Perhaps this was as odoriferous as I
thought it was...
"As Megaupload's Kim Dotcom's
megafarce trial continues, the New Zealand Herald reports that his
alleged offense not only falls below the threshold for extradition,
but also that the warrant
may not be properly served. 'My understanding as to why they
haven't done that is because they can't. We don't believe Megaupload
can be served in a criminal matter because it is not located within
the jurisdiction of the United States,' says Megaupload's lawyer Ira
Rothken. Not surprisingly, Kim Dotcom has a
few choice words to say about having his business trashed this
way, with 220 jobs lost, and millions left without access to their
legitimate data."
[Perhaps the first
comment sums it up?
Trial and extradition were never the
goal
He was put out of business and lost
tens of millions of dollars from the raid. His punishment has
already been served, without trial, and without due process.
An
interesting rant worth reading. Early on, the Internet was accused
of disintermediation. Today my students have never
heard the word.
Voldemort’s
Got Nothing On Jeff Bezos
E-books. Again. Amazon and the DOJ
vs.
Apple and “The Big Six.” The future
of reading. A breathtakingly
stupid David Carr piece in the New York Times, which thankfully
someone
else took down paragraph-by-paragraph, so I don’t have to.
Elsewhere,
an awesome quote which I want to cheer with the force of a million
choirs of angels:
I am completely
unmoved by the argument that if Amazon forces traditional publishers
to sell books at lower costs, then the publishers will go away and we
won’t have books anymore. Hogwash. The publishers built for a
printed books world may go away, but their digital native versions
will replace them.
Yes, it’s time to trot out that
obligatory William Gibson quote again:
A middleman’s
business is to make himself a necessary evil.
– Neuromancer
Interesting
"An analysis of software
licenses shows usage
of GPL and other copyleft licenses declining at an accelerating rate.
In their place, developers are choosing permissive licenses such as
BSD, MIT, and ASL. One theory for the decline is that GPL usage was
primarily driven by vendor-led projects, and with the shift to
community-led projects, permissive licenses are becoming more
common."
Amusing,
but I'm not sure it rises to the point of Interesting, let alone
useful.
Why
Internet/GDP Ratios Make No Sense
On Monday, the
Economist reprinted a chart from a BCG
report, which purported to show the contribution of “the
internet” to the total GDP of various different countries. Britain
comes out on top, with an internet-to-GDP ratio of 8.3%; it’s
followed by Korea, China, Japan, USA, India, and Australia. After
the UK, the highest-ranking European country is Germany, on just
3.3%, while Canada lags far behind the US.
… Zwillenberg did say that in ten
years or so, “you won’t need to measure the internet economy
because it will be totally pervasive.” But for the time being,
he’s determined to measure the internet. And the way he’s doing
it is very web 1.0.
Remember the dot-com boom of the 1990s,
when everybody got excited about the internet because it was a new
way to buy stuff? That’s basically what BCG is measuring
here. They’re taking total consumer expenditure in each country,
and working out how much of that expenditure is online. As in,
buying a hardback from Amazon, or a Beanie Baby from eBay. Then they
add in the amount you pay your ISP to get online each month. And
then they add a certain amount for investment by private enterprise
in internet infrastructure, and a bit more for what they call “net
exports” — the Czech Republic, for instance, apparently has a big
internet security software sector.
The exports bit helps to explain why
Canada’s number is low: a lot of Canadians, for obvious reasons,
like to buy things on Amazon and other U.S.-based e-commerce sites.
And every time they do, under BCG’s methodology, the Canadian
internet economy is decreased by that amount. (It’s an
export of the U.S., and an import of Canada, and the calculations add
up net, rather than gross, exports.) As a result, it’s
theoretically possible, in BCG World, for the internet to account for
a negative proportion
of GDP, in some countries. [Okay, that's interesting... Bob]
For those who were once addicted (you
know who you are)
With only $50,000 to go, the gang at
Replay Games is looking forward to receiving funding, and is asking
fans to provide some direction with how to use any excess money
received.
Not every Kickstarter project can be a
Double Fine Adventure Game, making millions of dollars more than
initial goals. The game that started the firestorm of community
funding for video games will go down as a rarity, with most projects
chugging along at a steady, if not remarkable, pace toward their
goals. Thus is the case with the Leisure Suit Larry in the Land
of the Lounge Lizards update.
Still, with more than 10 days to go, it
looks like the original goal of $500,000 will be surpassed.
Creating
a Blog is easy. Filling it with useful information every day is a
bit more complicated.
One of my go-to places for learning
Blogger tips, tricks, and hacks is Blogger
Buster. For the last year or so it was fairly dormant. In the
last couple of weeks, it has come back to life with a bunch of new
tips and tutorials. It's also a good place to find custom templates
to use with your Blogger blog.
Applications
for Education
If you're having students use Blogger
to maintain their own blogs or digital portfolios, you may have some
students who want to customize the look of their blogs to make them
stand-out from the crowd. For those students, Blogger Buster could
be a great place for them to find hacks to customize their blogs in
their own unique style. In trying these hacks your students will
also learn a bit about HTML and CSS.
(Related)
How
Niche Content Sites Can Build And Keep Audiences
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