In these cases, a cartel of multinational corporations collude to abuse our judicial system, distort copyright law, and frighten ordinary working people and their children.

October 4, 2007 in 09 F9, Corporate Fascism, RIAA, Wikipedia, p2p, predictive frameworks

Other titles that I considered for this post were: The RIAA loses, but doesn’t realize it or Boycotting the RIAA has never made more sense, or been easier… because this post touches on all these issues. But in the end, I decided on a snippet from the excellent blog Recording Industry vs The People.
The [...]

But what will the RIAA do with all the nukes…?

July 1, 2007 in Corporate Fascism, Free Culture, IP, RIAA, Wikipedia, predictive frameworks

The case of the man who sued his drycleaners for 67 million dollars has nothing on the RIAA, who is suing the Russian web site allofmp3.com for 1.65 trillon dollars. This exceeds the entire GDP of Russia. If they succeeded in this lawsuit and were somehow able to collect, the income from this [...]

The End of the Beginning

May 9, 2007 in Dell, Free Software, MS, SuSE, predictive frameworks

Microsoft probably thinks themselves very clever, having figured out a way to get revenue from GNU/Linux®. Their thinly veiled threats to sue, and to extract a fee for the right to use GNU/Linux®, seems to have borne fruit in that Dell is now buying SLES (SuSE Linux® Enterprise Server) licenses from Microsoft. However [...]

Parallel Questions

March 25, 2007 in Epidemiology, Globalization, Public Health, Terrorism, War, predictive frameworks

Mark C R UK asks, in response to my post Posse Comitatus, Requiescat In Pace:
“But how many functional enemies willing to disperse such agents and have the (alarming) patience to wait for for years before mortality begins?”
And this questions fits right in with the subject of a [...]

Journey to the End of the Night (Seadrome Edition)

January 1, 2007 in Future, History of the Future, The Great Depression, The Thirties, Things we don't need, predictive frameworks

Looking through the overstock of my Grandfather’s bookstore, I have quite a number of Architectural Magazines, including many editions of “The American Architect,” “The Architectural Forum” (which actually covered Architecture, unlike today’s Architectural Forum, which almost no Architects read) and “The International Studio.” They cover the period from from the early teens to the late [...]

Types of Knowledge

December 17, 2006 in The Thirties, predictive frameworks, sustainability, unplugged

An interesting excerpt from Collapse by Jared Diamond, about the native intelligence of New Guinea highland farmers, the utility and longevity of that knowledge:
New Guinea is the large island just North of Australia…lying almost on the equator and hence with hot tropical rainforest in the lowlands, but whose rugged interior consists of alternating ridges and [...]

Journey to the End of the Night (H.G. Wells edition)

November 30, 2006 in 2007 Predictions, Free Culture, Future, The Great Depression, The Thirties, predictive frameworks, urbanism

OR TYPES OF FAILURES OF PREDICTIVE FRAMEWORKS

A project that I have long wanted very much to do is to write a history of the Future, especially, a history of the Future as seen in popular culture. Certainly a society’s view of its future tells what it values, and what it fears. If the [...]