Posts Tagged ‘zombie-wars’

Michael Geist sez, “The Canadian government will introduce new Internet surveillance legislation that will mandate a massive new surveillance infrastructure at all Canadian ISPs and remove the need for court oversight of the disclosure of customer information. I’ve posted a detailed FAQ on the history of the bill, the likely contents, the lack of government

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Canada’s sweeping new, evidence-free electronic spying bill

El Zombre sends us this great video of Apollo 17 astronauts singing a silly song together on the moon surface. I dug in a little, and Wikipedia confirms that this is real footage! Thanks El Zombre! [Video Link]

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Apollo 17 astronauts singing on the moon

Minecraft’s defiantly unrealistic style notwithstanding, players appreciate the game’s internal consistency and get frustrated at certain failures of verisimilitude. Chunk errors, for example, are squared-off seams in the world caused by glitches in the landscape-generation algorithm. Right out of the annals of reality is unrealistic comes Roraima Mountain, a pleasing reminder that you are living

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Minecraft chunk error in real life

Julian Sanchez is on fire in this Ars Technica article on the funny accountancy and outright lies that underlie the harms-from-piracy stats cited in policy debates about Internet censorship and surveillance proposals like SOPA and PIPA: As a rough analogy, since antipiracy crusaders are fond of equating filesharing with shoplifting: suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart

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Lies, damned lies, and piracy statistics

With PIPA off the legislative calendar and SOPA paused, this tool may seem a bit redundant, but it’s a nice piece of advocacy work. Creator Jonathan Vanasco sez, “I tossed together a mashup over a few hours while sick on the couch. It uses the data from Propublica and SunlightLabs to create very-shareable profile pages

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SOPA/PIPA mashup: how much Hollywood money did your lawmaker take? Name and shame with fellow voters

This year-old butter ad from TINE, Norway’s “butter monopolist” manufacturer, eerily presages Norway’s notorious, Atkins-fuelled butter shortage. Reklamefilm TINE Smør – Superchef (Thanks, Samurai!)

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Norwegian butter crisis predicted a year in advance in "funny" ad from butter monopolist

[Video Link] The Fine Brothers (who make the entertaining “Kids React to Viral Videos” videos) made a “Teens React to Rick Perry’s Strong” video.

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Teens React to Rick Perry’s anti-gay commercial

Copyfighting nerd rapper Dan Bull made an anti-SOPA video. He says: Regarding the video: I first suggested the idea of collaborating on a SOPA track on Twitter a couple of days ago, asking for help with themes and lyrics. After I finished writing the song, I put a post on my Facebook wall asking people

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Crowdsourced anti-SOPA rap

Tomorrow’s special session of the House Judiciary Committee to finish markup on the Stop Online Piracy act have been summarily cancelled. Either they saw the mounting opposition and freaked out and decided to negotiate; or they saw the opposition and figured that they could wait it out; or something else altogether. (Thanks, Adam!)

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SOPA dead until 2012 for real this time?

Newt’s Nudes imagines a world where Newt Gingrich attends decadent feasts, consoles distressed Biblical characters, and occasionally, as a cherub, saucily peers down on amply-bosomed maidens. Perhaps not that far off from real life! Newt’s Nudes Thanks, pjtrimble!

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Newt’s Nudes: Renaissance paintings with Newt Gingrich’s head

Back in 2010, I blogged the video of Jules Mattsson, a 15-year-old freelance photographer who was stopped by police while shooting an Armed Forces Day parade in London. The police inspector took down his details, told him it was an offense under the Terrorism Act to take pictures of soldiers, told him that the police

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London cops apologise to young photographer who was told that shooting Armed Forces Day parade was "anti-social," "gay,"…

Dustin Hostetler (aka UPSO) says: Last year David posted a music video I made for my best friend Joel Roberts (aka goLab). For the past 10 or so years, he has been working on a cover record of the Beach Boy’s “Pet Sounds” called “Pet Zounds.” It’s now on iTunes. I think it’s pretty astounding,

Originally posted here:
"Pet Zounds" by goLab

Senator Ron Wyden’s staffers have promised a flood of Freedom of Information Act requests to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the DHS over its program of seizing domains it believes to be implicated in copyright infringement. ICE’s domain-seizure program made news this week when the Kafkaesque tale of dajaz1.com, a hiphop site that

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Sen Ron Wyden promises hard questions over US Customs Enforcement’s secret seizure of domain names

The Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church in rural Kentucky has banned interracial couples from its congregation, following a visit from the Church secretary’s daughter and her black African fiance.

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Kentucky church bans interracial couples:

We’ve posted many times about synesthsia, a fascinating and bizarre neurological condition in which two ore more senses are linked so that someone, for example, might “taste” sounds or “hear” colors. New research is exploring whether synesthesia, which appears to be a heritable physical condition, has survived evolutionarily because it’s beneficial. According to the UC

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Synesthesia and evolution

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