People in the News: R. you ready for this?: No minors!
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We can&#39;t believe we&#39;re saying this to anyone other than Paris Hilton, but here goes: Hey, R. Kelly! Stop having sex in front of cameras.
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Gabe: We did a really awesome project (can I say it"s awesome, is that okay?) for Wired magazine. You can either go pick up the most recent issue and read it there or check it out on their site. They asked us to do a piece for them handicapping all three of the next generation systems. We tried to be as fair as we could and hopefully you"ll get a kick out of it.
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Here's an up-to-the-minute round-up from Europe of what has been doing in the ongoing potboiler regarding the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the missing 3-year-old girl who allegedly was kidnapped from her room at a Portuguese vacation resort in May. Should you have had your head buried in the sand during the past few months or were abducted by aliens, first the background: Madeleine's parents, Gerry and Kate McCann had allegedly put all of their children to bed in a room at the Portuguese vacation village and were "relaxing with friends" over a few drinks at a tapas bar close to their room. Yes, the children were alone, unsupervised, but "being checked up on regularly" by their doting Doctor-parents. Varying accounts exist of how much alcohol was consumed during the evening. At the last bed-check, allegedly around 10 pm, Mrs. McCann allegedly discovered Maddie to be missing. Early reports indicated she returned to the tapas bar shouting hysterically "They've taken her, they've taken her." A massive month-long manhunt ensured and failed to turn up any clue of the little girl, despite leads pouring in, sightings of her in places as far away as Belgium. Vowing not to leave Portugal until Maddie was returned to them, the McCanns fled Portugal for the safety of Britain last week when Portuguese authorities stopped just shy of directly accusing the couple of having either accidentally or purposely killed their daughter and covered up the toddler's death with a fake abduction story. Since then, the accusations have been flying, tensions mounting and tempers here on Topix in the various fora running hot and heavy. And now, as a public service from Europe, a round-up of the latest headlines concerning the disappearance/death/kidnapping/murder/story of Madeleine McCann, age 3... (more) *********************************************
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Move over, slackers. Generation Y is hitting the workforce, tech gadgets in hand and eyes firmly on their careers. Now, if only they had some people skills & or patience ... or &
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A few things you may not have caught in last week's news.
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There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.  It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."  The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down. Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion. I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.  I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry? There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.  So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks. I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas. Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference. What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??
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Honestly, what you're about to read might surprise you.
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Snarky, self-referential and exhibitionist: That's my generation. Why are we so willing to bare our private lives and, well, our skin? It's just business.
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With all the hoopla over Bush and Kerry, some of you may not have been paying close attention to the other races going on in this loaded US political season. I've read a good dozen or so Senate outlooks, and my blurry eyes and spinning brain kept getting lost in all the numbers and losing track of who, ultimately, was likely to control the Senate on November third. So I made my very own Senate outlook to figure it out (or add further confusion, depending on what you think of my predictions). The bad news is, we probably won't know who controls the Senate on November third. The good news, if you're a Democrat (or a person who loves one), is that my best guess at this point is that when the dust settles, Democrats will probably be in control by the very slimmest possible margin. Shock! But everyone knows the Dems have no chance of taking either house of Congress. I think everyone hasn't been paying attention. Read on for my rundown.
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Gabe: You might have seen this story on CNN about the teens that murdered a homeless guy and then equated it to the sort of thrill one might get from a violent video game. There will be plenty of articles focusing on these kids and their crime. I"d like to take a second and talk about the parents of these teenagers instead. It is the job of a parent to teach their children certain rules. Obviously the rules themselves and the emphasis each family places on them will vary, but there are certain universal constants that these parents obviously failed to pass on.
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Tycho: It's "limited," but not that limited. There's fifteen hundred of them total, if you are interested. (CW)TB
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Plus: Are you having an identity crisis? [News.com Extra]
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Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.  One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.  No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the asshat asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway. "cheesecake"
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Tycho: If you'd like to submit some questions for the PAX panels next week, we won't stop you. Indeed, we might actively encourage such a thing.(CW)TB
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Tycho:  We put Monday's strip up early, so you might have seen it already - but you might not be familiar with the EGM interview it is based on, an excerpt of which appears here.  I sometimes worry about appearing partisan in these communiques, but it is not my job to be fair.  I'm not a journalist, I'm a consumer.  I don't buy one product from each company in the interests of some karmic ideal, and I don't need to purge my posts of wrongthink because I haven't produced something suitable for use as a press release.  Sony is grinding down their goodwill with every smug, psychotic interview, and someone needs to tell them so in clear terms.
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Just around the corner, or in the rear-view mirror--in any case, we need to be prepared at every level.
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By Chan, Chitat  ABSTRACT.  Thanks to advances in user-friendly, new media technology, many educational organizations around the world are supporting young people who wish to express their views through media production.