1 000 000 de téléchargements de woman & money, la fondation gates, le metro pneumatique de nyc en 1870, etc.
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Use Your Wii as a Media Center [Feature]
Naturally, you'll want to see what the end result will look like and what you can do with it before you proceed, so check out the gallery and video below to get a better idea of what Orb can do for your Wii. Qu’est-ce qu’un blogueur influent?Galaxie mouvante de petits mondes en permanente création -voire en récréation- la blogosphère est traversée de débats récurrents, dont le moindre n’est pas la question de l’influence. Question délicate, question sournoise, questions sous cape, qui engendre les positions les plus subtiles comme les plus tranchées. Trois discours affleurent au fil du temps. Ils se répondent de [...] What Do You Want to See in Thunderbird? [Ask The Readers]
Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0: New calendar, better search [Underexposed] Mozilla opens e-mail subsidiary [Infoworld] Gates Foundation Vs. Openness In ResearchAn anonymous reader writes "There have been complaints within the World Health Organization of some oddly familiar-sounding tactics and attitudes by the Gates Foundation. Scientists who were once open with their research are now 'locked up in a cartel' and are financially motivated to support other scientists backed by the Foundation. Diversity of views is 'stifled,' dominance is bought, and Foundation views are pushed with 'intense and aggressive opposition.'" The article tries hard for balance. It notes that the WHO official who raised the alarm on the Gates Foundation's unintended consequences on world health research is "an openly undiplomatic official who won admiration for reorganizing the world fight against tuberculosis but was ousted from that job partly because he offended donors like the Rockefeller Foundation." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Free Business Book Is Web SensationNEW YORK — The Oprah touch doesn't just work for traditional books. More than 1 million copies of Suze Orman's "Women & Money" were downloaded after the announcement last week on Winfrey's television show that the e-book edition would be available for free on her Web site, , for a period of 33 hours. http://www.oprah.com "I believe `Women & Money' is the most important book I've ever written," Orman said in a statement released Saturday by Winfrey. "So this was not about getting people to buy the book, but getting them to read it, and that was the intention behind this offer." The download offer "has built excitement for Suze's book across all formats," Julie Grau, the book's publisher, said in a statement. According to Saturday's statement from Winfrey, more than 1.1 million copies of Orman's financial advice book were downloaded in English, and another 19,000 in Spanish. The demand compares to such free online sensations as "The 9-11 Commission Report," which the federal government made available for downloads, and Stephen King's e-novella, "Riding the Bullet." The publishing community has endlessly debated the effects of making text available online, with some saying that free downloading is a valuable promotional tool and others worrying that sales for paper editions would be harmed. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers each have sued Google for its plans to scan and index books for the Internet. The offer for "Women & Money," originally released a year ago by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc., has not kept people from buying the traditional version. As of Saturday, the book ranked No. 6 on Amazon.com. The paper edition of "The 9-11 Commission Report," published in 2004 by W.W. Norton and Co., was a best seller for months. "I can tell you that with respect to the `9-11 Report,' the free download did not seem to hurt sales at all," Norton publisher Drake McFeely told The Associated Press on Saturday. "There were people who wanted it quickly, in a less convenient form, and that was clearly a different market from the people who wanted the traditional book." He said free downloading of books does concern publishers, but "if Norton had been given the opportunity for an Oprah Winfrey plug, and part of the deal was making the book free online, we would have gladly taken it." Ari Melber: Facebook Surveillance vs. Google DisappearanceFacebook is still feeling the heat over its Hotel California data policy, which hordes users' private information even after they try to desert the site. The Times' Maria Aspan has been all over this story, and her latest article reports that media and user pressure is forcing Facebook to finally let people completely extract themselves from the site. The company says this is a "technical" challenge, talking up codes and glitches. But the real motivator is money, of course, since social networking sites are in the business of monetizing the social graph. That means people are traffic and personal information is content. It's no secret why Web sites like to spread information of this sort: they are looking for more ways to make more money. Users' privacy is giving way to Web sites' desire to market to their friends and family. Technology companies are also stockpiling personal information. Google has fought hard for its right to hold on to users' searches in a personally identifiable way. What Web sites need to do -- and what the government should require them to do -- is give users as much control over their identities online as they have offline. [...] Protests forced Facebook to modify Beacon and to ease its policies on deleting information. Push-back of this sort is becoming more