This picture by Marc Adamus of a natural bridge in Coyote Gulch is pretty great:
But it is as cool as the same bridge with me and a friend?
Which picture is better?
Reply
Author Archives: Daniel
Rio panorama
Last week when my wife was in Rio, she sent me this picture of Copacabana beach from her iPhone 4s:
It’s pretty easy to see why people like Rio. But you don’t get a feel for the actual city. She also shot a number of pictures that I merged in Photoshop into a panorama. The panorama give you a better feel for the city:
On more reason I miss the west…
I love this pic below from The Big Picture:
The New York Times versus Free Speech
A judge in Oregon recently ruled that a blogger isn’t a journalist. John C. Dvorak, professional curmudgeon and one of the longest-tenured tech writers isn’t impressed with the decision:
The case of Crystal Cox, a self-professed "investigative blogger" from Oregon, should outrage the public. The woman was investigating targeted companies that she believed to be acting unethically and found herself at the wrong end of a lawsuit.
The evidence she had unearthed concerning a Pacific Northwest finance group she was after and the sources she used seemed, in the end, immaterial to the outcome of the lawsuit against her. I won’t get into the details of Cox’s case since my concern is the definition of journalist, but you can read more here." The judge, recent Obama appointee Marco Hernandez, asserted that as a blogger with no other credentials, she was not a journalist and was entitled to no protection.
He said, “Although the defendant is a self-proclaimed ‘investigative blogger’ and defines herself as ‘media,’ the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law in the first instance.”
Apparently, there are now new qualifications for journalists. So who decides these qualifications? Hernandez? Where did he get this from? I’ve never seen a laundry list in the U.S. that precludes bloggers. There is nothing in the Bill of Rights, to wit: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Predictably, the New York Times like the decision:
The ruling on whether she was a journalist in the eyes of the law turned out to be a MacGuffin, a detail that was very much beside the point. She didn’t so much report stories as use blogging, invective and search engine optimization to create an alternative reality. Journalists who initially came to her defense started to back away when they realized they weren’t really in the same business.
This is the problem. A MacGuffin shouldn’t matter. If Cox were lying, then there could be a case for defamation and it wouldn’t require the judge to make up the criteria for what is or isn’t a journalist. But it appears that the judge looked at what appears to be bad facts and came up with bad law.
In Focus’ Year in Photos
The Atlantic’s In Focus photoblog has a three part series of the year in photos, including this shot of a volcanic eruption:
DRM gives Amazon more power…
Charlie Stross thinks is it foolish for the Big Six book publishers to insist on digital rights management on ebooks because it just gives Amazon more power:
Anyway, my point is that the Big Six’s pig-headed insistence on DRM on ebooks is handing Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder.
DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform. If you buy a book that you can only read on the Kindle, you’re naturally going to be reluctant to move to other ebook platforms that can’t read those locked Kindle ebooks — and even more reluctant to buy ebooks from rival stores that use incompatible DRM. Amazon acquired an early lead in the ebook field (by selling below cost in the early days, and subsidizing the Kindle hardware price to consumers), and customers are locked into the platform by their existing purchases. Which is pretty much how they gained their 80% market share.
An 80% share of a tiny market slice worth maybe 1% of the publishing sector was of no concern to the big six, back in 2008. But today, with it rising towards 40%, it’s another matter entirely.
As ebook sales mushroom, the Big Six’s insistence on DRM has proven to be a hideous mistake. Rather than reducing piracy[*], it has locked customers in Amazon’s walled garden, which in turn increases Amazon’s leverage over publishers. And unlike pirated copies (which don’t automatically represent lost sales) Amazon is a direct revenue threat because Amazon are have no qualms about squeezing their suppliers — or trying to poach authors for their “direct” publishing channel by offering initially favourable terms. (Which will doubtless get a lot less favourable once the monopoly is secured …)
If the big six began selling ebooks without DRM, readers would at least be able to buy from other retailers and read their ebooks on whatever platform they wanted, thus eroding Amazon’s monopoly position. But it’s not clear that the folks in the boardrooms are agile enough to recognize the tar pit they’ve fallen into …
[*] It doesn’t reduce piracy; if you poke around bittorrent you’ll find plenty of DRM-cracked ebooks — including all of my titles. DRM is snake oil; ultimately the reader has to be able to read whatever they bought, which means shipping a decryption key along with the encrypted file. And once they’ve got the key, someone will figure out how to use it to unlock the book.
Random fact of the day: Kibosh edition
I thought this was pretty interesting from Merriam-Webster:
For a century "kibosh" has taxed the ingenuity of etymologists. It was prominent enough in lower-class London speech to attract the attention of Charles Dickens, who used it in 1836 in an early sketch, but little else is certain. Claims were once made that it was Yiddish, despite the absence of a plausible Yiddish source. Another hypothesis points to Irish "caidhp bhais," literally, "coif (or cap) of death," explained as headgear a judge put on when pronouncing a death sentence, or as a covering pulled over the face of a corpse when a coffin was closed. But evidence for any metaphorical use of this phrase in Irish is lacking, and "kibosh" is not recorded in English as spoken in Ireland until decades after Dickens’ use.
Where in the world is my wife
Today she’s in Rio:
One reason Newt isn’t fit to be President
Just a picture of a coal hauling truck…
A month ago I had the opportunity to tour a coal mine. The coal hauling trucks were pretty impressive—but maybe just because they look like gigantic Tonka trucks.
