So far we have fought for net nuetrality, and may or may not have won. We hit SOPA where it hurts, and PIPA is reeling. It’s alphabet soup. The latest head to pop up with this hydra is ACTA. It isn’t a US law, or a UK law. this is an international treaty, designed to protect a stranglehold on knowledge that some companies claim. It will quite simply stifle creativity, allow for simple and easy censorship of ideas. and invade your privacy in ways you would shudder to think about.
Just watch this video, which explains better than I can. I really want to get back to making funny posts, and silly jokes. but the serious topics keep coming back.
As a general FYI and news of the Day bump, The votes for both PIPA and SOPA have been put on hold, it doesn’t mean they are dead, and with wonderful rhetoric like This Gem from
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), “But the day will come when the Senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem. Somewhere in China today, in Russia today, and in many other countries that do not respect American intellectual property, criminals who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy.”
So an industry that employ’s a decent number of people here, but produces all of its promotional items abroad, gets a pat on the back. Millions of jobs lost right there senator.
How can a US law punish someone in another country. I’m pretty sure there are laws in Iran you may have violated today, should we ship you there to face punishment? It makes no sense. All these type of laws do is frustrate and censor citizens in your own country. They can stop a daycare from painting mickey mouse on a wall in Florida but they can’t stop anyone anywhere else from stealing a nickle.
Man I’ve done a lot of ranting lately… Where’s my coffee.
We here at the CaffiNation don’t take our freedoms lightly. And we are banding together with Boing Boing, Google and many other websites to show people what the internet means to our society. Bad legislation that gives unchecked power to not only disable sites, but to do so in a hamfisted way, which can very easily break the way the internet functions.
This doesn’t just affect people in the USA, but everywhere. But the problem is that we are the only ones who can can change things. Here is the short explanation. via Michael Geist ”
While there is little that people living outside the U.S. can do to influence SOPA and PIPA, there are many reasons why it is important for everyone to participate in tomorrow’s SOPA protest.
First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect in countries around the world.
Second, non-U.S. businesses and websites could easily find themselves targeted by SOPA. The bill grants the U.S. “in rem” jurisdiction over any website that does not have a domestic jurisdictional connection.
Third, millions rely on the legitimate sites that are affected by the legislation. Whether creating a Wikipedia entry, posting a comment on Reddit, running a WordPress blog, participating in an open source software project, or reading a posting on Boing Boing, the lifeblood of the Internet is a direct target of SOPA. If non-Americans remain silent, they may ultimately find the sites and services they rely upon silenced by this legislation.
Fourth, the U.S. intellectual property strategy has long been premised on exporting its rules to other countries. SOPA virtually guarantees that this will continue.”
Why bother breaking things to try and support business models with legislation? Thats the easy part, the people who have the money have the means to grease the wheels of government. Its time to shine a light on that slimy practice and remind the lawmakers who puts them in those hallowed halls.
The CaffiNation Podcast has been running since January 9th 2006, and Since April of 2006 we have been part of the fine folks at the Techpodcast Network. As it is their custom the fine folks at the TPN are winging their way to Las Vegas for CES, the consumer Electronics show. Basically a week long technology festival where all the vendors unviel thier most awesoem stuff, smaller developers get to showcase their wares, and only the best and brightest of tech shines.
We also have a friend of the Show rocking it out as a man on the Street. Norbert Davis is hunting for the best in Totally Cool Tech, So make sure to check out those websites in the coming days. But the CaffiNation will have the live stream of the TPN events on our homepage for the Duration of the conference!
If you like this website, hell if you hate this website, but like the ability to choose where you go online please read below. Quite Simply SOPA will allow the US government to turn off websites, on whim of a corporation.
This will break the internet, no hyperbole.