common. No one should have personal data stored or shared without their informed, active consent. Amen. I advocated a similar proposal in my recent feature on Facebook: A simple way to address one of Facebook's privacy problems is to ensure that users can make informed choices. Taking a page from the consumer protection movement, Congress could simply require social networking sites to display their broadcasting reach prominently when new users post information. Just as the government requires standardized nutrition labels on packaged food, a privacy label would reveal the "ingredients" of social networking. For example, the label might tell users: "The photos you are about to post will become Facebook's property and be visible to 150,000 people--click here to control your privacy settings." This disclosure requirement would push Facebook to catch up with its customers. After all, users disclose tons of information about themselves. Why shouldn't the company open up a bit, too?Debates over privacy and social networking often slip into variations of "blame the victim," especially when older luddites scorn young users for abdicating privacy and responsibility online. But these ongoing Facebook disputes reveal how companies can use technology to mislead users and preempt people from making responsible choices. And even with good information, it's still complicated. While Facebook is fighting to prevent users from fully removing their information from the site, other digital rights can run in the opposite direction. Web expert Danah Boyd recently stressed how millions of people trust companies like Google to store tons of vital information, but what happens if your digital identity is "disappeared"? She recounts how a friend lost his entire Google account and was told he had no recourse by customer service. After all, there may be no contract or back up files available: When companies host all of your data and have the ability to delete you and it at-will, all sorts of nightmarish science fiction futures are possible. This is the other side of the "identity theft" nightmare where the companies thieve and destroy individuals' identities. What are these companies' responsibilities? Who is overseeing them? What kind of regulation is necessary? Good questions. Photo of campus poster: Inju Flickr In 1870, New Yorkers Whooshed Under the City Via Pneumatic Tube [Retro Futurism]
"Let the reader imagine a cylindrical tube eight feet in the clear, bricked up and whitewashed, neat, clean, dry, and quiet," explained Scientific American in early 1870. The car itself fit snugly within the tube (there was an inch and a half clearance) and carried eighteen passengers at a cost of 25 cents each. "The weirdest thing about the subway project . . .," opined the New York Times in 1911, "is that the car was to be blown to and fro . . . by means of a big blowing machine." (In 1911, you could write things like that with a straight face.) The vacuum created when the air current was reversed pulled the car back in the opposite direction. Over 400,000 New Yorkers took a joy ride underground during the three years the pneumatic subway was open for demonstration. But public enthusiasm couldn't protect inventor Alfred Beach and his Beach Pneumatic Railway from the wrath of Tammany Hall. Even though a bill proposing extension of the subway for the entire length of Broadway as originally planned was supported by state lawmakers, Governor Hoffman caved in to Tammany interests and vetoed the project. (In his exhaustive and fascinating history of the Beach Pneumatic Railway, Joseph Brennan suggests that Beach himself may have started the now-accepted-as-true story that Tammany Hall forced the closure of his railway.) When Beach finally gained approval in 1873 (after Tammany Boss Tweed's death and a new governor's inauguration), a stock market crashed killed financial support and thus the pneumatic subway. In 1912, workers on the new BMT subway line reached Broadway and Warren Street, where they found the pneumatic railway tube, intact and well preserved. According to NYCSubway.org, the tunnel was almost certainly destroyed to make way for progress. FeedBurner Quietly Kills All-Time RSS Feed Stats
 Google is great! So... where are my all-time stats? So, what's the big deal? The big deal is bloggers that have relied on FeedBurner for any good length of time just lost all access to historical data. We can no longer see how our RSS subscriber growth rates are changing over time. We can no longer see accumulative statistics for click-throughs to popular articles, and and we can no longer show when our feeds reached specific milestones. For a great example, just look at my December 28th post, "Feedburner Milestone Reached: 200 Subscribers". In that post, I noted when we hit 50 subscribers, 100, and then, 200. Well, the big news would be that last night, for the first time ever, we reached more than 500 total subscribers to louisgray.com, but now, I can't show you that all-time graph. It's gone.  And FeedBurner remains silent. Their official blog hasn't been updated since November of 2007, and as customers beg for an explanation in the site's support forums, there hasn't been any response. We already know the blogosphere loves their RSS. We know they love their stats too. So, I'm a little surprised more folks haven't caught on to the fact this data's been erased. What's the deal, FeedBurner? Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie
BBC Content Coming to iTunes and AppleTV
