Monday, December 27, 2004

DRM Locks Out Library Patrons?. DRM at Its Worst? Here's a Prime Example [The Shifted Librarian] 10:16:03 PM    comment []

College Bowl Scene Is Flush With Corporate Dollars. The 28-bowl postseason, which began on Dec. 14 and will end on Jan. 4, brings in an enormous amount of publicity and revenue. By RICHARD SANDOMIR. [NYT > Sports] 10:12:26 PM    comment []

Letterman in Iraq: 'Anybody from out of town?'. On CNN [NewsIsFree: Popular Items] Letterman brought along musical director Paul Shaffer, stage manager Biff Henderson, comedian Tom Dreesen and the band Off the Wall. When hands flew in the air in response to requests for a volunteer to help deliver the opening monologue, he asked: "Isn't that how you got here?" 3:16:57 PM    comment []

Amazon drops TV advertising. Interesting quote from Amazon's Jeff Bezos in January's Wired Magazine: "About three months ago, we stopped doing TV advertising. We did a 15-month-long test of TV advertising in two markets -- Portland, OR and Minneapolis -- to see how much it drove our sales. And it worked, but not as much as the kind of price elasticity we knew we could get from taking those ad dollars and giving them back to consumers." Bezos said they used the money to lower prices and offer free shipping -- a move that "significantly accelerated" the growth of Amazon.com. He says the balance is shifting toward spending more money on the customer experience and less on advertising -- then depending on word of mouth to generate sales. [unmediated] 3:15:58 PM    comment []

This Modern World. There's just no pleasing the liberals! [Salon.com] 11:19:28 AM    comment []

Chomsky: Freedom: a moral hypothesis. Thus take a debate about slavery, or women’s rights.  If Jones claims that some people (say blacks) yearn to be slaves, and that women can only be satisfied when they follow orders and are beaten if they don’t, and that we must grant blacks and women what they dearly want, then Jones has the responsibility to provide evidence.  A pretty heavy responsibility in fact. [ZNet Blog] 10:23:46 AM    comment []

$10 for a Plain CD or $32 With the Extras. While the major record companies continue to discount new releases, some labels are pushing tricked-out versions of big titles that carry their highest prices ever. By JEFF LEEDS. [NYT > Business] 8:25:49 AM    comment []

EPIC (the Electronic Provacy Information Center) has posted a list of Top Ten Consumer Privacy Resolutions we should make in the New Year. 8:25:25 AM    comment []

Solutions to the Bandwidth Bottleneck. The Problem: Ever since Michael Verdi's daughter, Dylan, posted her first video blog and had 1600 downloads in 24 hours....Ive been thinking a lot about bandwidth issues. In the near future, watching video on the internet will be part of our daily web process. I see no reason why 10,000 people won't watch a simple video post. But there is NO way current bandwidth allotments can handle this traffic. Even 50 gigs of bandwidth is not enough...and that's the max bandwidth that most servers allow. [unmediated] (Along with two potential solutions that are feasible right now! (Isn't that a fine thing?)) 8:25:09 AM    comment []

R.I.P., Reggie White, Star in N.F.L. at Defensive End, Dies at 43. Reggie White, one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, played for the Philadelphia Eagles, the Green Bay Packers and the Carolina Panthers. By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN. [NYT > Sports] 8:22:50 AM    comment []

Three from our BB friends: What if Osama released albums, not videos? This Fark Photoshop contest offers a multitude of possible answers. Link (Thanks, Scott)   Can you copyright a typeface? BB readers debate. [NSFNLG warning: Not Safe For Non-LawGeeks.] A recent post on BoingBoing sparked debate among some readers about whether or not U.S. copyright law makes it possible to protect typefaces. Lessig announces Code v2 BoingBoing reader Alex says, On his blog, Lawrence Lessig has announced a new experiment for his first book Code and other Laws of Cyberspace. He's going to post version 1 (that's the original published version) to a wiki under a Creative Commons license. Updates and corrections will then be supervised by "chapter captains", and around June time Lessig will take the contents of the wiki, and mould it into Code v2. All royalties from the book will be donoated to Creative Commons, and the wiki will live on 'for ever'. He has an email address up if you have expertise and are interested in volunteering to be a "chapter captain". Link [bOing bOing] 8:16:38 AM    comment []

UPDATE on yesterday's Dave worry about NYT links: I just tried a link from last month and another from last year, both with the magic bits. Both appeared to work. 8:08:32 AM    comment []

Top Science Stories of 2004. On Scientific American [NewsIsFree: Popular Items] (I'm not going to try to run the table of end-of-year roundups, but I'll blink the occasional list that seems near the sweet spot of A blog doesn't need a clever name.) 8:07:29 AM    comment []

Whois data accuracy: IANA exempt?. In the course of programming iWhois.com, we wanted a foolproof way of identifying IANA-reserved domains (like example.com and z.org) by parsing the registry whois output. While scrutinising the relevant whois data, we noticed that the records for the IANA-reserved .org domains contain no address, phone/fax or even a correct email contact - most use not@available.org. Unless its data is also incorrect, available.org appears to be registered to Afilias! Hmm. By Andrew Moulden (mailto:andrew@moulden.org). [Jottings.com] 8:06:32 AM    comment []