Pics from around the world
[image via Pictures from the Sky]
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Interactive copyright navigator
Cory Doctorow: 
Here is a cool interactive Copyright Navigator that goes through the fundamentals of U.S. Copyright Law." This is a pretty intuitive way fo exploring what copyright does and doesn't do. Link (Thanks, Sarahfenix!)
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
On-Demand Harvard Courses: Click, View and Learn
If you have some spare time, why not put it to good use?Harvard University has dozens of online courses that you can view on demand. It's literally as simple as making a selection and clicking through. You obviously can't get any credits for taking these courses but if you want to brush up on a topic or really fine tune your knowledge, this is the place to go.
Here is a summary of the Spring 2007 online offerings. Not included here is the Fall 2006 course guide, which is still listed on their site.
- Computer Science (15 courses) - Linux, Unix, Java, Web Development, Nanobiotechnology...
- Liberal Arts and Sciences (33 courses) - Intermediate French lessons, Statistics, Metaphysics...
- Management (4 courses) - Accounting, Decision Making, Marketing
Harvard Distance Education
Beckhams Are Looking At Madonna's Mansion
David and Victoria Beckham have reportedly approached pop star Madonna about buying her Beverly Hills compound.
The British soccer star and the former Spice Girl have recently been on a whirlwind house-hunting spree in Los Angeles.
Beckham, who has signed a five-year deal with the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team that's potentially worth $250 million, is hoping to spend under $20 million for their new home.
The Beckhams' agent, Barry Peele, of Sotheby's International Realty, refused to comment on reports the couple has spoken to Madonna about buying her property, saying he had signed "a lengthy confidentiality agreement".
The celebrity couple reportedly saw 20 homes during their last trip and are looking at properties in the $18-30 million range in Los Angeles' Westside.
Kurt Rappaport of real estate firm Westside Estate Agency tells the Los Angeles Times, "They'll be away three weeks. There will be more homes for them to see when they get back."
FBI and MPAA train Swedish copyright cops
The MPAA and the FBI have gone to Sweden to train six cops in the art of fighting copyright infringement. Sweden is home to the Bittorrent tracker PirateBay, and is the birthplace of the Pirate Party, an international political movement dedicated to destroying the entertainment industry. The Pirate Party arose in the wake of a raid on the PirateBay's ISP, instigated by a Member of Parliament. The MP acted illegally in ordering the raid, and he did so at the behest of the MPAA and the US State Department.This US meddling in domestic affairs so outraged Swedes that they sided with the Pirate Party in great numbers, throwing their lot in with local rogues in favor of American bullies.
Apparently, the MPAA hasn't learned its lesson: when you intervene in local politics in Europe, locals see you as an evil representative of American hegemony. It's like they want the pirates to win!
In an effort to help stamp out pesky Swedish pirates, FBI agent Andrew Myers and the MPAA have given a group of six Swedish police officers extensive training on how to effectively combat piracy and catch people who engage in illegal downloading from the internet... Together, Agent Myers and the MPAA's instruction to this new Swedish anti-piracy unit ranged from rules and regulations governing copyright enforcement and piracy, to examples of anti-piracy initiatives in other countries that have already proven effective. The most shocking revelation is a report of a lecture given by the MPAA in which officers were shown the ins and outs of movie camcording, or "CAM-ing."
When the police were asked about possible conflict of interest by having a private interest group such as the MPAA involved in the training of enforcement personnel, they apparently saw none.credit
Monday, February 19, 2007
Tim O'Reilly sounds off on Yahoo's new "Pipes" service
Yahoo this week debuted a new service called Pipes. Here's the official description:
Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.Take BoingBoing, for example. You might enjoy one author's work, and find another not to your liking. Pipes provides an easy way to only read specific author(s), and filter out all other posts. Or, if the only subject you're interested in here is Disneyphilia, or ukeleles, or cat macros, or nanotechnology -- or you can't stand any of those, but like other stuff here -- Pipes provides easy ways to filter in or out particular content.
