Over at my other blog, my friend Amy Phillips has a funny comment about the blurring of nipples on those plastic surgery reality shows:
I watch a lot of plastic surgery, and while they always blur out women’s nipples, they never blur men’s (even when the men in question have boobs bigger than some of the pre-surgery women).
This leads to very weird results in shows about the plastic surgery that transgendered people undergo. When giving breast implants to a M-to-F transgendered person, the nipples are never blurred out at the beginning of the show, but about halfway through the surgery, once the implants are inflated, they pixelate the nipples. Same nipples, but when they sit on a rounder chest, they become indecent.
On F-to-M transgendered people, they blur out the nipples at the beginning of the surgery, but once a sufficient amount of breast tissue has been removed to make the chest look male, out come the nipples. Again, the same nipples that were once obscene become perfectly okay to look at once the chest is flattened out.
This happens without fail, regardless of what gender the patient in question considers her/himself, regardless of what genitalia the patient possesses, and regardless of the person’s legal gender. Context is everything, apparently.
Given that these are usually cable shows, we probably can’t blame the FCC for this one. We just live in a strange country.
In Indiana’s Marion County, about 175 of 914 precincts turned to paper because poll workers didn’t know how to run the machines, said Marion County Clerk Doris Ann Sadler. Election officials in Delaware County, planned to seek a court order to extend voting after an apparent computer error prevented voters from casting ballots in 75 precincts.
Illinois officials were swamped with calls from voters complaining that poll workers did not know how to operate new electronic equipment
In Florida, voting was briefly delayed at four districts because of either mixed up ballots or electronic activators being unintentionally wiped out, according to Mary Cooney, spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections. Voters were forced to use paper ballots after an electronic machine broke in the Jacksonville suburb of Orange Park.
In suburban Pittsburgh, some precincts opened late because workers couldn’t zero out voting machines, raising concern that votes from previous elections had not been purged
In Passaic County, N.J., Republicans complained that a ballot had been pre-marked on some machines with a vote for the Democratic Senate candidate; the state attorney general was looking into the matter.
In Utah County, Utah, workers failed to properly encode some of the cards that voters use to bring up touchscreen ballots.
In Kentucky, a school board race was inadvertently left off the touchscreen ballot in two precincts in Bourbon County, requiring the county clerk to make paper ballots on the spot.
And the polls haven’t even closed yet. I thought e-voting was supposed to make elections less error-prone.
The BBC confirms that Microsoft’s Zune platform and its “Plays for Sure” platform will be incompatible:
Microsoft has said it will stop selling music from MSN music from 14 November, when Zune goes on sale in the US.
But in a move that could alienate some customers, MSN-bought tracks will not be compatible with the new gadget.
The move could also spell problems for the makers of MP3 players which are built to work with the MSN store.
The problem has arisen because tracks from the MSN Music site are compatible with the specifications of the Plays For Sure initiative.
This was intended to re-assure consumers as it guaranteed that music bought from services backing it would work with players that supported it. MSN Music, Napster, AOL Music Now and Urge all backed Plays For Sure as did many players from hardware makers such as Archos, Creative, Dell and Iriver.
In a statement a Microsoft spokesperson said: “Since Zune is a separate offering that is not part of the Plays For Sure ecosystem, Zune content is not supported on Plays For Sure devices.”
Last week I wrote about how excited I was to learn that Microsoft would soon be announcing an eagerly awaited movie / video downloading service for its XBOX 360 gaming console. And now we have the details of their new business model. And, in my opinion, it looks like a winner for MS, content developers and consumers alike.
Beginning on November 22nd–the second anniversery of the XBOX 360 launch–XBOX users will be able to use their “Microsoft Points,” which can be earned or purchased on the XBOX Marketplace, to download movies and TV shows from affiliated partners. The first round of deals MS cut were with CBS, MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures, Turner Broadcasting System Inc., Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.
More deals are sure to follow, but that’s quite a bit of content already. I look forward to downloading Comedy Central and VH1 shows in particular, in addition to all the movies they’ll be offering. And my kids will love all the Nickelodeon and Nicktoons stuff that is on there. (A list of all the content companies involved in the deal can be found here).
In one elementary school in the predominantly black district of East Cleveland, Ohio, all 12 machines went down when voting opened at 6:30 am (1130 GMT), according to an AFP correspondent at the scene.
The machines were not started up until two hours later and poll officials refused to hand out paper ballots until a lawyer for the watchdog group Election Protection showed up.
“The machines weren’t working and they were just turning people away,” said the attorney, Fred Livingstone. “They are not allowed to do that.”
More than 250 problems were reported at polling places in Ohio soon after polls opened according to an Election Protection watchdog operation run by a minority rights group and other non-governmental organizations.
I see two reasons for concern here. First is the obvious one: one of the basic requirements for voting machines is that they work. Every voting system has problems, but I’m not aware of any situations in which paper ballots refused to boot.
