The guys at Automattic are doing one hell of a job here at WordPress.com. They’re really helpful, and are continuously adding really cool features (like OpenID support). Their embedded blog stats, for example, is so cool that lots of people, myself included, are asking for a version that works on any WordPress blog.
So it is with great sorrow that, just a few months after creating this account, I bid WordPress.com goodbye. Truth is Rico made me a great offer to integrate one of his series of tubes portals, which I promptly accepted. So, if anyone actually reads this blog, I ask you to go to proverbial.tube-tube-tube.com and update your feeds.
I’ll probably keep this WordPress.com version alive, since I have to keep my account because of Akismet. But there probably won’t be any more postings. Thanks for everything, guys!
If someone still had any doubts about the Arcade Fire’s renown as a rock band, I guess this five-page NY Times piece on them might help settle the matter:
Four years ago, when the Arcade Fire first started performing its songs from “Funeral,” it took the band six months to create the kind of show that eventually brought it such renown. Now, with a highly anticipated album about to come out, a year of tour dates lined up and one night to go before they were to begin their five-show run in London, the musicians were still groping their way forward — trying to find portable (and performable) ways of recreating the symphonic richness of “Neon Bible” by reworking vocal approaches and instrumental arrangements and improvising new bits of theater.
Pitchfork, which helped making them popular with a 9.7 review for their debut album, wasn’t all that impressed with Neon Bible, which only got an 8.4. I tend to agree with most of what they’ve said in it, but the Arcade Fire still sounds so fresh, so different and so good to me, that I can’t really say it’s any worse than Funeral. Now I just hope the damn thing gets released in Brazil soon, and that they come to play at Porto Alegre again.
I remember thinking, years ago, how the whole ECHELON conspiracy theory could be nothing but bullshit, since there would be no way for whoever ran the thing to analyze all the data it captured. The last couple of years made me rethink that notion, though, since not a day seems to go by without someone proposing some map the size of the world (original, in Spanish, here). This time, it’s that bastion of democracy, supreme commander of the free and the brave, Dubya himself:
The Bush administration has accelerated its Internet surveillance push by proposing that Web sites must keep records of who uploads photographs or videos in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate, CNET News.com has learned.
Excellent timing, if nothing else, seeing as how people are warning there may not be enough space to hold all the information we’re currently producing. Obviously, it shouldn’t take long for people to start thinking about Brazil analogies.
In fact, when things like these start happening, even such analogies might be unnecessary:
Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked “top secret.” And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls.
You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it.
Not to worry, though: the Bush administration is considering a ban on social networks for kids on libraries and schools. That should really help slow down the amount of traffic to monitor, and make the mapworld a little smaller. A very comforting idea when you have judges throwing teachers in jail for not knowing how to fight adware.
And still, no one understood the net. “Why go?“, they asked.
I’ve always thought of clowns as very sad characters, so in need of the audience’s laugh as to willingly make fools of themselves. Which is why I can’t really think of anything more depressing than news of a clown being killed on stage. I can even imagine some people laughing when the man was shot, seeing as how it took them a while to realize what was really goin’ on.
SLOG reports on the Netherlands’ debate over whether or not something should be done against “age play” in Second Life. While they wonder about the legal implications of such actions, I can’t help but think that the whole reasoning behind the idea is ass-backwards.
For starters, the idea that “virtually having sex with children [that are adults, in reality] will result in sexual child abuse in the real world” seems to me like another version of the “smoking pot will lead to stronger and more dangerous drugs”, or “violent video games are responsible for raising teen criminals” rationale. And also, while he’s in front of a computer having virtual sex with a child-like avatar that’s actually being controlled by a consenting adult, this would-be child molester is not out on the streets actually abusing kids. Isn’t it possible that this could, in fact, be used as a means of controlling these individuals’ urges?
I mean, if pedophiles can feel fulfilled with infatilists, isn’t that something that should be stimulated? Even better if the relation can be kept on a virtual basis. To me, this definitely seems like a case were the Dutch government’s money could be put to much better use.
England, home of “the toughest gun control laws in the world”:
Gun crime has doubled since they were introduced. Young hoodlums are able to acquire handguns – either replica weapons that have been converted, or imports from eastern Europe – with ease. (…) The only people currently incommoded by the firearms laws are legitimate holders of shotgun licences, who are subjected to the most onerous police checks.
The last sentence, in particular, is something that should be attached to some research on the rise of firearm-related crimes in post-Dunblane England and translated into every conceivable language on the planet, in hopes that people will at last understand that such laws are useless in preventing criminals from acquiring guns.
I wonder what the impact of a 250-meters-wide asteroid somewhere on the Pacific Ocean would do to current global warming calculations. All those predictions about an economic breakdown setting the world’s population back to the 19th century would probably seem a little silly.
What amazes me is that, unlike global warming, this is a problem that we seem well suited to solve and protect ourselves from. And yet, relying on scientists’ claim that it is not a realistic threat – even though not a week goes by without a Hubble image or something forcing astronomers to reconsider everything they believe in -, the powers that be don’t think it is something that needs to be dealt with at this point.