I'm sure other people could come up with far more interesting BoingBoing-related examples, and those are really pretty crude ideas of what this thing's capable of. Here's something else: the most popular Pipe right now is called New York Times through Flickr...
This Pipe takes the New York Times homepage, passes it thru Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr.
That's pretty badass.
Reactions from a number of internet-thinkers are very positive. Tim O'Reilly has an extensive post about why he likes Pipes, and he sees it as a manifestation of ideas that have been circulating for some time now:
[It] is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" that allows you to "create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.Read the whole post here -- it's a good one, and provides much to chew on: Link.Before I get into the details of what it is and how it works, I want to give a little background on why I'm so excited. This is something I've been waiting nearly ten years for.
The Morning After The Night Before - What Went Wrong For Spurs?
The morning after the night before is often a sobering occasion. Why am I chained to a lamppost? Why the f*ck aren’t we in the League Cup Final? That kind of thing.
For the long suffering fans of Tottenham Hotspur, last night was just another chapter in a miserable catalogue of underachievement and disappointment. 20 minutes of scintillating, breathtaking, poetic football thoroughly spoilt by 190 minutes of dogged defending, dodgy tactics and the inability to double-check a team sheet. Only Spurs.
The kneejerk reaction of a minority has already started to call for the head of Martin Jol, something that is as unlikely as it is ridiculous, but the thought that the great man himself might be scratching his head this morning over another heart wrenching derby defeat is worrying to say the least.
This tie should have been out of sight by the end of the 1st leg, perhaps even the 1st half of that game. The so called ‘youth team’ of Arsenal possess a great deal of talent yet their limited experience should have been punished in front of a White Hart Lane crowd baying for blood after Julio Baptista scored the first of his unorthodox hattrick last Wednesday. They should have been buried by a side keen to show that they would not tolerate facing a second XI in a domestic cup semi final.
Instead, we put the brakes on, a tactical switch that would prove all the more costly considering our two attacking focal points, Lennon and Berbatov, would play no further part in the 2nd leg. It should be abundantly clear that, when fielding an inexperienced side that had already proved themselves in reaching a semi final, Wenger’s brief would be that they had nothing to lose. “Go get those goals back”.
The advantage was lost pitifully and very rarely has a draw tasted so authentically like the bitterest of defeats. Baptista got his 2nd and 3rd goals of the evening, Spurs groaned and Arsenal sang. And when that happens, it really must be going their way.
Yesterday began even better than most ‘big game’ days. ‘Sheringham heading back to Spurs’ read the tabloids, along with 3 or 4 promising names that had been mooted for several weeks. Had we known at the time that none would have signed by the stroke of midnight, it might have been translated as an inadvertent message from the cruel red top hacks that it would have been better off staying in bed.
No Lennon, no pace. No Berba, no physical presence upfront. No attacking changes until a goal down, no ambition. Even passion, surely inherent during a cup semi against your local rivals was lacking from so many of the players. Are Jermain Defoe and Jermaine Jenas REALLY as upset as the fans this morning? I hate to say that I don’t think they are.
What Tottenham need is a battler, an Edgar Davids minus a few thousand miles. Nolan, Barton, even Savage, all wear their heart on their sleeve, run for ninety minutes and, perhaps most importantly, aren’t shirt swapping and hugging their local rivals after losing a cup semi final. And that’s why they are so adored by their fans and so despised by the opposition: they want to win.
All is not lost for THFC and this defeat will be nothing more than a minor blip should our cup form continue and the final victory of the season takes place at Wembley or Hampden Park. But if the current incumbents of that famous white shirt aren’t motivated for a game like Wednesday then it could all be a little too familiar when the silverware is handed out in May.
An American hero is dead
A great American passed away at the weekend. A man who shaped the way this nation conducts itself, symbolises what it stands for and provided an essential tool for living that, on average, each US household has four of.
Ah the remote control...where would we be without it?
