan komme igang med at udfolde vort egentlige potentiale som mennesker og samfund er, at vi kommer det problem til livs.

Er det så muligt? Ja, det er det ifølge George m.fl. Og hvis det er, fortjener det en meget grundig undersøgelse og alvorlig modtagelse (…) i vores samfund som helhed, og at hver en sten bliver vendt i fht. at finde ud af, om det kan lade sig gøre. Det er det eneste rimelige.

Nuvel, det kan være at man ikke synes, at det at eje et hus eller en stor grund i midtbyen er noget særligt privilegium. Men hvis det, på baggrund af en omhyggelig analyse, viser sig at fordelingen af disse privilegier er det som stiller sig i vejen for at vi kan løse den kolossale fordelingspolitiske udfordring, som vi står overfor (lokalt, såvel som globalt) så er vi eddermame forpligtet til at gøre op med det. Uanset hvor rart og komfortabelt vi synes vi har det i vore små stuer. Der er mange andre der har det knapt så rart, og som vi skylder det.

Når det så ovenikøbet er muligt, at vi, på baggrund af samme omhyggelige analyse, vil kunne skabe en økonomisk aktivitet i vores samfund, der om muligt vil være stærkere og mere robust end det vi kender til, og derfor vil være i stand til at løfte stadigt større opgaver for os, så er det godt tosset ikke at forfølge den idé til det yderste, for at finde ud af, hvor langt den kan bære.

Hvis jeg alene kan bidrage så langt, at flere opdager de her idéer og selv begynder at undersøge nærmere, hvad de går ud på, så de bliver lidt mindre forkætrede – og flere bliver mere nysgerrige på, hvad vi kan gøre ved hjælp af jordværdibeskatning, så er det små skridt på vejen i den proces.

Tak for tiden og opmærksomheden, kære læser. Jeg vil være taknemmelig for eventuelle kommentarer eller uddybende spørgsmål i kommentarsporene, om tid og lejlighed måtte byde dertil.

Rettelse : det ‘militære-økonomiske kompleks’ hedder retteligt det ‘militære-industrielle kompleks’. Det andet var en skrivefejl. Udtrykket blev først anvendt af den amerikanske præsident Dwight D. Eisenhower i 1961, idet han advarede imod en stor, permanent og derfor økonomisk og politisk betydningsfuld våbenindustri med indflydelse dybt inde i magtens korridorer.

When Megaupload was raided in January, questions were raised as to why the U.S. Government acted so aggressively against a company that seemingly played by the rules.

It’s no secret that the MPAA provides the authorities with “leads” for criminal investigations on a regular basis, but considering the size and location of the company Megaupload was not an ordinary target.

Soon after Kim Dotcom was released from custody he pointed the finger at Washington, arguing that the Mega investigation was a ‘gift’ to Hollywood, facilitated by corrupt Government forces. In the months that followed Dotcom and his team researched the motivations of the U.S. Government which resulted in some revealing findings.

While Megaupload’s founder is cautious about revealing too much early on, he says he has information which shows that it was none other than Vice President Joe Biden who called for the Megaupload takedown.

“I do know from a credible source that it was Joe Biden, the best friend of former Senator and MPAA boss Chris Dodd, who ordered his former lawyer and now state attorney Neil MacBride to take Mega down,” Dotcom told TorrentFreak.

Dotcom previously hinted that Biden was involved in the Megaupload case through one of his tweets.

“Lovebirds” Biden and Dodd

According to Dotcom the Mega case was discussed June last year in a meeting in the West Wing of the White House.

“After we received information from an insider we scanned the White House visitor logs for all meetings of Chris Dodd and studio bosses with Joe Biden and Obama. They are publicly available on the White House website,” Dotcom told us.

“It is interesting that a man by the name of Mike Ellis of MPA Asia, an extradition expert and former superintendent of the Hong Kong police, was also at a meeting with Dodd, all studio bosses and Joe Biden. The same Mike Ellis met with the Minister of Justice Simon Power in New Zealand.”

An overview of the visitors that were present at this meeting is listed below.

Barry Meyer – CEO Warner Bros Entertainment, Brad Grey – CEO Paramount Pictures, Michael Ellis -Managing Director MPA Asia Pacific, Chris Dodd – CEO MPAA, Jeff Blake – Vice Chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Ronald Meyer – President Universal Studios, Michael O’Leary – MPAA Senior Executive Vice President for Global Policy and External Affairs, Robert Regan – (?) and Rich Ross – Chairman of Walt Disney Studios at the time.

The meeting

The information above does indeed suggest that the Megaupload case was discussed at the highest political levels last year. Noteworthy is also the MPAA’s lobbying disclosure statement of last year which includes money spent on lobbying the office of Vice President Joe Biden.

What exactly Biden’s role has been, and whether that’s problematic, remains to be seen. However, Dotcom is convinced that corrupt elements in the U.S. Government brought Mega down. More on this will be made public in the near future.

“At the appropriate time we will release what we know. The whole Mega case is quite the political thriller,” Dotcom concludes.

Source: Kim Dotcom: Joe Biden Ordered the Megaupload Shutdown

Robert Steele author of the book The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust joins us in an integrity inspired talk on his new book. “In the United States, where every form of organization from government to banks to labor unions has betrayed the public trust—is integrity. Also lacking is public intelligence in the sense of decision-support: knowing what one needs to know in order to make honest decisions for the good of all, rather than corrupt decisions for the good of the few.
The Open-Source Everything Manifesto is a distillation of author, strategist, analyst, and reformer Robert David Steele life’s work: the transition from top-down secret command and control to a world of bottom-up, consensual, collective decision-making as a means to solve the major crises facing our world today. The book is intended to be a catalyst for citizen dialog and deliberation, and for inspiring the continued evolution of a nation in which all citizens realize our shared aspiration of direct democracy—informed participatory democracy. Open-Source Everything is a cultural and philosophical concept that is essential to creating a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for one hundred percent of humanity. The future of intelligence is not secret, not federal, and not expensive. It is about transparency, truth, and trust among our local to global collective. Only “open” is scalable.”

As we strive to recover from the closed world corruption and secrecy that has enabled massive fraud within governments, banks, corporations, and even non-profits and universities, this timely book is a manifesto for liberation—not just open technology, but open everything.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Open-Source-Everything-Manifesto-Transparency/dp/1583944435

Source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoVOQIO8S0U