Stuart Maxwell

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Onswipe

Onswipe: “We think users will love seeing your website transformed into this snazzy, magical, animated magazine-look…”

Users: “We just want to read the content.”

I can’t stress enough how much I dislike Onswipe and I’m still surprised that Wordpress.com have pushed this into their blogging network. Now it looks like we have even more Onswipe madness to look forward to.

Made to Pay

Speaker of the House, Lockwood Smith, says that Parliamentary Services won’t be paying for the equipment that our first profoundly deaf MP, Mojo Mathers, requires to be able to participate in debates.

Smith had said Parliamentary Services would accommodate those with ”physical disabilities” such as those in a wheelchair - but not the deaf, the spokesman added.

This is going to end badly for anyone who thinks that Mojo should pay for her own equipment.

Silicon Cesspool

Sheer brilliance from Dan Lyons.

Read the whole thing.

Forgiveness

Nick Bilton, writing for the Bits Blog on the NY Times:

It seems the management philosophy of “ask for forgiveness, not permission” is becoming the “industry best practice.”

I was already considering deleting my Path account when this happened, so it was a no-brainer to pull the plug when we realised that Path had uploaded all their customer’s address books to their server and were storing them indefinitely. Seems like Path were pretty lazy with their programming, perhaps they didn’t even care about the implications. On the flipside, here’s how Windows Live handles a similar feature, as described on Dare Obasanjo’s blog.

A Scientist Visits A Creationist Museum (by SkepticStream)

Back on Tumblr

I briefly dabbled with Octopress with the aim of some longform writing, but I just don’t have the time. So Tumblr is more suited to my time constraints at the moment and allows me to post links with some brief commentary without having to worry about forming an entire article around the subject.

No Copyright Intended

Andy Baio from waxy.org

Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance. You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give.

Louis C.K. Doesn’t Get Torrents, But Gets Distribution

Ernesto from TorrentFreak:

Stand-up comedian Louis C.K is [selling][https://buy.louisck.net/purchase] a direct download of his show at the Beacon Theater for 5 dollars.

No DRM, no forced email spam, no expensive middle-man – just value for value.

Dec 9

Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog

Mike Masnick from Techdirt:

The US government has effectively admitted that it totally screwed up and falsely seized & censored a non-infringing domain of a popular blog, having falsely claimed that it was taking part in criminal copyright infringement. Then, after trying to hide behind a totally secretive court process with absolutely no due process whatsoever (in fact, not even serving papers on the lawyer for the site or providing timely notifications — or providing any documents at all), for over a year, the government has finally realized it couldn’t hide any more and has given up, and returned the domain name to its original owner.

Welcome to the land of the free…

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