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Seen, Heard, Said

Things I’ve seen, heard, or was told by someone. Item in this category usually originate from the Internet.

Smartest City in the US: Seattle

Chalk up another great thing about Seattle:

From money.cnn.com:

If you equate education with intelligence, then the smartest city in the United States is Seattle – 52.7 percent of its residents age 25 or older have completed a bachelor’s degree or higher.

20.5%, or just about half of the degree holders, also have

But wait! There’s more:

Seattle’s also been ranked as the most literate city in the United States by Central Connecticut State University, beating out Minneapolis, Washington and Atlanta. That rating was based on such things as the number of booksellers, libraries and newspaper circulation – as well as educational attainment.

I don’t think has much to do with our educational system though, as the articles notes, Seattle (and the surrounding area) is home to Microsoft, Amazon, Cray, Washington Mutual and Costco. Seattle is also home to RealNetworks, Expedia, and Nintendo USA (which also is the majority owner of the Seattle Mariners, I just learned).

Wikipedia also has a list of businesses based in Seattle. It’s quite impressive really.

[tags]seattle, smart, intelligent, intelligence, reading, microsoft, amazon, cray, washington mutual, costco, realnetworks, expedia, nintendo, mariners, seattle mariners, central connecticut state university, cnn[/tags]

Flickr Geotagging

From the Inboxen™ of Andrew Ferguson:

Ahoy,

I work for Flickr. I’m writing to you because you have lots of geotagged photos and we’re about to launch geotagging. Our system works in a slightly different, more “built in’ way than what you’ve been doing so far, and does not require the “geotagged”/”geo:lat”/”geo:long” tags on your photos. (Existing 3rd party geotagging tools will continue to work and we will release the APIs so everyone can take advantage of the new system.)

We are not automatically importing existing geotagged photos into the new system since there are some privacy features we want people to be aware of. The location a photo was taken can be kept private, even if the photo itself is public. You can set a preference for the default location privacy and change it on a photo-by-photo or batch basis. Importing will respect whatever privacy setting you choose.

In advance of the launch, we’d appreciate if you could take a second to set your preference and start the import process. Then as soon as we launch, you’ll be all set to go!

Set your privacy preference here:
http://www.flickr.com/account/geo/privacy/

And then you can import here:
http://www.flickr.com/account/geo/import/

Thanks a lot, and keep on Flickrin’!

Cheers,

– Stewart

Now, a couple of things.

“you have lots of geotagged photos”
This is true, over 33% of my 6000+ photos on Flickr do have Geotags!

“Our system works in a slightly different, more “built in’ way than what you’ve been doing so far, and does not require the “geotagged”/”geo:lat”/”geo:long” tags on your photos.”
This worries me a bit. Geotags have been a great, open standard so far. Is Yahoo taking a page out of Sony’s manual and playing the “new-format” game? They say they’re going to release the APIs so that everyone can use it, but why change something that already works? Makes no sense to me. If anyone from Yahoo is reading this, can you please explain it? Or better yet, fix it!

“In advance of the launch, we’d appreciate if you could take a second to set your preference and start the import process. Then as soon as we launch, you’ll be all set to go!”
Not a problem. But if I’m going to be doing something for you, can you do something for me and tell me when it’s actually launching?

“keep on Flickrin’!”
Google doesn’t want to be a verb, but it seems like Flickr doesn’t mind. Interesting.

“Stewart”
Thanks Stewart. But who are you??

[tags]flickr, geotag, api, google, sony, geotagging, email[/tags]

Snakes in a What?

I did see Snakes on a Plane on Friday with Ryan Walter and his friend. It was a funny movie. Mostly funny in that really stupid way in which nothing shown on the screen could ever happen in real life, but still funny to see how the characters reacted.

Then I see this:
From wickedstageact2.typepad.com:

Snakes on a Plane = funny. Some idiot letting two live rattlers loose in a theatre = not funny.

What?

Yes, the National Ledger is reporting that two real live diamondback rattlesnakes (Crotalus atrox) were
From www.nationalledger.com:

…released in an Arizona theater during a showing of the new film, ‘Snakes on a Plane.’ The snakes were released after the film began rolling in the dark theater at the AMC Desert Ridge multi-plex at Tatum and the 101 in north Phoenix.

The two baby diamondbacks were actually slithering around the theater while the snakes on a plane were slithering around on screen with Samuel L. Jackson.

Wow. Imagine being in that theater. Tsk tsk (*Shakes head*).

New English

Heh. Duane sent this to me. It’s rather appropriate given that I’m currently in Europe right now.

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”.

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where! more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl.

Update: Added title

Happy Birthday WWW

Quick break from Europe postings:

From www.downloadsquad.com:

On August 6, 1991–15 years ago today–Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web with a message to the alt.hypertext newsgroup. In the message he says,” The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system,” and provides the source code for his prototype line-mode browser, a GUI hypertext editor for NeXT, and a skeleton server daemon. From those humble beginnings, all of this. Thanks, Tim, and Happy Birthday WWW!

