Chaos Magnet

Senator with iPod finally figures out broadcast flags

This is beautiful. From Boing Boing: Senators figure out the Broadcast Flag, curse it as an abomination!:

First MIT grad John Sununu of New Hampshire said that government mandates "always restrict innovation" and then 82-year-old Ted Stevens of Alaska talked about the iPod he'd gotten for Christmas and put the RIAA's Mitch Bainwol on the spot about whether his proposal would break Stevens' ability to move digital radio programs to his iPod and listen to them in the most convenient way (it would).

and

[Sununu] pointed out that "we have a whole history of similar technological innovation that has shown us that the market can respond with its own protection to the needs of the artists." And he concluded with one of the most damning depictions of the ahistorical nature of the flag (clip from Congressional RealVideo) you'll hear on the Hill:

"The suggestion is that if we don't do this, it will stifle creativity. Well...we have now an unprecedented wave of creativity and product and content development...new business models, and new methodologies for distributing this content. The history of government mandates is that it always restricts innovation...why would we think that this one special time, we're going to impose a statutory government mandate on technology, and it will actually encourage innovation?"

JSON: Ajax without the cross-domain issues

I've just posted an introductory discusion on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). What's itneresting about it is it provides away to get around the cross-domain issues you get when you try to access web services using Ajax. Yahoo's now outputting JSON in a ridiculously easy way, so this is worth checking out.

Slavery is not history

iAbolish is collecting signatures for a petition to as the US Government to Create a Task Force to Eradicate Slavery in Sudan. Some disturbing statistics from Christian Solidarity International:

Based on interviews with 1,306 freed male and female slaves over the age of eleven:
Forced labor 95.5%
Frequent beatings 95.7%
Racial insults 95.8%
Forced conversion to Islam 59.6%
Based on interviews with 1,025 female slaves over the age of eleven:
Rape 69.7%
Gang rape 59.4%
Genital mutilation 33.5%
Based on interviews with 281 boy slaves over the age of eleven:
Rape 6.0%

And these are just statistics from those who have been lucky enough to escape or be freed. Thousands of Sudanese are still being held as slaves, with the approval and assistance of the Sudanese government (such as it is).

Please sign the petition.

Narnia kills ... reality TV show?

Here's an intersting little mystery. (Or non-mystery, really.) It seems that ABC cancelled a reality show in which a gay couple convinces white, conservative, Christian neighbors they should win a house. The question that remains: was the company worried that early gay-bashing comments would turn people off, or did parent company Disney do it to prevent Christian groups from returning to their boycotts just before they released The Chronicles of Narnia?

Easy XML-RPC in PHP

I've just put together a quick tutorial on using XML-RPC in PHP over on the InformIT XML and Web Services Reference Guide. Very cool, and VERY easy. Definitely going to use this.

Why saving data isn't always good

I understand that you need to save some data in order to make sure your business functions. For example, I can understand why Google needs to log what searches are performed and so on. But it makes me nervous that Google (and Yahoo, and probably many of the other search engines) associate that data with a particular person. Kudos to Google for fighting an attempt by the Feds to get their logs. But if they hadn't collected the information in the first place, there wouldn't be a problem. Yahoo and AOL say they complied iwth the subpoena, but didn't provide personally identifiable information. MSN just talked about what law abiding citizens they were in abiding by lawful requests. I guess we know what that means.

When algorithms go bad

Chris Pirillo points out a funny little quirk in Google's Adsense results. Interestingly, if you Google "miserable failure", they have enough sense to make their first Adsense ad Why these results?. So at least they're not oblivious. :)

The reality of Web 2.0

well, I've finally given in and created a Web 2.0 category for this blog. I couldn't avoid it anymore. Unfortunately, there's just no better way to describe this category of discussion. What category, you may ask? Well, I mean the category of discussion that involves what is going on in the current phase of Web development, from tagging to user content to all of these other things that are coalescing around us. Ellyssa Kroski has an intersting look at the Hype and the Hullabaloo of Web 2.0, basically explaining what it is and what some of the controversy surrounding it involves. Also interesting is Dion Hinchcliffe's Five Great Ways to Harness Collective Intelligence, which really seems to be at the heart of the matter.

Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition

one thing I love about the Web is the fact that some of the specifications are right there for you to look at to know how things are done. These days, things are getting more and more complicated, but the specs are still there. Witness Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition, explains how applications can tell not so much what you said into that phone application, but what it actually means. I am hereby predicting that in the next 12 to 24 months we will see some public use of audio text analysis. And by public, I mean an application that regular people use rather than an application used on regular people.

Leap Second Lovers Are Traitors Says Bill O'Reilly

I love Steve Martin. He is so straight, sometimes you forget that he's making comedy. Check out his version of Bill O'Reilly.

Pretty impressed with FeedBurner, actually

well, I'm actually pretty impressed. First of all, the FeedBurner version of my feed looks very nice, and includes things like the ability to e-mail individual post to people, add it to del.icio.us, and so on. Very nice. But what impresses me, perhaps even more, is the fact that in just a couple of hours, it's already got three subscribers, only one of which is me. Interesting.

My Feedburner feed

OK, I've gone ahead and signed up with FeedBurner, so you can now subscribe to my FeedBurner feed. They purport to offer good publicity and easy fo use, as well as statistics. I'll let you know what happens.