Without him, Americans would be a few pounds lighter, some marriages might have lasted longer and those old coins stuck down the sofa would have remained undiscovered, along with dog hair and peanuts from Christmases long ago. I am talking, of course, of Robert Adler, inventor of the television remote control, who flipped channels for the last time in a nursing home in Boise, Idaho at the age of 93.
There is no truth in the rumour his remains were lost somewhere in the couch or that he was cremated and his ashes immediately misplaced. Millions of couch potatoes hit the mute button for a few moments of solemn remembrance. Books called "TV and the Remote Control: Grazing on a Vast Wasteland" and "Remote Control: A Sensible Approach to Kids, TV, and the New Electronic Media" had already examined his legacy.
But really, Bruce Springsteen's "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" () told us all we needed to know. Except that it's about 300 channels now, Bruce. Adler himself didn't fully enter into the spirit of the thing and continued to be an avid hiker and skier. "First and foremost, I hardly ever turn the TV on," he said in a 1996 interview. "And I certainly never channel surf." His wife said: "He was more of a reader."
On another occasion, he remarked: ""People ask me all the time -- 'Don't you feel guilty for it?' And I say that's ridiculous," he said. "It seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where you normally sit and watch television."
This seems to me to be the same kind of approach taken by Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of that other gadget that defined the 20th Century - the AK-47 - who shrugs when asked if he feels responsible for the war and death his weapon has been associated with.
Has a remote control ever killed anyone, I ask you say? I seem to remember a story about an obese woman who had to have a remote surgically removed from a fold in her stomach which had grown over it after it got stuck in there. Or perhaps this was an urban myth (aka urban legend).
I'd be surprised if there hadn't been a murder or two over custody of the remote. I know my wife has contemplated it at least a couple of times. But none of this takes away from Mr Adler's contribution to the American Dream - the God-given right to sit around doing sod all but watching crap television and getting fat.
Credit: Telegraph
Google Mashup Mania
I absolutely adore stuff like this! It's a google maps mash-up of handy sites in Los Angeles from Google Maps Mania. You can find the latest real-time traffic jams, where the closest vegetarian restaurant is, what clubs to hit in your area and what's going on with the LA Police, Fire Fighters and 911. There's also a Beer Map, a guide to all the Starbucks sites (heads up Markland!) and a big listing of Real Estate data. Fun stuff!
11 great Google Maps Mashups to get you started..
Real-time LA Emergency events - Real-time map of Police, Fire and 911 Events
My California Traffic: LA - Shows real-time traffic conditions on all LA area freeways. To get started, select Los Angeles from the list
Track inbound flights to LAX - Real-time flight tracker for all inbound flights to LAX
LA Weather Mashup - Current conditions, forecasts, weather cams. Lots of weather info for LA
LA Starbucks Map - Map of all LA Starbucks locations.. Search for Los Angeles, CA to get started!
LA Life - A great LA Real Estate resource with things like home info, community safety and school data to help you out
Trulia LA - Currently mapping 1180 LA properties for sale with an fantastic user interface
LA Beer Map - Find brewpubs, breweries, beer bars, beer stores and homebrew stores in LA
LA FastFood Map - Mapping every McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Wendy's, KFC, Jack in the Box, Hardee's, Carl's Jr. and In-N-Out in LA
Wikimapia LA - Describes hundreds of locations throughout the LA area. Take a look and add your own locations!
Sightseeing with Google Satellite Maps: LA - Scroll down through the list to see a great list of LA points of interest and landmarks zoomed in on a Google satellite map.
Now for the entire list..
Housing & Real Estate:
Food and Restaurants:
Transit and Transportation:
Google Transit Planner: Burbank, Orange County
Beer, Wine and Nightlife
Living in LA:
Exploring LA:
Check "Living in LA" section for more useful mashups for your trip to LA!
