cattle relations (!)

My Way News - Man Pleads No Contest to Cattle Relations

speaks for itself.

iTunes OPML (!)

Musings from Mars > iTunes Interface Controversy
A little exposed part of the iTunes interface:

I just figured out that iTunes imports & exports OPML! Who knew? (iTunes doesn't always expose advanced functionality, but this keeps things simpler for non-power users.)

To import OPML, just go to File > Import... and select the OPML file.
To export OPML, select the "Podcasts" item in the left hand column (of playlists/sources/etc) and then go to File > Export Song List. You may then choose Plain Text, Unicode Text, XML, or OPML from a popup menu.

farewell, MacIE

As noted here - shahine.com/omar/ - Slashdot | Microsoft Ends IE for Mac - MS will officially lay Macintosh Internet Explorer to rest at the end of this year.

I wish it well. It truly raised the bar for a "standards compliant browser" in its day. WinIE remains a "standards complaint browser".

The below is speculation, based on bits and pieces I've picked up online - I might very well be totally wrong:

Wasn't the "missing feature" in IE5 a Radio toolbar that would have been better than the one in WinIE? It was to play MP3 formatted streams, and (may or may not have been) related to SoundJam somehow?

(But what theoretically happened is that Apple wanted to buy SoundJam to make iTunes, and didn't want to ship IE as default browser if it contained a competing Internet radio player?)

comments on Y! buying Flickr and del.icio.us

Participatory Culture: News and Ideas > Blog Archive > Fullscreen Controls

Well… I do think Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr and del.icio.us raises questions. It all depends on how much advertising Yahoo adds, how they add it, and whether they give users a way to either benefit from it, or opt out of it.

I have dealt with websites before that showed ads and rewarded users for it. FreeRide.com, for one, in its previous incarnation (not the current one) had a forum, and both reading and posting within the forum were rewarded with points that could be exchanged for money and prizes, and although advertising was present, clicking on or interacting with ads was not a required condition of being rewarded. The idea was to simply offer an environment where users are paid to spend time on this forum, and money was made merely through the normal level of interaction that users would have with ads anyway. A portion of such monies were then returned to users.

Something else that Yahoo! might consider doing (although I don’t know if it would be considered enough “payback” to the community) is offering some financial or technical support to various open source projects, and/or offering open source projects free APIs to access various Yahoo! services.

I realize that in the mind of many users, the best solution would be for Yahoo! to never acquire such “Web2.0″ businesses anyway, but it seems to be inevitable that any site which reaches a certain level of popularity will either be acquired or be coerced by market forces to partner with a top-level portal (Google, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN).

'why not to use windows'

TalkBack: No wonder if they use windows | reader response on| CNET News.com: "There is no excuse, except maybe that they tried to use windows."

'the illusion of security' - interesting

TalkBack: Failures are intentional... | reader response on| CNET News.com: "The latter is
really the most important -- the illusion of
security, the illusion that the government is
being proactive in defending its citizens
against harm -- because without it, the
government would appear useless to a great
number of people."

homeland security Windows 95 = ?

Aging computers hobble Homeland Security | CNET News.com: "An upgrade to Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system failed ... which meant one division had to ... reversion back to Windows 95."

more surveillance

Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in U.S. After 9/11, Officials Say - New York Times: "eavesdropping inside the country without court approval"

surveillance society

... it marches onward ...
KWCH 12 | Hidden camera in boy's bathroom

not critical enough for you?

WorkingForChange-Drowning the hard questions: A Nova special

NOVA may not have been critical enough, but the PBS show NOW has asked the hard questions:

• October 21, 2005 NOW Updates on Katrina and the environment
  
• September 30, 2005 NOW goes inside the management mess at FEMA.
  
• September 16, 2005 NOW What's next for New Orleans? A 1-hour town hall meeting.
  

It goes on, and on, and on. NOW continues to deal with this issue regularly. Notably, NOW is the rare PBS show that is not (currently) funded by any corporations. Since Bill Moyers left, and NOW moved to a 30 minute format, it's been funded by a mix of foundations and the PBS network itself. And it's been doing a great job at speaking truth to power. It's the kind of stuff the commercial networks' newsmagazines used to do before they all got sucked into multinational corporate conglomerates.

glad to see

Mall Resurrects Display of Hurricane Town - Yahoo! News

The mall has decided to resurrect an ever-so-slightly-sanitized version of the display, along with a bulletin board where both sides can post their comments. This is a much better solution.

censored

Project Censored - Media democracy in action

My challenge to you, dear reader? Pick any one of the above-linked 25 stories and try to contain your outrage at this media and this government.