Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank: "Since the end of the cold war, tremendous power has flowed to the people entrusted to bring the gospel of the market to the far corners of the globe. These economists, bureaucrats, and officials act in the name of the United States and the other advanced industrial countries, and yet they speak a language that few average citizens understand and that few policymakers bother to translate. Economic policy is today perhaps the most important part of America's interaction with the rest of the world. And yet the culture of international economic policy in the world's most powerful democracy is not democratic."

Posted by John at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lost my hard drive at work Monday. I don't remember leaving it on; it smelled like buring plastic and made a wining sound. Reboot reboot can't find OS. Head crash, I think. Hated that box, a real piece of junk, but now I miss it because I have an P3 XP machine with no admin access. When I need to install software I have to call Helpdesk. It's kindergarten, really.

Posted by John at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Documentation of Internet Filtering Worldwide: "The authors are developing a software application for use in testing, analyzing, and documenting Internet filtering regimes worldwide. When complete, this application will allow interested Internet users to receive from our servers a list of sites to be tested; to automatically and efficiently test access to those sites; and to report results to our servers for centralized and automated tabulation and analysis."

Posted by John at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Congress is about to consider an entertainment industry proposal that would authorize copyright holders to disable PCs used for illicit file trading... A draft bill seen by CNET News.com marks the boldest political effort to date by record labels and movie studios to disrupt peer-to-peer networks that they view as an increasingly dire threat to their bottom line... Sponsored by Reps. Howard Berman, D-Calif., and Howard Coble, R-N.C., the measure would permit copyright holders to perform nearly unchecked electronic hacking if they have a "reasonable basis" to believe that piracy is taking place."

Posted by John at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Salon has launched Salon Blogs, powered by Radio UserLand. Not the best choice of platforms, unfortunately.

Posted by John at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Marshall McLuhan would have been 91 on July 21, today.

Posted by John at 8:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Scopeware was developed by computer scientist David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale. "The network file folder system as we know it is dead on the floor... We've wanted to be able to organize information without inventing directories and file names. We've wanted the question 'Where did I put that information?' to always have the same answer. [Using Scopeware] you don't have to worry about how you named something, what directory it is on, or what file it is in."

Posted by John at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

David Ness's Mid-Summer RBIs: "Many Americans will probably expect this to be a discussion of Baseball (RBI=Runs Batted In), and perhaps a complaint about the idiocy of the Baseball Commissioner's stopping of the All-Star Game... [I]nstead it is a piece about Really Bad Ideas which seem to be circulating with great frequency of late."

Posted by John at 6:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The current rates for American Internet broadcasting are based on a deal worked out between Yahoo!/Broadcast.com and the RIAA. Broadcast.com founder by Mark Cuban has been clear about why the rates were set as they were: "The Yahoo! deal I worked on, if it resembles the deal the CARP ruling was built on, was designed so that there would be less competition, and so that small webcasters who needed to live off of a 'percentage-of-revenue' to survive, couldn't." More at Slashot.

Posted by John at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

More wikiblog stuff: SnipSnap in Java and e_con, similiar to Vanilla but in Perl.

Posted by John at 9:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"We at Amazon.com want to see Web services work." Web services make it possible for diverse applications to discover each other and exchange data seamlessly via the Internet, and now you can build gizmos to talk to Amazon. Officially launched today, there are already some neat things, such as the Google-like Amazon Light, a hosted store in PHP, a bookmarklet for posting books to Blogger, and a similarities map.

Posted by John at 9:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

E7L3: "I wanted to think about the concept behind this site and make a couple of changes. In the course of the last few weeks I felt that something had gone wrong with it: it began to feel like a burden to provide new content. Everything became way too complicated and I thought about shutting it down altogether. But after a while I found the reason: I got bored of publishing links like: Look, Ma, a new link, found it all of my own! I also do not want to go mainstream, competing against all the fancy stuff that is so popular amongst webloggers nowadays... To the contrary -- what could be dumped? Is it really necessary to maintain an archive of opinions already gone stale?"

Posted by John at 9:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The heat is back, and we sleep in an attic at night. Okay, not the heat, the humidity.

Posted by John at 8:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was better to call it Freestyle, but Windows XP Media Center Edition is sort of interesting. A couple of months ago I took one of our spare PCs, slapped Windows Me on it, and hooked it up to our Ethernet, big television, and the stereo. The idea was to use it to play streaming audio and video, but we don't use it much for all the reasons you'd expect: it's hard to control the PC, boot time is slow, and we have to do some cable juggling.

Posted by John at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

"We have done more than 100 surveys and reports since late 2000 and this survey has the most overwhelming, and negative, response to a company or technology we have ever seen." A survey by investment and research firm ChangeWave of its clients who are current and former subscribers of America Online showed that 40% of respondents were dissatisfied with the service.

Posted by John at 2:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

LiNKY is a cute little Web-based bookmark manager, but I can't import my 1000+ "erotica" links.

Posted by John at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The lastest thing for me is summer tunes: shameless I am loving No Doubt's Hella Good, The White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl" and The Hives' "Hate to Say I Told You So": "Do what I please gonna spread the disease because I wanna / Gonna call all the shots for the no's and the not's." I love The White Stripes "Fell in Love with a Girl" and The Hives "Hate to Say I Told You So": "Do what I please gonna spread the disease because I wanna / Gonna call all the shots for the no's and the not's." Grrr!