See also: http://www.kottke.org/remainder/06/08/11599.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5242252.stm

Frequently Awkward Questions for the Entertainment Industry

To quote Peter Griffin, “Shazam!” Seriously though. Being the Intellectual Property aware person that I am, this a is good list of questions I’d like straight answers to.

From the EFF via BoingBoing:

The RIAA and MPAA trot out their spokespeople at conferences and public events all over the country, repeating their misleading talking points. Innovators are pirates, fair use is theft, the sky is falling, up is down, and so on. Their rhetoric shouldn’t be given a free pass.

To that end, EFF has prepared a sample list of tough questions for times when you hear entertainment industry representatives speaking and want to challenge their positions. Asking hard questions is a way of “keeping honest people honest” and revealing when they’re actually being deceptive. Feel free to republish these and add your own questions, or send additions to us at editor@eff.org.
Music

1. The RIAA has sued more than 20,000 music fans for file sharing, yet file sharing continues to rapidly increase both online and offline. When will you stop suing music fans?
2. The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing, who have on average paid a $3,750 settlement. That’s over $75,000,000. Has any money collected from your lawsuits gone to pay actual artists? Where’s all that money going?
3. The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing. Recently, an RIAA representative reportedly suggested that “students drop out of college or go to community college in order to be able to afford [P2P lawsuit] settlements.” Do you stand by this advice? Is this really good advice for our children’s futures?
4. The RIAA said that it only went after individual file sharers because you couldn’t go after P2P system creators. After the Supreme Court’s Grokster decision, shouldn’t you stop going after music fans?
5. Major entertainment companies have repeatedly brought lawsuits to block new technologies, including the VCR, Digital Audio Tape recorders, the first MP3 player, the ReplayTV PVR, and now P2P software. Why is your industry so hostile to new technologies?
6. DRM has clearly failed to stop songs from getting on file sharing networks, but it does prevent me from moving lawfully purchased music onto my iPod and other portable devices. Unlike the major record labels, many popular indie labels offer mp3 downloads through sites like eMusic. Why won’t you let fans purchase mp3s as well?
7. The RIAA says that it doesn’t mind if I rip CDs to my personal computer and put them on my iPod. Do I need your permission to do this or can I legally do it even if you object?
8. Recording off the radio is clearly permitted by copyright law and something Americans have done for over 25 years, but the RIAA supports legislation restricting devices that record from digital radio. Why are you against TiVo for radio?
9. Sony BMG recently implemented a DRM technology that damaged users’ computers. But for independent researchers’ analyses, this serious flaw may have gone undiscovered. After this scandal, will record labels allow any computer scientist or security expert to examine these products and agree not to sue them under the DMCA?

Video

1. The major movie studios have been enjoying some of their most profitable years in history over the past five years. Can you cite to any specific studies that prove noncommercial file sharing among fans, as opposed to commercial DVD piracy, has hurt the studios’ bottom line in any significant way?
2. Is it legal for me to bypass CSS DVD encryption in order to skip the “unskippable” previews at the beginning of so many DVDs? Why should I have to be forced to watch these ads when I already bought the DVD?
3. Is it legal for me to skip the commercials when I play back time-shifted TV recordings on my TiVo or other PVR? How is this different than getting up and going to the bathroom?
4. Why are there region-code restrictions on DVDs? How does this prevent copyright infringement? Is it illegal for me to buy or and use a region-free DVD player, or to modify a DVD player to be region-free?
5. In several lawsuits, the MPAA has repeatedly said that it’s illegal to make a back-up of a DVD that I purchased. Why is this illegal?
6. Is it ever legal for me to use software like DVD Shrink or Handbrake to rip a digital copy of a DVD I own onto a video iPod or my laptop? What if I want clips to use for a class report? Or if a teacher wants to include a clip in a PowerPoint slide?
7. Is there anything illegal about copying TV shows I’ve recorded off the air onto my video iPod?
8. If the MPAA-backed “broadcast flag” bill passes, I won’t be able to move recorded TV content digitally to my current video iPod. Why should TV studios get to take away my ability to lawfully time- and space-shift?
9. Major entertainment companies have repeatedly brought lawsuits to block new technologies, including the VCR, Digital Audio Tape recorders, the first MP3 player, the ReplayTV PVR, and now P2P software. Why is your industry so hostile to new technologies?
10. Hollywood is pushing legislation to “plug the analog hole.” These restrictions won’t keep copyrighted video off of file sharing networks, but they will block me from excerpting a recorded TV show for a school report or using tools like the Slingbox to send recorded TV shows to myself over the Internet. Why are you trying to restrict these legitimate uses?