links for 2010-08-25

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links for 2010-08-24

  • Amid ongoing budget woes, LA unveils nation’s most expensive school with $578M price tag – latimes.com There are so many goofball facts in this piece about the country’s most expensive school (named after RFK) being built on the site of the Ambassador Hotel. The talking benches line killed me, and the fact that Trump wanted to put the world’s tallest building on the site is hilarious.
  • [Anti-Piracy Failure Takes Down Creative Commons Videos TorrentFreak](http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-failure-takes-down-creative-commons-video-100812/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Torrentfreak+(Torrentfreak)) An apparent case of copyright being used incorrectly and explicitly for censorship, where an anti-piracy group issued takedown notices to political videos over which it had no rights. The embedded video, “Du bist Terrorist” (“You are a terrorist”, includes English subtitles) is a good example of the strong anti-surveillance and pro-privacy sentiment in Germany; it was one of those taken down.
  • Copycats vs. Copyrights – Newsweek There are a couple of nitpciky points I’d make here — teachers advocate copying all the time, that’s how we learn; the “incentive” justification for copyright and patents is primarily associates with common law countries and isn’t universal — but all in all this is a pretty good mainstream analysis of the fashion copyright proposals. Brings common sense to the table, which is always welcome.
  • From the Desk of David Pogue – Three Unknown Features of the iPhone 4 – NYTimes.com Pogue points out that the new iPhone, as a (slightly) more general purpose computer than the Kindle, can do text-to-speech with its iBooks. Exactly the same feature Amazon got sued over. No mention of this yet by the Author’s Guild.
  • Samsung Blu-ray players won’t play Warner, Universal movies after firmware update, require a rollback — Engadget Updates to Samsung Blu-ray players, which like all Blu-ray players require constant updates to play new movies, broke playback of Warner and Universal movies. Ladies and gentlemen, DRM!
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links for 2010-08-23

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Paulstretch on Ubuntu 10.04

There’s been a lot of slowed-down action on the web in the past few days after a particularly hilarious slowed-down version of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” generated over half a million plays on SoundCloud yesterday. Shamantis, the artist behind the recording, pulled off the hitherto considered impossible feat of making Bieber sound like Sigur Rós. The program Shamantis used is called Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch–it’s a powerful (if not particularly multi-faceted) program that is capable of real-time playback of songs stretched to one million times their original length without affecting the pitch, effectively making an audio texture out of any track, clip, or sound.

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Google/Verizon, one week later

It’s been one week since Google and Verizon announced a policy framework proposal that would do away with traditional network neutrality in the mobile space and possibly prompt the establishment of a second “premium” internet. Apparently this proposal has touched some nerves, and there’s been a lot of great writing about it. Nearly everybody I’ve read is opposed to the framework, but there are a few interesting differences in their opposition.

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