Thursday, June 02, 2005

Did Krugman win by T.K.O.?. The economics columnist trades blows with former Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent. [Salon.com] 7:01:28 PM    comment []

Dave: New Statesman columnist on podcasting. "Winer will get up mid-sentence to walk across the room and pour himself a coffee. That's 30 seconds of your life that you'll never get back." If your brain is dead. 7:01:23 PM    comment []

Intellectual Property and the Challenge of China: All eyes are watching as Viagra patent case winds its way through the Chinese legal system By Jane Parry, in The Scientist. 11:46:34 AM    comment []

How Apple will change everything about Podcasting, #3 -- How, a long tail of podcasts on iTunes will make us stop thinking of "podcasts" as just Wayne's World programming or radio-like genres. Display all posts in this series on one page by clicking this link An RSS feed of posts in this series [rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog] 7:33:49 AM    comment []

Loosing Google's Lock on the Past. Embarrassing moments live forever online. But learn to work with the Web, not against it, and you could reshape your cyberhistory. By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM. [NYT > Technology] 7:31:36 AM    comment []

Fair Use Day: July 11 [bOing bOing] 7:27:57 AM    comment []

hoder notes: Blog Spring (Jeff Howe, Wired Magazine) Writing Lolita in Tehran (Chris Dickey, Newsweek) Bloggers of Iran (Katrina Vanden, the Nation) 7:27:40 AM    comment []

NYT on a book-banning debate in Pennsylvania: A Town's Struggle in the Culture War. A debate over whether to ban a novel from the Muhlenberg High School's curriculum is a representative skirmish in a wider conflict over values. By BRUCE WEBER. 7:24:58 AM    comment []

Waiting for Detroit: San Antonio Repels Phoenix' Last Stand and Reaches Finals. The Suns never got closer than three points down the stretch, and the Spurs took a 101-95 victory to win the Western Conference finals. By By HOWARD BECK. [NYT > Sports] 7:24:04 AM    comment []

HOWTO build a siege engine at multiple sizes from different materials Trebuchet.com's HOWTO page includes links to plans for dozens of different home-made siege engines, from wooden tabletop models to easy-to-construct PVC pipe versions (shown here). Link (via Make Blog) [bOing bOing] 7:22:38 AM    comment []

Collector's Trove of Podcasts. A man makes it his mission to archive every scrap of online amateur radio, even though he thinks most of it is rubbish. By Ryan Singel. The Other Side of BitTorrent. As Hollywood ramps up its fight against the film-swapping kingpin, some in the industry find a silver lining. By Patrick Gray. [Wired News] 7:17:52 AM    comment []

Growing out of the establishment. "They are all tailored from the same textile." So a lot of Iranian émigré are saying about the reform movement in Iran. who have long lost touch with the situation in Iran. But this time, the reformist candidate -- or progressive reformist, as they want to be called recently -- is truly breaking the taboos of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They are not part of the establishment anymore with some of these unusual ideas they are pushing. They are proudly rejecting the religious authority of the supreme Leader beyond the law. They've announced they're going to use Liberal-Nationalists, long dismissed by the establishment, in their government. They have started to get recognize ethnic and religious minorities and women involved in the decision-making process. They've shown they believe in human rights and freedom of speech. Although there is still a huge gap between their words and their deeds, but even talking about all of these things are absolutely unprecedented. We should use this opportunity and not only hold them to all these ideas and promises, but also should push for deeper changes by actively engaging them. [Editor: Myself (English)] 7:16:12 AM    comment []

A mystery solved, but 'deep' issues linger. Deep Throat reveals himself, and rekindles debate about ethics and Watergate facts. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories] 7:13:57 AM    comment []

"The Net Effect" - On The Great Firewall Of China. The Net Effect http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jun05/0605cnet.html "As China's Internet gets a much-needed makeover, will the new network promote freedom or curtail it? - By Steven Cherry [IEEE Spectrum Online] Highly recommended. But I'm biased: How will censorship work with four different companies' products? According to Seth Finkelstein, a Cambridge, Mass., network programmer and an expert on Internet censorship, router-based censorship can and does take place at any point in the network. Each of the routers in the CN2 contract - in all three rings - can be expected to access a database of banned names and words, either within the router itself or in a subsidiary server connected to the router. ... And in conclusion: "The Internet is fairly centralized in the United States, too," notes Finkelstein, the Cambridge, Mass., programmer. "Not for political reasons but for economic ones." It turns out that the largest Internet providers push all their packets of data through large regional routers connected to proxy servers that already examine packets for evidence of quality-of-service or other problems. "Our political system is vastly different from China's," Finkelstein says, "but if we had a national panic, if we felt we had to censor the Internet, it's scary how easily it could be done. There's a famous saying, 'The Internet considers censorship to be damage, and routes around it.' I say, what if censorship is in the router?" [Infothought] 7:13:23 AM    comment []

Wes: For you DVD packrats, ratDVD is a utility/file format that can transcode a DVD to a much smaller size (1-2GB) while retaining all the menus, soundtracks, subtitles, etc. I like the idea, but I think a new file format is overkill -- a simpler approach would be to transcode all the MPEG-2/AC-3 VOBs into H.264/AAC VOBs (granted, this is a funky format, but it's less funky than ratDVD) and leave the IFOs and directory structure in place. 7:13:18 AM    comment []