The BBC has rolled out a handful of initiatives in the past year to gain profits from online distribution. After the dismal and rather limited release of the BBC iPlayer, which features recent episodes for free, the BBC kicked things up a notch, especially through its commercial arm. A branded channel on both YouTube and MySpace are both part of this push, but even updates to the launching of the iPlayer have been quite limited, especially in terms of the BBC’s global reach. Now the BBC is looking to Apple for a two-fold method of distribution in order to further the reach of its content. BBC content will soon be available on iTunes, and the iPlayer will also be available through AppleTV’s set-top box, according to The Register. Just as YouTube and countless others are looking for various ways in which to get online video content more integrated with the Home Theater experience, so to is the BBC. While additional details have yet to be confirmed, it appears as though this initiative is really relying on a global reach for its content, expanding beyond the UK and even beyond the television and radio distribution channels the BBC currently has.   Habitrail-Style Office Tower to Dominate Beijing Skyline Later This Year [Architecture]
   WikiLeaks Under Firekan0r writes "The transparency group WikiLeaks.org currently seems to be under heavy fire. The main WikiLeaks.org DNS entry is unavailable, reportedly due to a restraining order relating to a series of articles and documents released by WikiLeaks about off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands. The WikiLeaks whistle blower, allegedly former vice president of the Cayman Islands branch of swiss bank Julius Baer, states in the WikiLeaks documents that the bank supported tax evasion and money laundering by its clients from around the world. WikiLeaks alternate names remained available until Saturday, when there seems to have been a heavy DDoS attack and a fire at the ISP. The documents in question are still available on other WikiLeaks sites, such as wikileaks.be, and are also mirrored on Cryptome. Details of the court documents have also been made available." Read more of this story at Slashdot.  Multi-play Mario game video as Many Worlds quantum tutorialThe Mechanically Separated Meat blog has created a merged video of hundreds of games played against "Kaizo Mario World" (an insanely difficult homebrew Mario level) and used the resulting video as the jumping-off point for an extremely stimulating and enlightening discussion of the Many Worlds hypothesis in quantum physics. If I had to explain Many Worlds to an eight-year-old (something I expect to have to do in, oh, about eight years), this is where I'd start. I'm especially enamored of the choice of Mario for this, since it's just the right blend of puzzler and jumper to make youwant to explore all possible choices (I've recently become brutally addicted to Paper Mario, which now occupies about 10 percent of my brain on a more-or-less permanent basis as a kind of low-grade background process). Link (via Kottke)   Courts May Revisit Software PatentsAn anonymous reader writes "It looks like the courts may finally be gearing up to overturn the ruling that opened the floodgates for both software and business model patents. It's been nearly ten years since the US courts decided that business methods were patentable and that most software could be patentable — and we've all seen what's happened since then. With all the efforts to fix the patent system lately, it appears that the court that originally made that decision may be regretting it, and has agreed to hear a new case that could overturn that ruling and restore some sanity to the patent system." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Crammer MP3 Player is Cute, Orange, Simple
Leapfrog's petite, student-aimed portable music player takes the complexity out of entertainment. With a monochrome screen, study aids and simple kinetic UI, it'll never get iPod-killer headlines. But it does at least share one thing with Apple's wonderproduct that many MP3 players lack: it's easy to use. Joel Johnson at BoingBoing Gadgets has a hands-on review up, and he reports that it does have some idiosyncrasies. It's only available with 1GB of storage, which isn't a lot, and it also transcodes tunes to Ogg Vorbis format for playback. For $60, though, that's a good way to convince your parents that you can use a consumer entertainment product to help you with your education. It's like asking for a computer on which to "do your homework," only a lot cheaper.   The Martian Report, Episode Two: Extraterrestrial Anthropologist Investigates Solar EnergyIn 1976, Jim Neidhardt put one of the first Sony Portapaks in a backpack and used a telephoto lens. Equipped with a radiomike, Howard Rheingold roamed the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area, posing as Howard K. Martian, extraterrestrial anthropologist. This episode examines the automobile cult. Brigitte Fontaine - Comme A La Radio (1970)
La France prend la tête des Cnil européennes Le président de la Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés, Alex Türk, devrait être élu le 19 février président du groupe de travail « G29 », qui regroupe les autorités européennes en charge de la protection des données privées. |
Mozilla's baptized its Thunderbird revitalization effort "Mozilla Messaging" and announces the new features due out in T-bird 3.0 by the end of the year: official calendar integration (ala
It sounds like something out of Jules Verne or The Jetsons, but in 1870 a "pneumatic subway" ran under Broadway in Manhattan. Built in secret so as to not to arouse the ire of Tammany Hall, only a block-long segment between Warren and Murray Streets was completed before an enterprising reporter for the
As part of Beijing's efforts to