“Tomorrow, the US government will vote to have broad powers to block any site. SOPA would not only hurt free speech, it will choke off the internet workforce and its readers by taking down entire websites. Today is the only day we have left to have our voices heard. It’s time to pull all stops – please make a call right now to protest censorship. Your call matters. If you don’t call, SOPA will pass. If there is one call per minute into every one of our representatives, we have a chance of stalling SOPA enough so it dies for quite some time. Please call Congress now and tell them you oppose internet censorship and stifling the internet. If you own a site, you’re in the best position to spread the word. Please post this call widget. If we’re really going to stop SOPA, we need you to get involved. If you write emails or have a blog, or if you post to Facebook, twitter, tumblr, tell everyone by blacking out your text here. It’s super easy. SOPA kills jobs that we need right now and blocks sites to Americans for the purpose of serving copyright in vague and overbroad ways, in ways that are not even well-agreed on by academics in the field. Please help us stop SOPA now.”
Ever wanted to fall asleep abroad the USS Enterprise, any of them. To fall asleep after leaving your post, to the sultry sounds of the warp cores humming in some far off section of the ship. Well wait no longer. Here is a 24hr loop of the Ambient engine noise from Star Trek TNG… Wow.
Who hasn’t felt the pangs of loss when an old scanner goes to that great digital divide in the sky? Who hasn’t had a moment of heartbreak as a digital denizen passes on? Well imagine if all your old tech could sing.
That is what you get when Stepper Motors and other bits and bobs of technology harmonize into this beautifully done song. its pitch perfect and on time as far as my ear can tell. Enjoy!
No longer in Beta, Google has announced an update to their Google Music Service. Here is the breakdown.
The service will remain free to host 20,000 of your tracks online, for streaming playback via mobile devices, download and syncing of playlists between devices. I love being able to set a playlist as available for offline playback and forget about it until I want to listen to the music when a connection isn’t there. The service downloads music in the background, and has the ability to limit music streaming and downloads to wifi connections only if you are worried about blowing your data cap.
You can now buy tracks via the Android Market, and they will be available immediately in your online library, and sync to your computer shortly thereafter. There are a pretty good amount of free tracks available right now, some good some bad, some neither here nor there. You can do all of this from your browser, and the music shows up in your library within seconds.
The missing cog so far has been the social element. Google Music now allows your friends to listen to any song you buy once, via invitation. More than enough to share and let them know f they would like to buy it on their own. I like this addition, and I hope that they one day will open the sharing up to the rest of the songs in our library as well, but baby steps here folks.
The service now goes up against the Apple Music store directly, If yo have an Android device 2.2+ and you want the Music app update you can always download it immediately, or wait for the app store to prompt you. I like this player and I hope they come out with a app based client for iOs devices soon.
Are you a Rhythm Gamer? Guitar Hero god? Completed Physcobilly Freakout on iNSANE? nicely done. However real guitar players have long since derided these accomplishments as “button pushing” and other less savory terms.
File Rock Band, Guiatr Hero and Dance Dance Revolution into the same catagory. Follow instructions on a screen to get better in a very specific set of tasks. I love those games. I beat my friends who are much better dancers than I am in DDR, but it doesn’t translate to real life. And that has alway left gamers at a disadvantage.
Enter Rocksmith. A game where you plug your real guitar into your Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 or even your PC! It comes with a cord with a 1.4 inch jack on one hand and a USB jack on the other.
Siri is the new Apple personal assistant, voice recognition app. It can do so many things, and apparently one of them is comedy! Part of the challenge of designing software that reacts to people in real language is dealing with unexpected input. This isn’t a new problem, drop an F bomb in Zork, and you get the response “Such language in a high-class establishment like this!” And Zork came out in 1979, people haven’t changed that much since then.
As soon as you can talk to a piece of software someone is going to curse, another is say dirty suggestive things. And apparently Siri has the response to all of it. Pop Culture references, Philosophical queries, foul requests. All of that can be found on the hilarious blog. Shit Siri Says. People submit conversations, and we all get to laugh.
But Siri, as a concept has never been far from Apple’s mind. For a bit of a jaw dropping experience take a look at one of the original concepts for a digital assistant, the Knowledge Navigator.
I have a wonderful little setup at home, a Ubuntu Media Server running Boxee in the basement, makes the experience watching tv a wonderful thing. Views all my movies, TV online and a ton of fun other little features.
