Why, to list the problems and solutions the the TV character MacGyver came up with, of course.
In today’s era of fear, I can’t imagine a TV show that shows us so many ways to blow things up.
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Month: June 2006
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Chronicle bias?
I’m curious about the spin that The Chronicle of Higher Education puts on this particular interview with Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia. Here’s a quote from from the article:
Mr. Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic hot water. “They say, ‘Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia’†and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he has no sympathy for their plight, noting that he thinks to himself: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.â€
Sounds reasonable. Now here’s the headline for the article this is part of:
Wikipedia Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation
Ummm…yeah. He also is discouraging college-level researchers from using Britannica, and World Book, and Americana. I’m very disappointed in the Chronicle for this bit of wiki-bashing…it’s not wikipedia he’s saying doesn’t work/isn’t authoritative/is non-academic. It’s the encyclopedic format that he’s saying is not a source of university appropriate research.
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Allow me to reiterate…
…how exactly fucked the media conglomerates are. To be more specific, the RIAA and the MPAA’s of the world who are still desperately attempting to control content in an age where it is beyond anyones control.
The latest brilliant idea? LaLa, a CD trading site that lets you post your wants and haves, matches you up appropriately with other LaLa subscribers, provides postage paid mailers, and lets the USPS do the swapping. It’s like P2P without the digital. The cost? $1.49 per disc that you swap, giving you the ability to trade old music for new at prices that almost rival AllofMP3. For less than $20 a month, you could have more new music than you could comfortably listen to, all DRM free and with the ability to control it as you see fit.
Just another thing that the RIAA can’t stop. Just wait until some rolls this up with some open source social software that allows small groups to do this without the need for postage. How could they respond if Facebook provided this functionality?
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Server vs CMS, take two
So on the continuing saga of the UTC library website redesign:
We’re basically choosing between two different CMS’s…Drupal and Joomla. Neither of which is playing well with our server, an older Red Hat machine which hasn’t been updated yet to the appropriate versions of PHP. This is because RedHat hasn’t pushed the version out yet….even though it is well behind the actual PHP versioning.
*sigh*
Joomla I’m working on tomorrow. Keep your finger’s fingers crossed.
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National Slayer Day
Don’t forget, folks: It’s National Slayer Day! Go forth and blast Angel Of Death to all in earshot!
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Pirate Bay
Just to recap the last week or so for The Pirate Bay, the largest bittorrent engine in the world,
They were raided by the police, evidently under pressure from the United States and the MPAA. Keep in mind, of course, that this is in Sweden. You know, one of the places that isn’t the US. Their servers (along with other sites servers, which just happened to be in the same room) are seized.
Three days later:
Pirate Bay is back up, and now operating (evidently) as a distributed site in multiple countries with redundency. Ah, the beauty of Gilmore’s Law in action.
Their own take on it:
Just some stats…
… here are some reasons why TPB is down sometimes – and how long it usually takes to fix:Tiamo gets *very* drunk and then something crashes: 4 days
Anakata gets a really bad cold and noone is around: 7 days
The US and Swedish gov. forces the police to steal our servers: 3 days
.. yawn.
And finally, an absolutely brilliant speech from some of the people responsible for Pirate Bay, given at the Reboot conference.
The attack on Pirate Bay is an attack on that grey zone. Rather than securing their own copyrights, the movie industry are attacking an infrastructure that is needed for many kinds of independent production. They are not attacking piracy in general, as the sharing of digital files can always take its physical routes. They are attacking the very possibility to interconnect metadata of private archives. But while intellectual property will surely continue to be a battleground for major clampdowns in our society, there will always be enumerable lots of open ways.
How cool are these dudes? They have their own political party. Seriously. How much is a one way ticket to Sweden these days?
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This is just for Mark
No comment…if you’ve never seen or heard this…well…there are just no words. Shatner does Rocket Man.
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Valleyschwag 2
I recieved my first Valleyschwag package yesterday…I must say, I’m impressed. From the detail put into the packaging to the schwag itself, a cool once a month surprise. It’s like having a birthday every month!
It was, as you can see, wrapped in painted burlap. After you peeled away the burlap, the goodies inside were:
All in all, not bad for $14.95. The Rubyred T-shirt and the Goatse stickers will be worth that much in conversation at least, and the PerplexCity cards are just cool.
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Fox news Godwin
Sometimes real life IS just like the Interweb! Watch Fox News commit a real life Godwin!
From Think Progress:
Sterling Burnett is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, an organization that has received over $390,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. This afternoon on Fox, Burnett compared watching Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, to watching a movie by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to learn about Nazi Germany.
Transcript:
That’s the problem. If I thought Al Gore’s movie was as you like to say, fair and balanced, I’d say, everyone should go see it. But why go see propaganda? You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see the truth about global warming.