A Night Out With: Louie Vega
2 hours ago
Friday, 9 July 2010
Report card: Could do SO much better!
With Julia Gillard's 'East Timor refugee solution' falling to bits and with her intention to still bring in the Clean Feed internet filter nothing has really changed has it?
This despite a coalition including state schools, librarians and key players in the internet industry warning that protecting children online could be harder with a mandatory internet filter in place.
This despite a coalition including state schools, librarians and key players in the internet industry warning that protecting children online could be harder with a mandatory internet filter in place.
Meanwhile three Australian internet providers have this morning announced that they have agreed to voluntarily block a list of URLs compiled by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy ahead of the federal government's planned internet filtering plan.
Cary in the Sky with Diamonds
Before Timothy Leary and the Beatles, LSD was largely unknown and unregulated. But in the 1950s, as many as 100 Hollywood luminaries—Cary Grant and Esther Williams among them—began taking the drug as part of psychotherapy. With LSD research beginning a comeback, the authors recount how two Beverly Hills doctors promoted a new “wonder drug,” at $100 a session, profoundly altering the lives of their glamorous patients, Balaban included.
Methadone 'works and saves lives'
The study led by Edinburgh University researchers said methadone treatment reduced the frequency of drug use.
It also led to a drop in the risk of death by 13% each year, the research suggested.
But the findings also showed the drug could prolong the number of years users continued to inject heroin.
The long-term study followed hundreds of heroin abusers in the Muirhouse area of Edinburgh over almost 30 years.
It found that those on heroin substitutes such as methadone led less chaotic lives - and lived longer.
The researchers also rejected calls for methadone prescribing to be reduced.
Roy Robertson, a GP who led the study at the University of Edinburgh, said: "This study confirms that methadone works and works best when prescribed for as long as is needed.
"Even though some users continue to occasionally inject while on methadone, they still gain substantial health benefits from their prescription.
"Suggestions that methadone prescribing should be cut back or confined to the short-term are clearly misplaced and would lead to poorer health for drug injectors."
Three months ago, a group of 40 experts from around the world said methadone should be "readily available" to addicts seeking help.
They argued that scrapping the treatment could lead to a rise in crime and drug deaths.
But its use has been criticised by Scottish Conservatives, who claimed addicts are "parked" on methadone.
The party has called for the underlying causes of abuse to be tackled, and for more addicts to be put into rehabilitation programmes, including in prisons.
The Scottish government's drugs strategy aims to "support people to move on towards a drug-free life as active and contributing members of society".
The new study, which also involved researchers from Bristol and Cambridge universities, suggested there was a "balance" between saving lives and achieving abstinence.
Almost 800 people took part in the study, of whom 571 were still alive when research was followed up. At the end of that process, five more had died, bringing the total deaths to 228, or 29% of the group.
The study will be published by the British Medical Journal on 17 July.
Thursday, 8 July 2010
The Velvet Underground - A Symphony of Sound (1966)
The Velvet Underground And Nico (A Symphony of Sound) is a portrait of the band, recorded during a practice session at the Factory in January 1966. The soundtrack is an instrumental.
"This was never meant even as an experiment. It was meant as an item of wallpaper made for use behind the musical group as they set up and tuned their instruments. I had been using five different prints of silent footage, mainly screen tests, for simultaneous projection behind them. This was extremely effective while the music was played but in the long stretches between numbers when there was no sound coming from the stage, it was very boring.
I thought of recording the Velvets just making up sounds as they went along to have on film so I could turn both soundtracks up at the same time along with the other three silent films being projected. The cacophonous noise added a lot of energy to these boring sections and sounded a lot like the group itself. The show put on for the group was certainly the first mixed media show of its kind, was extremely effective and I have never since seen such an interesting one even in this age of super-colossal rock concerts."
RapidShare Cheapens Pricing Scheme After User Revolt
RapidShare has made several drastic changes to its service in the last months. They began in March when it became apparent that the company was trying to get copyright holders on board in an attempt to convert pirates into paying customers. A month later RapidShare ditched its CEO Bobby Chang on claims he was no longer the right person to successfully lead the company. And in a continued effort to avoid the pirate site stigma, RapidShare killed its reward program and went after sites that infringed their trademark to facilitate illicit downloading.
Two weeks ago premium users of the file-hosting site were informed about another upcoming change that was set to go into effect this month. RapidShare announced that it would stop the existing payment plans to introduce 5 new packages. These new packages would have daily usage limits and users would have to switch between them according to their daily download demands.
The result was that most users would be worse off than with their current plans, or would be forced to switch back and forth between the various packages on a day-to-day basis. Unsurprisingly, many premium users complained to RapidShare, urging the company to reconsider their offer.
“As a result of the recent adjustments to our product and pricing model we have received a lot of feedback from our users,” RapidShare communicated to its users yesterday. “There was also positive response but we want to be honest with you: most answers were negative.”
“With our adjustments we have alienated many users. As a matter of course, that was not our intention. Instead, it is our goal to introduce a system that gives our users more flexibility. However, we are happy about every single user response that we have received as this is the only way we can learn what our users really want,” the company added.
To accommodate the complaints of the revolting users, RapidShare changed its payment scheme to a simpler and much cheaper offer. For less than 5 euros users can now buy 4 months of premium access with 10 GB storage and a 30 GB monthly data limit. Heavy users can buy additional traffic and storage space if required.
The main benefit of the revised scheme, besides the fact that nearly every user will be better off, is the change from a daily limit to a monthly one. Under the old scheme, users with the cheapest account had a 1 GB download limit that they would have to upgrade even though they might never go over the 30 GB a month.
With these changes RapidShare thinks that there wont be any future revolts from users over the new pricing scheme. “We are convinced that we will meet our users’ needs with the new and simple model,” the company said.
Ernesto @'Torrent Freak'
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