LA Photos and Satellite Views:
Democracy Player gets even better
Democracy Player, the killer free Internet TV app, is edging closer to 1.0. The new version fixes a ton of little bugs and cleans up the UI even more. Democracy is like iTunes for Internet TV, without the DRM. Just tell it what channels you like (or pick from a huge menu, or your favorite YouTube or Google Video keywords) and it will download a steady stream of programming with BitTorrent. Democracy uses VLC to play back video, so it doesn't matter whether you're trying to view a QuickTime, WMV, or plain MPEG (or DivX, or FLV, or whatever...) -- it just works. And because Democracy has BitTorrent built it, it's cheap and easy to publish your own Democracy channel -- the more popular your channel gets, the cheaper it is to serve and the faster your fans get your video.Democracy runs with equal ease on Linux, MacOS and Windows. It's solid, easy to use, and free. (Democracy also has a new Ubuntu repository for fetching binaries of the latest versions)
Refined interface. simpler, smoother, easier to use.Share menu. New ’share’ menu on each item lets you email a video or post to Video Bomb, del.icio.us, Digg, or Reddit...
Pause / Resume downloads. Long awaited! You can now pause and resume any download or all downloads.
Better BitTorrent support. BitTorrent performance is significantly improved.
Teacher faces jail time over "accidental porn" in classroom
The Connecticut substitute school teacher who exposed 11 and 12-year-old students to porn in the classroom -- unintentionally, she says, because of malware on an infected PC -- may now go to jail. If her claims are true, she'll be the first American ever jailed for having had the misfortune of being forced to use a buggy school computer, with incompetent or nonexistent tech support from that school's administration despite repeated requests for help.From the New York Times story excerpted below, it sure sounds like the school administrators bungled the hell out of this one, and are now scapegoating Julie Amero instead of fessing up to their own failure to protect children:
Ms. Amero’s husband, Wes Volle, was emphatic in saying she was clueless about computers and was in over her head once the pop-ups began. Mr. Volle, a graphics designer, accused the school system of sacrificing his wife to deflect attention from its own failure to install effective filters on its computers.reg-free NYT Link. Brian Krebs at the Washington Post interviewed Ms. Amero, and has a thorough, updated writeup on the case here: Link“The computer was infected long before Julie walked into that room,” he said. No other staff members in the southeastern Connecticut district have been charged or are expected to be charged.
During the trial, Robert Hartz, the information services manager for Norwich’s schools, said the computer’s filters that would have blocked such ads were not fully operational, since they had lacked the proper updated information for several weeks.
In an interview, Pam Aubin, superintendent of the Norwich schools, said that Mr. Hartz had ordered an upgrade, but that the supplier had sent it to the wrong e-mail address, using “B” for Bob rather than “R” for Robert in Mr. Hartz’s name.
Google Earth: helpful for evading death squads in Iraq
BBC News Baghdad correspondent Andrew North reports that some people in Iraq are using Google Earth to avoid sectarian violence in Baghdad:
One tip - on the Iraq League site, one of the best known -- is for people to draw up maps of their local area using Google Earth's detailed imagery of Baghdad so they can work out escape routes and routes to block.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Hijacker beaten and burned by passengers
guy who tried to hijack a plane going from Africa to the Canary Islands was ambushed by flight attendants and passengers (with help from the pilots), had scalding water dashed in his face, and was then pounced on and beaten. Speaking to the gunman during the hijacking, the pilot realized the man did not speak French. So he used the plane’s public address system to warn the passengers in French of the ploy he was going to try: brake hard upon landing, then speed up abruptly. The idea was to catch the hijacker off balance, and have crew members and men sitting in the front rows of the plane jump on him, the Spanish official said.LinkThe pilot also warned women and children to move to the back of the plane in preparation for the subterfuge, the official said.
It worked. The man was standing in the middle aisle when the pilot carried out his maneuver, and he fell to the floor, dropping one of his two 7mm pistols. Flight attendants then threw boiling water from a coffee machine in his face and at his chest, and some 10 people jumped on the man and beat him, the Spanish official said.
Financial Times poll on DRM
This is a link to a poll currently taken at the Financial Times of London. It simply asks, 'Should music companies drop DRM?'" Link
Monday, February 05, 2007
New York City Bike Messengers
Check out this video.
Insane to say the least and so are the bike handling skills.
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