‘Digital Manners Policies’ is a marketing term. Let’s call this what it really is: Selective Device Jamming. It’s not polite, it’s dangerous. It won’t make anyone more secure — or more polite”
Best argument for open-source software; now what about open-source hardware?
WALL•E (2008) review:
The idea that a company in the business of mainstream entertainment would make something as creative, substantial and cautionary as WALL-E has to raise your hopes for humanity.
—John Anderson, Washington Post
That’s a lot to pin on a movie. Can’t wait to see it. Hopefully Thomas Newman’s score is up to his usual standards.
(Via metacritic.com.)
Mark Simonson Studio / Notebook: everything you ever wanted to know about the typographic anachronisms in the Indiana Jones movies…
(Via Daring Fireball, by way of Kottke.)
Stan Winston has died.
Even if you’re not a special-effects/make-up nerd, you know his work. Some highlights:
Michael Geist - The Canadian DMCA: Check the Fine Print: “The Canadian DMCA: Check the Fine Print”
The gist of Geist’s piece is that a lot of Prentice’s proposed legislation sounds good until you read the fine print; then you realize your rights are taken away. This is shameless pandering to foreign interests at the expense of all Canadians.
Prentice is practiced in sounding reasonable — witness his performance on CBC’s As It Happens last night, in which he smoothly side-stepped the question ‘did you talk to representatives of American media companies when preparing this legislation?’ (I’m paraphrasing).
Most amazing to me is how we’re supposed to be relieved that we’re “allowed” to copy our music CDs to our iPods, but since DVDs are “locked”, we’re criminals if we copy our legally-purchased movies to those same iPods. Amazing.
Never mind the fact that the “encrypted” audio CDs that Liberal MP Scott Bryson (on the same broadcast) says are so common in the United States aren’t actually CDs at all: Phillips, the owner of the Redbook Audio standard that defines what is and what is not a Compact Disc, says that if it has copy-protection then it’s not a Compact Disc. But that’s another story.
Title says it all, really.
One suspects this is timed to be all ready for next week’s World Wide Developers’ Conference keynote address by Steve Jobs.
Smart money says Jobs will announce international iPhone availability dates; I’m guessing sometime in July/August, rather than later in the year.
That’s good enough for me.
iTunes Store Top Music Retailer in the US: “iTunes Store Top Music Retailer”
Of course, this might be partly due to the fact that nobody buys CDs any more… But still…
(Via ArsTechnica.)
Apple - Trailers - WALL•E: Another trailer has been released; this is going to be a really fun flick. Can’t wait.
CBC News | “Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke dies at 90″
Clarke will be best-remembered for 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on his short-story The Sentinel, but he wasn’t just a writer of science fiction; he also wrote many science articles and invented something called the satellite. Yes, the geo-stationary orbiting kind that makes television and modern meteorology possible. Not too shabby. He was also an early adopter of technology, using something called electronic mail to correspond from Sri Lanka with 2010: Odyssey Two director Peter Hyams in the early 1980s.
CBC News | “English Patient director Anthony Minghella dies after surgery”
Minghella, director of Cold Mountain, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller and, of course, The English Patient, was 54.
Two eras come to a close.
