Alexander Cockburn dispels the myths of the microloan which have gotten so much press lately due to Mohammed Younus winning a Nobel prize. Cockburn asks basic questions about the effectiveness of the microloan including why the countries that have them aren’t bringing people out of poverty, where the money to repay microloans comes from and [...]
Boing Boing reports the Los Angeles chapter of the Boy Scouts of America is now offering a “merit patch” (they don’t call it a merit badge) for “respecting copyright”. One wonders what’s being taught to get this patch. Boing Boing is highly suspicious that there will be much left out, with good reason: The merit [...]
Joshua Frank’s article in Counterpunch (or on his blog) caught my eye, particularly because it helps to begin answering the question I implicitly asked when I wrote about Cindy Sheehan before—what will she do when it comes time to make an electoral decision? Frank gives her credit for restarting the moribund anti-war movement which took [...]
Broadly speaking, if you want to store digital audio, there are two ways to do the job: Compress the audio (usually by throwing out parts of the audio information humans can’t hear) and store the rest. Compress the audio without throwing out any part of the audio information. The first alternative is called “lossy” because [...]
Editing Archive runs Anime 24 hours a day 7 days a week. They recently switched to using Ogg Vorbis + Theora — in plain language, this means you can watch anime and anime-related fare on any computer operating system all day every day (Direct Ogg Theora feed). One of the most interesting things you can [...]
Paul Mueth, co-host of News from Neptune (all cards on the table: I was the technical director of this show), frequently refers to the Lehrer NewsHour on PBS as the “LiarHour”. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting gives us another installment to indicate why; updating their work from 1990, FAIR’s 2006 survey of the PBS news [...]
The Corporate Crime Reporter dissects a blog some of you (probably most) have never heard of which will eventually list 37 reasons to favor big business interests (including working against “environmental zealots”, thinking highly of Medicare Part D, fighting the so-called death tax, favoring drilling in ANWR). Linda Rozett admitted that the site is run [...]
Infoworld.com reports that the French Prime Minister has received a report recommending publishing all French documents in OpenDocument Format. There’s also talk of funding development of open source software in the report: In the report, Carayon also recommended the government fund a research center dedicated to open-source software security, and set up a system to [...]
What are the social consequences of basing one’s communication on email, instant messaging, or netnews? Randal Schwartz, Perl hacker, gave an interesting talk on this matter at FISL7 (download the audio or listen now). This talk is distributed to you under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation writes After a wait of nearly three years, Judge Hood in the Eastern District of Michigan finally ruled yesterday on the government’s request that the court dismiss a lawsuit brought by a group of Muslim and Arab-American associations challenging the constitutionality of PATRIOT Act Section 215. As you may recall, Section [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley