"I am astonished and appalled by Craigslist's refusal to recognize the reality of prostitution on its Web site -- despite advertisements containing graphic photographs and hourly rates, and widespread public reports of prostitutes using the site."To which I can only reply: I am astonished and appalled by Richard Blumenthal's refusal to recognize the reality of liability and section 230 safe harbors -- despite it being the law of the land and widely known and discussed in legal circles.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We at Boing Boing are delighted to welcome the latest addition to the Happy Mutants family, Sarah Milstein! Sarah joins us as our first-ever Operations Manager and Chief Loop Closer! We've had concentric orbits with Sarah for years and she's the perfect person to help us focus on what needs to be done in the short term, get our heads around what's possible in the long term, and grow thoughtfully.
"There are people who want to steal intellectual property. Their lobby is distributed, diffuse, but unfortunately very popular."This, ladies and gentleman, is the guy who's in charge of determining our intellectual property laws. He simply assumes that anyone who disagrees with him "wants to steal intellectual property" (which, of course, isn't possible -- you can infringe, but not steal it). But, even more to the point, the folks he's talking about are most certainlynot even defending the infringement of copyrights. They're talking about trying to bring the laws more in line with what's reasonable. To paint them all with the brush of defending "stealing" isn't just wrong, it's rather obnoxious.
Among the designs on display at Tokyo Fashion Week earlier this month -- bunnies and furries. If I'm not mistaken, the image above was taken from the runway show for Né-net, the line designed by Kazuaki Takashima. (Spotted on Tokyomango, thanks Marianne Shaneen!)
In Plenty magazine, this feature about the Chinese government's high-tech "weather modification" efforts for this summer’s Beijing Olympics. The big idea: keep the sun shining, through all that smog. Snip:
One thing worth considering when you tamper with nature is what sort of nature you’re tampering with. Nature is not kind to the city of Beijing. China’s capital is arid, nearly a desert, and its natural weather patterns are fickle and harsh. Winter is marked by howling Siberian winds; summer, by sweltering monsoon heat. In lieu of showers, springtime is best known for seasonal dust storms that sweep down from Central Asia. Fall is parched and gusty too, but the dust settles down. This basic brutality is overlaid with levels of pollution like those of England’s Industrial Revolution. Many things blot out the sunshine, and most have nothing to do with rain: factory and power plant emissions, construction dust, smoke from stoves burning scrap wood or pressed coal. There are more than 3 million cars on the streets—and the count is said to be growing by 400,000 vehicles annually. It is not unusual to check the AccuWeather international forecast on the New York Times website and find that while other cities’ weather is “mostly sunny” or “overcast,” Beijing’s is “smoky.” In February 2007, authorities finally abandoned a longstanding policy in which haze was referred to as wu, Mandarin for fog, and just called it what it is—mai, or haze.Link to article. (Thanks, Choire Sicha, you gorgeous creature, you.)
Image: "Sun through the smog in Beijing," by ~diP.
Above, two of the images from photographer Jacob Holdt currently on display at CNA gallery in Luxembourg.
[Holdt] was 24 years old when he decided in 1971, like many of his Danish compatriots, to travel across the American continent. He landed in Canada with the aim of rapidly crossing through the United States to get to the true destination of his travels: South America. But from the moment he crossed the Canadian border, Jacob Holdt was struck by an America characterised by poverty and the exclusion of the socially disadvantaged. In his outrage, he described the misery he was witnessing in letters to his parents who, for their part, remained incredulous. His father nevertheless sent him a small camera so that he could back up his accounts with tangible proof. And this is how the long voyage of the young Dane through the United States started, not to be completed until five years and several thousand snapshots later, with a deeply moving work: 'American Pictures 1970-1975', published as a book in 1978.Link (thanks, Clayton James Cubitt!)Jacob Holdt, who was nominated for this year's DeutscheBorse Photography Prize, has remained a key figure in Danish activist circles, despite having in the meantime more or less given up photography. His images of the America of the destitute of the seventies had great repercussions and to a large extent inspired the movies Dogville and Manderlay by Lars van Trier."