But one thing was missing. My Google TV was cut off from the Pack, I couldn’t watch my movies in the living room that were on the Media Server in the basement, not very “Home of the Future”. So I set out trying to find the right extra component to throw into the mix in the Lair to make the media experience in the rest of the house that much sweeter.
That last missing piece is MiniDLNA! That last missing piece is a lightweight dlna server that runs in the background making it all work. Currently watching Star Wars with my kids!
Steve Jobs died on October 5th 2011, at the age of 56. The news of which broke not an hour before we started to record our podcast.
PodCast… As much as disagree with the association between iPods and podcasts, it’s there. And no amount of Portable on Demand broadcasting can change it. People listen on their ipods, or whatever. And the term is forever linked. Without him that word wouldn’t be here.
There are things being written by people smarter than I am, and by people who actually knew the man. This won’t be 7 fun things he created, or 13 things your didn’t know about the man. A father has left his family, and three young children don’t have a dad tonight. A loving wife doesn’t have a husband. There is a very real loss to the community as a whole, but my thoughts go out to the people who didn’t just lose a leader and a visionary but a human being as well.
Steve Job’s passing saddens me because people are focused on the things he created, and that his vision helped shape. iPads, and pods, Macs and Apples. That seems shortsighted. If you look at this legacy he didn’t love these things. They were designed to be replaced in a year or two. They were products of a much larger vision for the world and a devoting to making beautiful design functional and easy to use. Focus on the abstract.
I wouldn’t have half my friends if Steve Jobs hadn’t been the man he was. Friends in Podcasting, Friends in Graphic Design. My son wouldn’t have his favorite movies, all Pixar. And I wouldn’t have the experience of playing my first video game with my son, not only because it was Cars2 the video game. A Pixar Joint. And not only because the Xbox 360 runs on a PowerPC chip, which for years powered the Mac. And not only because in the 1970′s Steve Jobs and Woz worked with Atari to help cut the code down for Pong, to make room for other innovations. That right there is several layers of genius missing from the world tonight.
I’ll do you one hyperbole better. Steve Jobs, was not the Walt Disney of our time, no he goes beyond that. Everything you touch today is influenced by Jobs, and Thomas Edison. That’s it. I can’t think of another analogue to the mans body of work. He quite simple thought differently, and changed the world. We are living in the world as it is because of what he wrought.
According the the EFF, Elctronic Freedom Foundation the House Judiciary committee just promoted and recommended HR 1981, which would require all internet service providers to keep a record of All traffic data for 12 months on each customer.
Let me break this down for you, Is this a Law? Not yet. Could it make it to becoming a law? Yes… yes it could. Because we have to protect the children… Very few phrases have had more backwards wrong-thinking associated with them then protect the children. This is privacy invasion pure and simple. A constantly on wiretap available for government agencies to scan and peruse. I’ll let the experts talk on this more,
But i wanted to do my part to push the information out there. No this isn’t the standard goofball links you will find here. But you need to pay as much attention to this as youtube cat videos. Call your Representatives, this is bad juju.
If you have ever wondered what it would be like to see yourself as a doll, now you have that chance. CloneFactory, based in Japan, is giving people the opportunity to create a doll resembling the customer. After a digital composite, the company is able to make the doll any way you would like, with outfits to go with it. They will even give your doll an expression. It is a little pricey to have this done for you. For a high cost of $1750, you can have a scary resemblence of yourself turned into a doll.
Danny Choo, director of and presenter of Culture Japan, took this oppurtunity to get a doll made of himself. After a few days, he had his doll, which was dressed up like a stormtrooper.
Normal lightbulbs usually last for about 1 year, or 2500 hours, depending on how much you use the light. How about a lightbulb that has lasted 110 years.
In Livermore, California, A Firehouse has a lightbulb that’s been burning since 1901. Made by The Shelby Electric Company, it is a handblown bulb with carbon filament. Currently running 4 watts, it runs on a separate power source, and is never turned off. It is currently the longest burning lightbulb in history. However, there are a few that are still going as well. They sure don’t make them like they used to.
Livermore, California is so proud of the shining light, that they have a website dedicated to the “Centennial Light“. Make sure you stop by the Bulb Cam to see the light bulb still going.
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