Posts

around the traps

  • Milktape Is a Modern-Day Mixtape for Music Lovers: "I made you a mixtape" is a phrase you probably haven't heard since 1992. Even burning CDs is passé in the era of Spotify. But somehow, sharing a playlist with the click of a mouse just doesn’t pack the same romantic punch as an actual, physical gift. Let's face it, nobody is going to blush like a schoolgirl over a file shared on Dropbox.
  • Twitter Turns Ugly Over PR Person's Idiotic Tweet: Sacco is nearly impossible to defend. It seems she has left a trail of casual racism across social media on her various travels, making the hacking scenario unlikely, and explaining why her company rushed to denounce her — they knew it was most likely the genuine article. ... Still, it was hard to ignore a disturbing feeling in the mob's response, and something creepy in the trial by social media that was going on in her absence.
  • Get Ready For The Streaming-Music Die-Off – ReadWrite: At long last, we have the celestial jukebox we dreamed of a decade and a half ago. Nearly any song is at our fingertips in seconds and that privilege costs far less than what an album used to, if it costs anything at all. This bubble of end-user bliss comes at the expense of almost everyone else, from artists right down to the people who pioneered the idea of renting music over the Web to begin with. How long can it last?
  • World’s first text message via molecular communication sent | KurzweilAI
  • Trust Me (I'm a kettle) - Charlie's Diary: The internet of things may be coming to us all faster and harder than we'd like. Reports coming out of Russia suggest that some Chinese domestic appliances, notably kettles, come kitted out with malware—in the shape of small embedded computers that leech off the mains power to the device. The covert computational passenger hunts for unsecured wifi networks, connects to them, and joins a spam and malware pushing botnet. The theory is that a home computer user might eventually twig if their PC is a zombie, but who looks inside the base of their electric kettle, or the casing of their toaster?
  • Simple as ABC: Tories are imploding: There is an eerie, Orwellian air to the Abbott government. Intriguingly, a couple of readers wrote this week to make the point, one directing me to these chilling lines: ''A few days later, when the terror caused by the executions had died down, some of the animals remembered - or thought they remembered - that the Sixth Commandment decreed 'No animal shall kill any other animal'.'' - Animal Farm. It's the ''thought they remembered'' that nails it. There's an acrid whiff of that in Abbott's frantic attempt to justify his handstands, conjuring tricks and pratfalls on education: ''We are going to keep the promise that we actually made, not the promise that some people thought that we made, or the promise that some people might have liked us to make. We're going to keep the promise that we actually made … ''
  • Sculpture on the moon: Paul van Hoeydonck’s Fallen Astronaut.
  • Jeffrey Toobin: The Grotesque Search for a Lethal-Injection Drug : The New Yorker: In 2009, Hospira, Inc., the sole American manufacturer of sodium thiopental, stopped production of the drug at its plant in North Carolina. ... What followed was a black comedy of increasingly desperate attempts by prison officials to procure sodium thiopental.
  • Sherlock Holmes Is in the Public Domain, American Judge Rules - NYTimes.com: A federal judge has issued a declarative judgment stating that Holmes, Watson, 221B Baker Street, the dastardly Professor Moriarty and other elements included in the 50 Holmes works that Arthur Conan Doyle published before Jan. 1, 1923, are no longer covered by United States copyright law, and can therefore be freely used by others without paying any licensing fee to the writer’s estate. No doubt the next few years will have some suits regarding the post-1923 works.

around the traps

around the traps