Posted by John at 9:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by John at 9:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Toronto artist Lyla Rye is defending her work against allegations of child pornography after Halifax police confiscated a video installation on display at a Halifax gallery ... The video, entitled Byte, shows Rye singing into her baby daughter's mouth. At the end of the tape, the baby bites Rye's lip. On top of the screen, Rye has superimposed black squares that look like the work of censors. She also slowed the tape down and put it on a loop so that a 12-second sequence lasts eight minutes." (Insert rant about Halifax here.)

Posted by John at 2:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"A sad day for the United Nations." When it comes to international law, there's one law for the USA and one law for the rest of the world. Disgusting.

Posted by John at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sharing Eminem tracks on P2P? The artist has some words for you: "I think that shit is fucking bullshit. Whoever put my shit on the Internet, I want to meet that motherfucker and beat the shit out of him, because I picture this scrawny little dickhead going 'I got Eminem's new CD! I got Eminem's new CD! I'm going to put it on the Internet.' I think that anybody who tries to make excuses for that shit is a fucking bitch."

Posted by John at 9:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

"Well, of course I hate you because you are Christian, but that doesn't mean I want to kill you." Now guess which country this Muslim cleric lives in.

Posted by John at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(*^o^*)   In Japan, users have worked out emoticons (or keyboard "smiley faces") adapted to their face and body language.   (^0^)   According to The New York Times (August 12, 1996), the Japanese are using emoticons even more than Westerners.   (^.^)   Because their PC keyboards handle the two-byte characters of Kanji, users can choose between single- and double-byte versions of certain characters such as underscore characters, allowing a further degree of expression.

Posted by John at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Clarke Fletcher's Japan-O-Rama has me spinning.

Posted by John at 1:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If You Build It, They Will Drink: "Described as 'an inhabitable cloud whirling above a lake,' the Blur Building is a media pavilion constructed for the Swiss Expo 2002 at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. Designed by MacArthur 'Genius' award-winners Diller and Scofidio as a temporary structure for the Expo, the pavilion is made of filtered lake water shot as a fine mist through 31,500 fog nozzles creating n artificial cloud that measures 300-feet-wide by 200-feet-deep by 65-feet-high."

Posted by John at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Hacktivismo, a politically minded offshoot of the long-running hacker collective Cult of the Dead Cow, will announce Six/Four -- named after the June 4, 1989 massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square -- in a presentation Saturday at the H2K2 hacker conference in New York City. Six/Four combines peer-to-peer technologies with virtual private networking and the "open proxy" method for masking online identities to provide ultra-anonymous Internet access.

Posted by John at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

"It is a strange kind of success: Wallace has created an artificial life form that gets along with people better than he does."

Posted by John at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"ClearChannelSucks.org is a free speech website dedicated to educating the public about entertainment giant Clear Channel. Clear Channel owns over 1,200 radio stations and 37 television stations, with investments in 40 radio stations globally, and Clear Channel Entertainment (aka SFX, one of their more well-known subsidiaries) owns and operates over 200 venues nationwide. They are in 248 of the top 250 radio markets, controlling 60% of all rock programming."

Posted by John at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After two and a half years and much debate, 2600 Magazine, the self-proclaimed "Hacker's Quarterly," announced Wednesday that it will not ask the Supreme Court to review the decision of a federal court order prohibiting 2600 from publishing or linking to sites containing DeCSS, a computer program that decrypts the Content Scrambling System (CSS) found on DVDs. The decision ends a long legal battle with the MPAA over an article 2600 posted on their website in December 1999 containing the software and links to mirror sites. The case was one of the first to involve the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 law prohibiting the distribution, use, or possession of technology that circumvented technological copy-protection systems.

Posted by John at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Once Hot, Now Not, Hunters of Cool Are in a Freeze: "Only a year ago Lauren Holden, the former director of design inspiration at Nike, speculated that mainstream American teenagers would soon be wearing organic love beads, flaunting these secular rosaries as an insignia of hip... Despite such predictions, these professed totems of vanguard chic have yet to register on the nation's fashion radar... In line just behind them may be the cool hunters themselves..."

Posted by John at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Flash! Macromedia tools speak up: Flash Communications Server MX, a new addition to the MX family of Web development and server products Macromedia has built this year, is meant to further encourage Web developers to add chat, interactive video and other communications features to their sites, said Kevin Lynch, chief software architect for Macromedia."

Posted by John at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From OnlineJournalism.com: "The biennial media survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press in Washington revealed that even though the Internet made possible the availability of access to news from anywhere at anytime, the only people using new media for news are those who used the old media."

Posted by John at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Saw Norah Jones last night at Club Soda. I've quite liked her CD, Come Away with Me, though I have no illusions about what it is: highly produced and controlled jazz-pop, the sort of borderline product that can be unbearable. But, damn it, she does have a nice voice, corrupt and innocent somehow, and tickets for her first show in Montreal were a priority.

Sitting in the first row of Club Soda, I flashed back to Sarah McLachlan during one of her late-1980s tours. Norah, like Sarah back in the day, seemed a bit over her head: nervous, unable to let herself get past the technique of her singing to connect to the audience. Something she may or may not learn in the next few years.

The crowd loved her, of course. Two kids to our left sang along with all her stuff, smiling and holding hands. I think they wanted to encourage her, but it might have scared her more.

Posted by John at 8:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back here in the chair, I wonder how much energy I can muster to continue the plod. I take pride in being so dedicated but now even my body rebels. Oh god, give unto me a new passion.

Posted by John at 8:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Net radio goes underground: "Inspired by Britain's iconoclastic history of pirate radio broadcasting, Iain McLeod wants to save Internet radio... The 39-year-old McLeod, a game designer who works out of his home in England, is the author of Streamer, a new software program designed to let people create online radio stations that are difficult for the authorities to trace."

Posted by John at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)