My usual rants about copyright law involve unwarranted strengthening of copyright law to protect old works that ought to be public domain by now. This post, however, deals with the drastic weakening of copyright protections by the proposed Orphan Works Act of 2008 (H.R.5889). This piece of legislation would damage the livelihoods of living artists, [...]
It’s shocking how bad the Windows Mobile browser is. Not only has it taken vast amounts of time waiting for pages to load, I’m not entirely certain I’m entering this in the correct part of the WordPress interface. Regardless of whether or not the post even appears, I won’t be able to read it, because [...]
You’ve got to be impressed by the sheer misogynist archaism of someone like Bernie Ecclestone, CEO and president of Formula One racing. His comment about women in racing seems like something from another era, possibly even from another planet:
You know I’ve got one of those wonderful ideas … women should be dressed in white like [...]
John B. Judis has an eye-opening article up on Foreign Policy. Imperial Amnesia draws parallels between the current neoconservative attempts to dominate and transform Iraq, and the late 19th-/early 20th-century imperialist attempts to dominate and transform the Philippines and Mexico. Both Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt initially set out with goals of changing the [...]
Clive Thompson wrote an essay in the New York Times Magazine that confirms what I’ve suspected all along: Powerpoint Makes You Dumb. Backed up by information presentation theorist Edward Tufte (Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information), Clive makes a compelling case that Powerpoint is contributing to the dumbing down of communication.
Powerpoint encourages very [...]
When Vivendi Universal bought MP3.com, it signaled the end of one of the finest downloadable music sites on the Web. MP3.com was a fantastic place for artists to distribute their work without having to hand over a large chunk of cash to the established recording industry. The site itself has gone downhill since the purchase, [...]
Jeremy Keith has a brief Photoshop tutorial that covers four simple but effective photo-retouching techniques. In addition to the usual step-by-step instructions you’d expect from a good tutorial, it’s also got all four techniques for download as a Photoshop actions (.atn) file.
It’s a shame I’ve only got the dumbed-down Photoshop Elements, which doesn’t appear to [...]
It’s been up since August this year, but I just now ran across it. Cory Doctorow has an excellent article on trademark law, and its abuses by overly-litigious corporate entities. Corporations, spurred on by their legal counsel, have become paranoid about maintaining 100% control over their trademarks, when such control is impossible in the face [...]
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