Archive for January, 2007

The web as a pidgin internet language

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

or "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet" A disproportionate amount of brilliant stuff was written by Douglas Adams, who in 1999 had this to say about the internet: the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have ...

A dark matter: structure of the universe influenced by dark forces?

Friday, January 19th, 2007

The indispensable New Scientist reports that the distribution of dark matter has been mapped in 3D for the first time, revealing how the mysterious substance has evolved over the lifetime of the universe. The results confirm that dark matter provided the scaffolding that allowed ordinary matter to clump together to ...

Internet Black Holes

Sunday, January 14th, 2007

Reporters sans frontiers rally against "internet black holes" - sectors of the internet where liberty is severely restricted: This map is a tad simplistic, being more about black and white than shades of grey - and its the shades of grey that I think are particularly nefarious. That said, its a ...

Infreemational news for the new year

Monday, January 8th, 2007

More signs that the music industry is realizing just how bad DRM is for business and experimenting with distributing music without digital rights controls: "The majors . . . have got to capitulate, or they will continue to have a fractured digital media market that will slow down and stagnate," says ...

Going Down the Tubes: The Illegal-ization of Culture

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007

We've all heard the platitude before: today's culture is going down the tubes. In recent history, major conduits for cultural influence have been "talking machines" (radio) and "boob tubes" (TV). More recently we have the rapid increase in influence of the internet (also composed of "tubes" if you listen to ...