Thursday 19 July 2012

HA!

This one's for you Spaceboy XXX

Kim Dotcom's Letter to Hollywood

Dear Hollywood,
The Internet frightens you. But history has taught us that the greatest innovations were built on rejections. The VCR frightened you, but it ended up making billions of dollars in video sales.
You get so comfortable with your ways of doing business that any change is perceived as a threat. The problem is, we as a society don't have a choice: The law of human nature is to communicate more efficiently. And the economic benefits of high-speed Internet and unlimited cloud storage are so great that we need to plan for the day when the transfer of terabytes of data will be measured in seconds.
Businesses and individuals will keep looking for faster connectivity, more robust online storage and more privacy. Transferring large pieces of content over the Internet will become common -- not because global citizens are evil but because economic forces leading to "speed of light" data transfer and storage are so beneficial to societal growth.
Come on, guys, I am a computer nerd. I love Hollywood and movies. My whole life is like a movie.
I wouldn't be who I am if it wasn't for the mind-altering glimpse at the future in Star Wars. I am at the forefront of creating the cool stuff that will allow creative works to thrive in an Internet age. I have the solutions to your problems. I am not your enemy.
Providing "freemium" cloud storage to society is not a crime. What will Hollywood do when smartphones and tablets can wirelessly transfer a movie file within milliseconds?
The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of changing their views to fit the facts, they try to change the facts to fit their views. The fact remains that the benefits of Megaupload to society outweigh the burdens. But instead of adapting, you imported one of your action-conspiracy movie scripts into the real world. In my view, MPAA CEO and former Sen. Chris Dodd lobbied his friends in the White House to turn me into a villain who has to be destroyed. Due process? Rule of law? Eliminate me and my innovation and worry about the consequences later. Never mind that millions of Megaupload users lost access to cloud data like their wedding photos. Well done, Hollywood, everyone with similar innovations got the message. But wait … You did not read the end of the script.
The people of the Internet will unite. They will help me. And they are stronger than you. We will prevail in the war for Internet freedom and innovation that you have launched. We have logic, human nature and the invisible hand on our side.
As you should have known, our Mega services operated within the boundaries of the law. We had users that spanned from the military to Hollywood to lawyers and doctors. If you are unhappy with that, it is up to you to convince Congress to amend legislation. You tried with SOPA and you failed. As an alternative, you chose to lobby the Justice Department to ignore the law and stage a global show of force and destruction. The only parties a New Zealand court has found to have violated the law in this case are the local police and the FBI.
Regardless of the issues you have with new technologies, you can't just engage armed forces halfway around the world, rip a peaceful man from his family, throw him in jail, terminate his business without a trial, take everything he owns without a hearing, deprive him of a fair chance to defend himself and do all that while your propaganda machine is destroying him in the media. Is that who you want to be?
There can still be a happy ending. I am working on solutions. Just call me or my lawyers. You know where to find me. Unfortunately I can only do lunch in New Zealand.
This open letter is free of copyright. Use it freely.
Via

Feds Drag Rapper Swizz Beatz Into Megapload Case

♪♫ Frank Ocean and Earl Sweatshirt - Super Rich Kids (Live in L.A)

Via

Wednesday 18 July 2012

Ad Break

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: London’s First Cafe Creates Ad for Coffee in the 1650s

Happy 94th Sir

XXX

The Lost Tapes By Can: An Oral History

William Gibson on Alfred Bester's 'The Stars My Destination'

I was so young, when I first discovered this book, that I was unable to read it. Which was just as well, as I’d come upon it serialized in a magazine called Galaxy, and had chosen on the basis of covers rather than contents. Starting an incomplete text of The Stars My Destination would have been a disaster.
I’d found it up in the metal loft above the main floor of the Office Supply Store on Main Street, a rickety Erector Set construction of perforated metal, painted battleship gray. There was a particularly pungent corner there, devoted to mouldering pulp, pocket editions a decade old (older than I was, likely) and a few science fiction magazines, similarly ancient. I carried some home in a brown paper bag.
One of them, I discovered, had text with letters going all swirly across the page. Not illustrations, but the actual words in the story turning into pictures. That was Alfred Bester, emulating synesthesia, in the novel you may be lucky enough to be about to read for the first time.
Not that much later, and equipped with a complete text, I was able to read The Stars My Destination (which had been titled Tiger, Tiger in England, and indeed that had been Bester’s title). I’m sure I enjoyed it hugely, but like much of the science fiction I read at the time, it was soon dashed aside by the onrush of puberty and history.

When I happened to rediscover it in my early twenties, I expected little more than a nostalgic read, a glance back to childhood. Instead, it blew, as we used to say, my mind. I hadn’t, I saw, actually been able to read it fully before. It had been too fast for me, too gloriously relentless, too brilliant. I hadn’t been able to appreciate the extent to which Bester strips the dross from classic mechanisms of fiction, because I hadn’t yet known that dross. There hadn’t yet been enough of me to be thrilled by all that the book accomplishes.
It was, I saw in my twenties, a book that had absolutely ignored everything that science fiction had been doing when it was written. It was built on bones pilfered from Dumas and Dickens (steal only the best). It was clad in a skin of archly sophisticated Mad Ave ur-hipness, with all the grot and glitter of a fully happening dude’s postwar Manhattan (something no other science fiction writer of the era was able to offer). It was, I recognized then, an utterly urban thing. It made most of the rest of its assumed genre look hick.
Bester’s protagonist hurls himself naked from a spaceship, fuelled by hatred. Bester’s novel hurled itself naked from the science fiction of its day, fuelled by something hipper than hatred, more potent. Into that vacuum, and on, into the actual 21st Century, Gully and the book rock.
It is, as Bruce Sterling remarked to me on our first meeting, “a seamless pop artifact.” Few and far between, such artifacts; each one a complete anomaly.
Read it. Then find The Demolished Man and read that too.
—Vancouver, February 23, 2012
@The Library of America

Pots, Pans and Other Solutions

In Iceland, the first European country to wake up to an economic crash, people became conscience they could and should intervene in society and started demanding more democratic participation.
The payment of bank debts by citizens went to referendum. The government was required to appoint and fund a Council to draft a new constitution: it is a citizens' group - without politicians, lawyers or university professors, they allowed the participation of all stakeholders in the procedure and succeeded on consensually approving a proposal for a new text.
Today, in Iceland, citizens are organized in associations and have substantial proposals for a society where everyone can participate.
Let's meet the Icelanders that the media refuse to talk about.
http://potspansdocumentary.wordpress.com/

Still hype averse 25 years on: Public Enemy on being "the security of the hip-hop party"

It's 25 years since Public Enemy dropped their debut record Yo! Bum Rush the Show and to mark the anniversary they're currently preparing two new albums, Most Of My Heroes Still Don't Appear On No Stamp and The Evil Empire Of Everything. Here, Chuck D and Flavor Flav tell us about staying politically aware on tour and share their advice for life in typically righteous fashion.
HERE