The New York Times has a great write-up of the continued rapid growth of Red Hat. Despite the looming recession, Red Hat is predicting 30 percent revenue growth in the coming year, to more than half a billion dollars. For a few years, Mike has been talking about how to make money while giving away infinite goods, and Red Hat could probably be the poster child for his argument. Despite the fact that virtually all of its "products" are available for free on the Internet, Red Hat is still convincing companies to pay it hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course, the reason this works is that Red Hat's product isn't its operating system or other software. Red Hat's product is access to the time and expertise of its employees, and to Red Hat's extensive ecosystem of developers, hardware vendors, and others who have built atop the Red Hat platform. Because Red Hat stands at the center of this tight-knit web of relationships, their employees are better-positioned than anyone else to quickly solve customer problems. And it turns out that companies are willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for that assistance.
The most interesting part of the article is where it talks about Oracle's effort to undercut Red Hat by offering the same software at a lower cost. Apparently, as we predicted, it hasn't been going too well. And it's not too hard to see why: Larry Ellison doesn't seem to understand Red Hat's business model. What Red Hat is selling isn't software, but support. And the value of a support contract is a function of the expertise of the company providing it. Not only does Red Hat have a number of key Red Hat developers on staff, but it also has a ton of strong working relationships with developers and vendors elsewhere in the Linux community. That means that if a customer encounters a bug in its Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation, Red Hat will either have an engineer on staff who can fix it, or it will have a strong relationship with the outside developer who developed that piece of software or the firm that manufactured the hardware. That makes it more likely that it will be able to address the issue quickly and incorporate the fix into the software for future releases.
Oracle has made comparatively little effort to either hire Linux developers or foster strong relationships with the broader free software community. As a result, Oracle isn't able to provide the same kind of value that Red Hat can. Yes, Oracle tech support can fix straightforward problems, but if they need to make changes to the code, they'll often need to go to a Red Hat engineer for help getting it fixed. And not surprisingly, most customers would rather cut out the middleman and go to Red Hat directly, even f it costs a little more.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Kats said he tried to reassure his fellow passengers that it was a school project -- not a bomb -- but people scrambled for the exits nonetheless. The box he was holding had a small battery, wires and a motor.Link"They were panicking, and I realized their fear," an apologetic Kats said.
He said he tried to disassemble the contraption on the platform even as he reassured riders, "Don't worry. This is my science project."
Link (Via the day they tried to kill me)Golubov doesn't dispute that he owned a Raskat at the time, but he says he purchased it online to resell it at a local market for a tidy profit.
"In the past in Ukraine it was risky to keep all company contract and clients data on computers," Golubov said. "At first -- tax inspection can confiscate computers, at second -- competitors can stole them and take over businesses."
Golubov said it was members of the law enforcement task force who used the Raskat to fry the data on his hard drive.
"Regarding information from the hard drive -- it was not me who destroyed it. But it was employee of task force who conducted a search," Golubov wrote to Security Fix. "This officer has found Raskat system remote control. He decided that it is remote from my car alarm and started to push on it in order to find which one of parked nearby car it was. I have no car and it was remote from the system Raskat, and I have clearly said this to him, but he has not listened to me, and told me to be silent. And he pushed this button several time. It can be possible he has erased all information on purpose, in order to say that all evidences are all wiped off, or more likely due to stupidity."
LinkIn 2004, journalist John Gorenfeld scooped the Washington press corps when he exposed a scandalous party on Capitol Hill, in which members of Congress watched as Moon held a ritual coronation for himself as the "King of Peace." Wearing a majestic cape and coronet, the publisher declared himself the Messiah. The New York Times editors compared the event, sponsored by a U.S. senator, to an act of the Roman emperor Caligula.
That, as you might imagine, was just the tip of the iceberg.
Bad Moon Rising takes you into the underbelly of the Religious Right. Which is surprisingly, scandalously entwined with Moon and his business empire--an untold chapter in American political history.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