My hope is that if China can build a weapon to shoot down satellites, they may be able to tweak it to make space rubble out of asteroids.
UPDATE: on MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle details what are our current options against a killer asteroid.
Well, it wasn’t quite concerns with imagery of Av. Paulista or Rio de Janeiro’s beaches, but it sure was fast (.br):
“It’s not only your image that’s exposed. You lose the tranquility of doing whatever you want in your residence”, says the attorney. According to Nicolau, the Public Ministry could file a preventive public civil lawsuit against Google to establish a limit to the images’ zoom.
All of this because Folha de S. Paulo didn’t seem to have anything better to report, and decided to talk about a November 2006 post on Google Sightseeing, showing people caught on Google Earth while sunbathing nude. But it should be interesting to see someone trying to convince a judge that it’s them in such crystal clear pictures like this.
Edible RFID. With the recent decision by a US court that covert GPS tracking is not illegal, I wonder how long it’ll be before policemen are putting RFID tags in suspects’ tea.
Even though it seems like the song was pasted over miscelaneous footage, what you see is what you get: Peter Frampton doing an instrumental cover of Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, with help from Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready and Matt Cameron. Great stuff.
It’s part of Frampton’s latest – and first all instrumental – record, Fingerprints, which has some other very interesting guests. I’ll certainly look for it on stores. (via LAist)
When he nationalized Bolivia’s natural gas companies, soon after being elected, Evo Morales threw Petrobras out of the country, leaving Brazil close to an energy crisis while he threatened to increase the fuel’s price. The situation still hasn’t been solved, since Morales says he’ll only negotiate with diplomats, while Lula’s Foreign Relations Ministry says this is a technical matter that should be dealt with by Petrobras officials.
Meanwhile, Brazil has notified its neighbour that it intends to build two hydroelectric power plants in the Madeira river, very close to the countries’ borders. Which, if you ask me, was already an unnecessary courtesy. But what was the Bolivian government’s response? They’re saying they won’t accept (.br) Brazil’s plans – cause the studies they’ve been presented with are not conclusive about the possible environmental implications to Bolivia -, and want a binational project for the region.
So, they kick Petrobras out of the country, hold a good deal of our energy matrix hostage while threatening to increase gas prices, and now want to decide what the government can or can’t build in Brazil’s own territory? I think it’s more than time for someone to teach mr. Morales a lesson on how to do proper politics.
These news about a mind reading device have raised quite a few comparisons with Minority Report. But while it does remind me of K. Dick’s novel, I have to say it is for a different reason: more than a critique on preventive policing, I think the book is mainly a defense of free will.
And just as the whole notion of pre-crime goes down the drain as soon as the subject of a prevision fails to commit his crime, I believe the debate over whether there is such a thing as free will or not would also be settled the moment someone does something different than predicted. Which is where something like this mind reading device could come in handy.
Privacy concerns? Don’t really bother me. If polygraphs can’t be used as proof for anything, I see no reason why this would. And you either prove that people don’t necessarily do what they’re thinking – in which case this thing would probably only be useful for psychiatrists -, or that people are predictable 100% of the time, in which case it wouldn’t seem that unjust to use it as a means of putting someone in jail.
Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country’s population information center’s website, to check if the name and the ID number of a person’s identity card match. If they do match the ID cardholder’s picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding that no other information is available to ensure a citizen’s privacy is protected.
Once again, I’m only counting the time until some lawmaker around here thinks this is a great idea. We already have the compulsory federal IDs with fingerprints part down.
A friend of mine who’s been living in Montreal for three years now says the first thing you notice when going out after a snowstorm is the silence. I’m guessing none of his neighbours have anything like this.
With the US dollar getting cheaper and cheaper in Brazil, several economists and businessmen are complaining about the country’s inability to have competitive prices in foreign markets. Former Ministry of Finance, Rep. Antonio Palocci, says there’s no need to worry, that it’s only a matter of time (.br) until a rise in imports balances the exchange rate.
Which seems like a very reasonable idea until you realize the amount of taxes and laws aimed at preventing imports and “currency evasion” this country has.
It is not by chance that Brazil is first in the iPod index, more than U$ 100 over second place India. Videogame consoles, according to this UOL Jogos piece (.br), receive a cascade of taxes adding up to 257% over the FOB (Free on Board) price – while games and handhelds get 233% and 209% tags, respectively. The result is that an XBox 360, which would go for U$ 399 in the US, costs about U$ 1.400 in Brazil.
Maybe mr. Palocci wasn’t talking about this sort of “private imports”, and actually meant some sort of large scale industrial imports which have exemptions from such absurd taxes. But it does seem kinda weird to see the former Ministry of Finance, someone who still has a great deal of influence over this administration, talking about free exchange and imports while his government legislates to prevent these same imports in order to “protect our economy”.
