Makes me feel old
Reshared post from +Kristoffer Sorensen
This has been making the rounds but I think it's great 🙂 If you don't know the connection between these two, well, then you weren't around in the 80s 🙂
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Maybe, just maybe, the rapid response by the internet community will help kill these censorship bills.
Frankly censorship is far more dangerous to society than piracy. Creative works will always be created whether Hollywood executives get rich from it or not. Democratic society cannot withstand censorship.
Reshared post from +Matt Cutts
I just blogged about the progress against SOPA:
"I thought we’d have to wait 20-25 years before a critical mass of people would defend the net. But SOPA has brought that day a lot closer. SOPA galvanized the tech community, from start-ups to venture capitalists to the largest web companies. SOPA was an unexpected shock and a wake-up call. Well, guess what? Now the internet is awake. And I don’t think it’s going back to sleep any time soon."
Read the post for more info, including some simple steps you can take.
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Progress against SOPA
Progress against SOPA. by Matt Cutts on November 21, 2011. in Personal,Web/Net. When I did my blog post about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last week, things looked quite grim. The fight isn't…
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A very thoughtful post on how the response to #OWS police brutality could very rapidly escalate out of control.
Reshared post from +Baratunde Thurston
I've watched this video several times and thought about it even more. There's a lot to say including some interesting thoughts in this Atlantic piece
Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike – Alexis Madrigal – National – The Atlantic http://bit.ly/rxCpEc
But I want to focus on another thought I've had but only voiced briefly in a standup show last night.
The authorities in all these #OWS crackdowns are assuming a steadily passive reaction from the protestors. Despite the constitutional right to peaceably assemble, governments and post 9/11 militarized police (LRAD!?) are responding with violence against their own people.
The thing about violent uprisings is that you rarely see a steady escalation. These Occupy Wall Street gatherings have been extremely civil and peaceful by and large. And I don't think you're gonna see some slowly increasing amount of violence on the part of the protestors. That's not how revolutions generally pop off. I'm pretty sure that, in general, something just snaps. A student gets shot. A man sets himself on fire. A cop punches an old lady. Then BAM: full scale violent conflict.
So there's that.
But I want to come back to the other risk in the presumption of passivity. There's a frighteningly relaxed attitude to this "Peace Officer" in the video below and among many authorities. It's a condescending attitude based in the idea that these "kids" won't do anything about it. I could be reading too much into the situation, but I think authorities have bought into the narrative that this is a generation raised on iPods and Facebook and MTV reality shows and when push come to shove, they won't fight back.
I would just humbly remind folks that all those factors are true about this generation, but the response may not be. You see, this generation was also raised on collaborative multiplayer combat sims: World of Warcraft, Modern Warfare, 007, Resident Evil, etc. We've literally spent hours building teams and fragging people and aliens and zombies and not batting an eye. Millions of Americans have clocked hundreds or thousands of hours in war simulations. We have all gotten pretty comfortable with coordinated violence.
While it's not "real" war or "real" violence, our brains think differently. We get an adrenaline rush. Our heart rates increase. We sweat. The perception is quite similar, and I just think it's worth some extra thought on the part of the authorities.
I am absolutely not advocating violence, but I can't help but think that you might want to be careful provoking people who have been subconsciously trained on war games.
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The death of John Smale on Saturday was a missed opportunity by several outlets to examine the negative impact that he had on General Motors during his tenure as a director and chairman of the board. Smale is best known in the business world for being the former CEO of Proctor and Gamble but like many high ranking executives in American business he served other companies as a director.
The extended obituary published in the Detroit News (written by AP reporter Dan Sewell) only mentions his GM role in passing in the opening paragraph while the brief piece on Autoblog focuses on Smale replacing Bob Stempel as Chairman and helping to bring GM back from the verge of bankruptcy. As chairman, Smale probably had little to do with the actual slashing of costs and spending at GM but he nonetheless had a huge impact on GM in another way and it wasn't good.
Smale was responsible bringing Ron Zarella, one of his former P&G colleagues to GM to institute brand management. Brand management was a totally bungled and wrong-headed approach to building and selling cars. At P&G Smale and Zarella found a way to sell the same products under multiple different brands and get away with it. Unfortunately this approach doesn't translate to the car business and resulting in such an unappealing car lineup that despite growing discounting, GM's market share continued to shrink throughout their tenure and consumer's attitudes to GM plummeted.
GM's lineup didn't begin to improve until Bob Lutz joined up and Zarella left in 2001 and even then it took several years to demonstrate that the company could build interesting vehicles. Even then, the company's problems were so deep seated that time that they couldn't earn enough to avoid bankruptcy in 2009. Perhaps if the company had focused on great products and a pared down brand lineup in 1992 instead of waiting more than a decade, that fate might have been avoided.
#gm #cars #auto_business
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An unusually symmetric egg from the hen house
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Reshared post from +Jason Calacanis
If UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi ordered the pepper spraying of students she not only needs to be fired, she needs to face criminal charges.
Additionally, I hope she is sued personally and wiped out financially.
Here she faces he students who lined her long walk to her car according to +Xeni Jardin's awesome +Boing Boing coverage.
Students at UC Davis should be outside of her home and the home of the cop who did the pepper spraying. Seriously, 500 people outside your home for a couple of nights, with your neighbors looking on, might give these absolute idiots some time to think about their behavior.
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In many ways the world is a better place because Steve Jobs lived in it, but I wouldn't have wanted to work with him.
I listened to Walter Isaacson's authorized bio of Jobs and while it is flawed in some ways, including some fundamental technical errors, the author should at least get credit for not making it into a hagiography. Jobs was a deeply flawed and troubled human being that often mistreated those that worked and lived with him. He is definitely someone that I would have wanted to work with or attempt to call a friend.
At the same time, I'm glad that he brought together the teams of people that created products like the Mac, iPod and iPhone. Despite the flaws in those products, they helped drive technology and communications forward in some very important ways.
Unfortunately his disdain for most people and his need for control also shows through in the way these products were actually manufactured. By shifting all production to China, he got lower costs by taking advantage of the lack of regulation and labor protections. Isaacson reports that Jobs "described how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs" during a meeting with President Obama. The only thing that is hard about building a factory in America is treating your workers well, something Jobs was loathe to do.
Jobs was also reluctant to take responsibility for his own actions including supporting his own daughter Lisa. He also gave almost nothing to charity or any philanthropic causes.
In Rolling Stone, the brilliant Matt Taibbi submits the Jobs case to his Supreme Court of Assholedom and raises a very interesting point. Because Jobs was a purveyor of consumer products, shouldn't we the consumers also take some of the responsibility for enabling Jobs buy actually spending money on all those Chinese made trinkets? I'd say we probably should but you should read Taibbi's post and make up your own mind.
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Supreme Court of Assholedom: The People vs. Steve Jobs | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
NOTE TO READERS: I will have something on the developments at Zucotti Park soon, and will also be appearing on Countdown tonight to talk about it. In
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Retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis demonstrated this week that not all cops corrupt hooligans. Too bad there aren't more cops like Lewis still on duty.
#OWS #occupy
Reshared post from +Beau Kahler
Emotionally intense images of retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis – who has joined the #OccupyWallStreet protests – being arrested by the NYPD.
Captain Lewis has been outspoken against the NYPD’s wrongful use of violence against peaceful protesters.
From what I have seen, Ray Lewis’ conduct defines honor, bravery, and dignity.
There is a media blackout on images of his participation in the protest, and on his arrest:
I couldn't find the photographers name to mention. This is quite an emotional set of photos, I am proud of this man for standing up for what he believes in such a pressing time in our countries history. Bravo!
When will the government realize that this situation is not going away, stop hiding from the truth, let's be honest.
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If you haven't already contacted your representative and senators about SOPA and PROTECT-IP, please head over to the EFF and demand that they stop these bills that will give big corporations the ability to censor internet communications.
Reshared post from +Dan Gillmor
I'm in China, where everyone takes Internet censorship for granted. Will the same be true soon in America? Stop SOPA…
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Take Action | Electronic Frontier FoundationStop the Internet Blacklist Legislation
The Internet Blacklist Legislation – known as PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House – is a threatening sequel to last year's COICA Internet censorship bill. L…
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An excellent post on all of the brutality we're seeing by police against peacefully protesting Americans. It's long past time for President Obama and other leaders that claim to support democracy to stand up and call for the police to stand down!
This is not acceptable behavior in any country much less one that claims to be a bastion of freedom. #occupy
Reshared post from +Alexander Howard
On #Occupy, civil disobedience and the disproportionate use of force*
Last week I found myself quite upset about the arrest of journalists covering the protests in NYC and beyond. This weekend, video showing a UC Davis police officer spraying non-violent protesters with pepper spray cemented a deep and growing concern about the actions of law enforcement with respect to peaceful civil disobedience. If citizens do not follow orders to lawfully disperse or otherwise commit civil disobedience, they can expect arrest. To make those arrests with disproportionate violence, however, seems to me to violate the 4th Amendment. If the people who are sworn to protect our rights violate them, I perceive that there's an issue for our social compact.
As +Trevor Timm pointed out today, there is a legal precedent to hold the officer in question culpable for his actions.
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1332957.htmlWhere isolated acts of disproportionate violence in one city might have simmered, now a nation connected with smartphones, YouTube and the Internet can see what others bear witness to where ever it occurs. http://witness.org has been hosting these stories for years. Over the last year, we've watched violence from across the Middle East filmed and shared on YouTube. Now we're seeing the impact of those connection technologies upon the understanding and awareness of civil unrest here in the United States.
That iconic photograph from Portland, Oregon and the video from this weekend are now focusing the eyes of millions upon a different issue than economic inequality, the financial meltdown or high unemployment: police brutality.
+James Fallows captured something important today over at the Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/pepper-spray-brutality-at-uc-davis/248764/"Let's stipulate that there are legitimate questions of how to balance the rights of peaceful protest against other people's rights to go about their normal lives, and the rights of institutions to have some control over their property and public spaces. Without knowing the whole background, I'll even assume for purposes of argument that the UC Davis authorities had legitimate reason to clear protestors from an area of campus — and that if protestors wanted to stage a civil-disobedience resistance to that effort, they should have been prepared for the consequence of civil disobedience, which is arrest.
I can't see any legitimate basis for police action like what is shown here. Watch that first minute and think how we'd react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We'd think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population. That's what I think here."
It's unclear as of yet how our national elected officials will act in response to these events. If the President of the United States condemned violence committed in Egypt by police officers against peaceful protesters (See: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/10/10/statement-press-secretary-violence-egypt ) what about will he say about its use in New York City or the University of California Davis?
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