The more serious concern, though, is the possibility that this was the result of deliberate tampering. It’s conceivable (although highly unlikely) that someone programmed those machines to crash in order to reduce voting in precincts thought to be favorable to a particular candidate. I think it’s unlikely–but it’s not impossible. But if someone were trying to steal an election, this is precisely the kind of tactic they might employ. It would look like an ordinary computer glitch, and people would probably think it was just a coincidence that it happened mostly in precincts that heavily favored a particular candidate.
Like I said, this was probably an innocent glitch, not a case of tampering. But it’s very worrisome that we will never know for certain.
Over on Cato@Liberty, I’ve written a couple of times about how government access to data threatens many new and forthcoming business models.
TechDirt, a favorite tech-business blog, writes today about some ISPs’ perceived lack of cooperation with law enforcement. That ‘lack of cooperation’ is asking for a warrant before revealing customer data. “But requiring a warrant is a check against abuse; without them it’s hard for ISPs to judge the legitimacy and seriousness of a request. By valuing privacy, they better serve their customers, and ensure that law enforcement is only pursuing cases within the scope of the law.”
Very nice to see a business-oriented blog showing how privacy protection nests with commercial interests and good government.
This is a Red Hat marketing video, but I think it’s pretty cool:
I’ve written about this in the past: in the long run, open systems tend to triumph over closed ones. I don’t think that Red Hat will necessarily be the open system that conquers the OS market. Personally, I’m rooting for the increasingly-open Mac OS X. But sooner or later, the inefficiencies of creating large software products using a centralized, Soviet development model will render that model unsustainable.
News outlets are fascinated with the news business, so quite a few stories have been flying around the last few days about the Gannett newspaper chain’s decision to use citizen journalists.
Gannett is attempting to grab some of the Internet mojo of blogs, community e-mail groups and other ground-up news sources to bring back readers and fundamentally change the idea of what newspapers have been for more than a century. . . .
The most intriguing aspect of Gannett’s plan is the inclusion of non-journalists in the process, drawing on specific expertise that many journalists do not have. In a test at Gannett’s newspaper in Fort Myers, Fla., the News-Press, from readers such as retired engineers, accountants and other experts was solicited to examine documents and determine why it cost so much to connect new homes to water and sewer lines. The newspaper compiled the data and wrote a number of reader-assisted articles. As a result, fees were cut and an official resigned.
The blogosphere (writ large) can and often does surface relevant knowledge better than any group of reporters, no matter how smart or dedicated. Gannett is wise to recognize this and incorporate superior local knowledge-gathering into its business model.
To make it a copyright trifecta today, here’s an interesting story about ambiguity in how copyright applies to RSS feeds. Does merely offering an RSS feed imply that anyone can take the feed and repurpose it on another site? Many “splogs” (spam blogs) aggregate unsuspecting RSS feeds to attract keyword-driven traffic and thus make money with Adsense.
EFF’s Fred Won Lohman says, “Frankly, until there is some case law on this or related issues, we simply can’t be sure of the answers to these questions.” IP prof Eric Goldman says “In my mind, there’s no question that a blogger grants an implied license to the content in an RSS feed. However, because it’s implied, I’m just not sure of the license terms.”
I’m not sure how an RSS feed is different from any other content on the web. Unless text on a site makes it clear that a feed is available to be used any way you’d like, why would should we presume that the owner is giving up any rights? Sure, RSS is XML, which makes it easy for others to repurpose your content, and presumably you wouldn’t be publishing easy-to-repurpose XML unless you intended others to do that. However, the most prevalent consumer application of RSS are newsreaders, so I think it’s much more reasonable to assume that personal news aggregation sites publish RSS. As far as copyright is concerned, I don’t see how this kind of use is any different than browsing content on the web.
Some sites, like the New York Times, offer RSS feeds with special instructions about using them on your own site. As long as that’s not the case, the usual web norms (increasingly accepted by courts) should apply: copying even large chunks of content with attribution is fair use (a la Google News or Eyebeam’s reBlog), taking entire sites wholesale is not.
Glen Whitman wonders why karaoke manufacturers record their own versions of hit songs rather than taking the originals and stripping out the vocals. The result is a nice summary of the law of copyright as it applies to covers and compulsory licensing. Glen’s conclusion:
Here’s your choice as a karaoke producer: You can use your own musicians and sound technicians to recreate the work, and then pay a few cents per song (multiplied by the number of copies made). Or you can use the original track and strip out the vocals; but in order to do so, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, with all the transaction costs and probably higher price that would entail.
Is this system efficient? On the one hand, it’s clearly a waste of resources to hire musicians and sound technicians to reproduce works that already exist. In addition, the perceived quality will generally be lower than the original, since karaoke singers generally want something as close to the original as possible. On the other hand, extending the property rule to cover indirect duplication would create a hold-out problem: copyright owners could demand high prices for the right to create karaoke tracks. Real resources would be wasted on the negotiation process; worse, if negotiations ever broke down, some great songs might never get converted to karaoke form.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.